If America became involved in a massive conflict for a longer period of time, a significant portion of workers will be coming home with combat experience. If tens of thousands of both Pinkertons and workers have direct experience with combat, there are going to be Blair Mountains everywhere. OTL the elite in the United States got lucky that American troops only participated in large scale operations for a few months towards the end of the war.
The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America
- Thread starter Iggies
- Start date
Yeah there’s still a little ways to go. It might seem like things are already boiling over, but historically a country often has a lot of ‘near misses’ before things actual spiral into revolution.
Umm I think he has a longer version of that tl in sufficient velocity that had two new updates last month. Dont know if it will continue though
It recently started updating again on Sufficient Velocity. If you're talking about "Saving Soviet Democracy" that is.
The Congressional Elections of 1900
The congressional elections of 1900 were overshadowed by the thrilling presidential contest, but they presented a victory for the new heterodox movements, and a further disintegration of the hitherto firmly established two-party system.
In the House, the Socialists added 21 seats to the 34 they’d won in ’98, bringing their total to 54. Colorado, with its two representatives, became the first state to send a delegation to Washington composed entirely of Socialists. They also elected two from Louisiana, one from Florida, and one from Georgia. Indeed, gains were being made in the south. In Pennsylvania, they expanded their seven representatives to thirteen, coming just shy of a majority of the delegation. They also won one from Washington, two from Nebraska, and three from Missouri.
Most of these were poached from the Populists—however, the latter were benefitting greatly from the collapse of the Democratic Party, and so there was still not so much occasion for hostility between them and the SLP. Their own total rose from 70 to 89. This included six of nine North Carolinian representatives, and eight out of 11 Georgians. There were also three from Louisiana, and two each from Alabama and Mississippi.
The Republicans witnessed the worrying fall of their own majority to a very near plurality of 171. These were mostly lost to the Socialists or the Populists. But there was a new challenger on the scene.
Frick’s National Party, formed as it was only a few months before the election, had little time to prepare any candidates for congressional contests. Nevertheless, a number of galvanized anti-socialists eagerly joined the ranks of the party and stood for election. A fairly impressive 8 representatives managed to make it to office, four from Pennsylvania, three from California, and one from New York. A small presence, but a foreboding one. The Nationalists had their first taste of state power.
As for the Democrats, they dropped to 24, controlling outright only the delegations now of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas.
So, as it stood when the 55th Congress was seated, there were 171 Republicans, 89 Populists, 54 Socialists, 24 Democrats, 8 Nationalists, and 15 Independents or members of smaller parties.
It was the most divided the House of Representatives had been in a very long time.
There were great changes in the Senate, as well.
The 54th Congress had hosted 60 Republicans, for a solid majority. There were also 16 Democrats, 13 Populists, and 1 stubborn Free Silver Republican from Wyoming.
In 1900, the Populists rose to 25 seats. The Republicans fell to 51 seats, still maintaining their majority, though a slimmer one. The Democrats sank to 6 senators, fattening primarily the Populists with their loss.
Most importantly, in 1900 the Socialists sent their first ever representative to the Senate: none other than Pennsylvania’s James Maurer.
When he entered the Senate chamber for the first time on 4 May 1901, he found few but the Populists and a small smattering of (quickly dwindling) liberal-minded Republicans would so much as shake his hand.
In the House, the Socialists added 21 seats to the 34 they’d won in ’98, bringing their total to 54. Colorado, with its two representatives, became the first state to send a delegation to Washington composed entirely of Socialists. They also elected two from Louisiana, one from Florida, and one from Georgia. Indeed, gains were being made in the south. In Pennsylvania, they expanded their seven representatives to thirteen, coming just shy of a majority of the delegation. They also won one from Washington, two from Nebraska, and three from Missouri.
Most of these were poached from the Populists—however, the latter were benefitting greatly from the collapse of the Democratic Party, and so there was still not so much occasion for hostility between them and the SLP. Their own total rose from 70 to 89. This included six of nine North Carolinian representatives, and eight out of 11 Georgians. There were also three from Louisiana, and two each from Alabama and Mississippi.
The Republicans witnessed the worrying fall of their own majority to a very near plurality of 171. These were mostly lost to the Socialists or the Populists. But there was a new challenger on the scene.
Frick’s National Party, formed as it was only a few months before the election, had little time to prepare any candidates for congressional contests. Nevertheless, a number of galvanized anti-socialists eagerly joined the ranks of the party and stood for election. A fairly impressive 8 representatives managed to make it to office, four from Pennsylvania, three from California, and one from New York. A small presence, but a foreboding one. The Nationalists had their first taste of state power.
As for the Democrats, they dropped to 24, controlling outright only the delegations now of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas.
So, as it stood when the 55th Congress was seated, there were 171 Republicans, 89 Populists, 54 Socialists, 24 Democrats, 8 Nationalists, and 15 Independents or members of smaller parties.
It was the most divided the House of Representatives had been in a very long time.
There were great changes in the Senate, as well.
The 54th Congress had hosted 60 Republicans, for a solid majority. There were also 16 Democrats, 13 Populists, and 1 stubborn Free Silver Republican from Wyoming.
In 1900, the Populists rose to 25 seats. The Republicans fell to 51 seats, still maintaining their majority, though a slimmer one. The Democrats sank to 6 senators, fattening primarily the Populists with their loss.
Most importantly, in 1900 the Socialists sent their first ever representative to the Senate: none other than Pennsylvania’s James Maurer.
When he entered the Senate chamber for the first time on 4 May 1901, he found few but the Populists and a small smattering of (quickly dwindling) liberal-minded Republicans would so much as shake his hand.
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INTERLUDE: The Resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan
Excerpt from The Republic of Blades and Bullets: Political and Personal Violence in the Late United States, by Randolph Roth
Belknap Publishing Collective, 2002
Belknap Publishing Collective, 2002
The Battle of Wilmington ‘frightened the south as only John Brown’s raid had done,’ as W.E.B Du Bois would later put it.
To many, it seemed a calculated strike at the foundations of the carefully structured white supremacist system that undergirded everything in Dixie. Like Harpers Ferry half a century earlier, it conjured up dreadful images of insurrection, heads on pikes, black rabble wielding sickles and pistols, bodies heaped up in the streets.
John Williams of Mississippi infamously promised that, ‘nigger rule may have fixed itself on North Carolina, but it shall not come a step further southward.’
It was a popular sentiment.
In two respects, Wilmington was worse than Brown’s raid had been. Most obviously, unlike that fateful misadventure, the Fusionists had succeeded in Wilmington. The Democrat uprising had been put down and the survival of the ‘negro government’ assured. Might it not be a signal to similarly restless would-be revolutionaries across the south?
And yet there was an aspect that was even more chilling. Though southern conservatives might fulminate about ‘negro rule’ and ‘black anarchy,’ deeply disturbing was the reality that white men had taken part in the fray on the same side as black men.
And not a small handful of radicals, but a broad cross-section of Wilmington’s working classes.
To many southern men, particularly in the more conservative states, it was an utterly alien mindset that had animated the Wilmington Fusionists.
“How southern white men can bear arms alongside negroes and against southern white men, I do not know,” one Arkansas farmer said.
Determined that such a thing should never come to pass in their own homes, many southern states resolved to root out any inkling of the contagion where it could be found.
In early 1897, South Carolina passed a statute with overwhelming majority support in the legislature criminalizing the SLP within that state’s borders. Another bit of legislation outlawed ‘outrageous combinations’ and South Carolina thereby proscribed unions, already threatened as they were in the rest of the country.
Louisiana managed to pass similar if milder laws before the disappearance of its Democratic majority in 1902, especially directed towards the disenfranchisement and suppression of the desperately poor black population in the Mississippi River Valley, who it was feared would be naturally susceptible to the ‘bacillus of revolution.’ Police presence in suspect counties was beefed up, and farmers were encouraged to keep their ears to the mutterings of their sharecroppers, and duly report any ‘red chattering’ they overheard.
All that was not enough.
Laws and police were all well and good, but that was not how the white men of the south had guarded their cherished ‘freedom’ in days gone by.
What was needed was a force that would terrorize the blacks into submission once more and do the same for any white foolhardy enough to challenge the sacred color line.
The Redshirts had been discredited by their ignominious defeat in Wilmington.
So, when southern white supremacist searched for a new and unblemished symbol, they peered further back into history.
This was not the first time Dixie had been assaulted by alien invaders seeking to dismantle all that was good and dear, and to stir up black against white. Then it had been the soldiers of the federal army under the stars and stripes.
Now it was ‘European anarchists’ under the red banner.
In the bloody days after Appomattox, the men of the vanquished Confederacy had donned hoods and shouldered rifles to safeguard civilization and white supremacy by any means necessary.
Times had changed, but those means need not.
And so, the Ku Klux Klan came out of its tomb.
A few scattered militia and gun clubs calling themselves ‘the Clansmen’ or ‘the Knights’ sprang up across the south in the weeks and months following Wilmington. But the Klan was not truly reborn until the summer of 1899, when James K. Vardaman, recently a Mississippi state representative, and known by the well-merited sobriquet of ‘the Great White Chief,’ formally constituted ‘the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’ in Biloxi, with thirty-two members besides himself.
Vardaman was a fierce and devoted racist, even by the standards of the south. He openly sanctioned lynch law and would go on to say that “if every black must be hanged to keep Mississippi from turning red, then it will be done.”
The Klan exploded across the south thereafter.
By late 1903, it boasted nearly 400,000 members across the country, nearly all of them in the lower states. The Klan’s official charter pledged all members to ‘the defense of civilization, order, peace, and the Heaven-ordained white supremacy that underlays all of these.’
The charter also swore an adherence to ‘peaceful and honorable means in the pursuance of our goals.’ But of course, much emphasis was put on the ‘honorable’ as opposed to the ‘peaceful.’ And there was little that could not be counted as ‘honorable’ if it was directed against blacks or reds.
The first death attributable to Vardaman’s Klan was that of William Jackson, a black Socialist from Madison County, Mississippi. Jackson was young, either 19 or 21 by conflicting sources, and had been converted to socialism in the aftermath of Wilmington. His insistent agitation among his fellow black farmworkers proved a thorn in the side of the farmers that employed him, and local whites in general. After several stern warnings by figures ranging from the local sheriff to other black workers to ‘cut the nonsense,’ it was decided firmer action was needed.
On 18 November 1899, a gang of five hooded Klansmen broke into the small shack where Jackson lived with his common law wife. She remembered one of the men saying only, “William Jackson, we charge you with treason against the state of Mississippi, find you guilty, and pass a sentence of death,” before shooting the stunned young socialist dead. No one was ever brought to trial or even arrested for the murder.
Soon, such actions became commonplace.
Of the 6,000 or so lynching victims in the United States between 1877 and 1918, a staggering 41% died in the bloody years between 1898 and 1908, overwhelmingly in the south.
The Klan was organized generally into county chapters, sometimes with more than one chapter in an especially populous county, or more than one county per chapter in sparsely peopled regions. The chapters could number anywhere from 10 to 10,000 men. Though all theoretically reported to Vardaman as the ‘Grand Wizard’ (the title General Forrest had used when he commanded the original Klan) of the Klan National Congress, in reality the KKK was very loosely federated. Chapters varied in membership, commitment, and discipline. Some cells were described as ‘terrifying, fierce, with the organization and ability of soldiers.’ Others were little more than glorified drinking clubs that gathered weekly to complain about blacks and the travails of daily life.
Most of what the Klan did was not violent. Not immediately, at least. They organized lectures and distributed literature concerning the inferiority of the black race, and regaling readers with the horrors of Chicago, the Paris Commune, and St. Domingue, promising their repetition here in the American southland should ‘rebellious negroes’ and ‘red incendiaries’ go unchallenged.
There was no need to kill where intimidation would do, and very often waking up to find one’s house surrounded by masked Klansmen was enough to scare a Socialist or a Populist out of his convictions.
Like their Reconstruction-era forbears, the Klan would often organize ‘night-rides’ in country regions. They charged through the hills in full regalia, bearing torches and rifles, after the fashion of avenging spirits.
To many northerners, the Klan became a figure of fun, yet another instance of their southern brethren’s single-minded fixation on the civil war.
But to southern blacks and their allies, the Klan was no laughing matter.
For while the Klansmen might disdain violence where they deemed it unnecessary, very often they deemed it necessary, such as in the cases of Bill Jacksons.
The SLP offices in Vicksburg were burned to the ground in October of 1901. No one was ever charged, and they were never rebuilt.
Four black sharecroppers were hanged in Shreveport, Louisiana that same year. They were accused of the murder of the farmer that had employed them, a murder which was supposed to have been the signal to inaugurate a ‘black anarchist commune.’ No one was arrested.
Despite the archetypical Klansman’s inevitable dress of a stark white robe and conical hood, there was never any standardization of uniform. Brown, grey, and even blue robes were sometimes worn, though white was preferred both as a symbol of racial purity, and of opposition to the red and the black alike. Men generally carried pistols, sometimes even rifles or old sabers.
So attired, Klansmen would go on parade through the streets, moving in eerie silence under torchlight, as they did in Columbia, South Carolina on Christmas Day, 1900. These ‘peaceful’ nighttime marches were meant to intimidate, and they worked wonderfully.
Perhaps most critical to the Klan’s mission was its class character. Though Vardaman was no wretched 'poor white', and his early lieutenants were disproportionately well to do, the Klan was soon drawing recruits from every strata of white southern society, welcoming the very poorest white laborer and the men of grand estates alike.
It was important, as Vardaman specifically stated, to prevent what had happened in North Carolina—a tactical alliance of blacks and whites—at all costs. As such, there was no room for class snobbery or division among the men defending the white southern order. Racial solidarity must be the beginning and end of it.
Though white sharecroppers, farmers, and laborers who voted socialist were not nonexistent, they were still very uncommon in the deep south. The biggest threat, as the Klan saw it, was the Populist Party. Pursuant to its part in the Wilmington drama, Bryan’s party was commonly seen as a sort of stalking horse for the reds. Most Populist politicians in the south still fully supported segregation and the strict maintenance of the color line, but this was not enough anymore.
The Populist Party had, since 1894 and especially 1896, exploded in popularity among poor southern whites. In Georgia and North Carolina, it had almost entirely displaced the Democrats among that demographic. It threatened to do the same in Florida and Louisiana, and its position elsewhere was strong as well.
If the Klan and its associated white supremacist allies had let the Populists be, conceded some of their begged for reforms, they could have driven a wedge between it and the SLP. Thus, they would have successfully locked the Socialists and black voters (increasingly coming to be identified with each other in the south) out of power for a long time to come.
But as it happened, they cast their net too wide, and included the increasingly powerful Populist Party in their list of the ‘foes of white supremacy.’ In doing so, they alienated many whites who would not have much cared if Socialists were run out of town and ‘insolent negroes’ beaten or lynched.
With Populist politicians and known Populist voters on the receiving end of the same aggression, the Klan found it had made itself a powerful and resilient enemy. Perceiving themselves (rightly) as under siege, southern Populists also became increasingly friendly to the SLP, not eager to drive off any allies, even small and radical ones.
The years between 1899 and 1904 were rough. The country was still reeling from the horrors of Wilmington and Cripple Creek, along with the political shakeup caused by the entrance of both the SLP and now Henry Frick into national politics.
In the south, this tension spilled over into generalized political violence earlier than it did elsewhere.
By mid-1902, bands of armed Populist ‘Minutemen’ styling themselves after the heroes of the American Revolution had sprung up across the south to protect themselves from the ravages of the Klan, alongside the SLP's armed 'Spartacus Columns.' They were not above employing ‘preemptive’ terror themselves.
In early 1903, in Tallahassee, Florida, Minutemen firebombed the home of a local Klan leader, killing him along with his wife and one of his sons.
A few weeks later in Vernon Parish, Louisiana, two white farmworkers known to be Populist voters were beaten and finally stabbed to death by suspected Klansmen. It was never ascertained with any certainty whether it had been a political murder or the results of a personal quarrel. Nevertheless, when the bodies were discovered the next morning, a fierce gun battle ensued between Klansmen and Minutemen, leaving three dead.
The Socialists, even more odious in the eyes of reactionary southerners than the Populists, naturally did not have to ask themselves which side they were on. In the few southern SLP strongholds, such as New Orleans, Atlanta, and a number of other cities, their Spartacist militants fought alongside the Minutemen. In areas where it was weaker, they counted on Populist protection. It was usually granted, at least tacitly.
Thanks in no small part to the Klan itself, an alliance took shape that was much like Wilmington writ large.
It became much harder for the Klan to portray its enemies as nothing but ‘negroes and white traitors,’ when such a large cross-section of southern whites could be counted among them. Likewise, rather than the Populists finding themselves marginalized by their association with the Socialists, to many the Socialists were made more palatable by their compact with the Populists. Certainly, southern membership grew in those early years.
Peter Clark celebrated ‘the dissolution of the color line among the workingmen of the south.’ It was a wild exaggeration. Populist and Socialist meetings across Dixie were invariably divided by race. In New Orleans there were two strictly separate Socialist ‘workingman’s club.’ One white, one colored. So it was in any southern town or city with sufficient Socialist membership to warrant a club in the first place.
Even so, there was a hint of truth to what he said, and the Daily People editorial in which that line appeared was deemed too incendiary for publication in the south.
Rather than the invincible cudgel of white supremacy and Democratic rule that the Klan had imagined itself to be, it just as often as not now found itself on the defensive.
Vardaman was largely successful in his dream of a cross-class white coalition, and low-class whites appeared in the ranks about in proportion to their part in general society. But the Klan’s spokesmen and most prominent figures were generally sophisticated, well-heeled men of the middling classes. This provided much fodder for the left, which tarred the KKK as a tool of class war disguised as one of race war.
“Lift up the white hood and you will find only green,” became a favorite canard of southern Populists and Socialists.
The New York Times ran a 1903 headline reading, ‘THE WAR FOR THE POOR WHITE MEN OF THE SOUTH.’
It was a fair description.
For the black men of the south, of course, the choice was clear.
They were the most firmly Socialist constituency in the country by 1903, and those who did not vote red voted Populist (especially the ever less-common black smallholder), though a smaller but sizable minority was still firmly loyal to the Party of Lincoln.
As ever, the left in the south had to pull off its delicate balancing act so as to maintain both black and white supporters in force. The Populist-Socialist alliance provided a unique opportunity.
Populist leaders were eager to maintain black support, especially in states where blacks had not been disenfranchised, like Louisiana and Alabama. But they feared accusations of fomenting ‘black anarchy.’
The Socialists were not eager to be seen as a ‘black party’, either. But their reputation was inevitably more radical than that of their allies, regardless. And so, they had less to lose in terms of public perception.
Thus, when Populists wanted to rally black voters, or make promises to the black community they had no intention of keeping, they often delegated the tasks to local Socialists, so they might be more easily disclaimed if necessary.
During the 1902 midterms, state Populist leader B.W Bailey dispatched Minutemen of both races to escort black voters to the polls in especially hostile parishes. However, the men were instructed to wear red armbands and identify themselves as Spartacists when questioned.
In the end, though the Klan certainly built up a powerful base of support, they failed to unify the white men of the south into a solid bloc as it had been in days past. One northern visitor was amused to hear a Populist farmer’s young son in Alabama describe his rifle as “for shooting ducks and Klansmen.”
Shootings, arson, lynching, and tit for tat violence in all its forms raged on in the south for years, but it would not boil over until 1903.
The depression hit the region hard and left countless thousands out of work. Countless sharecroppers lost everything, and common laborers found their wages screwed ever further downwards. Murmurings of revolt and anarchy were in the air, and the propertied people of Dixie were nearly as nervous and edgy as their social inferiors.
It was in this climate that the Ellis Murders took place.
Mary Ellis was the 18-year-old sister of 20-year-old Tom Ellis, an Atlanta bricklayer and Socialist. The siblings lived together with their aged mother, Sally. They were a white family.
In early March of 1903, Tom got into a political dispute with a number of coworkers known to be Klansmen. It was, as was reported, the latest of many such fights, but evidently was the last straw. On the 16th of that month, three drunken Klansmen appeared at the Ellis house. By their own account, they intended only to ‘scare’ Tom. But when they broke down the door, he fired on them with a revolver. Enraged, once they’d gotten hold of the young man, they cut his throat.
Mary attempted to save her brother. The intruders, worked up on alcohol and bloodlust, knifed her savagely in the gut and fled, leaving her to bleed out.
The reaction was swift and angry.
This time, the Klan had not killed a black man, nor had they killed some rough-edged Populist farmer or thuggish red sailor. In fact, some marveled that they had chosen the most sympathetic victim possible. Mary was politically uninvolved, young, pretty, and most importantly, a white girl.
There was a great outpouring of sympathy for the two slain youths and for old Sally Ellis, who had lost both her children. This time, the Klan could not count on the tacit protection of the authorities. The Atlanta chapter did not attempt to defend the culprits. They were swiftly handed over to the police, arrested, charged, and tried. Convictions were never in doubt, and the tearful testimony of Mrs. Ellis won not only three convictions but also three death sentences.
The affair also won the first official condemnation of the Klan from a prominent southern political figure. Georgia was the only state in the south with a Populist governor: Thomas E. Watson, an old national ally of Bryan’s. Watson had been moving to the left ever since ’94 and was even suspected by some of being a closet socialist (though he certainly would have denied this). Nevertheless, he was elected Georgia’s governor in 1900 by the votes of the state’s farmers.
In response to the murders, Watson gave a charged speech in which he denounced Klansmen as ‘mad dogs,’ and ‘hateful masked cowards.’
The speech was, naturally, immensely popular with black Georgians, and also with a large number of white Georgians. It produced a reaction beyond the state borders, and even beyond the south.
Vardaman was not mad enough to defend the murder itself, but staunchly defended his organization, insisting that “all the good, honorable men gathered under the banner of the Ku Klux Klan ought not to suffer condemnation for the outrages committed by a handful of scoundrels.”
Mississippi’s own governor, Anselm McLaurin, felt compelled to offer a counterweight to Watson’s speech, and pronounced Klansmen as “good, solid citizens,” but admitted that, like any society, “there are always a number of ruffians who use the standing of their upright fellows as cover for misdeed and depravity.”
The whole drama received considerable coverage in the northern papers as well and did not help ease a sectional reconciliation that, even 35 years after the end of the Civil War, was not proceeding uninterrupted.
The New York Times called it a ‘foul crime.’ The SLP’s Daily People proclaimed the Ellis siblings to be martyrs, ‘whose hearts’ blood has dyed our flag’s every fold,’ as the young Socialist activist Upton Sinclair put it, obliquely quoting the increasingly popular English labor anthem ‘the Red Flag’.
It brought national attention down on not only this case, but the increasing frequency and brutality of southern violence in general. There was even some brief noise among congressional Republicans to the effect of suppressing the new Klan using the Red Act, but little came of it.
North Carolina, ruled by Populists and Republicans, did criminalize the Klan within state borders, though this had not been one of its strongholds anyhow.
Even Frick’s Voice, despite the victims of the Ellis murders’ Socialist allegiances, denounced the crime as ‘barbarism, and a vile echo of Reconstruction.’
The response of the Klan and its sympathizers to this national opprobrium was to dig in their heels. It closed ranks and became increasingly rigid as an organization. Public rallies and parades declined. Regimentation was strengthened, with a new array of mandatory salutes and drills. Less ‘serious’ chapters were ordered to shape up and expelled if they did not.
Violent action was not scaled back, but in some locales even intensified, as Klansmen seemed determined to prove they were not ‘cowed’ by popular condemnation.
Lynching and gunfights continued to burn across the south, worsened by the deepening depression. Now that the eyes of the country were on this bloodshed, the turbulence of Dixie was magnified on a national level and added to the overall American anxiety of the period.
The south suffered the worst unemployment rates in the country during this time (with the exception of certain regions of the industrial belt), rising to ~35% by early 1904 in the six states of the ‘deep south’. By that same year, the homicide rate in the same region had risen to nearly 16/100,000 as unemployed youths wandered the streets in search of trouble, Klansmen, socialists, and Populists clashed, and domestic murders spiked.
Property crimes also became more common—sometimes it was simple robbery or acts of outraged vandalism at perceived injustices, or the settling of personal scores. Sometimes it was a political act—the firing of a labor union’s offices or a Klansman’s home.
New Orleans counted 46 cases of politically motivated property destruction between summer 1903 and summer 1904, 18 of them arson.
Turmoil only increased as the 1904 election neared.
The Klan itself was split over which candidate to endorse. Darrow was obviously out of the question. The Democrats were dead. A few considered supporting the Republican-Populist ticket, if only to stop the reds. But Roosevelt's less than stringent view on racial segregation soured many, as did Bryan’s recent history as a ‘red dupe.’ Vardaman himself briefly considered running on a ‘southern ticket,’ but dismissed the idea as foolhardy.
That left Frick.
Not many in the Klan were enthusiastic about the King of Coke. He was a northerner, and of fairly recent immigrant background to boot. He was not especially racist for a man of his time and place, perhaps even slightly less so. But he was rabidly antisocialist, and socialism and ‘negroism’ were quick dovetailing for many in the south.
Tentative feelers were put out to Frick by the Klan’s national congress—he rejected any official endorsement, and so none was ever offered. But many chapters and individual Klansmen ‘on the ground’ took it on themselves to campaign for the National Party.
A banner was briefly strung up outside the state house in Tupelo, Mississippi reading, ‘Frick and Freedom!’
Even as the Klan pushed for a German-Yankee, the ranks of the southern Socialists grew near exponentially.
The Populist Party had played a part in familiarizing southerners with the SLP and stripped the Socialists of much of their ‘foreign’ air. But now, as misery and poverty weighed heavier than ever on the country, the Populists were increasingly seen as insufficiently principled or radical. Appeals to smallholding farmers and old dreams of a yeoman republic held increasingly less meaning to newly landless sharecroppers or poor immigrant laborers in the port cities of the south. These men drifted instead over to the Socialists.
Where the Socialists grew, the Klan grew, and the same was true in reverse.
The Populist Party began something of a disintegration. Those with an inclination towards forceful action joined the ranks of the SLP. Some of those who could not stomach a radical program withdrew from politics entirely, and a smaller minority even went over to the Klan.
As the polarization worsened, so did the violence.
By November 1904, some regions of the south had neared something resembling low-intensity guerrilla warfare.
Blacks were increasingly terrorized and killed, even those who had nothing to do with the Socialists. Likewise, wealthy or even simply middling people were murdered and robbed with astonishing frequency, in what was often lewdly as described as ‘socialization,’ a term the SLP's ‘the Way Forward’ had introduced into the common lexicon. Often as not, this was simply the work of common criminals legitimized by a thin veneer of revolutionary conviction.
Vardaman publicly declared that the goal of the Klan was ‘to keep the red out and the black down,’ and this they did with aplomb.
Even where no black people were concerned, the struggles were often perceived through the prism of race war.
The sons of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ farmers donned white hoods or the cross of the Klan and marched into the south’s coastal cities to do battles with Socialist workers, the sons of ‘southern European rabble’. In New Orleans, three Italian Socialists were drowned at the wharf amid mocking shouts of “swim back to Sicily!”
The left proved almost equal in ferocity—a number of Klansman farmers had their fields and farmhouses set alight, sometimes with themselves and their families inside.
Blacks and immigrants might have had an easy enough choice, but it was less so for white Americans. Often, the fault lines ran through family, as white farmers and laborers were forced to decide whether class or race was more important to them.
In one case, a white Atlanta stevedore called his Socialist brother ‘nothing but a god-damned nigger in white skin.’ His brother shot back that he was a ‘Klan toadie and a dog,’ and then stabbed him to death.
By one count, there were 652 ‘political murders’ in the United States between 1902 and 1905. Nearly half of these were committed in the south, vastly out of proportion to its portion of the country’s overall population.
It was the bloodiest period in the south’s history since Reconstruction.
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Hmm--I did note while researching that Washington had a much larger share of the Debs vote than Oregon in 1912. Good point, I'll change it.
Good to see that the old order in the South is starting to break and class solidatiry is transcending the colour line, though they still have a way to go. Will the revive Klan spread to the North or will it remain a largely southern affair?
Awesome update. If I had to guess how things will go it would be something like this: Roosevelt wins in 1904 in the joint Republican-Populist ticket and subsequently implements a number of economic reforms, something happens in 1912 to split the ticket (maybe Roosevelt trying to run a third term or something else) which allows Frick to win in 1912. He immediately goes about reversing Roosevelt's reforms and enters WWI once it starts around the same time as OTL. Using the war as a pretense he gets large amounts of power which he uses to go after the socialists and anyone opposed to the war. The war becomes unpopular and Frick too as a result but he refuses to step down or give up war-time powers after the war and that causes the revolution.
Possibly. I could definitely see Roosevelt at the head of a Republican-Populist ticket (probably with Bryan as his running mate). But if the Socialists and Nationalists continue to make gains, he could face an uphill battle in 1908.
I think it's almost certain that the National Party will absorb the remains of the Democrats (possibly becoming the National Democratic Party). And while I doubt any of the Populist leadership will jump ship, their base might erode.