Frederic Heath

Frederic Faries "Fred" Heath (1864–1954) was an American socialist politician and journalist who was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America in 1897 and the Socialist Party of America in 1901. He was an elected official in Wisconsin for nearly half a century.

Frederic F. Heath was born September 6, 1864 to a Republican family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a young man, Heath worked variously as a teacher, a printer, a wood engraver, and an artist for wood engravers, the latter trades rendered largely obsolete by the invention of the linotype machine and the half-tone printing process. He moved to Chicago in 1886, moving to Florida in 1887 to publish a magazine called the Florida Fruit Grower. In 1888 he returned to his native Milwaukee, where he drew portraits and wrote editorials for the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel.

Heath later recalled that he had been won over to socialist ideas by Looking Backward, a popular utopian novel of Edward Bellamy published in 1888:

"I capitulated to it at once, and a few years later was the author of a series of reports of the sessions of a mythical Bellamy club, in a Chicago illustrated paper, of which I myself was editor, articles which afford me amusing reading today, you may believe. By this time I had come to think myself a socialist, yet kept on religiously voting for 'protection' of American industry."

Heath indicated that he was brought into the actual socialist movement through three influences: Julius Wayland and his newspaper The Coming Nation, forerunner to the Appeal to Reason; stray copies of literature produced by the Socialist Labor Party of America; and a direct acquaintance with Victor L. Berger, a former teacher who had become the editor of the German-language socialist daily newspaper in Milwaukee. Heath later wrote:

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