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This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Class struggles in America. 3d ed., rev. and enl., with notes and references
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
The Vision for Which We Fought: A Study in Reconstruction
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Production Management: Control Of Men, Material, And Machines, Volume 5
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This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Algie Martin Simons was an American socialist journalist, newspaper editor, and political activist.
Background
Algie Martin Simons was born on October 9, 1870 in North Freedom, Wisconsin, the oldest of the three sons and a daughter of Horace Buttoph Simons and Linda (Blackman) Simons. His father was a farmer, as were many of his forebears, of English and Scottish stock, who had settled in America in colonial times and had moved westward through succeeding generations. Facing the hardships of the frontier, none of them, including his father, met with prosperity. The family's religious background was Baptist.
Education
Simons attended the public schools of Sauk County, Wisconsin, graduating from the Baraboo High School in 1891. He entered the University of Wisconsin, where he became a student of Frederick Jackson Turner, a research assistant to the economist Richard T. Ely, and a wellknown and able campus debater. While at the university, Simons also served as a reporter for the Madison Democrat and as the local correspondent for the Chicago Record. He received a B. L. degree from the university in 1895 and was subsequently elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Career
Immediately after his graduation, Simons was employed as a social worker for the University of Cincinnati Settlement. A year later (1896) he went to work for the Stockyards District of the United (later Associated) Charities in Chicago, which assigned him the task of organizing relief efforts for the stockyards district, then in its third winter of severe economic depression. His pamphlet, Packingtown (1899), which vividly described the abominable conditions he discovered, attracted little public attention, but provided a major source for Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel, The Jungle (1904).
In 1897 he discouraged by the difficulty of bringing about reform through conventional political means, Simons joined the Chicago local of the Socialist Labor party (SLP), and in 1899 he became editor of the Worker's Call, a weekly newspaper of the SLP.
Over the next decade in Chicago, besides being elected a member of the Socialist party's National Executive Committee (1905), he successively edited the International Socialist Review (1900 - 1906) and the Chicago Daily Socialist (1906 - 1910). But his attempt in 1910 - along with other moderate Socialists - to effect an alliance between the Socialist party and the left wing of the American trade union movement caused a furor that cost him both his seat on the National Executive Committee and his editorship of the Daily Socialist. Abandoning political activity, Simons moved to Girard, Kansas, where he became editor of the Coming Nation (1910 - 1913), a socialist literary magazine.
In 1911 he published Social Forces in American History, the first Marxist interpretation of the American past. Elaborating upon ideas he had first presented in party pamphlets and articles several years before, Simons declared that the American nation, far from being a democracy of, by, and for the people, was really designed to exalt capitalists at the expense of the working class. It is for Social Forces that historians have chiefly remembered Simons.
The years before World War I were the most productive of Simons' life. During this period he moved from the extreme left wing of the Socialist movement, the Marxism of Daniel DeLeon, to the right wing, exemplified by Victor Berger and the Social Democracy of Milwaukee.
In 1913, Simons moved to Milwaukee, where the Socialists were enjoying considerable success, and became editor of the Milwaukee Leader (1913 - 1916). In addition to his editing, he was one of the principal theoreticians and political leaders of the socialist movement. He was especially convinced of the need to develop a socialism suited to the American environment and responsive to the distinctive needs of the American proletariat. which he defined to include land-owning farmers as well as industrial labor.
In articles in The American Farmer (1902) and in the Socialist party platform's planks on agriculture, Simons had, over the years, attempted to make the Socialist party a desirable political alternative for rural Americans.
In 1917, along with many other Socialists, Simons broke with the party over the issue of World War I. He viewed the war's outbreak as demonstrating the ineffectiveness of internationalism, and he fully supported America's entry into it, a position that led to his expulsion from the Socialist party. Simons thereupon became an organizer for the Wisconsin Defense League and when, a few months later, this organization transformed itself into the ultrapatriotic Wisconsin Loyalty Legion, he was named head of its literature department. In that year, also, he helped weld other pro-war Socialists into the Social Democratic League, and the following year he led the league-sponsored American Socialist and Labor Mission to Europe.
Modeled after a similar undertaking by Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, the mission sought to rekindle waning enthusiasm for the war among Allied radicals and set up the framework for a new Socialist international. By the time of the armistice, Simons' disenchantment with politics was complete. The exigencies of war, he believed, had done more to fulfill socialist goals than all that the propaganda efforts, election campaigns, and Socialist officeholders had done in twenty years.
His valedictory to radical politics, "The Uselessness of Protest Parties, " appeared in the American Federationist for April 1920. The keys to the future, Simons concluded in The Vision for Which We Fought (1919), lay in administration and efficiency, not in parliaments and class struggles. He therefore turned his interests to scientific management and industrial psychology. In 1920 he began teaching a course in industrial management in the extension division of the University of Wisconsin, and he took a position as personnel management expert for Leffingwell-Ream, management engineers. In 1921 he published his first book based on his new career, Personnel Relations in Industry.
When Leffingwell-Ream dissolved in 1921, he became secretary of the American School in Chicago and remained there until the onset of the depression in 1929. From 1930 until his retirement in 1944, Simons did research on the economic aspects of medical care, first for the American College of Dentists, and then as assistant director of the Bureau of Medical Economics of the American Medical Association (AMA).
His writings for the AMA had a single theme: health insurance of any kind, under any direction but that of private insurance companies, must be fought tirelessly. Simons died from complications of injuries sustained in an automobile accident, in New Martinsville, West Virginia, where he had gone to live with his daughter and son-in-law.
He was buried in the family plot in Baraboo, Wisсonsin.
Achievements
Although Simons played a major role in developing the agricultural policies of the Socialist party, he was not parochial in his interests. He wrote many articles designed to familiarize Americans with the main developments of European socialism, and for thirty years maintained contacts with leading British and continental Socialists. He translated several of the works of Karl Kautsky into English.
Simons also was, throughout his life, concerned with the ways industrial and urban forces were altering political and social relationships.
His interest in industrial psychology and personnel management exemplified that concern in the 1920's, just as his writings on urban slums and working conditions in the stockyards had done twenty years before.
Simons never entirely repudiated the values of midwestern rural America. He retained a distrust of "the East" that erupted at Socialist party conventions as it did among Wisconsin farmers whom he had doubtless heard curse the evil bankers of Wall Street. Frederick Jackson Turner and Richard T. Ely did the most to shape Simons' thinking, but Simons' own background had prepared him to share Turner's appreciation of the pioneer farmers' role in American development. Simons was correct in his assessment that Marxism, to attain success in America, had to be tied to traditions and institutions that were characteristically American. But he underestimated the vigor of the life to which he sought to attach this foreign graft. Socialism was choked out, and Simons went on to other careers.
Personality
Publicly, Simons, who was of medium height and build and wore a dark mustache and beard for much of his life, was a vain and irascible man.
He had great intellectual ability and physical energy, which he enlisted totally in whatever cause he was pleading at any particular time. He grew extraordinarily angry with people who disagreed with him. Privately, he was a kind, loving husband and father, who worried about the conflicts among his family responsibilities, his social conscience, and his political ambitions.
Connections
In June 1897, Simons married (Eleanor) May Wood of Baraboo. They had two children: Laurence Wood, who died in infancy, and Miriam Eleanor.
