JANUARY 1911
Able Talent in Array of Lyceum Course Speakers: Forceful Organizers and Entertainers Sure to Please All," by L.E. Katterfeld [Jan. 4, 1911] One of the leading leaders of the Communist Labor Party and its successor, the United Communist Party, was Ludwig E. "Dutch" Katterfeld, a veteran Socialist Party functionary. This article from the Chicago Daily Socialist documents Katterfeld's work in 1911 as head of the SPA's short-lived speakers' bureau, the Lyceum Bureau. Katterfeld explains the new program and details the list of touring speakers, who together presented a "lyceum course" on behalf of the Socialist Party. Katterfeld presents brief biographies of C.B. Hoffman, editor of the Chicago Daily Socialist as well as Oscar Ameringer and George Kirkpatrick, filling in for the jailed Fred Warren of The Appeal to Reason. "The opposition used to claim that the Socialist movement would never gain a foothold here, but the tremendous gains of the Socialist Party during the past year have put that claim to sleep forever," Katterfeld declares.



"Danger Ahead," by Eugene V. Debs [January 1911]  In the wake of the unprecedented electoral success of the Socialist Party of America in the fall 1910 elections, party leader Gene Debs was one of the first to throw a wet blanket on blind enthusiasm with this short piece published in International Socialist Review. Debs colorfully remarks that "Voting for socialism is not socialism any more than a menu is a meal" and cautions the party faithful to guard against the danger that the Socialist Party will be swamped by an exodus from the old parties seeing a coming government headed by the rising SPA as a distributor of government jobs. Moreover, Debs notes, "the truth is that we have not a few members who regard vote-getting as of supreme importance, no matter by what method the votes may be secured, and this leads them to hold out inducements and make representations which are not at all compatible with the stern and uncompromising principles of a revolutionary party.... Socialism is a matter of growth, of evolution, which can be advanced by wise methods, but never by obtaining for it a fictitious vote." Debs declares "the economic organization of the working class" to be of "far greater importance than increasing the vote of the Socialist Party," but warns against opportunistic promises being made to "American Federation of Labor and its labor-dividing and corruption-breeding craft unions" in pursuit of votes.



"The Socialist and Syndicalist Movements in France," by William Z. Foster [Jan. 24, 1911]  Former Socialist turned hardline Syndicalist William Z. Foster takes on a fundamental premise of American socialist ideology in this lengthy article from the IWW press -- the notion that the workers' movement advances through joint party-political and trade union-economic activity. Citing French experience, Foster challenges the idea that political action and direct action are complementary, arguing instead that the intellectual-dominated political movement collaborates with capitalism to expand its own influence at the  expense of the working class economic movement. Political socialism and economic syndicalism are held by Foster to be competing and adversarial tendencies. Politicians of every stripe, including Socialist politicians, are said by Foster to manipulate organized workers under the pretext of helping them. Foster asserts that Syndicalists actually see their movement as self-sufficient, solving their problems successfully by "direct action tactics alone." Rather than attempting to "penetrate" the government to pass ameliorative legislation, as the Socialists would have it, Syndicalist direct action coerces the state into the passage of laws, in Foster's view. Foster calls upon the IWW as an organization to maintain a policy of "strict official neutrality towards all political parties" and for its members to "vigorously combat the political action theory, be it advocated by the SP or any other 'party.'"



APRIL 1911

"Join the Party" (Editorial in the Columbus Socialist) [April 29, 1911] Perhaps the moment of greatest optimism in the history of the Socialist Party is documented in this front page editorial from The Socialist, published in Columbus, Ohio. Congressman Victor Berger was installed in office and the groundswell of popular support for the Socialist cause was palpable. Paid membership in the SPA had topped 78,000, it was reported, with National Executive Secretary Mahlon Barnes predicting 100,000 dues-payers by the start of the next year. There were more dues-paying members of the Socialist Party of America than the Socialist Party of France, a country in which twice the vote was garnered. The future was looking like roses, with at least a million votes predicted in the 1912 Presidential campaign and half a dozen Socialist Congressmen envisioned. Notable is the absolutely total commitment to the electoral road to Socialism, in which "capture" of the state through the ballot box was not only plausible but virtually preordained by history. "Never before has the future looked as bright for the Socialist Party in the United States as it does today," the editorialist declares. "There does not seem to be anything too big for it to accomplish during the next few years."


"Negro Resolution: Passed by the Ohio State Convention of the Socialist Party of Ohio, April 27-30, 1911." The early Socialist Party of America is frequently viewed as ambivalent to the question of race, at best, including as it did among its ranks at least a few virulent racists. This 1911 resolution of the Socialist Party of Ohio indicates that the SPA was not totally blind to the fact that American blacks represented a particularly exploited stratum of the American working classes which should be incorporated into the party ranks. The resolution is brief and to the point, declaring "It is the sense of this convention that we invite the negro to join the Socialist Party, which would give him an equal opportunity to receive the full social product of his labor, and urge that competent speakers be engaged by the State Executive Committee to organize the negro voters of Ohio into the Socialist Party. It is perhaps worthy of mention in the context of this site that CLP founding members Tom Clifford and Lawrence Zitt and CPA founding member C.E. Ruthenberg were among the delegates to the 1911 Socialist Party of Ohio conclave.


JUNE 1911

"Patriotism," by Ralph Korngold [June 1911] This short essay, really a prose poem, by Socialist Party activist Ralph Korngold was published in the monthly magazine of the Young People's Socialist Federation and Socialist Sunday Schools. "The capitalist class, by making the workers propertyless, has made them fatherlandsless. The workers have no country. This is no more your country than the shop you work in is your shop or the factory you work in is your factory. You are simply employed there, that is all.... I can imagine Morgan being patriotic, or Rockefeller, or Weyerhauser, but why a workingman, no matter to what country he belongs, should be patriotic is more than I can see.... Let Rockefeller and Morgan fight their own battles. The workingmen of the world have but one common enemy -- the capitalist class of the world."



"Why Boys Should Not Join the 'Boy Scouts,'" by Celia Rosatstein [June 1911]   The decade of the 1910s was marked by an ideological struggle for the hearts and minds of children, pitting on the one side the paramilitary Boy Scouts of America and on the other the radical anti-militarists of the Socialist Sunday School movement. This article from Young Socialists Magazine -- produced by the publishers of the socialist German daily New Yorker Volkszeitung -- makes the plea for SSS boys to reject the appeals of the Boy Scouts movement. Rosatstein writes: "Do not join the scouts. You will be taught to stand up for your master, to respect your master, to obey your master, and in case of a strike to shoot to kill. They will teach you that the workers are fools; that they don’t know what they are talking about when they want their rights. And when your parents who had struggled hard to support you that you may grow up to be good and healthy men, rise up and still struggle that you and your brothers and sisters may live in plenty, you, being on the side of the capitalists, will crush them. And yet you want to join an army where you will be taught to do the same."

 

"Who is the Foreigner?" by D. Bond [June 1911] Short anti-racist article from The International Socialist Review advocating acceptance of a class view of society rather than one of artificial racial and ethnic divisions. "There are but two nations in the civilized world. To which nation do you belong? Do you belong to the nation that lives by working, or to the nation that lives by owning? Some people who think they live by working in reality live by working the workers. Preachers, lawyers, capitalists, and burglars are apt to be of this class. 'Workingmen of all countries, unite.' That means unite in your own nation. The Chinaman, Jap, Mexican, Italian, Hungarian, or Negro who works, belongs to my nation. He belongs to your nation if you both are doing needful work," Bond declares.


"Comrade Bloor at Nelsonville," by W.W. Green [events of June 21-22, 1911] An excellent little snippet of Socialist social history here -- an account of two speeches by firebrand orator "Mother" Ella Reeve Bloor. Her June 21, 1911 speech in Nelsonville, Ohio drew a counterdemonstration in the other end of the town square, featuring a sermon by a preacher. Bloor seems to have won the contest handily: "When the preacher had finished his sermon he only had six listeners, while as many hundreds as you could count on the fingers of both hands gathered compactly around the little lady and held their breath while she gave them the message of Peace on earth, good will toward man." Then next day Bloor and Green went underground at Mine 204 to speak to several hundred coalminers assembled in a large cavern. "The miners cheered lustily as she drove and clinched nails in the coffin of Capitalism. She showed them how they had voted themselves into a darkness worse than the gloom that surrounded them -- that their unions were no more a remedy than their bank lamps were to dispel the blackness of the mine. They had voted themselves in -- they must vote their way out," Green declares.

 
JULY 1911

"The Secret of Efficient Expression," by Eugene V. Debs [July 8, 1911] Asked by the Education Department of the University of Wisconsin to participate in a study of oratorical "fertility and efficiency of expression," Socialist Party agitator Eugene V. Debs responds with an autobiographical essay on the men who shaped his conception of an orator -- Patrick Henry, John Brown, Wendell Phillips, and Robert Ingersoll -- and his path of self-education. Debs contends that "There is no inspiration in evil and no power except for its own destruction. He who aspires to master the art of expression must first of all consecrate himself completely to some great cause, and the greatest cause of all is the cause of humanity. He must learn to feel deeply and think clearly to express himself eloquently. He must be absolutely true to the best there is in him, if he has to stand alone."


"Debs on the Socialist Movement," by Elias Tobenkin [July 29, 1911] Extensive interview with copious direct quotations of Socialist Party leader Gene Debs, on the road in Newark, New Jersey, presumably lifted by the Columbus, Ohio Socialist from the New York Call. Debs sharply criticizes sectarian squabbling when he declares, "There is nothing so hurtful to the Socialist Party as squabbles over little, insignificant things. The uninitiated, who is not familiar with the Socialist mind, may easily become discouraged at seeing these squabbles and mistake them for vital disagreements, and then turn away from the Socialist movement, using the old argument that the Socialists do no agree among themselves." He objects to "coddling" the craft unionism of the AF of L, when he proclaims it "a mistake to fondle trade unionism in the hope of swinging it toward radicalism at some later time. We must consistently advocated industrial unionism, revolutionary unionism." Debs also proclaims the propaganda work of Victor Berger in Congress to be of "immense value" to the Socialist Party and the socialist movement and proclaims Pennsylvania as the strongest state for the Socialist movement.


AUGUST 1911

"The Rising Tide of Socialism," by Carl D. Thompson [Aug. 8, 1911] This is a snapshot of the electorally-oriented Socialist Party at its most self-satisfied. Carl D. Thompson, head of the SPA's Literature Department, reviews the growth of the socialist movement in America and around the world -- using the dubious benchmark of electoral results to happily pronounce the Socialist movement worthy of "inspiration and wonder." After providing vote tallies from 17 countries, Thompson exclaims, "Look at those figures! See them march upward. At that rate of increase it is not hard to see what the future has in store." The greatest historical importance of this article, however, deals with Thompson's provision of a year-by-year membership count for the Socialist Party. Instead of starting his membership series in 1903 -- as the Socialist Party officially did every time without exception until they started suppressing their membership figures altogether in 1923 -- Thompson provides figures for average monthly dues actually paid dating back to the start of the SPA in the summer of 1901. Thanks to this article by Thompson we know now that in 1901 the Socialist Party had an average monthly  paid membership of 4,320, while in 1902 it had a membership of 9,949. In assessing the state of the party press, Thompson counts 2 English Socialist daily newspapers, 6 non-English dailies, 33 English weeklies, and 22 non-English weeklies.


"Mob Wrecks Socialist Newspaper: Editor Ordered to Leave Town, but He Decides to Stick." [event of Aug. 24, 1911] Short article from the Columbus, Ohio Socialist documenting an act of mob violence committed by anti-Socialists in Garden City, Kansas. While the proprietor of the town's Socialist newspaper, The Interlocutor, was engaged conducting a public meeting addressed by prominent Midwestern pamphleteer W.F. Ries the right wing mob stormed the newspaper office, destroying the press and scattering lead type through the streets. Editor Ashford was threatened with death, given 24 hours to leave town. The editor refused to flee.


 
SEPTEMBER 1911

"The New Review: A Socialist Weekly, (A Prospectus)." [Sept. 1911] One of the most important American Socialist periodicals of the decade of the 1910s was a small theoretical journal published in New York City called The New Review. First published in 1913, the magazine brought together various stands of international socialist thought, including revolutionary industrial unionism and the general strike and anti-militarism. The journal was an intellectual bridge between the so-called syndicalist movement on the one hand and the anti-imperialist movement on the other, and included contributions by such individuals as Henry Slobodin, W.E.B. DuBois, Louis Boudin, Moses Oppenheimer, and Louis Fraina, among others. This trend would emerge in 1918-19 as the Left Wing Section, Socialist Party, the core anglophonic constituency of the American Communist movement. This prospectus notes the obsessive preoccupation of other Socialist periodicals with converting the unconverted with "so-called popular agitation," proposing instead to fill a glaring need for "serious discussion of the theoretical and practical problems of the labor movement" in a manner designed "for the education of the Socialists themselves." Includes a list of 22 sponsoring "members of the Socialist Party."

 

"The Young People's Socialist Federation," by Louis Weitz [Sept. 1911] This short article from the monthly Young Socialists' Magazine published by the New Yorker Volkszeitung was written by the director of the Young People's Socialist Federation. It provides a brief outline of that organization's history -- short on specific detail but nevertheless providing important clues about the origins of the youth section of the Socialist Party of America which eventually emerged as the Young People's Socialist League. The Young People's Socialist Federation is said to have begun in New York City in 1907, apparently started in an effort to "erase the false teachings of both our public and private institutions of learning," to develop interrelationships between young socialists and instilling training and discipline among them, and thus preparing these youth for active and productive participation in the socialist movement in the future. Beginning with "high hopes and enthusiasm," this project seems to have become something of a debacle, with falling membership, financial difficulties, and a failure of the Socialist Party to treat the matter with sufficient seriousness. Nevertheless, a small core of activists persevered, and a reorganization was made at a June 1911 gathering of Young Socialist clubs, which adopted a new constitution and elected a new set of organizational officers. Little work had taken place in the slow summer months of 1911, Weitz confessed, but he held high hopes for renewed activity in the coming fall months.


"Socialism and the Race Problem: A Speech to Black Workers," by Peter Kinnear [Sept. 4, 1911] The Socialist Party is sometimes regarded as having taken a position of benign neglect towards non-white members of the working class, with the Communist Party's position on the race question mythologized as a massive break from past practice. In reality, there was a large element of continuity as this lengthy Labor Day street speech before a black audience in Columbus, Ohio demonstrates. Again and again the orator, Peter Kinnear, proclaims commonality of interest of workers of all races. The experience of New Orleans dockworkers in joining together in a multi-racial union is held up as a model for emulation and the maintenance of racial bars to membership by some unions a major cause of the loss of strikes. The "Race Question" is viewed as a facile ruse utilized by the master class in an effort to divide the working class, thereby keeping wages low. This tactic was increasingly being recognized by the established union movement and racial bars were falling, Kinnear intimates. The Socialist Party and the union movement are portrayed as dual wings of a single organism, while the Republican Party -- traditional enemy of chattel slavery -- is said to have unconsciously lost its anti-racist principles over the course of five decades. "The working class unite themselves into an organization of physical strength, regardless of race, creed, or color, and under the guiding wing of Socialism...storm the political stronghold of the job-owners, forever abolish them, and bring about the democratic ownership of all jobs in the hands of the job-seekers," Kinnear declares.


"Make-Believe Radicalism," by C.E. Ruthenberg [Sept. 23, 1911]  Letter to the editor of Max S. Hayes' labor weekly, The Cleveland Citizen, by Socialist Party mayoral candidate C.E. Ruthenberg. Ruthenberg charges his Democratic Party opponent, Newton D. Baker, with opportunistically employing radical phrases to cloak the fundamental differences in strategic goals of the two parties. "The Democratic Party stands for reaction -- retrogression," Ruthenberg declares, adding that "In its platform it has declared itself in favor of returning to the days of ruthless competition in place of moving forward to the social revolution. The difference between the principles of the Democratic Party and the Socialist Party could not be greater than the differences now existing." Ruthenberg charges that Baker's refusal to debate him was related to a fear of exposure of these fundamental differences, rather than his claims that it would obscure fundamental unity of vision by dwelling upon minor tactical disagreements.


"The Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Party: The Fundamental Differences Between the Two Organizations," by Mary Rantz [Sept. 25 1911] While the American radical movement in the decade of the 1910s was dominated by the electorally-oriented Socialist Party of America, that organization never had a monopoly on the political field. The rival Socialist Labor Party maintained a radical critique. This open letter by a Socialist Labor Party activist from pages of the group's weekly press emphasizes the ideological and tactical differences between the two principle organizations of the American socialist movement. The roots of the divergence came 12 years earlier, Rantz notes, when "the Socialist Labor Party of America, after years of valuable experience, came to the correct conclusion that the only hope for a peaceful solution to the Labor Problem in America was the industrial organization of the workers on the economic field to supplement and give power to the revolutionary ballot of the workers." This provoked the division of the movement by a "renegade element" men "who had interests, material and otherwise, in the American Federation of Labor." Rantz notes the divergent views of the organizations towards the efficacy of the ballot: "The Socialist Party claims that the ballot and politics alone are sufficient to usher in the Socialist Commonwealth, and then it proceeds towards this goal 'a step at a time,' these 'steps' being issues which drain the energy, time, and money of the workers, without containing one benefit for them. The Socialist Labor Party states the correct position, THAT THE BALLOT ALONE is AN EMPTY, FUTILE thing, and can have no effect but the absolute demoralization of the working class, unless it has behind it the REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATION of the workers in the ECONOMIC FIELD."


 




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