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Uptian Sinclair And Socialism. Upton Sinclair and Socialism Socialism has always
been hard for me to understand. I never really grasped ...
Submitted by oppapers on November 5, 2001
Category: American History
Words: 2077 | Pages: 9
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Upton Sinclair and Socialism
Socialism has always been hard for me to understand. I never
really grasped the concept of it until I read the book The Jungle and
began to research for this paper. Before I begin I would like to go
through a condensed version of the history of Socialism. It was
founded in 1901 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Two groups came together
to form the Socialists, the Social Democratic Party and the “Kangaroo”
wing of the older Socialist Labor Party. These parties contained mostly
immigrant workers from big cities (Jurgis from The Jungle was one
such fictional worker). The new party expanded and included every
type of extremist. They stood on the motto of “reform vs. revolution”
and focused mainly on the labor union’s, “this included the concepts
of revolution by education and of ‘building the new society within the
shell of it’s old.’
In 1912 they had elected two members of Congress and more
than seventy mayors. The most members it every attained at this
time was 100,000 and even had a presidential candidate, Eugene
Debs, who received almost a million votes. However soon the party
began to have internal problems due to diverse ideologies. During the
war half did not believe in the war and half believed in Stalin and his
Communist ways, therefore, the party split.
The party had become weak and did not enter a political
candidate for the presidential election. However, once the Great
Depression began the Socialist party took a turn back to full tilt and
gained strength. It ran Norman Thomas as their Presidential
Candidate. He never won but continued to run, losing
votes every
time he ran. Finally in 1948 with only 80,000 votes Thomas declared,
“a Socialist presidential race was a futile effort and an utter waste of
the party’s...
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