This timeline is great! I'm excited about new entries in the future, and I love how Henry Frick is shaping up to be the Supervillain against labour.
The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America
- Thread starter Iggies
- Start date
I'm doubtful Roosevelt would even get close to the presidency to be honest? He got included as VP a bit by accident. He didn't really want it and felt pressured by the convention picking him. And him becoming president material was due to him inheriting the presidency, which is also an avoidable accident. I can't see him making much of a home in the republican party considering his views on trust busting.
Maybe just make him governor of NY for a while.
Maybe just make him governor of NY for a while.
If the Populists are the party of Trust Busting maybe Teddy gravitates to them?
Alternativley, the much higher class consciousness among the American bourgeoisie could result in him having much more conservative political views which might keep him in the Republican Party.
The US ITTL are gravitating towards a social and political system that is rather similar to that of various Southern American nations, and probably even to Spain (the widespread low-level violence between capitalist squadrons and militant workers reminds me particularly of early 20th century Spain). It demonstrates a distinct and plausible path of development the US could have taken (instead of becoming the world's democratic champion and leader for a while), shows us the bullet the US have dodged (and Brasil or Argentina have not, with the consequences still evident today). With the endemic corruption bred by this system, we're approaching a sort of caciquismo.
I have an eery feeling that TTL's socialist revolution in America is not going to be the nice democratic utopia I would've wished for, too, when I started reading the thread. Which can be good. It just might be a very blood-soaked business... and I find it harder and harder to predict just how it turns out when it is victorious. Gorgeous! I'm at the edge of my seat.
I have an eery feeling that TTL's socialist revolution in America is not going to be the nice democratic utopia I would've wished for, too, when I started reading the thread. Which can be good. It just might be a very blood-soaked business... and I find it harder and harder to predict just how it turns out when it is victorious. Gorgeous! I'm at the edge of my seat.
The Growth of the SLP and the STLA
The Socialist Labor Party had been formed in 1876, and after a few flickering signs of life in the wake of the 1877 railway strike, spent the next two decades languishing in obscurity and irrelevance. Chronic internecine spats and the sheer lack of appeal the philosophy of socialism seemed to hold for most Americans simply left the party dead in the water.
In the 1890s, the party came under the powerful influence of the Curaçaoan Daniel De Leon, who soon took control of the SLP’s media apparatus, and thus made himself its de facto leader. DeLeon was a hardnosed, determined follower of the doctrines of Karl Marx. His vigorous personality and force of will pumped new life into a scattered, dissipated party composed largely of German immigrants and their descendants, who were dangerously cut off from the mainstream of American cultural life.
But the great turn did not come until ’94.
The SLP fully supported the Pullman strikers from the beginning. When the strike spiraled into rioting which spiraled into insurrection, its meager printing houses across the country churned out broadsheet after broadsheet cheering the rebel workers of ‘the three insurrectionary cities’. De Leon himself called those slain on the barricades of Chicago or San Francisco ‘the flower of the working class’. It strengthened his uncompromising anti-reformist views (he condemned 'parliamentary idiocy' among certain socialists), and compelled him to add as the masthead of the SLP's Daily People the slogan, 'the working class and employing class have nothing in common'.
When the killing was done, for those horrified and dismayed at the repression, the SLP was the only party that did not cheer the government response or offer mealy-mouthed half apologies like the Populists did. Rather, it unabashedly said: “the workers were right—the bosses were wrong.” This alone was enough to win them a massive groundswell of support from the disgruntled workers and socialist-inclined intellectuals of the United States that felt the ‘Red Summer’ was a personal defeat for them.
The Socialists, for their part, saw their opportunity and did not neglect to seize it. DeLeon had always been something of a bull-headed, doctrinaire man who did not take kindly to ideological or political dissent. But even he could see that this was the SLP’s great chance to expand beyond its tiny immigrant base and ‘Americanize’ itself. The hope of a true, mass American workingman’s party seemed in reach. Thus he consented for the standing of candidates in the 1896 elections. Of course, he still refused to believe political action within the confines of the bourgeois state could ever produce any real change, much less substitute for organized revolutionary action, but he came around to the possibility that congress might be a useful forum for the 'representatives of the proletariat' to air their grievances and advertise their doctrines to the world.
So, it was anger over ’94 that won the SLP the astonishing 8.3% in 1896 that rocketed them to national prominence and gave them a voice in congress. But they could not ride on righteous indignation forever, and steps had to be taken to shore up and expand their constituencies.
The answer was a campaign of aggressive agitation that stretched through ’97 and to the next elections of ’98.
Socialists in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, New York, Denver, and other strongholds took advantage of the recent influx in members (and thus manpower) to open soup kitchens for the unemployed or underemployed, where a night’s meal was always accompanied by a fiery speech or a pamphlet explaining just how capitalism lay coiled up at the root of any and all suffering. These soup kitchens were often closed under pretext of ‘public health’, which led to certain Socialist wags hanging up signs that read: WARNING! THOSE WHO ENTER MAY BE INFECTED WITH HUMANITY!
The SLP also worked to assimilate labor unions, whether as corporate bodies or by reaching out to individual workers. The SLP’s affiliated union league was the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Ironically, because it had been so small and entirely irrelevant in ’94, and thus played no real part in the drama, it remained legal, unlike the moderate AFL.
Thus, in a strange twist of fate, the hysterical proscription of the AFL led to an explosion in membership for the much more radical STLA. In 1893, it had much less than 10,000 members (records are spotty). A disproportionate number of these were not workers at all, but socialist intellectuals and sympathizers, largely middle class.
This began to change in the aftermath of the Red Summer. By 1899, the STLA’s membership had ballooned to nearly 100,000. It would continue to grow in the early years of the 20th century, until its own destruction.
The increasingly heavy hand of the bosses and the formation of the LDP certainly helped in driving disgruntled workers into the union’s arms. So did the frustratingly stagnant wages in much of the country. The government's increasing unwillingness to intervene in labor disputes on the side of labor, the fresh leeway given to anti-union forces by the Red Act, and many other factors such as a marked drop in foreign investment (primarily from Britain and France) thanks to the recent and growing instability, led to a persistent halt in real wage growth, and even a drop in many parts of the country. The upshot was a fruitful harvest for the SLP.
Organizers generally toned down the more radical talk of absolute common administration of production or a world socialist republic when trying to rope in prospective Socialists. But much to the relief of DeLeon, Seidel, and the rest of the leadership, most were not scared off once they found out what socialism was ‘really about’.
Another great boon to the popularity of the SLP and STLA was the entrance of various well-known and admired personalities into the party. In 1897, Edward Bellamy, author of the phenomenally popular utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1877 officially joined the party and begin writing editorials for the Daily People. A year later, Clarence Darrow, the silver-tongued country lawyer that had defended Debs in court and counted the executed Governor Altgeld as a personal friend, made his allegiance to the party public. In his state of Illinois and elsewhere in the country, Darrow put his rhetorical skills to good use, denouncing the great capitalists he wryly called ‘the good people’ and expressing a belief in the inevitability of socialist society, as determined by historical law (Darrow was a staunch determinist). The adherence of many middle class intellectuals alongside rank and file workers gave the Socialists an outsized voice in 'respectable' society, as well as access to hitherto unavailable financial resources in the way of donations or membership dues (which were soon scaled according to party members' ability to pay).
The STLA was especially successful among the steelworkers of Pennsylvania, who would never forget Homestead, and among miners of the same region (and also of nearby West Virginia) with their long and sad history of violent class conflict, stretching all the way back to the storied ‘Molly Maguires’ of the late 1860s. The SLP, which was after all disproportionately German immigrant in composition, also made efforts to reach out to recent arrivals on American shores. Attempts to organize Jewish, Italian, or Hungarian labor proved complex—many of these men and women had come from such desperate poverty that the greediest of American bosses seemed like a benevolent saint—but there were many victories, such as the mass incorporation of largely female and Eastern European New York garment workers into the United Textile Workers union in 1897. First and second generation immigrants remained of outsized importance within the party up to the revolution itself.
The south was another region the SLP coveted, but it was also the hardest to crack. A great part of the south’s manual labor was performed by black men and women, who proved nearly impossible to organize thanks to the precarious existences they maintained, always balancing on the razor’s edge of poverty and racial terror. To many southern blacks, joining a union simply did not seem worth risking the wrath of boss or landlord. The powerful regional Democratic Party in the south also impeded the mission of the Socialists, rarely taking well to ‘northern and alien agitators’ (which, of course, the party’s emissaries did tend to be) stirring up trouble. Even in a big city like Charleston or Mobile, a socialist organizer was liable to wake up to a note stuck in his door with a knife, demanding he “GET OUT OF TOWN,” and assuring him he “WON’T BE ASKED AGAIN.” Venturing into the countryside could be near-suicidal. They made some small inroads, particularly in the coastal cities like New Orleans and Savannah, but the Socialists’ moment in the sun below the Mason-Dixon line would not come until the drama at Wilmington in November 1898.
Still, thanks to concentrated effort and a skillful manipulation of the emotions aroused by the sight of fellow workingmen and women shot down in the streets by federal troops the SLP was enabled to build up a real base.
In 1898, Socialist Victor Berger was elected mayor of Milwaukee. Hundreds of socialist aldermen and local officials were also swept into office across the industrial belt, including several in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, much to the annoyance of Governor Frick.
With the increase in its share of the national popular vote from the 8.3% they’d won in 1896, to 13.72%, the Socialists picked up 17 new seats, raising their total to 34. It was a fine increase, though certainly aided by the lower general turnout (relative to presidential election years) that was typical for American midterm elections.
Another jolt to the SLP was the passage of the ‘Red Act’ in 1897 and its implementation in 1898, which was immediately seized upon by bosses and local governments as a license for union busting.
When a strike committee was broken up by police or militia, its leaders arrested on the grounds of ‘conspiring to interfere with the lawful exercise of property right’, and everyone else sent home, there was always a socialist on hand to feed the festering hatred and explain that there could never be any compromise with capital in the long-term.
A twenty-year old New York furrier called Lazslo, a Hungarian who’d been kicked out of his NWA local for his radical convictions—was heard to say, once he had ascended to treasurer for the rival STLA-affiliated local—that “the socialists…were the only ones who were really fighting.”
For the part of Gompers and the NWA, they continued their policy of stringent moderation, counseling an avoidance of strikes if at all possible, and expelling without further consideration any member who exhibited socialist sympathies, or was moved to defend the Red Summer. Gompers went as far as to excuse the Red Act. While he did not outright speak in support of it, he claimed that “it ought not to scare anyone so bad as it does the anarchists.”
This made it quite easy for the SLP to smear Gompers and his allies as cowards and traitors, the bosses’ lickspittles and loyal opposition. In truth, Gompers was always an honest advocate of the workers and their rights—whether his strategies were misguided or not is a value judgment that cannot be made here, but the accusations that he was in the pay of the ‘mine and steel lords’ or that he’d connived at the arrest of Debs and the Chicago workers’ council in ’94 were entirely untrue.
Regardless, the vital energy of the SLP, when compared with the apparent decrepit collaborating spirit of the NWA, resonated with many angry young workers, and the end result of all this tireless activism was that the Socialists in 1898—especially in the aftermath of Wilmington—looked forward with great anticipation to the elections of 1900. They still did not imagine they might seize the presidency but allowed themselves to hope—not without reason—that they might at least eclipse the waning Democrats, and take perhaps 20% of the vote, or perhaps even more. And who knew? If an agreeable compact could be concluded with the Populists, perhaps national power was not such a far-fetched dream after all.
In the 1890s, the party came under the powerful influence of the Curaçaoan Daniel De Leon, who soon took control of the SLP’s media apparatus, and thus made himself its de facto leader. DeLeon was a hardnosed, determined follower of the doctrines of Karl Marx. His vigorous personality and force of will pumped new life into a scattered, dissipated party composed largely of German immigrants and their descendants, who were dangerously cut off from the mainstream of American cultural life.
But the great turn did not come until ’94.
The SLP fully supported the Pullman strikers from the beginning. When the strike spiraled into rioting which spiraled into insurrection, its meager printing houses across the country churned out broadsheet after broadsheet cheering the rebel workers of ‘the three insurrectionary cities’. De Leon himself called those slain on the barricades of Chicago or San Francisco ‘the flower of the working class’. It strengthened his uncompromising anti-reformist views (he condemned 'parliamentary idiocy' among certain socialists), and compelled him to add as the masthead of the SLP's Daily People the slogan, 'the working class and employing class have nothing in common'.
When the killing was done, for those horrified and dismayed at the repression, the SLP was the only party that did not cheer the government response or offer mealy-mouthed half apologies like the Populists did. Rather, it unabashedly said: “the workers were right—the bosses were wrong.” This alone was enough to win them a massive groundswell of support from the disgruntled workers and socialist-inclined intellectuals of the United States that felt the ‘Red Summer’ was a personal defeat for them.
The Socialists, for their part, saw their opportunity and did not neglect to seize it. DeLeon had always been something of a bull-headed, doctrinaire man who did not take kindly to ideological or political dissent. But even he could see that this was the SLP’s great chance to expand beyond its tiny immigrant base and ‘Americanize’ itself. The hope of a true, mass American workingman’s party seemed in reach. Thus he consented for the standing of candidates in the 1896 elections. Of course, he still refused to believe political action within the confines of the bourgeois state could ever produce any real change, much less substitute for organized revolutionary action, but he came around to the possibility that congress might be a useful forum for the 'representatives of the proletariat' to air their grievances and advertise their doctrines to the world.
So, it was anger over ’94 that won the SLP the astonishing 8.3% in 1896 that rocketed them to national prominence and gave them a voice in congress. But they could not ride on righteous indignation forever, and steps had to be taken to shore up and expand their constituencies.
The answer was a campaign of aggressive agitation that stretched through ’97 and to the next elections of ’98.
Socialists in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, New York, Denver, and other strongholds took advantage of the recent influx in members (and thus manpower) to open soup kitchens for the unemployed or underemployed, where a night’s meal was always accompanied by a fiery speech or a pamphlet explaining just how capitalism lay coiled up at the root of any and all suffering. These soup kitchens were often closed under pretext of ‘public health’, which led to certain Socialist wags hanging up signs that read: WARNING! THOSE WHO ENTER MAY BE INFECTED WITH HUMANITY!
The SLP also worked to assimilate labor unions, whether as corporate bodies or by reaching out to individual workers. The SLP’s affiliated union league was the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Ironically, because it had been so small and entirely irrelevant in ’94, and thus played no real part in the drama, it remained legal, unlike the moderate AFL.
Thus, in a strange twist of fate, the hysterical proscription of the AFL led to an explosion in membership for the much more radical STLA. In 1893, it had much less than 10,000 members (records are spotty). A disproportionate number of these were not workers at all, but socialist intellectuals and sympathizers, largely middle class.
This began to change in the aftermath of the Red Summer. By 1899, the STLA’s membership had ballooned to nearly 100,000. It would continue to grow in the early years of the 20th century, until its own destruction.
The increasingly heavy hand of the bosses and the formation of the LDP certainly helped in driving disgruntled workers into the union’s arms. So did the frustratingly stagnant wages in much of the country. The government's increasing unwillingness to intervene in labor disputes on the side of labor, the fresh leeway given to anti-union forces by the Red Act, and many other factors such as a marked drop in foreign investment (primarily from Britain and France) thanks to the recent and growing instability, led to a persistent halt in real wage growth, and even a drop in many parts of the country. The upshot was a fruitful harvest for the SLP.
Organizers generally toned down the more radical talk of absolute common administration of production or a world socialist republic when trying to rope in prospective Socialists. But much to the relief of DeLeon, Seidel, and the rest of the leadership, most were not scared off once they found out what socialism was ‘really about’.
Another great boon to the popularity of the SLP and STLA was the entrance of various well-known and admired personalities into the party. In 1897, Edward Bellamy, author of the phenomenally popular utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1877 officially joined the party and begin writing editorials for the Daily People. A year later, Clarence Darrow, the silver-tongued country lawyer that had defended Debs in court and counted the executed Governor Altgeld as a personal friend, made his allegiance to the party public. In his state of Illinois and elsewhere in the country, Darrow put his rhetorical skills to good use, denouncing the great capitalists he wryly called ‘the good people’ and expressing a belief in the inevitability of socialist society, as determined by historical law (Darrow was a staunch determinist). The adherence of many middle class intellectuals alongside rank and file workers gave the Socialists an outsized voice in 'respectable' society, as well as access to hitherto unavailable financial resources in the way of donations or membership dues (which were soon scaled according to party members' ability to pay).
The STLA was especially successful among the steelworkers of Pennsylvania, who would never forget Homestead, and among miners of the same region (and also of nearby West Virginia) with their long and sad history of violent class conflict, stretching all the way back to the storied ‘Molly Maguires’ of the late 1860s. The SLP, which was after all disproportionately German immigrant in composition, also made efforts to reach out to recent arrivals on American shores. Attempts to organize Jewish, Italian, or Hungarian labor proved complex—many of these men and women had come from such desperate poverty that the greediest of American bosses seemed like a benevolent saint—but there were many victories, such as the mass incorporation of largely female and Eastern European New York garment workers into the United Textile Workers union in 1897. First and second generation immigrants remained of outsized importance within the party up to the revolution itself.
The south was another region the SLP coveted, but it was also the hardest to crack. A great part of the south’s manual labor was performed by black men and women, who proved nearly impossible to organize thanks to the precarious existences they maintained, always balancing on the razor’s edge of poverty and racial terror. To many southern blacks, joining a union simply did not seem worth risking the wrath of boss or landlord. The powerful regional Democratic Party in the south also impeded the mission of the Socialists, rarely taking well to ‘northern and alien agitators’ (which, of course, the party’s emissaries did tend to be) stirring up trouble. Even in a big city like Charleston or Mobile, a socialist organizer was liable to wake up to a note stuck in his door with a knife, demanding he “GET OUT OF TOWN,” and assuring him he “WON’T BE ASKED AGAIN.” Venturing into the countryside could be near-suicidal. They made some small inroads, particularly in the coastal cities like New Orleans and Savannah, but the Socialists’ moment in the sun below the Mason-Dixon line would not come until the drama at Wilmington in November 1898.
Still, thanks to concentrated effort and a skillful manipulation of the emotions aroused by the sight of fellow workingmen and women shot down in the streets by federal troops the SLP was enabled to build up a real base.
In 1898, Socialist Victor Berger was elected mayor of Milwaukee. Hundreds of socialist aldermen and local officials were also swept into office across the industrial belt, including several in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, much to the annoyance of Governor Frick.
With the increase in its share of the national popular vote from the 8.3% they’d won in 1896, to 13.72%, the Socialists picked up 17 new seats, raising their total to 34. It was a fine increase, though certainly aided by the lower general turnout (relative to presidential election years) that was typical for American midterm elections.
Another jolt to the SLP was the passage of the ‘Red Act’ in 1897 and its implementation in 1898, which was immediately seized upon by bosses and local governments as a license for union busting.
When a strike committee was broken up by police or militia, its leaders arrested on the grounds of ‘conspiring to interfere with the lawful exercise of property right’, and everyone else sent home, there was always a socialist on hand to feed the festering hatred and explain that there could never be any compromise with capital in the long-term.
A twenty-year old New York furrier called Lazslo, a Hungarian who’d been kicked out of his NWA local for his radical convictions—was heard to say, once he had ascended to treasurer for the rival STLA-affiliated local—that “the socialists…were the only ones who were really fighting.”
For the part of Gompers and the NWA, they continued their policy of stringent moderation, counseling an avoidance of strikes if at all possible, and expelling without further consideration any member who exhibited socialist sympathies, or was moved to defend the Red Summer. Gompers went as far as to excuse the Red Act. While he did not outright speak in support of it, he claimed that “it ought not to scare anyone so bad as it does the anarchists.”
This made it quite easy for the SLP to smear Gompers and his allies as cowards and traitors, the bosses’ lickspittles and loyal opposition. In truth, Gompers was always an honest advocate of the workers and their rights—whether his strategies were misguided or not is a value judgment that cannot be made here, but the accusations that he was in the pay of the ‘mine and steel lords’ or that he’d connived at the arrest of Debs and the Chicago workers’ council in ’94 were entirely untrue.
Regardless, the vital energy of the SLP, when compared with the apparent decrepit collaborating spirit of the NWA, resonated with many angry young workers, and the end result of all this tireless activism was that the Socialists in 1898—especially in the aftermath of Wilmington—looked forward with great anticipation to the elections of 1900. They still did not imagine they might seize the presidency but allowed themselves to hope—not without reason—that they might at least eclipse the waning Democrats, and take perhaps 20% of the vote, or perhaps even more. And who knew? If an agreeable compact could be concluded with the Populists, perhaps national power was not such a far-fetched dream after all.
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Good observation. Civil War and immediately pre-Civil War Spain is one of my 'specialties', and I'm definitely drawing a lot of inspiration from the dire conditions in existence there at the time.
I wonder if the Populists might end up serving as the Mensheviks/SRs to the SLP's Bolsheviks? They take power but end up doing something really bad, blundering into a major war or mishandling a major economic crisis, which massively discredits them and leaves the door open for the SLP to rise and take power from them?
I'm really liking the way the SLP is developing, it's giving me hope that it won't end up repeating the mistakes of the Bolsheviks and other "we must end democracy and civil rights to safeguard the revolution" groups. Or well, since those mistakes haven't been made ITTL, they will just be avoiding them entirely. Anyway, here's hoping for an actual democratic post revolution instead of "Stalin but in America."
"Stalin but in America." is so cliche and America's conditions are way different from 1917 Russia, I don't think Iggies is gonna do that.
Yeah I'm not going to go the 'USSA' route. It might not be a full-on workers' paradise but even the bad bits won't just be OTL-USSR copy and paste.
If you don't mind me asking, and sorry for talking about other TLs in this thread, but can you tell me any TL that follows this premise? The only other socialist america timeline that I've ever read was Reds! and that was as far away from Stalin as can be.
Stalin but in America was the premise of the novel "Joe Steele".
@Napoleon53 also has a "Joe Steele" in "What Madness Is This" (who is once again, Josef Stalin under a different name).
Kaiserreich has Earl Browder as a Stalin-like figure, but I think that's it for the "Stalin in America"
The anthology Back in the USSA has Al Capone becoming the American Stalin (with Debs as the American Lenin, IIRC). But the whole point of that book was a tongue in cheek transposition of Soviet history into America so I suppose maybe they get a pass.
Funny that, there is another great @Napoleon53 TL where Al Capone is featured, but he's an industrial hegemon in the alcohol sector of a Fascist USA.
Maybe La Follete could be a Kerensky figure of sorts ITTL when the revolution occurs?
I prefer Fight and Be Right's Al Capone, who was Chief of State of France.
The Midterms of 1898 and the Decline of the Populist Party
1898 dawned well. The economic malaise that had set in back in ’93 seemed to be dissipating; unemployment had dropped to 12% from 18% two years earlier. That was still unacceptably high, but it was progress.
McKinley’s new tariffs had done much to glut native industry, and even went a ways towards satisfying labor.
But there was trouble to the south.
Spain in ’98 was a pale shadow of the mighty power that had tamed the New World and ruled the seas centuries ago. Dynastic strife and economic stagnation whittled away her power on the continent, while the wars against Napoleon stripped away her American holdings one by one. By the late 19th century, the no-longer-great power of Spain clung only to her metropolitan territory, a pitiable scrap of land in Morocco, the Philippines, and the single jewel remaining in her once grand imperial crown: Cuba.
Cuba was and had been for many centuries a source of great wealth, churning out by sugar by the ton into the markets and the teacups of Europe. Her importance magnified after the loss of St. Domingue to slave rebellion, when she became the Caribbean’s chief supplier of sugarcane. Spain may have lost everything else from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Bravo, but this island she would not surrender.
Unfortunately for her, the Cubans disagreed. Strongly.
A movement towards independence had brewed on the island for many years. It finally exploded in 1868, when the idealistic planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his hundreds of slaves in a show of commitment and then led an ever-growing band of Cuban rebels against the colonial government. The rising lasted ten years, and left tens of thousands of dead. In the end the Spanish managed to quell the revolt, but not to snuff out the embers of revolutionary yearning.
In 1895, the Cuban intellectual José Marti led a band of fellow exiled from the United States back to his fatherland, where they raised the standard of revolution once more. Again Cuba was aflame.
The yanquis watched with keen interest—many an American businessman owned property on the island or invested with those who did. To see the island’s economy wrecked by incessant warfare would not do. Certain humanitarians, also, balked at the cruel treatment meted out by Spanish soldiers to Cuban rebels, and demanded an American intervention on moral grounds.
Whatever their reasoning, the interventionists all agreed it would be easy: Spain’s empire was a dying empire, her armies would dissolve, her ships would be covered by the sea, and her grip on what remained of the old domains would be broken at last.
There were, of course, also plenty staunch non-interventionists. Some worried the creation of an ‘American Empire’ would erode Republican liberties and precipitate the same rotting decadence that had destroyed Rome. Some feared Spain was stronger than she appeared at first glance, and that war would result in a humiliating defeat, or at least a grinding, bloody victory. Some did not want to risk bringing large numbers of non-whites under the same government, and others simply thought the US had no right to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries without immediate cause.
But then there developed an immediate cause.
In February of 1898, the USS Boston—the same cruiser that had fired on San Francisco during the Red Summer—was at anchor in Havana Harbor. She’d been transferred from the Pacific to Atlantic Squadron in the aftermath of ’94, and now been sent by President McKinley to monitor the situation in Cuba and to establish an advance American presence should relations with Spain quickly deteriorate.
They did just that on the night of 15 February, when a massive explosion rocked the ship and killed most of its crew, before sending Boston to the bottom of the ocean.
It is today unclear what caused the explosion—Spanish sabotage or a mine were immediately blamed, of course, but more recent investigation has suggested (as was also suggested at the time by cooler heads) that the most probable cause was an internal boiler accident.
Nevertheless, outpouring of popular indignation was immense, and there was really no choice but war.
(A notable exception to that popular indignation was in San Francisco, where news that 'the Boston's gone down' was met with much celebration in certain parts of town. That very few of the men who had shelled the city in '94 would have still been serving aboard the ship four years later did not seem to strike many of these revelers as particularly important).
A motion for war was presented to congress.
But this was not a simple congress of Republicans and Democrats, as in years gone by.
When the motion to declare war was presented to the House, the Populists voted against it 37 to 24. The 17 Socialists voted against it to a man.
Ten Democrats also voted ‘no’, for a total ‘nay’ vote of 96 against the 261 ‘yes’ votes.
It passed the Republican-dominated Senate with even greater ease.
Thanks to the strong majority held by the Republicans, it really hardly mattered what the other parties thought or wanted, but the mere fact that there had been an appreciable resistance to the motion rankled many.
The Populists were roundly condemned as cowardly or unpatriotic, and this would be one of the factors, among many, that would lead to their downfall.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
On 9 September 1894, Bryan wrote to his wife concerning the recent suppression of the three Communes. His letter expressed a deep horror at the conduct of the government, and a deep sympathy for the strikers who had become rebels. “You know I am not an anarchist nor am I inclined towards any communistic school of thought. I am nevertheless overcome with despair. That American workingmen should be shot down in the streets by American soldiers! Does not a man have the right to open his mouth and speak as he believes? Does not a man have the right to demand a living wage? I am given to understand the soldiers of the government fired first. If that is so, does not a man fired upon have the right to return fire? I can hardly now look upon the blue coat of our own army without the bile rising in my throat.”
The letter did not come to light until many years after his death and indicates somewhat more radical sympathies than those he expressed in public (he never, in any official, public capacity, defended the actions of the rebels of the Red Summer, even when he denounced their repression). It also—though this has been much less commonly noted—may go aways towards explaining the anti-war stance he, and by extension the Populist Party, took in 1898. He was not the only Populist brought about to a dimmer view of United States military might by the events of ’94. Thomas Watson complained to a friend that “it is…a bitter pill to swallow, to understand that our soldiers might be employed—and employed so readily—in such monarchic fashion.”
Thus, come the clash with Spain, the Populists—or at least a significant number of them—were disillusioned with images of military glory and conquest.
Compounding this nervous distaste for displays of military might was the question of domestic concerns as against adventuring. The depression of ’93 was receding, but it was not yet gone. There were still plenty of western farmers only just eking out a living as crops rotted in storehouses or remained unsown. Most of the Populists balked at the prospect of funding foreign wars while there remained Americans in such dire straits.
“Not a single silver coin for guns or warships while a single American farmer cannot raise a crop,” Representative Goodwyn (P-Alabama) stood and pronounced, while Republicans and Democrats alike howled him down.
The Populists’ setting their faces against a generally popular war is often pegged as the reason for their tumble from relevance, but this is a severe oversimplification. It certainly did not help them at the polls that year, but the SLP gained, despite every one of its congressional representatives voting down the war. Moreover, that the gains of the Populists had stalled out was not immediately apparent until the elections of 1900, and their dissolution until later still.
In fact, the immediate cause of the Populist Party’s reversal of fortunes was most likely that the depression was receding, though as noted, it was not over. The discovery of gold in the Yukon two years prior had flooded the market with precious metal and given a livening jolt to the listing American economy. Banks found they could lend again, and farmers found they could sell their crops and pay off their loans. Argentina, India, and Eastern Europe had suffered great agricultural failures that year, with drought, hail, and vermin conspiring to precipitously lower output across the globe. Meanwhile, the American wheat yield of 1898 clocked in at 550 million bushels, nearly 20% higher than the average for the past decade. Suddenly the world market was laid wide open for the surplus product of American farmers.
In short, the Populist’s core constituency, desperate farmers, had just lost the chief reason to vote for them. Even McKinley’s new tariffs, unpopular as they were with the agricultural sector, did not do much to dent the ongoing recovery.
A final reason for the Populists’ less impressive results in the midterms of ’98 and 1900 was their ostensible ally in congress—the Socialist Labor Party.
The SLP in 1898 was still largely ignored in the halls of power, save for the occasional wary glance thrown in its direction when an established politician recalled its existence. When it had more than doubled its gains in ’96, after the ’94 surge, they had drawn further frightful looks. But still, the prevailing wisdom was that the SLP was still coasting on the furor following the Red Summer, and that they would soon fade back into oblivion, or at the very worst continue as the radical tail of the Populist Party (but not, certainly, as a tail that would ever wag the dog).
Now that the Red Act was in effect, it was also dearly hoped the ground-level, direct organization carried out by socialist militants would be neatly nipped in the bud, so that they would be effectively shut out from power on all fronts.
But it was not to be.
Many have asked why the Populist Party, a party centered around the weal and woe of the ‘common man’ and defining itself in opposition to moneyed interests splintered and eventually found itself on the ash heap of history while the Socialists, apparently oriented in much the same direction, not only endured but ultimately thrived.
It must be considered what voter each party appealed to. While there was certainly some overlap, with a number of farmers, particularly in the west and in the industrial belt voting Socialist, and a number of urban laborers, particularly in the cities of the south and the mid-Atlantic, voting Populist, by and large the two parties were defined by an urban-rural split.
If there was a typical Populist voter, he was an ‘old-stock’ American of English or Scots-Irish ancestry. He was a smallholder who jealously guarded the farm he had either inherited from his father or built up himself. He was staunchly patriotic and deeply distrustful of great cities and the seediness they seemed to breed.
If there was a typical Socialist voter, he was an immigrant or the son of immigrants, probably German or Italian in ancestry. He was a laborer who worked for a wage in a factory or workshop. He was an inhabitant of a large northern metropolis, possibly steeped in old-world radical tradition, and probably ambivalent about patriotism, if not outright hostile.
When the recovery finally began in ’98, it was the first group that found itself rescued from perdition. As independent producers, the market decided their renumeration. When the gold flowed, so did the wheat and the corn, and they prospered.
Such was not necessarily the case for the industrial laborers. Though a thriving market and rising profits ought to have meant rising wages, this was not true as a general rule. The passing of the Red Act enabled proprietors to label most any strike or dissent as insurrection and call for militia or troops to put it down. As such, they were hardly compelled to boost their workers’ pay, and indeed, now had an excellent incentive and opportunity to slash them. Real wages fell by 2% across the United States (but disproportionately in the Industrial Belt) between 1896 and 1899.
When economic conditions improved, the SLP’s base didn’t abandon it as did that of the Populists, because, for many of them, times had not improved. At least, not noticeably. In fact, many workers reached their peak of discontentment between ’96 and ’98, and the ranks of the Socialists actually swelled.
It has also been questioned why the anti-war stance of the Populists damaged them at the ballot box, while the if anything more uncompromising pacifism of the Socialists did not seem to have the same effect.
There certainly was no shortage of newspaper editorials or rival congressman denouncing the SLP and its adherents as unamerican reds, or the favorite; ‘aliens’. But the SLP’s relatively fringe status worked in its favor. The Populists received the brunt of hawkish attacks because, while the Republicans and conservative Democrats certainly viewed the ascendance of the Socialists as a worrying trend, they still saw their great enemy in the Populists, who seemed the more immediate and the more powerful menace. Thus, the Socialists dodged much of the odium and condemnation they made have otherwise received.
Additionally, the largely first- and second-generation immigrant composition of the SLP’s voter base (at this point possibly still more than 50% of the party) meant that many were simply not as fervently attached by emotion to the glories and triumphs of the US Military. This is not to give credence to the old canard that migrants were by nature subversive or hateful of their new country, but many were not so keyed in to the patriotic cultural rituals and customs of the United States, meaning they simply did not exhibit the knee-jerk nationalism triggered in many by was widely viewed as a just war.
All this was much clearer in retrospect.
Anyway, the status of antiwar activists was not raised when the optimists were proven correct, as America triumphed over Spain in a matter of weeks.
The nation went to the polls in 1898 generally good spirits, still flush from the victory and the subsequent cession of Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines.
However, the affair did not proceed without some trouble. In certain towns, especially in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the western mining states, private guards were hired by local party bosses to ‘stand watch’ over the ballot boxes for the purposes of ensuring ‘orderly’ voting. The true motivation—to prevent Socialist victories in districts that seemed favorably disposed—was painfully transparent to most. In Denver, a number of miners were turned away from the polling station on the dubious grounds that they had ‘already voted’. When the miners protested, a scuffle broke out, and one man died of a gunshot wound.
On the flipside, in the increasingly militant regions of western Pennsylvania and the Appalachians, reports came of men pressured into voting SLP by their radical coworkers. “They called me ‘blackleg’,” a molder who had staunchly refused to join the STLA-affiliated steelworkers’ union recalled. “And told me I would vote the red ticket, or they would split my skull.’
When the results came in, the first takeaway was that the Populists had been somewhat disappointed. They in fact gained in the House, it was just not as large a gain as they’d hoped. They rose to 70 seats, adding another nine to those they’d held in 1896. In fact, they actually lost three seats to the Socialists and one to the Republicans in the north but made them up in other quarters thanks to the collapsing Democrats.
The Democrats fell ever further, dropping to 29 representatives, and losing nine of those they’d held in ’96.
The Republicans lost, but still managed to cling to their majority. They gave up 28 seats but gained two, one Democrat and one Populist, bringing their grand majority down from 215 to 189.
But it was the Socialists that emerged from the election as the great winners. The other eight Democratic seats were theirs, along with the three they’d snatched from the Populists. Having lost no representatives, they also stripped away 17 Republican seats, doubling their number and raising it to 34.
So, as it stood following the elections of 1898, the House of Representatives seated 198 Republicans, 29 Democrats, 70 Populists, 34 socialists, and 24 independents and others.
The Socialists were now, to the horror of the established parties, a larger party than the Democrats in the House. Granted, it was not by much, since the Populists, Socialists, and Democrats all hovered much nearer to each another than any did to the GOP—but the very idea of it was sobering.
The papers predictably carried headlines such as the New York Herald’s ‘REDS ADVANCE IN CONGRESS’.
As for the Populists, they lost two of their senators. One went to the Democrats, one went to the Republican.
The Populists did not yet realize it, but their meteoric rise had already begun to sputter out.
Bryan wrote in his journal simply, ‘hopeful but not smashing’.
Some Populists, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd (who would himself in due time join the SLP), privately believed that the ranks of the party would swell once more should the next inevitable economic crisis come.
But the damage was done. Though the Populists would continue to contest elections as long as they were held, their influence declined slowly, and they would never again gain the peak they reached in ’94-’96.
McKinley’s new tariffs had done much to glut native industry, and even went a ways towards satisfying labor.
But there was trouble to the south.
Spain in ’98 was a pale shadow of the mighty power that had tamed the New World and ruled the seas centuries ago. Dynastic strife and economic stagnation whittled away her power on the continent, while the wars against Napoleon stripped away her American holdings one by one. By the late 19th century, the no-longer-great power of Spain clung only to her metropolitan territory, a pitiable scrap of land in Morocco, the Philippines, and the single jewel remaining in her once grand imperial crown: Cuba.
Cuba was and had been for many centuries a source of great wealth, churning out by sugar by the ton into the markets and the teacups of Europe. Her importance magnified after the loss of St. Domingue to slave rebellion, when she became the Caribbean’s chief supplier of sugarcane. Spain may have lost everything else from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Bravo, but this island she would not surrender.
Unfortunately for her, the Cubans disagreed. Strongly.
A movement towards independence had brewed on the island for many years. It finally exploded in 1868, when the idealistic planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his hundreds of slaves in a show of commitment and then led an ever-growing band of Cuban rebels against the colonial government. The rising lasted ten years, and left tens of thousands of dead. In the end the Spanish managed to quell the revolt, but not to snuff out the embers of revolutionary yearning.
In 1895, the Cuban intellectual José Marti led a band of fellow exiled from the United States back to his fatherland, where they raised the standard of revolution once more. Again Cuba was aflame.
The yanquis watched with keen interest—many an American businessman owned property on the island or invested with those who did. To see the island’s economy wrecked by incessant warfare would not do. Certain humanitarians, also, balked at the cruel treatment meted out by Spanish soldiers to Cuban rebels, and demanded an American intervention on moral grounds.
Whatever their reasoning, the interventionists all agreed it would be easy: Spain’s empire was a dying empire, her armies would dissolve, her ships would be covered by the sea, and her grip on what remained of the old domains would be broken at last.
There were, of course, also plenty staunch non-interventionists. Some worried the creation of an ‘American Empire’ would erode Republican liberties and precipitate the same rotting decadence that had destroyed Rome. Some feared Spain was stronger than she appeared at first glance, and that war would result in a humiliating defeat, or at least a grinding, bloody victory. Some did not want to risk bringing large numbers of non-whites under the same government, and others simply thought the US had no right to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries without immediate cause.
But then there developed an immediate cause.
In February of 1898, the USS Boston—the same cruiser that had fired on San Francisco during the Red Summer—was at anchor in Havana Harbor. She’d been transferred from the Pacific to Atlantic Squadron in the aftermath of ’94, and now been sent by President McKinley to monitor the situation in Cuba and to establish an advance American presence should relations with Spain quickly deteriorate.
They did just that on the night of 15 February, when a massive explosion rocked the ship and killed most of its crew, before sending Boston to the bottom of the ocean.
It is today unclear what caused the explosion—Spanish sabotage or a mine were immediately blamed, of course, but more recent investigation has suggested (as was also suggested at the time by cooler heads) that the most probable cause was an internal boiler accident.
Nevertheless, outpouring of popular indignation was immense, and there was really no choice but war.
(A notable exception to that popular indignation was in San Francisco, where news that 'the Boston's gone down' was met with much celebration in certain parts of town. That very few of the men who had shelled the city in '94 would have still been serving aboard the ship four years later did not seem to strike many of these revelers as particularly important).
A motion for war was presented to congress.
But this was not a simple congress of Republicans and Democrats, as in years gone by.
When the motion to declare war was presented to the House, the Populists voted against it 37 to 24. The 17 Socialists voted against it to a man.
Ten Democrats also voted ‘no’, for a total ‘nay’ vote of 96 against the 261 ‘yes’ votes.
It passed the Republican-dominated Senate with even greater ease.
Thanks to the strong majority held by the Republicans, it really hardly mattered what the other parties thought or wanted, but the mere fact that there had been an appreciable resistance to the motion rankled many.
The Populists were roundly condemned as cowardly or unpatriotic, and this would be one of the factors, among many, that would lead to their downfall.
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Excerpt from Meteor of the Evening: The Populist Party (Alabama Publishing Collective, 2003)
On 9 September 1894, Bryan wrote to his wife concerning the recent suppression of the three Communes. His letter expressed a deep horror at the conduct of the government, and a deep sympathy for the strikers who had become rebels. “You know I am not an anarchist nor am I inclined towards any communistic school of thought. I am nevertheless overcome with despair. That American workingmen should be shot down in the streets by American soldiers! Does not a man have the right to open his mouth and speak as he believes? Does not a man have the right to demand a living wage? I am given to understand the soldiers of the government fired first. If that is so, does not a man fired upon have the right to return fire? I can hardly now look upon the blue coat of our own army without the bile rising in my throat.”
The letter did not come to light until many years after his death and indicates somewhat more radical sympathies than those he expressed in public (he never, in any official, public capacity, defended the actions of the rebels of the Red Summer, even when he denounced their repression). It also—though this has been much less commonly noted—may go aways towards explaining the anti-war stance he, and by extension the Populist Party, took in 1898. He was not the only Populist brought about to a dimmer view of United States military might by the events of ’94. Thomas Watson complained to a friend that “it is…a bitter pill to swallow, to understand that our soldiers might be employed—and employed so readily—in such monarchic fashion.”
Thus, come the clash with Spain, the Populists—or at least a significant number of them—were disillusioned with images of military glory and conquest.
Compounding this nervous distaste for displays of military might was the question of domestic concerns as against adventuring. The depression of ’93 was receding, but it was not yet gone. There were still plenty of western farmers only just eking out a living as crops rotted in storehouses or remained unsown. Most of the Populists balked at the prospect of funding foreign wars while there remained Americans in such dire straits.
“Not a single silver coin for guns or warships while a single American farmer cannot raise a crop,” Representative Goodwyn (P-Alabama) stood and pronounced, while Republicans and Democrats alike howled him down.
The Populists’ setting their faces against a generally popular war is often pegged as the reason for their tumble from relevance, but this is a severe oversimplification. It certainly did not help them at the polls that year, but the SLP gained, despite every one of its congressional representatives voting down the war. Moreover, that the gains of the Populists had stalled out was not immediately apparent until the elections of 1900, and their dissolution until later still.
In fact, the immediate cause of the Populist Party’s reversal of fortunes was most likely that the depression was receding, though as noted, it was not over. The discovery of gold in the Yukon two years prior had flooded the market with precious metal and given a livening jolt to the listing American economy. Banks found they could lend again, and farmers found they could sell their crops and pay off their loans. Argentina, India, and Eastern Europe had suffered great agricultural failures that year, with drought, hail, and vermin conspiring to precipitously lower output across the globe. Meanwhile, the American wheat yield of 1898 clocked in at 550 million bushels, nearly 20% higher than the average for the past decade. Suddenly the world market was laid wide open for the surplus product of American farmers.
In short, the Populist’s core constituency, desperate farmers, had just lost the chief reason to vote for them. Even McKinley’s new tariffs, unpopular as they were with the agricultural sector, did not do much to dent the ongoing recovery.
A final reason for the Populists’ less impressive results in the midterms of ’98 and 1900 was their ostensible ally in congress—the Socialist Labor Party.
The SLP in 1898 was still largely ignored in the halls of power, save for the occasional wary glance thrown in its direction when an established politician recalled its existence. When it had more than doubled its gains in ’96, after the ’94 surge, they had drawn further frightful looks. But still, the prevailing wisdom was that the SLP was still coasting on the furor following the Red Summer, and that they would soon fade back into oblivion, or at the very worst continue as the radical tail of the Populist Party (but not, certainly, as a tail that would ever wag the dog).
Now that the Red Act was in effect, it was also dearly hoped the ground-level, direct organization carried out by socialist militants would be neatly nipped in the bud, so that they would be effectively shut out from power on all fronts.
But it was not to be.
Many have asked why the Populist Party, a party centered around the weal and woe of the ‘common man’ and defining itself in opposition to moneyed interests splintered and eventually found itself on the ash heap of history while the Socialists, apparently oriented in much the same direction, not only endured but ultimately thrived.
It must be considered what voter each party appealed to. While there was certainly some overlap, with a number of farmers, particularly in the west and in the industrial belt voting Socialist, and a number of urban laborers, particularly in the cities of the south and the mid-Atlantic, voting Populist, by and large the two parties were defined by an urban-rural split.
If there was a typical Populist voter, he was an ‘old-stock’ American of English or Scots-Irish ancestry. He was a smallholder who jealously guarded the farm he had either inherited from his father or built up himself. He was staunchly patriotic and deeply distrustful of great cities and the seediness they seemed to breed.
If there was a typical Socialist voter, he was an immigrant or the son of immigrants, probably German or Italian in ancestry. He was a laborer who worked for a wage in a factory or workshop. He was an inhabitant of a large northern metropolis, possibly steeped in old-world radical tradition, and probably ambivalent about patriotism, if not outright hostile.
When the recovery finally began in ’98, it was the first group that found itself rescued from perdition. As independent producers, the market decided their renumeration. When the gold flowed, so did the wheat and the corn, and they prospered.
Such was not necessarily the case for the industrial laborers. Though a thriving market and rising profits ought to have meant rising wages, this was not true as a general rule. The passing of the Red Act enabled proprietors to label most any strike or dissent as insurrection and call for militia or troops to put it down. As such, they were hardly compelled to boost their workers’ pay, and indeed, now had an excellent incentive and opportunity to slash them. Real wages fell by 2% across the United States (but disproportionately in the Industrial Belt) between 1896 and 1899.
When economic conditions improved, the SLP’s base didn’t abandon it as did that of the Populists, because, for many of them, times had not improved. At least, not noticeably. In fact, many workers reached their peak of discontentment between ’96 and ’98, and the ranks of the Socialists actually swelled.
It has also been questioned why the anti-war stance of the Populists damaged them at the ballot box, while the if anything more uncompromising pacifism of the Socialists did not seem to have the same effect.
There certainly was no shortage of newspaper editorials or rival congressman denouncing the SLP and its adherents as unamerican reds, or the favorite; ‘aliens’. But the SLP’s relatively fringe status worked in its favor. The Populists received the brunt of hawkish attacks because, while the Republicans and conservative Democrats certainly viewed the ascendance of the Socialists as a worrying trend, they still saw their great enemy in the Populists, who seemed the more immediate and the more powerful menace. Thus, the Socialists dodged much of the odium and condemnation they made have otherwise received.
Additionally, the largely first- and second-generation immigrant composition of the SLP’s voter base (at this point possibly still more than 50% of the party) meant that many were simply not as fervently attached by emotion to the glories and triumphs of the US Military. This is not to give credence to the old canard that migrants were by nature subversive or hateful of their new country, but many were not so keyed in to the patriotic cultural rituals and customs of the United States, meaning they simply did not exhibit the knee-jerk nationalism triggered in many by was widely viewed as a just war.
All this was much clearer in retrospect.
Anyway, the status of antiwar activists was not raised when the optimists were proven correct, as America triumphed over Spain in a matter of weeks.
The nation went to the polls in 1898 generally good spirits, still flush from the victory and the subsequent cession of Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines.
However, the affair did not proceed without some trouble. In certain towns, especially in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the western mining states, private guards were hired by local party bosses to ‘stand watch’ over the ballot boxes for the purposes of ensuring ‘orderly’ voting. The true motivation—to prevent Socialist victories in districts that seemed favorably disposed—was painfully transparent to most. In Denver, a number of miners were turned away from the polling station on the dubious grounds that they had ‘already voted’. When the miners protested, a scuffle broke out, and one man died of a gunshot wound.
On the flipside, in the increasingly militant regions of western Pennsylvania and the Appalachians, reports came of men pressured into voting SLP by their radical coworkers. “They called me ‘blackleg’,” a molder who had staunchly refused to join the STLA-affiliated steelworkers’ union recalled. “And told me I would vote the red ticket, or they would split my skull.’
When the results came in, the first takeaway was that the Populists had been somewhat disappointed. They in fact gained in the House, it was just not as large a gain as they’d hoped. They rose to 70 seats, adding another nine to those they’d held in 1896. In fact, they actually lost three seats to the Socialists and one to the Republicans in the north but made them up in other quarters thanks to the collapsing Democrats.
The Democrats fell ever further, dropping to 29 representatives, and losing nine of those they’d held in ’96.
The Republicans lost, but still managed to cling to their majority. They gave up 28 seats but gained two, one Democrat and one Populist, bringing their grand majority down from 215 to 189.
But it was the Socialists that emerged from the election as the great winners. The other eight Democratic seats were theirs, along with the three they’d snatched from the Populists. Having lost no representatives, they also stripped away 17 Republican seats, doubling their number and raising it to 34.
So, as it stood following the elections of 1898, the House of Representatives seated 198 Republicans, 29 Democrats, 70 Populists, 34 socialists, and 24 independents and others.
The Socialists were now, to the horror of the established parties, a larger party than the Democrats in the House. Granted, it was not by much, since the Populists, Socialists, and Democrats all hovered much nearer to each another than any did to the GOP—but the very idea of it was sobering.
The papers predictably carried headlines such as the New York Herald’s ‘REDS ADVANCE IN CONGRESS’.
As for the Populists, they lost two of their senators. One went to the Democrats, one went to the Republican.
The Populists did not yet realize it, but their meteoric rise had already begun to sputter out.
Bryan wrote in his journal simply, ‘hopeful but not smashing’.
Some Populists, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd (who would himself in due time join the SLP), privately believed that the ranks of the party would swell once more should the next inevitable economic crisis come.
But the damage was done. Though the Populists would continue to contest elections as long as they were held, their influence declined slowly, and they would never again gain the peak they reached in ’94-’96.
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Further Advances and the Ascendancy of Henry Frick
Excerpt from Blood and Steel: The Rise and Fall of Henry C. Frick, by Philip Dray (Montevideo University publishing, 2003)
In December of 1897, three months after the Lattimer Massacre, Governor Frick printed the first 1,000 copies of the Voice of the Nation. The paper initially circulated only in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and a few other major Pennsylvanian towns, but it soon found willing presses in New York, Illinois, the upper south, and even further afield.
It was an instant success. Ostensibly it was only another of the many weekly newssheets that were so popular among the American public. But, like most newssheets, it had a certain slant. Frick’s slant was one that resonated widely in the jittery, paranoid atmosphere fostered by the Red Summer, the seemingly untrammeled march of the Socialists in congress, the Lattimer catastrophe, and a number of smaller-scale strike actions and work stoppages that rippled across the country in ’96-’99.
The Voice was viciously anti-radical and anti-socialist. Frick himself and his editors might have disputed the charge ‘anti-labor’, but not many others would have.
The very first issue, a retrospective on the events of ’94, featuring assembled eyewitness accounts from the three insurrectionary cities, denounced the strikers as a ‘plundering horde’ and ‘creeping rabble under the red flag’.
An editorial of 1898, concerning the speech of Socialist representative Victor Berger in congress, called him a ‘dissipated, ranting Dutchman without a country,’ and went on later to assert coolly that, ‘the only cure for such absurd, poisonous doctrines is a heavy dose of lead.’
The masthead of the Voice thundered, ‘Countrymen awake!’
And to many who wrote in to the paper, it did seem like the Voice, and its readers, were the only ones awake.
Frick gladly printed them, so long as they were in step with the paper’s narrative.
‘How can the scatterbrained gentlemen in congress,’ complained one letter, from the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a New York silk merchant. ‘Continue blathering about trade and metals and scuffles with Spain when we stand on the brink of anarchy? A republic helmed by such ‘statesmen’ very nearly deserves oblivion!’
The Voice, whose columns were often written by Frick himself, and by a number of regular guest writers, tepidly supported the war effort against Spain in ’98. But even at the height of the fighting, the paper concerned itself primarily with the supposed socialistic threat lurking at home.
By 1899, the paper had achieved a national circulation of about 250,000 copies a week, making it one of the most popular publications in the country. If Homestead had briefly brought Frick to the country’s attention seven years earlier, the Voice of the Nation finally kept him there.
Frick was undeterred by those who mocked him for ‘playing newsman’ while he was supposed to be governing the state of Pennsylvania. Indeed, it did not seem to interfere with his duties. His tenure was not particularly eventful, save for the Lattimer Affair. In late 1897, he established two new public libraries, one in Pittsburgh and one in Philadelphia. Many whispered it was yet another petty swipe at his nemesis and erstwhile friend, Carnegie, whose philanthropy was legendary. In mid-1898 Carnegie Steel, of which he was still majority shareholder, was renamed U.S Steel. Later that year, he held a parade for the returning Pennsylvanian soldiers who’d taken part in the Cuban campaign. Despite his reputation for avarice, during his time as Pennsylvania’s governor he never attempted to award himself or his friends government contracts—despite accusations to the contrary—though he had ample opportunity to do so.
However, failure to chase gold did not mean he was above blatant corruption and politicking. In the fall of 1898, when seven socialist aldermen (constituting a majority) were elected to the city council of increasingly red Pittsburgh, an annoyed Frick worked with the city’s Mayor Ford to have the results overturned, and five of the seven stripped of their new posts.
The outraged Socialists of Pennsylvania naturally protested, and the incident soon ballooned into a national scandal. Frick charged that the Socialist victory was undue, and that they had stuffed ballot boxes. The Socialists of course, denied any such thing, and accused Frick of blatantly contravening the will of the people.
The Voice brought Frick’s side of the story to readers nationwide, while the more meager media apparatus of the SLP tried to do the same for its own narrative.
Eventually, a congressional committee was formed to investigate the matter—unsurprisingly in the Republican dominated House, it found in favor of Frick and Ford.
Henry Frick had once again stepped onto the national stage in the role of the man who could—and would—stand up to the Reds on their own turf and drive them back.
A diverse a set of voices ranging from ex-governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York and ex-president Cleveland expressed their approval of the outcome.
But by DeLeon’s angry ranting in congress, Frick was ‘the chief enemy of laboring people—reaction incarnate, soaked in the workers’ blood.’
Plenty in the street agreed.
On 1 March 1899, the offices of the Voice were bombed, killing a secretary and two pedestrians who’d had the misfortune to be passing by at the moment.
Though the Pennsylvania SLP disavowed the action, and the national SLP did as well, it did not keep the target off of their backs. De Leon did not at all help matters when he stood up in congress and declared that though the bombing was ‘regrettable, Mr. Frick has sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind’. A chorus of boos and hisses escorted the blunt Marxist back to his seat.
The bombing created an outpouring of sympathy across the nation and another anti-socialist backlash. Five foreign-born workers (three Hungarians, an Italian, and a Polish Jew), two of whom had actually participated in the Homestead strike years earlier, were ultimately arrested for the crime. Though the general historical consensus is that at least some of them were involved, all were finally released when damning evidence proved elusive. Nevertheless, two of the Hungarians were shot to death outside of a Pittsburgh bar weeks later by unknown assailants.
Frick’s overthrow of the socialist Pittsburgh government seemed retroactively vindicated.
As soon as the Voice came back on line, its first headline read, ‘UNDAUNTED: NO CONCESSION TO RED TERROR’.
Accusations that Frick orchestrated the attack himself have little foundation, but it certainly did not hurt him in the long term.
“I am glad they hate me so,” he boasted in an interview with the New York Times. “A man does well to be hated by howling scoundrels such as these.”
The SLP of Pennsylvania, which had by 1899 captured the electorates of multiple counties in the state’s coal and steel regions, including Homestead’s Allegeheny County, came in for another round of persecution.
The party’s rolls in the state now counted nearly 30,000 members, not counting the many officially unaffiliated sympathizers. This explosive growth could be traced to the particular brutality typically on display in Pennsylvania labor disputes. From the days of the Molly Maguires to Homestead to Lattimer, too much blood had been spilled. With the coming of the Red Act, unionization was almost impossible. Wages had fallen nearly 5% across Pennsylvania since 1897. Now that there was a party pledged to do something about it, many couldn’t sign on fast enough. Of course, an SLP membership was enough to cost a man his job at most any firm, so there were scores more who voted the ticket but kept quiet about it.
Frick was eager to do something about this spreading affliction, and now he had a good excuse. When the state leadership of the SLP tried to organize a May Day parade through Pittsburgh, Mayor Ford, again with Frick’s connivance, refused to grant the permit. A further several applications were similarly turned down.
The party, under the leadership of James H. Maurer, recognized the precarious position they maintained in the wake of the Voice bombing and backed down. But many of the more radical rank and file did not.
On 1 May 1899, some 400 workers and a number of socialist students from the University of Pennsylvania (a fraction of what would have assembled with the party’s official blessing) gathered in Market Square, waving red flags alongside the Stars and Stripes and singing ‘the Internationale’ and ‘the Star-Spangled Banner’ alike.
As moody crowds glowered at them, they attempted to sally out of the square and begin their march down Forbes Avenue.
Mayor Ford, deeply frustrated by the defiance, dispatched a contingent of police to put an end to the nonsense. The officers ordered the marchers to disperse and informed them they were unlawfully assembled.
The majority of the demonstrators went home. But a convinced core of some 100 remained. When again ordered to depart, they did not obey. The police formed a rough cordon around the Square. They attempted to arrest a number of men they had pegged as ‘ringleaders’.
Someone threw a stone. The marchers launched into a brawl with the forces of order. Amazingly, not a single firearm seems to have been discharged, and no one was killed. But thirty people were injured, and fifty arrested.
Ford, furious, had police raid the Pittsburgh SLP headquarters and Maurer, along with his comrades, arrested, despite their protests that the marchers had acted on their own initiative. Frick was fully supportive of Ford’s actions, hoping to bring Maurer and the rest up on charges of conspiracy and public disorder (and maybe indicting them under the Red Act, too), which with some luck might net them a few years in prison and smash the nucleus of the SLP in Pennsylvania.
Maurer along with six of his colleagues were indicted on just those charges on May 23rd to much outrage and celebration.
(Those actually arrested at the march on the other hand were, save for about ten ‘core radicals’, quietly released.)
The trial soon became a national cause célébre on both fronts, anti-socialist and pro-socialist alike. The Voice’s circulation soared ever higher. But so too did the publications of DeLeon’s Daily People, now the official mouthpiece of the SLP.
The trial of Maurer was seen as a sort of test case against American radicalism. It had already been dealt a heavy blow on the organizational ground-level with the Fourth Force Act, and it was hoped the conviction of Maurer would similarly cripple its more respectable, legal-political wing.
Maurer’s defense successfully proved the SLP as a legal political party had had no part in the organization of the assembly at Pittsburgh and had in fact actively discouraged it. The prosecution thus took a step back and insisted instead on the ‘moral culpability’ of the Socialist leadership in the disturbance.
The trial filled the country’s newspapers for weeks, stretching into early June, when it was overwhelmed by the news from Cripple Creek. After two demonstrations in support of the accused in Chicago and New York respectively ended in cracked heads and dozens of arrests, even President McKinley himself could not ignore it. He certainly was not well-disposed towards socialism but having familiarized himself with the minutiae of the case, was convinced the men were innocent of any crime, and moreover that Frick had rather blatantly manipulated the whole situation to raise his own star in the eyes of the country. Mark Hanna, the Ohio senator and Republican kingmaker who’d helped bring McKinley to office, encouraged him to intervene before things got any further out of hand.
Sometime in early July, McKinley personally telephoned Frick and recommended he pardon Maurer and the rest. Frick curtly denied the request, much to McKinley’s chagrin.
The trial was going poorly for Maurer and his comrades, and a conviction seemed increasingly likely. Then the socialists found themselves rescued by the unlikeliest of allies.
Andrew Carnegie was, of course, no more a socialist than Frick or McKinley. But he had always at least tried to present himself as understanding of labor, even when he did not always do so very well. Frick’s ‘persona’ had always been that of the iron-fisted industrial monarch; Carnegie’s had always been that of the jovial, philanthropic Santa Claus.
When Carnegie was asked why he was furnishing ‘reds’ with legal counsel and public support, he responded that “in this great land, men have the right to speak, think, and do as they please, so long as in the act they harm no other men. And waving flags in the square, red as they might be, hurts no one. Not even Mr. Frick.”
But driven as Carnegie might have been by genuine sentiment, or by the desire to maintain his image of the kindly rich man, his overriding motivation was no doubt revenge against his old partner and friend. He did not—and never would—forgive Frick for swindling him out of his own company, and if he had to bankroll socialists to undercut him, then so be it.
If there was any man in Pennsylvania who was still more than a match for Governor Frick in terms of wealth and power, it was Andrew Carnegie. Defended by the finest lawyers that money could buy, and the beneficiaries of a fervent propaganda campaign carried out through every paper that would publish, Maurer and his friends were soon set at liberty.
Frick was furious. His rage did not abate when McKinley publicly expressed his approval at the case’s outcome.
In private governor opined on McKinley and Carnegie, snapping that “the two dogs ought to be strung up from the same goddamned tree.”
He did not temper his fury until his old friend Andrew Mellon came along, with a rather fresh perspective of the whole debacle. It could, Mellon insisted, be turned into a victory. Frick was popular. Despised as he might be by radicals, organized labor in Pennsylvania and beyond, and sentimental intellectuals everywhere, he had in the past two years amassed a broad stratum of supporters among the agitated middle-classes and his fellow industrial titans. And he had built up that base by his incessant attacks on the red menace. Now the president himself was cheering the release of a few Socialist firebrands—it was clear Frick was the only man in the country with any sense left.
So that was exactly the line he took. In his first issue of the Voice published after the acquittal of the Socialists, Frick stated that he ‘could not understand why Mr. McKinley would celebrate the turning loose into society of men determined to uproot its very foundations and plunge the whole country into anarchy, and who would very much like to see his own refined head on a pike.’
It was the first time he had ever published anything like an attack on McKinley, still a popular and well-regarded president in the wake of the slowly recovering economy and the victory over Spain. It shocked many Republicans, who came to see Frick as a freewheeling rabble-rouser interested only in self-aggrandizement. But it caught the ears of many others. Ever since the Red Summer, and intensifying with every labor disturbance since, the current of those who demanded something be done about the snowballing danger of radical subversion grew ever stronger. And to these individuals, McKinley and his administration came across as frustratingly unconcerned. Blind, even. And Frick, at least, was speaking sense.
Though this break from party orthodoxy is significant, and a solid piece of evidence that Frick’s ambitions were not near satisfied, it is not known if he had at this point decided upon—or was even considering—a presidential run.
Then came Cripple Creek.
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