Hoopes, Darlington - 1989

Darlington Hoopes, 93, twice the Socialist candidate for president and a former Pennsylvania state legislator, died Monday at the Leader Nursing and Rehabilitation Center outside Reading. He lived in Reading.

Mr. Hoopes, who practiced law in Reading for many years, ran for president on the Socialist ticket in 1952 against Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson. Unlike the major-party candidates, though, Mr. Hoopes ran a campaign that cost only $150 and that saw him give a speech in Kenosha, Wis., to an audience of one. As a Socialist, he called for nationalization of banks, railroads, coal mines and the steel industry, and for strengthening the United Nations and reuniting the Germanys. "The wealthy have long used the power of government to enrich themselves," he said in a radio address Oct. 31, 1952. "In a democracy, government is a tool that should be used to advance the common welfare." On Election Day, he got 21,000 votes, to Eisenhower's 33 million. Mr. Hoopes also ran for president in 1956 and was the Socialists' vice presidential candidate in 1944.

Mr. Hoopes was a native of Harford County, Md., the son of the manager of a dairy farm. He attended the George School in Bucks County and graduated at the top of his class in 1913. Mr. Hoopes was a Quaker and a deeply religious man, his son Darlington Jr. said. He said his father came to embrace socialism through his Christian convictions. Mr. Hoopes studied agriculture at the University of Wisconsin but then turned to law, largely getting his legal education through correspondence courses. He first practiced law in Norristown and later in Reading, which, with support from the labor movement, was a base for Socialist political sentiment in the 1930s and '40s. Mr. Hoopes served as national chairman of the Socialist Party for 20 years, and was elected to three terms in the Pennsylvania legislature in the 1930s. In 1933 the Philadelphia Public Ledger called him a "pleasantly aggressive" politician who "bears aloft the torch of Socialism to brighten the gloomy corners of the House chamber." He was "good-natured, well-dressed, short, thin and talkative," the newspaper recorded. The same year, Mr. Hoopes introduced and helped pass the state's child labor law. He also helped found the Reading-area branches of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP. He served as Reading's solicitor from 1936 to 1940 and was president of the Berks County Bar Association in the early 1960s. He also was active in local consumer cooperatives and the YMCA.

Surviving are his wife, Hazelette Hoopes; sons, Darlington Jr. and Rae; daughter, Delite Hawk; 12 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

Services will be at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Reading Friends Meetinghouse, 108 N. Sixth St.