New York State Assembly Expels Socialists
One hundred years ago today … the Socialist Party of the County of New York considered its options. Chairman Julius Gerber gathered the leadership at their headquarters at 7 East 15th St. (The building still stands, hosting the Soka Gakkai Buddhist Center. Before the Socialist Party moved in, it had housed the Young Women’s Christian Association)
The day before, five duly elected members of the New York State Assembly had arrived in Albany to take their seats, only to have the rest of the Assembly vote them out. Majority leader Simon A Adler proposed the vote, which passed 140 to 6.
The expelled members, as reported in The New York Times: “Samuel A. DeWitt and Samuel Orr, representing the third and Fourth Assembly districts of the Bronx, Charles Solomon, representing the Brownsville district in Brooklyn, and Louis Waldman and August Claessens, representing the Eighth and Seventeenth Assembly Districts in Manhattan” (Barred Members Arraigned,” NYT January 8, 1920, p. 1). For Solomon, one of the fallouts was that a week later, a conference that he was supposed to a take part in at P.S. 147 in Brooklyn (Bushwick Avenue and McKibben Street) was cancelled due to students protesting his presence (“Pupils’ Protest Prevents Speech by Charles Solomon,” NYT January 16, 1920, p. 3). The topic was to be education policy.