He represented the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was one of only two members of the Socialist Party of America elected to the United States Congress.

Meyer's father, Efraim London, was a former Talmudic scholar who had become politically revolutionary and philosophically agnostic, while his mother had remained a devotee of Judaism.

In America, Meyer's father had become a commercial printer, doing jobs in the Yiddish, Russian, and English languages and publishing his own radical weekly called Morgenstern.

[4] Efraim London's shop was a hub of activity, bringing together Jewish radical intellectuals from throughout the city, many of whom met and influenced the printer's son with their ideas.

[5] He completed the program and was admitted to the bar in New York in 1898,[5] becoming a labor lawyer, taking on cases which fought injunctions or defending the rights of tenants against the transgressions of landlords.

[6] In the 1890s, London joined the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), standing as its candidate for New York State Assembly in 1896.

[7] He was attracted by Eugene V. Debs and his new Social Democracy of America (SDA) and resigned from the SLP to help establish Local Branch No.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was deeply inspirational to the former citizen of the Tsarist regime, and London threw himself into the task of speaking to mass meetings organized to help raise funds for the relief of Jewish victims of the pogroms which erupted at that same time.

[9] London also engaged in fund-raising on behalf of the Bund, the Yiddish-language revolutionary movement in regions with significant Jewish populations in the old Russian Empire.

[10] London was active in the 1910 New York Cloakmakers strike, during which the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) brought out 50,000 in a successful struggle for higher wages and better work conditions against their employers.

This is the first great attempt to regulate conditions in the trade, to do away with that anarchy and chaos which keeps some of the men working sixteen hours a day during the hottest months of the year while thousands of others have no employment whatever.

London's place in the cloakmakers' strike made him one of the best-known public faces of the Socialist Party in New York City and over the course of three runs for Congress he gradually constructed a winning coalition, emerging victorious despite the violence and fraud practiced by the campaign of his Tammany Hall-supported Democratic opponent in the election of 1914.

In a statement to members of the Socialist Party, London's radical opponents chronicled his transgressions: He ignored the St. Louis Resolution right after it was adopted.

With the Democratic and Republican parties united behind a single "fusion" candidate and his own supporters fragmented, London narrowly lost reelection in 1918, falling to Henry M. Goldfogle by a tally of 7,269 to 6,519.

[26] The next day, London's body was taken to the Forward building, where it lay in state while 25,000 men, women, and children filed past the casket, paying their respects.

[28] A funeral followed on Wednesday, June 10, one of the greatest mass displays of mourning in New York City's history, witnessed by an estimated 500,000 people.