Socialist Labor Party

SOCIALIST LABOR PARTY. The first major party of American socialism, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) has remained in the field to the present, a tiny remnant of late-nineteenth-century political styles. Its history suggests, first, the overwhelming impact of immigrants on American socialism and, second, the weight of a single charismatic personality on a Left political movement.

The SLP, founded in 1877 to succeed a one-year experiment, the Workingmen’s Party, represented with its earliest breath the curious amalgamation of socialist forces. Heir to the internecine divisions of American socialists, it notably did not include prominent figures in the First International sections linked to Karl Marx and to certain craft unions. Neither did it include many of the American reformers excluded from the First International by the avowed Marxists. Some would return, and other American reformers, including a sprinkling of African Americans, would join the SLP in times of peak interest, such as the late 1870s, the middle 1880s, and the mid-1890s. In general, the native-born (and especially women reformers, unable or unwilling to attend meetings held in taverns) found the SLP socially and culturally unaccommodating.

The SLP seemed instead to promote the hopes of a new type of multiethnic, immigrant working-class coalition. Perennially weak at the national center, it set down hardy roots locally, where even former national leaders of European socialism, relocated to the United States, took their considerable energies. Drawing immediately on the excitement of the 1877 railroad strike—in which small numbers had done yeoman agitation—and the establishment of a German-American socialist daily press in such cities as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York (where the dailies founded would endure) and Cincinnati and Saint Louis (where only weeklies would survive), the SLP nurtured its gains. Around the dailies or weeklies grew an abundance of social institutions, including clubs, theaters, and socialist-linked taverns. With only a few thousand members at its core, the SLP could rightly claim a following of perhaps five times that size.

For several years after its founding, the SLP enjoyed a brief vigor in electoral socialism, its local sections electing a handful of local and a few scattered state officials. At the peak of this development, the elections of 1878–1879, the SLP elected an Illinois state senator, three representatives, and four Chicago city councilmen on a reform platform similar to that of “municipal socialism” decades later. Characteristically, the party itself garnered few short-term and virtually no long-term benefits from this success. Interest in socialism grew rapidly, but party membership did not. By 1880–1881, when the protest vote had receded, several socialist candidates were “counted out” through ballot-stuffing and at least one elected candidate was expelled from the SLP for voting inconsistently with socialist principles. The boom had ended. At a national level, a hotly contested decision to support the Greenback Labor Party in 1880 proved doubly damaging when many socialists, refusing to compromise themselves, broke with the SLP and the Greenbackers went down to ignominious defeat.

The SLP record in unionism was rather more complex. The International Labor Union, a child in part of former First Internationalists who had given up party for labor activity but who still retained a strong commitment to socialism, experienced brief success in agitation among textile workers in 1877–1879, and quietly expired. The Federated Order of Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) was founded in 1881 largely by German socialists (party members and otherwise) and such former socialist protégés as Samuel Gompers. Almost immediately, the political nonpartisanship of the FOTLU (which would change its name to the American Federation of Labor [AFL] in 1885) set off a minor explosion, as did its inclination to achieve labor market stability through limitation of the work force. The ardently socialist Progressive Cigarmakers, established to compete with Gompers’s Cigarmakers International Union, looked upon the withdrawal of socialist political commitment as a step toward union conservatism. At a local level, socialists operated best, creating and staffing locals in a variety of trades, striving to work within the existing central labor councils where possible, and establishing new ones where corruption and conservatism reigned supreme.

The SLP could also boast of real intellectual accomplishments, if few organizing results, in the Americanization of socialism. The most famous English-language work of analytical socialist exposition, The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), was written by a Danish immigrant, Laurence Gronlund, who had played an important role in the 1877 Saint Louis “commune” established during the national railroad strike. Gronlund, no dogmatic Marxist, assailed capitalism’s destructive competitiveness, waste, and cruelty, and looked forward to socialism as an advanced form of state control. Hardly a best-seller, The Cooperative Commonwealth acquired readership as a popularization after Edward Bellamy’s Utopian Looking Backward had expanded the market for socialist ideas. The second and more lasting accomplishment, by C. Osborne Ward—First Internationalist and sometime SLP member, civil servant and brother of famed sociologist Lester Frank Ward—was the ponderous two-volume The Ancient Lowly (1879). Ward energetically detailed the evidence of a proletariat of sorts in pre-Christian days, tracing its rituals and trade organizations, and detailing his thesis that these laboring poor had been the basis for Christianity’s triumph (betrayed by the church’s turn toward power over the Roman state). A classic on the scale of contemporary texts by European socialists Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, or E. B. Bax on the medieval origins of the modern proletariat, The Ancient Lowly has remained a tribute to a peculiarly American Christian socialism.

Despite these formidable efforts, the SLP itself did not prosper in the 1880s. Failure at electoral socialism propelled many energetic militants toward “revolutionary socialism,” a predecessor to the later ideas and practices of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Unburdened of faith and patience in slow educational efforts, they led protest activity in a variety of spots, notably Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco, until the crushing blows of repression following the Haymarket Affair virtually eradicated this current. The SLP itself meanwhile dwindled down to a mere nominal affiliation of local union-linked socialists and their press. As old-timers later recalled, they suffered a characteristic identity crisis, unable to cast themselves as political party, pressure group, or educational entity.

Most of the links the SLP had created early on with American-born labor reformers and Irish nationalist labor militants had been as good as lost since. This weakness proved catastrophic. As Frederick Engels complained, the SLP found itself utterly unable to encompass the political excitement of the mid-1880s. Socialists in the SLP and outside participated to the fullest in the “eight-hour” movement, led in many cities by German-dominated trades. But they found cooperation with the predominantly American-Irish, temperance-oriented Knights of Labor extremely difficult. New York socialist participation in the 1886 Henry George mayoral campaign brought new energy, but also ended in a sharp disillusionment and internal division.

At a low point, the SLP weakened further. In 1889 the national executive committee, dominated by the New Yorker Volkszeitung, expelled the editor of the party’s national weekly, Der Sozialist, and shut down the press, declaring sharp criticism of unions to be treason. As this action revealed, the local organization and above all its union connections—especially in New York—continued to count for more than any other factor. SLP loyalists had, in effect, come to accept their tactical isolation and sought to live within it, much as the “American Exceptionalism” wing of the Communist movement avowed during the later 1920s.

The SLP members had their reasons, based in the continued success of their own intimate institutions. As activists in the brewery union among others, as fraternal organizers of an impressive insurance, health, and recreational network, as educators of their own ranks, the German immigrants managed their limited resources well. As socialists they already came to regard themselves as alte Genossen, “old heads” bloodied from repeated thumps against the stone walls of bourgeois American reality. But their acceptance of insularity did nothing to change socialism’s “foreign” image in the United States, and furthermore made the capture of the SLP by would-be Americanizers all the easier a few years later.

The early 1890s brought increasing support from local trades councils and their growing press, and the mass emergence of an entirely new constituency, eastern European Jews. By the mid-1890s, the SLP could call a dozen papers its own, including a new array of Yiddish publications and the first lasting “orthodox” English-language socialist newspaper, The People. Opportunity opened, and the party ran its first serious presidential campaign, gaining more than twenty-one thousand votes for its candidate, Simon Wing, in five states. Meanwhile, under Americanized intellectual Daniel De Leon’s firm hand, The People and the SLP set out on a path to create a socialist propaganda presence and a socialist labor federation.

Both strategies fell short, for want of resources and because other radical or socialist ideas of the time, from Populism to Eugene Debs’s Social Democratic Party, gained more attention. The People, with its arch “scientific” tone and its bitter scorn for non-SLP radicals, offered a case in point. Taking the editorship in 1892, De Leon, deeply admired by his faithful readers, introduced a quasi-anthropological framework (with considerable debt to Lewis Henry Morgan) to explain socialism as the next step of civilization. A handful of his public speeches, reprinted in The People as a guide to modern socialist principles, became overnight SLP classics. But De Leon devoted as much attention to abuse of the Populists—after 1895 the AFL, the followers of Eugene Debs, and various SLP dissidents—as to the exposition of socialism. In his belief, the end of capitalism drew near, and only the lures offered by false leaders and sham working-class organizations prevented the SLP from leading the revolutionary column. As it threw critics overboard, it could rightly claim a temporary upward spiral of votes: forty thousand for the presidential ticket in 1896, and a combined local tally of more than eighty thousand in 1898.

To skeptics, the advances seemed small, indeed, relative to the political opportunities in this worst of U.S. depressions, with manifestations like the Pullman strike, the Homestead strike, and the “industrial armies” of relief on all sides. Membership never exceeded five thousand. The People, too dry for public taste, seemed moreover increasingly shrill and simply unrealistic. To those just learning about socialism, from former Populists and Bellamy Nationalists to craft workers, The Coming Nation and local socialistic papers of central trades federations were vastly more acceptable. To a scattering of new immigrant formations—Italian, Russian, Hungarian, and others—the SLP offered few benefits in return for adhesion.

Such criticisms, especially when directed at De Leon, only reinforced loyalists’ determination. Belittled where not scorned, the SLP made one final, glorious effort to establish a labor-political hegemony within the Left. De Leon’s lieutenants seized control of Knights of Labor District Assembly 49, where New York socialists had long been active, and projected a coalition aimed at taking national leadership of the failing Knights of Labor. Actually promised the editorship of the Knights’ journal (for Lucien Sanial, the most distinguished of party intellectuals other than De Leon), the SLP was outvoted at the Knights’ 1894 convention and De Leon himself excluded as a “lawyer.” De Leon led a split, and next year called upon socialists in the AFL (still smarting at Gompers’s exclusion of SLP delegate Lucien Sanial from the 1890 national convention, and sufficiently powerful to vote Gompers out of office in 1894, from whence he quickly returned) to likewise abandon their organization. The result, the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance (ST&LA), was purportedly to organize the unorganized, but actually to give outright socialist leadership to a labor movement growing out of the ruins of the AFL (badly weakened by the depression) and the Knights.

This scheme had historical roots in the splits that German Americans had led from numerous local trades councils of the 1880s–1890s, including that of New York. But it had little chance of success. Among German American socialists, especially outside New York, the defections from the SLP were many, because the ST&LA could not provide even the limited benefits the AFL offered. Among the Jews, second most important constituency, anarchists joined conservatives to support the existing unions. With a split in Jewish ranks, and a new Jewish non-SLP daily paper, the Forverts, posed against the SLP’s dry Abendblott, the SLP could not recover.

The factional brawls of the next few years exceeded in scope and destruction any thus far in the U.S. Left. Expulsions and defections took the place of agitation. Socialists of various union factions broke each other’s strikes. In 1899 the Volkszeitung leaders, who had sniped at De Leon but remained in the organization, helped lead much of the remaining Jewish group, and others, in a fistfight over control of the national office. In essence half the remaining movement of perhaps five thousand split, each side claiming to be the “true” SLP. The anti-De Leonists, known as the “Kangaroos” (so named by De Leon for the kangaroo courts of the lawless western frontier towns), negotiated furiously for two years with Debs’s followers until settling upon unity in the new Socialist Party. The SLP, for its part, eliminated all the “immediate demands” from its platform, leaving only the demand for socialism.

Beset by continued small-scale rebellions and individual defections that included some of De Leon’s once-trusted friends, the SLP rapidly declined into isolated propaganda circles. It could still claim, however, the Daily People (created at great sacrifice in 1900) and the New York Labor News Company (which would specialize in editions of De Leon’s addresses but also bring out many early translated European socialist classics) as well as insist that it possessed more revolutionary virtue than the Socialist Party. The SLP retained special appeal, at the turn of the century and for decades afterward, to the working-class autodidact who instinctively mistrusted the generally middle-class leadership of other radical organizations.

Revolutionaries who believed ardently in political education via the soapbox and the press had by the early years of the new century more reasons to overlook the party’s defects. The upsurge in the class struggle, especially in the West, and the increasingly class-collaborationist character of the AFL, led the Western Federation of Miners to help form the American Labor Union in 1902. Still the only English-language socialist daily, The People began to campaign for industrial unionism. De Leon’s emissaries took part in the discussions leading to the formation of the IWW in 1905.

The SLP contributed more than material forces to this new movement. The ST&LA had been reduced to a handful of locals, mainly in eastern metal-working and textile centers like Lowell, Massachusetts, Paterson, New Jersey, Schenectady, New York, and Pittsburgh. But its symbolic presence counted, the more so when leading socialists in the AFL refused to endorse the IWW. More important by far, De Leon’s intellectual formulations and the daily press under his command set the tone in describing the failed unionism of the present and the democratic society of the future. De Leon’s famed address, “The Preamble to the IWW” (later reprinted in many editions as The Socialist Reconstruction of Society), was widely regarded as the industrial union movement’s theoretical manifesto. Even Debs, however cautiously, echoed a tone of respect toward his old adversary, considered more faithful to the industrial union vision than were Debs’s fellow Socialist Party leaders.

However briefly, the SLP enjoyed the first of two final major bursts of energy. Militants in recent immigrant groups affiliated through federations and established newspapers and clubhouses in their expanding blue-collar neighborhoods. Sometimes short-lived, these groups added numbers and strength to the skeletal organization. Among certain ethnic groups (Bulgarians and South Slavs especially) with fierce anticlerical traditions and a suspicion of reformism, the SLP had a certain appeal for generations. Even the venerable Yiddish-speaking sector, badly reduced by defections, published a reputable weekly, for a time edited by the literary notable David Pinski; it also had future Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ leader Joseph Schlossberg as its foremost labor personality.

Prospects for reunifying the American socialist movement, a notion intermittently promoted by the Second International, had never seemed particularly bright. But a “unity” resolution of the Stuttgart Congress in 1907 put the issue on the agenda. For many supporters of the IWW, a revolutionary labor movement would provide the proper foundation for a new or merged political body. A unity conference held in New Jersey that year produced a memorable document, but little optimism even among SLP leaders who could envision entering a larger organization only on a political basis that socialist moderates and IWW members opposed to electoral action would be sure to reject. In fact, De Leon and SLP-oriented unionists found themselves excluded from the following IWW convention in 1908.

Ironically, the IWW’s heroic period lay just ahead. As mass strikes of unskilled workers ensued in 1909, the rump “Detroit IWW” organized by the SLP gamely propagandized for its original vision of the IWW. During the strike wave of 1912–1913, the SLP’s best orators and organizers threw themselves into the fray and quickly found themselves behind bars. Lacking the publicity or charisma of the “Chicago IWW,” the Detroit IWW soon returned to propaganda status. In 1915, largely to avoid the legal persecution falling upon the IWW regulars, it was renamed the Workers International Industrial Union.

Hopes of large-scale revival for the party had by now dissipated. The financial weight of maintaining the Daily People alone emptied party coffers. At De Leon’s death in 1914, he was owed $5,000—on a $25 per week salary! The previous year, De Leon’s favorite son Solon had joined with his favorite intellectual protégé (and fellow Daily People editor), Louis C. Fraina, on a committee whose minority report recommended the dissolution of the SLP into the ranks of the Socialist Party. Accustomed to their isolation and their propagandizing, the vast majority of SLP members rejected this and any other drastic solution. Four years later, as the socialist movement faced probable U.S. entry into war, a second unity conference drafted a plan accepted in a referendum by SLP membership but never submitted to Socialist Party members by their leadership. This marked the SLP’s final effort to break out of its isolation.

New national secretary Arnold Petersen quickly took charge and ruled with an iron hand. Assuming office on the first day of January 1914, he held the position until 1969, casting out real and potential dissidents, “reorganizing” uncooperative branches, and otherwise enforcing a rigorous discipline and dogma. He faced three major crises in the early years: the death of De Leon in May 1914; the widespread repression of immigrant groups during wartime; and the defection of prominent SLP members who had pinned their hopes on the unity movement.

De Leon’s ghost, through his editorials, continued to occupy center stage after his demise, and Petersen carefully avoided the appearance of anti-war propaganda. The unity “disruption,” as such events were termed in the party, led however to an important splinter group, the Industrial Socialist League, which was headed by Caleb Harrison, the SLP’s candidate for vice president in the 1916 election. The Industrial Socialist League merged into the Communist Party in 1921 with Harrison becoming the first national secretary of the legal Communist Party. Few former SLP members stayed with the Communists, but the presence of a self-avowed revolutionary party badly damaged the SLP’s claims to unique status.

Thereafter, the SLP remained amazingly unchanged, decade after decade. Party life revolved around the distribution of socialist leaflets and the Weekly People (in addition to the foreign-language press and annual ethnic calendars); local study classes on the works of Marx, Engels, and De Leon; and the collecting of signatures to obtain ballot status. The SLP presidential vote in twelve to twenty-three states ranged from fifteen thousand to fifty thousand depending mostly on the broader political situation and on which other “protest” parties (especially left-wing parties) managed to gain ballot status. The national ticket reached its all-time high of 53,831 in 1972, although its candidate, Louis Fisher, was able to qualify for the ballot in the fewest number of states since 1892.

The reliance on mass leaflet distribution house-to-house, at factory gates, and in downtown shopping centers illustrates a unique aspect of SLP agitation during these decades. Its members’ dedication to convincing rank-and-file workers of the necessity of junking capitalism and the political state, and instituting a new “socialist industrial union” form of government, gave them a continued street presence when other left-wing movements had withdrawn into union work or factional warfare. Through millions of leaflets distributed annually for generations, many workers and other Americans received their introduction to the socialist vision of an alternative to capitalism. Likewise, the Weekly People, always published at a loss but widely available through coin-operated boxes or distributed free in many cities, was long known for clear prose and forceful analysis of capitalist economics.

Social life within the SLP meanwhile revolved around the ever-present need for funds to carry on agitation and education. An endless round of socials, picnics, and dinner/lectures, especially in older industrial centers like New York, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and elsewhere (in later years, the retirement zones of California and Florida), continued. Along with aging but well-organized and determined language federation members, the SLP retained into the 1960s the numbers necessary for a rich cultural life. Small propaganda circles, increasingly held around campuses in later decades, continued the SLP tradition.

Over the decades, individuals and groups intermittently rebelled at Petersen’s authoritarian leadership and the party’s failure to grow. These insurgents rarely questioned the party’s socialist industrial union program or its anti-reformist stance. But because they seemed (from the leadership perspective) to threaten party traditions and internal stability, they often evoked swift retribution and, occasionally, inspired institutional rivals.

The Industrial Union Party (IUP) thus grew from a 1926 letter by Sam Brandon, a member of section Bronx, to the editor of the Weekly People questioning some statistics that the paper used. The editor’s reply and Brandon’s rejoinder resulted in the expulsion of an entire section of sixty members, then the largest in the SLP. The dissidents reorganized as the IUP and began publishing their own journal, the Industrial Unionist. They attained a membership of nearly two hundred members in the Bronx and Brooklyn as well as a few local affiliates outside the New York area. During the heyday of independent industrial unionism in the early 1930s, just prior to the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the IUP played an important role among furniture workers in Jamestown, New York, and shipbuilders in Camden, New Jersey, among others. In 1939, after this heroic era had passed, the IUP itself split. About half the membership of several hundred reorganized, under the leadership of Abraham Ziegler, as the Socialist Union Party, distributing its journal, Labor Power. In 1947 and again during 1967–1969, when the SLP expelled dozens of members, remnants of the IUP took part in unsuccessful efforts to establish a national organization known informally as the “unfrocked De Leonists.”

In the meantime, second-generation SLP members filled some of the gaps left by attrition or division, and a thin stratum of fresh recruits came forward. Eric Hass, a former cabdriver who began a thirty-year tenure as editor of the Weekly People in 1939, was easily the most important of these. When Hass resigned in 1969 along with dozens of others upset by the leadership’s unwillingness to take part in the anti-war movement, the SLP’s downward slide probably reached a point of no return. By 1973 a personnel shortage seemed to endanger the Weekly People. Nathan Karp, who had become a part-time assistant to the aging Petersen in the 1950s and was elected national secretary in 1969, tried to give the SLP a new sense of purpose. He encouraged young people strongly influenced by the New Left to take over the Weekly People. Fewer in pages and with less emphasis on labor and the old jargon, the paper revived modestly.

By this time, however, the last of the language federations had folded (the Bulgarians, in 1969), the crucial funds accrued from these movements had nearly dissipated, and the membership had fallen to under seven hundred. Karp engineered the transfer of party headquarters from its historic location in Greater New York to Palo Alto, California. From this locale, Karp used his popularity among the surviving membership to try and change many of the policies that had isolated the party. Old guard De Leonites, based mostly in New York, withdrew during 1977–1978. Later rebellions against Karp’s Petersen-like management style brought expulsions of sections in Missouri, Michigan, and New Jersey.

By the later 1990s, SLP membership had fallen to a few hundred at most, and the Weekly People had become the monthly The People. Nevertheless, into the third decade of the new century, the SLP continued a paper-thin existence from an office in Mountain View, California, mainly reprinting essays of the forgotten turn-of-the-century intellectual, calling for the abolition of both capitalism and the state while holding a vision of pure socialism as the single solution for humankind’s many woes, had not yet expired.

Buhle, Paul. A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost: Louis C. Fraina/Lewis Corey (1892–1953) and the Decline of Radicalism in the United States. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995.

Daniel De Leon: The Man and His Work. New York: New York Labor News, 1919.

Girard, Frank, and Ben Perry. The Socialist Labor Party, 1876–1991. Philadelphia: Livra Press, 1991.

Socialist Labor Party Papers. Records. Microfilm Edition. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, in the National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/projects/catalog/socialist-labor-party-of-america-0