JZ

On a broad level, there was a lot of continuity, but also fundamental political discontinuity. There was an undercurrent of dissent in and around the SP — I say “around” because remember, the SP was not a centralized party. There wasn’t much of a party-owned press, if any, with individual newspapers such as the Appeal to Reason in Kansas and Victor Berger’s paper in Wisconsin, or magazines such as International Socialist Review , being sympathetic to the SP leadership though not immediately controlled by it, and often having different political positions.

Within the party, dissent from the left tended to be more militant about labor struggles (especially true of members connected to the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World) and less focused on electoralism, and there were ties to European leftism, particularly among various Central and East European language groups. But the left within the SP initially consisted of several overlapping loose groupings, rather than anything sharply defined or cohesive.

Some, but not all, of this milieu fed into the more organized left wing of 1919. The Socialist Party leadership expelled parts of it and other members just abandoned the SP to start building an alternative. Louis Fraina, Ludwig Lore, C.E. Ruthenberg, James Cannon, and Benjamin Gitlow were all sympathetic to the SP left before 1919 and went on to found the Communist movement, along with much of the party membership belonging to the Russian and other Eastern European language groups.

But the differences between the early SP left and what became the Communist movement were substantial. In 1912, oppositionists were dissatisfied with the SP’s reformism and its electoral emphasis, while the left wing of 1919 was galvanized by two events of global importance. One was the First World War, which revolutionary Socialists saw as an inter-imperialist war fought by the workers for the interests of the capitalists. But most European socialist parties supported the war aims of their own rulers — what Lenin called social chauvinism, socialist in words but nationalist in deeds.

The war and the collapse of the Second International exposed the rottenness of the established social-democratic parties. Officially the SP in the United States did not support the war, but many right-wing Socialists did, and the party maintained the same social-democratic tradition, in any case.

The other important world event, of course, was the Bolshevik Revolution, through which the working class took, and kept, state power for the first time. This really shook the world, as John Reed said, and American Socialists were thrown in all directions.

Some of those politicized by the Bolshevik Revolution had few links, if any, to the left wing of a decade earlier. At the same time, there were prominent figures from the SP left, such as Louis Boudin, who opposed Bolshevism.

Others, like longtime Socialist presidential candidate and spokesman Eugene Debs or IWW leader Vincent St. John, were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks but did not join the pro–Bolshevik left wing, despite efforts by early Communists to recruit them.

The Irish labor leader James “Big Jim” Larkin and IWW leader William “Big Bill” Haywood became Communists, at least for a while, but did not stay in the United States. And then you had SPers like Ludwig Lore who were active in the CP for a while, but ultimately did not want to be in a Bolshevik party.

In addition, the left wing contained many immigrant workers who identified with the left movements in their countries of origin. They considered the SP’s language federations almost as local outposts of the parties back home, not as branches of an American Socialist movement.

Some of them supported the Bolsheviks, and the early Communist movement had more than a dozen foreign-language groups, each with its own paper and with tenuous links to the central party. But Lenin was opposed to a federated party made up of independent language and ethnic groups essentially doing whatever they wanted.

One of the key challenges for the early CP — and I detail the successes and failures in my book — was to forge a Communist movement in the United States out of all these disparate traditions and personnel.