page_title: Socialist Party of America
section_title: Split of the Left Wing Section
hierarchical_section_title: Socialist Party of America / History / Split of the Left Wing Section
caption_attribution_description: English: Socialist Party of America defendants of the trial of 1919. Adolph Germer, Victor L. Berger, William F. Kruse, J. Louis Engdahl, Irwin St. John Tucker
context_page_description: The Socialist Party of America was a democratic socialist and social democratic political party in the United States formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party of America which had split from the main organization in 1899.
  In the first decades of the 20th century, it drew significant support from many different groups, including trade unionists, progressive social reformers, populist farmers and immigrants. However, it refused to form coalitions with other parties, or even to allow its members to vote for other parties. Eugene V. Debs twice won over 900,000 votes in presidential elections while the party also elected two Representatives, dozens of state legislators, more than a hundred mayors, and countless lesser officials. The party's staunch opposition to American involvement in World War I, although welcomed by many, also led to prominent defections, official repression, and vigilante persecution.
context_section_description: In January 1919, Vladimir Lenin invited the IWW and the radical wing of the Socialist Party to join in the founding of the Communist Third International, the Comintern.  The Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party emerged as an organized faction early that same year, building its organization around a lengthy Left Wing Manifesto authored by Louis C. Fraina. This effort to organize in order to "win the Socialist Party for the Left Wing" met with staunch resistance from the "Regulars" who controlled a big majority of the seats of the Socialist Party's governing NEC. When it seemed certain that the 1919 party elections for a new NEC had been dominated by the Left Wing, the sitting NEC, citing voting irregularities, refused to tally the votes, declared the entire election invalid and in May 1919 suspended the party's Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Polish, South Slavic and Hungarian language federations, in addition to the entire state organization of Michigan. In future weeks, the state organizations of Massachusetts and Ohio would similarly be disfranchised and "reorganized" by the NEC while in New York and Pennsylvania the "Regular" State Executive Committees undertook reorganization of Left Wing branches and locals on a case-by-case basis.
  In June 1919, the Left Wing Section held a conference in New York City to discuss their organizational plans. The group found themselves deeply divided, with one section, led by NEC members Alfred Wagenknecht and L. E. Katterfeld and including famed radical journalist John Reed favoring a continued effort to gain control of the SPA at its forthcoming Emergency National Convention in Chicago, to be held at the end of August, while another section, headed by the Russian Socialist Federation of Alexander Stoklitsky and Nicholas Hourwich and the Socialist Party of Michigan seeking to wash their hands of the Socialist Party and immediately move to the establishment of a new Communist Party of America. Eventually, this latter Federation-dominated group was joined by important Left Wingers C. E. Ruthenberg and Louis Fraina, a depletion of Left Wing forces which made the result of the 1919 Socialist Convention a foregone conclusion.
  Regardless, the plans of Wagenknecht and Reed to fight it out at the 1919 Emergency National Convention continued apace. With the most radical state organizations effectively purged by the Regulars (Massachusetts, Minnesota) or unable to participate (Ohio, Michigan) and the Left Wing language federations suspended, a big majority of the hastily elected delegates to the gathering were controlled by the Executive Secretary Adolph Germer and the Regulars. A group of Left Wingers without delegate credentials, including Reed and his sidekick Benjamin Gitlow, made an effort to occupy chairs on the convention floor before the gathering was called into order. The incumbents were unable to block the Left Wingers at the door, but soon called the already present police to their aid and the officers of the law obligingly expelled the boisterous radicals from the hall. With the Credentials Committee firmly in the hands of the Regulars from the outset, the outcome of the gathering was no longer in doubt and most of the remaining Left Wing delegates departed, to meet with other co-thinkers downstairs in a previously reserved room in a parallel convention. It was this gathering which established itself as the Communist Labor Party on August 31, 1919.
  Meanwhile, elsewhere in Chicago the Federations and Michiganders and their supporters established the Communist Party of America at a convention gaveled to order on September 1, 1919. Unity between these two communist organizations was a lengthy and complicated process, formally taking place at a secret convention held at the Overlook Mountain House hotel near Woodstock, New York in May 1921 with the establishment of a new unified Communist Party of America.  A Left Wing loyal to the Communist International remained in the Socialist Party through 1921, continuing the fight to bring the Socialist Party into the ranks of the Comintern. Th
caption: Executive Secretary Adolph Germer was one of top five Socialist of America leaders prosecuted by the Department of Justice in 1919
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