Social Democratic Party of America

Organizational history

Forerunners

Following the defeat of the 1894 American Railway Union (ARU) strike, the former populist Eugene V. Debs exhaustively read socialist literature provided to him by Milwaukee publisher Victor L. Berger and other independent socialists. Debs converted to the socialist cause, believing in the aftermath of the suppression of the ARU strike by federal troops that trade union action alone was insufficient to bring about the liberation of the working class.

In this same summer, smarting from a failed effort at establishing a socialist community near Tennessee City, Tennessee, publisher Julius Wayland established in Kansas City a new socialist weekly newspaper, Appeal to Reason, eventually moving the operation for financial reasons to a small town in southeastern Kansas called Girard. This paper was a major success, quickly gaining a paid subscribership of 80,000 and invigorating the socialist movement. A new colonization project was conceived through this paper, the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth, which aimed to seed an undecided western state with socialist colonies and to electorally take over the government of that state, thus establishing a foothold for socialism in America. Debs was named the head of this project and the planets were thus aligned for the formation of a new national political organization. A convention of the remnant of the American Railway Union was called for June 15, 1897, in Chicago.

Formation

The convention which gave birth to the new organization actually began as a final conclave of the ARU, which opened Tuesday morning June 15, 1897, in Handel Hall, Chicago. Director William E. Burns called the meeting to order and A.B. Adair of the Typographical Union presided. President of the ARU Eugene V. Debs delivered an address to the assembled delegates. The first three days of the convention were occupied with hearing reports of officers and of committees and closing up the affairs of the ARU.

On Friday, June 18, the organization formally changed its name to the Social Democracy of America and adopted a Declaration of Principles. The convention was then thrown open to delegates representing other organizations. Those represented included the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, the Scandinavian Cooperative League, the Metal Polishers and Buffers' Union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the Chicago Labor Union Exchange and an assortment of other organizations.

The Social Democracy of America initially did not have an official head—its executive powers were vested in an executive board, with a chairman (Eugene V. Debs) merely presiding over the activities of that body. The unit of organization of the Social Democracy was the local branch of at least five members. On the first Tuesday in April, each of these local branches was to elect a single representative to the state union, the state-level governing body. On the first Tuesday in May, all the state unions were to assemble and elect one representative each to the National Council, which was in turn to meet on the first Tuesday in May and elect a five-member Executive Board, which was to hold office for a term of one year. An initiation fee of 25 cents was set and monthly dues pegged at 15 cents per month. Office of the organization was established at 504 Trude Building, Corner of Randolph and Wabash Aves., Chicago.

The Social Democracy of America proved to be a short lived and disparate group of Marxists, trade unionists (especially veterans of the ARU), Owenite socialists, populists and unaffiliated radicals. The party initially sought to establish socialist cooperative colonies. In August 1897, a three-member Colonization Committee was established, consisting of Col. Richard J. Hinton (Washington, D.C.), Wilfred P. Borland (Bay City, Michigan) and Cyrus Field Willard (Chicago). This trio explored the possibility of establishing a colony to seed the future Cooperative Commonwealth in the Cumberland plateau of Tennessee. As an associated side-project seems to have made a concrete proposal to the city of Nashville to construct 75 miles of railroad for the city—a project which would put to work the blacklisted and unemployed former members of the ARU and Social Democracy and help to build the notion of social ownership of productive capital in a single moment, it was hoped.

Chicago Social Democratic Party

The political action wing of the Social Democracy bolted the final day of the June 1898 Convention of the Social Democracy of America and instead held their own gathering at Hull House on South Halsted Street in Chicago. Since the gathering was held by a bolting faction of a convention formally called by the Social Democracy of America, subsequent party histories do not regard this first organizational meeting as a formal Convention—although the party organ established at the same time, the Social Democratic Herald, did consider it as such.

The fledgling group issued its organizational platform in the form of a Statement of Principles on June 11, 1898. In this document, the group categorized socialism as "the collective ownership of the means of production for the common good and welfare" and called upon "the wage-workers and all those in sympathy with their historical mission to realize a higher civilization" to sever ties with existing conservative capitalist and reformist political parties and to instead work for "the establishment of a system of cooperative production and distribution".

The split of the Social Democracy in America into a colonization organization on the one hand and the electorally-oriented Social Democratic Party of America on the other demoralized many American socialists. According to founding member Frederic Heath, "the split ... disheartened many Socialists, so that the party grew very slowly. It was not until fully a year after [the split] that real headway began to be made, outside of a few party strongholds like Massachusetts, Milwaukee, and St. Louis".

A political-action faction led by Victor Berger left the party convention and founded the Social Democratic Party as an explicitly socialist alternative to the mainstream parties. Later that year, the Social Democratic Party managed early success when two members of the party were elected to the Massachusetts General Court.

The colonizationists had taken the Social Democracy of Americans periodical (Social Democrat) so the Social Democratic Party started a new national publication (Social Democratic Herald) during the negotiations for the unity of the Socialist Party of America, when it was decided that the party would not publish an official national publication so the newspaper was sold to the Milwaukee Social Democrats led by Victor Berger.

Springfield Social Democratic Party

In addition to the Chicago-based Social Democratic Party of America mentioned above, there was a second Social Democratic Party of America based in Springfield, Massachusetts. In the second half of the 1890s, the Socialist Labor Party of America was showing signs of growth in size and influence. Divisions arose within the organization over the group's relationship to the American Federation of Labor and the party's internal regime.

The organization was deeply split between two hostile groups. On one side was a so-called "administration faction", represented by the party's national officials, such as Henry Kuhn, Henry Vogt and Lucien Sanial; and the editors and staffs of the official party publications, The People (English) and Vorwärts (German). This Regular faction included most prominently Daniel DeLeon, editor of The People and the single most influential individual inside the party. Against their continued reign stood an opposition faction, centered on the independently owned German-language socialist daily, the Newyorker Volkszeitung, the editor of which was Alexander Jonas.

The latter group was particularly hostile to the trade union policy adopted at the 1896 Convention, believing it to have alienated erstwhile allies in the existing labor movement and thus marginalized the party. It also resented the rigid party discipline practiced by the National Executive Committee, which included the expulsions of dissidents and the suspension of entire sections. This festering split erupted in open conflict in July 1899 over the election of a new General Committee (akin to a City Committee) of Section New York, a group to which the 1896 party convention purportedly delegated the power to elect the committee for the national organization. This new committee was to in turn have the power of selecting editors of the party's printed organs. Section New York, narrowly controlled by the dissident faction, elected such a General Committee, which met for the first time on July 8, 1899.

This gathering quickly dissolved in acrimony and a second meeting was hastily scheduled to be held two nights later by the dissident faction. This second session, elected Henry Slobodin as national secretary and named a new editor of The People, to replace DeLeon, to whom the dissidents felt personal enmity.

This action of the dissident general committee was not recognized by the sitting National Executive Committee, the meeting held to be illegally constitute and the committee and the official press continued to conduct their regular operations. The dissidents declared themselves the rightful owners of the Socialist Labor Party's name, logo and press and established themselves as such. Two parallel organizations, each designating itself the Socialist Labor Party and issuing a publication called The People, thus emerged in 1899, naming competing full slates of candidates for the elections of 1899. The matter was taken to the "capitalist" courts. The dissidents were derisively referred to in polemics as the "Kangaroos" by the Regulars—the analogy being drawn between the dissidents' free-and-loose interpretation of party legality in the calling and conduct of their reorganizational meetings and the "Kangaroo courts" of the wild west.