The Socialist Mayor of Schenectady
Long before Zohran Mamdani, Schenectady, New York, elected a socialist mayor who tried to make good on radical promises inside city hall. His short experiment still speaks to the challenges — and possibilities — of governing on the Left.
Photograph of George Lunn, 1915. (Library of Congress / George Grantham Bain Collection)
In April 1912, Walter Lippmann was feeling down. Four months earlier, he had taken what seemed to him like an exciting post-collegiate political gig: assistant to George Lunn, the newly elected Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, a city of about 75,000 people twenty miles northwest of Albany.
Lippmann’s hopes of witnessing a revolution from the ground up were soon dashed, as he found that his work entailed more paper pushing than Marxist theorizing. So Lippmann quit. In a letter he wrote to a Socialist Party colleague a year later, he reflected on his time in Schenectady. The problem, Lippmann argued, was that Lunn had been elected by a town of progressives who wanted him to pass progressive, not Socialist, policies. Concerned about his own political future, Lunn was happy to oblige.
Winning Too Soon?
On paper, George Lunn didn’t seem like much of a Socialist to begin with. Lunn was a Protestant minister who had moved to Schenectady in 1904 to work at the city’s First Reformed Church. Five years later, he had created his own congregation focused on workers’ rights — a group that, unsurprisingly, appealed to the area’s Socialists.
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