- Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855-October 20, 1926) was an American labor and political leader, one of the founders of the International Labor Union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States.
- Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers (January 26, 1850-December 13, 1924) was an American labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and held the position as president of the organization for all but one year from 1886 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL. Focused on higher wages and job security, he fought against both socialism and the Socialist Party.
- Norman Thomas
Norman Mattoon Thomas (November 20, 1884 - December 19, 1968) was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
- Morris Hillquit
Morris Hillquit (1869-1933) was a prominent Socialist and labor lawyer in New York City's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. Born Moses Hilkowitz in Riga on August 1, 1869, he came to the United States in 1886. He helped found the United Hebrew Trades, a garment workers' union formed in 1888, while writing for the Arbeiter Zeitung, a Yiddish-language newspaper. He graduated from New York University Law School in 1893.
- William Z. Foster
William Zebulon Foster (February 25, 1881 - September 1, 1961), born in Taunton, Massachusetts, was the long-time General Secretary of the Communist Party USA and trade union leader. He passed through the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, as well as leading the drive to organize the packinghouse industry during World War I and leading the steel strike of 1919 before joining the Communist Party in 1921.
- Bill Haywood
William Dudley Haywood (February 4, 1869-May 18, 1928), better known as Big Bill Haywood, was a prominent figure in the American labor movement. Haywood was a leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America. During the first two decades of the 20th century, he was involved in several important labor battles, …
- Daniel de Leon
Daniel De Leon was a Curaçao-born American socialist and Syndicalism-influenced trade unionist of Jewish origin. He was educated in Germany and the Netherlands and arrived in the United States in 1874. De Leon settled in New York City, studying at Columbia University. He became a committed socialist during the 1886 Mayoral campaign of Henry George and in 1890 joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), becoming the editor of its newspaper, "The People".
- James P. Cannon
James Patrick Cannon (1890-1974) was an American Communist and Trotskyist leader. Cannon was the founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party. Born in Rosedale, Kansas, James P. Cannon was first a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and then of the Socialist Party of America. He was personally trained by Bill Haywood, a prominent IWW leader. Cannon opposed World War I from an internationalist position and rallied to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
- Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman (September 10 1904 - November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist. During his lifetime, he evolved from being a Leninist associate of Leon Trotsky to an anti-Soviet social democrat.
- Victor L. Berger
Victor Louis (Luitpold) Berger (February 28, 1860 - August 7, 1929) was an American politician, a major part of the Sewer Socialist movement, and a founding member of the Socialist Party of America. In 1919 he was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and twice denied a seat in the House of Representatives though elected repeatedly.
- Emil Seidel
Emil Seidel (December 13, 1864 - June 24, 1947) was the mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. He was the first socialist mayor of a major city in the United States, and ran as the Vice Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America in the 1912 presidential election. Seidel was born in Ashland, Pennsylvania, USA. His family moved to Wisconsin when he was a child. As a young man he lived in Germany where he trained as a woodcarver and also became a socialist.
- Rose Pastor Stokes
Rose Pastor Stokes (1879 - 1933) was a Socialist Party leader and feminist. Born in Russia, she emigrated to the United States and became active in labor politics and women's issues. Scandalizing "polite" society, she married millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes, a personal friend of President Woodrow Wilson. Stokes was born in the tiny Jewish settlement of Augustava Suvolk on July 18, 1879. She was the daughter of Jacob and Anna Wieslander.
- Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone (1897-1990) was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and CIA collaborator, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions within it.
- Charles Ruthenberg
Charles Ruthenberg (July 14, 1884 - 1927) was an American communist politician and activist, one of the founders of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Ruthenberg was born in New York City, New York, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia who was a prosperous garment merchant. He entered Columbia University in 1903, where he became involved with anarchist groups, and afterwards entered the far left of the Socialist Party of America (SPA).
- Hal Draper
Hal Draper (1914-1990) was a Third Camp American socialist activist, Marxist and author, perhaps best known for his role in the Berkeley, California Free Speech Movement. His brother, Theodore Draper, is best known for his studies of the Communist Party of the United States of America and himself an activist in the socialist movement. __FORCETOC_
- Daniel Hoan
Daniel Webster Hoan (1881 - 1961) was a United States politician. He became the second socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and his tenure is generally considered to be the longest continuous socialist administration in U.S. history. He was the second-longest serving mayor of Milwaukee. Hoan was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1881. He left school early but he studied at evening classes and in 1908 qualified as a lawyer.
- David McReynolds
David McReynolds (born October 25, 1929) is an American democratic socialist and pacifist activist who described himself as "a peace movement bureaucrat" during his 40-year career with "Liberation" magazine and the War Resisters League. He was born in Los Angeles to Charles and Elizabeth McReynolds. In 1951 he joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and in 1953 he graduated from UCLA with a degree in political science. McReynolds was openly gay in the 1950s.
- Meyer London
Meyer London (1871 - 1926) was one of two Socialist Party members elected to the United States Congress. London was born in Kalvarija, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1871. In 1891, he emigrated to the United States, taking up residence in New York's largely Jewish Lower East Side. London became a labor lawyer representing labor unions. He ran for Congress three times as a Socialist and was defeated by Tammany Hall-supported Democrats, but in 1914, …
- Louis Waldman
Louis Waldman (January 5, 1892 - 1982?) was a leading figure in the Socialist Party of America during its first 30 years and a prominent labor lawyer.
- William English Walling
William English Walling (1877-1936) (known as "English" to friends and family) was an American labor reformer and socialist born in Louisville, Kentucky. He was born into wealth and was educated at the University of Chicago and at Harvard Law School. He was a co founder of the NAACP, and founded the National Women's Trade Union League in 1903. He was a member of the Socialist Party of America, …
- Ella Reeve Bloor
Ella Reeve Bloor also known as Ella Bloor' and Mother Bloor but born Ella Reeve (1862-1951) was a radical labor organizer, socialist and communist in the United States. She was born on Staten Island, on July 8, 1862, and grew up in New Jersey. She was married first to Lucien Ware, then Louis Cohen, and finally Andrew Omholt. After marrying Lucian Ware when she was nineteen, she was a mother of four by 1892.
- Darlington Hoopes
Darlington Hoopes was a third-party candidate for President of the United States in the 1952 (in which he won 20,065 votes) and 1956 presidential elections, representing the Socialist Party of America. Both years, his running mate was Samuel H. Friedman. He had previously been their vice presidential candidate in 1944, as the running mate of Norman Thomas. Hoopes had also been a Chairman of the party, and a Socialist member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
- Allan L. Benson
Allan Louis Benson (November 6, 1871-August 19, 1940) was an American newspaper editor and author who ran for President as the Socialist Party of America candidate in 1916. Benson was born in Plainfield, Michigan in 1871. He was at times managing editor of the Detroit Journal, the Detroit Times, and the Washington Times. He married Mary Hugh in Windsor, Ontario on November 19, 1899 and had four children.
- John Keracher
John Keracher (1880 - 1958) was an American Communist pioneer. Born in Scotland, Keracher emigrated to the United States in 1909 and settled in Detroit, where he worked in a shoe store, and in April 1910 he joined the Socialist Party and after a while Keracher became the leader of the Socialist Party in Michigan. Keracher wanted to make the party more revolutionary and wanted its members to study Marxism deeper.
- Evan Thomas
Evan Thomas is an American journalist and author. A graduate of Phillips Andover, Harvard University and the University of Virginia School of Law, since 1991 he has been the Assistant Managing Editor at "Newsweek". From 1986-1996, he was Newsweek's Washington bureau chief. He has won numerous journalism awards, including a National Magazine Award in 1998 for NEWSWEEK’s coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
- James Robertson
James Robertson is the National Chairman of the Spartacist League in the United States and leader of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), an international organization of small Trotskyist groups. Of Scottish descent, Robertson studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in his youth. He was a member of the youth wing of Max Shachtman's International Socialist League in the 1950s.
- James T. Farrell
James Thomas Farrell (27 February 1904 - August 22, 1979) was an American novelist. Farrell was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a large Irish-American family, which included siblings Earl, Joseph, Helen, John, and Mary. In addition there were several other siblings who died in childbirth, as well as one who died from the influenza epidemic in 1917. He attended Mt. Carmel High School (then known as St. Cyril) with future Egyptologist Richard Anthony Parker, …
- Seymour Martin Lipset
Seymour Martin Lipset was a political sociologist from the USA. Seymour Lipset was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. Lipset received a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University in 1949. Before that he taught at the University of Toronto.
- Jasper McLevy
Jasper McLevy (1878-1962) was an American politician who served as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut from 1933-1957. He was a member of the Socialist Party. Born in Bridgeport in 1878, McLevy worked first as a roofer. After reading Edward Bellamy's futuristic, utopian novel "Looking Backward", he became a socialist, and joined the Socialist Party. He began running for mayor under the Socialist banner in 1901 and became a perennial candidate for local office.
- Tim Wohlforth
Timothy Andrew Wohlforth (born May 15, 1933) is a United States former Trotskyist politician. Since leaving the Trotskyist movement he has become a writer of crime fiction and of politically oriented nonfiction. As a student, Wohlforth joined the youth section of Max Shachtman's Independent Socialist League in 1953. He broke with Shachtman in 1957 when the ISL moved rightward to merge with the Socialist Party of America.
- Gus Tyler
Gus Tyler (born 1912) began his career as the chairman of the Young People's Socialist League, the youth section of the Socialist Party of America, in the early 1930s, making him a key leader in the party's faction fight of that period. After his "militants" won out in 1934, Tyler and many of his comrades were offered staff jobs with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) led by David Dubinsky, a stalwart of the rival "old guard".
- Andrew Biemiller
Andrew John Biemiller (July 23, 1906 in Sandusky, Ohio - April 3, 1982 in Bethesda, Maryland) was a prominent leader of American liberalism in the 20th century. After graduating from Cornell University in 1926, Biemiller became active in the Socialist Party of America and was a key leader of its "militant" faction, which favored unity of action with the Communist Party USA. In 1932 he went to Milwaukee to work for the Socialist mayor of that city, Daniel Hoan.
- Cyril Briggs
Cyril V. Briggs (born May 28, 1888; died October 18, 1966, Los Angeles, California) was an African-American writer and communist political activist. Briggs was born in 1888 in Nevis, a Caribbean island. Cyril's father was an overseer on a plantation. Briggs hoped to start his writing career and moved to Harlem in 1905. His first writing job was at the "Amsterdam News" in 1912. In 1917 he founded the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB).
- Hugo Oehler
Hugo Oehler (1903 - 1983) was an American communist. An active trade unionist, Oehler joined the Communist Party USA in its early days, and by 1927 was a district organizer. He was also known for his ability to organize workers, both in the southern textile mills and the mines of Colorado. In 1928, he followed James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern into the Communist League of America, the nation's first Trotskyist group.
- Charles Schenck
Charles Schenck was an American socialist, the Secretary of a local of the Socialist Party of America. He is notable for his involvement in the 1919 court case "Schenck v. United States". Schenck had been indicted and tried for distributing 15,000 subversive leaflets to prospective military draftees during World War I. The leaflets urged the potential draftees to refuse to serve if drafted, on the grounds that it constituted "involuntary servitude", …
- Julius Jacobson
Julius Jacobson (1922 - March 8 2003) was an American Third camp socialist activist, Marxist, Left-Shachtmanite, author, and founder of the independent Left journal "New Politics". Jacobson came from a working-class East European Jewish immigrant family. The family was politically leftist and he was therefore politically active at a very young age, first joining the Communist Party's Young Communist League, …
- Chandler Owen
Chandler Owen (1889 - 1967) was a member of the Socialist Party of America. Owen was born in Warrenton, North Carolina, in 1889. He graduated from Virginia Union University in 1913. Later, while attending Columbia University in 1916, he made friends with A. Philip Randolph, who he joined the "Socialist Party of America" with. The two became known in Harlem as Lenin (Owen) and Trotsky (Randolph). The two of them went on to start a Marxist journal in 1917, …
- Sam Dewitt
Samuel Aaron Dewitt was a businessman and a member of the New York State Assembly representing Bronx's 7th district from 1919 until 1928. In 1928 he made an unsuccessful campaign for the United States Congress. Sam Dewitt is most famous for being thrown out of the Assembly along with four fellow Legislators for being members of the Socialist Party. The five members brought this case to the Supreme Court of the United States.
- Margaret Haile
Margaret Haile was an American and Canadian socialist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a teacher and journalist by profession. Frederic Heath's "Socialism in America," published in January 1900 in the "Social Democracy Red Book", lists her, along with Corinne S. Brown and Eugene V. Debs, among "One Hundred Well-known Social Democrats".
- Juliet Poyntz
Juliet Stuart Poyntz (November 25, 1886-1937?) was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).