Talk:Morris Hillquit

American Socialists and the U.S. entry into World War One

Unfortunately, the way this article is written utterly muddles the fact that most (though not all) of the leaders, from all wings, who stayed in the Socialist Party of America, including Hillquit, Berger and Debs, opposed the war and followed the anti-war resolution (co-written by Hillquit, his ally Algernon Lee and the left-wing future Communist Charles Ruthenberg) which passed very heavily at an emergency convention of the SP of A at St Louis, Mo., in April 1917. Those pre-1914 Socialists who were favorable to U.S. intervention had left either to support President Wilson's re-election in 1916 or soon after the St Louis Manifesto, e.g. John Spargo, W.J. Ghent, Walter Lippman, Jack London and some labor-union leaders suffering membership or government pressure. The New Left historian James Weinstein's almost-universally-praised Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925 (1967) established this pretty decisively. Hillquit's campaign for Mayor of New York in 1917 was definitely an anti-war campaign and he suffered vicious attacks from all quarters, including reform Mayor Mitchel and ex-Pres. Roosevelt (who declared "Yellow speaks to Yellow").

During the extremely bitter factional struggle of 1917-1919, which resulted in the Socialist Party's splitting wide open and losing most of its base to the Communists, the "Left Wing" based much of its attack on the SP's leadership on how earnestly, strenuously, militantly and effectively those leaders had opposed the War. But Weinstein established fairly conclusively that this dispute cannot be stretched (as both contemporary Communists and some later writers hostile to the SP stretched it) to any significant leadership support for or complacency about U.S. intervention in the War. Weinstein attributed much of the confusion to false parallels with the pro-war stances of European socialist and labour parties' leadership.

There were some differences in rationale and nuance, which I don't remember clearly enough to attempt the necessary rewriting at the moment, but perhaps someone with a firmer grasp of the details can do so. -- Shakescene (talk) 06:15, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Upon reading this article more closely, I hadn't realized how completely confused it is. William English Walling was one of several left-wing intellectuals who left the Party to support the War. What Walling's despair about the behaviour of the German socialists has to do with Hillquit I cannot fathom. Hillquit was not a "staunch jingoist". The article badly misreads Irving Howe's account of Hillquit's attitude to the war and his 1917 Mayoral campaign: what frightened some conservative Jews was a fear of pro-war backlash hurting the Jews because both Hillquit and (as later studies showed) a preponderance of New York's Jews opposed the war. Shakescene (talk) 06:56, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Walter Lippmann was never a socialist, emerging first politically as a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt while a student at Harvard.

The whole story is a bit more complex. Herbert Aptheker, in an article firmly denouncing the Lippmann of 1913 onward as an apologist of capitalism, noted that Lippmann was president of the Harvard Socialist Club and that, "Until 1912 he holds to this allegiance and his few writings of the period identify him with the Left-wing of the Socialist movement. Indeed, he resigned his post, on May Day, 1912, as secretary for the Socialist Mayor of Schenectady because he said the Mayor was more reformist than Socialist. Despite these early espousals of radicalism Lippmann seems to have spoken truly when he told his biographer in 1949, that he was 'never a Marxist' and that 'he had never accepted the idea of the class struggle.'" (Aptheker, The Era of McCarthyism, 1962, pp. 53-54) In other words, it's fair to say Lippmann was caught up in the American socialist "fad" of the 1900s-10s, but that doesn't mean he was never a socialist, just one who could easily brush aside his earlier views as an example of youthful naïvete. --Ismail (talk) 15:52, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

It's Coming Along

Getting there now, anyway. Should we start trying to assemble a bibliography of leaflets and pamphlets, or would that be overkill?

There's a pretty good pictorial button from the Mayorality campaign that might make a good graphic.

I'm re-reading Loose Leaves and will probably have a few quotes to plug in also.

t Carrite (talk) 08:48, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Immigration Resolution

The article says the immigration resolution "opposed any legislation that forbade or hindered the immigration of foreign workingmen, some forced by misery to migrate." But the text of the resolution seems to commit the Congress to opposing "the importation of cheap labor" and so freedom of migration. Sorry if I've misread either the description or the resolution—it just seems as if some clarification might be helpful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.58.24.194 (talk) 19:28, 5 July 2017 (UTC)