DUES-PAYING SOCIALIST MEMBERS
According to the Appeal Almanac for 1916, the dues-paying members of the Socialist party from 1903 to 1915 totaled:
TABLE XLVIII
Number of Socialists Paying Dues Each Year, from 1903 to 1915
| 1903 | 15,975 |
| 1904 | 20,763 |
| 1905 | 23,327 |
| 1906 | 26,784 |
| 1907 | 29,270 |
| 1908 | 41,751 |
| 1909 | 41,479 |
| 1910 | 58,011 |
| 1911 | 84,716 |
| 1912 | 113,371 |
| 1913 | 95,401 |
| 1914 | 93,579 |
| 1915 | 79,374 |
The year 1912 was the year of the Roosevelt Progressive revolt against the Republican party; it may be that thousands of voters of radical or liberal tendency who resented the Republican attitude, but could not follow Mr. Roosevelt, or swung farther than the Progressive party was willing to go, went into the Socialist party. But it seems quite evident that the heavy slump between 1914 and 1915, when the figure dropped from 93,579 to 79,374, was due to the reactions of the war, and in particular to the increasing resentment of native Americans against the attitude of the party leaders which culminated in the platform adopted by the party organization at St. Louis—antiwar, and by most ordinary folk, including thousands of perfectly good Socialists, deemed not only pacifistic, but definitely pro-German. That situation alone drove a rift down through the Socialist ranks, and certainly made it legitimate henceforth—for the present, anyway—to regard the Socialist party, as constituted, as an organization distinctively of foreign stock and foreign born.