24 Jun 2026
Mamdani's Great But Who is Summer Lee?
Pittsburgh’s Red Thread: The Long Road to Summer Lee
In the national imagination, Pittsburgh is often cast as a city of steel mills, blackened smokestacks, football dynasties, and industrial decline. Yet beneath that familiar narrative lies another history—one less frequently taught, but no less consequential. It is the story of a city where socialism was not a foreign import, an academic abstraction, or a social media trend. It was a lived political tradition forged in the furnaces of capitalism itself.
As democratic socialists and social-democratic candidates gain traction in an increasingly dysfunctional two-party system, it is worth remembering that western Pennsylvania was traveling this road long before it became fashionable. And if there is a contemporary political figure who embodies that tradition, it is Congresswoman Summer Lee, whose rise from community organizer to member of Congress reflects not a political anomaly, but a return to one of Pittsburgh’s deepest historical currents.
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The story begins with blood.
The wealth that built Pittsburgh’s grand mansions and industrial empires did not emerge from innovation alone. It was extracted through grueling labor, dangerous workplaces, child labor, strikebreaking, and violent confrontations between workers and industrial magnates. The city’s legendary robber barons—men like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick—created fortunes so vast they transformed the American economy. But workers paid the price.
The violence of industrial capitalism created its own opposition. By the late nineteenth century, Pittsburgh had become fertile ground for labor radicalism. In 1876, activists helped establish the Workingmen’s Party, one of the earliest organized socialist movements in the United States. Workers packed meeting halls to debate wages, working conditions, and the concentration of wealth. Socialist newspapers circulated throughout the region. Union halls became universities of political thought.
By the early twentieth century, socialism had become so normalized in western Pennsylvania that it occupied a visible place in mainstream public life. Tens of thousands of Pittsburgh-area voters cast ballots for Eugene V. Debs, the five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate whose calls for economic democracy resonated deeply with industrial workers.
This was not fringe politics.
The Pittsburgh Press regularly carried socialist bulletins. Nearby industrial communities such as Turtle Creek and Pitcairn elected socialist mayors and council members. In steel towns stretching along the Monongahela River, socialist candidates became part of ordinary civic life.
Perhaps nowhere was this more visible than among the region’s Finnish immigrant communities. In places like Monessen, Glassport, and McKeesport, Finnish workers carried with them a rich cooperative tradition that blended labor activism, education, and community building.
These “Red Finns” established cooperative stores, mutual aid societies, educational programs, and enormous community centers known as Red Halls. Far from being marginal institutions, these halls became anchors of civic life, often rivaling local churches in influence. They hosted dances, lectures, political meetings, theatrical performances, and language classes. For many immigrant workers, socialism was not simply a political ideology. It was a way of constructing a community capable of surviving industrial exploitation.
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh’s Jewish labor movement was building its own institutions. The Labor Lyceum, founded in 1907 by the Workmen’s Circle and Jewish labor organizers, became a hub of socialist education, cultural life, and political organizing in the Hill District. Lectures on labor rights existed alongside theater productions, literary events, and community gatherings. Politics and culture were understood as inseparable.
This ecosystem of radical thought produced newspapers, pamphlets, strike bulletins, and community organizations that chronicled a vision of democracy extending beyond the ballot box. Publications such as the Allegheny Socialist documented struggles that mainstream institutions often ignored. Many of these materials remain preserved in the Archives & Special Collections at the University of Pittsburgh, where researchers can trace the contours of a forgotten political world.
That world never entirely disappeared.
The Cold War drove much of the socialist tradition underground. Red Scares, deindustrialization, and the collapse of organized labor weakened institutions that had once defined working-class political life. Yet fragments endured—in union halls, community organizations, neighborhood activism, and the stubborn memory of communities that understood economic power and political power as inseparable.
The election of Summer Lee represents the reemergence of that tradition in a new century.
Lee’s victories were frequently described by national media as evidence of a growing progressive movement. They were that. But they were also something more local and historical. Her success was rooted in communities that have spent generations organizing around labor rights, racial justice, economic inequality, and democratic participation.
What appears new from Washington often looks familiar from Pittsburgh.
The language has changed. Steel mills have given way to hospitals, universities, technology firms, and service-sector employment. The demographics of the movement have evolved. Yet the core questions remain remarkably consistent: Who benefits from economic growth? Who controls political power? Who has a voice in shaping society?
Those questions animated the Red Finns of Monessen. They inspired Labor Lyceum organizers in the Hill District. They motivated Debs voters throughout Allegheny County. And they continue to animate the political coalition that propelled Summer Lee to Congress.
For generations, America’s political establishment has treated socialism as an exotic ideology imported from somewhere else. Pittsburgh’s history suggests otherwise.
Social democracy and labor radicalism were not foreign intrusions into American life. They emerged organically wherever workers confronted concentrated wealth and sought democratic solutions. In western Pennsylvania, they became woven into the region’s identity.
The red thread running through Pittsburgh’s history is not one of revolution. It is one of democratic participation, collective action, and the persistent belief that ordinary people deserve a meaningful voice in the institutions that govern their lives.
Long before pundits debated democratic socialism on cable television, Pittsburgh workers were already having that conversation in union halls, cooperative stores, ethnic community centers, and crowded meeting rooms beside the mills.
Summer Lee did not create that tradition.
She inherited it.
And in many ways, she is simply the latest chapter in a story Pittsburgh has been writing for nearly a century and a half.
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