Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of AppreciationsDebs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
History
Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of Appreciations
Debs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
Socialism -- United States; Socialist Party (U.S.)
The _Coming Nation_, started at Greensburg, Ind., by J. A. Wayland, in
1893, was the first popular propaganda paper to be published in the
interest of Socialism in this country. It reached a large circulation
and the proceeds were used in founding and developing the Ruskin
Co-operative colony in Tennessee. Later Mr. Wayland began the
publication of the _Appeal to Reason_, and now it numbers its
subscribers by the hundreds of thousands. It is not saying too much for
the _Appeal_ that it has been a great factor in preparing the American
soil for the seed of Socialism. Its enormous editions have been and are
being spread broadcast and copies may be found in the remotest recesses
and the most inaccessible regions. The propaganda thus organized by Mr.
Wayland, for which he has peculiar genius, and carried forward and
enlarged constantly with the aid of a corps of able comrades, has been
and is a source of incalculable strength in promoting education among
the workers and building up the general movement.
The periodical end weekly press, so necessary to any political movement,
is now developing rapidly and there is every reason to believe that
within the next few years there will be a formidable array of reviews,
magazines, illustrated journals and daily and weekly papers to represent
the movement and do battle for its supremacy.
The last convention of the American Railway Union was the first
convention of the Social Democracy of America, and this was held at
Chicago in June, 1897, the delegates voting to change the railway union
into a working class political party.
The _Railway Times_, the official paper of the union, became the _Social
Democrat_ and later the _Social Democratic Herald_, and is now published
at Milwaukee in the interest of the Socialist party.
The Social Democracy, the evolution of unionism crushed by the weight of
despotic power, was the logical extension and expansion of the American
Railway Union, and the direct outgrowth of the great industrial uprising
known as the Pullman strike and the brutal tyranny and relentless
persecution that followed it.
The General Managers’ Association pursued the American Railway Union
with fiendish ferocity, determined to stamp out the last spark of its
life, and as a result, when the few surviving delegates met in national
convention in the year named, the last they ever held as a railway labor
union, the American Railway Union, loved and respected by labor, and
feared and hated by capital, was metamorphosed into the Social
Democracy.
At the national convention which followed a year later, in June, 1898, a
split occurred, one wing adhering to the colonization scheme, making
that the chief end of their movement, while the latter abandoned the
colonization feature and struck out for political action as a working
class party. The latter was known as the Social Democratic Party and
progressed rapidly from the start, while the former soon exhausted its
resources and passed out of existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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