27 Facts About Louis Waldman

Louis Waldman was a leading figure in the Socialist Party of America from the late 1910s and through the middle 1930s, a founding member of the Social Democratic Federation, and a prominent New York labor lawyer.

Louis Waldman was expelled from the New York State Assembly in 1920 during the First Red Scare.

Louis Waldman was born on January 5,1892, in Yancherudnia, Ukraine, not far from Kiev, the son of a Jewish innkeeper who was one of the few literate men of the village.

Louis Waldman first worked in a metal shop before becoming an apprentice garment lining cutter in one of the sweatshops of the city.

Louis Waldman joined a union and participated in the 11-week New York cloakmakers' strike of 1910, while attending high school in the evenings.

Louis Waldman graduated from high school in the spring of 1911 and, owing to a lack of funds for college, enrolled in the Cooper Union to study engineering that fall.

Louis Waldman graduated from Cooper Union in June 1916 with a degree in engineering, and worked as a construction engineer during the day while following his ambition to become a lawyer by attending law school in the evenings.

Louis Waldman was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1923 and worked thereafter as counsel for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, for the New York Central Trades and Labor Council, and for various other unions in the building and garment trades.

In 1916 the young engineer Louis Waldman was approached at a meeting of his Socialist Party branch and was drafted into becoming a candidate of the party for the New York State Assembly.

Louis Waldman did actually campaign mounting the platform to give public speeches, at which he gradually improved.

Louis Waldman performed well in the 1916 election, tripling the Socialist tally while losing to his Democratic opponent by a few hundred votes.

In November 1918, Waldman met with defeat, but he ran again for state assembly in 1919 against a fusion candidate of the Democratic and Republican parties and emerged victorious, along with four other Socialist Party comrades, August Claessens, Samuel Orr, Charles Solomon, and Samuel A DeWitt.

The next day, DeWitt and Orr were permitted to take their seats, but Claessens, Solomon and Louis Waldman were expelled again.

Louis Waldman was elected chairman of the Socialist Party of New York state in 1928, a position which he retained through the first half of the 1930s.

Louis Waldman stood as the SP candidate for New York Attorney General in Governor of New York in 1928,1930 and 1932, polling over 100,000 votes in each of these races.

Louis Waldman was one of the key spokesmen for the Old Guard in the debate over this document at the Detroit Convention.

Louis Waldman continued to play a leading role in the new SDF organization.

Louis Waldman however resigned from the ALP in 1940, feeling it had been taken over by a pro-Communist faction led by Sidney Hillman.

Louis Waldman was active in the New York State Bar Association and served over the years on numerous state commissions.

Louis Waldman begins by assuring his readers that he "espoused and still [espouses] the cause of civil rights for all people" and then argues:.

In such a way, Louis Waldman asserted: defying the law is on its face generally a bad thing because defiance would weaken respect for the law in most cases, especially if the legal system is basically decent; therefore, in order to meet this objection, those who advocated civil disobedience must have legitimate justifications to defy the law.

Louis Waldman married Bella B Waldman, with whom he had two sons.

Louis Waldman had six sisters and two brothers, one of whom was Hyman Louis Waldman, who followed in his older brother's footsteps as a lawyer and Socialist Party politician in addition to working with the American Labor Party and Liberal Party.

Louis Waldman died on September 12,1982, at the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged in Manhattan, New York City.

In 1944, Louis Waldman published his first autobiography, Labor Lawyer, in which he laid out his defense of the positions he had taken in his political career.

Louis Waldman was particularly alarmed by the integration of trade unions into the state apparatus that began to occur during World War II.

Louis Waldman published a second memoir, The Good Fight, in 1975.