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John Spargo (January 31, 1876 – August 17, 1966) was a British political writer who, later in life, became an expert in the history and crafts of Vermont. At first Spargo was active in the Socialist Party of America. A Methodist preacher, he tried to meld the Protestant Social Gospel with Marxist socialism in Marxian Socialism and Religion: A Study of the Relation of the Marxian Theories to the Fundamental Principles of Religion (1915). He also founded a settlement house in Yonkers, N.Y. Spargo moved steadily to the right after 1917 when he supported American intervention in World War I. With AFL leader Samuel Gompers he organized the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy in 1917. Spargo helped draft the Colby Note that formalised the Wilson administration's anti-communist policies. He strongly denounced the Bolshevik Revolution in Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy (1919). He opposed the foreign policy of the New Deal, especially its recognition of the USSR in 1933. He supported the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1930s and Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. He endorsed Barry Goldwater In the 1964 Elections. Biography Early years Spargo was born on January 31, 1876, in the small village of Longdowns in the parish of Stithians, Cornwall, England. His parents were Thomas Spargo (1850–1920) and Jane Hocking Spargo (1851–1900), whose maiden name was also Spargo. As a young man, He trained as a stonecutter, and he later became a lay Methodist minister. He was attracted to the socialist doctrines of early English Marxist Henry Hyndman, particularly to his book England for All. Spargo was a largely self-educated man, but he did in 1894-95 take two courses through the Oxford University Extension Program, including one by economist J. A. Hobson. Spargo went to work in 1895, moving with his alcoholic father to Barry Docks in South Wales, where he was employed as a stonemason. Within a year after his arrival at Barry Dock, Spargo had started the first local of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation (SDF), was elected president of the Barry Trades and Labour Council, became an editor of the Barry Herald, and was elected a member of the National Executive Committee of the SDF. As his biographer notes It was an amazing, meteoric progression for an uneducated stonemason from Western Cornwall that took place in these few years of Spargo's education in Marxism; by the end of his residence in Britain, the 25-year-old was recognized as one of the most promising and energetic Marxist agitators in the country. Through it all, he was guided, inspired, and sustained by the Social Democratic Federation's founder and leader, Henry Meyers Hyndman, the man whose England for All had converted him to Marxism and who for the rest of his life would remain Spargo's model, mentor, and friend. Spargo's political ideas in this early period were an amalgam of Christian Socialism and Marxism, simultaneously seeking the brotherhood of man by following "the true principles of the man of Galillee," while embracing science and the belief in the rule of the working class as the motive force to create social change. In January 1900, Spargo married Prudence Edwards, a clerk from Lancashire, England who shared her new husband's socialist politics. The couple had one son, named after Christian Socialist leader George D. Herron. In 1900, Spargo participated in some of the preliminary meetings which brought together representatives of the SDF, the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and various trade unions and cooperative societies to form the Labour Parliamentary Representation Committee, a direct forerunner of the British Labour Party. This drive of the SDF to unite with various non-Marxist organizations brought about an immediate reaction from the party's hardline "impossibilist" left wing, who sought revolutionary transformation rather than incremental, piecemeal parliamentary reforms. The rise of the left caused Hyndman to temporarily leave the SDF's executive council and alienated Spargo to some extent from the party. Providentially, Spargo received at this time an invitation from the private lecture bureau to travel to America to spend a couple months traveling the country, speaking about socialism. And so the newlyweds sailed for America and ultimately a new life there. Coming to America John and Prudence Spargo arrived at the port of New York in February 1901. The promised lecture series proved to be vastly exaggerated and Spargo wound up standing in bread lines to get food and shoveling snow from the sidewalks of the city for $7.50 a week. Eventually a few socialist lectures did come and Spargo made the acquaintance of many leading radicals in the city, including Christian Socialist George D. Herron, Job Harriman, and Algernon Lee. Spargo cast his lot with the dissident (and newly independent wing of the Socialist Labor Party headed by Henry Slobodin and Morris Hillquit), teaching at an SLP education center in Brooklyn, and working as an assistant to the lawyer Hillquit. Spargo also assumed the role of editor of an illustrated socialist monthly based in New York, The Comrade. The Spargos spent the next eight years living in a small apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with Spargo spending much of his time traveling the country as a paid lecturer. When the New York SLP dissidents merged with the midwestern Social Democratic Party of America headed by Victor L. Berger and Eugene Debs to establish the Socialist Party of America (SPA), Spargo was a founding member — although he was not in attendance at the Indianapolis Convention which established the organization in the summer of 1901. With regard to his travels on behalf of the American socialist movement as a lecturer, Spargo's biographer notes It was well known that on many of his trips Spargo cavorted with a number of attractive ladies, and he quickly built a reputation not just as an effective socialist organizer but as a womanizer of some note... There was nothing unusual in this since the early-20th century intellectuals who crowded New York's socialist circles tended to embrace free love as an indispensable dimension of their newfound aesthetics. In Spargo's case, however, the sexual cavorting led to some tricky situations, and once he had to borrow some 200 dollars from Hillquit to pay off a blackmailer who knew too much of some compromising tryst. Spargo continued as editor of The Comrade until April 1904. In May of that same year, he traveled to Chicago and attended the second convention of the Socialist Party as a delegate from New York. At the convention, Spargo was elected Chairman of the Resolutions Committee and he reported as such to the conclave. Among other topics, the committee passed resolutions attacking the payment of "exorbitant fees or salaries" of socialist speakers and lecturers and condemning "all propaganda organizations, not connected w.... Discover the John Spargo popular books. 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