Samuel Herman Friedman

Samuel Herman Friedman, February 20, 1897 (Denver, Colo.) – March 17, 1990 (New York, NY)

VP candidate for Socialist Party of America (1952, 1956)

Running mate with nominee (1952, 1956): Darlington Hoopes (1896–1989)

Popular vote (1952): 20,203 (0.03%)
Popular vote (1956): 2,128  (0.00%)
Electoral vote (1952, 1956): 0/531

The campaign (1952):

Six time Presidential nominee Norman Thomas was done with campaigning for elected office and after 1948 attempted to convince the Socialist Party of America to find other avenues to further the Party's agenda.

There were many factors contributing to the rapid decline of the SPA. To name just a few-- Like several other third parties, they had run (between Debs and then Thomas) personality-driven campaigns where one individual ran for several elections and became the face of the movement. Once that person stepped down after such a long reign the changes became overly dramatic. Also, many of their once radical platform ideas were now accepted as mainstream by most Americans and both major parties, although customized to fit within a capitalist setting. With the advent of television advertising and mass media campaigning the SPA could not hope to match the funds required for such political merchandising. And the increasingly strict requirements for gaining ballot access didn't help.

The SPA leadership agreed with Thomas that it was time cease the national campaigns but the rank and file still wanted a presence in the Presidential elections. Darlington Hoopes, the 1944 VP nominee was nominated for President and the courtly SPA veteran Samuel H. Friedman was selected as his running mate.

The 1952 SPA platform stood against the same military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower (who had been in a position to do something but apparently did not do enough to stop it) would warn America about eight years later.

With votes recorded in 17 states the SPA's best showings were in New Jersey (0.36%) and Connecticut (0.20%). 

The campaign (1956):

The SPA nominated the Hoopes/Friedman ticket again in what would prove to be the SPA's final Presidential campaign.

W.E.B. Du Bois who had supported the Progressive Party in 1948 and 1952 explained in The Nation why he was not voting in 1956. His reasons touch on the SPA and no doubt describes the world view of many other progressives of that era:

    In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no "two evils" exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party. On the Presidential ballot in a few states (seventeen in 1952), a "Socialist" Party will appear. Few will hear its appeal because it will have almost no opportunity to take part in the campaign and explain its platform. If a voter organizes or advocates a real third-party movement, he may be accused of seeking to overthrow this government by "force and violence." Anything he advocates by way of significant reform will be called "Communist" and will of necessity be Communist in the sense that it must advocate such things as government ownership of the means of production; government in business; the limitation of private profit; social medicine, government housing and federal aid to education; the total abolition of race bias; and the welfare state.

    These things are on every Communist program; these things are the aim of socialism. Any American who advocates them today, no matter how sincerely, stands in danger of losing his job, surrendering his social status and perhaps landing in jail. The witnesses against him may be liars or insane or criminals. These witnesses need give no proof for their charges and may not even be known or appear in person. They may be in the pay of the United States Government. A.D.A.'s and "Liberals" are not third parties; they seek to act as tails to kites. But since the kites are self-propelled and radar-controlled, tails are quite superfluous and rather silly.

On the ballot in only half a dozen states the SPA's best showing was in Friedman's native state of Colorado with 0.08%. In New York they gained 82 votes and in Rhode Island a whopping sum of two votes.

Election history:
1921 - New York State Assembly (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1922 - New York State Assembly (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1923 - New York State Assembly (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1926 - New York State Assembly (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1927 - New York State Assembly (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1928 - New York State Senate (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1929 - New York State Assembly (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1930 - New York State Assembly (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1932 - New York State Senate (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1934 - US House of Representatives (NY) (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1936 - New York State Senate (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1941 - New York City Controller (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1942 - Lt. Governor of New York (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1945 - New York City Council President (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1949 - New York City Council President (Socialist Party of America) - defeated

Other occupations: journalist, editor, labor union activist, public relations agent, high school social science teacher

Buried: Cedar Grove Cemetery (Flushing, NY)

Notes:
Columbia University MA 1940.
Jewish.
Member of the Three Arrows Cooperative Society.
Arrested numerous times in acts of civil disobedience.

Tucker Powell Smith

 Smith and Thomas (and Hoopes?)

Tucker Powell Smith, January 29, 1898 (Missouri) – June 25, 1970 (Ventura, Calif.)

VP candidate for Socialist Party of America (aka Socialist Party of the United States) (1948)

Running mate with nominee: Norman M. Thomas (1884-1968)
Popular vote: 139,569 (0.29%)

Electoral vote: 0/531

The campaign:

In his sixth and final run for the presidency, Norman Thomas found himself as the head of just another of the increasing and fragmented political parties on the Left. The days of the Socialist Party of America acting as the country's premier third party were over.

1948 running mate Tucker Powell Smith was long active in pacifist political activity. At the time of the campaign he was a resident of Highland Park, Mich.

Smith was rumored to have been a ghost-writer for an anti-Truman speech by his VP rival, Progressive Party running mate Sen. Glen Hearst Taylor.

The 1948 SPA platform slammed communists (and Henry Wallace's Progressive Party by association):

Three forces today are competing for the loyalty of men. And in this race, the stakes are the survival of mankind.

On the one hand, an economic system calling itself "free enterprise" asserts that it can lead to the salvation of humanity. It has brought us repeatedly to depressions and wars, yet its spokesmen in the Democratic and Republican Parties still pretend they
have solutions.

They have, in fact, betrayed the promises with which they woo the American people every four years. They offered prosperity and delivered depression. They pledged peace and delivered war. They promised to increase our standard of living and are now raising the cost of living. They promised freedom to organized labor and hobbled it with new bonds.

They have sought partisan advantage and jeopardized national welfare. The dominant wings in their parties have combined to destroy price control and give us inflation, to undermine restraints on greed and give us shortage, to favor the rich and deny the poor, to cut the taxes of the wealthy and insult the common man with a crumb.

There is a second force in the world—which promises security and speaks of freedom but delivers only economic bondage and dictatorship. It is the force of totalitarianism. Yesterday its most sinister front was Fascism; today it is Communism.

In the United States, it marches under masked banners. It calls itself a "new party" and has pushed into the forefront well-meaning liberals who do not know the purposes of their Communist allies. And this alliance, though speaking for civil liberties at home, defends the most powerful tyranny in the modern world. It speaks of peace but is blind to the most aggressive imperialism of the present day. It speaks of one world but works for two spheres of influence. It urges the brotherhood of man but sanctifies the divisive principle of national sovereignty.

As against these forces, the Socialist Party of the United States speaks for the Third Force—democratic socialism, the principles of democratic planning and international order.

With votes recorded in 34 states the Thomas/Smith ticket finished in a very distant 5th place. In Wisconsin they tallied 0.98%, in Oregon 0.96% and the percentages dramatically plummet after that. Georgia gave them three votes and in South Carolina they earned one single lonely vote.

Election history:
1929 - Alderman, New York, NY (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1930 - US House of Representatives (NY) (Socialist Party of America) - defeated

Other occupations: college teacher, Director of Brookwood Labor College 1933-1937

Buried: Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park (Westlake Village, Calif.)

Notes:
Shortly after the election he was dismissed from Olivet College in Jan. 1949 for union agitation.
Buried in the same cemetery as Karen Carpenter, Ronald Goldman, Jack Kirby, Virginia Mayo, Harry
 Nilsson, and Artie Shaw.
Future Pulitizer Prize winning author Carleton Mabee resigned his teaching job at Olivet in protest of
 Smith's firing.

Darlington Hoopes

 

James Hudson Maurer, 1928-1932 SPA VP nominee and Hoopes (left) in 1932

Darlington Hoopes, September 11, 1896 (Vale, Md.) – September 25, 1989 (Sinking Spring, Penn.)

VP candidate for Socialist Party of America (1944)

Running mate with nominee: Norman M. Thomas (1884-1968)

Popular vote: 79,017 (0.16%)

Electoral vote: 0/531

The campaign:

Norman Thomas, who had already run for President four times, was wanting to hand the torch to a younger generation and that hope rested on the 1940 VP nominee and second in command Maynard Kreuger. But Kreuger did not want it. So once again Thomas accepted the Presidential nomination in what was becoming a personality-driven rather than process-driven political party. Darlington Hoopes, much more of a centrist than Kreuger, was selected as the running mate. Hoopes was from the Socialist hotbed of Reading, Penn. and had experience as an elected SPA public servant passing legislation on child labor.

It was during this campaign Thomas supposedly said in a speech: "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened ... I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform." According to Snopes this is a bogus quote but it is repeated frequently by those on the Right as a form of confirmation bias without giving any source of the utterance. However, it is true that many of the Socialist ideas were co-opted by both of the major parties, but the capitalist system remained essentially intact and dominant, even under FDR.

After initially opposing America's entry into WWII, Thomas and the SPA supported the war effort but had fears of the USA entering a period of endless militarism and he anticipated the Cold War. "Sooner or later the USSR ... is bound to forget its present alliance and to aid native revolt against white-predominately British-supremacy. If we fight again with and for Britain ... it will be a terrible and unsuccessful [third world] war. That war, or long sustained preparation for it, will doom our democracy."

Thomas was one of the very few people (along with J. Edgar Hoover!!) to speak out against the internment of Japanese Americans.

The resulting national vote was the worst in the history of the SPA. With votes recorded from 29 states, including some where they were only write-ins, they didn't crack 1% in any of them-- although in Wisconsin, once a SPA stronghold, they finished with 0.99%.

Election history:
1929 - Judge, Berks County, Penn. - defeated
1931-1936 - Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Socialist Party of America)
1936-1940 - City Solicitor (Reading, Penn.)
1936 - Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1938 - Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1940 - Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1942 - Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1944 - Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1950 - Pennsylvania State Senate (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1950 - US House of Representatives (Penn.) (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1952 - US House of Representatives (Penn.) (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1952 - US President (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1956 - US President (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1958 - US House of Representatives (Penn.) (Socialist Party of America) - defeated

Other occupations: attorney

Buried: Maidencreek Friends Meeting Burial Ground (Berks County, Penn.)

Notes:
Attended Quaker school.
Joined the Socialist Party of America in 1914.
Was part of the "Old Guard" that split from the SPA in 1936-1937 and formed the Social Democratic
 Federation. He later returned.
A member of the Darlington-Butler political dynasty in Pennsylvania, including 5 members of US Congress.