What SPA Leader Norman Thomas Can Teach Today’s DSA
SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the author and is republished from Democratic Left.
The 1964 biography of Socialist Party of America (SPA) leader Norman Thomas by its one-time National Secretary Harry Fleischman gives us lessons for today on previous attempts at the party-surrogate (a group officially planning to become a party) and proto-party (the beginning of a party, official or not) models of U.S. socialists.
The book also grants insights into the persistent tensions around insider access and ballot lines that hamper party-building efforts. For members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) grappling with the goal of forming a new party, the book highlights how several opportunities to build a mass party failed and how SPA, even if independent, faced limits over ballot line control and their members’ incentives to maintain relationships with the Democratic party establishment.
One way the Thomas’s SPA differed from his predecessor Eugene Debs is that the national party after the 1920s often found itself acting more as a party surrogate than a fully formed party. In certain areas, the SPA could compete on its own, but the national campaigns rarely garnered more than single digits in the final vote numbers.
The SPA, twice on its own and once via an offer from the Communist Party, could have taken its organization into a possibly larger party infrastructure. These are examples of being either a proto-party or a party surrogate. Like DSA today, a party surrogate is an organization that tends not to be an official party but whose goal is to build a broader, mass democratic (small-d) party of the working-class. This party may not be officially socialist but certainly would be separate and independent from two major parties (or “old parties”, as Fleischman called them).
The SPA’s inability to achieve this under circumstances more favorable to creating a party should inform the efforts of those that wish for DSA to form a new independent socialist party.
Upon SPA leader Eugene Debs’ death in 1926, Thomas became the foremost socialist for many Americans partly through his presidential and other campaigns for elected office. The SPA of Thomas, however, was much weaker than that of Debs after decades of political persecution, especially during the First World War. Fleischman estimated at one point the party had one-seventh the membership under Thomas that it did under Debs.
Like DSA today, the SPA of the 1920s and for a few decades onward, had different factions – formal and not. Three key internal groups were the Militants, Centrists, and Old Guard. The Militants tend to skew younger and, as their name implies, were more radical in rhetoric than the other caucuses. The Centrists tended to include the Sewer Socialist-types, especially from Milwaukee. The Old Guard were closer to the more moderate German social-democratic tradition of Marxists like Eduard Bernstein. They were more openly anti-Communist than the others, but also arguably more progressive on the USSR than most Americans, including calling for normalization of relations with the new country and encouraging Washington to stay out of Soviet affairs. Thomas was closest to the Centrists and all groupings supported running candidates independent of “old parties” for much of Thomas’ tenure.
But independence of the major two parties did not mean Socialists didn’t seek to join with others. The first example under Thomas of the SPA seeing itself as a party-surrogate to make way for a new mass party was the 1924 presidential election where the SPA threw its support behind the Progressive Party and its nominee, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette.
Socialists lent their ballot line to La Follette for his White House run and backed his Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA) to form a new party. Future liberal Republican New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia was active in this effort and said he saw the Socialists being a bloc in a future Progressive Party.
Compared to today, labor was then more divided between the “old parties” and the AFL-CIO actually threw its support, albeit tepid, behind La Follette. La Follette only won his own state of Wisconsin, but got 16%of the national vote. However, La Follette died in 1925 and unions pulled their support from the CPPA. That year, Thomas ran for NYC mayor with La Guardia’s endorsement but only received 3.5%of the vote — a big drop from the over 20% the party received for the same office in 1917.
Thomas’ 1929 NYC mayoral campaign gave Socialists some hope, however short-lived, for an electoral turnaround. A three-way race pitted Thomas against corrupt Democratic incumbent Jimmy Walker and now former ally La Guardia resulted in the Socialist winning 12%of the vote.
Then, in 1932, the Socialist Party nominated Norman Thomas for president for the second time. He captured nearly 900,000 ballots or just over 2% of the voters, his best White House run.
There was no guarantee that the new Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt, who avoided public support of basic labor demands like collective bargaining, would eventually formalize private sector union rights, not to mention create the New Deal. There was hope among Socialists, according to Fleischman, that Roosevelt failing to alleviate suffering would pave the way for a move towards more radical solutions.
Roosevelt’s New Deal did win over large portions of the US voters. In turn, the dominance of the Democratic Party in the period and organized labor’s turn towards curtailed popular support for Socialists. Moreover, Thomas eventually concluded that, had Roosevelt failed, the beneficiaries would have likely been the populist and fascist right rather than anti-capitalists.
Activists who might have been sympathetic to the SPA instead joined the rapidly growing labor movement or moved into liberal Democratic politics. Some went on to form the Americans for Democratic Action, which for a time was a very powerful pressure group in the Democratic Party with leaders such as Eleanor Roosevelt. As William Prince recently wrote in Democratic Left, some Socialist Party members such as Upton Sinclair left to join the Democratic Party in order to run socialist primary candidates similar to today’s DSA. Sinclair almost became governor of California, with President Roosevelt and Hollywood joining the capitalist class to defeat the erstwhile SPA cadre.
The antagonistic relations between the U.S. Socialist and Communist parties during Thomas’ leadership prevented unity to form a more mass anti-capitalist party. In the first half of the century, both parties often found themselves on opposing sides in electoral politics and trade unionism. The two parties’ members would lead rival unions that sparred for workers’ attention and loyalty. The Communist song, the Cloakmakers’ Union, reflecting this intra-left conflict in the garment trades, even denounced Thomas by name.
The parties were not on the same page about building a larger workers party. It was the Communist Party that proposed a joint 1936 presidential ticket with its leader, Earl Browder, and Norman Thomas. It is unlikely this alliance, had it come to fruition, would have fostered a unified socialist party. But opposition by the Old Guard to the proposed electoral coalition means we will never know the fate of such unity in an era sympathetic to anti-capitalist alternatives.
A dozen years later, both the Socialists and Communists experimented in party-surrogate strategies to create separate, larger parties. The Progressive Party that ran Henry Wallace (not to be confused with the party with the same name nearly a quarter century earlier) and its Communist backing is more widely known. But democratic socialists, chaired by labor and Black civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, created the National Education Committee for a New Party. This effort was inspired by the rise of the Canadian Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and Labour Party victory in the UK after the Second World War.
Both party efforts ran into trouble and did not meet expectations. For the Socialists, Thomas and others tried to convince Randolph to be their 1948 presidential candidate. But after consulting with other Black leaders, Randolph declined, saying that he did not want to take away from the federal work he was doing on civil and labor rights.
This instance is another example of the dilemma socialists continue to face in the United States: take an independent route with considerable risk and reward or try to continue to have insider access to the establishment to make incremental change. It’s worth noting that the book does show that Thomas did have a direct line to Roosevelt, even though he ran against him, and did push the president.
“Thomas and Fleischman, and others in the U.S. socialist movement, concluded that having a party was less favorable than an independent organization like we have in DSA today.”
The results of the 1948 election showed a fractured electorate. Wallace, who at points was polling in double digits, came in fourth with over 2% — slightly under Dixiecrat protest candidate Strom Thurmond’s total. Unlike Wallace, Thurmond won electoral college votes but mostly due to the winner Harry Truman being kept off the ballot in some states. Thomas performed dismally, winning less than 1%.
Shortly after, the Progressive Party disbanded. The SPA fared little better. Thomas refused to run again. By 1956, the party that once could get nearly a million votes while their candidate sat in jail only received 2,044 ballots. The SPA stopped running candidates into the 1960s as its slow decline continued. It was one of the only radical organizations not to grow of any significance during that turbulent decade.
Thomas was a key advocate in the party ceasing to mount independent runs for the presidency. He shifted to advocating a strategy that seems similar to the DSA of today: electorally focused on primaries with a focus on socialist education. Flesichman wrote:
The decision was emotionally painful, but Thomas felt that it had to be made. In a pamphlet for circulation only to party members, he called upon the party to stop spending its “energy on political campaigns which gave us only a handful of votes.” He urged instead that Socialists work with liberals and unionists in old-party primaries and elections, while consciously stressing socialist education.
Fleischman supports Thomas’ conclusion, but contends that a younger version of the biographer and more importantly, most of the SPA, would have disagreed the period of Thomas’ leadership:
But it is my sober conviction that after 1934, no course of action he might have taken could have prevented the electoral decline of the Socialist Party. It might have been far more effective (and I confess I would have fought it at the time) if in 1936 Thomas had frankly repudiated Socialist campaign on the Socialist ticket and called for work with liberals and labor in old party primaries and political organizations. This, coupled with Socialist education of the sort done by the Fabian Society in Great Britain, might have led to much greater Socialist influence within the American body politic. But those who remained in the Socialist Party in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, rejected this approach solidly – and even if Thomas had come out for such a program, I am sure the Party members would have refused to accept it.
The SPA, like all anti-capitalist parties in the United States, failed to become a party that could truly compete nationally with both the Democrats and Republicans. This occurred despite several real attempts in the decades of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to create a workers’ or progressive party beyond the Socialist and Communist parties.
Those in DSA who wish to create a new workers’ party and use DSA as the party-surrogate would be wise to study these previous attempts. These efforts were conducted in times of less polarization between the parties and with key social groups such as organized labor being more open to creating a new vehicle to elect candidates. Thomas and Fleischman, and others in the U.S. socialist movement, concluded that having a party was less favorable than an independent organization like we have in DSA today. Reversing course may seem exciting, but a slow decline is not something worth emulating — and a slow decline can come when a group does not recognize the tide turning against them.