The Decline of the Socialist Labor Party

By the fall of 1879, the six-year depression was ending. The result of prosperity was declining support for the SLP and their subsequent defeat at the polls. In the fall of 1879, the socialists managed only 3,939 votes for county treasurer versus 22,514 for the Republican candidate and 18,777 for the Democrat. In the spring of 1880, the party did manage to reelect Stauber to the city council, but by a slim thirty-one-vote majority. Stauber's opponent refused to accept his defeat, challenged the result, and several election judges stuffed a ballot box during a recount. It took Stauber a year and the party $2,000 to regain the fraudulently denied seat. The SLP was never again an important factor in Chicago elections.

A party member, George Schilling, suggested, "This circumstance did more, perhaps, than all other things combined to destroy the faith of the Socialists in Chicago in the efficiency of the ballot" (Parsons 1889, xviii). Their alternative was the use of force; Schilling reported that the Lehr und Wehr Verein gained many new recruits after such instances of vote fraud, just as they had after the 1877 police repression of meetings.

Another indication of SLP weakness was increasing political conflict between German and (less numerous) Anglo-American activists in the party. The two groups had had an uneasy truce during the successful electoral campaigns. But there had always been suspicions on both sides. As one socialist leader put it, "the German Socialists were suspicious of the English Section and oft-times gave them to understand that the damned Yankees needed watching" (Parsons 1889, xv).

In the SLP, the problems had surfaced in 1878, when the issue of armed worker defense groups had become divisive. The German socialists planned a procession in April 1878 to include mainly the Lehr und Wehr Verein (with a strength of over two hundred German workers) and two Bohemian defense groups—the Bohemian Sharpshooters and the Jaeger Verein (with a hundred members each) (Schneirov 1975, 70). The German-language Vorbote also supported the procession, suggesting the defense groups were necessary if the ruling class should again dare to restrict the rights of free speech and public assembly (Commons et al. 1918, 2: 281). On June 13, just before the procession was to begin, the national executive committee, along with most of the Anglo-American members of the Chicago SLP, repudiated the armed groups because of their worry about alienating potential voters.

The two factions found another issue to be divisive in 1879. The yearly SLP convention met in December of that year and decided to endorse the Greenback presidential candidate. Greenbackism was a monetary reform strategy that suggested all would be well for workers if more currency were put in circulation. The German trade unionists immediately condemned the "Greenback compromise" as reformist. Both the Vorbote and the Nye Tid , the party's Norwegian organ, spoke of the move as a sellout of party principles. The American faction accepted the Greenback compromise and proceeded to expel the editors of the Vorbote and the Nye Tid from the party.

Amid chaos, the SLP put the Greenback compromise to a vote. It carried nationally, but the Chicago rebels would not submit. The German and Scandinavian sections gained control over the local central committee one week after the vote and elected a new executive committee. The foreign-born faction gained credibility when the Greenbackers received only three hundred thousand votes nationally.

As a result of these factional fights, as well as the declining electoral fortunes of the party, the SLP split into two groups; most of the German trade unionists remained with a socialist faction including the furniture workers, carpenters, tanners and curriers, silver guilders, and socialist shoemakers. They continued to push for the principles of socialism.

Most Anglo-American members, including some printers, painters, shoemakers, sailors, and butchers, returned to more conservative labor reform principles (Schneirov 1984, 126). One of the American printers suggested in his resignation speech that many of the Germans demanded immediate revolution yet refused to learn English and were ignorant of American institutions. He referred to the need to "Americanize socialism" (Schneirov 1984, 127). The Socialist , the sole English-language paper of the party, folded at this time after only one year of publication. From 1880 on, the socialist movement in the city separated into two clear factions: the English-speaking reformers versus the largely German (and some Bohemian) revolutionaries.