Revolution or Evolution:
The Socialist Party, Western Workers, and Law in the  Progressive Era

John P. Enyeart
Stanford University¹

In 1913 Socialist Party (SP) leader Morris Hillquit contended that the United States had embarked on the path toward socialism. He argued that the "modern principle of control and regulation of industries by the government indicates the complete collapse of the purely capitalist ideal of non-interference, and signifies that the government may change from an instrument of class rule and exploitation into one of social regulation and protection." He then asserted that like "the industries, the government is being socialized. The general tendency of both is distinctly towards a Socialist order." This fit with his under standing of the stages a nation underwent as it progressed first from a society with little to no state involvement in the economy, to a social democracy with state regulation of corporations and protections for workers, to, finally, a socialist state where a government which the people elected managed the economy.2	1
Hillquit, along with Victor Berger and John Spargo, led the evolutionary, or gradualist, wing of the SP. Evolutionaries included urban workers, usually members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and immigrants, mostly Jews like Hillquit himself. They argued that voting rights offered workers the opportunity to usher in socialism peacefully by relying on the country's democratic institutions. Further more, these socialists supported the reform mood of the Progressive Era. They claimed that the growing public concern over poverty and the regulatory acts that resulted—especially the measures at the state and local levels dealing with wages, hours, and safety—signified America's move toward social democracy.3	2
Many scholars argue that Hillquit's confidence that the corporate reforms of the period suggested the rise of American social democracy not only proved premature, but contributed to, or caused, the SP's disintegration. Hillquit and his wing have been considered "middle-class opportunists" who privileged political power over the advancement of socialism, Marxist intellectuals with a bourgeois sensibility, or socialists whose accommodationist strategies backfired when reform Democrats appropriated their policy aims. Whether manipulative party bosses or victims of their gradualist strategy, the dominant narrative of the SP holds that the Hillquit wing substituted fighting at the ballot box for engaging in the class struggle on the shop-floor. Evolutionaries, the story goes, impeded the SP's potential to radically transform the American economy because of their acceptance of gradual change and their unwillingness to use tactics more militant than voting.4	3
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