Morris Hillquit

• Morris Hillquit
• Born: August 1, 1869
• Died: October 17, 1933

Socialist leader and lawyer, was born in Riga, Latvia, the second of three sons of Benjamin Hillkowitz and Rebecca (Levene) Hillkowitz, who also had three daughters. His father owned a factory, and unlike most Jewish families in Riga the Hillkowitzes were neither poor nor Orthodox. In 1881 he was enrolled in the Russian-speaking Alexander Gymnasium because the Jewish quota in the German-speaking school was filled. His father lost his factory in 1884 and emigrated with his oldest son to New York City, where they lived in poverty. At about this time Morris Hillkowitz became converted to socialism. Arriving in New York City with the rest of the family in 1886, he was soon overwhelmed with guilt at being the only non-working member and dropped out of school to take a series of casual and seasonal jobs.

During this period Morris Hillkowitz spent a great deal of time at cafés and rooftop gatherings, discussing left-wing ideology with young immigrant intellectuals. He was attracted more strongly to ideas than to the working class itself, for which he never felt any particular affinity, and throughout his career he believed that the most important functions of a Socialist party were education and propaganda.

In the earliest months of the Yiddish-language paper Arbeiter Zeitung, founded by Abraham Cahan to help immigrant workers reconcile working-class solidarity with their Jewish identity, Hillkowitz worked as business manager, promoter, and writer. On his eighteenth birthday he joined the Socialist Labor party, and for several years he worked at the party headquarters (where he had access to the bookstore) as a clerk and an organizer of Russian-Jewish workers. He learned Yiddish for this job and helped to found the United Hebrew Trades. In both his newspaper and organizing work, he was less interested in trade unionism than in exposing East European immigrants to Western—and especially American—ideas. He himself joined the American branch of the ethnically organized Socialist Labor party as soon as his English was good enough.

Convinced by his reading and practical experience that radical social change could be accomplished only through alteration of the legal structure of society, Hillkowitz entered New York Law School in 1891; he was admitted to the bar in 1893 and opened a law office with his older brother Jacob under the legally changed name of Hillquit. On December 31, 1893, he married a first cousin and law-school classmate, Vera Levene, who then abandoned her plans for a legal career; they had three children: Nina, Leonard, and a son who died shortly after birth.

The Hillquits lived a close, stable family life while Hillquit rapidly built up a lucrative law practice. A short (five-foot-four-inch), slightly built man with dark hair and eyes and a gentle, charming manner, he inspired confidence in both his corporate clients and in the large number of workers for whom he handled compensation and other cases.

In the final years of the nineteenth century, Socialist parties all over the country were undergoing major schisms brought about by personality conflicts as well as disagreements over the relative merits of political action, trade unionism, and such experiments as the cooperative movement. In 1899 Hillquit led a dissenting faction out of the Socialist Labor party because of the autocratic leadership of Daniel De Leon, who wanted a “pure” Socialist movement rather than the broad-based party cooperating with established unions, as envisioned by Hillquit and others. When the courts awarded the Socialist Labor party name and the right to publish The People to De Leon’s partisans, Hillquit merged his group with a dissenting faction of midwestern Socialists headed by Eugene V. Debs and Victor Berger to establish the Socialist Party of America.

Hillquit devoted much of the rest of his life to the Socialist party. As proselytizer and debater, he was its unofficial spokesman and, as negotiator, he became known as the Henry Clay—the Great Pacificator—of the Socialist party. He served with Louis D. Brandeis on the committee whose settlement of a severe cloakmakers’ strike led to the “perpetual protocol of peace” in the garment industry. From 1914 until his death he was attorney for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. In 1904 he represented the Socialist party at the conference of the Second International in Amsterdam.

As part of his program of wider dissemination and Americanization of socialism, Hillquit cooperated with Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and others to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and he frequently addressed its meetings at Harvard and on other university campuses. After his defeat in the congressional elections of in 1906 and 1908, which he attributed to progressive support for his opponents, Hillquit began to cooperate closely with progressives—several of whom he boasted of converting to socialism—on various types of reform, among them woman suffrage, that were particularly dear to progressives.

In 1912, along with several New York City socialists and socially prominent individuals, including Helen Keller and Walter Lippmann, he was an adviser to Mayor George Lunn of Schenectady, whom the New York group hoped to convert to socialism; in this capacity he drafted an ordinance establishing a board of welfare for Schenectady. Hillquit moved easily in upper-class circles, for which facility—along with his meticulous dress, his art collection, and his handsome Riverside Drive apartment—he was frequently criticized by left-wing socialists who resented these characteristics as much as they disliked his gradualist philosophy.

As a staunch opponent of World War I Hillquit helped draft a “no annexations, no indemnities” peace program in 1915 and served on the committee that urged it on President Woodrow Wilson. In 1917, with a remarkably diverse group of supporters that included pacifists and prowar liberals, Hillquit ran for the mayoralty of New York City; he amassed 21.7 percent of the vote, about five times the usual Socialist showing. At the same time he began to act as counsel to newspapers and individuals prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

In 1918 Hillquit ran for Congress once more, from a Harlem district, and this time the election was so close that it was decided in the courts—in favor of his Republican opponent. During this period he was also becoming disturbed by the leftward drift of the Socialist party under the impetus of the Bolshevik revolution, the influx of East European immigrants, and the charismatic Communist leader John Reed. In a New York Call editorial in 1919 entitled “Clear the Decks,” he urged that the leftists leave the party; two small but homogeneous groups, he said, would be better than one large warring party.

All this stress and overwork led to a recurrence of the tuberculosis that had plagued him for years; he spent two years of enforced rest in Saranac, New York, that were only a brief hiatus in his troubles with the Socialist party. After leaving his sick bed for an unsuccessful fight against the expulsion of five Socialist members from the New York State Assembly, Hillquit narrowly escaped censure by the party’s executive committee at its 1920 national convention for what several members called an incompetent performance. At the same convention a strong attack was mounted against the toned-down language of the party’s Declaration of Principle, which Hillquit alone had written and which eliminated all reference to the class struggle.

After this dissension Hillquit turned his attention to the international socialist movement. The Socialist Party of America affiliated with the International Union of Socialist Parties, a moderate group opposed to the Russian-dominated Third International, and Hillquit attended four conferences of the union, the last in Vienna in 1931.

On the domestic front in the 1920s, a period during which party membership dropped from 118,000 to 7,800, Hillquit encountered increasing difficulties. Never a warm or magnetic leader, he came to seem autocratic, rigid, and pompous to a generation of such college-bred Socialists as Norman Thomas and Heywood Broun. In 1932 the young militants, who were in turn split into left and right wings, tried to oust Hillquit as national chairman on the ground that the post should be held not by a New Yorker but by someone recognized as “American.”

Although the resulting intraparty struggles embittered Hillquit’s last years and led to another physical breakdown, he emerged with his faith in democratic socialism intact and continued his active opposition to the exploitative and undemocratic aspects of American society. He battled against injunctions in labor disputes; succeeded in restoring some of the privileges lost during the Red scare of the 1920s by the Rand School, of which he was a trustee; and in 1932 ran once more for mayor, polling 250,000 votes. His last important contribution was the drafting of the National Industrial Recovery Act code for the garment industry in 1933. In the same year, at the age of sixty-four, he died of tuberculosis.

More nearly than any other individual Morris Hillquit represented the complexities and contradictions of American socialism. Although his own shortcomings, particularly his ambivalent attitude toward the working class, may have contributed to the movement’s weakness, the failure of Hillquit’s all-consuming goal—the adaptation of socialism to American conditions—was surely due less to the quality of his leadership than to American conditions themselves.

Morris Hillquit’s papers are in the Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison. His publications include his History of Socialism in the United States (1903) and his autobiography, Loose Leaves From a Busy Life (1934). Many of his addresses and debates are available in pamphlet form. For biographical data see articles in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1941) and in The Dictionary of American Biography (1944). I. Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (1952) puts Hillquit’s career in context. N. F. Pratt, Morris Hillquit: A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist (1979) is an excellent study from a contemporary perspective.