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Baltimore Socialism. At the center of this group were, in addition to Frank Trager,
Joel Seidman, who was a young faculty member at Johns Hopkins, Naomi Riches, a
professor of history at Goucher College, and Mrs. Kenneth Bauty, a school teacher
in Baltimore.   All four, like their immediate associates, were young white
professionals and intellectuals; all four were members of both the Socialist Party
and the League for Industrial Democracy, an independent, SP-initiated
organization that tended to attract college students, professionals, and white collar
workers; and all four became pan of the PUL leadership. Another key figure close
to this group, although at 40 years of age somewhat older and far more experienced
in Baltimore social movements, was Broadus Mitchell, Associate Professor of
Political Economy at Johns Hopkins. Mitchell, too, was involved in LID (he had
been on the lecture circuit for this organization), and, while he never held a formal
leadership position in the PUL, he worked tirelessly on its behalf. In 1932, these
young militants and their circle of compatriots decided it was necessary for
Socialism in Baltimore to strike out in a new direction.1-*

The younger Socialists of Baltimore were not an anomaly. A current of
youthful militancy — if not rebellion - was sweeping through the Socialist Party of
the United States in the early 1930s. In 1928, the Socialist Party had declined from
its 1919 high of 100,000 members to a minuscule 8,000 members and was virtually
moribund. But in the wake of Norman Thomas* 1928 presidential campaign and
then of the Great Crash, the SP began to attract a new constituency with many of
the new members arriving by way of the LID. The newer, younger members were
often more oriented toward mass activism than were the older members, who, in
historian Roy Rosenzweig's words, often held on to their "Fabian faith in the
"inevitability of gradualism."1 Additionally, the newer members were more often
outside the established labor movement than the older members were and tended
to gravitate toward the issue of unemployment.

The SP leadership was, however, of little help to members interested in