Requiem for a Communist

Yesterday was Si Gerson’s memorial at the Tamiment Institute. There were many wonderful stories, memories and tributes from friends, family and comrades. It was good to meet Si’s daughter, Deborah, who invited me to speak, and his two grand-daughters, Timi and Frieda.

I was asked if I would post my comments on this website, which I shall in order to correct a few factual errors in my earlier post (which was written from memory, and didn’t benefit from the research I did last week at Tamiment) and to post a few scans I gleaned from Si’s archives.

Thank you. I worked with Si in the Coalition for Free and Open Elections, which Si played a vary large role in, serving as the organization’s secretary for many years, until I took over from him. CoFOE is a coalition of third parties and other pro-democracy groups that Si helped form, along with some of my comrades in the Socialist Party, and colleagues in the Libertarian party, the Prohibition party and other third parties – aimed at greater access to the ballot for third parties. I remember Si as a very good comrade, warm and friendly, a great source of information and enormously encouraging to younger activists.

When I met him, he asked me about my work, and I told him about stuff I was doing in the Young People’s Socialist League, and he perked up and told me what he had done in the Young Communist League, which included not only that excellent work in ending compulsory ROTC at City College, but protesting race discrimination in baseball. This story is largely forgotten in the whitewash of Branch Rickey magnanimously integrating the league. The fact is that race discrimination in hiring was illegal under New York State law, and the Young Communist League, and the Young People’s Socialist League and others, would hold demonstrations in the bleachers of Ebbets Field, demanding “Integration now!” It became a PR nightmare for Rickey, who decided to improve his image – and snatch up the best player in the Negro Leagues – before demonstrations and court orders forced him to integrate.

I tell my peers about Si’s life and achievements to underscore the point that socialists don’t have to be marginalized, that we can play an active role in civic life. We just have to be prepared to fight.

As I’m sure many of you know, Si Gerson was the focus of two huge controversies during the Popular Front era in New York. The Communist party, like many leftist organizations, was a part of the fabric of New York’s culture and street life, but not the government. Not until corruption investigations in the early 1930’s sent Mayor Jimmy Walker fleeing to Europe to avoid prosecution and temporarily wrested city hall from the grip of Tammany Hall – providing the first real opening for the left during this era.

The old Board of Alderman was replaced by a more representative City Council that would be elected by proportional representation. The Council elections were actually held on a borough-wide basis, with the number of seats apportioned to the boroughs based on population (say, 12 seats for Manhattan, 9 for Brooklyn, 7 for Queens and so on). So, in Brooklyn, for example, over 150 candidates would be on the same ballot for those nine city council seats, and the voter would rank as many of the candidates as he wished in the order in which he preferred them. So you could vote for a Communist as your first choice, an American Labor party representative as your second, a black Democrat as your third, a liberal Republican as your fourth, and on down the line until you couldn’t really stand the candidates that remained. Candidates had to receive proportional support in order to represent one-ninth of the borough.

If no candidate reached the magic number (the magic number was typically 75,000 in Brooklyn) on the first ballot, then counters would start at the bottom and redistribute the lowest vote-getter’s ballots (the guy who got two write-in votes) to their second choice candidates. As a candidate reached the magic number, his ballots would be taken off the table, and any new votes that were redistributed his way would instead go to the next candidate ranked on the ballot. And so it would go, with ballots being redistributed from the top – from candidates who had already reached the threshold and were awarded a council seat – or from the bottom, from candidates who had the least support until all the seats were filled.

This was New York City’s system for electing its City Council from 1937 until 1947. I hope this explanation isn’t too dry or unwelcome. I think it’s important that we advocates of representative democracy be able to describe this system of proportional representation that worked. I strongly recommend Si’s book, “Pete,” to scholars of NYC and leftist history for Si’s evocative day-to-day detailing of the campaigns and strategies, the vote counts and the convoluted workings of borough-based single transferrable voting – not mention fun memories of those Ebbets Field demonstrations. Hopefully we can look forward to a new edition of the book being published.

Young Si Gerson demonstrated a knack for campaign strategy and legalities, and managed the repeated campaigns of Peter V. Cacchione, a popular community activist and unemployment organizer in Brooklyn. In his first campaign, Pete Cacchione missed being elected to the city council by just 250 votes. But Si’s talent and hard work and the CP’s Popular Front alliances brought Si to the attention of Manhattan’s reforming Borough President, Stanley Isaacs, who hired him to be his Executive Assistant on January 1, 1938.

This was the first big “Gerson Controversy.” The city’s papers howled in protest. A Communist in government!? The New York World-Telegram was particularly nasty. One political cartoon portrayed Isaacs handing Si his appointment in front of a mass of forlorn-looking unemployed men. The cartoon Si, naturally, is waving a red flag that reads “Hurray for Stalin.”

Isaacs, for his part, shrugged off the controversy. In a typical letter to the World-Telegram, Isaacs objected to the paper’s editorial focus and defended his young assistant, saying:

“Anyone studying the rise of Fascism in Europe must have recognized the tactics employed. The very first effort was made to divide those who had faith in democracy into factions to destroy their unity…So far as I am concerned, whether I agree or disagree with the economic and social views of those who belong to the extreme left or the extreme right, will make no difference in my willingness to recognize their right, as citizens, and I shall continue to fill such posts as come within my jurisdiction where I may exercise the power of appointments with men best fitted for the job, without any discrimination because of race, creed, color or political affiliation.”

The controversy did not let up, however. Catholic organizations, in particular, targeted Stanley Isaacs’s “parlor Communist.” The Holy Name Society filed suit against the City, claiming that Si was ineligible for civil service because, as a member of the international Communist conspiracy, he could not honestly swear to uphold the constitution of the United States.

Si served in Isaacs’ office for three years, but eventually resigned because of the looming lawsuit and the city’s corporation counsel’s refusal to defend Si on the grounds that the Communist Party was not a subversive organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the United States.

This allowed Si to focus back on Pete Cacchione’s campaigns. His rerun in 1939 (when Si was still embroiled in controversy on Isaacs’ staff) was derailed when his petitions were invalidated by machine hacks and his name was not allowed to appear on the ballot. Pete still received 24,000 write-in votes, but that was not enough.

Pete and Si knew that 1941 would be their year and focused on getting more than three times the amount of petitions needed to secure ballot status. Sure enough, Pete Cacchione secured the ninth and final city council seat in Brooklyn and became the first Communist City Councilman.

Pete was joined two years later by Ben Davis, the leader of the party’s Harlem organization. The early returns for Pete looked good on that 1943 election night – the highest first-vote count of all the candidates – 53,000 – and a shoo-in for re-election, but in Manhattan, there were reports of the votes from entire districts – Communist strongholds and minority districts – going missing. Please suspend your disbelief that not every vote in an election would be counted. Remember, this was a long time ago.

Pete, Si and their entire campaign team rushed to the location of the Manhattan count. Si, described in Davis’ memoirs as “the party’s ablest election worker” demanded that the vote count stop and the missing ballots be found and counted. A thorough search turned up nearly a thousand additional ballots – the margin of difference that sent Ben Davis to City Hall and created a Communist legislative team for the next four years.

In the council, Cacchione and Davis advocated rent control and price controls on bread and milk, ratification of subway fare increases by popular referendum, lowering city council salaries and introduced a host of anti-race discrimination bills. So popular was Cacchione that he won re-election to a four-year term in 1945 with the highest vote count in the borough: 75,000 votes.

When the war ended, Stanley Isaacs’ warning about dividing those who have faith in democracy into factions gained a new immediacy as Truman Doctrine Democrats set their sights on removing these two Communists from office.

They placed a referendum on the ballot to end New York City’s proportional representation. Big money went into the campaign to convince New York’s voters that there can be such a thing as “too much democracy.” Pete Cacchione gave his all in the campaign to defeat the ballot proposal, but he lost. Proportional representation was repealed and Pete’s heart literally gave out. He died in office, with two years remaining in his term.

The Communist Party, nominated Si Gerson to serve the remainder of Peter Cacchione’s term and thus began the other major “Gerson Controversy.” Under the laws at the time, a vacancy in office was to be filled by the City Council with a nominee of the party of the deceased legislator. Pete Cacchione was elected and twice re-elected to the City Council as a Communist – Row H. He, in fact, received more votes than any other candidate in Brooklyn. That same Communist Party nominated Si Gerson to serve the remainder of the term, but now the City Council’s Democratic majority was refusing to seat him because he was…a Communist.

Their paper-thin excuse was that the Communist Party did not have a ballot line in New York State and, therefore, was not a “party” under the law. Never mind the fact that the Communists had to collect about five times as many signatures as any major party candidate to get on the ballot and then received more votes than any of those major parties. The voters’ clear expression of their support for a Communist representative would be thwarted by a loophole.

A Citizen’s Committee to Defend Representative Government was formed to advocate Si Gerson’s placement on the City Council. Among those who signed on to the committee were Ben Davis, Mike Quill, Vito Marcantonio, WEB DuBois, some kid named Howard Zinn, representatives of 19 labor unions, five religious institutions and a number of good government organizations.

The Democrats succeeded in wearing down the clock and left Pete Cacchione’s seat vacant for two years. When Si Gerson ran for the seat in his own right in 1949, he received support from many of those same individuals and collected over 150,000 votes, but, without proportional representation, it was not enough.

Of course, Si had a very long and distinguished career after these early controversies, as an author and journalist and as a campaign manager. Si was an underutilized resource as a campaign advisor, and that’s all of our fault. Not just the Communist party, but to a large degree the Socialist Party, too, and the rest of the left, have largely abandoned independent electoral politics. And now we’ve lost an incredible resource.

I believe we should use this time to rededicate ourselves to some of Si’s biggest issues. Navigating the byzantine election requirements when working on Gus Hall’s presidential campaigns (The Truman Doctrine Democrats assaulted election laws across the country, beginning in 1947 and particularly after the Wallace campaign, ballot access laws became particularly onerous – tens of thousands of signatures with stringent requirements for getting a certain number of signatures in each county) convinced Si that third parties had to unite in order to pry open the political process, and that’s how the Coalition for Free and Open Elections came to be. Si always envisioned CoFOE being broader than just those third parties. David (McReynolds) misremembered the name of this group as the “Coalition for Free and Fair Elections.” That was actually the name taken by a breakaway group, led by the Libertarian and Green parties when they were experiencing real growth and victories in the 1990’s, and wanted to focus narrowly on lowering signature requirements. Si was very adament: free and open elections means not just lower petition requirements, but universal suffrage, campaign finance, proportional representation and a guarantee that all votes be counted. Mainstream politicians didn’t catch up with Si on this issue until we had a presidential election stolen from us.

I’m not sure if it means a local CoFOE or something else, but we should all unite on these issues, particularly proportional representation. We had it here in New York for many years, and it worked well, and now other cities are turning towards PR systems for their elections. We can win this.

I’d like to thank Deborah for inviting me to speak and the Tamiment Institute for hosting this memorial. In preparing for my talk, I actually reviewed Si’s papers, which are now housed but have not yet been catalogued by the library. I was searching for this needle in a haystack, information about Isaacs and Cacchione in 15 boxes of Si’s archives, and I found it right away. Si meticulously kept his papers in order so that they could be of use to future generations, and now that they’re here, I am sure they will be.