Socialist Party History
U.S. leftists have often been accused of lacking a sense of history. Affiliation with the SP and knowledge of U.S. radical history should help us to keep from repeating past mistakes. Acquaintance with the rich tradition of American Socialism, something most of us never learned about in high school, also helps to situate us as American, albeit in opposition, and is thus part of our construction of an alternative American culture.
This nation was founded in revolution. Primitive communitarian societies existed before the Europeans invaded. Many of these Europeans were themselves among the most radical of their age. While the American Revolution was on balance a bourgeois revolution, it also resulted in establishing a limited egalitarian Jeffersonian tradition that bore the seeds of future movements for social justice. Such anomalies as the Kentucky legislature coming within votes of outlawing private property, are examples of the extreme forms such egalitarianism could take even legislatively. The abolitionist movement is an outstanding example of an American radical movement that eventually became successful, when the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery (except in prisons).
The Civil War ended slavery, and also resulted in reorganizing the ruling class, with power shifting from the Southern plantation owner to the new northern industrial capitalist. A few of the abolitionists, such as Wendell Phillips, realized this. The labor uprising of 1877 was the first of a long series of attempts at redressing the consequences of this new rule for working people. Parallel to these upsurges were a series of radical agrarian movements, the Farmers Alliance, the Greenback Party, and the Populist or People’s Party. The International Workingmen’s Party and the Socialist Labor Party were the earliest attempts at explicit socialist organizing.
The young labor movement characterized by the utopian Knights of Labor and the newer, more economically oriented American Federation of Labor, reached a crisis in 1886 in organizing for the eight-hour workday. In Chicago, much of the leadership of this struggle was anarchist, representing both native and immigrant strains. May Day strikes were peaceful, but on May 3rd a peaceful rally protesting police brutality ended in violence when someone (the courts never bothered to determine who) threw a bomb, killing several policemen. The anarchist leadership of the eight-hour day movement was arrested, tried, and convicted of the bomb throwing, on the dubious ground that they were responsible for everything that occurred at the
Debs was a railroad worker from Terre Haute, Indiana, a second generation American of French parents. His persistent attempts to reorganize a union along craft lines met with failure, as the railroad companies were able to play off one rail brotherhood against another, breaking all strikes. In 1893, Debs led the effort to form an industrial union, the American Railway Union.
Holding a founding convention in Chicago in 1894, the ARU was met with a plea for help from striking Pullman Car workers who lived just south of Chicago in Pullman. George Pullman had attempted to set up a model company town under his autocratic leadership, but the depression forced him to choose between that and maintaining profits. Not unexpectedly, workers suffered. While Debs and other ARU leaders were uncertain as to whether they could help, rank and file enthusiasm pushed through a plank demanding a boycott of all trains carrying Pullman cars.
The federal government, under Democrat Grover Cleveland, responded by attaching a mail car to all trains, bringing in federal troops to insure the mail got through, and issuing an injunction against the leadership of the ARU. With such power the strike and boycott were broken, and Debs was sentenced to jail in Woodstock, Illinois for violating the injunction. While there, he read Marx and became a convinced Socialist. His Social Democracy of America, which in its first years would plan utopian experiments in the American West, in 1900 merged with a non-doctrinaire split from the SLP to form the Socialist Party of America.
Within the decade, the SP would become a mass party. It allowed a diversity of opinion and experience that let Oklahoma farmers share a common vision with New York City’s Eastern European immigrants. The Party was strongest in middle-sized industrial cities in the Midwest. By 1912, Debs would receive a million votes for president, 6% of the vote. More importantly, over 1200 local Socialist officeholders would be elected that year. The “Sewer Socialists” of Milwaukee, so called because of their experience with public works, not only were the best entrenched Socialists, but also the longest lasting, with fifty years of mostly Socialist administrations ending when Frank Zeidler retired as mayor in 1960. The Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, a spin-off of the SP which operated inside the Republican Party, controlled that state’s government for two years, and inaugurated such long-lasting changes as a state-owned bank.
Two factors halted the growth of the SP: the outbreak of WWI and a split over attitudes toward the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Revolution. In 1916 the SP campaigned on a platform demanding a referendum before any declaration of war, but did poorly against Woodrow “He kept us out of the war” Wilson. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, the Socialist Party of America became one of the few member parties of the Second International to condemn participation in the war, at a special St. Louis Convention. Many pro-war Party members resigned.
But more than these withdrawals were the all-out assault by the government on the civil liberties of socialists and IWW members. The SP was denied second-class postage rate, which hamstrung communication with Party Locals. Socialist members of Congress were denied their seats, even after special elections returned them to Congress. By the end of the war, practically the entire leadership of the SP was in prison or indicted. In May of 1918, Debs gave an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio for which he was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to 10 years in Atlanta Federal Prison. His statement at sentencing sums up his humanitarian philosophy and his courage: …While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Debs again received a million votes for president in 1920 with the slogan of “Vote for Convict #9653.” But the war hysteria continued after the war, with Palmer Red scare raids resulting in the deportation of hundred of immigrant radicals.
The other factor in the decline of the SP was the three-way split in 1920, resulting in the formation of the pro-Bolshevik Communist Party and Communist Labor Party. No faction distinguished itself for its democracy of charity during the split. But the basic question was the attitude toward the Russian Revolution, and the SP faction, while still sympathetic to what was going on in Russia, refused to subordinate its politics to that of the Bolsheviks.
When Debs was pardoned by Warren Harding and released from prison for Christmas 1921, his poor health reflected the poor health of the party. The boom times of the 1920’s and the now-ingrained anti-red fear in the U.S. culture were not fertile ground for rebuilding. In 1920 the SP endorsed the Progressive Party candidacy of Robert LaFollette for president, as did the American Federation of Labor, in a departure from its non-political traditions. While the SP worked hard to establish a permanent labor party from this campaign, the AFL refused to commit itself on this point, and in fact did not participate after the election. In 1928 the SP returned to running its own candidate, this time Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister who had joined the party because of his opposition to WWI. Thomas would run for president on the Socialist ticket six times, in 1932 rivaling Deb’s vote totals.
The stock market crash of 1929 put an end (at least for 20 years) to the capitalist myth of unending prosperity, and SP fortunes began to revive. (SP vice-presidential candidate Quinn Brisben has compared Party fortunes to those of pawnshops.) While in some ways the CP dominated the left of the 1930’s, the SP was an active and vibrant participant in the founding of the CIO and other struggles. The multiracial organizing of poor Southerners in the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union was an SP-initiated activity during those years. It was one of the SP’s solutions to the economic crisis, as well as the establishment of what there was of a welfare state in this country.
The SP leadership was leery of the U.S. slide toward WWII, correctly foreseeing the emergence of a warfare state in this country. But when war came, the Party as a whole gave it critical support because of the danger of fascism. Some Party members continued to oppose all wars as manifestations of the capitalist system, and spent time in prison for their refusal to cooperate. Since Party support was critical – unlike the unqualified support of the CP after the Soviet Union’s entry into the war – Socialists were instrumental, if lonely, in pointing out some of the abuses the war made possible: the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, the advantages capitalists took of no-strike pledges, and the Allies' demand for unconditional surrender, which made if possible for the first use of atomic weapons to name a few.
Socialist Party members came early to struggle for civil rights that would dominate the national agenda in the early 1960s. SP member and black union leader A. Phillip Randolph agreed to call a mass march on Washington during WWII only after the federal government agreed to concessions in its segregation policies. SP members were active in the early Freedom Rides and the Founding of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
After the 1956 Elections, the majority of the party began to favor a “realignment” strategy of working within the Democratic Party. The Debs Caucus advocated continuing to run Socialists for office. During the war in Indo-China, the Debs caucus was the only group within the party that favored unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam. Due to these differences, a three-way split developed in the old SP in the early 70’s, with the Debs Caucus reclaiming the name Socialist Party. The right wing Social Democrats, who by then were in the majority, renamed their organization “Social Democrats USA” (which no longer exists). The other split off was a centrist group that became the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (now called the Democratic Socialists of America).
The Socialist Party’s contributions in the areas of peace, civil rights, local government, and labor form a legacy that SP members can be proud of, and bear a responsibility for continuing. rally. The execution of the Haymarket martyrs had a profound effect on many labor activists, including young Eugene Debs.