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The Socialist Party of America

(1897-1946)

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1897

NOVEMBER

“The Social Democracy,” by Cyrus Field Willard. A fascinating article, essentially the “missing link” between Eugene V. Debs’ American Railway Union and Julius A. Wayland’s Ruskin Colony in Tennessee. Williard, one of the three members of the Colonization Commission of the Social Democracy of America (formed by the final national convention of the ARU) talks about the plans of that body to establish a socialist colony in Tennessee and a proposal to the city of Nashville to construct 75 miles of railway for the city—a project which would put the (blacklisted) unemployed workers of the ARU/Social Democracy of America to work and help advance the cause of collective ownership in a single stroke. First published in the November 1897 issue of The New Time, published by Charles H. Kerr & Co.

JUNE

“Statement of Principles of the Social Democratic Party”: Adopted at Chicago, June 11, 1898. A first platform issued by the fledgling socialist political organization which was to merge with the insurgent so-called “Kangaroo” faction of the Socialist Labor Party to form the Socialist Party of America in 1901. In this document, the Social Democratic Party of America categorized socialism as “the collective ownership of the means of production for the common good and welfare” and called upon “the wage-workers and all those in sympathy with their historical mission to realize a higher civilization” to sever ties with existing conservative capitalist and reformist political parties and to instead work for “the establishment of a system of cooperative production and distribution.”

 

JULY

“The Future,” by Eugene V. Debs [July 16, 1898] Letter from the former head of the industrial American Railway Union and leading participant of the Social Democracy in America to the members of the newly-formed Social Democratic Party of America. Debs gives his wholehearted blessing to the new political organization and remarks upon the recent split of the Social Democracy in America between the SDP political action faction and the colonization faction as follows: “The separation at the late convention was inevitable. It had to come. The contemplation of division was painful, as only those can fully realize who were party to it. But painful as it was, the operation had to be performed.” Debs notest that all members of the new SDPA “are full fledged Socialists. They are in accord with the program of International Socialism. There is not only in the number opposed to independent political action, not one that asks or expects anything from any old capitalist party, by whatever name it may be called.” He adds that “There is harmony. There is oneness of purpose, there is true-hearted fidelity to principle, there is unrelaxing energy, and these qualities in alliance presage success.”

1900

SEPTEMBER

“Why I Am a Socialist,” by George Herron,” [Sept. 1900] A speech by Professor George D. Herron to a campaign meeting of the Social Democratic Party held at Central Music Hall in Chicago on September 29, 1900. Herron argues that three main historical lines were coming together in the struggle for socialism in America: the “dogmatic” European Marxist trend exemplified by the Socialist Labor Party; the historic trend seeking individual liberty in the tradition of Rousseau, Jefferson, and the French Revolution; and a new religious sensibility seeking spiritual freedom through common economic liberation. Herron states that neither existing party was conscious of the reconstructive task facing society but rather sought to prop up the brute lawlessness of capitalism. Only common ownership of the resources and productive tools needed jointly by all would allow for the “full liberty of the human soul,” Herron stated, and only the action of the working class itself could win this liberty.

 

NOVEMBER

“A Plea for Unity of American Socialists,” by George Herron. [Nov. 1900] The stenographic report of a speech delivered by Christian Socialist stalwart George Herron to a mass meeting of Chicago Socialists on Nov. 18, 1900. Herron states that only disunity and factional strife could derail the socialist movement from ultimate victory (“for a generation or a century”) and arguing that a united movement could make use of the quasi-religious sensibilities of the educated segment of society in a mass movement for human liberation. An excellent exposition of SPA ideology from the university professor who co-founded the Rand School of Social Science.

 

1902

JULY

“Immediate Demands,” by Seymour Steadman,” [July 1902] The case for support of a “minimum program” for the Socialist Party of America is made here by Seymour Steadman, a Chicago lawyer who remained an important member of the Socialist Party for the rest of his life. Incremental improvement of the life of the workers weakened the grip of the capitalist class, Steadman argued, while failure to support a program of social reform would “leave no program for a possible elected candidate, and the conceit of it will breed sterility, and make DeLeon the true Messiah.” A document making clear the ideological division of the SPA between reformist and revolutionary trends, dating back to the initial days of the party.

 

1903

APRIL

“How I Became a Socialist” by Federic F. Heath,” [April 1903] Autobiographical account of the intellectual journey of Milwaukee Socialist Frederic Heath from liberal Republican to Bellamy Nationalist to founding member of the Social Democracy in America. While acknowledging the role played by Socialist Labor Party literature in formation of his personal philosophy, Heath draws a sharp line between his own views, which he believes steeped in “democracy,” and those of the SLP. A “Cooperative Commonwesath secured through cataclysm” is called a “wild dream,” utopian and contrary to the teaching of history. Further evidence of the long-running division of the American movement between the proto-Bolshevik SLP and the dominant social democratic trend in the Socialist Party of America.

 

JULY

“State Secretary Reports.” [July 1903] In July of 1903, the weekly Appeal to Reason published a special issue which included individual reports by 23 of the State Secretaries of the Socialist Party of America. Many of these recounted the history of the socialist movement in their state up to that juncture, details difficult to uncover from any other source. The result is an extremely important primary source document, an excellent starting place for in depth research of specific state histories. State Secretaries reporting here included those from Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

 

OCTOBER

“What Revolutionary Socialism Means,” by Carl D. Thompson [Oct. 1903] Very explicit exposition of the term “Revolutionary Socialism” by a leading figure in Victor D. Berger’s Social Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Rev. Thompson quotes Karl Kautsky at length to “settle” his assertion that “revolutionary Socialism” has no connection to violent overthrow of the state, but is rather a synonym for “scientific Socialism”—meaning one who believes in the use of “the independent political party to capture the powers of government by a hitherto oppressed class as a means of securing Socialism.” While the term “revolutionary Socialism” is misunderstood by an “ordinary audience,” it remains a phrase necessary to “distinguish us as Socialists from those who merely wish to patch up the present system and keep it,” according to Thompson. “It is to make the point of difference clear and to distinguish sharply between [reform] programs and Socialism that the Socialists use the term ‘revolutionary.’ We are not ‘reformers’—we are ‘revolutionists.’” Thompson continues by stating, “It is safe to say that every scientific Socialist in the world would regard it a calamity to the cause, as well as to humanity, to have a violent upheaval in society.... Socialism offers a possible, a peaceful solution.”

 

NOVEMBER

“The Negro and the Class Struggle,” by Eugene V. Debs [Nov. 1903] A fearless and principled defense of black Americans delivered by the past and future candidate of the Socialist Party of America. While acknowledging that “malign spirit of race hatred” was so pervasive in the south that even some socialists had succumbed to the reactionary ideology, Debs unflinchingly stated that “The whole world is under obligation to the negro, and that the white heel is still upon the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized.The history of the negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.” Debs argued that the whole question of “social equality” was inseparably linked to the struggle for economic freedom, for socialism—“there never was any social inferiority that was not the shrivelled fruit of economic inequality,” he says. The prescription was clear to Debs: “Our position as socialists and as a party is perfectly plain. We have simply to say: ‘The class struggle is colorless.’ The capitalists, white, black, and all other colors, on the other side.”

 

1904

APRIL

“The Multnomah County, Oregon, Socialist Party Convention of 1904: Two Reports from the Contemporary Press.” An esoteric piece of local history, this file consists of two pieces of newspaper reportage on the Multnomah County Convention held by the Socialist Party of Oregon in Portland in April 1904. The convention nominated a complete slate of candidates for the November 1904 election, a complete list of which appears in the article. A demonstration of the deep roots of the early SPA in the periphery of America, far away from the urban meccas of Chicago and New York.

DECEMEBER

 

“1904 Average Paid Membership by States, Socialist Party of America.” Alphabetical listing of official state-by-state totals of average paid membership in the SPA. Data for all 37 organized states is included. Top five state memberships included: Illinois (1,851), New York (1,791), California (1,566), Washington (1,146), and Massachusetts (1,101). There was an average paid membership of just 145 in Oklahoma in 1904, while Wisconsin surprisingly finished behind the state of Missouri, 775 to 650.

 

1905

FEBRUARY

“Aid for Russia.” [An appeal published in The International Socialist Review, Feb. 1905] As revolution against the oppressive Tsarist regime swept the vast Russian empire, a group of 15 leading luminaries of the Socialist Party of America consituted themselves as a fundraising committee, placing this appeal in the socialist press. “The cowardly murder of thousands of peaceful workingmen and women has revealed to the world the brutality of the Russian governing classes in all its hideous nakedness, and has made the hitherto inert masses of the Russian population susceptible to the world-redeeming gospel of socialism the appeal declared, adding that the financial resources of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party were entirely inadequate to the grand task. Socialists were called upon to send funds for the RSDRP to Dr. S. Interman of New York, who would in turn cable the money to the Russian party. “If there ever was an occasion for a practical demonstration of the international solidarity of the socialist movement, this is the occasion. If it ever was our duty to assist our struggling brethren abroad, this is our duty now.” This appeal was signed by Victor Berger, John Chase, Eugene Debs, Ben Hanford, Max Hayes, Morris Hillquit, S. Interman, Alexander Jonas, Jack London, William Mailly, Algie Simons, Henry Slobodin, and Julius Wayland.

 

AUGUST

“The Industrial Convention,” by Eugene V. Debs. [Aug. 1905] Socialist Party leader Debs attacks what he claims was systematic and intentional misrepresentation and distortion in its reporting of the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World. Debs alleged that these papers “resorted to downright mendacity to accomplish their purpose of defeating a body of men who by their records had proved that they were above the corrupting influences of capitalist bribery and whose object it was to unite the working clas for their emancipation from wage-slavery.” The capitalist press was loyal to the AF of L, Debs charged, adding that “silly and stupid falsehoods” about DeLeon “capturing” the organization or Debs being “disgusted” with it would “have no effect” upon the body.

 

NOVEMBER

Winning a World,” by Eugene V. Debs [Nov. 1905]. Article from the November 1905 issue of Wilshire’s Magazine, believed to be republished here for the first time. Debs waxes eloquent as to the lofty task of the Socialist movement, “to win the world—the whole world—from animalism, and consecrate it to humanity.” This is to be achieved as a result of releasing the “imprisoned productive forces from the vandal horde that has seized them, that they may be operated, not spasmodically and in the interest of a favored class, as at present, but freely and in the common interest of all.” For this the working class must be “roused” and Debs urges his readers to “Spread Wilshire’s Magazine, the weekly Socialist papers, the pamphlets, tracts, and leaflets among the people” and thereby educate the working class. He calls for both economic and political action, “One Great, All-embracing Industrial Union and One Great, All-embracing Political Party, and both revolutionary to the core—two hearts with but a single soul.” Includes a photographic image of Debs from a circa 1904 postcard.

 

DECEMBER

“1905 Average Paid Membership by States, Socialist Party of America.” Alphabetical listing of official state-by-state totals of average paid membership in the SPA. Data for all 38 organized states is included. Top five state memberships included: Illinois (2,412), New York (2,083), California (1,710), Wisconsin (1,666—a massive gain from the previous year’s total), and Ohio (1,541). Other states with more than 1,000 average paid members included Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Washington, and New Jersey. Oklahoma membership was up to 505, still trailing the unlikely state of Missouri.

 

1906

SEPTEMBER

“No Impossibilism for Us!,” by Victor L. Berger [September 1906] A succinct philosophical manifesto of the “constructive” Socialist political philosophy, originally published as an editorial in the Social-Democratic Herald by that paper’s editor, Victor L. Berger. Berger declares war upon “IWW element of our party,” of which he says that “most of whom are as ignorant as they are fanatical and hypocritical .” The AF of L for all its shortcomings is in every way preferable to the IWW, Berger contends. Berger states that a great deal has been done “for the working class and for humanity” within present society, with much more to be achieved or “Socialism will never be possible.” Berger says that “we believe in a policy of steady change very much in the social system per se, unless economic conditions (besides also the education and enlightenment of the people) are favorable towards a complete change. Otherwise, we might simply change masters.” A “moral, physical, and intellectual strengthening of the proletariat” is called for, as well as the formation of a “class alliance with farmers”—in this way society can “grow into” Socialism. In conclusion, Berger advocates the arming of the whole people: “Not for the sake of ‘revolution,’ but for the sake of peace and progress. An armed people are always a free people. Even the demagogues then would have a great deal less to say than they have today. An armed people is always a strong people.” Step-by-step constructive action is called for and “impotent and good for nothing REVOLUTIONARY PHRASES and holy words” are held in the lowest regard by Berger in this biting manifesto.

 

1908

MAY

Report of Committee on Foreign Speaking Organizations to the National Convention of the Socialist Party, May 17, 1908. Committee report to the 1908 SPA Convention in Chicago, delivered by S.A. Knopfnagel. The Committee advocated the acceptance of all foreign language organizations seeking affiliation with the Socialist Party, subject to 5 conditions: “ (1) They are composed of Socialist Party members only. (2) Any foreign speaking organization having a national form of organization of its own be recognized only if all the branches composing this organization having been chartered by the national, state, or local Socialist Party organizations, and pay their dues to the respective Socialist Party organizations. (3) No foreign speaking organization asking the Socialist Party for recognition shall issue their own particular national, state, or local charters. Same to be issued only by the respective organizations of the Socialist Party, as the case may require. (4) All foreign speaking organizations affiliated with the Socialist Party must and shall conform in every respect with the Socialist Party national, state, and local constitutions, platforms, and resolutions. (5) They should function only as agitation, education, and organization bureaus of the Socialist Party.” Includes an amendment made from the floor but not published in the SP’s Official Bulletin (probably due to incompetence rather than malice) prohibiting the refusal of admission to the SPA on account of race or language.

 

Report of the Finnish Translator to the Convention of the Socialist Party of America, May 10, 19088, by Victor Watia Extensive report of the Translator of the Organization of Finnish Socialists (Finnish Federation) to the 1908 Chicago convention of the SPA. Watia provides a number of interesting details about the oriigin of the Finnish movement inside the SPA, noting the pivotal decisions of the Federation’s 1906 convention which set the table for closer participation of the organization with the party. Watia reveals that the concept of a &#&8220;Translator” emerged spontaneously in several states of the upper midwest, in which Finnish socialists found themselves in need of assistance converting documents between Finnish and English and employed their own translators. The Finnish organization determined to establish the post of National Translator and made every effort to have this individual located inside SPA headquarters for convenience. This office soon came to serve as the central office of the Finnish organization itself. Watia notes the mutually beneficial nature of this post and advocates the placing of skilled SPA organizers in the field among the various language groups and committing itself to develop Translators for other language groups desiring them. Also includes the budget of the Finnish federation for first 16 months of its affiliation with the SPA (which began Jan. 1, 1907). Watia’s report includes a lengthy prohibition resolution of the Finnish Federation which caused Victor Berger to get grumpy.

 

1909

NOVEMBER

“What is the Matter with the Socialist Party?,” by Charles H. Kerr [Nov. 1909] The Communist movement did not magically materialize from thin air in 1919; it had deep roots in American radicalism older than the Socialist Party of America from whence it emerged. One might reasonably argue that the historic trend which lead to the 1919 split began with the disappointing performance of the SPA in the 1908 electoral campaign. This editorial by Charles H. Kerr in The International Socialist Review gives voice to the proto-communist revolutionary socialist wing inside the Socialist Party: “Long enough we have cringed before the aristocracy of labor begging for votes that we did not get. Long enough we have experimented with ‘immediate demands’ that might swell our apparent strength by winning the votes of people opposed to revolution. The time has come for the proletarians of the party and those who believe the party should be proletarian in its tactics to bring about a revolution in the party. Let us not withdraw...but take possession. Let us put wage-workers on the National Executive Committee. Let us cut the “immediate demands” out of our platform and leave reformers to wrangle over reforms. Let us make our chief task to spread the propaganda of revolution and of the new industrial unionism, and when we elect members of our own class to office, let us instruct them that their most important work is to hamper the ruling class in the war it will be waging on the revolutionary unions.”

 

DECEMBER

1909 Average Paid Membership by States, Socialist Party of America. Alphabetical listing of official state-by-state totals of average paid membership in the SPA. Data for all 41 organized states is included. Top five state memberships included New York (4,333), Illinois (3,517), Pennsylvania (3,266), Massachusetts (2,526), and Ohio (2,512). Other states with over 1,000 members included: California, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Texas, Michigan, Kansas, and Missouri. A total of 41 states were organized by the SPA. Weakest of the organized states was Vermont, with an average paid monthly membership of 82.

1910

AUGUST

“Accident Insurance and Political Action,” by Charles Ruthenberg. [Aug. 1910] A very early example (from his second year of SPA membership) of the writing of Cleveland Socialist C.E. Ruthenberg, later the head of the Workers (Communist) Party. “The industries of the United States kill, injure, and maim twice as many workers in proportion to the number at work as any other civilized country.... The capitalist class knows no other law than the law of profits... The workers have the power to place on the statute books a compulsory insurance law, but they cannot secure such a law by voting for the candidates nominated by parties owned and controlled by their employers.”

 

1911

JULY

“The Secret of Efficient Expression,” by Eugene V. Debs [July 8, 1911] Asked by the Education Department of the University of Wisconsin to participate in a study of oratorical “fertility and efficiency of expression,” Socialist Party agitator Eugene V. Debs responds with an autobiographical essay on the men who shaped his conception of an orator—Patrick Henry, John Brown, Wendell Phillips, and Robert Ingersoll—and his path of self-education. Debs contends that “There is no inspiration in evil and no power except for its own destruction. He who aspires to master the art of expression must first of all consecrate himself completely to some great cause, and the greatest cause of all is the cause of humanity. He must learn to feel deeply and think clearly to express himself eloquently. He must be absolutely true to the best there is in him, if he has to stand alone.”

 

SEPTEMBER

“The New Review: A Socialist Weekly, (A Prospectus).” [Sept. 1911] One of the most important American Socialist periodicals of the decade of the 1910s was a small theoretical journal published in New York City called The New Review. First published in 1913, the magazine brought together various stands of international socialist thought, including revolutionary industrial unionism and the general strike and anti-militarism. The journal was an intellectual bridge between the so-called syndicalist movement on the one hand and the anti-imperialist movement on the other, and included contributions by such individuals as Henry Slobodin, W.E.B. DuBois, Louis Boudin, Moses Oppenheimer, and Louis Fraina, among others. This trend would emerge in 1918-19 as the Left Wing Section, Socialist Party, the core anglophonic constituency of the American Communist movement. This prospectus notes the obsessive preoccupation of other Socialist periodicals with converting the unconverted with “so-called popular agitation,” proposing instead to fill a glaring need for “serious discussion of the theoretical and practical problems of the labor movement” in a manner designed “for the education of the Socialists themselves.” Includes a list of 22 sponsoring “members of the Socialist Party.”

 

1912

MARCH

“’Nigger’ Equality,” by Kate Richards O’Hare. [March 1912] One of the Socialist Party’s dirty little secrets was the presence in its ranks of a significant number of individuals with frankly racist perspectives. This 1912 pamphlet by Kate Richards O’Hare appealing to Southern voters is the epitome—the most racist document ever issued on the Socialist Party’s behalf. The Socialists do not seek social, physical, or mental equality, O’Hare states, but rather “Equality of Opportunity.” “Just as long as a ‘nigger’ can be robbed of the product of his labor by the capitalist class by being shut out from access to the means of life, just that long he can be made the club and chain that will drag and beat the white workers down into the mire of poverty,” O’Hare states. The only answer to the race question is segregation, O’Hare declares: “Let us give the blacks one section in the country where every condition is best fitted for them.... If the negro rises to such an opportunity, and develops his own civilization, well and good; if not, and he prefers to hunt and fish and live idly, no one will be injured but him and that will be his business.”

 

1913

JANUARY

“Direct Action and Sabotage,” by Moses Oppenheimer. [Jan. 25, 1913] There has been a tendency in the literature to dismiss the Socialist Party’s “Anti-Sabotage” faction fight of 1912-13 as a historical event having little relationship to the Communist/Socialist split of 1919. In reality, both of these episodes were chapters in the same long-running saga, heated political events linked to an ideological division within the SPA dating back to the 1901 establishment of the party and before. This January 1913 discussion of the newly-installed “Anti-Sabotage” section of the SPA constitution by New York activist Moses Oppenheimer helps to demonstrate this connection. Oppenheimer—a major figure in the Left Wing Section, Socialist Party six years hence—is sharply critical of the new “Anti-Sabotage” section, arguing that the two ideological concepts anathematized by the May 1912 Convention were either untested as to efficacy (in the case of Direct Action and the General Strike) or were merely a new name for a long-established defensive tactic of the labor movement (in the case of Sabotage). Oppenheimer considers the decision to rely on the political groundrules established by the reactionary and biased capitalist courts to be ridiculous. He further notes that the majority of the party had not spoken out on the matter, with only 20% voting on the referenda in question and both the contradictory majority and minority reports being approved by majorities of those voting. Oppenheimer sees Direct Action and Sabotage as being distinct from Anarchism due to their coordinated, mass nature, in contradistinction to Anarchist philosophy and practice.

 

“Debs on Syndicalism: A Letter to H.M. Hyndman in London from Eugene V. Debs in Terre Haute, Indiana, January 30, 1913.” This letter to British Socialist H.M. Hyndman was widely published in the American Socialist press as a means of propagating Debs’ views on the bitter conflict over “syndicalism” which divided the Socialist Party. Debs wrote: “Syndicalism has swooped down upon us, and the capitalist papers and magazines are giving it unlimited space, but the Socialist Party is in no danger on account of it. Just at present there are some sharp divisions and some bitter controversies on account of it, but the Socialist Party will emerge all the stronger after syndicalism has had its fling. The Anarchists are all jubilant over the prospect that syndicalism may disrupt the Socialist Party, but they will again be disappointed. There are many of our Socialists who favor syndicalism and sabotage, or think they do, but the party is overwhelmingly opposed to both, and will stick to the main track to the end.”

 

MARCH

“Debs on IWW: A Letter to William English Walling from Eugene V. Debs in Terre Haute, Indiana, March 5, 1913.” This letter to William English Walling was widely reprinted in the Socialist Party press as a means of making known SPA leader Eugene V. Debs’ view of the party’s “Anit-Sabotage” provision and the recent recall of Bill Haywood from the SPA’s National Executive Committee. “I regret to see Haywood’s recall, but it was inevitable. He brought it on himself. I should not have put Section 6 in the constitution, but it is there, and put there by the party, and Haywood deliberately violated it. Is not this a fact?” Debs declared. He added that “The IWW for which Haywood stands and speaks is an anarchist organization in all except in name, and this is the cause of all the trouble. Anarchism and Socialism have never mixed and never will. The IWW has treated the Socialist Party most indecently, to put it very mildly. When it gets into trouble it frantically appeals to the Socialist Party for aid, which has always been freely rendered, and after it’s all over, the IWW kicks the Socialist Party in the face. That is the case put in plain words, and the Socialist Party has had enough of that sort of business, and I don’t blame them a bit.”

 

“The Psychology of Syndicalism (An Editorial),” by Gaylord Wilshire. [March 1913] During the first years of the 1910s, a new radicalism blossomed both inside and outside the ranks of the Socialist Party of America. This left wing moment, centered its orientation around building revolutionary industrial trade unions and winning power through use of the tactic of the general strike. This movement, while in some sense a mere continuation of the dichotomy between “Lassallean-political action” and “Marxian-trade unionism” that had divided the modern radical movement for its entire history, nevertheless gained momentum on an international basis and self-consciousness as something entirely new—“Syndicalism.” The “new” radical industrial unionist movement gained important adherents in the American Socialist movement—the monthly magazine of the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. The International Socialist Review; the upstart New York theoretical journal The New Review; and, as this editorial demonstrates, the well-established (albeit ethically sketchy) Wilshire’s Magazine. This editorial by Gaylord Wilshire notes that “the revolutionary union is the product of the automatic machine and the trustification of capital. It is the only form of organization which can meet the present juncture, for the knell of craft unions was rung by the automatism of the machine.” Socialism, or “Revolution by voting,” is an anachronistic and futile enterprise, Wilshire indicates, colorfully stating that “voting is merely praying in a ballot box.”

 

“Socialism and the Municipalities,” by Henry L. Slobodin. [Oct. 1913] A short defense of the strategy of Socialist engagement in civic electoral politics en route to the social revolution. Not only would an educated, well-housed, and well-fed working class do more to advance the Socialist cause than an ignorant and impoverished working class, Slobodin argues, social revolutions historically always had been urban events. In such a scenario, victory would belong to those who controlled the city governments—with the number of Socialist politicians sitting in Congress a comparatively unimportant detail. Slobodin was the Executive Secretary of the SLP Right (the so-called “Kangaroos”) during the 1899 party split before moving into the Socialist Party. First published in The New Review, October 1913.

 

“Lobbying and Class Rule,” byLouis C. Fraina. [Oct. 1913] The relationship between financial power, corruption, and state control is explored in this article published in The New Review in October 1913. Fraina argues that lobbying and financial intervention in the political process are not class measures but rather “clique measures in the interest of one capitalist clique against another clique,” specifically the needs of the plutocracy against the interests of petty capitalism. The legislative and judicial branches of government inevitably represented the most powerful capitalist interests, Fraina argues. Retrospectively interesting is the observation that corruption “is no more a necessary condition of class rule than violence is a necessary condition of proletarian struggle. Both, in a measure, may be unavoidable, but they are not inherently necessary.”

 

1913

MARCH

“Jesus, the Supreme Leader,” by Eugene V. Debs. [March 1914] An underappreciated aspect of Eugene Debs’ ideology was his interpretation of Christianity and conscious emulation of the central figure of that religion. For Debs, Jesus Christ was in no way a fictitious or allegorical personage but rather a thoroughly admirable historical figure advancing a truly sacred cause—the class-conscious struggle of the downtrodden and oppressed against “Mammon.” For Debs, Jesus was a radical political leader whose tradition ran down the ages to John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and Karl Marx—and served as a model for the way in which a righteous person should live. This firey article is probably Debs’ fullest statement of his radical religious faith.

 

“Decision of the National Executive Committee on the Finnish Controversy.” [Dec. 13, 1914] From 1913 through 1915 a severe factional struggle raged in the Finnish Federation of the Socialist Party, brought about when the constructive socialist leadership of the Eastern District won control of the Executive Committee of the Federation and editorial control of the radical organ of the Middle District, Työmies. The left wing of the federation withdrew their support of Työmies and established a new daily newspaper called Sosialisti. The Federation leadership responded with a series of expulsions and the left appealed to the NEC of the Socialist Party to intervene. After hearings at the September 1914 NEC session, a subcommittee was appointed to deal with the Finnish controversy. The subcommittee attended the special convention of the Finnish Federation (boycotted by the left), and held a hearing of the two factions, before making their report to the December 1914 session of the NEC. The NEC approved the resolution here, which gave a green light to the constructive socialist Finnish leadership to purge the revolutionary socialist “disrupters” affiliated with Sosialisti, resolving that “the decision of the Finnish Federation as to expulsion of locals or members shall be accepted by state, county, and local organizations as final.”

 

1915

JANUARY

“An Appeal to the Investigating Committee of the NEC..” [Jan. 13, 1915] A very rare document, published as part of a special English language edition by the Duluth Finnish-language newspaper Sosialisti. This extremely lengthy article details the faction fight which raged in the Socialist Party’s Finnish Language Federation from 1912-15, in which the constructive socialist Eastern District and those around its organ Raivaaja captured effective control of Executive Committee of the Federation the leftist organ of the Middle District, Työmies. In response, a new left wing daily newspaper was established in the Middle District, Sosialisti. Punative expulsions of individuals and locals supporting the new periodical were begun by the Finnish Federation, which drew an appeal from the left wing to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America, since under the party constitution only the state organizations were granted the right of suspension and expulsion. The NEC of the SPA instructed the right wing majority group to reinstate the expelled left wingers and to settle the issue at a special convention of the Federation; this instruction was ignored by the Finnish Federation however, in an attempt to stack the forthcoming election of convention delegates. As a result, the left wing boycotted the election and renewed their appeal to the NEC. “The disruption within the Finnish Federation is very clearly and positively a result of a very fierce opposition in the main, of the officers in the organization against any criticism of their erroneous ideas, errors, or plain miscarriages in the offices,” this appeal document argues.

 

FEBRUARY

“Executive Committee Rule,” by T.E. Latimer. [Feb. 1915] In 1913-14 a serious factional struggle erupted in the Finnish Federation of the Socialist Party of America between a Right faction based in the Eastern US and a Left faction based in the Midwest. Accusing its opponents of favoring sabotage, in contradiction to the SPA Constitution, the Right faction attempted to seize the daily newspaper and assets of the Left faction and engaged in a series of expulsions as part of this process, which centered on Local Negaunee, Michigan. The SPA’s National Executive Committee was drawn into the controversy. This contemporary article reviews the issues behind the fight from a perspective sympathetic to the Finnish Left faction and hostile to the SPA NEC. Originally published in the Feb. 1915 issue of The International Socialist Review.

 

JUNE

Assessment of the 1915 National Committee Meeting by Ludwig Katterfeld and James P. Reid. Katterfeld and Reid, two members of the Left Wing of the SPA, were participants at this session. This meeting, held in Chicago in June of 1915, was regarded by both as a seminal session—a change of direction from the course set at the 1912 National Convention. Direct election of party officials was returned to the membership (to be exercised via the referendum) and “party treason” statutes were reinforced. Both Katterfeld and Reid went on to become active members in the Communist Labor Party of America.

 

1916

NOVEMBER

“Manifesto of the Socialist Propaganda League of America.” [Nov. 26, 1916] The “Left Wing” of the Socialist Party of America was a long-existing ideological trend, dating back to the 1901 origin of the SPA and before. It was not until the end of 1916, however, in the aftermath of the abject failure of the Second International to avert war and with the slogan of “Preparedness” sweeping America, that this radical fraction began the process of formal organization. The November 26, 1916, meeting in Boston which adopted this manifesto, established a dues-based membership organization, and initiated an official organ called The Internationalist may properly be regarded as the moment of origin of a formal “Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party”—an evolving movement which would in 1918 begin publication of another Boston newspaper called The Revolutionary Age and set into motion the political process leading to the formal splitting of the Socialist Party into Social Democratic and revolutionary Socialist wings in 1919. The manifest states: “The time is passed when our national Socialist parties, bound by old forms and moved by old ideals, can proceed with its old propaganda within the confines of capitalist legality and morals, and expect within these limits to advance the cause of industrial democracy. We are at the dawn of a new era; the day is big with the content of social eruptions, economic and political strikes, revolutions. It is an era in which the class conflict approaches its climax.”

 

1917

JANUARY

“Report to the National Executive Committee,” by Adolph Germer [circa January 1, 1917] Written report of the National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America to the members of the National Executive Committee sent just prior to the January 6-7, 1917 NEC meeting in Chicago. Germer provides a lengthy summary of the 1916 election, which marks as a “failure to roll up the vote that we so earnestly worked for and confidentially expected.” Germer attributes this step backwards to a number of factors, including “general apathy that has prevailed in the party for the past three or four years” and the effective capture of the anti-militarist vote by the Democratic Party with the slogan “He kept us out of war,” as well as the support of “the Adamson eight-hour law and a few other so-called labor laws” which were instrumental in the Democratic Party “befuddling the workers.” Germer provides the 1903-1916 party membership series, numbers which indicated that the party’s membership slide from the time of the 1912 Convention had been halted, although the miniscule increase was called “far from satisfactory in view of the campaign activities.” Germer also provides data concerning the cost of producing the party’s new monthly agitational leaflets and the official organ, The American Socialist. He further notes the existence of a new referendum being officially circulated for seconds calling for an extraordinary convention of the party in 1917 and advocates the NEC either dispense with the 1917 session of the National Committee in favor of this gathering or actively campaign against the convention in favor of the NC meeting, as there would be no need to undergo the expense of both.

 

“Constitution of the Socialist Propaganda League of America.” [January 1917] Organizational law of the Socialist Propaganda League of America, the Boston-based forerunner of the “Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party.” According to the group’s state objective, “The SPLA declares emphatically and will work uncompromisingly in the economic and political fields for industrial revolution to establish industrial democracy by the mass action of the working class.” This constitution reveals the SPLA as a dues-based organization (5 cents per month for members affiliated with local “branches,” 10 cents per month for at-large members). The organization was to be governed by a “National Committee” of seven, who would in turn elect a National Secretary and National Treasurer to handle the day-to-day operations of the group. Major policy matters were to be determined by referendum vote of the organization, with 3% of the organization sufficient to call a vote on any matter, irrespective of where those members were located.

 

MARCH

“Democratic Defense: A Practical Program for Socialism,” by W.J. Ghent, et al. [March 1917] The approach of American entry into the European was spurred Socialists of all colors into action. This document was produced by a group of individuals on the SPA’s Right, signing alphabetically and including prominently W.J. Ghent, the widow of Jack London, Upton Sinclair and his wife, William English Walling, and others. The statement states that there is a fundamental difference between “autocratic” and “democratic” governments, that disarmament is impossible while there are “autocratic” governments in the world, and that “the proper aim of Socialist world-politics at the present time is an alliance of the politically advanced nations for the defense of the democratic principle throughout the world.” While seeking a democratization of foreign policy and the removal of the profit motive from armaments procurement, the SPA Right supports building up of the army and the navy and developing military preparedness through youth organizations like the Boy Scouts, with the use of conscription strongly implied. “To use only volunteers in national defense is to kill off the men of courage and character, and to breed from weakness and incompetence; and this is national suicide,” the social-patriotic appeal declares.

 

“Socialist Party Referendum ‘A’ 1917.” [Mailed March 10, 1917] The Ninth Ward Branch of Local Cook County, Illinois, proposed this referendum to call a special National Convention of the Socialist Party in Chicago to begin Sunday, Sept. 2, 1917. Two hundred delegates were to attend. Although it is not so stated, it was implied that the convention would be held to determine the SPA’s position on the European War and the looming participation of America therein. The National Office was inundated with seconds of the motion, including some of the SPA’s largest locals (Local New York City, with 3500 members; Local Kings Co. NY, with 1771; Local Philadelphia, with 1376) as well as from a vast number of Federation branches—particularly German, Hungarian, South Slavic, Slovak, and Bohemian. The list of seconds is appended. The Referendum mailed to the membership of the SPA on Saturday, March 10, 1917, the same day the Executive Committee of the Party met in the National Office. The obvious popularity of the referendum pushed the Executive Committee into immediate action on the matter.

 

“Minutes of the National Executive Committee Meeting Held in Chicago, March 10-11, 1917.” With a war crisis rapidly approaching and in view of a popular party referendum for a September 2 National Convention certified as seconded and mailed, the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party (Comrades Berger, Hillquit, Maley, and Work) decided at its March 10-11 meeting to set aside the organization’s constitution and to immediately issue a call for an Emergency National Convention. In accord with Referendum “A,” 200 delegates were apportioned to the various states based upon average paid membership for 1916. These are the minutes for this seminal meeting of the NEC, as published for the record in the Socialist Party Bulletin.

 

“Replies of the National Committee to the Proposed Emergency National Convention of 1917.” [March 12, 1917] With war looming and a popular referendum calling for a September Emergency National Convention qualified to be mailed, the National Executive Committee sprung into action and went outside the SPA’s constitution to rush a convention to April 7 in lieu of the proposed September 2 conclave. The NEC submitted this proposal to the governing National Committee via telegram for an immediate vote by wire. These are the responses of various members of the National Committee of the Socialist Party of America to the proposal for an extraordinary Emergency National Convention to be held April 7, 1917.

 

APRIL

“The 1917 St. Louis Resolution on War.” [April 1917] This vigorous challenge to official American policy was written by a committee including Morris Hillquit, C.E. Ruthenberg, and Algernon Lee at the April National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party and later ratified by a referendum of the rank-and-file membership. It was a strong Left Wing statement that provoked government repression by the Wilson Administration, led to an exodus of Right Wing intellectuals from the party, and served as a beacon for aggressively anti-militarist Americans to join the Socialist Party. This militant resolution was later approved in a referendum of the Socialist Party membership by a margin of over 8-to-1, 22,345 to 2,752.

 

“Keynote Address to the 1917 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party, St. Louis, MO.” April 7, 1917, by Morris Hillquit The 1917 St. Louis Emergency Convention of the SPA was held immediately on the heels of the American declaration of war on Germany, called to bring together 200 delegates of the party to set policy in the new drastically changed situation. The anti-militarist tenor of the gathering was fanned by Morris Hillquit, who delivered this keynote address to the convention. The SPA had been in decline since its previous convention in 1912, Hillquit noted, with fewer members, a diminished press, and a general loss of enthusiasm and energy. The collapse of the International Socialist movement associated with the eruption of hostilities in Europe had a profoundly depressing effect on the American movement. Now the war had come to America, said Hillquit, and “millions of our boys will be sent to the trenches to murder millions of other boys in foreign countries, and they will be for the most part boys of the working class on both sides.” Furthermore: “War means reaction at home. War creates a mob spirit of unreason. War creates conditions under which all the powers of reaction, all the predatory powers of the country, can satisfy their desires, and accomplish their attacks upon popular liberty, upon popular rights with absolute impunity.” Only one organization, the Socialist Party, “still retained a clear vision, an unclouded mind, in this general din of confusion, passion, and unreason; and it falls to us to continue our opposition to this criminal war, even now after it has been declared,” said Hillquit. The war would ended by “the rebellious working class of Europe,” in Hillquit‘s estimation, and he called on his comrades to fight against militarism and to stand ready to join the movement when the world once again resumed its struggle for liberty and social justice under the banner of International Socialism.

 

May

“The Price We Pay,” by Irwin St. John Tucker [May 1917] A searing polemic prose-poem by the head of the Socialist Party’s Literature Department. Tucker served only briefly at this post, leaving after but a few weeks due to a personality clash with Executive Secretary Adolph Germer, but this blistering statement of anti-militarist rage placed Tucker firmly in the Wilson Administration’s gunsights. For this vitriolic explosion Tucker was prosecuted as part of a case which included Executive Secretary Germer, Congressman and newspaper publisher Victor Berger, editor of the SPA’s official organ J. Louis Engdahl, and head of the party’s youth section William Kruse as part of the Wilson regime’s attempt to decapitate the Socialist Party. The five Socialists each received 20 year prison terms under the so-called Espionage Act, later overturned. The SPA distributed over 600,000 copies of this piece in leaflet form in May and June of 1917.

 

SEPTEMBER

“American Socialists and the War,” by Morris Hillquit. [September 1917] The Socialist Party’s New York mayoral attempts to clarify the “systematic campaign of misrepresentation” waged against it by “the capitalist press with the helpful cooperation of a group of ‘patriotic’ Socialist intellectuals.” The Socialist Party of America has consistently opposed the “world carnival of slaughter,” Hillquit notes, supporting a policy of strict neutrality, opposing rearmament, and continuing their opposition to the war even after American entry into the conflict. The war was “essentially commercial in its origin” and “largely waged for material gain, at least in so far as the governments of the leading belligerent countries are concerned,” Hillquit states. The key to a permanent peace could be achieved without the total victory of socialism, in Hillquit’s view, adding that the first step was for the governments of the world to be “divorced from capitalist interests.” Thereafter, a program of immediate and complete disarmament, freedom of the seas and of trade, self-government of each nation, and establishment of an “international union for peaceful cooperation” would make possible a lasting peace. The reemergent international Socialist movement would play a key role in this new world as “a compelling power for the restoration of peace,” Hillquit indicates.

 

“1917 Constitution of the Socialist Party of America.” The basic document of party law of the SPA. This is the amended version of the constitution used between the 1917 St. Louis and 1919 Chicago Conventions. Extremely useful for determining the legality (or lack thereof) of various tactics employed by the “Regular” and “Left Wing” factions in the inner-party struggle that lead to the split of the SPA at the September 1919 Convention. Be advised that the version of this document published in the four volume report of the New York “Lusk Committee” dates from after the SP split; this is the version of the document in force during the bitter faction fighting leading up to the Emergency National Convention of August 1919.

 

1918

APRIL

“The Onward March of the Socialist Party,” by Adolph Germer. [April 1918] The National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America reviews the party’s fortunes after the first year of American involvement in the European War. “But few have faltered and fallen, in spite of the intimidation and threats by insane and drunken mobs and by nagging public politicians,” Germer notes, stating that the SPA was at that moment numerically stronger than at any time since March 1916. Includes the official series of average dues stamps sold over the course of each year from 1903 through 1917.

 

“May Day Message,” by C.E. Ruthenberg, A. Wagenknecht, and Charles Baker. [April 7, 1918] A short communique written by three imprisoned leaders of Local Cuyahoga County, Socialist Party to Cleveland party members. The trio call for their comrades to stand firm for the principles of International Socialism, as exemplified by Karl Liebknecht and his companions in Germany and “Trotsky and the Bolsheviki” in Russia.

 

NOVEMBER

“Joseph A. Weil Devised Arm and Torch Emblem for NY Socialist Party.” This unsigned article from The New York Call of Sunday, Nov. 3, 1918, was published to promote the candidacy of longtime member Joseph A. Weil for NY State Assembly. Weil, a member of the Socialist Labor Party from 1895 and participant in the 1899 split of that party, was revealed in this article as the creator of the SP’s “arm and torch” logo—one of the two primary emblems of the Socialist Party of America. Includes a photograph of Weil from the original article and a color shot of a vintage “arm and torch” pinback button.

 

“To Our Russian Comrades!,” byEugene V. Debs [Nov. 7, 1918] Short salute from the Socialist Party of America’s most popular leader to the Russian Soviet Republic and its Bolshevik leadership in commemoration of the first year of the regime’s existence. Debs neither hesitates nor hedges in his support of the Soviet Republic, stating, “When the Revolution in Russia occurred a year ago and the actual toiling and producing masses came into power under the leadership and inspiration of Lenin and Trotsky, all the ruling class powers on earth, the United States not excepted, instinctively arrayed themselves against the newborn working class Republic... But in spite of all these stupendous reactionary and destructive forces, the Soviet has survived and the Russian proletariat, thanks to its heroic and uncompromising leadership and its own inflexible determination...” Debs stated that American Socialists pledged not only to protest their government’s meddling and interference in Soviet affairs, but also “to strive with all our energy to emulate your inspiring example by abolishing our imperialistic capitalism, driving our plutocratic exploiters and oppressors from power, and establishing the working class Republic, the Commonwealth of Comrades.”

 

“Lenin—An Appreciation,” by Louis C. Fraina [Nov. 7, 1918] Article from a magazine published by the Socialist Publication Society of Brooklyn in commemoration of the first anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Class Struggle co-editor Louis C. Fraina provides a well-informed synopsis of the significance of V.I. Ul’ianov (N. Lenin) as a Marxist thinker and revolutionary leader. Lenin’s primary significance, in Fraina’s view was, was that of rescuer of revolutionary Marxism from opportunist degeneration: “During the past twenty-five years, Marxism has experienced a transformation, becoming the means of interpreting history and a fetish of controversy, instead of a maker of history and an instrument of revolutionary action. This degrading conception of Marxism was dominant in the old International.... Lenin used Marx against these pseudo-Marxists, insisted on making Marxism an instrument of revolutionary action, built upon the basis of Marxism and amplified its scope.” Fraina lauded Lenin’s ability to bring together theoretical acumen with uncompromising revolutionary action—“every opportunity, every crisis, every strength, weakness, and peculiarity of the social alignment becomes the subject of study and appropriate action.” The theoretical work of Lenin will “become a source of inspiration in the coming reconstruction of Socialism, supplemented by the accomplishments of the proletarian revolution in Russia,” Fraina states.

 

“Leon Trotsky,” by Ludwig Lore [Nov. 7, 1918] Article from a magazine published by the Socialist Publication Society of Brooklyn in commemoration of the first anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Class Struggle co-editor Ludwig Lore provides an absolutely invaluable account of the ten month tenure of Leon Trotsky in New York—Lore crediting Trotsky and his fellow Russian expatriates with a leading role in the establishment of an organized Left Wing faction in the Socialist Party. The list of the Russian luminaries who assembled in a Brooklyn apartment together with American revolutionary socialists is impressive: Trotsky, Bukharin, Kollontai, Vorovsky... While Bukharin advocated the immediate formation of a new organization with its own official organ, his proposal was defeated, Lore says; instead Trotsky’s idea to establish a Left Wing bi-monthly theoretical magazine as an initial step was accepted—the end result being the magazine The Class Struggle. Lore calls Trotsky a born leader, able to stir audiences of thousands but unprepossessed enough to speak intimately with smaller gatherings, a voluminous and perceptive journalist and pamphleteer, a gifted theoretician able to propagate his ideas clearly and in an interesting manner. Lore states that Trotsky was adament about the Left Wing of the Socialist movement needing to organize itself for action, quoting him as saying, ” “The European proletariat is vitally interested in the growth of a strong, revolutionary American movement. For your democracy is the only hope, the last refuge of the European bourgeoisie, who will appeal to your capitalists for help.”

 

DECEMBER

“Organizational Preamble of the Communist Propaganda League of Chicago.” (Adopted Dec. 6, 1918.)” Organizational manifesto calling for a fundamental change in the form and course of the Socialist Party, demanding that “the personnel of our party officialdom and our candidates for public office...must be brought into harmony with the revolutionary character of our movement. The preamble was signed by a prominent group of members of the Socialist Party of America including the Translator-Secretaries of the Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, German, and Scandinavian Federations. Secretary of the group was I.E. Ferguson.

 

“The Fundamentals of Bolshevism,” by N.I. Hourwich [Dec. 7, 1918] A brief exposition of the fundamental premises of Russian Bolshevism, written by a Contributing Editor of The Revolutionary Age for the readership of that paper. Nicholas Hourwich, the son of a radical Jewish lawyer who emigrated from Tsarist Russia to America, was an editor of the New York-based Russian language newspaper Novyi Mir and was better versed than most on matters of Bolshevik history and ideology. Hourwich characterized the Bolsheviks as “first of all a party of revolutionary action, a party of dynamic Socialism.” Their unswerving object was “the revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat, as an inevitable and necessary condition for the accomplishment of the transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” Hourwich stated. Key to the equation was the Bolsheviks’ melding of “democracy with centralism, of democracy with iron discipline,” in Hourwich’s view. While the Mensheviks refused to take revolutionary measures but instead made alliances with the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks and their revolutionary allies were uncompromising in their efforts to establish the proletarian dictatorship and to overturn the capitalist world, thus their success in becoming the “’government party’ of the first Socialist republic on earth.

 

1919

JANUARY

“Now For the Next Step,” by C.E. Ruthenberg. [Jan. 1919] Text of a direct mail piece sent out to subscribers of the Socialist News [Cleveland] by Local Cuyahoga County, Socialist Party over the signature of Sec. C.E. Ruthenberg. Ruthenberg seeks to bolster the subscription roll of the newspaper in order to fund its expansion. The capitalist press was poisoning the minds of the workers, both with regard to the Russian Revolution and as to the nature of the American workers’ movement itself, Ruthenberg states. “There will never be any hope for us unless we can build up newspapers pledged to the interests of the workers which will present the truth about the workers’ cause and offset the lies of the capitalist press.”

 

“The Situation in Ohio,” by Eugene V. Debs. [Jan. 8, 1919] This article was written for The Ohio Socialist by Gene Debs, essentially the Socialist orator’s hometown newspaper during from the tail end of 1918 into early 1919 during the legal persecution of Debs for his Canton speech. Prohibited from public speaking outside of the court’s jurisdiction, Debs concentrated his efforts on rousing the Ohio Socialist movement. Debs portrayed the situation in the heavily industrialized state of Ohio as “extremely favorable” and noted that he was in the process of speaking to a series of large and enthusiastic crowds. ” Let me ... bid you take advantage of the present favorable situation and combine all your energies to organize thoroughly the class-conscious forces of labor for the mighty task which now confronts it,” Debs urged. Debs also noted the release from prison of leading Ohio Socialists Charles Baker, C.E. Ruthenberg, and Alfred Wagenknecht, “These comrades have been consecrated behind prison bars and will now rise to their full stature in the service of the revolutionary movement,” Debs prophetically noted.

 

“A New Appeal,” by John Reed [January 18, 1919] Substantial essay by famed journalist John Reed about the state of the Socialist Party and the task of the revolutionary socialist movement in America. Reed sees a dichotomy in the ranks of the SPA—“American” members of the petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals and “Foreign-born” workers and intellectuals. He states that due to its vast size and seemingly limitless resources and fluidity of social boundaries “the American worker has always believed, consciously or unconsciously, that he can become a millionaire or an eminent statesman,” no matter how far detached from reality is this premise. The American worker also views his world politically rather than economically, Reed says, having a healthy disgust for the “dirty” politicians of both the Republican and Democratic parties but viewing Socialism as an alien system “worked out in foreign countries, not born of his own particular needs and opposed to ‘democracy’ and ‘fair play,’ which is the way he has been taught to characterize the institutions of this country.” The task of the Left Wing is not to pander for support of American workers at the ballot box, but rather to go to the workers, listen to their needs, and implement a practical program which not only meets those needs but raises the workers’ thinking beyond these immediate wishes—to “make them want the whole Revolution.” It is not the ballot box but “revolutionary direct mass action” in the workplace that will bring about the Social Revolution, Reed states. He concludes that “the workers must be told that they have the force, if they will only organize it and express it; that if together they are able to stop work, no power in the universe can prevent them from doing what they want to do - if only they know what they want to do! And it is our business to formulate what they want to do.”

 

“The Bolshevists: Grave-Diggers of Capitalism,” by C.E. Ruthenberg. [Jan. 29, 1919] Ruthenberg, Secretary of Local Cuyahoga Country [Cleveland], first published this article in the Jan. 29, 1919, issue of The Ohio Socialist, the official organ of the Socialist Party of Ohio. Ruthenberg poses the question whether the Russian Bolsheviks actually represented “something new”—“anarchy, ...rioting and bloodshed, wholesale murder and destruction.... the collapse of orderly society...” (as depicted in the pages of the capitalist press)—or whether it represented instead the consistent application of the established principles of Marxian Socialism. After outlining the basic tenets of Marxism, Ruthenberg argues in favor of the latter proposition, of course, stating that Bolsehevism is “Marxian Socialism in action. It is the workers on the road to victory and a better world.” Ruthenberg later served as the first Executive Secretary of the Communist Party of America.

 

“A View of the Trial,” by Adolph Germer. [Jan. 22, 1919] National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party Adolph Germer (in the past a miner and United Mine Workers Union official, in the future one of the key participants in the 1919 Socialist-Communist split) briefly summarizes the results of the Trial of the Five Socialists, in which he was a leading defendant. The Guilty verdict was “disappointing though not in the least surprising,” Germer states, as the jury pool was carefully screened by the prosecution against those with any knowledge of the labor movement and in favor of those “who are instinctively hostile to us.” The trial was not of the individuals named as defendants, Germer says, but rather of the Socialist Party and its principles. Germer is unrepentant, declaring “I have nothing to regret and nothing for which to apologize. If the democracy of which we heard so much and for which we were told we entered this war can be had only through prison cells, I am willing to take my place with countless others who have been denied their liberties because of a conviction.”

 

FEBRUARY

“The Chicago Socialist Trial,” by J. Louis Engdahl . A contemporary account of the Dec. 1918-Feb. 1919 Trial of the 5 Chicago Socialists written by one of the defendants. J. Louis Engdahl was the editor of “The American Socialist,” the official monthly periodical of the Socialist Party of America. He was convicted along with his comrades of violating the infamous Espionage Act and was sentenced to a term of 20 years imprisonment at Leavenworth Penitentiary. This material was first published in the 1919-20 edition of “The American Labor Year-Book,” published by the Rand School of Social Science.

 

“The Socialist Party on Trial,” by William Bross Lloyd [February 1919] An extensive report of the trial of Beger, Germer, Kruse, Engdahl, and Tucker by the financial angel of the Left Wing, published in the pages of The Liberator. The trial of the five began in Chicago on December 9, 1918, before Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis for conspiracy under the so-called Espionage Law, which Lloyd characterizes as a “clumsily subtle way of lending to the Administration the aid of the courts in enforcing the official war morality.... Criminality under this law consists of any attempt to impugn the idealistic advertisement under which the war is being imposed. And conspiracy is a joint attempt.” Lloyd provides brief character-sketches of the five principle defendants, as well as the judge and the chief accusers, District Attorney Clyne and Assistant District Attorney Fleming. He characterizes the trial as “twenty days of irritating stupidity” wrought by the prosecution, notes that the focus of the attack was on William Kruse, who as head of the Young People’s Socialist League was cast as the leading figure in a conspiracy to subvert conscripton (despite Kruse’s personal decision to register for the draft), and comments extensively on the testimony of defense witness Carl Haessler, a Socialist already convicted and imprisoned under the so-called Espionage Act whom the prosecution approached in an attempt to construct its case against Victor Berger. When the prosecution was rebuffed, retaliatory action was taken against Haessler’s wife, who lost her job as an Illinois teacher.

 

“The Yipsels and the Socialist Sedition Case: Part 1—The Prosecution’s Case.” by William F. Kruse. [Feb. 1919] One of the biggest show-trials conducted by the Wilson Administration against its radical opponents was the Trial of the Five Socialists—a group of defendants which included former Congressman and NEC member Victor L. Berger, Socialist Party National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer, Secretary of the Young People’s Socialist League William F. Kruse, Editor of the SPA’s official publications J. Louis Engdahl, and former head of the SPA’s Literature Department Irwin St. John Tucker. The five were indicted for alleged violation of the so-called “Espionage Act” on Feb. 2, 1918, and were finally brought before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis for trial beginning on Dec. 9, 1918—nearly a month after conclusion of the war. This article on the presecutorial hijinks behind the trial was written by defendant Bill Kruse for the monthly magazine of the YPSL. This first installment of a three part series was published in the Feb. 1919 issue of The Young Socialists’ Magazine.

 

“The End of War,” by C.E. Ruthenberg. [Feb. 12, 1919] This article by the Secretary of Local Cuyahoga County, Socialist Party was published in the official organ of the Socialist Party of Ohio. In it Ruthenberg addresses the proposed League of Nations—specifically its claim that it will be an institution able to abolish future wars. While acknowledging the desire of the capitalist class to avert destructive wars and the revolutions which they may well precipitate, Ruthenberg states that the division of the non-industrial world into “mandatories” would do nothing to alleviate the “inexorable conditions of capitalist production” that causes capitalist powers to compete for foreign markets. “In spite of all the machinery of arbitration and conciliation” the capitalist countries would be driven “to an appeal to arms in the struggle for survival,” Ruthenberg says. He contrasts this with a system in which the full product is appropriated by the workers producing it, which would have no innate dynamic to secure foreign markets, with its products either consumed, traded to other countries for necessary products produced elsewhere, or production contracted through the reduction of working hours.

 

“What Is the ‘Left Wing’ Movement and Its Purpose?,” by Edward Lindgren. [Feb. 1919] Lindgren, one of the organizers of the Left Wing section of the Socialist Party in New York City, outlines a brief history of the faction in this article published in Louis Fraina and Ludwig Lore’s theoretical journal, The Class Struggle. Lindgren contends that while factions had long existed inside the SPA, firm dividing lines were not drawn up until 1912, when the Right Wing won firm control of the party apparatus and launched a purge around the “sabotage” clause of the party constitution. The test of the 1914 war and failure of the party leadership to act in a principled manner led to an alienation of the rank and file membership of the party, which demanded and received an Emergency Convention in 1917 to declare its antimilitarist principles in no uncertain terms. The violent splits of the socialist movement in Germany (majority socialists/Spartacists) and Russia (Mensheviks/Bolsheviks) made the situation in the American party clear to “almost anyone who understands the theory of the class struggle.” The “Left Wing” group was thus “the logical outcome of a dissatisfied membership—a membership that has been taught by the revolutionary activities of the European movements ‘to compromise is to lose,’” says Lindgren. Includes a “Tentative Program” and “Immediate Demands” of the Left Wing section.

 

“Manifesto of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party of America: As Modified by Local Cuyahoga County, Socialist Party [Feb. 1919].” The Manifesto of the Left Wing Section is the fundamental theoretical document of the American Communist movement, an analysis and program that was systematically promoted by an organized faction within the Socialist Party of America intent on moving that party’s orientation from the electoral to the revolutionary socialist path. The original document was collective work written in early February 1919, attributed by the historian Theodore Draper to the pens of Bertram Wolfe and John Reed, then extensively revised by Louis C. Fraina. Whatever its origin, this document was further extensively revised before being published in the pages of The Ohio Socialist on Feb. 26, 1919. Whether these changes were rendered by C.E. Ruthenberg, Alfred Wagenknecht, or some other figure in the Cleveland Socialist Party organization remains unknown—although Ruthenberg would certainly seem the most likely candidate. The version reprinted here compares the text of the “official” New York variation with the revisions made in the document as published in Ohio.

 

MARCH

“Is the ‘Left Wing’ Right? A Letter to the Editor of The New York Call, March 4, 1919,” by Cameron King. The 1919 faction fight within the Socialist Party in general, and the Socialist Party of Greater New York in particular, was wound up in matters of personality, position, and power. This is a rare serious critique of the ideology of the opposite camp by one of the leaders of the New York Socialist Party establishment. King is critical of the contention in the Left Wing manifesto that the Socialist Party should eliminate reform planks from its platform limit itself to agitation for a complete revolutionary overturn of capitalism. He argues that the transition to Socialism will almost certainly be a long and protracted process, with initial victories in cities and several industrial states prior to the achievement of control of Congress and the Presidency by the Socialist Party. In the interval, the Socialist Party must actively improve the lot of the working class, or face defeat at the polls amidst charges of betrayal. Further, King cites a recent pamphlet by Lenin to validate his assertion that there is a roll for the political action of the central state in the administration and control of industry and distribution even after the revolutionary turnover of state power. The “Left Wing” doctrine on political action is inadequate and must be rejected because it does not recognize this essential policy of the pre-revolutionary socialist movement and the post-revolutionary state, King argues.

 

“A Left Wing—And Why: A Statement of Cause and Effect,” by N.S. Reichenthal [March 12, 1919] A lengthy and intelligent letter to the editor of the New York Call seeking a measured and open-minded approach to the emerging Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party. Reichenthal states that he is neither with the Left Wing and the “state within a state” in the Socialist Party nor a blind, epithet-spewing “loyalist.” To these latter, “all those who are crudely attempting to change or modify party policy and tactics are rank disrupters, anarchists, or syndicalists” to be purged—a mentality which Reichenthal believes is akin to the anti-liberal patriotic frenzy of the war years or the sectarian Socialist Labor Party regime in the factional war of 1899-1900: “Therefore, comrades, let’s stop talking nonsense and imitating DeLeon and our own dear Security League. Let’s discuss principles and tactics, not personalities and hare-brained metaphysics.” Reichenthal states that the platform of the Socialist Party from 1900 to the one adopted in 1917 became steadily more “practical,” to the point where “all reference to internationalism, to the party itself being the ‘Left Wing’ of the international proletariat striving to overthrow the capitalist state, is entirely eliminated.” Combined with opportunistic local platforms and less-than-stellar performance in office by elected Socialist officials has been “disappointing and very disheartening, and seem to justify the conclusions arrived at by some that mere parliamentary action as encouraged and practiced by the Socialist Party is a snare and a delusion.” On the trade union front “we became mere apologists for Gompers’ unionism, and our policy compelled us to keep silent or defend many rotten deeds on the part of certain unions and their officials,” resulting in the factional war of 1912-13 and the departure of thousands of supporters of the IWW and revolutionary industrial unionism. The Left Wing Section emerged as a direct response—cause and effect—to these factors. Reichenthal states that he has changed his own mind on these things since “we live in the midst of the revolution. Only action, revolutionary action, counts” and “the Russian Bolsheviki have demonstrated what a resolute, though ‘ignorant,’ proletariat and peasantry can do.” Reichenthal calls for an honest discussion of the merits of the argument of the Left Wing Section rather than mechanically resorting to “parliamentary tricks” or “reorganization” to stifle dissent in the manner of Daniel DeLeon.

 

“Left Wing Are Distruptionists,” by Joseph Gollomb. [March 12, 1919] Text of a long letter to the Editor of The New York Call, in which SPA member Joseph Gollomb attacts the ideology and tactics of the Left Wing Section and its leaders in the struggle for control of the party apparatus in New York City. Gollomb charges that the so-called “Left Wing Section” is an internal enemy of the Socialist Party, “the spirit and purpose of old Michael Bakunin.” These “anarchists, IWWs, and SLPs” have flocked into the SPA “not out of conversion, but with blackjacks behind their backs. They have organized a body within the party, with delegates from different branches, Central Committees, Executive Committees, State Committees, a National Committee, constitution, and membership cards, part for part with the organization of the party proper, with mandates on their members to be carried out at the meetings of the party.” Gollomb cites concrete examples of Left Wing tactics at SP branch meetings, with specific charges directed at Nicholas Hourwich and Jim Larkin. Gollomb advises immediate action to stop the seizure of the party by an organized minority.

 

“’Parliamentarism’ and ‘Political Action,’,” byJay Lovestone and William Weinstone. [March 17, 1919] Former City College of New York Young People’s Socialist League leaders Jay Lovestone and William Weinstone co-authored this lengthy letter to the New York Call in response to New York Socialist leader Cameron King’s critique of the Left Wing Manifesto published earlier in those pages. Lovestone and Weinstone conceive of the radical movement as being divided between “moderates” and “socialists.” The pair conclude that “the moderate contends that the industries can be socialized by means of the present bourgeois state... Our conception of socialist political control is, to quote Marx, ‘a transition period, in which the state cannot be anything else but a dictatorship of the proletariat.’ We hold with the Communist Manifesto that ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of this state—i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.’... It is not by attempting to solve the insolvable, capitalism’s contradictions, but by ‘teaching, propagating, and agitating exclusively for the overthrow of capitalism and the necessity of instituting of the proletarian dictatorship’ that socialism can be attained!”

 

“’Wants a Conference,” by J. Codkind [March 18, 1919] Letter to the Editor of The New Yok Call in reply to the long March 12 letter of Joseph Gollomb. Codkind, a Left Wing member of New York City’s 17th Assembly District Branch states that Gollomb is a purveyor of inaccuracies, indicating that attendance at business meetings of the the 17th AD Branch had increased rather than decreased over 1918 and that no business had been conducted by the Left Wing in the wee hours. Codkind states: “Undoubtedly, there have been unfair tactics employed. In my opinion, this is much more prevalent among the Right Wingers than the Lefts, but both sides are equally guilty. Why people on both sides - undoubtedly honest and sincere in their convictions - should descent to the use of these methods is more than I can understand... Let us stop calling each other names. Let us act like real men, and not like kids. Let us face the absolute fact - that both sides are honest and sincere. Let us try to calm ourselves; and let both sides elect or select about five delegates to hold a conference through which our differences may be settled without a party split.” Codkind suggests that the delegates to such a conference might be chosen by the factional caucuses of the Central Committee of Local New York.

 

“Letter to Morris Hillquit in Upstate New York from Adolph Germer in Chicago, March 22, 1919.” Historians of American Communism running the gamut from Theodore Draper to William Z. Foster have depicted Morris Hillquit as the master puppeteer behind the expulsions, suspensions, and split of the Socialist Party in 1919. As this letter from SPA National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer indicates, Hillquit was actually out of the loop during the critical months of 1919—at a sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, recovering from a bout of tuberculosis. Rather than the far-seeing General calling all the shots, Hillquit was resting and recuperating, receiving periodic updates of information by mail. In this letter, Germer notes that since the imprisoned Eugene Debs was $1400 in debt, the Socialist Party would be retaining him on the payroll at the rate of $50 a week, with periodic articles promised and some small chance of eventual repayment. Germer also expresses surprise at Kate O’Hare’s decision to accept nomination for International Secretary and run against Hillquit in the 1919 SPA election, a reversal of her expressed opinion of a fortnight earlier. Germer also updated Hillquit on the plans of the Left Wing section, noting that based on information received from New York party leader Julius Gerber, “they are making a well organized campaign to capture the district. What is true of District 1 is true of every other district. The impossiblists are determined to capture the party. If they cannot do it by capturing the National Executive Committee, they intend to do it in convention. As usual, they have no sense of responsibility and are of the opinion that the all important thing is to ‘propagate,’ regardless of consequences.”

 

“Proposal Ambiguous and Incomplete,” by Algernon Lee. [March 29, 1919] Letter to the Editor of the New York Call by Lee, a founding member of the Socialist Party of America and leading figure of the New York constructive socialist faction. Lee takes issue with a proposal made by 13 members of the New York Left Wing for a reasoned settlement of party differences rather than proceeding down the path of mudslinging and factional trench warfare. Lee accuses the 13 of having advanced a “creed” and a “statement of ready-made conclusions,” of being “ambiguous and incomplete” in their demand to eliminate all social reform planks from the party platform, and of sidestepping the fundamental questions of whether America would face a revolutionary crisis in the near future and whether a majority of the populus would support the program of a revolutionized Socialist Party in the crisis. If the crisis were instead to be fought between a revolutionary minority and a reactionary minority, Lee states that there was no consideration of which side was apt to win, and based upon that likelihood, whether the revolutionary crisis was to be sought or avoided by the party.

“An Evening’s Experience,” by Max Schonberg. [March 31, 1919] An interesting and rather illuminating first-hand report of hardball tactics employed at a March meeting of the 3rd-5th-10th AD Branch of Local New York, with “Big Jim” Larkin in the chair. Schonberg is sharply critical of Larkin’s “shameful tirade of cheap, personal abuse” directed towards Joseph Gollomb, who had the floor representing a contrary position for 10 or 15 minutes. Larkin is also criticized for failing to follow correct rules of parliamentary procedure and for speaking against a motion made by 15 or so regular members against the Left Wing leadership of the branch, during the course of which “he began a vicious attack of bitter invective and vituperation upon each of the individuals whose names were appended to it.” Later, Larkin is said to have rushed down from the platform with the intent of beating up Gollumb.

 

“Party Tactics,” by Morris Zucker. [March 31, 1919] Letter to the Editor of the New York Call from Zucker, a prominent member of the Left Wing Section. Zucker is encouraged at what he sees as “almost unanimous acclaim” of the Left Wing Manifesto by the rank and file of the Socialist Party. He sees, however, a “Centrist element” which adheres to the Left Wing program but who “are opposed to the tactics of the Left Wing within the party as likely to cause a split in the organization.” Loyalty to principle must take precedence over loyalty to the SP organization, Zucker contends, and a split on programmatic lines appears inevitable: “if, after making every honest and honorable effort, the Socialist Party does not, in substance, accept the program of the Left Wing, then it becomes the solemn duty of the Left Wing to organize a new party upon the basis of its principles and program. The party is merely an instrument for the accomplishment of a certain end, and not an end in itself.” Zucker challenges the Right and Center factions to call a general party meeting of the various locals of Greater New York to debate the question, “Resolved: That the Socialist Party shall endorse and adopt the manifesto of the Left Wing as an expression of its principles and policies.”

 

APRIL

“Letter from Adolph Germer in Chicago to Morris Hillquit at Saranac Lake, NY, April 17, 1919.” A very important letter from the National Executive Secretary to NEC member and leading party luminary, Morris Hillquit, then recuperating from tuberculosis at a sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York. Germer acknowledges Hillquit’s critiicism of the party leadership and states the primary difficulty is one of lack of communication with party members, which the SP’s Bulletin and The Eye Opener and first class mail stopped by Chicago postal authorities while the press of the Left Wing Section seemingly has free access to the mails. Germer states that most of the party’s growth is in the language federations, particularly the Russian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian, while “we are not reaching the American worker who, after all, is needed to achieve the revolution.” Germer notes a new form of campaigning for referendum seconds and remarks on the first example of bloc voting for a slate of candidates, in this case 16 ballots from a Russian Branch of Local Willimatic, Connecticut. He notes that a motion has been made for a meeting of the NEC May 24 and states the “very important matter” of establishing “the organization to hold title of property for the property” remains. It is clear throughout that ideas and information with regard to the 1919 faction fight are flowing from Germer in Chicago to Hillquit in New York, not vice versa, contrary to the theme of the secondary literature of the 1919 faction fight.

 

MAY

“Debs Goes to Prison,” by David Karsner. [May 1919]. Text of a pamphlet privately published in New York in May 1919, probably compiling material previously published in pages of The New York Call. Author David Karsner was the editor of the Call’s Sunday supplement and a biographer of Debs. He travelled to Terre Haute to make the trip with Debs to Cleveland and thenceforth to prison in Moundsville, WV. Karsner was one of four friends of Debs making the journey with the Socialist writer and orator to the prison gates—along with J. Louis Engdahl (who published a similar memoir), Alfred Wagenknecht, and Debs’ brother-in-law, Arthur Bauer. Includes a number of direct quotations of Debs and other interesting and historically valuable observations about the trip.

 

“Debs in Prison: The Story of Convict No. 2253, Eugene Victor Debs,” by J. Louis Engdahl. [May 1919]. First section of a pamphlet published by the National Office of the Socialist Party in May 1919, almost certainly reprinting material which first appeared in the pages of The American Socialist, which Engdahl edited. This is one of two first-hand accounts of the transfer of Eugene Debs from custody in Cleveland, Ohio, to prison in Moundsville, WV, a cloak-and-dagger operation involving a high-speed automobile chase and multiple train transfers as the authorities sought to elude Socialist protesters. Includes a number of direct quotations from Debs’ last day of freedom, including his last message, “Tell my comrades that I entered the prison doors a flaming revolutionist, my head erect, my spirit untamed, and my soul unconquered.”

 

“Manifesto and Program of the Left Wing Section Socialist Party, Local Greater New York.” [pamphlet version, circa May 1919] The main programatic document of the Left Wing Section, Socialist Party, was the “Left Wing Manifesto,” authored in January or early February by Louis C. Fraina, Bertram Wolfe, and others. The text of the document evolved slightly over time, eventually taking final shape as the content of this pamphlet issued by Local Greater New York. This is the full text of the Left Wing Manifesto and Program as published in the May 1919 pamphlet.

 

“The Left Wing Manifesto,” by David P. Berenberg [May 1919]. David Berenberg, an instructor at the Rand School of Social Science, was one of the leaders of the anti-Left Wing movement in the Socialist Party of New York. He started a weekly newspaper in response to John Reed’s New York Communist called the New York Socialist. (Reed later returned the favor by issuing a parody issue of the New York Socialist and sneaking a stack into the Rand School bookstore for distribution!) t was in the pages of the NY Socialist that this lengthy analytical critique of the “Manifesto and Program of the Left Wing Section” was published in serial form. Berenberg’s critique was doubtlessly influential among party regulars in the hothouse that was Socialist Party politics in New York city during the spring and summer of 1919.

 

“The Cleveland May Day Demonstration,” by C.E. Ruthenberg [May 10, 1919]. A disturbing tale of the crude and premeditated exercise of force and violence by a coordinated circle of conspirators against a law-abiding citizenry. On May 1, 1919, the Socialist Party of Ohio sponsored a massive May Day parade, in which a goodly number of unions and thousands of individuals participated. Despite disruptions by right wing provocateurs, including one wildly brandishing a handgun, the carefully-planned assembly was completely peaceable. This calm was shattered by the premeditated action of the Cleveland police department and their conservative vigilante allies, who violently attacked the marchers, crushing them with horses and beating them with clubs. In the melee which followed, two marchers were murdered by the police and scores arrested, and the headquarters of the Socilaist Party of Ohio was vandalized under the winking eyes of the Cleveland constabulary. C.E. Ruthenberg, Secretary of Local Cuyahoga County, Socialist Party, was charged with “causing a disturbance” in connection with this violent episode of state savagery, which he ably chronicles here.

 

“The Socialist Task and Outlook,” by Morris Hillquit [published May 21, 1919]. One of the seminal documents of the 1919 internal political struggle in the Socialist Party of America, first published prominently on the back page of the New York Call on May 21, 1919, This, Morris Hillquit’s so-called “Clear the Decks” article, has been (wrongly) characterized by historian Theodore Draper as a directive for a party purge. Hillquit, one of the leading figures of the SPA and an individual with an enormous amount of personal influence within the organization, weighed in on the faction fight between the “Left Wing” and their opponents here, stating that a split of the SPA was inevitable owing to the establishment of the “Left Wing” as a “schizmatic and disintegrating” movement within the party. Instead of conversion of their opponents, this group refused cooperation in favor fo an effort to “capture” the party organization in a sort of “burlesque on the Russian Revolution,” Hillquit stated. As a result, it would be “better a hundred times to have two numerically small socialist organizations, each homogeneous and harmonious within itself, than to have one big party torn by dissensions and squabbles, an impotent colossus on feet of clay.” Hillquit called for the Left Wing to split “honestly, freely, and without rancor.”

 

“Report to the NEC,” by Adolph Germer [May 24, 1919]. The “nationality card” is played here for the first time by the National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, Adolph Germer. In the face of the overwhelming defeat of the old and familiar faces in the 1919 elections for the SPA’s National Executive Committee, and with barely a month left in the lame duck outgoing NEC’s constitution term of office, Secretary Germer sounds the alarm, noting that over half of the party’s paid membership is affiliated with foreign language federations for the first time and declaring this “an abnormal and unhealthy condition.” Germer further cries fraud on the part of the language groups, citing a 70% rate of growth in five carefully selected Slavic and Baltic language federations between dues stamp sales in April 1919 relative to December 1918. Germer charges that the members of the five mentioned federations (Russian, Ukraianian, South Slavic, Lithuanian, and Latvian) “do not vote, but are voted by the ‘leaders’—voted en bloc, with mathematical uniformity—and all one way.” Germer states that the question of whether the Socialist Party is to become the tail of its constituent language federations “must be frankly faced and wisely solved” by the outgoing NEC.

 

“Indicting the Left Wing: A Speech to the NEC,” by James Oneal [circa May 27, 1919]. On May 27, 1919, the lame duck National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America unilaterally suspended the entire memberships of seven constituent language federations, consisting of over 20,000 dues-paying rank-and-filers. This is the lengthy speech of NEC member James Oneal of New York to the gathering—which included Translator-Secretaries of the affected federations and Left Wing NEC members Alfred Wagenknecht and L.E. Katterfeld. Oneal provides a brief history of previous “Left Wing” movements within the Socialist Party (all of which came to grief, often with leading participants jumping to the other side of the barricades). Oneal also sharply criticizes the current “Left Wing” Section for a lack of patience, a dictatorial attitude and an unwillingness to adhere to the spirit of the Socialist Party, a failure to follow the constitution of the party, and a pattern of destructive behavior. Oneal cites several articles of the SPA constitution in making his case—none of which seem particularly germane to the actual factional situation existing in the party. The constitutionality of NEC action to put aside election results and to suspend entire federations is discussed not at all, it should be noted. Regardless, this is one of the most intelligent and extensive discussions of the thinking by a NEC member with regard to the insurgent Left Wing Section. The speech was taken stenographically at the meeting and reproduced in the pages of the factional weekly The New York Socialist at the behest of members of the NEC.

 

JUNE

“Scuttling the Ship: A Statement of the Seven Suspended Language Federations, June 2, 1919.” This is the joint protest statement of the 7 affected Language Federations of the SPA (Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, South Slavic, and Latvian) in response to the May 27 action of the party’s National Executive Committee to unilaterally suspend the entire memberships of these organizations. The “autocratic 7” members of the National Executive Committee who approved this action on “over 30,000 dues payers” are rebuked for failing to provide notification, time for preparation, or a trial. In addition, the NEC bloc of 7 suspended the party elections and expelled the Michigan organization of nearly 6,000 without trial, locked up the party headquarters in the hands of a private holding company outside of party control, and arbitrarily threw the Translator-Secretaries of the affected federations out of party headquarters without allowing time for them to locate new quarters. “In short, this group of seven National Committeemen, drunk with power they assumed, feeling aggrieved because these federations dared to criticize the National Executive Committee, made themselves guilty of an act which will discredit them forever in the International Socialist movement,” the joint statement charged.

 

“Letter from Adolph Germer in Chicago to Morris Hillquit at Saranac Lake, New York, June 2, 1919.” Very illuminating letter from the National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party to leading luminary Hillquit, then convalescing from tuberculosis at a sanitarium in upstate New York. Far from being the puppeteer behind the seminal June 24-30 plenum of the SPA’s governing National Executive Committee, the disabled and out-of-the-loop Hillquit is here informed of the results after the fact. Germer sees Russian Federation Translator-Secretary Alexander Stoklitsky as the chief mover behind the Left Wing movement within the federations, with Joseph Stilson of the Lithuanian Federation his chief accomplice. “I had a private talk with the Translator-Secretary of the South Slavic Federation [George Selakovich] and I concluded from what he said that he regretted having become involved in this controversy,” Germer notes, adding “the others, I believe, were drawn into it without fully realizing what the result would be.” Alfred Wagenknecht of Ohio is portrayed as the chief protagonist for the Left Wing among the Anglophonic element.

 

“The National Executive Committee Acts,” by David P. Berenberg [June 4, 1919]. Unsigned editorial in the New York Socialist, presumably penned by editor David P. Berenberg, reporting the decision of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party to revoke the charter of the organization of the Socialist Party of Michigan, thus effectively expelling the state from the party. This decision was made on Saturday, May 24, 1919, by a 7-3 vote, ostensibly on the grounds that the insertion of a plank in the state constitution instructing the Michigan State Committee to revoke the state charter of any local or branch “advocating reforms” put the entire state organization in violation of the national constitution of the Socialist Party. Michigan was a hotbed of the Left Wing section, and the purge of the Michigan organization was the first of a number of countermeasures taken by the NEC in response to the growing Left Wing movement in the party.

 

“The National Committee Meeting,” by James Oneal. [June 4, 1919] The Socialist Party’s most aggressive anti-Communist member of the NEC explains the actions of that body at its seminal May 24-30 plenary session, a riotous meeting which saw the expulsion of the entire Socialist Party of Michigan and the suspension of the party’s Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, and South Slavic Language Federations—a majority of the members of the entire organization. “Filled with an emotional ecstacy over the Russian revolution,” these groups had formed a coalition intent on establishing “a dictatorship within the party,” says Oneal. Citing examples, Oneal notes that election fraud in the 1919 SPA election was rife and the NEC justified in terminating the election and taking action against the Left Wing. “What is facing the Socialist Party is an anarcho-syndicalist revival that should play into the hands of capitalist reaction and give our enemies an opportunity to outlaw any socialist movement. Where the ‘Left Wing’ has developed it has driven out many members through sheer disgust,” Oneal observes.

 

“Call for a National Conference of the Left Wing.” [Published June 4, 1919] This is the call for the holding of a National Conference of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, issued jointly by Local Boston, Socialist Party (Louis C. Fraina, Sec.); Local Cleveland, Socialist Party (C.E. Ruthenberg, Sec.); and the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party of New York City (Maximilian Cohen, Sec.). The call indicated that all locals (or minority groups of locals, should a local refuse to participate) should elect 1 delegate for every 500 members, with no group to elect more than four delegates. Acceptance of the Manifesto of the Left Wing of the Socialist Party of Greater New York was provisionally to be the acid test for participaton. The meeting was to discuss the crisis in the Socialist Party and to agree upon action thereon, to discuss ways and means to prevent the SPA from affiliating with any international organization other than the “Bolshevik-Spartacan Communist International,” to establish some sort of “national council or bureau” to receive and disseminate information. A declaration of principles was also to be drafted—although the actual meeting did not accomplish this latter task. Maximilian Cohen handled the formal correspondence related to this meeting, which was held in New York City.

 

“Forty Thousand Expelled by Seven,” by L.E. Katterfeld, Alfred Wagenknecht, and Louis C. Fraina [published June 7, 1919] An “official” Left Wing perspective of the May 24-30, 1919 plenum of the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee—written by the two “minority” members of the NEC along with Left Wing leader Louis Fraina. The decisions and motivations of the “Willful Seven” are outlined, including the expulsion of the Michigan state party without trial, the arbitrary suspension of seven language federations in an effort to control the tenor and outcome of the forthcoming Emergency Convention, the locking up of party assets in a factional “holding company” not subject to party recall, and the unconstitutional abrogation of the SPA’s 1919 referendum vote for officials. The statement indicates that “the ‘moderates’ on the National Executive Committee show no realization of the problems of the International Revolution. They do not see the need of reconstructing the Party policy in accord with the experience gained by our comrades in Europe, or, at any rate, do not act toward that end.” Party members are called to stay in the party and to “build, build, build,” since the “sabotage” of the “Willful Seven” is intended to cause the Left Wing to desert the party.

 

“The Counterrevolution in the Party: Report of the NEC Sessions in Chicago,” by I.E. Ferguson [June 7, 1919] The definitive account of the seminal May 24-30 plenum of the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee which expelled the Socialist Party of Michigan and suspended the entire memberships of the Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Hungarian, and South Slavic Socialist Federations. Ferguson, one of the principles of the Left Wing movement, is scathing in his review of the machinations of the outgoing NEC. Ferguson sees the NEC as an accumulation of frigtened and vindictive officeholders, spurred into frenzied and thoroughly unconstitutional action by the sudden realization that the reins of control of the party were slipping from the hands of the Right and into the hands of the Left Wing movement. The list of objectively illegal actions is impressive: Michigan expelled befor e a pending referendum confimed the action of its state convention, the Hungarian and South Slavic Federations suspended based on the signature of a single official (the Translator-Secretary of each) on a document protesting the action of the NEC. At root is a transparent effort to control the forthcoming Emergency National Convention of the Party by expelling political opponents, Ferguson indicates, the dirtiest of power politics.

 

“Italian Federation Endorses NEC Action: Resolution on the Expulsions and Suspensions of the Left Wing Section, June 8, 1919.” At its June 8, 1919, meeting the Executive Committee of the Italian Federation passed a resolution on the crisis in the Socialist Party, which was already marked by the suspension of the entire state organization of Michigan and the suspension of seven of the Slavic, Baltic, and Finnish federations of the party. While on the one hand the suspensions and expulsion were seen as justifiable for fairly clear violations of the party constitution, the actions of the NEC were called “too drastic and very unwise” since they were taken by a retiring NEC which was itiself called to stand down by the very same constitution. “In justice to all concerned and to show that the Socialist Party plays fair at all times and in all things it could, we believe, have found a less drastic way of disciplining these organizations and put the whole matter before the coming national convention for final solution,” the resolution stated. The resolution was mailed out to the members of the NEC and the parties concerned by John LaDuca, the Translator-Secretary of the Italian Federation.

 

“The Enemy Within,” by Abraham Tuvim [June 11, 1919]. The bitterness of the faction fight between the Left Wing section and the Socialist Party regulars in New York state is made clear in this article from the New York Socialist by adherent of the SP Right Abraham Tuvim. Tuvim details the actions of a June 2 meeting of the New York City Committee in repudiating the New York Call as a Socialist newspaper and deciding to move forward to the holding of a New York “City Convention” in contradiction of the instruction of the New York State Executive Committee on the matter. The meeting, which included at least two non-members of the SPA, according to Tuvim, voted 12 to 3 in favor of repudiation, leaving the question of recognition of the New York Communist as an official organ to the forthcoming City Convention. Tuvim calls the Left Wing Section a “counterrevolutionary and disruptive group” bent on “destroying our Party and its institutions” and states that “there must be no quarter” in the fight between Socialist Party loyalists and the insurgent Left Wing faction.

 

“Why the Foreign Language Federations Were Suspended,” by David P. Berenberg [June 11, 1919]. While accompanied by brief editorial comment in support of the decision, this article presents the full text of the landmark resolution of the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee to suspend seven of the organization’s Language Federations for a list of specific alleged violations of the party’s constitution. Includes footnotes containing the complete text of each cited constitutional section so that the reader may better determine the merit or lack thereof of each particular charge levied by the NEC.

 

“Foreign Federations,” by David P. Berenberg [June 11, 1919]. Unsigned editorial in the New York Socialist, presumably penned by editor David P. Berenberg, attempting to justify the action of the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee decision to summarily suspend the entire memberships of seven language federations from the party ultimately due to the endorsement of the Left Wing Manifesto by leading officials or sections of each. “These federations are made up of people who have had no experience whatsoever in political life at home. Being composed of a disfranchised group, and exercising no suffrage here, they naturally feel that the ballot is a useless scrap of paper, and that nothing can be accomplished by political action,” Berenberg states, adding that such individuals provided a fertile field for syndicalist and anarchist propaganda. The suspension of the seven federations was a strong measure necessary for the preservation of the party, according to Berenberg, who adds that the party would have the capacity to ratify or overturn this decision at its forthcoming Emergency National Convention.

 

“Immediate Demands,” by Louis Waldman [June 14, 1919]. Prominant New York Socialist Louis Waldman (later one of the “5 Expelled Assemblymen of 1920”) takes on the Left Wing’s call for the elimination of immediate demands from the platform of the Socialist Party. Waldman notes that only nine months previously, at the NY Socialist Party State Convention, such Left Wingers as Bertram Wolfe, John Reed, and Eadmonn MacAlpine had voted in favor of immediate demands as part of that state’s platform; now, despite no changes on the domestic or international front to merit such a shift, immediate demands were bitterly oppsed. Waldman asserts that the antipathy of the Left Wing to immediate demands was misplaced, and that partial victories in the struggle for the improvement of the lives of the workers—when the ultimate goal of complete emancipation through Socialism is maintained—actually served to increase the class struggle and by implication the class-consciousness of the workers. Waldman dismissed the charge that immediate demands were inherently conservative, noting that the construction of revolutionary industrial unions by the most revolutionary segment of the union movement, the IWW, made extensive use of small actions for limited demands as part of their program of organizational development.

 

“’The Willful Group of Seven,’,” byDavid P. Berenberg [June 18, 1919]. Unsigned front page commentary from the New York Socialist, presumably penned by editor David P. Berenberg. Here Berenberg responds to an article in The Communist by L.E. Katterfeld and Alfred Wagenknecht concerning the hearing of the seven federations prior to their suspension by the National Executive Committee. Berenberg contends the hearing was fair, conducted over a two day period, with Translator-Secretary Joseph Stilson of the Lithuanian Federation answering the charges seriatim on behalf of the other federations, who advised him and contributed to his arguments. Berenberg also defends the decision of the National Committee to place the Chicago headquarters of the Socialist Party in the hands of a nine member private holding company to place this asset out of reach of the Left Wing Section in any subsequent “capture” of the organization. Berenberg denies that there is any sort of “tidal wave” of the rank and file membership of the Socialist Party on behalf of the ideas of the Left Wing Section and describes an alleged model by which a Local of 1,000 members is captured by a small handful of “fanatics” through insuation and disruptionist tactics. “Socialist Party members might as well recognized that there can be no compromise with these factionalists,” Berenberg states, noting “if the Left Wing is successful it will drag the Socialist Party underground where it will disappear.”

 

“Present Party Officialdom Overwhelmingly Repudiated by National Referendum. (A Tabulation of the 1919 Socialist Party Election).” [June 18, 1919] In the spring of 1919, the Socialist Party of America conducted a referendum vote to elect new officers for the organization, in accord with the constitution fo the group. The term of office of the outgoing National Executive Committee, International Delegates, and International Secretary was set to expire on June 30, 1919. The Left Wing Section organized to elect its slate to the open positions and thus shift the line of the Socialist Party from the “constructive socialist” Center-Right that had historically dominated the party’s high offices to the “revolutionary socialist” left. When the results of the election began coming in, National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer and the outgoing NEC quickly cried fraud, arbitrarily invalidated the vote, and instructed State Secretaries not to tabulate the results. A series of suspensions and expulsions of ideological opponents followed. Knowing full well that they had swept the elections, the Left Wing Section through its Cleveland organ The Ohio Socialist independently polled the various State Secretaries as to the vote in their state and published the results. While the State Secretaries of the large states of Illinois and New York refused to comply with the request of the Left Wing Section, enough states did send in thier tallies for a very telling summary to be published. This document lists the vote for International Delegates and International Secretary by individual states, showing a massive defeat for the candidates loyal to the outgoing NEC. Numbers have been retabulated by computer for publication here, correcting a substantial published undercount of the vote for Morris Hillquit for International Secretary.

 

“Another Victory for Uncompromising Socialism: New National Executive Committee of Left Wing Socialists.” [June 25, 1919] The results of the SPA vote for National Executive Members in the party’s five electoral districts (arbitrarily voided by the outgoing NEC) were also independently gathered, tabulated, and published by the Left Wing Section in their weekly publication The Ohio Socialist. These results showed a strong Left Wing majority in the candidates who should have been elected: “These tabulations show that Fraina, Hourwich, and Lindgren were elected upon the new National Executive Committee from the First District; Ruthenberg, Prevey, and Harwood from the Second District; Keracher, Batt, and Lloyd from the Third District; Nagle, Millis, and Hogan from the Fourth District; Katterfeld, Wicks, and Herman from the Fifth District.” Of these, only the 3rd district candidates plus Harwood in the Second District and Herman in the Fifth, were Left Wing Candidates. Had the election not been invalidated, this evidence demonstrates fairly conclusively that the Left Wing Section would have “captured” the party via the democratic will of the membership in the Spring 1919 election.

 

“‘Report of the National Left Wing Conference (Extracts — Part 1): New York — June 21-25, 1919,’” The unity of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party was shattered by the coup of the outgoing NEC of the Socialist Party in the late spring and summer of 1919, suspending and expellling tens of thousands of party members. These members thrown outside the organization were less inclined to remain steadfast to a strategy of winning over the organization through normal internal processes of party decision-making, instead seeking immediate establishment of a new Communist Party. This material, published in the August 2, 1919 issue of the organ of the Left Wing Section, The Revolutionary Age, provides a range of perspectives on the situation facing the left wing from the time of relative unity of purpose. Includes the speeches of Louis C. Fraina, Dennis Batt (Michigan Party), I.E. Ferguson (Sec. of National Left Wing Council), John Ballam (Massachusetts Party), Alexander Stoklitsky (Russian Federation), and Harry Hiltzik (Jewish Left Wing Federation). Most interesting of the group are the perspectives of Ballam and Ferguson, who at this time were still staunch advocates of conducting the fight within the SPA. These two later became founding members of the Communist Party of America.

 

 

JULY

“Testing the Water,” a cartoon by Art Young [July 1919]. ***PDF GRAPHIC FILE (460 k.) This cartoon by Art Young appeared in the July 1919 issue of Max Eastman’s monthly,The Liberator. Untitled in the original, the drawing features a geriatric “U.S. Socialist Party” sitting beneath the tree of “petit-bourgeois respectability” dipping his toe in the “Communist International” pond.

 

“The Left Wing and the Truth,” by Adolph Germer [July 2, 1919]. The National Executive Secretary makes a spirited defense of the decision of the party’s governing National Executive Committee to expel the state organization of Michigan for violation of the constitution of the Socialist Party. Germer quotes the newly revised constitution of Michigan and its mandate that “any member, local, or branch of a local, advocating legislative reforms or supporting organizations formed for the purpose of advocating such reforms, shall be expelled from the Socialist Party” and notes the patent contradiction of this clause with the national constitution of the SPA. Germer notes that neither of the two Left Wing partisans on the NEC —- Alfred Wagenknecht and Ludwig Katterfeld—disputed the fundamental validity of this charge and details how the Michigan State Secretary, John Keracher, rushed to the May 1919 meeting of the NEC in Chicago and then refused to answer questions that might have put the position of Michigan in a more favorable light. Germer further quotes correspondence from a Detroit Jewish branch suspended by the Michigan Executive Committee to confirm the reality of the Michigan position in actual practice.

 

“The National Left Wing Conference,” by Louis C. Fraina. [Published July 5, 1919] Originally an unsigned report from the pages of The Revolutionay Age, attributed to Fraina based upon his editorship and content. This article details the First (and only) National Conference of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, held in New York City from June 21-24, 1919. The session was attended over 90 delegates hailing from about 20 different states. The opening address was given by Fraina, who said that “the proletarian revolution in action has modified the old tactical concepts of Socialism; and the inspiration of the Bolshevik conquests, joining with the original minority Socialism in the Socialist Party, has produced the Left Wing.” Includes a discussion of major issues at the Conference, first and foremost the question of whether to proceed immediately to the formation of a Communist Party or to continue the struggle for control of the Socialist Party’s Emergency National Convention in the face of mounting expulsions, reorganizations, and suspensions. Interesting mention of a dismissed alternative in which the Central Committees of the Language Federations would have each been entitled to a seat on the governing National Council of the Left Wing. Defeated on the question of immediate formation of a party and a federative National Council, 31 delegates of the Federations and Michigan caucused and declined further participation from the third day, thus moving towards a factionalized movement in September.

 

“People Ready for Socialism; Party Starting Work—Germer.” [July 24, 1919]. As the faction fight heated up in the summer of 1919, National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer travelled from Chicago to New York City for consultations with leaders of his faction. This article contains the content of an interview which Germer granted to the New York Socialist Party daily, the New York Call. Germer held a “rosy” view of the SP’s immediate future: “The situation as it existed last winter was wonderfully promising. If we had been able to remain united, nothing would have been too much to hope for. The time is ripe, and rotten ripe, for our propaganda. But the internal discussions and wranglings have sterilized our efforts to a very large extent.” Germer added that “There are thousands of old-time Comrades who had relapsed into inactivity, and who are only awaiting some stirring event to recall them to life. The time has come now. When the party gets rid of its internal disorders, when the decks are cleared, when we point our craft at the goal, we will be ready for work, and they will come back to us.” Germer exuded confidence as to the future result of the forthcoming Emergency Convention of the party: “The national convention that will meet on August 30 will take a strong stand, a resolute stand. Then, all those who do not care to remain with us can go their way. We will go our way, as we have always gone.”

 

“The National Left Wing,” by Isaac E. Ferguson [published July 25, 1919] An open letter from the Secretary of the National Council of the Left Wing Section, established by the June 1919 National Conference of the Left Wing held in New York. Ferguson announces that the National Council is to conduct “the work of publicity and preparation on a national scale” for the August 30 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party, to be held in Chicago. “The Left Wing triumph in the party elections makes emphatically clear what the membership wants.... It must not be annulled by the brazen dictation of a repudiated National Executive Committee which insists upon ruling the party in spite of the ending of its term on July 1st.” The dual strategy of the National Council that was to lead to the division of the Communist movement into two rival parties is already in evidence; Ferguson states “The Left Wing must control the regular party Emergency Convention, with the delegates instructed by the membership to undo the manipulations of the old NEC to join the party unreservedly with the Communist International, and to adopt a program of revolutionary socialism for all party activities. Or, if three-fourths of the party shall be expelled or suspended by August 30th, as appears now to be a definite possibility, or if the Emergency Convention shall be sidetracked by the rump NEC, the Left Wing delegates from all over the country must be brought together to organize an American Party of Communism.” Ferguson pleads for donations to the National Council and notes that 25ö Special Propaganda Stamps are for sale.

 

“One Lie Nailed,” by Ludwig E. Katterfeld [July 26, 1919] Left Wing Section partisan Ludwig Katterfeld goes on the offensive in response to a charge by NEC member James Oneal that the outgoing National Executive Committee was not repudiated by the referendum of 1919—the results of which were suppressed by the self-same outgoing NEC. Katterfeld asserts that in reality, the 20,764 votes independently tabulated by The Ohio Socialist from 26 reporting states represented nearly “TWICE AS MANY” votes as the same states produced in the previous year’s national election. Oneal is further tweaked for having received a mere 1,726 votes in those same 26 states, as compared to the tally of 16.074 racked up by the leading vote-getter in the race, John Reed. Katterfeld pulls no punches in making his charge: “In view of these facts, what becomes of Oneal’s assertions and allegations? I commend these figures to our would-be “historian” James Oneal. Was he ignorant of these facts, or did he deliberately lie in his efforts to defend the defeated and discredited party officialdom and to prejudice the membership against the Left Wing and Revolutionary Socialism?”

 

“The Split in the Socialist Party,” by Joseph B. Stilson [July 30, 1919] The Translator-Secretary of the Lithuanian Socialist Federation, one of the leading players in the 1919 crisis in the SPA, provides a lengthy perspective on the history of the party split. One of the definitive views of the thinking of non-Anglo members of the Left Wing Section, Stilson (arguably) dates the origin of the conflict to the 1916 Presidential candidacy of Allan Benson, a referendum-nominated SP candidate who dodged all mention of the class struggle, in marked contrast to the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric of perennial party nominee Gene Debs. Stilson saw the war as an important turning point in the radicalization of the SP rank and file, one that tipped the majority of the party against its centrist office holders. Faced with electoral defeat in the party election of 1919, the SP leadership began acting in a manner befitting of Tammany Hall, expelling and suspending its opponents without trial, backed by the flimsiest of excuses, hypocritically framed. “That these politicians knew that the Left Wing had been in existence for over two years was frankly admitted by [NEC member George] Goebel, who said that he kept on his files a copy of each manifesto, program, and paper of the Left wingers. It was evident therefore that the Left Wing was tolerated as long as it did not threaten the control of the reactionary machine... Only when the Left Wing touched the nest of the Opportunists did it become a ‘violation of the party Constitution,’” Stilson asserts.

 

AUGUST

"Letter of John Reed, et al. in New York to C.E. Ruthenberg in Cleveland, August 11, 1919.” Archival letter attributed to the typewriter of John Reed attempting to bring Left Wing National Council member C.E. Ruthenberg of Cleveland up to speed as to the rapid developments of August 1919. Reed and his associates are extremely hostile to I.E. Ferguson, Secretary of the National Council, stating that Ferguson had “consistently sabotaged the position taken by the majority at the Conference, and who on several occasions stated that unless some basis for compromise with the Federations could be found, he would resign from the Council and accept the minority position.” Thereafter Ferguson and Revolutionary Age editor Louis Fraina “entered into unauthorized negotiations with the Federation politicians” leading to the “surrender” to the Federations, who had structured the method of electing delegates in a manner designed to assure effective control of the new organization. Ruthenberg had been “manipulated by the tricky attorney [Ferguson] whose object has been from the first to surrender to the Federation-Michigan minority,” Reed and his partners claimed, noting that one August 5 executive motion of Ferguson to end all physical meetings of the National Council had overridden the decision the previous day to bring out of town members of the National Council together to hash out their differences in person, while another naming a Conventon Committee of three had the effect of expelling Gitlow and Larkin from decision-making authority, resulting in complete victory for the Federations’ convention scheme.

 

“Minutes and Executive Motions of the Left Wing National Council, August 4-12, 1919.” The Left Wing National Council was the executive committee established by the National Conference of the Left Wing held in New York, June 21-24, 1919. Originally a 9 member board, by August the Council had evolved into a 7 member group, headed by Secretary Isaac E. Ferguson and including John Ballam, Max Cohen, Benjamin Gitlow, Jim Larkin, C.E. Ruthenberg, and Bert Wolfe. The National Council was deeply split over tactics to be followed with respect to the Socialist Party, with Ferguson and a majority of the Council persuing accomodation with the suspended Language Federations of the Socialist Party, and a minority consisting of Gitlow and Larkin and their friends on the staff of the Revolutionary Age, Jack Reed and Eadmonn MacAlpine. With the August 30 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party approaching and plans proceeding for a September 1 foundation of a Communist Party based upon a convention call electing delegates in a manner virtually guaranteed to ensure the dominance of the Russian Language Federation over the new organization, the division on the National Council assumed the nature of trench warfare. This document provides the minutes of the last physical meeting of the National Council (Aug. 4), and the executive motions which followed—a path which ensured a split between those pursuing “capture” of the Socialist Party and those seeking formation of a wholly new Communist organization.

 

“National Council and NEC: An Open Letter to A. Wagenknecht in Cleveland from Louis C. Fraina in Boston, Aug. 13, 1919.” An open letter published in the pages of The Revolutionary Age by its editor, Louis C. Fraina, addressed to the insurgent Temporary National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party, Alfred Wagenknecht. Fraina resigns his place as a member of the newly elected (unofficial) National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party and is harshly critical of the failure of Wagenknecht and his compatriots to alter their strategy of fighting for control of the Aug. 30 Emergency National Convention of the SPA. Fraina charges that original plan implied that “the new NEC would assume complete control of the Convention”—a gathering “other than the convention of the old NEC.” Instead, “your decision, as Temporary Secretary of the new NEC, to old ‘our’ convention in the same hall as [SPA Executive Secretary] Germer’s breaks the plan completely. Any Left Wing delegates who now go to the Emergency Convention are going to the convention of Germer & Co., packed by the moderates in order to secure control for counterrevolutionary socialism.” With the Socialist Party of Ohio expelled from the SPA by the outgoing NEC, Wagenknecht would not even have access to the convention floor, Fraina stated. The solution was for the NEC to resign and endorse the call for a Sept. 1 convention to establish a Communist Party of America, in Fraina’s view.

 

“Letter of John Reed and Ben Gitlow in New York to the Labor Committee of the Left Wing National Conference, August 13, 1919.” Letter written by Reed with Gitlow sent out to the other 7 members of the Labor Committee established by the June 1919 National Conference of the Left Wing. Reed outlines the factional politics in the National Council of the Left Wing, pitting Secretary Isaac Ferguson, Revolutionary Age editor Louis Fraina, and their allies on the Council (John Ballam, Max Cohen, and Bertram Wolfe) against the National Council minority of Gitlow and Jim Larkin, along with their allies Reed and Eadmonn MacAlpine. At root is a battle over the strategy to be followed—continued struggle within the Socialist Party for control of the August Emergency National Convention vs. the immediate formation of a Communist Party in accordance with a Joint Call which virtually guaranteed dominance of the Russian Federations due to the method of delegate selection prescribed. Reed and Gitlow feel the minority of the National Council had been unjustly excluded from participation and the labor publication approved by the National Conference, The Voice of Labor, had been abandoned. “We believe that if anything comes out of Chicago, it will be a Party or organization formed at the National Emergency Convention, or from the delegates to that Convention; and not to the Communist Party crazy-quilt gathering,” Reed and Gitlow state.

 

“Letter from James P. Cannon in Kansas City, MO to John Reed and Ben Gitlow in New York, August 16, 1919.” The reply of National Conference of the Left Wing Section Labor Committee member Jim Cannon to the letter of John Reed and Ben Gitlow of August 13 to the committee. Cannon offers his “complete endorsement” of the decision of Reed and Gitlow to begin producing The Voice of Labor despite the efforts of the majority of the National Council to halt the launch of the publication, calling the first issue of the publication “the biggest thing, in my opinion, that has come out of the national conference.” Cannon states that the stands of Reed, Gitlow, and Larkin “in the whole controversy with the Federations...are so much in accord with my own opinion—and with that of the great majority of the membership, without a doubt—as to entitle you to the gratitude of those who look upon the socialist movement as an instrument for revolutionary propaganda to the working masses and not as a football of power-seeking bosses and fixers.” Cannon writes that the decision of the majority of the National Council to endorse immediate formation of a Communist Party of America according to the terms of the Federation-Michigan alliance will be repudiated since it surrenders control of the Left Wing to “those who cannot lead an American movement anywhere but into the ditch.”

 

“Letter from Stankowitz in Pittsburgh to John Reed and Ben Gitlow in New York, August 19, 1919.” The reply of National Conference of the Left Wing Section Labor Committee member Stankowitz, an immigrant industrial worker from Pittsburgh, to the letter of John Reed and Ben Gitlow of August 13 to the committee. Stankowitz, expressing himself as well as he is able in broken English, takes a middle position between the Federations wanting immediate formation of a Communist Party and the position of Reed, Gitlow, and Larkin. “Comrades that are trying to unite [the] minority and the majority of the Left Wing may be wrong, because we instructed them to issue a call to the Emergency National Convention [of the Socialist Party], and then form the Communist Party on the floor of the Convention if it was captured, etc., but they may be right, because the more one studies this fight within the Party, the more he learns that we never will have a [chance] to capture it for everything is on the side of [the] ‘Centrists’ and ‘Rights.’” On the other hand, “I don’t blame you comrades for taking the stand you took, for you are trying to satisfy the will of [the] delegates that expressed their will to fight in [the] Party.” Stankowitz is a great supporter of Reed and Gitlow’s The Voice of Labor, calling it the “best labor paper that has ever been put before the working class in America” and noting that he had almost sold his initial order of 500 copies. “Whatever happens, our future propaganda should be in factories, mines, mills, etc., and if the Communist Party does not unite with radical Industrial Unions, she will be a failure,” Stankowitz concludes.

 

“Letter from L.E. Katterfeld in Dighton, KS, to John Reed in New York City, Aug. 19, 1919.” An important letter detailing the thinking of the future Communist Labor Party element of the Left Wing Section heading into the August Emergency National Convention of the SPA. Katterfeld tells Reed that while the Left Wing National Council now felt the fight to win control of the Socialist Party was “futile,” the struggle should be continued nonetheless. “Even if we were sure to lose there we should make an honest effort because that is the ONLY way that we can demonstrate to the great mass of the membership of the Party who ARE revolutionary that they can not realize their aspirations within the Socialist Party. If we split off before then there will be tens of thousands that should be with us but that will not follow us out,” Katterfeld argues. Reed is to make sure that all elected New York Left Wingers attend the convention to challenge the right of the New York regulars’ machine (the “Gerberites”) to represent the “reorganized” locals. Katterfeld pegs the odds of success of seating every elected New York Left Wing delegate at 10-to-1, and that the Left still has a “very good chance to win” at Chicago.

 

“Circular Letter from Alfred Wagenknecht in Cleveland to ‘All National Convention Delegates,’ August 19, 1919.” With the Emergency National Convention fast approaching, National Executive Sectretary pro tem Alfred Wagenknecht sent this circular letter to elected delegates in an attempt to organize the Left Wing Section for action against the Center-Right alliance loyal to National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer and the outgoing NEC of the party. For this purpose offices were rented at Machinists’ Hall in Chicago—site of the August 30 convention—and a caucus meeting was called for August 29, 1919, at 8 pm. This meeting was organized “so that all delegates that denounce the acts of the former National Executive Committee and who are in sympathy with the principles for which nearly half the party membership was suspended and expelled, may discuss the necessary steps to take” at the Emergency Convention, Wagenknecht indicated.

 

“Excerpt of a Letter from Victor L. Berger in Milwaukee to Morris Hillquit at Saranac Lake, NY, August 20, 1919.” ” Two of the biggest bogeymen lurking in the CP’s mythology of the 1919 Socialist Party split were Morris Hillquit and Victor L. Berger, held to be the grand chessmasters who manipulated lesser players. This perspective is not in accord with objective reality. This is a valuable glimpse behind the scenes, correspondence from Wisconsin publisher and party leader Berger to the ailing HIllquit, recovering from tuberculosis at a sanitarium in upstate New York, written a mere 10 days before the start of the decisive Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party. Berger blames the moderate wing of the party for the current discord: “We have always played too much with the revolutionary phrase. In this game of would-be radical phrases, the one who can play the game the hardest will naturally win. And the emptier the barrel the louder the sound. I am sick and tired of the business. If there is to be a revolution some day, I and my crowd will surely be there. But that continuous threat of a ‘revolution’ reminds me of a man who is continuously brandishing a revolver which is not loaded.” Berger notes the difference between the young communist Marx and the mature socialist and remarks to Hillquit that “those who believe in communism, not in socialism, should be kind enough to start an organization of their own, which, by the way, the consistent fellows among them have already done.” Berger wishes the Russian Bolsheviki well but does not believe that their experience is tranferable to America. He believes neither in dictatorship, the Bolshevik concept of an Internationall, nor the Berne International—“cowed by the war patriots and completely dominated by English Laborites,” whom he characterizes as “weak sisters” and “dull.” As for the SPA Emergency Convention: “What the outcome of our convention in Chicago will be, I don’t know and don’t care—because Wisconsin is in a good position to go it alone for awhile, and to for a new center for crystallization.”

 

“Call for a Convention for the Purpose of Establishing the Communist Party of America,” signed by I.E. Ferguson and Dennis Batt. [Aug. 23, 1919] The National Council of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party of America, established in the summer of 1919 as a central organization for the organized Left Wing movement in the SPA, found itself deeply divided over tactics. One group—predominantly anglophonic and tending to be individuals not yet suspended or expelled from the party by Executive Secretary Adolph Germer and the outgoing NEC—sought to stay in the SPA through the Chicago Convention, attempting to win control of the party or winning as many party members to the cause as possible if the effort should prove a losing proposition. The other group—consisting in large measure of the members of the 7 suspended Language Federations and the suspended state party of Michigan—sought an immediate break with the SPA and formation of a new Communist Party. Ultimately, those favoring immediate action won the day on the Left Wing National Council, and this convention call for the formation of the Communist Party of America was issued and published in the press. The rapid pace of events is emphasized by the fact that this call, which outlined an organizational perspective and defined the basis for participation in the Founding Convention of the CPA, was published in the Revolutionary Age barely a week before the start of the Chicago convention.

“"The Communist Party of America,,” byNicholas I. Hourwich [Gurvich], Aug. 26, 1919.This is the report delivered to the Federation of Russian Branches in August 1919 at its 5th Convention in Detroit. The son of a long-time Socialist Labor Party member, Isaac Hourwich, Nicholas Hourwich was formerly on the 3 member Editorial Board of the Russian Federation’s newspaper, Novyi Mir, and was named responsible Editor by the 5th Convention. He was active in the Left Wing Movement and a founder and leading figure in the Communist Party of America from 1919.

 

“Minutes of the Left Wing Section of the 1919 Convention of the Socialist Party of America.” [Aug. 29-31, 1919]. The 1919 Chicago Convention of the SPA pitted two organized factions against one another, the group of “Regulars” around National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer and the outgoing NEC and the “Left Wing” faction around newly elected National Execuitve Secretary Alfred Wagenknecht and the incoming NEC—a group whose legitimacy was biitterly challenged by their outgoing counterparts, who refused to recognize the results of the 1919 election and who launched a series of suspensions of “Left Wing” Federations and states in an effort to rid the party of what they perceived as an alien influence. These are the meeting minutes of the Left Wing section from the time of their first organized caucus in Chicago on Aug. 29 until the issuance of a convention call for establishment of a new Communist Party (specifically, the Communist Labor Party) on August 31.

 

“Minutes of the Founding Convention of the Communist Labor Party of America, Aug. 31 - Sept. 5, 1919.” After fighting for control of the 1919 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party of America in Chicago and losing in their bid, the organized Left Wing Section of the SPA retired downstairs and held a convention of their own—a gathering which established the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP). The body elected organizational officers and wrote and adopted a platform and program.This document collects the minutes of every session of the CLP convention held over the six day period.

 

Bylaws of the Federation of Russian Branches of the Communist Party of America [August 1919]. This is the complete text of the constitution approved by the Federation in August 1919 at its 5th Convention in Detroit. This document sheds light upon the organizational structure of the Russian Federation, one of the most important institutions in the Communist Party of America.

 

“Statement Subscribed to the Delegates of the Emergency Convention by the Delegates of the State of California.” [September 1, 1919] A document from the CLP/UCP archive seized by the New York Bomb Squad and the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation in April 1921. This statement was apparently read or distributed to the 1919 Emergency National Committee by the California delegation, a Left Wing body denied the seats to which they were elected by the machine of outgoing National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer. Despite being elected by overwhelming majorities of uncontested locals in their states, and despite not being opposed in person by an opposition delegation, the California delegation was ejected from the convention floor by the Chicago Police and forced to stand for hours in an anteroom where they could not hear the proceedings for which they had travelled 2,000 miles to attend. All the while, ” packed delegations from other states occupied the convention floor,” the statement declared. The Contest Committee stalled a decision on the California delegation for two days, thus preventing them from participation, eventually coming in on the third day of the gathering with a recommendation to deny the delegation their seats. This was overturned by action from the floor by delegates who were held to have woke up to the “despotic procedure steamrollered by the officialdom of the convention.” The California delegation demanded that all contested delegations be seated, that the representation of the packed delegations from “reorganization states” be scaled down to the number of votes to which they were entitled based on actual paid membership, and the removal of the Chicago Police was demanded. The delegation—which included Max Bedacht, James Dolsen, and John C. Taylor—ultimately refused their seats and bolted the SPA convention to help establish the Communist Labor Party.

 

OCTOBER

“The Chicago Conventions,” by Max Eastman; Drawings by Art Young. [Oct. 1919]. [Large file—1 megabyte] At the end of August and first of September, there were three monumental conventions of the American left simultaneously taking place at Chicago: the 1919 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party of America, the Founding Convention of the Communist Labor Party, and the Founding Convention of the Communist Party of America. No more than a small handful of people attended sessions of all three bodies and only one chronicled them with a journalist’s touch and a historian’s eye. This lengthy analysis of the three gatherings by Max Eastman is a seminal pieces of reportage—absolutely indispensible for historians of the Debsian SPA and the early American Communist movement. First published in the pages of The Liberator in its October 1919 issue, this a the revised version of the article, adding many of the original sketches and pen-and-ink drawings by Art Young. Those with slow internet may alternatively download the text-only version .

 

“The Socialist Apostle Speaks,” by Nicholas I. Hourwich. [Oct. 25, 1919] This article in the official organ of the Communist Party of America attacks the perceived duplicity of Morris Hillquit’s second article on the factional war, “We Are All Socialists,” [Sept. 22, 1919], in the immediate aftermath of the Chicago party split. Hillquit’s chastening of his comrades for “infraction of Socialist ethics and decency” in the attack on the Left Wing is dismissed by Hourwich as paternalistic patter—the zealous attack of the Left in the bourgeois press is viewed as being uniform behavior by the “social-opportunists and the social-reformists of all lands” in their effort to prove their “ability” and “respectability” to the bourgeois public. An interesting example of the vehement antipathy held for the archetypical centrist social democrat Hillquit by many on the revolutionary left of the American movement.

 

1920

MARCH

“Application of the Socialist Party of America for Membership in the Communist International. A letter from Otto Branstetter to Grigorii Zinoviev, March 12, 1920.” Even after suspending and expelling a majority of the members fo the Socialist Party for endorsing the program of a formal Left Wing faction within the party, the rump of the organization approved via referendum vote a minority plank on international affiliation calling for the SP to immediately join the Communist International. This is the letter which SP National Executive Secretary Otto Branstetter composed and sent to Moscow in accordance with this decision of the party membership. Branstetter’s official letter, typed up by future National Executive Secretary Bertha Hale White, was pro forma and made no concrete case for inclusion of the Socialist Party in the Comintern. It was dispatched to Russia together with the rejected “Majority plank” and the approved “Minority plank” on international affiliation.

 

“Draft of a Supplemental Appeal to the Executive Committee of the Communist International from the Socialist Party of America, circa March 12, 1920,” by Otto Branstetter” While the official application for inclusion in the Communist International submitted on behalf of the Socialist Party of America by its National Executive Secretary, Otto Branstetter, was tepid and certain of immediate rejection, there was considered a strong appeal affirming with vigor the SPA’s credentials for membership. This fascinating document is a draft of a supplemental appeal to the ECCI composed by Branstetter. The Socialist Party’s opposition to the European war is characterized as militant, consistent, and nearly unanimous. The SP’s officials are characterized as “no less loyal and devoted and steadfast in maintaining the position of the Party,” as examplified by the draconian legal action taken against them by the “black reaction” of the capitalist state. “There was no split in the American Socialist party on account of or during the war. The split in this country occurred a year after the signing of the armistice” and “was largely composed of comrades who had never been affiliated with the Socialist Party until after the signing of the armistice and of those who, though affiliated, were conspicuously silent and inactive during the war.” The courage and capability of those Left Wing leaders is called into question by Branstetter, who observes “the fact that the most prominent and influential leaders in the recent split have fled to safety in foreign countries, while their deluded and deserted followers are being thrown into jails and penitentiaries by the thousands, is significant of the caliber and character of those leaders.” The leaders of the Socialist Party are held up in contradistinction to the successionists as the authentic representatives of American radicalism, worthy of inclusion in the Communist International in their stead.

 

MAY

“An Open Letter to Eugene V. Debs: Issued by the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of America.” [circa May 1919] The May 1920 Convention of the Socialist Party of America nominated Eugene V. Debs as its candidate for President for an unprecedented fifth time. Although imprisoned in the Federal Penitentiary at Atlanta, Debs accepted the nomination. The Communist Party of America was aghast at Debs’ decision and issued this “open letter” to him as a leaflet. “We presume, Comrade Debs, that you are ignorant of the facts and unacquainted with all that transpired within the Socialist movement this last year,” the open letter reads, detailing the opportunistic degeneration of the party in 1919-20, particularly the ultra-patriotic defense made in the context of the hearings over the suspension of the five New York State Assemblymen. “Between the Communist Party and the Socialist Party there can be no compromise. The latter is the most dangerous enemy of the working class and as such, we shall wage a bitter struggle against it. Their attempt to use your name in order to fool the masses will avail them of nothing. Their betrayal of Socialism has been too complete and too cowardly. Not even your name can hide their counterrevolutionary tendency. The class-conscious workers of America are through with the stinking carcass that calls itself the Socialist Party of America,” the open letter rages.

 

“Dictatorship and the International,” by Morris Hillquit. [May 1920] Speech by the International Secretary of the Socialist Party of America delivered at the 1920 New York Convention of the party. Hillquit, supportive of the Russian Revolution and the legitimacy of Lenin and Trotsky’s government, calls the Third International “a nucleus, but no more than that, of a new International.” Hillquit objects to any international organization which might impose theoretical interpretations and tactical policies on member parties, noting that “the rule of self-determination in matters of policy and matters of struggle” had been a fundamental principle of both the First and Second Internationals. In particular, Hillquit considers the Third International’s interpretation of the phrase “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” to be historically erroneous (citing the phrase’s origin in Marx’s 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program”) and tactically disastrous, opening the the Socialist movement to abrogation of democratic norms and victimization by its bourgeois opponents. Hillquit seeks the SPA’s participation in a future International including both the Russian Communist Party as well as the Independent Labour Party of Britain, the Socialist Party of France, and the Independent Socialists of Germany.

 

“The Socialist Party Convention,” by Ammon A. Hennacy. [May 19, 1920] An uncommon document, a critical first-hand account of the 1920 Socialist Party Convention in New York from the perspective of the Left Wing minority. About 140 delegates were in attendance at this convention, split about 2-to-1 between a Center-Right bloc of party regulars (Morris Hillquit, Jacob Panken, James Oneal, Victor Berger, Meyer London, John Work, Lazarus Davidow, etc.) against an organized Left Wing group including J. Louis Engdahl, William Kruse, Benjamin Glassberg, and Walter Cook. A blow-by-blow account of the convention is given, with an emphasis on the inconsistencies of the majority group and the focused efforts of the majority to railroad its platform and terminate debate of unpleasant matters. Hennacy notes that debate critical of the “patriotic” defense of the five Socialist Assemblymen expelled from the New York legislature was terminated through machine methods and the entire record of the debate expunged from the minutes and erased from the published record of the gathering in the party press.

 

OCTOBER

“Radicalism in Amerca,” by Morris Hillquit. [October 15, 1920] This article by Socialist Party NEC member Morris Hillquit in the party’s official organ reviews the two new political organizations to emerge in post-war America—the Labor Party (which transformed itself to the Farmer-Labor Party) and the Communist Party. Hillquit states that the Labor Party began from a principled position, seeking fundamental change of capitalist society, but was quick to sacrifice principle for expedience on the campaign trail, destroying its working-class nature through a merger with the “nebulous aggregation of middle-class liberals known as the ‘Committee of 48.’” To this amalgam was added the “purely imaginary forces of the farming community,” resulting in an eclectic mish-mash slated for quick political extinction. As for the Communist Party, Hillquit stated that while it was “desirable” to have “extreme” groups within the Socialist Party as a counterbalance to “any existing tendencies to opportunism,” in the current case the Left Wing’s position was not a “legitimate reaction” since the SPA had taken “the most advanced international socialist position” during and after the war. Instead, it was a “quixotic” attempt to duplicate the Bolshevik Revolution in the United States—and effort which had shattered by “endless internecine strife and successive splits” as soon as the negative program of opposition to the SPA leadership was replaced by the positive task of organization building. As a result, neither of the new political groups had made “any essential contribution” to American radicalism. “The Socialist Party still holds the leadership in radical politics in the United States,” Hillquit notes.

 

NOVEMBER

“Why Are We Not Stronger?,” by Eugene V. Debs. [Nov. 1920] During his 5th and final campaign for the Presidency in 1920, the government’s information blackout on the imprisoned Eugene V. Debs seems to have been abated and he was in periodic contact with some of his comrades in the Socialist Party. Debs even wrote a few columns on current affairs for the party press, as was the case with this article for the November issue of the SPA’s official organ, The Socialist World. Debs asks the question of why there is no strong socialist movement in America after 42 years of concerted effort and points to factionalism as the culprit: “Socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists, and IWWs spend more time and energy fighting each other than they do fighting capitalism. Each faction assumes that it is entirely right and that all others are entirely wrong, a very human way of seeing things, but far better calculated to prevent than to promote the effective organization of the workers.” To avoid a “disasterous if not fatal” blow to the socialist movement from factional bitterness, Debs strongly counsels his readers to show a “more decent, tolerant, and truly revolutionary spirit” towards those with whom they differ. Debs also states in this article that having now seen Zinoviev’s 21 Conditions for admission to the Communist International, unconditional membership in that body is now impossible: “No American party of the workers can subscribe to those conditions and live,” Debs writes.

 

“The Socialist Party and Moscow: Statement Issued by the NEC in Reply to An Inquiry by the Executive Committee of the Finnish Socialist Federation.” [Nov. 1920] A Minority Resolution initiated on the floor of the 1919 Chicago Emergency Convention and ratified by the membership of the Socialist Party via a referendum vote called for the party to affiliate in an international organization along with the Russian Bolsheviki and the German Sparticans. An application was duly sent to Moscow by National Executive Secretary Otto Branstetter on March 4, 1920. By the time of the SPA’s 1920 Convention, no answer had been given from Moscow. Following the close of the 1920 Convention, membership of the SPA again reaffirmed their desire for affiliation with Moscow via referendum, placing more restrictions upon this allegiance. Shortly thereafter, the content of the “21 Conditions” for affiliation to the Communist International became known, throwing a wrench into the works. This report of the National Execuitve Committee of the SPA is intended to explain this political situation and to answer a request made by the Finnish Socialist Federation to “state clearly the attitude of the Party on the question of affiliation with the Communist International.”

 

“Another One Caught: Joseph Krieg of St. Louis a Spy.” [Nov. 15, 1920] Documentation of a spy and agent provocateur expelled on Sept. 17, 1920, from Machinists’ Union no. 41 for epying on behalf of the Industrial Service Corporaton. Krieg had joined Local St. Louis, Socialist Party on May 26, 1917 and was said to have been a consistent and vocal supporter of the Left Wing Section during the faction fight of 1919, leaving the SPA at the time of the August 1919 split. This short article was published in the official organ of the Socialist Party of America as part of its ongoing effort to discredit the communist movement, rather than as an indictment of the authorities who wormed the undercover provocateur into the ranks of the radical movement.

 

1921

MAY

“William D. Haywood, Communist Ambassador to Russia,” by David Karsner. [May 1, 1921] In 1921, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the conviction and 20 year sentence of IWW leader William D. Haywood under the so-called Espionage Act. Rather than return to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, Haywood instead jumped bail and emigrated to Soviet Russia. This article, published in the illustrated Sunday supplement of the Socialist Party-affiliated New York Call assesses “Big Bill” Haywood’s career as a revolutionary labor leader and attempts to analyse the thinking behind Haywood’s decision to escape American justice for foreign shores. The author of this article, David Karsner, the editor of The Call’s Sunday magazine and the first biographer of Eugene Debs, was not unsympathetic to Haywood’s plight.

 

“Stedman’s Red Raid,” by Robert Minor. [May 1, 1921] Full text of a pamphlet produced by the UCP’s Toiler Publishing Association detailing a particularly disgusting footnote to the 1919 split of the Socialist Party. Minor indicates that in the immediate aftermath of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s anti-red raid of January 2, 1920, Socialist Party attorneys Seymour Stedman and Lazaras Davidow attempted to expropriate the assets of the Socialist Party of Michigan under the flimsy pretext that as “Communists” the expelled Michiganites of the party’s holding company were participants in a criminal organization which “advocated the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” At bottom of this scheme was a Detroit headquarters building owned by the Michigan party, represented by Minor as having approximately $90,000 of equity. Stedman issued a Bill of Complaint paralleling the criminal charges of the state against the unfortunate Michigan party members already jailed for alleged violation of the state’s Criminal Syndicalism law. He then red-baited the members of the legitimate holding company on the stand in an attempt to have the property awarded to a hastily gathered and miniscule Michigan “organization” retaining ties to the national SPA. Minor states that when they were at last confronted about their uncomradely behavior by concerned Socialist Party members, Stedman and Davidow thereafter lied and mislead their inquisitors as to their actions and had a further smoke screen laid by SPA National Executive Secretary Otto Branstetter with a fallacious news release of his own to the socialist press. A sordid tale of greed, deceit, and foul play...

 

“1920 Financial Report of Charles H. Kerr & Co., Book Publishers.” [May 5, 1921] A mimeographed financial report sent out by America’s largest socialist publisher, Charles H. Kerr & Co. to its cooperative stockholders. Kerr anounces the forthcoming publication of The Shop Book, planned to be an occasional publication, to replace the suppressed International Socialist Review. It is noted that 1920 export trade was “almost entirely cut off” by the depreciation of the pound, which made it impossible for English booksellers to buy Kerr publications economically. In addition, “the price of paper, printing, and binding almost doubled,” resulting in a large increase in unsold inventories. One of three highlighted new publications, William Z. Foster’s The Railroaders’ Next Step, was actually published by the Trade Union Educational League—another sign of the waning influence of Kerr as the leading radical publisher in America. Includes a full financial report of Receipts v. Expenditures and Assets v. Liabilities.

 

JUNE

“Moscow and the Socialist Party of the United States,” by Bertha Hale White. [June 11, 1921] White, one of the leading female members of the Socialist Party, writes in a pre-convention discussion bulletin that any discussion about SPA affiliation with the Third International in Moscow is moot, since the question has already been answered in no uncertain terms in the negative. Interesting for its discussion ofthe lengths taken by National Executive Secretary to make application to the Comintern for membership in 1920—as he was instructed to do by party referendum. White states the SPA must rebuild its shattered organization into a powerful force before being able to affiliate with Moscow on its own terms rather than be subject to conditions amounting to “tyranny.”

 

JULY

“’Farewell!’ to the Socialist Party: An Appeal to Its Remaining Members: Statement by the Committee for the Third International of the Socialist Party to the Members of the Socialist Party.” [Circa July 1921]. The Committee for the Third International was the organized faction for Left Wing realignment of the Socialist Party of America in 1920-21, after the departure of the great bulk of the Left Wing Section for the Communist Party of America, Communist Labor Party of America, and Proletarian Party of America. Headed by Secretary J. Louis Engdahl and including such future Communist leadership cadres as William F. Kruse, Benjamin Glassberg, Alexander Trachtenberg, J.B. Salutsky, and Moissaye Olgin, the Committee for the Third International formally left the SPA with this statement, published as a pamphlet in the aftermath of the June 25-29, 1921 Convention of the party. “A new home for constructive revolutionary Socialism must be built. Another political party of the working class must be established with the passing of the Socialist Party,” the farewell statement declared. In the interim, a formal organization called The Workers’ Council was established—a group which merged with the American Labor Alliance and elements of the majority underground CPA to form the Workers Party of America in December 1921.

 

SEPTEMBER

“A Call for United Action: To All Labor Unions, Farmers’ Organizations, and Other Economic, Political, Cooperative, and Fraternal Organizations of the Producing Class.” . [Sept. 1921] The origin of the Conference for Progressive Political Action has long been attributed to a joint decision of the 16 main railway unions, which sponsored a founding conference in Chicago in February of 1922. This September 1921 appeal for just such an organization, written and transmitted to the varioius unions by the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, lends support for the theory that this idea actually originated outside the 16 railway brotherhoods. The Socialist Party’s vision was of a loose alliance which brought together various labor groups in joint political action “similar to that of the federated organizations of the British Labour Party.” According to the appeal, America was embroiled in “the worst industrial depression we have ever experienced,” with six million workers unemployed, armed anti-union bands given free reign under the moniker of “detective agencies,” while other bands of thugs like the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan operated outside the rule of law altogether. Employers shamelessly used the legislative and judicial arms of the state to conduct an open shop drive which threatened the very existence of the organized labor movement. In response, a “united front” joining the forces of “every progressive, liberal, and radical organization of the workers must be mobilized to repel these assaults and to advance the industrial and political power of the working class,” according to the NEC’s appeal.

 

1922

FEBRUARY

“Conference for Progressive Political Action: A Report to the Membership of the Socialist Party,” by Otto Branstetter, et al. [Feb. 1922] The 1921 Detroit Convention of the Socialist Party instructed its National Executive Committee to make a survey of other progressive organizations in the US and the prospects for joint action; using this as justification, five leading members of the SPA accepted invitations to attend the Founding Conference of the Conference for Progressive Political Action and made this report to the membership of the party via an article in the group’s official organ, The Socialist World. The gathering—held Feb. 20-21, 1922, in Chicago—was characterized as “a disappointment, so far as immediate results are concerned,” due in large measure to the heterogenous nature of the body, ranging from conservative unionists seeking to promote pro-labor candidates in the old parties to the Socialist and Farmer-Labor Parties on the left, who sought to establish an independent political organization. Despite the lack of immediate results, the fact that the gathering of such a wide range of elements was held with little acrimony was heralded as a small step forward by the Socialist atendees.

 

MAY

“National Constitution of the Socialist Party: As Amended by the National Convention at Cleveland, April 29-May 2, 1922.” Basic document of organizational law of the Socialist Party. The early SPA had been a loose federation of state-based organizations; by this time stronger centralized authority was asserting itself, while extensive provisions for recall and referendum were retained. The lowest level of organization in the SP was the city- or county-level “Local,” which may or may not be subdivided into “Branches.” At least 10 of these Locals with an aggregate membership of 200 were organized into a State Organization which purchased dues stamps from the National Office. A 7 member National Executive Committee was to meet quarterly to supervise operation of the party between annual conventions, with day-to-day affairs of the National Office handled by an Executive Secretary employed by and serving at the pleasure of the National Executive Committee. Party dues in 1922 were 25 cents per month to the National and State offices in organized states (with additional dues paid to the Local); in unorganized states, dues were 50 cents per month.

 

“Death Chills Seize Meeting of Socialist Party,” by C.E. Ruthenberg. [May 13, 1922] The new Executive Secretary of the Workers Party of America, C.E. Ruthenberg, observed and wrote about the 1922 Cleveland Convention of the Socialist Party of America. He depicted it as a lifeless gathering, showing “senile decay.” As for the small group of assmbled delegates, Ruthenberg notes that “A majority of them are portly, gray-haired men with a look of petty-bourgeois prosperity about them. They talk in the language of past Socialist conventions, but there is no enthusiasm, no fervor, in what they say.” Ruthenberg isolated the root cause of this geriatric decay in the blows struck against the industrialist Left Wing at the 1912 Indianapolis Convention—“anti-sabotage, anti-force, and narrow definition of political action constitutional clauses” which drove vital elements from a 100,000 member organization. At the 1917 St. Louis Convention these “elderly men” were unable to control the gathering but sabotaged the party’s militant position against the war by lack of action, Ruthenberg charged, while at the 1919 Chicago Convention they presided over a mass purge of 3/4 of the party’s membership that resulted in the current lifeless skeleton organization.

 

AUGUST

 

An Answer from Debs,by Theodore Debs [Aug. 9, 1922] Reply on behalf of Gene Debs by his brother and personal secretary, Theodore, to Louis Engdahl’s open letter of August 3, 1922. “The attempt to make [Gene] appear the enemy of Lenin and the Soviet Government in face of the fact that from the hour that government was born he proclaimed himself its friend and has stood by it and defended and extolled Lenin and Trotsky in every word uttered and written, is too false and silly to merit attention,” writes Theodore. While Engdahl’s indictment of the offenses of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the Civil War is complete, it is nevertheless one-sided, omitting the fact that violence and outrages were committed by both sides, and that the PSR were victims as well as perpetrators. Gene Debs “does not believe in revenge, in capital punishment, in cold-blooded murder, and these brutal passions and atrocious crimes are all the more reprehensible in his eyes when committed in the name of law and justice by Socialists who have for years been denouncing capitalism for these identical infamies,” writes Theodore. “If we believe in bloodthirsty revenge, in cruel reprisals and savage killings to satisfy our law and ethics, we are even lower than the capitalists and their mercenary hangmen, who at least make no pretense of such humane ideals as we profess and shamelessly betray the moment we succeed to power.” Further, Gene Debs is said to be convinced “that the murder of these men would betray the weakness and fear of the Soviet Government and bring it into contempt all over the world among people who now give it their allegiance and support.”

OCTOBER

“Review and Personal Statement,” by Eugene V. Debs. [Oct. 2, 1922] At the time Gene Debs was imprisoned in April of 1919, factional storm clouds were brewing in the Socialist Party of America, but the party had not been split asunder. Isolated from active politics, the factional wars of 1919-21 took place in his absence, with Debs maintaining a strict neutrality in terms of stating his personal allegiance. It was not until this lengthy October 1922 published statement that Debs formally declared his intention to stay with his beloved Socialist Party and to help rebuild it. Debs encouraged others to rebuild their locals, pay their dues, to send organizers into the field, and to spread propaganda far and wide. Debs stoutly refused to engage in polemics, stating that “I have never had any heart for factional warfare. I simply cannot and will not engage in it. I can argue and reason with comrades, but I cannot and will not give way to anger and resort to vituperation over my differences with them.” Debs closes with a strong statement of unconditional support for the Russian Revolution: “It matters not what its mistakes have been, nor what may be charged against it, the Russian Revolution, in what it expresses for the Russian people and in what it portends for the oppressed and exploited peoples of all nations, is the greatest, most luminous and far reaching achievement in the entire sweep of human history.”

 

NOVEMBER

“Embattled Liberators,” by Eugene V. Debs. [written Nov. 1922] An article written to herald the 5th Anniversay of the Russian Revolution by Socialist Party orator Eugene Debs. Debs does not step back from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic an inch: “That the revolution and the republic which sprang from it have survived, not only to be commemorated on their Fifth Anniversary, but are today more puissant and promising, and pulse with keener life and activity than ever before, in the face of every conceivable attempt to crush and destroy them on the part of the combined capitalist powers of the earth, is a miracle no less marvelous and seemingly impossible than the revolution and republic themselves.” First published in the Dec. 1922 issue of The Liberator.

 

1923

MARCH

“Inviting Debs to Soviet Russia: Letter from Israel Amter in Moscow to the Presidium of the Comintern, March 9, 1923.” Despite his decision to stick with the Socialist Party of America which he helped to found, the American Communists continued to hold out hope that Eugene Debs would turn his back on the SPA’s increasingly conservative leadership. This letter from the CPA’s man in Moscow, Israel Amter, noted that Debs had at last been persuaded to visit Soviet Russia to see the situation first-hand and requested that an invitation be cabled to Debs by the Soviet railway union, central trade union body, or government. Amter remarks that “when Debs came from prison, he was very angry with the Communists for their failure to do anything to obtain his release. Undoubtedly he was right in his contention, but the American Party not understanding proper tactics and incensed that he did not break away” from the Socialist Party and consequently “did not feel inclined to speak in his behalf.” A sentimental disposition, Ill-health, and his “yellow Socialist” brother had prevented closer collaboration between the Communists and Debs—who instead fell victim to the “trickery” of the SPA. Nevertheless, Debs’ honesty and love for the working class combined with “repugnance at the brutal attacks of the Socialist press on Soviet Russia have made him at last desire to see Soviet Russia with his own eyes and judge for himself.”

 

“Memo from C.E. Ruthenberg to All WPA District Organizers on Infiltration of the Socialist Party, March 17, 1923.” A memo from Executive Secretary C.E. Ruthenberg to all District Organizers of the Workers Party of America that a “left wing” movement seemed to be emerging in the Socialist Party and that “it is necessary for us to help crystallize that left movement.” The DOs are instructed to “select some trustworthy and capable comrades who should be instructed to make an effort to join one of their branches in their locality. This is to be done in every city of your district where they are strong. One or two comrades is sufficient for every branch. The comrades must be absolutely trustworthy.” This operation is to be secret: “The entire question is absolutely confidential and should not be made subject for discussion among the general membership for obvious reasons,” Ruthenberg notes.

 

APRIL

“Getting Together,” by Eugene V. Debs. [April 1923] Article by the Socialist Party of America’s 5-time Presidential candidate on the trade union situation in America, published in the monthly magazine of the Trade Union Educational League. Debs states that recent defeats of major strikes in the steel, mining, and railroad industries would have been winnable had they been conducted by unified industrial unions rather than a multitude of fragmented craft unions—a form of organization which Debs believed to be an obsolete relic of individual handicraft production, utterly unsuited to the large-scale and complex industry of the modern world. In advancing the end of amalgamation of existing craft unions into large industrial unions, Debs wholeheartedly supports the work of the TUEL: “The Trade Union Educational League, under the direction and inspiration of William Z. Foster, is in my opinion the one rightly directed movement for the industrial unification of the American workers. I thoroughly believe in its plan and its methods and I feel very confident of its steady progress and the ultimate achievement of its ends.”

 

MAY

“Michigan in the Muck,” by Eugene V. Debs. [May 1923] Article on the heated legal battle in Michigan over the August 1922 raid of the Communist Party of America’s Bridgman, Michigan convention published in the pages of The Liberator. Debs, the most widely recognized member of the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee, unleashes a barrage on the “idiotic and criminal ‘criminal syndicalist’ law enacted by political crooks to seal the lips of industrial slaves” in Michigan. Debs charges that “The communists had as good a right to hold a convention in the state of Michigan and to discuss their affairs and formulate their program, any kind of a program that stopped short of the actual commission of crime penalized under the law, as the graft-infested Republican and Democratic parties have to hold such a convention.” The Michigan prosecutions were nothing but a “foul assault upon the Constitution and upon the elemental rights of citizenship,” according to Debs.

 

SEPTEMBER

“Let Us Build,” by Eugene V. Debs. [Sept. 1923] From the time of his imprisonment in 1919 until the end of his life, Gene Debs tirelessly argued against factionalism within the radical movement. In this article from the Socialist Party’s official organ, Debs rues the energy lost to factional infighting and calls for an end to namecalling (“reds” vs. “yellows) in the party. He colorfully remarks that “I know a good many of both, and so far as I am able to discern, they are much alike. The actual difference between them, were it fire, would hardly be enough to light a cigarette.” Debs does utter stern tones when he observes that “there is room enough” in the Socialist Party “for everyone who subscribes to its principles and upholds them in good faith; but there is no room in it for those who either openly sneer at political action or who avow it falsely to mask their treachery while they carry on their work of disruption.” Debs calls for unity of effort in a period of protracted party building and press building.

 

“The Story of the British Labour Party,” by Morris Hillquit [Sept. 1923] The stunning success of the British Labour Party in realigning the two-party system of that nation during the first two decades of the 20th Century served as a practical model for both the Socialist Party of America and the Workers (Communist) Party, each in their own way. This article by SPA leader Morris Hillquit in the party’s official organ recounted the path of success in Great Britain. It was there that “a series of intense industrial struggles in which the powers of the government werre openly and consistently arrayed on the side of the employers and against labor,” prompting the British Trades Union Congress to pass a resolution in 1899 calling for a conference of trade unions, socialist parties, cooperative societies, and other labor organizations to devise means for gaining better representation in the House of Commons. This conference evolved into the British Labour Party, which had received a full third of the vote and emerged as the primary opposition group in the 1922 national elections. “With the crying needs for political relief in this country and with the exaqmple and ready methods of England back of us we can form a powerful Labor Party in this country today; we can challenge the supremacy of the old parties in a few years,” Hillquit hopefully opined.

 

NOVEMBER

“Letter from C.E. Ruthenberg in Chicago to Morris Hillquit in New York, Nov. 3, 1923.” A cryptic note sent from the Executive Secretary of the Workers Party of the member to the leading light of the arch-rival Socialist Party of America. Ruthenberg notes that he will be in New York on Nov. 8, 1923, and that he seeks a conference with Hillquit to “talk with you” in regard to an invitation sent by the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party to labor political groups for a Nov. 15 conference in St. Paul. This conference was an attempt to “come to an agreement on the question of calling a national convention for the nomination of a presidential candidate and the adoption of a national platform.” Despite the hostility between the two organizations, this document affirms that there was at least informal discussion at the top level about the possibility of joint action with regards to the Farmer-Labor Party movement.

 

1924

OCTOBER

“The Death of the Socialist Party,” by J. Louis Engdahl [October 1924]. A final sneer at the Socialist Party from the 1924 campaign. Former editor of the Socialist Party’s offical organ Engdahl argues that the SP’s immersion in the campaign of progressive Republican Robert LaFollette for President of the United States spells the final deathknell for the SPA: “When the Socialist Party deserted the ‘Labor Party’ fight, turned its back on class action, and joined the LaFollette straddle of the two old parties of Wall Street, its members had two choices. They could either join the Communist forces in the Workers Party, or go over into the LaFollette camp. Many did join the Communist ranks, singly and in groups. The rest are going over to the temporary LaFollette organizations that will collapse after the election day has passed.... The Socialist movement has been swallowed up in the LaFollette wave. It has been completely obliterated.”

 

1925

JANUARY

“The American Labor Party,” by Eugene V. Debs. [Jan. 1925] A 2nd National Convention of the Conference for Progressive Political Actions (CPPA) was scheduled to closely follow the completion of the 1924 LaFollette/Wheeler Presidential campaign. Chief on the agenda for the group was the establishment of a new political party, intended to be built upon the alliances around the country developed during the course of the fall of 1924. The Socialist Party sought the formation of a British-style Labor Party, federating component organizations and envisioning itself as playing the role of the Independent Labour Party in the UK. This article by Eugene Debs in the official organ of the Socialist Party of America gives voice to this desire. Debs states that despite the “blind stupidity of the workers and the covert machinations of their enemies to thwart or misdirect them,” a Labor Party was inevitable in America. The staunch backing and support of the unions was mandatory for the success of such a venture, Debs declared, stating that while the leadership of the unions remained “almost to a man opposed to a Labor Party,” hope lay in the hands of the rank and file, who might successfully be aroused to the task. Debs did not think it likely that such an organization would be constructed by the forthcoming gathering of the CPPA, but he hoped for the best and professed patience and an ability to wait.

 

FEBRUARY

“Speech to the Conference for Progressive Political Action, Feb. 21, 1925,” by Eugene V. Debs. The National Chairman of the Socialist Party of America was the featured speaker at a “mass meeting” held at the Lexington Hotel in Chicago in conjunction with the Second Convention of the CPPA. This is the full text of his speech, from the official stenographic report of the convention. Debs argues that political parties can be either capitalist or socialist, but not both, and that any attempt to merge the “irrepressible” antagonistic interests of the capitalist class and the working class in a new party will be met with failure. Political parties by definition can not be non-partisan, Debs indicates, and the term “progressive” has been so “prostituted” that even J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller might be reasonably expected to consider themselves progressives. Only a true Labor Party dealing with the fundamental issue of whether the national as a whole should own and control its own industries has any prospects for long-term success, in Debs’ view.

 

“Statement of Party Policy by the Socialist Party in National Convention, Chicago, Illinois—Feb. 24, 1925.” The 1925 “Special Convention” of the Socialist Party was scheduled and held in Chicago immediately after the close of the 2nd Convention of the Convention for Progressive Political Action. This statement was issued by the SPA’s convention to announce to the party membership that the CPPA Convention had failed to establish a Labor Party on the British model, and that with the departure of the railway unions and failure of the CPPA to establish a Labor Party, there was “no conceivable good either to the Conference or to the Socialists” for any continued affiliation. The Socialist Party consequently was severing its relations with that organization.

 

MARCH

“The Chicago Conventions,” by Bertha Hale White. [March 1925] Assessement of the Chicago conventions of the Conference for Progressive Political Action (Feb. 21-22, 1925) and the Socialist Party of America (Feb. 23-24, 1925) by the National Executive Secretary of the SPA. White provided valuable detail about the parliamentary maneuvering at the CPPA gathering—a meeting split between the trade unionists seeking no party, socialists and radical unionists seeking a British Labor Party-style organization allowing participation by independent constituent organizations such as the Socialist Party, and liberals in favor of a Progressive Party constructed around a traditional individual memberships. White states that participants at the Socialist convention expressed “relief and satisfaction” knowing that the period of uncertainty was over effective with the unanimous decision of the SPA to withdraw from the CPPA.

 

1926

OCTOBER

“A Tribute to Debs,” by Morris Hillquit. [Oct. 23, 1926] A short tribute to the Socialist leader written by his friend and comrade and published on the front page of The New Leader at the time of Debs’ death. According to Hillquit, Debs was “a crusader and a fighter, but there was no hate in him. His most ardent fighting sprang from his deep and warm love for all that bears human countenance. A pure type of early Christian at his best, he was strangely misplaced in our cold age of selfishness and greed.” “Through all the years of his struggles and suffering his frail body was vibrant with flaming vitality. In spite of his advanced age and ill health he was to the last the impersonation of radiant youth in his mental alertness and never-flagging enthusiasm.”

 

NOVEMBER

“At the Bier of Debs,” by Morris Hillquit [delivered Oct. 22; published Nov. 13, 1926] One of the funeral speeches delivered in Eugene Debs’ honor from the porch of the Debs house in Terre Haute, Indiana in the afternoon of Friday, October 22, 1926—later reprinted in the Socialist press. Hillquit noted that while Debs “was one of the most effective orators of America” what really made the man was his personality. “It was first of all the boundless love of everything that bears human countenance which radiated from him. Not an intellectual love, not an abstract love, but a love that flowed naturally, organically, communicating itself electrically to all who came within the magic sphere of his personal contact. He loved everybody—the poor and even the rich, the righteous, the criminal, and the outcast. He loved mankind and his very eloquence sprung from his love. He did not merely appeal and convince, he communicated part of himself, part of his very being to his audience.”

 

“Debs and SP Policies,” by James Oneal. [Nov. 13, 1926] The Socialist Party Old Guard’s attack dog locks jaw on the “most revolting performance” of the American Communists in their attempt to “claim Eugene Debs as their own.” To this end, two charges were made in a Communist leaflet distributed at a Debs memorial meeting held at Madison Square Garden which stick in Oneal’s craw: (1) that Debs was “always on the left wing of the Socialist Party"; and (2) that only in recent years did the SP “permit” Debs to be a member of the SP’s governing National Executive Committee. Oneal mocks the first assertion, dumping everything from the Social Democracy in America’s colonization wing to Daniel DeLeon’s ST&LA to the eccentric anti-union views of two 1904 SP convention delegates to the 1912 syndicalist movement into a single large bin labelled “left wing.” Since Debs never followed any of this “topsy turvy conduct,” Oneal asserts, the claim of Debs’ fidelity to the “left” is absurd. Oneal depicts Debs’ later pro-unity position as the result of sentimentality and the cause of unintentional misunderstanding and says that the 1905 decision to help form the IWW was a “mistake,” soon corrected. As for the assertion that Debs was only allowed on the NEC in the last years, Oneal convincingly argues that Debs saw his role as a propagandist, not as a party executive, that he was regularly nominated—and declined—all such offices as a matter of preference, so that he might concentrate on his main mission. ” It is precisely because he was committed to the Socialist Party and its policies that he consented to go to the National Executive Committee in recent years. The fact that he took up work that he disliked and which he had avoided for more than twenty years shows that he was so convinced that the Socialist Party represented his views,” Oneal notes.

 

1928

AUGUST

“Speech to the Third Congress of the Labor and Socialist International, Aug. 6, 1928,” by Morris Hillquit. Text of an address by the Chairman of the Socialist Party of the United States to the International Socialist Congress held in Brussels from Aug. 5 to 11, 1928. Hillquit identifies three trends in the development of the world economy in the post-World War world: centralization, internationalization, and Americanization. He cautions about the negative effects of industrial rationalization and the trend towards American financial hegemony, warns of a trend towards exploitation of cheap “Asiatic labor and labor in backward countries,” and calls for international efforts to develop a labor movement “as powerful and more powerful than modern capitalism.”

 

NOVEMBER

“Report of William H. Henry, National Secretary, to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, Nov. 24, 1928.” This document covering the first 10 months of operations by the SPA in 1928 in comparison to the same period one year previous provides scholars with a first hard set of membership numbers for the organization for those two years. Includes a state-by-state membership count for 1927 and 1928, memberships for the five federations of the SPA, a brief discussion of organizational prospects in the various states, and financial details of the organization. Rather esoteric fare, perhaps, but a very important primary source document for specialists in the history of American radicalism in the 1920s.

 

1931

APRIL

“This Post-War Generation and Our Time: Will It Be Able to Find a Way Out?,” by Anna P. Krasna [April 30, 1931] A little heard perspective: the views of a Depression-era Socialist rather than a Communist; of a woman, not a man; of a Slovene-American, not an Anglo-American. Anna P. Krasna, a writer, appeals to the youth of America to wake up and begin to take an active interest in politics, as a new war was in the wind. The post-war generation had been bred upon illusions of individual success and was learning that the brutal reality of the economic system was different, Krasna stated. “We are hoping that the youth, seeing the future holds nothing but misery in store for them, or perhaps a chance to die a heroic death for the international speculators and exploiters, shall demand the right to live as comfortably as the modern technical improvements permit”—this to be achieved through participation in “the groups of those who believe in equality for all.”

 

1932

MAY

 

“The Finnish Socialists in America,” by W.N. Reivo. [May 1932] Report of the Secretary of the Finnish Federation of the Socialist Party to the 17th National Convention of the organization, held in Milwaukee in May 1932. Reivo states in no uncertain terms that “the future of the Socialist Party in America is in the native born stock. They days of the language federations are in the past.” Reivo notes that the children of Finnish immigrant socialist parents tend to join the English-language branches in their communities rather than the Finnish-language branches. This is not necessarily a bad thing, Reivo believes, as “perhaps it would be a mistake if the youth joined us directly and stood aloof of the body of the Socialist Party just as the older element does now.” Nevertheless, the reputation of the Finnish Federation was greater than at any time since the 1920 split of the organization and the growth of the SP was edifying—even if very few disgruntled ex-Communists were making the trek back to their former organization.

 

Should the American Workers Form a Political Party of their Own? A Debate. Morris Hillquit (National Chairman, Socialist Party)—Yes. Matthew Woll (Vice President, American Federation of Labor) - No. [1932] Nearly a decade after the Labor Party question first burned hot for the Socialist Party of America, its position had changed little—it was in favor of establishing a constituent organization akin to the British Labour Party. Nor had the opposition of organized labor moved—it remained, by and large, opposed to the establishment of a Third Party, instead continuing to tout the tactic of selective support of “Friends of Labor” within the two major parties. This 1932 debate between Socialist Party National Chairman Morris Hillquit and AFL Vice President Matthew Woll details the thinking behind each of these positions. In the course of his remarks Hillquit assigns blame for the failure of the Third Party movement in 1924 to the desire of Robert LaFollette to run alone, resulting in the “doom of the movement.” The AFL is upbraided by Hillquit for its “late and...luke warm” support of the LaFollette candidacy, which is said to have killed any chance for the LaFollette campaign to lay “the foundation of a great and powerful labor party in America.” Full text of a pamphlet published in 1932 by the Rand School of Social Science.

 

1937

MARCH

“Advance in Chicago: An Analysis of the March 1937 Special Convention,” by Samuel Romer & Hal Siegel. Held only 10 months after the 1936 conclave, the Socialist Party’s Special Convention of 1937 was ostensibly called to restructure the national organization, increasing centralization in place of the historic loose federation of largely independent state organizations and banning the factional press in favor of a central discussion bulletin. Factionalism remained one of the central concerns of the organization, however, particularly the working alliance between the historic small group of “single plankers” (who advocated no ameloriative reforms in the party program, only the agitation for revolutionary socialism) and the new cohort of former members of the Trotskyist “Workers Party,” who shared this perspective and gave the position critical mass from a factional standpoint. Romer and Siegel, adherents of the majority Militant wing of the party, note that the decision to ban factional inner-party organs was made by the convention unanimously and saw this as a positive sign for the future of the organization.

 

1938

MARCH

“The Moscow Trials,” by Norman Thomas [March 1938] Article by the leader of the Socialist Party attempting to make sense of the Great Show Trials in Moscow—the third of which, featuring Bukharin in the dock, was held March 2-13, 1938. “These confessions, true, false, or partly true and partly false, are for us who have believed in socialism as the hope of the world the occasion of bitter tears and deep humiliation,” states Thomas, who notes similar patently false confessions happened during the period of the Spanish Inquisition and the witchcraft trials. “I assume that in a regime which makes possible no legal or democratic opposition even within the Communist Party to the decisions of the bureaucracy there have been plots. This was probably especially true in the dark days of 1932-1933....The important thing is that there is no interpretation of these trials which does not bring shame upon the regime,” writes Thomas. He adds that “Lenin was a great enough man to master the amoral tactics which he consciously used with some regard for proportion and achievement. None of his successors has that ability. Insofar as Lenin, yes, and Trotsky, were responsible for this exaltation of secular Jesuitism as a kind of working class virtue, they must share in the guilt of its complete degeneration under Stalin.... [Stalin’s] supreme failure has been an exaltation of a regime which makes suspicion of one’s closest comrades inevitable and plots and counterplots the only vehicle of effective political activity.” Thomas calls the USSR “a totalitarian state under a monolithic party” and presciently notes the likelihood of a change of party line with some chance of “an alliance or understanding with Hitler.”

 

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