Early years Clarence Ollson Senior was born in 1903. He attended the
University of Kansas, where he was active in the
Student League for Industrial Democracy, the current incarnation of the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society headed by
Harry W. Laidler. Senior worked his way through high school and college, performing a variety of jobs, including work as a mechanic, night watchman, truck driver, shipping clerk and working in a soap factory. Upon graduation from Kansas, Senior had become associated with the League of Kansas Municipalities before moving to join the
Cleveland Federation of Teachers in
Cleveland, Ohio. While in Europe, Senior attended a conference of the
War Resisters' International and was a delegate to the World Youth Peace Congress held in the
Netherlands. When the Spring of 1929, Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party Henry fell into personal difficulties with his wife, Emma Henry, herself the SPA's State Secretary in Indiana, Executive Secretary Henry abruptly resigned his office. The governing National Executive Committee found themselves in a position of needing to find a permanent replacement, appointing
Mabel H. Barnes to fulfill the role on a temporary basis. The NEC arbitrarily waived the party's constitutional requirement that the Executive Secretary be a party member for at least three years and named Senior to the position. The Socialist Party was in a tenuous position when Senior was finally able to assume his new position in August 1929. The party owed money to its printer and was nearly two years in arrears in the payment of its dues to the
Socialist International in
Switzerland. Senior was instrumental in solidifying the party's financial situation through economical operation of the national office and through the successful solicitation of funds from the organization's loyal remaining membership core. Senior also set about building the size of the Socialist Party's membership ranks. Historian
David A. Shannon recalled: "When Clarence Senior became national secretary in the summer of 1929, he brought to the national office some long-needed vigor. the results were immediate. By the end of 1929 the Socialist Party had gained more members than it had in all the years since 1923. Through the United Socialist Drive it had raised more funds than it had in years, it had revived the flow of Socialist pamphlets which had all but dried up since the war, and it had boosted the circulation of Socialist newspapers.... Senior established a Social Problems Lecture Bureau bringing Socialist speakers to paying audiences around the country, promoting the party's cause and bringing in needed funds at the same time. Senior also targeted sympathetic individuals who were not formal members of the Socialist Party in his fund-raising efforts, sending out 10,000 letters as part of a 1931 campaign called the "Socialism Forward Drive." These efforts proved to be relatively successful. "The Socialist Party never had enough money to do all it wanted to, but Senior's money-raising enabled it to do more than it had for over a decade," Shannon notes. While the Socialist Party received an injection of enthusiasm in the aftermath of the first presidential run of
Norman Thomas in November 1928 and gained adherents in the aftermath of the
1929 Wall Street crash and the coming of the
Great Depression, many believe the party's growth during the first half of the 1930s was also due to Clarence Senior's energetic leadership. Historian David Shannon called 1930. Senior's first year on the job as Executive Secretary, "the first full year of vigorous leadership for the party since [Otto]
Branstetter resigned in the early 1920s." A period of growth followed, with 32 new SPA locals established in 1930, 96 more in 1931, and nearly 600 in 1932. Senior aligned himself with the younger, more vigorous, and more radical forces and against the "Old Guard." In the summer of 1933 the Militants, with Senior as their ostensible spokesman, sought to remove "official" status from the New York weekly newspaper
The New Leader, the voice of the Old Guard edited by
James Oneal – an action which earned the enmity of the slighted moderates. Personal antipathy was also intertwined in this factional struggle. Ever since 1928, party presidential candidate Norman Thomas had been at odds with National Chairman
Morris Hillquit, the best known and most widely respected of the Old Guard leaders. According to one historian, Thomas had played a leading role in an effort to oust Hillquit: "Thomas believed that Hillquit acted as a brake on Socialist activity nationally at a time when Thomas's protégé, Clarence Senior, was trying to make the party an effective organization. For these reasons, Thomas was instrumental in arranging for a coalition of all anti-Hillquit elements in an effort to wrest the national chairmanship from him." At the same time the Old Guard, with National Chairman
Morris Hillquit at their head, sought to remove Senior from his post as National Executive Secretary in favor of their own man,
Marx Lewis, who had recently led successful fundraising efforts on behalf of the Milwaukee socialist daily newspaper,
The Milwaukee Leader. Although the governing NEC of the party was narrowly split between the followers of Hillquit and Thomas, Clarence Senior was narrowly able to retain his position in 1932 due to the concerted effort of the Thomas group. The Militant majority of the American delegation lent their support to what one historian has called a "quasi-Communist resolution" calling for "workers' democracy" – a position which factional patriarch Norman Thomas did not share. Thomas was placed in a difficult position when this action of his allies was repudiated at a national conference of the SPA held in
Detroit in June 1934. In 1935, the Socialist Party began an official party newspaper,
The Socialist Call, in opposition to
The New Leader, and the organization moved towards a formal split, with James Oneal,
Louis Waldman,
Algernon Lee, and the Old Guard leaving the party immediately after the
May 1936 Cleveland Convention to form the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF). Senior remained in the post of Executive Secretary through the November 1936 election, resigning in December so that he might go to
Mexico to "recover his health." The retiring Senior was feted at a dinner in his honor at the Cafe Idrott in Chicago on the evening of December 12, 1936. The
Roosevelt landslide in the 1936 election in the face of a full Socialist campaign was disheartening and amidst the faction fighting and splits, party membership dropped precipitously. By February 1937 less than 6,500 paid members remained in the organization. With the end of Senior's tenure as Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party, his political career essentially drew to a close. A new chapter of his life awaited him in the world of academia.
Academic career Around 1940, Senior returned to college, attending the
University of Kansas City (now the University of Missouri-Kansas City) in the Department of Political Science and History. In 1942 he completed his
Masters' thesis, entitled
The Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railroad. Senior went on to publish a wide range of journal articles and books, specializing on
Puerto Rican affairs with an emphasis on matters of emigration and the problems of the Puerto Rican working class. Senior was also the
biographer of Puerto Rican socialist and labor leader
Santiago Iglesias, with his book published on that figure in 1972.
Later years, death, and legacy Clarence Senior died in 1974. A portion of Clarence Senior's papers, dating from 1924 through 1945, are held in the Social Action Collection of the
Wisconsin Historical Society at
Madison. ==Footnotes==