Soon after I began collecting Socialist Party materials, I began to get annoyed at the fact that so few good items come up for sale each year. I thought about all the wonderful collectibles that must be gathering dust in small-town antique malls. I therefore came up with the plan of running a small display ad in Antique Weekly. I included pictures of two Socialist Party pinbacks, and urged antique dealers to contact me if they had items of interest to sell.
Within three days of its appearance, my advert had borne fruit. I received a letter from the Pennsylvania Antiques Newsletter, urging me to run my ad in their publication! A few days later I received a letter offering to sell a New York gubernatorial pin, misidentifying the candidate in question as a Socialist.
After this flurry of excitement (two letters) I received no other responses. Finally, more than three weeks after the ad appeared, I got a letter from a gentleman who was retired, but who enjoyed the hobby of printing using antique printing presses. It turns out the man had purchased the printing press that had belonged to the Socialist Labor Party of Michigan. With the press came a small cigar box containing samples of the many printed materials produced by the SLP of that state. "You must think me an old fool," he said, "For keeping this stuff, but I just hated to throw it away." I wrote back that he most definitely had done the right thing in keeping the materials. Finally I paid the price of $40 and took possession of the little collection.
To be honest, I had been initially disappointed when I read the man's first letter and discovered the items were for the SLP and not for Eugene Debs' Socialist Party. My own collecting interests really did not extend much beyond the Debsian Socialists. But as I examined the collection I really grew to love it.
Nearly all of the materials in the shoe box were cards, about 200 of them. Some were in the nature of handbills, while others were tickets to particular events. One of the nicest items was a postcard showing presidential candidate Verne Reynolds (who ran in 1928 and 1932). The item is probably the only known Verne Reynolds collectible!
Other cards apparently were handed out on the streets, as SLP evangelists sought new converts. Some of these cards invited folks to lectures and educational meetings. The locations of the lectures will be familiar to anyone familiar with labor history: Highland Park, River Rouge, and other automotive-related sites. One interesting card, pictured below, invited one and all to tune in to "Voice of the Socialist Labor Party," heard weekly on radio station WCAR in Pontiac. This card promised that "Every Sunday There Will Be a Message of Vital Importance to Workingmen & Women." This card is dated 1940.
But to me, some of the most important cards are the ones produced as admission tickets to specific events. One example: The Socialist Labor Party Halloween Masquerade, which included both dinner and a dance. Held in 1941, the music was provided by Al Stewart's Hawaiian Orchestra. What a vivid mental image I get as I picture radical Socialists dressed up as pirates and clowns and doing the latest dance steps!
The South Slavonian branch held a Chicken Supper (see card above), with a 50 cent admission charge that included "Games." Other tickets were to poker parties, river cruises, bunco night, and sweetheart dances. The Socialist ideologues seem a little less grim-faced when we picture them competing in the three-legged race at a Spring 1939 picnic! Some of the cards are written in Slavic languages, while others refer specifically to Rumanians and Slovaks.
A number of cards in the group were issued by the "West Side Weekly People's Club," an SLP-related organization devoted to spreading the word about the party's weekly newspaper. Like the main part of the Socialist Labor Party, the Weekly People's Club held fund-raisers and social events. One such example is the Valentine Supper and Dance hosted by the Highland Park Weekly People's Club (see card below) in 1939.
The some 200 cards demonstrate how very active the Michigan Socialist Labor Party was. How much did this hard work pay off? The SLP probably did play an important part in union organizing drives, including the famous Sit-Down strikes of the late 1930s. The Party did not, however, win massive vote totals in Michigan races. Verne Reynolds, for example, won only 1401 votes in Michigan in the 1932 presidential race. On the other hand, Reynolds won only 659 in Pennsylvania and 494 in Wisconsin, so maybe the Michigan SLP workers were doing something right.
At any rate, they kept passing out those cards, cards which like the one pictured below urged laborers to work for that day when workers owned the factories and other means of production. It is this mix of uncompromising radicalism and good old fashioned fun that makes this cache of cards from Michigan's SLP so endearing.
| © 1999 by Stephen Cresswell |