"All the more unfortunate is it that the energies of the Socialist Party should at this time be dissipated in acrimonious and fruitless controversies brought on by the self-styled Left Wing movement. I am one of the last men in the party to ignore or misunderstand the sound revolutionary impulse which animates the rank and file of this new movement, but the specific form and direction which it has assumed, its program and tactics, spell disaster to our movement. I am opposed to it, not because it is too radical, but because it is essentially reactionary and non-Socialistic; not because it would lead us too far, but because it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States at this time is to deflect the Socialist propaganda from its realistic basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in the party platform means to abandon the concrete class struggle as it presents itself from day to day. "The Left Wing movement, as I see it, is a purely emotional reflex of the situation in Russia. The cardinal vice of the movement is that it started as a wing, i.e., as a schismatic and disintegrating movement. Proceeding on the arbitrary assumption that they were the Left, the ingenuous leaders of the movement had to discover a Right, and since the European classification would not be fully reproduced without a Center, they also were bound to locate a center in the Socialist movement of America.<sup></sup> What matters it to our imaginative Left Wing leaders that the Socialist Party of America as a whole has stood in the forefront of Socialist radicalism ever since the outbreak of the war, that many of its officers and leaders have exposed their lives and liberties to imminent peril in defense of the principles of international Socialism, they are Right Wingers and Centrists because the exigencies of the Left Wing require it. The Left Wing movement is a sort of burlesque on the Russian revolution. Its leaders do not want to convert their Comrades in the party. They must capture and establish a sort of dictatorship of the proletariat(?) within the party. Hence the creation of their dual organization as a kind of Soviet, and their refusal to cooperate with the aforesaid stage Centrists and Right Wingers. "But the performance is too sad to be amusing. It seems perfectly clear that, so long as this movement persists in the party, the latter's activity will be wholly taken up by mutual quarrels and recriminations. Neither wing will have any time for the propaganda of Socialism. There is, as far as I can see, but one remedy. It would be futile to preach reconciliation and union where antagonism runs so high. Let the Comrades on both sides do the next best thing. Let them separate, honestly, freely and without rancor. Let each side organize and work in its own way, and make such contribution to the Socialist movement in America as it can. Better a hundred times to have two numerically small Socialist organizations, each homogeneous and harmonious within itself, than to have one big party torn by dissensions and squabbles, an impotent colossus on feet of clay. The time for action is near. Let us clear the decks."
By the end of May, 1919, the Left Wing fight had become so serious that the National Executive Committee revoked the charter of the Socialist Party in Michigan and suspended the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukranian, Lettish, Polish, South Slavic and Hungarian branches, expelling or suspending considerably over 25,000 members out of a total dues-paying membership of about 100,000.
"The Ohio Socialist," the party organ of Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and New Mexico, in its issue of June 4, 1919, comments as follows on