AN OLD STORY THAT PROFESSOR PIGDEN'S COMMENT REMINDED ME OF

Charles Pigden’s lovely story about Peter Fraser and Trevelyan reminded me of a touching anecdote that I surfaced while writing a book about my grandfather, Barney Wolff and his long-time friend and comrade Abe Shiplacoff. Barney and Abe together started the branch of the Socialist party in Brooklyn New York in the early years of the point of the last century. That was a time when almost no one went to college and many people, like my grandfather, did not even complete elementary school. But the workers in the socialist movement held study sessions and inform themselves about the world and about Marx’s critique of capitalism. Nevertheless, many of them felt shamed and inadequate by their lack of formal education. Here’s the story as I wrote it:

“Abe Shiplacoff was two years older than Barney.  He was important enough to warrant a lengthy obituary in the New York TIMES when he died in 1934, from which we learn that he was born in Chernigov, Russia on December 13, 1877.  “Mr. Shiplacoff came to this country with his parents in 1891 [i.e., eleven years after Barney arrived].  For seven years he toiled over a sewing machine in a sweatshop, working twelve hours a day and studying at night..” [NY TIMES, February 8, 1934]

Shiplacoff was an indefatigable champion of Socialism and the leading figure in the Brownsville branch of the Party.  Elected to the New York State Assembly for the first time in the 1915 election to which the story is devoted, he won reelection the next year, and the year after.  In 1918, Shiplacoff ran for Congress from the 10^th Congressional District, but lost.  This loss, and the impact of the Red Scare triggered by the World War and the Russian Revolution, led to perhaps the bitterest disappointment of Barney’s political career, as we shall see a bit later.

If you read the Call for these years, you meet Shiplacoff in almost every issue.  Naturally, his doings in the Assembly were fully reported by the Call, but he was also constantly on the stump, making speeches, raising money, and supporting the Party.  When the Brooklyn Labor Lyceum burned to the ground, he led the successful effort to raise money for a new building in Brownsville.  As his obituary indicates, Shiplacoff was active as well in a number of New York unions, serving as an officer of the United Hebrew Trades and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. 

In September 1918, Abe Shiplacoff and the communist newspaper reporter and author John Reed were indicted under the Espionage Act, Shiplacoff for having spoken out against the war effort.  The indictment was later quashed, and subsequently, Shiplacoff ran for Brooklyn Borough president [in 1919.]

Shiplacoff was a little man with a pinched face and a rather unimposing presence, very much in contrast with Barney, who was a big, barrel-chested man with a booming voice.  But more than any other single person, he can be credited with creating the socialist movement in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, and leading it to its greatest electoral triumphs in 1917.

Looking for background material on Shiplacoff, I stumbled on the following story in a review by John Patrick Diggins of Bertram Wolfe’s autobiography, A Life in Two Centuries.  Wolfe is a well-known expert on Soviet Russia and twentieth century communist movements.  I include it here because it seems to me to capture perfectly both the strengths and the weaknesses of the generation of socialist leaders to which Abe Shiplacoff and Barney belonged.

The young Bertram Wolfe apparently debated against Shiplacoff, at the Labor Lyceum, over the split in the party produced by the Third International [of which more later.] The issue was whether dictatorial tactics should replace the democratic procedures of the American Socialist Party. After the debate, Diggins says, “the two adversaries resumed their discussion in a local cafe.”  There then appears this passage quoted from Wolfe’s book:

“There was an embarrassed silence until Shiplacoff burst into tears.  ‘I have worked so hard all my life,’ he said, ‘for our party and for the labor movement, that I have never had the time to read all those books by Marx and Engels that you have read.’  Then he wept on in silence.  Suddenly, I felt sympathy for him, and more than a little shame, for I had not read ‘all those books’ either.  Moreover, for the first time I understood how much men like Shiplacoff had given to building the party that my colleagues and I, mostly youngsters, were now tearing apart.  I did not know what to say: we both left our cake and coffee unfinished, but I never forgot the episode.  I began to feel more charitable toward the old-timers whose work we were helping to destroy.  Though I continued to use quotations, I could no longer summon up the scorn with which I had read them to that Brownsville Labor Lyceum meeting.”

I can only comment that I have read ‘all those books,’ and in them you will not find an adequate justification for replacing democratic procedures with dictatorial tactics.  Shiplacoff, Barney, and the other ‘old-timers’ understood Marx and Engels quite as well as necessary to devote their lives to building a working-class movement.  Would that Bertram Wolfe had done as much!”