Forerunners The Workingmen's Party of the United States was established in August 1876 and renamed itself as the
Socialist Labor Party of America at its National Congress in
Newark, New Jersey a year later. The members of the organization were predominantly immigrants from
Germany throughout its earliest years, although the SLP did maintain 7 English-speaking Sections by the end of 1877.
Establishment Volume 1, number 1 of
The People was unveiled on April 5, 1891, as the first party-owned English weekly since termination of
The National Socialist. The large
broadsheet was produced on the press owned by the association which published the
Volkszeitung and Sunday was initially chosen as the weekly publication day. First editor of the publication was
Lucien Sanial (1835–1927), a French-born veteran of the socialist movement. Although Sanial's leaving was ostensibly related to failing eyesight and other physical difficulties associated with old age, few active in the party doubted that the actual reason for Sanial's removal related to a simple need to seat the energetic and intense DeLeon in the editorial chair. DeLeon proved to be a highly effective editor of the 4-page weekly, contributing a stream of articles which aggressively excoriated purported systemic defects of
capitalism, while expounding the benefits of the socialist system. DeLeon's consistent and confrontational leftism in the pages of the party weekly soon propelled him to a position of high authority among the SLP's rank-and-file membership, even exceeding that of the nominal political chiefs of the organization.
1899 split As the decade of the 1890s progressed, the Socialist Labor Party became deeply divided over the relationship of the party to the trade union movement, with Daniel DeLeon and his co-thinkers supportive of
dual unionism through the SLP's 1896 establishment of a socialist rival to the
American Federation of Labor and
Knights of Labor called the
Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. The organization's division over the matter converged around the party press, with
The People and the SLP's official German paper,
Vorwärts, filled with attacks upon so-called "pure and simple labor unions" and their allegedly corrupt officers. An Anti-DeLeon "opposition faction" headed by
Morris Hillquit and
Henry Slobodin emerged, grouping themselves around the widely circulated
New Yorker Volkszeitung. There followed a period of organizational dualism, in which two groups both claimed for themselves the mantle of the Socialist Labor Party, each with their own officers and their own official English-language newspaper called
The People. The paper changed to a daily frequency in 1900, thereby becoming
The Daily People, ultimately reverting to the previous name in 1914 when financial concerns forced a retreat to weekly status. This name was maintained for decades. In addition to translations by DeLeon of the so-called
Marxist classics, new speeches and writings by DeLeon himself were published, such as
The Burning Question of Trade Unionism (1904) and
Flashlights of the Amsterdam Congress (1906). A sharply critical and at times venomous rhetorical tone was maintained in the pages of
The People against the perceived opponents and rivals of the SLP. In 1911 a series of 30 articles were published in the paper's pages analyzing the day-to-day activities of
Victor L. Berger, elected as the first Socialist to the
U.S. Congress in the fall of the previous year. These articles were later collected in pamphlet form in a tract entitled ''Berger's Hit and Misses.'' Johnson retired from the editorial chair in 1938, following a case of
tuberculosis which sapped her strength. Some historians believe her to have been forced out by
Arnold Petersen, the powerful National Secretary of the organization. Thus ended a print run of 117 years — by far the longest continuous run of any socialist or communist publication in the history of American radicalism. A short-lived effort to revitalize the publication as an on-line quarterly followed, commencing in the Summer of 2008 and ending in the fall of 2011, at which time the publication ceased publication indefinitely.
The People remains readily available to activists and scholars of
labor history and radical politics on
microfilm, the master negative of which is held by the
Wisconsin Historical Society in
Madison. ==
Socialist Studies==