Job Harriman
Job Harriman (January 15, 1861 – October 26, 1925) was an ordained minister who later became an agnostic and a socialist. In 1900, he ran for vice president of the United States along with Eugene Debs on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America. He later twice ran for mayor of Los Angeles, drawing considerable attention and support. He also founded a socialist utopian community called Llano del Rio in California, later relocated to Louisiana. Biography Early years Harriman was born on January 15, 1861, in Clinton County, Indiana. He lived on the family farm until he was 18. Harriman's early life was filled with religious influences by his parents. After graduating from Butler University in 1884, he went on into the ministry. He gradually came to doubt the ability of the church to fundamentally affect the lives of common people and to see organized religion as a trap. He recalled in 1902: "It is in doubt and not in faith that the salvation of the world is to be found. Faith is a delusion and a snare: a pitfall, a prison. It intimidates the intellect. With fear of eternal damnation religion crushes intellectual activity; with hero worship it destroys individuality; with hopes for the beyond it prevents the growth of ideals for the present. It makes of us a race of intellectual cowards; it changes but little if any our daily conduct toward each other. But doubt sets us free." As Harriman moved away from a belief in spirituality and towards philosophical materialism, he came into contact with socialist literature, being particularly impressed with the 1886 utopian novel, Looking Backwards, by Edward Bellamy. In 1886, he moved to San Francisco and where he established a local Nationalist Club, dedicated to attempting to put Bellamy's ideas into practice in America. Later, Harriman came into contact with the writings of Karl Marx, which turned his early Christian socialist inclinations towards Marxism. Harriman married the sister of a college roommate, Mary Theodosia Gray. In 1895, the couple had twins, a girl and a boy, with the girl dying as a young child. Harriman left the church and took up the study of law, becoming a lawyer and establishing his own law firm. Political career Harriman was initially a member of the Democratic Party but, as he became conscious of socialist ideas, he left that organization and joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). He was a gubernatorial candidate for California on the SLP ticket in 1898. Harriman broke with the SLP during the acrimonious split of 1899, which was largely linked to the SLP's insistence on establishing competing socialist dual unions with the existing trade unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. Harriman thereafter was affiliated with the East Coast-based variant of the Social Democratic Party of America (SDP), a group whose members included Henry Slobodin and Morris Hillquit. In 1900 during unity negotiations between the Eastern and Midwestern SDP organizations, Harriman ran for vice presidency of the United States on