In approaching the history of socialism in the United States, we immediately face the problem that historians have widely assumed socialism has never amounted to much here—even, among some specialists in the field, that in this country there has been no socialist movement worthy of the name. Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) was notably premature in its negative judgment upon the movement, drawing conclusions well before the high points of Socialist and Communist Party activity. His gloomy analysis has nevertheless set the standard for later commentators. Two of his points of criticism—that greater social mobility (or the appearance thereof) has prevented working-class solidarity in the United States, and that the U.S. two-party system has thwarted the influence of radical parties of all kinds—certainly must be reckoned with by any study of American socialism, including this one. Initially, though, it is the basic assumption, “no socialism in the United States,” that demands our attention. Among the many critics that have shared the Sombartian premise, it is the wide—and contradictory—variety of explanations of the assumption that stands out. On the one hand, as characterized in Daniel Bell's seminal Marxian Socialism in the United States, American socialism has been too rigidly theoretical and utopian ever to gain traction in the quotidian, workaday world, “trapped by the unhappy problem of living ‘in but not of the world,' so it could only act, and then inadequately, as the moral, but not political, man in immoral society.”1 On the other hand, as caustically dismissed in Brian Lloyd's Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922, socialism in the United States has been theoretically slack, altogether too pragmatic and accommodating toward American conditions to effect any real change in them, “attempt[ing] the impossible—defeating the enemy while waving the enemy's flag.”2 Obviously, these points of view are incompatible. But then what are we to make of the assumption of socialism's failure, shared by both? Should we conclude that American socialism was sometimes overly pragmatic, sometimes overly utopian, but nearly always the wrong one at the wrong time? Or if, as often happens in such debates, there is an element of truth on both sides, then is it possible that American socialists have sometimes gotten the balance right, a conclusion that must force us to rethink the assumption with which Sombart started us more than a century ago?
Here it may be objected—by exponents of socialism and its opponents alike—that socialism is not by any means about the right balance between extremes. One of the most famous formulations in the socialist tradition, after all, is Marx and Engels's unequivocal assertion that “only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”3 could the proper foundation for socialism's ultimate goal, the classless society, be laid. Yet in the same document containing this assertion, the epoch-making Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels sought precisely to stake out the middle ground between their socialist predecessors and the defenders of existing conditions. The writings of the early socialists Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, English and French promoters of communal schemes by which people of all classes were to meet on equal terms, might be “full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class,”4 but in Marx and Engels's estimation, the communitarian socialists had been sorely lacking in their understanding of the fundamental facts of class division and struggle in modern society and, therefore, had done little more than seek to impose their own “fantastic” conjured-up ideas upon material reality. Theirs were forms of socialism utterly divorced from the real. The bourgeoisie, for all their faults, could be credited with a more realistic appraisal of the relations between classes under capitalism. At the founding moment of Marxism as an internationally recognized movement among the available forms of socialism, Marx and Engels claimed for themselves not the most extreme position, not the most fundamental radicalism, but the middle ground recognizing the down-and-dirty reality of the class struggle—even as did the bourgeois—and yet claiming also the higher ethical ground of human equality—together with all other socialists, of however pragmatic or utopian a hue. Presently, in Engels's 1881 treatise Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the practical and righteous mean would have a name, “scientific,” but even before its coinage, Marxists, non-Marxist socialists, and nonsocialist progressives have fought for a claim upon that mean. What theory and practice, socialists have wondered and argued over, would have enough leverage upon existing society to make a new, socially egalitarian order practicable, yet would at the same time remain distinct enough to establish the conditions for genuine egalitarianism, not the same old capitalist inequality in a new guise?
In the context of this search and this argument, the larger number of American socialists asserted the possibility that the United States could become a classless society by a gradual, democratic, and nonviolent path. Some, indeed, insisted that genuine socialism could be successfully introduced only by such a path. Unorthodox as this may seem from a latter-day perspective colored by the socialist-capitalist antinomies of the Comintern and the Cold War, in the latter years of the nineteenth century American socialists of this type were not bucking but participating in an international trend. To understand where they were coming from, we need to know something of the genealogy of socialism in the nineteenth century, in which Marxism offered just one of several theoretical lenses, and in which socialists had to come to terms with other anticapitalist but not necessarily socialist movements—including anarchism on the international scene, Populism within the United States. These socialist and socialistic movements simply did not register with a commentator such as Sombart, who had a very specific, Marxist and trade unionist notion of what socialism looked like. But these various movements set the stage both for the subsequent development of American socialism and for the infusion of certain social democratic practices in American culture more generally. Ultimately, the later development of a socialism more oriented to Marxist notions of class struggle—closer to what we think of as socialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—tended to suppress forms of socialism that were more willing to assimilate other forms of radical critique and could be more readily assimilated into the wider culture. The initial steps of both processes—the assimilation and the suppression—become visible through the early career of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was an activist in both the Edward Bellamy Nationalist movement and the Populist movement, and who developed a synthesis of feminism and socialism that emerged in conversation with multiple socialist sources—a synthesis that has all too often been disregarded by later socialists and their historians alike.
REALLY EXISTING SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES, CIRCA 1890
“French and English, with the American enthusiasm of Bellamy.”
The socialism Gilman encountered when in 1890 she became active in the movement can be defined quite narrowly and with considerable precision and, at the same time, connected with a variety of groups and perspectives that are not so easy to describe by a simple rubric. In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she explained that “My Socialism was of the early humanitarian kind, based on the first exponents, French and English, with the American enthusiasm of Bellamy.”5 Such a genealogy is precise about the beginning of the socialist movement that Gilman embraced early in her career as an intellectual. Along with thousands of other American progressives, she counted herself an adherent of Edward Bellamy Nationalism by 1890, a political phenomenon whose existence can be dated definitely to the weeks immediately following the 1888 publication of Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887. For his part, responding to questions about why the movement was called “Nationalism” instead of “socialism”—a distinction that has prompted at least one critic of the movement to claim it wasn't socialist6—Bellamy explained in an 1894 New Nation editorial that the latter term was simply not exact enough. Bellamy notes that socialism is “a generic and not a specific term,” that a socialist might be defined broadly as any person “who accepts and works for the definite principle of organizing trade and industry collectively, by having land and industrial capital owned by the community (in some form), and operated co-operatively for the equitable (not necessarily the equal), good of all.” Nationalism, Bellamy suggests, “contain[s] all the meaning of socialism” thus defined, but it also specifies the form of collective ownership as the Nation while insisting that the common wealth be shared not just equitably but equally among individuals.7 Such a definition establishes a definite ideological content for the socialism with which Gilman affiliated as well as a clear point of historical origin.
The other elements of Gilman's definition of her socialism tend, however, to complicate as well as to enrich the picture, particularly because Gilman and her comrades in the 1890s were far from being the first U.S. citizens to be interested in socialism's “first exponents, French and English.” Gilman was alluding to the early nineteenth-century movements founded by the Englishman Robert Owen and the Frenchman Charles Fourier—the very socialists disparaged by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. Owen was a Welsh textile manufacturer and philanthropist, famous for his model textile factory and company town, who by 1824 had became determined to redress the working conditions not merely of his own employees but of all workers. His plan was to plant small cooperative communities throughout England and the United States, which might serve as winning models for the eventual transformation of society as a whole. Charles Fourier, a traveling-salesman-turned-philosopher who developed his system of collectivist, egalitarian “phalanxes” approximately ten years later, was also a communitarian, seeking to effect a wider transformation of society through the inspiration of communities that grew their own food and supplied most of their other material wants by traditional handicrafts. There was reason for Marx and Engels to concede that Owen and Fourier provided “most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class,” for the intellectual architecture of their movements was genuinely inspiring: Owen, Fourier, and their followers denounced the antisocial effects of private property and economic competition, insisted upon the equality of women with men, and declared that human beings might achieve their full potentiality if placed in nurturing and cooperative social environments.8
Owen looked specifically to the United States as the most fertile ground for his prototype agricultural and industrial communities.9 The United States had, after all, been a site of various communal experiments in cooperative and egalitarian economics since the beginnings of European settlement. The most famous of the first permanent European colonists, the Pilgrims, were communards motivated by religion—common ownership of property being one of the articles of the Mayflower Compact. While the Plymouth governor, William Bradford, began to allow some forms of private property within three years, confessing that human depravity prevented the realization of the communal ideal anywhere short of heaven, American religious communities with happier views of human nature continued to see communal property as practicable on earth, and included the Shakers, the Amana colonists, and the Hutterites.10 So it was that Owen came to the United States in the late 1820s armed with a degree of hope that he might find individuals willing to join egalitarian communities following his highly idealistic, though secular, philosophy. He personally supervised the formation of ten settlements, and nine more hailing Owen as their inspiration were formed in the 1830s and 1840s.
Fourierite communities in the United States followed closely on the heels of the Owenite experiments. Although their namesake never set foot in the United States, the Fourier phalanxes were actually more numerous and longer lived. Fourierism benefited from having articulate and influential American advocates: chiefly, Arthur Brisbane, whose books such as The Social Destiny of Man, or Association and Reorganization of Industry (1840) and A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association, or Plan for the Reorganization of Society (1843) combined translations of Fourier's writings with Brisbane's own commentaries; and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who permitted Brisbane to write a regular front-page column on Fourierism from March 1842 to September 1843. The publicity generated by Brisbane and Greeley led, in turn, to a boom in commune building—thirty-seven Fourierite settlements in thirteen states, almost all established during the 1840s.11
The knock against communitarian socialism was its supposed impracticality. Marx and Engels's criticism, that Owen and Fourier operated on the level of beautiful ideals divorced from material realities, was echoed in other quarters. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in the Brook Farm cooperative community supported by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists, made the community a matter for satiric and tragic fiction in The Blithedale Romance.12 His most explicit commentary upon Brook Farm, in the novel's final chapter, suggested that communes would never succeed because enterprising individuals would prefer the competitive world of the capitalist marketplace, whereas the loafers who hoped to gain from cooperation would never be able to make such a community self-sustaining: “Where once we toiled with our hopeful hearts, the town-paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield. Alas, what faith is requisite to bear up against such results of generous effort!”13 Hawthorne's objections somewhat bizarrely mix the two, diametrically opposed kinds of latter-day criticisms of American socialism, for just before his narrator, Coverdale, voices the impracticality of the communal arrangement, he also faults Blithedale for being insufficiently idealistic, “lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit.”14 Socialism in America, it seems, can be neither practical enough nor idealistic enough. Yet again, for whatever reason the judgment of history appears to back up Hawthorne's adverse judgment as well as Marx's and Engels's. The Brook Farm community had been defunct for several years by the time The Blithedale Romance was published, and though it lasted but six years, it was one of the longer lived socialist communes. Most of the Owenite communities disbanded after a year or two, with only the longest lived reaching the six-year mark, a distinction shared by the Coal Creek Community of Indiana and Fruit Hills in Ohio. The Fourierite communes did only somewhat better: a majority lasted for two years or less, while just six out of thirty-seven lasted six years or longer.15
Through the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, the main line of socialist development in the United States did not reject the philosophy of the Owenite and Fourierite experiments so much as it sought to place socialism upon a more practical basis. The communes had foundered, analysts felt, because they had been forced into competition with capitalism on a completely unequal footing—small islands of subsistence economics engulfed by a system with vastly greater resources, backed up by the allure of greater material consumption and an altogether hostile individualistic ideology. To have a fighting chance, socialism needed to be introduced on a much greater scale, meaning that not merely small groups of individuals needed to be persuaded of the value of socialism but a massive number, likely even a controlling majority of the citizenry. It was the perceived necessity of this greater scale that led to Bellamy's insistence that socialism be instituted nationally, but on this point Bellamy was neither alone nor the first among American advocates of social equality.
The historical landscape of the later nineteenth century was dotted with movements that sought large-scale alternatives to capitalism as practiced in the United States. Part of the complexity of comprehending socialism in the period lies in sorting out just how to classify these alternatives: some did not advocate common ownership of property and thus would permit capitalism in some form to be maintained, while others did not seek strict social equality but rather equal opportunity or (as with current advocates of liberation) radical freedom. But if these do not count as socialism—according to either the narrower definition preferred by Bellamy or the broader one—then they might count as socialistic, in the sense that they contributed to a critique of capitalism and offered collectivist or at least less individualistic remedies. A case in point is the Single Tax, minutely explained in Henry George's 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty. George's reform scheme was a straightforwardly confiscatory national tax upon land speculation, which, by rendering the ownership of untilled land unprofitable, sought to enable practically any American citizens who so desired to own their own small farms. Without demanding the abolition of private property, George's proposal sought to use government intervention on a single point to redirect individualist and entrepreneurial energies in ways that would result in a more equitable society—hence adopting the key socialist goal but an incompletely socialist means. Another awkward ideological mixture can be seen in the development of the Knights of Labor, whose leaders adopted the Owenite socialist philosophy of cooperation between labor and management, even as they organized America's first great industrial union, welcoming into one organization unskilled as well as skilled workers, blacks as well as whites, women as well as men. Because of their tremendous size—by the mid-1880s, over 700,000 members16—and limited opportunities for an Owenite education of the rank and file, the Knights were practically fated to enter instead into direct conflict with the captains of industry.
The evolution from communal socialism to the modern mass movement was not left entirely in the hands of ad hoc reformers and pragmatists, however. In attempting to persuade Americans of the feasibility as well as the desirability of socialism, American socialist theorists also sought to get a boost by demonstrating, as Marx and Engels had sought to do, that historical forces were driving toward precisely the egalitarian and generous society that comprised the socialist socio-ethical ideal. This was exactly the contention of Laurence Gronlund's 1884 book, The Cooperative Commonwealth, which in fact drew heavily upon Marx and Engels's ideas and even turns of phrase. Just as Marx saw the Paris Commune of 1871 as the beginning of revolutionary action in Europe, which would undoubtedly spread and deepen through the inexorable process of capitalist accumulation and labor exploitation, Gronlund predicted that the tumultuous American railroad strikes of 1877 were just the beginning of an inevitable cycle leading to revolution in the United States, as time and again capitalist overproduction would lead to economic crisis, economic crisis to labor unrest, and unrest to increasingly brutal suppression, until “in the fulness of time we shall have a labor revolt that will not be put down.”17 Echoing one of the more famous images of the Communist Manifesto—“What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers”—Gronlund announced, “This ‘Individualism,' which has created and nourished Capital and is making it bigger and bigger, is at the same time digging the grave of Capital.”18
Yet precisely at the moment of declaring the historical, dialectical materialist triumph of socialism across the board, at the very point where Gronlund's argument and his rhetoric aligns most closely with the Manifesto, Gronlund's argument turns in a quite different direction. Once historical and material forces have established the direction of social change, Gronlund imagines a tipping point at which the majority of citizens will acknowledge the inevitability of that change, approve of its results, and so give it their democratic assent: “As soon as the people learn not to be scared by the word ‘Socialism'; as soon as they learn the true nature of the State and see whither they are drifting, the Cooperative Commonwealth will be the only expedient system.”19
Edward Bellamy went still further in predicting the inevitability of socialism in America, finding the catalyst for revolution not in labor activism, as did Gronlund, but in the dreaded adversary of labor: monopoly capitalism. When the protagonist of Looking Backward, Julian West, falls into a state of suspended animation in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find his native Boston much improved by one hundred years of life under a socialist common wealth, nothing astonishes him more than the news that the great transformation from monopoly capitalism to state socialism took place with absolutely no violence or bloodshed. No doubt having in mind the violent insurrections of 1877 or, perhaps, the Haymarket riot, Julian West must be assured several times by Dr. Leete, his host on the cusp of the twenty-first century, that the emergence of socialism was greeted by the vast majority of citizens as reasonable and desirable. Indeed, the monopolies that many had felt “threatened society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured” are presented by Leete as actually paving the way for the final monopoly, the Nation. Dr. Leete informs Julian that “early in the last century,” the twentieth century, that is,
the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were entrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest and for the common profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared.20
Once they recognized the groundwork for the great monopoly being laid by the progressively larger industrial syndicates, even the laborers found they could bide their time, wait for the inevitable coming of the one collective that must necessarily be controlled by the central national government “representing the people.” And once practically all citizens recognized the productive efficiency realized through economies of scale and the elimination of redundant competitive industries, the demand for social ownership of the means of production became nearly universal: “Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it. There was no more possibility of opposing it by force than by argument.”21
Such a conception of a gentle and orderly path into the cooperative commonwealth was not, of course, a matter of consensus among socialists—neither in the United States nor elsewhere. Marx railed against Henry George's Single Tax: “Theoretically the man is utterly backward! He understands nothing about the nature of surplus value.”22 In 1880, Engels felt compelled to return to the critique of Fourier, Owen, and other early communitarians and socialist philosophers, organizing the debate between the non-Marxists and Marxists by terms that have since become widespread as terms of dismissal and approbation. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific sought to reject non-Marxian socialism as impossibly out of touch with reality, Marxian socialism as in the know about the objective conditions of society and history. Although a supporter of Bellamy Nationalism at the very beginning of his socialist career, Daniel De Leon soon became America's most ardent and vocal exponent of rigorous Marxist revolutionism and dialectical materialism. For De Leon as with Marx and Engels, history was driven essentially by class struggle; those socialists who wished for an easy road to revolution were indistinguishable from social reformers. Building upon the binary opposition articulated by Engels, De Leon asserted in an 1896 speech that genuine socialism “takes Science by the hand, asks her to lead, and goes withersoever she points.” Such scientific socialists “move as intelligent men; we do not mutiny because, instead of wings, we have arms, and cannot fly as we would wish,” and they do not insist upon nice moral distinctions in seeking “Revolution—peaceful or bloody, and the peacefulness or the bloodiness of it cuts no figure whatever in the essence of the question.”23
Among the protest groups that De Leon scorned were the Populists, whom he classed (along with the Knights of Labor and Henry George) as “movements that bred hopes in the hearts of the people” but were doomed to fail because they operated upon “denials of scientific facts.” Yet even as the People's Party had by then passed its apogee as an independent movement—De Leon jeered that “it went up like a rocket, and is now fast coming down a stick”24—the evidence provided by American history and by the socialist movement in America to that date did not back up the “science” of militant Marxism nearly as unequivocally as De Leon would have had his hearers believe. The impermanency of the cooperative communes had demanded reconsideration of their small-bore, experimental approach. Yet arguably, Marxist revolutionists were basing their suppositions upon still more slender historical reeds than were the socialists who envisioned a gradual transformation effecting a cooperative commonwealth. Marx believed he had gained enough empirical evidence from the Paris Commune of 1871 to draw specific conclusions in his pamphlet The Civil War in France about the historically ordained form to be taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the Commune had been possible in the first place only on account of the French military debacle of the previous fall in the Franco-Prussian war; it had been imperiled from the start, and was brutally crushed by regrouped elements of the French army after just seventy-three days. Even the least successful of the secular communes, whose philosophies served to inspire later American socialists of a gradualist and cooperative bent, lasted longer than this, and the longer-lived Fourierite groups sustained themselves for a decade or more: Utopia in Trialville, Ohio, lasted for eleven years; the Alphadelphia Phalanx in Michigan and the North American Phalanx in New Jersey both for thirteen; and the Hopedale Community in Massachusetts for twenty-five. Provocatively, the last American Fourierite phalanx was founded in the same year that the French army was routed at Sedan, setting the stage for the Commune. The Kansas Cooperative Farm did not grab headlines; it struck fear into the hearts of few; it did not inspire any imaginative literature so far as I know, and it remained functioning until 1884.25
As in Paris in 1871, those occasions when violent labor disturbances took place in the United States hardly produced much evidence that here lay the path to an egalitarian socialist society, although one could certainly make the case that these were events driven by powerful historical determinants. The Great Upheaval of 1877 was in many respects America's version of the Paris Commune. In that year spontaneous strikes among railroad workers in Pennsylvania and West Virginia led to widespread destruction of railroad property, armed confrontations in which some militiamen decided to support the workers, and protest meetings in some towns in which the workers, deliberately invoking the spirit of the Commune, declared the establishment of labor governments.26 The revolutionary rhetoric of the strikers seemed, however, only to embolden their antagonists, for federal troops swiftly, brutally, and completely crushed the strikes, and majority popular opinion turned sharply against the workers and their grievances. Something similar happened to the Knights of Labor, whose rank and file, despite the nonconfrontational stance of their leaders, went out on strike repeatedly in the mid1880s, almost as soon as they reached a critical mass in membership. Initial successes led to spring 1886 strikes against James Gould–owned railroads in the Southwest. Then sabotage and other acts of violence by some Knights-affiliated strikers provided warrant for law enforcement officials and company militias to strike back with violence of their own, and within weeks the Knights were forced to accept wage cuts and other concessions (and union membership fell almost as swiftly as it had previously risen, to around 100,000 by 1890).27 The year 1886, moreover, brought the Haymarket disaster, which showed that the link between radical labor leaders and violence need only be plausibly imagined in order to justify the widest-ranging persecution. No one claimed that the seven anarchist leaders who were convicted of murder charges had actually thrown the bomb that killed eight police at Haymarket Square, Chicago, yet Haymarket cemented in the popular imagination the image of the bomb-throwing anarchist that in the United States has served to define—and to discredit—anarchist socialism to this very day.
In Europe during the same period, socialist reaction to the Commune and the demise of the First Internationale were establishing the groundwork for a new, less confrontational approach. Although the intellectual supremacy of Marx's thought was so well established by the 1870s that every European socialist party claimed Marxism as its official ideology, European socialists were offering widely varying applications of that ideology to the practical difficulties they faced after the defeat of the Paris Commune. The preferred socialist strategy was parliamentary and gradualist, effectively implemented by the 1875 merger of the two major German socialist organizations to form the Social Democratic Party, and codified by the 1889 formation of the Second International. During the First Internationale, it was the minority position, maintained by Marx's arch-foe Ferdinand Lassalle, that revolutionary change might be possible by nonviolent and legal methods. In the Second Internationale it became the official majority line of the international movement, preached by prominent Marxists August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky. During the Second Internationale, Engels himself even occasionally countenanced the possibility of socialist revolution through parliamentary means, especially in countries with democratically elected governments such as the United States.28
In the United States, meanwhile, as if to fulfill all that Gronlund had prophesied as possible under American political and social conditions, the utopian literary projection and rhetorical persuasion of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published just two years after Gronlund's Cooperative Commonwealth, served to fuel a nationwide movement. Bellamy's Looking Backward had a tremendous popular readership, with somewhere between 160,000 and 300,000 copies of the book printed in the first two years, between 500,000 and one million within the first decade.29 Nationalist clubs devoted to studying its blueprint for the future sprang up almost immediately, too, numbering 158 clubs in twenty-seven states by the end of 1890, when Charlotte Perkins Gilman first affiliated herself with one of them.30 Gronlund was enthralled by Looking Backward, to the extent that he instructed his booksellers to push sales of Bellamy's book instead of his own, and he threw his energy into supporting the Nationalist movement. Largely on the strength of his observation of the Bellamy Nationalist phenomenon, Gronlund came to assert all the more unequivocally that socialism could be achieved without violence, through the institutions already existing in the United States. By the time he issued a new, revised version of The Cooperative Commonwealth in 1890, he eliminated his prediction that socialists could await the revolution with folded arms. Replacing this (formerly) scientific-socialist deduction were Gronlund's (newly) scientific-socialist prognostications about the pivotal role to be played by popular control of the state, which he saw Nationalism as helping to effect.31
In many ways Nationalism was the lineal descendant of Owenism and Fourierism—as Gilman would later suggest—for the movement insisted upon the principles of strict equality and the obligation of all to labor as well as upon the possibility of a natural, harmonious progression from capitalist competition into socialist cooperation. Along with Gronlund and other Marxists, Nationalism had also come to terms with industrial and technological modernity, embracing modern industrial production as the means to provide material abundance for all. Bellamy and other Nationalists further asserted, however, the need for a mass politics as the means to achieve a national transformation in political economy. Recognizing their own limitations—a movement reaching into many but not all states, and appealing more to intellectuals and bourgeois progressives than to a cross-section of the population—Nationalists sought to connect with a wider political movement. Consequently, Nationalist representatives attended the founding convention of the People's Party in 1892 and chose to support Populist efforts to supplant the established national parties.
Even as they were precise about the necessary scope of socialist organization and held high standards for the egalitarian criteria by which socialist success would be judged, Nationalists were flexible about the forms of progressive activism that might count as favorable to their cause. If, after all, monopoly capitalism could be turned to the ultimate advantage of the cooperative commonwealth, what movement aiming at social betterment could not be assimilated? It was not especially difficult, therefore, for Bellamy and other Nationalists to affiliate themselves with the Populist movement and the People's Party in the 1890s. Whereas De Leon scorned the Populists, Bellamy touted them. In an 1893 editorial, “This Revolution is Beginning Like all the Great Ones,” Bellamy speculated that “petty” Populist measures such as free silver coinage would in due course proceed to “the plain issue between the public conduct of all industry for the equal common benefit, and the present irresponsible system of private capitalistic rule for private ends.” Indeed, when Bellamy compared the People's Party with the Marxist but gradualist social democratic parties of Europe, he found the political demands and strategy of the American People's Party to be more aggressive. Referring to the moderate political strategy approved at the 1893 international socialist congress held in Zurich, Bellamy chided the “conservatism” of the German social democrats, “which looks like failing devotion to the ultimate socialist ideal” and “pretty mild sort of talk compared with the utterance of our people's party conventions.” Bellamy's criticisms echo Marx's own of the reformist direction taken by the German Social Democrats as early as the 1870s, as Bellamy asks puckishly, “Shall we have to export socialism?”32 Writing in much the same vein a few years later, Gilman's assessment of the international socialist movement is both broadly inclusive of groups being systematically excluded from the ranks of the Socialist Internationale and pointedly partisan toward the People's Party: “The social movement of to-day is felt in each civilized country, but varies in form according to the local conditions. In Russia we have nihilism; in Italy and Spain, anarchism, communism and Socialism. In Germany Socialism, strict and strong. In England a more ethical and educational form of Socialism. In America what we call Populism is our indigenous movement in the same direction.”33
While the philosophy of Nationalism is relatively easy to define, as the Nationalist organization always remained closely associated with the originating vision of Bellamy in Looking Backward, the task of defining Populism is fairly daunting, for the 1890s movement derived from many quite different sources and flourished in several regions of the country—the Southeast, Southwest, and upper Midwest—each of which gave the movement its own distinct constituency and different, even sometimes contradictory, aims. One of the leading historians of the movement, Lawrence Goodwyn, steadfastly resists classifying nineteenth-century Populist ideology under the categories of either capitalism or socialism: “Populists were not capitalist reformers, as we understand that phrase in modern political language; neither were they socialists. Though their mass movement literally grew out of their belief in the power of man as a cooperative being, they also accepted man as a competitive being.”34 Manifestly in the South, less so in the Midwest and Southwest, Populism was a movement of white farmers who felt threatened from below by black labor as well as from above by white-owned banks, railroads, and granaries. The history of Populism is, therefore, checkered by racism varying in kind and degree from region to region.35
Populists were united, however, by a consistent and far-reaching contempt for capitalism as practiced in nineteenth-century America. Even if, as Goodwyn suggests, the Populists were by no means united upon any particular, systemic alternative to capitalism, and if their attitude might be seen as preindus trialist nostalgia—very much the same spirit that had animated the communitarian socialist groups—those practical measures and reforms they advanced certainly meet the standard of being socialistic. The key demands uniting the People's Party nationally were for a government with much broader powers in the economic sphere. In all three major planks of the platform ratified in Omaha in 1892, the People's Party advocated either outright nationalized ownership or federal administration oriented more to public good than, as at present, to private gain. “Money,” railroads and telegraphs, and “Land,” Gene Clanton explains, “Having been usurped by corporations and privileged individuals . . . had to be reclaimed and superintended by means of public agencies, owned and administered by the community at large.”36 Using the Communist Manifesto as a yardstick, we may note that Marx and Engels's proposals there include nationalized banking, public ownership of transportation and communication, and land reform promoting smaller-scale farming and a more even distribution of population between country and city. While the reforms of the People's Party definitely fell short of the abolition of capitalism, they represented practical measures that could be, and in some cases actually were, implemented. The subtreasury plan of southwestern Populists created a cooperative market among farmers for crops, land, and equipment standing as a buffer to the “free,” capitalist market. It was one of the boldest and most creative challenges to market capitalism ever attempted in the United States.37
As De Leon's metaphor of the rocket suggests, the People's Party was remarkably and swiftly successful. In its regions of strongest support and during the economic crises of the early 1890s, the People's Party surpassed the popularity of the two established parties. An organization called the Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, the immediate predecessor of the national People's Party formed by midwestern and southern farmers and remnants of the Knights of Labor, had already fielded candidates in the election of 1890, eleven of whom won seats in the U.S. Congress.38 In 1892, with the further support of the Nationalists and other reform groups, this political organization under the new banner of the People's Party won two governorships. Its presidential candidate, General James Weaver, won five states as well as over 8 percent of the total national vote. Although by the time of the midterm elections of 1894 the People's Party retained only seven seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, it held six seats in the Senate and elected hundreds to state office and controlled or won influence in state legislatures throughout the Midwest and South.39
The subsequent career of Populism—which De Leon characterized as a “stick” returning to earth—I will be taking up in the third and final section of this chapter. At this point, suffice it to say that De Leon's dismissive attitude may be seen as strongly colored by defensiveness over the limited electoral success of his favored, more doctrinaire Marxist party, the Socialist Labor Party. When in 1892 General Weaver received over one million votes for U.S. president, the candidate of the Socialist Labor Party garnered 21,000.40 De Leon's argument was that historical forces were on the side of his version of scientific socialism, but the empirical evidence of the past several decades suggested, rather, that history was on the side of those socialists who found parliamentary, conciliatory, and gradual means as the more promising path into the classless society.
Bellamy, Gilman, and other Nationalists who threw their support to the Populists did not imagine that the movement represented a fully realized socialism—nor even that its ideals amounted to a fully formed socialist vision. In a sense, however, they actually cleaved more closely than the more doctrinaire Marxists did to the basic Marxist principle that socialism might be realized only within the framework of actually existing, material social relations. Bellamy and his followers extended this principle to the realm of political ways and means—effectively in accord with the Second Internationale—by asserting that socialism could be substantially advanced through progressive, merely socialistic popular movements and the existing political and legal apparatuses. The American Revolution appeared, in fact, to afford socialists a useful precedent and native national rhetoric for the popular control of industry. Bellamy hastens to draw the parallel early in Looking Backward, as Dr. Leete ties the common sense of economic revolution to the political revolution of 1776, as by the end of the nineteenth century “the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred-odd years before they assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had then organized for political purposes.”41 In her first extant public speech—given in 1890 before one of the Nationalist Clubs dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's ideas—Charlotte Perkins Gilman spoke on “Human Nature” both to dispute that capitalism offered a clear extension of human nature and to assert that the natural development of American culture pointed to socialism. Gilman urged her audience to imagine themselves extending an antiauthoritarian trend initiated in the Protestant Reformation:
[We] sat under religious tyranny [for a] long while—didn't know we could help it! But as soon as a few men were big and brave enough to take their right to religious freedom, why they did it, at awful cost—but to the world's great gain. We come from those men!
We sat under royal tyranny for a long while—didn't know we could help it. But as soon as a few men were big and brave enough to take their right to political freedom, why they did it—at awful cost again, but helping the whole world. We come from those men!
And still we sit under the tyranny of money, and most of us don't know yet that we can help it. But as soon as we grow big and brave enough to take [our] right to economic freedom—why we can do it, and help the world as it was never helped before.
We are those men!42
From the vantage point of the early 1890s, Gilman and her comrades saw a substantial American tradition of socialism that did, indeed, stress the possibility of common ground between most members of most social classes and insisted upon the possibility of nonviolent social change. And that tradition would include not merely Bellamy's “American enthusiasm” and the American exponents of Owenism and Fourierism, but the cooperative visions of the Knights of Labor, Laurence Gronlund's adaptations of Marxism, Henry George's socialistic Single Tax, and even the egalitarian ideals of the nation's founders and its first European settlers. Looking backward from 1890, Gilman and her socialist comrades found an independent, varied, and genuinely radical legacy upon which to build. Looking at the present, they saw in the emerging Populist movement a number of signs of popular resistance to capitalism, democratic control of industry and finance, and reform schemes tending toward social cooperation over competition. Looking forward, they sought to do the cultural and political work that might bring “the whole mass of the people” to throw their support to the cooperative commonwealth. In Gilman's words, Americans needed to do no more or less than be “big and brave enough” to assume their natural “right to economic freedom.”
POPULISTS AND WOMEN AS AGENTS OF REVOLUTION
“Woman, the house-servant, belongs to the lowest grade of unorganized labor.”
On a later day, when revolutionary Marxist-Leninism was to gain ascendancy in international socialism, Gilman would largely buy into the sharp dichotomy drawn by De Leon in the 1890s. She, of course, would gravitate to the pole of the binary opposite of De Leon's, when in her 1935 autobiography she not only asserted the kinship of her socialism with the Bellamy movement and the “humanitarian” French and English types but also insisted that “the narrow and rigid ‘economic determinism' of Marx, with its ‘class consciousness' and ‘class struggle' I never accepted, nor the political methods pursued by Marxists.”43 There were of course substantial differences between Gilman's and De Leon's brands of socialism—between socialism that envisages legal and nonviolent methods as efficacious to the accomplishment of its ends, and socialism that foresees extralegal and violent methods as necessary. But I would also have us consider that these distinctions were never quite so sharp as De Leon saw them to be in the 1890s or Gilman believed they were in the 1930s. This is evident from a close examination of Gilman's writings of the 1890s: both those commenting directly upon the Nationalist and Populist movements and those in which Gilman expounded the theoretical relationship of women and socialism, especially in conversation with the feminist tenets of Nationalism. In other words, the socialism in which Gilman participated and to which she contributed was not only gradualist but revolutionary, and not a merely superficial challenge to the existing social order but a rigorous and radical one.
When Charlotte Perkins Gilman attended the 1896 International Labor and Socialist Congress, convening in London, her reports upon the congress stressed the parallels between protest movements in the various European countries and the United States. Her report on the congress, quoted above, stressed the commonalities not merely between social democracy, communism, and Populism but between nihilism, anarchism, and English Fabianism. It was with Fabianism that Gilman evidently felt the strongest connection among the various forms of socialism that she came into contact with at the congress: her report was the first of many articles Gilman would publish in the American Fabian, the organ of the U.S. offshoot of the English Fabian Society. Still, it is the blurring of distinctions that is most striking in Gilman's 1896 accounts of international socialism. Gilman's diary from the days of the 1896 congress, for example, differentiates only slightly between her warm regard for the Fabians and her esteem for the Marxians in attendance: “Meet the Fabians, long honored. Bebel, Singer, Liebnecht, Lafargue, Eleanor Marck Aveling, etc.—lots of great names there.”44 Besides seeing August Bebel at the congress, the day before it opened she spoke on the same platform with him at a Hyde Park peace demonstration.45 Indeed, it seems that Gilman was then more open-minded in her socialism than were the mainline Marxists. Later on the very day that the congress refused to recognize the anarchists' credentials, carrying on the precedent set by Marx and Engels during the First Internationale, Gilman reports going to hear the anarchists at their parallel meeting: “Go in evening to Anarchist meeting in St. Martin's Hall. Krapotkine [sic]—Elisee Reclus—Louise Michel—very interesting.”46
Not only in 1896, when Gilman's contacts with socialists were as numerous and varied as they would be at any time in her career, but also in 1890, when she made her first connection to a socialist group by becoming involved in the Pasadena, California, Nationalist Club, Gilman's writings testify that she and her Nationalist colleagues envisaged their movement as something rather different from a matter of gentle humanitarian reform. Certainly, Gilman's first speech before the Pasadena club, “On Human Nature,” provides an indication of the difference between the ethos of the non-Marxian Nationalist movement and the Marxist Socialist Labor Party that De Leon would soon be associated with. The horticultural imagery that infuses the speech, for example, substantiates Mark Pittenger's argument that reform socialists drew upon the Lamarckian evolutionary views stressing adaptation, whereas revolutionary socialists emphasized struggle.47 Yet the speech's rhetoric consistently undermines the apparent contrast between the terms. Although certainly Gilman's embrace of Lamarckianism shows the preference of Gilman and her colleagues for social development through cooperation rather than antagonism, it also reveals a desire for change to be swift and thorough, more than orderly and conservative:
Here we all are today, suffering from this and suffering from that and suffering from the other, and calling it “the common lot of humanity”! Lot indeed!
Are we trees? Are we houses? Are we stuck in the ground and fenced in that we call life a “lot”? It would seem so.
But it is not so. We can move and leave that lot. And what is more we can dig and ditch and plow and plant until that lot is a garden of Eden—if we choose.
And we do choose. We heartily object to our lot as we find it; and we propose to so alter that lot that the former owners would not recognize it.48
Gilman's garden metaphor appears not so much to undermine the need for dramatic social change as to make such a change more palatable to her audience. Moreover, that change is actually premised on the idea of class division and conflict, of owners who set the terms of current suffering, and of occupants who, seizing control of their “lot,” will transform it according to their own pattern.
In this case, it appears that the difference between Marxian and non-Marxian socialism lies not in an absence of “class consciousness” and “class struggle” in Nationalism but in a different conception of these terms. Marx and Engels asserted that the critical fault line between the classes lay between the bourgeois and the proletariat—under contemporary conditions, a division so closely in halves that a protracted class struggle would clearly be demanded for the proletariat to win power. Bellamy, Gilman, the Nationalists generally, and the Populists whom they supported placed the principal division between the large capitalists (plus their dependents and their immediate subordinates) and virtually everyone else—meaning that a tremendous majority had an interest in the establishment of socialism, and merely had to be shown this fact and then persuaded to act upon it politically. The philosophy here articulated by Gilman has been called “producerism,” which, Michael Kazin explains, defines “productive labor” as including not only “the urban proletariat” but also independent “craftsmen . . . small merchants and manufacturers, and farmers of all regions and incomes,” in contrast to the classic Marxist tradition specifying that productive work is done only by manual, industrial laborers.49 Gilman's conception of the kinds of workers who belonged to the productive majority was always extensive. In 1893, for instance, she asserts that “the people, the poor people and the middling people, are so large a majority that they have only to decide on their course and take it.”50 As applied by Gilman and others in the Nationalist and Populist movements, working-class and middle-class people shared a common economic cause and therefore shared a foundation for common class consciousness. Without denying that working-class people suffered the most vicious abuses of capitalism—indeed, even while acknowledging and denouncing these abuses—they asserted that the vast majority of Americans were worse off under capitalism than they would be under collectivism. They were, therefore, natural allies rather than fundamental, historically determined foes, as postulated in the bourgeois-proletarian split of classic Marxism.
For a time in the early 1890s, the rising influence of the People's Party seemed to show that democratic control over industry could be established peacefully, by established legal and political means. In “What the People's Party Means,” a speech delivered before a People's Party meeting in 1893 near the high tide of Populist influence, Gilman saw the ultimate success of the producing majority of workers as assured. To “some [who] talk of necessary bloodshed—say that this great change can never be effected without loss of life,” Gilman had this to say:
They forget, these alarmists, the enormous—the ridiculous disproportion between The People and—and what? What possible opponents shall we have to slay?
The capitalists? Are we to have a war between the capitalists and the laborers? For shame! The uncounted thousands—yes millions of working men; full armed with productive skill—wealth-makers—world builders—shall these make war upon the inconsiderable handful of rich men, helpless non-producers that they are, mere dependents upon our favor—make war upon them as a thousand to one?
Impossible.51
While the unfolding Populist revolt meant a vindication of gradualist tactics in the theoretical debate with militant socialists, it promised to bring practical results and real consequences in the struggle with the captains of industry. Like other pronouncements by Populist activists (as well as her earliest Nationalist statements), Gilman's rhetoric also challenges the notion that Populist change would lack a revolutionary transfer in power. She treats with definite relish threats of dispossession and the prospect of police authority responsive to the will of the people: “Society does not make war upon a handful of thieves. It arrests them, restrains them, sets them to work. Capital punishment—or may I say capitalist punishment—is unnecessary.”52
Here and elsewhere during the ascendancy of the People's Party, Gilman's enthusiasm for the party could lead her to inflate its actual power. Yet even in her most impassioned partisan orations, Gilman also analyzed the social contingencies standing in the way of revolution as well as the opportunities making it possible. In short, rather than assuming that the forces of history would effect revolutionary change without any particular effort or conscious direction, she asserted the need for critique of the movement, redirection, and exhortation. To begin with, Gilman argues that more fundamental than voting rights, and indeed hampering anything like a constructive usage of those rights, is the very economic inequality that the People's Party would seek to address. In “What the People's Party Means,” therefore, Gilman questions the orderly progress from political independence to economic independence, mapped out in Looking Backward as a straightforward progression, “the people of the United States conclud[ing] to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred-odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government.”53 The problem is that the political independence of 1776 is largely illusory as long as voters remain unfree as economic agents:
We have our religious life.
We have our political life.
We have our industrial life.
In the first two we have made ourselves free, but because we are slaves in the last we are helpless in all.54
Without industrial freedom, Gilman continues, men “vot[e] this way or that as their masters direct, voting in idiotic triumph for the very measures that hold them down—mere cats paws for the artful ape behind.”55 For all Gilman's gloating over the productive strength of the People and the parasitic weakness of the capitalists, what she calls the “poor rich” appear to get the last laugh, as she recognizes how both false consciousness and economic inequalities between the classes prevent an effective political coalition.
It is noteworthy, however, that “What the People's Party Means,” Gilman's fullest statement of support for the People's Party, does not end with her analysis of how economic inequality complicates coalitions across class lines; that is where she begins. Thus, her effusions about the overwhelming majority of “wealth-makers—world-builders” are framed by the challenge of getting that majority to vote as one, and they constitute an effort to get them, beginning with her immediate audience, to do just that. Much critical analysis of class relations gravitates toward an individual's or group's being—what he, she, or they are. Gilman's own representation of the difficulties of forming an interclass Populist coalition makes clear reference to the relevance of such analysis. But this speech and other Gilman texts are ultimately less focused upon being bourgeois, proletariat, or some other class position, than upon an ethical practice concerned with doing something through these class positions and something about their fundamental inequality. Whereas critics of Nationalism, most notably Arthur Lipow in Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement, suggest that its activism was all about shoring up and celebrating the class position of the bourgeoisie, Gilman's work emphasizes an interrogation of that class position: an effort to show the bourgeois that their real, long-term interests lay not with the capitalist monopolists but with the common workers. Her work also offers a sustained critique of the ways that, at present, bourgeois advantages did in fact work to drive a wedge between their fellow members of the producer class.
During her brief tenure at The Impress, the organ of the Pacific Coast Woman's Press Association that she edited in 1893–94, Gilman wrote scathingly of the collaboration of middle-class consumers, both men and women, in maintaining the capitalist status quo. Although the periodical was short lived, it gave Gilman the opportunity to editorialize on the Homestead strike of 1892, the Pullman strike of 1893, and also on a smaller strike of female garment workers in New York City. Regarding the garment workers strike, Gilman quoted at length from the New York Tribune, which stated the workers had earned only “from $3 to $5 a week, working from 7 in the morning until 6 in the evening” and that, while on strike, they “have been driven to lives of shame to keep from starving.” To this sensational account Gilman added, scathingly:
Whose is the shame? Does it not redden your cheeks, you women of respectability and refinement, who are always eager for bargains, and you men who buy “cheap” shirts, without a thought of the wages paid to the makers of them? And you merchants, who think you are doing a clever thing when you can increase your profits some five or ten percent, regardless if the increase is squeezed out of the life and soul of the sewing woman,—is not her blood on your hands? But who of us is not partaker in this guilt? Who of us can plead not guilty to the charge: “These are the images ye have made of me!” And what are you going to do about it? Read the line again—have been driven to lives of shame to keep from starving.56
The appeal to middle-class propriety is plain enough, as it evokes melodramatically the “lives of shame” that the young, female garment workers have been driven into. Yet the argument also takes a turn that leads squarely to confrontation of her audience's and even Gilman's own bourgeois tendencies. Here she sees plainly the consequences of middle-class consumer behavior within the capitalist system, as well as the discrepancies, both potential and actual, between working-class and middle-class interests.
Even as elsewhere in The Impress Gilman applauds collectivist reforms wherever they emerge—a theme borrowed directly from Bellamy's New Nation, the organ of the Nationalist movement—she preaches all the more vigorously the need for middle-class people to embrace changes in their social and economic systems that do not make exploitation of the working classes necessary, or even possible. In calling for radical economic changes that would transform the social and moral landscape of the nation, changes that would dramatically alter middle-class as well as working-class life, Gilman sees the alteration in middle-class life as betterment. But she also recognizes that the alteration may mean sacrifices in lifestyle and relative economic advantage; for some in the middle classes, ethical betterment may have to compensate for economic loss. The possibility that Gilman here opens is that people of middle-class standing, if rightly guided and goaded by ethical imperatives, may well make political and social choices that sacrifice their own immediate economic benefit for the greater material and moral good of their society.57 That middle-class people, women as well as men, have not yet risen to the challenge speaks not just to the fractures in the Populist coalition, but places the far greater share of responsibility upon the middle-class women and men who are supposed to act as allies of blue-collar workers in the grand producing-class coalition.
Gilman's analysis of middle-class women was not confined, however, to their belonging to the middle class on terms similar with their male relations. In the 1890s she also initiated the lines of feminist critique for which she is today known, an enterprise shared by socialists both among the Nationalists and in the international movement. Gilman argued that women of whatever class, like proletarians, were exploited under capitalism; they, like the workers, stood to gain much from revolutionary change, and, hence, they too were specially positioned to lead that change. Here, as on the question of class struggle, the differences between Gilman and the Marxists, though real enough, were not absolute, and where differences do exist, it is not always evident that the Marxists were the keener analysts.
Populism, Gilman saw, would stand to benefit women tangibly, though it did not address their concerns directly. That the middle classes as well as proletarians were vulnerable under capitalism was a point of interest to middle-class women as well as middle-class men, proletarian women as well as proletarian men. That the votes being asked for by the People's Party belonged to husbands, sons, fathers, and coworkers meant a different relationship between women and the party, but it did not change women's potential interest in the success of the party or the potential importance of their mobilization as part of a People's revolt.
But Nationalism pledged more. Even in Looking Backward, which pays only minimal critical attention to women's roles, women were to have an equal share of the nation's wealth and, hence, economic independence from men. The underemphasis upon gender equality in Bellamy's groundbreaking novel, which has provided a clear opening for critics to jeer at its portrayal of women as consummate shoppers and objects of romantic interest, was largely rectified in the much fuller analysis of women's equality in the final major work of his career, Equality (1897), published just shortly before Bellamy succumbed to tuberculosis. Long before this, however, an observant follower of the movement such as Gilman could hardly miss the feminism integral to the Nationalist movement. The economic dependency of women and its resulting harm—the fundamental starting points for Women and Economics—are mapped out by Edward Bellamy in the New Nation of 1891, when Gilman had been active in the movement for over a year and was likely to have read the Nationalist organ.58 In one of his “Talks on Nationalism,” for instance, Bellamy's persona Mr. Smith meets a “Women's Rights Advocate.” While agreeing with her on the importance of women's suffrage and other reforms, Mr. Smith asserts, “I am interested in it merely as an entering wedge for obtaining the economical equality of women with men which nationalism proposes. I tell you frankly that I should be opposed to woman suffrage if I did not look forward to nationalism, because to give the suffrage to a class likely to remain dependent upon the favor of another class would be to make a mock of it.”59 The “W.R.A.” readily agrees—“Oh, no, Mr. Smith, you can't tell us women anything we do not already realize as to the humiliation of pecuniary dependence, either as daughters or wives”—lending weight to Mr. Smith's conclusion that under Nationalism women will “through life, be not only economically equal with every man, but absolutely independent of any man.”60
Bellamy's skepticism about the importance of voting rights for women finds its echo in a curious statement in Gilman's autobiography—that she saw suffrage as “reasonable and necessary” but “by no means as important as some of its protagonists held”—as well as in Gilman's admission in an 1890s letter to Houghton, her cousin and husband-to-be, that she could not “fire up” on “Woman Suffrage pure and simple.”61 More specifically, Gilman's series of “Classes in Socialism,” written for the American Fabian soon after returning from the International Labor and Socialist Congress, are uncannily like Bellamy's “Talks” of 1891. In Gilman's discussions, like Bellamy's, the expert manages the questioners so adroitly that only the most recalcitrant are not persuaded of the merits of collectivism. In the first of the lessons, while satirizing the Politician, Millionaire, Manufacturer, and Average Man who have learned from their professions “How to take care of myself, of course!” Gilman highlights the difference in women's socioeconomic position by the Average Woman's lesson: “How to get somebody to take care of me, of course!”62 While suggesting through her Average Woman the ludicrousness of women's dependency, Gilman in this article only implies the remedy. But as far back as 1891 Gilman had given the answer, much the same as Bellamy's during the same period: “The Way Up”—the title of an 1891 lecture by Gilman—lies in “pecuniary freedom.”63
Indeed, on questions of gender, it is difficult to see exactly where to draw the lines of influence within the Nationalist movement. Certainly Gilman was initially attracted to the Nationalist movement in part because of its stance on gender equality. But several of Equality's fuller elaborations upon gender matters suggest Gilman's potential influence upon her Nationalist mentor. Take, for example, the matter of women's clothing. As part of the elaborate conceit by which Equality was supposed to update Looking Backward without actually revising the original utopian vision, Bellamy explained that Edith Leete and her mother had worn long dresses merely as costumes so as to keep from offending the Victorian sensibilities of Julian West. Almost immediately when Edith reveals this secret to Julian (by then her betrothed), she changes her outfit, donning a typical twentieth-century garment, tailored but comfortably fitted and essentially the same for women and men, “since their bodily conformation is on the same general lines.” The new clothes are nevertheless stimulating to Julian's romantic interest, as when they go for a walk together “the buoyant grace of her carriage and the elastic vigor of her step as she strode now by my side was a revelation of the possibilities of an athletic companionship which was not a little intoxicating.”64 For readers acquainted with Herland, it is almost impossible not to hear an echo of Julian's observation on Edith's “athletic companionship” in the initial encounter of the male adventurers Van, Jeff, and Terry with the lithe, gymnastic women who will later become their companions.65 More likely, though, is that it is Bellamy who echoes Gilman, rather than vice versa, for already in 1891—and on many other occasions prior to 1897—she had announced: “It is just as right for a woman to be beautiful as it is for a man to be beautiful; but except for neck and arms there is no comparison in beauty between an agile muscular graceful young man and the tassel-shaped mass of cloth that is all we have of woman in her usual costume.”66
Whether in matters of clothing, physical development, or psychological health, Gilman sees women's lack of development as stemming from the one crippling cause: lack of economic independence. For Gilman, the remedy of economic independence was to be achieved not simply by being granted an equal share of the purchasing power of the nation. In contrast to the impression given by Looking Backward that, in the future socialist society, material abundance would be available to all people and especially women with minimal work, Gilman stresses repeatedly that society will become wealthier and happier when the social and economic equality of women enables—and demands—that women do more work, better work, and a greater variety of work. “Until every one of us women has some part in the work that is for mankind,” Gilman declares in the 1892 talk “How Our Work Affects Us,” “we cannot be great.” Although some women have begun to move outside the traditional roles of mother and domestic, Gilman opines that they have not yet “applied their energies to any other service that the world has claims upon her as a producer, a distributer, a manager, some human functionary.” Were women to take up these roles, Gilman asserts, both women and men would find themselves the better for it: “Holding steadily in view the formative effect of work upon character—remembering that the same natural laws which make man make us,—seeing plainly that any or all of these are not enough to make the race grow as it should—it becomes apparent that each one of us needs work in the world which will not only please some one else, not only earn our bread, but which will react upon us to our constant betterment.”67
Not infrequently, common points of reference between Gilman and Bellamy on women's issues extend to Marxian socialists and anarchists as well. The equation of marriage with prostitution, for instance, was asserted across a broad spectrum of socialist theoretical work. Indeed, it is a theme so well known in Marx and Engels and in the writings of anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre that the remarkable point is, no doubt, its appearance in the (relatively) conservative writers Bellamy and Gilman.68 Perhaps most intriguingly, in “Socialism as the Cure for The Social Evil” Gilman explains the hostile attitude taken by respectable married women toward prostitutes not as a matter of morality but of economic competition within the marketplace: “Countless thousands of poor women whose necessity forces them to underbid their virtuous competitors . . . offer the same wares at far less price!” Shifting her metaphor slightly (and consistently with the Marxist concept of labor power as commodity), Gilman asserts, “The virtuous women form a rigid union, and the vicious women fill the rank of unorganized cheap labor.”69 Much the same set of relations between economics and sexuality is narrated by Dr. Leete in “What the Revolution Did for Women,” chapter 20 of Equality, which asserts that the “essence” of marriage “in the eyes of the law and of society was its character as a contract, a strictly economic quid-pro-quo transaction.”70 This economic transaction was at bottom the same outside of marriage as within it.
As with American socialists' attitudes toward revolution and class struggle, so too with their feminism: the differences between Marxian and non-Marxian socialism were by no means absolute. And whereas Gilman's and Bellamy's analysis of gender is particularly close, reflecting an evolving dialogue in which Gilman's work consistently reflects its Nationalist roots and, at the same time, may push Bellamy to expand and refine his feminism, there are other places where Gilman's work actually shows greater kinship with gender analyses in the Marxist tradition.
These feminist-socialist currents and cross-currents can all be found in Women and Economics, the summation and fullest extension of Gilman's socialist analysis of gender. Notwithstanding the fact that Gilman later claimed that no bibliography had been compiled for the 1898 book because “the books I had read bearing on the subject . . . were only two! One was Geddes's and Thompson's Evolution of Sex, the other only an article, Lester F. Ward's, in that 1888 Forum,”71 the connections between Gilman's thought and Bellamy Nationalism emerge almost immediately. In the book's opening chapter, Gilman asserts that the root of women's inequality is their economic dependence upon men, hence rearticulating an argument she, Bellamy, and other Nationalists had been making for over a decade: “Their labor is the property of another: they work under another will; and what they receive depends not on their labor, but on the power and will of another.”72 Although Women and Economics never uses the words socialist or socialism (nor Nationalism, Fabianism, or Populism, either), the first chapter of Women and Economics also lays bare some of the connections between Gilman and other socialist traditions. Whereas the focus in Looking Backward falls upon women's equality with men in terms of purchasing and consuming power—as women have an equal share in the common wealth of the nation—Gilman's emphasis in the opening of Women and Economics falls upon gender equality in production.73 Thus, in the opening chapter of Women and Economics Gilman remarks of human beings, signified by the conventionally generic “man”: “Climate affects him, weather affects him, enemies affect him; but most of all he is affected, like every other living creature, by what he does for his living. Under all the influence of his later and wider life, all the reactive effect of social institutions, the individual is still inexorably modified by his means of livelihood: ‘the hand of the dyer is subdued to what he works in.'”74 Applied specifically to women, the connection between identity and labor means that most women of whatever class are valued primarily according to their sexual functions; but to be human, as Gilman tells her readers women assuredly are, demands a wider field of possibilities in the relations of production: “The desire to produce—the distinctive human quality—is no longer satisfied in a status that only allows for reproduction.”75
Not only does Gilman's analysis of women's economics follow up on this premise about the importance of production to women's identity and independence, but her argument moves toward an explicit statement of the relationship between proletarianized work, the central concern of Marxist and most other socialist analyses, and women's work. To begin, Gilman argues that women's household labor as well as reproductive labor is exploited by men. The domestic labor that women do, in spite of not being directly accounted for in the capitalist market, does in fact produce what Marxists call “surplus value”: “The labor of women in the house,” Gilman notes, “enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society.”76 But that economic value is transferred entirely and immediately to the husband's property: whereas the paid laborer at least has the compensation of the wage as the price of exploitation, the married housekeeper has her work appropriated directly, as a slave's labor is seized under chattel slavery. The comparisons Gilman draws to describe women's predicament are, therefore, between women and horses, and women and “valets,” a point she puts with disarming understatement: “If the valet is the property of the man, is obliged to perform [useful] service, and is not paid for it, he is not economically independent.”77 Continuing this line of reasoning, Gilman argues that women have effectively been cut off from the modern labor movement: instead of sharing in the productive advantages of specialization and cooperation, women's domestic work is pathetically unskilled, inefficient, and isolated. Therefore, within every marriage—especially middle- and upper-class marriages—there is effectively a class divide between bourgeois and proletarian. According to Gilman, the chasm supersedes all ideals of romantic love, domestic partnership, and shared social status: “The woman in marrying becomes the house-servant, or at least the housekeeper, of the man. . . . Married lovers do not work together. . . . They are economically on entirely different social planes, and these constitute a bar to any higher, truer union than such as we see about us.” Later Gilman remarks, “Woman, the house-servant, belongs to the lowest grade of unorganized labor.”78
Here Gilman's distinctiveness lies in the particular emphasis she provides to this comparison. She bids fellow socialists not to overlook the parallels between proletarians and women, and to give expression to the theoretical observation by making the liberation of women coequal with the liberation of workers. But the parallels themselves appear in socialist theory of many varieties. In Bellamy's Equality—at the printer during exactly the same months as was Women and Economics79—Dr. Leete explains to Julian West: “Now, the key to the fetters the women wore was the same that locked the shackles of the workers. It was the economic key, the control of the means of subsistence. Men, as a sex, held that power over women, and the rich as a class held it over the working masses.” This common problem demands, obviously to Dr. Leete and to his creator, Bellamy, a common solution: “economic equalization, which in the sexual as in the industrial relation would at once insure the substitution of co-operation for coercion.”80
Both Equality and Women and Economics were, moreover, preceded by other socialist texts in the Marxist tradition that noted the very same homologies between women and male workers. One of the most important, Friedrich Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, was a treatise written after Marx's death using notes compiled by him. It was published in English in 1891; the fact that Morgan was an American social anthropologist makes it all the more likely that it would have attracted Gilman's interest.81 Like Women and Economics, Origin of the Family goes beyond the assertion that women earn their keep by sexual labor to consider the value of the unpaid labor women do in their households, arguing that otherwise “bourgeois” women are proletarianized by their work at what we now call “homemaking.” This is true as a matter of historical process, Engels argues, for with the “patriarchal family” and especially its successor “the monogamian individual family,” “The administration of the household . . . became a private service. The wife became the first domestic servant, pushed out of participation in social production.” It is also true, Engels maintains, in the current bourgeois family: “Today, in the great majority of cases the man has to be the earner, the breadwinner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat.”82
Gilman's Women and Economics cannot even lay claim to being the first book by a socialist to focus primarily upon women's exploitation—fellow socialist-feminist Jane Addams singled it out not as the first book in the field about women, but the first one by a woman83—for August Bebel's Woman and Socialism was available in English already in 1885. Bebel had theorized that the women's movement, even when fixated on legal and political rights, might well exert progressive, collectivist leverage paralleling that of the radical labor movement. Even though suffragists may express hostility toward economic change, Bebel asserts that “all the same, the hostile sisters have, to a far greater extent than the male population—split up as the latter is in the class struggle—a number of points of contact [with the radical labor movement] on which they can, although marching separately, strike jointly.”84 Bebel goes so far as to emphasize that the apparently narrow class interests of women are bound to coincide with those of the radical labor movement because ultimately both redound to the good of all society: The feminist activist, Bebel says, “who aims at the solution of the Woman Question to its full extent, is necessarily bound to go hand in hand with those who have inscribed upon their banner the solution of the Social Question as a question of the whole human race. These are the Socialists, that is, the Social Democracy.”85 And still further, Bebel asserts that the full emancipation of women is a matter not merely of good socialist practice—an “agitational” issue—but of “necessity” an issue of socialist “principle”: “There can be no emancipation of humanity without the social independence and equality of the sexes.”86
The key theoretical difference separating various socialists was not whether women as a class were exploited, nor even whether the situation of women was analogous to that of the proletariat, but rather the degree to which women could be looked to as agents of revolution. Certainly women are a class of individuals exploited under capitalism. Are they also a self-conscious, collective mass capable of revolutionary leadership? For Engels, they clearly are not. Only working-class women, he reasons, have had their labor transferred into measurable capital; only they have been concentrated into a mass through industrialization, and therefore only they are capable of revolutionary action—fighting alongside proletarian men.87
For Bebel, in contrast, feminist women are capable of revolutionary leadership, even if they “march separately,” provided only that they agitate for “the solution of the Woman Question to its full extent.” Bebel does not even consider it necessary for women to be aware of their connections to the proletarian movement; they might even be “hostile sisters” toward their brothers in the labor movement. Edward Bellamy's projections about the role of the women's movement in social revolution trace much the same double movement for emancipation. Although he looks for the eventual coordination of women's and workers' campaigns, he too does not see overt alliances or deep self-consciousness as being necessary at first. “Unable to see beyond the end of their noses,” Dr. Leete reports, women were inclined to hold individual men liable for the subordination and abuse of individual women, and thus the popularity of the temperance movement. Or they were ambitious only of “securing the right to vote, together with various changes in the laws about property-holding by women, the custody of children in divorces, and such details.” Once begun, however, this movement “by no means revolutionary” led eventually to a frontal attack against the fundamental economic system, for as the omniscient Dr. Leete explains, “It was the system which permitted human beings to come into relations of superiority and inferiority to one another which was the cause of the whole evil.”88
For Gilman—who had spent much of the 1890s mobilizing middle-class people, and especially middle-class women, for the Nationalist and Populist movements—the revolutionary potential of women seemed obvious. The conclusion of Women and Economics even appears to reverse the usual Marxist priority of the working-class movement over the women's movement, as she writes, “Where our progress hitherto has been warped and hindered by the retarding influence of surviving rudimentary forces, it will flow on smoothly and rapidly when both men and women stand equal in economic relation.”89 But when in her study Gilman draws connections between her immediate subject and the labor struggle for equality, she adopts formulations that—like Bellamy's—concur in their essential points with Bebel's analysis. Gilman joins Bebel and Bellamy in noting the initial narrowness, the partisan interest, of the (ultimately) revolutionary movements for women's and workers' liberation:
Both make a class issue of what is in truth a social issue, a question involving every human interest. But the women naturally feel most the growing healthful pain of their position. They personally revolt, and think it is they who are most to be benefitted. Similarly, since the “laboring classes” feel most the growing healthful pain of their position, they as naturally revolt under the same conviction. Sociologically, these conditions, which some find so painful and alarming, mean but one thing,—the increase of social consciousness.90
Although in Women and Economics Gilman's attention is mostly focused upon the social consequences of women's economic disenfranchisement and the wide benefits of gender equality, she accords the working-class movement a coequal status to the women's movement, as she speaks of “the twin struggle that convulses the world to-day,—in sex and economics,—the ‘woman's movement' and the ‘labor movement.'”
One of Gilman's innovations in Women and Economics is the degree to which she sees proletarian-capitalist and male-female relations as interrelated and even overlapping. Following immediately upon her remarks about the labor movement, Gilman articulates how gender relations and gendered behaviors impact economic life throughout society: “in the economic world, excessive masculinity, in its fierce competition and primitive individualism; and excessive femininity, in its inordinate consumption and hindering conservatism.” But Gilman seeks to establish not only the importance of women's equality to class equality—clearly the critical and controversial point from the standpoint of socialist debates—but also the importance of class equality to women's equality—which becomes the critical point in feminist debates, and especially so given the degree to which Gilman is today seen as a feminist first and a socialist hardly at all. Both points are clearly in view when Gilman deliberately parallels the women's movement—as we have seen, a “concerted movement . . . seeking a common good”—to the labor movement: “So with the labor movement. It is not alone that the individual laborer is a better educated, more highly developed man than the stolid peasant of earlier days, but also that with this keener personal consciousness has come the wider social consciousness, without which no class can better its conditions.”91 The definite implication is that this “wider social consciousness” must include a consciousness of women's equality (and indeed of human equality in general), and that a lack of such consciousness will prevent the male-dominated labor movement from bettering “its conditions.”
What this close comparison between Bebel, Bellamy, and Gilman shows is the pervasiveness of women's rights as a theme—even a central theme—in the socialist theory of the 1890s. The revolutionary potential of feminism cuts across the divide that later appears so sharp between Marxist and non-Marxist socialism. Even the differences between Gilman and Engels are not as tremendous as they would first appear. In spite of her very different conclusion regarding the revolutionary potential of women, Gilman's reasoning is so close to Engels's as to amount to, not a separate socialist intellectual tradition, but an explicit refutation within a common tradition. For, remarkably, the common experience mobilizing women into a social and political force is not their common dependency upon men but rather their shared experience of entering the workforce in ever greater numbers. “For a while the introduction of machinery which took away from the home so many industries deprived woman of any importance as an economic factor,” Gilman observes, “but presently she arose, and followed her lost wheel and loom to their new place, the mill. Today there is hardly an industry in the land in which some women are not found.”92 At the same time—in effect contesting Engels's focus on proletarian women—she notes that the “increasing army of women wage-earners, who are changing the face of the world by their steady advance toward economic independence” includes middle-class women seeking professional work, “young girls [desiring] to have a career of their own,” as well as working-class women.93
In Gilman's most incisive account of the relationship between women of various classes, women's solidarity is based on two interrelated, essentially Marxian concepts: a shared self-consciousness as productive laborers, and a shared consciousness of economic exploitation. “The progress of social organization,” she explains, “has produced a corresponding degree of individualization, which has reached at last even to women,—even to the lowest grade of unskilled labor.” But Gilman finds in women a self-consciousness about their class that Engels explicitly denies. She continues, “The woman's movement rests not alone on her larger personality, with its tingling sense of revolt against injustice, but on the wide, deep sympathy of women for one another. It is a concerted movement, based on the recognition of a common evil and seeking a common good.”94 In theory, all women should be socialists.
Much of Gilman's subsequent career as an intellectual would be dedicated to trying to make them so—and to explaining why so many were not. Hence, in following Gilman's work into the first decades of the twentieth century, I will be focusing primarily upon the relation of socialism to the women's movement and the women's movement to socialism. Meanwhile, however, there is something to be said and concluded about the fate of the Nationalist and Populist movements with which Gilman was so active in the 1890s.
THE POPULIST LEGACY
“Radical, socialistic Democracy.”
Just as De Leon said, in 1896 the People's Party was in steep decline. Even while Gilman was making her acquaintance with the full range of socialist groups and representative leaders at the International Labor and Socialist Congress, the group that she had hailed as the American manifestation of the movement was being co-opted by a Nebraska Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, making the first of what would be three unsuccessful runs for the presidency. Nationalism was on the wane as well; within two years its inspiration and leader would be dead. Upon her return to the United States Charlotte Perkins Gilman associated with the very small offshoot of the English Fabian Society, and she would never again affiliate herself so closely with a major political group as she had with the Nationalists and Populists. What, though, was the legacy of Nationalist and Populist ideas and ideals when the groups espousing them faded, with even avid supporters such as Gilman falling away?
At least according to the predominant interpretation of the People's Party and the Populist movement, there was good reason for disillusionment. It seems that the coalition of labor and farmers, working-class and middle-class Americans, was all too easily torn apart when the mainstream parties took notice of a few of their grievances. After the elections of 1892 and 1894, the Populist success had reached the point where the party's policies and rhetoric—and their voters—began to attract serious attention from the two parties of longer standing, and especially the party generally in the minority since the Civil War, the Democrats. It was the hope of capturing Populist votes that led Bryan, then a young, charismatic congressman, to take the free coinage of silver—part of the People's Party platform—and make it the centerpiece of his 1896 run for the presidency. Considered the Waterloo of the People's Party by its major historian, Lawrence Goodwyn, the Bryan campaign sought and gained the Populist presidential nomination as well as the Democratic nomination by little more than the “free silver” platform plank and a good deal of antiestablishment rhetoric. Goodwyn argues that the election of 1896 meant not only the sacrifice of Populist autonomy; it also meant the national repudiation of Populist values. When Bryan lost to William McKinley, ideals of economic justice for small landholders and workers were decisively beaten back by the power of corporate capitalism and party-machine politics.95
Yet this negative assessment of the Bryan movement seems unduly attached to the demise of Populism as a separate movement and overly skeptical about the genuineness of the Democratic Party's assimilation of its ideals. After all, the People's Party was itself compromised by its amalgamation of reactionary and progressive ideas, its mix of egalitarianism and race prejudice, capitalist accommodations and socialistic proposals. Why not consider not only how Bryanism co-opted the membership and party structure of the People's Party but also how Populism infiltrated the ideology of the Democratic Party? Unlike the labor uprisings of the 1870s and 1880s, which were crushed by the combined power of government and business and (at best) worked toward the amelioration of the labor-capital conflict only indirectly and eventually, the Populist uprising of the 1890s succeeded directly and definitely in changing the course of one of the major American parties.
One measure of this change in course is the degree to which Populist rhetoric became incorporated into the Democratic Party platform, the degree to which this rhetoric persisted, and the extent to which rhetoric eventually translated into policy. In his examination of party platforms and election rhetoric of the major parties' leading candidates, John Gerring has argued that the leadership of Bryan and his influence upon the Democratic Party, especially as exerted in his three runs for the presidency, redirected the party—“Populist in tone and in policy”—in fundamentally new ways. Dating a “Populist” era in the Democratic Party from 1896 to 1948, Gerring sees Bryan as “the rightful father of the Progressive–New Deal Democratic party, bringing to it a regulatory style and redistributive purpose found hitherto only outside the mainstream of American party politics.”96 My own analysis of Democratic Party platforms concurs with Gerring's, while I note also the ways that many elements of the national Democratic prospectus that Gerring calls Populist were also socialistic. The 1892 Democratic platform, upon which Grover Cleveland was elected to his second term, had obsessed over the issue of Republican-instituted tariffs on international trade—the abolishment of which Democrats posed as friendly to working people as a means to reducing the cost of living, but which in fact almost certainly was no better than a wash because the reduction of market costs also would have a depressive effect upon wages. The 1896 Democratic platform on which Bryan ran was dramatically reoriented. The minting of silver coinage, with the aim of loosening the money supply, was not the most fundamental of the Populist reforms, but it would bring a definite benefit to the heavily mortgaged small farmers of the Midwest and South, and thus a shift in the direction of redistributing economic power from the greater moneybags to the lesser. Just as significantly, for the first time a major American party took an explicit stand for active government mediation in the conflict between labor unions and businesses: “We are in favor of the arbitration of differences between employers engaged in interstate commerce and their employees, and recommend such legislation as is necessary to carry out this principle,” the platform declared.97 To put the matter in the terms offered by Gilman's idealization and critique of the Populist movement, we might say that the Populist tilt of the Democratic Party from 1896 onward led “The People” to see not only their “political life” but also their “industrial life” as identified, increasingly, with the life of “working men.”
With Bryan continuing as a national leader of the Democratic Party for the next two decades, its presidential candidate again in both 1900 and 1908, the party's platform continued to move in directions originally mapped out by the Populist Party and its labor allies. Already in 1896, the Democratic Party had positioned itself as hostile toward corporate trusts and monopolies. The platform of 1900 amounted to a declaration of war. “We pledge the Democratic party to an unceasing warfare in nation, State and city against private monopoly in every form,” the platform thundered, while later it expanded on the theme: “Any attempt by corporations to interfere with the public affairs of the people or to control the sovereignty which creates them, should be forbidden under such penalties as will make such attempts impossible.”98 The 1900 platform also, significantly, declared war on war, defining the unequivocally imperial outgrowths of the Spanish-American War, the colonization of Puerto Rico and the conquest of the Philippines, as the preeminent issues of the election, announcing that “no nation can long endure half republic and half empire” and warning “the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.”99
By 1900, the Populist Party was but a shell of its insurgent self, just four years before. Yet after the turn of the century, the impact of Populism continued to ripple through national politics. With the sudden emergence of Theodore Roosevelt, it came to affect the Republican Party as well as the Democratic Party. Nominated as vice president in 1900, Roosevelt had made his name by opposing the old-style politics of the Democratic machine in his home state of New York; in effect, his political positions in favor of municipal reform and strong centralized government aligned him less with the economic and social conservatives that had dominated the Republican Party since the end of Reconstruction, and more with the muckrakers and reformers whose ideology formed the urban counterpart of the antiestablishment, populist movement within the Democratic Party, oriented to rural protest. Even as the assassination of William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz meant the political death knell for anarchism, it elevated Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, thus suddenly bringing TR's brand of progressivism—for a time—to the forefront of Republican Party politics. Czolgosz's action set back the radical liberty he had hoped to advance and advanced the state power he had hoped to thwart. But because the anarchists were opposed not only to capitalism but also to the kind of state direction that nineteenth-century socialists had come to see as necessary to surmount the limits of communitarianism, the McKinley assassination not only precipitated the rise of Theodore Roosevelt but also facilitated socialist aims: the greater involvement of the state in the many realms into which Theodore Roosevelt's administrations ventured, including federal policing of industrial monopolies, the public management of wilderness lands, and the national regulation of food and drug manufacturing. Hence, although Czolgosz's action had not done much for anarchist aims, it had resulted in a measure of progressive change. The assassination could therefore be used both to demonstrate the efficacy of violent direct action and to disprove it, helping to ensure that the debate over political uses of violence would be kept alive within American socialist circles in coming decades.
Beginning in the next chapter, we will need to explore in more detail the complex, paradoxical relationships between the most radical and despised individuals within the socialist movement, the most progressive of Republican presidents (who would not be the last Roosevelt credited with saving capitalism from itself), and the next generation of moderate American socialists who came of age after 1900, oriented more to issues of urban industrial labor than to those of agrarian protest. Meanwhile, summing up the longer-term impact of Nationalism and Populism upon American politics, we may note that the efforts of Roosevelt and successive “trust busters” actually interrupted the cartelization of American industry that Bellamy had anticipated as the graceful segue from capitalism to state-directed socialism. Yet the less absolute demands and programs of the Populists, which the Nationalists had accepted as entering wedges for socialism, did in fact redirect the national politics of both parties—and especially of the Democratic Party—in durable ways. Although the Democratic Party effectively conceded the progressive mantle to Roosevelt when their 1904 presidential nomination went to New York supreme court justice Alton Parker, the party's platform remained marked by elements of populism introduced by the Bryan movement. The 1904 platform, for example, asserted the principle that corporations ought not receive more than their “just share of the joint product of capital and labor” and declared, in an unmistakable broadside against the ideological defenders of capitalism, that “the rights of labor are certainly no less ‘vested,' no less ‘sacred' and no less ‘inalienable' than the rights of capital.”100
The return of Bryan to the top of the Democratic ticket in 1908 ushered in the most militantly Populist, prolabor, and anticapitalist platform yet. With the Republican Party pulling back from Rooseveltian Progressivism, the Democratic Party under Bryan effectively claimed the Progressive mantle and then some. The first substantive paragraph of the document hailed the “various investigations [that] have traced graft and political corruption to the representatives of the predatory wealth, and laid bare the unscrupulous methods by which they have debauched elections and preyed upon a defenseless public through the subservient officials whom they have raised to place and power.”101 The platform asserted the right not only of the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate commerce across state lines but also of the states to regulate commerce within their borders; it called for the end to judicial injunctions in capital-labor disputes, long and infamously used to criminalize strikes; it also demanded recognition of labor unions; and it advocated laws making employers liable for injury and death of their employees on the job. The document moved toward its close with a flourish of Populist rhetoric: “The Democratic party listens to the voice of the whole people and gauges progress by the prosperity and advancement of the average man; the Republican party is subservient to the comparatively few who are the beneficiaries of governmental favoritism.” The final statement of the 1908 platform declared a remarkable political-economic principle in favor of “such an administration of the government as will insure, as far as human wisdom can, that each citizen shall draw from society a reward commensurate with his contribution to the welfare of society.”102 Such a declaration falls short of the economic equality sought by socialism, but it links, for the first time in a U.S. major-party platform, two of the cornerstones of socialist philosophy: the responsibility of government to superintend American industry, and the obligation of all citizens to contribute to the common welfare.
Of course the Bryan platforms were those of the losing party every time out. As such, they represent the Populist-influenced ideology of the party never quite able to gain majority endorsement, whether in the 1890s or the following decade. But in their incorporation into the official platform of one of the major national parties, socialistic ideals articulated in the Populist and socialist movements of the 1890s were indeed working their way—by subterranean means though in perceptible degrees—into the mainstream of American politics.
The writing of W. E. B. Du Bois supplies one final piece of evidence not only that socialism and socialistic policies could be linked to the major political parties, especially the Democratic Party, but also that they were linked by observers of the time. At the time Bryan was making his third run for the presidency, Du Bois had already gained critical acclaim for his landmark study of black culture, economics, and political life, The Souls of Black Folk; there he had presented himself as both the successor and the alternative to Booker T. Washington. It is perhaps not surprising that Du Bois would consider support for the Democrats over the Republicans, for his rival, Washington, had recently been feted by President Roosevelt at the White House, and yet the party of Lincoln had done little for African Americans since the end of Reconstruction besides a meager dole of patronage positions in government. Du Bois had recently initiated the Niagara movement, an all-too-short-lived effort to draw African American leaders into an organization rivaling Washington's Tuskegee juggernaut. Still, the reasons given by Du Bois for his endorsement of Bryan in the Horizon, the Niagara-movement journal that he edited, were little short of remarkable. Du Bois argued that under Bryan's guidance the Democrats had become anti-imperialists, opponents of corporate wealth that held in its “crushing grasp” “no group of Americans . . . more than Negroes,” and even implacable foes of the southern Bourbons by virtue of their “radical socialistic Democracy.”103 Du Bois had become familiar with the German labor movement and social democracy since the 1890s, when he had conducted graduate study at the University of Berlin; he had begun exploring the possibilities of socialism as a way for black Americans to achieve that equality in all phases of life he had called for in The Souls of Black Folk. Yet he had not fully embraced the socialist label, and his identifying and praising the “radical” and “socialistic” tendencies of the Democratic Party—for an audience he was attempting to weld into a cohesive group, no less—suggests just how noncontroversial and indeed attractive those tendencies were. Moreover, as a relatively neutral observer of both socialism and the Democratic Party, Du Bois appears to be reflecting not a partisan argument about Bryan but a commonplace observation of his platform and proposals.
The suggestion is that in American political life in this period, it was logically possible, and perhaps even politically advantageous, to be a member of one of the major parties and be “socialistic,” if not actually socialist. To be a socialist was not to be foolishly utopian. Capitalism was not the only possible, really available political economy in the United States, and militant insurrection utterly overturning “all existing conditions” did not need to be the only path to the classless society or the cooperative commonwealth. This was the testimony of most American socialists of the 1890s even as it was Du Bois's observation in 1908, and just as it was the conviction of the European socialists who in the same era operated under the aegis of the Second Internationale.
Du Bois, along with Gilman, Sinclair, and other socialists, was not unrealistic about the obstacles along the reformist and nonviolent path. In one of his Horizon editorials, Du Bois characterized the “radical socialistic Democracy” of Bryan as a party within a party, engaged in an “impossible alliance . . . with an aristocratic caste party” of southern Democrats.104 Yet Du Bois obviously did not see this alliance as so fully “impossible” as to negate the progressive pull of Bryan, not so hopeless as to compel Du Bois and other African Americans to look elsewhere for political allies. This in fact was the pattern that marked Du Bois's career as a socialist, soon to commence. Du Bois, along with Sinclair and Gilman, sought to pull American politics and economics into increasingly radical and socialistic directions even while asserting, as they did so, that U.S. politics and economics were flexible enough to accommodate these directions. Du Bois believed he recognized, and Gilman, Edward Bellamy, and other Nationalists definitely sought to advance, just this kind of socialist trajectory within American Populism. That Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois all followed a similar strategy throughout their careers both shows their abiding faith in the possibility of socialism in America and suggests their observation of a really emerging “radical socialistic Democracy” there.