I've actually just restarted work on it. My drive ebbs and flows, but I'm feeling it again so there should be some updates soon. Thanks for the continued interest.
The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America
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you are currently one of favorite timeline writers so take as much time as you need.
That's great to hear! Looking forward to what comes next, glad the inspiration has returned.
Half Measures and the Approach of the 1904 Presidential Elections
Conceived in Liberty: The Life and Death of the American Republic, 1776 to 1919 by Richard White (Excerpt)
(© 1995, Melbourne University Press)
(© 1995, Melbourne University Press)
As the country seemed on the verge of disintegration, pressure piled on McKinley from all quarters to do something. Few had any concrete proposals. But all were clear that something must be done, even if they preferred someone other than themselves figure out what that ‘something’ was to be.
By summer 1903, unemployment nationwide had risen to nearly 20% again, and was showing no signs of slowing. In certain regions, such as the deep south with its precarious sharecroppers and already poverty-stricken black population, and the west with its thousands of agricultural day laborers who depended on seasonal employment, it crept past 25%. Still, there was no end in sight.
The results of the 1902 midterms caused extreme distress in the Executive Mansion. McKinley’s health had suffered amid the domestic turmoil of the last few years, along with the ongoing bloodshed in the Philippines. Though it was a closely guarded secret that would not be revealed publicly until decades later, on 8 December of 1902, the President suffered a heart attack that left him bed-ridden for two weeks. His doctor blamed stress and insisted he must not overtax himself, and suggested delegation of those executive duties that could be delegated. McKinley is supposed to have responded that “if I am to die or the country is to die, let it be the former.”
Attorney General Philander Knox payed a clandestine private visit to Henry Frick in Philadelphia on New Year’s Day of 1903. The two men were old acquaintances. They had moved in the same social circles prior to either’s entrance into politics and they had served together on the board of the Bank of Pittsburgh.
Though the details of the meeting are sketchy, it seems Knox begged Frick to desist from his political campaigning. He appealed to the distressful state of the country and told Frick nothing would be gained by the persistence of the National Party but the gratification of his ego.
Needless to say, Knox’s appeals fell on deaf ears, and the two men would not speak again for a long time.
But when McKinley rose from his sick bed, it seemed his convictions were strengthened. He summoned Roosevelt and asked him if he still thought the Industrial Commission for Oversight was a good idea. Roosevelt heartily affirmed so.
The commission was formed on 3 March 1903, with Roosevelt as its head, and a few hand-picked men under him. There was much outcry, including from many within the president’s own cabinet, such as Knox himself. One man in vocal agreement with its establishment was Secretary of State John Sherman, who was rather distraught at the way his anti-trust act of 1890 had been rendered essentially a dead letter over the past decade.
In congress, the Industrial Commission received hearty approval from the Socialists and most of the Populists, with even a few SLP congressmen shouting, “hurrah for McKinley!”. Many Republicans bitterly protested—but it went through.
Roosevelt wanted to outright break up as many trusts as possible, beginning with Henry Frick’s own US Steel, a very intentional choice. Then would come the turns of Standard Oil, Anaconda Copper, New York Central, and the rest. He hoped this would stimulate competition and consequently revive the flagging economy.
McKinley still thought this went too far, and so did most Republicans. Instead, a much more timid first step was taken: priority in federal charters and funding was promised to all firms that would voluntarily donate to relief efforts for the swelling throngs of unemployed.
It was not a smashing success. The bill did not specify any floor value for charitable donations, and so AT&T donated a paltry $1 million dollars to food drives in New York State, and won for itself a lucrative government contract laying phone lines from Buffalo to Manhattan.
There were many similar cases.
It did little to stem the tide of destitution and misery.
The Socialists’ Daily People blasted the measure as ‘scraps from the master’s table,’ and some Socialists went as far as to encourage workers to refuse such charity on grounds of ‘dignity.’
Another of the Commission’s scheme was to persuade industrialists, bankers, and others of the grand bourgeoisie to voluntarily inject millions of dollars into the economy for the purposes of revivification, without any apparent return on the investment. There was no stick, and not much of a carrot, either. The only incentive was, as before, government contracts and vague, promised future tax breaks (not that most of the wealthy paid much to begin with).
1903 ground on, with little sign of hope. Bank after bank continued to shudder and die.
Men reported to their factories and shops in the morning only to be turned away by foreman who sometimes apologized profusely for the layoffs, and sometimes threatened their former coworkers away with pistols.
Industry, already concentrated, became further consolidated. Standard Oil achieved its coveted 100% monopoly on oil production.
The LDP donated not-insignificant amounts to charity, but it and its constituent members spent more on the purchasing of bankrupt works and factories, and on beefing up security all around, as unrest among the underclass seethed. By the end of 1903, there were 30,000 men on the payroll of Continental Security in one capacity or another, rivaling the regular US Army in size.
Workers who refused to go upon their firings were beaten by CS men. In return, known ‘blacklegs,’ as both scabs and hired thugs were increasingly coming to be called, had their houses defaced, their families menaced. On occasion they were killed.
It was clear the government’s floundering half-measures were not working.
In early fall, McKinley’s administration took an unprecedented step: it established a ‘Provisional Relief Agency’.
This was done over the howls and shouts of traditional Republicans. It succeeded largely on Roosevelt’s personal initiative, as he cajoled, encouraged, persuaded, and on occasion threatened men into compliance.
The PRA met with a mixed response. It was largely greeted with relief by the dispossessed it was meant to help, who by this point would have welcomed anything that might alleviate their misery.
Those higher up the socio-economic ladder often found occasion to scoff and charge that it represented the further dissolution of the nation.
Harper’s Weekly asked: “while certainly, the present crisis demands immediate and decisive action, is it so wise to train the people up like dogs, expecting always of dispensations from above? We would have no republic at all if the Fathers had been content to beg the largesse of Mother England.”
The New York Times was more tentatively optimistic. “Better the untrammeled march of state power than the starvation of millions.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Frick’s Voice also approved of the program. It was called, “perhaps the first of this administration’s truly bold and actionable proposals. The country cannot go on if its lower half is left to waste.”
It was representative of Frick’s self-reinvention—no longer simply the capitalist autocrat, he was eager to make himself palatable to all Americans. When asked what he would do for the poor if raised to the Executive Mansion in 1904, Frick responded he would not be opposed to some redistributionist scheme so long as “it was done without brutish inefficiency and blundering disruption of natural commerce.”
It seemed his running mate, Hearst, still a Populist at heart, was getting to him. Hearst and Frick were now flanking the ruling Republicans not only from the right but from the left. “What cretins are we cursed to suffer in the halls of congress,” demanded Hearst’s New York Journal, “that in their useless gibbering have left the working classes of this land so desperate they will turn to the madness of the red flag for relief? No more!”
The PRA opened offices in most major cities and provided payouts for those who could meet its qualifications. Those qualifications were as follows: that one was a citizen of the United States for at least five years or lived in the household of one who was, that one could provide verification (either through documentation or third-party testimony) he had searched for work in the past two months, and that one regularly certify he was still seeking gainful employment so long as he continued to receive benefits.
The payout was not much. At $6 a week, it was significantly lower than the average worker’s wages earned for the same period. It was also next to impossible for rural people and those who could not prove citizenship or provide proof of recent employment to obtain benefits. Regional administrators took advantage of any opportunity they might seize upon to deny aid.
It helped some. In certain regions, the slight bump in income stimulated mild economic uplift, such as in Boston and Boise.
But it failed to do much for many more. Recent immigrants and their children were left out in the cold, and their resentment only grew as they were turned away because they wanted for one more year of citizenship, or because the men they had begged for jobs refused to vouch that they had done so.
PRA chief William Borah would later say, “we did what we could, where we could, only there was not too much that we could do and not too many places where we could do it.”
In the big cities and out west, the mood was radicalizing, and fast. Socialist speakers in Manhattan stood on overturned crates and howled at listeners to “burn the whole goddamned rotten system to the ground and take what you are owed!”
Nationalist Senator Burleson (N-TX) introduced a bill to expedite the arrest and persecution of those guilty of such ‘seditious speech,’ but it foundered on the opposition of the Populists and a few liberal Republicans, along with the SLP, of course.
As if the situation at home was not bad enough, the US also saw serious reversals in its grinding Filipino war. On 20 July 1903, Moro insurgents surrounded a company of American soldiers near Lake Lanao on the island of Mindanao and destroyed it, slaughtering the 300-odd troops to the last man. In response, US soldiers went on a vengeful tear, burning a dozen villages and killing several hundred civilians in the process.
The whole mess was splashed across every newspaper on the other side of the Pacific, and General Pershing’s conduct drew vociferous criticism from both those who thought he was too harsh and those who believed he was not harsh enough.
As the country sank further into economic catastrophe, the photographs of butchered American lads and coffins unloading at the docks of San Francisco were too much.
‘Bring our boys home!’ was added to the standard shouts of ‘jobs and food!’
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood was not marked out for greatness. He was born into obscurity in rural Utah a few years after the Civil War and spent his youth laboring as a miner and a cowpuncher, among other things. He had a rough, broad visage that spoke of trouble and made him look every bit the hard-bitten workman that he was.
Uneducated but attentive to politics, Haywood followed with interest the bloody labor struggles of the twentieth century, in which he saw his own travails reflected. But it was not until after the Red Summer, when he joined Ed Boyce’s WFM in a rage at the carnage in Chicago and New Orleans, that his life as a radical truly began.
Haywood spent the next few years organizing, building up WFM locals across the states of Colorado and Utah, and agitating against the reformism he thought so pervaded the labor movement. He met Sam Gompers once in Silver City, found him a mealy-mouthed ‘squat specimen of humanity that called itself the leader of labor,’ and hated him and all appeals to moderation forever.
By 1899 Haywood had built up something of a regional reputation for himself as a fire-breathing radical, a herald of something above and beyond that which labor had always been in the United States. A man, perhaps, in the mold of Eugene Debs.
It was this man that went to Cripple Creek that year, to aid the gold miners then striking against wage reductions. Here he met young Jack London for the first time, and the two men bonded over their shared convictions and over the hard lives they had lived. Along with John Welch, they led the miners in battle first against Sherman Bell and his militiamen, and then against John Pershing and his troops.
When the day was lost, Welch was captured and executed, but London and Haywood made good their escapes. London, still wanted for his attempt on the life of Collis P. Huntington some years earlier, melted back into the underground.
Haywood fled to Mexico.
He spent nearly a year here, primarily in the northern state of Chihuahua, where he worked sometimes as a cattleman or a jornalero under assumed names. There is little record of his life during this time.
In late 1901, Haywood traveled to Europe, hoping to further his revolutionary education and make the acquaintance of the continent’s socialist luminaries. Humble, undereducated workingman that he was, he found himself disoriented in this alien land, but made his way to Paris, where he was introduced to a number of fantastic figures, such as the anarchist Sébastien Faure and the socialists Jules Guesde and Jean Jaurés.
After a year or so in France, Haywood spent a few weeks in Germany, and then went on to London. He just missed Lenin, who in mid-1903 departed for America after presiding over the stormy split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. But he did meet Lenin’s comrade, the Bolshevik Maxim Litvinov, who he got on with, and who gifted Haywood an English edition of Marx’s Capital. Haywood claimed to his dying day that he had yet to finish the book.
In early 1904, Haywood finally returned to his home country, first passing through Mexico again and slipping quietly over the border. By now, the nation was in utter turmoil as the unemployment rate spiked to 27% and the presidential election approached.
Haywood was reunited with Jack London in St. Louis, who ‘filled him in’ on what he had missed in his time away, from the increasing radicalization of the labor movement to the emergence of Frick’s Nationalists. Haywood spent the next several months rebuilding his connections with old comrades, and it soon became clear that the time was ripe for the formation of the ‘one big union’ of which he had always dreamed.
When the necessary support had been won, London and Haywood traveled together to Chicago, and here, joined by some two dozen delegates of various trade unions and workers’ brotherhoods, including Tom Hagerty and William Trautmann, clandestinely formed the Industrial Workers of the World on 1 September 1904.
The IWW’s founding charter dedicated it to “undying war against the capitalist class.”
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
23 December 1902
23 December 1902
Knox closed the motorcar door behind him. He leaned down and thanked his driver. “Park around the side, sir. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
The chauffeur touched the brim of his cap and said simply, “sir.”
Knox sighed and turned. The mansion loomed before him, a towering early 19th century construction of mingled grey-beige brick, tall and narrow. He shook off his coat. The chill hit him instantly. As he tucked it under his arm, he saw that the pockets were still turned inside out. He swore and fixed them—those goddamned militiamen had not handled him easily.
Two men stood at the house’s step, just beyond the newly erected iron gate. There had been no gate before the Governor’s mansion ten years ago. That was just like Frick.
Knox approached—and one of the men, a fellow probably nearing 35 in a well-trimmed jacket with a lean, lined face beneath a crinkled bowler hat, stuck a revolver in his face. “Hold it,” the man barked. Knox gasped. Then he righted himself and put on his boldest expression.
“Sir, I’m here to speak with Governor Fr—”
“I know what you’re here for,” the guard’s second interjected. “Raise your arms.”
Knox glowered, but did as he was told. The first guard frisked him brusquely, then snatched his hat from his head. Knox cried out but did nothing. The guard turned the hat over, twirled it on the end of his finger, laughed and then handed it back.
“What the hell do you expect I’m going to do?” Knox snapped. “Shoot the man?”
“Can’t hardly be too careful,” the second guard said. Then they parted and allowed him through. Knox gathered his wits, cleared his head, and decided not to dwell on his second cruel interrogation of the night.
He came up to the oaken door, raised the knocker, and let it fall. The clang tore through the great house. Only a moment passed before the door was answered.
Knox was relieved to see, for the first time in some hours, a really friendly face.
“Mr. Knox!” Adelaide Frick smiled. She was a bit over forty, but still looked every bit the high-society beauty she had been all those years ago. Her bright eyes shone in the moonlight and the mansion’s lamps, and she pushed an errant strand of dark hair behind her ear. “It’s been far too long. Come on in!”
Knox nodded, smiled back, and stepped inside, glad to be out of the cold. Adelaide patted his shoulder.
“Henry is a bit occupied at the moment, he should be finished shortly. Come along to the sitting room, I’ll prepare you a cup of tea.”
Knox inclined his head and followed her. He could already feel his heartbeat getting away from him. He hardly wanted to be here—he had not told anyone he was coming. Not his wife, not any of his friends or associates, not the President or anyone else in the cabinet. But something had to be done, and he had a cruel feeling he was the only one who might do anything.
Adelaide prepared them both cups of warm tea and escorted her guest to the sitting room. He took a seat in one of the pillowy armchairs. Adelaide moved to sit across from him, but no sooner had her fingers brushed the headrest than the door to the room blew in, and in strode Frick.
Knox stood, having yet to sip his tea.
“I’ll leave you gentlemen to your business, then,” Adelaide said. On her way out, Frick took her by the arm and kissed her gently on the cheek. Then she departed.
“Go ahead and sit back down, Phil,” Frick said.
Knox obeyed.
Frick took the seat his wife had meant to take. He crossed his legs. He had aged some, Knox could clearly tell. There were flashes of grey in his black beard and his neatly combed hair. His brow was creased and his cheeks gaunt. But the light in his eyes had yet to dull.
“Ada seems well,” Knox said.
“She is,” Frick agreed. “We all are.”
“Even you?”
“Especially!” He paused for a moment. “But you’ve done well for yourself, haven’t you?”
“Mmm."
They spoke for a few minutes more, reminiscing on days gone by, afternoon hunts at Johnstown, fishing and dinner after. Then Frick’s voice fell, and he spoke more sharply.
“Phil, I’m busy—now, it’s lovely to see you, of course. But I have to ask —”
Knox swallowed. He closed his eyes for a moment. This was what he was here for, after all.
“Henry,” he said. “The President’s had a heart attack.”
Frick’s eyes seemed to freeze. For a moment there was a look on his face Knox had never seen before—surprise. But he quickly recomposed himself and settled back in his chair. His muscles relaxed. “Is he—”
“He’s alive. And the doctors say he ought to be at full health within a week—and by God, Henry, I had better not read about this in your damn paper!”
“Of course,” Frick nodded. “And my well wishes to the President and his family, of course.”
Knox shook his head. “Henry, you have got to stop this.”
“And what’s that I have got to stop?”
Knox could already feel his blood getting up. His hand trembled—he raised it and gesticulated wildly. “You—all of this! This—this National Party nonsense or whatever you’re calling it now. This crusade you’re on! What the hell do you think gave McKinley his damn fit? You, and these reds, and—God’s sake, do you truly think what the country needs is more parties? More division?”
“An ideal country would not have a single party, sir,” Frick answered. “But we live in the United States. And the United States is facing the kind of threat it’s never faced before, and it needs men willing to stand up to that threat. And with all due respect, Mr. McKinley and his party have conclusively shown themselves not to be those men.”
“Stop with the goddamned campaign talk!” Knox snapped. “That jumped-up red lunatic Darrow took damn near a quarter of the vote last time around. And with this—this—how many workmen do you think are out of a job? God knows what the returns will look like next year! You want to hand him the presidency? You want to—”
“I’m not handing anyone the presidency,” Frick said, coldly. He eyed his old acquaintance with an imperial chill.
“Good God—you actually think you can win, don’t you?” Knox asked, incredulous.
Frick shrugged. “If you think Darrow has a path, then why should I —”
“And you want to gamble the fate of the nation on that?”
“No, no,” Frick said. “There’s no gambling. You really don’t understand, Phil. I’m not sure any of you do. You men—you Republicans, you Democrats, you Populists, whatever you might like to call yourselves—you are not on the table anymore. It is not a choice between Mr. Darrow and sound gentlemen like yourself and Mr. McKinley. There is no room for the good, sound gentlemen. It is a choice between Darrow and me. And that is all there is to it.”
Knox could feel his face redden. He clenched his left hand into a fist. “My motorcar was held up twice by militiamen in getting here. Is that your style of governance, Mr. Frick? I—”
Frick nodded. “An anarchist bomb went off downtown not twenty-four hours ago. Would you have me recall the militia? As I’ve told you, this is the world we live in, Mr. Knox. History moves quickly. Tarry and she’ll pass you by.” He examined Knox’s face for a moment, and then added, “I think it may be that she already has.”
Knox ignored him and went on. “And what about those boys in shirtsleeves and caps? Who the hell are they? What right have they got to yank my driver out of the motorcar and search him for pistols? Wh—”
“The Continental Security boys?” Frick smiled. “Sturdy fellows. You hire them at a premium, too, by the way. The militia was undermanned. They are only here to help.”
Knox scoffed. He raised his shaking hand and jabbed a finger at Frick.
“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? The law answers to you, the men toting rifles are in your employ—you don’t give a damn about ‘anarchy’ or this country. I’ve got no doubt that you would wrap yourself in a red flag if you believed it would improve your prospects.”
“You’re wrong, Phil,” Frick said in that even, yet nearly broken tone that told he was growing angry. “This country took my fathers in, gave them the chance to make good men out of themselves. I love this country. You may not believe that—personally I don’t give a good goddamn what you believe—but it’s true.”
“If you love this country, Henry, if this was anything to do with principles, you would do something to help us save her. But you are having too much fun with playing dictator.”
Frick shook his head. “Principles? Have you forgotten about Johnstown already? I’m surprised at you. It’s hardly been ten years.”
“I—”
“How many corpses did they pull out of that town when it was all over and done with? A thousand—no, two thousand, wasn’t it? And it was our fault, I hope you don’t lie to yourself about that, sir. It would have cost us nothing to keep up that dam—pennies, really. But we didn’t. Don’t delude yourself—those corpses are ours to answer for on the Last Day. You, myself, Carnegie, and all the rest.”
“Henry—”
“But when I present my defense at the Judgment, I may at least tell the Judge that I paid out of pocket to help those poor souls—the undrowned ones, anyhow—rebuild. I don’t recall you doing any such thing. In fact—who was it that went before our human prosecutors and argued in a court of law that there was no blood on our hands, and that we did not owe anyone a cent? Oh—it was you, wasn’t it?”
Knox was struck silent. His stomach turned. Frick smiled, triumphantly, and went on. “You never met a principle you couldn’t put a price on, Phil, and I won’t have you sit here and pretend otherwise. And you will see me on the ballot come next November.”
A spell of silence that weighed like eternity hung for a time before breaking.
Knox bowed his head. He had lost. It was fruitless. He stood.
“Then I suppose we have nothing left to discuss.”
Frick looked up from his seat. “I suppose not.” He jerked his head towards the door. “Ada will show you out, if you like.”
“It was good to see you, Henry,” Knox said.
“And you as well,” Frick replied.
Knox showed himself out. He slipped back into his coat, replaced his hat, and stepped into a frigid Philadelphia night.
Finally got off my ass, good to be back.
Also changed some bits in the last chapter, regarding the indirect election of senators. Thanks to @Alexander the Average for pointing that out.
Also changed some bits in the last chapter, regarding the indirect election of senators. Thanks to @Alexander the Average for pointing that out.
Nice to see you back. I thought I was the only one continuing to make content for many of the America alternate timelines. Thank you so much.
I'm trying to avoid explicit Russian rev parallels ITTL, but I won't spoil too much beyond that.
Truly a broken clock moment for him. The Republicans and Dems have literally left no real alternative to them outside of Socalism. Bravo lads, you played yourselves.
You keep whining with shit like this:
While 20% of the country is penniless and engaged in a foreign unpopular war. Literally almost everything ripe for a revolt is ready. Just needs a spark to the tinder.
Provided he survives longer, I see De Leon as a potential American Lenin. An influential theorist with a stubborn, my way or the highway attitude and a firebrand revolutionary: the parallels with Vladimir Ilich are clear.
Jack London ITTL is more of a direct action kind of guy, doubt he'll take any political roles outside of the armed struggle.
But anyways I agree with OP, it's best to avoid direct parallels to OTL and try to develop these characters as their own thing