Socialist Party of America

History

Early history

In 1901, the Socialist Party was formed by a merger between the Social Democratic Party of America (headquartered in Chicago, IL) and dissident Lassallean members of the Socialist Labor Party of America, who had also adopted the name Social Democratic Party of America (headquartered in Springfield, MA). The new party chose "socialist" over "social democratic" because the latter lost its meaning when translated from German to English.

From 1901 to the onset of World War I, the Socialist Party had numerous elected officials throughout the United States. The Mapping Social Movements Project has identified more than 1,000 elected Party members in 353 cities and towns. There were two Socialist members of Congress, Meyer London of New York City and Victor Berger of Milwaukee (a part of the sewer socialism movement, a major front in socialism, Milwaukee being the first major city to elect a socialist mayor, which it did four times between 1910 and 1956); over 70 mayors; and many state legislators and city councilors. The party was able to successfully run candidates in smaller municipalities as well as big cities, winning the mayoralty of Butte, Montana, with Lewis Duncan and that of Schenectady, New York, with George R. Lunn. Its voting strength was greatest among recent Jewish, Finnish and German immigrants, coal miners and former populist farmers in the Midwest. According to Jimmy Weinstein, its electoral base was strongest west of the Mississippi River, "in the states where mining, lumbering, and tenant farming prevailed". It was also able to attract support from railroad workers. Its vote shares were highest in Oklahoma, Nevada, Montana, Washington, California, Idaho, Florida, Arizona and Wisconsin, and it also attracted support in Texas, Arkansas and Kansas. From 1900 (before its formal union) to 1912, it ran Eugene V. Debs for president at each election. The best showing ever for a socialist ticket was in 1912, when Debs gained 901,551 total votes, 6% of the popular vote. In 1920, Debs ran again, this time while imprisoned for opposing World War I, and received 913,693 votes, 3.4% of the total.

Early political perspectives ranged from radical socialism to social democracy. Victor Berger and New York party leader Morris Hillquit sat on the party's more social democratic or right-wing side. Radical socialists and syndicalists, including Debs and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), sat on the left. There were also agrarian utopian-leaning radicals, such as Julius Wayland of Kansas, who edited the party's leading national newspaper, Appeal to Reason, along with trade unionists; Jewish, Finnish and German immigrants; and intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and the Black activist/intellectual Hubert Harrison. The party outsourced its newspapers and publications so that it would not have an internal editorial board that was a power in its own right. As a result, a handful of outside publishers dominated the published messages the party distributed and agitated for a much more radical anti-capitalist revolutionary message than the party itself tolerated. The Appeal to Reason newspaper thus became part of its radical left wing as did the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company of Chicago, which produced over half of the pamphlets and books that were sold at party meetings.

Growth and membership

The party's membership rose by over 50,000 from 1901 to 1910. The party had 4,320 members in 1901, 20,763 in 1904, 41,751 in 1908, and 58,011 in 1910. That number doubled during the Debs campaign of 1912, reaching a peak paid membership of 113,371. Membership declined to 82,313 in 1916 but stayed at almost that level through World War I. The party reported 77,647 members in 1919, just before the Communist split.

Supporting this growth was a vast network of Socialist newspapers serving more than 100 cities and towns and publishing in 18 languages. Some were short-lived and managed only small circulations, but others were successful enterprises with national circulations. Most famous were the Appeal to Reason, which at one point claimed more than 700,000 subscribers; National Rip-Saw (150,000); and Jewish Daily Forward (140,000).

Syndicalism vs. Socialism

The party had a tense and complicated relationship with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). AFL leadership, headed by Samuel Gompers, strongly opposed the Socialist Party, but many rank-and-file unionists in the early 20th century saw the Socialists as reliable political allies. Many moderate Socialists, such as Berger and International Typographical Union President Max S. Hayes, urged close cooperation with the AFL and its member unions. Others in the Socialist Party dismissed the AFL and its craft unions as antiquated and irrelevant, instead favoring the much more radical IWW and the "syndicalist" path to socialism.

In 1911, IWW leader Bill Haywood was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, on which AFL partisan Morris Hillquit also served. The syndicalist and the electoral socialist squared off in a lively public debate in New York City's Cooper Union on January 11, 1912, with Haywood declaring that Hillquit and the Socialists ought to try "a little sabotage in the right place at the proper time" and attacking Hillquit for having abandoned the class struggle by helping the New York garment workers negotiate an industrial agreement with their employers. Hillquit replied that he had no new message other than to reiterate a belief in a two-sided workers' movement, with separate and equal political and trade union arms. "A mere change of structural forms would not revolutionize the American labor movement as claimed by our extreme industrialists", he declared.

The issue of "syndicalism vs. socialism" was bitterly fought over the next two years, consummated by Haywood's recall from the Socialist Party's National Executive Committee (NEC) and the departure of a broad section of the left wing from the organization. The memory of this split made the intraparty battles of 1919–1921 all the more bitter.

The party's opposition to World War I caused a sharp decline in membership. It suffered from the Postmaster General's decision to refuse to allow the delivery of party newspapers and periodicals via the U.S. mail, severely disrupting the party's activity, particularly in rural areas. Radicals moved further left into the IWW or the Communist Party USA. Members who supported the war effort quit, ranging from the rank and file to prominent intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann, John Spargo, James Graham Phelps Stokes and William English Walling. Some briefly formed the National Party in an unrealized hope of merging with the remnants of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party and the Prohibition Party. Official membership fell from 83,284 in 1916 to 74,519 in 1918. By 1918, the Socialist Party had won 1,200 political offices, including U.S. representative, 32 state representatives and 79 mayors. It gained new votes in ethnic strongholds such as Milwaukee and New York from conservative German Americans who also opposed the war.

Victor Berger in Milwaukee

According to historian Sally Miller, Victor Berger:

built the most successful socialist machine ever to dominate an American city....[He] concentrated on national politics...to become one of the most powerful voices in the reformist wing of the national Socialist party. His commitment to democratic values and the non-violent socialization of the American system led the party away from revolutionary Marxist dogma. He shaped the party into force which, while struggling against its own left wing, symbolize participation in the political order to attain social reforms. ... In the party schism of 1919, Berger opposed allegiance to the emergent Soviet system. His shrunken party echoed his preference for peaceful, democratic, and gradual transformation to socialism.

Split of the Left Wing Section

In January 1919, Vladimir Lenin invited the IWW and the radical wing of the Socialist Party to join in the founding of the Communist Third International, the Comintern. The Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party emerged as an organized faction early that year, building its organization around a lengthy Left Wing Manifesto by Louis C. Fraina. This effort to organize in order to "win the Socialist Party for the Left Wing" was staunchly resisted by the "Regulars", who controlled a big majority of the seats of the Socialist Party's governing NEC. When it seemed certain that the 1919 party elections for a new NEC had been dominated by the Left Wing, the sitting NEC, citing voting irregularities, refused to tally the votes, declared the entire election invalid and in May 1919 suspended the party's Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Polish, South Slavic and Hungarian language federations, in addition to Michigan's entire state organization. In future weeks, Massachusetts's and Ohio's state organizations were similarly disfranchised and "reorganized" by the NEC, while in New York and Pennsylvania the "Regular" State Executive Committees undertook reorganization of Left Wing branches and locals on a case-by-case basis.

In June 1919, the Left Wing Section held a conference in New York City to discuss its organizational plans. The group found itself deeply divided, with one section, led by NEC members Alfred Wagenknecht and L. E. Katterfeld and including famed radical journalist John Reed favoring a continued effort to gain control of the SPA at its forthcoming Emergency National Convention in Chicago, to be held at the end of August, while another section, headed by the Russian Socialist Federation of Alexander Stoklitsky and Nicholas Hourwich and the Socialist Party of Michigan seeking to wash its hands of the Socialist Party and immediately move to establish a new Communist Party of America. Eventually, this latter Federation-dominated group was joined by important Left Wingers C. E. Ruthenberg and Louis Fraina, a depletion of Left Wing forces that made the result of the 1919 Socialist Convention a foregone conclusion.

Regardless, Wagenknecht's and Reed's plans to fight it out at the 1919 Emergency National Convention continued apace. With the most radical state organizations effectively purged by the Regulars (Massachusetts, Minnesota) or unable to participate (Ohio, Michigan) and the Left Wing language federations suspended, a big majority of the hastily elected delegates to the gathering were controlled by the Executive Secretary Adolph Germer and the Regulars. A group of Left Wingers without delegate credentials, including Reed and his sidekick Benjamin Gitlow, made an effort to occupy chairs on the convention floor before the gathering was called into order. The incumbents were unable to block the Left Wingers at the door, but soon called to their aid the already present police, who obligingly expelled the boisterous radicals from the hall. With the Credentials Committee firmly in the hands of the Regulars from the outset, the gathering's outcome was no longer in doubt and most of the remaining Left Wing delegates departed, to meet with other co-thinkers downstairs in a previously reserved room in a parallel convention. It was this gathering that established itself as the Communist Labor Party on August 31, 1919.

Expulsion of Socialists from the New York Assembly

On January 7, 1920, less than a week after the Palmer Raids had swept and stunned the country, the New York Assembly was called to order. The majority Republicans easily elected their candidate for the Speaker, Thaddeus C. Sweet and after opening day formalities the body took a brief recess. Back in session, Sweet declared: "The Chair directs the Sergeant-at-Arms to present before the bar of the House Samuel A. DeWitt, Samuel Orr, Louis Waldman, Charles Solomon, and August Claessens", the Assembly's five Socialist members.

Sweet attacked the five, 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 rather "a membership organization admitting within its ranks aliens, enemy aliens, and minors". The party had denounced America's participation in the European war and had lent aid and comfort to Ludwig Martens, the "self-styled Soviet Ambassador and alien, who entered this country as a German in 1916". It had supported the revolutionaries in Germany, Austria and Hungary, Sweet continued; and consorted with international Socialist parties close to the Communist International. Sweet concluded:

It is every citizen's right to his day in court. If this house should adopt a resolution declaring your seat herein vacant, pending a hearing before a tribunal of this house, you will be given an opportunity to appear before such tribunal to prove your right to a seat in this legislative body, and upon the result of such hearing and the findings of the Assembly tribunal, your right to participate in the actions of this body will be determined.

The Assembly suspended the quintet by a vote of 140 to 6, with one Democrat supporting the Socialists. Civil libertarians and concerned citizens raised their voices to aid the suspended Socialists and protest percolated throughout the press. The principal argument was that the expulsion of elected members of minority parties by majority parties from their councils set a dangerous precedent in a democracy. The battle culminated in a highly publicized trial in the Assembly, which dominated the body's activity from its opening on January 20, 1920, until its conclusion on March 11. Socialist Party leader and former 1917 New York City mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit served as chief counsel for the suspended Socialists, aided by party founder and future Socialist vice-presidential candidate Seymour Stedman.

Quest for a mass Farmer–Labor Party

In the first half of 1919, the Socialist Party had over 77,000 dues-paying members, and by the second half of 1921 it had been shattered. Fewer than 14,000 members remained in party ranks, with the departure of the large, well-funded Finnish Socialist Federation adding to the malaise. Membership numbers soon fell below 10,000 and remained there until 1932. In September 1921, the NEC determined that the time had come to end the party's historic aversion to fusion with other political organizations and issue an appeal declaring that the "forces of every progressive, liberal, and radical organization of the workers must be mobilized" to repel conservative assaults and "advance the industrial and political power of the working class".

This desire for common action seems to have been shared by various unions, as late in 1921 a call was issued in the name of the country's 16 major railway labor unions seeking a Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA). The CPPA was originally intended to be an umbrella organization bringing together various elements of the farmer and labor movement together in a common program. Invitations to the group's founding conference were issued to members of a wide variety of "progressive" organizations of widely varied perspectives. As a result, from its inception the heterogeneous body was unable to agree on a program or a declaration of principles, let alone congeal into a new political party.

The Socialist Party was an enthusiastic supporter of the CPPA and the group dominated its thinking from the start of 1922 through the first quarter of 1925. In this period of organizational weakness, the party sought to forge lasting ties with the existing trade union movement, leading in short order to a mass labor party in the United States on the British model.

A first National Conference of the CPPA was held in Chicago in February 1922, attended by 124 delegates representing a broad spectrum of labor, farmer and political organizations. The gathering passed an "Address to the American People" stating its criticism of existing conditions and formally proposing an amorphous plan of action validating the status quo ante: the labor unions on the group's right wing to endorse labor-friendly candidates of the Democratic Party, the Socialists and Farmer-Labor Party adherents on the group's left wing to conduct their own independent campaigns. From the Socialist Party's perspective, perhaps the most important thing the CPPA did at its first National Conference was agree to meet again. The party leadership understood the process of building an independent third party that could count on the allegiance of the country's trade union leadership would be a protracted process and the mere fact of "agreement to disagree" but nevertheless meeting again was regarded as a step forward.

Left turn and split of the Old Guard

In 1928, the Socialist Party returned as an independent electoral entity under the leadership of Norman Thomas, a radical Protestant minister from New York City. This reentry into the electoral fray behind Thomas fueled major growth of the party during the first years of Great Depression, primarily among youth. A skilled orator and advocate of step-by-step solution of social problems, Thomas had excellent access to churches, colleges and civic institutions. He also had, as New York social democrat Louis Waldman later noted, "those qualities of mind and character which appealed to the intelligent and educated young people of the country and which drew them into the ranks of the party in unprecedented numbers".

The 1928 convention voted to reduce membership dues to just $1 per year, with only half that sum going to the use of the National Office and the balance retained by state and local organizations. This level of funding proved insufficient for anything beyond the bare minimum of operations by the National Office in Chicago—no official party publication was made available to the members of the organization, with several privately held socialist newspapers fulfilling the function as fonts of party information.

The dues rate cut did prove helpful in reducing the party's membership slide. After nearly a decade of steady decline, the Socialist Party again began to grow, advancing from a low of under 8,000 dues payers in 1928 to a membership of almost 17,000 by 1932. But this growth came at a price, as deep factional divisions developed between the youthful newcomers (radicalized and drawn to militant Marxism by the world economic crisis) and the "Old Guard" headed by Morris Hillquit, James Oneal and Waldman.

The generational battle first erupted at the May 1932 Milwaukee Convention. Participant Anna Bercowitz noted four primary factions at this gathering, i.e. an Old Guard defending the current course of the party and the position of Hillquit, practical Socialists of the Milwaukee type, the young Marxist Militants and liberal pacifist Thomasites such as Devere Allen who followed Thomas's lead.

The groups which represented the so-called 'New Blood' at the convention, the Militants and the Liberals and which at this convention merged for the sole purpose of deposing the present leadership [of the party] had little in common. Many members of the most aggressive, although numerically weakest of these groups, the Militants, had little in common with the so-called Thomasites. ... And as for the so-called Mid-western group, although they cast their vote with the opposition, on fundamentals they too are opposed to much of the liberalizing tendencies manifest in the party in recent years. Yet they voted, contrary to their usual procedure in their respective communities, with the opposition. That trades had been made there can be no doubt, and that some groups had been used as innocent dupes can also hardly be doubted...Fundamentally there is much more in common between the Militants and the so-called 'Old Guard' than between the Militants and the [religious pacifist] Thomasites and surely than between the frank practical 'mid-western' type of Socialists, yet when it was a question of vote on the Russian resolution, on the TU [Trade Union] resolution and on the question of the National Chairman and the Executive Committee votes were not cast on the basis of principles but apparently on the basis of 'trades'. The real difference between the Militants and the 'Old Guard' seems to be based on lack of sufficient activity and on tempo rather than on principle.

End Poverty in California movement

The novelist Upton Sinclair had long been associated with the Socialist Party in California. He was twice its candidate for Congress and its nominee for governor in 1926 and 1930, but won barely 50,000 votes out of a million cast. In 1934, Sinclair ran in the Democratic primary for governor on a platform of radical semi-socialist economic reforms he dubbed End Poverty in California (EPIC). In a major upset, he defeated former CPI chairman George Creel (backed by the powerful McAdoo machine) in a landslide, leading Republicans and conservative elements to rally against him. He won 879,537 votes, doubling his primary total, but that was only 38% of the record-breaking turnout, as Republican Frank Merriam won with 49%, while Raymond L. Haight, running under the Progressive Party banner, collected 13%. State Socialist Party chair Milen Dempster mounted a feeble effort to hold back the enthusiasm for Sinclair, gaining less than 3,000 votes.

Before and after Sinclair's primary victory, the Socialist Party in California suffered numerous defections, even from high-profile members like former Berkeley mayor J. Stitt Wilson and incumbent National Executive Committeeman John C. Packard. Those who remained but supported Sinclair were expelled, as the SPA refused to allow its members to be active in any other party. The defections and expulsions destroyed the Socialist Party in California. More importantly, Sinclair's campaign encouraged many radicals in other states to turn away from the Socialist Party. Membership, which had climbed back above 19,000 in 1934, declined to less than 6,000 in 1937 and barely 2,000 in 1940.

Demise of the all-inclusive party

Norman Thomas, his radical pacifist co-thinkers, and their young Marxist allies of the Militant faction sought to build a mass political movement by transforming the Socialist Party into what they called an "all-inclusive party". Not only was an appeal made to the radical intellectuals and trade unionists who were the historic core of the organization, but an effort was made to work closely with the Communist Party in joint actions and to infuse the Socialist Party with the leading personnel of small radical oppositional organizations, including in particular the anti-Stalinist communist groupings headed by Jay Lovestone (the so-called "Lovestoneites") and James P. Cannon (the so-called "Trotskyists"). An array of left-wing intellectuals came into the Socialist orbit as a result of this venture, including (from the Lovestoneites) Bertram D. Wolfe, Herbert Zam and Benjamin Gitlow, as well as (from the Trotskyists) Max Shachtman, James Burnham, Martin Abern and Hal Draper. A broad array of radicals from other tendencies also contributed to the pages of the party's official theoretical journal, including from the Communist Party orbit Joseph P. Lash of the American Student Union, the radical novelist James T. Farrell, public intellectual Sidney Hook, leading American Marxist of the 1910s Louis B. Boudin and Canadian Trotskyist Maurice Spector.

A bid was made to unite the factional and marginalized American Left in a common cause, and great hope was held for success in the enterprise. After the Nazis rose in Germany and Austria by 1934, no longer did the Communist Party engage in its Third Period epithets against the Socialists as so-called "social fascists". Lillian Symes wrote in the Socialist Party's theoretical magazine in February 1937 of the "incredible change" taking place in the Communist Party in its seeming abandonment of sectarianism and move toward a broad "people's front" against fascism. At the same time, other radical organizations sought to alter their tactics so as to rapidly build an aggressive left-wing organization to oppose nascent fascism. Since 1934, the French Trotskyist organization had entered the French Socialist Party in an effort to build its strength and win support for its ideas. Pressure to follow this policy of the "French Turn" was building among the American Trotskyist group. For a brief period in 1935 and 1936, the vision of the Socialist Party as an "all-inclusive party" that aggregated radical oppositionists and possibly even worked with the Communist Party in common cause seemed achievable.

In January 1936, just as the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was expelling the Old Guard, a factional battle was being won in the Trotskyist Workers Party of the United States to join the Socialist Party when a national branch referendum voted unanimously for entry. Negotiations began between the Workers Party and Socialist leaderships, with the decision ultimately made to allow admissions only on the basis of individual applications for membership, rather than en masse admission of the entire group. On June 6, 1936, the Workers Party's weekly newspaper, The New Militant, published its last issue and announced "Workers Party Calls All Revolutionary Workers to Join Socialist Party". About half of the Workers Party heeded the call and entered the Socialist Party.

Split with the Trotskyists

Before the March convention, the Trotskyist Socialist Appeal faction held an organizational gathering of their own, meeting in Chicago, with 93 delegates gathering on February 20–22, 1937. The meeting organized the faction on a permanent basis, electing a National Action Committee of five to "coordinate branch work" and "formulate Appeal policies". Two delegates from the Clarity caucus were in attendance. James Burnham vigorously attacked the Labour and Socialist International, the international organization of left-wing parties to which the Socialist Party belonged, and tension rose along these lines among the Trotskyists. United action between the Clarity and Appeal groups was not forthcoming and an emergency meeting of Vincent R. Dunne and Cannon was held in New York with leaders of the various factions, including Thomas, Jack Altman, and Gus Tyler of Clarity. At this meeting Thomas pledged that the upcoming convention would make no effort to terminate the various factions' newspapers.

No action was taken at the 1937 convention to expel the Trotskyist "Appeal faction", but pressure continued to build along these lines, fueled by the Communist Party's increasingly hysterical denunciations of Trotsky and his followers as wreckers and agents of international fascism. The convention passed a ban on future branch resolutions on controversial matters, an effort to rein in the factions' activities at the local level. It also banned factional newspapers, a move directly targeting The Socialist Appeal, and formally established The Socialist Call as the party's national organ.

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 Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists, and Trotsky's own decision to move toward 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 concluded that the Trotskyists had joined the Socialist Party not to make it stronger, but to capture it for their own purposes. On June 24–25, 1937, a meeting of the Appeal faction's National Action Committee voted to ratchet up the rhetoric against American Labor Party and Republican nominee for mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia, a favorite son of many in Socialist ranks, and to reestablish its newspaper, The Socialist Appeal. This was met with expulsions from the party beginning August 9 with a rump meeting of the Central Committee of Local New York, which expelled 52 New York Trotskyists by a vote of 48 to 2, with 18 abstentions, and ordered 70 more to be brought up on charges. Wholesale expulsions followed, with a major section of the Young People's Socialist League leaving the party with the Trotskyists.

Collapse of the united front

Things turned out no better for the official Communist Party, devoted as it was to Stalin's regime. The February–March 1937 joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party in Moscow, which green-lighted a massive avalanche of secret police terror known to history as the Great Purge, changed everything. Baby steps toward multi-candidate elections and the rule of law in the Soviet Union crumbled instantly as show trials, spy mania, mass arrests and mass executions swept the land. The Trotskyist movement in the Soviet Union was particularly targeted, accused of plotting murder of Soviet officials and conducting sabotage and espionage in preparation for a fascist invasion—seemingly insane charges that the Soviet elite genuinely believed. Blood flowed like water as alleged Trotskyists and other politically suspect individuals were rounded up, "investigated", and disposed of with a pistol shot in the base of the skull or a 10-year sentence in the gulag. Around the world, Stalin's and Trotsky's adherents raged against each other.

In Spain, the country in which the Lovestoneites invested most of their emotional energy as fervid supporters of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), 1937 marked a similar bloodbath, with the Communist Party of Spain achieving hegemony among the Republican forces and conducting bloody purges of their own at the Soviet secret police's behest. Joint action between Communist oppositionists and the loyalists to Moscow was henceforth impossible.

In 1937, Norman Thomas willingly acceded to a request from the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) to write a pamphlet on "Democracy versus Dictatorship". Thomas pulled no punches about the Soviet regime:

There are still in both the eastern and western hemispheres many examples of rather crude and primitive military dictatorships. [...] They preach a nationalism whose benefits, spiritual or material, to some degree are for all the people. They profess a positive and paternal concern for the masses. If they rule them sternly that is for their own good. [...]In the USSR the dictatorship has been the dictatorship of the Communist Party, but all of its professions and all of its performance has been in the name of the entire working class, and the Communist Party still gives lip-service to a final withering away of all dictatorship, even the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Opposition to the New Deal and discrimination in the armed services

By 1940, only a small committed core remained in the Socialist Party, including some militant pacifists. The Socialist Party continued to oppose Roosevelt's New Deal as a capitalist palliative, arguing for fundamental change through socialist ownership. In 1940, Thomas was the only presidential candidate who did not support rearmament of Great Britain and China. He also served as an active spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee during 1941.

After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the declaration of war, the United States' self-defense and war against fascism was supported by most of the remaining militants and all of the Old Guard. But the Socialist Party adopted a compromise position that did not openly oppose US participation in the war. Its failure to support the war created a rift with many leaders, like the Reuther Brothers of the United Auto Workers. The party's pacifist wing did not advocate any systematic antiwar activities, such as the general strike endorsed by the 1934 Declaration of Principles.

Socialist A. Philip Randolph emerged as one of the most visible spokesmen for African American civil rights. In 1941, Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste proposed a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in war industries and propose the desegregation of the US armed forces. The march was canceled after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, the Fair Employment Act. The order banned discrimination in only the war industries, not the armed forces, but the Fair Employment Act is generally perceived as a success for African American labor rights.

In 1942, an estimated 18,000 blacks gathered at Madison Square Garden to hear Randolph kick off a campaign against discrimination in the military, war industries, government agencies and labor unions. Following the act, during the Philadelphia transit strike of 1944 the government backed African American workers' striking to gain positions formerly limited to white employees.

In 1947, Randolph and colleague Grant Reynolds renewed efforts to end discrimination in the armed services, forming the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, later renamed the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience. On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman abolished racial segregation in the armed forces through Executive Order 9981. Thomas last ran for president in 1948, after which he became a critical supporter of the postwar liberal consensus. The party retained some pockets of local success in cities such as Milwaukee, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Reading, Pennsylvania. In New York City, it often ran candidates on the Liberal Party line.

Reunification

Reunification with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was long a goal of Thomas and his remaining associates in the Socialist Party. As early as 1938, Thomas had acknowledged that several issues had been involved in the split that led to the formation of the 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"; "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".

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. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, half the members of Communist parties around the world quit—including in the US, where many joined the Socialist Party.

Realignment, civil rights movement and the war on poverty

In 1958, the party admitted to its ranks the members of the recently dissolved Independent Socialist League, which had been led by Max Shachtman. Shachtman had developed a Marxist critique of Soviet Communism as "bureaucratic collectivism", a new form of class society 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 Đilas (Djilas). Shachtman was an extraordinary public speaker and a formidable debater, and his intelligent analysis attracted young socialists like Irving Howe and Michael Harrington. Shachtman's denunciations of the Soviet invasion of Hungary attracted younger activists like Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz.

Shachtman's youthful followers brought new vigor into the party, and he encouraged them to take positions of responsibility and leadership. As a young leader, Harrington sent Kahn and Horowitz to help 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., while Kahn and Horowitz quickly became close assistants of Rustin. The civil rights movement benefited from Shachtman's intelligence and analysis and increasingly from Kahn's. Rustin and his young aides, dubbed the Bayard Rustin Marching and Chowder Society by Harrington, organized many protest activities. The young socialists helped Rustin and Randolph organize the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Harrington soon became the most visible socialist in the United States when his The Other America became a best-seller after The New Yorker ran a long, laudatory review by Dwight Macdonald. 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.

The young socialists' role in the civil rights movement made the Socialist Party more attractive. Harrington, Kahn, and Horowitz were officers and staff of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), which helped start the New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The three LID officers clashed with the SDS's less experienced activists, as when Tom Hayden'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.

From the Socialist Party to Social Democrats, USA

The Socialist Party's 1972 convention had two co-chairmen, Bayard Rustin and Charles S. Zimmerman of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU); and a First National Vice Chairman, James S. Glaser, who were reelected by acclamation. In his opening speech to the convention, Rustin called for the group to organize against the "reactionary policies of the Nixon Administration" and criticized the "irresponsibility and élitism of the 'New Politics' liberals".The party voted to change its name to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Renaming the party SDUSA was meant to be "realistic". The New York Times observed that the Socialist Party had last sponsored a candidate for president in 1956, Darlington Hoopes, who received only 2,121 votes cast in only six states. Because the party no longer sponsored candidates in presidential elections, the name "Party" had been "misleading" as "Party" had hindered the recruiting of activists who participated in the Democratic Party, according to the majority report. The name "Socialist" was replaced by "Social Democrats" because many Americans associated the word "socialism" with Soviet Communism. The party also wished to distinguish itself from two small Marxist parties, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Labor Party.

The Unity Caucus had a supermajority of votes and its position carried on every issue by a ratio of two to one. The convention elected a national committee of 33 members, with 22 seats for the majority caucus, eight seats for Harrington's "Coalition Caucus", two for the "Debs Caucus" and one for the independent Samuel H. Friedman. Friedman and the minority caucuses had opposed the name change.

The convention voted on and adopted proposals for its program by a two-one vote. On foreign policy, the program called for "firmness toward Communist aggression", but on the Vietnam War the program opposed "any efforts to bomb Hanoi into submission" and instead endorsed negotiating a peace agreement, which should protect Communist political cadres in South Vietnam from further military or police reprisals. Harrington's proposal for an immediate withdrawal of American forces was defeated. Harrington complained that after its March 1972 convention the Socialist Party had endorsed George McGovern with a statement loaded with "constructive criticism". He also complained that the party had not mobilized enough support for McGovern. The majority caucus's Arch Puddington replied that the California branch had been especially active in supporting McGovern while the New York branch had instead focused on a congressional race.

Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and Union for Democratic Socialism

Late in October 1972, before the Socialist Party's December Convention, Harrington resigned as National Co-Chairman of the Socialist Party. Although little remarked upon at the time despite Harrington's status as "possibly the most widely known of the Socialist leaders since the death of Norman Thomas", it soon became clear that this was the precursor of a decisive split in the organization.

Harrington had written extensively about the progressive potential of the so-called "New Politics" in the Democratic Party and had come to advocate unilateral withdrawal from the Vietnam War and positions more conservative party members saw as "avant-garde" on the questions of abortion and gay rights. This put him and his co-thinkers at odds with the party's younger generation of leaders, who espoused a strongly labor-oriented direction for the party and who were broadly supportive of AFL–CIO leader George Meany.

In the early spring of 1973, Harrington resigned from the SDUSA. The same year, he and his supporters formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). At its start, DSOC had 840 members, of whom 2% served on its national board, while approximately 200 had been members of SDUSA or its predecessors whose membership was then 1,800, according to a 1973 profile of Harrington. Its high-profile members included Congressman Ron Dellums and William Winpisinger, President of the International Association of Machinists. In 1982, DSOC established the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) upon merging with the New American Movement, an organization of democratic socialists mostly from the New Left.

The Union for Democratic Socialism was another organization formed by former members of the Socialist Party. David McReynolds, who had resigned from the Socialist Party between 1970 and 1971, along with many from the Debs Caucus, were the core members. In 1973, the UDS declared itself the Socialist Party USA.

Other prominent members

This is a brief representative sample of Socialist Party leaders not listed above as presidential or vice presidential candidates. For a more comprehensive list, see the list of members of the Socialist Party of America.

¤ Went on to start or join another socialist or social democratic organization.

* Went on to start or join the Communist Party, Communist Labor Party or Workers Party of America.

Newspapers and magazines

Official national press

Most of the socialist press was privately owned as the party was concerned that a single official publication might lead to censorship in favor of the editors' views, in much the same way Daniel DeLeon used The People to dominate the Socialist Labor Party. A number of papers carried the party's official notices in its first years, the most important being The Worker (New York), The Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), The Socialist (Seattle and Toledo, Ohio), The Worker's Call (Chicago), St. Louis Labor, and The Social Democratic Herald (Milwaukee). The party soon discovered that it needed a more regular means of communication with its members and the 1904 National Convention decided to establish a regular party organ. Over the next seven decades, a series of official publications were issued directly by the SPA, most of which are today available on microfilm in essentially full runs:

Socialist Party Bulletin (monthly in Chicago) — vol. 1, no. 1 (September 1904), vol. 9, no. 6 (March/April 1913).

Socialist Party Weekly Bulletin (Chicago). — 1905? to 1909?. Mimeographed. New York Public Library has partial run on microfilm, August 12, 1905 – September 4, 1909.

The Party Builder (weekly in Chicago) — whole no. 1 (August 28, 1912) – whole no. 88 (July 11, 1914).

The American Socialist (weekly in Chicago). — vol. 1, no. 1 (July 18, 1914), vol. 4, no. 8 (September 8, 1917).

The Eye Opener (weekly in Chicago) — previously existing publication, official from vol. ?, no. ? (August 25, 1917) to vol. ?, no. ? (June 1, 1920).

Socialist Party Bulletin (monthly in Chicago) — vol. 1, no. 1 (February 1917), vol. ?, no. ? (June 1920). It may have suspended publication from July 1917 to May 1919.

The New Day (weekly in Milwaukee) — vol. 1, no. 1 (June 12, 1920), vol. ?, no. ? (July 22, 1922).

Executive Secretaries

1901–1903: Leon Greenbaum

1903–1905: William Mailly

1905–1911: J. Mahlon Barnes

1911–1913: John M. Work

1913–1916: Walter Lanfersiek

1916–1919: Adolph Germer

1919–1924: Otto Branstetter

1924–1925: Bertha Hale White

1925–1926: George Ross Kirkpatrick

1926–1929: William H. Henry

1929–1936: Clarence Senior

1936–1939: Roy Burt

1939–1942: Travers Clement

1942–1950: Harry Fleischman

1950–1954: Robin Myers

1954–1957: Herman Singer

1957–1962: Irwin Suall

1962–1966: Betty Elkin

1966–1968: George Woywod

1968–1970: Penn Kemble

1970–1972: Joan Suall

Electoral history