The Socialist Party of America by Ross Jack;

Author:Ross, Jack; [Ross, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL005000 Political Science / Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-communism & Socialism
ISBN: 2002375
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2015-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Along with the less inflamed Farmer-Labor leaders, Norman Thomas, who indicated his openness to working with Long for the cause of the Southern tenant farmers, probably shared this view.95 But Thomas was increasingly dependent on the support of SP Militants who echoed the Communist conceit that any non-Socialist populist or progressive was a potential fascist. The local SP leader in Huey Long’s New Orleans, Richard Babb Whitten, frankly advocated unity between the Socialist and Communist parties, referring to “the Roosevelts, the Coughlins, and the Longs” in the same breath.96 Clarence Senior, present as an observer at the Chicago Farmer-Labor conference, concluded, “The third party conference here so far as I can see at the present displays very little hope of anything constructive with any substantial support. Marcantonio at a banquet last night made a speech which could scarcely be distinguished from Huey Long’s Share the Wealth program.”97 This same Vito Marcantonio was soon the most notoriously faithful ally of the Communist Party in Congress. Indeed, stalwarts of the Farmer-Labor movement who were later maligned as “isolationists” of the “far right,” such as Ernest Lundeen and Gerald Nye, tended to have few qualms about aligning with the Communists in these years.98

For his part, Father Coughlin, fated to a far more fearsome reputation as a rightist demagogue than any of his contemporaries, was actually engaged in a constructive dialogue with Norman Thomas throughout 1935. Coughlin was on record saying, “The kind of Socialism as predicated by Norman Thomas is not Socialism in its real sense and has more right than wrong in it.”99 On those who charged him with being a fascist, he assured Thomas,

Fascism endeavors to protect private ownership and control of money and credit. Herein I differ from the Fascist. If I understand it, Fascism hopes either to establish a dictatorship or else, if it remains democratic (which I do not believe it can) it hopes to do away with geographical representation in parliament and establish an economic representation. Thus we would have the Senator from the motor industry, the Senator from the textile industry, etc. As a matter of fact this very thing has been going on at Washington for a long time.100

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