Hillquit, Morris

HILLQUIT, MORRIS (1869–1933). Popularizer, politician, consummate adapter of European-style social democracy to Jewish American life, Morris Hillquit played a leading role in the Socialist Party from its formation until his death. Born Moses Hillkowitz in Riga, Latvia, of assimilated Jewish parents, he attained an exceptional education for a Jew in the Russian school system and immigrated to the United States in 1885. Working in the garment trades of the Lower East Side, he joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and soon helped to organize the United Hebrew Trades. Less a journalist than an organizational talent, he was named manager of the weekly Arbeter Zeitung, and meanwhile studied law at New York University. Passing the New York bar exam in 1893, Hillquit became the most prominent of a handful (later, a far larger number) of Jewish former workers turned lawyers who remained loyal to the socialist cause. In the following decades, he would handle many hundreds of workers’ injury or civil liberty cases with only the smallest of fees.

Meanwhile, Hillquit emerged as an orthodox Marxist in his own terms, a “centrist” in the 1890s political lineup of loyal De Leon followers on the Left and independent socialists (mostly but not entirely native-born) on the Right. This perspective placed him roughly with Karl Kautsky of the German Social Democrats, against Bernstein’s “revisionism,” which denied the efficacy of socialist orthodoxy, but also more forcefully against the proponents of the general strike or other mass direct actions. Officially taking the name “Hillquit” in 1897, he led the “Kangaroo” rebellion within the SLP two years later, splitting the organization roughly in half. Hillquit dominated this dissident SLP in strategy and in theoretical perspectives. Along with other leaders of his group, he bargained intensively before agreeing to unity with Eugene Debs’s Social Democracy of America in 1901. Through that agreement, he emerged a foremost leader of the New Yorkers in the new Socialist Party.

According to his critics, Hillquit’s factional maneuvering did not cease, but only changed form. He reluctantly accepted the titular party leadership of Eugene Debs, and sought occasionally to put up other candidates for the presidential race. He was an inveterate foe of the Industrial Workers of the World and of the Socialist Labor faction that urged labor activity independent of the American Federation of Labor. He led the bitter internal party struggle to renounce the theory of sabotage, precipitating William D. Haywood’s removal from the National Executive Committee and the abandonment of the party by many revolutionary socialists. On the other hand, Hillquit had personally defended Haywood in the 1907 Steunenberg case, and he earnestly opposed, at Socialist International congresses and elsewhere, efforts by Milwaukee leader Victor Berger to urge immigration restriction to curry favor with the American Federation of Labor and supposedly raise the living standard of American workers. He also generally resisted calls for socialists to merge their efforts into a labor party. In the war years, Hillquit took a courageous anti-military position, doing much to shape the official party posture and the extraparty anti-war groups such as the People’s Council of America.

As a public figure, Hillquit proved an attractive political candidate, if not the equal of Berger or of Meyer London. His runs for Congress in 1906 and 1908, although unsuccessful, garnered wide public interest (including the endorsement of noted liberal and radical intellectuals) and helped lay the basis for London’s victory in the Lower East Side a few years later. Hillquit’s New York City mayoral candidacy in 1918 was widely viewed as a referendum on the First World War, his more than twenty percent of the total vote a strong signal to Washington and his forceful campaign an inestimable assistance to numerous Socialist candidates elected to New York city and state offices that year.

Hillquit also emerged, in these years, as the earliest official historian of American socialism, and as one of its prime popularizers of socialist theory. The History of Socialism in the United States, published in 1903 and revised for a new edition in 1910, had the memoirist’s touch, but also a preliminary scholarly dedication. His primary perspective, dividing early “utopian” from later “scientific” socialism, was consistent with Friedrich Engels’s brief Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Rather unfair to his factional opponents (especially De Leon), the book was in many other respects a remarkable intellectual achievement for its time. Hillquit’s 1912 theoretical study Socialism in Theory and Practice, on the other hand, was not greatly different from or superior to a half-dozen other contemporary American efforts along the same lines. Like the others, it had its following, mainly among Americanizing Jewish immigrants.

Hillquit suffered his major and permanent political defeat with the Russian Revolution’s impetus to American Bolshevism, and with the ascendancy of a new generation of Jewish radicals no longer sharing his calm confidence in socialism’s inevitable, peaceful, parliamentary advance. In another sense, the defection of liberal middle classes from municipal socialism to mainstream politicians and to Woodrow Wilson’s war policies had already restricted Hillquit to the Jewish ghetto. Stricken by tuberculosis in the late 1910s, Hillquit hoped in vain for an amicable separation of Communists and Socialists. Following the split, and following many savage verbal attacks upon him by the Communists (including Lenin himself), Hillquit became bitterly anticommunist, penning in 1923 From Marx to Lenin as a formal denunciation of Leninism.

Hillquit meanwhile had become the reigning senior figure in the reduced Socialist Party. He led the Socialists in supporting Robert La Follette’s 1924 Progressive campaign, and once again in nominating Norman Thomas as a titular leader to fill Debs’s shoes. A partial revival of the Socialist Party, ironically, found many critics regarding Hillquit as an obstacle to the successful Americanization of the movement. After a political brawl, he won a Pyrrhic victory in 1932, retaining his post as national chairman but helping to set the stage for the ultimate Socialist faction fight of 1935 in which his fellow “Old Guard” activists withdrew themselves and most New York socialist institutions from the party. In a last electoral effort for mayor in 1933, campaigning heroically despite his illness, Hillquit won a quarter-million votes. A few months later, his autobiography, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, appeared, an anecdotal treatment not destined to become a classic of American socialist literature. Almost within weeks, he died of tuberculosis.

Hillquit, Morris. Loose Leaves from a Busy Life. New York: Macmillan, 1933.

Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.

Pratt, Norma Fain. Morris Hillquit: A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Morris Hillquit Papers, 1886-1944. Finding Aid. Wisconsin Historical Society. http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;view=reslist;subview=standard;didno=uw-whs-ny00h