Ben Davidson (politician)

Ben Davidson
Born	1901 Pittsburgh
Died	December 1991 Los Angeles
Cause of death	complications from myasthenia gravis
Residence	Pittsburgh, New York, Los Angeles
Nationality	American
Other names	David Benjamin (CPUSA)
Alma mater	Columbia University
Occupation	politician, educator
Years active	1925–1977
Employer	Liberal Party of New York (1944–1977)
Political party	Liberal Party of New York, Communist Party (Opposition)
Spouse(s)	Eve Chambers Davidson
Children	Karla Davidson Feitelberg, John Davidson

Ben Davidson was an American politician who co-founded the Liberal Party of New York State with fellow teacher unionist George Counts, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Alex Rose of the Cloth Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers, and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Davidson was born in Pittsburgh in 1901. He began his undergraduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh and finished them at Columbia University.

"After college he taught social studies in schools in Manhattan," wrote the New York Times in his obituary.Whittaker Chambers recalled further details in his memoir. Among the first people he met when he joined the Communist front Workers Party of America in 1925 were Davidson and his wife. He wrote:

Eve Chambers and her husband have long been out of the Communist Party. They were expelled as "incurable right-wing deviationists and Lovestoneites" when the Stalinists took over the party in 1929. Today, David Benjamin is better known by his real name, Ben Davidson, and as an active lieutenant of the chief of the Liberal Party in New York—Adolf A. Berle, with whom, fourteen years later, when Berle was security officer of the State Department, I was to have a momentous conversation about Communist espionage. This group of Communists was called the English-speaking branch.

Davidson, he recalled, advised him against using his real name in the Party.

By 1923, he was a member of Local Union 5 of the American Federation of Teachers. There, Benjamin Mandel created a "Special Research Group," affiliated with the Educational Workers International, itself recently created by the Red International of Labor Unions, which in turn was affiliated with the Soviet-dominated Comintern. Pressure from Communist members led to a majority of Local 5 to reject this chain of affiliation. Communist members of Local 5 included Mandel, Davidson, Bertram Wolfe, Jacob Lind, Rae Ragozin, Jack Hardy, Sarah Golden, Clara Reibert, Abraham Zitron, and Isadore Begun.

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