Sometime in 1979 when I was 23, living in Columbia, Mo., and teaching peace studies at the University of Missouri, a young man knocked on my front door and introduced himself as Dave Rathke. He said he was from St. Louis and worked as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. He had gotten my address from the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), an offshoot of the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs, to which we both belonged.

Rathke had come by to introduce me to In These Times. I subscribed and was soon hooked on what the masthead described as “the independent socialist newspaper.”

That year, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) decided to challenge President Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primary. Many DSOC elders were delighted—but I, along with the young members of my local DSOC chapter, considered Kennedy too middle of the road. With the help of friends from the local NOW chapter and the Central Missouri Labor Council, we commandeered the Boone County Democratic caucuses, shutting out Kennedy supporters and sending dissident “uncommitted” delegates to the 1980 state and national conventions. We were Berniecrats avant la lettre, and In These Times was the periodical we turned to as young people coming of age in the aftermath of the 1960s.

Historian James Weinstein (1926-2005) had founded the magazine four years earlier on the belief “that no political movement can be healthy unless it has its own press to inform it, educate it and orient it.” The previous decade had seen the promising rise of the New Left come to naught. “Part of the reason the New Left disintegrated,” he would later write, “was that it had no intellectual center and no popular publication to disseminate its ideas and let people know what it was doing and why.”

James Weinstein, a historian of the American Left and the founder of In These Times, on Chicago’s Milwaukee Avenue in 1976

In the summer of 1976, animated by a desire to help build a healthy progressive movement with an “intellectual center,” Weinstein and other members of the original ITT staff packed up their homes on the West Coast and moved to Chicago, a city with three things going for it: a low cost of living, a storied labor history and a location that was not the Bay Area, New York or Washington, D.C.—places that were, respectively, too enthralled with the counterculture, too burdened by the baggage of left history and too deep inside the belly of the beast.

As a historian, Weinstein was interested in what could be learned from the experience of turn-of-the-century rabble-rousers like the Populists, Progressives and Socialists. These radical reformers (and their publications) were mobilized by the intolerable contradictions of the Gilded Age, an era in which an oligarchy luxuriated in ill-gotten riches while the majority endured a series of national economic crises. This was also the period in which the corporation came to dominate the American economy, and corporate entities were formally granted constitutional protections enjoyed by natural persons via the Supreme Court’s 1886 ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Through his research into the politics of this period, Weinstein came to appreciate the role the Socialist press played in confronting unbridled corporate power and informing social movements. He was particularly inspired by Appeal to Reason, a Socialist newspaper out of Girard, Kan., which hit a weekly circulation of 761,747 in 1913. The Appeal had published Upton Sinclair’s sensational novel The Jungle over the course of nine months in 1905. This exposé of the appalling working conditions and stomach-churning practices of Chicago’s meatpacking industry created a public uproar that led Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

A former member of the Communist Party (his FBI file runs in the hundreds of pages), Weinstein was also familiar with the Marxist Left—those fans of Trotsky, Lenin and Mao who from their clubhouses foment imminent revolution. He thought them to be undemocratic, both in how they operated and the goals to which they aspired. In ITT’s inaugural editorial, he promised a “break with both the sectarian legacy of the socialist Left and the timidity and incapacity of the social reform tradition.”

Weinstein embraced what he saw as “democratic, decentralist and pluralistic” political culture of the early Socialist Party, which was founded by Eugene V. Debs, a former Democratic Indiana state representative, among others.

The Socialist Party did not shy away from electoral politics. Debs would go on to be a five-time Socialist Party candidate for president, coming in fourth in the 1912 presidential election with 6 percent. He garnered 901,551 votes, one of which was cast by my grandfather, Walter F. Bleifuss, a farmer and physician in Olmsted County, Minn.

Despite the Socialist Party’s success in electing two members of Congress and a smattering of state and local officials, it never gained a toehold in the national political landscape. This had little to do with its policies and everything to do with the U.S. electoral system. It’s called a “system” for a reason. Over the years it has been constructed to favor the Democratic and Republican parties, two quasi-public institutions, granting them a lock on electoral power.

From this study of history, Weinstein understood that democratic socialist ideas would only enter the mainstream through candidates who ran as open socialists under the banner of the Democratic Party. Consequently, a founding tenet of ITT was its opposition to third-party electoral efforts­­­­—debilitating exercises that diverted progressive activists toward political dead ends.

From the beginning, we made it a priority to cover the campaigns of change-making candidates who challenged the Democratic Party establishment. And once they were elected to office, we reported on their efforts to institute structural reforms like single-payer healthcare, getting private money out of public elections and addressing income inequality through progressive taxation.

Though few of the elected public officials ITT championed openly embraced democratic socialism, all stood out as stalwart progressives.