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relationship to the community. As a child in the early 1930s, he went to hear a
Socialist soap box speaker near his home:
I remember going to it because the speaker was a Dr. Sam Neistadt,
who was my family's dentist. I used to go to him, too. I couldn't have been
more than ten or eleven years old, if that. I remember, I was curious. My
father must have said something about Sam Neistadt is going to be talking,
and so I went. My recollection is that there couldn't have been more than
ten people there, if that many. It was pathetic. And I hung back a little bit
and listened to him. I remember just two things about it. He had a phrase, a
sentence or two, that he used over and over again so it became a virtual
litany. I've never forgotten it. Ten percent of Americr.'s people own ninety
percent of America's wealth; ninety percent of America's people own ten
percent of America's wealth." He repeated it over and over.
Then I remember also kind of eavesdropping on a conversation after
the meeting was over. He got down off the soapbox and went over to talk to
a considerably younger man whom I encountered later at Johns Hopkins.
He was a graduate student in the economics department at Hopkins years
later. But he must have been some kind of a Socialist Party functionary.
And he had organized the meeting. I remember Dr. Neistadt being a bit
depressed and saying something about, well, he didn't do very well, there
were not very many people. And this other fellow trying to let Neistadt
down a little more easily. "It's not vour fault, Dr. Neistadt, we picked a bad
corner. We picked a bad corner."33
They had picked a bad corner, with few residences and little foot traffic. And there
were plenty of Socialist soap box speeches with larger crowds. But the truth was
that Socialists were of these working-class communities, but in no sense leaders of
them. Nevertheless, being of the communities and their institutions provide the
entryways the PUL organizers needed.
A second area of Socialist Party influence in Baltimore, one also effectively
utilized by PUL organizers, was among the middle-class professionals and the few
upper-class philanthropists who were heirs to the social reformist wing of the
Progressive Movement. The Progressive Movement was, during its heyday in the
first two decades of the twentieth century, a complex and contradictory
phenomenon. This movement was comprised of two basic currents. One current
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