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John Spargo (1876–1966) was a British-born American socialist writer and muckraker who later became a renowned expert in the history and crafts of Vermont.
Biography
Early years
Spargo was born on January 31, 1876, in the small village of Longdowns in the parish of Stithians, Cornwall, United Kingdom. His parents were Thomas Spargo (1850-1920) and Jane Hocking Spargo (1851-1900), whose maiden name was also Spargo. As a young man, he trained as a stonecutter, and he later became a lay Methodist minister. He was attracted to the socialist doctrines of early English Marxist Henry Hyndman, particularly to his book England for All.
Spargo was a largely self-educated man, be he did in 1894-95 take two courses through the Oxford University Extension Program, including one by economist J.A.Hobson. Spargo went to work in 1895, moving with his alcoholic father to Barry Dock in South Wales, where he was employed as a stonemason. Within a year after his arrival at Barry Dock, Spargo had started the first local of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation (SDF), was elected president of the Barry Trades and Labour Council, became an editor of the Barry Herald, and was elected a member of the National Executive Committee of the SDF.
As his biographer notes
"It was an amazing, meteoric progression for an uneducated stonemason from Western Cornwall that took place in these few years of Spargo's education in Marxism; by the end of his residence in Britain, the 25-year-old was recognized as one of the most promising and energetic Marxist agitators in the country. Through it all, he was guided, inspired, and sustained by the Social Democratic Federation's founder and leader, Henry Meyers Hyndman, the man whose England for All had converted him to Marxism and who for the rest of his life would remain Spargo's model, mentor, and friend."
Spargo's political ideas in this early period were an amalgam of Christian Socialism and Marxism, simultaneously seeking the brotherhood of man by following "the true principles of the man of Galillee," while embracing science and the belief in the rule of the working class as the motive force to create social change.
In January 1900, Spargo married Prudence Edwards, a clerk from Lancashire, England who shared her new husband's socialist politics. The couple had one son, named after Christian Socialist leader George Herron.
In 1900, Spargo participated in some of the preliminary meetings which brought together representatives of the SDF, the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and various trade unions and cooperative societies to form the Labour Parliamentary Representation Committee, a direct forerunner of the British Labour Party. This drive of the SDF to unite with various non-Marxist organizations brought about an immediate reaction from the party's hardline "impossibilist" left wing, who sought revolutionary transformation rather than incremental, piecemeal parliamentary reforms. The rise of the left caused Hyndman to temporarily leave the SDF's executive council and alienated Spargo to some extent from the party. Providentially, Spargo received at this time an invitation from the private lecture bureau to travel to America to spend a couple months traveling the country, speaking about socialism. And so the newlyweds sailed for America and ultimately a new life there.
Coming to America
John and Prudence Spargo arrived at the port of New York in February 1901. The promised lecture series proved to be vastly exaggerated and Spargo wound up standing in bread lines to get food and shoveling snow from the sidewalks of the city for $7.50 a week. Eventually a few socialist lectures did come and Spargo made the acquaintance of many leading radicals in the city, including Christian Socialist George D. Herron, Job Harriman, and Algernon Lee. Spargo cast his lot with the dissident (and newly independent wing of the Socialist Labor Party headed by Henry Slobodin and Morris Hillquit, teaching at a SLP education center in Brooklyn, and working as an assistant to the lawyer Hillquit. Spargo also assumed the role of editor of an illustrated socialist monthly based in New York, The Comrade. The Spargos spent the next eight years living in a small apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with Spargo spending much of his time traveling the country as a paid lecturer. When the New York SLP dissidents merged with the midwestern Social Democratic Party of America headed by Victor L. Berger and Eugene Debs to establish the Socialist Party of America (SPA), Spargo was a founding member — although he was not in attendance at the Indianapolis Convention which established the organization in the summer of 1901.
With regard to his travels on behalf of the American socialist movement as a lecturer, Spargo's biographer notes
"It was well known that on many of his trips Spargo cavorted with a number of attractive ladies, and he quickly built a reputation not just as an effective socialist organizer but as a womanizer of some note.... There was nothing unusual in this, since the early-20th century intellectuals who crowded New York's socialist circles tended to embrace free love as an indispensable dimension of their newfound aesthetics. In Spargo's case, however, the sexual cavorting led to some tricky situations, and once he had to borrow some 200 dollars from Hillquit to pay off a blackmailer who knew too much of some compromising tryst."
Spargo continued as editor of The Comrade until April 1904. In May of that same year, he travelled to Chicago and attended the second convention of the Socialist Party as a delegate from New York. At the convention, Spargo was elected Chairman of the Resolutions Committee and he reported as such to the conclave. Among other topics, the committee passed resolutions attacking the payment of "exorbitant fees or salaries" of socialist speakers and lecturers and condemning "all propaganda organizations, not connected with the Socialist Party, doing Socialist propaganda" and declaring membership in any such organization to be "sufficient cause for expulsion" from the SPA.
Spargo also took to the floor of the convention in opposition to the establishment of a national party-owned newspaper, a demand put forward by delegates from the left wing state organizations of the Pacific Coast but regarded as anathema by moderate Easterners who had fairly recently defected from the centralized Socialist Labor Party dominated by party editor Daniel DeLeon. Spargo declared
"I am opposed to a national party-owned organ because I am opposed to the heresy hunter all the time. (Applause.) I am opposed to a national party-owned organ because I will not trust the party integrity, I will not trust the party interests, I will not trust the party faith to the judgment of any one man, no matter how great he may be. (Applause.) If Editor Wayland, of the Appeal to Reason, makes a mistake, the Socialist Party stands firm, but if somebody who is declared to be for the time being the infallible literary pope of the movement makes a mistake, that mistake carries with it the Socialist Party." (Applause.)
Spargo's position won the day at the 1904 Socialist Party convention and it was not until 1914 until the organization finally established a party-owned weekly newspaper.
Spargo's first wife, Prudence, died of tuberculosis in March 1904. A year and 10 days later, he married Amelia Rose Bennetts, a British-born New York socialist who had lived in America from early childhood and who had recently been employed as a worker in a carpet mill. The couple set up house in Yonkers, New York, and had two children, a daughter named Mary and a son (who died in childhood) named John Jr.
Spargo was elected to the National Committee of the Socialist Party in 1905 and to the governing National Executive Committee in 1909. As his biographer notes, during this period Spargo began "easing his way toward the reformist right-wing" of the SPA, giving up on the tactic of agitation among striking workers in favor of building middle class socialist educational institutions. Spargo was instrumental in helping establish the Rand School of Social Science, persuading George D. Herron and his wife Carrie Rand Herron to make a large bequest and Mrs. Herron's mother to provide seed money for the new institution. Spargo also was a co-founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS), an organization dedicated to the establishment of non-partisan socialist study groups on college campuses and sponsoring debates and lectures on socialist topics. Spargo would later serve on the ISS executive from 1916 to 1919.
Spargo wrote a series of muckraking books only tangentially related to socialism, exploring such topics as child labor ( The Bitter Cry of the Children ) and child nutrition ( Underfed School Children , The Common Sense of the Milk Question ). In 1908, Spargo authored a lengthy and academically serious biography of Karl Marx, his book being recognized as the best such treatment published in the English language at the time.
In 1908, Spargo was elected as a delegate to the 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party, held again at Chicago. Spargo was returned by the convention to the post he had held at the previous national gathering, Ch
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