Julius Gerber

Julius Gerber (1872-19xx) was a leading Socialist party official and politician during the first two decades of the 20th Century. Gerber headed the important Socialist Party unit for New York City and its environs from 1911 through 1922. He played a key role in the party split of 1919, out of which the [[Communist Party USA}Communist Party]] emerged.

Biography

Julius Gerber was born December 24, 1872, in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian empire. He was an ethnic Jew and as was the case with so many others of that oppressed nationality, the Gerber family fled Tsarist Russia in 1886, landing in New York. Young Julius took a job as a sheet metal worker, a job at which he remained until 1911.

Gerber was a committed socialist from an early age, joining the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) in 1890.

In the bitter 1899 split of the SLP, Gerber allied himself with the pro-American Federation of Labor insurgents headed by Henry Slobodin and Morris Hillquit against the regular faction of Daniel DeLeon and Henry Kuhn. Julius was made the organizer of Local New York of the new organization, a group calling themselves the Social Democratic Party after the DeLeon-Kuhn faction won control of the party name and logo as the result of a lawsuit. In 1901 this Eastern SDP group united with a Midwestern group of the same name to establish the Socialist Party of America. Gerber remained on as organizer of Local Greater New York for this enlarged organization through 1902.

Gerber was active in the publishing group which issued the socialist Newyorker Volkszeitung and served as Financial Secretary of that organization. He was also Secretary of the Press Committee which established the English-language New York Daily Call a few years later.

Gerber worked as the organizer of Local Kings County from 1908 to 1901, before being elected Executive Secretary of Local Greater New York in February 1911.