The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs Vol. III: The Path to a Socialist Party, 1897–1904

Eugene V. Debs exploded upon the national scene in 1894 as the leader of a sensational strike by his American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Parlor Car Company—a job stoppage which paralyzed the country's transportation network for nearly two weeks. On January 1, 1897, the polarizing public figure Debs declared his allegiance to international socialism, emerging as the most widely recognized socialist in America. He would thereafter tour the country relentlessly, speaking to large audiences and writing hundreds of articles on political and economic themes over the ensuing three decades.

Debs almost singlehandedly established a new political party, the Social Democracy of America, in the summer of 1897, building upon the remnants of the depleted ARU. The organization advanced a double agenda, seeking to promote both electoral politics and the construction of socialist colonies on the frontier—a dual focus which led to internal tensions and a bitter split. In 1898 Debs cast his lot with Milwaukee publisher Victor L. Berger in a new organization dedicated to political action, the Social Democratic Party of America.

After a split of the older and larger Socialist Labor Party of America in 1899, protracted unity discussions between the Debs group and an organized body of former SLP dissidents ensued. This unity effort was marked by Debs's first run for president of the United States on a joint Social Democratic ticket in November 1900. After heated on-again off-again negotiation between the two groups, a marriage was finally brokered in the summer of 1901 and the Socialist Party of America was launched. The party would soon grow to become the third biggest in American politics, with Debs enthusiastically heading the Socialist ticket in 1904 in the second of his five runs for the presidency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642590883

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Introduction

This is the third of a six-volume series gathering the most important writings of American socialist and union organizer Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926).

Volume 1: Building Solidarity on the Tracks, 1877–1892 followed the career path and intellectual development of a youthful Gene Debs, a boy who worked a year and a half as an unskilled engine maintenance worker before gaining promotion to the role of fireman for steam locomotives in the switchyard and aboard local trains. Attending business school during his free time, Debs dropped the scoop in 1874 to take a full-time job at a regional grocery wholesaler in Terre Haute, a large operation run by a family friend. Debs nevertheless managed to stay close to the railroad industry he loved as the founder and leading activist of Lodge No. 16 of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (B of LF) in February 1875.

Tireless work for the fledgling social benefit organization was rewarded in 1878 when young Gene was named assistant editor of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, the brotherhood’s official monthly, followed by promotion to editor and election as national secretary-treasurer in 1880, a well-remunerated and prestigious job. Debs would remain a top functionary of the B of LF for nearly 15 years. In his role as a national labor magazine editorialist, Debs closely observed the world and labor’s place in it. Debs’s worldview gradually evolved from an early paternalistic emphasis on sobriety, clean living, the Protestant work ethic, and active self-improvement to a radicalized perspective marked by class struggle and a ceaseless battle of workers for adequate wages, better working conditions, and social respect.

The bitter defeat of striking engineers, firemen, and switchmen in a landmark 1888 strike against the Burlington railroad system played a pivotal role in Debs’s profound transformation. Seeing railroaders’ division into a dozen craft-based railroad brotherhoods as an insurmountable weakness when arrayed against the united front of railway owners and managers, in 1889 Debs sought to unite the existing organizations in a centralized federation known as the Supreme Council of the United Orders of Railway Employees. Debs’s hopes for this new structure were soon dashed, however, when the Supreme Council floundered and crashed in a bitter and dirty jurisdictional battle between two of its four affiliated member brotherhoods.¹ Debs was left even more firmly convinced of the need for unity among railway workers, feeling that a fundamental change in the form of labor organization in the railway industry was necessary for enduring success.

Volume 2: The Rise and Fall of the American Railway Union, 1892–1896 saw Debs quickly gravitate to the idea of a new industrial union encompassing all railway workers, abandoning the established system of craft-based brotherhoods altogether. While the original idea for such an industrial union originated with former railroad conductor George W. Howard, founder of a militant dual conductors’ union, it was the charismatic Debs who rapidly became the top organizer and public face of the American Railway Union (ARU) from the time of its establishment in February 1893.

The ARU was fortunate to win a quick and widely publicized victory of an April 1894 strike against the Great Northern Railway via arbitration, but it came to grief the following year when delegates at the first and only quadrennial convention of the ARU voted to adopt an ongoing strike of railway-car assembly workers as their own. The union’s boycott of trains attached to Pullman sleeper cars paralyzed much of America’s railway system for more than a week, from Chicago westward, before being crushed by the one-two punch of legal action by the aggrieved railways and military intervention by the federal government. Debs and a half dozen other top ARU officials were jailed without trial for contempt of court for having refused to immediately terminate the Pullman strike following judicial injunction. Decapitated, the union floundered; facing the blacklist, its members scattered. Despite the crushing defeat delivered to his union, the six months spent in county jail and his triumphant emergence as an unsullied hero of the working class would prove to be a seminal event in Debs’s life.

Upon his release in November 1895, Debs—convinced that lasting change was impossible through trade unionism alone—intensified his emphasis on politics, expanding his support of the independent third party politics of the fledgling People’s Party (Populists). While this organization had real success in a number of western states, the movement proved short-lived, ultimately damaged beyond repair by the election of 1896 in which the Populists hitched their wagon to the candidacy of insurgent Democrat William Jennings Bryan.² Resisting an effort by radical elements in the People’s Party to draft him as an alternative candidate for president, Debs instead campaigned for the halfhearted reformer Bryan, speaking dozens of times to labor audiences around the country on behalf of the Democratic-Populist fusion ticket.

Bryan’s smashing defeat in November 1896 came as a severe blow to Debs and other earnest reformers. With the Populists discredited for their opportunism and the smallness of their intellectual horizons, the organization rapidly atrophied in size and influence. A new path was sought by those who sought fundamental economic change as a mechanism for building a better world.

Home for Christmas 1896 from his relentless fall tour in support of the Bryan fusion ticket, Gene Debs found a surprise visitor to his Terre Haute home—Edward Boyce,³ president of the radical Western Federation of Miners (WFM).⁴ Boyce had a favor to ask of the ARU leader. A lengthy strike was underway in the booming mining town of Leadville, Colorado—a place where Boyce had himself toiled in the mines for four years previously. Wild fluctuations of the American economy had been the source of the trouble, with a partial recovery after the Panic of 1893 giving way to a new downturn in 1896. Unemployment escalated, and commodity prices, including those for silver and other metals, fell precipitously. Colorado mine operators used the bad economy and their weak bottom line as a pretext to cut wages, slashing the basic daily rate for a Leadville miner from $3 a day to $2.50. Feeling themselves unable to live on the reduced daily rate in the comparatively costly community of Leadville, then the second largest city in Colorado after Denver, miners had struck for a return to the former pay scale. The mine operators would not budge, and suspicions were rife that this intransigence was a mere pretext for an ulterior motive: busting the union. A massive strike had erupted, lasting for months. Boyce had come to Debs to ask for his help as a union activist and public orator in helping to bring the costly and violent Leadville strike to a reasonable conclusion. Debs promised his help early in the coming year.

The year 1897 would first begin with a profession of a new system of belief—a public declaration of allegiance to the doctrine of socialism. Volume 3: Path to a Socialist Party, 1897–1904 opens with a lengthy and carefully crafted declaration of faith in socialism by Gene Debs, timed for effect for publication on New Year’s Day. This was no casual announcement of support for an old cause, but rather a polished manifesto that attempted to build a groundswell for a new political movement to replace the discredited People’s Party. In an interview granted one day prior to publication of his bold announcement, Debs acknowledged:

I know that I will be criticized and berated by the press and especially by those persons who do not understand the true and better meaning of the term socialist. But there is coming to be a better understanding of what enlightened socialism means. Some of the ablest men, in the pulpit, too, are beginning to sound the alarm, and they will be heeded before there is a violent explosion.⁵

Debs had already long been a socialist in all but name. Debs and his ARU cellmates in the McHenry County Jail at Woodstock, Illinois, had rather naively constituted themselves the Cooperative Colony of Liberty Jail, news of which appeared in the press.⁶ The small band spent three months reading, writing, discussing, and delivering formal lectures to one another on various social issues of the day, with Debs then spending an additional three months behind bars alone as a dubious reward for his leading role as ARU president. While Debs later retrospectively portrayed his conversion to socialism as the direct result of a volume by Karl Marx delivered to him in person at Woodstock jail by socialist propagandist Victor L. Berger,⁷ in reality, Debs owed his evolving worldview more to ongoing discussions with his mates, the futuristic fiction of Edward Bellamy,⁸ and the signature work of Laurence Gronlund⁹ than he did to any alleged epiphany gained plowing through the ponderous Das Kapital.¹⁰

Early in January 1897, Debs made his way for the Mountain West, where he would spend about ten weeks on the road sharing the rostrum at public meetings with WFM president Edward Boyce. The Leadville strike had already been dragging on for months prior to Debs’s appearance, with strikebreakers engaged in the mines, a dynamite attack and gunfight erupting between striking miners and strikebreakers, and National Guard troops inserted in an attempt to reestablish order.¹¹ A hefty $1 monthly tax had been imposed by the union upon every member of the Western Federation of Miners to provide financial support to the strikers. As fall turned to winter, the rank-and-file WFM had been drained not only of funds but also seemingly of the will to persevere. Debs was called upon to rally the flagging spirits of strikers and their union brethren in a speaking tour of mining cities across the region. Debs also sought, albeit with little success, to generate broad public support of the strike and to generate financial aid for picketing miners from the American labor movement as a whole. In addition, an unsuccessful attempt was made to insert Debs directly into the strike settlement process as a negotiator representing the miners.

The idea of a sliding wage scale based upon the market price of silver was floated, but the concept gained no traction, with mine owners clearly on the verge of victory and in no mood for compromise. Nor did the growing American Federation of Labor step up with the substantial financial support needed to keep the struggling miners away from work without their families starving. Despite the best eleventh-hour efforts of Debs and Boyce, the western hard-rock strike ended in total defeat in March 1897 when members of the Cloud City Miners’ Union voted overwhelmingly to return to work at the reduced wage scale.

One lasting token of Debs’s commitment to the Cloud City Miners’ Union was a literary contribution made after the fact, a series of seven articles on the Leadville strike and its lessons composed for The Western Miner, weekly newspaper of the union, during April and May 1897. The six most important of these articles are republished for the first time in this volume.¹²

Returning to Terre Haute from a trip to Salt Lake City in May 1897, where he had been the esteemed guest of the Western Federation of Miners at its fifth annual convention, Debs was greeted by Norman Lermond of Thomaston, Maine,¹³ national secretary and leading spirit of a group of utopian socialist true believers known as the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth (BCC). The BCC had been organized in September 1896 with the stated objective of educating the public in the principles of socialism and uniting them into a single fraternal association so that cooperative colonies and industries could be established in one state until said state is socialized.¹⁴ Lermond hoped to win over Debs—one of the most prominent American labor figures in the wake of the ARU’s sensational 1894 strike—as a national organizer for his group.¹⁵

The BCC’s strategy both paralleled and informed Debs’s own manna-from-dirt-clods perspective,¹⁶ which postulated that like-minded individuals could be banded together in cloistered, non-exploitative communities on the American frontier and cooperatively build successful local economies that would inspire widespread emulation. This growing network of colonists could then exert political muscle at the state level, winning control of state government via the ballot box and legislating tax policy that would drive wealthy exploiters out of business. Cooperative economy would then spread like wildfire from state to state, ending with the transformation of the national economy from wage-slavery to a system based upon higher, collaborative principles.

The BCC had previously focused on such states as Tennessee, Arkansas, and Utah—rural venues with economical land prices. Debs, on the other hand, had in mind the state of Washington, a newly minted 1889 addition to the United States on the Pacific coast that boasted not only affordable and exploitable land but a relatively small population who had already elected a Populist as governor and who therefore seemed potentially amenable to the ideas of socialism. Lermond agreed to postpone his group’s Southeastern colonization plans pending the outcome of a convention of the moribund ARU, already scheduled for the middle of June in Chicago.¹⁷

Te June 15, 1897 special convention of the American Railway Union would be its last, with the handful of delegates in attendance gaveled into session barely long enough to terminate their affairs. The gathering immediately reconvened in a larger hall under a new banner—the Social Democracy of America (SDA). Not coincidentally, the officers of this new organization would be the same as those of the old—a sort of Woodstock mafia consisting of jailed ARU functionaries Debs, Sylvester Keliher,¹⁸ James Hogan,¹⁹ Roy Goodwin,²⁰ and William E. Burns.²¹ The weekly newspaper of the old ARU, The Railway Times, last vestige of the formerly active industrial union, was seamlessly repurposed with a new nameplate as The Social Democrat. The old union was transformed into a political party in a blink.

With public interest in the affairs of the self-proclaimed labor agitator Debs already high, an influx of observers and supporters made their way to Chicago to participate at the well-publicized founding session of the new political organization. The motley gathering would include a handful of loyalists to the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP)—far and away the biggest and most influential Marxist political party in America.²² Milwaukee newspaper publisher Victor L. Berger, long an enemy of the ultraorthodox SLP, would also be on hand, as well as independent radicals from Chicago such as Lucy Parsons,²³ a committed anarchist activist best known as the widow of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons.²⁴

The program of the new organization was eclectic; critics might call it muddled. On the one hand, it posited that the trade union struggle was ultimately fruitless, given the ready availability of armed force and the entire judicial system, waiting for the command of the real power behind the throne, capital. Only with the capture of the state through the ballot box and a revolutionary transformation of the entire political and judicial apparatus would just lasting change become possible.²⁵ Simultaneously, however, the new organization sought to pursue a parallel strategy of economic transformation through cloistered cooperative colonies, concentrated and connected in a single, sparsely-populated state in the West. Political transformation would start small, with the success of cooperative organization inspiring mass emulation and ultimately propelling the socialist cause to victory.

This dual political and economic scheme sounded reasonable in the abstract. Reality was more problematic. While plenty of people could be found to attend meetings, raising the massive funds needed to finance a large-scale program of land acquisition and colonization would prove more difficult. As a first step, the founding convention of the SDA elected a three-member

Colonization Commission consisting of prominent civil engineer and political activist Richard J. Hinton²⁶ of Washington, DC, and two important political journalists—the true fathers of the Bellamy political movement of the 1890s: Cyrus Field Willard of Boston,²⁷ and W. P. Borland²⁸ of Michigan. For his part, the Social Democracy’s best-known adherent, Eugene V. Debs, would remain a giddy advocate of the colonization scheme throughout the summer of 1897, with his ardor only gradually attenuating as the price tag of colonization and the difficulty of uniting a diverse organization around a single location— or even tactic of colonies at all—became clear.²⁹

Following the precedent of political parties and religious groups throughout history, the Social Democracy of America was an organization racked by factional disagreement. Beyond any disagreement over the tactic of colonization, the SDA faintly echoed a fundamental tension in the SLP of the 1880s, pitting a revolutionary socialist anarchist wing and the election-driven orientation of Debs and his fellows. This tension came to a head in September 1897 with news of the Lattimer Massacre in Pennsylvania, a premeditated bloodbath in which more than 20 striking immigrant coal miners marching on a public road were shot to death and dozens more wounded by a trigger-happy sheriff’s posse. Debs railed against the butchery with a September 12 editorial in which he provocatively declared that had he not been unalterably opposed to capital punishment I would say that the sheriff and his deputy assassins should be lynched.³⁰ However, when very similar sentiments were expressed at a meeting of Chicago Local Branch 2, SDA, a radical group that included the publicly known anarchist Lucy Parsons among its ranks, and the mainstream Chicago press caught wind, a harsh reaction followed. The moderate leadership of the SDA decided that, in order to quell the tempest, factional heads must roll. It was Debs himself who presided over the four-hour evening session of the SDA executive board that drummed the entire membership of Chicago Local Branch 2 out of the movement. These machinations foreshadowed the on-again, off-again factional war between radicals and moderates that periodically erupted within the future Socialist Party of America. In this first internecine battle, it should be emphasized, Debs was no wild-eyed leftist, nor were his hands clean.

Following the expulsion of Chicago Local Branch 2, factional discord was briefly quieted. President Debs earned his $100 a month salary as a touring lecturer for the SDA, speaking on behalf of the party to crowds around the country. Debs even took his organizing campaign north of the border, making a series of appearances in the Canadian province of Ontario late in 1897 before returning home to Terre Haute for Christmas. From there he would depart on a more pleasant winter jaunt, touring the sunny states of Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana early in 1898.

Debs’s aggressive travel schedule as de facto national organizer for the SDA was duplicated by the group’s independently financed Colonization Commission. Originally envisioned by the convention as a committee assigned in charge of hammering out details for a cooperative project in Washington or similar western state, the commission soon expanded its mission and around a broad section of the country investigating no fewer than four half-baked schemes.³¹ First came a plan for the SDA to serve effectively as a general contractor for the construction of 75 miles of train track for the city of Nashville, a project that was to be funded by the sale of government bonds. This idea rapidly morphed into a grandiose proposal for the acquisition of 400,000 acres of rural Tennessee, underwritten by selling bonds to financial speculators backed by the value of the property. The commission visited Georgia because it was rumored that there might be a suitable place for a cooperative colony, then pondered land in Utah, before settling on the idea of selling 5-percent-interest-bearing bonds to purchase a working gold mine in Colorado. The precious metal extracted would be used to pay off investors and fund future efforts at agricultural colonization, the commission surmised.

In its first year of existence, the overmatched Colonization Commission accomplished nothing of value, frittering away on salaries, travel, and lodging expenses several thousand dollars that had been raised for the express purpose of establishing a model cooperative colony. With the political action faction of the SDA already running candidates in local elections in Milwaukee in 1897 with gratifying results, dissatisfaction with the fantasy and failure of the Colonization Commission grew as the scheduled date of the first national convention of the SDA drew nigh.

The June 1898 convention of the Social Democracy of America would prove to be the last public act by the group. While political action and colonization had been conceived as complementary strategies of an efficient and multi-pronged organization at the founding convention in 1897, after just twelve months it seemed clear that a small and underfunded group such as the SDA could barely pursue one, let alone both, of these antagonistic agendas. The committed advocates of each path came to see those favoring the other tactic in an adversarial light, and concrete factional organization was begun in an effort to capture the convention and control the future direction of the organization. Pro-colonization forces were particularly adept in their organizing efforts, hastily establishing 11 new Chicago local branches in the weeks preceding the convention, each barely meeting the minimum size requirement of five members.³² These dubious newly-minted entities were nevertheless entitled to one voting delegate at the convention according to organizational rules. Smelling an attempt to pack the convention, national secretary Sylvester Keliher, a committed political actionist, attempted to block this foray by declining to issue charters for eight of the new local branches. This administrative action enraged the colonization faction, led by former ARU functionary James Hogan and Cyrus Field Willard of the Colonization Commission. The entire first day of the convention was spent in an acrimonious debate, arguing the case for seating these contested delegates. The colonization faction ultimately won the day, bolstering their delegate majority and indicating in no uncertain terms which way the convention would be turning.

The following morning, Vice President Hogan delivered a stinging two-hour report charging his former ARU brother Keliher with financial malfeasance, alleging that earmarked colonization funds had been improperly used to cover day-to-day operation of the national organization. Further debate over the party program devolved into a heated argument running late into the night, culminating in a 53–37 vote in the wee hours reaffirming the tactic of colonization, and approving the current scheme of establishing and operating a cooperative Colorado gold mine, financed by the sale of speculative shares to investors.³³

Time was running out on the convention; some politically-oriented delegates had already left for home, with others needing to depart the next day.³⁴ Gene Debs was sick in bed, conveniently and not for the last time taking ill in the face of bitter factional conflict. Occupied with credentials fights, mutual recriminations of officers, and speechifying, four days had already been wasted. With new officers slated to be elected the following day and the colonization faction in decisive majority control of the convention, the time for a break had arrived.

At 2:30 a.m., the gavel of adjournment fell. Thirty-one members of the political action faction immediately proceeded across the street to the parlor of the Revere House to unanimously constitute themselves a new political organization, the Social Democratic Party of America.³⁵ With Gene’s brother, friend, and top political advisor, Theodore, tapped as temporary national secretary of the new party at the pre-dawn founding conclave, there seemed little doubt where the elder Debs brother’s allegiance would lie. But similar unity of purpose would not be shown by Gene’s old ARU associates from Woodstock. The ambitious George Howard was first to split with his comrades back in their three months of joint internment. Then Louis W. Rogers³⁶ had stepped aside at the time of the 1897 transformation of the ARU into the SDA. Now, with the shattering of the SDA, three more ARU colleagues would part paths with Debs, with James Hogan and Roy Goodwin joining the nine-member National Executive Council of the restructured colonization group, and William Burns dealing himself out of national politics to return to the rank and file.

The split of the SDA was largely unexpected by the members and friends of the Social Democracy and drew sharp criticism from some quarters. Veteran Newark labor journalist Joseph Buchanan, investigating the situation just a few days after the breakup, revealed that he had previously warned Debs in no uncertain terms that any foray into politics would prove fatal for colonization efforts of his new organization, as the many rich men who sympathized with the poor and who gave generously to social reform causes would refuse aid if the industrial plan was attached to a partisan political scheme.³⁷ Now Debs and the political actionists were faced with the deceptively difficult task of developing a niche for the new political party in the narrow space between the People’s Party on the reformist right and the Socialist Labor Party on the impossibilist left.³⁸ He’ll see, if he hasn’t already seen … that there isn’t any use trying just now to split between those two organizations, Buchanan warned. Revered godfather of American social democracy Laurence Gronlund was similarly displeased, taking to the pages of the penultimate issue of the official organ of the colonization wing to rebuke Victor Berger and the political actionists for an unrealizable extremist program that would require a radical change in our national constitution.³⁹

Debs seems to have been physically exhausted by two years of relentless touring and deeply demoralized by the death of his true intellectual child, the American Railway Union. He retreated to his home in Indiana for the summer of 1898, delivering just one public address in Terre Haute and a handful of hastily written contributions to the new weekly newspaper of the SDP, the Social Democratic Herald. By September, Debs was so far adrift personally and professionally that he was reportedly testing the water for an implausible return as a functionary of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. He traveled at his own expense to the organization’s 1898 annual convention in Toronto, ostensibly to see friends. A single speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, provided a suitable pretext for this journey, the results of which were otherwise barren.⁴⁰

Only the coming of the fall election season shook Debs free from his torpor. Somewhat miraculously, the Social Democratic Party—taking over for and building upon a foundation laid in several previous local elections by the Socialist Labor Party—began to attract attention and support in a few industrial towns in Massachusetts, with shoe and textile operatives rallying to the red banner. Debs hurried to the scene of action, speaking nightly throughout October on behalf of the SDP in a series of Massachusetts engagements.⁴¹ Night after night, he hammered home the SDP’s message, appearing at Northampton, Holyoke, Worcester, Cambridge, Boston, and other locales. The SDP campaign was capped with success, with the party winning the election of Louis M. Scates⁴² and James F. Carey⁴³ to the Massachusetts legislature, followed several weeks later by success at the city level in the towns of Haverhill and Brockton. Although modest and limited in scope, the victories of the SDP in the 1898 elections seemed to validate the strategy of the adherents of electoral politics, giving the tiny new party a reprieve for growth.

With the elections having finished, Debs was once more left occupationally unmoored. Despite earlier misgivings that converting one’s fame to fortune on the lecture circuit was somehow unseemly, in December 1898, Debs reversed course and embarked on a new career, shifting from organizational functionary of a fledgling political party to paid orator. Twenty dates were booked for 20 nights in the state of Iowa, with the nonpartisan Debs lecturing extemporaneously on Labor and Liberty before eclectic audiences in such rural enclaves as Eagle Grove (population 3,500), Creston (7,700), and Boone (8,500).⁴⁴ Turnout for this initial midwinter speaking tour was sparse, but the first steps of the learning curve were navigated, and lessons learned for the future. Debs dedicated a substantial percentage of the proceeds of his early paid speaking engagements to retirement of the ARU’s five-figure debt for legal services incurred during the 1894 Pullman strike—a bill that he assumed personally following the union’s termination in 1897 in an effort to preserve its good name.

Debs also sought to build a career as a publisher in this period, adding new socialist titles to the Debs Publishing Company’s already substantial catalog of instructional books for railroad workers. A monthly series of socialist pamphlets under the series title Progressive Thought was launched in January 1899, with order fulfillment handled at home in Terre Haute by his wife, Kate. This fledgling operation was forced to battle for a place in a socialist publishing field already dominated by bigger rivals, including the former Unitarian publishing house of Charles H. Kerr in Chicago,⁴⁵ J. A. Wayland’s expanding Appeal to Reason operation based in Southeastern Kansas, the Wilshire Publishing Company of Los Angeles, and John Spargo’s Comrade Publishing Company of New York City.⁴⁶ Each of these friendly rivals published regular newspapers or magazines through which they promoted their wares, placing the Debs Publishing Company at a serious competitive disadvantage. Debs nevertheless continued to swim against the stream as a publisher through 1904, adding two short booklets from his own pen to the company’s catalog—The American Movement⁴⁷ and Unionism and Socialism.⁴⁸ He would formally liquidate his publishing enterprise only in August 1905.⁴⁹

Despite Debs’s struggles as a publisher, his career as a paid public speaker began to flourish during the first half of 1899. Warming up with a couple of Indiana dates in January, Debs engaged his old ARU associate and current president of the Michigan Federation of Labor, former Railway Times editor L. W. Rogers, to manage a ten-day tour of the Wolverine State. Unlike many of his previous dates in Iowa, these Michigan events were attended by large and enthusiastic audiences who paid 25, 35, or even 50 cents for a ticket to hear the earnest and lively extemporaneous prose of the famous labor leader. A tour of Ohio and Indiana followed during late February, with Debs returning home for several weeks before catching a train to New York City for a long-anticipated speech at Delmonico’s, one of the city’s finest restaurants, at the invitation of the tony Nineteenth Century Club.⁵⁰ April saw a further tour of Indiana; a vast swath of territory was covered in May and June, with Debs speaking in such far-flung locales as Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Touching base in Terre Haute from his massive tour barely long enough to sleep in his own bed, Debs immediately departed for Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota, before cracking back to Michigan and Illinois. Debs was much in demand as a public orator and willing to slake that thirst with political talks. Debs spoke earnestly and entertainingly for two hours a night on Labor and Liberty to audiences running into the thousands, in the meantime racking up honoraria with which he steadily chipped away at the ARU’s standing legal debt.⁵¹

Factional discord had consumed the Social Democracy by the middle of 1898. One year later, a similar tension was festering in the rival Socialist Labor Party (SLP). In 1890, a talented Columbia University lecturer had been installed in the top echelon of party leadership, Daniel DeLeon.⁵² As editor of the official English-language party weekly, The People, DeLeon would soon come to dominate the SLP through his masterful invective and political savvy, building a centralized faction of co-thinkers that included editor of the official Vorwärts (Forward), Hugo Vogt,⁵³ and the party’s iron-jowled national secretary, Henry Kuhn.⁵⁴ This leading group, enemies all of socialists making use of the tactic of boring within the established network of craft-based trade unions, had overplayed their hand by establishing a dual labor federation in 1895, the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (ST&LA). Marketed as a tool for organization of the unorganized, in practice the ST&LA did little more than initiate a series of bitter jurisdictional skirmishes with unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor—a contest that accomplished nothing more than the utter destruction of carefully constructed bridges between socialist trade unionists and the established labor movement.

As a result of this trade union policy and an attempt to instill ideological uniformity, a first wave of defections began in 1897 when a number of the party’s leading Yiddish-language journalists and activists, including Abraham Cahan,⁵⁵ Louis Miller,⁵⁶ and Morris Winchevsky,⁵⁷ exited amid insults and accusations. They chose to join forces with the fresh and unsullied Debs Social Democracy, participating in the founding convention of the SDA. This departure of the SLP’s talented Yiddish leadership exacerbated an already tense internal situation inside the party. Despite the dwindling number of adherents of the new union, the SLP national leadership’s support of the ST&LA continued unabated, while discontent at the state and local level grew. Criticism of party policy was stifled by the stranglehold on the press maintained by the New York leadership.

A factional explosion ripped apart the Socialist Labor Party in the summer of 1899, as an organized group of dissidents attempted to depose the DeLeon-Vogt-Kuhn leadership clique through regular party processes. The opposition faction was headed by attorneys Morris Hillquit⁵⁸ and Henry Slobodin,⁵⁹ as well as editors and staff of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, a semi-independent German-language SLP daily that had been sharply critical of the dual unionist ST&LA tactic.⁶⁰ The denouement came with the July 1899 election of the new General Committee of Section New York—the party unit that, under state and national party rules, was responsible for election of the National Executive Committee, which in turn appointed the party editors. DeLeon and The People accused the anti-ST&LA dissidents of duplicity, alleging that principle had been surrendered for the ephemeral support of the labor fakirs heading the constituent unions of the American Federation of Labor. Several outspoken opponents had been suspended.⁶¹ The dissidents responded by publishing a new factional paper, a so-called monthly edition of the Volkszeitung that attempted to isolate the DeLeon-Vogt-Kuhn leadership and its trade union policies, making use of the party mailing list to place it in the hands of all subscribers of The People and Vorwärts.⁶²

Rival slates were fielded for the General Committee elections, and the air was rife with accusations of election fraud and rumors of the establishment of phantom branches. The dissidents won the majority in the party election that followed. The newly elected delegates gathered for official reorganization on July 8, with unwavering DeLeon loyalist L. Abelson, organizer of Section New York, in the chair. An attempt to elect a temporary chair followed, with the nominee of the dissidents apparently receiving a majority of votes of those assembled before Hugo Vogt disrupted the proceedings by filibustering with an impromptu speech.⁶³ Recriminations about false credentials and violations of parliamentary procedure rapidly devolved into fisticuffs and, as one participant colorfully recounted,

the delegates pummeled each other until blood was seen flowing from many wounds. Men were sprawling upon the floor, others were fighting in corners, upon the tables, chairs, and upon the piano, Hugo Vogt having climbed upon the latter yelling and fairly foaming from his mouth. Kuhn, Vogt, Fiebiger, and many others were bleeding, and when they saw that the majority were not willing to submit to mob law, they withdrew from the hall.⁶⁴

With the first reorganizational meeting thoroughly disrupted, another session was called for July 10 at Laughut’s Hall in the Bowery to elect a new General Committee of Section New York (and thereby the National Executive Committee). This session was boycotted by the pro-DeLeon faction, which alleged the gathering to have been illegally called. Free of obstructionist tactics by troublesome opponents, provisional organizer of Section New York Julius Gerber⁶⁵ called the meeting to order, and the dissident faction rapidly proceeded to take action to sweep away the old leadership of the party. In a first resolution passed by over 50 delegates duly assembled, organizer Abelson, secretary Kuhn, and all other officers of Section New York, SLP were suspended from their positions and temporary successors elected, with the decision to be ratified by referendum vote of the party membership.⁶⁶ In further resolutions, the seven members of the New York State Committee and five members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) were similarly suspended and replaced by new slates. Henry L. Slobodin was elected by the meeting as provisional national secretary, with top leaders of the dissidents Benjamin Feigenbaum and Morris Hillquit elected to the state committee and NEC, respectively.⁶⁷

The administration faction refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of these suspensions and elections by the action of what they considered an illegally constituted kangaroo court.⁶⁸ Following the conclusion of the meeting, national secretary pro tem Slobodin made his way with a handful of other delegates to take possession of the national office located at 184 William Street. They arrived to find locked doors, behind which sat Kuhn, Vogt, DeLeon, Abelson, and other administration loyalists. Yet another brawl ensued, this time with clubs and bottles being wielded as weapons. Slobodin and the dissidents were the losers in this pugilistic rematch, which drew to a premature conclusion with the arrival of the police.⁶⁹ Two rival political parties went forward, each wrapping themselves in the mantle of the Socialist Labor Party, each publishing editions of official organs under identical nameplates as The People.

Fist-fighting in the halls gave way to less sanguinary battlegrounds. First came a fight in the capitalist courts, with the DeLeonists awarded the valuable party logo and ballot line. The second battle, a fight for the hearts, minds, allegiance, and dues money of the local leaders and the rank and file, ended in a split decision, with some leaders and organizations, such as J. Mahlon Barnes⁷⁰ and Section Philadelphia, Tommy Morgan⁷¹ of Section Chicago, Max S. Hayes⁷² and Section Cleveland, and Job Harriman⁷³ in California decisively splitting with the DeLeon faction while others rallied to the cause of the charismatic political strategist, translator, and newspaper editor.⁷⁴

The dissident SLP remained as much a New York–centered organization as the official party; it held its organizing convention upstate in the city of Rochester from January 27 to February 2, 1900.⁷⁵ The split with the administrative faction had left the SLP dissidents—practical politicians all—feeling isolated and weak. A hunger grew to restore the strength and upward trajectory of the organization through unification with Midwestern-based organization of Debs and Berger. In addition to common antipathy to Daniel DeLeon and his cohorts, a substantial programmatic agreement was recognized. Volition for unity originated with the SLP dissidents. By an overwhelming vote of 55 to 1, their Rochester convention named a nine-member Unity Committee to negotiate merger terms with the Social Democratic Party. The same convention also nominated California attorney Job Harriman and Cleveland newspaper publisher Max S. Hayes as its respective candidates for president and vice president of the United States, with the understanding that this slate was subject to change should a new unified organization rapidly emerge.

The depth of the partisan antipathy still held by the top SDP leadership was grossly underestimated by the SLP dissidents. Good faith was in short supply; outright hostility or, at best, deep and poisonous suspicion was coin of the realm. For two years, Debs and his associates had been on the receiving end of a torrent of ridicule from the SLP, with party editor DeLeon and his co-thinkers pouring forth a thick layer of insults and mockery alleging the pseudosocialist nature of the weak-minded neophytes who comprised the thoroughly middle-class Debserie. Although endured mostly in silence, this protracted attack was deeply resented by the top leadership of the SDP: Gene Debs and his brother, national secretary Theodore; grumpy and vain publisher Victor L. Berger of Milwaukee and his protégé, Frederic Heath; young Chicago attorney Seymour Stedman, a Debs acolyte from People’s Party days; Chicago attorney Jesse Cox, an aging veteran of Chicago progressive politics; party editor Alfred Shenstone Edwards, a veteran of the failed Ruskin colony of Tennessee who had come to Jesus as a committed political actionist through personal experience with the dismal reality of communal living; and powerhouse organizer Margaret Haile of Massachusetts. These top leaders of the SDP saw the SLP dissidents as guilty by association with the worst excesses of the DeLeon–Kuhn regime. The protracted legal fight to retain the name and apparatus of the Socialist Labor Party waged by the breakaway dissidents had done nothing to calm the visceral loathing of the SDP leadership of the devil DeLeon.

Four members of the dissident SLP’s unity committee were in attendance at the SDP’s regularly scheduled nominating convention, held in Indianapolis from March 6–9, 1900. These four came cap in hand, respectfully, and were granted the floor at the convention. There they spoke positively for the idea of unity and were received warmly. This delegation consisted of multilingual Morris Hillquit, an urbane intellectual uniquely able to calm the most troubled waters with well-chosen words; both members of the dissidents’ presidential slate of Job Harriman and Max Hayes, themselves very personable and affable individuals; and George B. Benham, editor of a San Francisco weekly, The Class Struggle, and a top socialist in the biggest city of the Pacific coast. Harriman graciously offered to stand aside for the famous Debs atop a unity ticket. Formal unification of the two kindred political organizations was envisioned to take place in the immediate future. In negotiations with SDP leaders, promises were made to continue using Social Democratic Party name in the new, unified party that was to follow.

Debs and the SDP leaders found themselves facing a veritable tidal wave of pro-merger sentiment at the March 1900 convention. Still wary of the SLP dissidents to the point of paranoia, they professed agnosticism on the unification question and bided their time. Berger, Heath, Haile, and Stedman were all elected to a nine-person joint unity committee by the gathering and given the task of meeting with their dissident SLP counterparts to hammer out a final unity proposal to be submitted to both organizations for ratification.⁷⁶ Debs, continuing his preference to be a party leader above the factional fray, did not participate in this SDP unity committee. Moreover, Debs initially resisted the entreaties of the SDP delegates to head the national ticket as candidate for president in 1900, repeating his refusal to run for office as a radical populist in the previous campaign. Only at the eleventh hour, amidst actual tears and figurative arm-twisting, was a recalcitrant Debs finally persuaded to put his hat into the presidential ring—thereby narrowly averting the deep organizational embarrassment that would have followed the SDP’s endorsement of the full ticket of the dissident SLP, already in the field. It was decided: Debs of the SDP would be the nominee for president and Harriman of the dissident SLP the nominee for vice president. Even without a merger, the two parties would run a joint ticket under the banner of the Social Democratic Party. This hurried decision to coordinate national campaign efforts, made at a time when the prospect of organic unity burned most brightly, would prove fortuitous in later months, tamping down factional jealously and Machiavellian shenanigans and keeping differences between dissident SLP New York and SDP Chicago from spiraling to an irreconcilable split.

Seventeen of the 18 members of the two unity committees met in New York City from March 25–27, 1900.⁷⁷ Never was the old adage the devil is in the details more true. The division between the SLP-loathing leaders of Chicago and Milwaukee and the rest of the unity delegates became abundantly clear during discussions over the fundamental issues of party name, location of headquarters, and official publication. With Berger missing the trip due to the forthcoming birth of a child,⁷⁸ the SDP delegation split 5–3 on issue after issue at the conference, with the pro-unity majority led at the table by William Butscher of Brooklyn and Mayor John C. Chase⁷⁹ of Haverhill, Massachusetts.

Division within the Chicago SDP was bitter; factional war was brewing. The unity conference majority attempted without success to stifle publication of an unfavorable minority report by the three disgruntled opponents of the Chicago delegation. Margaret Haile returned home to Boston to begin rallying merger opponents in her home state while delegates Stedman and Heath raced back to Chicago to organize defeat of the formal unity proposal agreed upon by the other 14 delegates. Their joint effort, wrapped in the mantle of authority as a Manifesto of the National Executive Board, was written on April 2 and rushed into print in the Social Democratic Herald later that week.⁸⁰ This rush to print effectively undercut the official majority report of the unity negotiators, which was only released for debate and a scheduled referendum vote in the subsequent weekly issue. The anti-unity manifesto was by four members of the five members of the National Executive Board (NEB), Debs alone declining to sign, and accused the dissident SLP of deception and duplicity, further asserting that the SDP’s own unity delegation had exceeded the bounds of their authority granted to them by the convention. The specter of a takeover by the nefarious Socialist Labor Party was emphasized. An impromptu alternative referendum was rushed to vote by the Chicago NEB, polling the question of whether the membership felt any further unity discussions whatsoever were desirable in light of the shocking revelations of SLP double-dealing. An agitation campaign to discontinue the unity effort was begun in the party press.

Debs joined the anti-unity fray on April 21, urging in a lengthy and bitter article that the unity campaign should be halted and the merger plans of the unity negotiators defeated.⁸¹ Debs contended that the breakaway SLP dissidents had continued to mock and criticize the SDP even after their split from DeLeon’s organization, and that the entire effort to combine forces had been made in bad faith. Intimations in letters to the party press of the dissident SLP that bossism and hero worship were practiced by the Chicago organization—that is to say, anti-democratic behavior and a Debs personality cult—seem to have particularly touched a nerve. Although doing his part to feed the drama gods in the intraparty fight over unification, Debs nevertheless remained atop the joint presidential nominee of both organizations in 1900. With tightly pursed lips, the SDP fusion ticket of 1900 proceeded to the November election, backed by rival campaign committees, East and West, conducting activities with little or no coordination.

On May 12 came the results of the snap referendum called by the Chicago leadership. The Social Democratic Party, it was announced, had decided to discontinue any further unity negotiations with the former SLP dissidents by a vote of 1,213 to 939. If Debs and the Chicago leadership believed that the drive for a unified socialist party had been effectively squelched with their rushed referendum, however, they badly miscalculated. The pro-unity majority of the SDP committee would continue to work with their SLP dissident counterparts as if no such resolution had been enacted. A second meeting of the joint unity committees, attended this time by Debs in an ex-officio capacity, had already been held in New York on April 20. After issuing demands that the meeting could only be unofficial in light of the ongoing party referendum, minority faction members Haile, Berger, Stedman, and Heath made their way to this second conference. They would stay just long enough to cause a commotion, stage a dramatic walkout, and take an early train ride home. The five-member majority of the Chicago SDP committee and the nine-member committee of SLP dissidents remained to proceed with unity preparations on their own. Through their work, a new joint organization was born, reusing the name Social Democratic Party in an effort to liquidate the red herring of party name featured in the anti-unity manifesto of the Chicago executive. New party headquarters were to be established in Springfield, Massachusetts, a choice made in an effort to reduce New York–Chicago rivalry by moving the party center to the hotbed of its political success. William Butscher, a veteran of the Debsian SDP organization from Brooklyn, was named the national secretary of the new organization.

As joint action by local activists continued during the 1900 campaign, pressure for unity by ordinary members of the Chicago-based organization steadily grew, effectively circumventing their anti-unity leaders. In the city of Chicago itself, a majority of local social democrats of all stripes joined forces in civic elections as an alliance presciently named the Socialist Party. In May, a joint convention was held in Manchester, New Hampshire, called by the state affiliate of the Chicago SDP, with the gathering passing a resolution recognizing the necessity of a union state ticket and agreeing to meet in joint session without preconditions. Local branches were urged to establish union caucuses in each locality for joint city nominations.⁸² In June, New York had its own convention, dominated by adherents of the dissident SLP but including a smattering of pro-unity members of the national organization based in Chicago.

Unity sentiment also burned strong in Massachusetts, the epicenter of SDP politics, when on June 12 the state committee voted—over the vehement objection of state secretary Margaret Haile—to open up its July 8 state convention to members of the Springfield group for participation on the basis of equality. This action preserved unity, bringing together the two most effective locals, the Springfield-allied Haverhill organization and the Chicago loyalists of Brockton. Haile was left to sputter that the cause of socialism had been disgraced when a joint program was agreed upon and a majority of former SLP members elected to the new Massachusetts State Committee.⁸³ Secretary Haile refused to accept this majority decision of the state convention, instead leading a split in September, enraged by the decision of the Massachusetts State Committee to end dues payments to the Chicago national office. In spite of this sectarian bitterness, the dueling Massachusetts SDP organizations continued to support the national unity ticket of Debs and Harriman as well as the mixed slate of state candidates named at the July joint convention in Boston. Neighboring Connecticut held a joint convention of its own in New Haven, bringing together all socialists believing in social democratic principles under one roof. The meeting went off without a hitch, passing a resolution that provided for unity between the SDP and the dissident SLP on presidential, state, and local candidates, platform, and state campaign committee in the state of Connecticut.⁸⁴ Unity from below also appears to have been achieved in Ohio in which locals pledging allegiance to one or the other national organization jointly supported a unitary state committee with a portion of their dues.⁸⁵ Iowa socialists joined the unity parade in August, when it held a state convention in Oskaloosa delegated by representatives of either national organization.⁸⁶ On the Pacific coast, the Springfield SDP organization was predominant, with the radical Washington state organization particularly unified.

Only in Wisconsin did the executive officers of the Chicago SDP manage to effectively deflect the rank-and-file demand for unity. Victor Berger’s powerful Milwaukee political machine continued to eschew organic unity so long as its eastern rival holds on to its old stagnating, heresy-hunting, and narrow habits of agitation—behavior that would mean simply the turning over of the splendid social democratic movement into the control of men not at all in sympathy with its broadness, and put the American socialist movement back to where it was when the SLP was the only party and ruled despotically.⁸⁷

Although it continued to control the party press and was thereby able to portray the ongoing factional situation in the rosiest of lights, the Chicago leadership could also count noses. It was clear to all that sentiment for unity had become a majority opinion among American socialists. Despite some timid saber-rattling by the Chicago NEB, no mass expulsions would follow, punishing its members for participating in unionist state conventions. The warlike official rhetoric emanating from Chicago proved toothless; the iron logic of a joint ticket pushed the Chicago and Springfield parties forward toward active collaboration. From the perspective of the ordinary member, similarities greatly exceeded differences between the two competing Social Democratic parties.

Although the two rival organizations worked more or less effectively at the local level in support of their joint ticket, results from the polls in November 1900 were not edifying. The crown jewel of the Springfield SDP, the Haverhill, Massachusetts, organization, suffered a stinging loss when Mayor John C. Chase was defeated in his bid for reelection by a Republican–Democratic fusion ticket, as were two SDP aldermen seeking another term. The strong right hand of Victor Berger, Elizabeth H. Thomas, herself recently transplanted from Haverhill to Milwaukee, shamelessly crowed about the defeat, assigning blame to the decision of the Haverhill organization to sever itself from moral and material aid by cutting ties with Chicago party headquarters. It has been disastrous for her and needs no comment, Thomas smugly noted, her confidence bolstered by news of the reelection of Brockton mayor Charles Coulter, a booster of the Chicago SDP, by a plurality of 35 votes in a three-way race.⁸⁸

John C. Chase was not the only Social Democrat who failed to meet expectations in the November 1900 election. The biggest disappointment of all was the presidential ticket of Eugene V. Debs and Job Harriman. No amount of optimistic spin could conceal the fact that the SDP, in its first presidential effort, had been delivered a severe rebuke at the polls. Crowds had clambered to hear Debs during his six-week whirlwind of whistle-stops and evening lectures; halls were filled to capacity, and the level of enthusiasm was high. Yet when the ballots were counted (or not counted, as some contended), the results proved poor to the extreme in key electoral districts. A mere 12,869 votes were tallied for Debs in the state of New York, a dismal count barely topping the 12,622 ballots accorded Joseph F. Maloney, an obscure machinist from Massachusetts who stood as the presidential candidate of the DeLeonist SLP.⁸⁹ In Massachusetts, the Debs–Harriman ticket ran more than 3,500 votes behind the SDP’s candidate for governor and failed to match the total delivered for any candidate on the statewide ticket.⁹⁰ Dreaming of a million votes, the Debs–Harriman ticket could not even achieve one-tenth of their vision.⁹¹

According to results published in the Chicago Tribune six weeks after the election, the Debs–Harriman ticket collected a mere 85,000 votes out of just under 14 million cast—just six-tenths of 1 percent.⁹² Ballots cast for the Social Democratic Party’s ticket were more than doubled by those delivered for the nominees of the Prohibition Party, third place finisher in the 1900 presidential race. In only one state did Debs and Harriman receive more than 2 percent of the vote: Massachusetts. In only six other states—Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin, Florida, New Jersey, and Montana—did the Social Democratic vote top 1 percent. Things got worse from there. The vote count in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where Debs had invested so much time on behalf of striking coal miners in 1897, suffering a severe sunstroke in the process, was particularly dispiriting, with only 4,800 votes registered out of nearly 1.2 million cast in the Keystone State. In neighboring West Virginia just 220 votes out of 220,000 were tallied for the Debs–Harriman team.

Debs continued to present an optimistic face to the public; behind the scenes he was sullen and snippy. Immediately after the close of the election, Gene wrote his friend and consigliere, his brother Theo Debs, declaring:

Thus closes the campaign—and the results show that we got everything except votes.

I am serene for two reasons:

First: I did the very best I could for the party that nominated me and for its principles.

Second: The working class will get in full measure what they voted for.

And so we begin the campaign for 1904.

With respect to potential unification with the Springfield SDP, Debs was even more bitter, writing:

I am surprised at [NEB member and close ally Seymour] Stedman’s intimation that we may have something to do with the other factions. Great heavens, haven’t we got enough?

If there is any attempt to harmonize or placate, count me out. We must go forward on our own lines and those who don’t choose to fall in need not do so. There must be no wobbling at this time.

I thought our plan of action was clearly understood and now I am overwhelmed with pleas to attend a conference etc etc etc etc.

Hell! Don’t we know what we want? Or are we crazy?

We held a deliberate board meeting and went over the whole ground in detail and agreed to call a special convention within 30 days after election. I wrote the call and mailed it to you …

I am well and in good spirits, but 30 hours a day for 6 weeks has told on me and I’m run down. I’ll not go to Chicago, nor attend any conference till I’m rested. I would not be fit for service in my present condition. If the convention has been called off I feel as if I ought to pull out and let the whole thing go and attend to my own business, but I won’t. I’ll stick to the party, through the gates of hell, till it stands on rock and defies the thunderbolts of Jove.⁹³

The surviving correspondence of Gene Debs is spotty and partial; he left neither a memoir nor unpublished manuscripts to reveal what he and the Chicago SDP leadership had in mind for their snap convention, which was planned for the month after the November 1900 general election. Nor does a stenographic report or official minutes exist for the gathering itself. We are left to read between the lines of the November 9 letter to Theodore above: We must go forward on our own lines and those who don’t choose to fall in need not do so.

The Debs brothers and the anti-unity Chicago leadership were now outnumbered on the unity question, but they were still spoiling for one more fight.

As Debs suspected, the delay in publishing the convention call immediately after the November general election meant that no gathering could be held during December 1900. Belatedly, an announcement was issued for a conclave in Chicago, scheduled to open on January 15, 1901. This call rather fancifully asserted that demand for such a convention had sprung from individuals and local branches around the country and was made necessary to meet the growing demands of the organization. The object of the special convention was thereby rendered as clear as mud. According to terms of the document, branches would be free to send as many delegates as they desired, with each paid member of the Chicago organization allotted one vote, assignable by written proxy to any individual able to attends.⁹⁴

Despite the official rationale, the idea for the January convention clearly originated with Debs and the leadership, not the rank and file, and was called with factional intent—a last-ditch effort to build momentum for the existing Chicago-based organization and to halt the seemingly inexorable drift toward unification with the rival Springfield organization. Although originally scheduled for party headquarters, a larger venue was made necessary, and the 200 delegates were called to order by NEB secretary Seymour Stedman at Aldine Hall on Randolph Street.⁹⁵ Margaret Haile, one of the most fierce and uncompromising opponents of unity with the so-called Kangaroos, was elected temporary secretary of the gathering.

A harsh anti-unity tone was orchestrated from the outset with the reading of an official message from the Springfield SDP objecting to Debs and the Chicago leadership’s sudden and surprising decision to hold the special national convention, with the event portrayed as a new obstacle hastily constructed to impede unification. This message was poorly received, and protracted debate followed as to whether the communication should be demonstratively returned to Springfield or merely filed without action. Debs spoke with some hostility toward the Springfield group during the debate that followed, quoted by an unnamed reporter from the Chicago Inter Ocean:

If the Kangaroos desire harmony, as they profess they do, why do they insult us in this manner? I am in favor of having the committee on resolutions give this letter the most considerate attention, but in their reply, let it be made manifest who is