History of the Socialist Party of the United States

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During the past century, the socialist movement throughout the world has grown from a few thousand social pioneers, many of them exiles from their native lands, to a movement which embraces tens of millions of men and women and is molding the economic and political systems of many of our most important countries. Parties with a democratic socialist viewpoint are today in control of the governments of Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Israel; have important representatives in the coalition cabinets of Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Finland; and are supported by strong delegations in the parliaments of Belgium, France, Western Germany, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

In numerous countries, it is true, the organized socialist movement is weak. But even in some of these countries, socialist ideas have had a remarkable effect on the country’s institutions. In India the Indian Socialist Party is small numerically, but Premier Nehru, leader of the Congress Party, has long been regarded as a democratic socialist, and has greatly influenced public thinking in the direction of the democratic socialist goal.

The United States is one of the few great industrial nations where the Socialist or Labor or Social Democratic Party has not attained political stature. But even here, the socialist message has profoundly influenced our economic, political, and social thinking.

The first stage of socialist thinking and agitation, as is well known, was the Utopian stage of over a century ago. In the beginning of the nineteenth century in France and England, many Utopian thinkers and doers, shocked at the gross inequalities, the economic wastes, and poverty which they witnessed all around them, determined to help bring about a society where justice, equality, and fraternity would be the order of the day. Many of them felt that the best way to do this was to organize cooperative colonies as experimental laboratories which would seek to carry out their ideas of a good society. They believed that once the people witnessed the success of these colonies, other cooperative ventures would result, and gradually the competitive, profit-making society would be supplanted by a cooperative economy where men and women worked for service to the community, rather than for private profit.

The followers of these Utopians—of Cabet and Fourier of France, of Robert Owen, famous cotton mill owner and social crusader of England, and others—began to look around for the best places in which to establish these colonies. They looked across the sea and saw the vast, unsettled territories in America. They sent their emissaries to this country to prepare the ground for their social experiments. In this they had the help of such Americans as Albert Brisbane, father of the famous editor, Arthur Brisbane. After a trip to Europe in the early 1830’s, Albert Brisbane interested the great Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune and others in the establishment of colonies here.

The result, particularly during the 1840’s, was the organization of large numbers of colonies in the United States, the most famous of which was the Brook Farm Experiment in New England. Most of the brilliant thinkers of that section of the country—Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Whittier, Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and John S. Dwight—were, in one way or another, associated with it. The North American “Phalanx,” developed by a number of New York idealists at Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1843, and New Harmony, established by Owen in Indiana twenty years earlier, should also be mentioned.

The colonies, for the most part, failed. It was found to be a difficult thing to establish little islands of Utopia in the midst of an economic system run on entirely different principles. But some colonies survived, and the fundamental discussions evoked by this development of the possibilities of the cooperative way of life contributed their part to the social thinking and action of this country.

A small socialist movement of a non-Utopian nature was started by a number of Germans who came to the United States following the uprisings of 1830 and 1848. But the antislavery movement and the Civil War began to absorb the energies of the “forty-eighters,” and the movement, to all intents and purposes, was suspended until after the war was over. In 1867, several groups of social radicals, primarily from Germany, reorganized their forces and formed a number of workingmen’s unions with a socialistic objective in cities of the East and Middle West.

In 1872, Karl Marx, who had formed the First International of Workingmen eight years before, found that, while he was hard at work in the London libraries on his Das Kapital and other works, Bakunin and his anarchistic followers, with a philosophy of violence and insurrection, were securing a tight hold on the machinery of this body. At the Hague Congress of that year, as a means of preventing the International from falling into Bakunin’s hands, Marx and his followers succeeded in having its headquarters removed to the United States. The small group of socialists in this country rallied to its support, but they were weak and divided, and, in 1876, after a lingering illness, the First International, which had taken up headquarters in New York, was finally pronounced officially dead.

Until the turn of the twentieth century, the principal socialist organization in the United States was the Socialist Labor Party. In the first decade of this movement the party members agitated vigorously for numerous reform measures and cooperated with a number of political and trade union groups. In 1886 they took an active part in the tense campaign for the election of Henry George, America’s leading single taxer, for Mayor of the city of New York.

In 1890, however, the party admitted to its membership Daniel DeLeon, a native of Venezuela, who, after receiving his education in Germany, came to the United States and was granted a prize lectureship in international law at Columbia University. DeLeon, who had an incisive mind and a trenchant pen, quickly rose in 1892 to the editorship of the party’s paper, The People. Once in the saddle, he used his position to mold all party members to his particular way of thinking.

One of his first crusades was that against the leaders of the trade-union movement whom he denounced for failing to organize along industrial lines. He took them to task for asking for mere crumbs for labor rather than working for an entire change in the industrial system. He declared that some of the leaders of labor were ignorant, some corrupt. All, he affirmed, were unfit for leadership.

In 1895, after failing to capture the Knights of Labor, he organized the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and began to form unions in competition with the A.F.L. and the K. of L. The Alliance, however, only succeeded in antagonizing and alienating organized labor and in splitting the Socialist Party ranks.

Among other things, it led Morris Hillquit, and those who wished to work closely with the A.F.L. and other labor groups, and who refused to conform to the rigid discipline imposed by DeLeon in the party, to secede from the S.L.P., and to join with other groups to organize the Socialist Party of the United States. In 1900, those who remained in the S.L.P. under DeLeon struck out all immediate demands from their platform, declaring that such demands belonged to the infancy of the movement. For this action, they acquired the name of “impossibilists,” and henceforth wielded little influence on the American scene.

After seceding from the S.L.P., the Hillquit group looked around for new allies. It found these allies in a group called the Social Democracy that had shortly before been organized in the Middle West. This group was composed chiefly of the followers of Victor Berger, the Milwaukee socialist leader, who later became the first socialist Congressman in the United States, and of the followers of Eugene Victor Debs. Berger, a man of great energy and keen intelligence, a native of Austria-Hungry, had brought his socialist ideas from Europe, and had built a strong movement in this important Wisconsin city.