Apart from local history buffs or election-obsessed politicos, few people know of the 24-year period where a socialist mayor reigned in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city. This socialist was Jasper McLevy, a roofer and son of Scottish immigrants, who had unsuccessfully run for office a whopping 21 times before finally winning in 1933. Beating both his Democrat and Republican opponents by thousands of votes, Bridgeport and the nation as a whole watched on with trepidation and excitement, eager and anxious to see how socialism and a Socialist Party mayor could change a city.

Ultimately, McLevy’s 24 years of mayorship, stretching from the early 1930s through the late 1950s, didn’t bring about a radical brand of socialism to the city. In fact, McLevy actually shocked the country by governing Bridgeport in a unremarkably moderate manner. Through examining a corpus of news articles from McLevy’s time, we contend that while McLevy came to power under a Socialist banner, he ignored the socialist principles he once stood for. Our reading of local Bridgeport newspapers from his time shows that McLevy’s moderate views and fixation with fiscal conservatism left him without the robust working class base socialists should strive for, and instead won him fairweather moderates that lacked the loyalty of a genuine political constituency. Without such constituency, we argue that there was no political force to hold him accountable, and eventually, McLevy lost his political mandate, and the city of Bridgeport looked not too dissimilar from before his tenure.

The Origins and Rise of Jasper McLevy

Jasper McLevy became convinced of socialism at a young age, and eagerly worked to form the Bridgeport Socialist Party in his early 20s. He first ran for office under the Socialist Party label he helped erect, and won an unimpressive 215 votes. But McLevy was persistent, and kept running for office over and over again, undeterred by his many defeats and paltry vote totals. In this sense, McLevy seems not too dissimilar from some aspirational socialists and progressives of Connecticut today, shooting for public office without much of a real organizing history beyond the ballot box, or much of a real organizing base. 

McLevy quickly found some degree of support at the ballot, owing to the surge of industrial labor unrest in the city, and a population almost unanimously dissatisfied with the establishment’s ruthless political machines and rampant corruption. In his first mayoral run in 1911, McLevy earned a quarter of the vote, no small feat for a man in his early 30s fighting for the highest office in a rapidly growing medium-sized city. McLevy tried and tried again, and in 1931, he lost to the Democratic incumbent by fewer than 2,700 votes, coming within an earshot of the mayor’s office.

In the fall of 1933, McLevy ran again for office, now seen as a real competitor for the first time in his career. The central focus of his campaign was common sense reforms targeting the political machines that ran Bridgeport, and much of Connecticut’s cities at the time, which doled out un-meritocratic spoils in exchange for political loyalty. Residents knew this well, as Bridgeport was largely under control of patronage systems from the Democratic and Republican parties alike throughout the preceding decades. Instead of aiming to replicate existing spoils systems, McLevy campaigned against the political machines, which he claimed had “brought every city and town in the state to the verge of bankruptcy”. This rhetoric appealed to a broad audience, and won sympathy from the state’s mainstream press, who wrote that his “diagnosis” was “correct”, and agreed that “his charge is true”. McLevy’s campaign wasn’t exclusively built on anti-corruption, and he would sometimes wax about the inevitability of “social ownership and control…as a matter of dire necessity”, but fundamentally, McLevy’s central platform, and appeal, was basic good governance.

In an outcome unsurprising to many locals, Jasper McLevy won the mayoral election that November. He kept true to his word, and quickly got to work making common sense reforms in city hall: he balanced the books, he reduced taxes, he held city contractors responsible, he cut down on waste, and he ushered in an era of much greater transparency for municipal happenings. Indeed, McLevy’s first years in city hall were a great success in the eyes of many, as his steady hand unwound the excesses and corruption of the city’s political machines. When McLevy ran for re-election in 1935, he won by a nearly 14,000 vote margin in a race of about 44,000 votes. He had established a firm mandate for the Socialist Party in Bridgeport that he himself started, and for many years, McLevy retained it. He won over Democrats and Republicans throughout the city, and candidates put forth by these heavyweight parties would often score less than 15% of the vote when put on the ballot against McLevy. His popularity helped get a whole slate of Socialist Party candidates in city hall, and even in the state legislature

During this time a split emerged among the Socialist Party throughout the country between the “Militants” and the “Old Guard”, with McLevy belonging to the latter. The “Militants”, led by future party leader Norman Thomas, believed in a greater degree of direct action and a stronger commitment to revolutionary socialism, while the “Old Guard” continued to support a social democratic and electoral approach that objected to revolution and critiques of America as a whole. Of particular concern was the 1934 Declaration of Principles adopted by the Party and written by a Militant opponent of McLevy from Connecticut, Devere Allen. Tensions between the factions soared, and McLevy openly declared his allegiances by joining the short-lived moderate Committee for the Preservation of the Socialist Party, a group dedicated purely to shifting the direction of the party at their 1934 national convention. This, alongside his actions as mayor, would lead to Norman Thomas openly charging McLevy with only paying  “lip service” to the socialist ideals he once espoused. Shortly after, McLevy, who dominated the party’s local apparatus, withdrew it from the nationwide Socialist Party.

From here, McLevy grew further and further rightwards. His frugality turned into pure fiscal conservatism, with an oft-quoted example being his infamous response to complaints that the city wasn’t shoveling snow: “God put the snow there, let him take it away”. As Bridgeport obtained more and more federal relief, McLevy was unwilling to spend this wealth. This shift to the right was not limited to city funds. When city employees fought for better conditions and wages, he fought viciously against them. It would only be when the city’s firefighters started asking for aid from the Teamsters that McLevy, a former union organizer, finally yielded, and rescinded the ban on municipal unions.

Perhaps the biggest example of his turn to the right was on housing. The city’s housing, especially in the East End, was incredibly decrepit by the time McLevy entered office. As the Depression went on, local activists, most notably Father Stephen Panik, called for federally funded housing projects to replace the slums they lived in. Despite the clear need and popular demand, McLevy once more was unwilling, citing the bill it would cost the city. This would begin a years-long fight that divided the city between those for better housing and a Socialist Party mayor who aligned himself with landlords and the Chamber of Commerce. It would only be when the popular support became too overwhelming to ignore that McLevy would switch on the issue, suddenly announcing the creation of multiple housing projects and placing the credit all upon himself. 

As McLevy spent more and more years in office, the term “socialism” lost all meaning to him. What once was ownership of the means of production became gradual reform and working within the constraints of the system. Those same gradual reforms then became moderation and feel-good politics that sought to cast a wide net of support. Finally, that moderation became genuine support of, and cooperation with, capital, and the Socialist label became nothing more than whatever McLevy supported at the moment. Any and all revolutionary thought was totally dulled, and Bridgeport lost the chance to deliver the real change the masses desired. 

And who could stop him? Not the national organization, which he broke from. Not the local party organs, which he himself created to advance his own goals. Not the city’s die-hard socialists, who had now become far outnumbered by the dozens of thousands of moderates McLevy now drew most of his support from. Ultimately, the very people who stood by McLevy’s side in his early days could no longer get him to lend his ear to them, which proved consequential for the fate of McLevy, and the city of Bridgeport as a whole.

What Happens When Your Organization is All About One Man

Jasper McLevy was a popular and pragmatic leader, but cracks eventually emerged in his support. The man who once flirted with 70% of the vote at the polls saw his support erode to less than 50% by the 1955 election. At this point, the city he ran was very different from the city he started with. New communities of black and Puerto Rican workers made Bridgeport their home, and as McLevy failed to make inroads to these communities, mainstream political parties made appeals to these voters that McLevy neglected. Ultimately, in 1957, McLevy lost by a narrow, narrow margin of 161 votes. Having lost 21 elections before first taking office, this didn’t stop McLevy, who ran for mayor again in the next cycle, where he got blown out, earning just 28% of the vote, comparable to how he fared as an aspiring newcomer nearly 50 years prior.

After 24 years in office, it seemed clear that Bridgeport was done with Jasper McLevy, not out of animosity, but out of fatigue. He didn’t offer a radical agenda, he didn’t offer anything uniquely socialist, and he had fully lost the support of the radical forces within the city. Instead, his remarkably unremarkable tenure could be replicated by any disciplined candidate from either mainstream political party.

By 1956, the Socialist Party was kicked out of city hall, discarded by moderate voters, detached from any real national organization, and decades removed from the city’s industrial working class. The aging bureaucrats who rode McLevy’s laurels into city hall failed to reflect on this, or take any meaningful action. Instead, they continued to pander to the political mainstream that threw them out of office. The candidate they put forth after McLevy would make any self-respecting socialist cringe: William Visokay, a “Superintendent of Plant Protection” turned police sergeant, who toured the city in a retrofitted bus called the “Socialist Mobile Campaign Headquarters”. Visokay garnered just 21% of the vote in 1961, and earned just half of that two years later. Jasper McLevy died in 1962, and his impact on the city began to fade away in the rear view mirror. The party’s last leader, Albert Perocco, an outspoken conservative who explicitly denounced socialism, shifted the remains of the party into his own right-wing populist vehicle. The Socialist Party’s decline towards irrelevance in Bridgeport continued through the 1960s and 1970s, lacking any real base to prop it up, and far removed from the struggles of actual socialists within the city. All that remained of the Socialist Party once shared with militant labor leader Eugene V. Debs was the name of a ballot line.

The same Democratic Party McLevy conquered decades before resumed its grip on power, and rebuilt its political machine with all the alienation and corruption of decades ago. With the same old guys at the helm of the city again, it found itself completely unprepared for the brutal period of deindustrialization which followed. Bridgeport faced a series of fiscal crises, companies packed up and left for the suburbs, and anyone who could also followed suit. A disenfranchised populace, a mostly impoverished and nonwhite one at that, inherited a hollowed-out shell of a city, run by a secession of corrupt dynasties which bludgeoned them down at every moment they wished to rise up. When teachers went on strike, they were arrested. When Hispanic organizers fought for equality, they were beaten by police. When neglected slums burnt down, the city sat idly by. Whereas many good socialists fought with them on the front lines of these battles for a better Bridgeport, the Socialist Party, which spent many decades revolving around Jasper McLevy and Jasper McLevy only, was nowhere to be found: indifferent and irrelevant at best, or part of the very mechanisms which led to this bleak moment at worst.

Lessons for Today

Jasper McLevy was fixated on running for office, and the Socialist Party in Bridgeport was perhaps always focused on him and his campaigns. It failed to build or sustain any real working class roots, and any connection with the struggles of labor. While some socialist proletariat were there by McLevy’s side in his earliest days, they could not exercise any meaningful influence once he took office, and could only watch as he governed no differently than any non-socialist would.

In a time when many onlookers have become outright infatuated with every move that the charismatic Zohran Mamdani makes, it is important to remember that a socialist movement cannot revolve around one man. Mamdani did not rise to power the same way McLevy did, having been bolstered by a broad, diverse, working class-centered movement that preceded and went beyond just him. It is a responsibility of the 15,000+ members of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America to keep Mamdani in check, or else they risk falling into the same trap the radicals of McLevy’s day did and lose the chance at genuine revolutionary change. The question of if Mamdani will capitulate to the forces of capital and liberalism is one that is as much up to them as it is him.

Time and time again, seasoned organizers within the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America are faced with the question of “where’s our Mamdani?”, oftentimes from people who have never worked on a campaign or are not even members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The truth is, we don’t have one right now, and we shouldn’t try to force one. An organization should only put forth projects and candidates sized small enough that it can hold them accountable. The Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America are planting the seeds for our own “mini Mamdanis”, but we will not try to force one to be conjured overnight. We will not allow any opportunists without real experience, without proper grounding, and without meaningful community presence steeped in the fight for liberation among our state’s communities of color, to use our organization to shoot for the highest office they can think of. 

We are here to have a sustained presence as a grassroots organization building working class power, and we are not here to engage in electoralism for the sake of electoralism. We stand on the ground of a self-proclaimed socialist organization which once did just that, and now, they are no longer to be found in even the smallest of margins of our textbooks. They are a one-off oddity, a fun trivia fact. Jasper McLevy and the Socialist Party in Bridgeport were not revolutionaries fighting alongside the working class, but we have to be.