[Marxism] When Proportional Representation got communists on NY City Council

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Communism, Race, and the Defeat of Proportional Representation
in Cold War America

New York City brought the most stunning victory. The city's Board of 
Aldermen had long been regarded as a particularly outrageous example of 
the problems of single-member districts. To counter Tammany's 
advantage, reformers looked to PR. At the least, PR would provide a 
vigorous minority in the city's legislature; but even more hopefully, 
PR might provide the means for Tammany's divided opposition to come 
together in a new reform majority, as reformers had in the 1920s in 
Cincinnati against the Republican machine there. In 1936 voters 
approved PR by a large margin.
. . .
In New York City, Tammany's effort to repeal PR in 1940 failed by more 
than 200,000 votes. In Yonkers in 1942, Republicans and Democrats alike 
attempted to red-bait the issue. Voters rebuffed their crude appeals by 
a 2 to 1 margin. Two years later, Hamilton, Ohio, voters rejected a 
fourth repeal attempt in that city. In 1945, Toledo did as well, by a 
substantial margin. During the war new gains were made, too. Lowell, 
Massachusetts, became the second city in that state to adopt PR, in 
1942, and the Long Island, New York, community of Long Beach did so the 
year after.

In New York, Tammany leaders tried to use Communist Peter Cacchione's 
1941 election from Brooklyn to discredit PR, but failed. Cacchione's 
new colleagues on the council defended his election. Two years later 
Cacchione led all candidates in Brooklyn, and was joined as a Communist 
on the council by Benjamin Davis (an African- American) from Manhattan. 
PR supporters continued to defend the voters' judgment. Hallett 
emphasized Davis's education at Amherst College and Harvard Law and his 
role as "spokesman for the special needs of the Negro community." He 
also pointed to Cacchione's creditable record in the Council. 
Significantly, over the course of three elections which brought 
Communists to office, efforts to repeal PR gathered little support.
. . .
In Massachusetts, attempts to repeal state authorization for the use of 
PR made little headway. In 1947, four more Massachusetts 
cities—Worcester, Quincy, Medford, and Revere—joined Cambridge and 
Lowell in adopting PR. . . . The campaign failed to excite anxieties 
about Communism; PR's margin among the voters increased significantly 
from the previous two repeal attempts.

In New York City in 1947 the result was very different. There, the 
Tammany campaign against PR finally succeeded. One issue stood out 
above all others—the election of Communists and other leftists. The 
five Democratic county leaders met and "decided unanimously to go all 
out for repeal"; in Queens the Democratic party distributed "thousands 
of cards" describing PR as "an un-American practice which has helped 
the cause of communism and does not belong to the American way of 
life." The director of Tammany's Manhattan repeal campaign directly 
linked PR to Soviet Communism: "There must be some reason why all 
Russian-dominated countries are so fond of the PR system of voting. 
There must be a reason why Molotov demanded its use in all German 
elections. It has saved the Communists of Western Europe from 
extinction and tends to do away with any government faintly resembling 
the two-party system.... This political importation from the Kremlin 
has had a ten- year trial and has failed miserably...." The linkage of 
PR to the Soviet threat stood at the center of an official resolution 
from the Tammany executive committee, as well:

    Whereas, the Communists of nine nations have revived the Comintern 
to fight the United States, and

    Whereas, the Proportional Representation method of election is the 
first beachhead of Communist infiltration in this country with two 
Communist members already in the City Council, ....

    Therefore be it resolved, that we, the Executive Committee of the 
Democratic organization of the County of New York, do hereby condemn 
the PR method of electing Councilmen as being a foreign importation 
designed to weaken the American structure of government, and

    Be it further resolved, that we will do all in our power to inform 
the electorate of New York County that in the interest of restoring the 
American system of majority rule and democratic government no effort 
will be spared to throw out this Stalin Frankenstein known as PR on 
Election Day, Nov. 4, 1947.
. . .
The problem which confronted PR proponents in Cold War America was more 
fundamental than the election of Communists; it was the more 
intractable division of American society by race and ethnicity. A 
subordinate issue in New York in 1947, it formed the primary lines of 
division in Cincinnati ten years later and in Worcester in 1960, both 
cities where the threat of radicalism was negligible. While PR 
proponents had always vigorously championed the utility of the 
representation of minority opinion, they were less enthusiastic about 
racial, ethnic, or religious group representation. They never denied 
the reality that voters made judgments on such grounds, and never 
denied their right to do so. But they were not interested in 
encouraging voting by racial preference, and went to some pains to 
demonstrate that under PR, such divisions played no greater a role that 
they did in districting. Many hoped that PR would obviate such voting 
behavior: after the first PR election in Lowell, Massachusetts, for 
example, an enthusiastic PR supporter happily reported that, "The 
voters ignored those old and odorous red herrings of race and religion, 
too, and proved that when given the chance they vote on the only real 
issue—fitness for office."

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/articles/kolesar.htm

from Brian Shannon


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