Old Guard faction

The Old Guard faction was an organized grouping in the Socialist Party of America (SPA) who sought to retain the organization's traditional orientation towards electoral politics by fighting Militant faction (generally younger party members) who factionally organized to promote greater efforts at direct action in advancing the cause of revolutionary socialism. The Old Guard had its roots as the "Regulars" in the inner party factional war of 1919, which resulted in the fragmentation of the Socialist Party into the Communist Party of America and Communist Labor Party of America. In 1935 the personal and political friction between the Old Guard and the Militants (and their "Progressive" allies) lead to an organizational split, with the Old Guard faction leaving to establish the Social Democratic Federation (SDF).

The Old Guard and their Militant foes both hailed from the broad Marxist tradition, the former seeing democracy as a positive value in itself and emphasizing the efficacy of the electoral road to power while the latter tended to see democracy as a sort of chimera, a tactical expedient propagated by the bourgeois in its maintenance of class power. Beyond this important analytical difference, the divide between these two factional groupings was largely generational, with the Old Guard dominated by middle aged party veterans of large standing while newcomers into the Socialist Party during the Depression years of the early 1930s tended to gravitate as a younger and more aggressive caucus.

Historian Irving Howe, himself a young Militant in the SP in the early 1930s, later recalled his own perception of the "Old Guard":

"On the right stood the Old Guard, hard and unyielding. As a youthful newcomer to the socialist movement, I was of course contemptuous of the Old Guard, and so was almost every other new member.... In the American left of those days anything not 'revolutionary' was dismissed as beneath discussion; but that didn't bother the Old Guard, which gloried in its distance from the vulgar ferment of popular radicalism. Perhaps the Old Guard carried within itself too large a weight of historical pain — its admirers would say, historical knowledge. It had won the struggle against the communists in the garment unions during the 1920s, but that had drained much of its socialist spirit. It made of its very moderation a mannerism of excess. With a principled sort of grouchiness, it seemed almost intent upon showing that sectarianism can be found anywhere along the socialist spectrum."