Jhon Spargo

John and Prudence Spargo arrived at the port of New York in February 1901. The promised lecture series proved to be vastly exaggerated and Spargo wound up standing in bread lines to get food andshoveling snow from the sidewalks of the city for $7.50 a week. Eventually a few socialist lectures did come and Spargo made the acquaintance of many leading radicals in the city, including ChristianSocialist George D. Herron, Job Harriman, and Algernon Lee.[9] Spargo cast his lot with the dissident (and newly independent wing of the Socialist Labor Party headed by Henry Slobodin and Morris Hillquit,teaching at a SLP education center in Brooklyn, and working as an assistant to the lawyer Hillquit.[9] Spargo also assumed the role of editor of an illustrated socialist monthly based in New York,The Comrade. The Spargos spent the next eight years living in a small apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with Spargo spending much of his time traveling the country as a paid lecturer.[10]When the New York SLP dissidents merged with the midwestern Social Democratic Party of America headed by Victor L. Berger and Eugene Debs to establish the Socialist Party of America (SPA), Spargo was afounding member — although he was not in attendance at the Indianapolis Convention which established the organization in the summer of 1901.
In 1900, Spargo participated in some of the preliminarymeetings which brought together representatives of the SDF, the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and various trade unions and cooperative societies to form the Labour ParliamentaryRepresentation Committee, a direct forerunner of the British Labour Party.[7] This drive of the SDF to unite with various non-Marxist organizations brought about an immediate reaction from the party'shardline "impossibilist" left wing, who sought revolutionary transformation rather than incremental, piecemeal parliamentary reforms. The rise of the left caused Hyndman to temporarily leave the SDF's...