Convention

They were 171 strong and represented 39 States, but they did not call themselves "We, the People." They called themselves simply the Socialist Party, a party of protest including much that passes for innocent insurgence on the outskirts of the two big parties. They held the first national convention of the 1928 season, last week in a Finnish hall on the unfashionable upper end of Fifth Avenue, Manhattan.

Victor L. Berger was there, the unique Socialist member of Congress. He could point to no legislative victories and lamented the defection of all but three Congressmen, including himself and New York's vociferous La Guardia, from what was once a bloc of ten House "radicals." Mr. Berger, as chairman of the party's executive committee, promised a light-wines-&-beer plank in the Socialist platform.

Other Socialists present were James H. Maurer, the Pennsylvania laborite; Daniel W. Hoan, Milwaukee's mayor; Joseph W. Swarts, candidate for Governor of Ohio; Norman Thomas, the blond clear-eyed ascetic-looking Manhattanite, who used to be a Christian minister, but left the pulpit for the press (The World Tomorrow, pacifist monthly). Perennially a candidate for something or other, perennially defeated, Mr. Thomas, happy champion of lost causes, was "mentioned for the Presidency" in the pre-convention gossip. So was Pennsylvania's Maurer.

Morris Hillquit, the Latvian-born Manhattan lawyer whose political history is that of the U. S. Socialist party since 1888 (when he was 19), made a "keynote" speech attacking the corrupt, reactionary Republicans and Democrats. "Only a party like ours," he said, "can be relied on to cleanse this immense cesspool of political corruption."

The Socialist national convention continued its deliberations.

Louis Waldman, onetime Assemblyman of New York, rose and nominated Norman Thomas to be Socialist candidate for the Presidency of the U. S. Cameron King of California cried his swift second to the nomination. The Convention shouted, cheered, applauded. Some, throaty with emotion, sang the Internationale. Six minutes passed. Candidate Thomas, in accepting the nomination, said that James H. Maurer ought to have been the party's candidate.

Mr. Maurer, however, was nominated for Vice President, by William Van Essen of Pennsylvania, with Morris Hillquit seconding.

People who like coincidences were pleasantly shocked to learn that nominee Thomas was born in Marion, Ohio, in 1884, the year that Warren Gamaliel Harding became a cub reporter on the Marion Star. Should the Socialists do any electoral "cleansing" this autumn, Mr. Thomas will doubtless be sung by Socialist poets as a savior whose birth was portentous, if not miraculous.

A graduate (1911) of Union Theological School, Mr. Thomas used to assist at the Brick Presbyterian Church, Fifth Avenue and 37th Street, Manhattan. Few strikes of any size in or near Manhattan, few free speech fights or Sacco-Vanzetti trials, are conducted without his assistance. In 1924 he was a candidate for Governor of New York.