Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Why is the DSA coming to the City Club?
On September 24th, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America will address the City Club of Cleveland. Ashik Siddique has led the DSA in a number of electoral victories over the last year, starting with the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York and Councilman Tanmay Shah here in Cleveland. This primary season has brought more wins for the DSA in scores of local legislative races, 20 congressional contests, and one senate primary in Michigan.
The DSA is ascendant and is clearly pulling the Democratic party to the left. The DSA also holds some positions that some members of our community might characterize as extreme or controversial: defunding the police, for instance, and support for the Palestinian right to self-determination "from the river to the sea," an anti-Zionist stance that some understand as a call for the destruction of the nation of Israel.
Despite criticism of their political stances, however, the DSA is shaping national politics and is changing the kind of conversation we are having about life in America today and in the future. There's a lesson for us all, though, in the City Club's past. In the 2013 history of our institution, "A Century of Free Speech at The City Club of Cleveland," Carol Poh writes of a controversial invitation extended to another Socialist activist more than 100 years ago.
In January 1923, in a city whose large population of low wage immigrant workers had embraced the message of socialism, the City Club’s commitment to free speech was tested—and found wanting. Five years earlier, in June 1918, the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs had made a speech in Canton, Ohio, opposing the World War and urging resistance to the military draft. Following the speech he was arrested in Cleveland, convicted of violating the Espionage Act, and sentenced to ten years in an Atlanta prison. Owing to Debs’s declining health, President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence to time served, effective Christmas Day 1921.
In 1922, Jack Raper, Peter Witt, and others proposed that Debs be invited to address the City Club and in December that year the public affairs committee voted to issue the invitation. City Club President Frank C. Cain directed that the invitation be held up until the board of directors could pass on it. On January 9, 1923, the board voted 6 to 4 in favor of extending the invitation. Francis T. Hayes, secretary of the City Club, issued the invitation, which Debs promptly accepted, agreeing to address the group in the near future.
Meanwhile, according to the Plain Dealer, “five men prominent in the business and professional life of Cleveland,” indignant that Debs had been invited to speak, resigned from the City Club. Others protested by letter, and one, A. M. Goldsmith, circulated a petition calling on the board of directors to reconsider its decision upholding the public affairs committee’s decision to invite Debs. City Club President Cain refused to preside at the Debs forum “because of his personal feeling that Debs should not have been invited.” When Debs learned of the dissension within the club, he gently begged off, writing to club Secretary Hayes: “Feeling disinclined . . . to obtrude where there is any question of my being welcome, or as to the right of being heard in a forum avowedly open to free speech, I beg to withdraw my acceptance and to respectfully decline the invitation of the club.” (12)
Today, we understand that 1923 moment as one in which we failed to live up to our ideals and our commitment to freedom of speech. We should have done better, as an institution and as individuals. It would be a sad day, indeed, if we made the same mistake again, 103 years later.
We know some members of the community will be disappointed that Siddique is speaking here, just as others were with Debs in 1923, or with George Wallace in 1967, Ilan Pappé in 2018, or Aaron Baer or Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this year. That's understandable. No one agrees with everyone who speaks here. Yet our disagreements shouldn't prevent us from welcoming views different from our own.
In the aftermath of his novel "The Circle" being banned in the public schools in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 2022, author Dave Eggers organized a local bookstore there to make his work and the banned work of other authors available for free to high school students. MSNBC produced a documentary about the book ban and the response. In it, Eggers summarized his stance on free speech. "Fear of ideas," he said, "is un-American."
On the 24th, some of you will join us at for Siddique's appearance to get close to a national leader inspiring you and your politics. Some of you will come out of curiosity, wondering what exactly is this movement that seems to be taking over the left? And some of you may come to confront Siddique on views you deeply disagree with. All of it is welcome. Your fearlessness is inspiring.
And if you choose not to come, that's welcome, too. You can still text us a question.
