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Nathan Godfried is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Maine. The views expressed here are his own.
As midterm election campaigns heat up, leaders in the Republican Party, and even some mainstream Democrats, have responded to a wave of primary victories by Democratic Socialists and progressives with a familiar refrain: They are all extremists, radicals, and communists. Such rhetoric is hardly new and obscures far more than it reveals. History never repeats itself exactly, but there are interesting and valuable parallels.
Progressive politicians and activists have emerged at various times in the last century. In the 1930s, for example, progressives, responding to the nation’s difficult economic and political problems, arose to challenge the political establishment. They did not exist in isolation, but grew from and spoke to a mass social movement encompassing, among other groups, workers, consumers, veterans, racial minorities, and immigrants.
Today’s progressives and radicals share many qualities and goals with their 1930s predecessors. During the era of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, the progressive ranks included U.S. Rep. Vito Marcantonio from East Harlem and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, both of whom began in the Republican Party. Claude Pepper a liberal-left Democratic senator hailed from conservative Florida. The muckraking writer Upton Sinclair challenged the Democratic Party hierarchy in California and became that party’s gubernatorial candidate in 1934, advocating the end of poverty in the state. Radical reformers Frances Perkins and Henry Wallace, both of whom served in key positions in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, were in the forefront of helping to devise key components of the New Deal.
These and other activists pushed a radical agenda that eventually produced a significant social safety net including Social Security, labor rights, the minimum wage, and so on. Those progressives and their “extremist” program would have been impossible if not for a mass social reform movement behind them.
Labor organizers, New Dealers, independent radicals, African Americans, Socialists, Communists, consumer activists, and so on, comprised a vibrant grassroots movement with its core in a self-conscious working class. This generic “popular front” social movement embraced the causes of antifascism, labor rights, civil rights for racial minorities, civil liberties, and economic democracy. By the mid-1940s, when it reached its peak, the popular front endorsed an international role for the United States in cooperation with other nations (it opposed unilateral U.S. military actions) and favored state initiatives to guarantee social and economic justice for all peoples.
The forerunners of today’s Democratic Socialists can be found in the labor and farmer-labor parties of the 1930s. Sarainne Loewe, a grassroots agitator and trade union organizer in the Midwest, helped create a comprehensive platform for the Labor Party in Illinois. It resembles many demands made by today’s progressives: The right of all workers to organize; a living wage and reduced workday; pay equity; equal rights for all regardless of race, sex, creed or economic status; the abolishment of child labor; the guaranteeing of free primary, secondary and college education; decent housing for all Americans; full civil rights for all peoples; opposition to Fascism, Nazism, and all other foes of Democracy; international economic cooperation, rather than national isolation; and opposition to all war that serves mainly the special interests of a minority, such as war for territory, profit or protection of investments. Progressives in the 1930s maintained that the general welfare of the vast majority necessitated government expenditures aimed at eliminating poverty and bad living conditions at home rather than paying for large armament programs.
Modern-day progressives have voiced similar “radical” goals: from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to U.S. Senate candidates Angie Nixon (Florida), Peggy Flanagan (Minnesota), and Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan), to selected politicians in Maine. Ocasio-Cortez once explained that “it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country. Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security … if that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”