The recent success of Democratic Socialists in primary races in New York City, here in Philly’s deep blue 3rd Congressional District race and most recently in Denver may seem without precedent. But they shouldn’t; because the ideological and cultural divide in the Democratic Party is nothing new. It has deep roots in our nation’s political history — as does a nativist, anti-government “America First” wing of the GOP. We saw it all nearly a century ago, including the Socialists in Congress, City Hall and other elected offices.
Not for nothing did that era’s great American humorist of the 1920s and 30s Will Rogers frequently say “I’m not a member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat.” And typically follow-up with “If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.”
Naturally, I was interested in the views recently expressed in the Inquirer by Alan J. Lichtman criticizing my first campaign boss James Carville for promoting a “schism” between the mainstream of the Democratic Party and left-wing Democratic Socialists. (Noting also that Carville’s first great campaign success wasn’t with Bill Clinton in 1992, but here in Pennsylvania with Bob Casey in 1986 and Harris Wofford in 1991, both of which I was proud to be a part of.)
Some headlines may refer to the charismatic Mayor Mamdani as a “king maker” for the electoral success of his endorsed challengers to established Democratic incumbents, but we would do well to remember that within the borders of his deep blue kingdom that’s nothing new! Big, diverse cities like New York and Milwaukee elected Socialist members of Congress for more than a decade starting in 1911. Milwaukee had a Socialist Party Mayor for much of the first half of the 20th Century until 1960.
“I’m not a member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat … If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.” — Will Rogers
To be sure, it’s helpful to look back on the remarkable coalition-building among regional and ideological factions with often sharply differing views that FDR accomplished during the “New Deal.” It was a remarkable political feat to somehow bring together most Northern liberals with Southern segregationists to support economic policies meant to lift the nation out of the Depression (while shamefully designed to deny most such economic assistance to Black Americans).
But let’s also remember that many on the political Left were sharply critical of FDR and the New Deal was too capitalist-friendly, and beholden to big business; and not doing nearly enough to redistribute wealth and end economic inequality in the U.S. In the depth of the Depression, FDR faced opposition from multiple third party movements and powerful charismatic leaders like Louisiana Senator Huey Long with his “Share Our Wealth” campaign and “radio priest” Charles Coughlin.
In California, writer Upton Sinclair ran for Governor several times, most famously in 1934 campaigning on the progressive End Poverty in California (EPIC) platform. But even after Sinclair had won the Democratic primary, FDR notably refused to endorse him and his more radical program.
As my late friend, historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his seminal book, Voices of Protest, Long and Coughlin were populist critics of corporate capitalism who denounced FDR for not doing nearly enough for the common man. While Long himself was assassinated in 1935, before Coughlin’s growing anti-semitism led to his vocal support for Nazi Germany, he helped launch a so-called Union Party and hand-picked North Dakota Congressman William Lemke as its 1936 presidential nominee on a platform of farm assistance, isolationism, and wealth redistribution, winning nearly 900,000 votes nationwide. During these years in Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party won the governorship and house seats. In Wisconsin, too, a politically successful Progressive Party was backed by the Socialists.
Even while the New Deal was bitterly attacked by big business and conservatives for being a socialist or even communist, the actual American Communist party complained in its platform that “Roosevelt … does not fight back these attacks. Roosevelt compromises. He grants but small concessions to the working people, while making big concessions to Hearst, to Wall Street, to the reactionaries.”
FDR did manage to work to co-opt the splintering of Democratic support from the Left by endorsing several liberal third party candidates and increasingly adopting a more explicitly progressive framing for his New Deal policies. That’s what he did in his historic 1936 Democratic convention speech in West Philly’s Franklin Field in placing government efforts to ensure a decent life for all American families on the side of the nation’s founding ideals of liberty and democracy against the rising tide of fascism both at home and abroad.
But a dozen years later, down 33rd street in the old Convention Center then known as Municipal Auditorium, a divided, dispirited Democratic party under President Harry Truman met again.
As Samuel Freedman wrote of the fractious 1948 convention in Philadelphia in his book INTO THE BRIGHT SUNSHINE: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, the progressive Minneapolis mayor campaigned relentlessly for a civil rights plank far stronger than Truman and his advisers believed politically wise. The unpopular successor to FDR was already facing a major third party challenge on the Left in northern and western states from Roosevelt’s former Vice President Henry Wallace, whose Progressive Party platform was both stronger on civil rights and weaker on the threat of Soviet communism than Truman. With Humphrey’s unexpected success at getting a strong civil rights plank adopted in Philadelphia 78 years ago this very week, the pro-segregation Democrats who had made up a critical part of the New Deal coalition promptly made good on threats to walk out of the convention. Led by Alabama delegate Eugene Connor, who would later become infamous as “Bull” Connor leading Birmingham’s violent police crackdown on peaceful civil rights marchers, on the night of July 14, the “Dixiecrats,” some waving their Confederate flags, dramatically bolted from the hall to a chorus of boos and made their way to train cars at 30th Street Station waiting to take them south to their own rump convention in Birmingham.
The only reason some prominent southern Democrats stayed behind was to ensure that their all-white state delegations weren’t replaced by alternative multi-racial slates of progressives. As the new “States Rights Democratic Party” the Dixiecrats quickly nominated South Carolina’s Strom Thurman for President, who went on to receive some 1.17 million popular votes, winning him the 39 electoral votes of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, where the Jim Crow laws they defended ensured that Black citizens didn’t get to vote.
Henry Wallace won nearly 1.6 million votes in 1948 (including my mother’s), but no states. And accidental President Harry Truman? He ultimately embraced Humphrey’s civil rights plank and by his own executive order less than two weeks later desegregated the American military. And despite the expectations he’d be roundly defeated by popular New York Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Truman’s relentless come-from-behind campaign against the “do-nothing Republican Congress” ensured that the infamous early Election Night headline of “Dewey Beats Truman” would prove the most inaccurate of American history. He won 24.1 million votes nationally and 303 in the electoral college, to Dewey’s less than 22 million and 189 electoral votes.
The point is, “big tent” coalitions among those with differing views can be politically powerful, but big tears in them are also nothing unusual, especially among Democrats. My mother’s first vote in 1948 for Progressive Henry Wallace didn’t help through the presidency to Dewey instead of Truman. Though in my generation I believe far Left demands for ideological purity – and votes for third party candidates — have likely helped elect Republicans whose policies they claim to abhor instead of Democrats whose goals would have been so much closer to their own.
Of course, we cannot know whether a few more votes Humphrey in 1968, Al Gore in 2000, Hilary Clinton in 2016, or Kamala Harris in 2024 would have won but for those who went for candidates like Ralph Nader, or Jill Stein, or the votes that were never cast because of this issue or that. We only know that Richard Nixon vastly escalated the killing in Vietnam for another four years, George Bush went to war in Iraq for a lie about WMDs and did nothing on climate, and the damage to our country and our world that Trump has done on so many fronts is incalculable.
To be sure, after nearly a half century of “trickle-down” GOP policies of tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, deregulation of business and cuts to social programs, there’s understandable frustration, especially among today’s young people, that mainstream Democratic policy prescriptions, despite their good intentions and genuine value, have nonetheless failed in our era of globalization to effectively address the vast divide in wealth and income that’s relentlessly grown across American society during our lifetimes.
Today may not be like the Great Depression that drove interest in socialist policies and third parties, but the sense that a decent middle-class life is beyond reach is pervasive. So at very least, let’s understand that the fight we’re having among Democrats is a familiar and perhaps necessary one. The 1930s also saw the rise of fascism both abroad and even at home, but what is genuinely new in our 250 year history is the constitutional crisis of a sitting President and party relentlessly seeking to undermine free and fair elections. So what matters most right now isn’t ideological purity, it’s Americans of many political views and parties who simply believe in democracy, and are willing to come together to fight for it.
Communications strategist David M. Stone is a former Executive Vice President for Communications at Columbia University who previously served as communications director for U.S. Senator Harris Wofford and deputy chief of staff for Governor Bob Casey.
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