How A Socialist Mainstay Found A Democrat Worth Supporting

 

Grand Choral Synogogue, Petersburg, where I communed with my grandfather's teenage spirit

A few years ago I visited Russia for the first time. My grandfather, fleeing a series of pograms in his district, left there when he was a young teen and came to the U.S. When I was in St Petersburg I visited the Grand Choral Synagogue, the biggest in Russia-- built in 1893. My grandfather, who wasn't a religious person, was there about 10 years after it was completed, the first non-wooden building he had ever been in and the last building he was in before leaving for the New World. Politically, he was my mentor. He came to America a committed socialist and, though he became a successful entrepreneur, he stayed true to his beliefs for his whole life. He used to tell me that there was "only one thing worse than the Democratic Party-- the Republican Party."

But... he abandoned the Socialist Party itself in 1936 and supported President Roosevelt, the first-- and last-- Democratic president he felt any enthusiasm for. The Jewish Daily Forward was already an old and established newspaper when my grandfather was starting to get involved with American politics. Today it is just known as The Forward and it has changed significantly. Like my grandfather, it used to be part of the Socialist movement... until FDR came along. Yesterday, reporter Talya Zax explained how that happened way back nearly a century ago.

"Nothing in this campaign happened to change my mind about there being no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties," Norman Thomas, the 1928 Socialist Party presidential nominee, wrote in a Forward column that appeared on Election Day that year, Nov. 6. "The question of who will win this election isn’t much more significant than the question of who will win the next big football game or the world series. Giving your vote to one of those two parties, that are so similar to one another, is what’s called tossing your vote away."

It was a statement completely in keeping with the politics of The Forward, which had, since its founding in 1897, consistently called for readers to vote the Socialist line.

But only eight years later, as Thomas sought the presidency for the third time, The Forward had shifted its stance on at least one of America’s two mainstream political parties. In a shocking move, our founding editor, Ab Cahan, endorsed the incumbent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt-- a candidate whom he had described in 1932 as embodying the capitalist system against which The Forward was determinedly arrayed.

How could The Forward, which had built its reputation on its staunch Socialist politics, have gotten in bed with the Democrats?

The story begins with Eugene V. Debs, perhaps the most famous Socialist politician of the 20th century.

Debs first campaigned for the presidency in 1900, when President William McKinley, a Republican [and Karl Rove's favorite president], ran for reelection against Williams Jennings Bryan, the Democrat he had beaten four years before. It was the first national election since The Forward’s founding, and Debs’ campaign was rich fodder for the young Socialist paper.

On Nov. 5, 1900, after circulars were distributed in Indiana falsely claiming that Debs was leaving the race, The Forward rushed to his defense. "Since the campaign began, the capitalist newspapers and politicians throughout the country have tried to swindle the citizenry," a column about the incident noted. But the Forward had a telegram from Debs himself standing firm against the falsehoods. "McKinley and Bryan will resign in favor of me, rather than I for them," he wrote. "I stand in these fights until the bitter end." (The Forward's postscript to the telegram: "Politicians know Debs as a bone stuck in their throat… Tomorrow is the day their skin crawls.")

Debs' dedication to his cause reached an apex in 1920, when he ran for president from a prison in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was serving a 10-year sentence on charges of sedition. The Forward was as loyal as ever, reveling in his comparatively successful-- but still losing-- campaign.

"Debs’ vote… will explode like a bomb in the barracks of the capitalist classes," crowed a column on election results. "The 3 million citizens who have given their votes for the socialist candidate who sits behind iron bars because he fought courageously for his ideas and for the right of his ideas to be freely expressed-- that powerful voice will echo in the ears of the capitalist reaction that so arrogantly raged across the country over these last years and once and for all, rouse from slumber their sweet dream of having finally succeeded in choking and snuffing out the spirit of freedom and rebellion against their despotic rule."

But by the time Thomas ran his first race, two years after Debs' death in 1926, the political environment had slowly begun to change. The Soviet Union, which The Forward initially believed might show the world the benefits of living under socialism-- the paper was an early American publisher of Leon Trotsky-- was veering increasingly into authoritarianism. The conflict between the upper classes and the organized-labor movement, the latter of which was a core passion of The Forward's, was reaching a new apex after the 1927 execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. And while the economy was temporarily holding strong, seeds had been planted for the 1929 collapse that would instigate the Great Depression.

By the mid-1930s, a clear rift had opened between The Forward and the Socialist Party under Thomas. The Forward celebrated Roosevelt's New Deal for its substantial investments in organized labor; Thomas lambasted it as shoring up a capitalist system that had, in the economic collapse, once and for all proved its fundamental insufficiency. The Forward had been raising alarms about the threat of Hitler for years, and pushing for aid to Europe's Jews; Thomas was a committed anti-interventionist. And as The Forward's editors saw far-right forces on the rise in the United States, they increasingly saw a mandate to prioritize the defense of liberty over ideological purity.

It must have pained Cahan to step away from the party affiliations he had spent decades urging American Jews to cultivate, but as his 1936 endorsement of Roosevelt made clear, there was no helping it.

"In these elections, as we have come to see, there’s a lot at stake. We all stand to lose, or win, a lot in these elections," he wrote.

"And so we must not neglect our duty. Each of us must today give their vote for Roosevelt and Lehman as candidates of the American Labor Party. No vote should be lost today. Each of us with the right to vote, must use their right and their duty and must vote today. The time has come when, with our vote, we can influence and decide which side will be victorious-- the reactionary one or the progressive one, and in that decisive moment no one must permit their vote to be used simply as a means of protesting against the current capitalist system."

It was a strident call, especially from a man who had, for decades, argued the opposite approach. But no matter what his emotions on the occasion were, Cahan was clearly certain that if his readers followed him in making such a sharp political turn, they'd be working for the public good. "Our conscience," he wrote, "will then be clear."