Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [271]
Debs announced his conversion to Socialism in a manifesto in the Railway Times of January 1, 1897, saying, “The time has come to regenerate society—we are on the eve of a universal change.” In association with other labour leaders and adopting the form of the name used in Germany, he founded the American Social Democracy, which became the party of native American Socialism. In its early years, with less than four thousand members, it was kept alive by the gold watch of Debs’s brother Theodore, pawned periodically to keep the party newspaper going. Whenever Theodore Debs appeared in the doorway of a pawnshop in the Loop, its old German proprietor would call over his shoulder to the girl at the cash register, “Giff the Socialist chentleman forty dollars.” The political period of American Socialism still lay ahead, when in the first twelve years of the new century, under changed conditions, Debs was to be four times his party’s candidate for President and campaign across the country on board the railwaymen’s Red Special.
For the moment, his rival was the Socialist Labor Party, drawn chiefly from the foreign born and existing largely on paper and in the mind of its fanatic dictator, Daniel De Leon. Born in Curaçao of Dutch-Jewish parents and educated in Germany, De Leon was convinced that only he was fitted to lead the class struggle. He had come to the United States at twenty-two, and having taken a law degree at Columbia and held a lectureship there in Latin-American history, he was scorned by union opponents as the “professor.” Besides keeping up hot and incessant propagation of Socialist ideas in his weekly The People, De Leon ran for the New York State Assembly, for Congress and in 1891 for Governor without visible result. To draw organized labor into political action he launched the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, whose chief function was to excite the rage of the craft-union leader, Sam Gompers. Political action in Gompers’ eyes was the devil’s pitchfork and of De Leon he said that “no more sinister force” had ever appeared in Socialism. In 1901 a large faction of the Socialist Labor Party, opposing De Leon’s “dictatorship,” seceded, under Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger, to join Debs’s group, which now renamed itself the Socialist Party of America.
Socialism’s inveterate opponent, Gompers was the prototype of regular as opposed to revolutionary trade unionism. He was the outstanding exponent of the view that labour’s fight must be carried on within, not against, the capitalist system. Dwarfish and stocky, “almost grotesque,” with a huge head and heavy coarse features, he was, though ugly, an impressive personality who dominated any meeting in which he took part. When launched on one of his anti-Socialist tirades in the Federation, an old opponent in the Typographers’ Union who enjoyed heckling him used to call from the floor, “Give ’em hell, Sam; give ’em hell.” Sam never slackened in the effort. Having rejected the Old World, he deeply distrusted the Socialist tradition, though well grounded in it. As a young man in the cigarmaking trade, which, paying by the piece, allowed one worker to read aloud while the others made up his quota, he read Marx, Engels, and Lassalle to his fellow workers. “Learn from Socialism” but “don’t join,” advised his mentor, an exiled Swedish Marxist. “Study your union card, Sam,” he would say, “and if the idea doesn’t square with it, it ain’t true.”
With faith in the new society of America, Gompers rejected the pessimism of the Marxian premise. He believed unalterably that labour should keep out of politics, while using its power to bargain directly with employers. Regulation of wages, hours and working conditions should be achieved by union activity, not by legislative enactment. He founded the Federation in 1881, when he was thirty-one, in a room ten by eight with a kitchen table for a desk, a crate for a stool and tomato boxes supplied by a friendly grocer for files. By 1897 it had 265,000 members, by 1900