Harry W(ellington) Laidler
Harry W(ellington) Laidler was an influential American economist, labor leader, and author, born in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised in a socialist environment, being the nephew of a prominent socialist union leader. Laidler pursued education that emphasized the needs of working people, studying at institutions such as Ruskin College and Wesleyan University. He became actively involved in socialist movements, co-founding the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and later serving as the executive director of its successor organization, the League for Industrial Democracy, for over three decades.
Despite his efforts to promote socialist candidates, Laidler faced limited electoral success, with a notable victory in 1939 as a fusion candidate for the New York City Council. He was dedicated to advocating for a mixed economy that would ensure equality of opportunity and often expressed concerns about the impact of big business on society. Laidler was also a prolific writer, contributing numerous articles and books focused on socialism and labor issues, with titles addressing various aspects of these movements. His extensive papers are preserved at the Tamiment Institute Library, reflecting his significant role in American socialist thought and labor history.
Subject Terms
Harry W(ellington) Laidler
- Harry Wellington Laidler
- Born: February 18, 1884
- Died: July 14, 1970
Economist, labor leader, and author, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of William Ebenezer Laidler and Julia (Heary) Laidler. His paternal grandfather, Stephen Laidler, was a Congregationalist minister who at the end of the Civil War came to the United States from Manchester, England, to work in the South among freed slaves before moving North for pastoral work.
Harry Laidler was brought up by an uncle, Theodore Atworth, a committed socialist who was at one time president of the Photo Engravers Union. After a public-school education at Brooklyn Boys High School, he attended Ruskin College for workingmen in Missouri and the American Socialist College in Wichita, Kansas, before winning a scholarship to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, from which he graduated with honors in 1907. While studying law at Brooklyn Law School, he worked as a reporter (1907-10) for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He was admitted to the bar in 1911 but continued his studies at Columbia University, taking a doctorate in economics in 1914.
In 1905, a year after transfering to Wesleyan, Laidler became, along with Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Clarence Darrow, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others, a cofounder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He was a director of the society from its inception, and its executive from 1910 to 1921, when the society was reorganized as the League for Industrial Democracy. From 1921 to 1957 he was the league’s executive director; its honorary president during much of that time was John Dewey, in his day the most famous philosopher in America. Discussing the league in an interview around the time of his eightieth birthday, Laidler said the organization “never promoted the Marxian cult. We conceived of the socialist society as one with a mixed economy, an economy with public, cooperative, and private ownership, the ultimate objective of which was real equality of opportunity for every man and woman.”
Laidler played an active part in the nationwide movement to win political legitimacy and power for socialist candidates. In this he was, like the movement, notably unsuccessful. He ran as the Socialist party’s candidate for governor of New York in 1936 and for U.S. senator in 1938. He won election only once, in 1939 as fusion candidate of the Socialist and American Labor parties for a seat from Brooklyn on the New York City Council. In 1941 he was denied the renewed endorsement of the American Labor Party and lost his bid for reelection.
He was a frequent traveler to Europe and the Soviet Union to observe labor conditions, the progress of socialist parties, and how cooperative movements were faring. In 1929, in Frank-furt-am-Oder, Prussia, he was an observer at the Second Anti-Imperialist World Congress, a meeting seen at the time as an international socialist protest against the prospect of a capitalist war to defeat the proletarian struggle against imperialism. As did the majority of his fellow socialists, Laidler felt the single greatest threat to the spread of progressive ideas was big business—monopolistic, rapacious, and antiegalitarian. In a reelection speech in 1941, he was able to discern some social progress in America, despite the onset of war in Europe. His chief reason for optimism was the failure of big business’s candidate, Wendell Wilkie, in the presidential election the year before, but he also singled out increasing acceptance by U.S. corporations of the principle of universal collective bargaining, the growth of consumer cooperatives, and the simultaneous rise in minimum-wage and fall in unemployment rates. Toward the end of World War II, speaking for the League for Industrial Democracy, Laidler called for a “constructive postwar program for the full employment of the nation’s material and human resources for the common good, for an equitable distribution of the fruits of industry, and for international cooperation in behalf of a just and lasting peace.”
Laidler was a very prolific author. A frequent contributor of articles to such magazines as the New Republic, North American Review, Current History, and Survey Graphic, he was also the author of several books on American socialism and the labor movement, and of dozens of pamphlets, many of them published by the league. The books, somewhat programmatic and repetitive in their structure and content, include Boycotts and the Labor Struggle (1914), Socialism in Thought and Action (1920), A History of Socialist Thought (1927), Concentration of Control in American Industry (1931), Socialist Planning and a Socialist Program (1933), Socializing Our Democracy (1935), A Program for Modern America (1936), American Socialism (1937), Social-Economic Movements (1944), and History of Socialism (1968).
The bulk of Harry W. Laidler’s papers are part of the League of Industrial Democracy Archives in the Tamiment Institute Library of New York University. Tape-recorded interviews with Laidler and other American socialist leaders are part of the oral history of the socialist movement housed at Columbia University: see The Oral History Collection of Columbia University, Supplement (1966), p. 29f. See his obituary in The New York Times, July 15, 1970; Contemporary Authors, vols. 5R and 29R; and Current Biography, 1945.