page_1002 < previous page page_1002 next page > Page 1002 tims of racism, the Spanish Republicans, and above all the unskilled workers enabled the Left to mount one fairly impressive political effort (Norman Thomas's 1932 bid for the presidency) and many dramatic campaigns. Industrial unions and progressive ethnic movements, by the end of the 1930s, fairly radiated a socialistic consciousness, even as they leaned upon the presence of the New Deal for political legitimation. Leftish political figures, such as New York congressman Vito Marcantonio, wove immigrant aspirations with a militantly democratic internationalism. Intellectual influences from the Left meanwhile fairly dominated a generation of writers and artists. Leaders of the communist Left, Earl Browder the most prominent among them, briefly gained, if not respectability, at least a wide hearing. The approach of World War II, and the political obeisance of communists to Moscow's direction, permitted a powerful engine of political repression to surface within Congress and to utilize the infiltration and intimidation the FBI had already set in motion. The outbreak of the cold war brought with it a heresy-hunting national mood. The president, Congress, the Justice Department, the commercial press, the Catholic church, employers, compliant labor leaders, and a wing of prestigious liberals joined to isolate dissent and dissenters. Socialists of all kinds faded away, and only scatterings of radicals openly opposed the arms race, U.S. foreign adventures, and neocolonialism in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Vietnam War, and the unwillingness of institutional authorities to redress adequately the full consequences of racism, brought a new socialist movement into being, but only briefly. Student opposition to the war met with tenacious institutional resistance by campus authorities and wide public denunciation by opinion leaders  conservative and liberal alike  effectively containing the transformational potential of "the movement." Racial protests, where not deflected by ameliorative social programs, were uprooted through massive government infiltration, harassment, and arrest of known leaders. Thus hampered, the New Left could propose only the possibility of a new and better society, free of class, sexual, racial, and imperial depredations. With the presidential victory of Richard Nixon in 1972, and the end of the Vietnam War, that socialist movement disappeared as well. In the decades since, its traces could best be found in resistance movements against continued U.S. aggression in Latin America, in feminist and homosexual causes, and in ecological opposition to globe-depleting economics. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (1987). PAUL M. BUHLE See also Debs, Eugene V.; Elections: 1912; Haymarket Affair; Industrial Workers of the World; New Left; Populism; Radicalism; Railroad Strike of 1877; Shakers; Socialist Party; Utopian Communities. Socialist Party This group, in its various American forms, has combined its European ancestry with uniquely American characteristics. It can be traced to the utopian socialism of such Europeans as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier and the communist theories of Karl Marx. Its first American manifestation was the Socialist Labor party, founded in 1877. Its leader, Daniel De Leon, broke with the American Federation of Labor over Samuel Gompers's rejection of political action. In 1901, a merger of several socialist groups created the Socialist party in Indianapolis, which had about 10,000 members at the start. Its perennial presidential candidate was Eugene V. Debs, a labor organizer who had led the Pullman strike of 1894. Debs advocated an Americanized socialism that anticipated much of the legislation of the New Deal and the modern welfare state rather than government ownership of the means of production. In 1912, Debs received about 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the total, in the presidential election, and twelve hundred Socialists won various state and local offices. The nationalism of World War I hurt the Socialist party, which split between those opposing  < previous page page_1002 next page >