John W. Slayton

John W. Slayton (1863–1935) was an American socialist lecturer and politician. He is best remembered as one of the Socialist Party of America's leading propagandists in the Eastern United States during the decade of the 1910s.

John W. Slayton was born in January 1863 in West Virginia. He was unable to read until the age of 13 and attended a total of only 15 months of school in a rural log school house. Instead, Slayton developed himself through self-education, studying in his spare time.

Slayton was a carpenter by trade and a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

Slayton moved to New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1900, where he served for a time as the business agent of the local Building Trades unions. He remained an active member of the Carpenters Union, attending many of the group's national conventions and serving as its delegate to four national conventions of the American Federation of Labor.

John W. Slayton was a pioneer American socialist, a member of the Social Democratic Party of America in the late 1890s. Slayton's first foray into electoral politics came in 1900, when he ran for U.S. Congress on the Social Democratic ticket.

When the Chicago-based Social Democratic Party to which Slayton owed his allegiance united with an Eastern-based organization of the same name which had defected from the Socialist Labor Party in 1901, Slayton joined the new organization, known as the Socialist Party of America (SPA). In 1903 Slayton was employed by the Socialist Party as one of its "National Lecturers" and took to the road throughout the East and Midwest speaking on socialist themes on behalf of the party.

In 1905, Slayton served as campaign manager for Walter Tyler in his race for Mayor of New Castle. Tyler won the contest, making New Castle the first town in Pennsylvania to have a Socialist at the head of its civic administration. Slayton was himself later elected to the New Castle city council.

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