1900s–1920s: Opposition to World War I and first Red Scare featuring
Eugene V. Debs and vice presidential candidate
Emil Seidel Victor L. Berger ran for Congress and lost in
1904 before winning
Wisconsin's 5th congressional district seat in
1910 as the first Socialist to serve in
Congress. In Congress, he focused on issues related to the
District of Columbia and also more radical proposals, including eliminating the president's
veto, abolishing the
Senate, and the
socialization of major industries. Berger gained national publicity for his old-age pension bill, the first of its kind introduced into Congress. Less than two weeks after the
Titanic passenger ship disaster of 1912, Berger introduced a bill in Congress providing for the nationalization of radio-wireless systems. A practical socialist, Berger argued that the wireless chaos which occurred during the
Titanic disaster had demonstrated the need for a government-owned wireless system. Outside of Congress, socialists were able to influence a number of progressive reforms (both directly and indirectly) on a local level. Socialists faced overwhelming public and political opposition when they voiced their opposition to America's entry into
World War I (1914–1918), and they even attempted to interfere with the conscription laws that required all younger men to register for the draft. On April 7, 1917, the day after the
United States declared war on the German Empire, an emergency convention of the Socialist Party took place in St. Louis. It declared the war "a crime against the people of the United States" and began holding anti-war rallies. Socialist anti-draft demonstrations drew as many as 20,000 people. In June 1917, President
Woodrow Wilson signed into law the
Espionage Act, which included a clause providing prison sentences for up to twenty years for "[w]hoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty ... or willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment of service of the United States." testified on January 22, 1919, during the German phase of the subcommittee's work. He established that anti-war and anti-draft activism during World War I, which he described as "pro-German" activity, had now transformed itself into propaganda, "developing sympathy for the Bolshevik movement." The United States' wartime enemy, though defeated, had exported an ideology that now ruled Russia and threatened the United States anew: "The Bolsheviki movement is a branch of the revolutionary socialism of Germany. It had its origin in the philosophy of Marx and its leaders were Germans." After visiting three communists imprisoned in Canton, Ohio, Eugene V. Debs crossed the street and made a two-hour speech to a crowd in which he condemned the war. "Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. [...] The master class has always declared war, and the subject class has always fought the battles," Debs told the crowd. He was immediately arrested and soon convicted under the Espionage Act. During his trial, he did not take the stand, nor call a witness in his defense. However, before the trial began and after his sentencing, he made speeches to the jury: "I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. [...] I have sympathy with the suffering, struggling people everywhere ...." He also uttered what would become his most famous words: "While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison and served 32 months until President Warren G. Harding pardoned him. During the war, about half the socialists supported the war, most famously
Walter Lippmann. The other half were under attack for obstructing the draft and the Courts held they went beyond the bounds of free speech when they encouraged young men to break the law and not register for the draft. Howard Zinn, historian on the left, says: "The patriotic fervor of war [was] invoked. The courts and jails [were] used to reinforce the idea that certain ideas, certain kinds of resistance, could not be tolerated." The government crackdown on dissenting radicalism paralleled public outrage towards opponents of the war. Several groups were formed on the local and national levels to stop the socialists from undermining the draft laws. The
American Vigilante Patrol, a subdivision of the
American Defense Society, was formed with the purpose "to put an end to seditious street oratory." The
American Protective League was a new private group that kept track of cases of "disloyalty." It eventually claimed it had found 3,000,000 such cases: Soon, "the halls of Congress rang with denunciations of the IWW" and the government sided with industry as "federal attorneys viewed strikes not as the behavior of discontented workers but as the outcome of subversive and even German influences." Their sentences ranged from a few months to ten years in prison. An ally of the Socialist Party had been practically destroyed. However, Wilson did recognize a problem with the state of labor in the United States. In 1918, working closely with
Samuel Gompers of the AFL, he created the
National War Labor Board in an attempt to reform labor practices. The Board included an equal number of members from labor and business and included leaders of the AFL. The War Labor Board was able to "institute the eight-hour day in many industries, [...] to raise wages for transit workers [...] [and] to demand equal pay for women [...]." It also required employers to bargain collectively, effectively making unions legal. On January 21, 1919, 35,000 shipyard workers in
Seattle went on strike seeking wage increases. They appealed to the Seattle Central Labor Council for support from other unions and found widespread enthusiasm. Within two weeks, more than 100 local unions joined in a call on February 3 for general strike to begin on the morning of February 6. The 60,000 total strikers paralyzed the city's normal activities, like streetcar service, schools and ordinary commerce while their General Strike Committee maintained order and provided essential services, like trash collection and milk deliveries. The national press called the general strike "Marxian" and "a revolutionary movement aimed at existing government." "It is only a middling step," said the
Chicago Tribune, "from Petrograd to Seattle." After strikebreakers and police clashed with unionists in
Gary, Indiana, the
United States Army took over the city on October 6 and
martial law was declared. National guardsmen, leaving Gary after federal troops had taken over, turned their anger on strikers in nearby
Indiana Harbor, Indiana. Internal strife caused a schism in the
American Left after
Vladimir Lenin's successful revolution in Russia. Lenin invited the Socialist Party to join the Third International. The debate over whether to align with Lenin caused a major rift in the party. A referendum to join Lenin's Comintern passed with 90% approval, but the moderates who were in charge of the party expelled the extreme leftists before this could take place. The expelled members formed the
Communist Labor Party and the
Communist Party of America. The Socialist Party ended up, with only moderates left, at one third of its original size.
John Reed,
Benjamin Gitlow and other socialists were among those who formed the Communist Labor Party while socialist foreign sections led by
Charles Ruthenberg formed the Communist Party. These two groups would be combined as the
Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The Communists organized the
Trade Union Unity League to compete with the AFL. By August 1919, only months after its founding, the Communist Party USA claimed 50,000 to 60,000 members. Members also included
anarchists and other
radical leftists. In contrast, the more moderate Socialist Party of America had 40,000 members. The sections of the Communist Party's
International Workers Order meanwhile organized for communism along linguistic and ethnic lines, providing
mutual aid and tailored cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height. (In 1928, following divisions inside the Soviet Union,
Jay Lovestone, who had replaced Ruthenberg as general secretary of the CPUSA following his death, joined with
William Z. Foster to expel Foster's former allies,
James P. Cannon and
Max Shachtman, who were followers of
Leon Trotsky. Following another Soviet factional dispute, Lovestone and Gitlow were expelled and
Earl Browder became party leader.) On January 7, 1920, at the first session of the
New York State Assembly, Assembly Speaker
Thaddeus C. Sweet attacked the Assembly's five Socialist members, declaring they had been "elected on a platform that is absolutely inimical to the best interests of the state of New York and the United States." The Socialist Party, Sweet said, was "not truly a political party," but was rather "a membership organization admitting within its ranks aliens, enemy aliens, and minors." It had supported the revolutionaries in
Germany, Austria and
Hungary, he continued; and consorted with international Socialist parties close to the
Communist International. The Assembly suspended the five by a vote of 140 to 6, with just one Democrat supporting the Socialists. A trial in the Assembly, lasting from January 20 to March 11, resulted in a recommendation that the five be expelled and the Assembly
voted overwhelmingly for expulsion on April 1, 1920. The five party members had been deeply involved with supporting the
1918–1920 New York City rent strikes. Running on a campaign during the lead up of the November 1919 elections, that promised to fight for several distinct tenant rights. They also before that became involved directly as a supporting role through organizing, after the strikes had already begun. The rent strikes themselves, led to the passage of the first ever rent control laws in the nation. Later in 1920,
Anarchists bombed Wall Street and sent a number of mail-bombs to prominent businessmen and government leaders. The public lumped together the entire far left as terrorists. A wave of fear swept the country, giving support for the Justice Department to deport thousands of non-citizens active in the far-left.
Emma Goldman was the most famous. This was known as the
first Red Scare or the "
Palmer Raids". Attorney General
A. Mitchell Palmer, a Wilsonian Democrat, had a bomb explode outside his house. He set out to stop the "Communist conspiracy" that he believed was operating inside the United States. He created inside the Justice Department a new division the
General Intelligence Division, led by young
J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover soon amassed a card-catalogue system with information on 60,000 "radically inclined" individuals and many leftist groups and publications. Palmer and Hoover both published press releases and circulated anti-Communist propaganda. Then on January 2, 1920, the Palmer Raids began, with Hoover in charge. On that single day in 1920, Hoover's agents rounded up 6,000 people. Many were deported but the Labor Department ended the raids with a ruling that the incarcerations and deportations were illegal. "Socialism" gradually came to be an American conservative attack-word aimed at merely liberal policies and politicians. Since the late 19th century, conservatives had used the term "socialism" (or "creeping socialism") as a means of dismissing spending on public welfare programs which could potentially enlarge the role of the federal government, or lead to higher tax rates. This use of the word had little to do with government ownership of any means of production, or the various socialist parties, as when
William Allen White attacked presidential candidate
William Jennings Bryan in 1896 by warning that "[t]he election will sustain Americanism or it will plant Socialism."
Barry Goldwater in 1960 called for Republican unity against
John F. Kennedy and the "blueprint for socialism presented by the Democrats." When the 1920s began, "the IWW was destroyed, the Socialist party falling apart. The strikes were beaten down by force, and the economy was doing just well enough for just enough people to prevent mass rebellion." Thus, the decline of the socialist movement during the early 20th century was the result of a number of constrictions and attacks from several directions. The socialists had lost a major ally in the IWW Wobblies and their free speech had been restricted, if not denied. Immigrants, a major base of the socialist movement, were discriminated against and looked down upon. Eugene V. Debs—the charismatic leader of the socialists—was in prison, along with hundreds of fellow dissenters. Wilson's National War Labor Board and a number of legislative acts had ameliorated the plight of the workers. The socialists were regarded as being "unnecessary", the "lunatic fringe" and a group of untrustworthy radicals. The press, courts and other establishment structures exhibited prejudice against them. After crippling schisms within the party and a change in public opinion due to the Palmer Raids, a general negative perception of the far-left and attribution to it of terrorist incidents such as the
Wall Street Bombing, the Socialist Party found itself unable to gather popular support. At one time, it boasted 33 city mayors, many seats in state legislatures and two members of the House of Representatives. The Socialist Party reached its peak in
1912 when Debs won 6% of the popular vote. Historian
Eric Foner described the fundamental problem of those years in a 1984 article for the
History Workshop Journal: However, despite this decline, a focus on specific local examples shows that within certain communities the socialist trends seen on a national scale continued to influence local socialist movements even after the decline of the mainstream Socialist Party. In specific parts of the United States, such as Ybor City, Tampa, immigrant populations played significant roles in helping translate national socialist efforts into local action. Fuelled by a rising and often radical Latin American immigrant population emerging in the early 1900s, Florida saw major socialist developments both politically for the Socialist Party with their successes in the 1904, 1908 and 1921 national elections and industrially through strike action such as the primarily Latin led February 1919 cigar factory strike in
Ybor City,
Tampa. Within Ybor City specifically, supported mainly by the predominantly immigrant workforce, radical socialist ideas spread rapidly, with these ideas continuing late into the 1920s and early 1930s, even after the mainstream decline of socialism in the United States. Within cigar factories the often-illiterate workforce would be educated by a 'lector'- a paid spokesperson who recited anarchist, communist and fictional material to workers. These were almost always led by immigrant communities, such as Tampa's significant Cuban, Spanish and Italian populations.
1930s–1940s: Popular front and the New Deal The ideological rigidity of the
Third Period (from ) began to crack with two events: the election of
Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States in 1932 and
Adolf Hitler's rise to power in
Nazi Germany in 1933. Roosevelt's election and the passage of the
National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 sparked a tremendous upsurge in union organizing in 1933 and 1934. Many conservatives equated the
New Deal with
socialism or with
Communism as practiced in the Soviet Union and saw its policies as evidence that the government had been heavily influenced by Communist policy-makers in the Roosevelt administration.
Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff argues that socialist and communist parties, along with organized labor, played a collective role in pushing through New-Deal legislation, and that conservative opponents of the New Deal coordinated an effort to single out and destroy them as a result. The
United States Progressive Party of 1948 was a
left-wing political party that served as a vehicle for former Vice President
Henry A. Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign. The party sought desegregation, the establishment of a national health insurance system, an expansion of the welfare system, and the nationalization of the energy industry. The party also sought conciliation with the
Soviet Union during the early stages of the
Cold War. Accusations of
Communist influences and Wallace's association with controversial Theosophist figure
Nicholas Roerich undermined his campaign, and he received just 2.4 percent of the nationwide popular vote. , six-time presidential candidate for the
Socialist Party of America The
Seventh Congress of the Comintern made a change in line official in 1935, when it declared the need for a
popular front of all groups opposed to
fascism. The CPUSA abandoned its opposition to the New Deal, provided many of the organizers for the
Congress of Industrial Organizations and began supporting civil rights of African Americans. The party also sought unity with forces to its right.
Earl Russell Browder offered to run as
Norman Thomas'
running mate on a joint Socialist Party–Communist Party ticket in the
1936 presidential election, but Thomas rejected this overture. The gesture did not mean that much in practical terms, since by 1936 the CPUSA was effectively supporting Roosevelt in much of his trade-union work. While continuing to run its own candidates for office, the CPUSA pursued a policy of representing the
Democratic Party as the lesser evil in elections. Party members also rallied to the defense of the
Spanish Republic of 1931-1939 during this period after a Nationalist military uprising moved to overthrow it, resulting in the
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The CPUSA, along with leftists throughout the world, raised funds for medical relief, while many of its members made their way to Spain with the aid of the party to join the
Lincoln Brigade, one of the
International Brigades. Among its other achievements, the Lincoln Brigade became the first American military force to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis. Intellectually, the Popular-Front period saw the development of a strong communist influence in intellectual and artistic life. This often took place through various organizations influenced or controlled by the party, or—as they were pejoratively known—
"fronts". The CPUSA under Browder supported
Stalin's
show trials in the Soviet Union, called the
Moscow Trials. Therein, between August 1936 and mid-1938, the Soviet government indicted, tried and shot virtually all of the remaining
Old Bolsheviks. He compared the show-trial defendants to domestic traitors (
Benedict Arnold,
Aaron Burr, disloyal
War of 1812 Federalists and
Confederate secessionists) while likening persons who "smeared" Stalin's name to those who had slandered
Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. in the early 1930s and founding most of the country's first
industrial unions (which would later use the 1950
McCarran Internal Security Act to expel their Communist members) while also becoming known for
opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the
Jim Crow period of
racial segregation. Historian
Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship offer "a more nuanced portrayal of the party as both a
Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s." The
Communist Party USA played a significant role in defending the rights of African Americans during its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Throughout its history, many of the party's leaders and political thinkers have been African Americans:
James Ford,
Charlene Mitchell,
Angela Davis, and
Jarvis Tyner (the current executive vice chair of the party) all ran as presidential or vice-presidential candidates on the party ticket. Others like
Benjamin J. Davis,
William L. Patterson,
Harry Haywood, James Jackson,
Henry Winston,
Claude Lightfoot,
Alphaeus Hunton,
Doxey Wilkerson,
Claudia Jones and John Pittman also contributed in important ways to the party's approaches to major issues from human and civil rights, peace, women's equality, the national question, working-class unity, socialist thought,
cultural struggle and more. African-American thinkers, artists and writers such as
Claude McKay,
Richard Wright,
Ann Petry,
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Shirley Graham Du Bois,
Lloyd Brown,
Charles White,
Elizabeth Catlett,
Paul Robeson,
Gwendolyn Brooks and many more were one-time members or supporters of the party and the Communists also had a close alliance with Harlem Congressman
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. A rivalry emerged in 1931 between the NAACP and the CPUSA, when the CPUSA responded quickly and effectively to support the
Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American youth arrested in 1931 in Alabama for rape. Du Bois and the NAACP felt that the case would not be beneficial to their cause, so they chose to let the CPUSA
organize the defense efforts. , labor organizer and later a longtime General Secretary of the
Communist Party USA In 1929 Reverend
A. J. Muste attempted to organize radical unionists opposed to the passive policies of
American Federation of Labor president
William Green (in office: 1924–1952) under the banner of an organization called the
Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA). In 1933 Muste's CPLA took the step of establishing itself as the core of a new political organization called the
American Workers Party (AWP). The AWP then merged with the Trotskyist
Communist League of America in 1934 to establish a group called the
Workers Party of the United States. Through it all Muste continued to work as a labor activist, leading the victorious Toledo
Auto-Lite strike of 1934. The
Communist Party of the USA (Opposition) was a
right oppositionist movement of the 1930s. The organization emerged from a factional fight in the CPUSA in 1929 and unsuccessfully sought to reintegrate with that organization for several years 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 Socialist Party of America's membership had begun to decline. 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 led by Thomas. 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. 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
Jack Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists and Trotsky's own decision to move towards a break with the party. Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the Thomas group, 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 Socialist Party not to make it stronger, but to capture the organization for their own purposes. The 1,000 or so Trotskyists who had entered the Socialist Party in 1936 exited in the summer of 1937 with their ranks swelled by another 1,000. On December 31, 1937, representatives of this faction gathered in Chicago to establish a new political organization—the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The
1948 United States presidential election was the last election where a
Socialist named party presidential candidate received over 100,000 votes as of 2024.
1950s: Second Red Scare propaganda of the 1950s, specifically addressing the entertainment industry
Monthly Review, established in 1949, is an independent
socialist journal published monthly in
New York City. As of 2013, the publication remains the longest continuously published socialist magazine in the United States. It was established by
Christian socialist F. O. "Matty" Matthiessen and
Marxist economist Paul Sweezy, who were former colleagues at
Harvard University. The world-famous physicist and resident in the United States
Albert Einstein published a famous article in the first issue of
Monthly Review (May 1949) arguing for socialism titled "
Why Socialism?". It was subsequently published in May 1998 to commemorate the first issue of
Monthly Reviews fiftieth year. Editors Huberman and Sweezy argued as early as 1952 that massive and expanding military spending was an integral part of the process of capitalist stabilization, driving corporate profits, bolstering levels of employment and absorbing surplus production. The illusion of an external military threat was required to sustain this system of priorities in government spending, they argued; consequently, the editors published material challenging the dominant Cold War paradigm of "Democracy versus Communism". The
Johnson–Forest tendency, sometimes called the Johnsonites, refers to a radical left tendency in the United States associated with Marxist theorists
C. L. R. James and
Raya Dunayevskaya, who used the pseudonyms J. R. Johnson and Freddie Forest respectively. They were joined by
Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American woman who was considered the third founder. After leaving the Trotskyist
Socialist Workers Party, Johnson–Forest founded their own organization for the first time, called Correspondence. In 1956, James would see the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as confirmation of this. Those who endorsed the politics of James took the name
Facing Reality, after the 1958 book by James co-written with Grace Lee Boggs and Pierre Chaulieu, a pseudonym for
Cornelius Castoriadis, on the Hungarian working class revolt of 1956. Anarchism continued to influence important American literary and intellectual personalities of the time, such as
Paul Goodman,
Dwight Macdonald,
Allen Ginsberg,
Leopold Kohr,
Julian Beck and
John Cage. Goodman was an American
sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist and
public intellectual. Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of
Growing Up Absurd (1960) and an activist on the
pacifist left in the 1960s and an inspiration to that era's student movement. He is less remembered as a co-founder of
Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and 1950s. In the mid-1940s, together with
C. Wright Mills, he contributed to
Politics, the journal edited during the 1940s by Dwight Macdonald. An American
anarcho-pacifist current developed in this period as well as a related
Christian anarchist one. Anarcho-pacifism is a tendency within the anarchist movement which rejects the use of violence in the struggle for social change. The main early influences were the thought of
Henry David Thoreau Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and devout
Catholic convert who advocated the Catholic economic theory of
distributism. She was also considered to be an anarchist and did not hesitate to use the term. In the 1930s, Day worked closely with fellow activist
Peter Maurin to establish the
Catholic Worker Movement, a nonviolent, pacifist movement that continues to combine direct aid for the poor and homeless with
nonviolent direct action on their behalf. The cause for Day's
canonization is open in the
Catholic Church.
Ammon Hennacy was an American pacifist, Christian anarchist,
vegetarian, social activist, member of the Catholic Worker Movement and a
Wobbly. He established the
Joe Hill House of Hospitality in
Salt Lake City, Utah and practiced tax resistance. Reunification with the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF) 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 SDF, 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." Following directions from the Soviet Union, the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its members were active in the
Civil Rights Movement for African Americans. Following Stalin's "theory of nationalism", the CPUSA once favored the creation of a separate "nation" for negroes to be located in the American Southeast. In 1941, after Germany invaded the
Soviet Union, Stalin ordered the CPUSA to abandon civil rights work and focus supporting American entry into
World War II. Disillusioned,
Bayard Rustin began working with members of the
Socialist Party USA (SPUSA) of
Norman Thomas, particularly
A. Philip Randolph, the head of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. 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 (DSF). When the Soviet Union led an invasion of Hungary in 1956, half of the members of communist parties around the world quit and in the United States half did and many joined the Socialist Party.
Frank Zeidler was an American socialist politician and mayor of
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, serving three terms from April 20, 1948, to April 18, 1960. He was the most recent socialist mayor of any major American city. Zeidler was Milwaukee's third socialist mayor after
Emil Seidel (1910–1912) and
Daniel Hoan (1916–1940), making Milwaukee the largest American city to elect three socialists to its highest office. In 1958, the SPUSA welcomed former members of the
Independent Socialist League (ISL), which before its 1956 dissolution 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 Djilas. Shachtman's ISL had attracted youth like
Irving Howe,
Michael Harrington,
Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz. The
Young People's Socialist League was dissolved, but the party formed a new youth group under the same name. The Second Red Scare is a period lasting roughly from 1950 to 1956 and characterized by heightened fears of Communist influence on American institutions and
espionage by
Soviet agents. During the McCarthy era, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists or Communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators and
union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations or beliefs was often greatly exaggerated. Many people suffered loss of employment and/or destruction of their careers; and some even suffered imprisonment. Most of these punishments came about through trial verdicts later overturned, laws that would be declared unconstitutional, dismissals for reasons later declared illegal or
actionable, or extra-legal procedures that would come into general disrepute. The most famous examples of McCarthyism include the speeches, investigations and hearings of Senator McCarthy himself; the
Hollywood blacklist, associated with hearings conducted by the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); and the various anti-communist activities of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under Director
J. Edgar Hoover. It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired. Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees did in fact have a past or present connection of some kind with the CPUSA. However, for the vast majority both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous. The African American intellectual and activist
W. E. B. Du Bois was affected by these policies and he became incensed in 1961 when the
Supreme Court upheld the 1950
McCarran Act, a key piece of McCarthyism legislation which required communists to register with the government. To demonstrate his outrage, he joined the CPUSA in October 1961 at the age of 93. In 1950, Du Bois had already
run for senator from New York on the socialist
American Labor Party ticket and received about 200,000 votes, or 4% of the statewide total.
Harry Hay was an English-born American labor advocate, teacher and early leader in the American
LGBT rights movement. He is known for his roles in helping to found several gay organizations, including the
Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States which in its early days had a strong Marxist influence. The
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality reports: "As Marxists the founders of the group believed that the injustice and oppression which they suffered stemmed from relationships deeply embedded in the structure of American society." A longtime member of the CPUSA, Hay's Marxist history led to his resignation from the Mattachine leadership in 1953. Hay's involvement in the gay movement became more informal after that, although he did co-found the Los Angeles chapter of the
Gay Liberation Front in 1969. As Hay became more involved in his Mattachine work, he correspondingly became more concerned that his homosexuality would negatively affect the CPUSA, which did not allow gays to be members. Hay himself approached party leaders and recommended his own expulsion. The party refused to expel Hay as a homosexual, instead expelling him as a "security risk" at the same time declaring him to be a "Lifelong Friend of the People". Homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder in the 1950s. However, in the context of the highly politicised Cold War environment homosexuality became framed as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security.
1960s–1970s: New Left and social unrest led the
1963 March on Washington at which
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "
I Have a Dream" speech The term New Left was popularised in the United States in an open letter written in 1960 by
sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), entitled
Letter to the New Left. Mills argued for a new
leftist ideology, moving away from the traditional focus on labor issues (
Old Left), towards issues such as opposing
alienation,
anomie and
authoritarianism. Mills argued for a shift from traditional leftism toward the values of the
counterculture and emphasized an international perspective on the movement. According to David Burner, C Wright Mills claimed that the proletariat were no longer the revolutionary force as the new agent of revolutionary change were young intellectuals around the world. In the wake of the downfall of Senator McCarthy (who never served in the House, nor HUAC), the prestige of HUAC began a gradual decline beginning in the late 1950s. By 1959, the committee was being denounced by former President
Harry S. Truman as the "most un-American thing in the country today." The committee lost considerable prestige as the 1960s progressed, increasingly becoming the target of political satirists and the defiance of a new generation of political activists. HUAC subpoenaed
Jerry Rubin and
Abbie Hoffman of the
Yippies in 1967 and again in the aftermath of the
1968 Democratic National Convention. The Yippies used the media attention to make a mockery of the proceedings. Rubin came to one session dressed as a United States Revolutionary War soldier and passed out copies of the
United States Declaration of Independence to people in attendance. Rubin then "blew giant gum bubbles while his co-witnesses taunted the committee with
Nazi salutes." The
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) was formed in the fall of 1961 by members of the CPUSA who felt that the
Soviet Union had betrayed communism and become
revisionist amidst the
Sino-Soviet Split. Progressive Labor Party founded the
university campus-based May 2 Movement (M2M), which organized the first significant general march against the
Vietnam War in
New York City in 1964. However, once the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) came to the forefront of the American leftist activist political scene in 1965, PLP dissolved M2M and entered SDS, working vigorously to attract supporters and to form party clubs on campuses. On the other hand, the Trotskyist
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) supported both the civil rights movement and the black nationalist movement which grew during the 1960s. It particularly praised the militancy of black nationalist leader
Malcolm X, who in turn spoke at the SWP's public forums and gave an interview to the
Young Socialist. Like all left wing groups, the SWP grew during the 1960s and experienced a particularly brisk growth in the first years of the 1970s. Much of this was due to its involvement in many of the campaigns and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. Kahn and Horowitz, along with
Norman Hill, helped
Bayard Rustin with the
civil rights movement. Rustin had helped to spread
pacificism and
non-violence to leaders of the civil rights movement, like
Martin Luther King Jr. Rustin's circle and
A. Philip Randolph organized the
1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "
I Have a Dream" speech. As such, he started his
Poor People's Campaign in 1968 as an effort to gain economic justice for
poor people in the United States. He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to
communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for
democratic socialism. In a 1952 letter to Coretta Scott, he said: "I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic." In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed that "[t]here must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." Dr. Martin Luther King was a leader of the
Civil Rights Movement, which emphasized nonviolence in demonstrating for social justice and to give Black Americans equal rights under the law. According to David J. Garrow, King in private conversation "made it clear to close friends that economically speaking he considered himself what he termed a Marxist, largely because he believed with increasing strength that American society needed a radical redistribution of wealth and economic power to achieve even a rough form of social justice." King, in 1966, "rejected the idea of piecemeal reform within the existing socio-economic structure. Only at that time did he become persuaded that capitalism is the common determinant linking together racism, economic oppression, and militarism." 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. Harrington, Kahn and Horowitz were officers and staff-persons of the
League for Industrial Democracy (LID), which helped to start the
New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The three LID officers clashed with the less experienced activists of SDS, like
Tom Hayden, when the latter's
Port Huron Statement criticized socialist and liberal opposition to communism and criticized the labor movement while promoting students as agents of social change. LID and SDS split in 1965, when SDS voted to remove from its constitution the "exclusion clause" that prohibited membership by communists: The SDS exclusion clause had barred "advocates of or apologists for totalitarianism." The clause's removal effectively invited "disciplined cadre" to attempt to "take over or paralyze" SDS as had occurred to mass organizations in the thirties. Afterwards,
Marxism–Leninism, particularly the PLP, helped to write "the death sentence" for SDS, which nonetheless had over 100 thousand members at its peak.
Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order is a book by
Paul Sweezy and
Paul A. Baran published in 1966 by Monthly Review Press. It made a major contribution to
Marxian theory by shifting attention from the assumption of a competitive economy to the monopolistic economy associated with the giant corporations that dominate the modern accumulation process. Their work played a leading role in the intellectual development of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. As a review in the American Economic Review stated, it represented "the first serious attempt to extend Marx's model of competitive capitalism to the new conditions of monopoly capitalism." It has recently attracted renewed attention following the
Great Recession. protesting, handing a flower to police—for the historian of the
anarchist movement Ronald Creagh, the hippie movement could be considered as the last spectacular resurgence of
utopian socialism In the 1960s, the
hippie movement influenced a renewed interest in anarchism, and some anarchist and other left-wing groups developed out of the New Left and anarchists actively participated in the
late sixties students and workers revolts. Anarchists began using
direct action, organizing through
affinity groups during
anti-nuclear campaigns in the 1970s. The New Left in the United States also included anarchist,
countercultural and hippie-related radical groups such as the
Yippies who were led by Abbie Hoffman, the
Diggers and
Black Mask/
Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. By late 1966, the Diggers opened
free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts and performed works of political art. The Diggers took their name from the original
English Diggers led by
Gerrard Winstanley and sought to create a mini-society free of money and
capitalism. On the other hand, the Yippies employed theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig ("
Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for president in 1968, to mock the social
status quo. They have been described as a highly theatrical,
anti-authoritarian and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics". Since they were well known for street theater and politically themed pranks, many of the "old school"
political left either ignored or denounced them. According to
ABC News: "The group was known for street theater pranks and was once referred to as the '
Groucho Marxists'." By the 1960s,
Christian anarchist Dorothy Day earned the praise of
counterculture leaders such as Abbie Hoffman, who characterized her as the first hippie, a description of which Day approved. was an American
anarchist and
libertarian socialist author, orator and
political theoretician. by publishing that and other innovative essays on post-scarcity and on ecological technologies such as solar and wind energy and on decentralization and miniaturization. Lecturing throughout the United States, he helped popularize the concept of ecology to the
counterculture. The
Black Panther Party was a black
revolutionary socialist organization active in the United States from 1966 until 1982. The Black Panther Party achieved national and international notoriety through its involvement in the
Black Power movement and American politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Gaining national prominence, the Black Panther Party became an icon of the
counterculture of the 1960s. Ultimately, the Panthers condemned black nationalism as "black racism" and became more focused on socialism without racial exclusivity. They instituted a variety of community social programs designed to alleviate poverty, improve health among inner city black communities and soften the Party's public image. Activists in the 1970s used Socialism and reinterpreted in order to encompass members of radical movements, whether it be the
Black Panther Party or the Gay and Lesbian Left. The overlap between all of these different radical movements was that they were oppressed peoples who were subjugated by the ruling straight white male elite class. Similar themes between these different movements was the issue of capitalist violence that was used to preserve power for the ruling class. There was a prominent group of socialist activists in San Francisco who were combatting the issues of homophobia,
American imperialism, and police brutality. The assassination of gay rights proponent
Harvey Milk by an ex-cop resulted in police violence that "encouraged attacks on gay men, Lesbians, prostitutes, and Third World people."
Angela Davis, an ally of the Black Panther Party and a socialist, viewed capitalism as an inherently violent system. In response to a question regarding the violent nature of the Black Panthers, she says "If you are a black person who lives in a black community all your life and walk out on the street everyday seeing white policemen surrounding you… When you live under a situation like that constantly, and then you ask me whether I approve of violence, I mean, that just doesn't make sense at all." Davis speaks to how capitalism subjugates black people through violence and that the main purpose of police is to protect white supremacy. The Black Panther Party were prominent members of Black Power Movement and was fueled by what they saw as systemic racism perpetuated against black people. According to Douglas Sturm, Professor Emeritus of Religion and Political Science at
Bucknell University: "Police brutality, lack of opportunity, and the realization that opportunity was not forthcoming in the near future led many Blacks to conclude that armed self-defense coupled with self-help was the only way to end the despair." This armed-self defense made many white Americans fearful of the Black Panthers and contributed to the
FBI's designation of the Black Panthers as a
terrorist organization. Although the Black Panthers were labeled violent extremists and terrorists, they provided many resources to their communities, including free healthcare, breakfast, and education services.
COINTELPRO was a series of
covert and at times illegal projects conducted by the United States
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveying, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic
political organizations FBI records show that 85% of COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed "subversive", including
communist and
socialist organizations; organizations and individuals associated with the Civil Rights Movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.; the
American Indian Movement; and broad range of organizations labeled "New Left", including Students for a Democratic Society and the
Weathermen; almost all groups protesting the
Vietnam War as well as individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation; organizations and individuals associated with the
women's rights movement; nationalist groups such as those seeking independence for
Puerto Rico,
United Ireland, and additional notable Americans —even
Albert Einstein, who was a socialist and a member of several civil rights groups, came under FBI surveillance during the years just before COINTELPRO's official inauguration. document outlining the FBI's plans to "neutralize"
Jean Seberg for her support for the
Black Panther Party by attempting to publicly "cause her embarrassment" and "tarnish her image" In 1972, the Socialist Party voted to rename itself as
Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) by a vote of 73 to 34 at its December Convention. Its National Chairmen were Bayard Rustin, a peace and civil rights leader; and
Charles S. Zimmerman, an officer of the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). In 1973, Michael Harrington resigned from SDUSA and founded the
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), which attracted many of his followers from the former Socialist Party. That same year,
David McReynolds and others from the pacifist and immediate-withdrawal wing of the former Socialist Party formed the
Socialist Party USA (SPUSA).
Bayard Rustin was the national chairperson of SDUSA during the 1970s. SDUSA sponsored a biannual conference that featured discussions, for which SDUSA invited outside academic, political and labor union leaders. These meetings also functioned as reunions for political activists and intellectuals, some of whom worked together for decades. The
Weather Underground Organization, commonly known as the Weather Underground, was an American
radical left organization founded on the
Ann Arbor campus of the
University of Michigan. Weatherman organized in 1969 as a
faction of
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and their supporters. With revolutionary positions characterized by
Black Power and opposition to the
Vietnam War, The United Federated Forces of the
Symbionese Liberation Army was an American self-styled left-wing revolutionary group active between 1973 and 1975 that considered itself a
vanguard army. The
Black Liberation Army (BLA) was an underground,
black nationalist militant organization that operated in the United States from 1970 to 1981. The
Communist Workers' Party was a
Maoist group in the United States which had its origin in 1973 as the Asian Study Group (renamed the Workers' Viewpoint Organization in 1976) established by
Jerry Tung, a former member of the PLP who had grown disenchanted with the group and disagreed with changes taking place in the party line. The party is mainly remembered as one of the victims of the
Greensboro Massacre of 1979 in which five protest marchers were shot and killed by members of the
Ku Klux Klan and the
American Nazi Party at a rally organized by the Communist Worker's Party intended to demonstrate radical, even violent, opposition to the Klan. The "Death to the Klan March" and protest was the culmination of attempts by the Communist Workers' Party to organize mostly black industrial workers in the area. The
Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist)'s predecessor organization, the October League (Marxist–Leninist), was founded in 1971 by several local groups, many of which had grown out of the radical student organization
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) when SDS split apart in 1969.
Michael Klonsky, who had been a national leader in SDS in the late 1960s, was the main leader of the Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) which was also joined by the black communist theorist
Harry Haywood. The
Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, known originally as the Revolutionary Union, is a Maoist communist party formed in 1975 in the United States.
1980s–1990s: New Communist movement and anti-WTO protests at the
University of California, Berkeley giving a lecture during the
2003 California gubernatorial recall election From 1979–1989, SDUSA members like
Tom Kahn organized the
AFL–CIO's fundraising of 300 thousand dollars, which bought printing presses and other supplies requested by
Solidarity, the independent labor-union of Poland. SDUSA members helped form a
bipartisan coalition of the
Democratic and
Republican parties to support the founding of the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose first president was
Carl Gershman. The NED publicly allocated US$4 million of public aid to Solidarity through 1989. Because of their service in government, Gershman and other SDUSA members were called State Department socialists by Massing, who wrote that the
foreign policy of the Reagan administration was being run by
Trotskyists, a claim that was called a myth by Lipset. This so-called Trotskyist charge has been repeated and even widened by journalist
Michael Lind in 2003 to assert a takeover of the
foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration by former Trotskyists. However, Lind's "amalgamation of the defense intellectuals with the traditions and theories of 'the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement' [in Lind's words]" was criticized in 2003 by University of Michigan professor Alan M. Wald, who had written a history of the so-called
New York intellectuals that discussed Trotskyism and
neoconservatism. The SDUSA and allegations that former Trotskyists subverted the foreign policy of George W. Bush have been mentioned by self-styled
paleoconservatives (traditional
conservative opponents of neoconservatism). The
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was formed in 1982 after a merger between the
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the
New American Movement (NAM). At the time of the merger of these two organizations, DSA was said to consist of approximately 5,000 former members of the DSOC, along with 1,000 from the NAM. Much like the DSOC before it, DSA was very strongly associated in electoral politics with
Michael Harrington's position that "the left wing of realism is found today in the Democratic Party." In its early years, DSA opposed
Republican presidential candidates by giving critical support to Democratic Party nominees like
Walter Mondale in 1984. In 1988, DSA enthusiastically supported
Jesse Jackson's second presidential campaign. DSA's position on American electoral politics states that "democratic socialists reject an either—or approach to electoral coalition building, focused solely on [either] a new party or on realignment within the Democratic Party." Anarchists became more visible in the 1980s as a result of publishing, protests and conventions. In 1980, the First International Symposium on Anarchism was held in Portland, Oregon. In 1986, the Haymarket Remembered conference was held in Chicago to observe the centennial of the infamous
Haymarket Riot. This conference was followed by annual, continental conventions in Minneapolis (1987), Toronto (1988) and San Francisco (1989). In the 1980s, anarchism became linked with
squats/
social centers like
C-Squat and
ABC No Rio both in
New York City. In the 1990s, a group of anarchists formed the
Love and Rage Network which was one of several new groups and projects formed in the United States during the decade. American anarchists increasingly became noticeable at protests, especially through a tactic known as the
black bloc. American anarchists became more prominent as a result of the
anti-WTO protests in Seattle: In the 1990s, "there was an effort to create a North American anarchist federation around a newspaper called
Love & Rage that at its peak involved hundreds of activists in different cities."
Common Struggle—Libertarian Communist Federation or
Lucha Común—
Federación Comunista Libertaria (formerly the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists; the NEFAC, or the
Fédération des Communistes Libertaires du Nord-Est) was a
platformist anarchist communist organization based in the northeast region of the United States. The NEFAC was officially launched at a congress held in Boston, Massachusetts over the weekend of April 7–9, 2000, following months of discussion between former Atlantic Anarchist Circle affiliates and ex Love & Rage members in the United States and ex members of the Demanarchie newspaper collective in Quebec City. Founded as a bi-lingual French and English-speaking federation with member and supporter groups in the northeast of the United States, southern Ontario and the Quebec province, the organization later split up in 2008. The Québécoise membership reformed as the Union Communiste Libertaire (UCL) and the American membership retained the name NEFAC before changing its name to Common Struggle in 2011 and then merging into the Black Rose Anarchist Federation. == 21st century ==