Indianapolis and the Socialist Party's Birthplace
Near Indianapolis, Indiana
In late July of nineteen oh one, more than a hundred men and women converged on a Masonic Hall in Indianapolis. They had come from across the country: labor organizers, progressive intellectuals, Christian socialists, Jewish activists from the needle trades of New York, members of the American Federation of Labor. Over four days, ending August first, they hammered out a platform and a party, and the Socialist Party of America was born in Indianapolis.
Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana, the railroad union leader who had converted to socialism during six months in the Woodstock, Illinois jail after the Pullman Strike of eighteen ninety-four, was the new party's best-known figure. He would run for president of the United States five times under the Socialist banner, including once from prison in nineteen twenty, when he received nearly one million votes while serving a federal sentence for opposing the First World War.
The party's platform in nineteen oh one called for collective ownership of transportation and communication, progressive labor laws, workers' insurance, government employment programs, education for children, and equal civil rights. These were positions that at the time placed their holders outside the mainstream of American politics. Several of them, over the following decades, became law.
The Masonic Hall where the party was founded is gone. Debs is buried in Terre Haute, sixty miles to the west. But Indianapolis remained a node in socialist political organizing for years afterward, partly because of its position at the Crossroads of America, partly because Indiana had a strong labor tradition rooted in the mines and mills and railroads that defined the state's working economy.
The party Debs helped build in that Masonic Hall in nineteen oh one never came close to power. What it built instead was a pressure. The eight-hour day, the child labor laws, the social insurance programs that followed, arrived in part because someone was standing outside the tent insisting they be let in.
