Morris Hillquit (August 1, 1869 – October 8, 1933) was a founder and leader of the Socialist Party of America and prominent labor lawyer in New York City's Lower East Side. Together with Eugene V. Debs and Congressman Victor L. Berger, Hillquit was one of the leading public faces of American socialism during the first two decades of the 20th century.
In November 1917, running on an anti-war platform, Hillquit garnered more than 100,000 votes as the Socialist candidate for mayor of New York City. Hillquit again ran for mayor of New York in 1932. He also stood as a candidate for the United States Congress five times over the course of his life, however, he never won election to any of these public offices.
Early years
Hillquit was born Moishe Hillkowitz on August 1, 1869, in Riga, Russian Empire, the second son of German-speaking ethnic Jewish factory owners.Norma Fain Pratt, Morris Hillquit: A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979; pages 3, 28. . From the time he was age 13, young Moishe attended a non-Jewish secular school, the Russian language Alexander Gymnasium.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 4. In 1884 when Moishe was 15, his father, Benjamin Hillkowitz, lost his factory in Riga and decided to leave for America to improve the family's financial situation.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 5. Together with his oldest son, he set out for New York City, where he procured a two-room apartment in a tenement house.Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life. New York: Macmillan, 1934; pg. 31.
In 1886, Benjamin sent for the rest of the family, and they joined him in New York. The family remained poor, living in a tenement in a predominantly Jewish area of the Lower East Side.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 6. Then he worked on various short-term jobs in the New York City textile industry and as a picture frame maker in a factory. Morris later remembered his family as "frightfully poor," with his older brother and sisters working to help support the family.
Hillquit felt compelled to get a job to help alleviate the family's difficult financial situation. Since his English was poor and his body frail, employment options were limited.Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, pg. 32. He joined other young intellectual émigrés from Tsarist Russia as a shirt-maker, repetitiously stitching cuffs of garments. In his posthumously published memoirs, Hillquit recalled that cuff-making was "the simplest part and required least skill and training," involving the simple stitching of square pieces of cut cloth. The young Hillquit never progressed past that entry-level task as a shirtmaker.
First political activity Hillquit's biographer, Norma Fain Pratt, remarks that Moishe was quickly drawn to the socialist movement in America: Almost as soon as he settled in New York, Hillquit was drawn into East Side Jewish radical circles. He was then a small (5'4"), slightly built, frail adolescent with dark hair, dark oval-shaped eyes, and a gentle charming manner. He was immediately attracted to other young Jewish immigrants, mostly former students, now shop workers, who considered themselves intellectuals — a new radical intelligentsia ... For the most part their radicalism was rooted in their experiences in the European socialist and anarchist movements. But emigration and economic hardships in the United States also contributed to their further radicalization. As foreigners in America they were situated far enough outside the society to observe its failings. As frustrated but literate people, they were ambitious enough to participate in it. The young intellectuals were interested in finding alternatives to their present circumstances; their solution was to transform them.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, pp. 6–7.
On his 18th birthday in August 1887, the future Hillquit joined the Socialist Labor Party of America, brought into the ranks by a fellow garment worker and Russian language socialist newspaper editor, Louis Miller. Moishe became a member of Section New York's Branch 17, a Russian-speaking unit established by Jewish émigrés from tsarist Russia not long before his joining.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, pp. 8–9.
Within a year or so of joining the SLP, biographer Pratt notes, Moishe became one of the party's leading crusaders against anarchism, publishing a lengthy article "Sotzializm un anarchizm" in the Arbeter Zeitung [Workers' News], a Yiddish newspaper that he helped to establish. Hillkowitz contrasted the individualism of anarchism with the communalism of socialism in the piece.Hillkowitz, "Sotzializm un anarchizm," Arbeter zeitung, April 8, 1890. Cited in Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 11. During that time the 19-year-old Hillkowitz worked as the business manager of the Arbeter zeitung, a paper that was jointly founded with Abraham Cahan, Louis Miller, and Morris Winchevsky in an effort to reach the city's Yiddish-speaking immigrant working class about socialism in their own idiom.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, pp. 14–15. Hillkowitz, ironically, was not fluent in Yiddish, having been raised with the German and Russian languages.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 16.
He helped to found the United Hebrew Trades, a garment workers' union formed in 1888, while writing for the Arbeiter Zeitung. He graduated from New York University Law School in 1893.Lewis Randolph Hamersly (ed.), Who's Who in New York: A Biographical Dictionary of Prominent Citizens of New York City and State. Seventh Edition, 1917–1918. New York: Who's Who Publications, 1918; pg. 520. He was admitted to the New York State Bar Association in November of that same year.
Early socialist movement
Hillquit led the departure of a dissident faction from Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor Party in 1899 and was a delegate to the group's convention at Rochester, New York, in 1900. He was a strong supporter of unity with the Chicago-based Social Democratic Party of Victor Berger and Eugene V. Debs. In August 1901, the two groups managed to bury their differences and come together to form the Socialist Party of America (SPA) at a convention in Indianapolis, which Hillquit also attended.
Morris Hillquit remained one of the paramount political leaders of the Socialist Party for the rest of his life.
Hillquit was a pioneer historian of the American radical movement, publishing a broad scholarly survey in 1903 entitled History of Socialism in the United States. The book would be issued in five English-language editions during Hillquit's lifetime and would be translated into a number of the primary languages of the American socialist movement, including German, Russian, Yiddish, Finnish, and Polish.For specifics of the editions, see WorldCat: German: OCLC 657001222; Russian: OCLC 11042488; Yiddish: OCLC 145440240; Finnish: 8527848; Polish: OCLC 33412186.
In 1904, Hillquit attended the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam and was involved with the proposed Anti-Immigration Resolution, which opposed any legislation that forbade or hindered the immigration of foreign workingmen, some forced by misery to migrate. The resolution read: In further consideration of the fact that WORKINGMEN OF BACKWARD RACES (CHINESE, NEGROES, ETC.) are often imported by capitalists in order to keep down the native workingmen by means of cheap labor, and that his cheap labor, which constitutes a willing object for exploitation, live in an ill-concealed state of slavery, — the Congress declares that the Social Democracy is bound to combat with all its energy the application of this means, which serves to destroy the organizations of Labor, and thereby to hamper the progress and the eventual realization of Socialism.
Hillquit ran for U.S. Congress on the Socialist ticket in the New York 9th Congressional District in 1906 and 1908.F. Gerald Ham with Carole Sue Warmbrodt (eds.), The Morris Hillquit Papers: Guide to a Microfilm Edition. Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1969; pg. 10. In the latter campaign, Hillquit garnered 21.23% of the vote in a losing effort against a Democratic incumbent.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 96.
Battle with syndicalist left wing
After the campaign, Hillquit turned his attention to inner-party affairs, which brought him into conflict with the SPA's syndicalist Left Wing. His biographer notes at least four serious points of departure between Hillquit and the Industrial Workers of the World wing of the party: a disbelief in the stability and the efficacy of industrial unions, a distaste for the strike-oriented tactics of the IWW as opposed to collective bargaining, a belief in the separation of functions between the political and labor wings of the workers' movement, as opposed to the IWW's desire to make industrial organization primary, and the radical tone of IWW propaganda, which Hillquit believed alienated much of society from the socialist movement and marginalized the left.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, pp. 99–100. His biographer declares: His leadership fanned the fires of Party disagreement, and although [Hillquit] was not alone in causing the break in 1913 with an important segment of its left wing, he certainly made a major contribution towards this unfortunate rupture.Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 99.
In 1911, IWW leader William "Big Bill" Haywood was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, on which Hillquit also served. The syndicalist and the electoral socialist squared off in a lively public debate in New York City's Cooper Union on Jan. 11, 1912. Haywood declared that Hillquit and the socialists ought to try "a little sabotage in the right place at the proper time" and attacked Hillquit for having abandoned the class struggle by helping the New York garment workers negotiate an industrial agreement with their employers. Hillquit replied that he had no new message rather than to reiterate a belief in a two-sided workers movement, with separate and equal political and trade union arms. "A mere change of structural forms would not revolutionize the American labor movement as claimed by our extreme industrialists," he declared.Hillquit. "What shall the Attitude of the SP Be Toward the Economic Organization of the Workers?" (Haywood Debate) in Hillquit Papers; quoted in Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 106.
Hillquit's battle against the syndicalist left of the party continued at the 1912 National Convention, held in May in Indianapolis. Hillquit's biographer notes that As chairman of the Committee on Constitution he more than likely authored the amendment to the Party's Article II, Section 6, which provided for the expulsion from the Party of "any member of the party who opposes political action or advocates crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation ..." He voiced his justification for the anti-sabotage amendment by reassuring the convention that "if there is one thing in this country that can now check or disrupt the Socialist movement, it is not the capitalist class; it is not the Catholic Church; it is our own injudicious friends from within."Pratt, Morris Hillquit, p. 108.
The issue of "syndicalism vs. socialism" was bitterly fought over the next two years, consummated by "Big Bill" Haywood's recall from the SP's NEC and the departure of a broad section of the left wing from the organization. The radical wing never forgave Hillquit for his anti-IWW orientation and made him a major whipping boy in the big split that was to come.
War years