The Class Struggle/Advance

1896-1902

Introduction

The Class Struggle began as the official organ of Section San Francisco of the Socialist Labor Party, believed to have been launched as a weekly in 1896. A four-page broadsheet of limited circulation, no early copies are known to have been survived. A single 1900 issue bearing the original name of the publication, preserved in the newspaper scrapbooks of Eugene V. Debs, is presented here.

On October 7, 1899 a five person group headed by San Francisco printer George B. Benham bought the paper, keeping it tightly allied with the dissident elements of the SLP opposed to the party's New York City leadership and party editor Daniel DeLeon. The paper followed the dissidents into orbit of the Social Democratic Party with headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1900.

On June 23, 1900 the paper was sold to the Social Democratic Party of California for $460 and Emil Liess was named its new editor. The name of the publication was changed to The Advance shortly thereafter and a greater national presence began to be exerted, with ads soliciting subscriptions placed in various east coast socialist publications.

In 1901 the paper was transformed into a 16-page tabloid, apparently becoming a subsidized appendage of the San Francisco Labor Council, the local federation of trade unions. As the official organ of Local San Francisco, the paper remained formally allied with the Socialist Party of America with its establishment in the summer of 1901, it goes without saying.

Early in 1902 the paper began to experience problems, both with personnel and finances. Emil Liess retired from active editorship of the paper and it was found that two people were needed to take care of the work he had previously done. The job was taken over by comrades named Noel, handling the editorial task, and Treft, handling business management. The cost of production increased commensurately with this doubling of staff.

At the same time that editorial costs were necessarily increased, revenue began to fall, with the launch of the California socialist papers Undercurrent and the Los Angeles Socialist. "Bills are due and must be paid," the Editorial Board warned in January 1902, otherwise "it will be necessary...to cripple the paper's power by greatly reducing its size or else to suspend publication altogether."

At its peak, circulation of Advance did not exceed 10,000 copies — and was perhaps substantially less than that.

The surviving run of Advance is virtually complete for the years 1901 and 1902, thereby providing a unique and valuable resource for study of the history of the Bay Area socialist and labor movement. No issues of Advance dated after Dec. 27, 1902 are known to exist, although the possibility that additional issues were produced can not be discounted.