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P age 56 Schwartz • Inspiration or Distraction? more in Yiddish, French, German, and other immigrant languages. 24 As a result of this increased experience, popular appeal, and organizational assets, the Socialist Party of American entered 1904 with significantly more momentum and grassroots potential than in 1900. When the Socialist Party of America held its first national convention, the leaders served to ironically remind the party of its ideologically unsettled condition when Leon Greenbaum was confirmed as national party chairman. Despite having only been in the Party for one year, Greenbaum was an uninfluential man who had managed to offend no one on either side during the factional conflicts of the years between elections. 25 By appointing a fairly insignificant figure to the chief organizational post for the entire Party apparatus, the real leaders of the Socialist Party sent the unfortunate signal that the theorists and speakers remained in control of the Party. Unfortunately, the result was to dis-incentivize further organizational growth just at the moment when the Party’s expansion as a formal political entity was creating the growth required for political significance. As the 1904 campaign approached, the leadership of the Socialist Party saw good reason to be encouraged but continued to make the same mistakes, patching up conflict without resolving it and ignoring the necessity of practical organizational growth. The 1904 Presidential Campaign was a solid victory for the Socialist Party as a whole and Eugene Debs in particular. To begin with, Benjamin Hanford, a well-known socialist editor and writer, replaced Deb’s former running mate Job Harriman. 26 The newly built Socialist machine was extremely valuable in this campaign. Debs received $32,700 to campaign, with 45 other pro-Socialist speakers on the trail, twenty-two paid state organizers, and millions of red stickers, Socialist newspaper copies, and other literature distributed. 27 Debs himself crisscrossed the continent, moving from the West Coast to the East Coast before returning to the Midwest, delivering a message of “the untrammeled will of the people as the supreme law of society.” 28 He belabored and mocked the Republicans and Democrats as two “wings of the same old bird of prey” throughout the campaign, appealing to workers and farmers to stop supporting those who would institute oppression against them. 29 Debs cried out that for workers “under Republican rule and Democratic rule conditions for them have remained unchanged” but that “the Socialist Party is unequivocally committed …to the abolition of the wage system and the freedom of the worker from exploitation.” 30 Despite the organizational support, this campaign still took a toll on Debs; he himself often had to attend to details such as his own luggage and hotel accommodations in an era when 24 Morgan, H. Wayne. 1962. Eugene V. Debs; socialist for President . n.p.: Syracuse, University Press, 1962., 63. 25 Salvatore, Nick. 1982. Eugene V. Debs : citizen and socialist . n.p.: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, ©1982., 191. 26 Morgan, H. Wayne. 1962. Eugene V. Debs; socialist for President . n.p.: Syracuse, University Press, 1962., 68. 27 Ibid, 71-73. 28 Morgan, H. Wayne. 1962. Eugene V. Debs; socialist for President . n.p.: Syracuse, University Press, 1962., 75. 29 Ibid, 76. 30 Eugene V. Debs, “The Socialist Party’s Appeal,” in Eugene V. Debs Speaks, ed. Jean Tussey (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 108-109.