Social Democratic Herald
1898-1913

Introduction

The Social Democracy of America (SDA), founded in 1897 by Eugene V. Debs from the remnants of his American Railway Union, was deeply divided between those who favored a tactic of launching a series of colonies to build socialism by practical example and others who favored establishment of a European-style socialist political party with a view to capture of the government apparatus through the ballot box. The June 1898 convention would be the group's last, with the minority political action wing quitting the organization to establish a new organization, the Social Democratic Party of America (SDP).

With the old official organ, The Social Democrat, remaining with the colonizationists, a new newspaper was needed for the new party, and on July 9, 1898, The Social Democratic Herald was born. The paper was published in Chicago under the editorship of Alfred Shenstone Edwards.

The Herald would remain the official organ for the Social Democratic Party with headquarters in Chicago, headed by Theodore Debs, younger brother of Eugene, throughout a long and difficult unification process with dissidents who split from the Socialist Labor Party back in 1899. The two groups would eventually bury their petty jealousies and minor differences and unify forces at a Socialist Unity Convention held in Indianapolis in the summer of 1901 — a meeting which established the Socialist Party of America (SPA).

Rather than decide which of the former official organs would become the official organ of the new SPA, delegates decided to forego such a paper altogether; both The Worker (organ of the former SLP dissidents) and the Social Democratic Herald (organ of the Chicago SDP) became independent publications.

As the Social Democratic Party with headquarters in Chicago had been in a state of membership decline and wound up deeply in debt, the Herald was in no position to continue publication without outside financial assistance. Rather than fold the publication, the paper and its subscriber list were sold to prominent factional leader Victor L. Berger, publisher of German-language newspapers in nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who continued the weekly with A.S. Edwards in the editor's chair.

The final issue of the paper published in Chicago (vol. 4, no. 6) was dated July 27, 1901; the first issue from Milwaukee (vol. 4, no. 7) was dated August 17. During this transition numbering of the publication was botched and whole numbers 159 and 160 were inadvertently repeated. The error was never corrected.

The first four months of the Social Democratic Herald from Milwaukee were believed to have been lost for many years. Eventually a decrepit browning and chipping run of the missing issues surfaced. Lamentably, this imperfect set of issues was incompetently filmed, rendered virtually illegible through poor lighting. This material, running from August through November 1901, has been rendered as legible as possible here via state-of-the-art scanning equipment and software manipulation of the digital images.

The Social Democratic Herald continued weekly publication through September 1913, when it was supplanted by a new Milwaukee English-language daily, the Milwaukee Leader, also published by Victor Berger.

Social Democratic Herald 1898-1913

Introduction

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Social Democratic Herald
1898-1913

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