Socialist Club Trains Speakers to Defy Police at Stump Gatherings--History of Harvard Socialism to Appear Soon

Stump-speakers to defend socialism when the weather gets warm are being trained by the Harvard Socialist Club. Men and women from colleges in Boston and the vicinity are being tutored in the style that will enable them to shout down all muttered objections at the meetings they intend to address later. The plan to outtalk the balky Boston police who hitherto have thwarted the cause of honest labor.

For the first two weeks they refuted the common objections to socialism. Communism was denounced last week. Tonight the subject is "Graft Unions vs. Labor Unions." The spell-binders are being led by Alfred Baker Lewis, former candidate for senator and now secretary of the New England Socialist Party.

A history of socialism at Harvard is being published this month in leaflet from. It will trace the club from its inception in 1902 as a chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Association, now the League for Industrial Democracy. Jack London and Upton Sinclair played a large part in the movement then. Socialism reached its peak here about 1910 when the membership of the chapter included such men as Heywood Broun '10, Walter Lippman '10, and Kenneth Macgowan '11. After that the organization weakened and, at the time of the war, disappeared completely. LaFollette's campaign for president in 1924 centered the attention of socialist on a LaFollette Club. In the spring of 1928 a club for the support of Norman Thomas for president was discussed. This bore fruit in the fall of the year in the Thomas-for-President Club. After the election the members reorganized to form the Harvard Socialist Club. For a long time the club confined its activities to pamphleteering, speech-making, and generally harrassing the capitalists. It has lately taken to organizing dances and is now attempting to interest students in it as a place for sincere public discussion.