"Work Among Women: A Progressive Woman Leaflet." [circa 1912] Short leaflet soliciting subscriptions to The Progressive Woman, a publication from J.A. Wayland's Girard, Kansas Appeal to Reason Socialist stable. The leaflet lists reasons why Socialist propaganda work among women is important, including: "Woman is disfranchised. The Socialist Party demands equal suffrage for all, regardless of sex, color, or race. Woman's disfranchisement is a great factor in holding here in economic slavery. Woman's position in industry is of a much lower status than man's. She seldom receives equal wages for the same grade of work. Woman has become a very large part of the industrial world. She is the most formidable competitor man has in the industries."

 

"A Statement to Our Readers," by J. Louis Engdahl [July 7, 1917] The Wilson administration wasted no time in putting the so-called Espionage Law of June 15, 1917 into effect, using it to declare the June 16, 1917 issue of the Socialist Party's official organ, The American Socialist, to have been non-mailable two weeks after the issue had been already delivered. This decision, never announced to the Socialist Party, set in motion a process whereby each of the future issues of this publication were deemed under suspicion and were consequently delayed until a final bureaucratic ruling on the mailability of each specific issue could be rendered. This culminated with the freezing of a special "Liberty Edition" of June 30. In response, American Socialist editor J. Louis Engdahl reduced the size of the July 7 issue from its usual 4 pages to 2, with this brief "Statement to Our Readers" outlining the cause of the delay of the previous issue. "Our paper will be published regularly. Every effort will be made to comply with the law and at the same time issue a publication that will be a credit to the Socialist movement," Engdahl declared. Only 9 more issues would be published before Socialist Party headquarters would be raided and the publication terminated.

 

"Text of the Search Warrant Served During the Raid of Socialist Party Headquarters and The American Socialist, September 5, 1917." On September 5, 1917, a raid was launched on the Chicago headquarters of the Socialist Party of America and its official organ, The American Socialist. This is the text of the search warrant served in conjunction with the raid. The warrant exhaustively lists any possible sort of document, publication, or picture that might be of use to the government's impending felony case against the officials of the party. Interesting is the rather incoherent list of publications for which the raiders expected to find back-issue files and printing plates, including anarchist publications like The Revolt and Mother Earth, the well-known New York Socialist publication The Masses, and the leaflet of an entirely different political organization, the SLP's "Manifesto of Socialist Labor Party on Present War Crisis."

 

"The American Socialist Martyred in the Great Cause of World Democracy and Peace," by J. Louis Engdahl [Sept. 15, 1917] American Socialist editor J. Louis Engdahl recounts the last two months of existence of the former official organ of the Socialist Party of America. Banned from the mails, the final (Sept. 8, 1917) issue of The American Socialist had been dispatched via rail express in bundles to major cities for local distribution. "To seek to serve all of our subscribers in this manner meant early and complete bankruptcy," Engdahl noted, adding that post office regulations would not allow The Eye-Opener to take over the old subscriber list under its 2nd Class permit unless the old publication was terminated. Three previous issues (June 16th, 23rd, and 30th, 1917) had been previously declared unmailable under the so-called Espionage Act, and the six issues following were "issued under a local censorship in Chicago," Engdahl states. A final effort had been made to gain a new 2nd Class permit for The American Socialist, without reply from the authorities until "we got our final answer on Wednesday afternoon, Sept. 5 [1917], when a score of operatives from the federal building in Chicago, reinforced by deputy marshals and local police, swooped down on our office and demanded everything in sight, from typewriters to mailing lists." Consequently, the decision was made to terminate The American Socialist and transfer the flag of the Socialist Party to the Chicago weekly, The Eye-Opener.

 

"Hillquit Scores Raids on Socialist Headquarters." [Sept. 22, 1917] Brief news story from the Socialist Party's de facto official organ containing SP leader and attorney Morris Hillquit's comments about the Sept. 5, 1917 raid of Socialist Party headquarters in Chicago. Hillquit declared that the coordinated raids of Sept. 5 were "part of a very definite policy on the part of the federal government to exterminate all organs of opposition and to stifle all voices of criticism of the war." Hillquit declared that ""I do not know of any country at war that is on the Allied side or in the Central Powers that has dared to go so far in the destruction of democratic institutions and civil rights of the people under pretexts of military necessity as has this country at the very outset of the war." Proclaiming the Wilson administration's actions to be "high-handed" and "lawless," Hillquit noted that the government's repressive policy, like that of the Tsarist autocracy, was driving the Socialist Party and various pacifist organizations to "methods of secret conspiracy activities" -- a state of affairs which did nothing to stave the revolution is Tsarist Russia.

 

"The Trial of Eugene Debs," by Max Eastman [November 1918] Account of the Sept. 10-12, 1918 trial of "spiritual chief and hero of American socialism" Eugene Debs in Cleveland for alleged violation of the so-called Espionage Act. Eastman, editor of The Liberator, writes for his readers that due to postal regulations he would make no effort to quote Debs' words concerning the war in Europe -- the essence of the trial -- but would rather limit himself to description of the proceedings and Debs' general statements on Socialism. Consequently, this account is of greatest value as a historical document for its descriptions of character and scene: (1) the judge ("Judge Westenhaver has the broad jowl and tightly gripped mouth of the dominant, magisterial man of affairs. His lips are so well clamped down at the corners that they remain taut when he speaks, keeping his aspect as stern as though he were silent. And yet his words come rather courteous -- softly, and with a precise lilt that trails off through long sentences into silence and grammatical uncertainty. I do not think he is quite so magisterial as he looks.... Judge Westenhaver was a young lawyer in the farmertown of Martinsburg, West Virginia. He was Newton Baker's partner there, and probably owes his appointment to the Secretary of War. He could not go to college, but he aspired to be educated, to be citified, to be 'correct,' to pass in any company as a 'man of culture and attainment' -- in short, to get away as far as possible from the small-town lawyer that he was."); (2) the jury ("...their character and probable reaction to a prophet of proletarian revolt was more simple to predict. They were about 72 years old, worth $50 to 60 thousand, retired from business, from pleasure, and from responsibility for all troubles arising outside of their own family. An investigator for the defense computed the average age of the entire venire of 100 men; it was 70 years."); (3) witness C.E. Ruthenberg ("His quietness, his gracious demeanor, his thin, keen, agile face -- he is like a smiling hawk -- seemed to testify to the absurdity of sending any of them to jail."); (4) Debs' speech to the jury ("It was dark when Debs began speaking, though only two o'clock in the afternoon, and as he continued it grew steadily darker, the light of the chandeliers prevailing, and the windows looking black as at nighttime with gathering thunderclouds. His utterance became more clear and piercing against that impending shadow, and it made the simplicity of his faith seem almost like a portent in this time of terrible and dark events.")

 

"Speech to the Court at the Time of Sentencing," by J. Louis Engdahl [Feb. 20, 1919] Socialist editor John Louis Engdahl was one of five top leaders of the Socialist Party tried by the federal government for alleged violation of the so-called Espionage Act during the first part of 1919 -- the other defendants including National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer, former and future Socialist Congressman Victor Berger, youth section leader William F. Kruse, and Literature Department head Irwin Tucker. All five of the accused were found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in Federal prison by hangin' Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis -- verdicts which were eventually reversed on appeal due to judicial prejudice. This is Engdahl's speech to the court at the time of his sentencing, as published in a pamphlet issued by the SPA. "I have noting to retract, at this crucial moment in my life. No valid argument presents itself why I should change any statement I have made, either through the printed or the spoken word," Engdahl declared. His view of the European conflagration in which Woodrow Wilson had embroiled America remained unchanged: "It was a capitalist war. It was born of the imperialistic ambitions of money-mad nations in the grip of the profit system. No nation can join in the struggle to create a free world until it has liberated itself from the social system that breeds both wealth and want, war, and woe." Engdahl saw the nationalist hysteria associated with American entry into the war as the direct cause of the repression: "For the time being extreme intolerance has usurped the places" of American constitutional guarantees of liberty, he declared. Engdahl depicted the Socialist movement as the vanguard of the 3rd American revolution -- the first two being independence from English monarchy and the defeat of the Southern "black slaveocracy." The legal structure of decaying capitalism was no more capable of rendering sound judgment on the adherents of the new day than the defenders of British despotism or of American chattel slavery had been in their own, Engdahl declared, adding of the prosecution in his case, "Coercion, intimidation, misrepresentation, and falsification -- all that, and more, is expected as a matter of course. Our trial, therefore, was no disappointment. No ends were too mean, no act too low, if it only lead to a conviction."

 

"A Proletarian Dictatorship vs. Parliamentarism," by Alexander Bilan [March 5, 1919] Article from the pages of The Ohio Socialist by future founding member of the National Executive Committee of the Communist Labor Party Alexander Bilan. Bilan states that "It is a mistake to believe that parliamentarism is a synonym for democracy. On the contrary, we find that where the parliamentary majority rules it is not democratic, and where it is approaching democracy parliamentary government becomes a weak institution." Victories of working class candidates in capitalist parliamentary elections do not lead to true democracy, Bilan observes, but rather to a powerless life in the margins. "As long as the working class representatives are few in number they are merely disturbers of the peace of the gay bourgeois company, to whom nobody is willing to listen unless compelled to. If the bourgeois have enough confidence in their strength and the support of the troublemakers is weak, they simply throw them out of the parliamentary body," he notes. If, on the other hand, working class representatives are elected in sufficient number, their votes can become decisive for certain reform legislation, although the question of their limits in participation soon arises. "The working class is denied the possibility of gaining a majority of the seats in parliament as long as the constitutions drawn by the ruling class exist," Bilan states. "Where free press, free speech, and freedom of assemblage exist, parliamentarism has played its part, just the same as has the capitalist system on the economic field. The best agitation and propaganda forces of the working class have to be employed outside of parliament in great mass meetings.... It is necessary that the rising power, the working class, organize as a class politically, but with the firm conviction that parliaments represent the dictatorship of the capitalist class, which must be replaced by the dictatorship of the working class. This dictatorship of the proletariat arouses the ire of the capitalist class because it abolishes all privileges and puts everybody in one class," Bilan concludes.

 

"Toledo Crowd Compels Release of Socialist Speakers: Audience Aroused Because Denied Freedom of Speech Disarm Policeman and Marches on Police Station." [events of March 30, 1919] News report of a little-known event of the turbulent year 1919 -- a near-riot in Toledo, Ohio, caused when the mayor arbitrarily decided to deny Eugene Debs uses of a city auditorium which had been rented out to a local union and transferred to the use of the Socialist Party. Even though Debs was ill in Akron and unable to make the trip, the facility was locked up by the city administration. A great mass of people, unable to attend an indoor rally at which state organizer Charles Baker was to speak, moved to a city park nearby -- where they were met by virtually the entire Toledo police department, who began arresting one person after another as they mounted the McKinley Monument and began to speak. The crowd swelled to as many as 10,000 people and grew more and more restive as the Socialists decided to take a stand for free speech by sending an endless list of speakers to the front, thus filling the jail and force the issues. Over 70 people were arrested and police control of the vast throng was slipping. To avert a riot, the city administration negotiated with Socialist leaders, who insisted upon the release of all those arrested in exchange for their work to pacify the mob. The mayor made this concession and the mood of the crowd was turned from anger to jubilation at the free speech victory won.

 

"Sidelights on Toledo Free Speech Fight," by Thomas Devine [events of March 30, 1919] Valuable participant's memoir of the March 30, 1919 Debs Rally Gone Awry in Toledo, Ohio. City Councilman Devine provides a colorful description of the events of the afternoon and evening, which was apparently triggered when the police interpreted a ban on Debs' use of a city auditorium as a ban on the constitutional right of Toledo Socialists to assemble and speak. When a Socialist soldier named Frank Serafin was roughly arrested by the police, the mood of the crowd turned hostile. Devine and Secretary of Local Toledo, Socialist Party, Frank Toohey were the two individuals with whom the city negotiated at the 11th hour to avert the riot which they nearly created. Devine characterizes the crowd as both orderly and disciplined and blames the trouble on Mayor Schreiber's poor decision to ban the Socialists as well as the local police for their unconstitutional behavior and excessive tactics. The jubilee in the streets with the freed soldier Frank Serafin hoisted aloft as a hero of liberty is characterized by Devine as the end to "a perfect day." A letter from the mayor to the Toledo Safety Director is appended in which Schreiber in which he states that "The order issued from the executive department closed Memorial Hall to Eugene V. Debs, but that was the full extent of the order" and that police had overstepped their authority by attempting to ban the further outdoor meeting of the Socialists, noting the "right of free speech is a fundamental right, clearly guaranteed by the constitution of the United States, and one to be jealously guarded. It prevails everywhere, both in public and in private places."

 

"Open Letter to Louis C. Fraina in Boston from Adolph Germer in Chicago, published April 2, 1919." Testy reply of Socialist Party Executive Secretary Adolph Germer to comments levied against him by Louis Fraina in the March 8, 1919 issue of The Revolutionary Age. Germer declares that "It is a thousand times easier to circulate a falsehood, and create distrust, than it is to instill confidence in the honesty and integrity of those who have been selected, wisely or unwisely, to administer the affairs of the Socialist Party. It seems to be human nature to believe that persons in official party positions always have 'ulterior motives.' There are also persons who regard it as a greater duty to carry on an internal quarrel, regardless of the consequences to the movement, than to enlist new converts to our cause." He outlines his personal opposition to an Emergency National Convention of the SPA in 1919, citing factors of cost and a previously planned platform and nominating convention in 1920. Germer states that Fraina's assertion that Germer had administratively disqualified the referendum motion of Local Queens County, NY to hold a 1919 convention was erroneous. He also indicates that the Socialist Party's effort to reach out to other organizations to generate mass pressure upon the Wilson regime to "regain victims for the wartime victims" (a United Front action, it should be noted) was a higher priority than holding a national convention to take a stand on international issues. Germer further indicates that the call for the convention is rather a matter of factional power-politics, writing "One of the champions of the convention idea put it very bluntly the other day when he said: 'We want to see who is boss in the party.' Others have expressed it more tactfully."

 

"Speech to the Jury," by Benjamin Gitlow [Feb. 5, 1920] One of the first American Communists persecuted for his beliefs was Benjamin Gitlow, a New York CLP member and close associate of John Reed. Gitlow was arrested for violation of the New York Criminal Anarchism Law on November 8, 1919, for his role as business manager of The Revolutionary Age, in which the Left Wing Manifesto was published. Gitlow's trial began Jan. 22, 1920, and went to the jury on February 5, with Gitlow delivering the speech here in his defense. Gitlow maintained that capitalism was unable to resolve its internal political contradictions and was "in a state of collapse" and the cause of "untold misery and hardships to the working men." Gitlow states that "The socialists have always maintained that the change from capitalism to socialism would be a fundamental change, that is, we would have a complete reorganization of society, that this change would not be a question of reform." The Soviet system established in Russia is lauded as the applicable model for the American future: "The dictatorship of the proletariat is a new form of organization. It is based on the industrial representation of the worker in industry. Today you have a government called a democracy, which is based on the territorial divisions of the people inhabiting the nations. Under the Soviet form of government, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, this condition is changed. You have a form of government that is based on representation of industry... The worker in industry today is not democratically controlling the affairs of his life, and the socialists maintain that it is the duty of the working class to organize efficiently for the democratic control of industry. And we see that in Russia, where we have the dictatorship of the proletariat, the democratic control of industry has been put into effect."

 

"Resolution on the Debs Nomination: Adopted by the First Convention of the United Communist Party, Bridgman, MI -- May 31, 1920." Resolution of the newly establish United Communist Party reaffirming the position taken by the two former organizations from which it was formed -- that "neither respect and love for Debs, nor admiration for his long service in the militant labor movement of this country, can efface the fact that this nomination makes him the standard-bearer of the Right Wing remnant of the party which existed at the time he went into the Atlanta penitentiary." The resolution states that "The name of Debs cannot in least alter the fact that the Socialist Party of the United States is an organization inherently anti-revolutionary, in that it fosters the illusion that capitalism can be destroyed through the legislative and constitutional methods of capitalist "democracy." The Socialist Party has the ambition to make itself part of this capitalist government, thereby to reform it. The Communists stand for the destruction of this form of government and constitutionalism, since these are in their very nature the mainstay of capitalist exploitation."

 

"Resolution on the 1920 Campaign: Adopted by the First Convention of the United Communist Party, Bridgman, MI -- May 31, 1920." Statement of the Founding Convention of the UCP that it the organization "will not attempt to nominate candidates in the 1920 elections." The resolution explained that the defeat of the steel and coal strikes by state intervention had ushered in a period of state repression against the radical movement. "These events have compelled the rebuilding of the party along entirely new lines.... Hundreds of cases are pending in the courts. The outcome of the cases up to this time labels the party as an outlaw organization; to expose one's affiliation with the party is alone sufficient to cause deportation or long imprisonment. Nominations are impossible under these circumstances." The Communists' left sectarian position of boycotting the 1920 elections rather than lending critical support to the Socialists was not forgotten by the SP when the concept of the United Front was unveiled in 1922.

 

"It Will Be Made Worthwhile," by Isaac E. Ferguson [July 3, 1920] Article from the UCP's official organ by top Ruthenberg lieutenant I.E. Ferguson, of Chicago. Ferguson explains the recent split in the CPA as the by-product of bloc voting by a 5 or 6 person majority on the CEC, with the minority allowed "no open forums through which to rally the membership against the majority." By the end of March, Ferguson was frustrated to the point of no longer pretending that there was any sort of unanimity on the CEC, dominated as it was by the group lead by Nicholas Hourwich. Ferguson states that he turned his attention to writing about the history of the Left Wing movement, hoping to obliquely show "that only by the most decisive action could the party be saved from the impotency of a CEC dominated by Andrew [Hourwich] & Co." Ferguson states that "the Left Wing movement, and thereby the Communist Party, had been artificially diverted into the political plaything of a few Russian-speaking leaders who had stultified the growth of the Left Wing and had paralyzed the Communist Party by taking out of it all realism of an actual functioning organization in the United States." To his surprise, a factional split erupted, based around the Chicago District Committee (headed by DO Leonid Belsky). By April 20 "a decisive split had become unavoidable" and Ferguson set his historical study aside to instead engage in practical politics in the new factional environment.

 

"A Farewell to Controversy," by C.E. Ruthenberg [July 3, 1920] Lengthy analysis of the April 1920 split of the CPA from the perspective of factional leader C.E. Ruthenberg. Ruthenberg traces the origin of the split to a unanimous resolution of the Chicago District Committee in early April 1920 stating that "unless decisions of the Central Executive Committee in regard to organization problems and on charges against members of that body could be satisfactorily explained in a personal conference, the Chicago District Committee would refuse to recognize the authority of the CEC and [issue a call for] a conference of district organizations, and through such a conference call a national convention." Ruthenberg says that he met with the Chicago District Committee (headed by Leonid Belsky) and convinced them to remain in the organization until the convocation of a forthcoming national convention, but that the CEC majority group (headed by Nicholas Hourwich) had move to take reprisals against the Chicago organization, which effectively "broke the unity of the party." Ruthenberg characterizes the CPA's demand for the return of the party funds with which Ruthenberg absconded as "the shallowest kind of hypocrisy," since to demand compliance by Ruthenberg, "who spoke for a majority of the party and who was supported by a majority of the District Organizers and Federation representatives present at the meeting at which the break took place," meant an appeal to "that mawkish, sentimental legalism which gives the lie to the pretensions of being simon-pure Bolsheviks, which the Federation group so loudly proclaims itself." Ruthenberg -- the majority of whose own faction was comprised of non-english language groups -- repeated refers to the CPA majority group as the "Federation group" and to the party as "the Federation of Federations, 3 or 4 separate parties loosely united by an Executive Committee." He claims that the UCP includes at least 60 percent of the membership of the former CPA and calls for the "absorption" of the remaining members of the "Federation group" into the new organization.

 

"The Crisis in American Agriculture," by Henry C. Wallace [Nov. 15, 1921] During the fall of 1920 and into 1921, American farm commodity prices plummeted, pushing the nation's agriculture into a state of severe crisis. This critical situation is detailed in this extensive excerpt from the first annual report of Republican President Warren Harding's Secretary of Agriculture, Henry C. Wallace (not to be confused with his son Henry A. Wallace, the Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1940 and Vice President during FDR's third term). Wallace-the-elder notes that "The crops of the year 1920 were produced at the greatest costs ever known. These costs were justified by prices which prevailed at planting time. They were incurred willingly because the farmers had been told over and over again that overseas there was a hungry world waiting to be fed and that there would be a strong demand for all they could produce. The production was large; the farmers worked very hard, and climatic conditions favored good crops. But before the crops were harvested prices had so decreased that at market time the crops sold for far less than the cost of production... Hundreds of thousands produced at heavy financial loss." With the inflated costs of farm labor and transportation relatively fixed, the fall of market prices for agricultural commodities proved particularly disastrous. This drop in product values was heavy indeed -- "The purchasing power of our major grain crops is little more than half what it was on an average for the five prewar years of 1910-1914, inclusive," Wallace observes. This catastrophe was made still worse by a spate of borrowing to buy farmland at the speculatively inflated prices that developed during the proseperous wartime years. This spelled disaster for untold thousands of farmers in 1921, Wallace says, adding that young farmers just starting out were particularly hard hit.

 

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