Morris Hillquit
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Morris Hillquit (1869-1933) was a prominent Socialist and labor lawyer in New York City's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century.
Born Moses Hilkowitz in Riga on August 1, 1869, he came to the United States in 1886. He helped found the United Hebrew Trades, a garment workers' union formed in 1888, while writing for the Arbeiter Zeitung, a Yiddish-language newspaper. He graduated from New York University Law School in 1893.
He led the departure of the "constitutional" socialists from Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor Party in 1899 and helped form what later became the Socialist Party of America. He was the foremost theoretician of that party and, along with Victor Berger, clashed with Eugene V. Debs over the Socialist Party's electoral politics and policies toward the American Federation of Labor.
In 1904 he attended the International Socialist Conference at Amsterdam and was involved in moving the proposed Anti-Immigration Resolution, which opposed any legislation which forbade or hindered the immigration of foreign working men, forced by misery to migrate. However following "further consideration of the fact that WORKINGMEN OF BACKWARD RACES (CHINESE NEGROES ETC.) are often imported by capitalists to keep doown the native workingmen by means of cheap labour, which constitutes a willing object of exploitation, lives in an ill-concealed state of slavery" which should be combatted by Social Democracy "with all its energy."
Along with the right wing of the Socialist Party led by Hillquit and Victor Berger, he supported the United States' participation in World War I, but nevertheless backed Debs and other socialists charged with espionage for opposing the war. "National feeling," he proclaimed in November 1914, "stands for existence primarily, for the chance to earn a livelihood. It stands for everything we hold dear--home, language, family, and friends. The working man has a country as well as a class. Even before he has a class." Hillquit's staunch jingoism and support for the war prompted Socialist Party member George Herron to proclaim himself "sick unto death" over the "moral failure" of the German comrades. Likewise, Socialist William English Walling proposed to the Party that Hillquist be expelled for his "nationalistic" tendency.
He twice ran for Mayor of New York and ran on five occasions for Congress. His unsuccessful run for Mayor in 1917 — when he ran on an anti-war platform that attracted support from some parts of the Irish and German community but frightened conservative elements in the Jewish community — marked in many ways the high point for socialist politics in New York City.
One of the buildings of the East River Housing Corporation, a housing cooperative started by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in Cooperative Village in the Lower East Side, is named after him.
[edit] Sources
- Howe, Irving, World of Our Fathers, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. ISBN 0-15-146353-0.
- Epstein, Melech, Profiles of eleven; profiles of eleven men who guided the destiny of an immigrant society and stimulated social consciousness among the American people, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965.
- Salvatore, Nick, "Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist", Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982. ISBN 0-252-00967-3.
