Here we are, more than a year from the presidential election and already national politics is taking center stage for political news junkies like me.
Surprises abound. The blustering narcissist Donald Trump is leading among 15 national Republican hopefuls. Inheriting millions from his father, he made millions more as an entrepreneur, suffering bankruptcies along the way. The laid-back Dr. Ben Carson, world-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, is second. He grew up in a Detroit ghetto and was helped by a tenacious mother, his religious beliefs, caring teachers and perseverance. Fiery Carly Fiorina, a former top executive of a Fortune 500 company, is catching up.
Surprisingly, not one of these three candidates is a Washington insider. None have experience in the government. All are outliers.
Another surprise. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, supreme Washington insider, once billed as the inevitable Democratic presidential choice, is fading. Her e-mail servers have not served her well.
The biggest surprise for me is Sen. Bernie Sanders, an outlier and an avowed Socialist running as a Democrat. I thought socialism as a serious political movement in the United States died decades ago. The last Socialist Party candidate to mount a respectable run for the U.S. presidency was Eugene V. Debs in 1912. He garnered almost a million votes that year, running against three other serious contenders, President Howard Taft, former President Theodore Roosevelt and New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson. Mr. Wilson was the victor.
American socialism emerged during the Progressive Era that captured the imagination of American thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson called themselves progressives. Sen. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin was another famous progressive of the time. The American Socialist Party (APA) was born in 1901.
Have Ukrainian Americans ever been seduced by the siren song of socialism? Oh, yeah. Big time.
Our early development as a community was definitely offbeat. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia shunned Father Ivan Wolansky, a Greek-Catholic priest who founded our first parish in Shenandoah, Pa., in 1884. Other Roman Catholic priests in the diocese soon followed suit. Father Wolansky, moreover, was the only Catholic priest in America to join the Knights of Labor, a left-leaning union of laborers.
The Greek-Catholic priests of the “American Circle” who helped establish what is today the Ukrainian National Association (UNA) were enamored of the nationalist and social reform ideals of Ivan Franko’s Radical Party. When Bishop Soter Ortynsky sought to take over the UNA in 1910, they balked. One of them, Father Ivan Ardan, bolted the UNA and became the first president of the Ukrainian Workingman’s Association (UWA) in 1911.
In 1900, Svoboda urged its readers to reject the political platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties and to vote for Socialists who, the UNA organ argued, were the only people truly interested in the workingman. The first political parties to emerge in the Ukrainian American community were socialist locals; they came together in 1915 to establish the Ukrainian Federation of Socialist Parties of America (UFSPA), which grew to 46 branches by 1917; it was quickly welcomed into SPA ranks, becoming one of 14 ethnic affiliates. Unlike the Democrats and Republicans of the time, the SPA leadership was interested in Ukrainian aspirations.
An UFSPA split soon developed between the social patriots, whose first priority was national reform in Ukraine, and the internationalists (Bolsheviks), who preached class warfare and world revolution.
The Bolshevik coup d’état in Russia fractured the SPA. “For the harassed Left in United States,” wrote one historian, “Bolshevism was a cool rain after a long dry spell… there was hardly a radical meeting, whether Socialist, anarchist, or IWW [Industrial Workers of the World], where the mere mention of Soviet Russia did not bring deafening applause.” By the spring of 1919, the Bolsheviks were the party for a number of American Socialist party branches, as well as for seven of the semi-autonomous ethnic federations. In 1919, some 128 SPA delegates gathered at Chicago’s Smolny Hall and gave birth to the Communist Party of America (CPA). At the moment of its inception, the CPA had 26,680 members. With 7,000 and 4,000 members respectively, Russians and Ukrainians accounted for some 40 percent of the membership. The UFSPA was now renamed the Ukrainian Federation of Communist Parties of America (UFCPA).
Anti-Communist Ukrainian socialists within the SPA, meanwhile, established Oborona Ukrainy (Defense of Ukraine) in 1922 and began publishing Ukrainska Hromada a year later. With the election of Myroslav Sichynsky to the presidency of the UWA in 1933, Ukrainian socialists finally had a power base. For the next eight years, the center of Ukrainian socialist vigor was located in Scranton, headquarters city of the UWA.
Despite growing disdain among Americans for the revolutionary dictates of Lenin’s party platform, Ukrainian American Communists survived. The first Ukrainian American daily newspaper, Ukrainski Shchodenni Visti (Ukrainian Daily News), published by the Communists, made its debut in 1921.
Communists in the United States struggled during the 1920s due to American distrust of the Bolsheviks. Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover refused to recognize the Soviet Union as a legitimate government. This changed with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who happily recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 – during the height of the Holodomor. The fortunes of Ukrainian American Communists improved considerably during the 1930s and early 1940s, especially after the Soviets opened their Embassy in Washington and provided technical and financial assistance to Ukrainian American Communists.
Will any of the current American political become the nominees of their party? It’s possible. Frustration with both American political parties was palpable in 1900. Lewis L. Gould, author of “Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics,” wrote: “Political parties no longer seemed the embodiment of democracy” but rather, “a means for unscrupulous leaders to frustrate the democratic will.” Sound familiar?
At this point it is at least conceivable that Messrs. Trump and Sanders could face each other in the 2016 presidential election. Now that would be a surprise of surprises for Ukrainian Americans.