Talk:Morris Hillquit
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[edit] 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)
