"The Call," May 8, 1919, publishes an interesting letter from one of its correspondents:
"It is not so much a question as to Left or Right Wing domination as it is a question of whether we are to have a united or divided party.
"I am not a Centrist, if that means to be in the center of the party as it is today. We must move to the Left--that is understood by all thinking, class-conscious Comrades, but we must move together, not, perhaps, as far as some of the hot-heads would like to have us--they fail to understand what an American Socialist Party should be, for they seem to think of New York City as the whole thing. If they could take a trip to Chicago and back they might find themselves moving toward the Right.
"No one wants to be where the stick-in-the-mud Rights are, either--that is, no one except them. The majority of us see the need for revolutionizing the party. What we don't see is any necessity of disrupting the party in the process. The master class would like to see that; in fact, they have been egging us on to fight among ourselves for the last two or three years, and we have blindly done the very thing that they want most we should do. They are laughing in their sleeves at us--poor boobs that we are."
On May 15, 1919, following the open fight against the Left Wing inaugurated by the New York State Committee and its Executive Committee, the Left Wing Locals of Boston, Cleveland and New York joined in a call for a National Conference of the Left Wing to convene in New York on June 21. This call opened with the following paragraph:
"The international situation and the crisis in the American Socialist Party; the sabotage the party bureaucracy has practised on the emergency national convention; the N. E. C. [National Executive Committee] aligning our party with the social-patriots at Berne, with the Congress of the Great Betrayal; the necessity of reconstructing our policy in accord with revolutionary events--all this and more, makes it necessary that the revolutionary forces in the Socialist Party get together for counsel and action."
Apparently so many bitter letters were sent to "The Call" that it found it expedient to publish the following notice in its edition of May 16, 1919:
"No letters dealing in personalities of any kind will be published in this column. All views and all arguments set forth must be confined strictly to the principles and tactics either defended or attacked. This ruling is by the unanimous vote of the Board of Managers of 'The Call.'"
Morris Hillquit, member of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party till September, 1919, and one of the principle leaders of the Right, published in his paper, "The Call," May 21, 1919, a long article in large type, covering half of the editorial page, under the caption, "The Socialist Task and Outlook." After speaking of the gloomy conditions in the Socialist Party abroad, he thus comments on conditions in the American branch of the international organization:
"All the more unfortunate is it that the energies of the Socialist Party should at this time be dissipated in acrimonious and fruitless controversies brought on by the self-styled Left Wing movement. I am one of the last men in the party to ignore or misunderstand the sound revolutionary impulse which animates the rank and file of this new movement, but the specific form and direction which it has assumed, its program and tactics, spell disaster to our movement. I am opposed to it, not because it is too radical, but because it is essentially reactionary and non-Socialistic; not because it would lead us too far, but because it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States at this time is to deflect the Socialist propaganda from its realistic basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in the party platform means to abandon the concrete class struggle as it presents itself from day to day.
"The Left Wing movement, as I see it, is a purely emotional reflex of the situation in Russia. The cardinal vice of the movement is that it started as a wing, i.e., as a schismatic and disintegrating movement. Proceeding on the arbitrary assumption that they were the Left, the ingenuous leaders of the movement had to discover a Right, and since the European classification would not be fully reproduced without a Center, they also were bound to locate a center in the Socialist movement of America.[D] What matters it to our imaginative Left Wing leaders that the Socialist Party of America as a whole has stood in the forefront of Socialist radicalism ever since the outbreak of the war, that many of its officers and leaders have exposed their lives and liberties to imminent peril in defense of the principles of international Socialism, they are Right Wingers and Centrists because the exigencies of the Left Wing require it. The Left Wing movement is a sort of burlesque on the Russian revolution. Its leaders do not want to convert their Comrades in the party. They must capture and establish a sort of dictatorship of the proletariat(?) within the party. Hence the creation of their dual organization as a kind of Soviet, and their refusal to cooperate with the aforesaid stage Centrists and Right Wingers.
"But the performance is too sad to be amusing. It seems perfectly clear that, so long as this movement persists in the party, the latter's activity will be wholly taken up by mutual quarrels and recriminations. Neither wing will have any time for the propaganda of Socialism. There is, as far as I can see, but one remedy. It would be futile to preach reconciliation and union where antagonism runs so high. Let the Comrades on both sides do the next best thing. Let them separate, honestly, freely and without rancor. Let each side organize and work in its own way, and make such contribution to the Socialist movement in America as it can. Better a hundred times to have two numerically small Socialist organizations, each homogeneous and harmonious within itself, than to have one big party torn by dissensions and squabbles, an impotent colossus on feet of clay. The time for action is near. Let us clear the decks."
By the end of May, 1919, the Left Wing fight had become so serious that the National Executive Committee revoked the charter of the Socialist Party in Michigan and suspended the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukranian, Lettish, Polish, South Slavic and Hungarian branches, expelling or suspending considerably over 25,000 members out of a total dues-paying membership of about 100,000.
"The Ohio Socialist," the party organ of Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and New Mexico, in its issue of June 4, 1919, comments as follows on the expulsions: