18 Facts About Job Harriman

Job Harriman was an ordained minister who later became an agnostic and a socialist.

Job Harriman founded a socialist utopian community called Llano del Rio in California, later relocated to Louisiana.

Job Harriman lived on the family farm until he was 18.

Job Harriman 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.

Later, Job Harriman came into contact with the writings of Karl Marx, which turned his early Christian socialist inclinations towards Marxism.

Job Harriman married the sister of a college roommate, Mary Theodosia Gray.

Job Harriman left the church and took up the study of law, becoming a lawyer and establishing his own law firm.

Job 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.

Job Harriman was a gubernatorial candidate for California on the SLP ticket in 1898.

Job 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.

Job Harriman thereafter was affiliated with the East Coast-based variant of the Social Democratic Party of America, 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 the Social Democratic Party of America ticket along with presidential candidate Eugene V Debs.

Job Harriman twice ran for mayor of Los Angeles on the Socialist ticket during the 1910s.

Job Harriman was one of the lawyers for the McNamara Brothers, along with Clarence Darrow.

Job Harriman was unaware of their guilt, and thus was taken by surprise by a plea bargain negotiated by Darrow, which, unfortunately for Harriman, was announced after the primary but before the general election.

Job Harriman instead sought to establish a self-sufficient community upon socialist principles.

The group issued its own monthly magazine, The Western Comrade with Job Harriman acting as editor.

Job Harriman was survived by his wife, Mary Theodosia Gray, and his son Gray Chenoweth Harriman.