Socialist Party of America
미국 사회당
A socialist party in the United States formed in 1901 by a merger of the Social Democratic Party of America and dissidents from the Socialist Labor Party. In the early 20th century it drew trade unionists, farmers and immigrants behind its presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, but it was weakened by repression over its opposition to the First World War and by the departure of its communist left wing in 1919. It ceased to be a party in 1972, when it renamed itself Social Democrats, USA.
In depth
The Socialist Party was formed in 1901 by a merger of the Social Democratic Party of America, headquartered in Chicago, and dissident Lassallean members of the Socialist Labor Party who had also adopted the name Social Democratic Party of America (headquartered in Springfield, Massachusetts). The Russian-language source notes that the former had been founded by veterans of the American Railway Union’s Pullman strike. Membership rose from 4,320 in 1901 to a peak paid membership of 113,371 during Debs’s 1912 campaign and stood at 77,647 in 1919, just before the communist split. A network of socialist newspapers published in 18 languages supported this growth.
Debs twice won more than 900,000 votes in presidential elections (1912 and 1920), and the party elected two U.S. representatives (Victor Berger and Meyer London), dozens of state legislators and more than 100 mayors. Its staunch opposition to American involvement in the First World War led to prominent defections and to official repression and vigilante persecution of its members. Debs was convicted under the Sedition Act for a 1918 speech urging draft resistance and sentenced to ten years in prison; President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence.
When Lenin invited the party’s radical wing to the founding of the Comintern in 1919, a Left Wing Section organised. The National Executive Committee annulled party elections the Left Wing appeared to have won and suspended the Russian, Latvian and other language federations and the Michigan state organisation. John Reed and others, who wanted to fight at the Emergency National Convention, were expelled from the hall by police and founded the Communist Labor Party on 31 August 1919. The federations separately founded the Communist Party of America in Chicago, on 1 September 1919 according to the English-language source and on 2 September according to the Russian-language source.
After endorsing Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party in 1924 the party returned to independent action and grew modestly in the early 1930s behind Norman Thomas. But it lost ground to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and to the organisation of the Communist Party under Earl Browder, and the admission of Jay Lovestone’s followers and James P. Cannon’s Trotskyists caused the traditional Old Guard to leave and form the Social Democratic Federation. Its opposition to American entry into the Second World War also cost it support. The party ran its last presidential candidate, Darlington Hoopes, in 1956; the English-language source gives his vote as fewer than 6,000 in its lead and as 2,121 votes in six states in its main text.
By the late 1960s the party was divided into Max Shachtman’s Unity Caucus, Michael Harrington’s Coalition Caucus and the Debs Caucus. Its last national convention, in December 1972, led by the majority Unity Caucus, renamed it Social Democrats, USA, because the word “party” was misleading for a group that no longer ran presidential candidates and because many Americans associated “socialism” with Soviet communism. Harrington’s caucus formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (later the Democratic Socialists of America), and the Debs Caucus, through the Union for Democratic Socialism, proclaimed itself the Socialist Party USA in 1973.