Despite taking place over a century ago, the dynamics of Hillquit’s first race look far more similar to Mamdani’s run than Dinkins’s or Messinger’s. In 1917, incumbent mayor John Purroy Mitchel faced deep unpopularity due to budget cuts, preference for privatized transit, and constant partying with the city’s upper crust. Sound familiar? Mitchel’s unpopularity ran so deep that he lost in the Republican primary, and instead was forced to campaign as an independent — certainly in the realm of possibility for Eric Adams. International political affairs loomed over the local election — as American entry into World War I sparked both explosive nativism and support for American militarism, and pacificism in many immigrant communities. Accordingly, the election occurred during a stark period of political realignment.
“While for a generation in this city there has been an ever-lessening tendency of voting along party lines, there has been in some other years what might be termed approximately a ‘solid’ Democratic vote, a ‘solid’ Republican vote, a ‘solid’ Socialist vote. Apparently there will be no solid Democratic, Republican, or Socialist vote” this time around, the Times wrote just days before the election. With chaos in the air, “even the Socialists are in a position to predict victory for their candidate with apparent plausibility,” they begrudgingly added.
Running on the slogan “The city for the people,” Hillquit and the socialists leaned aggressively into voters’ major causes of discontent. On the municipal front, they sought to establish programs to bring down cost-of-living expenses. Newspaper ads trumpeted an effort to control the price of household goods like milk and bread by creating a city agency charged with buying directly from farmers and bakers and distributing the goods at cost, nodding to European cities already running similar programs.
Strong municipal programs were a feature of successful socialist mayorships elsewhere at the time, like Milwaukee. But Hillquit had broader political ambitions. He would later allegedly coin the term “sewer socialism” to denigrate socialists solely focused on local issues, lacking solidarity with the international working class fighting revolutions across the globe. Running for mayor of the country’s largest city, Hillquit became one of the most visible leaders of the American antiwar effort.
He characterized the war as an effort to benefit aristocrats and industrialists in which rural peasants and urban workers would suffer greatly, opposed the purchasing of Liberty Bonds by which citizens could finance the war effort, and any American intervention in World War I. For this, he was slandered by Mitchel, who called into question the foreign-born candidate’s loyalty to America. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt even said Hillquit “stands as an aid to the Prussianized autocracy” and “a Hun inside our gates,” while the sitting attorney general clamored to prosecute the socialist.