Channels, Spring 2017

Channels • 2017 • Volume 1 • Number 2 Page 57 William McKinley had won the presidency with a passive Front-Porch Campaign in 1896. 31 The effort ultimately paid off, as Debs collected over 402,000 votes, a quadrupling of his previous total, and another boon for the Socialist Party’s organizational growth. The Party was in an upward spiral, but its electoral success forced it to confront some growing issues in the aftermath of the 1904 election. As Debs toured the South as part of his presidential campaign, he became concerned with the status of African-Americans there. While most politicians in this post-Reconstruction, pre-Civil Rights era simply ignored the oppressive conditions facing the black community, Debs thundered, “The history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without parallel.” 32 He saw the sharecropping and political exclusion of blacks as another example of the inequality, exploitation, and harm inherent in the capitalist system. Nevertheless, some members of the party saw African-Americans as a threat, a possible substitute for industrial jobs. One member publicly argued that “the negro worker of the South lacks the brain and backbone necessary to make a Socialist.” 33 In fact, this was the attitude of much of the Socialist Party toward minorities in general. Some Party members opposed immigrants and approved of immigration restrictions such as the Naturalization Act of 1906, its predecessor the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885, and its successor the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed a permanent numerical limit on immigration. Debs opposed these measures and always sought to align the Socialist Party with working class minorities, proclaiming that the Party was “the whole working class of the whole world.” 34 Debs sought to bring minority causes, especially those of African-Americans, under the Socialist Party umbrella and gain support in this way, arguing “There never was any social inferiority which was not the shriveled fruit of economic inequality.” 35 Despite Debs’ advocacy in these areas, the Socialist Party never took up any civil rights issues as a serious part of the platform or fully relinquished its suspicion of immigrant labor. This left a source of conflict within the party, albeit a comparatively minor one. The second critical concern the growing Socialist Party faced between 1904 and 1908 was the divisive question of which strategy of action by labor was best. The debate over labor strategies arose as a result of the founding of the IWW. The Industrial Workers of the World, organized in January, 1905, sought to unite labor unions on an industrial basis around a revolutionary ideology, opposed to the conservative, reformist tendencies of the craft-union based American Federation of Labor. Unfortunately, this development 31 Morgan, H. Wayne. 1962. Eugene V. Debs; socialist for President . n.p.: Syracuse, University Press, 1962., 80. 32 Ibid, 78. 33 Salvatore, Nick. 1982. Eugene V. Debs : citizen and socialist. n.p.: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, ©1982., 225. 34 Morgan, H. Wayne. 1962. Eugene V. Debs; socialist for President . n.p.: Syracuse, University Press, 1962., 78. 35 Eugene V. Debs, “On Race Prejudice” in Eugene V. Debs Speaks, ed. Jean Tussey (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 93.