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Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 24, 1900
Presidential Candidate Eugene V. Debs on Mission of Social Democratic Party

From The Independent of August 23, 1900:

The Social Democratic Party

By Eugene V. Debs,

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE OF THE PARTY.

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In the Presidential election of 1892 the socialist candidate received 21,512 votes; in the election of 1896 the vote was increased to 36,275 votes [Socialist Labor Party]. The following two years witnessed an unprecedented spread of Socialist sentiment and in the Congressional and state elections of 1898 the Socialist candidates received 91,749 votes, an increase of almost 200 percent, in two years. But it must not he assumed that this vote represented the entire political strength of Socialists in the United States. In a number of states the election laws were such that the Socialist ticket could not be placed upon the official ballot, while in many districts the number of socialists was so small and they were so widely scattered that no nominations were made and the socialist vote was not polled.

The figures given are sufficient to indicate that in the United States, as in other countries. International socialism is making tremendous strides and that its seven million supporters, spread over all the belts and zones of the globe, and the most active propagandists ever known, will in the next few years be multiplied into controlling majorities in all lands which have modern industry as the basis of their civilization. Socialism being wholly a question of economic development. This will mean the end of the present capitalist competitive system and the introduction of its economic successor, the cooperative commonwealth.

The movement is international because it is born of and follows the development of the capitalist system, which in its operation is confined to no country, but by the stimulus of modern agencies of production, exchange, communication, and transportation, has overleaped all boundary lines and made the world the theater of its activities. By this process all the nations of the earth must finally be drawn into relations of industrial and commercial cooperation, as the economic basis of human brotherhood.

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