There was no clearer indication that the beginning of the 1920s marked the end of an era in American radicalism than the fate of the IWW. In three mass trials held since 1917, 168 convictions were brought down against its members, including a twenty-year sentence against Bill Haywood. In April 1921, after exhausting his appeals, Haywood fled to Soviet Russia where he died in 1928, leaving his loyal followers cruelly disillusioned. Mary Marcy, a loyal secretary for both the IWW and ISR, was driven to suicide, and another IWW veteran was painfully blunt: “If Bill ever comes back to the United States, he will be met at the dock by a direct action committee of the IWW, who will leave very little for the government to do.”1 A shadow of the organization lingered through the interwar years and beyond, keeping the flame of anarcho-syndicalism alive for its modest new left revival.
On January 31, 1921, A. Mitchell Palmer recommended that Woodrow Wilson grant a pardon to Eugene Debs in the final month of his presidency. When Wilson denied the recommendation, Debs wrote to the press:
I understand perfectly the feelings of Wilson. When he reviews what he has done, when he realizes the suffering he has brought about, then he is being punished. It is he, not I, who needs a pardon. If I had it in my power I would give him the pardon which would set him free. Woodrow Wilson is an exile from the hearts of his people. The betrayal of his ideals makes him the most pathetic figure in the world. No man in public life in American history ever retired so thoroughly discredited, so scathingly rebuked, so overwhelmingly impeached and repudiated as Woodrow Wilson.2
Warren Harding entered the White House on March 4 committed to granting generous amnesty on a case-by-case basis. The Socialist Party had an indispensable asset in encouraging this commitment in its fast-rising star in New York, Norman Thomas, who as a youth was a paperboy for Harding’s newspaper, the Marion Star. For the last few years, Thomas had been editor of the magazine of the religious-pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, The World Tomorrow. Having become increasingly ill at ease with an avowedly religious approach to politics, by 1921 he accepted Oswald Garrison Villard’s offer to be co-editor at The Nation. Yet if Thomas was becoming a religious skeptic, he retained a deeply conservative sensibility from his religious training. He openly blasted the mindless feel-good atmosphere he felt at the first and only gathering he attended of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and was appalled when a Social Gospel bishop confided to him, “Of course, when I pray to God I am really thinking of Lenin and Trotsky and all the workers of the world.”3
Thomas and Villard were received by President Harding in the spring. After Harding demonstrated the solemnity with which he took his duties regarding amnesty, he began chatting with the hometown boy Norman on a first-name basis, recalling a good-natured German in Marion whom Harding said he thought of every time he was asked to pardon a completely apolitical German American who had been jailed for the most dubious reasons.4 Harding bluntly stated he saw no good reason to keep Debs in jail, but that he needed to be convinced that there was as much sentiment in the country in favor of his release as against it, with the American Legion in particular remaining vocal in opposition. At the end of March, Attorney General Harry Daugherty ordered the warden at Atlanta to send Debs unescorted to Washington for a personal meeting. The campaign for Debs’s release reached critical mass by the summer, with “Ireland is Free—Why Not Debs” among its more popular slogans. No fewer than three hundred thousand petition signatures and seven hundred organizational resolutions were ultimately presented to the Harding administration in favor of Debs’s release.5
In the meantime, the Socialist Party gathered for its now annually mandated national convention in Detroit on June 25. The short-lived Committee for the Third International was overwhelmingly repudiated, and its principals defected to the Communists before the end of the year. This was followed by a last hiccup of contention with the all-but departed left wing, a debate about the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that led an exacerbated Morris Hillquit to exclaim, “This is a political convention, not a dictionary.”6 The eagerness to purge all reminders of the left wing was made clear when Executive Secretary Otto Branstetter suggested that all foreign language federations be abolished.7 Indeed, there was no mistaking that this convention marked a drastic course correction. By a vote of 37 to 2, the convention instructed the incoming National Executive Committee “to make a careful survey of all radical and labor organizations in the country, with a view to ascertaining their strength, disposition, and readiness to cooperate with the Socialist movement upon a platform not inconsistent with that of the party.” In other words, the Socialists were ready to build a Labor Party.8
President Harding initially looked to pardon Debs on July 4, but an aggressive campaign by the American Legion forced a delay, a poignant metaphor for how American patriotism was being redefined as the United States began its rise as a world power.9 But the clamor for Debs’s release continued unabated, with virtually the entire AFL leadership now on board, including Samuel Gompers in an awkward and self-serving posture.10 Nothing got under the Socialists’ skin more than the appeals on Debs’s behalf by old adversaries, of which there were more than a few. Most memorable was John Spargo, who seems to have had principled misgivings about Wilson’s suppression of civil liberties, but to whom the New York Call could only reply, “Better the frank opposition of Mr. Spargo’s imperialist associates in the holy war for petroleum than this obscurantist and cowardly apology for his own conduct.”11
On December 23, President Harding announced that Debs would be one of twenty-three political prisoners to have their sentences commuted on Christmas Day. To the cheers of his fellow prisoners as he departed them, Debs was met at dawn on Christmas morning just outside Atlanta Penitentiary by his brother Theodore, who was to accompany him for a short stop in Washington, where the president was eager to meet this man he had heard so much about. A crowd of twenty thousand greeted Debs when he reached his final destination of Terre Haute on the evening of December 28. Every fire bell in the city rang as the throng followed him to his house, where as he at last graced the front porch, a colored band was playing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”12
Yet even after Debs’s release, the Socialists hardly slowed down their efforts for a general amnesty. Kate Richards O’Hare led the wives and children of the remaining Old Southwest stalwarts in Leavenworth to the White House the following spring, and Meyer London urged his congressional colleagues to honor those who suffered for the cause of peace in time for the Washington Disarmament Conference, held throughout late 1921 and early 1922.13 The last thirty-three Espionage Act prisoners were released on December 15, 1923, to the continuing displeasure of the American Legion, the New York Times, and Kennesaw Mountain Landis.14
However conservative, Harding was sincerely committed to healing the deep wounds the war and its aftermath had left on the American psyche, and even his harshest historical critics usually concede that he was among the most kind and decent men to grace the American presidency. The scandals that plagued his administration and that one way or another led to his mysterious death were mostly the doing of his attorney general, Harry Daugherty, and implicated both major parties equally. Warren Harding was no paragon of virtue to be sure, but the real reason he is so despised by the men and women who make a handsome living celebrating certain American presidents as demigods is because, in seeking to largely repeal the revolution effected by Woodrow Wilson, he was one of very few to hold the office who believed the United States should be a republic, not an empire.
By 1921 Norman Thomas had achieved such popularity among the battered New York Socialists that he was their first choice to be their candidate for mayor that year. With his oldest son terminally ill, he declined in favor of Judge Jacob Panken, who polled a respectable 82,019 votes.15 By 1922, The Nation could no longer afford to keep Thomas as a full-time editor, but his indispensability as a professional Socialist was such that he quickly found a new post.16 After maintaining a tenuous existence through the war as the one awkward meeting ground between pro-war socialists and their SP adversaries, the crumbling Intercollegiate Socialist Society was renamed the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) in 1921 under the leadership of Harry Laidler, a Columbia-educated lifelong Brooklynite.17 Thomas served as co-director of the LID with Laider, beginning their lifelong collaboration by launching an ambitious campaign to establish a major presence on America’s college campuses.18
The most consequential development in New York Socialism as the new decade began was the rise of The Messenger, a voice of Negro radicalism that not a few white Socialists considered the best Socialist publication of its era. Eugene Debs praised its editors for their “splendid work in the education of your race and in the quickening of the consciousness of their class interests,” and its reputation spread all the way to Europe.19 After Chandler Owen relocated to Chicago in 1921, A. Philip Randolph found a new partner in running the magazine in George Schuyler, who in the words of historian Jervis Anderson “had a greater admiration for H. L. Mencken than for Karl Marx” and indeed achieved fame a decade later writing for Mencken’s American Mercury.20
The greatest distinction to this Harlem Socialist circle came in its opposition to the quixotic mass movement led by Marcus Garvey. In 1916, Randolph was the first to introduce the recent arrival from Jamaica at the fabled “speaker’s corner” at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. For a time the Harlem Socialists worked harmoniously with Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), collaborating on its more radical response to the question of African freedom as a consequence of the war than that promoted by the increasingly suspect elitist W. E. B. DuBois.21 But by the time Garvey packed Madison Square Garden in 1921 to declare himself “Provisional President of Africa,” Randolph and his comrades were perhaps the least of those in the black community who looked on in horror.
In large measure at the instigation of Randolph and The Messenger, the Friends of Negro Freedom was established to organize community sentiment against Garvey. This placed Randolph and his colleagues sharply at odds with the growing nationalist zeitgeist in Harlem. As early as 1917, Randolph’s early mentor Hubert Harrison had expressed his disillusionment with the Socialists, writing that “the roots of class-consciousness inhere in a temporary economic order, whereas the roots of race-consciousness must of necessity survive any and all changes in the economic order.”22 The defectors from The Messenger into the Communist movement formed an organization committed to a Harrison-inspired left-wing nationalism called the African Blood Brotherhood, itself embittered after an uneasy alliance with Garvey.23 One early Jamaican collaborator of Randolph, W. A. Domingo, left to become editor of Garvey’s Negro World, while another West Indian, Frank Crosswaith, became the outstanding black Socialist of the 1930s as Randolph devoted most of his energies to the trade union movement.
The UNIA degenerated before long into fratricidal violence, but this violence also threatened its enemies, and with the possible exception of DuBois, none was more violently despised than Randolph. Tensions intensified after it became known in the summer of 1922 that Garvey had met with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in an attempt to form an alliance. On September 5, 1922, Randolph received a suspicious package that he first believed to be a bomb. When the police arrived to inspect the package, it was discovered to contain the severed hand of a white man, holding a note imploring Randolph to “get right with your own race movement” and signed “KKK.” The origin was never determined, but the police suspected the package had been sent from New York despite a New Orleans postmark, and Randolph believed it was sent not by a Klansman but by a Garveyite.24 But by this time, the government had already begun its ultimately successful prosecution of Garvey for mail fraud, and an earlier civil judgment against him had been handed down by none other than New York’s Socialist judge, Jacob Panken, who pronounced from the bench, “You should have taken the $600,000 and built a hospital for colored people in this city instead of purchasing a few old boats.”25
Panken may have come down with such force against Garvey in part because he saw in his movement an unmistakable mirror image of the growing Zionist movement among the Jews of New York. The highly idealistic Judah Magnes had gone to Palestine to become a founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before becoming cruelly disillusioned. Meyer London remained unbowed in his anti-Zionism, expressing exactly the position of Panken and other members of the American Council for Judaism in the 1950s: “If there are Jews who want a home land of their own and who believe that the Jewish people cannot accomplish their mission in the world without living a separate and distinct national existence fortified by a Jewish state, they are welcome to it. All that I ask of them is that they should not be speaking in the name of all the Jews. Then they will be within their rights.”26
By the end of 1921, the great hope of reviving the missed opportunity of the previous election appeared to materialize when William Johnston, the Socialist president of the Machinists Union, invited Morris Hillquit to attend a conference of national labor leaders to consider organizing a new party modeled on the British Labour Party. Hillquit spent most of the second half of 1921 in Europe surveying the state of the Socialist movement as it was rebuilding from the war, and he was especially impressed by the British party.27 He greeted Johnston’s invitation with the utmost excitement and anticipation, later recalling, “Johnston himself represented the highest type of trade union official. . . . His initiation of the new movement was a guarantee of its solid prospects, good faith, and progressive character.”28
More than 150 delegates gathered in Chicago on February 20, 1922, to found the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA). The Socialist Party delegation consisted of Hillquit, Victor Berger, Daniel Hoan, James Oneal, Otto Branstetter, and Bertha Hale White.29 Other Socialists present included James Maurer, Thomas Van Lear, and Herbert Bigelow, a Cincinnati minister who had been the victim of one of the most scandalous pro-war mob actions of 1917.30 Hillquit was named to represent the Socialist Party on the executive committee of the CPPA, joined by Johnston, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, William Green of the United Mine Workers, and representatives of the Non-Partisan League, the Farmer-Labor Party, and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. The manifesto issued by the meeting proclaimed,
We hold that the splendid structure of the visible American government is sound and well adapted to the genius of our people. But through the apathy of the people and their division upon false issues, the control of this visible government has been usurped by the “invisible government” of plutocracy and privilege and, administered in every branch by their creatures and servitors, has become destructive of those sacred rights to secure which it was established. . . . We, therefore, citizens of the United States of America, in conference assembled, do solemnly publish and declare that our government of right ought to be administered for the common good and for the protection, prosperity, and happiness of the people, that its present usurpation by the invisible government of plutocracy and privilege must be broken, that this can be best accomplished by united political action suited to the peculiar conditions and needs of each section and state.31
Most historians of the labor party movement of this era tend to dismiss the CPPA as a cynical ploy by the Railroad Brotherhoods who came to dominate it, in their efforts to restore government administration of the railroads that had been implemented during the First World War; and further see Socialist involvement in the CPPA as an act of pathetic desperation as the SP limped into the 1920s. This may be largely accurate with respect to the Brotherhoods, but the CPPA was initiated by the leaders of large, SP-sympathizing industrial unions such as William Johnston, William Green, and Sidney Hillman, who were at this time genuinely interested in forming a Labor Party. The two groups came together in a dubious alliance of convenience, each seeking to use the other to its ends. It was certainly a gamble, but a reasonable one for the Socialist Party to marshal its diminished assets behind what was historically its bloc in the AFL in this power struggle.
Still, the tension that proved the undoing of the CPPA was clear from the beginning. As Hillquit stated his position to his colleagues at the outset,
We Socialists have come to this conference in the frank hope and with the confident expectation that the movement initiated here will ultimately lead to the formation of a labor party in direct and consistent opposition to the Republican and Democratic parties alike. We have no faith whatever in the slogan of “rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies” within the old parties. . . . We hope our arguments and your experiences will eventually convince you that we are right. But we have no intention to attempt to capture the conference by intrigue, maneuvers, or machinations. We have no personal stakes in the movement and are here solely to serve the interests of the working class as we see them.32
Tremendous strides were made by politicians aligned with the Non-Partisan League and Farmer-Labor Party in 1922, in what Daniel Bell would later call “the Indian summer of progressivism.”33 In North Dakota, the Non-Partisan League suffered a harsh blow when the recall mechanism it implemented was used by the state’s business interests to boot Governor Lynn Frazier from office in 1921, yet the following year Frazier was triumphantly elected to the U.S. Senate. In that body, “Fighting Bob” LaFollette could count on such allies as Frazier and Gerald Nye of North Dakota, George Norris of Nebraska, and William Borah of Idaho. In Montana, Burton Wheeler had been badly beaten as a Non-Partisan League candidate for Governor in 1920, but was elected to the Senate two years later on the Democratic ticket.34 The most spectacular breakthrough occurred in Minnesota, where the Farmer-Labor Party elected Henrik Shipstead, a former Republican legislator who had campaigned for Charles Lindbergh Sr., to the Senate in 1922, followed by the special election victory of Norwegian-born Farmers Union leader Magnus Johnson to join him the following year.
But the spirit of American Socialism may have had no truer representative in the U.S. Senate in this era than Tom Watson, whose return to Congress, in the words of C. Vann Woodward, “after thirty years was like the emergence of a hermit, already a little legendary.”35 Drawing upon his youthful passion for the history of Revolutionary France in calling for recognition of Soviet Russia, he recalled that “President Washington, himself a revolutionist, not only recognized the French republic, whose garments dripped with blood, but he put up to Congress in a respectful way an application for a loan. Let us not affect too much saintliness. Are our skirts entirely clean of wrong doing in Hawaii, the Philippines, and Santo Domingo?”36 In typical form, he thundered to his colleagues,
You are afraid of your own proletariat . . . the dissatisfied workman, thrown out of employment by these soulless, these heartless, these insatiable trusts and combinations of capital, you are afraid of the millions of men and women and children who do not have enough to eat in this land of bounteous harvests, not enough to wear in the very cotton fields where their hands bring forth the staple that clothes the world. . . . The American people will not submit. Therefore, these vast combinations of capital want a standing army in order to beat down the dissatisfied, who have a right to be discontented.37
Yet Watson was overcome by his usual melancholy as he wandered the imperial capital at the dawn of the American century. He died on September 26, 1922 at his boarding house in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Eugene Debs wrote in heartfelt tribute to Watson’s widow: “He was a great man, a heroic soul who fought the power of evil his whole life, long in the interest of the common people, and they loved and honored him.”38
The desperate organizational state of the Socialist Party was abundantly clear when a national convention of only twenty-two delegates from seventeen states met in Cleveland on April, 29, 1922. On Hillquit’s recommendation, they voted 11–9 to affiliate with the Labor and Socialist International recently convened in Vienna. Charles Ruthenberg, present as an observer for the Communists, reported for their press, “A glance at these delegates tells the story of the Socialist Party. A majority of them are portly, gray-haired men with a look of petty-bourgeois prosperity about them. They talk in the language of past Socialist conventions, but there is no enthusiasm, no fervor, in what they say.”39 This was the context in which the Socialists decided they had little to lose with the Conference for Progressive Political Action, which Hillquit even took credit for naming.40
August Claessens embarked on a tour of the Western states in the latter part of 1921, attempting to rebuild the party there but achieving dismal results.41 In small towns across the Great Plains, the American Legion typically used the threat of force to keep out radicals of all stripes. In Sidney, Nebraska, Claessens had to shame the mayor and sheriff into allowing him to lead a meeting on the courthouse steps.42 Typical was a sign posted on the entrance into town of St. John, Kansas: “Keep Out! Warning to all Non-Partisan Leaguers, IWW’s and Socialists. Stay out of St. John. By order of the American Legion.”43 In Fort Dodge, Kansas, where 105 out of 110 votes were cast for Debs in 1920, it was discovered that the Socialist local was entirely contained within the Civil War Old Soldiers’ Home. The wise-cracking Claessens wrote that “had we found at least a few, say, around 78 years old, believe me, we would have organized a YPSL branch.”44
Debs took to the stump twice thereafter in a similar rebuilding effort, but could only bring about a fleeting temporary revival to the local parties wherever he went.45 The brutal reality of the Socialist collapse was brought home in the election results of 1922. In New York, where the Socialist and Farmer-Labor parties established a harmonious fusion ticket under the big tent of the American Labor Party, Meyer London suffered a crushing loss, earning only 32 percent of the vote against Democrat Samuel Dickstein, who would be the founding chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1930s ultimately exposed to have been on the payroll of Soviet intelligence. But in Milwaukee, Victor Berger finally earned his much-deserved vindication with more than 53 percent of the vote and, with the Wilson terror fading into history, was seated without controversy.
In deeply traumatized Oklahoma, the regrouped Farmers Union joined such Socialist veterans as Dan Hogan and Luther Langston in forming the Farmer-Labor Reconstruction League in late 1921, with its platform drafted by John Hagel, publisher of the Oklahoma Leader founded by Oscar Ameringer and a member of the SP National Executive Committee. Its founding convention drew an unprecedented level of support from Oklahoma’s African American community, freshly wounded by the infamous Tulsa race riot. Its successful candidate for governor of Oklahoma was Jack Walton, then-mayor of Oklahoma City, railroad brotherhood member, and fierce opponent of the Ku Klux Klan. As “Our Jack” toured the state with a jazz band and a cohort of battle-hardened Socialist campaign advisors, Texas Non-Partisan League candidate Fred Rodgers ran a surprisingly close race for governor in that state, and in Louisiana, a son of deeply red Winn Parish named Huey Pierce Long was waging his first campaign for statewide office.46 As governor, the corruptible Walton proved an easy target for the Klan-dominated political class of Oklahoma, yet an especially disillusioned Oscar Ameringer could still look back and recall,
Without money to speak of, with virtually the entire press of the state and all the spokesmen and spellbinders of the financial and monopolistic interests against us, we had triumphantly elected Our Jack, destined to become the Andrew Jackson of the 1920s. Naïve as we were, we realized that the winning of the first battle did not necessarily mean the winning of the war. Many more battles would have to be fought to restore the government of Oklahoma and the wealth of mineral resources to the people of the state.47
The bright Indian summer of progressivism was fatally dashed by the harsh chill of American Communism’s arrival as a force to be reckoned with. By late 1922, the unified Communist Party had emerged from its underground beginnings, though known as the Workers Party until 1929. Theodore Draper, the dean of the historians of the movement, famously postulates that the trauma of being so profoundly mistaken in the underlying premise of founding the Communist Party—that the global collapse of capitalism was imminent—was the essential root cause of an emotional dependence on Soviet dictation that transcended mere ideology:
It was a difficult birth and an unhappy childhood. Like most people with unpleasant memories, the older Communists would rather forget them, they prefer to give the impression that the real history of the movement started much later. But something crucially important did happen to this movement in its infancy. It was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power. Nothing else so important ever happened to it again.48
Yet the face of American Communism did change substantially during its earliest years. John Reed died in Russia of a chronic kidney ailment in 1920, by most accounts almost completely disillusioned. Also out of the picture was the man who did more than any individual to create American Communism, Louis Fraina. After being suspected of everything from working for the Justice Department to stealing party funds, Fraina was reassigned from the American party to Comintern duty in Mexico, where he disappeared only to resurface a decade later as an idiosyncratic left-wing economist named Lewis Corey. Charles Ruthenberg remained national secretary, joined in the top-tier leadership by the effectively co-equal national chairman, James P. Cannon, along with their respective protégés, Jay Lovestone and Earl Browder. Cannon and Browder brought in the party’s most prized recruit, the gifted radical union organizer in Chicago with whom each of them worked at different times, William Z. Foster.49
The American Communists, whose formative political experience had been opposition to the Socialist Party majority, were in for a rude awakening when Lenin began to elaborate his concept of the “united front” with the publication of Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder in 1920. First defining the united front in connection to the miniscule Communist movement in Great Britain, Lenin urged the British Communists to agitate for acceptance as an autonomous entity in the Labour Party coalition structure. If they succeeded, the party would be open to a Communist propaganda offensive from within, and if they failed, the Labour Party would be exposed as an enemy of working-class unity. In his characteristically blunt idiom, Lenin described it as support “in the same way as a rope supports one who is hanged.”50
After the founding of the CPPA in 1922, the applicability of this principle to the American scene became obvious. Indeed, Lenin may have been set on this path in part by his meeting with Parley P. Christensen, who passed through Moscow on a world tour in 1921 and was warmly greeted by Lenin, who said, “I know you! You and Cox were the also-rans!”51 This united front strategy was championed by an unlikely figure who dominated the party in its earliest years as an open and legal party—Joseph Pogany, the Comintern representative to the American party under the alias John Pepper. With a reputation for incompetence ever since he was minister of war in the ill-fated Hungarian regime of Bela Kun, Pepper amateurishly observed American conditions, in which, it must be said, he took a far keener interest than the American Communists themselves.52 He put forward a bizarre analysis positing Robert LaFollette as the American Kerensky who must be supported to set the stage for the Communists’ ultimate triumph:
The revolution is here. World history stands before one of its greatest turning points. America faces her third revolution—the LaFollette revolution of the well-to-do and exploited farmers, small businessmen and workers. It will contain elements of the great French Revolution, and the Russian Kerensky Revolution. In its ideology it will have elements of Jeffersonianism, Danish cooperatives, Ku Klux Klan and Bolshevism. The proletariat as a class will not play an independent role in this revolution. After the victory of this LaFollette revolution, there will begin the independent role of workers and exploited farmers, and there will begin then, the period of the fourth American revolution—the period of the proletarian revolution.53
Thus would the events leading up to the 1924 election set the pattern for the downfall of American Socialism in the 1930s. As Theodore Draper plainly and bitterly puts it, the duplicity “in the Communist version of the united front, more than anything else, has been responsible for the most tragic experiences in the labor and radical movements of the 20th century.”54
On December 11, 1922, the CPPA held its second meeting in Cleveland. The Workers Party sent four delegates to attempt to be seated, but the CPPA credentials committee immediately refused to allow that, asserting that their belief in the dictatorship of the proletariat was incompatible with the democratic aims of the CPPA.55 The one member organization objecting to this move was the declining Farmer-Labor Party, and William Z. Foster, denounced by the newborn Communists during the 1919 steel strike as an AFL stooge, would here prove his tremendous value. The guiding spirit of the Farmer-Labor Party, John Fitzpatrick, was Foster’s indispensable partner in his massive Chicago organizing drives, and the mid-level leadership of the Chicago AFL was dominated by followers of Foster who entered the party with him.56 The significance of this coup for the Communists could hardly be overstated—within a year of emerging from the underground, they not only had a significant beachhead in the labor movement but had it in what was widely seen to have replaced the Socialists leading the radical opposition in the AFL.
By a narrow vote of 64 to 52, the CPPA rejected a proposal by the Farmer-Labor Party to immediately organize a new party; this proposal may have had a better chance of passage had it been proposed by a different group.57 This rejection was in any event an extremely short-sighted move, giving the Communists their essential opening to take up the mantle of a national Farmer-Labor Party and carry out exactly the stratagem laid out by Lenin. This was lost on the parochial Railroad Brotherhood leaders, whose increasingly clear objective was to secure the Democratic nomination in 1924 for William McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the treasury and son-in-law who had come out strongly for re-nationalization of the railroads. However, the implications of this delay in forming a new party were likely appreciated by William Johnston and William Green, the industrial union leaders experienced in dealing with the Communists and their syndicalist predecessors. Morris Hillquit certainly understood the potential consequences of this delay, as he addressed his CPPA colleagues:
We are convinced that we have made the initial step. But these gains or these victories in the old party primaries, we are convinced, are temporary. We are convinced that the workers of this country will eventually go by the road which has brought power and progress to the workers and farmers of the other countries of the world. I want you to know that this is my sentiment, my hope and inspiration. But personally I take the position that progress is always made safely and slowly, step by step.58
The Farmer-Labor Party resigned from the CPPA in protest, though the fast-rising Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party was affiliated separately and remained.59 A call for a founding convention of a “Federated Farmer-Labor Party,” so named to suggest that it was taking the step of establishing a British Labour-style coalition party, was issued for July 3. John Fitzpatrick, an Irish labor militant of the old school, frankly yet naively told his Communist subordinates in the Chicago AFL, “We are willing to go along, but we think you Communists should occupy a back seat in this affair.”60 When the Federated-Farmer Labor Party convention opened, a few unions officially participated, most notably the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, in one of the earliest indications of Sidney Hillman’s ambiguous alliance with the Communist movement for the next quarter-century. The welcoming address was given by Richard Pettigrew, the seventy-five-year-old former Silver Republican senator from South Dakota, who lavishly praised the Soviet constitution to the wild cheers of the crowd.61 It was clear that the Communists completely dominated the convention, as Theodore Draper writes:
Only ten delegates were officially allotted to the Workers Party, compared with approximately 50 for the Farmer-Laborites. But the Communists had other ways of getting in. Dozens of Communists attended as delegates from local trade unions. Others managed to represent such organizations as the Lithuanian Workers’ Literature Society, the Rumanian Progressive Club, and the United Workingmen Singers. Pepper and Ruthenberg later admitted that the Communist delegates numbered about 200, and the Communists therefore went into the convention with from one-third to almost one-half of all the delegates. . . . For the first time, the Communists demonstrated their superiority in the technique of electing delegates to a united front.62
The Railroad Brotherhoods’ paper Labor ran a caustic headline that would resonate for generations to come as the perfectly distilled essence and folly of Leninist maneuvering—“Communists Capture Selves.”63 A shell-shocked and outraged John Fitzpatrick attacked the convention’s entire proceedings on the final day:
I know Brother Foster and the others who are identified and connected with him, and if they think they can attract the attention of the rank and file of the working men and women of America to their organization, I say to them and to this organization, that is a hopeless course, and they cannot do it. Then what have they done? They have killed the Farmer-Labor Party, and they have killed the possibility of uniting the forces of independent political action in America, and they have broken the spirit of this whole thing so that we will not be able to rally the forces for the next twenty years! I know, as a practical proposition, that the minute the Workers Party is identified with this movement, then that will be the battering ram that is going to be used against every group.64
A few remnants of the original Farmer-Labor Party of 1919 remained with the Communists, most notably the initially mighty Washington state party led by John C. Kennedy, former Socialist alderman in Chicago and now a reliable Communist ally. More typical was the Detroit Federation of Labor, for whom the returning delegates urged affiliation with the Communist-run Federated Farmer-Labor Party, but were beaten back largely by members of the tiny Proletarian Party.65 At the national AFL convention that year, Gompers subjected Fitzpatrick to an unprecedented public humiliation, even after he led the Illinois state convention in a dramatic reversal of all the offending positions associated with the Labor Party movement and Foster.
In the meantime, the Socialist Party opened its once again very modestly attended convention in New York on May 19. One notable feature was that it was the first Socialist convention personally attended by Eugene Debs since 1904, though he took no official part other than to address a banquet of the delegates. The major address was given by Abraham Cahan, who shocked many in the audience with a speech denouncing the Soviet Union. Lobbing personal attacks on Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, Cahan also signaled his tenuous future relationship to the Socialist Party in declaring it a failure.66 Cahan had praised the Soviets as late as 1920, but he resisted the affiliation of the Workmen’s Circle with the Communists in 1921, which indeed proved extremely short-lived.67 Cahan’s lieutenant Alexander Kahn led the minority Jewish Socialist Verband out of the Workmen’s Circle, an act that decades later proved consequential in the ultimate demise of the Socialist Party.
A mood of optimism returned among the New York Socialists by the fall of 1923. The previous year, a recent Harvard graduate named Charles Garland gave 90 percent of his million-dollar inheritance to support left-wing enterprises. When a $50,000 grant to start a labor daily in New York was matched by both the ILGWU and Amalgamated, the struggling New York Call folded its assets into the new startup to launch the New York Leader on October 1, 1923, with Norman Thomas as editor-in-chief. Despite a promising start, it survived as a daily for less than a year. But the successor weekly, The New Leader, became a much-needed pillar in rebuilding a national Socialist press.68 This renewed optimism was also greatly enhanced by the exciting prospects for the CPPA as the election of 1924 approached. Even Eugene Debs was excited by these possibilities. The sentimental Debs became all the more so with age, so the notion that the Railroad Brotherhoods, with whom he had parted ways at the start of his Socialist career, were in the vanguard of this new movement was overwhelming to him.
In the fall of 1923, after a speech at Cooper Union, Debs had as his dinner guests Louis Waldman and David Karsner, the New York Call reporter who was his first biographer. Over a lavish Italian meal at the East Side restaurant of an Italian Socialist Federation stalwart, just before dawn Debs finally broke the news to his young admirers:
I’ve run my last campaign. I say this not only because I’m tired, but because in the coming Presidential election the Socialists must be free to go with the entire American labor movement. It’s my firm hope and belief that labor is waking up at last and will soon move towards independent political action. The Railway Brotherhoods and Machinists and the Chicago Federation of Labor mean business this time. They’re slow to get started, but when they do they’ll sweep everything before them. I’m not their kind of candidate. The Socialist Party must work with these organizations and be part of something as big as America itself. I must ask that my name be withdrawn from any consideration. I hope this conference for political action may turn out to be the very thing we’ve been working for in the past 25 years.69
After the debacle of the Federated Farmer-Labor convention, Minnesota AFL leader and SP veteran William Mahoney believed that the Minnesota party, with its recent smashing success, was in a position to pick up the pieces and organize a national party that would be impossible “for extremists of the right or the left to arrest or divert.”70 It was evident that he was mistaken when the conference he called to this end opened on November 15 in St. Paul. Though Mahoney unreservedly blasted the Communists for their antics at the Chicago convention, he admitted both the Workers Party and the Federated Farmer-Labor Party into his convention, largely out of disgust with the heavy-handedness of Gompers.71 Senator Henrik Shipstead denounced the conference as soon as the Communist specter became evident,72 whereas Morris Hillquit pleaded to Mahoney,
Such labor organizations as are at all interested in politics and in the idea of an independent Farmer-Labor Party are, almost without exception, affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Political Action. . . . Personally I have no illusions about the sentiment of the leadership of the Conference toward independent politics but there is still a widespread feeling that the fast moving political developments may shape themselves in a way to force the Conference to make independent Presidential nominations. Should this hope fail, then a number of the constituent organizations of the Conference will undoubtedly be ready to join a movement having for its purpose to nominate an independent Farmer-Labor ticket.73
The Communists’ beachhead in Minnesota was Clarence Hathaway, a young convert from the Machinists Union in Detroit who upon relocating became a vice president of the Minnesota AFL.74 Other close Communist allies, if not party members, entrenched in the St. Paul convention included John C. Kennedy of the Washington Farmer-Labor Party and Charles “Red Flag” Taylor, a burly Farmer-Labor–aligned Republican member of the Montana legislature.75 Another noteworthy delegate at St. Paul was John Zahnd, who had been the Socialist candidate for the U.S. House in Indiana’s second district in 1912. The frustrated prophet of a small utopian offshoot of the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints (itself a Mormon splinter group dating back to 1860), after his disillusionment with the Communists Zahnd maintained a small but devoted following in his tiny Greenback Party. This sect, based on a fanciful set of theories about the Federal Reserve, may have been midwife to much of the so-called radical right and persisted in some form through the 1960s.76
If Morris Hillquit was fatally missing in action at the Farmer-Labor convention in 1920, the old soldier analogously led astray in 1924 was J. A. H. Hopkins, who led the Committee of 48 in supporting the St. Paul Farmer-Labor convention and attended that gathering. Much as Hillquit could have been an ideal agent of compromise in 1920, the Committee of 48 could have tipped the balance in favor of forming a new party had it instead joined the CPPA. Apparently wracked by guilt over the failure to adopt a compromise platform with the Farmer-Labor Party in 1920, Hopkins was now dealing with a very different creature in the Communist-led Farmer-Labor movement. Hopkins wrote Hillquit that he was “induced to do so partly because of the necessity at the present time of uniting every branch of the progressive or radical movement into one effective political instrument that will become a contender in the 1924 elections.”77 Shrewdly recognizing the maneuvers by which the Communists hoped they might still carry out their complete Labor Party gambit, Hillquit replied,
The organization committee of the Conference, of which I am a member, considered the question of giving representation to the body which called the St. Paul conference for May 30. The issue in this case was whether every organization connected with the St. Paul movement should have separate representation on the arrangements committee or whether such representation should be confined to the three persons charged with organizing the St. Paul conference. The latter suggestion prevailed. . . . I know very little about the present condition or stand of your Committee and I need not assure you that my sentiments toward you personally have never ceased to be friendly and cordial.78
To be sure, there was plenty of anxiety in Socialist ranks about the insistence of the leadership on staying the course with the CPPA while bolder action was being taken in Minnesota. Kate Richards O’Hare, who managed to keep the National Rip-Saw kicking into the early 1920s, editorialized that “all that can be done by political action now rests in a Farmer-Labor Party.”79 But Hillquit’s approach was not as foolhardy as the ultimate failure to form a Farmer-Labor Party might suggest. As committed as the Railroad Brotherhoods were to William McAdoo, Hillquit was correct that if his closer union allies in the CPPA were not necessarily opposed to endorsing a major party candidate in principle, they could not support McAdoo. By early 1924, the groomed dynastic successor to Woodrow Wilson was implicated to a great extent in the Teapot Dome scandal.
Some historians have pushed the erroneous notion, based on the position of the Railroad Brotherhoods, that there would have been no Progressive candidacy in 1924 had William McAdoo emerged as the Democratic nominee. That June, the Democratic convention in New York was among the most legendary and depressing affairs in the annals of American politics. McAdoo, an architect of the Federal Reserve and Council of National Defense, faced off for 103 ballots as the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan against New York governor Al Smith, before the obscure Wall Street lawyer John Davis emerged as the eventual compromise. Even most of the Railroad Brotherhoods, by the time the convention opened, were being led by the force of events to support the increasingly certain candidacy of Robert LaFollette. The aging Samuel Gompers and his inner circle may have had a lingering sympathy for McAdoo, longing for their salad days with Wilson, but the practical men of the AFL saw their champion in the man who was urban ethnic America, Al Smith. In the labor movement no less than in the Democratic Party itself, McAdoo was the symbol of the past and Smith of the future.
LaFollette decided he would seek the presidency in 1924 when he was with his family over the preceding Christmas holidays. According to the memoirs of his son Philip, he immediately decided that he would run as an independent and not on a third-party ticket in order to avoid the specter of Communist infiltration that had thwarted his candidacy in 1920.80 James Weinstein disputes this by pointing to a letter in which LaFollette indicated his likelihood of accepting the nomination of the Farmer-Labor Party when it convened on June 17, but doing so would not have been inconsistent with the wishes of LaFollette, who was already anticipating the support of the Socialist Party.81 Several gestures were made throughout the spring of 1924 attempting to ensure harmony between the St. Paul convention and the CPPA, which looked increasingly certain to nominate LaFollette in Cleveland on July 4. But William Mahoney insisted on going forward with his plans, thinking he might compel the CPPA to merely endorse LaFollette as the nominee of his Farmer-Labor Party.82 One attempt to resolve this impasse was made by Edwin Evans, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), who proposed the formation of an entirely new umbrella group that would immediately exclude the Communists.83
On April 28, an anxious Samuel Gompers called a meeting of union leaders and members of Congress aligned with the LaFollette movement to urge them to repudiate the planned St. Paul convention, and thus decisively extricate both the labor and progressive movements from the Communist menace. He was particularly concerned that the assorted congressmen were being manipulated on the Communists’ behalf by Henry Teigan, Mahoney’s collaborator and one-time secretary of the South Dakota SP, who served as chief of staff to Senator Magnus Johnson. Both Johnson and Henrik Shipstead were at this meeting, as were the three Minnesota Farmer-Laborites in the House. A few misgivings were expressed about Gompers’s position, but the unqualified support of William Johnston secured consensus.84 On May 29, LaFollette released to the press a letter he had written to Wisconsin attorney general Herman Ekern repudiating Communist support:
I have no doubt that many of those involved in organizing the St. Paul meeting are actuated by the purest desire to promote genuine political and economic progress. But it will not command the support of the farmers, the workers or other progressives. The Communists have admittedly entered into this political movement not for the purpose of curing, by means of the ballot, the evils which afflict the American people, but only to divide and confuse the Progressive movement and create a condition of chaos favorable to their ultimate aims. Their real purpose is to establish by revolutionary action a dictatorship of the proletariat, which is absolutely repugnant to democratic ideals and to all American aspirations. Not only are the Communists the mortal enemies of the progressive movement and democratic ideals, but, under the cloak of such extremists, the reactionary interests find the best opportunity to plant their spies and provocatory agents for the purpose of confusing and destroying the progressive movements. I have devoted many years of my life to an effort to solve the problems which confront the American people by the ballot and not by force. I have fought steadfastly to achieve this end, and I shall not abandon this fight as long as I may live. I believe, therefore, that all progressives should refuse to participate in any movement which makes common cause with any Communist organization.85
LaFollette further emphasized that the Workers Party was “acting under orders from the Communist International in Moscow,” citing a statement by Foster and Ruthenberg that openly acknowledged Comintern instruction in the May 16 issue of the Daily Worker. Several groups immediately cut all ties with Mahoney, including the Committee of 48 and virtually all the supportive labor press.86 Yet Victor Berger editorialized against LaFollette’s move in the Milwaukee Leader: “Had LaFollette wanted the convention to be a success, had he wanted to overwhelm the Communists and make them look like a frog in the ocean, had he wanted a strong and virile new party formed, all he had to do was urge his supporters to go to the convention in large numbers.”87
James Weinstein comes down in favor of this view, to the point of strongly suggesting that eventual AFL support for LaFollette’s candidacy was only a means of thwarting the emergence of a Labor Party.88 But this claim ignores several facts, not least LaFollette’s own wishes from the outset. Indeed, Lenin’s statement about supporting him “as a rope supports one who is hanged” was a matter of public record, and LaFollette may have also been aware of the crazed imaginings of John Pepper. This reading also denies or diminishes the extent of Communist infiltration of the St. Paul movement. Though their involvement was not as brazen as in Chicago a year earlier, the Communists still had decisive control of the executive committee of the St. Paul Farmer-Labor Party, suggesting that all LaFollette could have done was lead the rank and file out, which he effectively did anyway.89 William Mahoney emerged as embittered and repentant as John Fitzpatrick before him, all the more in that he could not now even be seated as a delegate at the CPPA convention.90
As for the AFL, it is true that it opposed the formation of a new party for reasons all its own, and its official statement endorsing LaFollette took an explicit shot at the Socialist Party. But LaFollette made clear in his official message to the CPPA that, though he was running as an independent, he foresaw a new party being formed after the election, “when the people will register their will and their united purpose by a vote of such magnitude that a new political party will be inevitable.”91 The success of the Non-Partisan League and Farmer-Labor Parties from the Midwest to the Northwest, all of which had stood firmly with the CPPA against the Federated Farmer-Labor Party, strongly suggested that a realignment of such magnitude could indeed be in the offing. The AFL likely wanted to keep its options open for such an eventuality, and Gompers had even made some effort to accommodate the Labor Party movement when it first emerged in 1919. Whatever he was thinking now, it scarcely mattered after he passed away in September. If there was any scheming involved, it was against the insurgency stirring since the end of the war led by John L. Lewis and William Hutcheson, presidents of the Mine Workers and Carpenters, respectively. In another indication of the gravely missed opportunities of 1920, these formidable labor leaders were successfully wooed by the Republicans that year as progressive critics of Gompers.92
The St. Paul convention went forward as scheduled on June 17 and proved a farce. Just a couple of days after LaFollette released his letter blasting the Communists, a frantic communication from the Comintern, reflecting the chaos reigning in Moscow since Lenin’s sudden death in January, denounced support for the Farmer-Labor Party as dangerous opportunism, and ordered them to change course. In that spirit, the two most adamant opponents of supporting LaFollette in the Workers Party—Ludwig Lore and Ludwig Katterfeld, who closely identified with the party’s roots in the old SP left wing and with Trotsky—were also purged.93 Keeping the new line a secret until the convention opened, Mahoney made a pathetic attempt to decertify the ten delegates officially representing the Workers Party and Federated Farmer-Labor Party, with one of his few allies being Walter Thomas Mills, representing the fledgling Farmer-Labor Party of California.94
Charles Taylor of Montana was elected permanent chairman, declaring in perfect jargon, “Out of this convention is destined to grow the great mass-class Farmer-Labor Party, a party that in a few short years will dispose of the two capitalist parties that hold power today, and take over the power in the nation in the name of the workers and producers.”95 Because the majority of the five hundred delegates were still behind LaFollette, both Mahoney and the Communists were allowed to save face by provisionally nominating Duncan McDonald, former Socialist president of the Illinois Federation of Labor, with the understanding that his nomination would be withdrawn when LaFollette was nominated in Cleveland. Four days after LaFollette was nominated, the Farmer-Labor executive committee voted to liquidate the party and endorsed the recently named candidates of the Workers Party, William Z. Foster for president and Ben Gitlow for vice president.96 Foster and Gitlow campaigned in the fall more or less exclusively against LaFollette, whose campaign they described as representing “the forces of American fascism, complete from Hearst to Debs.”97
The CPPA nominating convention at the Cleveland Municipal Auditorium on July 4 was an infinitely more upbeat affair, with ten thousand in attendance. William Johnston gave the keynote address, praising the convention as “the mightiest political force ever assembled in our nation to fight unswervingly for truth, for justice and for freedom.” Johnston continued, praising LaFollette as “the tribune of the American people, their greatest spokesman and their most loyal defender.”98 But not all was harmonious behind the scenes, as Hillquit continued to plead with his colleagues on the CPPA national committee to announce the intention to form a new party then and there. As Hillquit described the scene,
My appearance on the stage was the signal for a spontaneous and lusty ovation, such as I had seldom, if ever, witnessed. Delegates and visitors stood on chairs, waved and cheered and shouted for many minutes, until I succeeded in establishing a semblance of order and was able to make myself heard. Neither I nor my opponents in the committee were deceived about the nature and meaning of the demonstration. It was not a personal tribute. It was generally known that I was desperately fighting in the committee for the formation of an independent political party, and the popular acclaim was an endorsement of my stand as clearly as articulate language could have expressed it. Had I at that moment proposed the immediate organization of a new party the proposal would have been carried by an overwhelming vote. The temptation was great, but one to be resisted. The National Committee was still debating the crucial point, and some acceptable compromise seemed possible. It would manifestly have been an act of disloyalty for me to attempt to force a decision from the floor of the convention before the committee had reached a conclusion, especially when I was acting as emissary of the committee. A snap convention decision to form a new party would moreover have been a pyrrhic victory.99
Robert LaFollette Jr. then read his father’s letter to the convention, which laid out the position of waiting until after the election, with a mandate of the voters behind them, to go forward with the formation of a new party. The CPPA leadership affirmed this by calling a convention for that purpose to be held on November 29. LaFollette was then nominated by acclamation. Seconding speeches were given by Hillquit; women’s suffrage leader Harriet Stanton Blatch; William Pickens, a leader of the NAACP who collaborated with A. Philip Randolph in the Friends of Negro Freedom; and Abraham Lefkowitz, a founder of the American Federation of Teachers and veteran New York Socialist who had been a founder of the Labor Party in 1919.100 The convention agreed to authorize the executive committee to ratify LaFollette’s own choice for a running mate. LaFollette’s first choice was Louis Brandeis, who would have led his brain trust had he become president twelve years earlier.101 But Brandeis had no desire to step down from the Supreme Court, and thus it came as something of a surprise when LaFollette named Burton Wheeler, the freshman Democratic senator from Montana.
A product of the Montana Non-Partisan League, where it was most closely aligned with the SP of any state where it was organized, Wheeler distinguished himself with just two years in the Senate as the lead investigator into the Teapot Dome scandal, earning him the continuing ire of Warren Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, now running for election to a term of his own.102 Once all doubt was removed about the outcome of the agonizing Democratic convention, Wheeler announced that “when the Democratic Party goes to Wall Street for a candidate, I must refuse to go with it . . . the uncontrolled, liberal, and progressive forces must look elsewhere for leadership.”103 At first, Wheeler was reluctant to run and incredulous at LaFollette’s personal assurance that “either you or I will be elected President of the United States”—an indication that LaFollette and the CPPA leadership believed that they would win a large enough bloc of states in the West and Northwest to throw the election into the House of Representatives.104 But when the Justice Department issued a retaliatory indictment against Wheeler, offering to withdraw it if he would not accept the nomination, Wheeler was so galled that he did accept.105
The Socialist Party opened its convention in Cleveland following the CPPA convention on July 7. Bertha Hale White was now the acting executive secretary after the tragic drowning death of Otto Branstetter. The majority report submitted to the convention gave the assurance:
The Presidential campaign of the CPPA will develop into an insurgent political movement of labor. It will be supported by the advanced workers of the country. The Socialist Party must take its stand with these workers. During the four months to come the Socialists will have an unparalleled opportunity to work with the organized workers of this country, side by side, as comrades in a common cause.106
Two members of the NEC, however, were compelled to submit a minority report opposing the nomination of the Progressive ticket. William Snow of Illinois and William Henry of Indiana argued that the CPPA had adopted “a platform so meaningless it might have been written by W. J. Bryan thirty years ago.”107 Yet the LaFollette platform substantially contained all of the party’s historic immediate demands, including public ownership of natural resources and railroads, a large inheritance tax, direct election of the president, abolition of federal judicial review, and a drastic reduction in the U.S. military arsenal. The convention paid little heed to the minority report and endorsed LaFollette and his platform by a vote of 106 to 17. Eugene Debs, as ever, captured the mood of the party that now honored him with the ceremonial post of national chairman, insisting “there is no compromise in going with the working class when it breaks with the old parties.”108 To the slurs of William Z. Foster, Debs responded with the sharp anti-Communist riposte that assured his place of pride in American historical memory: “Having no Vatican in Moscow to guide me, I must follow the light I have, and this I have done as I always have in the past.”109
The pitfalls of Socialist support for the LaFollette-Wheeler campaign were well in evidence, however, as Norman Thomas finally accepted a Socialist nomination to high office, running his first campaign in 1924 for governor of New York. As early as the spring of 1923, the Railroad Brotherhood leaders in the New York state CPPA were alarmed at the predominance of the Socialists, but nonetheless mollified them with a resolution commending the recent success of the British Labour Party.110 But they were eager to reelect the pro-labor governor, Al Smith, then in a tough reelection battle against Republican Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Thus Thomas was usually prevented from speaking in behalf of his own candidacy at the many LaFollette meetings he addressed across the state.111 Still, he was joined many times on the stump by Burton Wheeler, with whom he later stood at the forefront of the campaign to keep the United States out of the Second World War. It was also likely during this campaign that Thomas first heard of the man who would one day gravely affect both his personal legacy and that of American Socialism itself, a rising star of the Young Communist League named Max Shachtman, who wrote of his campaign in the Daily Worker, “Every evening before he dons his nightie he lights a lamp and says a prayer for clean government and hopes that the workers will forget that there is or should be or might be such a thing as a class struggle.”112
Even some former stalwarts of the Social Democratic League, which passed out of existence no later than 1921, supported LaFollette. Most notable were William English Walling and J. G. Phelps Stokes, whose sister Helen, a committed pacifist, would be a leading figure in the Socialist Party of Vermont through the 1930s. But others had moved much further to the right since the war. John Spargo endorsed Calvin Coolidge in what proved the beginning of a long Republican partisan career. Another figure from the Socialist Party’s earliest years in the Coolidge camp was Henry Slobodin, whose letter to Walling defending his position bore the unmistakable marks of his left-wing Socialist background:
Internationally, LaFollette is a bitter reactionary. . . . LaFollette wants the United States to step in now and demand that Europe return to chaos so as to please the German voters in Wisconsin. . . . Economically LaFollette is unsound and reactionary. He promises to smash monopolies. Have the events of the last thirty years been wasted on him?113
Spargo wrote to Slobodin with a hearty endorsement of this letter, revealing, “Whenever I take a move in matters political which marks any sort of departure from the old Socialist ways I quite eagerly await your judgment. In all the long years of our association I have always felt the more certain of my own judgment when it coincided with yours.”114
LaFollette and Wheeler appeared exclusively on the Socialist ballot line in California and appeared on Socialist ballot lines beside their independent lines in Connecticut, Missouri, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. In New York, one of LaFollette’s most outspoken supporters, Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, was denied renomination as a Republican and, after first being elected to Congress as the fusion candidate against Scott Nearing in 1918, had to run for reelection on the Socialist ballot line. Identifying himself as a Progressive for caucusing purposes in the House, Victor Berger paid tribute to LaGuardia by insisting that there was a “Socialist and a half” in Congress.115 A popular speaker for LaFollette throughout the country during the campaign, LaGuardia had to abruptly cancel a tour through Pennsylvania during the fall campaign and was promptly replaced by August Claessens, who had traversed the Midwest for LaFollette.
After causing chaos at the Democratic convention, the Ku Klux Klan reached its zenith during the 1924 campaign, basing its appeal on continuing to uphold the “100% Americanism” of the war years. It saw the LaFollette campaign as especially menacing, yet Claessens recalled, a generation later, as he campaigned for LaFollette before a besheeted parade in the committed Klan strongholds of Lebanon and Quakertown,
The moment the tail of the procession was in sight I stood up, removed my hat and coat, and without any introduction or explanation of who I was, I opened, “fellow citizens.” Of course, I did not mention the Klan. I did not attack it. I was not that dumb. . . . So I began my speech quite innocently. I talked enthusiastically about our great country . . . then I explained the incompetent, wasteful, anarchic capitalist system and the exploitation of the masses and the ruin of our national resources. And of course I wound up with a plea for a collective and cooperative economy, and that a vote for LaFollette was a step in that direction. The hundreds of plain working people listened to me with interest and perfect attention. They roared at my funny stories, they donated a handsome collection and cleaned me out of my Socialist booklets and papers. They gave me a warm ovation and I thanked them for their beautiful attention.116
The following week, when the famously bald Claessens arrived in Reading, a leading party stalwart, J. Henry Stump, told him of a friend who warned him, “You Socialists had better watch out . . . damn my soul if I am lying, that bald-headed guy gave an appealing and quite convincing talk on Socialism. You got to hand it to the KKK. They are a damn clever bunch and they are out to win your people away from you.”117
But more insidious hysteria against LaFollette came from the Republican-aligned sections of the business community. The National Association of Manufacturers intoned that “we have in LaFollette and Wheeler a Lenin and Trotsky.”118 By the end of September, the Coolidge campaign ceased targeting the hopeless Democrat and focused all of its fire on LaFollette with the slogan “Coolidge or Chaos.” The incoming vice president, Charles Dawes, declared that the campaign was a fight between “those who favor the Constitution of the United States and those who would destroy its essential parts.” Dawes described LaFollette as “the master demagogue and the leader of a mob of extreme radicals of which the largest part, the Socialists, fly the red flag.”119 Ignoring what actual Communists thought of LaFollette, the Saturday Evening Post ran an editorial denouncing LaFollette as a Bolshevik agent that would be printed on the back of every Pennsylvania Railroad dining car menu.120
Burton Wheeler began his enthusiastically received national campaign tour in his native Massachusetts, where he had an auspicious supporter in maverick Irish Democrat Joseph P. Kennedy.121 Mrs. Wheeler joined him in Chicago, along with her antiwar activist colleague Jane Addams, proceeding by private rail car across the West.122 After Wheeler addressed a crowd of twenty thousand at the Hollywood Bowl, the Los Angeles Examiner reported, “No prima donna, no golden throated tenor, no orchestra leader with a magic wand has ever known the depths of applause that reverberated through the Hollywood Hills about the Bowl when Senator Wheeler had finished.”123 The major campaign meeting at Madison Square Garden was addressed by Wheeler, Morris Hillquit, Norman Thomas, and A. Philip Randolph.124 LaFollette himself returned to the Cleveland Municipal Auditorium for the final speech of the campaign:
The progressive tide is rising, but this is only the beginning of the fight. We cannot in one short struggle capture all the strongholds in which monopoly has been entrenched. For more than fifty years the private monopoly system has been digging itself into the very heart of government. Its allies are in the executive departments, in Congress and in the courts. They are in the state and city governments. They have spent millions in securing their present power, and it would be almost impossible to free the country of their enormous power and influence in a single presidential election. Regardless of the outcome, I shall forever rejoice that I had a part in this great campaign to restore government to the people. I shall be proud that I aided in proclaiming the message of this great movement—the message of humanity, liberty, and justice.125
With Calvin Coolidge securing an impressive 54 percent of the vote in a three-way contest, LaFollette polled a generally disappointing, but by historic standards formidable 4,831,706 votes, at 16.6 percent. He carried the electoral votes only of his native Wisconsin, but came excruciatingly close in North Dakota, and in ten other states came in a solid second, including California, where he ran solely on the Socialist ballot line. LaFollette would also receive the majority of his vote on the Socialist line in New York and Missouri. The maiden Communist presidential campaign of Foster and Gitlow received a mere 33,364 votes in the fourteen states where they were on the ballot, coming just a hair behind the Socialist Labor Party’s Frank T. Johns. Of more than 120 U.S. House candidates nominated by the Socialists as part of the LaFollette coalition, in addition to LaGuardia and Victor Berger, notable campaigns included Leo Krzycki in the ever-elusive fourth district of Wisconsin, August Claessens with 13 percent in the Bronx-based twenty-third district of New York, and SP founding member and perennial candidate John Slayton with 19 percent in the New Castle-based thirty-fifth district of Pennsylvania.126 But the general mood of setback, as it extended beyond the presidential ticket, was probably best represented in Oklahoma. “Our Jack” Walton, after his impeachment by the Klan-dominated legislature and the disillusionment of his early Socialist supporters, shocked many by capturing the Democratic nomination for the Senate, only to be beaten in a landslide by the Klan-backed Republican.127
It was not immediately clear that the effort for a Labor Party was a complete loss, but the year ended on a tragicomic footnote perfectly encapsulating the transition that was beginning from one era to another in American radicalism. Albert Weisbord, the Harvard-based YPSL chairman, announced that he was defecting to the Communists after the campaign, letting it be revealed that he had long been a Communist plant. In the words of Executive Secretary Bertha Hale White, “We thought him rather immature, if not childish, in some of his communications but considered him perfectly honest and trustworthy . . . his latest action came as a complete surprise, and to say the least, it was a painful shock to all of us here.”128 There was a fear that Weisbord might abscond with the records and assets of the YPSL as apparently happened in 1919—indeed, he was the third consecutive YPSL chairman to defect to the Communists.129 Weisbord achieved a moment of glory as a gifted Communist union organizer in the textile industry before abandoning the Communist Party, leading a miniscule Trotskyist sect in the 1930s and then fading into obscurity. With the failure to form a Farmer-Labor Party and, in the words of Gene Debs, become part of something as big as America itself, such dubious characters were the future of American radicalism.