Intercollegiate Socialist Society

The Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) was a socialist student organization active from 1905 to 1921. It attracted many prominent intellectuals and writers and acted as an unofficial student wing of the Socialist Party of America. The Society sponsored lecture tours, magazines, seminars and discussion circles all over the US to propagate socialist ideas among America's college population. The group expanded into a philosophy in the 1920s that did not focus exclusively or even primarily on college students. To symbolize the shift in emphasis, the group changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy in 1921.

Supporters of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) were heartened by the results of the Presidential election of 1904, which saw the party's candidate, Eugene V. Debs, win approximately 400,000 votes. One supporter in particular, novelist Upton Sinclair, was motivated to help advance the socialist idea among the political leaders of tomorrow by establishing a new organization targeted at college students. Sinclair made contact with a number of leading public intellectuals of the day, gaining formal endorsements for a new national college socialist organization from a number of important figures, including novelist Jack London, millionaire financier James Graham Phelps Stokes, socialist republican William English Walling, magazine publisher B. O. Flower, attorney Clarence Darrow, writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, publicist Leonard D. Abbott, abolitionist hero Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Harry W. Laidler.

Over the signatures of these and other prominent public figures, in the Spring of 1905 Sinclair issued a call for the formation of a new organization, a group to be called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Their original call was written as follows:

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