"Socialist Party" Harry Fleischman Hand Signed 5X7 Sepia Photo For Sale

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"Socialist Party" Harry Fleischman Hand Signed 5X7 Sepia Photo:
$349.99

Up for sale a RARE! "American Socialist Party" Harry Fleischman Hand Signed 5X7 Sepia Photo.

ES-9635

Harry Fleischman, who has died of cancer aged

90, was a link to the once-powerful American Socialist party. The party's

national secretary from 1942 to 1950, he was also the presidential campaign

manager of its charismatic leader Norman Thomas in 1944 and 1948. In 1964 his Norman

Thomas: A Biography, the definitive portrait of that major American figure, was

published. From 1979 he led the Workers Defense League (WDL), fighting against

obdurate employers. Fleischman was born to Jewish immigrant, working-class

parents in the Bronx, in New York. He lost his first job for attempting to

organise a union. Like so many others, he moved leftward at the onset of the

depression, but was attracted not to the furious revolutionary impulses of the

Communist party of the United States (Cpusa), preferring moderate socialist

electoral strategies. Fleischman saw in Thomas, a former Presbyterian minister,

the proper successor to the late Eugene V Debs, who had dominated American

socialism in the first decades of the 20th century. Thomas's vote of nearly a

million in the 1932 presidential election - won by Franklin D Roosevelt - was

heartening, if less than expected, but proved to be the apex of the socialist

revival. The populist tilt of the New Deal in 1935 and Roosevelt's popularity

within the growing industrial union movement eclipsed Thomas's following and

boosted a much-moderated Cpusa into the leading force on the left. Many

socialists, including some of the most prominent, abandoned Thomas, but

Fleischman did not. During the ensuing decade, he divided his time between

labour and socialist organising in New York, Illinois and Michigan. Travelling

for the Young People's Socialist League and national secretary of the Young

Falcons - a socialistic alternative to the Boy Scouts - he graduated to being a

major figure in the socialists' diminished ranks. During the second world war,

the WDL became more important in Fleischman's life. Founded by Thomas in 1936,

it had heroically defended southern share-croppers, battled for the right to

organise unions, and sometimes simply fought for Americans' right to speak in

hostile terrain. In the 1940s, the WDL successfully fought for changes in

treatment of military personnel, including racial desegregation; defended

Japanese-Americans facing internment; and supported individual war resisters.

With Thomas in the lead, socialists aspired, in the face of their own decline,

to uphold the conscience of the nation. The cold war all but eliminated the

remaining few electoral strong points of socialists in Connecticut,

Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Thomas abandoned his presidential candidacy after

1948. Fleischman kept travelling, working among the party faithful and against

the rightward-shift in the labour and political milieu, while turning out

newspaper columns urging civil liberties and world peace. As labour editor of

Voice of America and director of the American Jewish Committee's National Labour

Service from 1953 to 1979, Fleischman found himself during the 1950s trapped

between competing forces. Labour leaders around him were embracing the politics

of the cold war while adamantly resisting efforts to compel racial integration

of union membership or high office.

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"Socialist Party" Harry Fleischman Hand Signed 5X7 Sepia Photo

$499.99