Benjamin Hanford

Benjamin "Ben" Hanford (1861 – January 24, 1910) was an American socialist politician during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A printer by trade, Hanford is best remembered for his 1904 and 1908 runs for Vice President of the United States on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America, running next to Presidential nominee Eugene V. Debs. Hanford was also the creator of the fictional character "Jimmie Higgins," a prototypical Socialist rank-and-filer whose silent work on the unglamorous tasks needed by any political organization made the group's achievements possible — a character later reprised in a novel by Upton Sinclair.

Benjamin Hanford was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1861, the son of George Byington Hanford and Susan Elizabeth Martini Hanford. Ben's mother died when he was in infancy. Hanford's father later married Frances Jane Thompson, a woman from Bangor, Maine who as Hanford's step-mother imparted a taste for scholarship and culture upon him.

As a boy Hanford went to work for a newspaper, learning the printer's trade at the Marshalltown Republican of Marshalltown, Iowa. With his 18th birthday approaching Hanford left Iowa for the great regional metropolis of Chicago, where on February 26, 1879 he became a member of the Chicago Typographical Union, a local affiliate of the International Typographical Union. Hanford would remain a dues-paying member of that organization for the rest of his life.

In 1892 Hanford relocated to New York City. There he worked as a printer and became involved in the affairs of International Typographical Union Local No. 6 — known as "Big Six" in that era.

In 1893 a fellow printer from Philadelphia named Fred Long converted his fellow union member to the ideas of socialism. Hanford joined the dominant American socialist political organization of the day, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Hanford was selected to head the New York state ticket of the SLP in 1898, running for Governor of New York. In 1899 the SLP split, however, and Hanford left the organization with an anti-dual union faction led by Morris Hillquit and Henry Slobodin and centered around the New Yorker Volkszeitung.

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