From party literature and press clippings, it seems as though Eloise Booth was singlehandedly running the Socialist Workers Party’s entire Pittsburgh operation.
The Trotskyist militant — a waitress who worked on union campaigns, reported for the party press and organized events from a Fifth Avenue office — spent several years in Pittsburgh before her sudden death in 1952. A key figure in the SWP but little-remembered outside the party, she seemed to be the sort of jack-of-all-trades activist who keep small radical groups afloat.
It was an important job for a party that believed a new American revolution was “the realistic program of our epoch.”
Trailblazer
Born in California in 1912 and growing up with a Marxist father, Booth joined the Trotskyist movement in the early 1930s, a comrade said decades later in a memorial address: “She was an active participant in the strike struggles of that day, a trade union organizer in the cannery field, a prominent members of the waitress’ union and always a party activist.” The Trotskyists had split from the Communist Party just a few years earlier, sparking a bitter rivalry that sometimes spilled into violence.
Booth moved across the country, first working for the SWP in New York and later as a traveling “trailblazer” selling The Militant, the party’s newspaper. She was one of two women members of the party’s National Committee, fellow leader Myra Tanner Weiss later recalled. As World War II ended, she settled in Pittsburgh to run the party’s activities here.
The late 1940s marked a high-water mark for the U.S. Marxist left, with the mainstream Communist Party counting tens of thousands of members and wielding tremendous influence in organized labor. The SWP was tiny in comparison, counting fewer than 1,500 members at the time, according to Paul Le Blanc in “Trotskyism in the United States.” Nevertheless, its leaders were confident: James Cannon, the SWP founder, delivered a speech on “the coming American revolution” in 1946.
“Flanked by a red banner”
In Pittsburgh, Booth — sometimes working under the surname Gordon, either a married name or a pseudonym — launched herself into her work. She reported from coal towns hit by wartime strikes and visited steel workers’ picket lines. “Pickets told the Militant reporter that they can see the supervisors scurrying around the plant wrapped up in blankets the company provided,” she reported from a Jones & Laughlin mill in 1946. “They are suffering from the cold, and look enviously at the salamanders outside burning coke to keep the pickets warm.”
The Militant obituary later recalled: “She was especially highly regarded among the workers at the huge Westinghouse Electric plant in East Pittsburgh. Some of them, under Stalinist influence, who were first hostile to her, came in time to trust her for advice and guidance” after what the newspaper called “Stalinist betrayal.”
Booth arranged most of the SWP’s public-facing activity from an office and reading room at 1418 Fifth Ave., just two blocks from the Communist Party’s bookshop. A speech by a Trotskyist organizer for the United Auto Workers, a forum featuring a United Steelworkers officer, an anniversary celebration for the Russian Revolution — all were held at the party’s headquarters, often with Booth’s name attached.
The Pittsburgh Press described a typical event, a 1947 new year’s party:
Over coffee and sandwiches, 40-odd ‘comrades’ celebrated the old year accented by strikes but saw 1947 with a less enthusiastic eye. The darkest cloud hovering over 1947, according to a speaker from the party’s New York headquarters, was the GOP Congress. . . . The meeting hall was decorated in a Russian motif. Pictures of Trotsky and Lenin flanked a red banner with the ‘workers of the world unite’ slogan.
Called to Congress
Booth’s most prominent work came in September 1946, when Duquesne Light Co. power workers walked off the job. Newspapers fanned fears of “anarchy,” judges threatened to hold strikers in contempt and politicians warned that communists were behind the strike. Ernie Adamson, a Pittsburgh attorney working as counsel for the House Un-American Activities Committee, claimed radicals had organized the strike, and by October Booth — who had organized among the power workers — faced a congressional subpoena. “I guess I’ll have to go to Washington by donkey,” she told reporters. “They gave me $20 for the trip and I’m a working girl.”
Booth’s hearing was held behind closed doors, but she made much of what she called a “pretty dull” occasion. “They were looking for a witch in this situation,” she said outside the hearing. “It’s a pretty time-worn method — to try to introduce a red herring, trying to indicate there were outside agitators.” An SWP comrade covered the testimony in The Militant, quoting Booth as asking why the Duquesne Light Co. executives hadn’t been called to testify as well. “Taken aback by her militant attitude, the committee members refused to answer her pointed question and blusteringly insisted that they were asking the questions,” he said.
The Red Scare
By the late 1940s, Booth’s activity appeared to be winding down. Allies later noted that she had suffered from health problems and asked for a leave of absence, but she kept writing from the sidelines. In 1949, after a mob attacked a meeting of the Communist Party — the SWP’s hated rivals at the time — she wrote to the Pittsburgh Press blaming the police and news media. “While we disagree sharply with the Stalinist methods and aims, we vehemently oppose the action of the police force, which has shown much more energy in breaking up legitimate workers’ picket lines than they showed in restraining the hoodlum elements that threatened this public meeting,” she wrote.
By the early ’50s, the SWP faced decline. Splits and a right-wing attacks had weakened the Trotskyist movement, the mainstream Communists and organized labor alike. The SWP office on Fifth Avenue was eventually closed or moved. Booth kept up contact with the party while working at the Home Plate Cafe in Oakland.
“The very best”
On April 21, 1952, she collapsed at work and died at 40 years old (a death certificate said the cause was unknown; a news report said it was a heart attack). Friends sought out family in California, where her remains were sent for burial in Sacramento.
“Some months ago I heard that Eloise was thinking of coming back into party activity — and that was such good news!” a comrade said at a memorial meeting in New York, recounting the sudden realization that she had died. “She was the best — the very best!” Her stature was such that, in a volume of Trotsky’s writings published nearly two decades later by the SWP press, the opening page was dedicated “to the memory of Eloise Booth.”
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