More than a century ago, a young, charismatic socialist with the gift of gab decided to run for mayor in his New York town. He campaigned on a platform of affordability: City-run grocery stores, cheap fares for streetcars, taxing the rich, and good government.
Sound familiar?
George Lunn was a 38-year-old preacher when he joined the Socialist Party and ran to be mayor of Schenectady in 1911. While electing a socialist was new to the people of the small, industrial town in upstate New York in 1911, the Socialist Party was having a moment. The Socialists reached peak membership in the United States in 1912 and, in the first two decades of the 20th century, more than 130 Socialist candidates were elected as mayors, with the party promoting better conditions for the working class, and public ownership of major industries.
Conditions were ripe in Schenectady for Lunn: The population of the town had grown, rapidly doubling to around 70,000 thanks to a surge of immigration from Italy and Eastern European countries, and massive hiring from local industry giants General Electric and the American Locomotive Company. Growing diversity, and an affordability crisis, were sending new voters to the polls. Schenectady's physical and social infrastructure strained under the weight of its own growth. Schools were heaving, sewers were breaking, and, thanks to local monopolies on essential goods like ice, coal, and local transport, prices were too damn high.
For the last 20 years, Union College professor Andrew Morris has looked to Schenectady as a historical lab, a microcosm of many of the major changes seen across the United States in urban industrial areas over the past century and a half. Now, he's seeing echoes of the popular Lunn—who united voters across the working and middle classes and served four terms as mayor of Schenectady—in New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
"History doesn't repeat itself," Morris said, "but it often rhymes."
Morris said he first became fascinated by the similarities between Lunn and Mamdani when the assemblymember announced his plan to open City-run grocery stores.
"I was like, wait, George Lunn tried that 100 years ago. And obviously with both having an affiliation with the socialist movement of their time," he said. "I thought it would be interesting to line them up and see what echoes there are, how much the socialism of the 21st century bears any resemblance to the socialism of the early 20th century."
This week, Hell Gate chatted with the historian and professor about what made Lunn's rise possible, and what Mamdani's campaign can learn from looking back.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Hell Gate: Mamdani, before he ran for office, was a rapper. And what is a rapper but a preacher to a different kind of congregation?
Andrew Morris: Yes. One of the big parallels between these two political figures is that they're both intensely charismatic individuals. And I think you can see that in Lunn's ministry. And you can see that in Mamdani's rapping and in the way his campaigning has caught fire in his outreach.
Lunn's congregation in Schenectady grew fast. He brought in all these sorts of working-class people that would come to hear his lectures. One of the issues that drew him into politics and also got him in trouble at his church was this question about transportation and the cost of streetcars. And so there's another sort of echo across time here in these campaigns.