Workers’ Offensive
(This article was written by WO and edited by our comrades who write for Nuevo Curso).
“Our political lineage comes from Marx and Engels, the First International, the revolutionary years of the Second and Third, Liebknecht, Luxembourg, Lenin, Daniel de Leon, Trotsky, and the opposition to Stalinist counterrevolution in Russia. The events that we connect with are the Paris Commune, the Russian revolution of 1917, the German revolution of 1918-23, the hundreds of thousands of men murdered by the present Russian system, in its destruction of the revolutionary tendencies; with the Spanish insurrection of the 19th of July 1936 against the clerical-military reaction and the insurrection of May 1937 against Stalinism and Popular Front; with the hundreds of thousands of men murdered by Francoism. We also demand the insurgent action of the German, Polish, Hungarian proletariat, etc., against the Moscow regulations.”
“Beginning” Alarm #1, 1958.
Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, Luxembourg, Lenin, Trotsky… are commonly mentioned in Marxist “pantheons”. But Daniel de León? Who was he? What led the revolutionaries of the Spanish Communist Left to place an American socialist leader alongside the great theoreticians and historical leaders of Marxism? Why is he practically forgotten today? In order to answer these questions, we are releasing a series of articles on the history of the labor movement in the United States and the legacy of Daniel de León and the SLP.
The foundational milestones of the labor movement in the U.S.
1866
The National Labor Union (NLU) was formed and directed its energies towards reducing the working day to eight hours.1
The NLU was a federation of local trade unions which, as was typical at the time, mostly represented skilled workers and craftsmen. Everywhere, the first trade union movement received its impetus from the craftsmen and not the industrial proletariat.2 However, the NLU served as a bridge between the movement of the craftsmen and the movement of the industrial proletariat in ascendant capitalism.
1869
The Knights of Labor (KOL) was founded in secret and became public ten years after its founding. It was originally a union made up of mostly craftsmen but later ended up playing an essential role in the industrial workers’ movement. The KOLs, during the 1880s, brought together both skilled and unskilled workers and experienced massive growth during their early years as a public union.3
1874
The crisis caused by the collapse of the Northern Pacific railways in 1873 left more than 180,000 workers unemployed. In 1874, thousands of workers peacefully demonstrated at Tompskins Square in order to demand employment in public works. They, however, were met with the violent force of the State.4
1877
The great railway strike showed the maturation of the movement. Machinists and switchmen, i.e. skilled and unskilled workers, went on strike in West Virginia in response to the latest wage cut in a series of wage cuts imposed by the company. The movement soon spread to many other states:
The Virginians were followed by the switchmen of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who were striking against the “double-heading” system. Later, when other railroad workers joined the strike, the demand to reverse the last reduction in wages was added.
In Pittsburgh, all freight traffic was blocked and strikers, accompanied by unemployed workers, marched throughout the city. When the local militia refused to fire on the workers, 600 Philadelphia militiamen were sent to shoot into the crowd. Unfortunately for the militiamen, the strikers successfully fought them back and, after driving the militiamen from the city, destroyed company property with all of their fury.
In St. Louis, the strikers were able to take full possession of the city and an executive committee was elected at a meeting convened by the Socialists.5 This executive committee differed from the strike committee. In contrast to the latter, which consisted exclusively of striking railroad workers, the former was composed largely of members of the St. Louis section of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS).
The WPUS
The WPUS was made up of the Marxists, who were the members of the 1st International and were referred to as the “Internationalists,” and the Lassallean current. The Marxists understood the struggle for economic improvement and the parliamentary struggle as two facets of the same process, while the Lassalleans –following the theory of the “iron law of wages” of their founder– saw the struggle for better wages as useless. After the death of the IWA (International Workingmen’s Association), both tendencies had united in Germany to form the SPD at the famous Gotha congress.
As a result, when the nineteen U.S. sections of the International met in 1876, the SPD was the model that they chose to follow. At that time, the vanguard of the class in the country was made up mostly of German migrants and, consequently, most of the labor press was published in German. The platform of the Internationalists, which put trade union activity first and the need to delay electoral activity until the party was mature enough, ended up prevailing in the conference.6 The Lassalleans, however, won the majority of seats on the national executive committee. Philip Van Patten, a Lassallean, became the first secretary7 of the party born of the conference: the WPUS.
The WPUS and the railway strike in St. Louis
All this informed how the St. Louis section of the WPUS would react to the great railway strike of 1877. From the start of the great strike in St. Louis, the executive committee sent delegates to different stores in order to spread the strike while the strike committee of East St. Louis, implementing General Order nº1, dedicated itself to blocking the railroads. The WPUS urged the workers to include the demand for the eight-hour day and to refrain from resorting to violence. These were not merely statements since metalworkers were organized by the committee in Carondelet for the express purpose of preventing vandalism and violence.
On July 26, the members of the executive committee proclaimed that the objectives of the strike should be the dispatch of proletarian delegates to Washington, the nationalization of the railroads, a public works program for the unemployed, and “the recall of all charters of all national banks, together with their whole currency.” This last demand was influenced by the greenback movement. This petty-bourgeois populist movement, described by Engels in 1892 as “humbug,” had, as its demand since 1868, an increase in the circulation of paper money.
The committee continued to send delegates to extend the strike in other areas and cities. But while it contributed greatly to the success of the workers’ seizure of power in the city, it ended up fearing the strikers more than the state forces. On the same date, they turned their backs on the workers when they issued a proclamation saying that
“…in order to avoid riot, we have determined to have no large procession until our organization is so complete as to positively assure the citizens of St. Louis of a perfect maintenance of order and full protection of property.”
This move by the WPUS was driven in part by profound racist prejudices. They feared that more and more black proletarians would join the big marches and demonstrations. Albert Currlin, one of the local leaders of the WPUS, boasted that the local party organization was trying to “dissuade any white men from going with the n—-rs.”
The same leader declared in an interview that, “A gang of n—-rs…sent word that they wanted to join the [Workingmen’s Party]. We replied that we wanted nothing with them.”
In marked contrast to the local leadership of the WPUS, the strikers welcomed the black proletarians with open arms. When a black boatman asked the striking workers if they would support the black proletarians, the strikers responded with a resounding “We will!”8 What we are looking at here is basic class consciousness: the struggle shows in practice that it cannot be extended and consolidated without breaking all divisions based on “identity”. That, regardless of what the multiple oppressions have “taught” each of us who “we are,” as a class we are not a confluence of individuals and their “identities,” but the first step in the reunification of a society and a consciousness split by the division of society into exploiters and exploited with the thousands of oppressions that adorn it.
The massive meetings that the WPUS ended up canceling were the way in which the workers could become unified; something which is essential to their constitution as a political class; as a revolutionary subject. The strength and unity of the strikers and their organization were destroyed by the cancellation of the meetings. The WPUS, instead of responding to the experience of the strike and its needs, behaved like a head divorced from its body.
The collapse of Lassalleanism
Lassalleanism represented the stratum of the craftsman in decantation. The craftsman, as a stratum, was being split into the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The craftsmen, skilled workers endowed with feudal privilege, were either being converted into an “independent” petty bourgeoisie or becoming proletarianized.
Lassalleanism thus expressed ambiguous, if not openly reactionary, aspirations such as the bourgeois state taking “socialist measures” by creating cooperatives or taking responsibility for the education of children. These are ideas that Marxists in the German party have had to face from the moment of the merger and even long after, as can be seen in Marx’s “Critique of Gotha’s Program” and Engels’ “Erfurt Program”.
Transplanted to the conditions of the US south, that attachment to the feudal and identitarian distinction of the craftsman, that vague aspiration of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, was manifested in the form of racism and defense at all costs of small property hand in hand with the state. The Lassallean leadership went so far as to affirm that it would collaborate with the state authorities to avoid damage to property. Instead of aiding the strength and disciplined organization of the workers, the Lassalleans ended up dividing and paralyzing the workers by holding on to the arm of legality and the state.
But obviously, the state wasn’t going to meet their aspirations. Soon after the strike was repressed, John S. Phelps, the Governor of Missouri, ordered the general responsible for the administrative apparatus to distribute arms to the St. Louis authorities and to:
collect such ordnance and ordnance stores as were recently sent to St. Louis by my orders, to be temporarily issued to the citizens who were called upon to aid the civil authorities in preserving the public peace.9
Before the strike was repressed, the Governor of Missouri issued a proclamation ordering the striking workers to disperse. The executive committee replied that the strikers would not give in unless their demands were met, but, it shamelessly urged the workers to just be patient. In the end, the municipal and federal forces ended up storming the city and repressing the strike on July 27th and 28th. The railroad strikes in the other U.S. states were also repressed at around the same time.
The executive committee’s actions, its conciliatory stance toward the mayor, its attempt to appeal to local merchants, shameless racism, and its attempt to moderate the resistance to repression expressed one of the poles toward which Lassallean “social democracy” could lean. Faced with proletarianization, the remaining craftsmen could fantasize about becoming a petty bourgeoisie with state aid or accepting their inescapable future as proletarians. The executive committee of St. Louis took the first road, even at the cost of growing confrontations and clashes with the party base and the movement.10 The final decantating of Lassalleanism, between petty bourgeoisie and proletariat, between past and future, at the end, between state and class, was thus staged in the U.S., tens of thousands of kilometers from the Germany in which it was born and seven years after the Paris Commune.
The Socialist Labor Party
But the railroaders’ strike was neither limited to St. Louis nor did it serve only to show the theoretical and moral collapse of Lassalleanism. In fact, it was the first massive strike in the United States, the first manifestation of the working class as a political subject capable of asserting itself, as the Manifesto says, nationally, that is to say in all the territory and in front of the national state as a whole. A new historical epoch was then opened in the development of the workers movement in the United States that responded to the expectations that Marx himself had shared with Engels in the first moments of the railway strike:
What do you think of the workers in the United States? This first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down, but it could quite well form the starting point for the establishment of a serious labor party in the United States.
And indeed, the WPUS won a large number of votes for the first time in the fall election of 187711 after reconsidering the position adopted at its founding conference only a year earlier.
The change in tactics was accompanied by a name change. From then on, the party would call itself the “Socialist Labor Party” (SLP). What Engels wrote to Sorge in 1889 applies equally well to the labor movement in the United States in 1877.
The people are throwing themselves into the job in quite a different way, are leading far more colossal masses into the fight, are shaking society much more deeply, are putting forward much more far-reaching demands: eight-hour day, general federation of all organizations, complete solidarity. Thanks to Tussy [Eleanor Marx Aveling] women’s branches have been formed for the first time – in the Gas Workers and General Laborers’ Union. Moreover, the people only regard their immediate demands themselves as provisional, although they themselves do not know as yet what final aim they are working for. But this dim idea is strongly enough rooted to make them choose only openly declared Socialists as their leaders.
The SLP continued to grow until in 1879 it was composed of 10,000 militants spread over a hundred sections.12 At the same time, as a result of the experience of the 1877 strike, the unions grew massively both in size and number of members. Between 1879 and 1880, KOL membership grew from 9,000 to 28,000 members. And by 1885, there were already 111,000 members.13
On the other hand, the great strike of 1877 raised the question of workers’ self-defense. The violence of the capitalist class and the incompatibility between labor and capital had been clearly demonstrated. Self-defense groups like “Lehr-und-Wehr Verein,” appeared in Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, and, significantly, in St. Louis. Most of them existed in cities where workers had suffered or were suffering police repression. These groups like “Lehr-und-Wehr Verein,” “Bohemian shooters,” “Jaeger Verein,” or “Irish worker guards” practiced with rifles and bayonets. When in 1879 they marched armed, in formation, through the streets of Chicago, memorializing the Paris Commune, the Illinois Congress reacted by banning all paramilitary groups.
A significant number of SLP members participated in these self-defense groups, causing immense controversy within the SLP. The SLP National Executive Committee considered that the paramilitary groups were giving the wrong impression of socialist politics and objectives. They ended up ordering party members to withdraw from paramilitary groups, causing the “Arbeiter-Zeitung” and the “Vorbote” to denounce them for “interfering with the local rights of party affiliates.” But the discussion remained open, and a heated debate on the subject took place in the Allegheny’s convention of December 1879. Albert Parsons, known for his participation in the ’77 strike and who later, disillusioned with the SLP, would become an anarchist, attempted to win a vote of no confidence against the National Executive Committee for its ban on the participation of SLP members in paramilitary groups. Philip Van Patten, the Lassallean party secretary, demanded from the delegates a “definitive vindication” of their position. In the end, the party leadership was maintained and Philip Van Patten was re-elected as national secretary.14
Stuck between a Lassallean leadership and an anarchist opposition, the party could not even affirm an independent class policy in the electoral arena, which disillusioned many militants. The SLP did not even stand alone in the national elections, but rather always relied on populist and petty-bourgeois parties. The SLP signed the “greenback compromise”, a temporary alliance with the agrarian populists, a move which finds its parallel in the PSOE in Spain and its “republican conjunction”. To top it off, the 1880 campaign in which judges Walsh and Gibbs stuffed the ballot in order to get their candidate J.J. Grath to win the elections, angered thousands of workers and led them to wonder whether electoral mobilization was worth the effort since the elections themselves proved to be a terrain clearly rigged by the local bourgeoisie.15
Many SLP members ended up joining the “social-revolutionary clubs”. Philip Van Patten argued, rightly for the first time, that the members of these clubs could not be members of the SLP because their apoliticism and their defense of paramilitary organizations were irreconcilable with a workers’ party. But anarchism grew as the electoral failures of the SLP mounted. Johann Most arrived in the US just a year after Van Patten argued against the revolutionary clubs. Johann Most was a Bakuninist German immigrant who ended up promoting anarchism among the workers, multiplying its overall strength and influence. Most promoted terrorist tactics, rejected the unions, and participation in elections. Meanwhile, the anarchists in Chicago soon asserted what would later be known as “anarcho-syndicalism”, presenting the unions as embryonic organs of the future socialist society. According to the program of the then recent Anarchist International (IWPA):
The International (IWPA) recognizes in the trade union the embryonic group of the future ‘free society’. Every Trade Union is, nolens volens, an autonomous commune in the process of incubation. The Trades Union is a necessity of capitalistic production, and will yet take its place by superseding it under the system of universal free co-operation. No, friends, it is not the unions but the methods which some of them employ with which the International finds fault, and as indifferently as it may be considered by some, the development of capitalism is hastening the day when all Trades Unions and Anarchists will of necessity become one and the same.16
Although Marx and Engels considered union struggle essential to the advance of the labor movement, they never thought that unions could be the embryonic organs of socialist society. Trade unions are, by nature, reformist organizations that, by their position in capitalism, are incapable of transcending it and much less of being the organs through which it would be abolished. The progressive role of trade unions, during the period when capitalism was expanding, was always limited to what the labor movement could achieve within the limits of capitalism.
The popularity of this form of anarchism was undoubtedly partly provoked not only by the need to participate in the trade union struggle, but also by the inadequacy of the SLP in tackling it. The weakness of the reformist line followed by the SLP leadership, the revisionist idea that revolution could be carried out peacefully through the ballot box, threw many members of the SLP into the arms of the anarchists. By 1883, the SLP had only 1,500 members, while the Chicago Anarchist International had 7,000.17 That year, in the midst of a clear organizational disaster, Philip Van Patten, the party’s national secretary since 1877, left his post.18
The weakness of the socialist movement and its leaders had fueled anarchism, which, according to Marx, was the “great war horse of their master Bakunin, who has taken nothing from the socialist systems except a set of slogans.” Class violence — its ability to impose its needs and those of society over the institutional fabric of the bourgeoisie and state apparatuses — becomes messianic, group violence, defended by both the pro-union anarchists of Chicago and the anti-union anarchists of New York. An era of dynamite worship begins which dissolves the collective capacity of the self-organization of the class. Lucy Parsons, a prominent anarchist who was one of the founding members of the anarchist International, addressing the “tramps” and unemployed, admonishes:
but stroll you down the avenues of the rich, and look through the magnificent plate windows into their voluptuous homes, and here you will discover the very identical robbers who have despoiled you and yours. Then let your tragedy be enacted here!… Send forth your petition, and let them read it by the red glare of destruction…you can be assured that you have spoken to these robbers in the only language which they have ever been able to understand; for they have never yet deigned to notice any petition from their slaves that they were not compelled to read by the red glare bursting from the cannons’ mouths, or that was not handed to them upon the point of the sword. You need no organization when you make up your mind to present this kind of petition. In fact, an organization would be a detriment to you; but each of you hungry tramps who read these lines avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land. Learn the use of explosives!
It is evident in this text, as her denial of the necessity of organization demonstrates, that her concept of the role of violence in revolution was completely divorced from the demands of the movement and real class struggle. In reality, the same can be said of her anti-parliamentarianism, which contrasted greatly with the Marxist orientation towards the question. For Marxists, parliamentarianism was always a question of tactics, not strategy or principles. The socialist parliamentarians only voted for the extension of political rights for the class, they did not enter into the discussion or voting of budgets, for example. Electoral participation was first and foremost a tool for the organization and political mobilization of the class. Like participation in trade unions, it was about developing the capacity and presence of the class as a political subject in bourgeois society while it offered such an opportunity.
The anarchist rejection of “politics”, not only of electoral participation during ascendant capitalism, but of politics in general, reduces anarchism to a merely “expressive”, aesthetic movement, turning its militants in the best of cases into true “liberals with bombs” incapable of contributing anything to the proletariat’s struggle for emancipation from capitalism.
The party before Daniel de León
Neither the Lassalleans nor the anarchists were able to understand two fundamental ideas: that tactics depend on the great historical framework given by the development of global capitalism — and therefore have an expiration date — and that the organization of revolutionaries either provides a direction to the outbursts of combativity or only serves to leave the class defenseless against the political, economic and repressive attacks of its antagonist. When the party meets to try to regain ground at the 1883 Baltimore Convention, the actions they take will be even more counterproductive. In an attempt to regain the disillusioned former members, the party would give more autonomy to the sections, abolish the post of national secretary, and weaken the power of the national executive committee.19 If in organizational terms, one can only speak of a weakening, in programmatic and tactical terms, the setback was direct and brutal. The poor electoral results that we mentioned previously led them to retract from electoral activity. The party ended up accepting the need for violence to achieve socialism, but nevertheless, defended their role in their 1886 manifesto as:
a propagandistic organization which goes hand in hand with the great labor movement that is now refermenting the society of the world, and we shall be revolutionists only when forced into being such by legislation and persecution withholding from us the means of a peaceable propaganda.20
Although it limited itself to this propagandistic role, the SLP began to recover members, increasing its sections from thirty to forty-two. By 1886, there were sixty sections. At the same time, the workers’ movement, increasingly focused on the struggle for the eight-hour working day, gained momentum in 1886. The SLP, encouraged by new growth, eagerly resumed electoral participation.21
But at the same time, the “Central Labor Union” (CLU) would play an important role in the 1886-87 election campaigns. Several SLP members convinced the CLU to participate independently in the 1886 elections. The “United Labour Party” (ULP) was created for this purpose. It was the first attempt to create a “Labor” party, i.e. a trade union party, in the USA. The new party presented the agrarian populist Henry George, who advocated the abolition of all taxes except the land use tax, as a candidate for mayor of New York. The result: 68,000 votes, much more than anyone expected.22 But when described by the press as anarchist and socialist, Henry George reacted by separating himself from the socialists who made such a result possible.23
When the ULP, during the preparation of the program for the 1887 elections, accepted Henry’s proposal for a program based on “tax reform” that was devoid of labor demands, the SLP pronounced itself against it and ended up being expelled from the ULP. The split, which dragged not only members of the SLP but also workers in the CLU, had led to the foundation of the “Progressive Labor Party”. The Progressive Labor Party nominated its own candidates but was unable to receive many votes. At the same time, the repression of Haymarket, which struck against the unions as well as the anarchists related to them, dismantled the anarchist International. The repression and the crude opportunism of the unions both worked to generate a vacuum, a new opportunity to restart the U.S. labor movement.
The “coup” of 1889
The New Yorker Volkszeitung, a private newspaper that was composed of SLP members which appeared a year after the 1877 railway strike, was to play an important role in the subsequent developments of the SLP. The Volkszeitung had started with a capital of 1,100 dollars, donated by the SLP. The newspaper was able to sustain itself through individual subscribers, as well as through the backing and financial support of the unions, which would later bring the group closer to the “American Federation of Labor” (AFL).24 The electoral disaster of 1887 convinced the Volkszeitung team that conditions were not conducive to electoral participation. W.L. Rosenberg and the majority of the SLP National Executive Committee, on the contrary, were hostile to the unions and wanted the SLP to maintain independent political and electoral action. As a result, for the first time, the SLP participated independently in a national election, but with poor results.
In contrast, the people grouped around the Volkszeitung gained strength through its pro-union stance as the vigorous fight for the eight-hour working day spread. In the New York Section of the General Assembly, they obtained a majority, dismissed Rosenberg, and elected three new members to the National Executive Committee. At the party convention, the political orientation differed from the “old SLP” in that it supported, without reservation, the eight-hour day movement and eliminated once and for all the Lassallean slogan of government-funded cooperatives.25
All this was happening a year before Daniel de León entered the SLP and changed its character drastically. As we have seen, the SLP was characterized by a multitude of internal conflicts and tendencies from Lassalleanism to Anarchism. The party was theoretically and organizationally weak and characterized by political confusion. Lassallean influence played a disastrous role in the St. Louis strike of 1877. But strengthened by the impulse of the strike and the rise of the labor movement in general, the SLP intermittently participated in the elections. Internal divisions and electoral failures fed each other by sharpening programmatic differences without ever finding any clarification. The fundamental differences were on the unions, electoral participation, and the self-defense groups. When the party regained attention, aided by the disintegration of the anarchist International and the growing movement for the eight-hour workday, it faced a new electoral disaster after its conflictive association with the Henry George movement. Finally, the Volkszeitung, an expression of German immigrant socialists in New York, would bring about a partisan “coup d’état” in 1899 with which trade unionists would displace the Lassalleans.
KJ
NOTES
1 Paul Le Blanc, A Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2016) 42.
2 Benjamin Péret, Los sindicatos contra la revolución.
3 Gary Chaison, Unions in America (California: Sage Publications, Inc., 2006), 3.
4 Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States (New York, London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906), 179-181.
5 Ibid, 220-223.
6There were, however, Lasallian concessions in the program: state-funded cooperatives and a provision allowing sections to enter local elections if it would be advantageous to do so. Frank Girard, Ben Perry, The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991 A Short History (Philadelphia: Livra Books, 1991), 4.
7 Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912 (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2005) 8-9.
8 James Callahan, «Unlawfully and riotously assembled in the City of St. Louis: The Workingmen’s Party’s Role During the Great Strike of 1877 in St. Louis» (Sr. Seminar, Western Oregon University, 2004), 15-33.
9 Report of the Adjutant General, Acting Quartermaster General and Acting Paymaster General, State of Missouri for the years 1877 and 1878 (Jefferson City: Carter and Regan State Printers and Binders, 1879), 4-5.
10 Robert Ovetz, When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2018), 97-98.
11 They received 9,000 votes in Cincinnati, 6,000 votes in Chicago, 8,000 votes in Louisville, etc. Nelson’s Perpetual Loose-leaf Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference, Volume XI, s.v., «Socialism». New York: Nelson’s Encyclopedia, 1909.
12 Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States (New York, London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906), 225- 226.
13 Gary Chaison, Unions in America (California: Sage Publications, Inc., 2006), 3.
14 Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984, 45-47.
15 Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, Life of Albert Parsons, with Brief History of the Labor Movement of America (Chicago, Mrs. Lucy E. Parsons, 1889), xxxvi.
16 John Rodgers Commons, David Joseph Saposs, Helen Laura Sumner, Edward Becker Mittelman, Henry Elmer Hoagland, John Bertram Andrews, Selig Perlman, Don Divance Lescohier, Elizabeth Brandeis, Philip Taft, History of Labour in the United States: Nationalisation (1860-1877) (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918), 297.
17 Carl Reeve, The Life and Times of Daniel de Leon New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1972, 36.
18 Robert Bills, How the SLP emerged as a Marxist political party.
19 Frank Girard, Ben Perry, The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991: A Short History (Philadelphia: Livra Books, 1991), 9.
20 National Executive Committee of the Socialistic Labor Party, Socialism and Anarchism: Antagonistic Opposites (1886).
21 Frank Girard, Ben Perry, The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991: A Short History (Philadelphia: Livra Books, 1991), 9.
22 Robert Bills, How the SLP emerged as a Marxist political party.
23 Rudolph Schwab, Henry Kuhn, Olive M. Johnson, Rudolph Katz, Chas. H. Ross, F.B. Guarnier, Sam J. French, Ch. H. Corregan, Daniel De Leon, the Man and His Work, A Symposium (National Executive Committee Socialist Labor Party of America, 1919), 2.
24 Peter Conolly- Smith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes Popular Culture, 1895-1920 (Smithsonian Institution, 2010).
25 Frank Girard, Ben Perry, The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991 A Short History (Philadelphia: Livra Books, 1991), 11.