Hoopes, Darlington

HOOPES, DARLINGTON (1896-1989). The standard-bearer in the Socialist Party’s final two presidential campaigns, in 1952 and 1956, Hoopes was one of the leading socialists of Pennsylvania, where the party continued to elect local officials into the 1950s.

Voters in Berks County elected Hoopes to three terms in the Pennsylvania legislature, and he held appointed city positions in Reading during the mayoralty of Socialist J. Henry Stump. Even when other Socialist Party (SP) leaders in the 1950s and 1960s increasingly favored “realignment” with Democrats, Hoopes persistently opposed that strategy, clinging to his early 1950s characterization of Democrats as “a double-dealing, fraudulent gang who promised all kinds of liberal and social legislation [but] delivered very little of it.”

Born into a Maryland Quaker farming family with roots in William Penn’s colony in the 1680s, Hoopes remained a lifelong pacifist. He became a socialist as a teenager largely due to Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel writings, joining the SP in Wisconsin while briefly studying agriculture at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Hoopes returned to the Philadelphia area, becoming a lawyer, and was SP state secretary, 1923-28. Hoopes and his wife, Hazelette, relocated in 1927 to the Socialist stronghold of Reading, where he worked as assistant solicitor under Mayor Stump. Hazelette won election to Reading’s school board in 1929.

Hoopes’s election to the legislature, where he served alongside Socialist Lilith Wilson, also from Reading, came in 1930 during the depths of the Great Depression. While few of the dozens of bills they introduced passed, capital-area journalists labeled Hoopes the “most able legislator” in 1935, and the pair earned grudging respect from other elected officials. Hoopes wrote bills to improve workers’ lives under capitalism, such as extension of workers’ compensation to cover industrial diseases as well as workplace accidents, but he also introduced pointedly socialist legislation, such as nationalization of the banks. Hoopes did help win increased “old age assistance” in the pre-Social Security era, and he was pivotal in the legislature’s endorsement of a national constitutional amendment outlawing child labor. Because not enough states signed on, the amendment failed, but the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act incorporated most of its provisions. After his 1936 defeat for reelection, Hoopes returned to Reading, focusing his work as city solicitor on numerous building projects, including public housing. Some called Hoopes the “power behind the throne” in Mayor Stump’s second term.

Hoopes supported the Party’s “Militant” faction’s 1934 “Declaration of Principles,” but soon backed away from it and sought to broker peace with the “Old Guard.” Having followed Local Berks out of the SP and into the Social Democratic Federation in 1936, Hoopes helped bring the local back into the Party in 1943, after which he ran for Vice President under Norman Thomas in 1944. When Thomas tried to reorient Party strategy away from independent electoral activity after disappointing results in his 1948 Presidential race, Hoopes successfully led the opposition to this change. He served on the SP’s National Executive Committee, 1932-1948 and as National Chairperson, 1949-1957 and 1960-1968. His resulting elevation to Party chair was followed by his own Presidential runs, with results going from bad to worse: his 20,410 votes in 1952 were only one-seventh of Thomas’s 1948 total, and in 1956 Hoopes won only 2,300 votes. Hoopes nevertheless continued to support independent Socialist electoral activity, and he joined the small the insular Socialist Party, U.S.A. when the SP split in 1972.

Hoopes supplemented his decades-long SP activism with leadership in a wide range of progressive and civic groups, including the farmer-based Eastern Cooperatives, the Pennsylvania Fair Employment Practices Council, the Pennsylvania Equal Rights Council, and even the Berks County Bar Association.

Fowler, Glenn. “Darlington Hoopes, Socialist, 93; Twice Party Choice for President.” New York Times (Sept. 27, 1989).

Henderson, J. Paul. Darlington Hoopes: The Political Biography of an American Socialist. Glasgow, U.K.: Humming Earth, 2005.

Hoopes, Darlington. Papers, 1910-1977. Collection Overview. Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA.