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Alright, here's my attempt at a TL that leads to a Socialist America (though not like the USSR or the PRC). The TL has a number of PODs:

1. death of Samuel Gompers, union leader, and better relations between the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor
2. No Zimmermann telegram and thus no entry into WW I
3. No split of the left wing with a clear policy being written down afterward.
4. Subsequent political and economic butterflies lead to a success for Debs (who lives longer ITTL).

Anyhow, here it goes.

PS: I don't have much knowledge of American politics so don't butcher me for inaccuracies. Also, I haven't readt Jello Biafra's TL on the same subject so any resemblances between my TL and his are coincidental.

Hope you enjoy it ;).



A Red America


Chapter I: Formative Years, 1901-1922.


The Socialist Party of America was founded in 1901 with the merger of the Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had broken off from the main party. By the time of the second decade of the twentieth century the SPA had grown significantly in membership and had two people seating in the House of Representatives, 70 mayors and many elected state legislators and city councilors across the country, for example in Milwaukee which was the largest city with a Socialist mayor. The party was a very broad organization incorporating moderate social democrats, more radical Marxist leaning elements, syndicalists and agrarian utopians and was most popular among German, Finnish and Jewish immigrants. Despite their success so far, they could use a broader base of support, but the party’s dividedness and the enmity of union leader Samuel Gompers made the relations with the most logical support base, the American Federation of Labor, difficult even if rank and file union members supported the SPA.

A break came for the party in 1910 when the leader of the American Federation of Labor, Gompers died of a heart attack and was succeeded by John McBride. McBride had started his career as a coal miner in Ohio and had been a member of the Populist Party in the American Midwest in the 1890s. He was much more amenable toward the Socialists than Gompers had been which had to do with the fact that their propaganda was aimed at target groups in which he fitted; relations improved although differences of opinion would remain on some matters. De facto party leader Eugene V. Debs started a propaganda campaign aimed specifically at coal miners, promising them better work conditions, better pay, better hours and control of the means of production instead of their capitalist, bourgeois employers which meant that the profits would be returned to them. McBride endorsed Debs’ efforts at improving conditions for miners and moved the AFL closer to the SPA and urged the AFL’s members to vote for the Socialists in his own campaigns. The SPA also expanded into unexplored territories when they addressed poor, white cotton farmers and hard-pressed wheat farmers in the Plains states and the South, specifically in Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas which in the 1890s had been affected by the Populist movement. The SPA adopted similar hostility to banks, “bourgeois landowners” and elites in general. The party advocated seizure of lands owned by these elites to form farming cooperatives in which the “landless laborers” would keep the produce, sell the surplus and divide the profits equally in some kind of agrarian utopia as advocated by Julius Wayland, editor of Appeal to Reason. This radical propaganda attracted a larger following among the supporters of the dead Populist movement and party membership grew to around 3 million across the United States by 1912. The SPA, however, remained pragmatic due to its diverse nature and also supported the much more radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) although they disapproved of any violence or anarchism.

Eugene Victor Debs ran in the 1912 presidential election with former mayor of Milwaukee Emil Seidel as his running mate and achieved 3.075.386 votes or around 20% of popular vote, carrying Ohio and Pennsylvania, both of which were strongly industrialized regions, centers of mining, manufacturing, heavy industry and so on, and therefore hubs of union activity. The Socialists also garnered strong support among miners in Illinois, but failed to win that state, and among farmers in the Midwest where they failed by relatively small margins in taking a few states here. In the 1914 elections for the House of Representatives, the SPA did gain 22 seats out of 435 with the majority of votes coming from the states of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama and North Carolina, especially the first four states which had a larger population of laborers and a larger population in general.

In the meantime the Great War erupted in 1914 in Europe and the Socialist Party of America was quite unanimous in its standpoint regarding American participation. The vote was unanimously against it and the war was denounced as an imperialist conflict over the backs of the proletariat to gain new markets, new colonies for natural resources and cheap labor and profit for the capitalists, weapon producers among them, while the working classes only suffered and didn’t gain any improvements in their lives from it. In the meantime the European conflict bogged down in trench warfare. Millions died in the sludge of the trenches in barbaric fights, often only for the goal of shifting frontlines forward by mere meters. No radical changes were brought about by bloodbaths like the Somme, Ypres or Verdun which seemed to prove the SPA’s point. In spite of Germany’s declaration of unlimited U-boat warfare which caused friction with the Wilson administration, the United States didn’t enter the war. In Europe, the British naval blockade slowly strangled Germany and the stalemate ended barely with a negotiated victory peace with civil unrest, communist stirrings and general dissatisfaction across Europe. Russia by now had already collapsed into communist revolution under Vladimir Lenin and the SPA was struggling with how to cope with this unseen phenomenon, a communist revolution.

The party was divided more than ever, but rather than risking a split Eugene Debs called for a party congress which was to become the First Party Congress of the Socialist Party of America (held in the steel industry center of Pittsburgh, December 1917-January 1918). In it, the left wing of the party gained dominance after a number of enflamed and brilliant oratory shows of Debs himself although he was somewhat pragmatic in dictating policy to avoid a radical split between left and right. He stated at the closing meeting in January 1918 that the SPA would follow a Marxist-Leninist course, but would also cooperate with the “petit bourgeoisie” defined as small shop owners, clerks, civil servants, small landowners, trade unions and others who were defined as “small capital holders” and useful allies against “big business”. This peaceful “bourgeois” and purely electoral course would be maintained until the time was ripe for revolution, which was not now considering the embryonic stage of the party. The war ended in November 1918 after a successful German summer offensive with an armistice followed by a negotiated peace in which Germany lost its colonies and Alsace-Lorraine, but was allowed to keep its gains from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Second Party Congress of the SPA was held in April and May 1919 on the occasion of the German Revolution and the establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The attending members debated whether to recognize the Bavarian Soviet Republic and communist Hungary, but they didn’t out of fear of losing support. The two communist regimes fell anyway the same year after dismal failure, but the Soviet Union didn’t and it received recognition from the party leadership in 1921. Germany maintained control although Austria-Hungary collapsed which led to Germany’s annexation of Austria and Bohemia-Moravia in 1919. The Ottoman Empire survived and would linger on throughout the 1920s while Bulgaria annexed Vardar Macedonia from Serbia while Romania took Transylvania in a short war against Hungary and annexed Moldova as Russia sank into chaos. Several more communist revolutions took place across Europe, but they all failed miserably; the most notable ones which temporarily threatened state security were in France and Italy where enormous strikes and riots took place for better pay, better hours, bread on the table and an end to the war.

By 1920, Eugene Debs had run for President again and had attained over 7 million votes, around 28% of popular vote, while carrying Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan for a total of five states. He was still beaten by Republican candidate Warren G. Harding who carried 32 states and Democratic candidate James M. Cox who carried eleven states. In the following 1922 elections for the House of Representatives the SPA gained 23 seats, leaping from 22 to 45 representatives and by now they also held eight seats in the US senate. A beginning had been made.
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