Socialist Party of America. Founded in 1901, the Socialist party of America (SPA) drew on deep roots of dissent within American society, enjoyed its peak influence during the Progressive Era, and remained a sometimes lively ghost in later years. The Socialist party's precursors—including abolitionists, women's rights campaigners, agrarian radicals, utopian socialists, and trade unionists—had long proposed alternative social arrangements. Small socialist political organizations, led mainly by German Americans in the post–Civil War decades, played a crucial role in the formation of the American labor movement. But the depression of the 1890s, violent labor struggles, the Populist revolt, and the appearance of newer ethnic immigrants (especially East European Jews) with socialist connections all foreshadowed a major reorientation. A split in the sectarian Socialist Labor party of 1899 and the emergence of former railroad‐union leader Eugene V. Debs in 1900 brought unity within sight.

The SPA's founding convention, held at Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1901, included various elements of the socialist movement, especially small‐town and rural socialists—native‐born, often middle‐aged railroad mechanics, teachers, ministers, and farmers—who carried the educational zeal of earlier times into hundreds of local presses, study clubs, and political campaigns. Because these grassroots activists were unimpeachably “American,” immigrant socialists usually ceded them leadership in the movement. By 1912, Oklahoma had become the epicenter of socialist influence, more than a thousand socialist candidates had been elected nationwide, and Debs garnered 6 percent of the presidential vote.

The labor movement changed dramatically as well. Beginning in 1909, a wave of strikes by unskilled, foreign‐born workers shook the confidence of the business classes. The Industrial Workers of the World, launched with socialist assistance in 1905, preached “solidarity” among all working people. Even within the staid American Federation of Labor, headed by antisocialist Samuel Gompers, a number of member unions turned strongly leftward. Buoyed by this energy, the Socialist party reached a membership of 100,000, including a growing number of foreign‐language federations made up of immigrant nationalities.

But the two‐party system quickly adjusted itself to the threat of radical outsiders. In many localities where socialists sought election, Republicans and Democrats formed “fusion” tickets with resources beyond the reach of newcomers. Elsewhere, reformers appropriated socialist positions involving municipal issues and honest government. Many disappointed voters fell away from Socialist party ranks. America's entry into World War I nearly finished off socialism, as the government's crackdown on antiwar activities fell heavily upon socialists and labor radicals.

The Socialist party never fully recovered from the war. Although Debs received a million presidential votes in 1920 while in a federal penitentiary, the party lost more than half of its members. Its remaining appeal owed largely to the charismatic leadership of Norman Thomas, a former Presbyterian minister from New York. A perennial candidate for local, state, and national office, Thomas garnered 800,000 votes for president in 1932. Yet the party faced an uphill struggle as the New Deal borrowed socialist planks (as in the Social Security Act) and won blue‐collar workers to the Democratic party. A shattering division in 1936 between moderates and radicals and the coming of another world war reduced the party to a few thousand members. Nevertheless, loyalists persisted in maintaining a few press organs and running local candidates for office. A handful continued to be elected, generally in nonpartisan races.
See also Capitalism; Depressions, Economic; Labor Movements; Political Parties; Populist Era; Socialism.

Bibliography

Richard Judd , Socialist Cities: Explorations into the Grass Roots of American Socialism, 1990.
Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left, rev. ed., 1998.

Paul Buhle

SOCIALIST LABOR PARTY

SOCIALIST LABOR PARTY. Founded in 1877, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) is the longest-lived socialist organization in the United States. Never rising above a membership of several thousand, the SLP has from time to time exerted influence far beyond its numbers.

Its origins can be found in the communities of German-language immigrant workers who formed labor union bodies, organized social clubs, and published newspapers with broadly socialistic views from the immediate post–Civil War era to the early 1900s. From their ranks mainly arose the earliest U.S. sections of the First International (1864), dominated by the followers of Karl Marx. After the expulsion of American-born followers of the feminist and spiritualist Victoria Woodhull in 1871, this preliminary movement collapsed, although local labor activities continued unabated. A Sozialistische Arbeiter Partei (Socialist Labor Party) formed in 1877, in time to take advantage of working-class outrage following the national railroad strike of that year and to elect members to local and state office in Chicago and elsewhere. (See Railroad Strike of 1877.)

The party swiftly declined thereafter and suffered grievously from the defection of "revolutionary socialists" (known widely as anarchists) based in Chicago—the heart of the most influential radicalism of the 1880s. Reaction to the Haymarket Riot (in which anarchists were falsely accused of a bombing, arrested, tried, and executed), the upswing of the labor movement, and the publication of Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward (1889), followed by the economic depression of the 1890s, all encouraged another wave of political socialism. Once again the little Socialist Labor Party elected a handful of members to local office and bid fair to take over sections of the American labor movement.

Disappointment again followed, as the Knights of Labor collapsed, the American Federation of Labor took a conservative turn, and socialist efforts to organize an all-inclusive union alternative soon failed. In 1897–1899, more than half of the SLP membership defected, soon to join with native-born socialists to form the Socialist Party of America in 1901.

Now a propaganda group, the SLP had one important mission remaining. Daniel De Leon, a former Columbia University lecturer, had become the voice of the SLP and of antiracist sentiment within the socialist Second International. In 1905 he helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and its bitter opposition by employers, the press, and the American Federation of Labor made De Leon and his organization the prime propagandists of radical labor.

De Leon's articulation of a classless society, governed from the workplace rather than the political state (which would be abolished) remains a signal contribution of American socialist thought. But internal disputes led to the expulsion of De Leon from the IWW in 1907.

De Leon's ideas nevertheless continued to exert wide influence upon the strategists of industrial unionism. From the 1910s until the 1960s, SLP loyalists meanwhile distributed many millions of leaflets and ran in countless educational election campaigns, attacking capitalism's unfairness and irrationality and continuing its utopian appeal for a noncoercive society. An aging membership and confusion about the radical movements of the 1960s practically dissolved the remnant, although it has narrowly maintained its existence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buhle, Paul. "The World of Daniel De Leon." In his From the Knights of Labor to the New World Order. New York: Garland, 1997.

Laslett, John. Labor and the Left. New York: Basic, 1970).

PaulBuhle

See alsoAmerican Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations ; Labor Parties ; Socialist Party of America .

Socialist Labor party in the United States, begun in 1877 by New York City socialists. Its membership came largely from German-American workingmen. During the 1880s a national organization was established and the party concentrated, unsuccessfully, on electoral politics. The depression conditions of the 1890s brought it renewed strength, and, under the leadership of Daniel De Leon , a Marxist revolutionary, it emphasized militant labor activities and organized (1896) its own union. After many members who opposed the leadership of De Leon withdrew (1899) and joined the less militant Social Democratic party (see Socialist party ), the Socialist Labor party did not regain its previous importance.