The SLP in the 1890s

This chapter details strengths and limits of the significant shifts American socialism went through in the 1890s. In this period, the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP) freed itself of the most problematic forms of scientific racialism it had embraced in the previous decades; at the same time, with its emphasis on class equality, the party struggled to come to term with the significance of race in American working relations. What is more, the party missed the occasion to build on its multiethnic membership base: in 1899, the rigid program of Americanization imposed by the controversial Marxist leader Daniel De Leon provoked a split that pushed the SLP at the fringe of the American radical world.