Morris Hillquit

Long-time Socialist populizer and campaigner. Hillquit was born Moses Hillkowitz in Riga, Latvia, to Jewish parents who raised him in the Russian school system. He immigrated to the United States in 1885 and worked in New York's Lower East Side as a garment worker. He became involved in the socialist movement here, joining the Socialist Labor Party and socialist trade unions. He also studied law at New York University and entered the bar in 1893.

He officially took the name Hillquit in 1897 — roughly the same time that he led a Marxist "Kangaroo" faction against the hardliner Daniel De Leon in the SLP. After negotiating with Eugene V. Debs's Social Democratic Party in 1901, Hillquit's Kangaroos officially joined with the Debsians, forming the Socialist Party of America. He would go on to serve as the SP's first national secretary.

Hillquit was similar in political orientation to Germany's Karl Kautsky. Both were "centrist" Marxists — opposing both mild reformists and extreme revolutionaries. Hillquit was one of the chief opponents of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and demanded the expulsion of Bill Haywood from the SP's National Executive Committee. However, as a lawyer, he defended countless unionists (including Haywood), regardless of their political views.

Hillquit ran for many offices on the Socialist slate — including US Congress (1906 and 1908) and New York City mayor (1918 and 1933). He wrote a monumental book, The History of Socialism in the United States, and served as the first American "socialist historian." Following the split between Communists and Socialists (and after he received negative epithets from both Lenin and Trotsky), Hillquit became an anti-communist — writing the critical From Marx to Lenin (1923).

In 1933, Hillquit ran a brave campaign for New York City mayor and received a quarter of a million votes. He died of tuberculosis shortly afterward.