William English Walling

• William English Walling
• Born: March 14, 1877
• Died: September 12, 1936

Socialist, labor activist, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and writer, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the first of two sons of Willoughby Walling, a physician, and Rosalind (English) Walling. He was descended from colonists who fought in the American Revolution and had Irish, English, French, German, and Dutch ancestors. His father and mother were both liberals who supported President Woodrow Wilson but opposed his entry into World War I.

As a child, young Walling recited the speech of acceptance given by his maternal grandfather, William Hayden English, upon nomination for vice president by the Democrats in 1880. At nine he watched a crowd of poor people battle with the police in London. In 1897, after private schooling in Louisville and Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father served as United States Consul for four years, Walling was graduated from the University of Chicago. He attended Harvard Law School briefly and studied sociology and economics at Chicago.

Walling inherited enough money to enable him to live comfortably without working and to devote his time and energies to his intellectual and altruistic interests. These began to take shape in 1900-01, when he served as a factory inspector of the state of Illinois; throwing himself into his work, he lived in the factory district. At about this time his father tried to dissuade him from radical thought by having the governor of Illinois, a cousin by marriage, offer him an appointment as a state representative. Hearing from the young man that he was not a Democrat, the governor offered to find him a Republican nomination. Walling’s reply was, “I am a Socialist.”

Walling then went to New York City, where he lived at the University Settlement on the Lower East Side; there he was struck by the world of tenements, where three or four thousand immigrants lived on each block. He mingled with the newly arrived immigrants and made friends with such leaders as Abraham Cahan of the Yiddish-language Daily Forward, with whom Walling often sat talking in local cafes until early in the morning. He became involved with the labor movement and with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), eventually becoming a close friend of its president, Samuel Gompers. Throughout much of the rest of his life he wrote for the American Federationist and spent one week each month in Washington, D.C., assisting in AFL business. With Gompers’s support, he collaborated with Mary O’sullivan and Jane Addams in founding the National Women’s Trade Union League at the AFL convention of 1903. In 1904 he helped to write the Socialist party platform, although he was not yet a member.

Walling went to Russia in October 1905, a year of revolution in that country, He interviewed such major socialist figures as Gorky and Lenin, with whose potential as a leader he was greatly impressed. Among the radical groups, he felt most sympathetic toward the peasant Socialist-Revolutionary party. Tolstoy remarked that “of all the Americans who have come to see me, this one is the most remarkable.”

In the United States Walling had known Anna Strunsky, a socialist writer who had collaborated with Jack London. They were married in Paris in October 1906. Four of their children lived to maturity: Rosamond English, Anna Strunsky, Georgia, and William Hayden English.

In 1908 the race riots in Springfield, Illinois, the home of Lincoln, inspired Walling to write two articles for The Independent. In “Race War in the North” he observed that it was important to revive the spirit of Lincoln and of Elijah Love-joy, the abolitionist editor who was killed by a proslavery mob in 1837, and “to come to treat the Negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality. ...” Yet, he went on to ask, “who realizes the seriousness of the situation?”

Mary White Ovington, responding to Walling’s question as more than rhetorical, wrote to him, suggesting that they act in concert. Meeting with others in a little room in Walling’s apartment in New York City, they founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Walling told the assembled group that blacks in America were treated more poorly than Jews in Russia, and with reform editor Oswald Garrison Villard he drafted a Lincoln’s Birthday call declaring that “this government cannot exist half-slave and half-free any better today than it could in 1861.” Walling became the first chairman of the board of directors of the NAACP. From a dialogue with Ovington about James Russell Lowell’s poem “The Present Crisis,” Walling suggested the title of the organization’s magazine—The Crisis, and he was instrumental in persuading the black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois to edit the journal.

Walling joined the Socialist party in 1910, although he had earlier been active in it in a variety of ways. He had entered the dispute between radicals and the right wing of the party in 1909, attacking such prominent leaders as Morris Hillquit, Victor Berger, and Algie M. Simons for what he considered overly conservative reformist views. (This factional issue resolved itself when many radicals, not including Walling, left the Socialist party in 1912.) But Walling’s chief association with socialism lay in his writings. In 1912 his Socialism as It Is asserted the importance of the final goal of a basic transformation of society. No moderate advance in wages, he said, should blind a worker “to all the possibilities of modern civilization from which he is still shut off and which will remain out of reach . . . unless his share in the income is increased.” In The Larger Aspects of Socialism (1913) and Progressivism—And After (1914), he stressed again that reform, desirable and necessary, must be a transitional step in achieving basic socialist goals.

The entry of America into World War I marked a growing conservatism for Walling as well as for many other progressives and socialists. Defending President Woodrow Wilson’s policy and critical of socialist opposition to the war, he resigned from the Socialist party in 1917. He refused the president’s request that he accompany Elihu Root on a special mission to Russia in 1917, but he began to feel, after October 1917, that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had become antidemocratic. With Samuel Gompers he collaborated on a book critical of the Soviets, Out of Their Own Mouths (1921). He continued to work actively for the AFL, writing speeches and articles. Since he had been a Socialist party delegate to many international congresses and had many contacts with labor leaders abroad, he helped to cement ties between the AFL and the International Trade Union Federation. His literary proficiency in French, German, and Spanish were also helpful in this task.

Former socialist Walling came to feel that the Democratic party could be made into a party of labor and reform. He ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1925 as a Democratic and Progressive candidate, but was defeated.

In the 1930s Walling continued his activities in Europe. As executive director of the Labor Chest, in 1935, he organized committees all over the Continent to relieve and eventually liberate workers in Fascist countries. At the age of fifty-nine, while working with the labor underground, he died in in Amsterdam; despite a heart attack, he had kept an appointment with a group of anti-Nazi Germans.

Involving himself early in the life of the underprivileged, Walling devoted his talents, particularly his creative talents, to the socialist and labor movements in the United States, and then to the Resistance in Europe. It is for this dedication that he is significant.

Walling’s writings include Whitman and Traubel (1916); American Labor and American Democracy (1926); The Mexican Question (1927); and “The Founding of the NAACP,” The Crisis, July 1929. Biographical sources include A. S. Walling, et ep., William English Walling: A Symposium (n.d.); M. W. Ovington, How the NAACP Began (1967); and The Dictionary of American Biography (1967).