"In the first place, a plank of this kind you will find in every platform or program of every other civilized nation in the world. Yet in no country do they have as much reason for it as in this country. There is not a race in the world that is as thoroughly religious as the Anglo-Saxon race. If you want a party made up of free-thinkers only, then I can tell you right now how many you are going to have. If you want to wait with our co-operative commonwealth, until you have made a majority of the people into free-thinkers, I am afraid we will have to wait a long while. I say this, although I am known, not only in Milwaukee, but wherever our papers are read, as a pronounced agnostic.... You can hardly find a paper in which we are not denounced as men who want to abolish all religion and abolish God. Something must be done in order to enable us to show that Socialism, being an economic theory--or rather the name for an epoch of civilization--has nothing to do with religion either way, neither pro nor con."
What reader, who elsewhere in this book has followed the evidence linking together the cunning craft of Morris Hillquit and Victor L. Berger in committing their party and followers to deceit and hypocrisy to obtain votes under false pretenses, will be surprised to find them thus also in the 1908 convention uniting the tongues of two old foxes to put through Hillquit's hypocrisy-plank on marriage and religion? These are the two whose deceit and violence have now reduced the Socialist Party of America to little more than a hollow echo of two lying hearts.
Delegate Vander Porten opposed the adoption of the plank as originally read by Simons and urged the adoption of Morris Hillquit's amendment: