Луи Вальдман: Американский социалист, юрист и политик.

20th Century American politician, lawyer, writer, politician, activist

Louis Waldman (January 5, 1892 – September 12, 1982) was a leading figure in the Socialist Party of America from the late 1910s and through the middle 1930s, a founding member of the Social Democratic Federation, and a prominent New York labor lawyer. He was expelled from the New York State Assembly in 1920 during the First Red Scare. Waldman first worked in a metal shop before becoming an apprentice garment lining cutter in one of the sweatshops of the city. He joined a union and participated in the 11 week New York cloakmakers' strike of 1910, while attending high school in the evenings. Upon conclusion of the strike and resumption of his job, Waldman was fired and blacklisted for carrying out his function as a union representative in supervising the enforcement of the union contract in his shop. Barred from the garment industry, Waldman thereafter worked unsuccessfully as a door to door peddler of ribbon before taking a job in a cardboard box factory. Waldman graduated from high school in the spring of 1911 and, owing to a lack of funds for college, enrolled in the Cooper Union to study engineering that fall. Waldman witnessed the Triangle Waist Company fire of 1911. Packed into a tight space and locked away from means of escape, 146 workers from the building's 9th floor died that day in one of the greatest tragedies in New York City's history. At a memorial meeting held at Cooper Union in the aftermath of the fire, Waldman saw and heard Socialist leader Morris Hillquit speak for the first time, an event which inspired Waldman to engage in "a veritable orgy of reading" on socialism and thereby won the young man over to the socialist cause. Waldman graduated from Cooper Union in June 1916 with a degree in engineering, and worked as a construction engineer during the day while following his ambition to become a lawyer by attending law school in the evenings.

He was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1923 and worked thereafter as counsel for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, for the New York Central Trades and Labor Council, and for various other unions in the building and garment trades.

In 1916 the young engineer Louis Waldman was approached at a meeting of his Socialist Party branch and was drafted into becoming a candidate of the party for the New York State Assembly. Although he protested that between his engineering job and his evening studies of law he had no time for campaigning, the party official approaching him smiled and replied, "Campaigning? Who said anything about campaigning? We just want someone to run for office. If you get more than seven hundred votes we'll be lucky. The real campaigns this year will be for Meyer London and Morris Hillquit." And thus was born a Socialist Party politician. Waldman did actually campaign, however, mounting the platform to give public speeches, at which he gradually improved. Waldman performed well in the 1916 election, tripling the Socialist tally while losing to his Democratic opponent by a few hundred votes. In the fall of 1917, with America embroiled in the European conflict and a section of the American electorate radicalized by the turn towards war by the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson, Waldman ran for the Assembly again as a Socialist, this time winning election. Waldman was a member of the State Assembly (New York Co., 8th D.), sitting in the 141st New York State Legislature, one of 10 Socialists elected to the Assembly of 1918, the best electoral performance that the organization would ever achieve. In November 1918, Waldman met with defeat, but he ran again for state assembly in 1919 against a fusion candidate of the Democratic and Republican parties and emerged victorious, along with four other Socialist Party comrades, August Claessens, Samuel Orr, Charles Solomon, and Samuel A. DeWitt. The five Socialist Assemblymen were suspended on the first day of the new legislative session by the Republican dominated body and their expulsion trial before the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly and subsequent court fight became a cause celebre of the Red Scare. They were expelled on April 1. All five were re elected at a special election on September 16, and appeared to take their seats at the beginning of the special session on September 20. The next day, DeWitt and Orr were permitted to take their seats, but Claessens, Solomon and Waldman were expelled again. Protesting against the re expulsion of their comrades, DeWitt and Orr resigned their seats. In 1924, he ran on the Socialist ticket for New York Attorney General. Waldman was elected chairman of the Socialist Party of New York state in 1928, a position which he retained through the first half of the 1930s. He also stood as the SP candidate for Governor of New York in 1928, 1930 and 1932, polling over 100,000 votes in each of these races. Along with Morris Hillquit, James Oneal, and Algernon Lee, Waldman was recognized as a leader of the SP's "Old Guard" faction, which favored close working relations with the trade unions of the American Federation of Labor and pursuance of gradual ameliorative reforms leading eventually to socialism rather than cataclysmic revolutionary transformation. This perspective brought Waldman and the Old Guard into opposition of the largely youth based "Militant" faction in the party, who favored reconciliation with the Communist Party USA, in keeping with the united front policy of the Comintern and preparation for a socialist struggle for power in the event of capitalism's collapse.

Waldman continued to play a leading role in the new SDF organization. An organizational meeting was held of the new group in early July, at which Waldman sought to endorse Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President of the United States in lieu of the Socialist nominee, Norman Thomas. The gathering found itself split on the issue, however, and no endorsement was forthcoming. Waldman's foes, such as New York Socialist Party Executive Secretary Jack Altman and Socialist candidate for Governor Harry W. Laidler were quick to attack Waldman, charging him with a "betrayal of Socialist principles" in attempting to "divert 100,000 Socialist votes to the Roosevelt column." He was also active in the New York State Bar Association and served over the years on numerous state commissions. Representing unions as varied as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Longshoremen's Association, Waldman continued his practice until retiring due to a stroke in his late 80s.

Like many liberals of his time, Waldman expressed sympathy for the endeavors of civil rights activists but did not agree with their tactic of breaking the law. In an article published by the New York State Bar Journal in 1965, he expressed his worries. He begins by assuring his readers that he "espoused and still [espouses] the cause of civil rights for all people" and then argues:
Those who assert rights under the Constitution and the laws made thereunder must abide by that Constitution and the law, if that Constitution is to survive. They cannot pick and choose; they cannot say they will abide by those laws which they think are just and refuse to abide by those laws which they think are unjust
The country, therefore, cannot accept Dr. King's doctrine that he and his followers will pick and choose, knowing that it is illegal to do so. I say, such a doctrine is not only illegal and for that reason alone should be abandoned, but that it is also immoral, destructive of the principles of democratic government, and a danger to the very civil rights Dr. King seeks to promote." In such a way, Waldman asserted: defying the law is on its face generally a bad thing because defiance would weaken respect for the law in most cases, especially if the legal system is basically decent; therefore, in order to meet this objection, those who advocated civil disobedience must have legitimate justifications to defy the law. Answering Waldman's objections, King often used such a particular argument: the evils being opposed were so serious, so numerous, and so difficult to fight that civil disobedience was a justifiable last resort. Although the means were regrettable, the end justified the means. His papers reside at the New York Public Library.

The law firm he helped found, later Vladeck, Waldman, Elias, and Engelhardt, currently Vladeck, Raskin & Clark, continues to exist in New York.

In 1944, Louis Waldman published his first autobiography, Labor Lawyer, in which he laid out his defense of the positions he had taken in his political career. Among other things, Waldman became very critical of the New Deal, considering it to be overly accommodating to the Communists and exhibiting certain authoritarian tendencies, somewhat echoing the critique of the old right. He was particularly alarmed by the integration of trade unions into the state apparatus that began to occur during World War II. Labor Lawyer also represents an important primary source for the history of the Socialist Party in the years following the death of Eugene Victor Debs. It is worthy of note that many of the figures he denounces as dangerous pro Communists in his book, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Andrew Biemiller, would later become pillars of anti Communist liberals of the postwar years. While Waldman himself was mostly apolitical after the war, this perspective clearly informed younger Old Guard supporters such as Morrie Ryskind and Ralph de Toledano who moved to the right from the anti Communist left. TIME (possibly Whittaker Chambers) reviewed the book, saying: Waldman's experiences in the years that followed were part of the tumultuous coming of age of U. S. social consciousness Labor Lawyer, Waldman's autobiography, is an esoteric jumble Above all, it is an old Socialist's insistent, desperate warning against Communism as the No. 1 despoiler of the democratic ideal Waldman believes that the strength of Communism in the U. S. is now reaching a new peak in the C. I. O. 's Political Action Committee (TIME, July 24, 1944), "the catch all for the political activities of unions dominated by Communists, militant Socialists and others willing to cooperate with them." He concludes flatly: "Unless the New Deal casts out the seeds of left wing totalitarianism, which it fosters today, it may either lead to an American variety of Communism, or, what is more likely, provoke an American expression of unadorned fascism." Waldman published a second memoir, The Good Fight, in 1975.

Food and the People: The Problem of the High Cost of Living in the New York Legislature. New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1918. The Great Collapse: Higher Fares or Public Ownership. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919. Louis Waldman, Albany: The Crisis in Government: The History of the Suspension, Trial and Expulsion from the New York State Legislature in 1920 of the Five Socialist Assemblymen by Their Political Opponents. Introduction by Seymour Stedman. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920. Should unions be incorporated? Responsibility of Unions Under the Law. Washington, DC: Social Democratic Federation USA, n. d. [c. 1937]. The Good Fight: A Quest for Social Progress. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1975.

"The 1932 Socialist Campaign and the American Political Scene," American Socialist Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4 (Autumn 1932), pp. 10–21.