[3] Radical editor Louis C. Fraina composed a Left Wing Manifesto, around which the Left Wing Section organized itself, holding raucous meetings of SPA locals and branches to force endorsement of the program and running a slate of candidates in the SPA's annual election in an attempt to "capture" and remold the party according to the Russian Bolshevik Party's model.

However, with many Left Wingers already abandoning this approach and the Regular faction firmly in control of a majority of the states electing delegates to the Emergency National Convention in Chicago scheduled for August 30, 1919, the fight was essentially over before it began.

The Credentials Committee of this convention was easily won by adherents of the Oneal-Germer Regulars, who froze out Left Wing-oriented delegations from California, Oregon and Minnesota.

The five-member National Executive Committee consisted of Max Bedacht, Alexander Bilan, L. E. Katterfeld, Jack Carney and Edward Lindgren.

The party moved to the underground in response to mass arrests and deportations conducted by the Justice Department and its Bureau of Investigation, guided by Special Assistant to the Attorney General J. Edgar Hoover.

These raids and the move to the underground virtually destroyed the organization, which only existed in skeletal form in the first half of 1920, although publication of its legal newspaper, The Toiler, was maintained.