The
19th century had been a period of rapid industrial expansion in America.
Between 1800 and 1900 the per capita wealth of the country had increased
from $200 to $1,200. However, the distribution of this wealth was
extremely uneven. It was this economic situation that stimulated a
growth in socialist ideas in the United
States. In 1874 a group of socialists formed the Workingmen's Party.
Three years later it was renamed the Socialist Labor Party. Some members
of the party came under the influence of the anarchist
ideas of the German revolutionary, Johann Most.
In 1886 the party became involved in helping organize the campaign
for the eight-hour day. At one meeting on 4th May, in Chicago, the
Haymarket Bombing took place and several
former members of the party, including August
Spies, Albert Parson, Adolph
Fisher and George Engel, were found
guilty of conspiracy to murder and executed.
In
1891 the SLP established its journal The
People. Daniel De Leon, Laurence
Gronlund, Morris Hillquit and Abraham
Cahan emerged as leaders of the SLP. De Leon wrote the SLP's first
program that included the breakup of the state, workers' democracy,
the seizure of social power by the organized producers and the socialist
reorganization of the economy.
In
1892 Simon Wing ran for President, with Charles H. Matchett as Vice
President. They received 21,173 votes. In 1896 the SLP's vote increased
to 36,367 and in 1898 reached a peak of 82,204. At that time the party
had 10,000 members.
In the 1900 presidential election the Socialist
Labor Party candidates received only 33,382. The other major left-wing
party, the Social Democratic Party
(SDP), led by Eugene Debs and Victor
Berger, did better winning 97,000 votes. SLP presidential candidates
won 33,510 votes in 1904, 14,029 in 1908 and 29,213 in 1912.
(1)
When Daniel
De Leon
became editor of The People in 1891 he explained the functions
of a socialist newspaper.
A daily Socialist paper in the English language must start with the
knowledge that, in point of what is called news, it cannot think of
competing with the capitalist contemporaries. An English Socialist
daily may not trim its sails to attract 'new readers'; in that field
it is hors de combat from the start; it must furnish a specialized
kind of news that the capitalist press either does not care for, or
does not want - legitimate, labor and social news; it must thus create
a field from which capitalist competition is, ipso facto, excluded.
With such a news policy, supplemented by a news policy that illustrates
Socialist principles by the light of the events of the day, and watching
its opportunity to enlarge, a daily socialist paper must begin with
modest aspirations. It must realise that ninety-nine out of every
hundred of its readers will stick to the Egyptian fleshpots of the
capitalist 'news' papers. It must aim at getting these readers to
acquire a taste for its own bill of fare, without expecting them to
drop their own favorite capitalist news menu, at least not immediately.
It must thus slowly build up its own audience, upon its own ground.
It must, in short, follow the tactics, not of attempting to dispute
their field with the capitalist 'news' contemporaries, but, first,
of seeking to share their readers; and then, as an ultimate aim, to
strip them of their proletarian dupe-audience, together with those
in sympathy with these. Even such a course will encounter serious
financial obstacles. But these obstacles it is possible to overcome.
(2)
Daniel
De Leon,
The People (8th January, 1893)
Private ownership in the instruments of production - in the land,
tools, machinery etc. — was at one time the basis of industry
and of freedom; concentration of these instruments of production in
the hands of a few, and the introduction of machinery establish a
system of production upon so gigantic a scale that the individual
small producer cannot hold his own; he is stripped of his instruments
of production, and becomes a proletarian, a wage slave, dependent
for his existence upon the capitalist, who has concentrated in his
own hands the things that are necessary for a living; this system
fills the land with paupers, breeds crime, prostitution and sickness;
freedom under such a system tends to disappear.
(3)
Daniel
De Leon,
The People (25th October, 1903)
Why should a truly Socialist organization of whites not take in Negro
members, but organize these in separate bodies? On account of outside
prejudice? Then the body is not truly Socialist. A Socialist body
that will trim its sails to 'outside prejudices' had better quit.
A truly Socialist body is nothing if not a sort of 'Rough on Prejudices'.
Ten to one, however, where the 'issue' arises in such a body it is
catering, not to outside, but to inside prejudices, to the prejudices
of the members themselves.
(4)
Daniel
De Leon,
The People (2nd November, 1908)
Socialism means but one thing, and that is the abolition of capital
in private hands, and the turning over of the industries into the
direct control of the workmen employed in them. Anything else is not
socialism, and has no right to sail under that name. Socialism is
not the establishment of an eight-hour day, not die abolition of child
labor, not the enforcement of pure food laws, not the putting down
of die Night Riders, or the enforcement of the 80-cent gas law. None
of these, nor all of them together, are socialism. They might all
be done by the government tomorrow, and still we would not have socialism.
They are merely reforms on the present system, mere patches on the
worn out garment of industrial servitude, and are no more socialism
than the steam from a locomotive is the locomotive.
(5)
Daniel
De Leon,
The People (15th June, 1909)
What is 'reform'? For that we must go to the reformer himself. He
is perfectly explicit in what he is not. The reformer firmly objects
to revolution. He holds the thing to be harmful in theory, still more
harmful in practice. He holds tenaciously to the essence of what is
without upsetting the essence, the reformer seeks to improve details.
(6)
Henry Kuhn, The Socialist Labor Party
(1931)
The life of the Party organization was dominated by the necessity
of maintaining a daily paper, a terrible task. Part of the membership
worked like Trojans and almost bled themselves white to give support.
Not a few militants broke under the strain and withdrew from the fray.
The SLP of those days used up a good deal of human material.
(7)
William Haywood wrote about Daniel
De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party in his his autobiography published
in 1929.
De Leon always insisted he was right. He made it impossible for
any except his devotees to work with him. The Socialist Labor Party
dominated by De Leon's prejudices could not lend strength to any movement
with which it became associated.
(8)
Morris Hillquit, Daniel De Leon obituary,
New Yorker Volkszeitung (13th May 1914)
He, who expired on Monday evening, fared as did so many before
him, he died a few decades too late; he outlived himself. True to
his maxim to destroy what he could not rule, he concentrated, during
the last fifteen years, his vitality and will-power upon tearing down
what he, personally, had helped to create. And therein he was great,
far greater than in construction and erection. De Leon was, indeed,
a destructive genius, i.e. he was great in demolishing, in tearing
down. With an hatred that was insatiable and unstable, he fought since
his entrance into die American labor movement against every movement
of the working class of this country that showed success and that
seemed to be in die ascendancy.
(9)
Daniel De Leon obituary, People (16th May 1914)
In losing him we lose a man whose very life was dedicated to the
emancipation of the working class from wage slavery. When the history
of the labor movement and the Social Revolution will be written by
future historians, his name will be mentioned with reverence as one
who gave of the fullness of his truly wonderful mind and heart that
the Disinherited of the earth might come into their own.
(10) Crystal
Eastman, The
Liberator
(January, 1920)
The
most revolutionary thing about the recent Labor Party Convention at
Chicago was its decision to appoint a National Executive Committee
composed of two members from each state, one man and one woman. To
force women to take an equal share in the actual business of building
up the executive machine, - it's never been heard of before in the
history of the world, not in trades-unions, not in co-operatives,
not in Socialist parties, not in Utopias. It means more for feminism
than a million resolutions. For after all these centuries of retirement
women need more than an "equal opportunity" to show what's
in them. They need a generous shove into positions of responsibility.
And that is what the Labor Party has given them. It is proof that
there is some very honest idealism among the thousand delegates who
gathered at Chicago.
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