[1] In the first decades of the 20th century, the SPA drew significant support from many different groups, including trade unionists, progressive social reformers, populist farmers and immigrants.

[3] The party's staunch opposition to American involvement in World War I, although welcomed by many, also led to prominent defections, official repression, and vigilante persecution.

A divisive and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to broaden the party by admitting followers of Leon Trotsky and Jay Lovestone caused the traditional Old Guard to leave and form the Social Democratic Federation.

While the party was always strongly anti-fascist as well as anti-Stalinist, its opposition to American entry in World War II cost it both internal and external support.

In 1970–1973, these strategic differences became so acute that the SPA changed its name to Social Democrats, USA, both because the term "party" in its name had confused the public and to distance itself from the Soviet Union.

[8] According to Jimmy Weinstein, its electoral base was strongest west of the Mississippi River, "in the states where mining, lumbering, and tenant farming prevailed".

Its vote shares were highest in Oklahoma, Nevada, Montana, Washington, California, Idaho, Florida, Arizona and Wisconsin, and it also attracted support in Texas, Arkansas and Kansas.

There were also agrarian utopian-leaning radicals, such as Julius Wayland of Kansas, who edited the party's leading national newspaper, Appeal to Reason, along with trade unionists; Jewish, Finnish and German immigrants; and intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and the Black activist/intellectual Hubert Harrison.

Party propaganda argued that if working-class solidarity did not extend across racial lines, then the ruling class would exploit blacks as strikebreakers and an instrument of repression.

In 1911, IWW leader Bill Haywood was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, on which AFL partisan Morris Hillquit also served.

Members who supported the war effort quit, ranging from the rank and file to prominent intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann, John Spargo, James Graham Phelps Stokes and William English Walling.

Urging young men to ignore the draft law was a crime under the Sedition Act of 1918 and Debs was convicted and sentenced to serve ten years in prison.

A group of Left Wingers without delegate credentials, including Reed and his sidekick Benjamin Gitlow, made an effort to occupy chairs on the convention floor before the gathering was called into order.

The party had denounced America's participation in the European war and had lent aid and comfort to Ludwig Martens, the "self-styled Soviet Ambassador and alien, who entered this country as a German in 1916".

On September 16, 1920, a special election was held to fill the five seats vacated by the Assembly, with each of the five expelled Socialists running for reelection against a "fusion" candidate representing the combined Republican and Democratic parties.

Although the Socialists did not realize it at the time, the chances that the organization would ever be transformed into an authentic mass Farmer-Labor party like British Labour were greatly lessened by the FLP's departure.

After their defeat on this question, the railroaders on National Committee members withdrew from the meeting, announcing that they would await further instructions from their respective organizations with regard to future participation.

[45] The 1928 convention voted to reduce membership dues to just $1 per year, with only half that sum going to the use of the National Office and the balance retained by state and local organizations.

[46] But this growth came at a price, as deep factional divisions developed between the youthful newcomers (radicalized and drawn to militant Marxism by the world economic crisis) and the "Old Guard" headed by Morris Hillquit, James Oneal and Waldman.

Among these, I painfully record, was Norman Thomas.Along with the blue shirts, the red ties, the clenched fists, the raised arm salute, came the banners, the slogans, the demonstrations; all the trappings that make for totalitarian, unthinking mass fervor.

In 1936, the leaders of the Old Guard formed a new rival organization to the Socialist Party, the Social Democratic Federation, and somewhat reluctantly endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in that year's election.

In 1934, Sinclair ran in the Democratic primary for governor and astonished everyone by winning on a promise of radical socialist economic reforms he dubbed End Poverty in California movement (EPIC).

Not only was an appeal made to the radical intellectuals and trade unionists who were the historic core of the organization, but an effort was made to work closely with the Communist Party in joint actions and to infuse the Socialist Party with the leading personnel of small radical oppositional organizations, including in particular the anti-Stalinist communist groupings headed by Jay Lovestone (the so-called "Lovestoneites") and James P. Cannon (the so-called "Trotskyists").

Historian Constance Myers notes that "initial prognoses for the union of Trotskyists and Socialists were favorable" and it was only later that "constant and protracted contact caused differences to surface".

A special convention was planned for the last week of March 1937 to set the party's future policy, initially intended as an unprecedented "secret" gathering.

[70] The meeting organized the faction on a permanent basis, electing a National Action Committee of five to "coordinate branch work" and "formulate Appeal policies".

Roosevelt's order applied to banning discrimination in only the war industries, not the armed forces, but the Fair Employment Act is generally perceived as a success for African American labor rights.

In 1942, an estimated 18,000 blacks gathered at Madison Square Garden to hear Randolph kick off a campaign against discrimination in the military, war industries, government agencies and labor unions.

Harrington, Kahn and Horowitz were officers and staff-persons of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), which helped to start the New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The Socialist Party's 1972 convention had two co-chairmen, Bayard Rustin and Charles S. Zimmerman of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU);[90] and a First National Vice Chairman, James S. Glaser, who were reelected by acclamation.