Intercollegiate Socialist Society

INTERCOLLEGIATE SOCIALIST SOCIETY. The earliest collegiate radical movement in the United States, founded in 1905, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) made an impact in several ways. It made socialist ideas intellectually respectable. It brought together on equal ground a remarkable coalition of socialist revolutionaries and reformers. And it established the institutional basis for a particular kind of socialist intellectualism that gained importance in the labor movement during the 1920s and retained political value into the 1960s. By then the ISS had become the lineal ancestor of another radical student group, Students for a Democratic Society.

The original ISS “call,” issued by Upton Sinclair, was signed by prominent intellectuals from abolitionist veteran Thomas Wentworth Higginson and socialist Charlotte Perkins Gilman to reform editor B. O. Flower, lawyer Clarence Darrow, and writers Jack London and William English Walling. Its student representative on the executive committee, Harry W. Laidler, began a lifelong dedication to campus socialist thought and socialist ideas.

Jack London’s 1906 campus tour initiated the new method of agitation, followed with success by many other ISS speakers, of rousing students to the realities of poverty and suffering. Soon, chapters were founded at Wesleyan and Columbia, followed by Princeton, Harvard, and more than fifty others; although mostly concentrated among the elite schools of the Northeast, the movement established a presence in many state and private colleges. A small bulletin grew into the Inter-Collegiate Socialist, a wide-ranging quarterly with contributions from most major US socialist intellectuals and a handful of British leaders.

ISS leaders and members stressed not commitment to socialism, as in the Socialist Party proper, but willingness to discuss the subject. With that perspective, they urged (sometimes successfully, as at Harvard) the introduction of courses on socialism into the regular curriculum. They held forums and, where possible, channeled regular political work such as electioneering into the local Young People’s Socialist League. In a few cases, they launched their own publications, the most famous of which was the New York Dental College’s curious monthly, the Progressive Dentist. All in all, the ISS had little direct political influence and an inevitably shifting, unstable membership of a few thousand; but its influence upon the emerging generation of intellectuals was often considerable.

World War I, and especially US entry into the war, produced a conservative tide on campus, and a simultaneous defection of leading intellectuals (some of them formerly active in the ISS) to the Wilsonian program. The ISS executive board, divided internally and fearing repression, took no official position on the war. Meanwhile campuses became virtual camps of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and the ISS strove to remain quietly alive.

In the aftermath of the war, the ISS published Socialist Review to survey the prospects of the world socialist movement from a reform (rather than a revolutionary, or Communist) perspective. As the ISS became the League for Industrial Democracy in 1921, devoted to the scientific study of social change, so the Socialist Review became Labor Age, published with the aim of “keeping [American] labor informed of worldwide labor developments.” Early writers included carryovers from the Socialist Review and a new entity of socialistic labor researchers (not necessarily members of the Socialist Party), including David Saposs and Theresa Wolfson and an “angel” of the magazine, Prince Hopkins.
Labor Age, professionally one of the most attractive radical monthlies of the 1920s, informed a mostly educated readership about the latest developments in labor. Somewhere to the left of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), it refrained from open criticisms and eulogized AFL president Samuel Gompers upon his death in 1924. Soon after, the magazine began to dissent from the “new era” policies of the new AFL president, William Green, and vice-president, Matthew Woll. Labor Age, unlike the AFL, supported industrial unionism, urged US recognition of the Soviet Union, and opposed the American invasion of Nicaragua.

Toward the end of the 1920s, Labor Age completed the trajectory from the Inter-Collegiate Socialist’s rallying of students to the promotion of labor studies. Brookwood Labor College and its leader, A. J. Muste, became the foremost influence in Labor Age. From 1929 to 1933 the official organ of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (AFL dissidents rallied by Muste), Labor Age reported primarily on the Conference’s organizing efforts. When the Conference dissolved to become the American Workers Party, Labor Age ceased publication. The League for Industrial Democracy, descendant of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, had survived by remaining on campus (as the Student League for Industrial Democracy, or SLID), although engaged in research more than action. SLID remained nominally intact until the founding of its vital lineal successor, Students for a Democratic Society. SLID, after decades as a small research center guided by Harry Laidler, fell during the 1960s into the hands of rightward-leaning labor leaders who were fully supportive of the Cold War.

Horn, Max. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 1905-1921: Origins of the Modern Student Movement. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979.

Weisenberg, Mina. The L.I.D.: Fifty Years of Democratic Education, 1905–1955. New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1955.

Intercollegiate Socialist Society Records, 1905-1921. Guide. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_048/