 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.