An excellent practical example of Left vs. Right in the Socialist Party was the attitude towards the leadership of the garment workers union during Chicago’s mass uprising in 1910-11. Robert Dvorak was the lead reporter on the strike for the Chicago Daily Socialist…until he began reporting on the strikers’ rejection of the union leadership’s offers. Dismissed by his ‘Socialist’ editor, Charles H. Kerr’s Chicago-based International Socialist Review with an editorial on the failure of the Daily Socialist to support the rank and file and its larger meaning for the workers’ movement.

‘The Daily Socialist and the Garment Workers’ by Charles H. Kerr from International Socialist Review. Vol. 11 No. 9. March, 1911.

The Daily Socialist and the Garment Workers.

Comrade Dvorak’s story of a strike that failed is full of facts that every active socialist needs to know and to understand. We are giving these facts to the readers of the Review at the risk of being charged with hostility to the management of the Chicago Daily Socialist. Such a charge, however, would be wholly untrue. It is because we believe the success of the Daily Socialist is of the utmost importance to the Socialist Party and the entire socialist movement of the United States, and because we think that success is being delayed and imperiled by the tactics the paper has hitherto adopted, that we are outspoken in our criticism. On the motives of the directors and the managing editors of the Daily we have no reflections to make. They are working for the interests of the working class as they see them. The trouble is that they fail to distinguish between two things that are unlike. The interests of the wage-workers of Chicago are one thing. The interests of the craft union officials of Chicago are a very different thing. The craft unions are a survival from a former industrial stage when they arose and when they were of use to their members. They have become useless to their members, but very useful to their officers. These officers almost invariably receive more pay for less work than the rank and file of the membership, the people who pay their salaries. They have also constant opportunity to get money “on the side” from rival employers who want to manipulate the action of the unions for their own benefit. And there are plenty of ugly rumors indicating that the officials do not miss all these opportunities. Most important of all, the craft unions were started on the false assumption that the interests of employers and wage-workers are identical. This theory still looks right to the officials. It no longer looks right to the men that pay the dues. Probably a majority of the Socialist Party members in Chicago, and of the city readers of the Daily, are members of the unions affiliated with the Chicago Federation of Labor. But right here is the fallacy in which the directors of the Chicago Daily Socialist have been entangled from the start. It does not at all follow that because a man pays dues to a union he approves the policy of its officials. More likely he endures its grumblingly because he does not clearly see just how a different policy would work out.

The Paper With a Muzzle.

In their mistaken idea that the success of the Daily depends on the favor of union officials rather than on the enthusiasm of the wage workers of Chicago, the directors and editors have persistently excluded nearly every important item of news bearing on the propaganda of industrial unionism. Some instances of this are related in Robert Dvorak’s article. Another notable case was the speech of Debs at Riverview Park last fall, the substance of which we published in the November Review. This speech was reported in the Daily on the clay following its delivery, but nearly all the vital and important passages were “blue-penciled.” Again, on December 10, the Daily published an appeal from Debs in behalf of the garment workers, but the editors cut it almost beyond recognition, as will be seen by comparison with page 394 of the January Review.

Why? Because the rank and file of the craft unions ARE becoming interested in the propaganda of industrial unionism. If they had read Debs’ words in the Daily Socialist, they might have agitated in their unions for radical changes which would have imperiled the fat jobs of the officials. And so the officials would have been angry with the Daily Socialist. That would have been terrible!…But don’t you see, Comrade Directors, that in the city of Chicago there are but a FEW union officials, while there are MANY wage-workers? Let the Officials go, and talk to the wage-workers. You have been giving them just the same sort of labor news that Hearst gives them. They compare the two. they recognize the fact that they are alike; they also recognize the fact that Hearst gives them six or eight extra pages of sporting news and sensations, which you can’t afford to give them. Next time they buy the American.

The Way to Win.

Take the muzzle off. Print the real news about the unions, the things the other papers refuse to print. Get into the fight of the wage-worker. The union officials will soon begin to love the Daily as much as the Devil is popularly supposed to love holy water, but they will keep on buying copies to see what you have to say ; now as a matter of fact they don’t buy them because they KNOW what you will say. And the million wage-workers in and around Chicago, the people who are languidly indifferent to a spineless, muzzled Daily, will wake up and stand by you when you wake up and stand by them. It’s worth trying even if it meant a loss. But it doesn’t. You have been losing ever since you started. The Daily has been kept alive by the gifts and loans of a few hundred devoted enthusiasts who could ill afford to give or lend. The Appeal to Reason is an aggressive, fighting paper, and it has a circulation of half a million. The New York Call was at the last gasp a few months ago. It threw off its muzzle and it is out of danger and in a fair way to become a great power. The Review languished seven years, then it came out squarely for a revolutionary party and revolutionary unionism, and the tide turned. Its paid circulation and its fighting strength are today more than twelve times what they were when the change was made. The tactics that have brought success to us will bring success to you. And not only to the Daily but to the Socialist Party in Chicago.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v11n09-mar-1911-ISR-gog-Corn-OCR.pdf