Transcription and commentary by SA Reed.
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Introduction 

Much has been written about the history of the socialist program, with classical European examples like the 1891 program of the German Social-Democratic Party or the 1880 program of the French Workers Party being the primary points of reference. But comparatively little attention has been paid to the history of programmatic socialism in the United States, largely due to the lack of a concerted effort to see the lesser-known programs of American socialist parties published. A comprehensive collection, online or in print, of historical American socialist programs would contribute substantially to the study of the political genealogy of socialism in the United States. In the meantime, the aim of this article is to make a lesser contribution towards that end by transcribing two under-published and understudied programs from America’s socialist past and elaborating on their historical situation.

The first is the 1892 platform of the Socialist Labor Party, which has been paid the least attention of the two. With the publishing of this article, the contents of this document are now freely available online for the first time ever.

The second, the 1908 platform of the Socialist Party of America, is more readily accessible as it is, but is generally overshadowed in studies of American socialism by its successor in 1912. For this reason, it is included below to highlight not only its continuities with and departures from the 1892 program of the SLP, but also to examine some of the ways in which the Socialist Party changed in the briefer interval of 1908-1912.

The Socialist Labor Party articulated its 1892 platform at a national convention where it nominated a ticket for that year’s presidential election, marking the beginning of the first real socialist presidential campaign in U.S. history. There had been stirrings of working-class political militancy in the previous decade, most notably resulting in the United Labor Party and its campaign for Mayor of New York City in 1886. Though the SLP was involved in the ULP coalition—it worked to elect ULP candidate Henry George in the mayoral election of 1886, and its membership overlapped with that of the Knights of Labor and other trade unions aligned with the ULP—it traced its political ancestry not to Georgism, American “pure and simple trade unionism”, or the agrarianism brewing in the various farmers’ organizations of the West and South, but to the Marxism of German social democrats.

Much of the SLP’s membership in its early years hailed from German immigrant communities in New York and the Midwest. Originally organized in 1876 as the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, it was formed from the fragmented remains of the American section of the First International, which itself consisted of a large number of German expatriates who had brought with them the political disputes raging in the labor movement of their homeland.¹ The WPUS, like the SPD in Germany, had its own internal struggles between Marxists and Lassalleans. The Marxists came out on top, and under the leadership of figures like Friedrich A. Sorge (a veteran of the Revolutions of 1848 and a close political ally of Marx and Engels), the rechristened SLP increasingly oriented itself towards revolutionary social democracy. During the drama of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the party was at the front line in several cities. It organized a general strike in St. Louis, briefly bringing the city under the control of an ad hoc workers’ government that conjured fearful specters of the recent Paris Commune for the bourgeoisie and their press.² In the following years, it made forays into state and local electoral politics with varying degrees of success, mobilizing, for example, more than twelve thousand working-class votes in the Chicago mayoral election of 1879 but fewer than three hundred in an election for the same office two years later. It fielded a slate of electors for the presidential election of 1888, but nominated no candidate, and received a mere 2,000 votes concentrated in the state of New York.³

In 1892, the SLP made its first real attempt at a national-level political campaign. At its national convention (in reality, a gathering of just eight delegates from five states), the party nominated camera manufacturer Simon Wing and electrician Charles H. Matchett for President and Vice President, with ballot access in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Wing and Matchett received over 21,000 votes running under the following program, also adopted at the eight-man convention of 1892.⁴

The Socialist Labor Program of 1892

The Socialist Labor Party of the United States, in convention assembled, reasserts the inalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

With the founders of the American republic, we hold that the purpose of government is to secure every citizen in the enjoyment of this right; but in the light of our social conditions we hold, furthermore, that no such right can be exercised under a system of economic inequality, essentially destructive of life, of liberty, and of happiness.

With the founders of this republic we hold that the true theory of politics is that the machinery of government must be owned and controlled by the whole people; but in the light of our industrial development we hold, furthermore, that the true theory of economics is that the machinery of production must likewise belong to the people in common.

To the obvious fact that our despotic system of economics is the direct opposite of our democratic system of politics, can plainly be traced the existence of a privileged class, the corruption of government by that class, the alienation of public property, public franchises and public functions to that class, and the abject dependence of the mightiest of nations upon that class. Again, through the perversion of democracy to the ends of plutocracy, labor is robbed of the wealth which it alone produces, is denied the means of self-employment, and, by compulsory idleness in wage-slavery, is even deprived of the necessaries of life. Human power and natural forces are thus wasted, that the plutocracy may rule. Ignorance and misery, with all their concomitant evils, are perpetuated that the people may be kept in bondage. Science and invention are diverted from their humane purpose to the enslavement of women and children.

Against such a system the Socialistic Labor Party once more enters its protest. Once more it reiterates its fundamental declaration, that private property in the natural sources of production and in the instruments of labor is the obvious cause of all economic servitude and political independence; and

WHEREAS, the time is fast coming when, in the natural course of social evolution, this system, through the destructive action of its failures and crises, on the one hand, and the constructive tendencies of its trusts and other capitalistic combinations, on the other hand, shall have worked out its own downfall; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That we call upon the people to organize with a view to the substitution of the co-operative commonwealth for the present state of planless production, industrial war, and social disorder—a commonwealth in which every worker shall have the free exercise and full benefit of his faculties, multiplied by all the modern factors of civilization. We call upon them to unite with us in a mighty effort to gain by all practicable means the political power.

In the meantime, and with view to immediate improvement in the condition of labor, we present the following “Demands:”

SOCIAL DEMANDS

Reduction of the hours of labor in proportion to the progress of production.

The United States shall obtain possession of the railroads, canals, telegraphs, telephones, and all other means of public transportation and communication.

The municipalities to obtain possession of the local railroads, ferries, water-works, gas-works, electrical plants, and all industries requiring municipal franchises.

The public lands to be declared inalienable. Revocation of all land grants to corporations or individuals, the conditions of which have not been complied with.

Legal incorporation by the states of local Trade Unions which have no national organization.

The United states to have the exclusive right to issue money.

Congressional legislation providing for the scientific management of forests and waterways, and prohibiting the waste of the natural resources of the country.

Inventions to be free to all; the inventors to be remunerated by the nation.

Progressive income tax and tax on inheritances; the smaller incomes to be exempt.

School education of all children under fourteen years of age to be compulsory, gratuitous, and accessible to all by public assistance in meals, clothing, books, etc. where necessary.

Repeal of all pauper, tramp, conspiracy, and sumptuary laws. Unabridged right of combination.

Official statistics concerning the condition of labor. Prohibition of the employment of children of school age and of the employment of female labor in occupations detrimental to health or morality. Abolition of the convict labor contract system.

All wages to be paid in lawful money of the United States. Equalization of women’s wages with those of men where equal service is performed.

Laws for the protection of life and limb in all occupations, and an efficient employer’s liability law.

POLITICAL DEMANDS

The people to have the right to propose laws and to vote upon all measures of importance, according to the Referendum principle.

Abolition of the Presidency, Vice-Presidency, and Senate of the United States. An Executive Board to be established, whose members are to be elected, and may at any time be recalled by the House of Representatives as the only legislative body. The States and Municipalities to adopt corresponding amendment to their constitution and statutes.

Municipal self-government.

Direct vote and secret ballots in all elections. Universal and equal right of suffrage, without regard to color, creed, or sex. Election days to be legal holidays. The principle of minority representation to be introduced.

All public officers to be subject to recall by their respective constituencies.

Uniform civil and criminal law throughout the United States. Administration of justice to be free of charge. Abolition of capital punishment.

The SLP’s campaign in 1892 was overshadowed by that of the People’s Party, an agrarian reform coalition with some labor backing that won over a million votes and carried five states that year. Still, the socialist vote tally continued to climb, reaching a peak of over 82,000 in the midterm elections of 1898.⁵ The following year, the SLP suffered a disastrous internal schism. Discord had been mounting within the party for some time, much of it concerning the position of its Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance in relation to the broader labor movement. The opposition found itself unable to freely oppose the party line in the face of frenzied internal purges by the leading clique massed around Daniel DeLeon, and when tensions came to a head in the internal elections of 1899, two rival organizations each claiming to be the real “Socialist Labor Party” emerged. The opposition eventually abandoned the SLP entirely and merged with the young Social Democratic Party of America, a product of the Populist movement and trade union struggles of the first half of the 1890s, to form what would become the Socialist Party of America.⁶ These bolting elements represented the bulk of the classical social-democratic influence on the SLP, and with their exit it completed its evolution from programmatic socialist party to party-sect. From the election of 1900 onwards, the SLP would never again publish a minimum-maximum program of the variety adopted at its 1892 and 1896 conventions.

On the other hand, the merger of the SLP defectors and the SDPA proved quite fruitful. Eugene V. Debs, the Social Democrats’ candidate for President in 1900, took in twice as many votes as the SLP that year. Debs would go on to lead the new Socialist Party to progressively larger shares of the vote in subsequent elections, winning over a million votes in 1912 and again in 1920. The Socialists stuck with the minimum-maximum format and continued to present classical Marxist programs to the public at its national conventions in election years. As stated previously, the program of 1912 has received some attention in the modern socialist sphere—DSA’s Marxist Unity Group lists it as foundational reading material, for example— but the other programs have largely flown under the radar.

The Socialist Party drafted the following platform at its national convention of 1908, where it nominated Debs for President for the third time. This was the year of the famous “Red Special” campaign, which brought Debs to the people on a cross-country circuit of speeches delivered from the back of a custom red train car.⁷ It won the approval of more than 420,000 voters.

The Socialist Program of 1908

PLATFORM FOR 1908

The Socialist party, in national convention assembled, again declares itself as the party of the working class, and appeals for the support of all workers of the United states and of all citizens who sympathize with the great and just cause of labor.

We are at this moment in the midst of one of those industrial breakdowns that periodically paralyze the life of the nation. The much-boasted era of our national prosperity has been followed by one of general misery. Factories, mills and mines are closed. Millions of men, ready, willing and able to provide the nation with all the necessaries and comforts of life are forced into idleness and starvation.

Within recent years the trusts and monopolies have attained an enormous and menacing development. They have acquired the power to dictate the terms upon which we shall be allowed to live. The trusts fix the prices of our bread, meat and sugar, of our coal, oil and clothing, of our raw material and machinery, of all the necessities of life.

The present desperate condition of the workers has been made the opportunity for a renewed onslaught on organized labor. The highest courts of the country have within the last year rendered decision after decision depriving the workers of rights which they had won by generations of struggle.

The attempt to destroy the Western Federation of Miners, although defeated by the solidarity of organized labor and the Socialist movement, revealed the existence of a far-reaching and unscrupulous conspiracy by the ruling class against the organization of labor.

In their efforts to take the lives of the leaders of the miners the conspirators violated state laws and the federal constitution in a manner seldom equaled even in a country so completely dominated by the profit-seeking class as is the United States.

The Congress of the United States has shown its contempt for the interests of labor as plainly and unmistakably as have the other branches of government. The laws for which the labor organizations have continually petitioned have failed to pass. Laws ostensibly enacted for the benefit of labor have been distorted against labor.

The working class of the United States cannot expect any remedy for its wrongs from the present ruling class or from the dominant parties. So long as a small number of individuals are permitted to control the sources of the nation’s wealth for their private profit in competition with each other and for the exploitation of their fellowmen, industrial depressions are bound to occur at certain intervals. No currency reforms or other legislative measures proposed by capitalist reformers can avail against these fatal results of utter anarchy in production.

Individual competition leads inevitably to combinations and trusts. No amount of government regulation, or of publicity, or of restrictive legislation will arrest the natural course of modern industrial development.

While our courts, legislatures, and executive officers remain in the hands of the ruling classes and their agents, the government will be used in the interests of these classes as against the toilers.

Political parties are but the expression of economic class interests. The Republican, the Democratic, and the so-called “Independence” parties and all parties other than the Socialist party, are financed, directed, and controlled by the representatives of different groups of the ruling class.

In the maintenance of class government both the Democratic and Republican parties have been equally guilty. The Republican party has had control of the national government and has been directly and actively responsible for these wrongs. The Democratic party, while saved from direct responsibility by its political impotence, has shown itself equally subservient to the aims of the capitalist class whenever and wherever it has been in power. The old chattel slave-owning aristocracy of the south, which was the backbone of the Democratic party, has been supplanted by a child slave plutocracy. In the great cities of our country the Democratic party is allied with the criminal element of the slums as the Republican party is allied with the predatory criminals of the palace in maintaining the interests of the possessing class.

The various “reform” movements and parties which have sprung up within recent years are but the clumsy expression of widespread popular discontent. They are not based on an intelligent understanding of the historical development of civilization and of the economic and political needs of our time. They are bound to perish as the numerous middle-class reform movements of the past have perished.

PROGRAM

As measures calculated to strengthen the working class in its fight for the realization of this ultimate aim, and to increase its power of resistance against capitalist oppression, we advocate and pledge ourselves and our elected officers to the following program:

GENERAL DEMANDS

1. The immediate government relief for the unemployed workers by building schools, by reforesting of cutover and waste lands, by reclamation of arid tracts, and the building of canals, and by extending all other useful public works. All persons employed on such works shall be employed directly by the government under an eight hour work day and at the prevailing union wages. The government shall also loan money to states and municipalities without interest for the purpose of carrying on public works. It shall contribute to the funds of labor organizations for the purpose of assisting their unemployed members, and shall take such other measures within its power as will lessen the widespread misery of the workers caused by the misrule of the capitalist class.
2. The collective ownership of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, steamship lines and all other means of social transportation and communication, and all land.
3. The collective ownership of all industries which are organized on a national scale and in which competition has virtually ceased to exist.
4. The extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and waterpower.
5. The scientific reforestation of timber lands, and the reclamation of swamp lands. The land so reforested or reclaimed to be permanently retained as a part of the public domain.
6. The absolute freedom of press, speech and assemblage.

INDUSTRIAL DEMANDS

1. The improvement of the industrial condition of the workers,
   1. By shortening the workday in keeping with the increased productiveness of machinery.
   2. By securing to every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.
   3. By securing a more effective inspection of workshops and factories.
   4. By forbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age.
   5. By forbidding the interstate transportation of the products of child labor, of convict labor and of all uninspected factories.
   6. By abolishing official charity and substituting in its place compulsory insurance against unemployment, illness, accident, invalidism, old age and death.

POLITICAL DEMANDS

1. The extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the amount of the bequests and the nearness of kin.
2. A graduated income tax.
3. Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women, and we pledge ourselves to engage in an active campaign in that direction.
4. The initiative and referendum, proportional representation and the right of recall.
5. The abolition of the senate.
6. The abolition of the power usurped by the supreme court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of legislation enacted by Congress. National laws to be repealed or abrogated only by act of Congress or by a referendum of the whole people.
7. That the constitution be made amendable by majority vote.
8. The enactment of further measures for the general education and for the conservation of health. The bureau of education to be made a department. The creation of a department of public health.
9. The separation of the present bureau of labor from the department of commerce and labor, and the establishment of a department of labor.
10. That all judges be elected by the people for short terms, and that the power to issue injunctions shall be curbed by immediate legislation.
11. The free administration of justice.

Such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole power of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance.

The Programs Examined

Considerable continuity can be seen between these two documents. The relative extent to which this can be explained by an overlap in membership (SLP veterans like Morris Hillquit and Max Hayes played leading roles in the Socialist Party, after all) as opposed to the two parties simply having a common Marxist heritage is up for debate. What is perhaps more interesting to examine is the ways in which they differ from each other as well as from other Marxist programs of the era.

Each program, that of the SLP in 1892 and the SPA in 1908, displays the distinctive markings of the year in which it was written. The former features a plank calling for the abolition of the death penalty, likely because the execution of the Haymarket martyrs five years prior still weighed heavy on the hearts of socialists and trade unionists across America. The latter makes specific reference to the Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone trial of 1907, a great legal scandal of the day in which a trio of prominent labor organizers were nearly hanged for an assassination they did not commit. It also raises specific demands regarding unemployment relief, in reference to the economic crisis of 1907, and freedom of speech, possibly in reference to the early “free speech fights” organized by the Industrial Workers of the World and certain sections of the SPA, or perhaps to attempts by Theodore Roosevelt and the postal service to censor Socialist newspapers. It places extra emphasis on the demand for women’s suffrage, likely due to the contemporaneous escalation of the campaign to extend the franchise to women.

Naturally, the content of these programs reveals something about the internal politics of the parties that issued them, particularly when held in comparison with later versions. As mentioned previously, the timing of the SLP’s transition from the minimum-maximum schema to a cruder style of program indicates where the opposing factions within stood on the issue of programmatic politics. Following the departure of the opposition faction, all future SLP platforms would consist of a prosaic condemnation of capitalism followed by a call for industrial democracy in the here and now, without much in the way of an actual program of action to point prospective supporters towards. This was the style of program favored by DeLeon’s faction. Lucien Sanial, a member of the founding generation of the party who had become a leader of the DeLeon clique, first introduced elements of this style of program at the national convention of 1889.⁸ His style augmented the earlier, more straightforward minimum-maximum programs the SLP had adopted at all its previous conventions, and with the withdrawal of the orthodox social-democratic opposition and their theoretical influence a decade later, the Sanial-style program was all that remained. Sanial’s touch is apparent in the introduction to the program of 1892; from 1900 onwards, the SLP’s programs would be winnowed down so that they effectively consisted only of such an introduction without anything else of substance appended.

The SPA’s program of 1908, when compared with that of 1912, bears several telling distinctions. Most glaringly, it lacks the demand for a constitutional convention found in the latter, but other planks calling for the introduction of a minimum wage, the abolition of the electoral college and the presidential veto, the extension of democratic rights to the District of Columbia and overseas territories, and the abolition of federal district courts are also absent. All in all, the political demands were less sweeping in 1908 than in 1912. The demands for collective ownership, on the other hand, were arguably bolder. Unlike in 1912, the program of 1908 issues a call for the collectivization of all land, a position from which the Socialists of 1912 retreated to instead propose collectivization of land wherever “practicable,” along with some specific proposals for the municipal ownership of agricultural infrastructure. In general, the program of 1908 is a document less concerned with the proletariat’s conquest of political power than with directly dismantling private property relations, and not at all concerned with the interests of farmers wherever they clashed with those of urban workers.

Two distinct but related processes explain the evolution of the Socialist program from 1908 to 1912: one, the rebalancing of factional forces within the SPA to the detriment of what might be called the “left opposition,” and two, the settlement of long-running debates over the agrarian question. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917 redrew the lines of division in the Socialist Party to create pro-Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik camps, the original “left opposition” consisted of an eclectic mixture of Marxists and proto-syndicalists closely associated with the IWW.⁹ Partisans of this group fetishized the mass strike and the “spontaneous” movement of the class, often to the exclusion of party-building and political action, matters on which they were generally agnostic.¹⁰ In modern parlance, they would be considered “ultra-left.” In regions where they controlled the party apparatus, Socialist literature emphasized reductions in working hours and workers’ control of factories, mines, and mills above all else. A program focused on confiscation of property more-so than the conquest of political power is in keeping with their understanding of socialist strategy. The influence of the IWW is important to note here; nearly all influential figures in the old SPA left were leading members of the IWW as well, and most of the rank-and-file aligned with this faction were dual-carders. The IWW was, per its bylaws, strictly an organization of wage-earners and therefore it actively avoided engaging with the interests of small farmers. The strength of this faction at the time might explain the 1908 program’s blunt stance on the collectivization of land.

In the years after the election of 1908, the balance of forces between the Socialist left, right, and center shifted. A series of conflicts over labor strategy marginalized the faction aligned with the IWW as the orthodox Marxist center typified by Debs, previously aligned with the left, gravitated towards a center-right bloc with the reformist wing of the party. This new bloc differed on broad theories of change, with revolutionary social democrats in the center and Bernsteinian revisionists on the right, but all parties agreed on the necessity of a minimum program built around political demands. This realignment culminated in the recall of leading Wobbly Bill Haywood from the party’s National Executive Committee, triggering the exodus of much of the rank-and-file left.¹¹ Meanwhile, the debate over the proper Socialist stance towards American farmers, one which had been raging since at least the SPA’s founding and attracted attention from observers as far afield as Karl Kautsky in Germany, at last approached a decisive settlement. Perhaps in response to the party’s underperformance in 1908—Socialists and bourgeois papers alike had predicted it would net over a million votes,¹² only for it to deliver less than half that—it finally came around to the side of the agrarian debate that favored making programmatic concessions to small farmers. The party softened its demands for collectivization of the land in the process. It was rewarded with a record-breaking vote count in 1912, powered in large part by high turnout from smallholders in the Great Plains and the Southwest.

Though the strongest increases in vote totals from 1908 occurred in areas where the left and center factions of the party had flung themselves into intense episodes of class conflict on behalf of wage-workers—states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Washington—Debs outperformed his national average of six percent in agrarian states like Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Texas as well, doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling his share of the vote in these states.¹³ It is reasonable to surmise that the changes in the SPA’s program had a tangible effect on farmers’ turnout, considering the formidable propaganda network the party operated in the Plains states. Socialist newspapers like the Appeal to Reason, based out of Kansas, circulated hundreds of thousands of copies weekly. Socialist campaign tactics like the party’s famous weeklong encampments, where alternative socialist culture flourished, brought in farmers from miles around. Readers of publications like the Appeal and attendees at encampments would certainly have encountered the party’s revised program and weighed it against their own material interests.

Conclusions

All told, the program of the Socialist Labor Party in 1892 was stronger on many points than the program of the Socialist Party in 1908, and indeed stronger than the latter’s refined successor in 1912. In 1892, the SLP called for a more holistic destruction of the capitalist state—the complete replacement of undemocratic state institutions with a unicameral, proportional body both legislative and executive in nature, with corresponding upheavals to occur at all lower levels of government. It also explicitly denounced the disenfranchisement of Black Americans and other oppressed racial groups, which the SPA failed to even recognize in its program a full two decades later.

Then why did the SLP not reach the same heights as the Socialist Party? From a rigidly historical-materialist perspective, one could argue that the American proletariat simply was not ready for a mass socialist party in the SLP’s heyday—that it was too small, too disorganized, too enmeshed in the project of Western colonization to stand on its own as a class. But to say there was no mass socialist party in the 1870s or 1880s because there never could have been is a teleological argument, and it rests on a dubious understanding of American history. The labor revolt of 1877, early attempts at labor politics in Chicago and New York, the accelerating proliferation and combination of trade unions, and the mass movement for the eight-hour workday all suggest that the potential existed for a large, dynamic party of the class-conscious proletariat, but that potential was never realized. There is a more straightforward explanation for the SLP’s shortcomings: despite the quality of its program, it was inhibited by its sect-like nature. From its first split in 1889 onwards, the Party began to deform itself, taking on the characteristics of a religious society. The dominant faction’s line on trade-union strategy and other issues became an infallible gospel, and dissent was risky. The SLP pioneered many of the methods used to suppress dissent by the Bolshevized parties of the Third International decades later. DeLeon and Hugo Vogt, an influential DeLeonist partisan, controlled the main organs of the party press and used them to whip up their loyalists into a fury against “fakirs” and treacherous elements within their midst. Their clique subjected the rank-and-file to wanton purges where members were expelled en masse and entire local sections were suspended, a process they considered “purification” of the party as if to emphasize the religious zeal with which they executed it. Even Sanial, a longtime standpat of the DeLeon faction, described the state of affairs in the party at this time as a “burlesque reign of terror.”¹⁴ He defected to the SPA in 1902.

In essence, the experience of the SLP is an early lesson against bureaucratic centralism. The party took instruments designed to build an effective political vehicle for revolutionary social democracy and warped them into means of suppressing internal dissent. It sought unity not around a set of programmatic objectives, but around a specific political line, deviation from which was treason not just to the party but to the entire class. The result? A series of catastrophic splits, theoretical and strategic stagnation, isolation from the rest of the movement, and a long slide into irrelevancy. In other words, the birth of the first Marxist micro-sect. As we, like the socialists of the 1870s, are faced with the challenges of building a movement nearly from scratch, twenty-first-century socialists would do well to take note: no political line and no party program is good enough to make up for bad party-building.

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1. Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York, NY: Monad Press, 1977), pp. 106-108.
2. Ibid, pp. 115-187.
3. Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States (New York, NY: Funk and Wagnalis, 1910), pp. 239, 257-258.
4. Ibid, p. 259.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, pp. 294-301.
7. Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2007), pp. 268-284.
8. Hillquit, p. 234.
9. David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1967), pp. 37-39.
10.  Ira J. Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 187, 191-193.
11. Kipnis, pp. 407, 416-418.
12. Ginger, p. 283.
13. Edgar E. Robinson, The Presidential Vote, 1896-1932 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1934), pp. 379-398.
14. Hillquit, p. 296.