In the early 1900\'s a US political group called the Socialist Party was founded
ID: 1212489 • Letter: I
Question
In the early 1900's a US political group called the Socialist Party was founded. In 1912, the Socialist Party political platform called for, among other things:
"The extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and water power.”
As it happened, the political party had only limited success, with its Presidential candidates getting just 6 percent of the electoral vote. Judging the party by this policy alone, do you think the Socialist Party would have managed to fulfill one of its other platforms, which was increasing the prosperity of America? Explain.
Explanation / Answer
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist and social-democratic political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization in 1899.
In the first decades of the 20th century, it drew significant support from many different groups, including trade unionists, progressive social reformers, populist farmers, and immigrants. However it refused to form coalitions with other parties, or even to allow its members to vote for other parties. Eugene V. Debs twice won over 900,000 votes in presidential elections (1912 and 1920), while the party also elected two United States Representatives (Victor L. Berger and Meyer London), dozens of state legislators, more than a hundred mayors, and countless lesser officials.[2] The party's staunch opposition to American involvement in World War I, although welcomed by many, also led to prominent defections, official repression and vigilante persecution. The organization was further shattered by a factional war over how to respond to the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the establishment of the Communist International in 1919: many members left the party in favor of the Communist Party.
After endorsing Robert LaFollette's presidential campaign in 1924, the party returned to independent action at the presidential level. It had modest growth in the early 1930s behind presidential candidate Norman Thomas. The party's appeal was weakened by the popularity of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the organization and flexibility of the Communist Party under Earl Browder, and the resurgent labor movement's desire to support sympathetic Democratic Party politicians. A divisive and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to broaden the party by admitting followers of Leon Trotsky and Jay Lovestone caused the traditional "Old Guard" to leave and form the Social Democratic Federation. While the party was always strongly anti-Fascist, as well as anti-Stalinist, its opposition to American entry in World War II cost it both internal and external support.
members of Congress, Meyer London of New York City and Victor Berger of Milwaukee (a part of the sewer socialism movement, a major front in socialism, Milwaukee being the first city (and the only major one) to elect a socialist mayor, which it did four times between 1910 and 1956); over 70 mayors, and many state legislators and city councilors. Its voting strength was greatest among recent Jewish, Finnish and German immigrants, coal miners, and former Populist farmers in the Midwest. From 1900 (before its formal union) to 1912, the Socialist Party ran Eugene Debs for president at each election. The best showing ever for a Socialist ticket was in 1912, when Debs gained 901,551 total votes, or 6% of the popular vote. In 1920 Debs ran again, this time while imprisoned for opposing World War I, and received 913,693 votes, 3.4% of the total.
Early political perspectives ranged from radical socialism to social democracy, with New York party leader Morris Hillquit and Congressman Berger on the more social democratic or right wing of the party and radical socialists and syndicalists, including members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the party's frequent candidate, Eugene V. Debs, on the left wing of the party. As well there were agrarian utopian-leaning radicals, such as Julius Wayland of Kansas, who edited the party's leading national newspaper, Appeal to Reason along with trade unionists; Jewish, Finnish, and German immigrants; and intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and the Black activist/intellectual Hubert Harrison. The party outsourced its newspapers and publications so that it would not have an internal editorial board that was a power in its own right. The result was that a handful of outside publishers dominated the published messages the party distributed, and agitated for a much more radical anti—capitalistic revolutionary message the party itself tolerated. The Appeal to Reason newspaper thus became part of its radical left-wing, as did the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company of Chicago, which produced over half of the pamphlets and books that were sold at party meetings.
In January 1919 Vladimir Lenin invited the Industrial Workers of the World and the radical wing of the Socialist Party to join in the founding of the Communist Third International, the Comintern.
The Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party emerged as an organized faction early that same year, building its organization around a lengthy Left Wing Manifesto authored by Louis C. Fraina. This effort to organize in order to "win the Socialist Party for the Left Wing" met with staunch resistance from the "Regulars" who controlled a big majority of the seats of the SPA's governing National Executive Committee. When it seemed certain that the 1919 party elections for a new NEC had been dominated by the Left Wing, the sitting NEC, citing voting irregularities, refused to tally the votes, declared the entire election invalid and in May 1919 suspended the party's Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Polish, South Slavic, and Hungarian language federations, in addition to the entire state organization of Michigan. In future weeks, the state organizations of Massachusetts and Ohio would similarly be disfranchised and "reorganized" by the NEC, while in New York and Pennsylvania, the "Regular" State Executive Committees undertook reorganization of Left Wing branches and locals on a case-by-case basis.
Expulsion of Socialists from the New York Assembly (1920
On January 7, 1920, less than a week after the Palmer Raids had swept and stunned the country, a new session of the New York State Assembly was called to order. The majority Republicans easily elected their candidate for the Speaker, Thaddeus C. Sweet and after opening day formalities the body took a brief recess. Back in session, Sweet declared: "The Chair directs the Sergeant-at-Arms to present before the Bar of the House Samuel A. DeWitt, Samuel Orr, Louis Waldman, Charles Solomon, and August Claessens", the Assembly's five Socialist members.
Late in October 1972, before the SP's December convention, Michael Harrington resigned as National Co-Chairman of the Socialist Party.[76] Although little remarked upon at the time despite Harrington's status as "possibly the most widely known of the Socialist leaders since the death of Norman Thomas," it soon became clear that this was the precursor of a decisive split in the organization.
Harrington had written extensively about the progressive potential of the so-called "New Politics" in the Democratic Party and had come to advocate unilateral withdrawal from the Vietnam war and to advocate positions regarded by more conservative party members as "avant-garde" on the questions of abortion and gay rights. This put Harrington and his co-thinkers at odds with the party's younger generation of leaders, who espoused a strongly labor-oriented direction for the party and who were broadly supportive of AFL-CIO leader George Meany.
In the early spring of 1973, Harrington resigned his membership in SDUSA. That same year, Harrington and his supporters formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). At its start, DSOC had 840 members, of which 2 percent served on its national board; approximately 200 had been members of Social Democrats, USA or its predecessors whose membership was then 1,800, according to a 1973 profile of Harrington. Its high-profile members included Congressman Ron Dellums and William Winpisinger, president of the International Association of Machinists. In 1982 DSOC established the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) upon merging with the New American Movement, an organization of democratic socialists mostly from the New Left.
The Union for Democratic Socialism was another organization, which was formed by former members of the Socialist Party. David McReynolds, who had resigned from the Socialist Party between 1970 and 1971, and many from the Debs Caucus, were the core members. In 1973, the UDS declared itself the Socialist Party USA