Debs converted to the socialist cause, believing in the aftermath of the suppression of the ARU strike by federal troops that trade union action alone was insufficient to bring about the liberation of the working class.

In this same summer, smarting from a failed effort at establishing a socialist community near Tennessee City, Tennessee, publisher Julius Wayland established in Kansas City a new socialist weekly newspaper, Appeal to Reason, eventually moving the operation for financial reasons to a small town in southeastern Kansas called Girard.

[1] The convention which gave birth to the new organization actually began as a final conclave of the ARU, which opened Tuesday morning June 15, 1897, in Handel Hall, Chicago.

[2] The Social Democracy of America proved to be a short lived and disparate group of Marxists, trade unionists (especially veterans of the ARU), Owenite socialists, populists and unaffiliated radicals.

In August 1897, a three-member Colonization Committee was established, consisting of Col. Richard J. Hinton (Washington, D.C.), Wilfred P. Borland (Bay City, Michigan) and Cyrus Field Willard (Chicago).

The presence of such well-known Anarchists as Mrs. Lucy Parsons, wife of one of the victims of the outrageous Haymarket trial, Emma Goldman, common-law wife of Berkman, who shot Manager Frick at the time of the Homestead strike, and others, all enlisted under the colonization wing, the members of which were now using the phrases of the Anarchists at sneering at political action, showed that a parting of the ways must come.

[4]The Colonization Committee delivered a lengthy report, detailing the proposed purchase of a Colorado gold mine and the establishment of a colony around that operation.

This imaginative (or hallucinatory) plan fanned the sentiments of the party's political actionists (who called themselves the "antis"), who found themselves more anxious than ever to disentangle themselves from what they perceived as an unsavory stock-selling scheme.

[5][6] During the fourth day of the proceedings on Friday, June 10, things turned increasingly bitter when James Hogan of Utah delivered a two-hour report as vice chairman of the national executive board and treasurer, during the course of which he directly attacked Secretary Sylvester Keliher (a political actionist), alleging incompetence or dishonesty.

The day was absorbed by a bitter debate over the program of the organization, with the main object of division a minority report put forward by John F. Lloyd on behalf of the colonizationists (disparagingly called the "goldbrick" faction by the "antis").

The meeting was adjourned and many delegates straggled off to bed, the anti-colonization faction already having decided to depart the organization and to establish a political party of their own in the aftermath of defeat on the colonization issue.

Against their continued reign stood an opposition faction, centered on the independently owned German-language socialist daily, the Newyorker Volkszeitung, the editor of which was Alexander Jonas.

The latter group was particularly hostile to the trade union policy adopted at the 1896 Convention, believing it to have alienated erstwhile allies in the existing labor movement and thus marginalized the party.

It also resented the rigid party discipline practiced by the National Executive Committee, which included the expulsions of dissidents and the suspension of entire sections.

This second session, elected Henry Slobodin as national secretary and named a new editor of The People, to replace DeLeon, to whom the dissidents felt personal enmity.

Two parallel organizations, each designating itself the Socialist Labor Party and issuing a publication called The People, thus emerged in 1899, naming competing full slates of candidates for the elections of 1899.

Dissident Section Chicago moved in fairly short order towards unity the largely German New York party right oppositionists.

[11] Henry L. Slobodin was formally elected executive secretary of the Rochester organization, which tentatively continued to call itself the Socialist Labor Party and to issue its own English language newspaper under the name of The People.

According to the report of National Secretary William Butscher made to the July 1901 convention that established the Socialist Party of America, the Springfield SDP had a paid membership of 5,310 in the continental United States, with another 1,080 members in Puerto Rico, for a total of 6,390 as of January 1, 1901.