John Spargo
[5] As his biographer notes It was an amazing, meteoric progression for an uneducated stonemason from Western Cornwall that took place in these few years of Spargo's education in Marxism; by the end of his residence in Britain, the 25-year-old was recognized as one of the most promising and energetic Marxist agitators in the country.
Through it all, he was guided, inspired, and sustained by the Social Democratic Federation's founder and leader, Henry Meyers Hyndman, the man whose England for All had converted him to Marxism and who for the rest of his life would remain Spargo's model, mentor, and friend.
[8] This drive of the SDF to unite with various non-Marxist organizations brought about an immediate reaction from the party's hardline "impossibilist" left wing, who sought revolutionary transformation rather than incremental, piecemeal parliamentary reforms.
The promised lecture series proved to be vastly exaggerated and Spargo wound up standing in bread lines to get food and shoveling snow from the sidewalks of the city for $7.50 a week.
There was nothing unusual in this since the early-20th century intellectuals who crowded New York's socialist circles tended to embrace free love as an indispensable dimension of their newfound aesthetics.
In Spargo's case, however, the sexual cavorting led to some tricky situations, and once he had to borrow some 200 dollars from Hillquit to pay off a blackmailer who knew too much of some compromising tryst.
[13] Spargo also took to the floor of the convention in opposition to the establishment of a national party-owned newspaper, a demand put forward by delegates from the left-wing state organizations of the Pacific Coast but regarded as anathema by moderate Easterners who had fairly recently defected from the centralized Socialist Labor Party dominated by party editor Daniel DeLeon.
[15] A year and 10 days later, he married Amelia Rose Bennetts, a British-born New York socialist who had lived in America from early childhood and who had recently been employed as a worker in a carpet mill.
As his biographer notes, during this period Spargo began "easing his way toward the reformist right-wing" of the SPA, giving up on the tactic of agitation among striking workers in favor of building middle class socialist educational institutions.
And that ideal can never be realized until every mother-to-be is safeguarded by all the arts and resources of our civilization to the end that she may bring her baby into the world with joy–healthy of body, glad of heart, serene of soul, unafraid of the future, unterrified by want or the fear of it, secure in the consciousness that the child she bears is heir to all the riches and advantages of earth.
[19]In 1908, Spargo authored a lengthy and academically serious biography of Karl Marx, his book being recognized as the best such treatment published in the English language at the time.
[21] He was diagnosed with a heart ailment and suffered from a lung infection which claimed the life of his younger son, so the Spargos moved to a new home in the hamlet of Old Bennington, Vermont, close to the New York border in the southwestern corner of the state.
Along with, incidentally, Industrial Workers of the World leader "Big Bill" Haywood, Spargo was one of 24 delegates of the Socialist Party to the 1910 Congress of the International, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, from August 28 to September 4, 1910.
[23]The brewing skirmish erupted into an open fight at the 1912 National Convention of the Socialist Party, to which Spargo was once again a delegate from New York as well as the elected Chairman of the Resolutions Committee.
"[24] The debate was vitriolic, with Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin stating the matter in its most bellicose form: Comrades, the trouble with our party is that we have men in our councils who claim to be in favor of political action when they are not.
Spargo charged that the IWW's tactic of encouraging sabotage would have the effect of undermining the honor, courage, and self-respect of the working class, causing it to lose sight of the spiritual ideals of socialism.
He held that the "IWW form of organization which denies autonomy to local unions and centralizes power in the hands of the executive, really involves the ideal of a bureaucratic government in the future society.
The year 1912 also marked Spargo's only foray into American electoral politics, when he ran for the United States Congress in the 1st Congressional District of Vermont as the nominee of the Socialist Party.
This proposal was decisively defeated, garnering the support of only 5 delegates, in favor of the militant St. Louis Resolution, which called for an active struggle against the American war effort.
Up until the party voted to ratify the St. Louis Resolution, Spargo clung to the hope that a majority of the rank and file would endorse his own views of the European conflict.
[29] Spargo wrote to his former comrade Morris Hillquit, co-author of the St. Louis Resolution, that his resignation from the Socialist Party "probably means the end of practically everything.
Spargo was chosen as the first Chairman of the SDL,[31] with Haldeman-Julius apparently handling the day-to-day operations of the organization through the offices of the Appeal in Girard, Kansas.
He became a member of the Republican Party, supported Calvin Coolidge in the election of 1924, and was regarded as a prospective United States Secretary of Labor during the presidency of Herbert Hoover.
