Fleischman, Harry

FLEISCHMAN, HARRY (1914-2004). A Socialist organizer, official, writer and publicist from the Norman Thomas era through that of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Harry Fleischman also represented a generation of young socialists who later made significant contributions to the labor and civil rights movements.

Born in the Bronx to immigrant Jewish parents, Fleischman joined the Washington Heights branch of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) at age seventeen after hearing a Socialist street corner speaker. He soon entered the all-consuming world of socialist meetings, speeches, organizing, and strike support during the early years of the Great Depression. By 1934, he had become a traveling YPSL organizer in Pennsylvania, then a Socialist Party (SP) organizer in Schenectady and Olean, New York, where the 100 members of the SP included eight police officers and seven firefighters under assumed names. In 1936, he moved to Chicago and was given charge of the SP children’s group, the Red Falcons, followed by stints as SP organizer in Illinois and Michigan, where he was beaten and arrested on a United Auto Workers picket line. After working on SP leader Norman Thomas’s 1940 Presidential campaign in the Midwest, Fleischman became National Chairman of the Socialist Party. He retained this post from 1942 to 1950 and served as campaign manager for Thomas’s final two presidential runs, in 1944 and 1948.

In 1950, agreeing with Thomas that third-party campaigns had become unviable, Fleischman left the SP leadership. He worked briefly for the Cold War era Voice of America as a labor correspondent, then joined the American Jewish Committee (AJC) staff as director of its National Labor Service. There, over the next quarter century, he promoted the labor movement, civil rights, and civil liberties, including those of Communists, notwithstanding his own strong anti-Communism and the general rightward shift of Jewish institutional life. He also organized and led a staff union at the AJC. Fleischman remained close to Norman Thomas and in 1964 published Norman Thomas: A Biography. He served as chairman of the SP-founded Workers Defense League, a workers’ rights organization; gathered oral history interviews of many Socialist comrades of his generation; and wrote for Dissent magazine. He became a longtime columnist for Democratic Left, the publication of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (later DSA), recording the highlights of local branch activities around the country.

Fleischman’s AJC column “Let’s Be Human” encapsulated his optimistic political spirit. He took special pride in his lifelong civil rights advocacy, including his role in organizing a YPSL branch in Harlem, his later work with the Socialist-led Negro Labor Committee, and his involvement in building strong support for the civil rights movement at the American Jewish Committee. Unlike many Socialists of his generation who became hawkish liberals (or conservatives), and unlike the AJC itself which sponsored the neoconservative magazine Commentary, Fleischman represented those who maintained their commitment to democratic socialism.

Buhle, Paul. “Harry Fleischman.” Guardian, 16 November 2004.

Fleischman, Harry. Norman Thomas: A Biography (revised edition, NY: W.W. Norton, 1969).

Harry Fleischman Papers, Preliminary Inventory. Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_115/dscref5.html