Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/31

 26 the Federation and constantly making headway with their program. Yet they had a steady fight to make with the reactionary elements. This was being carried on successfully until the appearance of Daniel DeLeon as a power among the radicals. DeLeon, with his dynamic personality and alluring program of separtism, was quickly able to put a stop to the work in the trade unions and to start the rebel movement definitely upon the road to dual unionism.

Few men have made a greater impression upon the American labor movement than Daniel DeLeon. His principal accomplishment was to work out the intellectual premises of dual unionism so effecttively as to force its adoption and continuance as the industrial program of the whole revolutionary movement for a generation. He was an able writer, an eloquent speaker, a clever reasoner, and a dominant personality generally. But despite his brilliance he was essentially a sophist and a utopian. He particularly lacked a grasp of the process of evolution. He made the fundamental mistake of considering the old trade unions as static, unchangeably conservative bodies, and in concluding that the necessary Socialist unions had to be created as new organizations. He did not know that the labor movement is a growth, intellecuallyintellectually [sic] from conservatism to radicalism, and structurally from the craft to the industrial form. DeLeon's industrial program of dual unionism was merely the typical utopian scheme of throwing aside the old, imperfect, evolving social organism and striving to set up in its stead the new, perfect institutions.

DeLeon came to acquire considerable prestige in the radical movement about 1888. Of a hasty, impulsive, and autocratic nature, he soon fell foul of the two great branches of the labor movement, the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor. He broke with the A. F. of L. over a skirmish which occurred in 1890 between that organization and the New York Central Labor Federation. The latter body, controlled by the Socialists, accepted the affiliation of a local branch of the Socialist Labor Party. But when its delegate, Lucien Sanial, appeared at the following convention of the A. F. of L. he was denied a seat. Unquestionably Gompers was right in this controversy, for until this day labor organizations, no matter how radical, do not permit the direct affiliation of political parties. But the affair embittered the hasty DeLeon, who repudiated the A. F. of L. and turned his attention to the then decadent Knights of Labor. In