The Socialist Party was the product of Eugene Victor Debs’s disillusionment following the Pullman Strike and schisms within the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). In 1897 Debs dissolved the American Railway Union and reconvened it as the Social Democracy of America. In addition to railroaders, two other distinctive groups joined the new organization. One, largely composed of recent immigrants, based their socialism upon the writings of Karl Marx and other European theorists. Victor Berger and his followers comprised the largest group in this wing. Emigrating from Austria, Berger settled in Milwaukee where he founded the Wisconsin Vorwarts and advocated political action to achieve immediate goals. Disciples of the Lassallean W. L. Rosenberg, who left the SLP in 1889, and a New York faction recently expelled from the SLP completed the “European” wing of the party. The other wing, most of whom were born in America, consisted of former Knights of Labor, disgruntled agrarian radicals, and those who drew their inspiration from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), a novel describing a futuristic socialist society.
Reflecting its utopian basis, the Social Democracy committed itself to a colonization scheme. According to this plan members of the party would move into a western territory, where they would establish a socialist commonwealth. Once established, the commonwealth would fulfill Bellamy’s prophesy and would be the example that the country would emulate and copy. Within a year Berger and others, however, convinced Debs that the colonization dream was unrealistic. Unable to convince the 1898 convention that it should remove the colonization plank from its platform, Debs, Berger, and others seceded from the Social Democracy to form the Social Democratic Party.
Further reading: Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949).
—Harold W. Aurand
World History
