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“... German trade and other labor organiza-
tions which, in the very nature of things in those days, had to
serve as a fulcrum whenever the S. L. P. lever had to be ap-
plied to dislodge some obstruction in the path of the revolu-
tionary movement. Sanial, lacking this advantage of position,
was, nevertheless, a valuable man. An effective and fluent
speaker in English, despite his atrocious French accent, a
writer of clear and forceful English, a man who had quite a
reputation as a statistician, in physique broad-shouldered,
heavy-set, of venerable appearance, he was the very antithesis
of the rather undersized, frail and youngish-looking Vogt.
Sanial certainly was a good third of the De Leon-Vogt-Sanial
team. Vogt, cool, calculating, logical, and wielding a force-
ful tongue and pen; Sanial, though old enough to have been
Vogt s father, more mercurial in temperament, optimistic often
to a fault, often inclined to be visionary, easily impressed with
this scheme or that to advance...”
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“... labor
crook to feather his own nest at the expense and over the
hack of his rank and file. All of this is rather self-evident
and would scarcely deserve mention were it not for the bane-
ful effect that condition has upon the general Labor move-
ment and, necessarily, upon its revolutionary wing as well.
New York City has, during the last thirty years or so,
furnished another striking example of the indigenous growth
of the American labor faker. At the time when, due to the
industrial expansion of Germany the immigration of work-
ers from that country began to slow up, a heavy Jewish im-
migration began to set in, tending to transform or at least to
affect, vitally, the character of the citys population. Jewish
onions were formed in great number and numhjsrs, a Jewish
central labor body arose, the United Hebrew Trades, which
body became the incubator of a set of labor fakers second to
none the country over.
De Leon understood this condition, he knew what it
meant and that...”
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“...DANIEL DE LEON-OUR COMRADE
When I was approached by Comrade Petersen, National
Secretary of the Socialist Labor Party, with the request that
I write a biographic contribution to this book, my feeling was
one of profound regret and annoyance with myself. The fact
is that I had for many years back harbored a secret desire to
write De Leons biography some day. That a biography of
De Leon, however, should be infinitely more than the mere
events and data of his life, I knew only too well; that it should
be even more than the story of his activity in the Labor
Movement, I was fully aware. It ought to combine all of this
indeed, and, besides, contain something of his inner life, his
development, and his action and reaction upon the causes and
events as they unfolded themselves during his rich and event-
ful life. Some of this a few of us knew fairly well, but the
real key was held by De Leon himself. I had often resolved
to ask him to give something of his most intimate...”
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“... task of supplying the English-speaking proletariat with
most useful knowledge, by translating from the German Marxs
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Bebels (Die Frau
und der Sozialismus) Woman under Socialism, and from
the French the monumental masterpiece of Eugene Sue, The
Mysteries of the People, or History of a Proletarian Family
Across the Ages.
Again, what a contrast between De Leon and the writers
of books, the authors, in the other camp. There, writers of
pamphlets and books mostly without an original thought, a re-
hash of what others had taught and written, in some instances
even plagiarizing De Leons great lectures, What Means Tins
Strike? and Reform or Revolution, and invariably paid for
by a publisher; here, a man who, having all the qualifications
of a man of letters, preferred to translate what he thought use-
ful for the training of the class conscious workers, and equip-
ping them with the knowledge requisite for their emancipation,
rather than...”
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