February 7: The Jewish Debs

Abraham Shiplacoff, the first socialist elected to the New York State Assembly, died in Brooklyn on this date in 1934. A labor activist and editor, he was prosecuted in 1918 under the federal Espionage Act for his outspoken opposition to U.S. military intervention in post-revolutionary Russia, but the indictment was quashed by Attorney General Palmer (of the infamous Palmer Raids) after the World War I’s conclusion. Shiplacoff neverthess gained a reputation as the “Jewish Eugene V. Debs.” As a legislator, he introduced New York’s first birth control bill, which would have permitted the dissemination of printed information about birth control (the bill was defeated), and he repeatedly put “up a fight,” he later said, “against the bills which were opposed to the interests of labor, or were otherwise of a vicious nature.” One bill that he succeeded in passing outlawed “the third degree” (beatings) in police interrogations. Shiplacoff chaired several radical and labor organizations, including the Sacco-Vanzetti Liberation Committee, the Joint Board of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, and the National Labor Committee for Palestine. “[T]hink how . . . bitter the Russian people today have a right to feel against people who, in the name of democracy, in the name of everything that seems to be sacred, come there and hand out the same dose to Russia today which was handed out by the Hessians to the American Republic.” —Abraham Shiplacoff