'Government by misrepresentation': Repression, civil liberties, and political change in the New York State Assembly in 1920.

Abstract

In 1920, the New York State Assembly suspended and later expelled its five-member Socialist delegation. Historians have credited the expulsion with generating public outrage at the post-World War I red scare and thus hastening the red scare's conclusion. Such historians frequently view the state as a neutral unit of response to public pressure. Recent scholarship has suggested that the state may be more productively viewed as a composite of groups and individuals interested in protecting their own jobs and expanding their power. This dissertation brings this new perspective on the state to bear upon the expulsion of the New York Socialists and subsequent interpretations of the event. In commenting upon the incident, Zechariah Chafee, Jr.--a civil libertarian and Professor of Law at Harvard University--claimed that "the New York State Assembly ... has repudiated government by representation and substituted government by misrepresentation." The Socialists were misrepresented by the conservative upstate Republicans who equated the Socialist program of social welfare legislation with Soviet-style bolshevism. Yet, the Socialists were also misrepresented by liberals, like Chafee, who defended them. These liberals fought for procedural protection for radicals, while denying the political significance of radicalism. Many liberal misrepresentations have been repeated uncritically by historians. In examining these concentric circles of misrepresentation, this dissertation links the rise of anti-communism, the defeat of electoral socialism, the construction of the social welfare state, and the consolidation of the Democratic Party's grip on urban ethnic voters. This one incident offers a fresh vantage point from which to view the construction of the liberal dominance that would later characterize the New Deal.