"It is not so much a question as to Left or Right Wing domination as it is a question of whether we are to have a united or divided party. "I am not a Centrist, if that means to be in the center of the party as it is today. We must move to the Left--that is understood by all thinking, class-conscious Comrades, but we must move together, not, perhaps, as far as some of the hot-heads would like to have us--they fail to understand what an American Socialist Party should be, for they seem to think of New York City as the whole thing. If they could take a trip to Chicago and back they might find themselves moving toward the Right. "No one wants to be where the stick-in-the-mud Rights are, either--that is, no one except them. The majority of us see the need for revolutionizing the party. What we don't see is any necessity of disrupting the party in the process. The master class would like to see that; in fact, they have been egging us on to fight among ourselves for the last two or three years, and we have blindly done the very thing that they want most we should do. They are laughing in their sleeves at us--poor boobs that we are."
On May 15, 1919, following the open fight against the Left Wing inaugurated by the New York State Committee and its Executive Committee, the Left Wing Locals of Boston, Cleveland and New York joined in a call for a National Conference of the Left