John Louis Engdahl (November 11, 1884 – November 21, 1932) was an American socialist journalist and newspaper editor. One of the leading journalists of the Socialist Party of America, Engdahl joined the Communist movement in 1921 and continued to employ his talents in that organization as the first editor of The Daily Worker. Engdahl was also a key leader of the International Red Aid (MOPR) organization based in Moscow, where he died in 1932.
Biography
Early years
The son of Swedish Lutheran immigrants, J. Louis Engdahl (who went by his middle name, "Louis") was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 11, 1884. Engdahl was intelligent and well educated, he graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1907, having paid his way through school by working as a telegraph operator and as City Editor of the Minneapolis Daily News.
Political career
Engdahl was a member of the Socialist Party from 1908. In 1909, he took a position as the Labor Editor of the Chicago Daily Socialist, assuming the mantle of Editor of that publication from 1910 until its termination in 1912.
Engdahl attended the Copenhagen Congress of the Socialist International in 1910 as a journalist on behalf of the Scandinavian Socialist Federation. He joined the Socialist Party of America in September 1912. Despite his traveling to Europe for the Scandinavian Federation, it does not seem that Engdahl ever directly participated in language federation politics in any way.
Louis Engdahl was a Socialist candidate for US Congress from Illinois in 1916; for the Chicago City Council in 1917; again for Congress in the Illinois 7th C.D. in 1918. He also was on the Organizing Committee of the Communist Propaganda League of Chicago from its origin in 1918 until its demise in 1919.
In 1914, Engdahl assumed the position of Editor of The American Socialist, the Chicago-based official organ of the SPA. He continued to edit this newspaper each week until it was suppressed by postal authorities in 1917. Thereafter, he moved to the successor weekly publication, The Eye Opener, which he continued to edit until 1919.
In February 1918, Engdahl's aggressive antimilitarism caused him to run afoul of the US Department of Justice, who targeted him as editor of the Socialist Party's weekly newspaper under the Espionage Act for undermining the American military conscription program. Along with his party comrades Adolph Germer, Victor L. Berger, Bill Kruse, and Irwin St. John Tucker, Engdahl was indicted by a grand jury. The quintet was brought to trial before the harsh Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis on December 6, 1918 (that is, after the war had ended), with the trial ending during the first week of January 1919. The jury found all five guilty as charged, and Judge Landis imposed a draconian sentence of 20 years in the Federal Penitentiary upon each. This sentence was later overturned on appeal for the reason of judicial bias.
Out pending appeal on $25,000 bond, Engdahl was a delegate from Illinois to the seminal 1919 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party, refusing to either support Adolph Germer, James Oneal, and the party regulars or to bolt the convention to join either of the fledgling Communist organizations — the Communist Labor Party of America or the Communist Party of America. Instead, Engdahl remained in the Socialist Party as a leader of the Left Wing faction, which congealed as the Committee for the Third International in 1920. Engdahl served as Secretary of this faction until it departed the party in the aftermath of the 1921 Convention.
From 1920 until July 1921, Engdahl served as editor of the Chicago Socialist, publication of Local Cook County of the SPA, until he was finally removed for political reasons. He was also the Secretary of Local Cook County SPA until his resignation on July 21, 1921.