Ross - The Socialist Party of America: a complete history

The story of how I came to the study of American Socialism is the story of a personal inheritance.

My great-grandfather, also named Jack Ross, emigrated from the Polish city of Lomza at the age of fourteen, once he was old enough to be jailed by the Okhrana for his involvement with the Jewish Socialist Bund. In New York, he became a skilled diamond cutter and a founder of the International Jewelry Workers Union. After settling down with a family in Brooklyn, he was a Jimmie Higgins, as unsung rank and filers of the Socialist Party were known, of Jewish Branch Boro Park.

What he lacked for distinction in the movement, he more than made up for in the depth of his convictions. He remained an unreconstructed Bundist, insisting he was not a Zionist and reliably voting for what he regarded as the sufficiently nonbourgeois Liberal Party of New York until his death in 1975. His son, my fathers father, was never especially interested in politics, but knew well enough from his father to stay away from the Communists at Brooklyn College in the 1930s, and he voted for Norman Thomas in 1948.

My mothers parents, Gertrude and Stanley Ruttenberg, were never members of the Socialist Party, but they were my role models in serving the cause of social justice. They met on the Steelworkers Organizing Committee in Pittsburgh and were intimately acquainted with the more famous leaders of the CIO up to the time of the merger that formed the AFL-CIO and beyond. They were of a generation of labor partisans caught up in the heyday of Cold War liberalism, with my grandfather ultimately becoming an assistant secretary of labor under Lyndon Johnson.

Naturally, they had many friends who had been active with the Socialist Party. I was fortunate enough to know Morris and Yetta Weisz as an adult and to learn from them at the early stage of my serious interest in its history. Others included Hyman Bookbinder, Emil Rieve, Jack and Mary Herling, Jack and Kitty Barbash, and Esther and Oliver Peterson. My parents met in the mid-level leadership of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee ( DSOC ). My father was first active in the Harvard Young Peoples Socialist League ( YPSL ) in the 1960s, and my mother became involved at the behest of labor economist and one-time Young Socialist Nat Weinberg.

By the time I was seriously interested in politics as a teenager, I was acutely aware of the dissonance between my parents liberalism, defined by loyalty to the labor movement if not a conscious inheritance from American Socialism, and contemporary liberalism. Greater still were two additional dissonances: one between those liberalisms and what called itself the left as I came of age a decade after the collapse of Communism, and another between both liberalism and the left and any genuine populism or radicalismthe spirit if not always the substance of which I could clearly tell belonged to what was widely regarded to be the radical right.

An avid reader of American history from a very young age, I was first awakened to the continuity from Populism and the historic American left to so-called right-wing populism before I was even seventeen years old, by a curious volume of radical right provenance titled Populism vs. Plutocracy: The Universal Struggle. I became active with the Green Party around that time, and the books claim to the heritage of leading progressive populists of the first half of the twentieth century, though not of the Socialists, was well received by those Greens I shared it with. As time went on I was exposed to a more substantive and nuanced version of that narrative through such authors as Bill Kauffman and others around the magazine The American Conservative, where I found intellectual stimulation I could never have hoped to find on the contemporary left.

This presented me with the central thesis question of this book very early on: how was the Socialist Party of the original Middle American radical Eugene V. Debs and the quintessential progressive isolationist Norman Thomas the same Socialist Party whose legacy was claimed by so many at the rightmost edge of Cold War liberalism? How was it so for many frankly elitist contemporary liberals, to say nothing of the sectarian left? By the time I began the research for this book, I found the chasm separating the actual Socialist Party of America and the historical memory thereof to be all the greater, and many ideas I associated with my misbegotten radical youth to be quite apt and perhaps even understated.