In January 1936, just as the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was expelling the Old Guard, a factional battle was being won in the Trotskyist Workers Party of the United States to join the SP, when a national branch referendum voted unanimously for entry.[40] Negotiations commenced between the Workers Party and Socialist leaderships, with the decision ultimately made to allow admissions only on the basis of individual applications for membership rather than en masse admission of the entire group.[41] On June 6, 1936, the Workers Party's weekly newspaper, The New Militant, published its last issue and announced "Workers Party Calls All Revolutionary Workers to Join Socialist Party."[42] Approximately half of the Workers Party heeded the call and entered the SPA.[43]
Although party leader Jim Cannon later hinted that the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party had been a contrived tactic aimed at stealing "confused young Left Socialists" for his own organization,[44] it seems that at its inception, the entryist tactic was made in good faith. Historian Constance Myers notes that while "initial prognoses for the union of Trotskyists and Socialists were favorable," it was only later when "constant and protracted contact caused differences to surface."[45] The Trotskyists retained a common orientation with the radicalized SP in their opposition to the European war, their preference for CIO over the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor, a commitment to trade union activism, the defense of the Soviet Union as the first workers' state while at the same time maintaining an antipathy toward the Stalin regime, and in their general aims in the 1936 election.[46]
Norman Thomas attracted nearly 188,000 votes in his 1936 Socialist Party run for President but performed poorly in historic strongholds of the party. Moreover, the party's membership had begun to decline.[47] The organization was deeply factionalized, with the Militant faction split into right ("Altmanite"), center ("Clarity") and left ("Appeal") factions, in addition to the radical pacifists around Norman Thomas and the midwestern "constructive" socialists around Dan Hoan. A special convention was planned for the last week of March 1937 to set the party's future policy, initially intended as an unprecedented "secret" gathering.[48]
Split with the Trotskyists
Prior to the March convention, the Trotskyist "Jack Altman, and Gus Tyler of Clarity. At this meeting Thomas pledged that the upcoming convention would make no effort to terminate the newspapers of the various factions.[50]
No action was taken at the 1937 convention to expel the Trotskyist "Appeal faction," but pressure did continue to build along these lines, fueled by the CPUSA's increasingly hysterical denunciations of Trotsky and his followers as wreckers and agents of international fascism. The convention did pass a ban on future branch resolutions on controversial matters, an effort to rein in the activities of the factions at the local level. It also did ban factional newspapers, a move directly targeting The Socialist Appeal, and formally established The Socialist Call as the party's national organ.
Constance Myers indicates that three factors led to the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Socialist Party in 1937: the divergence between the official Socialists and the Trotskyist faction on the issues, the determination of Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists, and Trotsky's own decision to move towards a break with the party.[51] Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the group around Thomas, Trotsky recommended that the Appeal group focus on disagreements over Spain to provoke a split. At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had come to the conclusion that the Trotskyists had joined the SP not to make it stronger, but to capture the organization for their own purposes.[52] On June 24–25, 1937, a meeting of the Appeal faction's National Action Committee voted to ratcheted up the rhetoric against American Labor Party and Republican nominee for mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia, a favorite son of many in Socialist ranks, and to reestablish their newspaper, The Socialist Appeal.[53] This was met with expulsions from the party beginning August 9 with a rump meeting of the Central Committee of Local New York, which expelled 52 New York Trotskyists by a vote of 48 to 2, with 18 abstentions, and ordering 70 more to be brought up on charges.[53] Wholesale expulsions followed, with a major section of the YPSL leaving the party with the Trotskyists.
Secretary of Local New York Jack Altman declared that the Trotskyists "were expelled for attempting to undermine the Socialist Party, for loyalty and allegiance to an opponent organization, the Bureau of the Fourth International, and for refusing to abide by the decisions and discipline of the National convention, the National Executive Committee, and the City Central Committee of the party, and for no other reason."[54] Editor Gus Tyler of The Socialist Call echoed Altman's sentiments, emphasizing that "the Trotskyites have, during the last week ,...abandoned the usual means of inner party controversy — debate and appeals through party channels — and, like the Old Guard, have carried their argument into the public, into the capitalist press."[55] The issuance of a statement by the Trotskyist faction to the New York Times and the relaunch of their own newspaper, The Socialist Appeal, was seen as particularly galling by the Call's' editor.[55]
Collapse of the united front
The youth and militance of the depression-era SP is reflected in the cover of this 1935 song book published by the SP-affiliated Rand School Press.
Things turned out no better with the official Communist Party, devoted as it was to the Stalin regime in the USSR. The February–March 1937 joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party in the Moscow, which green-lighted a massive avalanche of secret police terror known to history as the Great Purge, changed everything. Baby steps towards multi-candidate elections and the rule of law in the USSR crumbled instantly as show trials, spy mania, mass arrests, and mass executions swept the land. The Trotskyist movement in the USSR was particularly targeted, accused of plotting murder of Soviet officials and conducting sabotage and espionage in preparation for fascist invasion—seemingly insane charges which were honestly believed by the Soviet elite. Blood flowed like water as alleged Trotskyists and other politically suspect individuals were rounded up, "investigated," and disposed with a pistol shot in the base of the skull or a 10-year sentence in the GULag. Around the world, the adherents of Stalin and Trotsky raged against one another.
In Spain, the country in which the Lovestoneites invested most of their emotional energy as fervid supporters of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), 1937 marked a similar bloodbath, with the Communist Party of Spain achieving hegemony among the Republican forces and conducting bloody purges of their own at the behest of the Soviet secret police. Joint action between Communist oppositionists and the unflinching loyalists to Moscow was henceforth an abject impossibility.
In 1937 Norman Thomas willingly acceded to a request from the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) to author a pamphlet on the topic of "Democracy versus Dictatorship."[56] Thomas pulled no punches about his views of the regime in the USSR:
"There are still in both the eastern and western hemispheres many examples of rather crude and primitive military dictatorships.... The preach a nationalism whose benefits, spiritual or material, to some degree are for all the people. They profess a positive and paternal concern for the masses. If they rule them sternly that is for their own good....
"In the USSR the dictatorship has been the dictatorship of the Communist Party, but all of its professions and all of its performance has been in the name of the entire working class, and the Communist Party still gives lip-service to a final withering away of all dictatorship, even the dictatorship of the proletariat."[57]
Thomas further noted the Communist Party monopoly of press, radio, schools, army, and government and recalled his own recent visit to Moscow, writing:
"The old keenness of political discussion in the party has almost died, at least in so far as policy is concerned. (Criticism of administration is still allowed). A quotation from Stalin is a final answer to all argument. He receives the same sort of exaggerated veneration in public appearances, in the display of his picture, and in written references to him that is accorded to a Mussolini or a Hitler."[58]
Any thought of common-cause with the Communists was now dismissed by Thomas, who indicated that the Communists' fairly recent change of line from fighting the existing trade unions and damning of all political opponents as "social fascists" to attempting to build a "popular front" was merely tactical, related to the perceived needs of Soviet foreign policy in building coalitions with capitalist countries to forestall fascist invasion.[59]
The factional havoc of the move to the "all-inclusive party" paralyzed activity, while the Old Guard's new group, the Social Democratic Federation of America, controlled the bulk of the SP's former property and the allegiance of those best able to fund the organization. The expulsions of the Trotskyists and disintegration of the party's youth section left the organization greatly weakened and gasping for life, its membership level at a new low.
1940–1955
Labor-union and civil-rights leader A. Philip Randolph in 1942.
By 1940, only a small committed core remained in the Socialist Party, including a considerable percentage of militant pacifists. The SP continued to oppose Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal as a capitalist palliative, arguing for fundamental change through socialist ownership. In 1940 Norman Thomas was the only presidential candidate who failed to support rearmament military support of Great Britain and China. The pacifist Thomas also served as an active spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee during 1941.
After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in the fall of 1941, and the declaration of war, however, the U.S. defense of itself and war against fascism was supported by most of the remaining Militants and all of the Old Guard. However, the Socialist Party adopted a compromise position that did not openly oppose American participation in the war. Its failure to support the war created a rift with many leaders, like the Reuther Brothers of the United Auto Workers. The pacifist wing of the party did not advocate engaging in any systematic antiwar activities such as the general strike endorsed by the 1934 Declaration of Principles.[60]
Socialist A. Philip Randolph emerged as one of the most visible spokesmen for African-American civil rights. In 1941, he, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste proposed a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in war industries and to propose the desegregation of the American Armed forces. The march was cancelled after President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, or the Fair Employment Act. Roosevelt's order applied to banning discrimination within only the war industries, but not within the armed forces.
But, the Fair Employment Act is generally perceived as a success for African-American labor rights. In 1942, an estimated 18,000 blacks gathered at Madison Square Garden to hear Randolph kick off a campaign against discrimination in the military, in war industries, in government agencies, and in labor unions. Following the act, during the Philadelphia Transit Strike of 1944, the government backed African-American workers' striking to gain positions formerly limited to white employees.
In 1947, Randolph, along with colleague Grant Reynolds, renewed efforts to end discrimination in the armed services, forming the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, later renamed the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience. On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman abolished racial segregation in the armed forces through Executive Order 9981.[61]
Thomas led his last presidential campaign in 1948, after which he became a critical supporter of the postwar liberal consensus. The party retained some pockets of local success, in cities such as Milwaukee, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Reading, Pennsylvania. In New York City, they often ran their own candidates on the Liberal Party line.
Reunification 1956
Reunification with the Social Democratic Federation was long a goal of Norman Thomas and his associates remaining in the Socialist Party. As early as 1938, Thomas had acknowledged that a number of issues had been involved in the split which led to the formation of the rival Social Democratic Federation, including "organizational policy, the effort to make the party inclusive of all socialist elements not bound by communist discipline; a feeling of dissatisfaction with social democratic tactics which had failed in Germany" as well as "the socialist estimate of Russia; and the possibility of cooperation with communists on certain specific matters." Still, he held that "those of us who believe that an inclusive socialist party is desirable, and ought to be possible, hope that the growing friendliness of socialist groups will bring about not only joint action but ultimately a satisfactory reunion on the basis of sufficient agreement for harmonious support of a socialist program."[62]
The Socialist Party and the SDF merged to form the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation (SP-SDF) in 1957. A small group of holdouts refused to reunify, establishing a new organization called the Democratic Socialist Federation. When the Soviet Union led an invasion of Hungary in 1956, half of the members of Communist Parties around the world quit; in the U.S., half did, and many joined the Socialist Party.
Max Shachtman, Civil Rights, and the War on Poverty
In 1958 the party admitted to its ranks the members of the recently dissolved Independent Socialist League, which had been led by Max Shachtman. Shachtman had developed a Marxist critique of Soviet Communism as "bureaucratic collectivism", a new form of class society that was more oppressive than any form of capitalism. Shachtman's theory was similar to that of many dissidents and refugees from Communism, such as the theory of the "New Class" proposed by Yugoslavian dissident Milovan Đilas (Djilas).[63] Shachtman was an extraordinary public speaker and formidable in debate, and his intelligent analysis attracted young socialists like Irving Howe and Michael Harrington. Shachtman's denunciations of the Soviet 1956 invasion of Hungary attracted younger activists like Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz.
Shachtman's youthful followers were able to bring new vigor into the Party, and Shachtman encouraged them to take positions of responsibility and leadership. As a young leader, Harrington sent Kahn and Horowitz to help 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King delivered his I Have A Dream speech.
Michael Harrington soon became the most visible socialist in the United States when his The Other America became a best seller, following a long and laudatory New Yorker review by Dwight Macdonald. Harrington and other socialists were called to Washington, D.C., to assist the Kennedy Administration and then the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty and Great Society.
The young socialists' role in the civil rights movement made the Socialist Party more attractive. Harrington, Kahn, and Horowitz were officers and staff-persons of the [67]
The experience of the civil rights movement, and the coalition of labor unions and other progressive forces, suggested that America was changing and that a mass movement of the democratic left was possible. In terms of electoral politics, Shachtman, War on Poverty.
From the Socialist Party to Social Democrats, USA
Bayard Rustin, an important member of the Socialist Party throughout the decade of the 1960s, was elected a National Co-Chairman late in the decade.
In its 1972 Convention, the Socialist Party had two Co-Chairmen, [69]
The Party changed its name to "Social Democrats, USA" by a vote of 73 to 34.[69] Renaming the Party as SDUSA was meant to be "realistic". The New York Times observed that the Socialist Party had last sponsored a candidate for President in 1956, who received only 2,121 votes, which were cast in only 6 states. Because the Party no longer sponsored candidates in Presidential Elections, the name "Party" had been "misleading"; "Party" had hindered the recruiting of activists who participated in the Democratic Party, according the majority report. The name "Socialist" was replaced by "Social Democrats" because many Americans associated the word "socialism" with Soviet communism.[69] Also, the Party wished to distinguish itself from two small Marxist parties, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Labor Party.[70]
The Unity Caucus had a supermajority of votes and its position carried on every issue, by a ratio of two to one. The Convention elected a national committee of 33 members, with 22 seats for the majority caucus, 8 seats for Harrington's "coalition caucus", 2 for "a Debs caucus", and one for the "independent" Samuel H. Friedman.[71] Friedman and the minority caucuses had opposed the name change.[69]
The convention voted on and adopted proposals for its program by a two-one vote. On foreign policy, the program called for "firmness toward Communist aggression". However, on the Vietnam War, the program opposed "any efforts to bomb Hanoi into submission"; instead, it endorsed negotiating a peace agreement, which should protect Communist political cadres in South Vietnam from further military or police reprisals. Harrington's proposal for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces was defeated.[71] Harrington complained that, after its March 1972 convention, the Socialist Party had endorsed [72]
DSOC and UDS
Late in October 1972, well before the SP's December convention, Michael Harrington resigned as National Co-Chairman of the Socialist Party.[73] Although little remarked upon at the time despite Harrington's status as "possibly the most widely known of the Socialist leaders since the death of Norman Thomas," it soon became clear that this was the precursor of a decisive split in the organization.[73]
Harrington had written extensively about the progressive potential of the so-called "New Politics" in the Democratic Party and had come to advocate unilateral withdrawal from the Vietnam war and to advocate positions regarded by more conservative party members as "avant-garde" on the questions of [73]
In the early spring of 1973, Harrington resigned his membership in SDUSA. That same year, Harrington and his supporters formed the [75]
The David McReynolds, who had resigned from the Socialist Party between 1970 and 1971, and many from the Debs Caucus, were the core members. In 1973, the UDS declared itself the Socialist Party USA.[76]
Conventions