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recalled Joel Seidman, Naomi Riches, and Elinor Pancoast of the economics
department of Goucher College traveling with her and other ACW organizers to
Westminster, Maryland, to leaflet workers on their rights under the NRA. She also
recalled that Broadus Mitchell, Elinor Pancoast, and other professors from
Hopkins and Goucher were her teachers at union-sponsored classes. (Speaking of
Mitchell in particular, Barren remembered, "We paid him a quarter a week for
class; the union did not have any money.") This cross-fertilization between the
PUL and the industrial unions continued through the end of the thirties, as leading
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PUL activists such as James Blackwell became important CIO organizers.
A handful of figures associated with white working-class Socialism became
close allies of the younger Socialists in the process of building PUL. The most
important was Dr. S.N. Neistadt, a dentist and probably the best known Jewish
Socialist in Baltimore. Neistadt had been involved in the party for years, was a
frequent SP candidate for public office, a leader in Der Arbeiterring or the
Workmen's Circle, a supporter of the ACW, and a teacher of ACW-sponsored
classes. Frank Trager later singled Neistadt out as one of the older Socialists
closest to the young militants. He was a part of the Socialist core of PUL* and a
member of that organization's executive committee. ^
It is important to again stress that, however important the Socialist Party's
network of contacts was, its overall influence, including that in white working
communities, was modest. If this were otherwise, the Socialist Party vote in
elections, even taking into account the ineligibility of some immigrant workers,
would have been much higher. Even in the Eastern European Jewish community,
the influence of the party and of socialist ideology in the strong sense, was limited:
by the mid-thirties, in the words of Sigmund Diamond who grew up in that
community in a garment worker family with a Labor Zionist father, "the politics in
the Jewish community was overwhelmingly New Deal." Diamond also recounted an
incident that stuck in his mind and that may be symbolic of the Socialist Party's
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