page_title: Walter Thomas Mills
section_title: The Mills Affair of 1907
hierarchical_section_title: Walter Thomas Mills / Biography / Political career / The Mills Affair of 1907
caption_attribution_description: English: Hermon Titus, Washington socialist activist and newspaper publisher, 1904.
context_page_description: Walter Thomas Mills was an American socialist activist, educator, lecturer, writer, and newspaper publisher. He is best remembered for the role he played in the Socialist Party of America during the first decade of the 20th Century as one of the leaders of the organization's moderate wing. He also was a key actor in the labor movement of New Zealand as a founder of the United Labour Party in 1912. He returned to the United States in 1914 with the advent of World War I and worked unsuccessfully to keep the country out of the bloody European conflict, eventually leaving the socialist movement in the 1920s.
context_section_description: The arrival of Walter Thomas Mills as a Seattle resident in 1906 energized the embattled moderate faction, which had in the previous year managed to deprive the revolutionary socialists of their center of power, the Pike Street Branch of Local Seattle, through a reorganization orchestrated by the Seattle City Central Committee only to see lose Local Seattle lose its charter and be reorganized by the left wing-dominated State Executive Committee. Mills persuaded the Seattle moderates who had been cast aside by the Socialist Party of Washington and who had organized themselves as the "Propaganda Club of Seattle" to rejoin the Socialist Party, with a view to winning control.
  Throughout early 1907 Mills conducted Sunday afternoon meetings independent or the regularly scheduled Sunday afternoon propaganda meetings of Local Seattle, using these gatherings as a means of making contact with Socialists discontented with the left wing state organization and leadership of the reorganized Local Seattle. By the first of June, Mills' Sunday meetings — scheduled in direct conflict with the regular Sunday propaganda meetings of the left wing-dominated officialdom, had resulted in "steadily diminished" crowds being drawn by the left and a great expansion of the size and confidence of the moderate faction. "This is a great setback from the time when the revolutionary element had absolute control in the party some four or five months ago," left wing adherent Harry Ault declared.
  The situation was complex, however. In March 1907, Mills had been charged by the British Columbia Dominion Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of Canada with having advocated "compromise and fusion" in a speech delivered in Victoria on December 28, 1906, in which Mills urged support of the Canadian Labor Party. Having gotten wind of Mills' fusionist heresy, left wing Washington State Committee member Alfred Wagenknecht wrote to the BC Dominion Executive Committee on February 20, 1907, soliciting a complaint against Mills. The Dominion Executive Committee complied on March 6 with a letter to the Washington State Executive Committee, which lead to charges being preferred against Mills. Both sides began to organize frantically for the May Washington State Convention, which was seen as the means by which the dilemma could be overcome by Mills forces — a majority at the convention for the moderates would mean a new State Committee and an end to pressure.
  Mills was brought to trial before the Local Seattle on Sunday, April 28, 1907 at 10 am on the Victoria speech. Before the largest mass meeting of Local Seattle in the organization's history, charges were read by J.G. Morgan, Secretary of the Socialist Party of Canada. Mill pleaded "not guilty" and the point was reached where Morgan was to make his opening statement and to introduce his evidence. Suddenly, Mills was given the floor and he made a motion of adjournment, which was quickly seconded and carried amid the whooping and shouting of his supporters.
  Despite being outnumbered in the city of Seattle and unable to discipline Mills through Local Seattle, the left wing still held the reins of the State Committee, which continued to mull over the situation into June. At its June 10, 1907 meeting, the State Executive Committee (formerly the Local Quorum) discussed the situation at length and telegraphed a forthcoming action to the membership in a tersely-worded report by State Secretary Richard Krueger that he had been instructed "to communicate with all the state committeemen and inform said committeemen of all the facts" regarding the failure of Local Seattle to "deal in a constitutional manner with the charges against Walter Thomas Mills."
  On June 23, 1907 the State Executive Committee tabulated a poll of the members of the State Committee and instructed the State Secretary to prepare evidence in proper documentary form and to notify Local Seattle to do likewise, with the deadline for submission of its defense given of 30 minutes before the start of the next scheduled meeting of the SEC. Evidence from both sides
caption: Left wing Seattle newspaper publisher Hermon F. Titus was the nemesis of Walter Thomas Mills during his years in that city.
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