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young white Socialists were highly motivated and moved by a sense of morality and
ideals; Frank Trager's statement that PUL work was "our duty, so to speak, this was
our social duty to do something about a very calamitous national situation," could
easily have been made by Juanita Jackson Mitchell about organizing the Forum.19
Also like their Forum counterparts, the younger Socialists had valuable
organizing skills and knowledge to offer, and enormous energy with which to apply
these. Additionally, both the Forum activists and the PUL organizers were aroused
by the mass practice of Baltimore Communists, but rejected the Communist Party
as a means for organizing. Trager later recalled that PUL organizers were
motivated by a desire to confront "the challenge of the Communist Party's
Unemployment Councils." But unlike the Forum organizers, who were organically
tied to the broader African American community including the African American
section of the working class, the young Socialists were organically connected to very
little and especially not to the working class. The alliance of the younger Socialists
with the key older Socialists, and the ability of this alliance to utilize the matrix of
connections that the Socialist Party had with several communities in Baltimore,
allowed the younger PUL organizers to compensate for their own lack of organic
20
connection.
As important as the Socialist Party's network of connections was to the PUL,
it is important to put this organization and its influence in proper perspective. The
SP was not in any sense a major social force in Baltimore and Maryland. Its
gubernatorial candidates in the 1926 and 1930 elections only received 2,495 and
4,178 votes respectively, totals significantly larger than those of the Communists,
but nonetheless representing only a tiny fraction of the electorate. Its May Day
celebrations in 1931 and 1934, by press accounts, drew between 200 and 300
persons on each occasion, only slightly larger than the simultaneous Communist
Party events. The SP only had six "struggling" ward clubs in Baltimore in 1934 and
only 375 members in all of Maryland at that time.21
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