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“...not
bound to take notice of this and kindred matters mentioned
by you. I remain cool and judicial. Dont, when you get
to read the thing, miss the place where he fabricates having
told me to be damned. The ass does not realize that by pub-
lishing his letter to me and my answer to him, he makes that
part of his story look very fishy.
At any rate, let me know all that goes on. We here
philosophize on the Hexenkessel [witches cauldronH. K.].
I wish you would let me have the date of the Daily Peo-
ple in which I had the translation about the Moscow police.
Fraternally,
D. De Leon.
The disturbance of 1899 had been designated by the Party
as the Kangaroo exodus, and from that designation the
latter-day disrupters, of 1902, inherited the appellation of
Kanglets, indicative of their more diminutive size and im-
portance. Following these precedents, if ever there are other
attempts to either capture Or kill the S. L. P-> we shall, per-...”
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“...now show what there is in them.
But for the same reason I regret to see your Warning*
in yesterdays People. In the first place you ought to be
cautious. It may be said your office does not authorize you
to address the Party members except as the mouthpiece of
the N. E. C. A color is given to the claim that you pre-
judged. In the second place. I hold that In this particular
Curran issue the N. E. C. should act with studied neutrality.
The Curran statement aims, true enough, at killing The Peo-
ple: but it expressly assails and marks out for decapitation
you and metwo officers under the N. E. C. At such times...”
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“..._St.
Louis and Chicago and Milwaukee city elections have furnished
fresh materialis working both ways. In New York it is hav-
ing the effect of causing the intellectuals to be acting still
more intellectually against the proletariat; elsewhere it is
causing what I said is happening in Ind. and Chic. In both
cases the boil is being ripened. [In the latter part of May the
International Socialist Review returned the Open Letter with
the excuse that as the letter had already appeared in The' Peo-
ple the Review could not publish it as it was its practice never
to reprint from American publications. It should be noted,
however, that the Letter had been in the hands of all S. P. pub-
lications ample time before it was used in the Daily People.
De Leons comment was: "Well, Kerr took backwater! And
what a backwater! He knew you had sent the O. L. to all radi-
cal papers. According to his excuse, he would only take what
all other papers reject. It would have been a sight to see the
O. L. in Ks ...”
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“...en-
trance into the American labor movementsince 1892against
every movement of the working class of this country that
showed success and that seemed to be in the ascendancy. It
was contrary to his nature to perform constructive labor, he
was the born caviller, who, everywhere, had to find fault, with
whom only one person the world around could do the right
thing: Daniel De Leon.
Had I the time for research among the old documents
that must Still exist in the editorial office of the Weekly Peo-
ple, I have no doubt that I would find a great deal of really
amusing evidence of this campaign of vicious slander, the only
weapons that the enemy really possessed against himargu-
ment and logic they never dared to try, for then their weapons
flew to pieces like wooden swords against steel.
Since I took charge of the office, I have found in a crev-
ice an old tablet on which De Leon had taken copious notes at
several Volkszeitung Association meetings in the Spring of
99. There we have them all p...”
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“...please with it, and that anything they send in
should be published without comment, question or abridge-
ment. If this inalienable right is infringed upon it
can only be because the editor, who should be a ser-
vant of the membership, is a "boss and a "tyrant. At
every N. E. C. meeting we had a batch of appeals from De
Leons "arbitrariness to settle, and De Leon always came out
on tophe never ruled out anything unless he had a very good
reason. The most insistent complainants were, naturally, peo-
ple with literary talent and ambition, the class that is always
"misunderstood and suppressed. The workingmen in the
Party caused him little or no trouble of this kind. These
would send in news from the field of action in plain, direct, and
often crude language, and were pleased if they saw it edited
and printed or made use of in a news item; if they heard noth-
ing of it they took for granted that it was not worth the print-
ers ink. Not so the literateur, If his effusion was ruled
out, his child...”
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“...WITH DE LEON SINCE 89. .11
of the industrial centers. The leaders of the pure and sim-
ple trade unions had indeed good cause to fear the S. T. &
L. A.
The founding of the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance
was the first recognition and application of the principle of
strategy in the Socialist and labor movement in the world. It
was declared that without the organization of the workers into
a class conscious revolutionary body on the industrial field^
Socialism would remain but an aspiration. It was chargeii''
that the idea of organizing the Socialist Trade and Labor Al-
liance originated in De Leons head. It did. That charge,"
at least, was true. So much the better for De Leon. Recent
developments across the Atlantic have demonstrated beyond
doubt the impotence of the pure and simple political move-
ment.
Credit Due Daniel De Leons Work
To Marx belongs the discovery of the economic interpre-
tation of history and the scientific application of the theory off
value. To De Leon belongs the...”
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“...employes, but which protected the bosses against
strikes, at least for the period of a season.
These are not unsubstantiated assertions. We may look
today at the men who were the loudest protestors against De
Leons "dictatorship: Abraham Cahan of the Jewish Daily
Forward, whose income out of the labor movement exceeds
that of Gompers and some of his lieutenants besides. Louis
Miller, formerly of the Jewish paper, Wahrheit, who recently
started another daily paper on the East Side, is another exam-
ple. Millers real estate speculations were very successful_
no wonder De Leons attitude was not cherished by him I Last,
but not least, there is Morris Hillquit, a lawyer and now also
a Boersianer, or speculator in Wall Street. Hillquits "origi-
nal accumulation was derived from fees in writing the agree-
ments mentioned above. Original accumulations and the rev-
olutionary Socialist movement do not go hand in hand, hence
the starting of the opposition on the East Side at the time when
De Leon as a...”
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“...joined by an additional or fourth
eleient in New York, which trained with Julian Pierce, then
manager of the Labor News Company. Pierce had nothing m
common with Hickcj' or Voct; he was a sober man, in fact
the very one, as already stated, who preferred charges against
Hickey at the outset of the whole affair. The fellows who
stood with Pierce were the two Ephraims; Ephraim Siff and
Ephraim Harris, and a few others with saintly names but
Luciferic motives. They wanted to discontinue the Daily Peo-
ple and turn the Daily People plant into a money-making en-
terprise. The Pierce-Siff aggregation became known, accord-
ingly, as the Daily People Killers League.
United by Jealousy of De Leon
The triple alliance became a quadruple concern, but none
of its component parts dared openly to assail the Socialist La-
bor Party principles or tactics; they all claimed to be in accord
with the basic principles of the Socialist Labor Party. In at-
tacking the party they all hid their real object behind gener-...”
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“...ancestor, Ponc.De Leon, sought to discover in Flor-
ida the Fountain of Youth.
It was then that Reilly volunteered to tell what Algernon
Lee, another shining light in the firmament of the Socialist
Party, was in the habit of telling confidentially to all who
would believe himthat De Leon, while a resident in Germany,
was a Bismarck spy! We all thought this as good a ghost-
story as we had heard. De Leon himself had his chuckle out
of it, but he requested Reilly to write a letter to the Daily Peo-
ple in the form of an inquiry regarding Algernon Lees allega-
tion. Reilly, after having made the statement, could not re-
fuse to comply with De Leons request or himself stand brand-
ed as a base slanderer. He did write such a letter, which was
published in the Daily People with De Leons answer appended.
It was quite -certain that at the second convention of the
I. W. W. some attempt would be made to cause dissension,
the way having been prepared by the work of the Lees and...”
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“...found itself with Frank Bohn as its
national secretary, James Connolly as a member of the Nation-
al Executive Committee, and Justus Ebert in the editorial room
of the Daily People. Each one of the trio had his own ambi-
tion, each one wanted to become the editor-in-chief of the
Daily People, though each one had a different purpose in that
desire.
The Self-Seekers in the Party
Bohn, whom I have described as resembling in manners a
funeral director, wanted to become the editor of the Daily Peo-
ple so as to be able to turn over the Socialist Labor Party in
bulk to the Socialist Party, and thus become the undertaker in-
deed. Did he not write, after his schemes had failed, in the New
York Call: I have bearded the lion in his den, etc." Yes, he
had bearded the lion in his den; he bore the scars to prove
it.
James Connolly wanted to become the editor of the Daily
People because he imagined himself to have been bom to be
an editor and incidentally because he imagined it a much easier
job than...”
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“...all party documents which under Bohns administration
were lying loose in a harum-skarum condition about the office,
discovered the trick that had been played. Augustine found
the original motion as written by the recording secretary of
the Sub-Committee, and found that it had been falsely tran-
scribed by Bohn so as to read, by leaving out the word Sub,
to empower the N. E. C., etc.
The motion as originally written was photographed and
electrotyped and reproduced in the columns of the Daily Peo-
ple. Bohn was charged with having thus falsified the N. E. C.
minutes; he was challenged to refute the charge; he could not.
Before facts in this case were fully known by the party mem-
bership, Connolly, as a delegate to the New Jersey state con-
vention of the Socialist Labor Party, made, together with Pat-
rick Quinlan, the false allegation as stated above. The part of
De Leons letter quoted related to this Connolly matter.
Before dropping the three former members of the Social-
ist Labor Party...”
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“...enclose a
copy of my letter to Trautmann on that letter of O. J. I did
not preserve the copy of the second letter to Trautmann on
the subject of his report. Return me the copies.
I also return within the letter to you signed with Traut-
manns stamp, but obviously written by O. J. Your answer,
copy of which you sent me, is to the point. O. J. is hedging.
Trautmanns report reads, Markley is using The Daily Peo-
ple against the I. W. W. That is a concrete charge, to be
proved or disproved by the articles in question. If the charge
is true I am guilty. I should not be caught napping by peo-
ple who wish to use The People against the I. W. W. O. J.s
is still vaguer. He speaks of articles which dont conform
with facts. This is an attempt to impeach the veracity of the
alleg;ations in articles that do not concern the I. W. W. In-
sist upon an answer, and upon retraction when the time comes
that O. J. can dodge no more.
Since writing to you, two requests have come to me to
answer in The Bulletin the...”
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“...solidarity, through united intelligent action on both
the political and the industrial fields.
Fifty speakers of the Detroit I. W. W. were on the strike
scene; Herman Richter, the general secretary was among
them. Arthur E. Reimer, Caleb Harrison, Frank Young, Au-
gust Gillhaus, Robert McLure, Olive M. Johnson, Margaret
Hilliard, Edmund Seidel, M. Angelevski, Boris Reinstein, and
many others used their best endeavors and worked overtime to
enlighten, encourage, and organize. A number of young peo-
ple, the sons and daughters of New York comrades, came to
Paterson to help in doing clerical work; thousands of mem-
bership books had to be issued for which men, women, and
boys and girls who had joined the organization clamored, and
which could not be made out as fast as applicants for mem-
bership demanded them, for in those days nothing was so
cherished as a membership card of the Detroit I. W. W.
S. P. and Bummery Treason
But the hand of treason once more destroyed the newly
built organization...”
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“...X INDEX.
New Yorker Volkszeitung, part taken by, in formation of So-
cialist Trade and Labor Alliance, I. 11; attack made by, on
Socialist Labor Party, 17; controversy between The Peo-
ple and, 18-19; monthly edition in English of, 19-20; unsuc-
cessful raid engineered by, on offices of Socialist Labor
Party in New York, 21, II. 67-69; true attitude of, toward
revolutionary Socialist movement, as revealed by utter-
ance in 1909, I. 22-23; editorial in, upon death of De Leon,
24-25, 117-118; dirty work by, in early days, II. 5-6; early
hidden enmity of, toward S. L. P., 60; open issue taken
with The People by, 63-66.
Obrist, J., opponent of De Leon, II. 65.
Optimism, De Leons definition of, I. 117.
OToole, Barney, sponsor for James Connolly, II. 100.
Overall Brigade at fourth convention of I. W. W., II. ISO-lSl.
Paris, International Socialist Congress at, in 1900, II. 86-89.
Parsons, Albert, II. 3-4.
Party Press, The, booklet on, I. 88.
Paterson, silk workers strike in, II. 159-161.
Patterson...”
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