A decadent Jeffersonian on the socialist gridiron?!

Believe it or not, this pamphlet was once titled “A Decadent Jeffersonian on the Socialist Gridiron”. Before that, it was simply called “Watson on the Gridiron”. In 1961, it got its present title, which is canonical: “Evolution of a Liberal: From Reform to Reaction”. This title is easily the worst, not really capturing the contents of Daniel De Leon's articles against ex-Populist Thomas E Watson.

Watson was a former leader of the Populists in Georgia. The Populists were a farmer-dominated radical movement, and originally regrouped both White and Black farmers in the South in a rare display of inter-racial unity. Watson had at one point called on his supporters to physically stop a racist lynch mob. After the failure of Populism and the introduction of Jim Crow, Watson betrayed his anti-racist ideals, moved to the right and began a sustained campaign of attacks on Blacks, Jews and Catholics. The Populist Party in Georgia was reduced to a White supremacist rump and eventually dissolved, but Watson himself still had a certain degree of influence on public opinion through his very own newspaper, called “Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine”. He achieved Herostratic fame in 1915 when his newspaper incited the lynching of convicted Jewish killer Leo Frank.

This was still in the future when “The Jeffersonian” (as Watson's paper was called for short) launched a series of attacks on socialism in 1909. Daniel De Leon, the leader of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) in New York City and editor of the party's newspaper “Daily People”, decided to respond. It's not entirely clear why, but De Leon had never been a friend of Populism, not even in its early and more radical incarnation. He saw it as a “reform” movement, doomed to failure and eventual re-absorption into “capitalist” politics. Watson was therefore a tempting target, being a former radical reformer turned racist and reactionary. Besides, the Southern newspaperman had mentioned Daniel De Leon in his anti-socialist diatribes, since De Leon had translated August Bebel's monumental “Woman and Socialism”, a work often regarded as lecherous at the time.

De Leon's articles, which contain the bulk of this pamphlet, are relatively uninteresting. They are eloquently written (De Leon was a former law school professor!), sarcastic and (perhaps) witty, but they contain virtually no analysis of Watson's politics or political evolution. Essentially, De Leon pokes fun at the Southern “Jeffersonian”, portraying him as a political and literary ignoramus, a feudal Junker and plantation-owner, a misogynist, and (surprise) a racist who is nevertheless dependent on the labor of the Blacks he so despises. In other words, a typical “Saxon-Southron”. De Leon also explains the ABCs of Marxism, since Watson had mostly misunderstood Marxist terms such as “surplus value”, “socially necessary labor time”, “capital”, etc. He didn't know much about anthropology, either.

Watson (in typical Southern fashion?) challenged De Leon to a literary duel, offering him ten pages in “The Jeffersonian” to defend socialism. De Leon took the offer, sending Watson the articles he had just published in “Daily People”. In the end, Watson sent back De Leon's envelope unopened, whereupon the socialist leader declared victory. Watson had been informed by somebody that the SLP was a relatively small organization and hence not representative of “true Socialism”. The Georgia Junker had hoped to provoke Eugene Debs or Charles Russell of the much larger Socialist Party to respond, which none of them seems to have done! De Leon and the SLP were indeed very sectarian, and became even more so after De Leon's death. The small socialist group was still declaring victory over Tom Watson circa 1990, when I got hold of this pamphlet…

I'm not entirely sure who might be interested in “Evolution of a Liberal”, but it could perhaps be a fun addition to your private stash of Americana. With some reservations, I give it three stars. I mean, if forced to choose between a sectarian socialist and a Southern racist, I take the socialist anytime!