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The Socialist Party |
| Compared to the major party campaigns, Socialist
presidential campaigns were run on a
shoestring. The Socialist Party’s financial resources, (unlike the major parties, the
Socialists had dues-paying members--100,845 as the party convened in 1912) press coverage,
and public visibility all paled in comparison when compared to the major parties; what
coverage they did receive in the mainstream press was as often as not openly hostile.
Nevertheless, the Socialists opened 1912 with a great deal of optimism. |
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Organizationally, the Socialist Party was as strong as it had ever been. In 1910 they
elected their first Congressman, Victor Berger of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and pulled
approximately 700,000 votes in various races throughout the nation. By 1912 the party held
in the neighborhood of 1000 elective offices around the country, most of them municipal
offices in pockets of Socialist strength throughout the Midwest. Other areas of strength
included the new state of Oklahoma, where more than half of all farm families were
landless tenants, and parts of the far west and California where industrial development
had been particularly naked. In Oklahoma and other parts of the southwest, a strange
alliance formed between socialism and conservative evangelical Protestantism, creating a
sort of rural socialist revivalism no European Marxist (and in fact few American Marxists)
could ever fathom. Such grassroots socialist development, strange though the roots often
were, encouraged party leaders to believe a breakthrough might be at hand. In fact,
the socialist vote had recently shown remarkable growth.
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Nevertheless, the Socialist Party also entered 1912 almost as divided internally as the
two major parties. The vast majority of Socialists holding office were not fire-breathing
radicals or orthodox Marxist ideologues, but constructive reformers only a little to the
left of progressive Democrats or Republicans. Their success revealed a major fissure in
the party between politically-oriented reformers and labor radicals. The conservative
wing, led by Berger, drew most of its strength from skilled workers in the northeast and
Midwest, many of them ethnically German and/or employed in industries which retained a
heritage of skill and craft (Berger’s strength in Milwaukee, for example, was based
in the brewing industry and affiliated with the conservative trade unionism of the
American Federation of Labor). Berger was opposed by an alliance of agrarian radicals,
purist Marxists, and the hard-core labor radicals either involved in or supportive of the
International Workers of the World and its policy of direct action against capitalism.
These radicals opposed the skilled unionism in which much Midwestern socialism was based,
some on grounds of socialist doctrine and some because it conflicted with their strategy
of organizing the unskilled, and resented Berger’s strength within the party. They
also disagreed among themselves as much as they agreed. |
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| Debs floated above these divisions as best he could, partly to avoid damaging his
reputation as America’s number one Socialist and partly because he had no taste for
the fierce organizational infighting they involved. Debs’ own sympathies leaned
toward the party radicals; he disliked Berger personally and distrusted Berger’s
relationship with the AFL. But Debs had also broken with the Wobblies over the issue of
labor violence, and his socialism was always much closer to the
indigenous-American-protest strain of the southwestern agrarians than it was to the
orthodox theorists. He remained the party’s de facto national leader, but was
increasingly mistrusted by certain factions within it. Nor were egos in short supply;
Debs, Berger, and IWW leader Big Bill Haywood, buoyed by the success of the Lawrence textile strike,
all had a confidence in their own righteousness second to no one else, least of all
themselves. The Socialists thereby prepared for its May 12-19 convention in Indianapolis in a state of agitation almost as severe as the Republicans’. |
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The convention’s major issue was what to do about the IWW, which hoped to receive
formal recognition and endorsement. The success of the Lawrence strike, during which
socialists of many different stripes had worked together successfully (even Haywood and
Berger), suggested that some sort of accommodation between the factions might be possible.
The passage early in the convention of a platform plank broadly supportive of organizing
unskilled and immigrant workers (the IWW position) seemed to suggest the same. But it was
merely prelude to purge. On day two of the convention, the conservatives secured passage
of a party constitutional amendment expelling "any member of the party who opposes
political action or advocates sabotage or other methods of violence as a weapon of the
working class." Haywood, who during the Lawrence strike attacked Berger personally in
the socialist press even as the two were working together, was voted off the party’s
National Executive Committee. The Wobblies were out. |
| Once the Wobblies were purged, the convention turned to the Presidential nomination.
Debs, who to avoid the infighting did not attend the convention himself, was the natural
front-runner and the clear choice of the western agrarians and other elements of what was
now left of the party’s radical wing. Berger and the conservatives, however, opposed
Debs as well and supported their own candidates. Debs was nominated, but with less support
than in previous years; the conservatives asserted their power by nominating Berger allies
Emil Seidel for Vice-President and J. Mahlon Barnes (who Debs openly opposed) as
Debs’ campaign manager. The convention also came out in favor of woman suffrage.
(Click here for more images of the Socialist
leaders.) |
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Debs was not in the hall when the
delegates nominated him, but his running mate, Emil Seidel, upon receiving the
vice presidential nomination, promised the delegates "that he would make
the campaign 'as lively as the capitalist parties have ever seen.'"
As the
candidate, Debs largely ignored his campaign manager and the party apparatus and
campaigned as he always had, delivering long, fiery speeches from the back platform of his
campaign train or in front of open-air crowds of thousands of working-class listeners. He attacked both capitalism in general and his fellow candidates. Taft he attacked as a
reactionary jurist, Wilson as a kindly but ineffectual puppet of Tammany Hall
("ladylike in his utterances," Debs once called him), and Roosevelt as an
insincere latecomer to support for the downtrodden. Debs feared, however, that the split
of the Republican Party and the nomination by the Democrats of a relatively progressive
candidate might siphon off potential Socialist votes. (Roosevelt, in particular, was
attacked by Debs and other Socialist campaigners as an opportunistic thief of Socialist
Party platform planks.) Debs therefore spent much of his time on the stump attacking
mainstream reformers as ineffectual accommodationists protecting an inherently unjust and
unworkable capitalist system. "The Republican, Democratic, and Progressive Parties
are but branches of the same capitalistic tree. They all stand for wage slavery,"
said Debs in front of 15,000 supporters at a rally in Madison Square Garden. "There is
no essential difference between them." |
The entire campaign cost the Socialists $66,000, a fraction of what the major parties
could muster. In support of their contention that the major parties were supported
by
capitalists and therefore uninterested in challenging them fundamentally, the party
published a list of every Socialist Party contributor and the amount of their donation.
The mainstream press, which drenched itself in daily coverage of the three major
candidates and their activities, either attacked or ignored them. They depended on the
Socialist press, their own literature, and Debs’ own personal magnetism to carry
their message.
Although
this cartoonist saw Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party as
"Socialism," and thereby stealing the thunder of both the Bryan wing
of the Democratic Party and of Debs's Socialist Party, certainly the Socialists
did not agree. |
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Sources: The cartoon of Debs in the Pond is
from Harper's Weekly,
Sept. 21, 1912, p. 9; the caricatures are by Art Young from a 1912 issued of Metropolitan
Magazine. |
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