The shunning of lawmakers who are on the right side of history
It is tempting to see the recent expulsion of two members of the Tennessee state Legislature as yet one more symptom of today’s bitter political schism. Before the inflamed politics of the Trump era, who can remember an American legislative body expelling a member who was legally elected? The Tennessee case seems unprecedented.
But it is not. Something very similar took place roughly a century ago in New York. On Jan. 7, 1920, in the grand, pillared chamber of the New York State Assembly, lit by daylight streaming from high clerestory windows, five members were startled when summoned to come forward. Four of the five were veterans of previous sessions, and none had been tainted by scandal. The Assembly’s speaker looked down at them and declared, “You have been elected on a platform which is absolutely inimical to the best interests of the State of New York and the United States.”
Their crime was to belong to the Socialist Party. Despite the astonished protests of the five, the rest of the Assembly, Republicans and Democrats alike, voted to declare the five seats vacant. Only two Democrats dissented. When the five expelled lawmakers refused to leave, the sergeant at arms escorted them out, one by one. Assemblyman Louis Waldman was a garment union activist who had immigrated from Ukraine with, as he said, “the sounds of the pogroms” in his ears. As he was force-marched out of the chamber, he heard one of those who had voted to expel him say, “Sorry, Waldman, we just couldn’t help it.”
American politics may seem superheated today, but they were far more so a hundred years ago. Five days before the New York State Assembly’s action, the country saw the largest of the Palmer Raids, the sweeping roundups of roughly 10,000 radicals or suspected radicals whom Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was eager to deport from the United States. (Some 140 people arrested in Boston were marched through the streets in chains and leg irons on their way to prison on Deer Island in the harbor.) He saw this as the foundation stone of his campaign for the 1920 Democratic nomination for president. New York State had its own witch-hunting committee staging similar raids, bringing along friendly journalists to cover them. Amid fear sparked by the Russian Revolution, the country was going through its first Red Scare: a frenzy of press censorship, vigilante violence, and political imprisonment that make the McCarthy years seem tame by comparison.
New York’s was not the only legislature ejecting legally elected members. In the nation’s capital three days later, the House of Representatives, with a mere six dissenting votes, expelled its one Socialist, Victor Berger of Wisconsin. It made no difference that Berger was among his party’s moderates, highly critical of what he saw as an emerging dictatorship in Soviet Russia.
Expelling from office an elected legislator who has broken no law is a form of shunning. Tightly knit religious groups practice shunning when a member does something judged abhorrent, like marrying outside the faith. In a novel set in Puritan New England, Nathaniel Hawthorne made the shunning of the adulterous Hester Prynne the subject of “The Scarlet Letter.”
The crime of the expelled Tennessee legislators — who have since been sent back to their seats by commissioners in their home counties — was to use bullhorns to take part in a vociferous protest in the chamber demanding better gun control in a state that had just seen three students and three school employees killed in a horrendous mass shooting. (Incidentally, the same legislature in recent years has failed to expel one member accused by three women of sexually assaulting them when they were minors, another who joked about bringing back lynching, and an Assembly speaker facing federal charges of money laundering, wire fraud, bribery, and arranging kickbacks.)
The crime of the expelled Socialists of 1920 was simply that of belonging to a particular party. It was a party that had, in the previous two decades, elected more than a thousand members to state and local office, including mayors in cities as disparate as Milwaukee;
Schenectady, N.Y.; Toledo, Ohio; and Pasadena, Calif. The Socialists won 6 percent of the popular vote for president in 1912, and nearly 22 percent of the vote for mayor of New York City five years later. But the hysteria of the Red Scare allowed its opponents to shun it as dangerously revolutionary.
What did those revolutionary politics consist of ? The party had only the haziest of ideologies, and its members held a broad spectrum of beliefs. By 1920, those on the far left had mostly resigned to become Communists. Socialists elected to office tended to be more practical and were often called “sewer socialists,” a reference to their emphasis on public works and social legislation. Victor Berger, for instance, in 1911 had proposed a national old-age pension, a goal that would be realized 24 years later as Social Security. In 1916, the only other Socialist of that era elected to Congress, Meyer London of New York’s Lower East Side, introduced a bill strikingly similar to one that would become law nearly a century later, the Affordable Care Act.
Will it take a century for the hope of the expelled Tennessee legislators — tighter regulation of guns — to be realized? Maybe not. One crucial difference between the public shunnings of a century ago and this most recent case is that today there are huge differences of opinion on hot-button issues like guns between different parts of the country. We often bemoan this as another sign of our divisions. But is there a hopeful side to it? Might Tennessee, with its relatively weak regulation of guns, look at Massachusetts, a national leader on that score, and notice that the latter has less than one-sixth the number of gun deaths per capita? This is not a vain hope. Some state governments that long resisted cooperating with the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid have recently looked across their borders and changed their minds. Once-shunned ideas have a way of eventually emerging in the mainstream.