His parents, Alexander MacCartney and the former Mary M. Jones, moved the family briefly to Denver, Colorado, when Frederic was six, before settling down for the next 13 years in Storm Lake, Iowa.

[3] The Unitarian minister was won to the idea of socialism during his student years at Andover when in the winter of 1890 he read Looking Backward, a utopian novel written by Edward Bellamy.

[3] The experience was a powerful one, MacCartney later recalled, as he found his eyes "opened somewhat" with respect to "the vital relationship between [his] religious ideals and the constructive principles advanced by Bellamy.

"[2] In 1892 MacCartney affiliated himself with the People's Party, attracted by that organization's program calling for national and state ownership of major industry and the adoption of direct legislation.

[5]MacCartney was named as a candidate for legislature by the Massachusetts Social Democratic Party in the November 1899 election, running against a former state legislator in the 4th Plymouth District, previously regarded as conservative and solidly Republican.

[6] Social Democrats worked hard over the course of several weeks holding a series of rallies were held in the three towns of the district — Rockland, Hanover, and Hanson — with MacCartney ultimately emerging victorious in the three-way race by a plurality of 102 votes.

MacCartney made extensive use of Christian imagery in his speech, declaring that Debs during his 1895 imprisonment in connection with the Pullman Strike had undergone a transformation akin to the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos: [H]e had revealed to him a vision of things that were to be, of the new kingdom, of the new era ...

[9]The funeral eulogy was delivered by James F. Carey, one of nine members of the Massachusetts state legislature in attendance, who remembered his friend as one who "had the joy of sowing the seeds of liberty, of equality, of fraternity.