Intercollegiate Socialist Society
The Intercollegiate Socialist Society (later known as the League for Industrial Democracy) was formed on September 12, 1905 at a meeting of approximately one hundred people who met in a loft over Peck’s Restaurant, at 140 Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. The purpose of the meeting was to strategize the overthrow of the Christian worldview that still pervaded much of American culture and to replace it with the ideas of a then rather unknown writer by the name of Karl Marx.[1]
About
The strategy of the organization was to infiltrate their ideas into academia by organizing chapters in as many colleges and universities as possible. The first annual convention was held in 1910, and by 1917 they were active on sixty-one campuses and a dozen graduate schools. In 1921 the Intercollegiate Socialist Society took its next organizational step, changing its name to the League for Industrial Democracy. Its purpose was “education for a new social order based on production for use and not for profit."
The college chapters of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society now became the Student League for Industrial Democracy. As members graduated from college, some entered the pulpit, others the classroom; some wrote textbooks while others entered the labor movement and both political parties. When the New Deal began in 1933, they were prepared. At the time the league had only 5,652 members, but they were in positions of leadership everywhere.
Leaders
The following were leaders of the organization:[1]
Intercollegiate Socialist Society
- Upton Sinclair, founder
- Jack London, first president
- Clarence Darrow, who worked as an attorney
- Walter Lippmann, later author and director of the Council on Foreign Relations, president of the Harvard Chapter
- Walter Reuther, future president of United Auto Workers, headed the Wayne State chapter
- Eugene V. Debs, went on to become the five-time Socialist candidate for president, leader at Columbia.
- W. E. B. DuBois, later became an official of the NAACP and a CPUSA member
- Victor L. Berger, Wisconsin, who became the first Socialist elected to Congress.
League for Industrial Democracy
- Norman Thomas, Socialist candidate for president, leader behind the scenes
- Robert Lovett, editor of the New Republic, first president
- Paul Blanshard, field secretary
- John Dewey, honorary vice president (1941), league vice president (1930s)
- Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian, treasurer
Members
The following is a list of those who were members of the organization:[1]
- Robert N. Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union
- Charles Beard, historian
- Carroll Binder, editor of the Minneapolis Tribune
- Helen Gahagan Douglas, defeated by Richard Nixon for the U.S. Senate
- Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court justice
- Sidney Hook, the educational social philosopher
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet
- Henry Morgenthau, Jr., one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most trusted economic advisers
- Walter and Victor Reuther, United Auto Workers
- Will Rogers, Jr., humorist
- Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., the president’s son
- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historian
References
- ↑ Jump up to: 1.0 1.1 1.2 [http://usactionnews.com/2010/11/they-met-to-kill-god-and-establish-marxism/ One Year Book of Christian History, by E. Michael and Sharon Rusten