Ben Hanford

[5] In 1899, the SLP split, and Hanford left the organization with an anti-dual union faction led by Morris Hillquit and Henry Slobodin and centered around the New Yorker Volkszeitung.

Hanford was regarded as an effective orator who possessed both "a burning earnestness" and "an ability to clothe his thoughts and feelings into the simplest and most direct language.

In addition to his efforts as a labor organizer and socialist orator and political candidate, Hanford was an effective pamphleteer, winning praise for his 1901 tract, Railroading in the United States, and making a lasting mark on the literature of American socialism with his short story "Jimmie Higgins,"[8][6] lauding the silent efforts of a prototypical Socialist rank-and-file member to complete the mundane tasks that made an effective political movement possible.

This character, reckoned by one commentator as "a veritable apotheosis of the faithful worker in the ranks,"[9] was reprised after Hanford's death in a novel by the same title by Upton Sinclair.

[10] Following the close of the 1908 Socialist Party National Convention, at which he was nominated for vice president for a second time, Hanford was stricken by "a virulent stomach trouble.

Hanford's demise proved to be slow and painful, with his friend John C. Chase noting that he was confined to bed "for weeks and sometimes for months" in an "agony such as few men have to endure," while his body wasted from "the ravages of long continued illness.

"[12] Ben Hanford died at his home in Brooklyn, New York at noon on Monday, January 24, 1910, with his wife and party comrades by his bedside.