On January 2, 1905, the American Labor Union met in Chicago “to discuss ways and means of uniting the working people of America on correct revolutionary principles.”1 Eugene Debs was still in the long recuperation period that followed each of his three national campaign tours, but was involved in the discussions that led to the meeting, held soon after the 1904 campaign. Among those present from outside the ALU was William Trautmann, editor of the journal of the Socialist-aligned Brewery Workers. Trautmann had recently returned to the Socialist Labor Party after loudly opposing the SP trade union policy at the 1904 convention, publicly tearing up his membership card after it passed. Trautmann dominated the proceedings at the ALU conference, along with Thomas Hagerty, a lapsed Catholic priest in the orbit of the Western Federation of Miners. Also present were Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John as official representatives of the WFM, the elderly itinerant mineworkers organizer Mary “Mother” Jones, and Charles Sherman, leader of the United Metal Workers, a recent splinter group from the Machinists Union.
The ALU conference resolved to form a new “revolutionary industrial union” and called a founding convention for June 27, 1905, in Chicago. These events greatly alarmed the Socialist Party leadership. As Victor Berger frantically wrote to Hillquit:
There can be no question that it is the intention of Trautmann and his coterie to split the Trades Union movement and lead as big a part of it as they can into the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance and then split the Socialist movement and lead as many as they can into the Socialist Labor Party. I will go and see Debs personally next week and explain the situation to him. He must come out immediately and come out in a decided and unequivocal manner or else there will be war. If Debs stays with that crowd, it will land them some prestige for a little while, but I am also sure that would be the end of Eugene V. Debs. But for God’s sake, since we have now a party that seems to be the coming Socialist Party of America, let us not destroy it. Let us do everything in our power to hold it together and to finally evolve out of the stage of childhood and sectarianism.2
Though Berger, Hillquit, and other Socialist leaders were invited to attend this convention, only Debs obliged. Bill Haywood presided as chairman, proclaiming it “the continental congress of the working class” and insisting “it has been said that this convention was to form an organization rival to the AFL. This is a mistake. We are here for the purpose of forming a labor organization.”3 Yet initial expectations that several AFL locals were ready to bolt to the new organization failed to materialize. As Berger predicted, the program adopted by the convention was that of Daniel De Leon, a fully credentialed delegate, rather than that of Debs and his fellow critics of the SP majority trade union policy at International Socialist Review.4 Anointing themselves the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), their principles were stated with unmistakable directness and militancy in the preamble to their constitution:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. . . . The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.5
With De Leon’s Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance folding itself into the new IWW, the Socialist press went on a no-holds-barred attack. Especially galvanized was the new executive secretary of the SP, J. Mahlon Barnes, who had played a leading role in the fight against the SLP adoption of dual unionism. His comrade in that earlier struggle, Max Hayes, now had a prominent paper in the Cleveland Citizen. They were joined by the Forward in New York and, most outspoken, the Social Democratic Herald in Milwaukee, where the Socialists were already winning elections with the support of the AFL. Curiously, Victor Berger refrained from direct involvement in the controversy and left Milwaukee’s response to his lieutenant Frederic Heath. In contrast, Debs insisted that the IWW convention “was in many respects the most representative proletarian gathering I have ever seen,” adding “Berger and Heath probably never worked for wages a day in their lives, and yet they appear in leading trade union roles.” Heath, a skilled woodcarver of Mayflower descent, reminded Debs that he had been on the railroads only five years before taking trade union office, a far shorter wage-earning career than either Berger’s or his own.6
The romance of the IWW would prove remarkably resilient with the American left. When this romance first took hold with the new left in the 1960s, the critic Christopher Lasch denounced the “militancy, advocacy of violence and sabotage, and view of radicalism as a movement based on marginal people” that both these movements held in common.7 Odder still has been the tendency to view the IWW as predecessor of the Communist Party-backed corporatism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), though in part this can be attributed to the CIO mainstreaming the songs of the IWW for the postwar labor movement. But in fact, the IWW shared with the AFL the tendency to view the state as the principal enemy of labor. Indeed, the two industries in the remote West where the IWW established itself with any consistency, mining and timber, were perhaps most directly implicated in federal-corporate collusion.8
The doctrine of the IWW has been generally identified as “anarcho-syndicalist,” though it is problematic to compare it to the relatively more systematic anarcho-syndicalism of French labor radicalism, typified by Georges Sorel. In the American version was added a cult of the proletarian distinctly provincial to the American West. This ideology probably took its most coherent form in the IWW preamble, but often was little more than the glorification of marginality and violence.9 The man who for all practical purposes was the IWW—Bill Haywood, the Wild West outlaw who ended his days a political exile in the Soviet Union—was surely no less a man of major contradictions than Tom Watson. But most consequential has been the myth that the IWW was a prodigious “organizer of the unorganized.” As one of the earliest histories of American labor radicalism describes the actual modus operandi of the IWW,
The most spectacular successes centered in areas where the local leaders and workers, particularly immigrants, had, on the basis of casual experience during a disastrous strike, lost confidence in the existing unions and their officials. The IWW also had fair success in industrial centers where unions had not operated during the advent of the immigrant workers. The general course of affairs is aptly illustrated by events in the territories where the organization was most active. Previous to IWW participation in the famous textile strikes the United Textile Workers, an AFL organization, was active in the very centers with which the IWW name is connected, as Lawrence, Paterson, Passaic. But the union neither succeeded in firmly establishing itself nor in retaining the confidence of the immigrant workers, although they at first were loyal to it. Thereafter the workers in these textile towns remained practically unorganized until the great strikes led by the IWW.10
In other words, outside of its timber and mining strongholds, the IWW merely provided freelance leadership to chaotic strike situations where AFL unions had already begun the major agitation, leaving it to the established unions to pick up where it left off after the strike was either won or lost. And even this level of involvement was largely limited to the textile and garment industry.
At the same time that the specter of the IWW first began to haunt American Socialism, an equally important institution was emerging at its polar opposite in temperament. On September 12, 1905, the first gathering of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) was held in New York. The ISS was the brainchild of Upton Sinclair, who the following year published his expose of the Chicago meatpacking industry in the Appeal to Reason that would later take book form as The Jungle. Personally greeted by Theodore Roosevelt at the White House North Portico to help pass his Pure Food and Drug Act, Sinclair lamented of his intended polemic against industrial capitalism, “I aimed for America’s heart, and instead I hit it in the stomach.” Hoping to reach intellectuals, college students, and the affluent, Sinclair was a founding vice president of the ISS, joined by many others with only one foot in the Socialist movement such as J. G. Phelps Stokes, Robert Hunter, Clarence Darrow, and Charles Beard. The first president of the ISS was America’s leading popular novelist and a veteran of the Socialist Labor Party, Jack London.11
In a time and a movement defined by characters of many contradictions, there was no greater walking contradiction than Jack London. A hardscrabble working-class seafarer and proletarian purist who yielded to none in his posture of revolutionary militancy, as described by David Shannon: “London, who signed his letters ‘Yours for the Revolution,’ took with him on tour a Korean valet, who dressed him in as unproletarian costume as it was possible to devise. London addressed his audiences dressed in a white flannel shirt with a rolling collar that suggested a little boy’s sailor outfit, a white silk tie, a black cheviot suit, and patent-leather pumps.”12 The adventurous cosmopolitan who ever sympathized with the underdog, London believed devoutly in the doctrine of the Nietzschean Superman in its most frankly white supremacist iteration. Revered across the western world for his prophecy of totalitarianism in The Iron Heel, he ended his life on the eve of U.S. entry into the First World War in the camp of the most aggressive American militarists.
At the height of his fame and popularity, Jack London was also one to scandalize. Only a year after he married, he began a widely publicized affair with a Russian Jewish immigrant girl named Anna Strunsky, a leading light of the Socialist Party in his native San Francisco. Strunsky collaborated with London on a novel based on their love letters, The Kempton-Wace Letters.13 After the inevitable scandal, Strunsky married an equally unlikely wild man of the Socialist movement, if one of a distinctly different type. William English Walling was the scion of a prominent Midwestern banking family—his maternal grandfather, William Hayden English, was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1880. Walling was a fixture at the University Settlement of Lower Manhattan, where well-to-do recent college graduates provided social, medical, and educational services to the immigrant poor.
At University Settlement, the so-called millionaire socialists, a major influence on the Socialist Party’s formative years, were brought together largely by Walling’s networking.14 The most important of these was James Graham Phelps Stokes, son of Yale University rector Anson Phelps Stokes and heir to a branch of the Phelps Dodge fortune; he was moved to dedicate his life to social uplift after his experiences as an ambulance assistant in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan while at Columbia University Medical School.15 The leader of the University Settlement staff was Stokes’s brother-in-law, Robert Hunter, the son of a prosperous carriage manufacturer from the beloved Terre Haute of Eugene Debs. In 1904, Hunter’s book Poverty rivaled in impact the more famous How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis.16
After serving on the New York slate of electors for Tom Watson in 1904, Stokes and Hunter entered the orbit of William Randolph Hearst, the dominant figure in the Municipal Ownership League and its candidate for mayor of New York in 1905. Hearst was now the undisputed leader of the movement for a new national party among non-Socialist progressives. Though they echoed the immediate demands of the Socialists and enjoyed the support of most AFL unions, Hearst and his colleagues campaigned as crude demagogues. Hearst’s candidate for Manhattan district attorney, Clarence Shearn, based his entire campaign on his promise to imprison Tammany Hall boss Charles Murphy—later the basis of one of the most famous scenes in the history of American cinema when Orson Welles campaigned for governor of New York in Citizen Kane.17
J. G. Phelps Stokes accepted the nomination of the Municipal Ownership League for President of the Board of Aldermen. Running against the popular Tammany mayor George McClellan (son of the Civil War general), Hearst fell just under four thousand votes short of election, with Stokes running only a few thousand votes behind. Hearst challenged the result on the highly plausible grounds of theft by Tammany Hall, with the recount only ending with a final decision by the New York Supreme Court on June 30, 1908.18 Receiving 11,711 votes, or just under 2 percent, was Socialist Algernon Lee. Hearst was a deeply flawed candidate, but the Socialists polling three times the margin of victory nevertheless illustrated the dilemma of dealing with potential allies outside the party.
Still, it appeared that the opportunity belonged principally to the Socialists. For years, most of the leading Hearst backers belonged to an exclusive dinner and discussion club known as the “X Club,” in which Morris Hillquit had long been a frequent participant. By 1905, the mood of the X Club had moved so swiftly in the direction of socialism that even some of the more conservative members of the club were disheartened to see Stokes still identifying with Hearst.19 Stokes increasingly took on a leadership role in this clique of socially conscious members of his class. Early in 1905 he held a large gathering at his father’s estate in Noroton, Connecticut, billed as a forum for free-wheeling debate and discussion of social problems. Morris Hillquit and Tom Watson were both present, along with Edward F. Dunne, the victorious Municipal Ownership League candidate for mayor of Chicago.20
By the time a second conference at Noroton was called for the weekend of March 2–4, 1906, both Stokes and Robert Hunter were on the verge of joining the Socialist Party. Stokes had received much press attention the previous year for his unlikely marriage to Rose Pastor, a young reporter for the Jewish immigrant press. As at the previous gathering, those who attended were assured that the discussions would remain private, but this time the conference was clearly if tacitly an exercise in building the Socialist Party, with the hope of persuading others of wealth and influence to follow Stokes and Hunter’s lead. This was evident in the invitations sent to leading progressive officeholders such as Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, Joseph Folk of Missouri, and the reform mayors of Cleveland and Toledo, Tom Johnson and Brand Whitlock, respectively, who all, along with Tom Watson, sent their regrets.21 Hillquit, Victor Berger, John Spargo, and Gaylord Wilshire officially represented the Socialist Party. Other attendees included the Socialist-sympathizing Hearst lieutenant Arthur Brisbane, editors Hamilton Holt and Leonard Abbott, Brooklyn labor leader Alfred Boulton, and the humorist Finley Peter Dunne, who even wrote a sketch of his beloved “Mr. Dooley” character commenting on the meeting.22
The second Noroton conference was destined to attract considerable press comment. Though abroad at the time, William English Walling made his mark on the conference through his brother Willoughby in Chicago, who dispatched to Noroton a most promising convert—Joseph Medill Patterson, of the family that owned the Chicago Tribune. Patterson had created a sensation when he resigned in disillusionment from the initially promising city administration of Edward F. Dunne in 1905 and announced that he was now a Socialist. The publicity followed him to New York, where he disclosed the happenings at the Stokes estate to curious reporters, leading to sensational headlines about “millionaire socialists” and “national life savers.”23 Somewhat more thoughtful was a New York Times editorial commending such young men of social standing for “flying the flag of the public weal,” but cynically wrote off their idealism as inevitably doomed.24 Morris Hillquit, continuing in his memoirs to regard Noroton as “of almost historic importance for the Socialist movement,” recalled the moment in history it epitomized thus:
“Muckraking,” as Theodore Roosevelt contemptuously baptized the literature of expose, was the fashion. But the vogue of the purely critical and negative movement could not endure forever. Thoroughly convinced of the evils, many thoughtful persons began to look for the remedy, and there was Socialism offering a ready and constructive program of radical change. It was inevitable that the critics and doubters should turn with interest to the new creed. Socialism became a favorite topic of discussion among New York’s intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia were always strong on discussion.25
Yet the conference fell short of its aim of converting a critical mass of wealthy reformers and newspapermen to the Socialist Party. The performance of Victor Berger was no doubt partly responsible. When actually in the presence of affluent supporters of Hearst and the Municipal Ownership League, the alleged Milwaukee opportunist tore into them with all the militant fury of his enemies to the left. Informally over drinks late in the evening, Berger loudly upbraided his hosts: “They are your laws. We abhor them. We obey them because you have the power to force them on us. But wait until we have the power. Then we shall make our own laws and, by God, we will make you obey them!” As Hillquit recalled what followed:
An embarrassed silence fell on the gathering. The discussion came to an abrupt end. The next morning one of the conferees cornered me. “What do you think of Berger’s violent speech?” he asked anxiously, “Surely you do not share his views.” “Well,” I replied in my mellowest tones and suavest manner, “we Socialists believe in democracy. Under any democratic system the majority of the people, of course, have the right to make laws and the power to enforce them. The minority must submit, but may continue to advocate a complete change of the law. When it has succeeded in persuading a sufficient number of people, the minority becomes the majority, empowered to make new laws, to which the new minority must bow with equal grace. Is not that your conception of democracy?” “Oh, yes” said my relieved interlocutor. “Nobody can quarrel with that theory, but Berger spoke like an anarchist rather than a Socialist.”26
Berger’s outburst at Noroton can be seen as a metaphor for the larger drama that was about to play out in the national spotlight. In late December 1905, Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg was killed by a bomb blast outside his home. Elected as a Democratic-Populist fusion candidate, in 1899 Steunenberg had called in federal troops to suppress a strike in Coeur d’Alene and was thereafter regarded as a sworn enemy and traitor by the Western Federation of Miners. When an Idaho miner named Harry Orchard, later revealed to have been a plant of the Pinkerton Agency, was apprehended, he told the police in exchange for leniency that he was hired to murder Steunenberg by the WFM leadership. In February 1906, Bill Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone, were arrested in Denver and spirited to Idaho without proper extradition proceedings.
Both the AFL and the Socialist Party put aside their differences with the IWW and rallied to the defense of the three men, with Debs rushing into an unparalleled emotional frenzy. In what may be the most famous statement of his first decade as leader of the American Socialist movement, Debs took to the Appeal to Reason on March 10, 1906, comparing the trial of Haywood to that of his long-standing hero, John Brown, as the inevitable beginning of a great cataclysm. With the headline “Arouse, Ye Slaves,” Debs thundered,
Nearly twenty years ago the capitalist tyrants put some innocent men to death for standing up for labor. They are now going to try it again. Let them dare! There have been twenty years of revolutionary education, agitation, and organization since the Haymarket tragedy, and if an attempt is made to repeat it, there will be a revolution and I will do all in my power to precipitate it. . . . From the farms, the factories and stores will pour the workers to meet the red-handed destroyers of freedom, the murderers of innocent men and the arch-enemies of the people. . . . If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.27
The trial was as big a media sensation as any criminal trial of that generation, with outsized personalities to match—not only the defendants but also Clarence Darrow as their attorney and future U.S. senator William Borah as prosecutor. The Socialist Labor Party, then at the peak of its influence in the IWW, would long claim to have taken the lead in rallying popular support for the defendants, though the SP press had a capable correspondent on the ground in Ida Crouch Hazlett, a dominant personality in the rapidly growing Montana party who wrote regular dispatches for the Social Democratic Herald.28 So radicalized was the Socialist Party by the trial that not only did it make Haywood its nominee for governor of Colorado in 1906 but his candidacy even enjoyed the support of the SLP.29 The trial also radicalized the new millionaire converts to the party, many of whom were deeply involved in hosting Maxim Gorky in New York following the 1905 revolution. When Gaylord Wilshire issued a telegram in Gorky’s name supporting Haywood, much of the press began publishing the Russian Embassy propaganda against the heretofore sympathetic advocate for democracy.30
Clearly referring to Debs, President Roosevelt gave a speech denouncing “the so-called labor leader who clamorously strives to excite a foul class feeling on behalf of some other labor leader who is implicated in murder.”31 Roosevelt was forced to qualify many of his other public remarks about the trial when he was called out for presuming the guilt of the defendants, but he refused to back down against Debs, referring to the Appeal to Reason as “a vituperative organ of pornography, anarchy, and bloodshed.”32 But Debs did not benefit from any sympathy in return. When Haywood and his co-defendants were acquitted in August 1907, the fanatical excess of “Arouse, Ye Slaves” was made to look ridiculous by Haywood’s profuse expressions of gratitude, which were even extended to the prosecutor, sheriff, and deputies. Thus was the face of the Socialist Party discredited to many ordinary Americans at the very time the Socialists were getting a hearing as an alternative to the major parties—a point never considered by historians, including biographers of Debs.33
Though Debs never openly acknowledged the consequences of his emotional recklessness, it is nevertheless clear that the events of 1905 and 1906 humbled him and put an abrupt, if ambiguous, end to his drift into what was by now the full-fledged revolutionary “left wing” of American Socialism. By the time the IWW had its second convention in 1906, neither Debs nor his closest SP ally on trade union policy, Algie Simons, was in attendance. Daniel De Leon dominated the convention, so that not only was any notion of electoral support for the SP brushed aside but so was any effort to build stable industrial unions, no less important a principle for Debs than the ballot box.34 Though Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John remained with the IWW, the Western Federation of Miners bolted from the erstwhile “one big union” in 1906 and by 1909 affiliated with the AFL as the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. But Debs continued to harbor a personal grudge against much of the SP leadership, particularly Victor Berger, for having been proven right about the IWW’s aims.
Morris Hillquit waged his first of several congressional campaigns from Manhattan in 1906. Though there were high hopes in New York, they were in large measure dashed by William Randolph Hearst, who buried the hatchet with Tammany Hall and marshaled his forces behind their man on the Lower East Side, Henry Goldfogle.35 Hearst himself ran as a fusion candidate for governor with the Democratic endorsement in 1906, losing narrowly to Charles Evans Hughes, future Republican presidential nominee and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Curiously, there is evidence that Hearst initially offered his party’s gubernatorial nomination to J. G. Phelps Stokes.36
The New York Times suggested less than three weeks before the election that Hillquit had a chance of winning, noting buoyant enthusiasm for the Socialists on the Lower East Side, partly fostered by stump speeches given by Maxim Gorky. With Daniel De Leon himself running as the SLP candidate against his old nemesis, and a candidate of Hearst’s Independence League on the ballot despite the newspaper mogul’s strong backing of Goldfogle, Hillquit polled 26 percent of the vote.37 In part, his campaign suffered from making a middle-class municipal reform appeal in the most proletarian urban district in the country. Typical campaign literature came under such headings as “The Tenement Evil,” “The Sanitary System,” “Vice,” “Municipal Government,” and “Public Franchises,” and the National Executive Committee went as far as to censure Hillquit for stressing his business and financial success as qualifications for office.38
As the SP became an increasingly respectable force in New York politics, the city also saw the establishment of one of American Socialism’s great institutional pillars, the Rand School of Social Science. George Herron, leader of the Christian Socialist Fellowship, had earlier left his first wife to marry the youngest daughter and namesake of Carrie Rand, who had endowed his former chair in Applied Christianity at Iowa College. When the elder Mrs. Rand died in 1905, a trust was willed to establish the Rand School to serve the Socialist Party. With incorporation papers filed under the name American Socialist Society, the board comprised George and Carrie Herron, Morris Hillquit, Algernon Lee, Job Harriman, Ben Hanford, William Mailly, Leonard Abbott, and Henry Slobodin.39 Herron’s generosity also led to the launch of the New York party’s English daily, the New York Call, with Algernon Lee as its first editor.40
William J. Ghent, a founder of the prestigious X Club, was the first president of the Rand School, to be succeeded by the increasingly ubiquitous Lee.41 Bertha Mailly, wife of the former executive secretary, was the school’s administrative secretary through the 1950s.42 In his memoirs, Hillquit recalled the Rand School’s early vision:
From the outset, the founders of the school agreed on a broad curriculum to include not only the theory of Socialism but a liberal range of general cultural subjects. We expected to recruit the body of students from the ranks of the workers, many of whom had been deprived of the advantages of even an elementary education, and we realized that they could not be trained for effective work in the Socialist and labor movement by a mere study of dry economics. The program of the first year of instruction included, besides the history, philosophy, economics, and methods of Socialism and trade unionism, such subjects as Social Evolution, the Arts, Composition and Rhetoric. Later the curriculum was extended to all conceivable subjects of general information beginning with elementary classes in English for foreigners and running through the whole gamut of history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, popular science, literature, music, the drama and foreign languages besides the more practical and direct subjects of instruction for which the school was primarily organized.43
The Rand School was very much a legacy of wealthy parlor socialists and their approach to social problems, which, however conscientious, remained in great measure one of noblesse oblige. Illustrative of their impact on the Socialist Party outlook was John Spargo, who largely designed the Rand School’s course of study, which would remain long after his ignominious departure from the SP. When Graham Stokes and his friends first began to drift into the party, Spargo joined those who bitterly mocked them as “young ladies with weak eyes and young gentlemen with weak chins flittering confused among heterogeneous foreigners, offering cocoa and sponge cake as a sort of dessert to the factory system.”44 But within a few years, Spargo joined Stokes, Robert Hunter, and William English Walling at the new Prospect House settlement in the Bronx.
In the early months of 1907, Eugene Debs arrived in Girard, Kansas, to take an active part in editing the Appeal to Reason, where his articles had long been a fixture, and would spend a significant part of each year there for the next five years. For Debs, Girard was essentially an escape—both from the humiliation of his disastrous affair with the IWW and from his troubled marriage.45 As the biographer of Julius Wayland put it, “The Appeal and Debs were made for each other. They shared a utopian outlook and a sentimental vision of the coming of socialism.”46 Debs’s retreat into the Appeal took place at the very time Wayland’s influence was starting to wane in the party, particularly in his own region, the old Populist heartland. Wayland remained aloof from the labor movement, not least from the coal miners of his own part of Kansas. Still, this did not prevent the surrounding Crawford County from becoming as towering a Socialist stronghold as any that ever was.47
For a newer and more dynamic Socialist movement was emerging in the “Old Southwest,” as the states of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri were known. This Socialist prairie fire was ignited by the desire of the mostly Midwestern national leadership to somehow transplant the “Milwaukee model” to the promising region—Victor Berger had, after all, come out of the Populist Party and saw no reason he should not be able to repeat his past success in winning over so many of the region’s radicals to the Socialist banner. Eager to marginalize Wayland, Berger first dispatched Walter Thomas Mills, a scion of prominent Ohio Quakers who was especially despised by the ostensible left wing.48 At Fort Scott, Kansas, Mills established a “People’s College” to deliver correspondence courses in the Rand School style across the rural West, serving as an epicenter for the regional movement.
Even the Appeal to Reason itself was increasingly overshadowed by a new publication. The National Rip-Saw was started in 1904 by the somewhat eccentric “Colonel” Dick Maple, a Populist convert to Socialism and unreconstructed Southern partisan in St. Louis, and under new management this paper took its place in the top tier of Socialist press.49 Its dominant personalities were Populist veteran Kate Richards O’Hare and her husband Frank. A native of the Kansas plains who moved to Kansas City as a girl with her father, Kate Richards became a working machinist and trade unionist and converted to Socialism after a personal encounter with Mother Jones. She met her husband in 1905 through Walter Thomas Mills, and they resided for a few years in Oklahoma Territory before returning to Kansas City in 1909 to help run the National Rip-Saw.50 The O’Hares virtually remade the entire Socialist speaker’s bureau, particularly when they revived the “encampments” from Populist days.
But the most important figure to arrive in the Old Southwest was Oscar Ameringer. Born in 1870 in the Bavarian village of Achstetten, he came to the United States as a teenager and aspiring artist. After enjoying some success as a humorist with appearances in Puck magazine, Ameringer returned for the better part of the 1890s to Munich. He attributed much of his radicalism to the provincial virtues of Bavaria, close in spirit to neighboring Switzerland, which responded to the 1848 revolutions by establishing the most successful model of direct democracy in the history of mankind.51 With Munich having thus emerged as a stronghold of the German Social Democratic Party, Ameringer was ripe for political radicalization when, on returning to the United States, he was employed as a member of the brass band that played at William McKinley’s Canton, Ohio, front porch in the campaign of 1896. This experience taught him the rule of “never voting for a presidential candidate who had the slightest chance of election.”52
An organizer for the Brewery Workers when he joined the Socialist Party, in 1905 Ameringer was dispatched to New Orleans to lead a strike of the city’s interracial dockworkers, who were represented by the Socialist Brewery Workers while the AFL increasingly acquiesced to prevailing racism.53 From there he traveled to Oklahoma, where another young marvel of the Milwaukee organization, Otto Branstetter, was serving as organizing secretary for the newly admitted state that held such promise for the Socialists. In addition to its place at the very center of the old Populist heartland, Oklahoma was home to hundreds of former members of the American Railway Union who, blacklisted after the defeat of the Pullman Strike, sought a new beginning in the last part of the frontier opened to settlement.
As Daniel Bell writes in one of the earliest histories of American Socialism, “Oklahoma may not have had a working class, but it did have, in the most literal sense of the word, a proletariat—a dispossessed propertyless group with little visible means of support.”54 Or as Ameringer put it far more vividly:
These people were not wops and bohunks. They were not Jewish needle slaves, escaped from the ghettos and pogroms of Czarist Russia and Poland. Their forefathers had been starved, driven, shipped and sold over here long before and shortly after the Revolution. They were more American than the population of any present-day New England town. They were Washington’s ragged, starving, shivering army at Valley Forge, pushed ever westward by beneficiaries of the Revolution. They had followed on the heels of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, like the stragglers of routed armies. Always hoping that somewhere in their America there would be a piece of dirt for them. Now they had settled in the hills of the Indian Territory, tenants of white land hogs, Indians, squaw men and Afro-American freedmen. A quarter of a century later, burned out and tractored out, they pulled up stakes for the last time until they landed in ramshackle trucks and tin lizzies in California, as ragged, hungry, and shivering as their ancestors at Valley Forge.55
In 1906, a group of Socialist Party supporters had met in Shawnee, Oklahoma, to draw up a list of radical demands for inclusion in the new state’s constitution, effectively calling for the implementation of the national platform’s immediate demands. The Shawnee demands soon found an able advocate in William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, elected Speaker of the Constitutional Convention after no fewer than seventy-three of the Democratic delegate candidates pledged themselves to the Shawnee demands. But Murray was responsible for scuttling the most radical demands—for the initiative and referendum and for women’s suffrage. For the next several years Murray would be the frustrated leader of the progressive faction in the dominant Democratic Party of Oklahoma, presenting for the first time the dilemma of a potential Socialist ally who, unlike Watson and Hearst earlier, remained in one of the major parties.56
The movement in the Old Southwest was a legacy of Populism to be sure, but by this time most activists had gotten their political training in the trade union movement rather than from agrarian campaigns, and even a rapidly growing share of the rank and file was too young to have been meaningfully involved in the Populist Party. The demise of the Southern Mercury in 1907 marked the final passing of any serious rival for radical agrarian support.57 Its resistance to backing the Socialists reflected a sharp divide dating back to the 1901 Unity Convention, with doctrinaire Marxists insisting that farmers were not wage workers and therefore no appeal should be made to them. In response, Morris Hillquit devised the position that while the interests of farmers and wage workers were not identical, farmers were still an exploited class though “the agencies and mode of exploitation are different.”58 But in practice such finer points of doctrine were becoming superfluous. Oscar Ameringer arrived in Oklahoma convinced that as good Marxists the SP must not become a party of farmers. But after his first organizing campaign during which he stayed in dilapidated shanties and subsisted on “sow belly, corn pone, and molasses until my stomach had gone on the warpath,” he declared upon returning to Oklahoma City that “of my notion that all American farmers were capitalists and exploiters I had long since been permanently cured.”59
Ameringer’s best known and loved work was his Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam, an irreverent history of the United States that would be translated into sixteen languages and earn him the moniker of “the Mark Twain of American Socialism.” Showing his impressive knowledge of history, it begins with a spellbinding discussion of the various waves of indentured servants who washed up on to the colonies and the various European wars that prompted their arrivals. Indeed, in brevity and humor as well as radical substance, this short work puts to shame the “people’s history” franchise of a later generation:
Kings used to claim that they received their power from God himself. The framers of the Constitution couldn’t very readily claim the same thing for this document, especially while the writings of Paine and Jefferson still lingered in the minds of the masses. But in the course of time their successors succeeded in canonizing the Constitution. What was originally a scheme to deprive the people of self-government was praised to the sky until the dense masses accepted the constitutional straight-jacket as the ermine of popular sovereignty. . . . Now, it is a well proven historical fact, that the people who own the wealth of a nation soon will own its government too. The southern slave owners had run the government in their own interests. They had opposed railroad building, so essential to capitalist expansion. They had discouraged manufacture, fearing that a great factory population would furnish a market for the product of the northern farmers, thus raising the cost of feeding their own slaves. But over and above all, the south had bitterly opposed the protective tariff demanded by the northern capitalists. The tariff, more than any other factor, was responsible for the war between north and south. Of course Mary’s little history says it was the desire of the good northern people to free the slaves from the oppression of the bad southern people that brought on this Civil War. But Mary’s school history doesn’t explain why abolitionists were persecuted in the north as much as in the south. . . . On the contrary, the war came in spite of the most earnest pledges of the government of Lincoln that slavery would not be disturbed.60
The most distinguishing feature of the Socialist movement in the Old Southwest was the “encampment” method of organizing, educating, and rallying the faithful. An inheritance from Populism, the first Socialist encampment meeting was held in 1904 in Grand Saline, Texas, where one would be held annually until 1917. The National Rip-Saw fostered a far-flung network of encampments tied together by the annual speaking tour it sponsored—typically consisting of Debs, Mother Jones, Ameringer, and Kate Richards O’Hare—that visited all of them. Other lecturers included Walter Thomas Mills, Caroline Lowe, and “Red Tom” Hickey, who published his own popular newspaper, Rebel, out of Halletsville, Texas. Combining evangelistic oratory with instruction in history and economics of the type on offer at the Rand School and People’s College, the carnival atmosphere of the encampments was complemented by an inspirational repertoire of old Populist and newer Socialist songs, usually followed by a classical concert performed by the brass quartet of Oscar Ameringer and his sons.61
Gene Debs, naturally, was the highly sought-after star attraction of the encampments, the “fountain of enthusiasm.” In her final years Kate Richards O’Hare described the response to Debs’s appearances:
Gene was at his best in these camp meetings. We often traveled together to cover them and as I watched him and the response of the crowds, Oklahoma faded and we were Jesus of Nazareth and Martha, burdened with many cares, speaking to the harried Jews in Palestine. I don’t think anyone could have known Gene well, lived and worked with him, watched his power over the masses and not known the Carpenter of Nazareth intimately.62
Such worship of Debs was by no means limited to the Old Southwest, but it poignantly reflected that time and place. The dirt farmers of the old Populist heartland had been left behind by an increasingly institutionalized Protestant denominationalism as well as by industrial capitalism. The agrarian ideal of Jefferson was central to their political and social identity, and so too was the radically nonconformist Christianity of Jefferson, of which Debs was in many ways the last major representative. They remained devoutly Christian in their beliefs to be sure, many coming out of such marginal, largely rural sects as the Campbellites and Pentecostalists. Typical of the marriage of their politics and religion were the overtly Christian themes in the Rebel, which proclaimed, “Capitalism has been weighted in the balance and found wanting. As sure as God reigns, Babylon is falling to rise no more. The international socialist commonwealth—God’s Kingdom—shall rise on the wreck and ruin of the world’s present ruling powers.”63
By 1910, Socialist encampments were a larger attraction in much of the Southwest than religious revival meetings.64 In Europe, the success of the Socialists in the Old Southwest so impressed the leaders of the Second International that the French Socialist leader Jean Jaures even asked Kate Richards O’Hare to come to France to advise his party on how to make an agrarian appeal, oblivious to why tent revival meetings were ill suited to the Vendee.65 O’Hare would serve briefly in the following decade as a delegate to the International. The peculiar condition that generated O’Hare’s popularity with the continental Socialist leaders was the prominence in international involvement of those who came to the Socialist Party out of motivations squarely in the American scene and not because of previous attachments to the international movement. George Herron, after helping found the Rand School, spent most of his time in Europe working for the Socialist International and was soon living as a full-fledged expatriate in Italy.66 Morris Hillquit, in keeping with his status as unofficial figurehead of the American party, had long been regarded as its leader in the International, but he was now encouraging Robert Hunter to take on that role.
The official delegation to the 1907 Stuttgart Conference of the International consisted of Hillquit, Hunter, and Algie Simons.67 Ahead of Stuttgart and in keeping with the aspirations of the Noroton conference, Hunter excitedly wrote to Hillquit hoping that a delegate from the AFL might be seated to help bring about a reconciliation with the SP.68 Hunter was increasingly convinced of the urgent need for such a rapprochement if the party was to have a future, but the leaders of the International had other ideas. At an ocean’s distance, most European Socialists believed that reconciliation with the Socialist Labor Party was the real imperative, encouraged in this delusion by the two parties largely joining hands in the defense of Bill Haywood. The SLP continued to be represented in the International, and the Stuttgart conference passed a resolution urging the formation of a unity committee between the two parties. The recommendation was overwhelmingly rejected at the SP national convention the following year.69
By the time of the Stuttgart Conference, whatever prospects the SLP still had were coming undone in the implosion of the IWW that followed the departure of the Western Federation of Miners. In anticipation of his attendance at Stuttgart, Hillquit received a letter from the disillusioned first president of the IWW, Charles Sherman, describing how the SLP captured the executive board through violence, intimidation, and recourse to the capitalist courts—the same methods that the “so-called ‘revolutionists’ ” employed against the founders of the Socialist Party a decade earlier.70 The following year, Daniel De Leon and William Trautmann set up a rival “Detroit IWW” that would be renamed the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance several years later before finally giving up the ghost in the 1920s. The final remnant of SLP trade union support, mostly Irish Boot and Shoe Workers and Italian Granite Workers in New England, remained in the IWW after the departure of the SLP.
Yet the implosion of the IWW was occurring just as the first manifestations of an actual revolutionary left wing were emerging in the Socialist Party, which would hound it at the margins for the next decade before ultimately providing the foundation of the American Communist movement. The watershed event took place in Chicago at the offices of the International Socialist Review (ISR). Algie Simons was disenchanted with the IWW along with Debs and resigned from ISR at the beginning of 1908. The differences between Simons and Charles Kerr were as much tactical as political, with Kerr determined to give the magazine a less academic and more popular tone. Kerr was also moving sharply to the left, but had his own misgivings about the IWW and urged the supporters of revolutionary industrial unionism to attempt to win converts within the AFL.71
The IWW remained a potent force out west, but even in its natural strongholds there was significant pushback from non-revolutionary Socialists. In Montana, the powerful Butte local, based among the radicalized mine workers, clashed with the major power in the state party, the editors of the Montana News, Ida Crouch Hazlett and James Graham. The Butte organization attempted to bring them down by accusing them of embezzlement based on a $550 deficit at the paper, but Hazlett and Graham were supported by the locals in Missoula and Laurel. Even in notoriously crimson Washington State, where Herman Titus was one of the few genuine revolutionary ideologues in the earliest years of the SP, Walter Thomas Mills, after bringing Kansas to heel, started a successful paper to squelch his influence, the Saturday Evening Tribune.72
The movement in the Old Southwest never fit neatly into the factional categories of the national party. The Oklahoma party, for all its fire-eating populism, was at all times under the steady guidance of the orthodox German-born Social Democrats Otto Branstetter and Oscar Ameringer. The Texas party, by contrast, had deep roots in the most radical wing of the Populist movement and continued to yield to none as radicals within the Socialist movement, typified by the frankly apocalyptic Christian Socialist millennialism of Tom Hickey’s Rebel.73 Even the IWW gained a foothold in the Southwest through Covington Hall, a poet of Mississippi plantation-owning pedigree who was forced to resign as an adjutant general of the United Sons of Confederate Veterans for his Socialist affiliations. Hall organized the timber workers of northern Louisiana for the IWW during a period of prolonged strikes that peaked in 1908, leaving behind the leading Socialist stronghold in Dixie and indeed one in the top tier nationwide.74
But the most notable first stirrings of the Socialist Party’s historic left wing took place in New York, home to the brilliant lawyer and Marxist exegete Louis Boudin, whose 1907 book The Theoretical System of Karl Marx was recognized internationally as the most important defense of orthodox Marxism against social democratic reformism. Born in Russia and arriving in New York as a teenager in 1891, Boudin entered the fray of internal SP politics in great measure out of his intense personal dislike for Morris Hillquit, the exemplar of the German Social Democratic model.75 The other leader of the New York left wing at this time was Henry Slobodin. Chronically an odd man out in the Socialist movement, Slobodin was a rare veteran of the 1890s struggle against De Leon to identify with the SP left and later, even rarer, a New York Jew in the pro-war Social Democratic League during the First World War. As early as 1908, a group of discontented radicals in the Cloakmakers Union announced the formation of a “Proletarian Society,” an alternative to the Rand School “to create internal propaganda for the preservation of the true principles of socialism . . . and to encourage facility of expression on the part of the comrades of the rank and file.”76 Though the Society never appears to have come into existence, there would soon be a following for its platform in the garment unions.
The approaching 1908 election was to a great extent defined by the repercussions of the emergence of the IWW. Although sympathy for the IWW had all but collapsed in the party, views on the AFL and any moves it made toward independent political action were still confused and contradictory. The AFL itself was in crisis as it attempted to chart its future political course. As it increasingly became settled law (ultimately affirmed by the Supreme Court) that strikes and boycotts were criminal under antitrust laws, the AFL hoped it could flex its political muscle by working for the defeat of a select group of anti-labor congressmen, a campaign that failed miserably. But while the Socialist delegates urged independent political action when the debate over this campaign was held at the 1906 AFL convention, they did not support a similar resolution the following year when it stood a better chance of passing at a moment of desperation.77 Even more fickle was the titular leader of the Socialist bloc, Max Hayes, who spoke contemptuously of the Union Labor Party in San Francisco during the 1906 debate, but the following year made an unusually bold call for a Labor Party:
Let us sink our differences of the past, as we did in fact at the Norfolk convention and get together in a national conference, as is the desire of the rank and file everywhere, and proceed along the lines of the British socialists and trade unionists, and include the farmers, if they will come, and organize a political combination.78
When the 1908 Socialist Party convention opened in Chicago on May 10, it appeared there might be a real contest for the presidential nomination. Eugene Debs had not declared his intentions, and there remained considerable ill will following his misadventure with the IWW. Morris Hillquit hoped to present a consensus candidate in James F. Carey, one of the party’s brightest stars at the time of its founding. The Milwaukee machine put forward Carl Thompson, the leading Socialist clergyman of that city, as a favorite son candidate. Algie Simons also threw his hat into the ring, and a group of die-hard left-wingers hoped to draft Bill Haywood into the race.79 But when Ben Hanford read a message from Debs to the convention, declaring that he was “willing to do anything the party commanded of him,” the possibility that anyone else would be nominated vanished.80 Carey even withdrew his name from consideration, and the first ballot was anything but close: Debs with 159 votes, Carey with 16, Thompson with 14, and Simons with 9.81 Ben Hanford was once again nominated for vice president.
The immediate demands of the 1908 platform, more comprehensive than the 1904 platform but still concise, established the general program that would remain largely unchanged through the end of the 1930s. These demands included the collective ownership of “all social means of transportation and communication” and “all industries organized on a national scale and in which competition has virtually ceased to exist”; the abolition of “official charity and substituting in its place compulsory insurance against unemployment, illness, accidents, invalidism, old age, and death”; and “unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women,” with the solemn pledge “to engage in an active campaign in that direction.” But perhaps most noteworthy was the radical constitutional program of the Socialist Party, concretely argued for the first time. In addition to the initiative, referendum, and recall at all levels of government, the Socialists called for the abolition of the U.S. Senate and of “the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of legislation enacted by Congress,” the ability to amend the Constitution by majority vote, the election of all judges, and the abolition of their injunction power.82
Debs accepted the Socialist presidential nomination for the third time on May 23 with an extemporaneous two-hour speech in the town square of Girard, Kansas, inviting his listeners to join him “on a march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known.” The Appeal to Reason published the entire speech and was able to circulate it to an audience of four million, a quarter of the entire voting population.83 The impeccably Middle American and righteously reactionary strain of Debs’s indictment of industrial capitalism was on full display:
I have seen children ten years of age in New York City who had never seen a live chicken. The babes there don’t know what it is to put their tiny feet on a blade of grass. It is the most densely populated spot on earth. You have seen your beehive—just fancy a human beehive of which yours is the miniature and you have the industrial hive under capitalism. If you have not seen this condition you are excusable for not being a Socialist. Come to New York, Chicago, San Francisco with me, remain with me just 24 hours, and then look into my face as I shall look into yours when I ask “What about Socialism now?” These children by hundreds of thousands are born in sub-cellars, where a whole grown family is crowded together in one room, where modesty between the sexes is absolutely impossible. They are surrounded by filth and vermin. From their birth they see nothing but immorality and vice and crime. They are tainted in the cradle. They are inoculated by their surroundings and they are doomed from the beginning. This system takes their lives just as certainly as if a dagger were thrust into their quivering little hearts, and let me say to you that it were better for many thousands of them if they had never seen the light.84
The most emblematic token of the 1908 campaign was the volume published by the Charles Kerr Company of Debs’s writings and speeches going back to the days of the American Railway Union, which included several testimonials by leading Socialists. John Spargo’s contribution was typical of the sentimental and worshipful tone:
Our love for Eugene V. Debs, the greatest lover of us all, entered into our choice of him as the bearer of our standard, the scarlet banner of the sacred cause, the symbol of a world-brotherhood to be. But it was not our love alone. Into our choice there entered another element than our love for Debs, namely, our consciousness that he was splendidly equipped for the task. Nature and Destiny seemed to have joined to dower Debs with the qualities of mind and soul needed for the task we gave him.85
Robert Hunter’s reminiscence of old Terre Haute was nothing short of maudlin:
I remember as a little lad of eight or nine years, walking with my father in one of the streets of Terre Haute. A tall, slender, handsome young man stopped to talk with my father. At first I was fascinated by the way they grasped hands and looked into each other’s eyes. I was then impressed by their animated conversation. But they talked on and on until it seemed to me hours at length, and finally I began to tug at my father’s coat-tails, urging him to come on. After a while they parted, and my father said to me very seriously, “You should not interrupt me, Robert, when I am talking. That young man is one of the greatest souls of this earth, and you should have listened to what he said.” . . . These and countless other stories are told by his fellow citizens. Many of them do not understand Gene. His views and his work they cannot comprehend, but every man, woman and child in that town loves him with a devotion quite extraordinary. They say that a prophet is without honor in his own country, but in Terre Haute you will find that however much they misunderstand the work that Gene is doing there is not one who does not honor and love him.86
But the most memorable outburst of adulation in the 1908 campaign came during Debs’s weeklong campaign visit to New York in early June. At Carnegie Hall, a woman in the audience suddenly got up and shouted, “There he is! There he is! Gene Debs, not the missing link but the living link between God and man, the God consciousness come down to earth!”87 This fervor was not atypical of how Debs was received in New York, where thousands of Jewish immigrants, many of whom became Socialists only after arriving in the United States, were drawn to the man from Terre Haute as representing everything they aspired to become as Americans. David Shannon writes that “the demonstrations of affection he received in New York were more than usually sentimental and even pathetically maudlin,” and even this description probably fails to do justice to the collective emotional experience that is no doubt largely responsible for the odd phenomenon of the Socialist movement’s enduring legacy in American Jewry.88 Even the Jewish Socialist leadership was not immune to this hero worship, with the United Hebrew Trades leader Morris Winchevsky proclaiming that Debs spoke to them in “love’s interracial pan-human language.”89
The 1908 campaign thus provided the most poignant illustration for Daniel Bell’s argument that “Debs wore his romanticism like a cloak, and this was his strength as well as his weakness.”90 For while the Socialists were ultimately able to retain their place as the leading successor of Populism, there was an opening for an alternative to reemerge in the wake of the Haywood trial. Tom Watson eagerly seized on the intermittent possibilities for a Labor Party before accepting, in a fit of depression, the nomination of the dying Populist Party.91 Yet when the nominating convention of William Randolph Hearst’s Independence League opened in July, Hearst’s moment had already passed. Once again, the Hearst platform echoed the Socialists’ immediate demands, but included strong support for Chinese exclusion and, in a callback to Hearst’s infamous role in precipitating the Spanish-American War, a greatly expanded navy.92 In a final echo of what might have been, the contenders for the Independence League nomination included Milford Howard, the man who entered Debs into nomination at the Populist convention in 1896. Ultimately, Hearst’s clear favorite carried the day—Frank Hisgen, who had run an impressive Hearst-aligned campaign for governor of Massachusetts two years earlier.93
By the time of the Hearst convention, the Democrats had nominated William Jennings Bryan for the third time. Bryan traveled extensively abroad in the years following the 1904 campaign and in Germany even sang the praises of that country’s Social Democrats.94 With relative ease he was able to claim vindication for his platform following the Democratic disaster in 1904, and thus he had no serious competition for the nomination in 1908. Theodore Roosevelt ultimately anointed as successor his secretary of war, William Howard Taft. Few substantive differences separated Taft and Bryan in 1908—both favored an income tax, the direct election of Senators, and the continuation of Roosevelt’s policies generally. The one major difference was with respect to labor. Whereas Taft in his long career on the bench solemnly affirmed the judicial consensus against labor, the AFL had been unofficially aligned with Bryan since 1896.
For the first time in a presidential election, perhaps largely to spite Taft’s record, the AFL officially endorsed Bryan in 1908. Gompers even personally reviewed the labor planks of the Bryan platform and wrote most of the campaign materials directed to urban and working-class districts. Both Gompers and Bryan were compelled into the alliance by desperation. While the Democrats were more harmoniously behind Bryan than in the past, the party organization was still reeling from a decade of lethargy, and the infrastructure that the AFL could provide was critical to any chance of victory.95 The failure to prevent this marriage of the AFL and the Democrats was not the only gravely missed opportunity for the Socialists in 1908. The other conspicuous failure was to attract the critical mass of press and elite support that was the goal of the 1906 Noroton conference. It was widely believed that the intended marriage would be announced to the world late in 1906 with an article in William Randolph Hearst’s recently acquired Cosmopolitan magazine. But when the article failed to appear as publicly anticipated in the October issue, it became widely believed in Socialist circles that it was suppressed at the urging of Tammany boss Charles Murphy in the home stretch of Hearst’s run for governor of New York.96 Still, the “millionaire socialists” remained highly regarded within the Socialist Party. Around this time Willoughby Walling won over William Bross Lloyd, son of Henry Demarest Lloyd and also connected by family to the ownership of the Chicago Tribune. Joseph Medill Patterson, author of the popular manifesto Confessions of a Drone, was even appointed the national campaign manager for Debs in 1908.
Shortly after the campaign got underway, Executive Secretary J. Mahlon Barnes proposed that the party lease a train to carry Debs and reams of campaign literature on a national speaking tour, convincing the initially incredulous National Executive Committee to issue a fundraising appeal for the “Red Special,” which embarked just in time for the fall campaign on August 31.97 When Samuel Gompers accused the Republicans of financing the Red Special, Barnes promptly published the complete list of fifteen thousand individual Socialists who contributed to the cost of the train, which made nearly three hundred stops in thirty-three states over the next two months.98
Prominent campaigners for Debs in 1908 included the Populist veteran Mary Lease and Brand Whitlock, mayor of Toledo, Ohio, and a confidante of the “millionaire socialists.” But perhaps the most auspicious endorsement Debs received in 1908 came from Lincoln Steffens, the increasingly acknowledged dean of the “muckrakers.” Steffens published an extensive interview of Debs for Everybody’s magazine, and in confiding his own support for Debs assured him, “As you well know, I am not addressing Socialists—they know it all, but the people who do not understand. If I did fairly by you, it was because I was fair, if you are presented attractively (as I find all readers say) then that is creditable to you. For I did not write this to please you or even because I liked you, but because I found you to be as I have shown you to be.”99
On Election Day, Taft beat Bryan by more than a million votes, with Colorado, Nebraska, and Nevada the only states outside the South to go to Bryan. Debs and Hanford received a generally disappointing 420,852 votes nationwide, a marginal improvement in actual votes but a small decline in the percentage of the vote from 1904. The Independence League ticket proved to be a flop, receiving only 83,739 votes. (Hearst would run again for mayor of New York in 1909 with a more than respectable third-place showing, but by that time was widely mocked as “William Also-Randolph Hearst”). The last noncampaign of Tom Watson garnered a dismal 29,147 votes, more than half coming from Georgia.100 The final gathering of the once mighty Populist Party took place in St. Louis in 1912, where all of eight delegates were bitterly divided between the candidacies of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.101
The Socialists could take ample consolation that all their rivals of the last decade—Bryan, Hearst, and Watson—were now effectively out of the picture. Nevada and Oklahoma took their places as the top two states for the Socialist ticket, with the West and Northwest following closely and with pockets of strength in Louisiana and Florida. Socialist strength in down-ballot races remained limited to New York and Milwaukee, with the candidates for the latter city’s two congressional districts, Albert J. Welch and Edmund T. Melms, winning 27.8 percent and 24.7 percent of the vote, respectively. Morris Hillquit again ran for the ninth district of New York, but fell off from his 1906 showing with only 22 percent of the vote. The 1908 election saw one of the earliest instances of an occurrence that would repeatedly haunt the Socialists. In the ninth district of Minnesota, “Independent Populist” Ole Sageng was narrowly defeated by entrenched Republican Halvor Steenerson, blocked by a Socialist candidate polling the margin of victory.102 Worst still was the evidence of a significant depression of the Socialist vote by fraud that cursed the party well into the future. No votes for Debs were recorded in his own precinct in Terre Haute, even though he voted there and was assured of the votes of many of his neighbors.103
In many ways, the 1908 election was even more fateful than the election of 1896. The AFL endorsement of Bryan began the long marriage of organized labor to the Democratic Party, which, in a political system characterized by frequent switching of allegiances between the two major parties, has proven a rare constant for the last century. The consequences of the failure this represented for the Socialists would be profound. As the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset convincingly argues in his impressive survey of historic American Socialism, the structural and institutional obstacles to the Socialist Party’s success—the nonparliamentary constitutional order of the United States, the ambiguous and heterogeneous nature of the American working class, and the entrenchment of the two-party system and legal obstacles for minor parties—though by no means insignificant, could all have been overcome had the party secured the support of the trade union movement, as occurred in the Socialist Party’s greatest successes.104 But most consequential of all was the significance of its embrace of the Democrats for the labor movement itself. Leaving aside any questions of capitalism, socialism, militancy, or pure and simple unionism, the American labor movement became a part of the system of political control represented by the two-party system, and thus beholden to the agenda of America’s power elite, both at home and abroad. Nothing else so important ever happened to it again.
But the election was no final verdict on the Socialist Party, and 1909 proved an especially eventful year for the movement. It became clear that the IWW would not quietly pass from the scene, particularly after a steelworkers strike in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. The tactics that defined the IWW in its most active years were now well developed, including the so-called free speech fight. The most memorable of these actions took place late in 1909 in Spokane, Washington. As early as 1907 a full-fledged class war had broken out in the radical stronghold of Spokane, with the city issuing an ordinance banning public meetings. The ordinance was defied by the Socialists, the IWW, and even the AFL, and mass arrests began on November 12. The increasingly acknowledged leader of the protests, a rising IWW firebrand and future Communist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, was arrested on December 1, causing a mass of outraged radicals from across the country to descend on Spokane to fill the city jails. The ordinance was repealed in March 1910.105
On the other end of the continent, the garment workers toiling under miserable conditions and as yet only nominally organized by the United Hebrew Trades were also at a desperate pass. In 1903, most were reorganized into the jurisdiction of the newly chartered International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Morris Hillquit served as its general counsel until his death, but as more and more of his attention was given to leading the Socialist Party, many of his trade union duties were delegated to Meyer London. Born in 1871 in Kalvaria, Poland, and arriving in New York in 1891, London had been among the first activists on the Lower East Side to leave the SLP for Eugene Debs’s Social Democracy and, being more culturally attuned to the Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side movement than Hillquit, was increasingly replacing him in his local role in New York. His biographer would laud his devotion to the movement:
London spent his nights and days in the service of the unions, the Socialist Party, the revolutionary movement in Russia and the relief campaign for the victims of oppression and poverty. He was the lawyer of the poor man, the advocate of the poor union, the poor man’s champion. . . . London put his professional career in jeopardy when he was still a young man and gave himself to the service of the union as agitator, organizer, negotiator with the employers. His devotion to the working man was not mere mouthing, it was deep-seated in the very heart of his being. In those days many of the radical attorneys grew wealthy. Some of them made fortunes in real estate speculation. Practical men thought London insane for neglecting his practice for months at a time in order to travel over the country to collect funds for the Bund or to carry on socialist propaganda.106
On November 22, 1909, the ILGWU held a mass meeting at Cooper Union to consider calling an industry-wide general strike. The major issue was the prevalent system of subcontracting, in which large employers subcontracted manufacturing to often unscrupulous men who ran small shops, often in their own homes amid the appalling conditions of Lower East Side tenements. After two hours of cautious debate, a twenty-one-year-old shirtwaist worker named Clara Lemlich rose to move for a general strike. As her Yiddish speech was translated into Italian and English, the crowd broke into massive cheers and it was so.107 Meyer London initially urged moderation, but yielded to none in militancy once the strike was underway, declaring on behalf of the strike committee:
We offer no apology for the general strike. If at all we should apologize to the tens of thousands of the exploited men and women for not having aroused them before. . . . The employer who neglects all sanitary requirements, who does business with money taken from the workmen under the guise of security and who levies a tax upon the employees for the use of electricity, is a danger not only to the employees but to every reputable employer in their trade. This general strike is greater than any union. It is an irresistible movement of the people. It is a protest against conditions that can no longer be tolerated.108
Indeed, the strike won sympathy throughout New York, including from the upper classes. Most notable for rallying support from the general public and its most affluent members was Lillian Wald, a social worker on the Lower East Side and a leading Socialist sympathizer from the older, predominantly German-descended Jewish elite known as “Our Crowd.” It was the leaders of this elite, including future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, who ultimately stepped forward to mediate a resolution to the strike, leading to a widely hailed “Protocol of Peace” after a second strike in the spring of 1910. Meyer London was the chief negotiator for the ILGWU as it won most of its demands and established a permanent collective bargaining infrastructure, but agreed to surrender the right to strike in the future.109 This created the opening for militant dissent among the garment workers that provided an important base for the IWW and other revolutionist elements in the years ahead. Not least of these radicals would be Clara Lemlich herself, who went on to be a devoted Communist Party member from its founding until her death in 1982.
The other event of 1909 that was extraordinarily consequential in defining the legacy of American Socialism was barely noticed at the time. Early that year, William English and Anna Strunsky Walling visited Springfield, Illinois, to survey the damage caused by a particularly devastating race riot. Shocked by what he saw, Walling issued a call for a new organization to advocate for Negro equality. What resulted was the founding that summer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Walling, unlike his wife, did not join the Socialist Party for another year, but Socialist Party members who helped found the NAACP included Mary White Ovington, daughter of an abolitionist minister and a leading Christian Socialist in Brooklyn, and Charles Edward Russell, a journalist in the Hearst orbit who had recently joined the party.110 Another founder of the organization was Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the abolitionist icon William Lloyd Garrison and increasingly drawn to the Socialist movement.
W. E. B. DuBois, the first African American to receive a Harvard PhD and the leading sociologist of the America Negro, agreed to become editor of the NAACP journal Crisis, and soon thereafter would even briefly join the Socialist Party. But there would be many ironies to this vital part of the American Socialist legacy. The NAACP became defined by seeking to secure the rights of African Americans through the courts, an approach radically at odds with the Socialist platform. Moreover, in his frank elitism and abiding belief in the supremacy of “the race question” above all others, DuBois bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Moses Hess, the theorist of nationalism and early prophet of Jewish nationalism who was an early antagonist of Karl Marx. These tendencies ultimately led DuBois, in common with many of his early Socialist supporters, to support American involvement in the First World War, believing that Wilson’s professed support of “self-determination of nations” would lead to African liberation.
In the final months of 1909, the leaders of the Socialist Party were gripped by a contentious and dramatic debate over the party’s future. The disappointing election returns of 1908 prompted a mood of reappraisal, and two events in particular focused this reappraisal on the ubiquitous labor party question. The first was a visit to the United States by Keir Hardie in June, in which he upbraided his American comrades for their narrow, sectarian attitudes and urged them to follow the example of his increasingly successful Independent Labour Party in Britain.111 The second was the 1909 sweep of the Union Labor Party in San Francisco, with Carpenters Union leader Patrick McCarthy elected mayor along with an overwhelming ULP majority on the Board of Aldermen. The ULP had an ambiguously cooperative relationship with the California Socialists. The official San Francisco party was decidedly impossibilist and in the orbit of the IWW, but the state party was controlled by Job Harriman and his powerful AFL-backed Los Angeles local, who treated the Union Labor Party as the de facto San Francisco local.112
It was clear that the Socialist Party was moving against its increasingly restive left wing. The tempestuous William English Walling only saw this as an opportunity to seize the reins of leadership of the left wing and wrote a polemic against the Labor Party model for International Socialist Review. Walling’s former University Settlement colleague Robert Hunter became his leading antagonist, writing a series of articles in the wake of Keir Hardie’s visit for the New York Call.113 Then, Algie Simons, now editor of the Chicago Daily Socialist, wrote to Walling in an apparent attempt to find common ground: “I do not like the English policy, but I say frankly it is better than the present Socialist Party,” adding that the AFL “comes much nearer representing the working class than the SP, and unless we are able to so shape our policy and our organization as to meet the demands and incarnate the position of the workers we will have failed of our mission.”114
Walling took this letter and charged headlong to the ramparts, claiming that it revealed a conspiracy by the National Executive Committee to dictatorially transform the Socialist Party into an “Independent Labor or Social Democratic Party.”115 He forwarded the letter to the left-wing editors of the New York Volkszeitung, Ludwig Lore and Gustavus Myers, who read and denounced it to a mass meeting that nearly broke out into a riot.116 Walling demanded that the five members of the NEC he implicated in this conspiracy—Hillquit, Simons, Victor Berger, Carl Thompson, and Graham Stokes—be removed from office. Past historians of the Socialist Party, largely influenced by the partisan work of Ira Kipnis, have tended to believe that Walling was correct to charge the existence of a conspiracy.117 But Walling’s “conspiracy” amounted to little more than the stated position of the SP majority. As Morris Hillquit wrote in attempting to contain the potential crisis,
I have at all times maintained that the prime object of the Socialist Party is to organize the working class of this country politically, that it would be very desirable to have the Socialist Party as such to perform that task, that it has so far not succeeded in doing so, and that if a bona fide workingmen’s party should be organized in this country for political purposes on a true workingmen’s platform, and upon the principle of independent and uncompromising working class politics, our party could not consistently oppose such an organization, but that it would have to support it and cooperate with it. . . . None of us ever made a secret of these views, on the contrary, we have been discussing them in private and public very freely, whenever an occasion presented itself.118
The other principals implicated by Walling were enraged by his antics. Victor Berger wrote to Hillquit, “I can explain this only by the jealousy that egotistic and impotent fellows have toward men who try their best to do something. And since the impossibilists are organizing all over the country, it is only right that we should do the same.”119 Even more outraged was the response of John Spargo: “I know of nothing in Mr. Walling’s character or history which would justify my giving the slightest weight to any statement he might make about me. Mentally unbalanced, erratic in his movements, Mr. Walling is one of the most pathetic figures I have ever encountered.”120 But most aggrieved was J. G. Phelps Stokes, already caught between his friend and his brother-in-law Robert Hunter in the initial debate. Hillquit, Spargo, and the others took out most of their anger over the incident on Stokes; Walling claimed to have his support, and Stokes did little to disabuse the notion.121
Historians have also puzzled over why Simons sent his letter to Walling in the first place, but this confusion stems from a failure to appreciate the nuances of Socialist factionalism in this era. Simons had only recently left International Socialist Review, and his position was increasingly the position of the SP left—skepticism toward the IWW but nonetheless in favor of a militant trade union program and its priority over electoral action. Walling, who fancied himself a theorist of syndicalism, also identified with this view, and therefore Simons would have anticipated a friendly exchange on tactics rather than Walling’s erratic behavior. Naturally, Walling received an emphatic note of sympathy from Eugene Debs:
I’ve been watching the situation closely and especially the tendencies toward reactionism, to which we are so unalterably opposed. The Socialist Party has already catered far too much to the AFL and there is no doubt that a halt will soon have to be called. The revolutionary character of our party and our movement must be preserved in all its integrity, at all costs, for if that be compromised it had better cease to exist.122
But Debs, as ever, was only reacting emotionally, and it was soon clear that he would yield to the SP majority trade union policy as a practical matter. But the Walling episode marked the arrival of the revolutionary left wing that ultimately decided the party’s fate. More than in any tangible organizational progress, this was reflected in the rising prevalence of an attitude, articulated clearly by Walling at the outset:
In placing so-called “practical” questions in the foreground and slighting questions of principle, “Labor” Parties adopt the ethics and philosophy of Capitalism, forget all the lessons of history and corrupt the morality and intelligence of the rising generation. In denying the class struggle and the probability of a revolutionary conflict “Labor” Parties do a service to Capitalism so great as to obtain its lasting gratitude and the assurance to all “leaders” of that Party that should they ever wish to stoop, they are certain of obtaining their reward—at least by public office and the advantage of close association with the rich. This is social not financial corruption, a subtle form that not many can resist.123
That within a decade, the author of these words was a confidante of Samuel Gompers in rallying support for Woodrow Wilson’s war policies, calling for “right-wingers” like Victor Berger to be jailed for sedition, tells all that one needs to know about the constantly recurring agonies of the American left.