By Ian Noah Gavigan and Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan

Pennsylvania voters in four state house districts have nominated self-identified democratic socialists to represent them in Harrisburg.

All four are women--Elizabeth Fiedler from Philadelphia, Kristin Seale of Delaware County, and Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato, both of Allegheny County.

And though they ran as Democrats in Pennsylvania's closed primaries, these nominees are reigniting a long-dormant Pennsylvania tradition of egalitarian, self-consciously socialist politics. In the first half of the twentieth-century, Pennsylvania's socialists built a vibrant movement.

They were most successful in Reading, an industrial city whose voters first sent a socialist to the state house in 1910. Reading twice reelected labor leader James Maurer, who was made famous by his anti-police violence activism.

But state repression and organizational splits after World War I beat back the movement; in the 1920s, Pennsylvania socialists mostly drifted off the political scene.

During the Great Depression, however, the Socialist movement re-emerged as a potent political force in the state. Energized by widespread unemployment and impoverishment, they came out swinging with platforms of social ownership over productive industries and universal public services.

By May 1932, the Socialist Party had over one hundred chapters across Pennsylvania, from the big cities to the small coal towns. Reading again proved itself to be a Socialist Party stronghold. There, the Depression-era labor movement exercised genuine political power through the party.

City residents voted Socialist leader J. Henry Stump mayor three times--in 1927, 1935, and 1943. In 1930, the same working-class voters sent Lilith Martin Wilson, one of only a handful of women elected to the body, and Darlington Hoopes to Harrisburg.

Wilson had already pursued state politics; she was the first woman to be nominated for governor in Pennsylvania history, running in 1922 and garnering over 20,000 votes, and also ran for state treasurer in 1928.

In a time of men-dominated politics, women played an outsize role in the movement to turn the state red.

Following the 1920 passage of the nineteenth amendment, and the establishment of women's suffrage, Pennsylvania women immediately entered the state electoral fray.

The first women to be elected to serve in the Pennsylvania House took office in January of 1923. By the end of the decade, Socialist women saw an opportunity: between 1928 and 1934, forty-one women ran for state representative as Socialists.

In those elections, 54,117 voters cast ballots for Socialist women. In Allegheny County alone, ten women ran as Socialists for the state house; in Philadelphia, the number was fourteen.

Amidst the Great Depression, state lawmakers hotly debated how to care for the vast throngs of dispossessed across the commonwealth. Wilson and Hoopes made names for themselves in these contests by standing up for the common people.

Despite constituting a caucus of two, Hoopes and Wilson covered ample ground in their efforts to fight for their constituents.

Their work drew support from the old parties on a number of issues; Wilson led the fight to expand workers' protections. Hoopes, whom Harrisburg reporters at one point described as the "ablest" member of the house, led a 1933 legislative revolt, pushing through powerful child labor restrictions against the protests of major party leaders in the House.

Wilson, backed by the union movement, introduced an early bill to establish state health insurance and lay the groundwork for universal medicine. She led the fight to expand mid-sized cities' power to provide public services to residents and even proposed the creation of state-run stores to guarantee that all people had access to their basic needs.

With Pennsylvanians facing deepening poverty and entrenched inequality across the state, Summer Lee, Sara Innamorato, Elizabeth Fiedler, and Kristin Seale could help upend the bloc of far-right conservatives that have long dominated the Pennsylvania legislature.

But if any lessons should be drawn from the story of Pennsylvania's socialists it is this: Hoopes and Wilson came out of and were accountable to a social movement.

The modest wins they and their comrades scored were only possible because of the passionate and active grassroots base of poor and working people who believed, organized, and voted for a vision of the cooperative commonwealth. Without such a movement, none of it would have been possible.

The four nominees, all of whom are running on platforms that foreground the needs of working Pennsylvanians, share in this tradition.

The legacies of Wilson, Hoopes, and Maurer's demonstrate that for Pennsylvania's socialists, as Maurer's campaign slogan declared, "It can be done."

Ian Noah Gavigan, of Philadelphia,

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s a graduate student in history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is working on a history of Great Depression-era socialism in the United States. Readers may email him at iangavigan@gmail.com.

Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan is instructor and coordinator of Public History at Rutgers University. Tweet at her:

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