Political background In 1899 a bitter factional fight swept the
Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), pitting loyalists to the party's English-language newspaper,
The People, and its intense and autocratic editor,
Daniel DeLeon, against a dissident faction organized around the party's German-language paper, the
New Yorker Volkszeitung. In addition to personal antipathy, the two sides differed on the fundamental question of
trade union policy, with the DeLeon faction favoring a continuation of the party's policy of establishing an explicitly socialist union organization and the dissidents seeking to abandon the course of
dual unionism so that closer relations to the established unions of the
American Federation of Labor could be forged. A bitter split had ensued, with the dissident wing — pejoratively called "Kangaroos" by the
DeLeonist SLP Regulars — attempting to appropriate the name of the organization and its English-language newspaper for themselves. The matter ended up in the courts, with SLP Executive Secretary Henry Kuhn, Daniel DeLeon, and the Regulars victorious in the legal battle. The losers were forced by the court to change their name and the name of their publication so that no electoral or commercial confusion would result from the factional dualism. On April 28, 1901, the losing side in the litigation, the so-called "Socialist Labor Party" headquartered in
Rochester, New York, headed by
Henry Slobodin, relaunched their weekly New York City newspaper with a new name —
The Worker. Old numbering used previously for their version of
The People was carried forward, with the first issued under the new banner designated "Volume 11, Number 4." After a search,
Julius Gerber managed to locate six surviving members of the old WCPA who remained interested in starting a new socialist newspaper were located and the organization was thus relaunched on its new task. Fundraising proved neither quick nor easy. In November 1901 a fair was held for the benefit of the
Volkszeitung, raising several thousand dollars over a four-day period so in the fall of 1902 the WCPA decided to repeat this idea to raise funds for the English daily the next spring. The fair was held in March 1903; during its 16-day duration a
linotype machine was put into action as a practical demonstration and a sample newspaper called the
Daily Globe was produced. Raffles were conducted, amusements held, food and drink sold, and several thousand dollars were raised for the future English daily, which was planned to be revisit the name
New York Daily Globe on a permanent basis. By the end of June it had become clear that the drive to raise even the more modest sum of $35,000 would be met in failure and the birth of the
Daily Call was necessarily postponed. A decision was made to hold one more fundraising fair and then to launch the paper on
May Day, 1908, regardless of whether or not the desired nest egg of $50,000 had been accumulated. While the Yiddish-language and German-language socialists of New York City had long had daily newspapers of their own,
The Call was remarkable as the first such effort for English-speaking radicals. Editorial offices were established at 6 Park Place in New York City, in a building subsequently removed and replaced by the massive
Woolworth Building. Veteran journalist George Gordon was named the first editor of the publication and former Socialist Party Executive Secretary
William Mailly the paper's managing editor.
The Call became the second English-language socialist daily in America, following the
Chicago Daily Socialist, established in 1906, but preceding the long-running
Milwaukee Leader, which launched in 1911. The daily papers of the Socialist Party were dominated ideologically by the organization's dominant
"constructive socialist" alliance, with the
Chicago Daily Socialist in the hands of editor
A. M. Simons, the
Milwaukee Leader under the general editor control of party founder and U.S. Congressman
Victor L. Berger, and the
Call firmly in the hands of loyalists to
Morris Hillquit. The party's
revolutionary socialist Left Wing was left to find other vehicles for its ideas, such as the monthly magazine published by
Charles H. Kerr, the
International Socialist Review as well as a small handful of weekly papers. Fundraising to support the cost of a daily newspaper proved an ongoing battle for New York City Socialists, with future member of the SPA's National Executive Committee
Anna A. Maley given a full-time job as fundraiser for the publication.
Editorial cartoons were given a prominent place, with material contributed by Ryan Walker and others. The Higgins character proved enduring, being further immortalized in a 1919 novel by
Upton Sinclair,
Jimmie Higgins: A Story. Whittaker Chambers refers to himself using that term in his 1952 memoir: The
Call also provided substantial original coverage of various labor disputes, such as the
New York shirtwaist strike of 1909 and disasters such as the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911.
Opposition to World War I In April 1917, President
Woodrow Wilson, who had recently won re-election to a second four-year term of office behind the
slogan "He Kept Us Out of War", asked
Congress for a
declaration of war against
imperial Germany. That same month, with emotions running high, elected delegates of the Socialist Party of America gathered at their 1917 Emergency National Convention to determine party policy on the war. The organization reaffirmed its staunchly
anti-militarist stance, declaring its opposition to the European war and American participation in it. In June 1917, as part of the move of the United States government to
military conscription, so-called "
Espionage Act" legislation was passed making the obstruction of
military recruitment a crime. Mere opposition to the American war effort via public speech or the printed word was interpreted by the Wilson Administration, and affirmed by the courts, as a violation of the law and a wave of prosecutions and administrative actions followed, including action by
Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson to ban offending newspapers from the mail. Charles Ervin, managing editor of the
Call during this period, decided that, beginning on Monday, December 3, 1917, the paper would be printed in the evenings and would handle its own distribution. The paper continued to be distributed outside of New York by first class mail at this time. At a meeting announcing the decision, Ervin was asked about the paper's attitude towards the U. S. Government and the war. He said that his criticism of the war was not to be understood as criticism of the government. In particular, Ervin told a
New York Times reporter that: The
Call was forced to make do for the duration of the war primarily with door-to-door sales by
carriers and at
newsstands. The paper did not have its
second-class mailing privileges restored until June 1921.
Response to the Russian Revolution of 1917 With the advent of the
Bolshevik Revolution in the fall of 1917, the
Call was taken by surprise. On December 26, 1917, the paper editorialized that events in
Russia had "got clean away from us" and that the editors could "make nothing of it at present, nor predicate anything for its future from present reports." The paper made its columns available both to supporters and critics of the
Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, but were generally supportive of the Russian Revolution in its earliest phase. As with
The Jewish Daily Forward, later a bastion of
anti-communism in the Socialist Party,
The Call was not severely critical of
V.I. Lenin,
Leon Trotsky and their regime until after the end of the
Russian Civil War and the destruction of the internal left wing political opposition in 1921. This effort to stabilize the daily newspaper's funding was unsuccessful, however, and the
New York Leader was terminated just six weeks later. The papers of the Workingmen's Co-operative Publishing Association are held by the
Tamiment Library of
New York University in two archival boxes. The material is open for the use of researchers without restriction. ==See also==