The socialist theorist and American political leader Daniel de leon (1852-1914) was, according to Lenin, “the greatest of modern socialists, the only one who has added anything to socialist thought since MarxHowever, De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party remained a small sect.
According to his own testimony, Daniel de leon He was born to a wealthy family on the island of Curaçao, near Venezuela, but it is possible that he was born in the United States. He is also said to have studied languages, history, philosophy, and mathematics at Dutch and German universities between 1865 and 1871. In 1872 he arrived in New York and briefly helped Cuban revolutionaries edit a newspaper in Spanish. Of Lion he taught at a preparatory school and in 1876 entered Columbia University School of Law. He graduated in one year and in 1883 he was appointed to a professorship in international law at Columbia. He left Columbia in 1889, when he was denied a promised promotion.
The race of Of Lion at Columbia he apparently declined because of his support for Henry George’s mayoral bid for the third time in 1886 and his interest in Edward Bellamy’s nationalist movement. In any case, Of Lion he joined a small, almost dying German organization in New York, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), and within a few years became the recognized leader of the organization. In 1891 he became editor of the party newspaper and his leadership of the SLP was never seriously questioned until his death in 1914.
The stormy and radical race of Of Lion he irritated most socialists in the United States. Personally, he was arrogant, inflexible, and intolerant of dissent; he even expelled his favorite son, Solón, from the SLP for questioning one of his theses. His unsuccessful attempts to control the unions earned him further enmity, and his dictatorship in the SLP caused the secession of many of his former supporters.
The attempt to Of Lion of lining up the Knights of Labor as auxiliaries to the SLP in the early 1890s only accelerated that union’s decline. After an unsuccessful attempt to “bore from within” the American Federation of Labor, he organized the Socialist Workers and Guilds Alliance (STLA) in 1895. It did not grow faster than the SLP, and in 1905 merged it with the Industrial Workers. of the World (IWW). Again, his collaborators became suspicious of his intentions, and in 1908 he and the STLA were tacitly expelled from the IWW. Of Lion He claimed that his followers were the real IWW, and the fiction remained until his death.
Prolific and brilliant writer, Of Lion produced dozens of articles and essays on issues facing the revolutionary movement of his day. Like his writings, his speeches were models of clarity and logic, full of vivid metaphors and aphorisms. But his insistence on a hard and fast ideology did not prosper and the leadership of American socialism passed to the more flexible Socialist Party of the United States.