The movement had seen educated men (and women), but none like DeLeon. Latin-American born, a former professor of international law at Columbia University, he had an apparent genius for adaptation to the native terrain, a universal mind, and a talent for the sweeping generalization. Self-taught workers idolized his breadth of knowledge and the intensity of his devotion, while oldtime German intellectuals put their reservations below their hopes for such fresh energies. Jewish Socialists above all were known to worship at his feet. Leon Kobrin recalls DeLeon as a fighting rabbi carried triumphantly through the streets by young Socialist Chassidim shouting his praises. Exuding sacred energy, he promised them and their faithful suffering a redemption in America.
DeLeon became editor of the new weekly English-language The People in 1891, and swiftly put his stamp upon it. English-Socialist papers had never, with the exception of Woodhall & Claflin's, been much more than labor reform sheets. The People had a different tone. Editorials by DeLeon created sustained intellectual monologue that German-American editors had provided but no previous American felt competent to liver. Without much need, or possibility, of the fraternal activities reports and homeland news that dominated the German and Jewish sheets, DeLeon subordinated reportage and incidentals to his ideological claims. This, he argued incessantly, was no paper for mere trade unionism or reform appeals; it offered the reader pure Scientific Socialism and a definitive political position from its principles.
DeLeon exploited many contemporary enthusiasms, synthesizing them into a single, apparently seamless doctrine. One ingredient was evolutionary theory, already bastardized by Spencer into the petty-bourgeois mania of Social Darwinism. DeLeon, in turn, adapted Darwinism to the vogue of American anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, who had fascinated Engels with his hypotheses about universal laws of social development.
DeLeon also responded to the longstanding restlessness of rank-and-file Socialists, weary of Sisyphian attempts to convert native craft aristocracy through patient education and organization. The depression of 1893 revived millenarian visions. No one could predict if the American Federation of Labor would be able to survive the slump and accompanying employers' offensive. Meanwhile its rightward-moving leadership under Gompers turned sharply against former Socialist allies as well as against the new immigration. Foreign-born, especially Jewish, Socialists railed against collaboration with double-dealing and often nativist craft leaders.
At the same time, DeLeon captivated many American-born still small in number but increasing with the reform of the early 1890s, who had never lost the old dream of independent political action. The formation of the Republican Party only two generations earlier had led to the freeing of Black slaves. Might not the reconstitution of a Socialist electoral machine lead to the freeing of wage slaves? The European example seemed to promise as much, while the contemporary repression, together with the widely lamented 'end of the frontier', suggested a radical turning point in American history.
'Science' to DeLeon thus signified clarity, which in turn demanded exaltation of the Socialist movement as the single, revolutionary beacon destined to survive the coming crisis and to transform American society. 'The question', he wrote in 1891, of 'whether society will emerge on the upward or the downward grade of evolution, depends upon the degree of clearness among the masses as to the road on which they are traveling. This clearness can only be effected by holding forth in all its [sic] purity the principles that guide onward and upward.' Socialists heretofore had not quite imagined themselves capable of approaching power so rapidly without (as in the Social Revolutionaries' fantasies) a mass, spontaneous armed uprising. DeLeon and his coterie of mostly self-taught immigrant intellectuals believed Americans would vote by the thousands and then the millions for the one political party which knew its future. In a series of public addresses printed as mass-circulation pamphlets (and reprinted ad infinitum by the Socialist Labor Party as fundamental Marxist doctrine), DeLeon elaborated scientistic distinctions between reform and revolution, between revolutionary unions (those that preached Socialist politics) and mere economic efforts doomed to failure. Abstractly, as a complete system for the self-educated worker or neophyte convert from a disappointing reform movement, his conceptions had an admirable symmetry.
DeLeon's memorable Two Pages From Roman History (1903) later argued that the proletariat, unlike all previous rising classes, lacked the material power to establish its own infrastructure, and therefore needed political defenses built up against the lures of reform. This was a theory of working-class backwardness, disguised as an argument for pure revolutionary strategy. The argument had some historic basis in the capacity of the Democratic Party to absorb labor reform impulses, and in the eagerness of craft union organizations to make arrangements with politicians and industrialists at the expense of the unskilled, female, Black and more recently immigrant working class. But his solution went no further than attempting to regiment the same craft workers into a reliable Socialist formation.
Even if the economic and political crisis of American society had been total, DeLeon failed to grasp the lineaments of a credible alternative. He treated the multiplicity of working-class internal divisions, the complexity of social unrest among wide classes of Americans, by levelling Marxist theory down to an impossibly narrow concept of class. He saw no class worth considering but the abstract working class. Its failure to heed his words seemed to him a certain indication that false prophets were keeping the flocks ignorant and confused. These charges in-his appeal, by providing simple arguments and effective against internal critics. The more DeLeon showed himself intransigent and the more he was attacked by moderates the labor and Socialist movements, the more his revolutionary integrity and scientific predictions seemed the issue rather than the prospects for proletarian uprising in the real world.
In short, DeLeon replicated and unwittingly caricatured the gravest errors German-American Socialists had made toward American social life. They had arrived at a cautious labor reformism by discarding the peculiar history and social arrangements nation they set out to revolutionize; DeLeon reversed the and made that very reformism the result of insufficient determination. They had invested their strategic hopes in the too little crediting their own cultural apparatus; DeLeon disregarded that apparatus as pointless and conservatizing, the unions a vessel for collecting Socialist ballots. The alte Genossen [old knowledge?] had failed for twenty years or more. He believed that he would succeed overnight.
DeLeon briefly sustained confidence with a grand plan to all revolutionary unionists, from the faltering Knights of and the American Federation of Labor, into a single new that would organize the unorganized and preach Socialist doctrine. The plan failed because Socialists possessed impossibly resources, and because of the political demands DeLeon upon even the most loyal union chiefs. As happened often bad times for the Communist Party in this century, trade-activity collapsed into building the Party, and Party activity collapsed into support of the press. Non-English language groups, pressured for the same reasons as they would be by Communist leaders thirty years later, either lost their supporters or departed with their institutions. In 1899, DeLeon eliminated planks in the Party platform calling for amelioration of conditions.
He could maintain leadership over the movement, amid this only with a political bludgeon and the support of a loyal DeLeon moved, with the savagery attributed to later at rule-or-ruin internal wrangling, to close down all other avenues of Socialist approach. On the one side, he would finish off the pesky American utopianism; on the other, he would cure immigrant Socialism of its institutional conservatism. With the logic and almost the same wording as Marx and Sorge had used to expunge the critics from American First International ranks, DeLeon proposed to banish from the party once and for all the 'freelovers and such like riffraff unfit for Socialist participation.' Laying down this law, he attracted the sort of fanaticism for political bloodbath familiar in subsequent sectarianism, including no few American-born radicals too young or too insular to understand the value of the native tradition. Reformers and cranks remained, of course, but only by quieting their criticism of DeLeon, who worked out a philosophy that would have done Sorge credit.
The petty-bourgeoisie, he increasingly argued, bore the blame. It monopolized radical ideas in America and confused the proletariat. Later, avowed Marxist critics of reform Socialism would repeat this charge, with the same grain of truth and the same incapacity to explain how and why that class succeeded. Internal life in American Marxist politics became a burlesque reign of terror, as petty-bourgeois opponents turned up and were dismissed from party ranks.
By the same standard, DeLeon increasingly decided, the older and established immigrant Socialists represented a petty-bourgeoisie in themselves. He treated as defacto proof of institutional conservatism their suspicions of his political demands upon unions and his imperious leadership style. DeLeon challenged the fundamental basis of ethnic Socialist localism, the publication of Socialist newspapers by private associations based in the ethnic community rather than by the Socialist movement as a whole. Much like the Communists thirty years later, he demanded Party control over their columns. Unlike the Communists, he had no mandate from a Socialist country to hold over their heads.
Inevitably, secessions began to take place on all sides. Local Socialist groups with their own newspapers had to depart or shut down their papers. Jewish anarchists joined trade-union conservatives in defending the AFL from devastation and in appealing for defections. The Germans, and a group of dedicated Marxist Jews, were the last to leave in 1899. A few years later, DeLeon would comment that he had to look in the office mirror to see if he himself had departed, so many loyalists had gone through the doors.
It is tempting to see the DeLeon episode merely as a false start (or false renewal) of American Socialism, a blind alley where Marxists unnecessarily hammered their heads against a wall. The episode reflected too many deep trends in the history of American Marxism for that comforting conclusion. Both the problem of the Marxist intelligentsia and the larger dilemma of Marxist politics found their reflections in DeLeon's sectarianism.
Deleon had been converted to Socialism by reading in Engels' Anti-Duhring and Lewis Henry Morgan's anthropology. Only later, and out of a distant sympathy, did the working class fit into his Marxism. He developed his hyper-proletarian strategy by choosing his enemies and identifying the obstacles to Socialism within the Socialist and labor movements themselves. The working class was the deus ex machina for his science of society. In this, DeLeon was far from exceptional. note as they usually were from the daily experiences of immigrants, Americans with education had scarce opportunities to the lives of the German-American or Yiddish intellectuals, with the basic human element of the Socialist movement understand its compromises with reality. The immigrants could be fanatical themselves, especially when European events and the absence of meaningful American alternatives made them despair. They could also unconsciously negate their own best insights by blandly accepting the mainstream American view of reality, the marginalization of the foreign-born. But their icons of Marxism had nevertheless an organic basis; the Americans who could make the same claim, a Socialist Eugene Debs or Industrial Workers of the World leader William D. Haywood, never aspired to similar intellectual status. They worked on instinct. Their practical prowess and intellectual limitations left the question unresolved: who would the American be, and how would he (or she) treat the fundamental of class? .
The Left's isolation found its perversely logical conclusion here, in the fin de siecle. Trade unionism and reform politics had failed. The Social Revolutionaries of the 1880s, circling around against European parliamentary tactics displaced to America craft unionist conservatism born in America (or England), asserted that Marxism was possible only with an insurrection around the corner. When that had failed, when the mass did not spontaneously rise and smite the enemy, a vanguard force in an conscious society seemed steadily more appealing. (Next time, that prospect would have a world revolution and a credulous ethnic movement in enthusiastic support.) Socialists had paid an especially heavy price in the 1890s and so the credibility of Marxist ideas. Contrary to what Socialists liked to tell themselves, then and later, DeLeon had not been an aberration. He spoke directly to the sense of disappointment the immigrants felt at their slow progress, to the despair at impotence in the face of mass suffering, and to the eagerness of American Socialists to field a political force beyond the ghettoes. The People, widely considered the first 'scientific' newspaper on the left, gave a badly distorted image of what Socialism meant to American practice. It made Socialists into know-it-all fanatics rather than community members one step ahead of their neighbors; and it made them agents of an organization that separated itself from their struggles in order to proclaim the absolute truth they would have to follow for their salvation.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)