Slight disagree on part 2. I think Roosevelt winning retcons the worst excesses of the Frick administration, so I think that would be the last chance to stop a 2nd civil war... Roosevelt's platform did have many steps to limit corporation power, after all.
The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America
- Thread starter Iggies
- Start date
This timeline is amazing, watched!
Love Knox's final capitulation to centrist authoritarianism, leading to the rise of a fascist dictator. The subtle social commentary permeating this TL is interesting and well-done.
Love Knox's final capitulation to centrist authoritarianism, leading to the rise of a fascist dictator. The subtle social commentary permeating this TL is interesting and well-done.
Once the SLP was declared illegal, every option for the establishment became lose-lose as far as preventing an escalation of socialist militancy and violence is concerned: either the least voted candidate was catapulted to the Presidency on the back of a party ban and corrupt bargain, or literally the embodiment of the worst aspects of American capitalism won because the establishment banned the party that got the most votes. Either way, Jack London's fable is proven more than just accurate, it's proven prescient: despite all the lying, cheating and stealing by the establishment parties, the Socialists still won (at least, in the sense they're most likely to actually care about: they won the most votes), and the establishment's response was to destroy the Republic rather than allow them to take power peacefully. The only road that remains is armed revolution, and no one but the establishment is to blame.
I'm gonna guess that, with the legal avenues for change cut off, Haywood and London will refocus the socialist movement into the IWW instead as an underground organization that begins to low-key resist the Frick dictatorship while laying the groundwork for a revolution. My prediction is that Roosevelt and the Populists try to adopt more leftist policies to try and placate the socialists and get them to support them in the 1908 election only for Frick to ban the Republican-Populist coalition for "colluding with the socialists". causing him to run unopposed in '08 and'12 creating a full blown corporatist dictatorship. Once WWI begins Frick drags the country into the conflict to try and get as much of the disgruntled working class into the fields of Europe and give the population an external enemy to fight, leading to the proletariat's discontent boiling over, leading to a civil war that ends in 1919 with the Frick government defeat and the establishment of a syndicalist commonwealth that's much more libertarian socialist state than the USSR OTL.
I think there's also the possibility of entire states - the ones whose house delegations just got arrested to the man for example - might suddenly find themselves in a legal quandary that will probably end with either a token election guaranteeing those electoral votes for Frick or just no slate of electors from that state indefinitely. I mean, there are presumably a few states and cities with SLP governors or mayors or legislative majorities, and those have all just been declared illegal as well.
Hey Iggies, if you want some poster/flag and heraldry designs for this just hit me up on the DMs. Love how this is going.
You still arrested the politicians of a mass party that already skirted the line of insurrection. That's not going to fly. Hell even Frick may decide to take arms against the government once the mess explode made because the man has an ego.
The only way to a void a civil war was Roosevelt getting a decisive win in the electoral college and that was never going to happen with Frick around.
Just caught up on this TL and finding this a very well-written and thought out thread. Monarchist I may be, I love reading Red America and Red France TL's.
I hope Canada avoids a Socialist revolution personally, though I think best case scenario for my home Dominion is as a Cold War frontline between Red America and the British Empire. Then again if Germany and/or Russia go Red the Empire will be in quite dire straits
I hope Canada avoids a Socialist revolution personally, though I think best case scenario for my home Dominion is as a Cold War frontline between Red America and the British Empire. Then again if Germany and/or Russia go Red the Empire will be in quite dire straits
As a leftist monarchist hear hear. God Save the Queen! Long Live the Revolution!
If anything I'd consider Canada the most likely place for the eventual US government in exile and loyalist army units to flee to, so I wouldn't be too worried about them. Nor would I be worried about Germany going red either.
The real question for Canada should be if there's enough will and/or manpower after WW1 to try and occupy vital areas near the border, mostly Michigan and New England/New York.
The real question for Canada should be if there's enough will and/or manpower after WW1 to try and occupy vital areas near the border, mostly Michigan and New England/New York.
Frick OTL dies of a heart attack in 1919, which is implied to be the year the revolution starts. That could mean the spark that ignited the revolution is his succession crisis if he goes full dictator.
I hope he actually lives long enough to see everything collapse around him and get his comeuppance.
I want to see one of these Robber Barons be horrified about their terrible conditions, forced labor, and starvation wagesonly to be told by their former workers that its still better than working at their factories had been.
One upside: with entire industries already concentrated into a few hands and semi-merging with the government, it’ll ironically make it much easier to socialize the economy when the time comes.
I hope he actually lives long enough to see everything collapse around him and get his comeuppance.
I want to see one of these Robber Barons be horrified about their terrible conditions, forced labor, and starvation wagesonly to be told by their former workers that its still better than working at their factories had been.
One upside: with entire industries already concentrated into a few hands and semi-merging with the government, it’ll ironically make it much easier to socialize the economy when the time comes.
I hadn't considered that actually, but wouldn't an American government-in-exile (along with loyalist elements of US military) sheltering in Canada make it a target for the Reds? I can't imagine they'd be too thrilled to have a rival government across the border, contesting legitimacy as the true American government.
With a Red America preaching revolution right on their doorstep, I can imagine the Canadians being very worried about US intentions and the possibility of Socialist subversion in the Dominion. Can't imagine the British would be able to ignore it as well, so I can see militarization of the border and a Canadian population galvanized to increase military preparedness, not to mention they'd be keeping a very close eye on local unions. UK might even opt to reinforce Canada,though that would depend on the outcome of WW1.
Let's not be hasty. We don't know almost anything about the international political context when Red America becomes a thing. There's any number of possibilities, and we shouldn't be quick to assume a USSR-Poland dynamic between Socialist-USA and Canada. Yes that's one possibility, but there are others. To name only one of the important variables we're totally ignorant of, we have no idea what relations between the pre-revolutionary USA and Canada will be like in the period immediately before the Revolution. If the pre-revolutionary USA was a close ally of Canada right up until the moment of its revolution, that would make Canada likelier to be hostile to the Socialist-USA; if the pre-revolutionary USA was formerly an ally of Canada but pulled out of World War I, abandoning its allies, in order to deal with its own internal issues à la Russian Republic, Canadians might well see that as a kind-of betrayal and would be much less inclined to be hostile to its socialist successor-state; and if the pre-revolutionary USA was in World War I on the other side, Canada and Socialist-USA might even be co-belligerents.
Going further, we don't even know what the sides of World War I will be. I've spoken about this in much greater detail elsewhere, but the long and short of it is: the pop-history understanding of the genesis of World War I, as rigid alliance blocs and treaties acting like tripwires, is pretty much completely wrong. (The only part of the pop-history understanding that's pretty accurate is that there were lots of different flashpoints that could have triggered conflict; if it wasn't Gavrilo Princip in Serbia vs Austria-Hungary, there were loads of other places that could have led to a blow-up.) The diplomatic situation in Europe was extremely fluid. Alignments were changeable. There's absolutely no guarantee that the UK would end up fighting in a war on the same side as Russia and against Germany; and indeed, if you'd asked that of people in Europe at numerous periods in the early 20th century, they would have considered that to be vastly less probable than the possibility of the UK fighting beside Germany against Russia. Some states, notably France and Germany, were strongly hostile to each other, but most of the relationships between the great powers of Europe were much more mixed than that: neither eternal friends, nor eternal enemies, but with areas where they agreed and also with areas that were flashpoints of serious tension between them. e.g. You could name "the Great Game" for the UK and Russia; Africa for the UK and France; Italy's territorial ambitions on Austria-Hungary; Italy's ambitions against France in Savoy and Nice. Plenty of major diplomatic relationships, which with hindsight people pretend were ironclad, were in fact momentary and at the time could have gone either way. People have a tendency to overstate the inevitability and understate the amount of happenstance—sheer dumb luck—in the events leading up to the war.
Indeed, the diplomatic situation was so fluid that I'd go so far as to say it's severely improbable to end up with exactly the same countries on the same sides of World War I if you introduce any substantial butterflies in the period of history leading up to it.
And IOTL Canada arguably came closer to a socialist revolution than the USA, socialism was more popular (and it came to Canada from the USA). The cultures are entwined, so a more socialistic American culture is going to mean a more socialistic Canadian one.
If America goes socialist, and I sincerely hope it does in every TL, I believe Canada is only a couple of years behind max.
This forgets that Socialist US doesn't exist in a vacuum. The OTL 1920s British didn't go super-radical reaction Red Scare in Canada (like OTL US in the south) because they were assured by the Capitalist government in the US that they themselves got a handle on any socialist agitators and parties states side, so it won't spread too much north.
TTL, I fully expect a British
Before our speculation goes too far, it's worth noting that we have no idea what the situation in Britain will be like in ATL 1919.
That's not to say you're wrong, nor is it to say you're right. It's to say we are uncertain. we know, maybe TTL will have a socialist Britain and a thoroughly right-wing capitalist Russia. Other than a socialist revolution in the USA we know very, very little about what the future of this timeline holds.
Americans in the Second International
The International Workingman’s Association (soon known as ‘the International’ and then ‘the First International’) was founded in 1864 in London by a smattering of European radicals and trade unionists, mostly exiles fled to Britain beyond the reach of continental secret police. Its aim was, simply enough, the coordination of the international proletariat towards the destruction of the present order and the establishment of some manner of socialist society. There was little agreement beyond this. Anarchists, utopians, Blanquists, Proudhonists, and proto-Marxists (most notably Marx himself) clashed bitterly through the International’s thirteen years of existence, and as much time was consumed by petty partisan squabbling as by serious deliberation.
The First International ultimately held five congresses, ostensibly representative of the global working class but in reality, heavily weighted towards Germany, France, and Britain, who provided by far the lion’s share of the delegates to each. In 1871, in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune, the International became the object of the hysterical fear of Europe’s reactionary forces, who blamed its shadowy machinations for the turmoil (there had been representatives of the International in Paris at the time, but their role was far from decisive). It and its members were outlawed in France and other countries besides.
Ultimately the First International foundered on internal dissent, primarily that between the factions led by Marx, and those led by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. It finally splintered in 1872 and dissolved entirely four years later.
Though at its peak some six million workers in various trade unions, labor associations, and socialist parties over Europe and the Americas had been affiliated with the International in some capacity or another, it failed to ever really put itself at the head of the global proletariat as it had hoped.
American representation to the International’s various congresses did exist, but as the American socialist movement was itself tiny and largely immigrant in composition, it was of little account.
Though the First International was not a smashing success, the dream if not the reality remained alluring, and it was only a matter of time until a second attempt at a unification of the international working-class movement.
The dream came to a second fruition in 1889, when the founding congresses of a Second International were held in Paris. ‘Congresses’ in plural, because once again the fissures in the movement ran deep. An irreconcilable split had developed amid the French socialists, between one Paul Brousse and his ‘possibilists,’ who took the reformist line that socialists ought to struggle for incremental improvements within existing parliamentary systems and the hardnosed Jules Guesde and his doctrinaire Marxist (insofar as Marxism yet existed as a doctrine) ‘impossibilists’ who insisted on the revolution as the only salve for the workers’ ills.
The possibilists announced an international socialist congress to be convened in Paris on 14 July on the rue de Lancry, only to be immediately attacked by the likes of – along with Guesde - Friedrich Engels, who denounced them as toadies of the bourgeoisie and discouraged all revolutionary socialists from attending.
Ultimately, Guesde’s impossibilists summoned their own congress, on the rue Petrelle, to be pointedly opened on the same day.
The day unfolded as something of a farce – possibilists were supposed to have waited at the railway station to lead hapless delegates intended for the rue Petrelle to the rue de Lancry instead. Delegates chose which congress to attend based on personal animosities rather than any theoretical conviction. Marxists invaded the rue de Lancry congress and disrupted the proceedings. The French Blanquist Edouard Vaillant roomed with Wilhelm Liebknecht, leader of the German Social Democrats, to make sure he did not defect to the possibilists.
Ultimately, the rue de Lancry congress is generally taken as the Second International’s founding congress, since in 1891 the two branches relented and unified at a second congress in Brussels, at the behest of the possibilists.
The Second International was soon moving in a decidedly reformist direction. The German Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – SPD) were the largest Socialist party in Europe and the world, and thus the dominating force in any international congress. The Anti-Socialist Law of Bismarck at last lapsed in 1890, and the Social Democrats were leery of any rash action that might lead again to their delegitimization. The SPD ballooned in the wake of its legalization, swelling up with millions of members as the German proletariat flocked to the one party that seemed to have its interests at heart. German workers were immersed culturally, socially, and politically in the SPD milieu – they kept abreast of the world through Socialist papers, taught their children from Socialist readers, labored alongside Socialist comrades, drank in Socialist workingman’s clubs, and subsisted on Socialist trade union funds in times of strike or unemployment. The SPD did not want to jeopardize this enviable position with insurrectionary adventurism.
The French socialists lagged behind their German comrades, but soon found themselves nearly as intoxicated by bourgeois politics. In 1894, Jean Jaurés and even Jules Guesde and Edouard Vaillant were elected to the Republic’s Chamber of Deputies, despite their earlier (the latter two at least) staunch opposition to reformism. The parliamentary French socialists soon began even to unite with the Radicals and Independents in the Chamber in the interest of certain legislation (generally that directed against the church), much to the horror of their unreconstructed revolutionary militants.
The young German anarchist Gustav Landauer was expelled from the Second International at its third congress in Zurich when he viciously opposed this manner of collusion with the bourgeois state. Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis was regularly shouted down when he attempted to introduce motions pledging the International and its constituents to revolutionary struggle. The controversial ‘Zurich resolution’ introduced at that congress attempted to make a commitment to parliamentary action a requisite for membership in the International.
This sluggish reformist tendency would receive a serious upset in the aftermath of America’s Red Summer.
Americans had again been a negligible element in the Second International, for the weakness of their native movement. But the scenes in Chicago and New Orleans in July of 1894 caught the eye of the world.
The first Second International congress held in the aftermath of ’94 was the 1896 conference in London. The 795 delegates were, as always, heavily weighted towards France, Germany, and Britain (which as host country furnished more than half this time around). But the SLP sent a respectable deputation of thirty-seven from across the sea, headed by Matthew Maguire, a New Jersey machinist and SLP organizer, and Daniel DeLeon himself.
The entrance of the American delegates was greeted with an “awed silence,” recalled English observer Bernard Shaw. “As if we were graced with the presence of conquering heroes.”
The tumult began on the very first day – Keir Hardie of the British ILP moved to confirm the Zurich Resolution, which would result in the expulsion or submission of the many anarchists and other ‘anti-parliamentarians’ gathered in the hall that day, including the fiery Italian Enico Malatesta, Gustav Landauer, and the ever-present Domela Nieuwenheis. H. N. Hyndman of the English Social Democratic Federation stood and spoke in support of the resolution, as did Jaurés and also the German Liebknecht.
Nieuwenheis, Malatesta, the Englishman Tom Mann, and the Frenchman Jean Allemane spoke against it.
Then all eyes turned to the American delegation, from which DeLeon rose to make his own position known. He vociferously attacked the possibilist tendencies of the congress and defended the anti-parliamentarians, to great cheers from the Italian and French sections.
The congress erupted into further disputation. Two years earlier it would have been easy to tar DeLeon as ornery and out of touch. But now, blooded in the chaos of ’94, it was difficult to dismiss all appeals to insurrectionary action as mere romantic sentiment.
When Hyndman demanded “what present and feasible alternative” existed to parliamentary reform, the American Maguire bluntly answered; “Chicago.”
Louise Michel, the great ‘Red Virgin’ of the Paris Commune, stood and compared in glowing terms the insurrection of that city twenty years before to the ‘heroic assault’ of the American workers ‘on the citadel of privilege.’ Then, on behalf of the French delegation, she threatened to walk out if the Zurich Resolution was confirmed.
This annoyed the staunchly parliamentarian element among the French, but they were now a distinct minority, smaller than they had been in 1893.
When the vote was taken, the Zurich Resolution passed, but not overwhelmingly – by a vote of 384 to 411, carried only on the votes of the numerically dominant English delegates, in which ran a distinctly reformist tendency. Many who had intended to vote for the resolution were swayed by the descriptions of Chicago street-fighting and the speechifying of those like DeLeon or Malatesta.
A mass walk-out of the deputies from the American, French, and Italian delegations was avoided when the congress decided instead to table the resolution for the time being.
The congress continued for another week, but the motion was never revived, and the anti-parliamentarians were not ejected from the International.
The next congress of was held in Paris, four years later in 1896. 952 delegates attended. This time, the possibilist slant afforded by the preponderance of English delegates was gone. French socialists who made up the lion’s share of this congress - even their parliamentarian wing considered - were significantly more radical. And the strength of the revolutionary wing, headed by the likes of Allemane, Guesde, and Vaillant, was growing, bolstered by the example of their American comrades and the failure of the International to condemn anti-parliamentarianism.
The central point of dispute was, again, reformism. In France, the socialist Millerand had been brought into Prime Minister Waldeck-Rousseau’s cabinet as Minister of Commerce, a deeply controversial decision that had forced the possibilist and impossibilist schools of thought and practice further apart than ever before. Allemane and Guesde tarred him as a loose cannon, verging on a traitor. Jaurés staunchly defended him.
The congress heatedly debated whether or not it was ever acceptable for socialists to not only stand for election in bourgeois parliaments (which most at least agreed was tactically permissible) but actually participate in bourgeois governments.
The German social democrats, despite the fact that they had themselves largely disclaimed violent action for the time being, vociferously opposed out and out participation in bourgeois administration after the fashion of Millerand, and heaped scorn on the French socialists to that effect.
The Russians and the Americans went further. Both sections stood generally to the left of international socialism, particularly the Russians, who enjoyed no legality whatsoever and existed like hunted rats within the borders of the Romanov Tsardom. V. I. Lenin accused Millerand of being a ‘treacherous renegade.’
The Polish-Jewish Socialist Rosa Luxemburg asked what Millerand would do if the French Army marched off to ‘slaughter German or Italian workers.’ The German Karl Kautsky heartily agreed and then asked what would become of socialism if there was ‘a Millerand in every land.’
Jaurés fired back by accusing the enemies of Millerand of speaking on a situation they could not comprehend. It was easy enough for Socialists in countries where they had no hope of grasping political power by parliamentary means to criticize those who did – even in Germany, where the SPD was legal and advancing in the Reichstag by leaps and bounds, the Kaiser would never allow it to actually govern.
But the mood was hard. The Second International had shifted decidedly to the left since 1894. The 600 French delegates were disproportionately disciples of Allemane or Guesde and hostile towards Jaurés and Millerand. The affirmation that participation in bourgeois governments was beyond the pale passed resoundingly. Another motion to threaten the Jaurés faction of the with expulsion should they not recant their support of Millerand failed, but narrowly.
Notably and loudly speaking in favor of the French possibilists were the English delegates, including the usual Mr. Hyndman, not to mention the middle-class Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. English labor had been of a decidedly more reformist slant than continental labor for some time, and it showed at the 1900 congress, where British delegates voted 72 – 26 against the anti-Millerand resolution.
Though one sign of unity emerged from Paris, the establishment of the ‘International Socialist Bureau’ to coordinate the affairs of the association between congresses, a clear split was emerging already in the Second International, similar to that which had destroyed the first. On the reformist wing were the Socialists of Britain, many of those of France, and those of various smaller democracies such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Nordic states. On the revolutionary wing were the Socialists of the despotisms and autocracies – the Russian, the Austrians, the Italians, the Spanish, and increasingly, the Americans. Somewhere in the middle hung the indomitable Germans led by Bebel and Liebknecht, who were all for parliamentary participation, but firmly against actual entry into capitalist government.
Sometimes, Jaurés was heard to curse the Americans, whose fiery action and rhetoric he said had “reignited illusions of 1871” in the hearts of European socialists.
Back home in America, the SLP’s affiliation to the Second International did little but increase the suspicion of other Americans that the party was nothing but a tool of alien subversives. In The New York Journal Hearst charged that “the first loyalties of Mr. Darrow, Mr. DeLeon, and all the rest, are to their dread International.”
Lofty international politicking was of little interest to most rank and file American Socialists, who were more concerned with ameliorating their own immediately miserable situations.
Then in 1901, the American stock market crashed. Britain was hit hard. The Crisis stretched also to the continent. There was a slump in production and consequently in employment in France. While not as severe as that in the Anglosphere, it hit French workers in the port cities of the west and in the northern industrial belt especially hard, and these were the populations already most sympathetic to socialist philosophies.
The Crisis in France plumbed its lowest depths in 1903, and abated soon after, but in that year or so, much support was drawn from the reformist Jaurés faction of the Socialists towards the intransigents of Allemane and Guesde. At rallies of jobless coal miners in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, cries of “down with the Chamber and the Senate” and “vive l’Internationale!” could be heard.
In Britain, it drove a wedge between Labour and their Liberal allies in parliament, in the wake of Asquith’s betrayal. Keir Hardie, hitherto rather moderate, swore to never again join hands with the Liberal Party in anything. Tom Mann charged that they were worse than the Conservatives, because “a knife in the breast is always preferred to a knife in the back.” The radical strains in British labor represented by men like Mann were, if not brought to the fore, at least strengthened.
The next congress of the Second International was to be held in Stuttgart Germany in November 1904. Unfortunately, the Kaiser was rather jittery that year, and conscious of the ‘havoc’ the Socialists were wreaking in America, he was unwilling to countenance the same in his country. Consequently, the delegates were all stopped at the border and promptly turned back.
By necessity the congress was again held in Zurich, and only convened in early December. It was scheduled in the midst of the American constitutional crisis of that winter. Occupied by that all-important drama, DeLeon, Clark, Hillquit, and most of the party leadership was compelled to stay put. Thus the 1904 American delegation was less luminous than in previous years.
It was headed by a young Socialist journalist named Upton Sinclair, accompanied by Caroline Pemberton, who ran guns and money to revolutionary fugitives, along with George Washington Woodbey, a former slave and one of the leaders of the embattled black Socialists of the south, and thirty more minor representatives besides.
A number of issues were on the table in 1904 – colonialism and the proper socialist attitude towards it, wars and how to prevent them, and the question of women’s and minorities’ rights. Many, including Lenin himself, noted that the American delegation was short-tempered and nervous, distracted as their minds were by the turmoil back home.
Tensions exploded on the matter of war. Jean Jaurés, who was a convinced pacifist, introduced a motion to confirm that the International and its constituent parties would call a general strike in the event of an international conflict, and refuse to take up arms against foreign workers.
This was fiercely resisted by many, including Bebel of the SPD, who said that, “if Russia, the champion of cruelty and barbarity, the enemy of all human culture were to attack Germany. . . . we are as much and more interested than those who stand at the head of Germany, and we would resist Russia, for a Russian victory means the defeat of social democracy.” Likewise (and perhaps ironically, considering he was much to the left of Jaurés on most issues) Guesde swore that in the event of war the French workers would defend the Fatherland ‘to their last breaths.’
The most vociferous critics of such ‘social patriotism’ were the Russians and the Americans, and the delegations’ unit in that regard was perhaps the first glimpse of the iron alliance between Russian and American socialism that would shape the twentieth century.
The American Socialists were for the most part staunch anti-militarists, particularly in consideration of the ongoing, grinding war to subjugate the Philippines, which had by 1904 claimed more than 10,000 American lives, not to mention the 100,000+ dead natives. This was only compounded by the bitter clashes with federal troops that now colored the SLP’s history.
In this, they were joined by the Russian Bolsheviks (newly named after Lenin split the RSDLP), similarly short on patriotism thanks to the blunt despotism under which they lived.
Sinclair flatly stated that “if we must take up arms at all, the American workers will only ever take up arms against the capitalist class.”
Lenin and his second Maxim Litvinov heartily agreed, denouncing the ‘national chauvinism’ of their German and French comrades.
In a heated moment, Bebel snapped, “don’t you Americans love your country?”
George Woodbey pointedly replied, “sometimes we feel as if we haven’t got one.”
Rosa Luxemburg also jumped in for the anti-war faction, opining that even the national liberation of Poland from Russian oppression was not worth a drop of workers’ blood.
The dispute dragged on for some days, but in the end, the anti-war motion was carried, and the International pledged all its constituents not to vote war credits nor to campaign for war should their respective governments demand it.
There was much grumbling, and even talk of another split. But the ‘national chauvinists’ acceded for the time being.
In the aftermath of the vote, Lenin formally introduced himself to Sinclair and the rest of the American delegation for the first time. He congratulated the Americans on their principled intransigence and lamented the ‘gutless’ currents in the International of which he was growing increasingly contemptuous. In fact, Lenin was at this point preparing for a return to Russia, where revolution looked to be brewing, and where it would eventually explode early the next year. He and the Americans wished each other luck.
Then, on 22 December, just as the conference wrapped up, news came from America of the mass arrest of SLP congressmen, and the House’s election of President Frick. The American delegates were shocked and dismayed. With good reason, they feared to return home.
Eleven of the delegates did return to the United States within the next six months. All were promptly arrested upon disembarking (though most were eventually released).
Sinclair, along with Woodbey, and the rest of the delegates, remained abroad. Most would not return to America until the revolution, if ever. Pemberton was an exception – she returned to the US in mid-1905, and spent the next decade working in the underground.
At the next three congresses of the Second International, the American Socialist movement was represented by those exiles already abroad. Sinclair would attend all three up to 1912. Haywood, who fled the United States again in 1905, would attend two.
The congresses would continue until the War, but the Americans had done their work. With their revolutionary fire they had fractured the association, dividing the International like a river, into reformist and revolutionary tributaries. That done, they set the International on the path to its ultimate fate.
The First International ultimately held five congresses, ostensibly representative of the global working class but in reality, heavily weighted towards Germany, France, and Britain, who provided by far the lion’s share of the delegates to each. In 1871, in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune, the International became the object of the hysterical fear of Europe’s reactionary forces, who blamed its shadowy machinations for the turmoil (there had been representatives of the International in Paris at the time, but their role was far from decisive). It and its members were outlawed in France and other countries besides.
Ultimately the First International foundered on internal dissent, primarily that between the factions led by Marx, and those led by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. It finally splintered in 1872 and dissolved entirely four years later.
Though at its peak some six million workers in various trade unions, labor associations, and socialist parties over Europe and the Americas had been affiliated with the International in some capacity or another, it failed to ever really put itself at the head of the global proletariat as it had hoped.
American representation to the International’s various congresses did exist, but as the American socialist movement was itself tiny and largely immigrant in composition, it was of little account.
Though the First International was not a smashing success, the dream if not the reality remained alluring, and it was only a matter of time until a second attempt at a unification of the international working-class movement.
The dream came to a second fruition in 1889, when the founding congresses of a Second International were held in Paris. ‘Congresses’ in plural, because once again the fissures in the movement ran deep. An irreconcilable split had developed amid the French socialists, between one Paul Brousse and his ‘possibilists,’ who took the reformist line that socialists ought to struggle for incremental improvements within existing parliamentary systems and the hardnosed Jules Guesde and his doctrinaire Marxist (insofar as Marxism yet existed as a doctrine) ‘impossibilists’ who insisted on the revolution as the only salve for the workers’ ills.
The possibilists announced an international socialist congress to be convened in Paris on 14 July on the rue de Lancry, only to be immediately attacked by the likes of – along with Guesde - Friedrich Engels, who denounced them as toadies of the bourgeoisie and discouraged all revolutionary socialists from attending.
Ultimately, Guesde’s impossibilists summoned their own congress, on the rue Petrelle, to be pointedly opened on the same day.
The day unfolded as something of a farce – possibilists were supposed to have waited at the railway station to lead hapless delegates intended for the rue Petrelle to the rue de Lancry instead. Delegates chose which congress to attend based on personal animosities rather than any theoretical conviction. Marxists invaded the rue de Lancry congress and disrupted the proceedings. The French Blanquist Edouard Vaillant roomed with Wilhelm Liebknecht, leader of the German Social Democrats, to make sure he did not defect to the possibilists.
Ultimately, the rue de Lancry congress is generally taken as the Second International’s founding congress, since in 1891 the two branches relented and unified at a second congress in Brussels, at the behest of the possibilists.
The Second International was soon moving in a decidedly reformist direction. The German Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – SPD) were the largest Socialist party in Europe and the world, and thus the dominating force in any international congress. The Anti-Socialist Law of Bismarck at last lapsed in 1890, and the Social Democrats were leery of any rash action that might lead again to their delegitimization. The SPD ballooned in the wake of its legalization, swelling up with millions of members as the German proletariat flocked to the one party that seemed to have its interests at heart. German workers were immersed culturally, socially, and politically in the SPD milieu – they kept abreast of the world through Socialist papers, taught their children from Socialist readers, labored alongside Socialist comrades, drank in Socialist workingman’s clubs, and subsisted on Socialist trade union funds in times of strike or unemployment. The SPD did not want to jeopardize this enviable position with insurrectionary adventurism.
The French socialists lagged behind their German comrades, but soon found themselves nearly as intoxicated by bourgeois politics. In 1894, Jean Jaurés and even Jules Guesde and Edouard Vaillant were elected to the Republic’s Chamber of Deputies, despite their earlier (the latter two at least) staunch opposition to reformism. The parliamentary French socialists soon began even to unite with the Radicals and Independents in the Chamber in the interest of certain legislation (generally that directed against the church), much to the horror of their unreconstructed revolutionary militants.
The young German anarchist Gustav Landauer was expelled from the Second International at its third congress in Zurich when he viciously opposed this manner of collusion with the bourgeois state. Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis was regularly shouted down when he attempted to introduce motions pledging the International and its constituents to revolutionary struggle. The controversial ‘Zurich resolution’ introduced at that congress attempted to make a commitment to parliamentary action a requisite for membership in the International.
This sluggish reformist tendency would receive a serious upset in the aftermath of America’s Red Summer.
Americans had again been a negligible element in the Second International, for the weakness of their native movement. But the scenes in Chicago and New Orleans in July of 1894 caught the eye of the world.
The first Second International congress held in the aftermath of ’94 was the 1896 conference in London. The 795 delegates were, as always, heavily weighted towards France, Germany, and Britain (which as host country furnished more than half this time around). But the SLP sent a respectable deputation of thirty-seven from across the sea, headed by Matthew Maguire, a New Jersey machinist and SLP organizer, and Daniel DeLeon himself.
The entrance of the American delegates was greeted with an “awed silence,” recalled English observer Bernard Shaw. “As if we were graced with the presence of conquering heroes.”
The tumult began on the very first day – Keir Hardie of the British ILP moved to confirm the Zurich Resolution, which would result in the expulsion or submission of the many anarchists and other ‘anti-parliamentarians’ gathered in the hall that day, including the fiery Italian Enico Malatesta, Gustav Landauer, and the ever-present Domela Nieuwenheis. H. N. Hyndman of the English Social Democratic Federation stood and spoke in support of the resolution, as did Jaurés and also the German Liebknecht.
Nieuwenheis, Malatesta, the Englishman Tom Mann, and the Frenchman Jean Allemane spoke against it.
Then all eyes turned to the American delegation, from which DeLeon rose to make his own position known. He vociferously attacked the possibilist tendencies of the congress and defended the anti-parliamentarians, to great cheers from the Italian and French sections.
The congress erupted into further disputation. Two years earlier it would have been easy to tar DeLeon as ornery and out of touch. But now, blooded in the chaos of ’94, it was difficult to dismiss all appeals to insurrectionary action as mere romantic sentiment.
When Hyndman demanded “what present and feasible alternative” existed to parliamentary reform, the American Maguire bluntly answered; “Chicago.”
Louise Michel, the great ‘Red Virgin’ of the Paris Commune, stood and compared in glowing terms the insurrection of that city twenty years before to the ‘heroic assault’ of the American workers ‘on the citadel of privilege.’ Then, on behalf of the French delegation, she threatened to walk out if the Zurich Resolution was confirmed.
This annoyed the staunchly parliamentarian element among the French, but they were now a distinct minority, smaller than they had been in 1893.
When the vote was taken, the Zurich Resolution passed, but not overwhelmingly – by a vote of 384 to 411, carried only on the votes of the numerically dominant English delegates, in which ran a distinctly reformist tendency. Many who had intended to vote for the resolution were swayed by the descriptions of Chicago street-fighting and the speechifying of those like DeLeon or Malatesta.
A mass walk-out of the deputies from the American, French, and Italian delegations was avoided when the congress decided instead to table the resolution for the time being.
The congress continued for another week, but the motion was never revived, and the anti-parliamentarians were not ejected from the International.
The next congress of was held in Paris, four years later in 1896. 952 delegates attended. This time, the possibilist slant afforded by the preponderance of English delegates was gone. French socialists who made up the lion’s share of this congress - even their parliamentarian wing considered - were significantly more radical. And the strength of the revolutionary wing, headed by the likes of Allemane, Guesde, and Vaillant, was growing, bolstered by the example of their American comrades and the failure of the International to condemn anti-parliamentarianism.
The central point of dispute was, again, reformism. In France, the socialist Millerand had been brought into Prime Minister Waldeck-Rousseau’s cabinet as Minister of Commerce, a deeply controversial decision that had forced the possibilist and impossibilist schools of thought and practice further apart than ever before. Allemane and Guesde tarred him as a loose cannon, verging on a traitor. Jaurés staunchly defended him.
The congress heatedly debated whether or not it was ever acceptable for socialists to not only stand for election in bourgeois parliaments (which most at least agreed was tactically permissible) but actually participate in bourgeois governments.
The German social democrats, despite the fact that they had themselves largely disclaimed violent action for the time being, vociferously opposed out and out participation in bourgeois administration after the fashion of Millerand, and heaped scorn on the French socialists to that effect.
The Russians and the Americans went further. Both sections stood generally to the left of international socialism, particularly the Russians, who enjoyed no legality whatsoever and existed like hunted rats within the borders of the Romanov Tsardom. V. I. Lenin accused Millerand of being a ‘treacherous renegade.’
The Polish-Jewish Socialist Rosa Luxemburg asked what Millerand would do if the French Army marched off to ‘slaughter German or Italian workers.’ The German Karl Kautsky heartily agreed and then asked what would become of socialism if there was ‘a Millerand in every land.’
Jaurés fired back by accusing the enemies of Millerand of speaking on a situation they could not comprehend. It was easy enough for Socialists in countries where they had no hope of grasping political power by parliamentary means to criticize those who did – even in Germany, where the SPD was legal and advancing in the Reichstag by leaps and bounds, the Kaiser would never allow it to actually govern.
But the mood was hard. The Second International had shifted decidedly to the left since 1894. The 600 French delegates were disproportionately disciples of Allemane or Guesde and hostile towards Jaurés and Millerand. The affirmation that participation in bourgeois governments was beyond the pale passed resoundingly. Another motion to threaten the Jaurés faction of the with expulsion should they not recant their support of Millerand failed, but narrowly.
Notably and loudly speaking in favor of the French possibilists were the English delegates, including the usual Mr. Hyndman, not to mention the middle-class Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. English labor had been of a decidedly more reformist slant than continental labor for some time, and it showed at the 1900 congress, where British delegates voted 72 – 26 against the anti-Millerand resolution.
Though one sign of unity emerged from Paris, the establishment of the ‘International Socialist Bureau’ to coordinate the affairs of the association between congresses, a clear split was emerging already in the Second International, similar to that which had destroyed the first. On the reformist wing were the Socialists of Britain, many of those of France, and those of various smaller democracies such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Nordic states. On the revolutionary wing were the Socialists of the despotisms and autocracies – the Russian, the Austrians, the Italians, the Spanish, and increasingly, the Americans. Somewhere in the middle hung the indomitable Germans led by Bebel and Liebknecht, who were all for parliamentary participation, but firmly against actual entry into capitalist government.
Sometimes, Jaurés was heard to curse the Americans, whose fiery action and rhetoric he said had “reignited illusions of 1871” in the hearts of European socialists.
Back home in America, the SLP’s affiliation to the Second International did little but increase the suspicion of other Americans that the party was nothing but a tool of alien subversives. In The New York Journal Hearst charged that “the first loyalties of Mr. Darrow, Mr. DeLeon, and all the rest, are to their dread International.”
Lofty international politicking was of little interest to most rank and file American Socialists, who were more concerned with ameliorating their own immediately miserable situations.
Then in 1901, the American stock market crashed. Britain was hit hard. The Crisis stretched also to the continent. There was a slump in production and consequently in employment in France. While not as severe as that in the Anglosphere, it hit French workers in the port cities of the west and in the northern industrial belt especially hard, and these were the populations already most sympathetic to socialist philosophies.
The Crisis in France plumbed its lowest depths in 1903, and abated soon after, but in that year or so, much support was drawn from the reformist Jaurés faction of the Socialists towards the intransigents of Allemane and Guesde. At rallies of jobless coal miners in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, cries of “down with the Chamber and the Senate” and “vive l’Internationale!” could be heard.
In Britain, it drove a wedge between Labour and their Liberal allies in parliament, in the wake of Asquith’s betrayal. Keir Hardie, hitherto rather moderate, swore to never again join hands with the Liberal Party in anything. Tom Mann charged that they were worse than the Conservatives, because “a knife in the breast is always preferred to a knife in the back.” The radical strains in British labor represented by men like Mann were, if not brought to the fore, at least strengthened.
The next congress of the Second International was to be held in Stuttgart Germany in November 1904. Unfortunately, the Kaiser was rather jittery that year, and conscious of the ‘havoc’ the Socialists were wreaking in America, he was unwilling to countenance the same in his country. Consequently, the delegates were all stopped at the border and promptly turned back.
By necessity the congress was again held in Zurich, and only convened in early December. It was scheduled in the midst of the American constitutional crisis of that winter. Occupied by that all-important drama, DeLeon, Clark, Hillquit, and most of the party leadership was compelled to stay put. Thus the 1904 American delegation was less luminous than in previous years.
It was headed by a young Socialist journalist named Upton Sinclair, accompanied by Caroline Pemberton, who ran guns and money to revolutionary fugitives, along with George Washington Woodbey, a former slave and one of the leaders of the embattled black Socialists of the south, and thirty more minor representatives besides.
A number of issues were on the table in 1904 – colonialism and the proper socialist attitude towards it, wars and how to prevent them, and the question of women’s and minorities’ rights. Many, including Lenin himself, noted that the American delegation was short-tempered and nervous, distracted as their minds were by the turmoil back home.
Tensions exploded on the matter of war. Jean Jaurés, who was a convinced pacifist, introduced a motion to confirm that the International and its constituent parties would call a general strike in the event of an international conflict, and refuse to take up arms against foreign workers.
This was fiercely resisted by many, including Bebel of the SPD, who said that, “if Russia, the champion of cruelty and barbarity, the enemy of all human culture were to attack Germany. . . . we are as much and more interested than those who stand at the head of Germany, and we would resist Russia, for a Russian victory means the defeat of social democracy.” Likewise (and perhaps ironically, considering he was much to the left of Jaurés on most issues) Guesde swore that in the event of war the French workers would defend the Fatherland ‘to their last breaths.’
The most vociferous critics of such ‘social patriotism’ were the Russians and the Americans, and the delegations’ unit in that regard was perhaps the first glimpse of the iron alliance between Russian and American socialism that would shape the twentieth century.
The American Socialists were for the most part staunch anti-militarists, particularly in consideration of the ongoing, grinding war to subjugate the Philippines, which had by 1904 claimed more than 10,000 American lives, not to mention the 100,000+ dead natives. This was only compounded by the bitter clashes with federal troops that now colored the SLP’s history.
In this, they were joined by the Russian Bolsheviks (newly named after Lenin split the RSDLP), similarly short on patriotism thanks to the blunt despotism under which they lived.
Sinclair flatly stated that “if we must take up arms at all, the American workers will only ever take up arms against the capitalist class.”
Lenin and his second Maxim Litvinov heartily agreed, denouncing the ‘national chauvinism’ of their German and French comrades.
In a heated moment, Bebel snapped, “don’t you Americans love your country?”
George Woodbey pointedly replied, “sometimes we feel as if we haven’t got one.”
Rosa Luxemburg also jumped in for the anti-war faction, opining that even the national liberation of Poland from Russian oppression was not worth a drop of workers’ blood.
The dispute dragged on for some days, but in the end, the anti-war motion was carried, and the International pledged all its constituents not to vote war credits nor to campaign for war should their respective governments demand it.
There was much grumbling, and even talk of another split. But the ‘national chauvinists’ acceded for the time being.
In the aftermath of the vote, Lenin formally introduced himself to Sinclair and the rest of the American delegation for the first time. He congratulated the Americans on their principled intransigence and lamented the ‘gutless’ currents in the International of which he was growing increasingly contemptuous. In fact, Lenin was at this point preparing for a return to Russia, where revolution looked to be brewing, and where it would eventually explode early the next year. He and the Americans wished each other luck.
Then, on 22 December, just as the conference wrapped up, news came from America of the mass arrest of SLP congressmen, and the House’s election of President Frick. The American delegates were shocked and dismayed. With good reason, they feared to return home.
Eleven of the delegates did return to the United States within the next six months. All were promptly arrested upon disembarking (though most were eventually released).
Sinclair, along with Woodbey, and the rest of the delegates, remained abroad. Most would not return to America until the revolution, if ever. Pemberton was an exception – she returned to the US in mid-1905, and spent the next decade working in the underground.
At the next three congresses of the Second International, the American Socialist movement was represented by those exiles already abroad. Sinclair would attend all three up to 1912. Haywood, who fled the United States again in 1905, would attend two.
The congresses would continue until the War, but the Americans had done their work. With their revolutionary fire they had fractured the association, dividing the International like a river, into reformist and revolutionary tributaries. That done, they set the International on the path to its ultimate fate.
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