This awkward straddle is explained by the fact that the American Socialist Party, under the pro-German leadership of Morris Hillquit of New York and Victor L. Berger of Milwaukee, had in its Congressional platform for 1918 expressly endorsed the Inter-Allied Socialist and Labor Conference, held at London that year. This is the conference which the Lenine government scoffs at in the manifesto quoted just above, styling it the "so-called inter-allied conference," in which "America was represented by Gompers, representing associations which never had anything to do with the Socialists." That the American Socialist Party had been led into the endorsement of the conference by Berger and Hillquit because the conference had recommended a meeting with German workingmen seems evident from the wording of the endorsement, taken from the official publication of the Socialist Party's 1918 Congressional Platform, pages 3-4:
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