Fox World is all a-twitter because a handful of members or fellow travelers of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are about to be elected to the U.S. Congress and various state legislatures. They’re “godless communists,” according to President Trump, and what with inflation, an insane war, and Trump family grift, we’ll be hearing about commies all election season.
Michael “The Other America” Harrington, founder of DSA, was about as threatening as the Mills Brothers. The current DSA candidates seem, at first glance, as off-putting as your typical hectoring grad-school wokester, but I can’t get too worked up over them. After all, New York City once sent a real communist to Congress—and his example complicates the Sean Hannity narrative.
Vito Marcantonio served seven terms in the U.S. House representing the “Little Italy” of his native East Harlem. He was a brash, dukes-up attorney who loved his neighborhood and wore a crucifix draped around his neck. Gilbert Millstein, whose ecstatic New York Times review would later launch Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, said that Marcantonio had “baleful black eyes, hunched shoulders and the face of an erudite ferret.”
Vito was elected to Congress as a protégé of the progressive Republican NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Soon nicknamed “Pink Pachyderm,” he scoffed at the New Deal as far too pinchpenny. He proposed massive public employment and insurance programs, yet he lined up with the libertarians at times, denouncing compulsory ROTC programs on college campuses and advocating independence for the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. Such stands earned him kind words from patriots like North Dakota’s Senator Gerald Nye, scourge of those “merchants of death” who had profited from the First World War, and General Smedley “War Is a Racket” Butler. As Marcantonio told the Old Right stalwart Rep. Hamilton Fish Jr. in 1936, “I shall always respect you as an honest conservative even though we shall be on opposite sides of the fence.”
By 1938 Vito had joined the New York–based American Labor Party and enjoyed the foot-soldier support of the Communist Party. Marcantonio raised funds for the Daily Worker, spoke at the party’s May Day rallies, and called the CPUSA an “American political party operating in what it considered to be the best interests of the American working class and people.” It’s possible he never formally joined the party, but his words and votes hewed to the party line for his entire career. Through the 1940s and into the early Cold War he was mocked as “Moscow’s mouthpiece.”
But even a radical in Congress operates within narrow policy boundaries. Socializing the means of production wasn’t up for a vote, nor was collectivizing agriculture. Marcantonio consistently voted against measures to ban, monitor, or legally cripple the Communist Party and its members, but then these were votes that a midcentury Ron Paul would have cast. Vito also revered Thomas Jefferson, in contrast to those modern DSA-ites who apparently resent anyone whose folks arrived in America before last Tuesday.
Marcantonio was not without political shrewdness. In 1948 he unsuccessfully urged Henry Wallace, candidate of the Communist-infected Progressive Party, to emphasize inflation and housing rather than “generalities and abstractions.” Sound familiar?
So Manhattan produced the closest thing to an actual Communist member of Congress—and it also gave us the only Soviet spy to serve in that august body: Rep. Samuel Dickstein.
Dickstein, who displaced Meyer London, a truly noble Socialist congressman, offered his services to the USSR in 1937, just months before he became a prime sponsor of what evolved into the House Un-American Activities Committee. Assigned the code name “Crook” by his Soviet masters, Dickstein spent three years demanding ever higher fees for passing along intelligence about “fascists,” a commodious term that included everything from Trotskyites to Ukrainian nationalists. The Soviets finally dropped him; one of his last paid services was a speech on the House floor advocating an increased budget for the FBI.
Ain’t American history funny?
Samuel Dickstein ended his long career in government service as a justice of the New York State Supreme Court. His perfidy was finally revealed when in the 1990s historians Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev gained access to KGB files.
While the spy Samuel Dickstein begat the House Un-American Activities Committee, Vito Marcantonio favored its abolition, but, as a sympathetic biographer noted, “he was completely capable of calling for a bit of ‘book-burning’” if those books were anti-communist. Likewise, I don’t expect our DSA congresspeople to wave the First Amendment when the Harris administration tries to shut down Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson.
Look: I wish Americans were electing the Republican likes of Robert Taft, H.R Gross, Mark Hatfield, Ron Paul, and Thomas Massie to Congress, just as I wish the Democratic delegation consisted of peace-and-justice McGovernites and working-class intellectuals of the Pat Moynihan stripe.
Instead we get Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries while the Murdoch media panic over a few lefties from atypical districts. Pardon my non-participation in the panic. Given the example of Vito Marcantonio, I’ll predict that those of us who favor peace, the Bill of Rights, and a minimal state will find the voting records of at least some of the DSA “commies” more palatable than that of Chuck Schumer.
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