"Aid for Russia." [An appeal published in The International Socialist Review, Feb. 1905] As revolution against the oppressive Tsarist regime swept the vast Russian empire, a group of 15 leading luminaries of the Socialist Party of America constituted themselves as a fundraising committee, placing this appeal in the socialist press. "The cowardly murder of thousands of peaceful workingmen and women has revealed to the world the brutality of the Russian governing classes in all its hideous nakedness, and has made the hitherto inert masses of the Russian population susceptible to the world-redeeming gospel of socialism," the appeal declared, adding that the financial resources of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party were entirely inadequate to the grand task. Socialists were called upon to send funds for the RSDRP to Dr. S. Interman of New York, who would in turn cable the money to the Russian party. "If there ever was an occasion for a practical demonstration of the international solidarity of the socialist movement, this is the occasion. If it ever was our duty to assist our struggling brethren abroad, this is our duty now." This appeal was signed by Victor Berger, John Chase, Eugene Debs, Ben Hanford, Max Hayes, Morris Hillquit, S. Interman, Alexander Jonas, Jack London, William Mailly, Algie Simons, Henry Slobodin, and Julius Wayland.
MARCH 1905
"Editorial in Opposition to Paul Carpenter for County Court Judge," by Victor L. Berger [March 18, 1905] This editorial by newly-elected member of the Socialist Party's National Executive Committee Victor L. Berger ignited a firestorm in the party, culminating in his removal by the National Committee and subsequent reinstatement by party referendum. At issue was Berger's endorsement of former Milwaukee mayor Emil Wallber against sitting judge Paul Carpenter in a non-partisan race for County Judge -- an election for which the Social Democratic Party of Wisconsin (state affiliate of the SPA) did not field candidates. Berger stated that Carpenter had spoken against Socialism and the Socialist Party at a meetings of Catholic societies and had used his position to assign dependent children to Catholic charities rather than to the public institution established for that purpose. Berger's endorsement of a non-Socialist political candidate was considered a brazen violation of the party constitution's prohibition of "fusion" with other political organizations, and great hay was made of the transgression by Berger's Left Wing opponents, who immediately moved to have him removed from the NEC.
"Motion to the National Committee, SPA [on Apparent Fusionism in Milwaukee]," by William Trautmann [March 23, 1905] Text of the motion of Left Wing SPA National Committee member William Trautmann of Ohio, which "calls upon the State Executive Board of Wisconsin to proceed at once with an investigation" as to whether there was collusion between Local Milwaukee SPA and any capitalist political party surrounding the endorsement by Victor Berger of former Milwaukee mayor Emil Wallber in the race for the judicial seat held by Paul Carpenter. Includes text of Berger's editorials and Trautmann's explanation of the thinking behind the action. Trautmann states: "It is absolutely necessary for the Socialist Party as a whole to find out whether it is in line with Socialist tactics, discipline, and the integrity of the party to allow such bargain counter and counter-bargaining deals prevail in any part of the Union. If the party membership of Milwaukee has sanctioned such policy, then the Socialists all over the United States ought to know it; if they have not, then they will demand and give themselves such an explanation as will set them clear before the Socialists, and bring those who are responsible for this to give account for."
APRIL 1905
"Letter to the National Committee, SPA from Victor L. Berger, National Committeeman for Wisconsin." [published April 1, 1905] Reply by Victor Berger to the motion of William Trautmann calling for an investigation of the published endorsement of a non-Socialist judicial candidate which he made in March 1905. Berger calls Trautmann's insinuation that "there is a collusion, or secret or open understanding in the city of Milwaukee between the Social Democratic Party organization or a member or members thereof and representatives of capitalist parties" a "miserable and cowardly slander." Berger explains the thinking behind the decision of Milwaukee Socialist organization not to run candidates in the judicial campaign and the reasoning behind his call for negative action against sitting judge Paul Carpenter, a "Catholic zealot" and avowed enemy of Socialism. Berger states that he in no way violated the constitution of the Socialist Party, which he interprets as providing "the absolute and irrevocable duty of every Social Democrat" to vote a straight Socialist ticket whenever the party names one, but "whenever and wherever the Social Democratic Party has no ticket in the field, any member individually has a right to vote or not to vote just as he pleases." Berger claims personal motives behind Trautmann's motion against him: "Trautmann is simply bitter, because I refused to endorse his plan of splitting up the national trade union movement. After trying to split the economic movement of the working class, Trautmann would like also to split up the political movement of the working class." Berger declares that "we are a political party, not a politico-religious order. We are not Dominicans nor Franciscans. We want strict party discipline, and there is no man who stands for good discipline more than I do. But whenever discipline turns into oppressive fanaticism, then I oppose it."
"At the Parting of the Ways," by Hermon F. Titus [April 8, 1905] In this important article by Left Wing Socialist Hermon Titus, Titus argues that the simultaneous eruption of "Impossibilism" and "Opportunism" has brought the Socialist Party "sharply, but not unexpectedly, to the parting of the ways." On the one hand he cites the example of Thomas J. Hagerty, a radical industrial unionist who advocated the doctrine that "economic organization of the working class must precede and dominate political organization." Titus characterizes this as the same sort of "ruinous" thinking long espoused by Daniel DeLeon, a "propaganda of expletives, of misrepresentations, of meaningless mouthings of revolutionary phrases" -- leading ultimately to suspicion and distrust of the Socialist Party and political action in general and the subjugation of the political movement to the temporal needs of the trade union movement. At the other pole, Titus states, is the "opportunism" of Victor Berger. Berger and the doctrine of "state autonomy" which he espoused implied an inability of the national Socialist Party to enforce its principles -- "especially the principle of no compromise with capitalism." Titus observes that "state autonomy is not the cause of compromise, any more than industrial unionism is the cause of impossibilism. State autonomy is but the shield behind which compromise can hide. As the doctrine of states' rights was used to defend and uphold chattel slavery, so can state autonomy in our day be used to cover and bolster up compromise in the Socialist movement." It is for this reason that Berger must be reined in for his transgressions and his doctrine of state autonomy crushed, in Titus' view. "If the impossibilists stand for anything it is for a species of Socialism which would ultimately make political action impossible, magnify the importance of economic action, and end with the 'general strike,' the anarchist method of revolution. To follow opportunism, fortified by state autonomy, to its logical conclusion would be to make the state independent of the national organization, the local of the state, and the individual of the local, thus arriving also at individualism, the essence of anarchism, and establishing an affinity between the impossibilist and the opportunist of which they are perhaps both unaware," Titus declares.
MAY 1905
"An Object Lesson in Referendums," by Hermon F. Titus [May 4, 1905] Although controlled by adherents of the ideology of the Socialist Party's Left Wing from its earliest days, the Socialist Party of Washington was the scene of a non-stop factional war, driven by the Center-Right minority that controlled Seattle's King County organization. Godfather of Washington's majority Left Wing was former Baptist preacher turned Seattle newspaper publisher Hermon F. Titus. During the first decade of the 20th Century Titus's paper, The Socialist, gained a national readership as a semi-official organ of the Left Wing -- standing in opposition, say, to the electorally-oriented neo-populism of Julius Wayland's bigger and better-known Kansas weekly, The Appeal to Reason. With Titus exiting the state to greener pastures in Toledo, Ohio, enemies brought charges against Titus, alleging irregularities in a ballot distributed at Seattle's radical Pike Street Branch. A new state constitutional referendum was now being pushed by conservative forces in the Washington Party, aiming at eliminating the branch system of organization and replacing it with a division of the cities of the state based upon electoral districts. Titus characterizes the charges against him as personally motivated, politically driven, and trivial and charges that the timing of the charges was intentionally such as to prevent Titus from defending himself in person."Moderation, Comrades!" by Morris Hillquit [May 6, 1905] New York's SPA National Committee representative Morris Hillquit weighs in on the Berger Affair with this letter to the Toledo Socialist, a Left Wing weekly edited by Hermon Titus, the business manager of which was former SPA Executive Secretary William Mailly. Hillquit states that while he disapproved "unqualifiedly" of Berger's decision to endorse a friendly capitalist judicial candidate over an unfriendly capitalist judicial candidate, at the same time "I am opposed to any punishment or disciplinary measures against the organization of the state of Wisconsin or that of the city of Milwaukee or against Victor L. Berger personally." Instead, the Socialist Party needed to "adopt clear and unambiguous rules against the recurrence of such conditions as have brought about the Milwaukee trouble." Hillquit states that "I believe that as soon as a fallacious or injurious tendency is noticed in any quarter of our movement, it should be energetically combated, but combated by argument and not by punishment -- by discussion, not by expulsion. Our comrades are voluntary fighters for a great cause, not soldiers in compulsory service. We can maintain the purity and integrity of our party by educating the membership to a proper understanding of the nature and spirit of our movement, but never by a system of rigid discipline." Hillquit states that while he greatly respects Titus and Mailly, at the same time they had come to take their self-appointed task of the preservation of Socialist Party purity "a trifle too strenuously." "Within the comparatively short career of our movement we have managed to develop two new types within our ranks, the 'Opportunist' and the 'Impossibilist,' and I hardly think it will be conducive to our welfare to enrich our anthropological museum by a new species, that of the "Alarmist," Hillquit declares.
"Shield No One: A Reply to Morris Hillquit," by William Mailly [May 6, 1905] Business manager of the Toledo Socialist, NEC member, and former Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party William Mailly responds to Morris HIllquit's defense of Victor Berger with this article. Mailly notes that Hillquit expresses agreement with his strong disapproval of Berger's actions in endorsing a non-Socialist judicial candidate in Milwaukee, but had thereupon retreated into a sort of "Tolstoian nonresistance to evil." Mailly declares that "I...believe that any party member who willfully supports a capitalist candidate for any office is not qualified to represent the Socialist Party in any capacity and in this immediate case the offense is all the greater because the offender has been honored by the national party with a place on its National Executive Committee and he therefore owed and still owes a duty to the national party which rises above any petty, local political interest." Berger was well aware of precedent in this matter, Mailly insists, yet he still unapologetically chose to proceed along a prohibited course of action, and he should be subject to disciplinary measures the same as any other less famous party member. Further, contrary to Hillquit's pooh-poohing of the assertion that Berger was planning to split from the Socialist Party and form a new organization if events turned against him, in fact Berger had declared this very thing at the most recent meeting of the National Executive Committee. "Impossibilism exists because Opportunism has been allowed to flourish. One is the complement of the other. Let the national party go on record in favor of placating (and that is all it will be) Opportunism and compromise, and Impossibilism will receive an impetus from which it will take the party years to recover," Mailly insists.
JUNE 1905
"Berger and His Opponents," by Eugene V. Debs [June 17, 1905] Eugene Debs chimes in on the Berger Affair in this letter to the editor of Hermon Titus' Left Wing Socialist weekly, The Socialist, the publication which broke the story of Berger's transgression and which stirred the pot most vigorously after the matter came to a boil. Debs declares that while Berger's actions were "wrong, flagrantly wrong, in my judgment," it was excessive to remove him from the National Executive Committee, a "position of trust in a party he helped to organize and for which he worked with all his strength of mind and body." Debs argues that for his error, Berger "should have been called to account, but there was, and is, nothing in the case to warrant the extreme measures that have been taken against him and that, if carried into effect, would make of an unfortunate tactical blunder an act of foulest treason." The excessiveness of the penalty will serve only to make Berger a martyr among many in the party, defeating the efficacy of his punishment. "A reasonable rebuke would have served a good purpose, while extreme harshness will react in favor of the accused and make his offense the means of praise instead of blame," Debs warns. "Let us preserve the party purity and vigilantly guard its uncompromising tactics, but let us not be too swift to condemn a mistake as a crime and an erring comrade as a vicious traitor," Debs declares. Debs seeks an end to the matter: "Let us have done with the Berger case. He has been more than punished and the incident should now be closed. There is no danger of repetition of the offense."
JULY 1905
"What Socialists Think," by Charles H. Kerr [July 1905] A concise exposition of pre-Bolshevik American Marxist political philosophy. Kerr briefly outlines the concepts of historical materialism and the labor theory of value and makes note of the change if the capitalist class from actual participants in the production process to idle holders of stocks and bonds. Kerr states that "when the battle lines are drawn for the final contest between the capitalist and the laborer," the capitalists will count "only those whole live by owning and those who can be fooled, or bribed, into voting against the interests of the class to which they really belong." Kerr estimates the true correlation of forces to be "less than 10% of the people" as true members of the capitalist class vs. "more than 90% of the people" being of the working class. Small shopkeepers are unhesitatingly counted by Kerr among the working class, their "profits" being "nothing more or less than wages, and usually very low wages, for the labor [expended] in taking care of his shop and selling goods." We see in Kerr's analysis a final objective NOT of a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" but rather of the establishment of the "Cooperative Commonwealth," which Kerr defines as "a society in which the good things of life shall not be produced for the profit of a part of the people, but for the use of all the people, and where on one who is able to work shall have the privilege of living on the labor of others." Kerr states that "reform" may be bloody and "revolution" bloodless, and reduces the true difference between the two concepts to the simple question of whether a new class comes to political power to implement societal change. He states the Socialist Party, as the political agent of the rising working class, thus represents an agency of revolutionary change rather than social reform. Tactically, he notes the vast mechanized military force in the hands of the capitalist state and the availability of the ballot box as a mechanism to alter control of the command structure. Armed struggle and civil war are not seen by Kerr as an essential or inevitable part of revolutionary change -- again, a marked difference with the ideology of American Communism that would emerge after 1917. Kerr finally states that the Socialists "do not want to do away with the freedom of the individual. On the contrary, they realize that today it is only a few here and there who have nay freedom worth speaking of. What they mean to do is make individual freedom a real thing for all." Equality of opportunity through expanded education, and allocation of labor through differential pay rates between tasks are part of Kerr's programmatic vision.
"The Industrial Workers: The Convention and Its Work," by Eugene V. Debs [July 29, 1905] This article on the recent founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) by prominent Socialist Gene Debs written for The Socialist, published by Hermon Titus in Toledo, Ohio. Debs characterizes the new union as a major step forward for the American working class, the existing structure unions hopelessly splintered, bureaucratic, and supportive of the capitalist regime. "To me it seems not only impossible but absurd to expect the American Federation of Labor, under its capitalistic Civic Federation supervision, to turn itself inside out, as certain of our comrades expect it will do in the course of a few years or centuries," Debs writes. As for the charge made against the IWW of "splitting" the trade union movement, Debs cites the myriad of competing unions already in the field and calls the charge "something so silly and stupid about it in the light of existing facts that it seems nothing less than idiotic." Under the umbrella of the American Federation of Labor "every handful of men that are ground through the hopper of industrial evolution must have a separate union, separate jurisdiction, and above all, and most important of all, a separate set of 'grand' or 'supreme' officers, of whom there is an army and to whose personal interest it is to keep the workers divided into innumerable petty factions," Debs states. "The working class are going to unite, economically and politically, for their emancipation," Debs declares, and he indicates that the formation of the IWW is a historic step forward down this path.
AUGUST 1905
"The Industrial Convention," by Eugene V. Debs [Aug. 1905] Socialist Party leader Debs attacks what he claims was systematic and intentional misrepresentation and distortion in its reporting of the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World. Debs alleged that these papers "resorted to downright mendacity to accomplish their purpose of defeating a body of men who by their records had proved that they were above the corrupting influences of capitalist bribery and whose object it was to unite the working class for their emancipation from wage-slavery." The capitalist press was loyal to the AF of L, Debs charged, adding that "silly and stupid falsehoods" about DeLeon "capturing" the organization or Debs being "disgusted" with it would "have no effect" upon the body.
NOVEMBER 1905
"Winning a World," by Eugene V. Debs [Nov. 1905]. Article from the November 1905 issue of Wilshire's Magazine, believed to be republished here for the first time. Debs waxes eloquent as to the lofty task of the Socialist movement, "to win the world -- the whole world -- from animalism, and consecrate it to humanity." This is to be achieved as a result of releasing the "imprisoned productive forces from the vandal horde that has seized them, that they may be operated, not spasmodically and in the interest of a favored class, as at present, but freely and in the common interest of all." For this the working class must be "roused" and Debs urges his readers to "Spread Wilshire's Magazine, the weekly Socialist papers, the pamphlets, tracts, and leaflets among the people" and thereby educate the working class. He calls for both economic and political action, "One Great, All-embracing Industrial Union and One Great, All-embracing Political Party, and both revolutionary to the core -- two hearts with but a single soul." Includes a photographic image of Debs from a circa 1904 postcard.
"Class Unionism: Speech at South Chicago," by Eugene V. Debs [Nov. 24, 1905] In 1905, Socialist leader Gene Debs went on the campaign trail on behalf of the newly organized Industrial Workers of the World, singing the organization's praises. This is one of Debs' longest preserved speeches, an analysis of the evolution of trade unionism from its "old and outgrown and out-of-date" origins in craft association to its present necessity for organization on an industrial basis to correspond with the concentration and enlargement of industry. Debs characterizes the situation as thus: "You have this great body of workers parceled out among scores of petty and purposeless unions, which are in ceaseless conflict with each other, jealous to preserve their craft identity. As long as this great army of workers is scattered among so many craft unions, it will be impossible for them to unite and act in harmony together. Craft unionism is the negation of class solidarity." Debs cites his previous experience attempting to organize the American Railway Union on an industrial basis in 1894 and the way in which state power was brought to bear in an attempt to crush that fledgling labor organization. The Industrial Workers of the World is depicted as the continuation of the spirit and practice of the ARU on a broader basis. Debs hails the revolutionary industrial union, leading strikes of "class-conscious, revolutionary workingmen, who, while they are striking for an immediate advantage, at the same time have their eyes clearly fixed upon the goal. And what is that goal? It is the overthrow of the capitalist system, and the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery." Debs declares: "We have declared war upon the capitalist class, and upon the capitalist system. We are of the working class. We say: Arouse, you workingmen! It is in your power to put an end to this system. It is your duty to build tip this great revolutionary economic organization of your class, to seize and take control of the tools with which you work, and make yourselves the masters instead of being the slaves of industry. Wipe out the wage system, so that you can walk this earth free men!"
DECEMBER 1905
"1905 Average Paid Membership by States, Socialist Party of America." Alphabetical listing of official state-by-state totals of average paid membership in the SPA. Data for all 38 organized states is included. Top five state memberships included: Illinois (2,412), New York (2,083), California (1,710), Wisconsin (1,666 -- a massive gain from the previous year's total), and Ohio (1,541). Other states with more than 1,000 average paid members included Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Washington, and New Jersey. Oklahoma membership was up to 505, still trailing the unlikely state of Missouri.
