controls the Federation of Labor, or Murphy, Tammany
Hall....

"The only possible way to avoid a split so openly and shamelessly
advocated by some of the opportunist leaders of our party--Berger even
threatened it in the last National Convention--is to have the system of
proportional representation....

"Unless some such changes as these are made in the next four years, it
does not take a prophet to see that there would be nothing left of what
we now know as the Socialist Party. If we cannot control our own petty
autocrats, how can we ever hope to control the infinitely more powerful
and resourceful autocrats of the Capitalist system?"

"The Communist," formerly the Left Wing organ of the Chicago Socialists,
in its edition of April 1, 1919, bitterly assails Victor L. Berger of
the Right Wing:

"A vote for Berger is a vote of pitying contempt for our Bolsheviki
and Spartacan comrades. A vote for Berger is a vote approving his
repeated and uncalled-for condemnation of our class-war comrades of
the I. W. W.--condemnation persistently offered to prove Berger's
own eminent respectability. A vote for Berger is a vote of scoffery
against the St. Louis platform--a vote of apology for the platform,
dissipation of its meaning, and disavowal of its essential spirit.
A vote for Berger is a vote for the International of German
Majority Socialism. A vote for Berger is a vote for petty bourgeois
progressivism as the essence of Socialism; it is a vote against
identification of the Socialist Party with the revolutionary mass
aspirations. A vote for Berger is a betrayal of all the efforts,
sacrifices and dreams of those whose lives have gone into the
socialist movement as torch-bearers of proletarian triumph over
capitalist exploitation, from Marx to the humblest comrade fighting
today in the ranks of the revolutionary class struggle.

"As far as this election is concerned there is nothing to be
considered about Victor Berger, past and present, except the ideal
Socialism which has become unchangeably attached to his name. If
the American Socialist Party is to be a party of Berger-Socialism,
then indeed, the Socialist movement will not die in America. No, it
is the Socialist Party that will die."

As we shall see presently, these prophecies of disruption were soon
fulfilled.

The representatives of the Socialist organizati