to perceive the more 'civilized' methods" that he had long recommended to the organization. Historian Rayback comments, "It was an ill-advised attack." The 1905 Preamble to the IWW Constitution had stated, Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class without affiliation with any political party. [emphasis added] At the 1908 convention, members of the IWW, led by the overalls brigade, first challenged DeLeon's credentials, declaring that he didn't actually work in the Industrial Union with which he was registered. Then they removed the Preamble language about "struggle [on] the political, as well as on the industrial field," which DeLeon had made a condition of his participation at the founding convention in 1905. The IWW was left with only the industrial struggle delineated in the Preamble. DeLeon and his SLP followers walked out of the convention, never to return. Cannon wrote that St. John, in his capacity as the leader of the early IWW, "judged socialist 'politics' and political parties by the two examples before his eyes — the Socialist Party bossed by Berger and Hillquit and the Socialist Labor Party of De Leon — and he didn’t like either of them." Labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky weighs in on the rejection of the SLP, DeLeon was among the first to attack the "new" IWW (on the grounds of becoming an anarchist organization) ... But DeLeon and others misunderstood what the convention had done ... [delegates] recognized ... that political debates between socialist factions wrecked union locals and undermined labor's morale. Hence, the Wobblies decided to keep political debate within the party, where it belonged, and to promote industrial action within the IWW, whereby workers could improve their lives. To Foner, the new orientation of the IWW was a mixed result because, [T]he program virtually guaranteed the isolation of the I.W.W. from vast numbers of American workers who knew from experience that political action was a necessary weapon in the class struggle, and that, indeed, the existence of many unions, threatened by injunctions and other court decisions, could only be preserved by labor's effectiveness at the ballot box ... [Yet] there were still fertile fields for organizing ... [and in the following years the IWW would]