In 1930s NYC, Proportional Representation Boosted the Left
In New York City, a disgraced mayor and a discredited Democratic Party are creating potential openings for socialists. NYC history suggests that the Left might profitably revive proportional representation as a tool to build its electoral strength.
On September 25, the mayor of New York was indicted on criminal charges for the first time in the modern era. The charges marked the culmination of only one of four ongoing federal investigations into an administration drowning in FBI raids, subpoenas, and resignations.
This cartoonish corruption, in addition to alleged shakedown operations, has revived the memory of Tammany Hall, the corrupt Democratic Party club and patronage machine of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York. William M. “Boss” Tweed, the man most associated with Tammany, was eventually imprisoned for his corruption. The mayor is trying to avoid this fate by groveling his way to a pardon from Donald Trump, going so far as to shamelessly cancel Martin Luther King Jr Day plans to attend the inauguration. But the damage to Adams’s political career could already be permanent.
With politicians across the city smelling blood, Adams now faces a competitive primary in 2025, with a widening field that includes socialist assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is running on an ambitious platform that boasts a rent freeze, free buses, no-cost childcare, and city-owned grocery stores. The cost-of-living-focused campaign aims to harness the frustration of the city’s working class — and in particular Muslim and Arab American New Yorkers, who have grown disaffected with a Democratic Party and a mayor that have been championing the interests of capital over those of working people and cheerleading Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In this legitimacy crisis for Adams and Democrats nationally, Mamdani and the democratic socialist movement in New York can draw lessons from the Old Left’s fight against corrupt Tammany Democrats like Tweed. The Left helped break the power of Tammany and establish a foothold in New York City government in the mid–twentieth century thanks, in large part, to the adoption of a proportional representation electoral system — a project that is worth taking up again today.
Socialists’ First Breakthrough
Left-wing electoral challenges came and went throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but all fell short in the face of Tammany Hall’s dominance and the United States’ antidemocratic two-party system. A breakthrough came in 1917, when, in the immediate aftermath of US entry into World War I, Socialist Party (SP) leader Morris Hillquit ran a dramatic and energizing antiwar campaign for New York City mayor. Though Hillquit came up short, his campaign helped elect a wave of socialists to state and municipal office.
Coming into office in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s October Revolution, these elected officials faced the full force of the First Red Scare. Some socialist legislators were expelled from their seats, but just as effective was electoral coordination between New York Republicans and Democrats, who combined forces to field fusion ticket candidates against the Socialists. This, along with a Tammany-crafted redistricting plan that diluted socialist strongholds — and the SP’s debilitating split in 1919 — left the electoral project in ruins by 1921.
This failure made clear that the fight for electoral reform would be crucial to sustaining power against the two-party system. One reform that proved key in the fight against Tammany was proportional representation (PR). PR is an electoral system that allows for multiple winners per district, where parties are awarded seats based on their proportion of the vote. This more easily allows third parties to achieve representation and mitigates the threat of gerrymandering. PR contrasts with the United States’ single-member, winner-take-all system, which creates a “spoiler effect” that predisposes us to the widely hated two-party duopoly. For these reasons, socialists have long advocated for PR. It was listed as the first demand in the German Social Democratic Party’s Erfurt Program in 1891, and today proportional representation is the world’s most popular electoral system.
In the 1920s and early ’30s, a movement experiment with PR grew in New York. When proportional representation was adopted in municipal elections in 1937, it facilitated rapid electoral success for the Left, including the election of two Communists, before McCarthyism and a racist backlash killed the system in its infancy. But with Eric Adams reverting to Tammany-style schemes and a contemporary socialist electoral movement still on the march, it’s a good time to renew the fight for PR.
In fact, it has already been experiencing a small revival across the country. PR is now used in eight US cities, five of which have adopted it within the last decade. New York’s recent adoption of ranked-choice voting (RCV) already moves the city halfway to PR, and a push for its restoration would expand democracy and give the Left more room to establish itself as an electoral force.
The Downfall of Our First Nightlife Mayor and the Rise of PR
Long before Eric Adams, New York City had another swaggering, nightlife-loving mayor. In 1926, Jimmy Walker, a Tammany man, was elected mayor and quickly got to work partying the night away. Walker embodied the excesses of New York’s Jazz Age, and while his distaste for work would certainly have rubbed the grindset-minded Eric Adams the wrong way, the two may well have bonded over their shared interests in defending loyal flunkies and taking in unexplained sums of money.
Walker’s corruption, which was revealed during the early turbulent years of the Great Depression, outraged the public and delegitimized the Democratic Party. The mayor’s decline began with an investigation into an NYPD extortion ring that had framed young women for prostitution charges. The story dominated tabloid headlines of the day, leading to further investigations of municipal graft, which eventually reached Walker himself. Among other crimes, the mayor was given a $10,000 line of credit to gallivant around Europe after he granted a citywide bus franchise to a shadowy company. When Walker was forced to resign in late 1932, reformers quickly seized the opportunity to propose a raft of municipal reforms, chief among them proportional representation.
In the wake of Walker’s scandal, Fiorello La Guardia won the 1933 mayoral election, giving the pro–New Deal, socialist-friendly Republican a mandate to take on Tammany. Even though PR would have benefited the underrepresented city GOP at the time, many upstate Republicans allied with Democrats against the reform. As the Communist Party’s campaign expert would later recall, the Republicans “didn’t mind losing an occasional seat as long as the old two-party spoils system kept functioning smoothly . . . and both got paid off in the last analysis by the economic overlords.”
Despite the opposition, La Guardia was able to secure a voter referendum in 1936, which would replace the Board of Aldermen’s sixty-five gerrymandered districts with a City Council that held borough-wide elections with ranked-choice voting and proportional representation. The proposal quickly found admirers on the Left, who recognized the chance it offered socialists to challenge the two-party system and regain representation after the fleeting success of the Socialist Party in the late 1910s.
This reform push for PR linked up with a growing industrial union movement interested in political action. As La Guardia was fighting in Albany, New York’s labor movement was gearing up for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first reelection campaign. The leading force behind 1930s industrial unionism, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), campaigned for FDR nationally under the Labor’s Non-Partisan League. And in New York, CIO leaders joined with Socialists to form the state-level American Labor Party (ALP).
New York’s fusion voting laws allowed the ALP to campaign for Roosevelt on its own ballot line while also canvassing for PR. The coalition paid off. Roosevelt won by the greatest margin of his four runs, and the PR referendum passed easily with 62.4 percent of the vote. The ALP would get the chance to test its real strength the following year.
PR in Practice
New York’s first City Council election illustrates the potential promise of PR for the Left. While Democrats still won the most seats, their strength was cut nearly in half, falling from 95 percent control of the Board of Aldermen to only 50 percent in the new twenty-six-seat City Council. Tammany was shocked.
Even more surprising was the success of the ALP, which displaced the Republicans as the body’s largest minority party. Under the new system, candidates who received 75,000 votes automatically earned a seat, and any votes over that threshold would be transferred to each voter’s next ranked choice. Of the eight people who received 75,000 votes in 1937, five were ALP candidates.
In his book on New York’s experiment with PR, historian Daniel Prosterman notes that these ALP elected officials were actual labor leaders. Salvatore Ninfo had been an organizer with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) going back to the days of the Uprising of the 20,000 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. Mike Quill entered office while still president of the powerful Transport Workers Union. Louis Hollander was a cofounder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), an original member union of the CIO, and Andrew Armstrong was from the Printing Pressmen’s Union. Baruch Charney Vladeck, manager of the Jewish Daily Forward, was the only one of the five with prior experience as an elected government official. He had been one of the Socialists elected to the Board of Alderman in 1917 and was now returning to office as the City Council’s new minority leader two decades later.
Proportional representation also helped the Communist Party (CP). Though the CP did not win a seat in that first election, Communist candidate Pete Cacchione missed out on a Brooklyn city council seat by only 367 votes. He was well positioned to gain a seat in the 1939 election, but Communist hopes for success were derailed by the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August of that year. The pact produced a backlash both within the Left and more broadly, resulting in a “little Red Scare” that, among other things, saw the entire CP slate struck from the ballot under dubious legal circumstances.
But in 1941, with the Soviet Union now at war with the Nazis, Pete finally won. This victory was one of the most high-profile events in the history of American communism, and it was seriously aided by PR.
New York’s experiment with proportional representation also showed the system’s superiority in helping elect black representatives. In 1941, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr won a council seat in Manhattan on the ALP line. Powell became the city’s first black councilmember and quickly set his sights on higher office. He won his Harlem congressional seat (though as a Democrat) in 1945, but not before campaigning for Ben Davis Jr to replace him on the City Council. In an era when it was hard to be black or a red, Davis was both, and with the help of PR and his Harlem base, he narrowly won a Manhattan council seat in 1943.
Davis’s PR-assisted victory left Tammany and the city’s assorted reactionaries apoplectic. They would get an opportunity to target Davis, the CP, and the PR system as a whole a few years later.
Black and Red Scares and the Repeal of PR
A rising reactionary tide against a fractured left killed New York’s experiment with proportional representation. In 1944, the ALP suffered a devastating split, with an anti-communist wing, headed by ILGWU leader David Dubinsky, leaving to form the Liberal Party. The Liberals competed in the 1945 PR elections and, while they won two seats, were unsuccessful in their aim of unseating Ben Davis.
As this sectarian infighting continued, the end of World War II birthed a national shift toward reaction. The year 1947 would prove to be a defining one. Republicans, newly empowered in the House and Senate, passed the Taft-Hartley Act, gutting the National Labor Relations Act. In New York, Communist union leaders were arrested, and the state passed the Condon-Wadlin Act (predecessor to the infamous Taylor Law), barring public sector strikes.
With FDR dead and the charismatic Mayor La Guardia retiring, no prominent figure remained to defend the city’s burgeoning multiparty social democracy. Tammany and longtime PR opponents like Robert Moses were joined by the city’s Republicans and the mainstream press. After two failed repeal campaigns, the anti-PR coalition rallied for a third attempt in 1947, an off-year election without mayoral or council races. Communists, socialists, and CIO unionists put up a spirited defense of PR, but it was not enough. The city voted to repeal PR 935,222 to 586,170. The repeal’s first casualty was the council seat of Pete Cacchione, who died of a heart attack two days after the vote; Democrats refused to seat a Communist replacement, outraging even liberal anti-communists.
Emboldened by this coup, Democrats quickly set their sights on ousting Ben Davis. Davis was indicted under Red Scare legislation in 1948, along with eleven other Communist leaders. The witch hunt took priceless time away from his 1949 reelection campaign, and with proportional representation overturned, Davis faced the same fate as the Socialist Party elected officials of the generation prior. The Democrats, Republicans, and Liberals joined forces to field a fusion candidate, defeating Davis in a newly drawn Harlem district. Then, with a month still remaining in his term, Davis was expelled from the council and sentenced to five years in prison. The ALP shuffled along for a few more years but, without the help of PR, dissolved in 1956.
New York’s left was weakened for a generation. Ironically, Tammany also lost its grip on power in the intervening years, but no democratic electoral reforms came as a result. Reformers had made their peace with Democrats and liberal Republicans, and although the Liberal Party survived for a few more decades with its working-class base of ILGWU members, party leaders pursued a strategy aimed primarily at winning concessions from the two parties, relying on New York’s fusion voting laws and consistently ignoring rank-and-file calls to run their own candidates.
Without a robust political democracy or a strong electoral left, elites could relatively easily curtail the city’s social democracy during the 1970s fiscal crisis. The crisis shifted New York State’s balance of power out of the city and away from the working class for decades, but the post-2016 return of a leftist electoral opposition may be reopening possibilities.
PR’s Prospects Today
With Mayor Adams under indictment and the outrageous criminality of his administration on view for all, the need for an alternative is clear. Beyond New York City, Democrats are operating a historically unpopular and underperforming state-level party and continuing to shed working-class support nationally — setting the stage for Trump’s return to the White House.
In the 1930s and ’40s, left-wingers faced a somewhat similar predicament. Dissatisfied with the rightward trajectory of the New Deal coalition, many leftists hoped New York’s ALP would go on to form a constituent part of a national labor party, amalgamating with other state-level formations like Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) and Wisconsin’s Progressive Party. Such a national party did come into being in 1948, but it was hollow and doomed from the start. Formed in 1948 as a vehicle for Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign, the Progressive Party emerged after most independent parties had already capitulated to their respective state machines. In 1944, the FLP merged with the Minnesota Democratic Party, and two years later, the Wisconsin Progressive Party, which had been a powerful force in ’30s politics, dissolved.
The push for a national third party might have found success a decade or so before, when labor and the Left were operating from a position of strength. Instead, the Progressive Party attempted to intervene from a position of desperation and weakness, with the Communist Party on the back foot in the face of the emerging Red Scare. The failed experiment made clear the necessity of strong left and labor organization, and today’s Left would do well to rebuild municipal and state-level organizations, not least because that is where electoral reforms like PR are most achievable.
Proportional representation is already helping to create such organization. Following a successful ballot measure in 2022, Portland, Oregon, held its first proportional representation City Council election this year. It was a big success for the Left, with Portland Democratic Socialists of America capitalizing on the moment with two winning socialist campaigns. Without PR, organizers believe, they would have been able to win one of the campaigns at most. Like many municipal elections across the country, the Portland City Council race was nonpartisan, allowing the candidates to run as open socialists, unburdened by the Democratic Party label. The use of nonpartisan elections has worked for the Left for years in California, where the Richmond Progressive Alliance has built a working-class electoral machine independent of the Democrats.
New York’s left can look to these examples for inspiration and work to harness dissatisfaction with Adams into the energy needed to restore proportional representation. While PR is far from a panacea, its revival in New York and continued adoption across the country are important fights for those of us looking to build a political alternative.