no great delusions of their prospects of success, but instead sought to make their united effort at the polls a cause for building the organized strength of the working class. This alliance lasted until the summer of 1894, when the Populists severed themselves from the socialist movement by banning admission of Victor Berger and two dozen socialists as delegates to their state convention. Relations between the socialists and the Populists continued to sour over the next several years, with Berger declaring at the time of the November 1896 elections that socialists should support the Populists at the polls only until a national political party was established for the working class. Berger and his co-thinkers had not long to wait for such an organization. On January 2, 1897, trade union organizer and orator Eugene V. Debs announced in an open letter that he was severing himself from the increasingly conservative People's Party, owing to his conversion to Socialism. Berger had been instrumental in winning Debs to the socialist cause, visiting him with books in hand during the time of his incarceration in Woodstock Jail in Chicago in 1895, and he wrote to Debs exploring the formation of a new explicitly socialist political party. This would take shape later that same year as the Social Democracy of America, from which Berger and Debs would split in 1898 to form the electorally-oriented Social Democratic Party. Establishment On July 7, 1898, Eugene Debs made his first public speech on behalf of the Social Democracy at a meeting held at West Side Turner Hall in Milwaukee before a large and enthusiastic audience. Two nights later, Milwaukee saw the establishment of Branch 1 of the Social Democracy of America, with Debs again on hand to provide a keynote address to the session. Between 75 and 100 of the city's residents, including many German-American immigrants, turned out to help establish the new organization. From the earliest days, left wing opposition existed to the new organization in the form of the Socialist Labor Party, which sought to debate Debs and the Social Democracy on the nature of Socialism. One historian of this interlude has intimated that such a desire for debate was natural, characterizing party leader Daniel DeLeon of the SLP and Victor Berger of the Social Democracy as "the sages behind two opposing schools of socialism." Debs had planned to stay in Wisconsin helping to establish the