Arthur E. Reimer

Arthur Elmer Reimer (January 15, 1882 – November 25, 1969) was an American socialist political activist and politician who served as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Labor Party of America twice.

Biography

Early years

Arthur Reimer was born January 15, 1882, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of a machinist.Solon DeLeon with Irma C. Hayssen and Grace Poole, ''The American Labor Who's Who.'' New York: Hanford Press, 1925; pg. 194. Reimer attended public school in Boston before going on to Northeastern University, also in Boston, where he earned a law degree in 1912.

Reimer worked as a ladies' tailor in his younger years.

Political career

In 1898 Reimer joined the Socialist Labor Party of America.

In 1905, he was among those SLP members who joined the new Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Reimer exited that organization along with his party comrades in 1908 to establish a rival organization, the Workers International Industrial Union (WIIU) as a result of disagreement between the IWW majority and the SLP group over matters of strategy and tactics.

As a member of WIIU, Reimers was a participant in the 1912 Paterson Silk Strike.

He was the Socialist Labor Party presidential candidate for the 1912 election. His running mate was August Gillhaus of New York, the SLP's candidate for president in the previous election, that of 1908.

Afforded access to one of the country's leading weekly news magazines of the day in the days before the election, Riemer criticized the attempt of the rival Socialist Party of America to win piecemeal ameliorative reform and declared a need for revolutionary change:

"Where the social system starts with the private ownership of the necessaries for production, the bolt that, at first, slightly impedes fatedly becomes in the end a total bar to 'opportunity' — so far as the masses are concerned. The chains of wage slavery become more galling... At such a stage of capitalist rotten-ripeness, to look for reformatory redress in the governmental and economic maxims that rocked the cradle of the green infancy of capitalism is to be blind to economic evolution. It is to seek to hold back a runaway horse by the tail....


"Capitalism has organized the forces for and firmly sunk the piers on which to rear the structure of the industrial republic — the social system under which the plants of production are owned collectively and democratically administered. * * *


"Socialism may be summed up in the motto, 'Down with the political state, up with the industrial administration!' ...Afraid, on the one hand, to alienate the vote of the 'furtive Socialists' by a propaganda which these may mistake for anarchism, the Socialist Party suppresses this vital revolutionary feature of socialism; on the other hand, afraid to forfeit the vote of floating, hence anarchistically tainted discontent, the Socialist Party has elected a notorious anarchist William D. Haywood ">William_D._Haywood.html" ;"title="William D. Haywood">William D. Haywood to its National Executive Committee."

Reimer and Gillhaus received 33,070 votes in the 1912 campaign.Alexander Trachtenberg (ed.), ''The American Labor Year Book, 1917–18.'' New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1918; pp. 365–366.

In 1913 he ran for governor of Massachusetts, only spending six cents, and again in 1914 Massachusetts gubernatorial election">1914