Philip Van Patten

Simon Philip Van Patten (1852–1918), known by his middle name of "Philip," was an American socialist political activist prominent during the latter half of the 1870s and the first half of the 1880s. Van Patten is best remembered for being named the first Corresponding Secretary of the Workingmen's Party of the United States in 1876 and for heading it and its successor organization, the Socialist Labor Party of America, for the next six years. In 1883 Van Patten mysteriously disappeared, with his friends reporting him as a potential suicide to law enforcement authorities. He later turned up as a government employee, however, having abandoned radical politics in favor of stable employment.

Simon Philip Van Patten was born February 22, 1852 in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., in the United States, the son of ethnic Dutch heritage. One early socialist historian characterized Van Patten as "an American of good family, with an excellent education." According to U.S. Census data, his father was born in New York state and his mother in Pennsylvania. His father was a renowned naturalist who was a Dutch-speaking confidant of President Martin Van Buren. Philip Van Patten spent much of his childhood in Costa Rica.

At the age of 21, Philip Van Patten rented a room without a bath or kitchen on the West Side of Chicago, and worked as an architectural draftsman downtown. He arrived as the boom of building construction necessitated by the great Chicago fire had gone bust due to a national financial crisis. From 1875 through 1876, Van Patten supplemented his income by rendering buildings or drawing maps as an insurance surveyor.

According to the recollection of pioneer Chicago Socialist George A. Schilling, Philip Van Patten seems to have become involved in the radical politics in about 1875, joining John McAuliffe and John Eckford as among the first group of English-speaking Socialists in that city. Other leading English-speaking Chicago socialists in this period, who had organized themselves as part of the Social Democratic Party of North America (SDP), included Schilling himself, Thomas J. Morgan, John Paulson, and Albert R. Parsons. Of this group, Van Patten does not seem to have been a gifted orator, for Schilling recalls that "at this time A.R. Parsons and John McAuliffe were the only ones capable of expounding in public the principles of the party in the English language." The official organ of this group was a weekly newspaper published in New York City called The Socialist.

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