De Leon, Daniel

DE LEON, DANIEL (1852–1914). The first English-speaking intellectual to influence long-run trends within the American Left, Daniel De Leon could not build a successful socialist movement. He nevertheless elucidated powerful notions about the evolution of industrial society and evoked prospects for a future, stateless order guided by the workers themselves. He also created, within severe limits, a model “vanguard” organization in the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) that he dominated and served as editor of a resolutely revolutionary daily press a generation before the Communist Party’s Daily Worker.

Born to Sephardic Dutch-Jewish parents on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, De Leon went abroad to Germany with his mother in 1866, attending but not graduating from the prestigious Leiden Academy. Arriving in the United States between 1872 and 1874, De Leon taught Latin, Greek and math at a secondary school in Westchester, New York. He entered Columbia College in 1876 and graduated with honors in 1878. He opened law offices first in Texas then New York, and then abandoned law after gaining a prize three-year lectureship in Political Science at Columbia, renewed in 1886. There, he lectured notably on Latin America, emphasizing the destructive role of the United States and its Monroe Doctrine. He was also an early contributor to the Political Science Quarterly. His first wife died in childbirth, and he married again, to a Kansas school teacher and Christian Socialist, in 1891. His first child, Solon De Leon, was to become a socialist activist, to break with his father’s SLP, and in later decades, to emerge a labor journalist and editor of note.

Growing interested in the anti-establishment Henry George mayoralty campaign of 1886 in New York, Daniel De Leon commenced public activity for the Left. Denied the usual offer of a third term at Columbia as lecturer, De Leon abandoned an academic career, converted to socialist ideas through reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. He plunged himself into the New York Nationalist Clubs, immediately notable as an appealing public lecturer. Disappointed with the unclarity of the ideas and the milieu, De Leon pressed leftward, toward the small Socialist Labor Party (SLP), joining in 1890. Within a year, he had become not only a leading lecturer but assistant editor of the new weekly, The People. Following the resignation its first editor, due to failing eyesight, De Leon assumed the reins of the paper, and would hold them until shortly before his death. Almost overnight, thanks to his writing and speaking but also to the paucity of other English language socialist notables, he had become the admired leader of the first socialist party seemingly gaining a firm foothold in the United States. Fluent in German, Dutch, ancient Greek and Latin, as well as his native Spanish, he would be regarded as an intellectual leading light even by those deeply opposed to his political orientation.

De Leon had gained much by a close reading of Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle and other socialist writers. But he carried within him the outlines of a general theory formulated in terms of contemporary natural science and social science. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her evocative Woman and Economics or August Bebel and his Frau und der Sozialismus (of which De Leon himself would make the first American translation), De Leon looked to Darwinian “natural laws” of evolution and to the anthropology of Lewis Henry Morgan, which hinted at a return of humanity to a collective stage abandoned eons ago, at a lower level of social development. De Leon expounded this theory of socialism’s approach with a brilliance of logic and language that no previous English-language American speaker or writer had offered or could offer.

Almost immediately, he added life to the SLP’s municipal campaigns through his multilingual oratory. He would repeatedly run for assorted offices in New York, not with any expectation of being elected but for the value of a platform in German or English, for his ideas and his support of the SLP. Meanwhile, he transformed The People into something hitherto unknown, a stern analytic sheet, improving labor reportage but writing editorial matter largely himself. With relatively few socialist papers yet published in English, and most of those filled either with hayseed sentimentalism (as the vastly more popular Coming Nation) or local labor news (such as the Cleveland Citizen), the People appeared more socialist, more Marxist, and more “scientific,” a major claim of his version of socialism. Meanwhile, De Leon undertook an immense array of translations from socialist texts in German and French, making the New York Labor News Company, SLP outlet, the leading publisher of such texts until the early years of the next century. More than a dozen small volumes of Eugene Sue’s history of common people across the ages; Ferdinand LaSalle’s theatrical drama on a medieval revolutionary, Franz von Sickingen; Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire; and the weighty Frau Und Der Sozialismus, these constituted altogether a veritable socialist library, further proof of the erudition that gave followers a near-messianic faith in De Leon’s ideas.

Convinced that the severe economic depression of the 1890s meant the end of capitalism, De Leon pursued a political agenda not unfamiliar to veteran socialists of seemingly grand opportunities that disappeared quickly, leaving little behind. Above all, he intended to throw off the caution that American socialists had accrued in decades of slight success, finding themselves successful in institution-building only among German speakers and craft workers. If not initially by intent, he assaulted the timidity of the leftwing German Americans, holding onto daily papers housed in their thriving social-cultural halls, and to their minority representation in local labor assemblies. They had survived, but in their cautious unwillingness to criticize the craft unions for refusal to endorse the socialist movement and socialist candidates, i.e., the standard for most European labor, he believed he had found the enemy-from-within: institutional conservatism.

De Leon therefore called for aggressive political campaigns and a break with the conservatism of the leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The exclusion of an SLP delegate from the 1890 AFL convention in Detroit seemed to demonstrate the hopelessness of the familiar tactical approach of patient socialist education. De Leon’s efforts within the Knights of Labor, drawing upon reform traditions of solidarity wider than unionism, ended in 1895 when the Knights’ leadership reneged on a promise to make a socialist the editor of their official journal. Breaking off with the AFL the same year, De Leon personally led the creation of the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance (ST&LA) as the alternative to both existing organizations.

The ST&LA briefly made some headway amongst the largely female workforce of textile mills in New England, veterans of Knights campaigns of the 1880s. Here as elsewhere, success ended early, amidst massive unemployment and capitalist counter-attacks. De Leon’s insistence upon the absolute political fealty of ST&LA leaders likewise doomed the new movement after a few years, as even socialist-leaning craft unionists, failing to replace Gompers as head of the AFL after 1895, fatalistically accepted the status quo or hoped for a future opportunity to commit organized labor to the socialist cause. This defection alone would likely have doomed the SLP, but the movement arising in the West around Eugene Debs had the popular base among groups of ordinary Americans forever beyond the SLP reach

Opponents of De Leon more and more abandoned the SLP, a development he greeted with jeering attacks upon the personalities of his critics. The SLP might have failed entirely but for a modestly rising vote and De Leon’s own powerful rhetoric. During the later 1890s and first years of the new century, he delivered a series of addresses, reprinted in the People and virtually innumerable pamphlet editions, that demonstrated his analytic abilities and clarified his revolutionary perspectives.

During the conflicts within the socialist movement, De Leon had upped the ante on polemical and accusatory rhetoric, a habit that gave critics plenty of room to charge him with excess and divisiveness. Certain of his lofty views, he had no patience with doubters. Some AFL unions, especially in the construction trades, had indeed feuded with each other over memberships that did essentially the same work, making “raids” on competing locals with a mixture of violence and bribes. The same unions, like the home plumbers’ local of George Meany’s father in the Bronx, also traded votes with Democratic politicians, especially Irish politicians, who could deliver the goods with public building projects. But De Leon persistently over-reached, especially against perceived socialist rivals. He also set a tone so ill that Eugene Debs would complain, against the anti-De Leon faction fighting De Leon and actually splitting the SLP in 1899, that even they had learned their bad habits from him. As he lost members, however, De Leon charmed public audiences and his sections of the movement by the power of the word.

De Leon’s celebrity can be traced in no small part to the form of his lectures. He notoriously shunned the familiar crowd-pleasing devices, discouraging applause and seeking earnestly to provoke his audience into hard thought. In one of his most celebrated ruminations-become-pamphlets, Two Pages from Roman History: Plebs Leaders and Labor Leaders (1902), De Leon used the historical example of the Gracchi brothers in Rome to argue his main strategic point. The proletariat, the first social class to emerge heir apparent yet collectively pauperized, had to compensate for its tactical weakness with an absolute clarity of aims. “The proletarian revolution … must avoid, as it would a pestilence, all alliance with any other class,” any sign of weakness or dependence upon others. Only a political party with unity and clarity, De Leon’s followers believed, could prove equal to the task of leading this vulnerable but potentially all-conquering class. Little real evidence of Marxist orthodoxy for these innovations could be demonstrated from doctrine, but De Leon had, like Lenin after him, genuinely captured a sentiment in Marx’s interpretation of the Paris Commune as the wholesale replacement of the bourgeois order.

De Leon might also rightly be compared to the other socialist intellectuals of his time. In parts of Europe, great names had been established early, including a few, like Antonio Labriola, who had become leading scholars in major universities. The situation had been different in the United States, an intellectual difference clear as early as the 1880s. Few college-trained intellectuals drew close to the small socialist movements, and important academics ill-treated for their sympathy for the Knights of Labor (Professor Richard T. Ely, prominent Knights’ supporter, fled Wisconsin for Johns Hopkins) distanced themselves from presumably dangerous anarchism and socialism. The field opened wide, then, to a worldly savant of De Leon’s background, devotion and energy.

The contrast could helpfully be extended to the time when US socialists published journals of their own, traveled to European socialist congresses and tried to join in the global dialogue. After 1900, the International Socialist Review’s founding editor, A.M. Simons, had trained in Madison with key labor economists, and had wide European contacts. The magazine never gained much readership during his tenure. Readers preferred the lively journalism and illustrations of the new ISR, and The Masses.

Simons himself was sui generis, while the world of Jewish socialists, many from Yiddish-speaking backgrounds, had in their seemingly miniature world, a wide variety of leftwing minds. Poets, socialistic short story writers and playwrights abounded. But as for socialist theory, Louis B. Boudin stood almost alone, the one scholar of Marx’s economics translated into German and admired widely abroad. Still, until the time of his death, De Leon could be rightly described as the most singularly erudite American socialist thinker, possibly fluent in more languages than the Jews of the Pale who could use Russian, German, sometimes Polish or Hungarian. The wave of avowed left-wing professors came late to the United States, and by that time, De Leon had been long gone. He had not published any scholarly volumes in the paths open to him way back in the 1880s. He made his mark otherwise.
By the turn of the century, the SLP had been reduced to only a few thousand members, soon to be far outdistanced by the growing Socialist Party. Some of De Leon’s trusted functionaries deserted him shortly thereafter. Efforts by immigrants of various kinds to attach their groups to the SLP rather than the Socialist Party generally ended in disappointment, especially given De Leon’s stern unwillingness to yield any meaningful autonomy to ethnic peculiarities. But he and his faithful survived. for a time, in a kind of splendid isolation. His pamphlets provided reading matter for avowed revolutionary socialists from the United Kingdom to Ireland and Australia, with several short-lived organizations owing their inspiration to his work. Among those deeply influenced he could count Irish revolutionary James Connolly, who traveled to the United States and broke with De Leon over the issues of atheism in the socialist movement. He also made notable appearances at several international socialist congresses, arguing against immigration restrictions and other compromises with craft union policies. Thus, he forcefully backed the sentiments of Lenin and Luxemburg, mostly developed after his passing. To the De Leonite, typically a self-educated member of the working class, De Leon seemed to incarnate the true revolutionary dedication to knowledge and proletarian strategy.

The defeats of the AFL, its sinking membership and the rightward turn of its leadership meanwhile prompted unionists of varied backgrounds to conclude that the craft union had become obsolete and only a new body of industrial unionists could take on modern capital. De Leon but more often key former followers, especially the California lawyer and theoretician Austin Lewis, to suggest that the “craft” of the craft unionist operated as individual small property to be defended against leftward threats. De Leon, who had looked upon his AFL opponents as crooks, seems to have pondered the point. Perhaps, he began to suggest, the timidity of European socialist movements had a material base. They existed in a political past, relative to the United States, where they joined the bourgeoisie to combat the remnants of the old aristocratic system. American conditions, rendering craft unionism hopelessly backward, demanded more, and this could be asserted with a kind of scientific argument.

De Leon’s last major political opportunity loomed with the 1905 founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He delivered perhaps his most heralded address, “The Preamble to the IWW,” in Minneapolis just before the convention. As Big Bill Haywood, speaking at the convention, called it the “Continental Congress of the Working Class,” De Leon argued in the broadest terms that the time had come for something drastically different, and not only in the United States.

The evolution of society, De Leon insisted, had outmoded the inherently repressive political State, and objectively prepared the working class to abolish it in favor of a non-coercive, merely economic mechanism. The sources of De Leon’s theoretical stroke cannot be determined with any certainty, but seem close to the discussions of contemporary European syndicalists, with a major difference. De Leon continued to insist upon the centrality of education through political opposition to the State. He had a following within the Socialist Party and outside, suspicious of the AFL and eager for industrial unionism to succeed. For several years, the Daily People, launched in 1900, remained the only daily leftwing publication, with all its weaknesses, to proclaim the IWW as the savior of society, “the greatest thing on earth.”

After the 1907-1908 recession had wiped out a large section of IWW membership (including the dues to keep a national office afloat) and its largest affiliate, the Western Federation of Miners, had withdrawn, the groundwork was set for a factional showdown. By way of polemic against him but mainly to get rid of a perceived factional opponent, some in the IWW reasoned that he could be driven out under a pretext, and his followers would leave.

At the 1908 convention, expelled by a newly enforced rule that barred lawyers, he departed and his supporters gamely tried to set up a competing organization, the “Detroit IWW,” but with few affiliates. His son, Solon, along with Louis C. Fraina, considered a rising star in the SLP, left the party together. So did many others.

But De Leon’s ideas continued to have many devotees, some of key editors and theorists of the Wobblies, including Justus Ebert, whose pamphlet The New Society on Trial (1912) illuminated the stakes in the Lawrence textile strike; Ben H. Williams, another prominent strategist/editor; and Joseph Schlossberg whose influence in the rising Amalgamated Clothing Workers tended, in the flush union drive of wartime, toward “workers control” in a vague but emphatic way. Ebert, Williams and Schlossberg were not alone. The very ideals of the IWW including the famous “Father Haggerty’s Wheel of Fortune,” a diagram delineating the structure of the future society, had their roots in De Leon’s forceful presentations. De Leon had convincingly supplied the theoretical formula with engaging logic of industrial inevitability, much as Gilman had depicted the emancipation of women through economic self-support. Fraina, who had served as the Daily People’s correspondent during the Lawrence strike, would shortly make himself the proto-communist intellectual par excellence. Producing the first important US book on the Russian Revolution, he interpreted the Russian Soviets as workers’ councils, as the IWW had hoped to see them.

The Daily People suspended publication in 1914, and De Leon died not long after. Some thirty thousand people nevertheless appeared at his funeral in New York, a remarkable tribute to the leader of a sectarian organization that had attracted relatively to SLP membership and retained fewer still. Funerals in those days were often major public events, but many of the mourners must have read the People and admired the man who stood unrelenting against capitalism and reformism. The SLP, frozen in amber, remained utterly dedicated to his principles and memory. His essays would appear in the Weekly People for generations, as the essays of Raya Dunayevskaya would appear in the newspaper News and Letters long after her death, with a similar gravity. De Leon’s followers circulated his pamphlets widely, as a follow up to the Weekly People sold mainly on kiosks in big cities, and as an invitation to the study classes that continued into and beyond the 1980s.

Buhle, Paul. “The World of Daniel De Leon,” in From the Knights of Labor to the New World Order, by Paul Buhle. New York: Garland Publishers, 1997.

Daniel De Leon: The Man and His Work; a Symposium. New York: New York Labor News, 1918.

Seretan, L. Glen. Daniel De Leon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1979.

Socialist Labor Party Records on Microfilm. Collection Number: 5168 mf. Kheel Center for Labor- Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL05168mf.html