Norman Thomas - Socialist Party Politics

Socialist Party Politics

Thomas failed to isolate himself from the rough and tumble internal factional politics of the Socialist Party, as his predecessor Debs had been able to do. At the 1932 Milwaukee Convention, Thomas and his radical pacifist allies in the party joined forces with constructive socialists from Wisconsin and a faction of young Marxist intellectuals called the "Militants" in backing a challenger to National Chairman Morris Hillquit. While Hillquit and his cohort retained control of the organization at this time, this action earned the lasting enmity of Hillquit's New York-based allies of the so-called "Old Guard". The diplomatic party peacemaker Hillquit died of tuberculosis the following year, lessening the stability of his faction.

At the 1934 Convention, Thomas' connection with the Militants was deepened when he backed a radical Declaration of Principles authored by his long-time associate from the radical pacifist journal The World Tomorrow, Devere Allen. The Militants swept to majority control of the party's governing National Executive Committee at this gathering, and the Old Guard retreated to their New York fortress and formalized their factional organization as the Committee for the Preservation of the Socialist Party, complete with a shadow Provisional Executive Committee and an office in New York City.

Although Thomas himself favored work to establish a broad Farmer-Labor Party upon the model of the Canadian Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, he nonetheless remained supportive of the Militants and their vision of an "all-inclusive party," which welcomed members of dissident communist organizations (including Lovestoneites and Trotskyists) and worked together with the Communist Party USA in joint Popular Front activities. The party descended into a maelstrom of factionalism in the interval, with the New York Old Guard leaving to establish themselves as the Social Democratic Federation of America, taking with them control of party property, such as the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, the English-language New Leader, the Rand School of Social Science, and the party's summer camp in Pennsylvania. The party was left in dire financial circumstances. As the social democratic Marxists of the Old Guard were expelled and left the SP in 1936, revolutionary Marxists from the Workers Party of the United States were admitted en masse. Disagreements among the Militant faction led it to shatter into three rival groups, a Right Wing headed by Jack Altman, a Center group called "Clarity" headed by Herbert Zam and Gus Tyler, and a Trotskyist revolutionary Left Wing faction called the "Appeal" group after the name of their factional newspaper.

In 1937 Thomas returned from Europe determined to restore order in the Socialist Party. He and his followers in the party teamed up with the Clarity majority of the National Executive Committee and gave the green light to the New York Right Wing to expel the Appeal faction from the organization. These expulsions led to the departure of virtually the whole of the party's youth section, who affiliated to the new Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Demoralization set in and the Socialist Party withered, its membership level below the lowest nadir of 1928.