Benson, Allan L.

BENSON, ALLAN L. (1871–1940). The first two decades of twentieth century are remembered as the halcyon days of the Socialist Party of America, during which it ran candidate slates on tickets headed by charismatic orator Eugene V. Debs. Only once during the twenty-year span from 1900 to 1920 did the Socialists nominate another individual for the highest office in the land—journalist Allan L. Benson in 1916.

Allan Louis Benson was born in Plainwell, Michigan, the son of a factory worker. His mother died during his infancy, and the boy was raised by his grandfather, a Michigan farmer. Although he aspired to become a lawyer, Benson was forced by economic necessity to give up formal education after just one year of high school. His further learning came through personal reading and study.

In 1891, Benson escaped a low wage factory job building railroad cars to take a position as managing editor of a small daily newspaper in Ann Arbor. Poised and polished, he was able to parlay this experience into positions rewriting telegraph copy at major newspapers in Chicago and Salt Lake City before landing managing editor positions for large news organizations in Detroit and Washington, DC.

Benson was gradually won over to radical ideas, and early in the twentieth century he gave up mainstream newspaper work to write books and articles for the socialist press. He first gained national notice with a book published by Victor L. Berger’s Milwaukee Social-Democratic Publishing Company, Socialism Made Plain: Why the Few are Rich and the Many are Poor (1904). Greater prominence came in the next decade as a lead writer for the mass circulation Pearson’s Magazine, edited by Frank Harris, for which he wrote monthly exposés on socialist and pacifist themes.

With the eruption of war in Europe in 1914, the outspoken anti-militarist Benson persistently promoted a ban on United States entry into the conflict until approved by a national referendum of the American people. Though criticized by many both inside and outside the Socialist Party as wildly impractical, this idea found traction among the rank and file.

When in 1916 Eugene V. Debs finally stood aside and declined the party’s presidential nomination, Benson was tapped to head the ticket in a national vote of party members. Running with prominent anti-war activist George R. Kirkpatrick, the 1916 Benson for President campaign was bitterly disappointing, garnering a mere 590,000 votes—barely 60 percent of the Socialist vote in 1912.

Following American entry into the European was in 1917, Benson was swept up by the national fervor to stamp out “German imperialism” in the “war to end all wars.” He slammed the Socialist Party as a tool of the “anarchist” Industrial Workers of the World in a June 1917 article in the renamed social-patriotic iteration of the venerable Appeal to Reason, for which he began to write, and bolted the party altogether in July to join the fledgling Social Democratic League of America. After the war Benson launched his own short-lived monthly magazine, Reconstruction, and wrote several books on popular, non-political topics. Afflicted with pernicious anemia, Benson spent his later years as an invalid in Yonkers, New York, where he died at age sixty-eight.

Currie, Harold W. “Allan L. Benson, Salesman of Socialism, 1902–1916,” Labor History, vol. 11, no. 3 (Summer 1970), 285–303.

Allen L. Benson. Works. Internet Archive.