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Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy by Daniel Soyer (review)

2023; Volume: 104; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nyh.2023.a902927

2328-8132

Kim Phillips‐Fein,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

Reviewed by: Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy by Daniel Soyer Kim Phillips-Fein (bio) Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy By Daniel Soyer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. 432 pages, 9 b&w illus. $46.95 hardcover, $30.99 e-book. Contemporary readers, if they remember the Liberal Party at all, are likely to associate it with the newspaper headlines about the arrest of its political boss on corruption charges in the early 2000s. But Left in the Center, Daniel Soyer's absorbing, deeply researched account of the party's history, argues that before its sad last years, the Liberal Party played an important role in New York City's political scene—especially in the 1940s and 1950s. Soyer's book goes beyond a narrow account of the party to evoke the distinctive alliances, tensions, institutions, and debates that defined the political world of the city during the heyday of its social democratic institutions—a political culture that has disappeared as thoroughly as the Liberal Party itself. The Liberal Party had its roots in the city's socialist politics of the early twentieth [End Page 230] century and in the ways that these were twisted and transformed by anticommunism in the 1930s and 1940s. Garment worker leaders, most notably David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and Alex Rose of the hatters' union, played a key role in founding the party; as late as 1966, the majority of the Manhattan district leaders had once been members of the Socialist Party. Soyer makes the case that many of the Liberal Party's leaders as well as its rank-and-file were driven by what he describes (following Howard Brick) as a "post-capitalist" vision of "social enterprise" and "economic democracy," as the party's founding document put it. This vision also attracted some left-inclined but anticommunist intellectuals such as Adolf Berle (former "brain trust" member and coauthor of The Modern Corporation and Private Property), civil rights activist Pauli Murray, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, housing lawyer and advocate Charles Abrams, and Teachers College professor George Childs. Both the intellectuals and the party rank-and-file were alienated by the machine politics of Tammany Hall and sought to follow Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas in promoting an independent political party to endorse what they called "fighting liberalism." But anticommunism was also central to the creation of the Liberal Party. That the Liberal Party could exist at all is due New York State's provision for "fusion voting," which has itself been infused with antimachine sentiment over the years. Candidates in the state can run on more than one ballot line, with the total votes added together. This permits smaller parties to exert pressure on the Democratic and Republican candidates by either endorsing them or threatening to withhold their support. In the 1930s, labor activists in the city, led by Alex Rose, were eager to find a way to build support from the left for both Republican Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Working with Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Rose organized the American Labor Party (ALP). Initially, politically left workers in the city were so unaccustomed to voting for mainstream candidates that they had to be persuaded that it was all right to do so on the ALP line. But it did not take long before fierce internal schisms broke out within the ALP, as Communist organizers sought to build their strength within the organization. When a coalition that included Communists was victorious, the right wing of the ALP abandoned the party to start the rival Liberals in 1944. Accordingly, the Liberal Party was both defined by its efforts to push the Democratic Party on the national level and La Guardia locally to the left, and by its intense anticommunism. Soyer makes the case that its anticommunism reflected a principled revulsion of the Soviet Union's political repression (including the repression of Socialists during the Stalin years) as well as of the real difficulties of working with Communists...