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IN 1930S NYC, PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION BOOSTED THE LEFT  
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Trevor Goodwin
January 26, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In New York City, a disgraced mayor and a discredited Democratic
Party are creating potential openings for socialists. NYC history
suggests that the Left might profitably revive proportional
representation as a tool to build its electoral strength. _

Communist city councillor Ben Davis Jr (R) leaves a New York City
federal courthouse during his Smith Act trial in 1949., Wikimedia
Commons

 

On September 25, the mayor of New York was indicted on criminal
charges for the first time in the modern era. The charges marked the
culmination of only one of four ongoing
[[link removed]] federal
[[link removed]] investigations
[[link removed]] into
an administration drowning in FBI raids, subpoenas, and resignations
[[link removed]].

 

This cartoonish corruption, in addition to alleged shakedown
operations
[[link removed]],
has revived the memory of Tammany Hall
[[link removed]],
the corrupt Democratic Party club and patronage machine of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century New York. William M. “Boss” Tweed, the
man most associated with Tammany, was eventually imprisoned for his
corruption. The mayor is trying to avoid this fate by groveling his
way to a pardon
[[link removed]] from
Donald Trump, going so far as to shamelessly cancel Martin Luther King
Jr Day plans to attend the inauguration
[[link removed]].
But the damage to Adams’s political career could already be
permanent.

With politicians across the city smelling blood, Adams now faces a
competitive primary in 2025, with a widening field that
includes socialist assemblyman Zohran Mamdani
[[link removed]].
Mamdani is running on an ambitious platform that boasts a rent freeze,
free buses, no-cost childcare, and city-owned grocery stores. The
cost-of-living-focused campaign aims to harness the frustration of the
city’s working class — and in particular Muslim and Arab American
New Yorkers, who have grown disaffected with a Democratic Party
[[link removed]] and a mayor that have
been championing the interests of capital over those of working
people
[[link removed]] and
cheerleading Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In this legitimacy crisis for Adams and Democrats nationally, Mamdani
and the democratic socialist movement in New York can draw lessons
from the Old Left’s fight against corrupt Tammany Democrats like
Tweed. The Left helped break the power of Tammany and establish a
foothold in New York City government in the mid–twentieth century
thanks, in large part, to the adoption of a proportional
representation electoral system — a project that is worth taking up
again today.

Socialists’ First Breakthrough

Left-wing electoral challenges came and went throughout the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, but all fell short in the face of
Tammany Hall’s dominance and the United States’ antidemocratic
two-party system. A breakthrough came in 1917, when, in the immediate
aftermath of US entry into World War I, Socialist Party (SP)
leader Morris Hillquit
[[link removed]] ran
a dramatic and energizing antiwar campaign for New York City mayor.
Though Hillquit came up short, his campaign helped elect a wave of
socialists to state and municipal office.

Morris Hillquit poses for a photo in 1910. (Wikimedia Commons)

Coming into office in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s October
Revolution, these elected officials faced the full force of the First
Red Scare. Some socialist legislators were expelled from
[[link removed]] their
seats, but just as effective was electoral coordination between New
York Republicans and Democrats, who combined forces to field fusion
ticket candidates against the Socialists. This, along with a
Tammany-crafted redistricting plan that diluted socialist strongholds
— and the SP’s debilitating split in 1919
[[link removed]] —
left the electoral project in ruins by 1921.

Coming into office in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s October
Revolution, the Socialists faced the full force of the First Red
Scare.

This failure made clear that the fight for electoral reform would be
crucial to sustaining power against the two-party system. One reform
that proved key in the fight against Tammany
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proportional representation (PR). PR is an electoral system that
allows for multiple winners per district, where parties are awarded
seats based on their proportion of the vote. This more easily allows
third parties to achieve representation and mitigates the threat of
gerrymandering. PR contrasts with the United States’ single-member,
winner-take-all system, which creates a “spoiler effect” that
predisposes us to the widely hated two-party duopoly. For these
reasons, socialists have long advocated for PR
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It was listed as the first demand in the German Social Democratic
Party’s Erfurt Program in 1891, and today proportional
representation is the world’s most popular electoral system
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In the 1920s and early ’30s, a movement experiment with PR grew in
New York. When proportional representation was adopted in municipal
elections in 1937, it facilitated rapid electoral success for the
Left, including the election of two Communists
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before McCarthyism and a racist backlash killed the system in its
infancy. But with Eric Adams reverting to Tammany-style schemes and a
contemporary socialist electoral movement
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on the march, it’s a good time to renew the fight for PR.

In fact, it has already been experiencing a small revival across the
country. PR is now used in eight US cities
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five of which have adopted it within the last decade. New York’s
recent adoption of ranked-choice voting
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already moves the city halfway to PR, and a push for its restoration
would expand democracy and give the Left more room to establish itself
as an electoral force.

The Downfall of Our First Nightlife Mayor and the Rise of PR

Long before Eric Adams, New York City had another swaggering,
nightlife-loving mayor. In 1926, Jimmy Walker, a Tammany man, was
elected mayor and quickly got to work partying the night away. Walker
embodied the excesses of New York’s Jazz Age, and while his distaste
for work would certainly have rubbed the grindset-minded
[[link removed]] Eric
Adams the wrong way, the two may well have bonded over their shared
interests in defending
[[link removed]] loyal
[[link removed]] flunkies
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taking in unexplained
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of money
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Walker’s corruption, which was revealed during the early turbulent
years of the Great Depression, outraged the public and delegitimized
the Democratic Party. The mayor’s decline began with an
investigation into an NYPD extortion ring that had framed young women
for prostitution charges. The story dominated tabloid headlines of the
day, leading to further investigations of municipal graft, which
eventually reached Walker himself. Among other crimes, the mayor was
given a $10,000 line of credit to gallivant around Europe
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he granted a citywide bus franchise to a shadowy company. When Walker
was forced to resign in late 1932, reformers quickly seized the
opportunity to propose a raft of municipal reforms, chief among them
proportional representation.

In the wake of Walker’s scandal, Fiorello La Guardia won the 1933
mayoral election, giving the pro–New Deal, socialist-friendly
Republican a mandate to take on Tammany. Even though PR would have
benefited the underrepresented city GOP at the time, many upstate
Republicans allied with Democrats against the reform. As the Communist
Party’s campaign expert
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later recall, the Republicans “didn’t mind losing an occasional
seat as long as the old two-party spoils system kept functioning
smoothly . . . and both got paid off in the last analysis by the
economic overlords.”

Despite the opposition, La Guardia was able to secure a voter
referendum in 1936, which would replace the Board of Aldermen’s
sixty-five gerrymandered districts with a City Council that held
borough-wide elections with ranked-choice voting and proportional
representation. The proposal quickly found admirers on the Left, who
recognized the chance it offered socialists to challenge the two-party
system and regain representation after the fleeting success of the
Socialist Party in the late 1910s.

This reform push for PR linked up with a growing industrial union
movement interested in political action. As La Guardia was fighting in
Albany, New York’s labor movement was gearing up for Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s first reelection campaign. The leading force behind
1930s industrial unionism, the Committee for Industrial Organization
(CIO), campaigned for FDR nationally under the Labor’s Non-Partisan
League. And in New York, CIO leaders joined with Socialists to form
the state-level American Labor Party (ALP).

Fiorello La Guardia gives a speech on the radio in 1940. (Wikimedia
Commons)

New York’s fusion voting laws allowed the ALP to campaign for
Roosevelt on its own ballot line while also canvassing for PR. The
coalition paid off. Roosevelt won by the greatest margin of his four
runs, and the PR referendum passed easily with 62.4 percent of the
vote. The ALP would get the chance to test its real strength the
following year.

PR in Practice

New York’s first City Council election illustrates the potential
promise of PR for the Left. While Democrats still won the most seats,
their strength was cut nearly in half, falling from 95 percent control
of the Board of Aldermen to only 50 percent in the new twenty-six-seat
City Council. Tammany was shocked.

The reform push for proportional representation linked up with a
growing industrial union movement interested in political action.

Even more surprising was the success of the ALP, which displaced the
Republicans as the body’s largest minority party. Under the new
system, candidates who received 75,000 votes automatically earned a
seat, and any votes over that threshold would be transferred to each
voter’s next ranked choice. Of the eight people who received 75,000
votes in 1937, five were ALP candidates.

In his book on New York’s experiment with PR, historian Daniel
Prosterman [[link removed]] notes that these ALP
elected officials were actual labor leaders. Salvatore Ninfo had been
an organizer with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
(ILGWU) going back to the days of the Uprising of the 20,000 and the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. Mike Quill entered office
while still president of the powerful Transport Workers Union. Louis
Hollander was a cofounder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of
America (ACWA), an original member union of the CIO, and Andrew
Armstrong was from the Printing Pressmen’s Union. Baruch Charney
Vladeck, manager of the _Jewish Daily Forward_, was the only one of
the five with prior experience as an elected government official. He
had been one of the Socialists elected to the Board of Alderman in
1917 and was now returning to office as the City Council’s new
minority leader two decades later.

Proportional representation also helped the Communist Party (CP).
Though the CP did not win a seat in that first election, Communist
candidate Pete Cacchione missed out on a Brooklyn city council seat by
only 367 votes. He was well positioned to gain a seat in the 1939
election, but Communist hopes for success were derailed by the signing
of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August of that year. The pact produced a
backlash both within the Left and more broadly, resulting in a
“little Red Scare” that, among other things, saw the entire CP
slate struck from the ballot under dubious legal circumstances.

But in 1941, with the Soviet Union now at war with the Nazis, Pete
finally won. This victory was one of the most high-profile events in
the history of American communism, and it was seriously aided by PR.

 

New York’s experiment with proportional representation also showed
the system’s superiority in helping elect black representatives
[[link removed]].
In 1941, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr won a council seat in
Manhattan on the ALP line. Powell became the city’s first black
councilmember and quickly set his sights on higher office. He won his
Harlem congressional seat (though as a Democrat) in 1945, but not
before campaigning for Ben Davis Jr to replace him on the City
Council. In an era when it was hard to be black or a red, Davis was
both
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and with the help of PR and his Harlem base, he narrowly won a
Manhattan council seat in 1943.

Davis’s PR-assisted victory left Tammany and the city’s assorted
reactionaries apoplectic. They would get an opportunity to target
Davis, the CP, and the PR system as a whole a few years later.

Black and Red Scares and the Repeal of PR

Arising reactionary tide against a fractured left killed New York’s
experiment with proportional representation. In 1944, the ALP suffered
a devastating split, with an anti-communist wing, headed by ILGWU
leader David Dubinsky, leaving to form the Liberal Party. The Liberals
competed in the 1945 PR elections and, while they won two seats, were
unsuccessful in their aim of unseating Ben Davis.

David Dubinski meets President Harry Truman. (Wikimedia Commons)

As this sectarian infighting continued, the end of World War II
birthed a national shift toward reaction. The year 1947 would prove to
be a defining one. Republicans, newly empowered in the House and
Senate, passed the Taft-Hartley Act, gutting the National Labor
Relations Act. In New York, Communist union leaders were arrested, and
the state passed the Condon-Wadlin Act (predecessor to the
infamous Taylor Law
[[link removed]]),
barring public sector strikes.

With FDR dead and the charismatic Mayor La Guardia retiring, no
prominent figure remained to defend the city’s burgeoning multiparty
social democracy. Tammany and longtime PR opponents like Robert Moses
were joined by the city’s Republicans and the mainstream press.
After two failed repeal campaigns, the anti-PR coalition rallied for a
third attempt in 1947, an off-year election without mayoral or council
races. Communists, socialists, and CIO unionists put up a spirited
defense of PR, but it was not enough. The city voted to repeal PR
935,222 to 586,170. The repeal’s first casualty was the council seat
of Pete Cacchione, who died of a heart attack two days after the vote;
Democrats refused to seat a Communist replacement, outraging even
liberal anti-communists.

Emboldened by this coup, Democrats quickly set their sights on ousting
Ben Davis. Davis was indicted under Red Scare legislation in 1948,
along with eleven other Communist leaders. The witch hunt took
priceless time away from his 1949 reelection campaign, and with
proportional representation overturned, Davis faced the same fate as
the Socialist Party elected officials of the generation prior. The
Democrats, Republicans, and Liberals joined forces to field a fusion
candidate, defeating Davis in a newly drawn Harlem district. Then,
with a month still remaining in his term, Davis was expelled from the
council and sentenced to five years in prison. The ALP shuffled along
for a few more years but, without the help of PR, dissolved in 1956.

With FDR dead and the charismatic Mayor La Guardia retiring, no
prominent figure remained to defend the city’s burgeoning multiparty
social democracy.

New York’s left was weakened for a generation. Ironically, Tammany
also lost its grip on power in the intervening years, but no
democratic electoral reforms came as a result. Reformers had made
their peace with Democrats and liberal Republicans, and although
the Liberal Party
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for a few more decades with its working-class base of ILGWU members,
party leaders pursued a strategy aimed primarily at winning
concessions from the two parties, relying on New York’s fusion
voting laws and consistently ignoring rank-and-file calls to run their
own candidates.

Without a robust political democracy or a strong electoral left,
elites could relatively easily curtail the city’s social democracy
during the 1970s fiscal crisis. The crisis shifted New York State’s
balance of power out of the city and away from the working class
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decades, but the post-2016 return of a leftist electoral opposition
may be reopening possibilities.

PR’s Prospects Today

With Mayor Adams under indictment and the outrageous criminality of
his administration on view for all, the need for an alternative is
clear. Beyond New York City, Democrats are operating a historically
unpopular and underperforming state-level party
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to shed working-class support nationally
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setting the stage for Trump’s return to the White House.

 

In the 1930s and ’40s, left-wingers faced a somewhat similar
predicament. Dissatisfied with the rightward trajectory of the New
Deal coalition, many leftists hoped New York’s ALP would go on to
form a constituent part of a national labor party, amalgamating with
other state-level formations like Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party
(FLP) and Wisconsin’s Progressive Party. Such a national party did
come into being in 1948, but it was hollow and doomed from the start.
Formed in 1948 as a vehicle for Henry Wallace’s presidential
campaign, the Progressive Party emerged after most independent parties
had already capitulated to their respective state machines. In 1944,
the FLP merged with the Minnesota Democratic Party, and two years
later, the Wisconsin Progressive Party, which had been a powerful
force in ’30s politics, dissolved.

The push for a national third party might have found success a decade
or so before, when labor and the Left were operating from a position
of strength. Instead, the Progressive Party attempted to intervene
from a position of desperation and weakness, with the Communist Party
on the back foot in the face of the emerging Red Scare. The failed
experiment made clear the necessity of strong left and labor
organization, and today’s Left would do well to rebuild municipal
and state-level organizations, not least because that is where
electoral reforms like PR are most achievable.

Proportional representation is already helping to create such
organization. Following a successful ballot measure
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2022, Portland, Oregon, held its first proportional representation
City Council election this year. It was a big success for the Left,
with Portland Democratic Socialists of America capitalizing on the
moment with two winning
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[[link removed]]. Without PR, organizers
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they would have been able to win one of the campaigns at most. Like
many municipal elections across the country, the Portland City Council
race was nonpartisan, allowing the candidates to run as open
socialists, unburdened by the Democratic Party label
[[link removed]]. The use
of nonpartisan elections has worked for the Left for years in
California, where the Richmond Progressive Alliance
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built a working-class electoral machine independent of the Democrats.

New York’s left can look to these examples for inspiration and work
to harness dissatisfaction with Adams into the energy needed to
restore proportional representation. While PR is far from a panacea,
its revival in New York and continued adoption across the country are
important fights for those of us looking to build a political
alternative.

_TREVOR GOODWIN is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in
New York City._

_If you like this article, please subscribe
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