Victor L. Berger
founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America and its successor, the Socialist Party of America
1860 CE to 1929 CE
Victor L. Berger (February 28, 1860 – August 7, 1929)is a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America and its successor, the Socialist Party of America.
Born in Austria-Hungary, Berger immigrates to the United States as a young man and becomes an important and influential socialist journalist in Wisconsin.
He helps establish the so-called Sewer Socialist movement.
Also a politician, in 1910, he is elected as the first Socialist to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a district in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In 1919, Berger is convicted of violating the Espionage Act for publicizing his anti-interventionist views and as a result is denied the seat to which he had been twice elected in the House of Representatives.
The verdict is eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in 1921, and Berger is elected to three successive terms in the 1920s.
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The Social Democracy of America (SDA), founded in 1897 by Eugene V. Debs from the remnants of his American Railway Union, is deeply divided between those who favor a tactic of launching a series of colonies to build socialism by practical example and others who favor establishment of a European-style socialist political party with a view to capture of the government apparatus through the ballot box.
Debs had became interested in socialist ideas after being jailed in the aftermath of the 1894 Pullman Strike.
Despite supporting William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential race, Debs announces his conversion to socialism in January 1897.
In June of this year, he holds a convention of his American Railway Union (ARU) in Chicago, where it is decided to merge the ARU with a faction of the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth (BCC) and other elements to create a new organization, the Social Democracy of America.
The newspaper of the ARU, Railway Times, is retitled to become official organ of the new organization, The Social Democrat.
The convention establishing the SDA is opened on June 15, 1897 in Uhlich's Hall in Chicago—the former headquarters of the ATU during the Pullman strike.
The session is attended by one hundred and eighteen delegates, predominately from the Midwest and the Western United States.
The keynote address to the convention is delivered by Gene Debs.
Among the elements that join in forming the new party is a faction of independent Midwestern socialists centered around Victor Berger
This mainly German American group keeps up a loosely organized Social Democratisher Verein and publishes the oldest socialist daily in the country, the Milwaukee Vorwarts.
This tendency emphasizes electoral socialism, especially in local politics, in order to appeal to workers on issues of immediate, day-to-day importance.
Prominent American adherents to this faction include Seymour Stedman and Frederic Heath.
The Socialist Party of America (SPA) is a socialist political party in the United States formed on July 29, 1901, by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party of America which had split from the main organization in 1899; the chief organizers are Victor L. Berger, Job Harriman, and Morris Jillquit of the Socialist Labor party and Eugene V. Debs of the American Railway Union.