(1) Tom Mann, Memoirs (1923)

William Morris joined the Democratic Federation in 1883. He favoured a distinctively Socialist policy, and his body became the Social Democratic Federation in 1884. It soon became manifest that differences of opinion existed, and no doubt some incompatibility action was a bone of contention. William Morris and other members of the executive decided to resign, and to form the Socialist League.

 

(2) Edward Carpenter joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1883.

My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline. That outline as regards the industrial situation was given me by reading Hyndman's England For All. Later on in the same year I one evening looked in at a committee meeting of the Social Democratic Federation in Westminster Bridge Road. It was in the basement of one of one of those big buildings facing the House of Commons that I found a group of conspirators sitting. There was Hyndman, occupying the chair, and with him round the table, William Morris, John Burns, H. H. Champion, J. L. Joynes, Herbert Burrows, and others.

 

(3) George Lansbury, Looking Backwards and Forwards (1935)

I was a great admirer of Henry George and believed firmly in the taxation of land values. During the years 1886 to 1892 I came more and more under the influence of William Morris and H. H. Hyndman, Will Thorne, Tom Mann, Ben Tillet, and decided to join the Social Democrats.

 

(4) Emanuel Shinwell, Conflict Without Malice (1955)

My experience among the miners in some of the mining villages of Fife and Lanarkshire was that the policy of the Social Democratic Federation made a greater appeal than that of the I.L.P. The miner everywhere is suspicious of novelty until he has studied its advantages and disadvantages. The Social Democratic Federation was so close to the old Radical movement that the miner could accept it without misgivings despite the fact that it was essentially English, inspired by Marx's best-known English disciple, H. M. Hyndman, and with little Scottish blood in its hierarchy at the outset. England for All, the title of Hyndman's exposition of the S.D.F. policy, was hardly conducive to the creation of enthusiasm across the Border, though the nationalism we know in Scotland today was not at the time so marked. In the event, the S.D.F.'s powers soon declined, for England for All was really just an anglicized simplification of Marxian views, written without acknowledgment to the originator. Marx did not forget the slight, and by the time I began to read Marx it was the I.L.P. which had received the seal of approval from his collaborator, the other great European Socialist force, Engels.

Two notable S.D.F. members in my day, who played a leading part on the Clydeside, deserve mention; the likeable but formidable Willie Gallagher, and that great exponent of Socialism, John McLean, both of whom served several terms of imprisonment because of their political activities.

 

(5) David Kirkwood, My Life of Revolt (1935)

For some years before the outbreak of war I had been a Socialist, but I had taken no part in any movement except the Trade Union and Temperance. There were great discussions at that time about the Social Democratic Federation, which was in turmoil. H. M. Hyndman and Harry Quelch, two of the foremost pioneers of Socialism, were being opposed by a younger school led by Yates, Matheson, and Tom Clark. When this group failed in their effort to capture the Social Democratic Federation, they formed the Socialist Labour Party. This Party had one outstanding feature. It was purely educative, setting out to pervade the people with the idea that in Socialism lay their only hope of economic progress. They used to tell the people not to vote for them unless they were in favour of Socialism. At that time there was a great deal of talk among the working class that certain individuals took an interest in the working-class movement only for the fleshpots of Egypt - that is to say, to become well-paid Trade Union officials. To prove that they were not of this type, the S.L.P. made it a condition of membership not to take a paid position in the Trade Union movement and to work for the cause and not for filthy lucre.

 

(6) Herbert Morrison, An Autobiography (1960)

I have to confess that my fidelity to the SDF was short-lived. While a willing and interested student of Marx I was fed up with the excessive adulation of the man and the attitude of the SDF leaders that he was a prophet and his book akin to the Bible as regards the distillation of truth in it. Hyndman's recurrent references to his friendship with Marx were both boring and suspect.

Hyndman had talked to Marx only once so far as anybody knew - in 1880. Twenty-six years later he was still describing the master's conversation as if it had happened yesterday. The suggestion that Marx liked and trusted Hyndman, which the latter was never tired of explaining, was probably really a confession that Hyndman had a childlike faith in, and unrequited adoration for, Marx.

Marx was not the type of man who liked anybody, least of all a rich and aristocratic young man with the manners and accent bred into him at Eton and a high regard for the genteel frock coat and top-hat without which Hyndman never appeared in public.

 

(7) Paul Thompson, Socialist, Liberals and Labour (1967)

The story of the foundation of the Social Democratic Federation (the S.D.F.), the first avowedly socialist political party in England, has been recounted in some detail by historians of socialism. It will be sufficient here to say that it resulted from a coincidence of radical dissatisfaction with Gladstonian Liberalism, with the arrival on the political scene of H. M. Hyndman. It is clear from reports in the Radical that already some club speakers were urging the need for "a labour party which should be independent of the Liberal party" and arguing that "nearly every internal struggle in a country - whether it be Nihilism in Russia, Socialism in Germany, Communism in France, or Radicalism in England-could be reduced to this logical fact-a fight between the profit producer and the profit receiver. In 1881 the Radical began a campaign, very probably suggested by Hyndman, for "a non-Ministerial Radical party" to be led by Joseph Cowen, the radical M.P. for Newcastle. The first of a series of conferences resulting in the formation of the new party, the Democratic Federation, was held under Cohen's chairmanship in February. But the fact that the Democratic Federation survived, and developed into a socialist party, was because it very rapidly passed to Hyndman's leadership.

A man of independent means, widely travelled, a Cambridge graduate aged nearly 40, Hyndman was temperamentally a radical imperialist Conservative in the tradition of Disraeli, who had been converted to the Marxist standpoint by reading a French translation of Capital in 1880. He was to be the undaunted propagandist of English socialism for another forty years, but in spite of his dedication he was
Ensor found Wells "absurd" and recorded repeated "tedious discussion" and "silly personal bickering". Consequently although nine of the fifteen reform candidates were elected they were unable to form a united group. As Wells wrote to Ensor afterwards, "There ain't no always an incongruously unsuitable leader. A natural gambler and adventurer who delighted in political crisis, he totally lacked the personal tact and strategic skill which a successful politician needs. The personal enemies he made included Marx and Engels, William Morris, and the trade unionist socialist pioneers John Burns and Tom Mann. He regarded first the Independent Labour Party and then the early Labour Party with scorn. He opposed the campaign for an Eight Hour Day as a diversion, and denounced the "First of May folly". He regarded trade unions as politically unimportant and their leaders as "the most stodgy-brained dull-witted and slow going time-servers in the country". He opposed both the syndicalists and the suffragists in the 1900s, and suggested that women who struggled for their emancipation as a sex question "ought to be sent to an island by themselves". He was a persistent anti-semite, became a violent anti-German, supported Carson and the Ulster Protestants and backed allied intervention against the Russian revolution.' In considering the mistakes made by the S.D.F. in London and the eventual failure of Marxist socialism to consolidate its early advances, it is important to remember that it suffered throughout the period from singularly unsuitable leadership.

At first the Federation was a negligible force, with only two branches in 1881-2. It quickly lost the support of the radical clubs when Hyndman's hostility to "capitalist radicalism" was made apparent. The real socialist revival was set off by Henry George, the American land reformer, whose English campaign tour of 1882 seemed to kindle the smouldering unease with narrow radicalism. This radical voice from the Far West of America, a land of boundless promise, where, if anywhere, it might seem that freedom and material progress were secure possessions of honest labour, announced grinding poverty, the squalor of congested city life, unemployment, and utter helplessness. George's book Progress and Poverty sold 400,000 copies. His argument pointed beyond land reform, and stimulated an intellectual interest in socialism, which he certainly never intended. The new atmosphere brought important recruits to the Democratic Federation in 1883 and 1884: William Morris, Dr. Edward Aveling a Darwinian chemist and secularist leader, Harry Quelch a packer in a city warehouse, H. H. Champion a former army officer, and John Burns, born in Battersea of Scots parents, a temperance enthusiast who had been influenced by an old French communard in his engineering workshop.