Philip Van Patten

Simon Philip Van Patten (February 22, 1852 – September 20, 1918) was an American socialist political activist prominent during the latter half of the 1870s and the first half of the 1880s. Van Patten is best remembered for being named the first Corresponding Secretary of the Workingmen's Party of the United States in 1876 and for heading it and its successor organization, the Socialist Labor Party of America, for the next six years. In 1883 Van Patten mysteriously disappeared, with his friends reporting him as a potential suicide to law enforcement authorities. He later turned up as a government employee, however, having abandoned radical politics in favor of stable employment.

Biography

Early years

Simon Philip Van Patten was born February 22, 1852, in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., in the United States, the son of ethnic Dutch heritage. One early socialist historian characterized Van Patten as "an American of good family, with an excellent education." According to U.S. Census data, his father was born in New York state and his mother in Pennsylvania.

At the age of 21, Philip Van Patten rented a room without a bath or kitchen on the West Side of Chicago, and worked as an architectural draftsman downtown. He arrived as the boom of building construction necessitated by the great Chicago fire had gone bust due to a national financial crisis. From 1875 through 1876, Van Patten supplemented his income by rendering buildings or drawing maps as an insurance surveyor.

Political career

According to the recollection of pioneer Chicago Socialist George A. Schilling, Philip Van Patten seems to have become involved in the radical politics in about 1875, joining John McAuliffe and John Eckford as among the first group of English-speaking Socialists in that city. Other leading English-speaking Chicago socialists in this period, who had organized themselves as part of the Social Democratic Party of North America (SDP), included Schilling himself, Thomas J. Morgan, John Paulson, and Albert R. Parsons. Of this group, Van Patten does not seem to have been a gifted orator, for Schilling recalls that "at this time A.R. Parsons and John McAuliffe were the only ones capable of expounding in public the principles of the party in the English language." with a new editor named to take charge of the publication.

Chosen to be the Party's leader at the age of 24, Van Patten continued to lead the party until 1883. Van Patten attributed his own rise to Party leadership to "the difficulty in getting anyone who could write correct English," due to the fact that the party consisted largely of German immigrants.

The railway strike of 1877

A great railroad strike erupted in the Eastern United States in 1877, spreading West to the working class center of Chicago, where it was conducted directly by the National Executive Committee of the NEC. Chief among the leaders of this Chicago organization were National Secretary Philip Van Patten, head of the Chicago City Committee, George A. Schilling, and English-language newspaper editor Albert R. Parsons. As one historian has observed, thousands of miles of costly railroads had been constructed in this period "on the mere expectation of the future development of the country, and without reference to the actual requirements of traffic." At these sessions the Workingmen's Party called for the nationalization of the railroads and for the establishment of an 8-hour day throughout America. Van Patten was arrested as a strike leader, taken to police headquarters, and threatened with hanging — as had been Parsons earlier in the day. at the time the site of a large and active "Section" of the party. Van Patten dutifully relocated there in mid-February 1878.

By the time the NEC had established itself in that city in March 1878 factionalism and discouragement had largely disrupted the local organization, however, a situation exacerbated by the failure of the party's Cincinnati-based daily, the Ohio Volkszeitung, in September of that year. As early as 1875 there had been established in Chicago a workers' militia known as the Lehr und Wehr Verein (Education and Defense Society) — a paramilitary organization which declared itself armed and ready to defend the working class against manifestations of state violence against striking workers and their political activities.

By May and June 1878, the popular press was filled with sensational stories positing an armed insurrection to seize the state by these groups. Van Patten and the Detroit NEC of the SLP which he headed were outspoken opponents of the Lehr und Wehr Verein, instead advocating the use of electoral methods to win control of the state by the workers movement. In response to the June 1878 press frenzy, Van Patten published a document "denying the false reports that our Sections were arming, and informing the public that our party, as a party, would not be responsible for any violations of law by its members."

This position placed Van Patten in opposition to the Chicago organization, including the staffs of the daily Chicagoer Arbeiter Zeitung and the weekly Vorbote, which ridiculed the NEC mercilessly.

Called upon to decide the question, the 2nd National Convention of the SLP, held in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, at the end of 1879 narrowly approved after heated debate a resolution of censure of the actions of Van Patten and the NEC for intervening in the local affairs of Section Chicago. This was not held against Van Patten personally, however, and he was returned as National Secretary by the convention, which was ultimately controlled by the moderate rather than the radical wing of the party.

Decline of the SLP

During this interval, Van Patten fulfilled a dual Secretarial role, not just heading the SLP but also serving as Secretary of the governing General Executive Board of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, an early trade union federation largely composed of ethnic Irish and English members. In this organization Van Patten was a voice which advocated closer relations between the Knights and the existing radical, ethnic German-dominated local unions of the Chicago Central Labor Union (CLU), from which anti-Socialist unionists and the Knights had seceded in 1880. Despite their failure to materially influence the program of the Greenbackers, Van Patten and his associates requested that SLP members support the Greenback Party ticket in the fall campaign — an attitude which further deepened the division between the NEC and the radical trade unionists of Section Chicago. Membership in the Socialist Labor Party plummeted during this battle. Although the total size of the organization was not stated at the 1879 Convention of the SLP, a subsequent report submitted by New York City activist P.J. McGuire to the 1881 Convention of the Second International claimed a membership of just 2,500 for the American organization — a total disputed by Adolph Strasser, who estimated the count at just 1,500.

The departure of the left wing of the SLP to the Anarchist movement left the party apparatus, such as it was, in the hands of the electorally-oriented moderates. The December 1881 3rd National Convention of the organization, held in New York City, was attended by a mere 17 delegates, mostly from New York City itself. The convention made New York the headquarters city for the organization and returned Philip Van Patten as National Secretary. Van Patten remarked to a correspondent at the time that his re-election related to the party's "difficulty in getting anyone who could write correct English" and was made possible by the absence at the convention of what he called the "thick-headed, dyspeptic element."

In 1883, Van Patten was named as a prospective editor of a new labor newspaper that had been launched in New York City called Voice of the People.

Van Patten died on September 20, 1918, in Hot Springs. Only the Little Rock Sentinel-Record newspaper noted his passing, with a one paragraph obituary eulogizing Philip Van Patten as "one of the leading architects of the city," an "early settler" of Hot Springs and an active member of the Knights of Pythias. He was 66 years old at the time of his death.

Works "Workingmen’s Party of the United States: Address of the Executive. With Conrad Pfeiffer. The Labor Standard [New York], vol. 1, no. 21 (Sept. 2, 1876), pg. 1. "Report of Proceedings of the Executive Committee of the Workingmen’s Party of the US: Chicago — August 6, 8, 11, 18, 1876." The Labor Standard [New York], vol. 1, no. 21 (Sept. 2, 1876), pg. 4. "Workingmen’s Party of the United States: To the Workingmen of All Countries." With Conrad Pfeiffer. The Labor Standard [New York], vol. 1, no. 23 (Sept. 16, 1876), pg. 1. "Report of the NEC to the 2nd National Convention of the Socialist Labor Party of America: Allegheny City, Pennsylvania — Dec. 26, 1879," Published in Proceedings of the National Convention of the Socialistic Labor Party Held at Turner Hall, Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, Commencing Dec. 26th, 1879. Detroit: National Executive Committee of the Socialistic Labor Party, 1880; pp. 5–17. "The National Executive Committee to All Members and Friends of the Party," Bulletin of the Social Labor Movement," vol. 1, no. 14 (Dec. 1880-Jan. 1881), pg. 1.

Footnotes