Socialist Party

SOCIALIST PARTY. Founded in 1901 and attaining its apex in the 1910s, the Socialist Party (SP) more than any other Left organization in U.S. history impressed its ideas upon the mainstream and propounded a credible, popular vision of socialism. In its failures and its final collapse, it mirrored most of the fundamental weaknesses of the American Left.

The immediate origins of the SP can be found in the 1880s and 1890s, with the rise of labor and social protests and the inability of the mostly immigrant socialists to create a large or durable organization. Eugene Debs, allying his followers from the American Railway Union and Social Democracy of America with dissidents from the Socialist Labor Party, both negotiated the merger and ran for the presidency on a unified ticket in 1900. His own characteristic milieu of native-born skilled workers, lower-middle-class veterans of social protest, and a volatile tenant-farmer population in the Southwest dominated the public tone of the SP in the early years. German, Jewish, and a handful of other immigrant groups, strong in selected neighborhoods and unions, eagerly shared the dream of “Americanizing” the socialist movement.

Popular agitation and education supplied the means to reach the masses, with the Socialist press the key mechanism. By 1912–1913, more than three hundred periodicals, mostly weeklies but also many dailies and monthlies, were in circulation. The Jewish Daily Forward, reaching 200,000 by the close of the 1910s, was the Yiddish circulation leader in the world. The Appeal to Reason, peaking at three quarters of a million (and in some special weeks, reaching more than a million) was for a time the most widely circulated political weekly in the United States. Although no clear estimate can be made, a combined circulation figure would run to several million. Most of these periodicals had an intense regional or local audience of party members and sympathizers expectant of a swift increase of socialist ranks.

The strength of the Socialist press lay, above all, in its variety and adaptation. Unlike the Socialist Labor Party’s Daily People, which presumed to offer a single position for all socialists to follow, SP papers assumed (sometimes in a very insular way) the inevitability of different tastes for different constituencies. One might note, for example, the extraordinary strength of the Hallettsville (Texas) Rebel, supported by twenty-five thousand readers among the district’s tenant farmers and followed by supporters of the Mexican Revolution; or the monthly National Rip-Saw from Saint Louis, with its 150,000 readers spread across the South and Southwest. In the single district of Chicago, influence was exerted by a dozen or more papers (the Slovakian Rovnost Ludu had a readership of almost ten thousand, the Slovenian Proletarec reached more than four thousand, the Bohemian Spraredelust claimed twelve thousand, and the Christian Socialist had nearly twenty thousand). Many central labor councils proudly sponsored Socialist loyalties. Such was the case in Cleveland, with the Cleveland Citizen, and with a few important national unions such as the brewery workers and western miners, with Brauer Zeitung and Miners Magazine, respectively. So widely scattered was this press that Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma each had more than a dozen papers, often with small circulations of less than a thousand but intense, semirural followings.

Public and especially street-corner (or “soapbox”) lectures also offered a major arena for attracting political attention. Hundreds of traveling lecturers, often paid through a percentage on sales of pamphlets, toured each possible constituency in a fashion that the abolition, woman suffrage, temperance, and popular movements had long since made successful. Socialists added a religious-populist favorite, the tent meeting, stretching over days of education and entertainment in rural southwestern locations.

If Socialists praised the agitator, however, they offered little solace and less support to the weighty thinker so prestigious among European socialists. Such a figure as Ernest Untermann, translator of Capital’s first volume, had to make do with popularizations for American readers, while sending his more original work for publication to Germany. Untermann’s favorite U.S. publication, International Socialist Review, jettisoned its theoretically oriented format entirely in 1908 and became a popular magazine, leaving a vacuum never truly filled. The Left’s intellectual creation, the New Review, did no better, folding in 1917 after making a brave beginning just four years earlier. Only in the Yiddish monthly Zukunft did the theoretically-minded (at that, often restricted to literary or Jewish topics) have anything like free range to explore deeper questions of socialist philosophy.

In the absence of such a discussion, internal differences hinted at a youthful exuberance but also a deep uncertainty over the problems America held for socialist strategy. From an empirical standpoint, the party did not attract the native-born, urban, eastern or Midwestern worker in any significant proportion. Frequently Irish and tied to the Democratic Party (or at any rate Catholic, and successfully deterred by the clergy’s denunciations and warnings), this worker also often enjoyed great material advantages over the unskilled, recently immigrated worker. Exceptions could readily be found. Where ethnic factors (such as German descent) nurtured a socialistic leaning, or where a one-industry town minimized the middle class, or again where Socialists had organized and maintained control over central unions, the SP could exert an exceptional force. Even here, however, defeat—frequently to a fusion ticket of cooperating Republicans and Democrats—often followed on the heels of a victory.
Disputes regularly centered on solving this problem of reaching the “real American worker,” or of finding alternative constituencies. On the “Right,” longtime activists in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), occasionally quite successful (as in Milwaukee) in building a local political machine, stressed the party’s respectability. Indeed, such Socialists urged support for the AFL’s demand for immigration restriction and acquiesced in its combination of open racism and general denigration of the unskilled worker. On the “Left,” a variety of militants and intellectuals insisted on the presentation of the full Socialist program and believed the goal could be reached by mobilizing the mass of workers, preferably through radical industrial unions. The formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905 galvanized both sides of the dispute. Jockeying on the IWW and other issues continued until the climactic division of 1919.

By no means could all differences be so characterized, however. On the crucial issue of a farm program—whether land would be “nationalized” or returned to the poor farmer—the rural and urban divisions proved far more important, with “scientific” socialists unable to grasp the unpopularity of state landownership. On women’s rights and specifically the support of the woman suffrage movement, the “Left” frequently disdained such reforms as insubstantial while sections of the “Right” found themselves comfortable with suffrage activists. Among youth groups, both community (Young People’s Socialist League [YPSL]) and campus (Intercollegiate Socialist Society), “Right” and “Left” likewise shared encouragement and criticisms. On Blacks and their status in the United States, few Socialist voices could be heard before 1915. But the “Left,” unwilling to make compromising qualifications for any special status of worker, offered what appeared to be empty promises of egalitarian futures.

The rise of the mass strikes among the unskilled, along with a sharp reversal of electoral successes, set the stage for more fundamental antagonisms within the movement. For a moment it seemed that the IWW would succeed in mobilizing large sections of eastern and southern European workers across the East and Midwest, thus revolutionizing the SP. At the party convention of 1912—the banner year, with nearly a million votes for Debs, and the election of hundreds of local officials—William D. Haywood faced removal from the national executive committee (to which he had been elected by the party at large) for advocating sabotage, a practice widely engaged in (but only sub rosa) by workers of many kinds. Provoked by the “Right,” Haywood turned from the party. Many of its younger industrial militants abandoned the organization with him (a few hundred were also removed, through purges of membership rolls, mostly in certain foreign-language groups). Far more devastating, local elected officials in power lacked the ability or opportunity to truly transform political life—in a few cases, so much losing interest in Socialism that the SP local expelled them while they remained in office. In this calamity, membership fell to a little more than half its 1912 level of some 100,000.

Two other issues at the same pivotal convention raised question marks over the SP’s future. A handful of leading Socialist intellectuals, including historian-editor A. M. Simons, greeted a relative leftward shift within the AFL by proposing Socialist support for a labor party. Not many others could agree to the abandonment of party independence, especially on such a weak reed. But this tendency hinted defections to the Right mirroring those to the Left. Second, the party leadership reluctantly agreed to charter the growing foreign-language socialist groups into official associative federations. This issue, unlike the Haywood matter, had no “Left” or “Right” tilt despite the heavily immigrant character of the later Communist movement. Taken with other developments, it suggested that the Socialists’ infrastructure had begun to give way.

The growth of the foreign-language section to some forty percent of a diminished party by 1916 signaled the consolidation of the changes. While strong local branches, which were organized around election campaigns, grew and rapidly dwindled, specific new immigrant groups integrated the socialist faith and political practice into the logics of their developing communities. Czechs, Finns, Slovenes, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and others, despite their own internal conflicts, revived the Socialist movement in various cities and industrial settlements.

The outbreak of war in Europe underlined the importance of international issues to these constituents in particular. Many felt the aspirations of their relatives in oppressed nations; all, it is safe to say, feared for the worst and sought to gather resources to send back home; in more than a few cases, they also supplied the radical pamphlets and other publications through which the Old World struggle would reorient itself to new realities. Over the next half-dozen years, the problems of connecting class and national struggles became steadily more complex. But in almost every case, Socialists came to a position of new importance within the crisis-ridden communities desperately seeking dynamic leadership.

For the first time, Black socialists also became an estimable factor, albeit almost entirely in northern cities rather than in the rural South, and despite being offered no special encouragement by the party. Around Pullman car organizer A. Philip Randolph and his stylish monthly, the Messenger, a Harlem group formed. Aroused by a handful of Black Socialists elsewhere, and touched by incipient Black nationalism, an urban race movement of both intellectuals and workers began to show promise.
The economics of these communities also favored a rapid Socialist growth. Wartime conditions both shut off new immigration to the United States—tightening job markets perceptibly—and prompted an American economic boom following the 1913–1914 recession. The IWW, which had hoped to lead these very largely unskilled, mass-production ranks, had been driven to the West by major defeats, and would soon face an unprecedented government-and-business repression. Burgeoning industrial unionism flowed, especially from the U.S. entry into the war, into the existing AFL unions or into newly organized and radical-leaning bodies such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. “Practical” unionism with a radical edge emphasized the importance of radical politics, and despite all official party reluctance, the federations became the main recipients of fresh energies.

The party’s English-language sector meanwhile suffered serious blows as a result of the war. Woodrow Wilson’s appeal for a peace presidency drove socialist electoral tallies far down. European socialist (especially German Socialist) failure to vote against war credits had a devastating effect on morale. Important intellectuals, both Right and Left, defected to patriotism. Repression of the Socialist press fell particularly hard upon the rural papers, which needed second-class mailing permits to survive, and upon rural and small-town constituencies, which now faced severe pressure from the spreading reactionary patriotism. The party’s 1917 Saint Louis convention mandated an essentially pacifist anti-war program, and party activists—“Right” as well as “Left”—urgently pushed their appeals for a cessation of the fighting. They were quite literally the only major movement in U.S. society to stand adamant against the war currents.

Rising anti-war sentiment, by 1918 or so, began to reward courage and hard work. Deprived of some constituencies, Socialists began to gain others (most especially, but not only, among the victimized nationalities, such as German Americans). Local electoral strongholds returned in some cases, and in others appeared for the first time. This new burst of electoral enthusiasm brought new Socialists to office in Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Minnesota, Kentucky, and elsewhere. Electoral success peaked in 1917 in Ohio, where Socialists received up to fifty percent of the vote, and in large industrial cities where they had strength; in Chicago, where they received a third of the municipal vote; and in New York.

A second-place mayoral finish that year for New York City candidate Morris Hillquit City was considered not only as an anti-war but also a near Socialist mandate. The People’s Council for Peace and Democracy, which might be described as the American Left’s first Popular Front-style mobilization, drew pacifist and radical labor leaders behind a unified anti-war and anti-repression appeal and gained attention. Meanwhile, key Socialist-led unions such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (whose president, Sidney Hillman, also headed the People’s Council) quickly consolidated their grip on industries through careful use of government-based mediations. Even among such weakly represented groups as Italians, Socialist support and (less commonly) membership began to grow significantly. The future of the Socialist movement, now more than fifty percent immigrant, might have been imagined as a bright one.

The Russian October Revolution, the failure of the revolution in Europe, and the appearance of the Third International brought Socialist schism and diminished political opportunities. A Moscow-mandated split in socialist parties took place via growing challenges over war issues (the emerging immigrant-dominated Left demanded not pacifism but “direct action”) and control of the party. Right-leaning functionaries, mostly from the older generation of immigrants and native-born, had watched the steady demographic change of the movement with unease. Still gripping party mechanisms, they set aside a national executive committee election that would have given pro-Bolsheviks an outright majority. Thereafter, one Communist faction withdrew immediately, and another awaited the 1919 convention, denouncing the expulsions of branches, state party sections, and entire foreign-language federations.

Ironically, as with the war issue, the Socialist “Right” for the most part had often taken very “Left” positions on the Russian Revolution, while future American Communist leaders did not entirely see its blessings. All this mattered little when the break took place. Amid massive repression, an organization of more than 100,000 members divided into two or three parts, which altogether could manage no more than forty thousand members two years later. The bulk of the Socialist movement had simply faded away. While the immigrant groups recovered a portion of this loss, the English-language sector disappeared into farmer-labor movements or simply grew quiescent.

In terms of members, the SP nevertheless remained larger than the Communist movement through the early 1930s. But its strength lay in older members, a few local political machines (notably, Milwaukee), ethnic groups (mainly Slovenians) with special reasons for resisting the Soviet Union’s appeal, and a handful of unions centered in the garment trades. Between Left-leaning youth and the progressive unions, a handful of Socialists effected an important link through the slick monthly Labor Age and earnestly supported the Brookwood Labor College’s activities. Likewise, the Rand School, launched in the 1910s, continued to have a formidable public presence in New York. Christian pacifism also drew a talented group of younger Socialists. But temporary revivals in Socialist activities usually ended in disappointment.

Most of all, the Socialists exhibited the tiredness of senior radicals who had lost confidence in their mission, and who at times (as in the garment trades and the pages of the weekly New Leader) seemed more intent on attacking Communists than in ending capitalism. Well placed in the leadership of the “Jewish unions” and concentrated in the United Hebrew Trades, they had had enough revolutions for the foreseeable future and yearned for stability. Communists, exuberant in their revolutionary fervor, attracted activists and intellectuals (including important leaders of the Socialists’ reorganized YPSL) with their dynamism. The major outpouring of Socialist energy into Robert M. La Follette’s 1924 Progressive campaign added little to the tarnished luster of the party and its failure resulted in further discouragement.

Norman Thomas almost single-handedly revived the SP. In 1928, the year of his first presidential campaign, membership stood at a staggering low of eight thousand. Thomas generated news with his public addresses, and he appealed forcefully to religious and academic liberals such as John Dewey and Paul Douglas, with whom he formed the League for Independent Political Action. After he attracted a respectable vote, and as the United States entered the Great Depression, Socialist fortunes improved and membership doubled by 1932.

In retrospect, this was the high point of the SP revival. Thomas’s 1932 presidential campaign, which gained 800,000 votes, enlivened campus politics on an unprecedented scale and reached a diversity of Americans (including many almost but not quite willing to vote for him). Adulation bordering upon the hero-worship previously reserved for Eugene Debs surrounded the former Presbyterian minister in his perpetual speaking tours, banquets, and radio addresses.

The SP-led Unemployed Leagues formed in a handful of cities, and for a few years competed heavily with the Communist-led Unemployed Councils and a third competing entity led by A.J. Muste. Due in no small part to Communist sectarianism, a Socialist youth movement meanwhile grew from campus to community, and the Socialist presence within the labor movement waxed strong once more. In Wisconsin, in Reading, Pennsylvania, and in a scattering of other cities, local Socialist electoral campaigns took on new life. Certain ethnic groups, notably Jews and Finns, gained fresh energies from returnees, activists disillusioned with Communist practices but still dedicated to socialist ideals. The political activities of other groups, such as Slovenes, resumed after a long concentration on fraternal institution-building. Chiefly through the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, the Socialists made new inroad in the South.

At this apex, the SP once more fell to external and internal foes. The most formidable of these, the New Deal, dragged leading Socialist unionists into Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign, a development that Socialists (unlike Communists) could not tolerate. Even before then, several of Thomas’s most promising supporters had defected to Fiorello La Guardia’s mayoral campaign in New York. Upton Sinclair had suggested yet another way forward by garnering nearly 900,000 votes on the Democratic ticket in the 1934 gubernatorial race in California. With the partial easing of the depression, many radicals soon found themselves negotiating with Roosevelt officials. As if anticipating the Second New Deal, with its vast appeal to ordinary Americans, the promise of the socialist movement fell to bits.

Thomas’s 1936 campaign, winning less than half the votes of 1932, offered a dour guide to Socialist troubles. After the party’s May convention, the Old Guard withdrew in a bloc, forming the Social Democratic Federation, which threw itself immediately into the American Labor Party and indirect support for Roosevelt’s reelection. Along with the Old Guard went several of the party’s most precious institutional resources: the Rand School, the New Leader, and New York radio station WEVD. Forverts, the widely circulated Yiddish daily, spoke sympathetically about socialism but seemed to lose its aspirations for any dramatic change in society. Thomas sought to run a campaign that left open the door both for activity in state farmer-labor parties and in the SP. The next year, Thomas himself would withdraw from the New York mayoral race, leaving the path clear for his supporters to turn to La Guardia’s fusion ticket.

Such maneuvers could not make up for the losses and the party’s internal bleeding. With the definite leftward tilt of the New Deal in 1936 and the subsequent rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), promising young socialists either went to Washington as brain-trust bureaucrats or plunged wholly into labor activities. Despite widespread Socialist youth activity on the campuses, the Communist Party, now entering its Popular Front phase, tended to recruit the most promising activists in college and youth movements, or alternatively to capture control of organizations and discourage dissenters. Socialists might publish a respectable weekly (the Socialist Call) and organize effectively to help the Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike, but they gained few members for their efforts. Meanwhile the Trotskyist movement entered the SP en bloc in 1936 and, after nearly two years of bitter factional fighting, withdrew (or was expelled) with the cream of the recent YPSL crop. Other than scattered municipal activism and a pacifist remnant, little remained behind Norman Thomas, who by 1938 called realistically for a turn from electoral politics to educational efforts.

The socialist caucus around UAW leader Walter Reuther marked one stunning, if ambiguous, exception. Walter Reuther’s brother Victor and Victor’s wife, Sophie, Eddie Levinson, and a circle of other SP members played key roles in launching and consolidating the United Auto Workers. Riveted to union activities, most of the group drifted out of the SP by wartime but stayed within Reuther’s inner circle. Tacticians of the anticommunist bloc, they nevertheless maintained hopes for an unrelenting opposition to capitalism, a vision that faded in time into Democratic Party liberalism with a pinkish tint. Victor Reuther distinguished himself by exposing the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities within the labor movement and continuing, into advanced old age, as a fiery speaker at labor conventions.
It was also notable, albeit as a side issue, how little theoretical speculation appeared in Socialist publications, even relative to the modest intellectual work carried on by other Left groups. Haim Kantorovich, a refugee intellectual, conducted the American Socialist Quarterly for a few years, with the participation of David P. Berenberg and a small circle of other writers. They turned their eyes largely toward the contemporary European socialists’ leftish fringes and vaguely mulled the issues of socialism and democracy. Harry W. Laidler, one-man intellectual whirlwind of the League for Industrial Democracy, meanwhile produced volume after volume advocating a British-style nationalization. But perhaps the most notable effort, by Christian socialists in the World Tomorrow and, after its close in 1934, in their books and pamphlets, stood the furthest from traditional Marxism and the Second International. Norman Thomas’s best efforts, scarcely theoretical but full of intelligent and compassionate argument, took place within this context. Having drifted rightward by the 1940s, the New Leader lacked this humane dimension and mainly expressed its bitter opposition to enemies on the Left without countering with any positive vision other than a mildly reformed capitalism. By the late 1930s, SP membership dropped to under ten thousand.

Under Thomas’s leadership, this much-reduced organization played its most notable role in anti-war propaganda. Socialists organized the Keep America Out of War Congress in 1938. While adamantly hostile to fascism, Thomas accurately predicted that following the U.S. entry, the decline of radical prospects, the erosion of civil liberties, and a world reshaped along totalitarian lines. His warnings, above all of “armament economics,” that is, a permanent war economy ruled by the military-industrial complex, proved sadly prescient, as did his complaints about an all-too-compliant and corrupted liberalism. Thomas had anticipated the future impact of the Cold War on all political discourse. By 1941 only a small portion of the SP remained with him to carry on much-needed work on behalf of conscientious objectors and others newly imprisoned.

The SP could not recover from this decline. It nevertheless remained doggedly alive, running Thomas’s presidential campaigns through 1948, denouncing both Stalinism and the Democratic Party’s broad shift to the right. While waiting for inevitable disillusionment with both Communism and capitalism, the SP drifted. The formerly Trotskyist Independent Socialist League of a few hundred members—many of whom had been expelled by the SP in 1938—rejoined the party in 1957 along with the Social Democratic Federation. A few thousand, mostly aged members looked to a vacuum created by the weakened CP and placed even more hope in the rising civil rights and disarmament movements.

By this time, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal wing of the existing labor leadership offered the lodestars. “Realignment” of the two-party political system became the all-consuming strategy. Much rested, it was believed, upon the initiatives of well-placed individuals. Michael Harrington, whose The Other America (1960) inspired the War on Poverty, appeared to be the model policy-analyst for Democratic Party liberals. Former Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman, ever closer in influence and views to the top leadership of the AFL-CIO, drafted out influential position papers for labor. YPSL luminaries guided the Student Peace Union’s meteoric rise to militancy in the early 1960s and remained active in Young Democrats and Campus Americans for Democratic Action (CADA) chapters thereafter. Directors of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, campus connection of the SP since the 1930s, aided the modest rebirth of the movement in the 1950s on a few campuses and supplied resources for its conversion into Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1963. Faced with the New Left, the SP leadership moved swiftly right on many issues. Most socialist leaders tended to support U.S. military posture when the alternative looked suspiciously Communist. They also forcefully opposed Black Power and denounced public criticism of Israeli policies. Bayard Rustin, the most prominent Black SP leader, thus broke with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s avowed opposition to the Vietnam War. By the close of the 1960s, a flagging YPSL viewed itself as the centrist alternative to the booming, radicalized SDS.

Once more the party fractured. The most conservative faction, closely linked to the upper echelons of the labor movement, broke away in 1972 to form Social Democrats USA (SDUSA), whose near-fanatical anticommunism, resistance to feminism, opposition to affirmative action, and unwavering support of Israel—along with a cultural discomfort with younger generations at large—were its most notable features. The left, supporting George McGovern, formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC).

After the smoke cleared and few SP members remained, a small but stubborn group of loyalists kept the regular SP franchise alive. In 1976, former Milwaukee mayor Frank Zeidler ran for president on the Socialist ticket. The SP maintained its national campaigns with such notables as peace activist David McReynolds and labor-feminist author Barbara Garson in titular roles. The 1984 ticket of Sonia Johnson and Richard Walton accrued more than 70,000 votes, a high point in the decades to follow. Except for a few locations, the SP had lost its electoral raison d’être. Yet the continued nomination of presidential campaign slates, including Green Party leader Howie Hawkins in 2020, inspired activists to keep making an effort.

The swelling of Democratic Socialists of America to more than 60,000 members by 2020 would seem, once again, to have marginalized the Socialist Party to the point of no return, but this was not so. The more than occasional election of a local SP member to a variety of offices, usually in nonpartisan local races, helped demonstrate some unease with the two-party system and hope for a rebirth of third party politics on the Left.

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