up a broom or arranged a chair. Such tasks were presumably left to the goyim but since there were no goyim, they fell to lesser types such as my father. He took a good look at them, took the measure of them, and what he saw were young men in search of a career. They regarded the Socialist Party as a vehicle of opportunity that enabled them to run for office, to find sinecures in governmental agencies and union bureaucracies, and only incidentally to improve the lives of those who voted for them. The entire lot of them, taken together, began to repel Sam, though he found many of them decent on a personal basis.
What most repelled him, however, was the moral collapse of the reformist wing of the Socialist Party in the run-up to World War I:
The anti-war World War I declaration of the Socialist Party in 1917 aroused hundreds of thousands of citizens to elect socialists; some to the New York State Assembly, others to the post of New York City aldermen. The prominent socialist Jacob Panken made it to the Municipal Court, and, a signal triumph, the voters sent socialist Meyer London to the United States House of Representatives. I still remember when the newly elected assemblymen chartered a special railway coach to Albany, the state capital. The coach was flamboyantly decorated with red flags and banners, while a brass band blared out the proletarian hymns International and The Marseilles. Jacob Panken and the other dignitaries hailed this event as the beginning of the long awaited social revolution.
“I did not at the time grasp the significance of the fact that these duly elected socialists were expelled and not allowed to take their seats on a legal pretext a few months later,” Sam noted. Being who they were, the expelled lawyers wrangled and compromised. In the general euphoria, my seventeen-year-old father-to-be joined the YPSL in 1919.
In the run-up to World War I and immediately thereafter the United States became a fascist country. It was the time of the orchestrated Red Scare and as with every fascist country the pressure came not only from government persecution, but from the entire machinery of the dominant society: the press, the clergy, the entertainment industry, the military. It was open season on radicals, unionists, and other nonconformists. And they came down hard. My parents knew many men imprisoned during the Red Scare, and Abe and I met more than a few of them growing up. Our adroit socialist “reformers,” however, like cats sensing the warmest spot in the room, managed to find their personal comfort zones.
“A few months after its St. Louis anti-war declaration,” Sam pointed out, “members of the party were beginning to shy away from the anti-war position; Jewish socialistic unions like the powerful United Hebrew Trades supported the pro-war policies of the government and insisted that the St Louis antiwar stand must be reversed and repudiated. Meyer London, twice elected to the House of Representatives, who from the beginning reluctantly accepted the party’s antiwar position, now urged the party to support the war efforts of the government. He refused to introduce a bill for the repeal of conscription into the armed forces.” London even sent a telegram to the head of the Provisional Government following the overthrow of the Tsar, urging Russia to continue fighting the Germans, the revolution be damned.
Nationalism, laced with fear, trumped socialism. The Jewish Daily Forward at the time had a circulation in the hundreds of thousands and was the largest Jewish newspaper in the world. The editor, Abraham Cahan, served notice that, “Now that war has been declared, opposition to the war must be given up and we, loyal citizens, must faithfully carry out all decisions of our government.” The Jewish socialistic labor unions—the garment and allied workers, shoe, bakery, and furniture trades, the great national fraternal association the Workingmen’s Circle—all knuckled under.
So did the far more powerful German socialists, who proclaimed their everlasting support of the Kaiser’s military ambitions. Never mind that these beacons of working-class solidarity on both sides of the Atlantic now advocated killing one another. Never mind thirty-seven million dead and maimed. After the war men such as Abraham Cahan of the long-declining Forward, and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), found lifetime warm spots in the unions and front organizations associated with the emasculated Socialist Party. With time, these men came to be hailed as “statesmen” in New York Times editorials, their offices decorated with plaques and honorary degrees.
There were a few reform leaders, brave men, who never wavered in their opposition to the war. And a more militant wing of the Socialist Party, to its everlasting lasting good name, refused to knuckle under, and faced the force of the government head-on. In 1917, Charles Schenck, Secretary of the Socialist Party, was sentenced to prison for six months in violation of the newly passed Espionage Act. His crime had nothing to do with espionage as that word is commonly understood. Rather it was for speech previously protected under the First Amendment. The Party had mailed out leaflets urging opposition to compulsory military conscription on the grounds that it constituted involuntary servitude, which is prohibited under the 13th Amendment. Such speech violated a weasel-worded sedition clause tucked into the Espionage Act. The clause was clearly unconstitutional; nothing in the Constitution says you are not allowed to speak out against war during war time, or Capitalism, or the United States government. But the Supreme Court knuckled under, too, and upheld Schenck’s conviction.
“Free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his Jesuitical opinion that introduced the “clear and present danger” justification. In 1918, the Sedition clause was strengthened to include “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States—or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army and Navy.”
My teenage father at the time knew little of the Wobblies, who, like the militant Socialists, were imprisoned and otherwise abused under the Espionage Act for antiwar speech. Still a Socialist, his attention was focused on a man he would revere his entire life—and whom he was privileged to meet briefly when that man was aged and bent: Eugene V. Debs. I tried over the years to get my father to explain exactly what it was that so attracted him to Debs and he would give me nothing specific. You had to be in his presence, you had to see him, was all he would say. “He brought out the better part of you.”
At Debs’s funeral in 1926, a leading journalist of the day, Heywood Broun, repeated this quote from a cynical admirer: “That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that’s not the funniest part of it. As long as he’s around I believe it myself.”
The “old man” was surely one of the great orators of American history. He was brave and he was honest. In 1906, less than a year after playing an instrumental role in the founding of the IWW, Debs told an audience of working men: “I am not a Labor Leader.… I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.” He left the IWW with the conviction that electoral politics rather than strikes and industrial agitation was the best path toward a just society. He ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket in 1912 and received 900,000 votes: not bad for a revolutionist. He would not back down as the U.S. geared for war, and the patriotic fervor began to mount.
“When I say I am opposed to war I mean ruling-class war, for the ruling class is the only class that makes war. It matters not to me whether the war is offensive or defensive, or what lying excuse may be invented for it. I am opposed to it, and I would be shot for treason before I would enter such a war.” Debs was eventually convicted of Sedition under the Espionage Act. At his trial he said, “Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government, that I am opposed to the social system in which we live, that I believed in change of both, but by perfectly orderly and peaceable means…. I ask no mercy, I plead no immunity.” And he received none. He was sentenced to ten years in Atlanta Penitentiary. At his sentencing hearing on November 18, a week after Armistice Day, Debs told the Court. “Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind I was not one bit better than the
