Flashback: Socialists professors honor prominent socialist.

Flashback to 1964. The New York Times reports on socialist Harry L. Laidler's big 80th birthday party:

The lengthy list includes Sen­ator Paul H. Douglas, Demo­crat of Illinois; Dr. Evverett R. Clinchy, a founder of the Na­tional Conference of Christians and Jews; Babette Deutsch, the poet; James Henle of Van­guard Press, book publisher; Walter Lippmann, the colum­nist; Talcott Parsons, Harvard sociologist; Dr. Selman A. Waksman, co‐discoverer of streptomycin; and Dr. Sidney Hook, New York University philosopher.

Dr. Laidler, still hale and hearty despite a slight limp, is a slender, mild‐mannered man with sandy hair and a florid Anglo ‐ Saxon face.

“We never promoted the Marxian cult,” Dr. Laidler said in a recent interview. “We con­ceived of the socialist society as one with a mixed economy, an economy with public, co­operative and private owner­ship, the ultimate objective of which was real equality of op­portunity for every man and woman so he or she could achieve the fulfillment of his or her potentialities.”

Dr. Laidler was born in Brooklyn on High Street in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, near Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church, where his father was a lay leader.

He was brought up by an un­ble, Theodore Atworth, a for­mer president of the Photo

The Intercollegiate Socialist Society was organized by Sin­clair, London, J. G. Phelps Stokes and Robert Hunter, who decided the executive committee ought to have at least one col­legian. They elected Dr. Laidler.

The vanguard of the socialist movement , in America, doesn't appear to be workers.