The People was an official organ of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), a weekly newspaper established in New York City in 1891. The paper is best remembered as a vehicle for the ideas of Daniel DeLeon (1852–1914), the dominant ideological leader of the SLP from the 1890s until the time of his death. The paper became a daily in 1900, reverting to weekly publication in 1914 for budgetary reasons. Publication of the paper was moved to Palo Alto, California, during its later years, finally terminating publication in 2008. Its 117 years of continuous publication make The People the longest running socialist newspaper in the history of American political radicalism.
Publication history
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.
Bolting trade union-oriented Marxists established a newspaper called The Labor Standard in 1877, although no official English-language publication existed until the governing National Executive Committee established The National Socialist in Cincinnati, Ohio in May 1878. This publication was in existence only a short time before budgetary concerns forced its abrupt termination, with a Chicago newspaper called The Socialist emerging as the main English-language organ of the organization. The party's German-speaking majority were served by a privately owned daily, the New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York People's News), which first saw print in 1878.
The SLP's English-speaking membership atrophied during the first half of the 1880s and the organization had no official English paper for several years. Instead, the organization launched and briefly maintained an official organ in German, Der Sozialist (The Socialist), published in New York City from 1885 to 1887. It was not until a privately owned weekly, The Workmen's Advocate, debuted in New Haven, Connecticut by the Trades Council of New Haven on September 8, 1883, that the SLP's English-speaking members again had access to a party-oriented newspaper in their own language. It would be this publication from which The People would emerge.
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.
Sanial was soon shunted aside however, resigning as editor in 1892 to make way for the rising star of the SLP's firmament, a university lecturer recently converted to Marxism named Daniel DeLeon. 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 would remain at the post until his death in May 1914.
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.<ref>Katz, With DeLeon Since '89," pg. 14.</ref> 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.