Tom Kahn

Tom David Kahn was an American social democrat known for his leadership in several organizations. He was an activist and influential strategist in the civil rights movement and 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 organize the 1963 March on Washington. Kahn's analysis of the civil rights movement influenced Rustin, who was the nominal author of "From Protest to Politics"; this article, originally from the League for Industrial Democracy, was written by Kahn, according to Rachelle Horowitz. It remains widely reprinted, for example in Rustin's Down the Line and Time on two crosses.
A leader in the Socialist Party of America, Kahn supported its 1972 name change to Social Democrats, USA. Like other SDUSA leaders, Kahn worked to support free labor unions and democracy and against Soviet communism; he also worked to strengthen U.S. labor unions. Kahn worked as a senior assistant to 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.
In 1980, Kirkland appointed Kahn to organize the AFL–CIO's support for the Polish labor union Solidarity despite protests by the USSR and the Carter administration. Kahn began acting as director of the AFL–CIO Department of International Affairs in 1986 and officially became director in 1989. He died in 1992, aged 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 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 became his lifelong friend and political ally.

Democratic socialism

As undergraduates at Brooklyn College, Kahn and Horowitz joined the U.S. movement for democratic socialism after hearing Max Shachtman denounce the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary: Shachtman described
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 for his book on poverty in the United States, The Other America. Kahn idolized Harrington, particularly for his erudition and rhetoric in writing and debate.

Civil rights

As a leader of the American socialist movement, Harrington sent Kahn and Horowitz to help Bayard Rustin, a leader of the civil rights movement, who became a mentor to Kahn. Harrington affectionately called Kahn and Horowitz the "Bayard Rustin Marching and Chowder Society". Kahn helped Rustin organize the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington and the 1958 and 1959 Youth March for Integrated Schools.

Homosexuality and Bayard Rustin

According to Horowitz, as a young man Kahn "was gay but wanted to be straight It was a different world then". He had a short relationship with a member of the Young People's Socialist League :

Although everyone active in the movement was aware of it, 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."

Kahn was "very good looking, a very attractive guy" according to longtime socialist David McReynolds, also an openly gay New Yorker. Kahn accepted his homosexuality in 1956, the year he and Horowitz volunteered to help Rustin with his work in the civil rights movement. "Once he met Bayard, 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.

Cohabiting in Rustin's apartment proved unsuccessful, and their romantic relationship ended when Kahn enrolled at Howard University, but Kahn and Rustin remained lifelong friends and political comrades.

Howard University

Kahn enrolled for his junior and senior years at Howard, where he became a leader in student politics. He worked closely with Stokely Carmichael, who later became a national leader of young civil-rights activists and then one a leader of the Black Power movement. Kahn and Carmichael helped fund a five-day run of The Threepenny Opera, by the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht and the socialist composer Kurt Weill: "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. Kahn introduced Carmichael and his fellow SNCC activists to Rustin, who became an influential SNCC adviser. Kahn's and Rustin's emphasis on economic inequality influenced Carmichael. Kahn graduated from Howard in 1961.

Leadership

Kahn helped Rustin and A. Philip Randolph plan the 1963 March on Washington. For this march, Kahn also ghost wrote Randolph's speech. Kahn's analysis of the civil rights movement influenced Rustin, Carmichael, and William Julius Wilson.

League for Industrial Democracy

In 1964, Kahn became director of the League for Industrial Democracy. Beginning in 1960, he had written several LID pamphlets, many of which were published in political journals like Dissent and Commentary and some of which appeared in anthologies. His pamphlet The Economics of Equality 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, he was involved with the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which became Students for a Democratic Society. Along with other LID members Rachelle Horowitz, Michael Harrington, and Don Slaiman, Kahn attended the LID-sponsored meeting that discussed the Port Huron Statement. He was listed as a student representative from Howard University and 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. According to Port Huron activist Todd Gitlin, Kahn believed the SDS students were "elitist" and overly critical of labor unions and liberals, attributing upper-class origins and Ivy League schooling to them.
In 1965, LID and SDS split 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 a "disciplined cadre" to attempt to "take over or paralyze" SDS, as had happened in mass organizations in the 1930s. Afterward, Marxism–Leninism, particularly the Progressive Labor Party, helped write SDS's "death sentence". But Kahn continued to argue with SDS leaders about tactics, strategy, and accountable leadership. In 1966, he attended SDS's Illinois Convention, where his arguments and delivery overwhelmed and were resented by other activists.
Kahn's determined style of debate emerged from the socialist movement led by Max Shachtman. He 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 changing its name to Social Democrats, USA, despite Harrington's opposition. Ben Wattenberg said that SDUSA members seemed to be
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. According to Wattenberg, he was an effective speechwriter because he could communicate ideas to an American audience.

Estrangement from 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.According to Irving Howe, the conflict between Kahn and Harrington became "pretty bad".
Harrington handed former SDS activist and New York City journalist Jack Newfield a speech by AFL–CIO President George Meany. Addressing the September 1972 Convention of the United Steelworkers of America, Meany ridiculed the Democratic Party Convention, which had been held in Miami:

We heard from the gay-lib people who want to legalize marriage between boys and boys, and between girls and girls ... We heard from the people who looked like Jacks, acted like Jills, and had the odor of Johns about them.

Harrington attributed this gay-baiting taunt to Kahn, and Newfield repeated it in his autobiography. Maurice Isserman's biography of Harrington also describes this speech as reflecting Kahn's self-hatred.
The blaming of Kahn for Meany's speech and Isserman's scholarship have been criticized by Rachelle Horowitz and by Joshua Muravchik, then an officer of the Young People's Socialist League. According to Horowitz, Meany had many speechwriters—two specialists besides Kahn and even more writers from the AFL–CIO's Committee on Political Education Department. Horowitz called it "inconceivable that Kahn wrote those words". She quoted a concurring assessment by Arch Puddington that Isserman "assumes that because Kahn was not publicly gay he had to be a gay basher. He never was." According to Muravchik, "there is no reason to believe that Kahn wrote those lines, and Isserman presents none."
Harrington failed to support an anti-discrimination plank in the 1978 platform of the Democratic Party Convention, but noted his personal support after being criticized in The Nation. Along with others in the AFL–CIO and SDUSA, Kahn was accused of criticizing Harrington's application for his Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to join the Socialist International and to organize a 1983 conference on European socialism; Harrington complained for six pages in his autobiography The Long Distance Runner, and "brooded" about Kahn's opposition, exaggerating the importance of the Socialist International to the U.S., according to Isserman's biography. In 1991, even after Harrington's 1989 death, Howe warned Isserman that Kahn's description of Harrington "may well be a little nasty" and "hard line".