Daniel de Leon
| Daniel De Leon | |
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Daniel De Leon in 1902.
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| Born | December 14, 1852 Coro, Venezuela |
| Died | May 11, 1914 (aged 61) New York, New York |
| Nationality | American |
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Daniel De Leon (December 14, 1852 – May 11, 1914) was an American socialist newspaper editor, politician, Marxist theoretician, and trade union organizer. He is regarded as the forefather of the idea of revolutionary industrial unionism and was the leading figure in the Socialist Labor Party of America from 1890 until the time of his death.
Daniel De Leon was born December 14, 1852 in Coro, Venezuela, the son of Salomon de Leon and Sarah Jesurun De Leon. His father was a surgeon in the Royal Netherlands Army and a colonial official. His family ancestry is believed to be Dutch Jewish of the Spanish and Portuguese community; "De León" is a Spanish surname, oftentimes toponymic, in which case it can possibly indicate a family's geographic origin in the Medieval Kingdom of León.
His father lived in the Netherlands before coming to Curaçao when receiving his commission in the military and a brief time in Coro where attended a Jewish community. Salomon De Leon died on January 18, 1865, when Daniel was twelve and was the first to be buried in the new Jewish cemetery of Willemstad.
De Leon left Curaçao on April 15, 1866 and arrived in Hamburg on May 22. In Germany he studied at the Gymnasium in Hildesheim and in 1870 began attending the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He studied medicine at Leiden and was a member of the Amsterdam student corps, but did not graduate. While in Europe he had become fluent in German, Dutch, French, English, ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to his first language Spanish. Sometime between 1872 and 1874 he emigrated to New York, with his wife and mother. There he found work as an instructor in Latin, Greek and mathematics at Thomas B. Harrington's School in Westchester, New York. In 1876 he entered Columbia College, now Columbia University, earning an LLB with honors 1878.
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