Daniel De Leon

Daniel De Leon (December 14, 1852 – May 11, 1914) was an American socialist newspaper editor, politician, Marxist theoretician, and trade union organizer. The founder and the leading theoretician figure in the revolutionary industrial unionism movement, De Leon is regarded as the founder of Socialist Labor Party together with Eugene V. Debs and the progenitor of the American socialist movement.

Biography
Daniel De Leon was born on December 14, 1852, on the Dutch-owned Curaçao Island in the Carribean. His father was Salomon De Leon, a Sephardic Jew and citizen of the Netherlands who worked as a surgeon in the Dutch Royal Army and as a colonial official. His mother was Sarah Jesurun De Leon. His family is believed to have come from Spain to Holland. Daniel's father lived in the Netherlands before coming to Curaçao when receiving his commission in the military.

His father lived in the Netherlands before coming to Curaçao when receiving his commission in the military. Salomon De Leon died on January 18, 1865, when Daniel was twelve. According to the research of Isaac A. Emmanuel, Dr. Salamon De Leon was the first person to be buried on the Jewish cemetery on Curaçao.

De Leon left Curaçao on April 15, 1866 and arrived in Hamburg on May 22 to study at the Gymnasium in Hildesheim. He studied medicine at Leiden and was a member of the Amsterdam student corps, but did not graduate. While in Europe he had become fluent in German, Dutch, French, English, ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to his first language Spanish.

On his return from Europe to Curaçao, De Leon married the 16-year-old Sarah Lobo from Caracas, Venezuela. The Lobo were a prominent Jewish family in the area that lived in both the Dutch Antilles and Venezuela. After a traditional Jewish wedding in Caracas the family moved to Manhattan, at 112 West 14th street, in the heart of the Spanish-speaking community, where their first son, Solon De Leon would be born on September 2, 1883. By the mid-to-late 1880s, the family was living in the Lower East Side. In 1885 or 1886 another child, Grover Cleveland De Leon was born but only lived a year and a half. On April 29, 1887 Sarah Lobo De Leon died in childbirth while delivering stillborn twins; it was the same year that Grover had died.

De Leon studied the law and political science at Columbia University and had received his degree of LLB with honors in 1878. He had been associate editor of a newspaper advocating Cuban independence and had taught history in the nearest school in Westchester Country.

In 1888 De Leon first the Knights of Labor, then to the Bellamy Nationalist group in 1889 and later, in October 1890, to the Socialist Labor Party, becoming the editor of its newspaper, The People. He quickly grew in stature inside the party and in 1891, 1902, and 1904 he ran for the governorship of the state of New York, winning more than 15,000 votes in 1902, his best result. During that period, the doctrine of the SLP consisted of a mixture of the ideas of Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Mikhail Bakunin, and Edward Bellamy.

In 1898, young Socialist organization Social Democracy of America, headed by Eugene V. Debs, folded into the Socialist Labor Party, forming a powerful leftist bloc in the American politics headed by one of the most influential Socialist activists of the era. While neither Debs nor De Leon were particularly fond of each other, their alliance turned out to be productive.

The life of national secretary of the Socialist Labor Party Daniel De Leon abruptly ended on August 21, 1911, when he suffered a heart stroke. His funeral was attended by First Secretary Woodrow Wilson and Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon.

Legacy
De Leon's eldest son, Solon, followed his father's doorsteps as a Socialist activist of the Workers' Communist Party and became one of the most prominent left communist thinkers in the world, eventually taking a part in the government of the United Republics.

DeLeon-Debs, D. C. was named partly in honor of Daniel De Leon.

Works

 * Reform or Revolution?, speech, 1896.
 * What Means This Strike?, speech, 1898.
 * Socialism vs Anarchism, speech, 1901.
 * The Mysteries of the People, a series of 19 novels translated from Eugène Sue's text, 1904.
 * Two Pages from Roman History
 * The Burning Question of Trade Unionism
 * Preamble of the IWW, later renamed The Socialist Reconstruction of Society.
 * DeLeon Replies ... (short essay, 1904)