William English Walling

Background

William English Walling was born in Louisville, Ky. , the first of two sons of Willoughby and Rosalind (English) Walling and a grandson of William Hayden English, Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1880.

Education

Walling was educated in private schools in Louisville and Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father, a physician, was for four years United States consul. In 1897 he received a B. S. degree from the University of Chicago. He studied briefly at the Harvard Law School and then took graduate work in economics and sociology at Chicago.

Career

A man of independent means, Walling devoted his life from the age of twenty-three to the labor movement. In 1900-01 he was a factory inspector of the State of Illinois, and for the next four years he was a resident of the University Settlement in New York City's lower East Side. At the 1903 convention of the American Federation of Labor he joined with Jane Addams, Mary O'Sullivan, and others in founding the National Women's Trade Union League. From immigrant friends in New York Walling acquired an interest in the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1905 he went to Russia to study it and remained there for the better part of two years, interviewing most of the leading revolutionary figures, including Lenin and Gorky. Upon his return to western Europe he wrote Russia's Message (1908). In 1908 Walling and his wife observed a race riot in Springfield, Ill. , and soon afterwards Walling published two articles on race relations in the North in the Independent. At the suggestion of Mary White Ovington, a social worker interested in the problem of the Negro, he called a series of meetings in his New York apartment to discuss the formation of an organization to work for Negro rights. From these meetings there grew the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was in time to become the foremost Negro organization in the United States. Meanwhile Walling had become active in Socialist circles, though he did not actually join the party until 1910. In 1909 he set off a sharp fight between the radical and conservative wings of the party when he accused a group of Socialist conservatives - Victor Berger, Morris Hillquit, Algie M. Simons, and Robert Hunter - of secretly planning to convert the party into a reformist labor party. His charges, which apparently had some foundation, plunged the party into a quarrel that did not abate until the most radical group was expelled at the 1912 convention. Walling himself remained a member of the Socialist party until 1917, when he resigned because of its antiwar policy. Although he declined President Wilson's offer of a place on the special diplomatic mission to Russia headed by Elihu Root in 1917, Walling vigorously supported the war and was extremely critical of the Socialist pacifists. Even when he had been in the left wing of the Socialist party and associating with syndicalists, Walling had devoted considerable time to assisting the American Federation of Labor. He did whatever was asked of him, perhaps because he believed it would have been arrogant of him as a middle-class person to try to tell labor leaders how to conduct their affairs. After the war he worked full-time for the A. F. L. , writing for the American Federationist and ghost-writing speeches and articles. In 1924 he ran for Congress in Connecticut on the Democratic and Progressive tickets. In 1935 he became executive director of the Labor Chest, an organization for the relief and liberation of workers in fascist countries. He died in 1936, of pneumonia and endocarditis, in Amsterdam, Holland, where he had insisted on going, despite a serious heart attack, to keep an appointment with a group of underground anti-Nazi Germans. His ashes were returned for burial in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis, Ind.

Achievements

• He founded the National Women's Trade Union League in 1903. Moved by his investigation of the Springfield Race Riot of 1908 in the state capital of Illinois, he was among the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. He wrote three books on socialism in the early 20th century.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Socialists and the War: A Documentary Statement of the Position of the Socialists of All Countries, With Special Reference to Their Peace Policy (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Socialists and the War: A Documentary St...)

  • The German Socialists: Do They Stand for a Democratic Peace? Will They Revolt? (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The German Socialists: Do They Stand for a D...)

  • Sovietism the a of Russian of Russian the According to the Bolshevists (Classic Reprint)

    (What everybody wants to know is not what theB olsheviki c...)

  • Progressivism and After (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Progressivism and After But to make my poin...)

Politics

World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution had a profound and conservative effect upon Walling, as they had upon many other progressives of his generation. Early in his career he had believed that trade unionism and reform were sufficient to bring the kind of society he thought America needed. By the time he wrote The Larger Aspects of Socialism (1913) and Progressivism - And After (1914) reform had become to him only a necessary, but desirable, step toward socialism. The failure of the Second International, however, and the anti-democratic and anti-libertarian aspects of the communist revolutions led him back to his earlier reformist position. By 1921 Walling was collaborating with Samuel Gompers, whose labor reformism he had once held insufficient, in an anti-Soviet book, Out of Their Own Mouths.

Connections

While in Europe he married Anna Strunsky, a socialist and writer who had collaborated with Jack London, at Paris in June 1906. They had four children who grew to maturity: Rosamond English, Anna Strunsky, Georgia, and William Hayden English.

Father:

Willoughby Walling

Mother:

Rosalind (English) Walling

Spouse:

Anna Strunsky

child:

Anna Strunsky

child:

Rosamond English

child:

William Hayden English

child:

Georgia

References

• Whitman and Traubel (Classic Reprint)