Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy

By Daniel Soyer

Daniel Soyer's history of the Liberal Party of New York State, Left in the Center, shows the surprising relationship between Democratic Socialism and mainstream American politics.

Beginning in 1944 and lasting until 2002, the Liberal Party offered voters an ideological seal of approval and played the role of strategic kingmaker in the electoral politics of New York State. The party helped elect presidents, governors, senators, and mayors, and its platform reflected its founders' social democratic principles. In practical politics, the Liberal Party's power resided in its capacity to steer votes to preferred Democrats or Republicans with a reasonable chance of victory. This uneasy balance between principle and pragmatism, which ultimately proved impossible to maintain, is at the heart of the dramatic political story presented in Left in the Center.

The Liberal Party, the longest-lived of New York's small parties, began as a means for anti-Communist social democrats to have an impact on the politics and policy of New York City, Albany, and Washington, DC. It provided a political voice for labor activists, independent liberals, and pragmatic social democrats. Although the party devolved into what some saw as a cynical patronage machine, it remained a model for third-party power and for New York's influential Conservative and, later, the Working Families parties.

With an active period ranging from the successful senatorial career of Jacob Javits to the mayoralties of John Lindsay and Rudy Giuliani, the Liberal Party effectively shaped the politics and policy of New York. The practical gains and political cost of that complicated trade-off is at the heart of Left in the Center.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501759895

Book preview

Left in the Center

The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy

Daniel Soyer

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

Contents

Introduction: The Liberal Party and the Rise and Fall of Pragmatic Social Democracy

1. Labor Politics in New York

2. Fighting Liberals at the Polls

3. New Deal Legacy at the Crossroads

4. A Year-Round Party

5. Cold War Liberalism in City, State, and Nation

6. Liberal Crusades and Backroom Deals

7. New Frontiers

8. Liberal Victory and Liberalism in Turmoil

9. Wars in Vietnam and at Home

10. The End of the Rose Era

11. Not Liberal, Not a Party

Postscript: The Afterlife of the Liberal Party

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The Liberal Party and the Rise and Fall of Pragmatic Social Democracy

On May 19–20, 1944, 1,124 delegates and several hundred observers—representing unions, district clubs, and progressive fraternal and communal groups—packed the ballroom at the Hotel Roosevelt in Manhattan for the founding convention of the Liberal Party of New York State. The convention call envisioned a new world order based on international cooperation and a domestic policy of economic democracy. It attacked the Republicans as the party of reaction and imperialistic-isolationism, and the Democrats as the party of viciously reactionary southern congressmen and corrupt big-city machines. Convention speakers picked up those themes, demanding a fair distribution of wealth and positing an important postwar role for social enterprise alongside private enterprise. The convention’s emotional high point came on the second day, when the new party nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt for a fourth term so that he could continue his fight against the Axis powers abroad and economic royalists at home.¹ The history of the Liberal Party thus begins on a high note: the party’s platform reflected its social democratic ideals, the packed convention hall its mass base, and the nomination of FDR its pragmatic strategy of fusion with the major parties.

Third parties have come and gone, and this exuberant founding convention could also have been forgotten as soon as the bunting had been removed from the hall. But as it turned out, the third party established then was no flash in the pan. Rather, it wielded real power for more than half a century—longer than any other in US history—helping between 1944 and 2002 to elect presidents, governors, and senators, not to mention several mayors of the nation’s largest city. The sources of both its longevity and its influence lay in its close alliance with the labor movement, especially the garment unions, and in its practical approach to politics. When the Liberal Party finally collapsed, it was because the connection with labor had been lost and the pragmatism had degenerated into cynicism. By that time, as one oft-repeated quip had it, just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, the Liberal Party was neither liberal nor a party. Rather, it was a law firm with a ballot line.

This story of political rise and fall thus has much to say about both the meaning and the shifting fortunes of American liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century. At the start, it suggests that post–New Deal, postwar liberalism did not surrender its social democratic character as quickly or completely as has been suggested most influentially by Alan Brinkley. A labor party drawing financial and popular support especially from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), the Liberal Party represented a form of ideologically charged postcapitalist politics. As described by the historian Howard Brick, some postcapitalists were reformist Socialists. Others were liberals who had concluded that capitalism could neither survive on its own nor provide for social justice without significant public intervention. Whether they came from liberal or Socialist backgrounds, postcapitalists called for an extensive government-run social security system, increased mechanisms for democratic economic planning, government intervention in the market not only to smooth out business cycles but also to guide the economy in socially desirable directions, public ownership of some industries, and an equitable distribution of wealth through taxation and government spending on social programs and public services. The Liberal Party and the larger current it represented thereby synthesized liberal and radical traditions. With no explicit mention of Socialism, they called more vaguely for social justice, industrial or economic democracy, a politics of social responsibility, or even a cooperative commonwealth—all visions that postcapitalists could share as American parallels to European-style social democracy not only in the Depression decade, but for decades thereafter.²

American social democracy was stronger in some parts of the country than others, and New York was one of its bastions. Indeed, the Liberal Party was a central pillar of what the historian Joshua Freeman and others have called an experiment in social-democracy-in-one-city that flourished especially between the 1930s and the 1970s. In its heyday, New York social democracy sought to provide the city’s working-class citizens with a decent standard of living through an expansion of the public and cooperative spheres, social welfare programs, and regulation of private enterprise. Features of New York’s social democratic polity included widespread public and cooperative housing projects, rent regulation, municipal hospitals and health clinics, free public education from kindergarten through college, cheap mass transit, and even cultural and arts programs.³ New York’s social democracy had national implications, informing such initiatives as the 1949 Housing Act, which its opponents feared would spread Socialistic New York-style public housing, in Samuel Zipp’s words, to other parts of the country.⁴

The labor movement, social reformers of various stripes, Communists, Popular Front liberals, major-party politicians, and even old-fashioned urban political machines helped build the social democratic polity. But historians have overlooked one element of this coalition—actual social democrats.⁵ Many of the Liberal Party’s leaders and activists had been members of the right wing of the Socialist Party, which had enjoyed some electoral success between 1914 and 1922. Tired of their political isolation, they established the Liberal Party’s predecessor, the American Labor Party (ALP), in 1936 to support the New Deal nationally and locally through an independent labor party. Given New York’s complicated political alignments, this meant backing Democrats like President Franklin Roosevelt and Governor Herbert Lehman, and Republicans like Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. While not explicitly Socialist, the ALP, and later the Liberal Party, nevertheless retained a social democratic thrust—pushing for further extensions of the New Deal, into health insurance, for example, and in general for the expansion of the public sector. Through the ALP, and later the Liberal Party, Socialists joined liberals and laborites in the social reform coalition.

They were able to do so because of the phenomenon of fusion voting, or cross endorsement. Since the 1930s, a number of small parties have taken advantage of an unusual feature in state electoral law that allows candidates to run under the banner of more than one party, seeking to manipulate the larger groups by proffering or withholding their support. This provision thus allows third parties to have their political cake and eat it too—retaining their independence while exerting real influence on elections and policy. Often united around a more coherent program than the Democrats or Republicans, they have brought a European brand of ideological and coalition politics to New York. The Liberal Party inspired emulation by others of both Right and Left, including the Conservative and Working Families Parties, both of which continued to exert outsized influence well into the twenty-first century. Major-party politicians might resent the minor parties’ influence, but doing away with them has proven difficult. Only in 2020 did Governor Andrew Cuomo, angry at the Working Families Party for its reluctance to support his reelection two years earlier, manage to slip into the state budget a provision that would make it harder for small parties to gain and maintain official ballot status. Even so, both the Working Families and Conservative Parties managed to survive the 2020 election, and the possibility for cross endorsements remains.⁶

In an era in which the ideological distinction between the two large American parties was not always clear, the Liberals leaned on both Democrats and Republicans. The GOP may have been the party of big business, but it also had a progressive wing. The Democratic Party was the party of New Deal liberalism, but it also had its southern white supremacists and its relatively conservative urban machines. The Liberal Party sought to leverage its support to strengthen the liberal wings of both. For decades, no Democrat could win a statewide race unless the Liberals decided not to split the progressive vote by running their own candidate. But at a time when liberal Republicans sometimes sought to outflank Democrats from the left, Democratic-Liberal fusion was not always a given. Especially in New York City, where the Liberals claimed a part of the anti-Tammany reform tradition, they frequently fused instead with reform-minded Republicans, for whom the Liberal seal of approval was essential to success in citywide races.

Success depended on the ability to mobilize voters. In fact, the Liberal Party could count on thousands of union members to show up for rallies or distribute flyers, and hundreds of thousands of voters to pull its candidates’ levers on Election Day. It thus provides a model of political mobilization based on class interests for progressive ends. At the same time, as has often been the case in US politics, ethnic identity played a central animating role. With its base in the garment unions, the Liberal Party appealed especially to New York’s Jewish and Italian voters, many of whom had recently united behind La Guardia in his challenge to Irish-dominated Tammany Hall and the city’s other Democratic machines. In this way, the Liberal Party contributed to the process of ethnic succession in New York political power that took place from the 1930s to the 1960s.

But the party expressed above all a Jewish political sensibility. Indeed, although in its heyday its chair was always a gentile intellectual, and it included members of other ethnic groups, the Liberal Party was perhaps the closest thing to a Jewish political party to exist in the United States. The Liberals espoused not only far-reaching social welfare programs, but also cosmopolitan internationalism, a liberal cultural orientation, and an insistence on the strict separation of church and state, stances that sometimes put them in conflict with Catholics in local and national politics.⁷ But rather than reflecting some sort of Judaic essence or modern Jewish nationalism, the Jewish liberalism the party represented was rooted in specific historical conditions of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Europe and United States, and in the historical experiences of working-class and upwardly mobile immigrants and second-generation Americans. Historians have debated the source, nature, and staying power of Jewish liberalism, but the social democratic core of American Jewish liberalism has been largely overlooked in much of the scholarship.⁸

The Liberal Party thus influenced both local and national politics, and it was deeply embedded in the histories of American Jewry and the American Left and liberalism. But while many scholars have noticed its existence, few have paid it much attention.⁹ By contrast, the New York Conservative Party, founded in 1962 in explicit imitation of the Liberal model, is the subject of several scholarly and semischolarly books. Of course, while the Conservative Party successfully achieved its goal of pulling the Republican Party to the right, the Liberal Party disappeared, and this might be one reason why scholars have ignored it.¹⁰

Another reason for the lack of scholarly interest might be the Liberals’ decidedly unromantic and unfashionable anti-Communism. Although the party only arose in 1944, its roots were in the decades-long civil war in the American and Jewish Left sparked by the Russian Revolution. Historians have by and large favored the Communists, viewing the Communist Party and its Popular Front periphery as the historical Left’s most heroic and effective element. Conversely, influential historians have viewed anti-Communism as inherently reactionary—necessarily a spur to imperialism and militarism, and an obstacle to movements for labor empowerment and racial equality. When liberal, Socialist, or anarchist anti-Communism is considered at all, it is viewed as a surrender to conservative pressures, one that bore much of the blame for stalling the progressive agenda during the early Cold War.¹¹ The Liberals’ premature anti-Stalinism has thus made them unattractive to historians of American radicalism. The pro-Soviet Left has therefore received much more attention than the anti-Soviet Left, even in the period when the former was becoming increasingly isolated and the latter worked more effectively to expand labor and civil rights and other progressive causes.¹² This book aims to recover the history of anti-Communist American radicals and liberals.

In addition to anti-Communism, historians may not have found attractive the precarious attempt to balance idealist ideological politics with pragmatic urban political horse trading. Party leaders and loyalists saw backroom wheeling and dealing, occasional compromises with the machine they claimed to oppose, and support for imperfect politicians as necessary levers of progressive influence. Self-consciously unromantic, their methods were unappealing to historians caught up in the romance of American Communism. But even during the party’s heyday, many progressives thought the party too compromised, opportunistic rather than pragmatic. When some party members also came to this conclusion, there were lively, even bitter, contests for the soul of the party. But the established leadership always won out.

Tensions between ideology and pragmatism, idealism and compromise, are inherent in any attempt at practical progressive politics. But the Liberal Party also embodied the friction between the institutionalization of that politics and highly personalized leadership. Historical studies of twentieth-century New York politics have generally focused on a few remarkable individuals—from Big Tim Sullivan to Ed Koch, with Al Smith, Fiorello La Guardia, Herbert Lehman, and Bella Abzug in between. The institution that has received the most attention is Tammany Hall, New York City’s dominant Democratic Party political machine. Once mainly reviled for its endemic corruption, Tammany has more recently been rehabilitated as an expression of small-d democratic politics and a vehicle for working-class and immigrant empowerment. Its opponents, on the other hand, have been painted as stuck-up, upper-class, Anglo-Protestant (or Anglo-Protestant wannabe) elitists.¹³ This book not only shifts attention from individuals to the institutions through which they worked, but highlights an alternative anti-Tammany reform tradition, one based just as much in the immigrant working class as was the Hall.

But although the Liberal Party was rooted in the immigrant working class, it was a top-down affair, in which a few strong personalities played an outsized role. In fact, a handful of leaders, especially the ILGWU’s David Dubinsky and Alex Rose of the hatters’ union, exercised near complete control over its direction. In the early years, the party was something of a model labor-intellectual alliance, as a number of prominent liberal intellectuals, including the legal scholar Adolf A. Berle Jr., the housing reformer Charles Abrams, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, joined Dubinsky and Rose in the inner circle. That party leaders took intellectuals seriously was in itself an important difference between the Liberal Party and Tammany. But as the years wore on, the inner circle contracted and ideas seemed to matter less and less. By the mid-1960s, Rose was in almost complete control. By that time, too, favors and jobs seemed to outweigh ideological considerations in decisions regarding candidate selection. Leaders became bosses, as some even within the party noticed, and the difference between Tammany and the Liberals narrowed. The history of the party thus illustrates the dangers of overly personalized leadership; the institution did not survive the personalities intact.

Moreover, during the 1960s, as American liberalism tore itself apart over such issues as the Vietnam War and racial conflict, the general crisis played itself out in local institutions. Many members of a party founded on Cold War anti-Communism supported the Johnson administration’s policy in Vietnam as a means of containing Soviet and Chinese aggression. Others, however, fell under the influence of the New Politics movement and viewed opposition to the war as a litmus test for true liberalism. Petty personal politics further magnified disputes over the war. Thus, after Dubinsky retired from the presidency of the ILGWU in 1966, the union gradually removed its cash and mass base from the party. Although differences over the Vietnam War played a role in this decision, so did the determination of Dubinsky’s successor, Louis Stulberg, to consolidate his own position by doing everything the opposite of his predecessor. Since the Liberal Party was Dubinsky’s baby, Stulberg distanced the union from it.

Likewise, changing urban demographics challenged New York’s traditional brand of social democratic liberalism and undermined its base. Increasingly polarized racial politics—as manifested in conflicts over school governance and the placement of public housing—created divisions within the party and drove a wedge between it and its traditional working- and middle-class Jewish supporters. In any case, that base was shrinking as Jews moved out of New York City and up the social ladder. Moreover, the terms of politics—both Jewish and general—were changing. Many Jews who remained in the party’s former strongholds in the city’s outer boroughs turned rightward and deserted liberalism. Meanwhile, despite some desultory efforts, the party proved unable to attract a mass following among the ascendant African American and Latino populations. Finally, the New York City fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and a national conservative trend inaugurated a period of austerity that made the Liberal Party’s tradition of social democratic liberalism appear outmoded.¹⁴

As its own brand of social democratic liberalism fell out of step with both ascendant identity liberalism and free-market, austerity neoliberalism, the party seemed to degenerate, becoming less principled and more focused on patronage. In fact, with more power and fewer people, it came to resemble a patronage club in which everyone was angling for appointed office. If the dour Rose had been the party’s undisputed boss, at least he seemed to remember its original social democratic raison d’être. After his death in 1976, his successor, the flamboyant Raymond Harding, made fewer bones about being a political operator. By the end, which came in 2002, the party was little more than a cynical patronage machine, more open than ever to charges of corruption. By that time, the party had outlived the social and political conditions that gave rise to it, and had failed to adapt to a new era.

In 1944, speakers railed against economic royalists at a mass rally and founding convention. The party’s end is best captured by a widely circulated news image of an obese and worried Harding, the epitome of a corrupt boss caught with his hand in the till, being led in handcuffs to his arraignment for influence peddling.¹⁵ Though Harding’s 2009 arrest came seven years after the Liberals had lost their ballot line and closed their office, the party and its former leader were so closely identified that the scandal seemed a fitting coda.

So what are the stakes of a history of the Liberal Party of New York? On the one hand, as the recent Democratic Socialist insurgency led by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others within the Democratic Party demonstrates, the issues of principle and strategy raised by the Liberal Party are not dead. The party’s history illuminates the ways in which the ghost of American Socialism has long animated certain corners of American liberalism. Moreover, it rescues anti-Communist liberalism and social democracy from undeserved association with right-wing reaction, and the Left from unnecessary association with foreign tyrannies. With its base in the immigrant and second-generation Jewish (and secondarily Italian) working and middle classes, the Liberal Party illustrates the ethnic component of American political movements, just as it represents a model of a successful political mobilization of organized labor in alliance with radical-liberal intellectuals. On the other hand, the history of the Liberal Party also provides a cautionary tale for political movements of all stripes. The party ultimately failed to maintain a balance between idealism and pragmatism. Its practice of trading support for jobs and influence, combined with the exclusivity of its inner circle, eventually transformed it into the kind of political organization it professed to oppose. Finally, its success depended not only on the continued vitality of a particular base, but also on the perceived viability of its brand of liberalism. When both of these conditions disappeared, the party lost not only its influence but also its direction.

A statewide party, regulated by New York State election law, the Liberal Party’s permanent spot on the ballot in elections throughout the state was determined by the vote total for its gubernatorial candidate every four years. Nevertheless, most of its support came from New York City, and that is where it was most active. Accordingly, this book pays attention to statewide elections and developments but focuses mainly on the party’s role in New York City.

Liberalism was national in scope and much broader than a single party. So it is hard to avoid confusion in referring to those liberals who were members of the Liberal Party and those who were not. Here, when the word Liberal is capitalized, it refers to the party and its members. When the word is not capitalized, it refers to those who were not in the party, or to the broader movement of which the party was just one section.

Chapter 1

Labor Politics in New York

In 1886, Henry George, the radical social philosopher and advocate of a single tax on land, ran for mayor of New York at the head of the Union Labor Party. Advocating higher pay, shorter hours, and better conditions for workers; public ownership of utilities and mass transit; and the right to strike and organize, the George campaign assembled a varied and enthusiastic coalition of trade unionists, Irish nationalists, middle-class social reformers, German Socialists, and the dissident Roman Catholic priest Father Edward McGlynn. Radicals in the still-small East European Jewish immigrant community eagerly enlisted in the campaign as well, willing for the moment to put aside Socialist doctrinal purity in favor of a broad appeal for social justice. The spirited campaign gave voice to the city’s working class and frightened its bourgeoisie. In the end, George won just short of a third of the vote and came in second, ahead of the Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt. Radicals were encouraged by the results. But before they could build on them, the coalition fell apart and, riven by factionalism, the movement faded. In the memory of many New York Socialists, however, the 1886 Henry George campaign remained an exciting memory of a first hurrah.¹

Indeed, the prehistory of the Liberal Party and its predecessor, the American Labor Party, can be seen as a long struggle to reconstruct the broad coalition for radical social reform that had powered the George campaign. For a short while, it seemed like the Socialist Party could by itself serve as a viable vehicle for effective independent labor politics. But when that prospect faded in the early 1920s, many Socialists searched for a way to insert themselves into the political mainstream while remaining independent of the major parties. At the same time, a cohort of progressive Democratic and Republican politicians emerged to make it increasingly difficult for radicals to pretend that it made no difference which capitalist candidate was elected. By the mid-1930s, four political streams gradually came to intersect in New York politics to make possible the reconstruction of the George coalition: reformist Socialists, the farmer-labor movement, radical social liberals, and progressive members of the dominant political machine. The new politics found a base of support especially in the working-class new-immigrant communities of East European Jews and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Italians.

Beginning in 1936, New York’s moderate Socialists, as well as its independent laborites and social reformers, finally found an effective means to reinsert themselves squarely into the political mainstream—establishing the American Labor Party. Over the next eight years, the ALP became an essential partner in the complex local New Deal coalition that ranged at times from liberal Republicans to Communists, demonstrating in the process that a powerful constituency existed for its brand of practical social democratic politics. At the same time, however, the civil war between Communists and anti-Communist social democrats that had embroiled the Left in the 1920s had never been settled, and when the two sides found themselves uncomfortably together in the ALP, their battles took the form of a struggle for control. The internal war, though waged in primaries for local public and party office, often centered on international issues, especially those of special interest to the New York Left’s core Jewish constituency. By 1944, the conflict led to a split and the founding of the Liberal Party.

Immigrants, Socialists, and Reformers

Between 1870 and 1914, mass migration from Eastern Europe made New York’s Jews the largest single ethnic community in the city, and not surprisingly they left their mark on its culture, economics, and politics. Settling first on the Lower East Side, they soon branched out to neighborhoods in Brooklyn, upper Manhattan, and the Bronx. For decades, they constituted a majority of workers—and employers—in the garment industry, New York’s largest manufacturing sector. They were politically divided, but the most characteristically Jewish contribution to New York’s politics was a strong strain of Socialism. By 1910, a Jewish labor movement emerged that included not only unions and the Socialist Party, but newspapers, fraternal organizations, and even theatrical troupes. This interlocking Jewish Socialist and labor milieu was a visible and influential presence in the Jewish districts.²

Italians, overwhelmingly from Sicily and the south of Italy, also came to New York in great numbers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. By 1930, there were just over a million Italians and Italian Americans in various neighborhoods throughout the city. Coming at the same time as the East European Jews, many Italians, especially women, also found their way into the burgeoning garment industry, and by the mid-1920s, Italians made up a majority of its workers. The Italian community also gave rise to a significant radical subculture, with its own newspapers, orchestras, choral groups, theaters, libraries, and schools.³

Jews and Italians together built the radical unions in the needle trades. The most important unions to emerge by the second decade of the twentieth century were the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), an American Federation of Labor affiliate founded in 1900, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), a militant independent union founded in 1914. Both the ILGWU and the ACWA, as well as smaller unions such as the Cloth Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union, were led primarily by immigrant Jews. Though relations between Jews and Italians within the unions could sometimes be tense, Italian workers achieved some autonomy with the founding of two Italian-language ILGWU locals: Local 48 for cloakmakers in 1916, and Local 89 for dressmakers in 1919. Not only did the locals offer their members a way to participate in the union in their own language, but they formed bases of power for leaders such as Luigi Antonini, who later played an important role in the American Labor and Liberal Parties.⁴ The ILGWU was most closely tied to the Socialist Party, but all three unions proclaimed a belief in independent labor political action for a transition to a cooperative commonwealth.

With the support of the unions, the Socialist Party started to achieve some electoral success in the city in 1914. According to the historian David Shannon, the New York Socialists put great emphasis on political action, on getting votes, in an effort consistent with an evolutionist approach to Socialism.⁵ Over the next seven years or so, Socialists had substantial success, especially in Jewish immigrant districts, electing a congressman, a municipal judge, a state senator, and a number of state assemblymen and city aldermen. New York Socialists never governed the city, but in thinking about what it meant to legislate and serve constituents they were forced to consider the nuts and bolts of municipal and state policy.

High points in the Socialist electoral surge included the election in 1914 of the popular labor lawyer Meyer London to Congress from the Lower East Side, and the attorney Morris Hillquit’s dramatic run for mayor in 1917. In Congress, London introduced bills to create a system of social security including unemployment, disability, and health insurance, and he successfully sponsored a bill that would make bankrupt employers responsible for some of the wages they owed their workers.⁶ What the journalist and historian Melech Epstein noted was often called Hillquit’s peace and milk campaign focused mainly on opposition to US involvement in World War I, but, as Hillquit himself put it, he also put forward the usual Socialist platform of municipal reform, stressing the high cost of food and calling for public ownership of transit lines, free meals for schoolchildren, municipal nurseries, and health care. The Socialist didn’t win, but he finished with over 20 percent of the vote in third place, just behind the unpopular incumbent.⁷

Hillquit’s remarkable campaign carried ten Socialists into the state legislature, where they acted as a disciplined caucus for what they called constructive Socialist legislation and against legislation hostile to the interests of the people. Of course, the Socialist assemblymen were for the abolition of capitalism, but in the meantime, they reported, their daily question was this: Is this for the benefit of the workers? If it is we are for it. If it is not, we are against it. Only one Socialist-sponsored bill passed—enabling workers who had recovered wages in court to collect them more easily. But other bills that were for the benefit of the workers—mostly involving improvement of working conditions—did pass, introduced by members of other parties and supported by the Socialists. If nothing else, the Socialists acted as a good-government caucus, exposing the inefficiencies, inequities, laziness, and cronyism of the legislature. They were proud of the kudos they received from such bourgeois reform groups as the Citizens Union.⁸ The seven Socialist New York City aldermen had a similar program, though they were hampered by the unfortunate fact that the New York City Board of Aldermen did very little of substance.⁹ The Socialist elected officials were not all Jews, but they were all elected from Jewish districts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

There were, of course, other reformers besides the Socialists. An elite good-government tradition that stretched back to the middle of the nineteenth century culminated in the administrations of Mayors Seth Low (1902–3) and John Purroy Mitchel (1914–17). These good-government campaigners fought Tammany Hall, the dominant Democratic machine, and sought to promote honest and efficient municipal governance. But their elite orientation often led them to antidemocratic views and social conservatism, and they sought to redirect power from the immigrant working class to wealthy businessmen and allied technical experts. Their Fusion campaigns could occasionally succeed by taking advantage of egregious Tammany scandals and bringing the Republican Party together with dissident Democrats and representatives of ethnic communities who felt they were not getting their fair share of the spoils. But once in office, Low and Mitchel adopted conservative policies, often tinged with Protestant moralism (though Mitchel was a Catholic), that alienated their working-class and immigrant supporters. Reform administrations in New York City generally lasted one term.¹⁰

Other progressives, on the other hand, sought to combine political reform with social reform. One progressive politician who shared those interests was Fiorello La Guardia, who over the years frequently crossed paths with New York Socialists and radical unionists. Though his disgust with Tammany led him to join the Republican Party, La Guardia had many friends among the left-wing Italian immigrant intelligentsia and played an active role as a union attorney and organizer. La Guardia was no Socialist. But even as he ardently supported the US war effort during World War I as a member of Congress and officer in the Army Air Corps, La Guardia defended civil liberties, opposed the Espionage Act, and criticized the exclusion in 1920 of elected Socialists from the New York State legislature. Unafraid of associations outside the political mainstream, La Guardia later recalled, I had many friends in the Socialist Party. Thus, though they encountered each other sometimes as allies and sometimes as antagonists, La Guardia’s progressivism made it increasingly difficult for the radicals to dismiss mainstream politicians out of hand.¹¹

Some progressive politicians even rose from Tammany Hall itself. Chief among these were Al Smith and Robert Wagner, who as Democratic leaders of the state assembly and senate, respectively, chaired the official Factory Investigating Commission after the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 1911. The commission crisscrossed the state taking testimony and researching industrial conditions. Its recommendations led to the passage of a slew of laws more strictly regulating working hours, wages, and conditions. Social reformers such as Frances Perkins and the radical labor activists Rose Schneiderman, Clara Lemlich, and Pauline Newman all took staff positions for the commission, guiding Wagner and Smith through the state’s industrial netherworlds. Just as the reformers gave Smith a seminar in industrial relations, he educated them in effective political infighting.¹²

Socialists in the Political Wilderness

After 1920, the electoral fortunes of the Socialist Party in New York declined and Socialists entered the political wilderness. A number of factors led to the Socialist electoral fall: voter intimidation and ballot fraud, gerrymandering, Democratic-Republican fusion campaigns, and outright repression. The split between Socialists and Communists, which soon erupted into a full-fledged civil war on the Left and in the unions, did not siphon off many votes, but it did sap energy from a movement now engaged even more than before in bitter internecine battles. Finally, the compact working-class immigrant Jewish neighborhoods were beginning to thin out as Jews moved up socially and out to new areas around the boroughs. The Socialists remained active and, especially in Jewish communities, retained a large following and some influence. But they were continually and increasingly frustrated in their efforts to break into the political mainstream.¹³

Since the predominantly Jewish and Italian unions in the garment trades formed the most important base for independent labor political action, the tumultuous state of those unions in the 1920s handicapped such efforts. The most serious wounds were inflicted on the ILGWU by an internal civil war between the Communist-led Left and the mainly Socialist administration. The culmination of the civil war came in 1926, when the Communist-dominated New York Joint Board led a general strike of cloakmakers that dragged on for six months as the indigenous left-wing leaders were ordered by Communist Party functionaries to reject a favorable settlement. The cloakmakers eventually returned to work having won little beyond what had been offered in the first place. The disastrous strike all but wrecked the union, leaving it with millions of dollars in debt.¹⁴ The civil war in the ILGWU had lasting effects. For one thing, the leadership retained its bitter anti-Communism and, though it tolerated a wide range of political orientations in the union, it tended to see Communists behind every internal challenge.

The struggle also furthered the rise of David Dubinsky, one of the most fervent anti-Communists, to the top of the ILGWU hierarchy. Short and stocky, gregarious and moody, shrewd and idealistic, opportunistic and practical, the Brisk-born and Lodz-raised Dubinsky had arrived in the United States in 1911 at the age of nineteen. Through personal connections he managed to get admission to Local 10, the union of the highly skilled and relatively well-paid garment cutters. A veteran of the underground Jewish Labor Bund who had been arrested for revolutionary activities in Russian Poland, Dubinsky also joined the Socialist Party. Throughout his career, he retained sentimental ties to the Bund and remained close to the leading Socialist Yiddish daily, the Forward, and Jewish Socialist circles. But his main efforts went into the union. By 1920 he was president of Local 10, by 1929 he was secretary-treasurer of the International, and in 1932 he ascended to the union presidency.¹⁵ As president for over three decades, Dubinsky led the ILGWU to the height of its power and influence.

The ACWA did not suffer nearly as much as the ILGWU from the civil wars of the 1920s. In fact, for the ACWA the decade was one of institutional consolidation and growth, in which it pioneered what came to be called the New Unionism, according to which the union took responsibility not only for the needs of the workers, even outside the shop, but also for organizing the industry as a whole. Partly because the ACWA administration allied itself for a time with the Communists, factional battles were not as acute.

The ACWA’s president and dominant personality was Sidney Hillman. Although Hillman, too, had been a Bundist in his youth, he was otherwise very different from Dubinsky politically and temperamentally. Born in Zagare, Lithuania, Hillman was, as his biographer Steve Fraser describes him, neat, trim, quiet, consummately self-possessed, reserved, and taut with concentrated energy. A former yeshiva student from a rabbinical family, he had an intellectual mien, though some biographers have seen him as a more limited half-intellectual. After arriving in Chicago in 1907, he went to work as a cutter’s assistant in the men’s clothing industry. Prominent in the militant workers’ insurgency that led to the founding of the ACWA, Hillman was a believer in independent labor political action. But he nevertheless quickly left dogmatic Socialism behind, turning instead to the American Progressivism of Jane Addams. Moreover, unlike Dubinsky, Hillman moved away from Jewish concerns and affiliations, and sometimes allied with the Communists and the Soviet Union. Hillman thus came into conflict early on with the Forward and was, as Melech Epstein put it, practically a stranger to 175 East Broadway, the Forward Building and center of the Jewish labor movement in New York.¹⁶

Another, much smaller union, whose leaders nevertheless played an important role in the development of labor politics in New York, was that of the hatmakers, whose longtime president was Max Zaritsky. Born in Pietrikov, Belarus, Zaritsky was, like Hillman, a former yeshiva student and retained a scholarly air even after immigrating to the United States and going to work as a hat blocker. A Labor Zionist by conviction, Zaritsky believed in independent labor political action, and his union generally endorsed Socialist candidates. During the 1920s, Zaritsky drove the Communists out of the union in a protracted battle with the help of his fellow Labor Zionist Alex Rose, secretary-treasurer of the milliners’ Local 24. He also helped to prompt the Seabury investigations of corruption in New York politics with his complaint to Governor Franklin Roosevelt concerning gangsterism in the garment industry.¹⁷

Apart from the Socialist Party, some American Federation of Labor (AFL) trade unionists abandoned the federation’s traditional nonpartisan political stance to advocate an independent labor party. The New York branch of the national Farmer-Labor movement, known as the American Labor Party, was organized in January 1919 with the support of many trade union bodies. The new Labor Party adopted a platform that called for the democratic control of industry and commerce by those who work with the hand and brain, and the elimination of autocratic domination of the forces of production, whether by selfish, private interests, or bureaucratic agents of the government. This translated into practical demands for better regulation of hours, working conditions, and pay; guarantees of full employment and the right to organize; social security; progressive taxation; free higher education; equal pay for equal work regardless of sex; and public ownership of utilities and natural resources. But the American Labor Party had a tough time gaining traction. In 1919, the ALP failed to get its candidates on the ballot. Under pressure from AFL president Samuel Gompers, the New York City Central Trades and Labor Council dropped its support for the party. In 1920, its results were disappointing: the Farmer-Labor presidential candidate Farley Christensen received less than 1 percent of the vote statewide, compared to 7 percent for the Socialist Eugene Debs.¹⁸

At first, the Socialist Party saw the Labor Party as a rival on the left and refused to cooperate. But with the Socialist Party losing ground in the early 1920s, it began to reassess its attitude toward the ALP. Inspired by the rise of the British Labour Party and hoping to establish closer ties to the trade unions, the party now reversed itself and sought affiliation, as long as the Socialists could affiliate with a new labor party as a group, as in Britain, and as long as the new party did not endorse candidates of the two old parties. This remained the essential Socialist position on a labor party through the 1930s.¹⁹

For a moment, Robert La Follette’s 1924 Progressive campaign for president seemed to be just such a national labor party in the making. The campaign originated in the Conference on Progressive Political Action (CPPA), a coalition called together at the end of 1922 by the railroad brotherhoods and the machinists’ union, and included the Socialist and Farmer-Labor Parties, the farmers’ Non-Partisan League, and the Committee of 48, a group of veteran social reformers who had the franchise on the Progressive Party name. The CPPA adopted a program that offered a little bit to everybody, but the question of forming a new permanent political party vexed the coalition from the beginning—the Socialists and old Progressives were eager to do so, while the unions held back.

In the meantime, however, all were ready to pursue an independent campaign with a national ticket headed by Wisconsin senator Fightin’ Bob La Follette. In many ways, the campaign was a success: La Follette garnered almost five million votes, nearly 17 percent of the total. But the divisions concerning the nature of the effort continued throughout the campaign. La Follette himself insisted he was running as an independent, rather than as the leader of a new party. And although the Socialist Party, feeling that this was a unique opportunity to break out of its isolation, swallowed its qualms and campaigned enthusiastically, the AFL and many of the unions endorsed the ticket only reluctantly and made it clear they saw it as a one-off deal.²⁰

In New York, Socialists, laborites, and Progressives cooperated uneasily. At the same time, New York Socialists continued their on-again-off-again flirtation with Congressman La Guardia, who as a supporter of La Follette now ran for reelection on the Socialist ticket. Throughout the campaign, La Guardia and his supporters worked closely with the Socialists, the congressman was reelected, and although the Socialists were disappointed when he returned to the Republican fold, the coalition partners remained in cordial contact after the election.²¹ Moreover, according to Nathan Fine, La Follette made a clean sweep of Jewish districts that had once been … socialist stronghold[s].²²

But reactions to the results followed the same pattern of division between radicals and labor, and quickly led to the demise of the movement. The Socialists were initially encouraged and hoped the campaign would lead to a permanent labor party. The trade union leaders, on the other hand, were disappointed by the results and saw them as a good reason to pull out of the CPPA entirely. By the time of the follow-up conference in February 1925, it was clear that neither the unions nor the radical farmers’ groups would help found a farmer-labor party, and without them, even the Socialists concluded that there was no point in continuing. In the end, the Socialists felt they had emerged weaker, having subsumed their identity in the effort and gotten little in return.²³

As third-party dramas played out, the Democratic Party under Al Smith began to take on a progressive cast. As governor, Smith continued to work for progressive social and structural reform, maintaining cordial behind-the-scenes relations with the radical labor movement. With advice from two of his top advisers, the reformers Belle Moskowitz and Frances Perkins, Smith continued to support legislation to expand the social welfare state, establish public control over natural resources, and regulate industrial conditions. More than once, Smith intervened in threatened garment industry strikes on terms favorable to the union. By the time of Smith’s ill-fated try for the presidency in 1928, Socialist trade unionists were thus in a quandary. Officially, the Socialist Party denied that Smith’s platform had anything to do with Socialism, and excoriated the Democrat as a mere shirtfront for Tammany corruption. But some Socialists weren’t so sure. As for Dubinsky, despite his Socialist affiliation, his primary loyalty was to his union, and so, as he later recalled, When I was asked to make speeches for Norman Thomas in 1928, I told the Socialists that I couldn’t do it, because I really believed it would be better if Smith got elected. In the end he abstained from voting at all. In the absence of a strong Socialist or labor party, radical labor leaders were thus forced to reject doctrinal purity to make practical distinctions among capitalist politicians.²⁴

Smith’s two Democratic successors as governor continued his progressive, pro-labor policies. Like Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt intervened in garment and other industrial disputes in ways favorable to labor. At the beginning of the Great Depression, he supported, though somewhat inconsistently, an extension of social security measures. FDR, too, was educated in the problems of working people by Rose Schneiderman, whom he appointed to the state prison labor commission.²⁵

But it was Herbert Lehman—financier, Jewish communal activist, lieutenant governor under Roosevelt, and then his successor as governor—who established the closest ties to the needle trades unions. When Smith and Roosevelt took an interest in the garment industry, Lehman often served as their point man. In 1924, Smith named Lehman to a committee that mediated a threatened strike and then worked to stabilize the notoriously chaotic industry and maintain union conditions. He chaired a similar commission in 1929 at the behest of Roosevelt. In 1931, he helped broker the first collective bargaining agreement in the millinery trade, where the following year he helped root out racketeers at the request of the union. Using his personal wealth, Lehman financed an ACWA cooperative housing project, and provided a loan of $25,000 to the ILGWU to save it from insolvency after the disastrous 1926 cloak strike. Through this work, Lehman established good working relationships with Dubinsky, Hillman, and Zaritsky, winning their lasting gratitude.²⁶

Municipal Reform and the New Deal

Meanwhile, though the Socialists failed to form the kernel of a broad-based labor party, their campaigns began to attract the support of some good-government reformers. In 1929, the mayoral candidate Norman Thomas even received the endorsement of the city’s premier good-government group, the Citizens Union.²⁷ In articulating their program, the Socialists began to develop an interest and expertise in the nuts and bolts of municipal policy.²⁸ One important expression of this new Socialist interest in civic reform was the City Affairs Committee (CAC), which brought Socialists together with prominent liberal reformers. The CAC served as a vehicle for Socialist influence in mainstream politics even when the Socialists could not elect candidates of their own. Indeed, it played a role in prompting the famous Seabury investigations of municipal corruption and ousting Mayor James Walker in 1932.²⁹

With their ties to prominent politicians, New York’s non-Communist radical labor leaders and Socialists thus found themselves on the margins of New York’s political mainstream. When Morris Hillquit again ran for mayor, in the special election in 1932, his program once more combined good government with radical social reform. But while the Socialists proposed a detailed set of municipal policies, it wasn’t always clear who they thought would implement them. Their demands for such things as public housing, improvements in relief programs, and a unified and publicly owned mass transit system added up to a new point of view in government, according to the Socialist former assemblyman William Feigenbaum—a point of view that can be described as social responsibility. But social responsibility was hardly Socialist revolution, and Feigenbaum recognized that more mainstream politicians might, under pressure, enact at least part of the program. Even a 10 percent vote for the Socialists, he wrote, would push the politicians toward this program. In subsequent years, such an argument left some Socialists open to coalitions with those, such as La Guardia, who articulated a similar vision for the city.³⁰

Hillquit was not elected mayor in 1932, but Franklin Roosevelt was elected president. The advent of the New Deal the following year sharpened the dilemma faced by New York’s practical Socialists and radical trade unionists. They had an especially difficult time sorting out their feelings (almost more than their thoughts) about the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The cornerstone of the early New Deal program, the NRA called for industry-wide cartels that would set codes to regulate competition, prices, wages, and conditions in each industry. Many Socialists regarded the NRA as the kernel of a new form of state capitalism that might even lead to what the Socialist New Leader called a monstrous feudalism of capitalist power or fascism. But since the NRA also seemed to open up new possibilities for the organization of workers in unions and to give them a seat at the table where decisions about their industries would be made, labor leaders like Dubinsky and Hillman became enthusiastic supporters of the NRA and, by extension, the New Deal. Some right-wing Socialists even began to argue that the NRA promoted cooperation, rational economic planning, and democratic control of industry under government direction—the antithesis of cutthroat capitalism.³¹

Indeed, some moderate Socialists were already toying with support for the New Deal. In one famous incident at a union rally in October 1933, Abraham Cahan, powerful editor of the Forward, praised the New Deal as a manifestation of the Socialist program and invited Roosevelt to join the party. Following Cahan’s lead, the leading Yiddish and Socialist newspaper began tentatively to regard Roosevelt as a friend of labor in thrall to capitalism and reactionary forces in his own party. On the one hand, the Forward believed, Roosevelt’s immediate reforms opened the way for true Socialist reforms in the future and demonstrated that the US was turning its back to individualist capitalism and that Socialism was no longer a dirty word. On the other hand, as long as Roosevelt remained within the framework of a bourgeois party, his reforms would have only limited and temporary effect.³² One might have inferred from these arguments the need for a labor party, loosely allied with Roosevelt but independent enough to pressure him from the left. And, indeed, the success of what the Forward called semi-Left campaigns within and outside the major parties in the 1934 elections gave hope that an independent labor party might yet arise on the national level.³³

In 1935, the New Deal did turn left and incorporate many of the Socialists’ demands. The Forward enthusiastically greeted the passage of the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act, and FDR’s proposal for a sharply progressive estate tax. Indeed, with FDR enacting much of the Socialists’ traditional immediate program, Roosevelt was simply the leading exemplar of what the Forward perceived as a general convergence of liberal and Socialist thought. Between 1933 and 1936, the newspaper periodically pointed to admissions by leading liberals and progressives that the present capitalist system is bankrupt and must be changed. Support by Catholic bishops, cabinet secretaries, major-party politicians, AFL leaders, and liberal intellectuals for government regulation and planning vindicated views that the Socialists had long advocated and proved that although the Socialist Party was weak, Socialist ideas had permeated American society and politics. Within the administration itself, Left battled Right, with the Left seeking to promote greater social justice by making the New Deal permanent and pushing for further reform of the economic system.³⁴

The process noted by the Forward has been described in retrospect by the historian Howard Brick as a fusion of liberal and social democratic dispositions into a post-capitalist perspective among some prominent American intellectuals. Postcapitalism carried both descriptive and prescriptive connotations. Its adherents believed that classical capitalism, characterized by inviolable private property and the free market, had become obsolete, even that it had already ceased to exist—an observation lent credibility by the general economic collapse of the Great Depression. What would replace the old system was not yet clear—it could be Italian- or German-style fascism or Soviet-style Communism—but postcapitalists retained an allegiance to liberal democracy, and hoped for a social state that would promote an egalitarian society within a liberal democratic framework.³⁵

Two influential postcapitalist intellectuals who later played active roles in the Liberal Party were Adolf A. Berle Jr. and Charles Abrams. As a professor at Columbia Law School, Berle achieved notoriety when he teamed up with the economist Gardner Means to study the emerging corporate structure of American capitalism. Berle and Means posited a growing separation of ownership from control, and a steady concentration of power and wealth into the hands of an oligarchy of corporate managers. They argued that these oligarchs rigged the system to give themselves the advantage over ordinary people, and that only government intervention could stave off the emerging industrial feudalism, restore popular control, defend the public interest, and provide a modicum of security to most citizens. The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) received rave reviews in the liberal press and won Berle comparisons with Adam Smith and Karl Marx as an economic theorist. Turning from theory to political activity as an original member of FDR’s brain trust, Berle advocated more government planning and regulation, without which, he believed, the economy was headed for a smashup. After the election, Berle played an eclectic role as adviser to various agencies, drafter of legislation, and ideological advocate for a strong New Deal. ³⁶

Abrams similarly espoused a postcapitalist viewpoint, and like Berle became deeply involved in local politics in the 1930s, especially around the issues of housing and racial discrimination. A Greenwich Village bohemian and successful corporate attorney and real estate speculator, the Vilna-born Abrams devoted much of his time to civic affairs. Like Berle, Abrams believed that corporate forms of power and wealth were in the process of superseding personal forms, and he particularly lamented the subordination of urban development to the market. As a democratic counterweight to private power, he advocated state planning for healthy, egalitarian cities, and public housing to ensure an adequate supply of quality affordable housing. Abrams drafted the law that called the New York City Housing Authority into being, and he served as the authority’s counsel from 1934 to 1937. At the same time, he criticized New Deal housing programs for subsidizing private gain and socializing losses.³⁷

Meanwhile, the ascension of Fiorello La Guardia to the mayoralty in 1933 made it impossible to regard the Democratic Party as the unambiguous political vehicle of the New Deal in New York. In 1933, La Guardia was still a nominal Republican, but in the lame-duck Congress in the opening days of Roosevelt’s presidency he had been an outspoken friend of the president’s program. Because sections of the Democratic Party, in particular Tammany Hall, failed to back the president wholeheartedly, New York’s New Deal coalition intersected the two major parties. It also included numerous independents, and eventually Socialists and Communists.³⁸ At the same time, La Guardia captured the lion’s share of reform and progressive support in 1933, partly through the maneuvering of Berle, who after the election became city chamberlain and served as liaison between the city and national administrations.³⁹

Some Socialists, including much of the staff of the City Affairs Committee, began meanwhile to defect to the La Guardia camp. Moreover, La Guardia sometimes turned to Socialists to fill important positions in his administration. CAC director Paul Blanshard became commissioner of accounts (later, investigations), a kind of powerful inspector general, who with the mayor’s backing worked to root out corruption and waste throughout the city government. Other Socialists tapped by La Guardia included the former alderman Baruch Charney Vladeck to the new housing authority; former judge Jacob Panken as justice of the domestic relations court; and the attorney S. John Block to the city charter revision commission. The mayor even named Charles Solomon, his Socialist opponent in the 1933 mayoral race, to the magistrates’ court. Radicals did not always agree with the mayor—as when he instituted early austerity measures or turned to a sales tax to raise revenue. But it was hard to ignore his progressive leanings. Above all, La Guardia seemed to embody Feigenbaum’s call for a new point of view of social responsibility in government.⁴⁰

Ironically, even as Socialist ideas seemed to gain credence in wider circles than ever before, the right wing of the party, known as the Old Guard, increasingly suspected that the Socialist Party itself was becoming an obsolete political liability. (Cahan referred to the party as a second mortgage.) Bitter factional battles fueled this suspicion, as the party’s Left gained control. The party finally split following its convention in May 1936, most of the Old Guard leaving to form the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). Not exactly