U.S. social democrat (1938 – 1992)
Tom David Kahn (September 15, 1938 – March 27, 1992) was an American social democrat known for his leadership in several organizations. He was an activist and influential strategist in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a senior adviser and leader in the U.S. labor movement.
Kahn was raised in New York City. At Brooklyn College, he joined the U.S. socialist movement, where he was influenced by Max Shachtman and Michael Harrington. As an assistant to civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, Kahn helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, during which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Kahn's analysis of the civil rights movement influenced Bayard Rustin (who was the nominal author of Kahn's "From Protest to Politics"). (This article, originally a 1964 pamphlet from the League for Industrial Democracy, was written by Kahn, according to . It remains widely reprinted, for example in Rustin's "Down the Line" of 1971 and "Time on two crosses" of 2003.)
A leader in the Socialist Party of America, Kahn supported its 1972 name change to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Like other leaders of SDUSA, Kahn worked to support free labor-unions and democracy and to oppose Soviet communism; he also worked to strengthen U.S. labor unions. Kahn worked as a senior assistant to and speechwriter for Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, AFL–CIO Presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland, and other leaders of the Democratic Party, labor unions, and civil-rights organizations.
In 1980 Lane Kirkland appointed Kahn to organize the AFL–CIO's support for the Polish labor-union Solidarity; this support was made despite protests by the USSR and the Carter administration. He acted as the Director of the AFL–CIO's Department of International Affairs in 1986 and was officially named Director in 1989. Kahn died in 1992, at the age of 53.
Biography.
Early life.
Kahn was born Thomas John Marcel on September 15, 1938, and was immediately placed for adoption at the New York Foundling Hospital. He was adopted by the Jewish couple Adele and David Kahn, and renamed Thomas David Kahn. His father, a member of the Communist Party USA, became President of the Transport Workers Local 101 of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company.
Tom Kahn was a civil libertarian who "ran for president of the Student Organization of Erasmus Hall High School in 1955 on a platform calling for the destruction of the student assembly, because it had no power", an election he lost. In high school, he met Rachelle Horowitz, who would become his lifelong friend and political ally.
Democratic socialism.
At Brooklyn College (CUNY), the undergraduate students Kahn and Horowitz joined the U.S. movement for democratic socialism after hearing Max Shachtman denounce the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary: Shachtman described
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;rolling Russian tanks ... defenceless Hungarian workers and students fighting back with stones ... a heroic people's crushed hopes, and ... our democratic socialist links to those hopes. Freedom, democracy—they were not abstractions; they were real and could therefore be destroyed. Communist totalitarianism was not merely a political force, an ideological aberration that could be smashed in debate; it was a monstrous physical force. Democracy was not merely the icing on the socialist cake. It was the cake—or there was no socialism worth fighting for. And if socialism was worth fighting for here, it was worth fighting for everywhere: socialism was nothing if it was not profoundly internationalist.
I do not remember whether that was the night I signed up. But it was the night I became convinced.
As young socialists, Kahn's and Horowitz's talents were recognized by Michael Harrington. Harrington had joined Shachtman after working with Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker's house of hospitality in the Bowery of Lower Manhattan. Harrington was about to become famous in the United States for his book on poverty in the United States, "The Other America". Kahn idolized Harrington, particularly for his erudition and rhetoric, both in writing and in debate.
Civil rights.
As a leader of the American socialist movement, Michael Harrington sent Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz to help Bayard Rustin, one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, who became a mentor to Kahn. Kahn and Horowitz were affectionately called the "Bayard Rustin Marching and Chowder Society" by Harrington.
Kahn helped Rustin organize the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington and the 1958 and 1959 Youth March for Integrated Schools.
Homosexuality and Bayard Rustin.
As a young man, Tom Kahn "was gay but wanted to be straight ... It was a different world then", according to Rachelle Horowitz. He had a short relationship with a member of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL):
Although everyone active in the movement was aware of it, [before 1956] he was never explicitly out of the closet. He took his sexual orientation as an affliction, a source of pain and embarrassment. In part, perhaps, because he was so unreconciled to his longings, he limited himself for a long time to brief encounters. But then he became involved with one of the YPSL's and was compelled to seek the counsel of a psychiatrist to explain his unfamiliar feelings. The diagnosis, he told me, was "you're in love."
Tom Kahn was "very good looking, a very attractive guy" according to longtime socialist David McReynolds, who was also an openly gay New Yorker. Kahn accepted his homosexuality in 1956, the year that Kahn and Horowitz volunteered to help Bayard Rustin with his work in the civil-rights movement. "Once he met Bayard [Rustin], then Kahn knew that he was gay and had this long-term relationship with Bayard, which went through many stages", according to Horowitz, who quoted Kahn's remembrance of Rustin:
When I met him for the first time he was a few years younger than I am now, and I was barely on the edge of manhood. He drew me into a vortex of his endless campaigns and projects ... He introduced me to Bach and Brahms, and to the importance of maintaining a balance in life between the pursuit of our individual pleasures and engagements in, and responsibility for, the social condition. He believed that no class, caste or genre of people were exempt from this obligation.
However, cohabiting in Rustin's apartment proved unsuccessful, and their romantic relationship ended when Kahn enrolled in the historically black Howard University. Kahn and Rustin remained lifelong friends and political comrades.
Howard University.
Kahn, a white student, enrolled for his junior and senior years at Howard University, where he became a leader in student politics. Kahn worked closely with Stokely Carmichael, who later became a national leader of young civil-rights activists and then one of the leaders of the Black Power movement. Kahn and Carmichael helped to fund a five-day run of "Three Penny Opera", by the Marxist playwright Berthold Brecht and the socialist composer Kurt Weill: "Tom Kahn—very shrewdly—had captured the position of Treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council and the infinitely charismatic and popular Carmichael as floor whip was good at lining up the votes. Before they knew what hit them the Student Council had become a patron of the arts, having voted to buy out the remaining performances." Kahn and Carmichael worked with Howard University's chapter of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Kahn introduced Carmichael and his fellow SNCC activists to Bayard Rustin, who became an influential adviser to SNCC. Kahn and Rustin's emphasis on economic inequality influenced Carmichael. Kahn graduated from Howard in 1961.
Leadership.
Kahn (along with Horowitz and Norman Hill) helped Rustin and A. Philip Randolph to plan the 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. For this march, Kahn also ghost wrote the speech of A. Philip Randolph, the senior leader of the civil-rights movement and the African-American labor movement. Kahn's analysis of the civil-rights movement influenced Bayard Rustin (who was the nominal author of Kahn's 1964–1965 essay "From protest to politics"), Stokely Carmichael, and William Julius Wilson.
League for Industrial Democracy.
Kahn was Director of the League for Industrial Democracy after 1964. Beginning in 1960, he wrote several LID pamphlets, many of which were published in political journals like "Dissent" and "Commentary", and some of which appeared in anthologies. Kahn's "The Economics of Equality" LID pamphlet gave an "incisive radical analysis of what it would take to end racial oppression".
Student League for Industrial Democracy: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Before Kahn became LID director in 1964, he was involved with the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which became Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Along with other LID members Rachelle Horowitz, Michael Harrington, and Don Slaiman, Kahn attended the LID-sponsored meeting that discussed the Port Huron Statement. Kahn was listed as a student representative from Howard University and was elected to the National Executive Committee. The LID representatives criticized the Port Huron Statement for promoting students as leaders of social change, for criticizing the U.S. labor movement and its unions, and for its criticisms of liberal and socialist opposition to Soviet communism ("anti-communism"). Kahn believed that the SDS students were "elitist", being overly critical of labor unions and liberals, and attributed upper-class origins and Ivy-league schooling to them, according to Port-Huron activist Todd Gitlin, who observes that Kahn was the son of a "manual laborer".
LID and SDS split in 1965, when SDS voted to remove from its constitution the "exclusion clause" that prohibited membership by communists, against Kahn's arguments. The SDS exclusion clause had barred "advocates of or apologists for" "totalitarianism". The clause's removal effectively invited "disciplined cadre" to attempt to "take over or paralyze" SDS, as had occurred to mass organizations in the thirties. Afterward, Marxism Leninism, particularly the Progressive Labor Party, helped to write "the death sentence" for SDS. Nonetheless Kahn continued to argue with SDS leaders about the need for accountable leadership, about tactics, and about strategy. In 1966, Kahn attended the Illinois Convention of SDS, where his forceful arguments and delivery overwhelmed and were resented by the other activists; Kahn was then 28 years old.
Kahn's determined style of debate emerged from the socialist movement led by Max Shachtman. Kahn expressed his admiration for Shachtman's intellectual toughness in his 1973 memorial:
"His answers, of course, could not always be correct. But they were on target and always fundamental."
Social Democrats, USA.
Kahn and Horowitz were leaders in the Socialist Party USA, and supported its change of name to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA), despite Harrington's opposition.
Ben Wattenberg commented that SDUSA members seemed to be
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;... ingeniously trying to bury the Soviet Union in a blizzard of letterheads. It seemed that each of Tom's colleagues—Penn Kemble, Carl Gershman, Josh Muravchik and many more—ran a little organization, each with the same interlocking directorate listed on the stationery. Funny thing: The Letterhead Lieutenants did indeed churn up a blizzard, and the Soviet Union is no more.
I never did quite get all the organizational acronyms straight—YPSL, LID, SP, SDA, ISL—but the key words were "democratic", "labor", "young" and, until events redefined it away from their understanding, "socialist". Ultimately, the umbrella group became "Social Democrats, U.S.A", and Tom Kahn was a principal "theoretician."
They talked and wrote endlessly, mostly about communism and democracy, despising the former, adoring the latter. It is easy today to say "anti-communist" and "pro-democracy" in the same breath. But that is because American foreign policy eventually became just such a mixture, thanks in part to those "Yipsels" (Young People's Socialist League), with Tom Kahn as provocateur-at-large.
On the conservative side, foreign policy used to be "anti-communist," but not very "pro-democracy." And foreign policy liberal-style might be piously "pro-democracy," but nervous about being "anti-communist." Tom theorized that to be either, you had to be both.
It was tough for labor-liberal intellectuals to be "anti-communist" in the 1970s. It meant being taunted as "Cold Warriors" who saw "Commies under every bed" and being labeled as—the unkindest cut—"right-wingers".
Kahn worked as a senior assistant and speechwriter for Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, AFL–CIO Presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland, and other leaders of the Democratic Party, labor unions, and civil rights organizations. He was an effective speechwriter because he was able to express ideas to an American audience, according to Wattenberg.
Estrangement with Harrington.
Another protégé of Shachtman's, Michael Harrington, called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1972. His proposal was rejected by the majority, who criticized the war's conduct and called for a negotiated peace treaty, the position associated with Shachtman and Kahn. Harrington resigned his honorary chairmanship of the Socialist Party and organized a caucus for like-minded socialists.
The conflict between Kahn and Harrington became "pretty bad", according to Irving Howe.
Harrington handed former SDS activist and New York City journalist Jack Newfield a speech by AFL–CIO President George Meany.