Be real ironic if Micky Mouse & the gang became Communist symbols, used as codes in the underground leftist/Marxist parties in the Entente nations.
The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America
- Thread starter Iggies
- Start date
Be real ironic if Micky Mouse & the gang became Communist symbols, used as codes in the underground leftist/Marxist parties in the Entente nations.
According to Wikipedia, Walt's father Elias Disney was a socialist and Debs support so it is not unlikely that he or his children could get caught up in the revolution. Also Roy was born before the POD but Walt was born a little after.
Hahahaha, that's brilliant! We should absolutely have Mickey Mouse as a Socialist icon!
"Come on gang, let's break the chains! We shall bring death to the Robber Barons. A-ha!"
Deleted member 82792
I would love to see what Disney movies would be like ITTL
Imagine Snow White, but the Dwarves join a miner's revolution and force the royal family of the kingdom to either abdicate their status or get executed.
*suspiciously looks to Aelita's Reds! Mortimer Mouse fromt the Hyperion Collective and Walt Disney*
Well. Uh. Yeah. Both of that was already done before to a similar extent.
I mean, this revolution happens before Walt Disney's career as an animator even starts, so he may very well not even create Micky Mouse and perhaps his Alice comedies do better, or ITTL Oswald the Lucky Rabbit becomes big, or Walt Disney doesn't become famous as an animator or at all.
That's way less fun though. Personally I really love the irony of the symbols of Disney becoming synonymous with American Socialism (almost on par with the red rose symbol) and the notorious non unionized Walt Disney Productions becoming the animation arm for whatever the post 2nd ACW socialist government calls themselves.
Also what's even funnier to me is the domino effect of a Red Summer in 1890 leading to not only devout Socialist Disney, but also a franchise in the far future called "Commune Hearts".
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It's way more fun to notice OTL famous people in alternate timelines.
I do like the idea of Oswald becoming TTL's Mickey Mouse. TTL Walt should probably have the rights to his own creation instead of having it be possible for the character to be taken from him like OTL.
The "Commune Hearts" thing is way more of a stretch since that was a result of a deal between Disney and a Japanese video game company decades in the future. And that's incredibly easy to butterfly away.
I totally agree. I honestly wouldn't mind OTL famous people appearing or making a cameo even long after the POD.
You know what, that's fair. It was mostly a joke anyways and referencing the meme of Franz Ferdinand getting shot leading to the modern day anime scene.
Not to mention figuring out how OTL figures would change with the new circumstances. Like how would Donald Trump's life look like in the post-revolution United States?
PART II: The Iron Heel
So, the gambit of McKinley and Knox failed, rebounded on them, and instead handed the presidency to Henry Frick.
Roosevelt always steadfastly denied that he had known of the scheme, but that is quite difficult to believe.
Some of his defenders insist upon it to this day.
Nevertheless, the rest of the country received the news as could be expected.
Nowhere was DeLeon’s summons to revolution answered. In 1904 there were no great armed uprisings, no pitched battles with federal forces, as there had been in ’94 or at Cripple Creek.
There was much general, disorganized fighting and violence, as there had been for months, but no organized revolutionary action. Only sitting in his new cell at Sing Sing did DeLeon realize how wrong he had been.
With McKinley’s proscription of the SLP, many a governor, marshal, or sheriff was finally free to do what he had longed to do for years. Scores of men were deputized and sent out to round up ‘reds.’ In Pittsburgh, 200 Continental Security agents were deputized for that purpose.
In some southern towns and cities, the Klan was given the same quasi-governmental status as it went out to do what it did best.
In the next few weeks, some 10,000 persons were arrested across the country. SLP party offices and STLA trade union headquarters were burned or wrecked. Red flags were hauled down and set alight.
The roundups probably produced about thirty deaths nationwide as Socialists fought back against the men who came to haul them away. But in the end the power of the state was decisive.
Jail cells from San Francisco to Boston were soon crammed full.
The Daily People published its last edition on Christmas Day, 1904, before its Chicago headquarters were occupied by federalized National Guardsmen and its presses destroyed. It pledged the “workingmen and women of this land” to “eternal struggle, if need be.” The front-page headline consisted of a line from ‘the Red Flag’: “COME DUNGEON DARK OR GALLOWS GRIM.”
Most of the arrestees would be released within a few weeks—some 7,000—the remainder would go to trial, for sedition, or insurrection, or abetment of some revolutionary crime. Among these 2,000-odd prisoners left languishing in cells were many of the SLP’s luminaries, including Peter Clark, Max Vogt, Emil Seidel, Edward Bellamy, and of course, Daniel DeLeon.
When Henry Frick took office on 4 March 1905, most of the violence of the previous few months had died down. The economy had plumbed hitherto unknown depths. But the organizational nuclei of the left had been smashed, and everywhere the right stood triumphant.
Moreover, what soon became known as the ‘December Decree,’ by embittered revolutionaries was a devastating emotional blow to Socialists all over the country. “We were crushed,” remembered one young woman from Chicago. “Defeated. We’d lost.”
Frick’s inauguration had a ‘dreamlike’ aspect, as one spectator described it. “We tried to hope this meant it was all finally over.”
He shook the outgoing president’s hand. McKinley had some three inches on Frick, and yet a newsman for Harpers Weekly reported that “somehow, Mr. Frick seemed a giant, and Mr. McKinley a stooped old man, aged by decades.”
As a light drizzle fell over Washington, with the broad dome of the Capitol rising out of the vague morning fog, Frick laid his hand on a Bible and spoke, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The first months of Frick’s presidency were not especially remarkable. He spent them building up his cabinet, something he’d paid precious little attention to during the hectic campaign. As it happened, it was a rather unusual one. It boasted far fewer politicians than was routine for the day.
The position of Secretary of State inevitably went to his old and loyal friend Andrew Mellon, rewarded for his years of service.
For Secretary of War he tapped Gen. Jacob “Howling Jake” Smith, the veteran of the Philippines, who had become equal parts hero and devil to various parts of the country for his brutal dealings with Aguinaldo’s rebels. Particularly for his infamous order to “kill every man over ten.”
The position of Attorney General went to William H. Taft, a long-time Republican and former Solicitor General. Taft was known for his conservative positions on business, but also had something of a humanitarian streak, and so served to round out some of the crueler edges of Frick’s burgeoning administration. Taft accepted after some deliberation.
The rest of the cabinet was filled out with a number of smaller personalities, some who had supported Frick from the start, some who had had nothing to do with him prior to his election.
Perhaps the most shocking appointment was that made in late 1905, when Frick established a new federal department; the Department of Capital and Labor. This department was created for the purpose of ‘directing and encouraging the commercial growth of the United States, and the dutiful management of capital and labor.’
For its head, he asked Samuel Gompers, leader of the long-banned AFL.
It was an obvious sop to the working class, but Gompers had been out of the public eye for so long and become such a symbol of milquetoast reformism, that it did not have nearly the desired effect. Still, Gompers reluctantly accepted.
Generously, his supporters have argued he took the post because he sincerely believed it was the best available way to continue to advance the interests of American workers in government. Cynically, others charge the man was simply desperate to feel important once more.
Nevertheless, in the long run the appointment served only to forever cement his position in revolutionary mythology as the Judas to Debs’ Christ.
Also on the agenda was settling with congress. The arrests of the Socialist representatives and senators in the winter of 1904 had left 99 vacant seats in the House and three in the Senate.
The House elected that fall would have looked as such:
The Senate would have hosted:
But now the Socialists were proscribed—the solution was to hold special elections in the districts SLP congressmen would have represented. This was done from March through October.
Because Socialists and Nationalists so often hailed from the same regions, a great number of Nationalist congressmen replaced the ‘outgoing’ Socialists.
When the new House was finally seated in October of 1905, its composition was as follows:
The new Senate’s composition was as follows:
The Nationalists thus had a commanding majority in the House, and a very near majority in the Senate—one they could reach easily enough each with the cooperation of conservative Republicans.
The first major piece of legislation put through Frick’s congress—what came to be known as the Extraordinary Crime Act—was passed in early October of 1905. It prescribed “…that any person who commits the offenses of murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, murder in the third degree, or manslaughter, allowing that these offenses are committed with revolutionary intent, shall be subject to the death penalty....any person who commits the offenses of battery, armed robbery, destruction of government property, or destruction of property essential to foreign or interstate commerce, shall be subject to not less than twenty years imprisonment, allowing that these offenses are committed with revolutionary intent."
A cartoon in Britain's Puck Magazine featured a Continental Security man holding a smoking gun, standing over the corpse of a shoeless young street urchin, still clutching a stolen loaf of bread. The CS agent says, “revolutionary intent!”
Frick’s cabinet:
The proscription of the SLP in the winter of 1904 began what would be known forevermore among the revolutionaries, with proper grandiloquence, as ‘the days (or 'the time') of the Iron Heel.’
The term was taken from one of Clarence Darrow’s campaign speeches, in which he warned that a victory for Frick would see labor “crushed under [an] iron heel.” It was popularized particularly by Jack London, who used it extensively in underground communiques and essays as an oblique reference to the government. But it remained in use long after that government had deciphered it.
The American socialists were now relegated to the same sort of twilight existence their comrades in Europe had known for so long. There would be no more newspapers, except those that could be printed on pulp and distributed surreptitiously when no one was looking. No more public speeches. No more marches or rallies. And of course, no more elections.
Attempts to enter the Populist Party en masse were curtailed when William J. Bryan, not eager to share Daniel DeLeon’s fate, publicly stated that his party “is not, and has never been, in favor of revolutionism or of any compact with revolutionists,” and directed local party leaders to turn away all those they suspected or knew to be former Socialists.
Many—perhaps most—Socialists simply withdrew from politics as morale plummeted.
But that only meant the underground movement that soldiered on would comprise the most hardened and the most dedicated of revolutionaries.
On 6 January 1906, a secret meeting of the IWW’s executive committee was held at Crested Butte, Colorado. There, a crude plan for the establishment and maintenance of revolutionary cells across the country was sketched out.
London attempted to temper the pessimism with the promise that, “the Iron Heel can and will be toppled. It is only a matter of how long it will last.”
The life of a revolutionary became less about winning the hearts of the masses, and more about concentrated strikes at the system where it was weak, carried out by individuals or small, disciplined cadres. This action might be small-scale propagandization, vandalism, robbery, or even assassination.
The previous years had shown that American workers were receptive to the message of socialism, and that was heartening. The IWW had only to keep the flame alive until the day the people could again storm onto the stage of history.
That was how Elizabeth G. Flynn, only sixteen years old in 1906, put it. “Our job was to keep the torch burning and the red flag flying.”
Flynn was the child of Irish immigrants, born and raised in Harlem, and “reared in the socialist tradition as a Catholic is taught catechism.” Already committed to the cause of the revolution, her convictions were hardened when, during the constitutional crisis of winter 1904, her father was shot dead by a New York policeman in the course of a Socialist demonstration.
After the SLP’s illegalization, Flynn remained in touch with her many comrades. New York City was so thick with Socialists it was essentially impossible to truly suppress leftist organization, and so the authorities settled for banning all public sloganeering and displays of the red flag.
Flynn spent her time handing out Socialist pamphlets cleverly disguised as shopping catalogues and apolitical news sheets to the workers of textile factories, or to longshoremen at the city harbor. She also helped maintain a private fund fed through the ‘illicit’ donations of party members and used for the purchase of printing presses and the occasional bail bond.
Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she received a tip-off from a friend that a warrant had been put out for her arrest, and she fled New York City in the middle of the night. She made her way to Colorado, still a bastion of red sympathizers, and continued her work there under various assumed names.
Her story was not atypical.
Lovett Fort-Whiteman was a black Texan born only one year before Flynn. His father had been an ex-slave and cattleman, but Fort-Whiteman himself was hardly satisfied with such a life, and from the first smarted at the oppression under which the southern negroes suffered.
Soon after his fifteenth birthday in 1904, he joined the Dallas SLP, only for it to be banned nationwide quite literally two weeks later. Upon the publication of the December Decree, a gang of armed vigilantes came for Fort-Whiteman and his comrades—he fled the city with three friends, but they were cornered on the outskirts of town within the night. Fort-Whiteman was the only boy to escape with his life, and thus began his revolutionary career. By twenty, he had participated in three bombings and helped plan the robberies of two banks.
In many ways, the south was both an easier and more difficult field for revolutionaries to operate in. On the one hand, its rural, undeveloped nature meant people travelled slow and news traveled slower. So, it was far easier for a wanted man to disappear and reemerge with a new name. Weapons were also far more plentiful than in the north, and their carriage raised far fewer questions. On the other hand, the violence perpetrated by both the state and private individuals upon real and suspected insurrectionists was unlike that in any other region of the country.
In the south, Klansmen could carry out the extrajudicial execution of four farmworkers (three white, one black) found distributing old SLP pamphlets, and not spend a single day in court. Such excesses were more difficult (though not impossible) to swing in the north. In the states of the Old Confederacy, especially South Carolina, men such as these—Klansmen or simple vigilantes—were increasingly deputized by local sheriffs to perform arrests. The line between private and state terror wavered, blurred, and finally disappeared.
It was a difficult life to adjust to,
Of course, some revolutionaries had been operating from the underground since long before the December Decree.
Jack London was irritated by the sudden flood of “new revolutionists” unaccustomed to the life of a fugitive. In a way, he wrote in a letter to Caroline Pemberton, he was “glad for the new state of affairs, because it will separate worthy men from cowards and compromisers.”
As a ‘veteran’ of the fight and member of the IWW executive committee, London soon found himself looked up to by many of these new revolutionists. His essays, which he wrote from various safe houses, mostly by hand, were widely disseminated and some even reached Europe.
The IWW’s banner was soon that beneath which ongoing revolutionary activity was organized. It had been on the far left of the legal SLP, and had scandalized moderates such as Hillquist and Berger. But now it was the only game in town.
Soon ‘wobbly’ (a term whose etymology to this day remains unclear) was the general term for any revolutionary, used by police, the general public, and even the revolutionaries themselves.
As for the federal government, it was determined the red menace be stamped out once and for all.
In August of 1906, congress established the Bureau of Internal Security (BIS), which existed for the purpose of ‘identification and liquidation of threats to the safety of the American people and the functioning of the United States government.’
Its first Security Chief would be none other than Adj. General Sherman Bell, veteran of Cuba, the Colorado National Guard, and most importantly, Cripple Creek. He had no experience in law enforcement, but he had definite military administrative experience, and had made something of a celebrity of himself during Frick’s campaigns. He had - in violation of US Army protocols - stumped for the man all across the country and regaled audiences with tales of revolutionary horror. His hatred of reds was unsurpassed.
In its first year, the BIS recruited 3,000 operatives. These men were drawn from the ranks of federal marshals, state militias, and the army. But the single most important source for BIS men was Continental Security, whose agents had particular experience dealing with radicals and labor unrest.
The BIS was empowered to hunt criminals of all sorts across state borders, and its mandate encompassed common crime such as bootlegging, robbery, or murder. But the first priority was always radicals.
In the beginning, ‘the Iron Heel’ was a fairly histrionic name for Frick’s administration. Besides a number of figures among the top leadership of the SLP, the vast majority of the Socialists arrested in the aftermath of 1904 were shortly thereafter released. In fact, most Socialists were never molested at all by the government in these early years.
Even many of the high-profile figures swept up in the initial arrests, such as Victor Berger and Edward Bellamy (who, it was true, were both rather to the right of the Socialist movement), were set at liberty within a few months. Most of the truly brutal suppression, the arrests of common laborers or the murder of Socialist activists, was the result of local terror in the south or industrial north.
In the first year of its operation, the BIS also did not carry out many fresh arrests. Its first task was to build profiles of the various ‘dangerous radicals’ at large in the country.
A dossier was delivered to Bell in early 1907, cataloguing the names and available information of up to one hundred known revolutionists. Among them were Caroline Pemberton, Edward Boyce, the young wobbly Frank Little, and of course, Jack London and Big Bill Haywood. The report almost certainly made its way to Frick’s desk at some point, though there is no record of it.
The upshot is that in its early days, the BIS was largely content to gather data and store it away for later reference.
Later, the appellation ‘the Iron Heel’ would become far more apt.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Towards the end of 1905, the first signs of economic improvement began to show. By October, unemployment had fallen to 23%. That was still a dreadful number, but far better than it had been at the peak of the crisis, around the time of the last election.
Exports ticked up again. Outgoing grain shipments had fallen by nearly 40% during the worst weeks of 1904. By New Year’s, 1906, they had risen by 15% of the pre-crisis average again.
The economy had begun to ‘settle’ after the massive dislocation. In the west and the south, a major readjustment of the agricultural economy had taken place. Some 6.5 million independent farms had existed in the United States in late 1901. By 1905, this number had fallen to slightly more than 4.3 million, a nearly 35% reduction.
At the same time, the average size of American farms grew, from roughly 200 to nearly 300 acres. The cause was the concentration of agriculture as small and middling farmers were bankrupted, and their land snapped up at floor prices by sprawling concerns.
These would later be called with a hint of humor, ‘Cartel Collectives.’
Farmers who had made a proud living as independent producers were reduced to tenants or even wage-earning laborers. The armies of the unemployed shrank as such men ‘returned to work’, often on farms they had until recently owned. This proletarianization stung, both economically and psychologically.
In 1906, the Western Farming Trust was formed, consolidating a large number of these cartel collectives. 52% of its shares were owned by Standard Oil (and this number would later grow), making it effectively a subsidiary of the massive corporation.
In the industrial regions of the country, recovering markets both out west and abroad meant a rebound in activity. In certain regions of the north, such as upper New York and Pennsylvania, unemployment among industrial laborers had reached 40% at the worst of the crisis. Now it was down to 30%, though wages were lower.
The great titans of industry, as well as the middle classes, breathed a sigh of relief. Though there was probably not any real threat of a successful revolution in the United States in these years, that was hardly so clear at the time. To many it felt as if complete anarchy had only just been averted.
The Dow-Jones Industrial Average crept back up to 61 from the 44 it had crashed to in the depths of the crisis, though it would never again near the 200 it had reached in mid-late 1901.
And though Frick’s ascendancy to the Executive Mansion could hardly be credited for the recovery, many did so anyways.
In a speech given in autumn 1906, Frick said that, “the country has been saved from political, commercial, and social ruin. Now we must go on saving her.”
With a slight economic recovery underway, investors and stock traders were spurred on to further buying, creating a positive feedback loop.
The rampant violence that had characterized the dreadful years between 1902 and 1905 receded. In 1907, the national homicide rate was 7/100,000, down from 13/100,000 during that three-year period. ‘Political murder’ was down 60%.
The New York Times claimed, “a light cuts through the darkness.”
The real test of public confidence, both in the economy and in the political structure of the United States, would come with the 1906 midterms.
Of course, the congress elected in 1904 had never truly been seated, with the mass arrest of the Socialist delegates. What would be contested would be the congress formed in 1905, where contingent elections had raised mostly Nationalist contenders to the places SLP men would have filled.
Turnout was down nearly 20% from the 1904 congressional elections. A variety of reasons explain this change. The desperation, despite the persistence of large-scale unemployment, was not so acute as it had been, then. Furthermore, Socialist voters were heavily demoralized, and many simply withdrew from politics entirely.
Those who voted were disproportionately supporters of Frick, or at least warm towards him.
Thus, the returns showed a strong vote of confidence in the National Party:
The new Senate’s composition was as follows:
The Populists saw modest gains in both chambers, largely as a result of those Socialist voters who did vote voting for what they saw as “the next best thing.”
The Nationalists lost a handful of seats in the House but retained a commanding majority. In the Senate, they managed to capture new districts and win a majority here as well, thus placing them in domination of congress. This was largely thanks to the sudden explosion of Nationalist state legislators raised up to take the place of arrested or otherwise ejected Socialists.
Thus, though the country was still mired in recession, there was “a glimmer of hope on the horizon,” as Frick’s own Voice put it.
Of course, not everyone experienced it as such. The aforementioned farmers shoved down into the ranks of the proletariat were embittered, resented the Cartel and the Frick administration, which they by and large blamed for their predicament.
Industrial laborers who had lost their STLA-affiliated unions with the December Decree were similarly despondent. Even in places where most working-class organization had long since been rendered next to impossible, unions had been able to at least engage in fundraising and unemployment support, if not real collective action. Now even that was gone.
Furthermore, the immigrant ‘hunkies’ of Pennsylvania, along with Jews in New York and Italians in Chicago, were devastated when Frick made good on another of his campaign promises. On 18 January of 1907, the Nationalist-controlled congress pushed through the 'McKinlay-Kitchin' immigration bill extending the term of naturalization from five to ten years. Worse yet, it was to be applied retroactively, consequently stripping thousands of their citizenship.
Its purpose was transparently obvious to all. It was Mr. Frick’s great favor to his friends at the Cartel, who had helped elevate him to the presidency. The act served primarily as a form of labor discipline, threatening migrant workers who might be inclined towards unionism or socialism with deportation.
A test case soon found its way to the Supreme Court. Jurgis Jaunzemis, a Latvian steelworker from Buffalo, appealed his recently lost citizenship. His lawyers insisted that McKinlay-Kitchin be overturned, as it violated Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. In Jaunzemis v United States, the court found against the plaintiff 5-3. With Calder v. Bull as precedent, it was ruled that the legislation did not violate the ex post facto clause.
The decision was a great blow, and duly lamented as such in the corpus of literature left by immigrant authors such as Arturo Giovannitti and Yente Serdatzky.
But perhaps the greatest losers in America’s restored ‘normalcy’ were the black people of the south.
On the heels of the December Decree, not only were Socialists thrown out of southern legislatures from Louisiana to Florida to North Carolina, so were many Populists, who had not even been federally proscribed as had the SLP. Socialist workers, writers, and activists were hounded and beaten. Often, they were killed. And now that they were ‘traitors’ they had no legal recourse, as against what little they had had before.
Spartacus Columns or farmworkers’ unions were not allowed any longer even the grudging legality they had enjoyed. They were smashed down wherever they were found.
Nationalist politicians were in ascendancy all across the south. With the Democrats dead, the Nationalists were increasingly seen as the only suitable alternative. It was a point of consternation for many southerners that Frick’s party—out of lack of conviction and out of deference for northern public opinion—would not endorse open racialist policy. Nevertheless, it was increasingly thought that continued subjugation of the south’s black minority might be achieved through the medium of anti-socialism.
In 1906, the south’s first Nationalist governor, Edmond Noel of Mississippi, was elected to office. Noel explained his departure from the moribund Democrats to the National Party as his joining “the only all-American party that exists,” and the only one that could “preserve peaceful and harmonious relations between the races.”
Despite its late arrival to the region, the National Party in fact entrenched itself here fasted than it did in the north, thanks to the south’s history of one-party rule and political corruption. By 1914 or so in Mississippi, membership in the National Party was almost a prerequisite to office, or to rank in the state National Guard.
Northern Nationalists tended to find the racial complexes of their southern counterparts embarrassing or outright immoral but were generally not disposed to do much about it (Frick himself included). At least, not so long as the common threat of ‘anarchy’ remained.
Roosevelt always steadfastly denied that he had known of the scheme, but that is quite difficult to believe.
Some of his defenders insist upon it to this day.
Nevertheless, the rest of the country received the news as could be expected.
Nowhere was DeLeon’s summons to revolution answered. In 1904 there were no great armed uprisings, no pitched battles with federal forces, as there had been in ’94 or at Cripple Creek.
There was much general, disorganized fighting and violence, as there had been for months, but no organized revolutionary action. Only sitting in his new cell at Sing Sing did DeLeon realize how wrong he had been.
With McKinley’s proscription of the SLP, many a governor, marshal, or sheriff was finally free to do what he had longed to do for years. Scores of men were deputized and sent out to round up ‘reds.’ In Pittsburgh, 200 Continental Security agents were deputized for that purpose.
In some southern towns and cities, the Klan was given the same quasi-governmental status as it went out to do what it did best.
In the next few weeks, some 10,000 persons were arrested across the country. SLP party offices and STLA trade union headquarters were burned or wrecked. Red flags were hauled down and set alight.
The roundups probably produced about thirty deaths nationwide as Socialists fought back against the men who came to haul them away. But in the end the power of the state was decisive.
Jail cells from San Francisco to Boston were soon crammed full.
The Daily People published its last edition on Christmas Day, 1904, before its Chicago headquarters were occupied by federalized National Guardsmen and its presses destroyed. It pledged the “workingmen and women of this land” to “eternal struggle, if need be.” The front-page headline consisted of a line from ‘the Red Flag’: “COME DUNGEON DARK OR GALLOWS GRIM.”
Most of the arrestees would be released within a few weeks—some 7,000—the remainder would go to trial, for sedition, or insurrection, or abetment of some revolutionary crime. Among these 2,000-odd prisoners left languishing in cells were many of the SLP’s luminaries, including Peter Clark, Max Vogt, Emil Seidel, Edward Bellamy, and of course, Daniel DeLeon.
When Henry Frick took office on 4 March 1905, most of the violence of the previous few months had died down. The economy had plumbed hitherto unknown depths. But the organizational nuclei of the left had been smashed, and everywhere the right stood triumphant.
Moreover, what soon became known as the ‘December Decree,’ by embittered revolutionaries was a devastating emotional blow to Socialists all over the country. “We were crushed,” remembered one young woman from Chicago. “Defeated. We’d lost.”
Frick’s inauguration had a ‘dreamlike’ aspect, as one spectator described it. “We tried to hope this meant it was all finally over.”
He shook the outgoing president’s hand. McKinley had some three inches on Frick, and yet a newsman for Harpers Weekly reported that “somehow, Mr. Frick seemed a giant, and Mr. McKinley a stooped old man, aged by decades.”
As a light drizzle fell over Washington, with the broad dome of the Capitol rising out of the vague morning fog, Frick laid his hand on a Bible and spoke, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PART II
The Iron Heel: The Presidency of Henry Frick
McKinley hatched a handsome plot
To buy the House for Roosevelt
But in his haste the man forgot
That Frick had gold to spare as well!
- Ambrose Bierce, 1905
The Iron Heel: The Presidency of Henry Frick
McKinley hatched a handsome plot
To buy the House for Roosevelt
But in his haste the man forgot
That Frick had gold to spare as well!
- Ambrose Bierce, 1905
The first months of Frick’s presidency were not especially remarkable. He spent them building up his cabinet, something he’d paid precious little attention to during the hectic campaign. As it happened, it was a rather unusual one. It boasted far fewer politicians than was routine for the day.
The position of Secretary of State inevitably went to his old and loyal friend Andrew Mellon, rewarded for his years of service.
For Secretary of War he tapped Gen. Jacob “Howling Jake” Smith, the veteran of the Philippines, who had become equal parts hero and devil to various parts of the country for his brutal dealings with Aguinaldo’s rebels. Particularly for his infamous order to “kill every man over ten.”
The position of Attorney General went to William H. Taft, a long-time Republican and former Solicitor General. Taft was known for his conservative positions on business, but also had something of a humanitarian streak, and so served to round out some of the crueler edges of Frick’s burgeoning administration. Taft accepted after some deliberation.
The rest of the cabinet was filled out with a number of smaller personalities, some who had supported Frick from the start, some who had had nothing to do with him prior to his election.
Perhaps the most shocking appointment was that made in late 1905, when Frick established a new federal department; the Department of Capital and Labor. This department was created for the purpose of ‘directing and encouraging the commercial growth of the United States, and the dutiful management of capital and labor.’
For its head, he asked Samuel Gompers, leader of the long-banned AFL.
It was an obvious sop to the working class, but Gompers had been out of the public eye for so long and become such a symbol of milquetoast reformism, that it did not have nearly the desired effect. Still, Gompers reluctantly accepted.
Generously, his supporters have argued he took the post because he sincerely believed it was the best available way to continue to advance the interests of American workers in government. Cynically, others charge the man was simply desperate to feel important once more.
Nevertheless, in the long run the appointment served only to forever cement his position in revolutionary mythology as the Judas to Debs’ Christ.
Also on the agenda was settling with congress. The arrests of the Socialist representatives and senators in the winter of 1904 had left 99 vacant seats in the House and three in the Senate.
The House elected that fall would have looked as such:
172 Socialists
125 Nationalists
53 Populists
28 Republicans
8 independents or members of smaller parties
1 Democrat remained.
125 Nationalists
53 Populists
28 Republicans
8 independents or members of smaller parties
1 Democrat remained.
The Senate would have hosted:
9 Socialists
27 Nationalists
23 Populists
31 Republicans.
27 Nationalists
23 Populists
31 Republicans.
But now the Socialists were proscribed—the solution was to hold special elections in the districts SLP congressmen would have represented. This was done from March through October.
Because Socialists and Nationalists so often hailed from the same regions, a great number of Nationalist congressmen replaced the ‘outgoing’ Socialists.
When the new House was finally seated in October of 1905, its composition was as follows:
222 Nationalists
103 Republicans
53 Populists
8 Independents or members of smaller parties.
103 Republicans
53 Populists
8 Independents or members of smaller parties.
The new Senate’s composition was as follows:
33 Nationalists
32 Republicans
25 Populists
32 Republicans
25 Populists
The Nationalists thus had a commanding majority in the House, and a very near majority in the Senate—one they could reach easily enough each with the cooperation of conservative Republicans.
The first major piece of legislation put through Frick’s congress—what came to be known as the Extraordinary Crime Act—was passed in early October of 1905. It prescribed “…that any person who commits the offenses of murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, murder in the third degree, or manslaughter, allowing that these offenses are committed with revolutionary intent, shall be subject to the death penalty....any person who commits the offenses of battery, armed robbery, destruction of government property, or destruction of property essential to foreign or interstate commerce, shall be subject to not less than twenty years imprisonment, allowing that these offenses are committed with revolutionary intent."
A cartoon in Britain's Puck Magazine featured a Continental Security man holding a smoking gun, standing over the corpse of a shoeless young street urchin, still clutching a stolen loaf of bread. The CS agent says, “revolutionary intent!”
Frick’s cabinet:
Secretary of State: Andrew Mellon
Secretary of the Treasury: William Clark
Secretary of War: Jacob H. Smith
Attorney General: William H. Taft
Secretary of the Navy: George Dewey
Secretary of the Interior: Charles H. Burke
Secretary of Agriculture: Julian Carr
Secretary of Capital and Labor: Samuel Gompers
Secretary of the Treasury: William Clark
Secretary of War: Jacob H. Smith
Attorney General: William H. Taft
Secretary of the Navy: George Dewey
Secretary of the Interior: Charles H. Burke
Secretary of Agriculture: Julian Carr
Secretary of Capital and Labor: Samuel Gompers
The proscription of the SLP in the winter of 1904 began what would be known forevermore among the revolutionaries, with proper grandiloquence, as ‘the days (or 'the time') of the Iron Heel.’
The term was taken from one of Clarence Darrow’s campaign speeches, in which he warned that a victory for Frick would see labor “crushed under [an] iron heel.” It was popularized particularly by Jack London, who used it extensively in underground communiques and essays as an oblique reference to the government. But it remained in use long after that government had deciphered it.
The American socialists were now relegated to the same sort of twilight existence their comrades in Europe had known for so long. There would be no more newspapers, except those that could be printed on pulp and distributed surreptitiously when no one was looking. No more public speeches. No more marches or rallies. And of course, no more elections.
Attempts to enter the Populist Party en masse were curtailed when William J. Bryan, not eager to share Daniel DeLeon’s fate, publicly stated that his party “is not, and has never been, in favor of revolutionism or of any compact with revolutionists,” and directed local party leaders to turn away all those they suspected or knew to be former Socialists.
Many—perhaps most—Socialists simply withdrew from politics as morale plummeted.
But that only meant the underground movement that soldiered on would comprise the most hardened and the most dedicated of revolutionaries.
On 6 January 1906, a secret meeting of the IWW’s executive committee was held at Crested Butte, Colorado. There, a crude plan for the establishment and maintenance of revolutionary cells across the country was sketched out.
London attempted to temper the pessimism with the promise that, “the Iron Heel can and will be toppled. It is only a matter of how long it will last.”
The life of a revolutionary became less about winning the hearts of the masses, and more about concentrated strikes at the system where it was weak, carried out by individuals or small, disciplined cadres. This action might be small-scale propagandization, vandalism, robbery, or even assassination.
The previous years had shown that American workers were receptive to the message of socialism, and that was heartening. The IWW had only to keep the flame alive until the day the people could again storm onto the stage of history.
That was how Elizabeth G. Flynn, only sixteen years old in 1906, put it. “Our job was to keep the torch burning and the red flag flying.”
Flynn was the child of Irish immigrants, born and raised in Harlem, and “reared in the socialist tradition as a Catholic is taught catechism.” Already committed to the cause of the revolution, her convictions were hardened when, during the constitutional crisis of winter 1904, her father was shot dead by a New York policeman in the course of a Socialist demonstration.
After the SLP’s illegalization, Flynn remained in touch with her many comrades. New York City was so thick with Socialists it was essentially impossible to truly suppress leftist organization, and so the authorities settled for banning all public sloganeering and displays of the red flag.
Flynn spent her time handing out Socialist pamphlets cleverly disguised as shopping catalogues and apolitical news sheets to the workers of textile factories, or to longshoremen at the city harbor. She also helped maintain a private fund fed through the ‘illicit’ donations of party members and used for the purchase of printing presses and the occasional bail bond.
Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she received a tip-off from a friend that a warrant had been put out for her arrest, and she fled New York City in the middle of the night. She made her way to Colorado, still a bastion of red sympathizers, and continued her work there under various assumed names.
Her story was not atypical.
Lovett Fort-Whiteman was a black Texan born only one year before Flynn. His father had been an ex-slave and cattleman, but Fort-Whiteman himself was hardly satisfied with such a life, and from the first smarted at the oppression under which the southern negroes suffered.
Soon after his fifteenth birthday in 1904, he joined the Dallas SLP, only for it to be banned nationwide quite literally two weeks later. Upon the publication of the December Decree, a gang of armed vigilantes came for Fort-Whiteman and his comrades—he fled the city with three friends, but they were cornered on the outskirts of town within the night. Fort-Whiteman was the only boy to escape with his life, and thus began his revolutionary career. By twenty, he had participated in three bombings and helped plan the robberies of two banks.
In many ways, the south was both an easier and more difficult field for revolutionaries to operate in. On the one hand, its rural, undeveloped nature meant people travelled slow and news traveled slower. So, it was far easier for a wanted man to disappear and reemerge with a new name. Weapons were also far more plentiful than in the north, and their carriage raised far fewer questions. On the other hand, the violence perpetrated by both the state and private individuals upon real and suspected insurrectionists was unlike that in any other region of the country.
In the south, Klansmen could carry out the extrajudicial execution of four farmworkers (three white, one black) found distributing old SLP pamphlets, and not spend a single day in court. Such excesses were more difficult (though not impossible) to swing in the north. In the states of the Old Confederacy, especially South Carolina, men such as these—Klansmen or simple vigilantes—were increasingly deputized by local sheriffs to perform arrests. The line between private and state terror wavered, blurred, and finally disappeared.
It was a difficult life to adjust to,
Of course, some revolutionaries had been operating from the underground since long before the December Decree.
Jack London was irritated by the sudden flood of “new revolutionists” unaccustomed to the life of a fugitive. In a way, he wrote in a letter to Caroline Pemberton, he was “glad for the new state of affairs, because it will separate worthy men from cowards and compromisers.”
As a ‘veteran’ of the fight and member of the IWW executive committee, London soon found himself looked up to by many of these new revolutionists. His essays, which he wrote from various safe houses, mostly by hand, were widely disseminated and some even reached Europe.
The IWW’s banner was soon that beneath which ongoing revolutionary activity was organized. It had been on the far left of the legal SLP, and had scandalized moderates such as Hillquist and Berger. But now it was the only game in town.
Soon ‘wobbly’ (a term whose etymology to this day remains unclear) was the general term for any revolutionary, used by police, the general public, and even the revolutionaries themselves.
As for the federal government, it was determined the red menace be stamped out once and for all.
In August of 1906, congress established the Bureau of Internal Security (BIS), which existed for the purpose of ‘identification and liquidation of threats to the safety of the American people and the functioning of the United States government.’
Its first Security Chief would be none other than Adj. General Sherman Bell, veteran of Cuba, the Colorado National Guard, and most importantly, Cripple Creek. He had no experience in law enforcement, but he had definite military administrative experience, and had made something of a celebrity of himself during Frick’s campaigns. He had - in violation of US Army protocols - stumped for the man all across the country and regaled audiences with tales of revolutionary horror. His hatred of reds was unsurpassed.
In its first year, the BIS recruited 3,000 operatives. These men were drawn from the ranks of federal marshals, state militias, and the army. But the single most important source for BIS men was Continental Security, whose agents had particular experience dealing with radicals and labor unrest.
The BIS was empowered to hunt criminals of all sorts across state borders, and its mandate encompassed common crime such as bootlegging, robbery, or murder. But the first priority was always radicals.
In the beginning, ‘the Iron Heel’ was a fairly histrionic name for Frick’s administration. Besides a number of figures among the top leadership of the SLP, the vast majority of the Socialists arrested in the aftermath of 1904 were shortly thereafter released. In fact, most Socialists were never molested at all by the government in these early years.
Even many of the high-profile figures swept up in the initial arrests, such as Victor Berger and Edward Bellamy (who, it was true, were both rather to the right of the Socialist movement), were set at liberty within a few months. Most of the truly brutal suppression, the arrests of common laborers or the murder of Socialist activists, was the result of local terror in the south or industrial north.
In the first year of its operation, the BIS also did not carry out many fresh arrests. Its first task was to build profiles of the various ‘dangerous radicals’ at large in the country.
A dossier was delivered to Bell in early 1907, cataloguing the names and available information of up to one hundred known revolutionists. Among them were Caroline Pemberton, Edward Boyce, the young wobbly Frank Little, and of course, Jack London and Big Bill Haywood. The report almost certainly made its way to Frick’s desk at some point, though there is no record of it.
The upshot is that in its early days, the BIS was largely content to gather data and store it away for later reference.
Later, the appellation ‘the Iron Heel’ would become far more apt.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Towards the end of 1905, the first signs of economic improvement began to show. By October, unemployment had fallen to 23%. That was still a dreadful number, but far better than it had been at the peak of the crisis, around the time of the last election.
Exports ticked up again. Outgoing grain shipments had fallen by nearly 40% during the worst weeks of 1904. By New Year’s, 1906, they had risen by 15% of the pre-crisis average again.
The economy had begun to ‘settle’ after the massive dislocation. In the west and the south, a major readjustment of the agricultural economy had taken place. Some 6.5 million independent farms had existed in the United States in late 1901. By 1905, this number had fallen to slightly more than 4.3 million, a nearly 35% reduction.
At the same time, the average size of American farms grew, from roughly 200 to nearly 300 acres. The cause was the concentration of agriculture as small and middling farmers were bankrupted, and their land snapped up at floor prices by sprawling concerns.
These would later be called with a hint of humor, ‘Cartel Collectives.’
Farmers who had made a proud living as independent producers were reduced to tenants or even wage-earning laborers. The armies of the unemployed shrank as such men ‘returned to work’, often on farms they had until recently owned. This proletarianization stung, both economically and psychologically.
In 1906, the Western Farming Trust was formed, consolidating a large number of these cartel collectives. 52% of its shares were owned by Standard Oil (and this number would later grow), making it effectively a subsidiary of the massive corporation.
In the industrial regions of the country, recovering markets both out west and abroad meant a rebound in activity. In certain regions of the north, such as upper New York and Pennsylvania, unemployment among industrial laborers had reached 40% at the worst of the crisis. Now it was down to 30%, though wages were lower.
The great titans of industry, as well as the middle classes, breathed a sigh of relief. Though there was probably not any real threat of a successful revolution in the United States in these years, that was hardly so clear at the time. To many it felt as if complete anarchy had only just been averted.
The Dow-Jones Industrial Average crept back up to 61 from the 44 it had crashed to in the depths of the crisis, though it would never again near the 200 it had reached in mid-late 1901.
And though Frick’s ascendancy to the Executive Mansion could hardly be credited for the recovery, many did so anyways.
In a speech given in autumn 1906, Frick said that, “the country has been saved from political, commercial, and social ruin. Now we must go on saving her.”
With a slight economic recovery underway, investors and stock traders were spurred on to further buying, creating a positive feedback loop.
The rampant violence that had characterized the dreadful years between 1902 and 1905 receded. In 1907, the national homicide rate was 7/100,000, down from 13/100,000 during that three-year period. ‘Political murder’ was down 60%.
The New York Times claimed, “a light cuts through the darkness.”
The real test of public confidence, both in the economy and in the political structure of the United States, would come with the 1906 midterms.
Of course, the congress elected in 1904 had never truly been seated, with the mass arrest of the Socialist delegates. What would be contested would be the congress formed in 1905, where contingent elections had raised mostly Nationalist contenders to the places SLP men would have filled.
Turnout was down nearly 20% from the 1904 congressional elections. A variety of reasons explain this change. The desperation, despite the persistence of large-scale unemployment, was not so acute as it had been, then. Furthermore, Socialist voters were heavily demoralized, and many simply withdrew from politics entirely.
Those who voted were disproportionately supporters of Frick, or at least warm towards him.
Thus, the returns showed a strong vote of confidence in the National Party:
207 Nationalists
107 Republicans
73 Populists
4 Independents or members of smaller parties.
107 Republicans
73 Populists
4 Independents or members of smaller parties.
The new Senate’s composition was as follows:
48 Nationalists
22 Republicans
20 Populists
22 Republicans
20 Populists
The Populists saw modest gains in both chambers, largely as a result of those Socialist voters who did vote voting for what they saw as “the next best thing.”
The Nationalists lost a handful of seats in the House but retained a commanding majority. In the Senate, they managed to capture new districts and win a majority here as well, thus placing them in domination of congress. This was largely thanks to the sudden explosion of Nationalist state legislators raised up to take the place of arrested or otherwise ejected Socialists.
Thus, though the country was still mired in recession, there was “a glimmer of hope on the horizon,” as Frick’s own Voice put it.
Of course, not everyone experienced it as such. The aforementioned farmers shoved down into the ranks of the proletariat were embittered, resented the Cartel and the Frick administration, which they by and large blamed for their predicament.
Industrial laborers who had lost their STLA-affiliated unions with the December Decree were similarly despondent. Even in places where most working-class organization had long since been rendered next to impossible, unions had been able to at least engage in fundraising and unemployment support, if not real collective action. Now even that was gone.
Furthermore, the immigrant ‘hunkies’ of Pennsylvania, along with Jews in New York and Italians in Chicago, were devastated when Frick made good on another of his campaign promises. On 18 January of 1907, the Nationalist-controlled congress pushed through the 'McKinlay-Kitchin' immigration bill extending the term of naturalization from five to ten years. Worse yet, it was to be applied retroactively, consequently stripping thousands of their citizenship.
Its purpose was transparently obvious to all. It was Mr. Frick’s great favor to his friends at the Cartel, who had helped elevate him to the presidency. The act served primarily as a form of labor discipline, threatening migrant workers who might be inclined towards unionism or socialism with deportation.
A test case soon found its way to the Supreme Court. Jurgis Jaunzemis, a Latvian steelworker from Buffalo, appealed his recently lost citizenship. His lawyers insisted that McKinlay-Kitchin be overturned, as it violated Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. In Jaunzemis v United States, the court found against the plaintiff 5-3. With Calder v. Bull as precedent, it was ruled that the legislation did not violate the ex post facto clause.
The decision was a great blow, and duly lamented as such in the corpus of literature left by immigrant authors such as Arturo Giovannitti and Yente Serdatzky.
But perhaps the greatest losers in America’s restored ‘normalcy’ were the black people of the south.
On the heels of the December Decree, not only were Socialists thrown out of southern legislatures from Louisiana to Florida to North Carolina, so were many Populists, who had not even been federally proscribed as had the SLP. Socialist workers, writers, and activists were hounded and beaten. Often, they were killed. And now that they were ‘traitors’ they had no legal recourse, as against what little they had had before.
Spartacus Columns or farmworkers’ unions were not allowed any longer even the grudging legality they had enjoyed. They were smashed down wherever they were found.
Nationalist politicians were in ascendancy all across the south. With the Democrats dead, the Nationalists were increasingly seen as the only suitable alternative. It was a point of consternation for many southerners that Frick’s party—out of lack of conviction and out of deference for northern public opinion—would not endorse open racialist policy. Nevertheless, it was increasingly thought that continued subjugation of the south’s black minority might be achieved through the medium of anti-socialism.
In 1906, the south’s first Nationalist governor, Edmond Noel of Mississippi, was elected to office. Noel explained his departure from the moribund Democrats to the National Party as his joining “the only all-American party that exists,” and the only one that could “preserve peaceful and harmonious relations between the races.”
Despite its late arrival to the region, the National Party in fact entrenched itself here fasted than it did in the north, thanks to the south’s history of one-party rule and political corruption. By 1914 or so in Mississippi, membership in the National Party was almost a prerequisite to office, or to rank in the state National Guard.
Northern Nationalists tended to find the racial complexes of their southern counterparts embarrassing or outright immoral but were generally not disposed to do much about it (Frick himself included). At least, not so long as the common threat of ‘anarchy’ remained.