Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 51, 20 December 1948. pp. 1 & 2.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
NEW YORK, Dec. 10 – Tonight I sweated out the speaking program at a testimonial dinner here in the Roosevelt Hotel in honor of Hubert Humphrey, senator-elect from Minnesota.
It was held under the auspices of the Reunion of Old Timers and the League for Industrial Democracy, an intellectual front organization for the Socialist Party, of which Norman Thomas is a director.
I went there as a reporter for The Militant, not to pay tribute to Humphrey.
When I said over the CBS network on Nov. 2 that “The Socialist Workers Party ... will not cooperate with the new administration which will be the servant of Big Business just as the old one was,” I meant Humphrey, Chester Bowles and their kind, as well as Truman, Raidin and all other political stripes in the Democratic Party.
I arrived just as the guests were finishing their meal – at $12.50 per plate. But the price presented no problem since most of those present draw fat salaries and usually have swindle sheets to which such little incidentals may be charged.
The roster of guests was made up primarily of old socialist and social-democratic functionaries and union bureaucrats, such as Abraham Beckerman, Nathaniel Minkoff and the ex-socialist judges, Jacob Panken and Samuel Orr.
There was also a liberal sprinkling of representatives of the younger generation of the same breed – Gus Tyler, Max Delson and others – who dabbled with left-wing socialism for a brief period during the 1930’s.
At specially designated tables sat the officials of a long list of New York unions – International Ladies Garment Workers, Cap Makers, etc. – which at one time constituted the union base of a flourishing socialist movement.
William H. Davis, former chairman of the War Labor Board, and Leon Henderson, ex-OPA administrator, were among those on the dais.
In the main the assemblage was a melange of former socialist lawyers, functionaries and union bureaucrats who in the course of their evolution have renounced independent class politics and settled for a place on the liberal fringe of the Democratic Party. They are now going to school to a pair of newly arisen messiahs of liberal capitalism, Hubert Humphrey and Chester Bowles.
A.F. Whitney of the Railway Trainmen, David Dubinsky of the ILGWU and Walter White of the NAACP led off with laudatory speeches about the “great statesmen,” Humphrey and Bowles, who are leading a “campaign for righteousness.”
Bowles followed with a few remarks about the need for some “hard thinking” to cook up\ a “new New Deal,” and the stage was set for the guest of honor,
Humphrey is hailed as a boy wonder, having landed in the U.S. Senate at the age of 37 after a short career in politics. He is called not only a “friend” but even a “champion” of labor. Everything in this description is stood on its head.
Until 1946, Humphrey had spent his time as a professor of political science at Macalester College and in holding down petty jobs gained through political patronage. He never even got his feet wet in the labor movement and actually knows little about it. He remained a political nobody until the powerful Minneapolis unions picked him out of obscurity and backed him for mayor of that city in 1945.
In other words, Humphrey’s spectacular rise to high public office ig in reality a demonstration of the great political power of the unions reflected through him.
Humphrey’s main contributions were a glib tongue and a capacity for opportunism, that is, a callous disregard for the rights and welfare of those to whom he is obligated in order to seize opportunities to advance his personal interests.
Although he owes everything to the working people. Humphrey has nevertheless decided to cast his lot with the Big Business-dominated Democratic Party and to serve the labor movement only insofar as it may coincide with his own ambitious plans for a political career.
In his speech, Humphrey stayed strictly within the framework of the Democratic election platform, advocating repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act and that the government “do something” about housing, inflation, civil rights, soil conservation, etc.
His most radical statement was a proposal to let the Dixiecrats stay out of the Democratic Party. He didn’t really warm up until he got around to denouncing the “iniquity of communism,” However, he didn’t have a word to say about the outrageous witchhunt led by the Democratic administration which has already victimized thousands of people.
He went right down the line on the bipartisan war program, calling for a tough policy against the Soviet Union and repeating the Douglas proposal for a corps of “labor diplomats” to sell American imperialism to the workers of the world.
Humphrey, who peddles this treacherous line, is a typical representative of the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party. Such is the party within which the union officials and social democrats propose to organize a new American version of the “Peoples Front.”
They are placing themselves and they seek to place the working people at the service of American imperialism in its program of world conquest for the price of a few paltry concessions on the domestic front. They don’t care what happens to the peoples of the world. When they say “the people” they really mean themselves.
We will fight against this betrayal by the union officials and social democrats with all our strength. As I said on Nov. 2 over C.B.S,
“The Socialist Workers Party will continue the same uncompromising struggle against the bipartisan policy of war, high price, Taft-Hartleyism, race prejudice and witch hunting. We will persevere in our major objective: the education of the American workers to the need for forming an Independent Labor Party and establishing a Workers and Farmers Government.”
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