In April 1912, Walter Lippmann was feeling down. Four months earlier, he had taken what seemed to him like an exciting postcollegiate political gig: assistant to George Lunn, the newly elected Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, a city of about 75,000 people twenty miles northwest of Albany.
Lippmann’s hopes of witnessing a revolution from the ground up were soon dashed, as he found that his work entailed more paper pushing than Marxist theorizing. So Lippmann quit. In a letter he wrote to a Socialist Party colleague a year later, he reflected on his time in Schenectady. The problem, Lippmann argued, was that Lunn had been elected by a town of progressives who wanted him to pass progressive, not socialist, policies. Concerned about his own political future, Lunn was happy to oblige.
On paper, George Lunn didn’t seem like much of a socialist to begin with. Lunn was a Protestant minister who had moved to Schenectady in 1904 to work at the city’s First Reformed Church. Five years later, he had created his own congregation focused on workers’ rights — a group that, unsurprisingly, appealed to the area’s Socialists.
Those ties to the Socialist Party would propel Lunn into the 1911 Schenectady mayoral election as the party’s nominee. What Lunn lacked in political experience he made up for in political instinct. His timing was simply impeccable — socialism was on the rise across the United States, with Milwaukee, Wisconsin, having recently elected a government staffed by the party. By the end of 1912, Eugene Debs would take 6 percent of the vote in the presidential election, one of the best showings for a third-party candidate in the twentieth century.
Schenectady’s own unique political situation made it a logical place for socialism to take root. As Lippmann put it, the Democratic and Republican parties were rampant with corruption and “utterly hopeless,” meaning the city’s progressive voters — lovers of Teddy Roosevelt and…
Auteur: Nick Perkins
