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Through her activities in which she absorbed her friends, she took me away from
my academic work. It was a kind of yeast in what might have become an academic
lump." Interestingly, while both had been deeply involved in Socialist circles for
years, Mitchell like Oilman only formally joined the party only in the late twenties
(although, the Sun claimed, he had "voted the Socialist ticket ever since casting his
first ballot"). The fact that the party's two best know leaders were, organizationally
speaking, recent recruits, undoubtedly undercut the potential for a clash between
the old guard and the young militants. Both Oilman and Mitchell were very close
to the younger militants, Mitchell (as pointed out above) especially so. While
neither was ever a formal leader of the PUL, both were extremely active building
the league and in marshaling social liberal support. Oilman and Mitchell, along
with Neistadt, Mead, and a few other older Socialists, formed the older half of the
organizing core of the PUL.
PUL bore evidence of the support of the social liberals from its inception.
The keynote speaker at the mass meeting to kick off PUL's original organizing
campaign was Paul T. Beisser, president of the Maryland Conference of Social
Work. The meeting itself was held in Christian Temple of the leading religious
reformer Rev. Peter Ainslie, who was joined by fellow clergyman Rev. R. W.
Sanderson in endorsing the PUL program. The chairman of the organizing
committee and future chairman of PUL throughout its existence was retired the
Reverend Clarence W. Whitmore, a retired Episcopal minister (who was not, by
the way, a Socialist). Three Johns Hopkins professors (including Broadus Mitchell)
were on the list of 13 endorsers, as was Judge Thomas J.S. Waxter, a well-known
liberal jurist. Also on this list were two representatives of the German Jewish
community: Reform Rabbi Edward L. Israel, the most prominent liberal rabbi in
Baltimore, and pharmaceutical manufacturer and philanthropist Sidney Hollander.
Hollander, who was also involved in social welfare organizations, in the Urban
League, and in the Jewish charities, became one of the main financial backers of
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