ABSTRACT
In 1913, the Socialist Party created the Information Department and Research Bureau to serve the burgeoning movement’s information needs. Compared to the hierarchical information management protocols of major corporations and universities, the Information Department represented a profoundly democratic foray into this area. Carl D. ompson, the director of the Information Department, sought to use his position to turn the class struggle into a struggle over facts. Indeed, in his e ort to push socialist theory into the realm of praxis, he relied on facts to demonstrate the e cacy of socialist propositions. Facts, he argued, proved the bene ts of public ownership over private, socialism over capitalism. In his work, ompson eschewed the emotional appeals that sought to win readers over through epiphany and revelation. Instead, he looked to help socialists win the class struggle through reason and rationality. ough his fact-based initiatives never eclipsed the emotional appeals that proved so instrumental in building the movement, ompson’s e orts were nonetheless signi cant in their attempt to better ground socialism in real world politics. Ultimately, however, a lack of nancial resources ended this experiment in information management and served as a harbinger for the decline of the Socialist Party in the late 1910s.1
