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Furthermore the Socialists were not as highly disciplined as were, for
example, the Communists. Actually, it is difficult to detect any really centralized
chain of command in the Maryland SP at all. The lack of unity of direction and
purpose among Maryland Socialists can illustrated by the way they, as an
organization, worked with the PUL. Despite the reality that Socialists were the
main organizers of PUL, and that the Socialist Party gave material support to the
PUL including small cash donations and constant coverage in the party-linked
newspaper, the Maryland Leader, the SP as a whole in no sense threw itself into
building the PUL. In March of 1934 (when PUL had organized about 15,000
unemployed), Frank Trager wrote to national Socialist Party leader Norman
Thomas to complain that only 20 or so of the SP's 375 members were active in
PUL. Most members, he remarked, were "indifferent or critical, if not hostile." In
fact, if there was a split between young and old in the SP of Maryland in this period,
it was expressed by this indifference and silent hostility among the more passive
majority of the party, not in factionalism between younger and older activists.
Nevertheless, the uneven collection of forces that were grouped into the
Socialist Party of Maryland did have a network of contacts and a web of influence
that was crucial to the construction of the PUL. This network extended into three
general areas of Baltimore's social structure: into sections of the multi-ethnic white
working class and the organized trade-union movement; into the assortment of
white middle- and upper- class elements that were heir to the reformist side of the
Progressive Movement; into the leadership and intellectual levels of the African
American community and the Black freedom movement. Leading Baltimore
Socialists, with deep contacts in each of these areas, fused with the younger
militants to provide the organizing core that created the PUL.
The Socialist Party's connection to the white sections of the Baltimore
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