John Spargo

John Spargo (January 31, 1876 – August 17, 1966) became a renowned expert in the history and crafts of Vermont. Spargo is best remembered as an early biographer of Karl Marx and as one of the leading public intellectuals affiliated with the Socialist Party of America during the progressive era of the early 20th Century.

Spargo was born on January 31, 1876, in the small village of Longdowns in the parish of Stithians, Cornwall, England. His parents were Thomas Spargo (1850–1920) and Jane Hocking Spargo (1851–1900), whose maiden name was also Spargo. As a young man, he trained as a stonecutter, and he later became a lay Methodist minister. He was attracted to the socialist doctrines of early English Marxist Henry Hyndman, particularly to his book England for All.

Spargo was a largely self-educated man, but he did in 1894-95 take two courses through the Oxford University Extension Program, including one by economist J. A. Hobson. Spargo went to work in 1895, moving with his alcoholic father to Barry Docks in South Wales, where he was employed as a stonemason. Within a year after his arrival at Barry Dock, Spargo had started the first local of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation (SDF), was elected president of the Barry Trades and Labour Council, became an editor of the Barry Herald, and was elected a member of the National Executive Committee of the SDF.

As his biographer notes

"It was an amazing, meteoric progression for an uneducated stonemason from Western Cornwall that took place in these few years of Spargo's education in Marxism; by the end of his residence in Britain, the 25-year-old was recognized as one of the most promising and energetic Marxist agitators in the country. Through it all, he was guided, inspired, and sustained by the Social Democratic Federation's founder and leader, Henry Meyers Hyndman, the man whose England for All had converted him to Marxism and who for the rest of his life would remain Spargo's model, mentor, and friend."

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