Early years Thomas John Morgan, known to his friends as "Tommy", was born in
Birmingham, England on October 27, 1847. He was one of nine children born to Thomas John and Hannah Simcox Morgan. Thomas Senior, a former member of the
Chartist movement, As a boy Tommy Morgan attended a so-called "pauper's school" until the age of 9, at which time left school to take a job. He remained for 20 years with this company, working in the
railroad car repair shops. Morgan joined the
Social Democratic Workingmen's Party of North America in 1876 and continued membership in its successor organization, the
Workingmen's Party of the United States, which had changed its name to the
Socialist Labor Party of America before the decade was out. The meeting was not harmonious and following a spate of factional shenanigans a group of 26 conservative trade unionists were excluded from the gathering on the basis of their professed support for candidates of the
Republican and
Democratic Parties. Although not himself a candidate, Morgan played a key role behind the scenes of the United Labor Party, chairing the important committee on platform and resolutions at the nominating convention, and helping to shape the final program of the organization. A similar nominating convention was held by the United Labor Party in February 1887, attended by more than 600 delegates. Morgan was once again the power behind the throne as head of the platform convention and chief among the movers and shakers of the organization, prompting the
Chicago Tribune to opine that "Tommy Morgan...bossed the convention from first to last." The party's nominee for
mayor of Chicago in the
1887 election was ultimately defeated by
political fusion of the so-called "Old Parties" in which the Democrats (fielding no nominee of their own) largely supported the Republican nominee "to save city government from capture by the 'Reds.'" Morgan was the Socialist Labor Party's nominee for Chicago mayor
in 1891. In the summer of 1901 that organization, headed by
Eugene V. Debs and
Victor L. Berger, merged with a rival political group to establish the
Socialist Party of America (SPA). Morgan was a delegate to the founding convention of that organization in
Indianapolis, Indiana. 1908, and the so-called "Congress" of 1910. Morgan turned to journalism in 1909, editing and publishing a Socialist newspaper called
The Provoker until shortly before time of his death in 1912. The tangled dispute over whether Barnes did or did not repay led to charges of dishonesty being preferred against Barnes before the Socialist Party, which were dismissed as "frivolous" by the governing National Executive Committee. Additional material, including 26 issues of Morgan's
The Provoker, is held in the Special Collections department of the library at the
University of Chicago. ==Footnotes==