Daniel De Leon (1852 - 1914)Daniel De Leon was more or less the leader of the New Union Party. The NUP did not have a clear leader in any of its history, but they followed the model and ideal of socialist newspaper editor Daniel De Leon. De Leon proposed many ideas that the NUP agreed with and took as their parties ideals. He was born December 14, 1852 in Curacao, from the couple of Salomon De Leon and Sarah De Leon. Salomon was a surgeon in the Royal Netherlands Army, and his lineage traces back to Spanish-Dutch Jewish ancestry. He along with many others founded Syndicalism or the replacement for capitalism. His father Salomon De Leon died when Daniel was 12. A year after his father's death Daniel left his hometown and traveled to Hamburg. There he went to college learned medicine but never graduated. There he learned six languages and was fluent in all of them in addition to his native language spanish. When he was 16 he traveled back to Curacao to marry young Sarah Lobo. They traveled back to the Spanish speaking area of Manhattan, where they had their first child, Solon De Leon. Then from 1878 - 1882 he lived in Brownsville, Texas, as an attorney. Daniel then traveled back to New York where he worked to earn a prized lectureship that had a decent paying salary but harsh requirements. Daniel was given the lectureship in 1883 and was kept on for 6 years until Columbia released him, because of his political activities, but some said it was because his topic was too esoteric to be a permanent part of the curriculum at Columbia. After this he became a political figure in New York, joining the Socialist Labor Party, and becoming the editor of their newspaper. Working for the newspaper he quickly gained popularity, and ran for governorship of New York in 1891, 1902, and 1904. In 1902 he had his best result a total of 15,000 votes. De Leon was a Marxist and wanted to overthrow capitalism through revolution. Besides this, De Leon was an important figure in the US labor movement. He attended the International Socialist Congress and there, under the influence of the American Labor Union he changed his politics to focus more on industrial unionism. He then worked to found the Industrial Workers of the World, in 1905. He then continued on to criticize the ideals of the IWW and eventually left the IWW to form his own group in Detroit. It was there that he founded the Workers' International Industrial Union and died on May 11th, 1914. His ideals still exist today in the form of De Leonism, and have influenced many political parties to this day.
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