353

within the framework of the broad principles of "democratic socialism."

In this regard, it is interesting to again raise, as was done before in chapter 8,
the question of the plan Frank Trager and his circle advanced within the SP in early
1934. It will be recalled that the plan called for an multi-issue, interracial election
front lor the 1934 elections, built organizationally around the PUL and
programmaticaJly around socialist principles. It will also be recalled that older
Socialist leaders in Baltimore, including some like Elisabeth Oilman who were
usually allies of the younger Socialists, rejected the plan. Given what actually
happened in the Socialist Party campaign of the 1934, its promises and its failures,
it does not seem entirely out of line to speculate that had the multi-issue front been
built for this election, the convergence of the militant white Socialists and the Black
youth of the Forum might have found a higher organizational form and gone much
further.

Speculative and counter-factual arguments aside, however, it is important to
keep the 1934 Socialist campaign in perspective. While this campaign may not have
lived up its implicit potential of strengthening the Forum-Socialist convergence, it
was not disaster in this regard either. Common work against lynching continued, as
did involvement of individuals from one grouping in the other grouping's programs
and practices. During 1935, Frank Trager and Edward Lewis addressed a Forum
Friday night meeting on the unemployment crisis, Trager became a sponsor of the
Forum, and the Forum maintained its formal liaison with the PUL. Also during
that year, Elisabeth Oilman received the Socialist Party nomination for mayor of
Baltimore, and put forward a program, prominently featured in the Afro, ihat
included many of the demands for racial justice that Broadus Mitchell advanced in
1934.14

But times were changing, and the underpinnings of the interracial
convergence of 1933-34 were eroding. This erosion is symbolized by the fact that