sentenced[C] to
twenty years in Leavenworth prison, was reported to have been ousted
from the organization, having been considered too conservative by the
millionaire Socialist, William Bross Lloyd, and the latter's friends who
controlled the Communist Propaganda League, the Left Wing faction of the
local organization.

"The Call," May 8, 1919, publishes an interesting letter from one of its
correspondents:

"It is not so much a question as to Left or Right Wing domination
as it is a question of whether we are to have a united or divided
party.

"I am not a Centrist, if that means to be in the center of the
party as it is today. We must move to the Left--that is understood
by all thinking, class-conscious Comrades, but we must move
together, not, perhaps, as far as some of the hot-heads would like
to have us--they fail to understand what an American Socialist
Party should be, for they seem to think of New York City as the
whole thing. If they could take a trip to Chicago and back they
might find themselves moving toward the Right.

"No one wants to be where the stick-in-the-mud Rights are,
either--that is, no one except them. The majority of us see the
need for revolutionizing the party. What we don't see is any
necessity of disrupting the party in the process. The master class
would like to see that; in fact, they have been egging us on to
fight among ourselves for the last two or three years, and we have
blindly done the very thing that they want most we should do. They
are laughing in their sleeves at us--poor boobs that we are."

On May 15, 1919, following the open fight against the Left Wing
inaugurated by the New York State Committee and its Executive Committee,
the Left Wing Locals of Boston, Cleveland and New York joined in a call
for a National Conference of the Left Wing to convene in New York on
June 21. This call opened with the following paragraph:

"The international situation and the crisis in the American
Socialist Party; the sabotage the party bureaucracy has practised
on the emergency national convention; the N. E. C. [National
Executive Committee] aligning our party with the social-patriots at
Berne, with the Congress of the Great Betrayal; the necessity of
reconstructing our policy in accord with revolutionary events--all
this and more, makes it necessary that the r