The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America

INTERLUDE: The Filipino Rebellion and the German Kaiser

    • Iggies

    In 1898, with the United States defeat of Spain on land and sea, the Philippine islands passed into American hands. Victory over the Spanish had come in no small part thanks to the enthusiastic cooperation of Filipino revolutionists headed by Emilio Aguinaldo, who longed for liberation from their oppressor of generations.

    Of course, once the Spanish were gone, the natives found their new American ‘friends’ had little intention of ceding the islands to an independent government. The declaration of a Philippine Republic went unheeded by the United States, and when it came time for Yankee troops to march triumphantly into the colonial capital of Manila, they offered the ultimate insult to Aguinaldo’s troops, who were bluntly excluded from the procession.

    Tensions simmered for months, as the Americans set up a military government over the Philippines, and Aguinaldo continued to insist that he was president of an independent Philippine Republic.

    Open war finally broke in late 1898, with the Battle of Manila, which ended with some 300 dead and American control over the city secured.

    The conflict was a lamentably lopsided one; the Filipinos were people of a poor island nation against one of the great powers of the world. They matched their American foes in nothing except raw courage.

    Perhaps the war should have been over in months.

    But the Filipinos then found they had a new friend from across the sea: Kaiser Wilhelm II, of the German Empire.

    The Kaiser, who in 1899 had been on his throne for only ten years, was something of a loose cannon. Disregarding the advice of those who insisted Germany’s natural sphere of influence lay on the European continent, Wilhelm entertained dreams of global empire. Enamored of the American officer and strategist Alfred T. Mahan, whose book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History pointed to naval strength as the key to national greatness, he was soon fixated on the fantasy of a mighty blue water navy to rival England’s.

    In the 1880s, Germany had acquired a strip of land on the northern coast of New Guinea, an island in the South Pacific to the north of Australia. In the eyes of Wilhelm and other expansion-minded Germans, along with holdings in southern Africa, it might serve as the nucleus to Germany’s to-be global empire.

    New Guinea was also within striking distance of the Philippines.

    Wilhelm and his ministers had been watching the United States for some time, along with the rest of Europe. As the country went through convulsion after convulsion triggered by violent labor struggles or racial strife, European confidence in American stability eroded. When events such as the Battle of Wilmington and Cripple Creek were filtered across the Atlantic through newsmen prone to hyperbole, the country's troubles were greatly exaggerated. Many in Europe even believed the United States was growing ripe for revolution.

    As such, America fell in the esteem of European statesmen. She was still a force to be reckoned with, and not one to take lightly, but she seemed less the unstoppable industrial juggernaut she had in the years after her Civil War.

    Egged on by his imperialist Chancellor von Bülow, Wilhelm saw in the perceived weakness of the United States an opportunity for Germany.

    The Philippines would surely be a shining jewel in the imperial crown. And American grip on the islands was already tenuous, as US troops fell by the score to insurgents and razed down villages in turn.

    The Germans expected the United States would soon tire of the mess halfway across the world and surrender the islands, especially in the face of what looked to be a contentious 1900 election. Upon that defeat, Germany might swoop in and claim the Philippines for herself.

    If she were to provide aid to the anti-American rebels, she would only be rushing along the inevitable.

    The idea was controversial with the Kaiser’s circle. There was no need to provoke the American eagle—she might be troubled, but she was far from crippled.

    Wilhelm was relentless. Even should the Americans discover Germany’s designs and react in fury, what might they do?

    In the end, he and Bülow prevailed over the dissenters.

    The first shipments of rifles, pistols, and explosives arrived in the Philippines in very early 1900. Most of these supplies were laundered through German businessmen in Guam or New Guinea, putting as many intermediaries between Berlin and Aguinaldo’s rebels as possible. Of course, it was not expected the Americans (or anyone else) would really be fooled, but it was important to ‘play the game,’ and maintain some plausible deniability.

    With the arms came a handful of German technical and military advisors disguised as civilians.

    Fairly quickly, US commanders realized something was afoot in the islands.

    In May of 1900, General Jacob H. Smith captured a rebel encampment in northern Luzon—along with some 100 insurgents, his troops also took dozens of old German Gewehr 71 rifles.

    By the time a white man who insisted on identifying himself as a Dutch tourist was captured with native rebels in February of 1901, it was quite clear what was happening.

    An angry complaint was lodged with the German Embassy in Washington. Ambassador Theodor von Holleben flatly denied Germany had any interests in the Philippines.

    While no sufficient grounds were found for an expulsion of German diplomats, a wave of Teutonophobia swept the country, exacerbated by headlines such as the New York Journal’s “GERMAN BULLETS KILL AMERICANS.”

    Nevertheless, the Germans went on providing their low-level aid to the Filipino insurgents. Never so much; the goal was not to win a smashing victory for Aguinaldo, but to make the war bloody, costly, and gruesome enough that the Americans would cut the islands loose as a lost cause.

    By the time the crash came in the winter of 1901, German bullets were still killing Americans.
     
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    • The Deepening Crisis and Congressional Elections of 1902

    • Iggies

    Conceived in Liberty: The Life and Death of the American Republic, 1776 to 1919 by Richard White (Excerpt)
    (© 1995, Melbourne University Press)​

    By November of 1902, the membership rolls of the SLP had nearly doubled in size. Almost 300,000 could be counted as card-carrying socialists, and this did not count the legions of sympathizers unable or unwilling to join their names to the party’s in any official capacity.

    That party had been thoroughly ‘proletarianized’ by the crisis. While the SLP had maintained a strong working-class base in the north since the mid-1890s, and manual workers had been a plurality of party members since at least 1898, there had also been a disproportionate number of middle-class intellectuals and activists filling out its upper ranks. With the coming of the crisis, throngs of dispossessed bricklayers, ironworkers, miners, and farmhands flooded into the SLP, and the party’s composition was suddenly upwards of 75% ‘properly proletarian,’ much to the delight of many long-time members, who had long since feared an ‘embourgeoisement’ of Socialist Labor.

    The growth was rapid and expansive enough to make many a head spin. It was suddenly necessary to organize this surfeit of discontented workers. Embourgeoisement may have been prevented, but the ‘vulgarization’ and dissipation of the party program was also a threat, in the view of its sudden mass base.

    SLP chapters over the country were soon working overtime to educate new comrades. A pamphlet with an anonymous author (most likely written or at least heavily edited by DeLeon, if the barely restrained scorn for liberal democracy that runs through is any indication) was soon making the rounds. It was titled ‘the Way Forward,’ and was an extremely simplistic explanation of the socialist program, peppered with heartfelt appeals to the legacies of Washington and Lincoln (probably the bits not written by DeLeon), and accompanied by vivid illustrations. Though some felt it was ‘condescending,’ the truth was a great many of these ‘new socialists,’ were quite poorly educated; not a few of the recent European migrants were outright illiterate.

    Condescending or otherwise, ‘the Way Forward’ soon reached a circulation of several hundred thousand, to the point that many firms, schools, and conservative trade unions specifically proscribed it.

    It was significantly more radical than the ‘What Do the Reds Want?’ leaflet that had been distributed during the election of 1900. Rather than demanding wages rise in tandem with profits, it decried the wage system as ‘an evil.’ Rather than demanding the Socialists ‘elevate our best comrades to Congress and the Executive Mansion’ it demanded the construction of Debs’ ‘Commonwealth of Toil, the rationalization of production, and the ultimate movement towards the classless society.’

    ‘The Way Forward,’ stopped short of calling for violent revolution, and dutifully maintained its token appeals to the ballot rather than the bullet. But if it stopped short, it was only just short.

    Sereno Payne stood up in the House waving a copy of and condemning the ‘evil doctrine’ contained inside.

    Mass meetings provided another vector through which socialist ideology was disseminated to new recruits. They were held in dance halls and private houses where they could be procured, in the open air where they could not.

    Men with little to do but starve, beg, and steal filled these assemblies to bursting.

    “It was a dream,” one organizer would later recall. “Where once we addressed dozens, now we addressed hundreds, or even thousands.”

    But the exponential growth of the party also presented a great many difficulties.

    For one, mixed in with the throngs of interested newcomers were the agents of the bosses and the sheriffs.

    Max Eastman, who first involved himself in radical politics as a youth during the 1902 crisis, recalled that “there was always the inevitable police spy. Suspiciously clean-shaven and erudite, he would demand to know where the next bomb was to be set, or who was the next captain of industry marked for death.”

    Eastman exaggerated in the interest of humor, and most of the infiltration (which was primarily the work of the LDP and other private enterprises, rather than ‘police spies’—a term American socialists poached from the vocabulary of their European comrades) was bumbling and ineffectual. But it was real.

    There was also the problem of the party’s changing composition. Though they were still not a majority, ‘old-stock’ Americans of English or Scots-Irish ancestry for the first time constituted a really appreciable portion of the party membership. Rolls that had been replete with Rosenfelds, Schneiders, Mancusos, and Szabós were now filled with Coopers, Lees, McDonalds, and Thompsons.

    They brought with them a noted nativist arrogance that irked other socialists. Men would mock the accents or foreign customs of their new comrades, leading on occasion to a scuffle. They would resent being lectured to by ‘aliens.’

    One ironworker attended a single meeting in Buffalo, and resolved to never attend another, for he had “thought this was an American party, [but] found it is filled with hunkies and wops and Jews.”

    Yet all the difficulties and growing pains did not change the fact that the party was growing, and fast.

    The firmly socialist sympathies of ‘industrial belt’ workers were confirmed and expanded. As Jack London would later boast (though he himself had little to boast of, considering his status as a fugitive meant he made scant contribution to the party’s 1902 advances), ‘by New Year’s Day of 1903, the workers of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and West Virginia were all red.’

    It was not a great exaggeration. In November of 1902, a whopping 48 socialists were elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature. In the aftermath of the elections, mobs of drunken socialists went through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, cheering and singing. On one egregious occasion, a well to do young man and his fiancée caught on the street were forced to remove their hats and shout “long live Gene Debs!” at gunpoint, and then robbed.

    Growth was also significant in the mining west. Cripple Creek, rather than discredit socialism among the region’s laborers, had considerably bolstered it. In 1902, Colorado’s voters sent 35 socialists to the state legislatures, winning a majority and in fact making Colorado the first American state with a socialist government. There were similar advances in the legislatures of Nevada, California, and Washington, though none as spectacular.

    It was in the south that the hard battle was fought.

    Though the SLP had managed to gain a sizable black following in the southern states after Wilmington, the same had soured many white voters on it. In many states, 1902 and the crash did little to change this. In South Carolina, that old heartland of southern reaction, the socialists picked up a scanty 4% of the vote and sent no representative to the state legislature or to congress. Arkansas, and Texas were similarly disappointing.

    But in other regions of the south, the message of the socialists resonated. And, to at least some white workers, the immiseration that had suddenly been thrust upon them outweighed the racial prejudices that might have earlier disposed them against the SLP.

    In Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida especially, the socialists gained a foothold, as would become clear with the congressional elections of 1902.
    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
    The 1902 midterms unleashed the storm, so to speak. By the time the people went to the polls that November, unemployment had reached 19% again. Desperation was as always, the mother of disorder. Tens of thousands had been left jobless and even homeless in the year since the crash, and millions more feared they would soon join the swelling ranks of pauperdom.

    It was a violent election—though still only a faint shadow of 1894—or, as the nation would soon sadly discover, 1904.

    In the south, the Klan mobilized to keep blacks from the polls. Black men armed and accompanied by similarly armed Socialists or Populists, mobilized to defend their right to the vote.

    Brawls or even gunfights at the ballot box were common. Two men were shot dead on election night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, and another three in Liberty County, Florida.

    Black men who openly voiced their intentions to vote were harassed, sometimes flogged, as was one man in Washington County, Mississippi, or simply killed outright.

    Whites did not necessarily escape the same fate. Known Populists and especially Socialists were “invited” to stay home on election night at gunpoint. One Socialist schoolteacher was burned alive in Galveston, Texas.

    The left retaliated where it could.

    Two Democrats were hanged near Montgomery on 28 October. A Biloxi businessman locally known for his especially vicious anti-Socialism had his skull split with a pickaxe by ‘unknown assailants.’ Three separate and apparently unconnected attempts on the life of James Vardaman were made, all unsuccessful. The lives of two assassins were forfeit, instead.

    In New Orleans, workers gathered outside city hall, many carrying firearms or blades, threatening the lives of the state legislators gathered inside. They were dispersed by police with four deaths. One New Orleans patrolman voiced his wish to “kill every goddamned dago and squarehead in this city if we can do so.”

    But though the violence was worst in the south, it was by no means contained there.

    In New York City, a group of Jewish-Russian anarchists assassinated three policemen in September. Two were subsequently killed in a shootout with detectives, the rest apprehended and quickly charged, convicted, and sentenced to death.

    The Lower East Side was ‘awash in red flags,’ said Hearst's New York Journal. There was a violent clash between blacks and Italians, the former of whom still largely voted Republican in the north, and the latter of which was quickly becoming a Socialist constituency.

    Unemployed men slept in gutters or curled under bridges, offering many a passerby a grim preview of his own future. Some of these men resorted to extreme measures to keep themselves and theirs fed, and common crimes, especially armed robbery, theft, and murder, spiked by upwards of 30%.

    In the Bronx, a bright-eyed girl of twelve named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was out campaigning for the SLP, a red ribbon pinned to her breast and a band reading ‘vote Socialist!’ wrapped around her hat. While doing her rounds she asked a particular gentleman how he intended to vote. He smiled in condescension and replied, ‘why, Nationalist, my dear.’

    Flynn frowned and said, ‘surely you know, that the Nationalists are the enemies of the working class?’

    ‘I hardly think that’s the case, little lady,’ replied her target.

    ‘Nevertheless—we will win one day,’ Flynn replied. ‘And when we do, we may not forget that you voted Nationalist.’

    The man walked on, flustered by the threat.

    Pennsylvania was the most violent state in the north. Its working class had become what SLP leaders were increasingly referring to—in private of course—as ‘the vanguard of the American proletariat.’

    In Lattimer, five newly jobless miners tracked their old foreman, who they were sure had recommended their firing, to his home. They kidnapped him, beat him, then shot him in the head. When they were done, they dumped the corpse down an abandoned mineshaft.

    Just a decade earlier, such a brutal crime would have captured the attention of the whole state, perhaps even the country.

    Now, while it certainly made the papers, it seemed almost expected. If it was not yet ‘normal,’ it was fast approaching normal.

    In early June, another attempt was made to assassinate Governor Frick in Philadelphia—the bomb failed to kill anyone at all but destroyed a few storefronts. The culprits were quickly rooted out. It was a band of Socialist student radicals from the University of Pennsylvania, five lads and three girls, who called themselves ‘the People’s Will,’ after a revolutionary terrorist organization of the same name recently active in Russia.

    These were not scruffy anarchists—they were well to do youngsters who had simply been ‘carried away.’ Their parents, and even much of polite society, asked clemency.

    Frick was not inclined to provide it.

    The three young women received twenty-year prison sentences. Two of the young men—the supposed ringleaders—were sentenced to death, and the other three to life imprisonment. Of the three life sentences, two would ‘take their own lives’ in their cells within the next two years.

    Frick rammed an act through his increasingly rubber stamp state legislature, banning 'revolutionary assembly' within the state borders of Pennsylvania. It was expected it would be struck down by the courts, but for the moment it would serve.

    On that authority, almost 500 unionists of the STLA were rounded up and arrested in July of 1902. About 370 were released within a week, though many with fresh bruises. 87 were given various prison sentences on largely fabricated or wildly exaggerated charges. But nine of the men simply disappeared.

    Their bodies were never recovered, but soon graffiti demanding ‘where are the nine?’ began to appear splashed across walls and alleyways.

    There was a brief attempt by the SLP to invite federal investigators to bring to light what they were sure had been extrajudicial executions. In the turmoil of the next two years, this was never realized.

    But what was most disturbing about these arrests were the actors who carried them out. Some were Pennsylvania policemen—but most were the private guards of Continental Security, the recently formed ‘security agency’ affiliated to the LDP, whose stated goals were ‘the protection of life and property.’ In practice, this often meant the destruction of life and property.

    84 CS men were rushed through the formality of an induction into the Pennsylvania state militia before participating in the mass roundup. It was a worrying and portentous marriage of state and corporate power.

    Less bloody, but not by much, were the Midwest and west. The miners of Colorado and the surrounding states were bitter with the recent memories of Cripple Creek. Some blamed the organizers of the strike for the bloodshed. But more blamed the bosses and the government. Unemployment struck hard here, too. In a single month in Denver, five killings with ‘political motives’ were reported by police.

    California, which had hosted one of the original three insurrectionary communes in ’94, also had its share of violence. Much of this was racial. The state SLP struggled to balance its commitment to organizing workers of all races with the often-violent hatred that existed between white proletarians in California and the Chinese ‘coolie’ immigrant labor that was seen as having come in to ‘take American jobs.’

    When a Socialist organizer in Santa Rosa attempted to convince an audience of fishermen and fieldworkers that ‘the Chinese worker is also your brother,’ he was shouted down and pelted with fruit, and then sucker-punched as he left the stage.

    This terrible and worsening climate saw the explosive growth of another party besides the SLP: The National Party.

    The SLP’s growth, impressive but steady for the past eight years, went exponential, as has been described.

    The Nationalists were even newer than the Socialists. But they were also growing even faster.

    In Pennsylvania, the state NP chapter already outmatched the Republican in size, thanks to Governor Frick’s generous patronage of the former and increasing hostility against the latter. It made inroads in New York, where many country people were frightened by the explosion of radicalism in the city. California also saw a burgeoning Nationalist movement, as the specter of the Red Summer’s San Francisco commune returned and racial strife threatened.

    The party even made inroads in the south, where many ex-Democrats decided Frick’s rabidly anti-socialist politics would have to do in the face of the Democratic collapse, even if he was not a partisan of open racism.

    This was the mood and the state of the America in which the votes were cast in November of 1902 amid such desperation and anxiety.

    The Republican majority in the House shrank massively, crashing from 171 to 102. The Socialists nearly eclipsed them, soaring to 99 as the industrial belt, the west, and parts of the south turned decisively red. The Populist were an exception, somehow managing to whether a dizzying realignment, and losing only 5 of their 83 seats, dropping them to 78. The Nationalists exponentially increased their little eight-man delegation to a smashing 62, all but nine snatched from the Republican column. The Democratic share of representatives dwindled to true insignificance, and only 13 were elected, all from the Deep South.

    A record number of independents were also elected, largely men who simply promised to "help out" their home districts with little appeal to national politics, or who even especially campaigned on 'keeping out' of the developing country wide mess.

    The Senate was also shaken up. The Socialists won two new senators, joining Maurer from Pennsylvania—J.B Bitterly from Colorado and Victor Berger from Wisconsin, both narrowly appointed by increasingly red legislatures, over the protestations of Republicans, Nationalists, and remaining Democrats. The Senate proved exceptionally difficult for the SLP to penetrate - its origins, after all, lay in the founders' fear of overbearing democracy, and it was now serving its role as a bulwark against the ambitions of the 'lower orders.' Not a few Socialists were chagrined by this, and not least of those DeLeon, who blasted the Senate itself in The Daily People as 'the assembly of the great lords against the people.' Soon enough, the SLP would throw its weight behind the drive to abolish legislative appointment of senators in favor of popular election.

    The Nationalists on the other hand were in a plum position to enter the Senate, awash as they were in the donations of jittery bourgeois and Frick's own great wealth, not to mention the definite sympathies held by many who were not yet all out for the party. Thus, in their first election they stormed into the chamber with six senators. Frick’s furious attempt to unseat Maurer failed, but he managed to raise one of his Nationalists, George F. Huff, an old friend of the governor’s from the pre-politics day, to the remaining Pennsylvania seat. Also elected were recent converts to the party, James Gillet of California, John Williams from Mississippi, Albert Burleson of Texas, Leroy Sweetser of Massachusetts, and Robert Lansing from New York.

    The GOP could still count on a basically solid New England, but everywhere else it was under assault from the right by the Nationalists, and from the left by the Socialists. Everywhere old coalitions whose weaknesses few had really comprehended were breaking down. Pennsylvania was now solidly red, as were most of the mining states out west. The SLP also received massive numbers of votes from other states such as Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri.

    There had been a Herculean effort to suppress the black vote in the south. Besides the terror, intimidation, and outright murder, there was also widespread fraud. In one Alabama hamlet, 103 votes more than there were eligible men in the county were tallied, all but nine for the Democratic candidate. In certain Mississippi River Valley towns, vote totals seem to have been invented outright. And yet, though many blacks were certainly kept from voting, many more were not. It was them that helped give the Socialists a plurality of Florida and Louisiana’s congressional votes, and a close second in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina.

    As a general rule of thumb, the Nationalists were strong where the Socialists were strong, and vice versa. They courted opposite constituencies, and each played up the fears of the other.

    Even as loyalties and parties splintered apart, a new dualism was taking shape in American politics. But it was not the system of old where two camps argued the merits of lower tariffs or the coinage of metals with a certain cordiality and agreement on basic principles. This was a Manichaean struggle, an existential contest. Apocalyptic.
     
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    • Half Measures and the Approach of the 1904 Presidential Elections

    • Iggies

    Conceived in Liberty: The Life and Death of the American Republic, 1776 to 1919 by Richard White (Excerpt)
    (© 1995, Melbourne University Press)​

    As the country seemed on the verge of disintegration, pressure piled on McKinley from all quarters to do something. Few had any concrete proposals. But all were clear that something must be done, even if they preferred someone other than themselves figure out what that ‘something’ was to be.

    By summer 1903, unemployment nationwide had risen to nearly 20% again, and was showing no signs of slowing. In certain regions, such as the deep south with its precarious sharecroppers and already poverty-stricken black population, and the west with its thousands of agricultural day laborers who depended on seasonal employment, it crept past 25%. Still, there was no end in sight.

    The results of the 1902 midterms caused extreme distress in the Executive Mansion. McKinley’s health had suffered amid the domestic turmoil of the last few years, along with the ongoing bloodshed in the Philippines. Though it was a closely guarded secret that would not be revealed publicly until decades later, on 8 December of 1902, the President suffered a heart attack that left him bed-ridden for two weeks. His doctor blamed stress and insisted he must not overtax himself, and suggested delegation of those executive duties that could be delegated. McKinley is supposed to have responded that “if I am to die or the country is to die, let it be the former.”

    Attorney General Philander Knox payed a clandestine private visit to Henry Frick in Philadelphia on New Year’s Day of 1903. The two men were old acquaintances. They had moved in the same social circles prior to either’s entrance into politics and they had served together on the board of the Bank of Pittsburgh.

    Though the details of the meeting are sketchy, it seems Knox begged Frick to desist from his political campaigning. He appealed to the distressful state of the country and told Frick nothing would be gained by the persistence of the National Party but the gratification of his ego.

    Needless to say, Knox’s appeals fell on deaf ears, and the two men would not speak again for a long time.

    But when McKinley rose from his sick bed, it seemed his convictions were strengthened. He summoned Roosevelt and asked him if he still thought the Industrial Commission for Oversight was a good idea. Roosevelt heartily affirmed so.

    The commission was formed on 3 March 1903, with Roosevelt as its head, and a few hand-picked men under him. There was much outcry, including from many within the president’s own cabinet, such as Knox himself. One man in vocal agreement with its establishment was Secretary of State John Sherman, who was rather distraught at the way his anti-trust act of 1890 had been rendered essentially a dead letter over the past decade.

    In congress, the Industrial Commission received hearty approval from the Socialists and most of the Populists, with even a few SLP congressmen shouting, “hurrah for McKinley!”. Many Republicans bitterly protested—but it went through.

    Roosevelt wanted to outright break up as many trusts as possible, beginning with Henry Frick’s own US Steel, a very intentional choice. Then would come the turns of Standard Oil, Anaconda Copper, New York Central, and the rest. He hoped this would stimulate competition and consequently revive the flagging economy.

    McKinley still thought this went too far, and so did most Republicans. Instead, a much more timid first step was taken: priority in federal charters and funding was promised to all firms that would voluntarily donate to relief efforts for the swelling throngs of unemployed.

    It was not a smashing success. The bill did not specify any floor value for charitable donations, and so AT&T donated a paltry $1 million dollars to food drives in New York State, and won for itself a lucrative government contract laying phone lines from Buffalo to Manhattan.

    There were many similar cases.

    It did little to stem the tide of destitution and misery.

    The Socialists’ Daily People blasted the measure as ‘scraps from the master’s table,’ and some Socialists went as far as to encourage workers to refuse such charity on grounds of ‘dignity.’

    Another of the Commission’s scheme was to persuade industrialists, bankers, and others of the grand bourgeoisie to voluntarily inject millions of dollars into the economy for the purposes of revivification, without any apparent return on the investment. There was no stick, and not much of a carrot, either. The only incentive was, as before, government contracts and vague, promised future tax breaks (not that most of the wealthy paid much to begin with).

    1903 ground on, with little sign of hope. Bank after bank continued to shudder and die.

    Men reported to their factories and shops in the morning only to be turned away by foreman who sometimes apologized profusely for the layoffs, and sometimes threatened their former coworkers away with pistols.

    Industry, already concentrated, became further consolidated. Standard Oil achieved its coveted 100% monopoly on oil production.

    The LDP donated not-insignificant amounts to charity, but it and its constituent members spent more on the purchasing of bankrupt works and factories, and on beefing up security all around, as unrest among the underclass seethed. By the end of 1903, there were 30,000 men on the payroll of Continental Security in one capacity or another, rivaling the regular US Army in size.

    Workers who refused to go upon their firings were beaten by CS men. In return, known ‘blacklegs,’ as both scabs and hired thugs were increasingly coming to be called, had their houses defaced, their families menaced. On occasion they were killed.

    It was clear the government’s floundering half-measures were not working.

    In early fall, McKinley’s administration took an unprecedented step: it established a ‘Provisional Relief Agency’.

    This was done over the howls and shouts of traditional Republicans. It succeeded largely on Roosevelt’s personal initiative, as he cajoled, encouraged, persuaded, and on occasion threatened men into compliance.

    The PRA met with a mixed response. It was largely greeted with relief by the dispossessed it was meant to help, who by this point would have welcomed anything that might alleviate their misery.

    Those higher up the socio-economic ladder often found occasion to scoff and charge that it represented the further dissolution of the nation.

    Harper’s Weekly asked: “while certainly, the present crisis demands immediate and decisive action, is it so wise to train the people up like dogs, expecting always of dispensations from above? We would have no republic at all if the Fathers had been content to beg the largesse of Mother England.”

    The New York Times was more tentatively optimistic. “Better the untrammeled march of state power than the starvation of millions.”

    Perhaps surprisingly, Frick’s Voice also approved of the program. It was called, “perhaps the first of this administration’s truly bold and actionable proposals. The country cannot go on if its lower half is left to waste.”

    It was representative of Frick’s self-reinvention—no longer simply the capitalist autocrat, he was eager to make himself palatable to all Americans. When asked what he would do for the poor if raised to the Executive Mansion in 1904, Frick responded he would not be opposed to some redistributionist scheme so long as “it was done without brutish inefficiency and blundering disruption of natural commerce.”

    It seemed his running mate, Hearst, still a Populist at heart, was getting to him. Hearst and Frick were now flanking the ruling Republicans not only from the right but from the left. “What cretins are we cursed to suffer in the halls of congress,” demanded Hearst’s New York Journal, “that in their useless gibbering have left the working classes of this land so desperate they will turn to the madness of the red flag for relief? No more!”

    The PRA opened offices in most major cities and provided payouts for those who could meet its qualifications. Those qualifications were as follows: that one was a citizen of the United States for at least five years or lived in the household of one who was, that one could provide verification (either through documentation or third-party testimony) he had searched for work in the past two months, and that one regularly certify he was still seeking gainful employment so long as he continued to receive benefits.

    The payout was not much. At $6 a week, it was significantly lower than the average worker’s wages earned for the same period. It was also next to impossible for rural people and those who could not prove citizenship or provide proof of recent employment to obtain benefits. Regional administrators took advantage of any opportunity they might seize upon to deny aid.

    It helped some. In certain regions, the slight bump in income stimulated mild economic uplift, such as in Boston and Boise.

    But it failed to do much for many more. Recent immigrants and their children were left out in the cold, and their resentment only grew as they were turned away because they wanted for one more year of citizenship, or because the men they had begged for jobs refused to vouch that they had done so.

    PRA chief William Borah would later say, “we did what we could, where we could, only there was not too much that we could do and not too many places where we could do it.”

    In the big cities and out west, the mood was radicalizing, and fast. Socialist speakers in Manhattan stood on overturned crates and howled at listeners to “burn the whole goddamned rotten system to the ground and take what you are owed!”

    Nationalist Senator Burleson (N-TX) introduced a bill to expedite the arrest and persecution of those guilty of such ‘seditious speech,’ but it foundered on the opposition of the Populists and a few liberal Republicans, along with the SLP, of course.

    As if the situation at home was not bad enough, the US also saw serious reversals in its grinding Filipino war. On 20 July 1903, Moro insurgents surrounded a company of American soldiers near Lake Lanao on the island of Mindanao and destroyed it, slaughtering the 300-odd troops to the last man. In response, US soldiers went on a vengeful tear, burning a dozen villages and killing several hundred civilians in the process.

    The whole mess was splashed across every newspaper on the other side of the Pacific, and General Pershing’s conduct drew vociferous criticism from both those who thought he was too harsh and those who believed he was not harsh enough.

    As the country sank further into economic catastrophe, the photographs of butchered American lads and coffins unloading at the docks of San Francisco were too much.

    ‘Bring our boys home!’ was added to the standard shouts of ‘jobs and food!’
    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood was not marked out for greatness. He was born into obscurity in rural Utah a few years after the Civil War and spent his youth laboring as a miner and a cowpuncher, among other things. He had a rough, broad visage that spoke of trouble and made him look every bit the hard-bitten workman that he was.

    Uneducated but attentive to politics, Haywood followed with interest the bloody labor struggles of the twentieth century, in which he saw his own travails reflected. But it was not until after the Red Summer, when he joined Ed Boyce’s WFM in a rage at the carnage in Chicago and New Orleans, that his life as a radical truly began.

    Haywood spent the next few years organizing, building up WFM locals across the states of Colorado and Utah, and agitating against the reformism he thought so pervaded the labor movement. He met Sam Gompers once in Silver City, found him a mealy-mouthed ‘squat specimen of humanity that called itself the leader of labor,’ and hated him and all appeals to moderation forever.

    By 1899 Haywood had built up something of a regional reputation for himself as a fire-breathing radical, a herald of something above and beyond that which labor had always been in the United States. A man, perhaps, in the mold of Eugene Debs.

    It was this man that went to Cripple Creek that year, to aid the gold miners then striking against wage reductions. Here he met young Jack London for the first time, and the two men bonded over their shared convictions and over the hard lives they had lived. Along with John Welch, they led the miners in battle first against Sherman Bell and his militiamen, and then against John Pershing and his troops.

    When the day was lost, Welch was captured and executed, but London and Haywood made good their escapes. London, still wanted for his attempt on the life of Collis P. Huntington some years earlier, melted back into the underground.

    Haywood fled to Mexico.

    He spent nearly a year here, primarily in the northern state of Chihuahua, where he worked sometimes as a cattleman or a jornalero under assumed names. There is little record of his life during this time.

    In late 1901, Haywood traveled to Europe, hoping to further his revolutionary education and make the acquaintance of the continent’s socialist luminaries. Humble, undereducated workingman that he was, he found himself disoriented in this alien land, but made his way to Paris, where he was introduced to a number of fantastic figures, such as the anarchist Sébastien Faure and the socialists Jules Guesde and Jean Jaurés.

    After a year or so in France, Haywood spent a few weeks in Germany, and then went on to London. He just missed Lenin, who in mid-1903 departed for America after presiding over the stormy split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. But he did meet Lenin’s comrade, the Bolshevik Maxim Litvinov, who he got on with, and who gifted Haywood an English edition of Marx’s Capital. Haywood claimed to his dying day that he had yet to finish the book.

    In early 1904, Haywood finally returned to his home country, first passing through Mexico again and slipping quietly over the border. By now, the nation was in utter turmoil as the unemployment rate spiked to 27% and the presidential election approached.

    Haywood was reunited with Jack London in St. Louis, who ‘filled him in’ on what he had missed in his time away, from the increasing radicalization of the labor movement to the emergence of Frick’s Nationalists. Haywood spent the next several months rebuilding his connections with old comrades, and it soon became clear that the time was ripe for the formation of the ‘one big union’ of which he had always dreamed.

    When the necessary support had been won, London and Haywood traveled together to Chicago, and here, joined by some two dozen delegates of various trade unions and workers’ brotherhoods, including Tom Hagerty and William Trautmann, clandestinely formed the Industrial Workers of the World on 1 September 1904.

    The IWW’s founding charter dedicated it to “undying war against the capitalist class.”
    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
    23 December 1902    ​

    Knox closed the motorcar door behind him. He leaned down and thanked his driver. “Park around the side, sir. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

    The chauffeur touched the brim of his cap and said simply, “sir.”

    Knox sighed and turned. The mansion loomed before him, a towering early 19th century construction of mingled grey-beige brick, tall and narrow. He shook off his coat. The chill hit him instantly. As he tucked it under his arm, he saw that the pockets were still turned inside out. He swore and fixed them—those goddamned militiamen had not handled him easily.

    Two men stood at the house’s step, just beyond the newly erected iron gate. There had been no gate before the Governor’s mansion ten years ago. That was just like Frick.

    Knox approached—and one of the men, a fellow probably nearing 35 in a well-trimmed jacket with a lean, lined face beneath a crinkled bowler hat, stuck a revolver in his face. “Hold it,” the man barked. Knox gasped. Then he righted himself and put on his boldest expression.

    “Sir, I’m here to speak with Governor Fr—”

    “I know what you’re here for,” the guard’s second interjected. “Raise your arms.”

    Knox glowered, but did as he was told. The first guard frisked him brusquely, then snatched his hat from his head. Knox cried out but did nothing. The guard turned the hat over, twirled it on the end of his finger, laughed and then handed it back.

    “What the hell do you expect I’m going to do?” Knox snapped. “Shoot the man?”

    “Can’t hardly be too careful,” the second guard said. Then they parted and allowed him through. Knox gathered his wits, cleared his head, and decided not to dwell on his second cruel interrogation of the night.

    He came up to the oaken door, raised the knocker, and let it fall. The clang tore through the great house. Only a moment passed before the door was answered.

    Knox was relieved to see, for the first time in some hours, a really friendly face.

    “Mr. Knox!” Adelaide Frick smiled. She was a bit over forty, but still looked every bit the high-society beauty she had been all those years ago. Her bright eyes shone in the moonlight and the mansion’s lamps, and she pushed an errant strand of dark hair behind her ear. “It’s been far too long. Come on in!”

    Knox nodded, smiled back, and stepped inside, glad to be out of the cold. Adelaide patted his shoulder.

    “Henry is a bit occupied at the moment, he should be finished shortly. Come along to the sitting room, I’ll prepare you a cup of tea.”

    Knox inclined his head and followed her. He could already feel his heartbeat getting away from him. He hardly wanted to be here—he had not told anyone he was coming. Not his wife, not any of his friends or associates, not the President or anyone else in the cabinet. But something had to be done, and he had a cruel feeling he was the only one who might do anything.

    Adelaide prepared them both cups of warm tea and escorted her guest to the sitting room. He took a seat in one of the pillowy armchairs. Adelaide moved to sit across from him, but no sooner had her fingers brushed the headrest than the door to the room blew in, and in strode Frick.

    Knox stood, having yet to sip his tea.

    “I’ll leave you gentlemen to your business, then,” Adelaide said. On her way out, Frick took her by the arm and kissed her gently on the cheek. Then she departed.

    “Go ahead and sit back down, Phil,” Frick said.

    Knox obeyed.

    Frick took the seat his wife had meant to take. He crossed his legs. He had aged some, Knox could clearly tell. There were flashes of grey in his black beard and his neatly combed hair. His brow was creased and his cheeks gaunt. But the light in his eyes had yet to dull.

    “Ada seems well,” Knox said.

    “She is,” Frick agreed. “We all are.”

    “Even you?”

    “Especially!” He paused for a moment. “But you’ve done well for yourself, haven’t you?”

    “Mmm."

    They spoke for a few minutes more, reminiscing on days gone by, afternoon hunts at Johnstown, fishing and dinner after. Then Frick’s voice fell, and he spoke more sharply.

    “Phil, I’m busy—now, it’s lovely to see you, of course. But I have to ask —”

    Knox swallowed. He closed his eyes for a moment. This was what he was here for, after all.

    “Henry,” he said. “The President’s had a heart attack.”

    Frick’s eyes seemed to freeze. For a moment there was a look on his face Knox had never seen before—surprise. But he quickly recomposed himself and settled back in his chair. His muscles relaxed. “Is he—”

    “He’s alive. And the doctors say he ought to be at full health within a week—and by God, Henry, I had better not read about this in your damn paper!”

    “Of course,” Frick nodded. “And my well wishes to the President and his family, of course.”

    Knox shook his head. “Henry, you have got to stop this.”

    “And what’s that I have got to stop?”

    Knox could already feel his blood getting up. His hand trembled—he raised it and gesticulated wildly. “You—all of this! This—this National Party nonsense or whatever you’re calling it now. This crusade you’re on! What the hell do you think gave McKinley his damn fit? You, and these reds, and—God’s sake, do you truly think what the country needs is more parties? More division?”

    “An ideal country would not have a single party, sir,” Frick answered. “But we live in the United States. And the United States is facing the kind of threat it’s never faced before, and it needs men willing to stand up to that threat. And with all due respect, Mr. McKinley and his party have conclusively shown themselves not to be those men.”

    “Stop with the goddamned campaign talk!” Knox snapped. “That jumped-up red lunatic Darrow took damn near a quarter of the vote last time around. And with this—this—how many workmen do you think are out of a job? God knows what the returns will look like next year! You want to hand him the presidency? You want to—”

    “I’m not handing anyone the presidency,” Frick said, coldly. He eyed his old acquaintance with an imperial chill.

    “Good God—you actually think you can win, don’t you?” Knox asked, incredulous.

    Frick shrugged. “If you think Darrow has a path, then why should I —”

    “And you want to gamble the fate of the nation on that?”

    “No, no,” Frick said. “There’s no gambling. You really don’t understand, Phil. I’m not sure any of you do. You men—you Republicans, you Democrats, you Populists, whatever you might like to call yourselves—you are not on the table anymore. It is not a choice between Mr. Darrow and sound gentlemen like yourself and Mr. McKinley. There is no room for the good, sound gentlemen. It is a choice between Darrow and me. And that is all there is to it.”

    Knox could feel his face redden. He clenched his left hand into a fist. “My motorcar was held up twice by militiamen in getting here. Is that your style of governance, Mr. Frick? I—”

    Frick nodded. “An anarchist bomb went off downtown not twenty-four hours ago. Would you have me recall the militia? As I’ve told you, this is the world we live in, Mr. Knox. History moves quickly. Tarry and she’ll pass you by.” He examined Knox’s face for a moment, and then added, “I think it may be that she already has.”

    Knox ignored him and went on. “And what about those boys in shirtsleeves and caps? Who the hell are they? What right have they got to yank my driver out of the motorcar and search him for pistols? Wh—”

    “The Continental Security boys?” Frick smiled. “Sturdy fellows. You hire them at a premium, too, by the way. The militia was undermanned. They are only here to help.”

    Knox scoffed. He raised his shaking hand and jabbed a finger at Frick.

    “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? The law answers to you, the men toting rifles are in your employ—you don’t give a damn about ‘anarchy’ or this country. I’ve got no doubt that you would wrap yourself in a red flag if you believed it would improve your prospects.”

    “You’re wrong, Phil,” Frick said in that even, yet nearly broken tone that told he was growing angry. “This country took my fathers in, gave them the chance to make good men out of themselves. I love this country. You may not believe that—personally I don’t give a good goddamn what you believe—but it’s true.”

    “If you love this country, Henry, if this was anything to do with principles, you would do something to help us save her. But you are having too much fun with playing dictator.”

    Frick shook his head. “Principles? Have you forgotten about Johnstown already? I’m surprised at you. It’s hardly been ten years.”

    “I—”

    “How many corpses did they pull out of that town when it was all over and done with? A thousand—no, two thousand, wasn’t it? And it was our fault, I hope you don’t lie to yourself about that, sir. It would have cost us nothing to keep up that dam—pennies, really. But we didn’t. Don’t delude yourself—those corpses are ours to answer for on the Last Day. You, myself, Carnegie, and all the rest.”

    “Henry—”

    “But when I present my defense at the Judgment, I may at least tell the Judge that I paid out of pocket to help those poor souls—the undrowned ones, anyhow—rebuild. I don’t recall you doing any such thing. In fact—who was it that went before our human prosecutors and argued in a court of law that there was no blood on our hands, and that we did not owe anyone a cent? Oh—it was you, wasn’t it?”

    Knox was struck silent. His stomach turned. Frick smiled, triumphantly, and went on. “You never met a principle you couldn’t put a price on, Phil, and I won’t have you sit here and pretend otherwise. And you will see me on the ballot come next November.”

    A spell of silence that weighed like eternity hung for a time before breaking.

    Knox bowed his head. He had lost. It was fruitless. He stood.

    “Then I suppose we have nothing left to discuss.”

    Frick looked up from his seat. “I suppose not.” He jerked his head towards the door. “Ada will show you out, if you like.”

    “It was good to see you, Henry,” Knox said.

    “And you as well,” Frick replied.

    Knox showed himself out. He slipped back into his coat, replaced his hat, and stepped into a frigid Philadelphia night.
     
    • The Knife's Edge of Legality

    • Iggies

    My Wars, by Jack London
    (Cripple Creek Publishing Collective, 1950)    ​


    In late July of 1903, I returned to Oakland for the first time in nearly six years. I imagined, with my flight from San Quentin as far behind me as it was, and the travesty of Cripple Creek only so much more recent, I might visit mother and Eliza with minimal risk to my life and liberty.

    Indeed, I was unmolested for the week I stayed with them. I was much relieved to understand they had not heard my name mentioned in connection with the Colorado Labor Wars and was certainly not inclined to make the connection myself. Of course, they upbraided me for the mess with Mr. Huntington, but that I had been prepared for.

    Finding mother as hard up for cash as she ever was, I did consider remaining in California for as long as I was able—but I made myself to understand that I had other duties, now, and these demanded my fullest attention, and personal sentiment could not come into it.

    I gifted her what earnings I had with me and was on my way again. It was traveling southwards, in San Diego, that I met with J.R Jones, a Louisiana Socialist who spoke, naturally, with the wondrous accent of his state. We were shortly introduced, and got to talking, and when he understood I was a man who was not unaccustomed to danger or hardship, he revealed to me that he had a ‘job’ I might be interested in.

    At this time, the strength of the revolutionists was growing massively in the south of the country, but the Bourbons and their Klan dogs did their level best to snuff it out. Men were tortured, hanged, and shot by the score for their Socialist allegiances in those days, and that was only the start of it.

    The job, as it was, was explained to me thusly: some sympathetic (and anonymous) northerners of means had purchased 2,000 Winchesters for use by the ‘Spartacist’ leagues of the south, those self-defense bands formed by the SLP for the purpose of fighting the ravages of the Klan. These rifles were to come southwards down the Mississippi in batches of 300 or so, and from there be distributed to the various Socialist party chapters throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

    I and another man were to collect one of these shipments in Vicksburg, and from there deliver the weapons a dozen at a time to about as many specified towns and cities through the State of Mississippi.

    It was all entirely illegal, which deterred me not at all, and I heartily agreed.

    Jones furnished me with $50 for my journey, shook my hand, and sent me on my way. In Galveston, Texas I met with Price, the man who was to accompany me in my assignment. Price was a timber worker, big and broad with a bushy black beard. He spoke like an orator, even when we were alone. He was also a mulatto, and I took consciousness of his race to be the reason for his nervous disposition as we traveled across the south, with good reason. When we were stopped, whether it be by fellow travelers or, on one occasion, a sheriff, he would mutter such things as “now we are had,” though we had not yet done anything objectionable, much less illegal.

    Together we tramped through Louisiana, and finally arrived in Vicksburg two days ahead of schedule. We frittered away the extra time in the city’s bars and saloons—when a gang of toughs demanded to know why I was so friendly with a negro, Price and I fairly well handled them, and spent the rest of the evening flecked with blood and shattered teeth.

    When the time came, we met the men we were to meet at the docks, and surreptitiously they unloaded from a northern ship a crate of fifty rifles. It was substantially less than we had expected, but they explained financial difficulties had pared down the number of firearms available for the party’s use.

    Nevertheless, we took the crate, hitched it to a single horse, and were on our way. Our itinerary was confused, half the roads we took could not be found on the maps, and the damp, muggy Mississippi countryside sapped the vital energies of brain and body with unbelievable efficacity. Nevertheless, we performed our duty, traveling from town to town, and delivering ten or so rifles to the local Socialists (or Populists, as it sometimes was) of each.

    Usually, these revolutionists were negro tenant farmers, but on occasion there were white men among them. They would take the guns, stow them away in some special place (most often a church, but sometimes a friendly farmer’s barns or a private home), thank us, and we would be on our way.

    I said it was heartening, to know there were so many of us scattered even across this desolate countryside—to know we had such hidden strength.

    Price replied he would only be happy when the whole system of the south had been torn up at the roots. Seeing the manner in which he, and the other colored men on our journey, were so often treated, I could hardly find cause to fault him for his feelings. Indeed, my own race prejudices at this time were far from extirpated, but the whole job did much to erode them.

    Near the end of our trail, we were to deliver the latest load of arms to a little town whose name I have forgotten, situated somewhere in Adams County, in the west of the state. We approached this hamlet at nightfall.

    We were greeted on the road by two men with old repeaters slung over their shoulders. They hailed us, bid us stop, and demanded to know two things: our business in the county, and the contents of our wagon.

    I told them it was not any of their business, and they responded that, as it was their county, it was indeed their business. Price remained silent, though he had begun to sweat profusely. They did not wear the evil hoods of their order, but on their shoulders bore the Cross of the Klan. We bickered for a while, until one of the Klansmen grew tired of us and shoved his repeater in my face, demanding “for the final time,” that I open up the wagon.

    I was inclined to cooperate, at least for the time being.

    Price was not.

    In one fluid motion, he drew his knife from his belt, knocked aside the rifle, and slashed the man’s throat so deep he was nearly decapitated. He stumbled back, gurgling and bleeding. His companion stood, dumbstruck. In that moment of opportunity, I freed my revolver and fired two shots squarely into the second Klansman’s face. The two tumbled over atop each other, like skittles, and Price and I were left panting like dogs with the energy of the moment, recovering our wits.

    We dragged the corpses into the swamp alongside the road’s shoulder and deposited them in a nearby lagoon. I asked if they might be found, or if the alligators would have at them, first. Price laughed and informed me that the rats would do away with all flesh long before the first alligator lumbered along.

    We made our delivery and were done with the mission. But the local party head, a man called Jackson, bid us stop, and served us drinks, and thanked us for our aid. We ate and spoke for some time with him and a number of his comrades—Populists and Socialists, both. Finally, Jackson told us that two days hence, he planned to go to New Orleans—which was only across the river—and attend a lecture by some fellow called Vlad Lenin. A Russian revolutionary exile, he said. The name meant nothing to me at the time, nor to many beyond Russia, I imagine. He asked if we might like to come along.

    With little to do now that our mission was accomplished, we agreed.

    The New Orleans SLP had sought some theater or opera house for Lenin’s debut, but as it happened no one would rent out their venue to a bunch of howling reds. So, he spoke instead in the square before St. Louis’ cathedral, standing upon an upturned fruit crate.

    The crowd was mixed—there were Italian longshoremen from the wharf on the river, German grocers, ‘old-stock’ white steelworkers, negro bricklayers, and a number of finely dressed, curious bourgeois. Price, Jackson, and I slotted in easily enough, with no real effort.

    I had known Russians in California in my youth, and found them to be a brutish and surly, if stalwart and capable, people. In the mold of those men, I expected of this Lenin some haggard rogue with a great Russian beard and arms like redwoods—I was rather surprised when I finally saw the man himself. He spoke English well enough, though the accent remained. Even without it, he would never have been taken for a local, with his great domed head and flashing Mongol eyes and funny little beard. He was no broad-shouldered workman, but an intellectual with a bookish look to him.

    “In four months, I have been through your country, north and south,” Lenin told us. He said he was impressed by how rapidly “racial and ethnic barriers are breaking down among the American proletariat, and that base prejudices are here racing towards extinction.” I thought that he must have had himself a pretty well-curated trip to come off with that impression, but no one corrected him.

    He told us then that, though he understood the economic troubles were painful, the pressure was “raising the revolutionary consciousness of the American worker to a hitherto unseen level, and at an astonishing pace.” That brought much cheering.

    Lenin went on to say that he had been much impressed with the organizational capability of the American Socialists, in the marshaling of our ever-growing forces for the storming of the ballot boxes and the contestation of office. While, he was sure to say, he “maintained no faith in the peaceful conquest of power,” he was dissuaded from many of his reservations concerning the utility of ‘parliamentary politics,’ and had become fairly convinced even bourgeois legislatures and executives could be fairly put to use by the parties of the proletariat in the lead-up to a truly ‘revolutionary moment.’ This occasioned more applause.

    He went on to speak of his experiences in that great ‘prisonhouse of nations’ that was Holy Russia in those days, dodging the Tsar’s police spies and wasting in Siberian exile. I daresay these tales far more electrified his audience than all the speechifying and pontification on matters of theory.

    Near the conclusion of his address, I resolved to waylay Lenin when he was finished, for there were a number of questions I wished to ask of him. I did not get the opportunity.

    He slipped off into the French Quarter’s shadows just as the police arrived to break up the unlicensed demonstration.

    I wrote it off as regrettable, but never imagined I might ever have cause to think of Lenin again.
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    The Heroic Years: A Collection of Essays on the Pre-Revolutionary Socialist Labor Party of the United States
    (Pariser Publishing, 2015)​

    In the last days of the Old Republic, the Socialist Labor Party made a habit of dancing on the knife’s edge of legality. The Daily People and the party’s less prominent editorials always stopped just short of advocating the overthrow of the American government or calling for the assassinations of hated public figures. The party was always careful to disclaim any responsibility for the occasional bombing or shooting carried out by left-wing radicals, even if it vigorously defended the principals of the accused or refused to condemn their motives, as it often did.

    As Darrow increasingly became the face of the party from 1899 onwards, the SLP increasingly took on the façade of respectability—paradoxically as ferment and violence increased over the country. He was well-spoken, clever, and most importantly, thoroughly American. One did not look at him and see an ‘alien,’ as they might looking on DeLeon or Hillquit. Darrow in particular fought to anchor the SLP to American history and tradition and head off those who claimed socialism was a fundamentally foreign philosophy.

    In a Daily People editorial published amid the market crisis of 1901, Darrow said, “it is charged that we are ‘anti-American.’ That we wish to ‘destroy the American ideal.’ Is this charge accurate? If the ‘American ideal’ is a great cartel, a fat gentleman of the ‘League for the Defense of Property,’ that defends the property of very few and covets that of very many, then yes! If the ‘American ideal’ is a congressman who has long ago emptied out his own head and refilled it with the lies of the industrial tyrants he serves, then yes! If the ‘American ideal’ is a starving child on the street, a beaten workman left to beg because he is an ‘alien,’ a young maid forced to offer her pride and honor up for a loaf of bread, then yes! Away with the ‘American ideal,’ and may nothing so black and evil ever disgrace mankind again! But if the American ideal is the ideal of Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln, if it is the dream of a free society of equal men that look one another in the eye, if it is a republic of art and toil and plenty, then no—if that is the American ideal, then we, the Socialists, would gladly give up our lives in its defense.”

    Peter H. Clark, the old abolitionist and stalwart of the ’77 railway strike, also played his part. The man, even entering his seventies, was a clear and powerful speaker, and entranced crowds in Chicago, Albany, Cambridge, and the other great cities of the north. He was very proud of his participation in the fight against the old south’s ‘peculiar institution’ in his youth and took every opportunity to tie chattel slavery to the ‘modern slavery of wages.’

    “The chains that bound my people held fast for two centuries,” he informed a crowd in Augusta. “I remember well how we struggled to shatter them. How we raised good men to office, men like Lincoln himself. Men who promised to struggle for the right, and who so very often did struggle. But the slavers struggled, too, and they would not have their serfs ripped from them and raised to freedom so long as there was breath in their lungs. In the end, the bonds of the negro were only burst at the point of bayonet. It need not be so today. The ballot is still in our hands, still compelling, still worthy. But the great lords of capital fight, as their rebel forebears did. We do not want blood. We never have, and never shall. Yet, let the lessons of the Great Rebellion be well remembered by all.”

    The cause of the socialists was thus often spun as a second ‘Emancipation,’ and cartoons depicted a slave shattering his iron manacles only to have them replaced with golden chains. The point of Clark’s speech was, as he summed up, “we are no more anarchists nor terrorists than Lincoln was.”

    SLP offices always flew the Stars and Stripes along with the red flag and were always careful to be sure the American colors flew higher.

    Nevertheless, for all this drive at Americanism and respectability, the SLP never severed its connection with underground revolutionists and outright criminals.

    Jack London, even as he drifted around the country under various assumed names, maintained a constant relationship with ‘legitimate’ Socialists. London, along with Bill Haywood and others such as George Pettibone and the black revolutionary Ed McKay, who in this part of the century were forced into hiding due to their part (or perceived part) in terroristic activities, sustained their links with the ‘above ground’ SLP through a number of intermediaries.

    Probably the best-known of those intermediaries was Caroline Hollingsworth Pemberton. Pemberton was assistant secretary of the Pennsylvania SLP. By origin, she was a socialite and of the well-to-do classes. She was also a niece of the Rebel general John C. Pemberton, and in spending time on his southern estate, had become well-acquainted with the wretched conditions of black southern laborers, even after the legal abolition of slavery.

    Pemberton was, if not eager to take up arms herself, staunchly defensive of socialists who did, and scorned those who a priori excluded violence as a means to the ends .

    She quietly set aside a small portion of the Pennsylvania party’s annual funds—what she would later call an ‘extraordinary fund’—and placed it at the disposal of those comrades who were ‘outside the law.’ Through another tier of intermediaries—trade unionists or simply ordinary party members on the street—she identified who these comrades were, and through those same intermediaries, channeled money to them when it was needed.

    It was most likely Pemberton who purchased the rifles that Jack London and his mysterious comrade ‘Price’ delivered to Mississippi socialists in 1903. She also paid for the room and board of the aforementioned Ed McKay, who was laying low in Chickamauga after his part in the bombing of a coal mine in Illinois.

    Pemberton established a relationship with London in particular. The two wrote often, friendly letters as well as ‘official’ ones. After London and a crew composed mostly of European anarchists attempted the disastrous robbery of a Rochester bank in early 1902, Pemberton wrote a letter addressed to the young revolutionary, and mailed it to a New Jersey ‘safehouse’ where Socialists often picked up ‘hot’ correspondence. She asked London if he was “well.” Within the month, he answered. “Well enough,” said the twenty-six-year-old. “Except that Buono and Chaskevich (I believe I have not spelled the poor Polack’s name correctly) are dead, and that a bullet has grazed my thigh. But it is not extremely painful and hit nothing of particular import. We who are left, and who will certainly miss our dead comrades, are disposed to try again and may need money for pistols and ammunition.”

    She dutifully sent him $80.

    Pemberton was hardly the only one. This sort of terroristic sponsorship was especially common in the south, where the SLP was borderline criminal anyhow. Socialists tended to keep buried caches of rifles and pistols, and ‘kill lists’ of influential Klansmen or other foes were often maintained in SLP or STLA offices.

    That is, when rightists charged the SLP with circumventing legality and abetting anarchy, even murder, there was much truth in the charge. But of course, the Socialists could just as fairly point to the hired thugs of the cartels and the southern Klansmen, and say they were only retaliating in kind.

    Though few official records of the party’s early years survive, it seems most of this illegal activity was done on the initiative of regional branches, and little was coordinated from the national leadership in Chicago.

    DeLeon most likely knew of it anyhow (and if he did not, he would hardly have been broken-hearted to find out), as did Clark, Boor, Darrow, and other party figureheads. But there does not seem to have been any large scale, organized ‘shadow party’ operating as a dark reflection of the ‘public’ SLP.

    Nevertheless, though it may have been mostly a haphazard web of dark money, illegal firearms, clandestine correspondence, the line between the legal and illegal activities of the SLP was blurred and often nonexistent.

    In fact, in London’s case at least, it seems he was not so occupied with his life as a revolutionist that he could not spare a moment to write for The Daily People.

    In the late, hot summer of 1904, when the depression was nearing its nadir, and the country was fevered with anticipation of the coming election, a piece was published in the SLP’s mouthpiece paper.

    It was a sort of fable.

    It begins with an assembly of the great men of the day for a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. JJ Astor, JP Morgan, John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, Jacob Schiff, all descend on the luxury hotel for this fictitious banquet. The evening grinds on, as these titans talk politics, finances, society, and indulge in all the conversational niceties of the elites.

    Finally, Rockefeller asks, teasingly, of a humble hotel worker (the author does not specify exactly what the job is of this character, who is only referred to as ‘the Worker’) his opinion on the state of the gold market.

    The worker takes a stand before all these mighty personages, who wait, amused, for this poor man to drown in a matter far beyond his comprehension. Of course, this being the Daily People, the worker delivers not only a perceptive analysis of the gold market, but launches into a long, flowery speech elucidating all of the shortcomings and contradictions of capitalism, finally assuring his wealthy audience of socialism’s historical inevitability.

    The flustered men of gold and silver rise and desperately attempt to explode his argument. Hill, Morgan, and of course, Carnegie; they all stand up, one after the other, and appeal to their philanthropy, their hard work (‘whose?’ the worker asks), their mental acumen, laws of nature and God, to justify their ill-gotten hoard. The worker effortlessly tears apart their tortured logic and leaves them gasping for words.

    The robber barons finally fall back and return to their seats, exhausted and defeated.

    Only one man among these immortals has remained silent so far: Henry Frick. Now he stands and confronts the worker.

    The dialogue is worth reproducing here:

    “We have no words to waste on you,” Frick said, haughty and high. “When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And, in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words: Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.”

    “I am answered,” the worker said quietly. “It is the only answer that could be given. Power. It is what we of the working class preach. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So, we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you—”

    "What if you do get a majority, a sweeping majority, on election day? " Mr. Frick broke in to demand. "Suppose we refuse to turn the government over to you after you have captured it at the ballot box?"

    "That, also, have we considered," the worker replied. "And we shall give you an answer in terms of lead. Power, you have proclaimed the king of words. Very good. Power it shall be. And in the day that we sweep to victory at the ballot-box, and you refuse to turn over to us the government we have constitutionally and peacefully captured, and you demand what we are going to do about it in that day, I say, we shall answer you ; and in roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns shall our answer be couched. You cannot escape us. It is true that you have read history aright. It is true that labor has from the beginning of history been in the dirt. And it is equally true that so long as you and yours and those that come after you have power, that labor shall remain in the dirt. I agree with you. I agree with all that you have said. Power will be the arbiter, as it always has been the arbiter. It is a struggle of classes. Just as your class dragged down the old feudal nobility, so shall it be dragged down by my class, the working class. If you will read your biology and your sociology as clearly as you do your history, you will see that this end I have described is inevitable. It does not matter whether it is in one year, ten, or a thousand—your class shall be dragged down. And it shall be done by power. We of the labor hosts have conned that word over till our minds are all a-tingle with it. Power. It is a kingly word."

    And so ended the night with the men of the Cartel. *

    The short story is credited to ‘J.L’

    London never publicly claimed authorship, but the style is certainly his, as is the hard-nosed pragmatism. If he did write it, it certainly would have been transmitted to the editor in Chicago via Caroline H. Pemberton.

    The real Frick never spoke with such forthright villainy, and the arguments presented by the other titans of industry are largely composed of straw, but the story is nonetheless instructive.

    It shows a current—increasingly a dominant current—in the Socialist movement. One that did not necessarily disdain peaceful, ‘legitimate’ means, but was not shy of appeals to force should those means fail. That was the spirit of the party, and what so affrighted its foes. “We shall play your game, for now.”

    That was legality’s razor edge.

    The story itself proved massively popular in those heated days. DeLeon himself was said to have liked it very much. It was controversial enough that in some cities the presses of the SLP were temporarily shut down by municipal order.

    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    *This section is taken more or less word for word from OTL's The Iron Heel
     
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    • Campaign Season, 1904

    • Iggies

    Conceived in Liberty: The Life and Death of the American Republic, 1776 to 1919 by Richard White (Excerpt)
    (© 1995, Melbourne University Press)    ​

    Privately, McKinley thanked God that his second term was finished. He only hoped his health had not been so wrecked that he mightn’t live a few extra years in peace once he left the Executive Mansion.

    What was far from clear was who the Republican Party would run in his stead.

    1904 was to be an election like no other. Unemployment now hovered at 28%, far worse than it had ever been during the darkest days of the ’93 crisis. It seemed every day carried news of some new assassination, or bombing, or gunfight.

    Darrow and Frick had swept congress in ’02. It seemed now to be truly possible, even likely, one of them would similarly march into Washington come November. The panic was palpable.

    “We are done! It is finished!” cried Rep. Henry Teller (R-CO) in congress, at the news that martial law had been declared again in Florida. “The Republic has only to die.” He apologized for his outburst, but retracted nothing he’d said. That was 10 October 1903.

    Debates in congress were increasingly stormy and seemed to consist ever more of the Socialists and Nationalists shouting at each other across the chamber.

    In the House, Socialist representative Ed Wetzel (S-FL) stood up and announced that the PRA was “an impotent sham,” and that it “mocked the people’s suffering.” He prophesied, “the worker will only have rest when the red flag is flying everywhere.”

    Congressman George Malby (N-NY) sprang up and shouted, “we’ll have that filthy rag ripped down!”

    “It will float over your grave!” Wetzel retorted.

    The argument deteriorated, and the two men sprang at each other. The Sergeant-At-Arms pulled them apart, but not before they had managed to bloody one another’s faces.

    At the next session, Wetzel arrived with a revolver on his hip. He made a point of ostentatiously lifting his jacket to flash the weapon to his fellows. Malby and the other Nationalists (and not a few others) were enraged. Soon enough, a number of Nationalist representatives were also wearing holstered revolvers to congress.

    On 8 September 1903, a motion was passed 267-124 prohibiting the carriage of firearms into the Capitol. Soon, the Sergeant-at-Arms was demanding congressmen unholster and hand over their weapons before entering the chamber. They could be collected on the way out.

    Thus, the situation in the vaunted halls of American government mirrored that in the streets.

    Amid the chaos, one man had decided on his course of action. That was Theodore Roosevelt. He would seek the GOP’s nomination for himself, and he intended on getting it. His popularity with the general public was high. Among those who resented the power of the trusts, Roosevelt had garnered a reputation as McKinley’s ‘good advisor’, always trying to pull him away from business and towards the people. Of course, that was an exaggeration, but it stuck.

    But Roosevelt had many enemies within the Republican Party. Perhaps more enemies than friends.

    Mark Hanna, the party’s invincible boss, was ever hostile. He had no intention of handing the GOP over to “that cowboy.” On Hanna’s side were Attorney General Philander Knox and House Speaker Joseph Cannon, among others. They were determined a ‘sound, sensible,’ man be nominated. Another McKinley.

    But Roosevelt was gathering his own allies. He counted among them Secretary of State John Hay, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Secretary of War Elihu Root. These men had been sufficiently shaken by the tumult to realize the country needed a change. Another four years of McKinley would do nothing at all to alleviate the situation.

    In agreement with this judgment was McKinley himself. Those who knew him said they thought the old politician to have aged twenty years since 1900. He counted his presidency as an abysmal failure and was heard privately to curse the day he ever stood for office. He himself hoped for Roosevelt’s nomination, despite the man’s decidedly un-conservative ideas in many spheres and went so far as to say he saw in Roosevelt ‘what little hope is left to this country.’

    As 1903 melted into 1904, the titanic struggle was on.

    Roosevelt had one major advantage, and it was this: a large number of ‘conservative’ Republicans, whose primary concern was the maintenance of the country’s economic system as it was, and the suppression of Socialism, had already deserted to Frick’s Nationalists. It was by no means a majority, but it was a substantial minority. This left the party’s conservative wing weakened in comparison with the ‘progressive’ wing that favored Roosevelt.

    Then Roosevelt developed a scheme that many, even his allies, viewed as utterly mad.

    He was, like most, sincerely worried about the growing popularity of the SLP and the Nationalists. It seemed entirely likely that either Frick or Darrow would take a plurality of the vote in 1904. Roosevelt did not want to chance it. So, he reached out to another man who had risen to national prominence on the back of the ‘common man,’ who had won fame for himself challenging the stolid old entrenched masters of his party: William Jennings Bryan.

    In early May of 1904, Roosevelt wrote Bryan a letter, asking to meet with him at his earliest possible convenience. Bryan was curious but suspected some manner of political trap. Nevertheless, after some thought, he met with Roosevelt at the man’s private residence in the Catskills.

    Roosevelt’s proposal was bold but simple. He wanted to merge the Republican and Populist tickets and run with Bryan as his VP.

    Bryan was stunned. It would have been unimaginable only four years ago. In 1896 it would have seemed a fever dream.

    But times were changing fast.

    Roosevelt was prepared to make concessions, such as lowering certain tariffs and coining silver again (though he stopped short of acceding to Bryan’s full “16:1” program). But such petty policies faded into irrelevance, now, he said. The Republic itself was in danger. It could not be allowed to tumble into the abyss that awaited on both the left and the right.

    “You would lose half your party with me,” Bryan warned him.

    “But I would make it up with yours,” Roosevelt countered. “And I fear that half might very well cast their ballots for Frick, regardless.”

    Bryan did not reject the proposal outright. The two men shook hands and parted.

    When news of the meeting broke, the GOP descended into chaos. It was charged that Roosevelt had lost his mind. RNC chair George Cortelyou, also secretary of commerce and labor, even said that “Roosevelt…must be removed, at all costs.”

    A not insubstantial number of Republicans in fact left the party and went over to the Nationalists when they got wind of Roosevelt’s madcap plan.

    Hanna wired him in furious desperation, begging, “SIR COME TO YOUR SENSES.”

    But there were those, including the old Senator Henry Teller, and Roosevelt’s long-time ally Henry Lodge, who tentatively supported the fusion idea. Lodge was, though friendly to Roosevelt, a conservative. Only a year before, by his own admission, he would have fled in terror from the prospect of a united front with William Bryan of all men. But “the country is menaced by twin specters,” he despaired. “This is an age of monsters. Against monsters, one cannot choose his allies.”

    The conservative Republicans were in a tizzy, desperate to win, desperate to stave off the assault from all sides. At last, unable to find a suitable champion, Mark Hanna elected to step into the ring and challenge ‘the cowboy’ himself. Hanna ultimately chose the aging Joseph Cannon—despised by radicals for his introduction of the Red Act years ago—as his running mate. Neither man was in very good health.

    The Republican Party’s National Convention gathered at the Chicago Coliseum on 21 June 1904.

    Hanna spoke first. He appealed to the party’s history, to the first half of McKinley’s administration and the ‘progress’ it had seen. He begged, again and again, for ‘sensibility.’ “Now,” Hanna said. “Is the time to plant ourselves where we stand and cry ‘reason! Let reason rule!’”

    In view of the fact that the Coliseum was surrounded by state militiamen, and that many of the delegates’ cabs and motorcars had been pelted with stones by Socialist youths on the way to the convention, Hanna’s pleas rang hollow.

    Then Roosevelt spoke.

    He began by making clear his heartfelt regret that the country had ever come to the place at which it was. But it had, and Roosevelt said that they—the Republican Party—bore a not insubstantial share of the blame.

    “We have been creatures of the trusts and the cartels for too long. We have starved the workingmen and women of this country—what right do we have to cry ‘betrayal!’ when so starved, they swallow poison?”

    There were shouts of “shame, shame!”

    There was also much applause.

    “Where’s Bryan?” someone jeered, to laughter.

    “Bryan is not here,” Roosevelt waved down his accusers, before speaking the immortal words of that convention: “But I believe this country is worth free silver. And Mr. Bryan believes it is worth a Republican president. Do you disagree?”

    On the first ballot, Roosevelt picked up 521 delegates. It was a majority, but only just.

    The floor dissolved into shouting and hollering as Hanna’s delegates demanded a rather pointless recount. When it became clear there would be no such thing, they did what Frick’s delegates had done four years previously and stormed out.

    What was left of the GOP acclaimed their presidential and vice-presidential nominees for the year 1904: Theodore Roosevelt and his running mate, William Bryan.

    Their platform was bare and simple enough. The trusts would be broken up, and the LDP outlawed as a criminal association in contravention of the dead-letter Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Likewise, the full force of the law would come down on ‘anarchist deviants.’ Immigration would be curtailed, both to protect the bargaining power of the American working class, and to prevent the infiltration of European radicals into that working class. The PRA would be expanded, though not drastically so. Roosevelt’s promises to Bryan regarding free silver and tariffs remained, for now, off the record.

    It was a centrist programme par excellence.

    The Conservative Republicans that repudiated Roosevelt soon dissolved. A great many of them, including Hanna’s VP-hopeful, the old veteran Cannon, went over to Frick. He was, as Cannon put it, “tragically, the only force that might prevent our country’s utter dissolution.”

    The rump that remained insisted on nominating Hanna, anyhow. Then, on 20 August, Hanna inconveniently died of typhoid fever. The conservative GOP remnant quickly melted away before the coming storm.

    They voted for Frick or they voted for Roosevelt. There was no other choice.

    The Populist Party had much less trouble accepting the controversial alliance. Its members were largely loyal to Bryan, personally—it was said they would have shouted “hurrah for the Great Commoner” if he ran on a ticket with Satan himself. Furthermore, Bryan’s constituency felt they had precious few options besides.

    Once, the plight of the farmer had captivated the nation. Now, it seemed, the humble smallholder was receding into irrelevance before the hordes of unemployed industrial workers and impoverished sharecroppers massed together under the red flag. Those who had lost their land increasingly went over to the Socialists. Those who feared the reds above all else would cast their ballots for Frick.

    Left for Bryan was a shrinking core of small farmers who still clung tenaciously to their patches of earth and maintained a fervent, quasi-religious faith that free silver would solve all of their problems. But there was still a million or so of these men, at least. And perhaps they would be enough.

    Darrow and Frick were renominated without any fuss.

    But this time, Frick’s campaign would be different. With ‘Trust-Buster Roosevelt,’ as he was coming to be called, on the stage, business despaired at the degeneration of its once ever-reliable GOP. They had been glad to stick with McKinley in 1900. But they did not want to stick with Roosevelt, so long as there were options.

    And the option, in this case, was Henry Frick.

    Frick, still burned that so many of the men he considered natural allies had not supported his first campaign, relished their reversal. Men as grand as Rockefeller and Morgan came to him, offering sundry millions to raise him to the presidency.

    The LDP officially endorsed the National Party. Flexing its economic muscle, it was soon estimated that, despite its voters comprising only some 30% of the electorate, nearly 60% of published campaign material in 1904 was that of the Nationalists.

    For the first time, America felt the true might of the Cartel whose shadow had long extended over the land. Socialist and Republican-Populist speakers found their venues denied them. Their papers were shut down without warning by orders of municipal governments (usually, the municipal government had received a curt warning a day before from some local office of Standard Oil or New York Central, explaining very politely that the slander put out in The Daily People was not appreciated, and ought to be curtailed at the earliest possible convenience). Socialist rallies were disrupted by young men of the middle class in shirtsleeves, armed with knives or even revolvers. Sometimes they were paid, sometimes they came of their own initiative to crack a ‘red dago’ skull or two. The chairman of an STLA Ironworkers’ local in Richmond was shot point blank in the head a few weeks before the election as he stopped to purchase a newspaper.

    On 20 July, Frick held a banquet at his old friend ‘Andy’ Mellon’s home in Pittsburgh. Attending were some of those great names of the day: Rockefeller himself was there. So was Vanderbilt. H.H Rogers, William Clark. They were well aware it was Frick’s little triumph and held their tongues.

    Of course, there exist no minutes of the evening. But it seems clear Frick clearly and coldly presented to his fellow capitalists the facts of the matter.

    Sarah McKentire, one of Mellon’s maidservants, would decades later recall what she could of the meeting.

    Dinner was finished, and everyone was patting his stomach. They were all very fat and happy. But they were actually not so happy, because they all kept looking at Mr. Frick. He did not sit at the head of the table—that was Mr. Mellon—he sat to Mr. Mellon’s left, so he did not really stick out. But he had been very quiet all evening, and left the talking to Mr. Mellon, and also to Mrs. Frick, who was there and who was a great deal friendlier than her husband.

    I came to clear away the plates, and finally that was when Mr. Frick got up to speak. All the men—all these men who were so much richer than he was, and who were supposed to be so much more powerful—turned to watch him.

    He gave a short speech; I don’t really remember. It was very vague. But then he said, “gentlemen, when I am president, you may rest easy. All of your hard-earned holdings will be safe with me.” The fellows clinked their glasses in merriment and laughed. I recall Mr. Vanderbilt burped. Then Mr. Frick said, “but in that day, you will remember     who the president is.” They stopped the clinking. They were all quiet for a little while. I remember it felt like someone had stolen their voices away. They looked at each other. Some of them even looked embarrassed. Then someone said, “hurrah!” and the clinking started up again.

    I guess Mr. Frick was clear enough. He would be their friend, but he wasn’t going to be their front man.

    Nevertheless, the Cartel had little choice beside Mr. Frick, now that his two rivals were Roosevelt and Darrow.

    Frick did not really need the backing of the LDP—he could certainly fund his own campaign—but he had it anyway and relished having it. If nothing else, he enjoyed watching the great robber barons crawl to him on their hands and knees.

    The country’s big cities were awash in Nationalist electoral propaganda. In San Antonio, the wall of a meat packing plant was entirely given over to fifty-foot-high letters spelling “VOTE FRICK!” in stark black and gold paint. In Charleston, men hurled pamphlets from the windows of private vehicles as they careered through the streets.

    Party speakers were accompanied by brass bands; audiences were kept safe from Socialist toughs by well-armed CS men, state militia, or local volunteers.

    One of Frick’s most popular posters simply bore a reproduction of the man’s face over the words, “GIVE ME A MAJORITY AND I WILL GIVE YOU BACK YOUR COUNTRY.”

    The Socialists and the Republican-Populists fought hard with their comparatively meager resources, but they were indeed comparatively meager.

    A Delaware printing house putting out posters for Roosevelt found itself inexplicably shuttered and its printers seized. In Pittsburgh, copies of ‘the Way Forward’ were confiscated by the police as ‘obscene’ material.

    In early October, Roosevelt arrived in San Francisco to speak to supporters. Traveling down Market Street, he and his entourage were forced to brave a gauntlet of police with their rifles, called out by the city’s recently elected Nationalist mayor. Ostensibly, it was to hunt out the ‘anarchists’ that had recently bombed a newspaper office, but the real motive was clear enough.

    Roosevelt in particular was not helpless. He did have his friendly and well-heeled backers. Henry Lodge, for one, and his vast wealth along with his many influential friends. Charles Schwab, who was still somewhat bitter about being undercut by Frick’s US Steel, donated generously to the Republican campaign. The Roosevelt family itself was hardly mired in penury.

    But Frick easily outspent him at least 2:1.

    The Socialists, of course, trailed far behind in corporate donations. But even they were not entirely destitute. Though popular history has the SLP surviving solely on the humble dues of common workers, the party had its share of wealthy sympathizers. Darrow himself contributed heartily to the SLP’s coffers. Fellow travelers among the intelligentsia and middle classes in New York or Washington pitched in where they could.

    And the party had one most unsuspected backer: Andrew Carnegie.

    Carnegie was, of course, no Socialist. Nor was he really even a progressive in the Roosevelt mold. He certainly did not wish to see private property done away with in the United States.

    But he did hate Henry Frick. And as he saw it, with the collapses of both the Republicans and the Democrats, the SLP had the best chance of keeping his old rival out of the Executive Mansion. He did not expect an outright win for Darrow, either. If he had, he would likely not have given a cent to his campaign. It seems his goal was to force a deadlocked election out of which some nebulous compromise might arise. In private, Carnegie claimed he would “fund the devil himself,” before he would consent to a President Frick.

    The great philanthropist’s contributions were meant to be a secret, but they became a public one soon enough.

    Soon Carnegie had been granted, by Socialists and everyone else, the new sobriquet, ‘the Bankroller of the Workers’ Revolution.’

    Frick was naturally furious and promised to “do in that low-down bastard Andrew” once and for all at the first opportunity.

    In fact, there was plenty of ‘doing-in’ during the election season of 1904.

    At least 93 killings were officially recorded as directly related to the election in the days leading up to 8 November, and countless more were injured.

    In Peoria, a band of armed Socialists opened fired on a Nationalist rally, killing two. In Tallahassee County, Florida, a Socialist schoolteacher was decapitated with a machete coming out of her schoolhouse, a particularly hideous excess among hideous excesses. In the Lower East End, Manhattan, two Jewish Socialists were shot dead by vigilantes, one of whom was caught and beaten to death by some comrades of the slain.

    Militia was called out, withdrawn, and called out again. Martial law went into effect in dozens of counties across the country.

    McKinley suffered another heart attack on 22 October, which left him able to work only from bed.

    Rhetoric and action grew more and more unhinged as the crisis deepened. Flying red flags, jobless men in Cleveland burnt down the steel plant at which many of them had worked, and then engaged in a brawl with the police. When it was reported that ten of them had been beaten to death (technically inaccurate - it was four), The Daily People cried ‘OUR PATIENCE WEARS THIN!’ An SLP election poster showed a mighty, muscled red fist crushing a black serpent sporting Frick’s beard and dollar signs for eyes. A Nationalist orator in New York swore that when Frick won, they would take “every last red sheeny and dago and toss them all back into the sea.” Many took it on themselves to do just that, and the number of attacks based on racial or ethnic hatred shot up. In an especially gruesome incident that outraged even most in sympathy with the Nationalists, a Sicilian mother and her young son were knifed to death in Chicago.

    Candidates spoke in the most Manichean of terms.

    Should Frick win, Darrow charged to an audience in the Socialist stronghold of Chicago, “you, labor, and all mankind, will be crushed under the iron heel of a despotism as relentless and terrible as any despotism that has blackened the pages of the history of man.”

    Frick, of course, said the victory of the Socialists would be “the last plunge into anarchy, murder, godlessness, and all the horrors of hell loose on the world.”

    On 8 November, with this feeling in their hearts, the people of the United States went to the polls.
     
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    • Selections From the Platforms of the Major Parties, 1904

    • Iggies

    THE NATIONAL PARTY​

    ...We of the National Party realize we are newcomers, and that we ask much when we ask the confidence of you, the American people. But we realize also that these are times unlike which any our Republic has faced, and that such tempestuous times call for such men unlike any which our Republic has wanted in the past…

    …The National Party disdains all anarchy and lawlessness. We have no quarrel with the law-abiding champion of labor, and we detest all efforts to establish an identity between the worker and the anarchist. We do insist on the fiercest and most definite punishment for the terror-spreaders, the partisans of the red flag who wish to dissolve property, order, religion, and good government into a welter of primitive chaos. There is no hope in the creed of Socialism, and it must wound every patriot’s heart to watch it take root among the discontented of this land. We demand that all murderers, and the egregious destroyers of property, who commit their deeds in the name of revolutionary ideals be liable to capital punishment…

    …We realize the United States have long stood as a beacon of hope to the dispossessed of the earth, who wish only prosperity and peace for themselves and their descendants. As such, we by no means wish to turn our faces from those of foreign lands who seek to live honestly among us. That being so, we recognize also that among these honest men and women come hordes of foreign incendiaries bearing lunatic philosophies and bloodied daggers. These we will not countenance among the body politic. And so while we ask no further restrictions on foreign immigration beyond those now in existence, we demand the term of residence qualifying an alien for naturalization be extended from five to ten years, so that only those who have proven themselves worthy of a stake in our country may fairly involve themselves in its civic life…

    …We challenge those who aver that the consolidation of production is an inherent evil. These are not ‘monstrous cartels,’ but rather the natural and beneficial outcome of competition, through which those that have proven themselves in the arena of commerce inevitably come to the fore. As such, those who counsel the division, or worse, the socialization of benign industrial combinations would do great harm to the economic life of the country. We oppose any measures to these ends unreservedly…

    …The war in the Philippines must be brought to a swift and immediate end. We must demonstrate we can stand for ourselves and the Filipino people alike. The insurgents must and can be rendered incapable of further depredations…

    …This is not a contest between peaceable men over matters of policy. This is, quite simply, a contest between those who mean to save civilization, and those who wish to drag it into perdition. The republic cries out for salvation, and we are the only men disposed to answer.



    THE SOCIALIST LABOR PARTY​

    …Capitalism has outlasted its historic moment and has ceased to be an instrument of progress. It delivers now only hideous poverty and repression to the working people of the earth in general, and of the United States in particular. Productive capacity has grown by leaps and bounds, so that our ancestors would marvel at the wonders we have built. And yet, the fruits of this industry are delivered up to the exclusive enjoyment of an ever-smaller handful of men, while the vast masses sink further and further into immiseration…

    …Now, in this last hour of the capitalist system, the master classes have made their bid for total despotism. No longer able to delude the worker with false promises of prosperity and equality, they seek instead to crush him down by force and secure their rule forever more. Parliaments and laws are eroding more every day in favor of bayonets and bullets…

    …We demand that the wealth produced by the many be enjoyed by the many. As such, we demand the passage into collective ownership of the great trusts that instead of enriching American life with their fantastic works and machines, have made it hardly worth living. The railroads, the telegraphs and telephones, the oil fields, the mines of gold and coal, must become the possessions of the workers that work them…

    …We demand the immediate abolition of the uncivilized practice of child labor, by which boys and girls in the full flower of their youth are driven to waste it away in toil, their only reward mutilation, exhaustion, and an early grave…

    …We demand equal suffrage for the female sex on the level with that of the male…

    …We demand the institution of proper relief for the jobless workers of this country, irrespective of age, condition, or civic status…

    …These are only the opening salvoes of our crusade. We will have in the end our great Commonwealth of Toil, where poverty, tyranny, and hatred are but distant nightmares, and all men are brothers. It is a long and difficult road we shall travel, but it is one that must be traveled. In the end, it is victory or destruction.


    THE REPUBLICAN-POPULIST PARTY​

    …The purpose of government is to safeguard the life, liberty, and property of its people. When it can no longer do this, that government has failed…

    …We have been many things—party men, Republicans, Populists, Democrats. But first and foremost, we must be lovers of our country. There was a time when patriotism was general. Yet, today, it seems that affection for our republic and her institutions is quick decaying, to be replaced my narrow-minded hatreds based on section or class…

    …The Republican Party was founded fifty years ago to combat the heinous injustice of human slavery. Today we find ourselves faced with two specters at least as menacing. On the one hand, that of total cartelism and absolute tyranny of the few. On the other, that of utter anarchy and absolute tyranny of the mob. Both would destroy the beautiful inheritance bequeathed to us by our fathers, tested and bettered in the crucible of hideous civil war…

    …We may be in agreement on little, but that little is worth everything. We men of the Republican and Populist parties agree that ours is the best government ever erected, and that it is the last, best hope of the earth. We believe our republic is a republic worth keeping. We will not turn her over to those who mean to wreck her…

    …We demand, first and foremost, the immediate disbandment of the great Cartel that calls itself the ‘League for the Defense of Property’ and the dissolution of its constituent trusts, and the passage of legislation to keep such monstrous commercial combinations from ever forming again…

    …the proscription of all parties or leagues that preach violent revolution against the American government, and the prosecution of their members, in accordance with all of the established laws of the United States of America…

    …the legal protection of all workers’ unions that seek, through peaceful and legal means, the defense of the collective rights of American labor…

    …a national minimum wage for all American workers….

    …the immediate halt to all immigration until the present crisis has run its course, and the regulation of future immigration so that the ability of American workmen to earn a living wage is not grievously impacted…

    …without regard for prior or current political affiliation, we appeal to all Americans who love our country. We love her, too. Help us to rescue her.
     
    • The Election of 1904

    • Iggies

    From the first, fraud was widespread and systematic.

    Without a doubt its greatest purveyor was the National Party. Not necessarily because the party was especially perfidious. Rather, with the collapse of the GOP, the men of wealth and institutions in whose power it was to affect such fraud put themselves at the disposal of the Nationalists, instead.

    In many counties of Pennsylvania, Frick’s old kingdom, men were turned away from the ballot box if their surnames “smacked of Sicily or Hungary.” Even those who could prove citizenship were often denied the vote.

    In Oakland, Jack London’s hometown, Darrow’s name was simply cut out of ballots.

    In the south, suppression of the vote was even more egregious. Most Nationalists were former northern Republicans who did not have any special opposition to black men voting and may have even favored it in previous times. But now that blacks were an increasingly red constituency, they could make common cause with the tatters of the southern Democrats and their bête noire of negro suffrage.

    In Florida, the vote totals of Tallahassee and Calhoun County at least, seem to be entirely fictitious, with 95%+ for Frick, in counties that had showed strong Socialist pluralities in 1902.

    An Alabama farmer threatened his tenants that if he heard “any of you voted red, you’ll be begging alms by Friday.”

    Sometimes, the methods of manipulation were more forthright. So it was in Houma County, Louisiana, where a group of black men heading to the polls was fired upon by Klansmen armed with Winchesters.

    But blacks organized to defend their ballot access. And now that they were leagued with a not-insignificant portion of the white population, they constituted a real challenge to their white supremacist foes.

    The Spartacist columns had spent months drilling and preparing for election day, armed with the pistols, rifles, and daggers men like Jack London had helped them acquire. By November they were, if not quite as well-disciplined as soldiers, at least as well-disciplined and capable as the enemy.

    In New Orleans, black and ‘foreign’ Spartacists (mostly Italians and Germans) marched to the ballot box with pistols jangling in their belts. The much smaller band of armed white citizens that had gathered to prevent just that lost its nerve and scattered. The Crescent City went resoundingly to Darrow.

    Sometimes, neither side gave way. In Jackson County, Mississippi, a firefight broke out at the polls between Klansmen and Spartacists. Though four men died, there was no real victor, as in the end the ballots were destroyed by fire, and Jackson County ultimately did not contribute to the election of the 26th President.

    About 36 people died across the south on 8 November as a direct result of electoral violence. There were many more over the rest of the country.

    The Socialists naturally could not engage in election-day skullduggery to the same extent, since they lacked any comparable control over the political and state machinery that allowed it. But where they had power, whether through local officials or simply the force of numbers, they did use it.

    In Leadville, Colorado, the Socialist mayor placed miners packing revolvers at the ballot boxes for ‘maintenance of public order.’ Though the Nationalists had mustered a rally of some 2,000 citizens a week before, not a single of the town’s 4,382 votes cast went to Frick or Roosevelt.

    In Pennsylvania, where the might of the NP left little recourse, there were reports of radical steelworkers quite literally putting guns to the heads of their non-Socialist coworkers to ‘compel them to vote aright.’

    The Republican-Populists probably bore the least responsibility for the general fraud. Again, not out of any particular virtuosity, but because they lacked both the money and state power of the Nationalists and the street-level mobilization of the Socialists.

    Early Tuesday evening, the first of the results began to roll in.

    “I believe the night is promising,” Frick told a reporter, upon discovering he had again won New Jersey.

    As that night went on, it became increasingly clear that Frick and Darrow were almost neck and neck, with Roosevelt trailing somewhere behind. Americans awaited the returns with a terrible desperation, even as they beat, shot, and stabbed each other.

    It was clear early on that Frick had swept New England, as all had expected. The great exception was Maine, which narrowly went to Roosevelt. The south was Frick’s as well, thanks to his unofficial compact with the remains of the Bourbon Democrats. That was, except for Louisiana and Florida, which went to Darrow, and Georgia along with North Carolina, which went for the Roosevelt-Bryan ticket out of stubborn affection for the Great Commoner.

    Past the Mississippi it was a patchwork—the Socialists had taken most of the desolate western states of ever more radical miners and farmworkers; Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Nevada. The Nationalists managed to hold California again. The Socialists took Washington, but Oregon was Frick’s.

    As morning of 9 November dawned, the terrible truth became clear: no candidate would take an outright majority of electoral votes.

    In the end, Frick took a plurality of 228 electors. Darrow was not far behind, with 188. Roosevelt lingered in third place, with 60.

    As for the popular vote, the official returns gave Darrow a small plurality of 6,053,351 ballots cast, for 36.4% of the total.

    Frick had 5,583,973 votes cast for him, for 34.5% of the total.

    Roosevelt won over 3,900,688 of the men who voted, for 24.2% of the votes cast.

    4.9%, or 793,086 ballots were write-ins, spoiled, or otherwise discounted, a notably high amount. This speaks both to the tumult of the election, and the level of fraud.

    On the morning of 10 November, the New York Times carried the headline, NO MAJORITY; ELECTION WILL GO TO HOUSE!

    It went over with the general populace about as well as might have been expected.

    The Daily People charged that Frick had won Pennsylvania’s coveted 32 electoral votes only through fraud, and that they rightfully belonged to Darrow. Frick took a majority in Pennsylvania by only 11,307 votes. It is certainly possible fraud made up the difference, though such will probably never be known for certain. The paper then went on to make the far more fanciful claim that Darrow had in fact won an outright majority of the popular vote nationwide, but that this had been obscured by the Cartel and its lackeys.

    The Voice as well as Hearst’s New York Journal, Harpers Weekly, and a number of conservative papers besides trumpeted: FRICK VICTORIOUS, though of course he was as of yet no such thing.

    The NYSE fell by nearly 20% upon publication of the results, though considering the economic mire in which the country was already sunk, this was not noticed by many besides stock traders and bankers. Foreign investors—French and British, mostly—began to pull their assets from the country. Those which still remained, at least.

    And the violence worsened. In the Lower East End of Manhattan, a Socialist hotbed, a brawl over the results of the election killed three people (which began when someone shouted, “hurrah for President Frick!”). When the police arrived, one of the officers on scene was shot dead.

    80 persons were arrested, mostly European immigrants.

    Some Nationalists took Frick’s plurality in the electoral college as a sanction to vent their rage on the hated red enemy (if they were not doing so already). Early in the evening of 9 November, the Chicago SLP offices were set alight and severely damaged in the resulting fire. In retaliation, the city’s Nationalist club was stormed by armed Spartacists and four men killed.

    In San Francisco, Nationalist Mayor Boxton was assassinated by a pistol-wielding Socialist student. Such was the turmoil in the country this went largely unnoticed beyond California’s borders.

    In Philadelphia, unemployed Socialist workers surrounded a courthouse that had served as a polling place the day before, demanding to count the ballots themselves. They were suspicious of the appointed judges who had done the tallying, for they were suspected of being in the pay of the National Party. The courthouse was guarded by CS men, and when the Socialists refused to disperse, they opened fire. Ten men were killed.

    This went on for the remainder of November, by which time New York City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Denver, along with a number of less distinguished cities and counties, were under martial law.

    “Congress must not dither and must confirm President Frick as soon as is humanly possible,” Hearst thundered in his journal. “The country crumbles down around our ears.”

    Though they might not agree with his pronouncement of the results, all agreed with the sentiment.

    Behind closed doors, Daniel DeLeon was greatly excited. Thrilled by reports and photographs of Socialist militants marching ‘with wonderful discipline’ all across the country, he was deluded into believing the strength of the SLP in the streets much greater than it really was (probably slightly more than 25% of the total electorate could be counted in its camp, though it may have been the single most popular party at the moment). DeLeon excitedly told Clark that he believed revolution was at hand, and the ‘electoral show’ would all soon be irrelevant, anyhow. In fact, DeLeon wished to issue a call to arms in the Daily People. Clark was alarmed. He and others near the top of the party, including Ella Bloor and Emil Seidel, struggled to disabuse DeLeon of his wild optimism. Narrowly, they managed to talk him down.

    DeLeon buckled and refrained from an outright declaration of war, but he toed the line precariously as he could. In the Daily People, the old Marxist thundered: “Workers! Maintain your arms! Be always watchful! The time is fast approaching!”
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    As provided by the US Constitution, when no candidate prevailed to win an outright majority of electors, then the election would go to the House of Representatives. There, the president would be chosen from the top three candidates (measured by popular vote) by a majority of state delegations, each delegation itself casting a vote in accordance with a majority of its constituent representatives.

    The Vice President would be chosen from the top two Vice Presidential candidates by a simple majority of Senators voting individually.

    This process had proven necessary twice before in the history of the Republic: with the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, and with that of John Quincy Adams in 1824.

    But never had there been a congress so chaotic as that which to the election was thrown in the winter of 1904.

    In view of rapidly deteriorating state of the Union, the weary President McKinley called a special session of congress on 11 December, with the intention that they select the next president (who he prayed would be Roosevelt) post haste.

    By early morning on the 11th, a large crowd of the jobless had formed at the Center Market in the federal capital, and from there dispersed through the city, chanting “Darrow is president!” as they marched through the streets and threatening frightened onlookers into joining in the cry. With congressmen now descending upon Washington en masse for the assembly, federal troops were called out to clear out the mob and protect the legislators as they performed their sacred duty.

    When senators and representatives trundled from Baltimore into the capital by cab or carriage, they were escorted by hundreds of blue-coated soldiers holding off ‘masses of roaring reds’ at bayonet point.

    “Darrow! Darrow!” Rep. George Southwick (R-NY) heard a young man scream from the crowd. “Or we’ll kill you all!”

    “I had no doubt,” Southwick would say. “That they would make good on their promise given the opportunity.”

    Congress convened under this storm. Inside the vaunted chambers, the atmosphere was scarcely better. Nationalists, Socialists, and Republicans traded barbs, and sometimes threw punches. The stacks of surrendered pistols outside the chambers grew to several feet high.

    The Senate easily enough selected its Vice President—the only choices were Emil Seidel, Darrow’s running mate, and William Hearst, Frick’s. The Senate still held a 51-strong majority of Republican senators who, while they might not all be for Frick, were certainly against Darrow. As such, Hearst was narrowly elected Vice President by 47 votes.

    It was in the House that the true battle played out.

    When the congressmen were finally quieted and confined to their seats by the Sergeant-at-Arms, the first ballot was cast.

    The congress was that which had been elected in 1902; that meant in the House, there were 102 Republicans, 99 Socialists, 78 Populists, and 86 Nationalists. All these were scattered over the country, making for divided delegation after divided delegation. Moreover, the Republicans had been elected prior to the 1904 convention split between the Rooseveltians and the Conservatives, the latter of which had largely gone over to Frick. That meant many of the Republicans sitting in Congress were better disposed towards the Nationalist candidate than their nominal party fellow, Roosevelt.

    The first ballot was cast in alphabetical order, and went as follows:

    Alabama-Frick (6-3)

    Arkansas-Roosevelt (4-3)

    California-Frick (5-3)

    Colorado-Darrow (3-0)

    Connecticut-Frick (4-1)

    Delaware-Roosevelt (1-0)

    Florida-Darrow (2-1)

    Georgia-Roosevelt (6-5)

    Idaho-Darrow (1-0)

    Illinois-Frick (13-11)

    Indiana-Roosevelt (9-4)

    Iowa-Roosevelt (7-4)

    Kansas-Roosevelt (5-3)

    Kentucky-Frick (6-5)

    Louisiana-Darrow (4-3)

    Maine-Frick (4-0)

    Maryland-Frick (5-2)

    Massachusetts-Frick (9-5)

    Michigan-Roosevelt (9-6)

    Minnesota-Darrow (7-3)

    Mississippi-Frick (7-1)

    Missouri-Frick (10-9)

    Montana-Darrow (1-0)

    Nebraska-Darrow (4-2)

    Nevada-Darrow (1-0)

    New Hampshire-Frick (2-0)

    New Jersey-Frick (6-3)

    New York-Frick (20-16)

    North Carolina-Roosevelt (6-4)

    North Dakota-Darrow (2-0)

    Ohio-Frick (11-10)

    Oregon-Roosevelt (2-0)

    Pennsylvania-Darrow (17-15)

    Rhode Island-Frick (2-0)

    South Carolina-Frick (7-0)

    South Dakota-Roosevelt (2-0)

    Tennessee-Roosevelt (7-3)

    Texas-Darrow (9-7)

    Utah-Roosevelt (1-0)

    Vermont-Frick (2-0)

    Virginia-Darrow (6-0)

    Washington-Darrow (2-1)

    West Virginia-Darrow (3-2)

    Wisconsin-Darrow (6-3)



    The final tally :

    17 states for Frick.

    13 states for Roosevelt.

    15 states for Darrow.    ​

    As soon as the balloting was done the chamber erupted into the usual shouting and insults.

    Another ballot was conducted, with precisely the same results. This went on until the sun broke on Washington DC. By that morning, the representatives had reached their 11th ballot, with not a single change in delegations. Some individual congressmen had switched their votes, but none were strategically positioned to flip a state.

    Outside, a belligerent crowd gathered around the Capitol, kept back by two battalions of the US 2nd Infantry and four Maxim guns. They roared, “Darrow! Darrow! Give us Darrow!”

    Soon, the bickering congressmen could hear The Internationale in the streets outside.

    At about 7:00 in the morning, in the middle of the 15th ballot, Henry Teller stood and begged of his fellow representatives. “I appeal to you as intelligent, reasonable men!” he cried, almost in tears. “Does any one of you really, truly want Henry Clay Frick or Clarence Seward Darrow to be the 26th President of the United States?”

    A brief and fleeting concord developed between the Nationalists and Socialists as they rose from their seats to heap vicious abuse on the old veteran congressman. Teller stood his ground and steadfastly refused to acknowledge his colleagues’ jeers.

    The balloting went on, with no progress.

    Occasionally, someone would demand a recount of this or that state, or this or that county (mostly the SLP, and mostly concerning Pennsylvania). But it was abundantly clear to all that an impartial recount was entirely impractical under these conditions.

    Meanwhile, the United States continued to fall to pieces. In St. Louis, a band of Nationalists attacked an STLA Woodworkers’ Union office armed with state-of-the-art bolt-action rifles stolen from a militia armory. They shot dead two workers, including one woman, before being repulsed by the Socialists’ own firepower, which claimed the lives of three Nationalists in turn. That was 14 December.

    In Brooklyn, National Guardsmen panicked and fired into a crowd of Socialists after the latter began to pelt them with stones and bricks. In the confused, panicked reports the death toll was variously relayed as 3, 6, 8, or 15.

    In Clay County, Alabama, six black farmworkers suspected of SLP membership were shot and buried in a mass grave.

    “WHO IS PRESIDENT?” The Wall Street Journal demanded.

    It was then that DeLeon at last decided to ‘ruin everything,’ as a bitter Victor Berger would put it some years down the line.

    Like the rest of the country, his anxiety had reached a fever pitch. He was by now convinced that the failure by congress to select a winner was all part and parcel of the bourgeois conspiracy to deny the SLP its rightful victory.

    Bulling through the objections of his comrades, on 18 December, he published a front-page editorial in The Daily People.

    Its headline was, “TO ARMS!”

    The content of the article was even more belligerent.

    “The capitalist system has reached its hideous apotheosis. From here it will tumble into history’s abyss…but only by the force of your arms!”

    He went on to charge the American government of fraud: “it is no coincidence that the machinery of this bourgeois republic has come to a terrible halt. For if parliament and the ballot box were anything more than cruel deceptions, the government would by now have passed into our hands. The ‘representatives of the people’ deliberate only to decide the best way in which to cheat us of our victory. We have wrung all we can out of this rotten, cretinous system.”

    The article finished with, “let there be no more presidents, no more capitalists or kings. Workers, let your rifles speak!”

    It was, at last, what the SLP had managed to refrain from all these years—an open call to violent, armed revolution.

    It is debatable to what extent DeLeon was in fact responsible for subsequent events. It is likely history would have unfolded very similarly without his explosive editorial. Nevertheless, its immediate role is difficult to deny.

    For upon reading this virulent summon to insurrection, Attorney General Philander Knox hit upon an idea.

    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
    Washington DC, USA
    19 December, 1904​

    President William McKinley was in pain.

    All sorts of pain.

    He feared he was on the verge of another heart attack. The twisting stabs and aches in his chest grew more frequent. His gut squirmed. Even his limbs felt drained of strength.

    McKinley lay back on the ottoman in the East Sitting Hall, an arm laid over his chest. Outside he could hear the roar of the mob. And then the dreadful chant, that scabrous little tune—he could nearly sing it himself by now.

    Arise, ye prisn’ers of starvation, arise, ye wretched of the earth!

    He expected any moment now to hear the rip of Maxim guns. All it took was one bloodthirsty corporal. One hot-blooded red. And then what? A field of corpses spread out all before the Executive Mansion. Soldiers marching roughshod over the dead.

    Just like at Wilmington. Just like at Cripple Creek.

    Like at Chicago.

    McKinley closed his eyes. Periodically, an aide entered the room to inform him on the situation at congress. There was no real purpose to it. It had been the same on the last thirty ballots, and would be the same, now.

    He heard the congressmen had taken to sleeping on the chamber floors. It was too much hassle for the soldiers to clear a path through the horde outside so senators and representatives could exit the Capitol.

    Frick. Darrow. Roosevelt.

    Roosevelt with Bryan.

    The President could hear his breath rattle. Good Christ, hadn’t he beaten Bryan? When was that? 1896? Eight years past?

    How could this have happened?

    The Senate had elected that firebrand Hearst. And so, if the House did not select a winner by March, he would ascend to the Presidency himself.

    Hearst and Frick. Wasn’t that Hearst supposed to be half a red himself? What sense did that make?

    Nothing. What did make sense, now?

    That would be his legacy, McKinley thought, and there was another stab of pain in his breast. He’d failed as surely as any president had failed.

    He’d failed to save the country’s commerce. He’d failed to stop the slaughters at Wilmington and Cripple Creek. He’d failed to stop Frick. Failed to stop the reds. Failed to stop the risen Klan.

    McKinley the failure.

    McKinley the coward.

    If there were any Americans left in fifty years, that was how they would remember him.

    He cursed the day he accepted the Republican nomination. But what did that matter? There were no Republicans anymore.

    The door to the hall clicked open. McKinley turned, expecting to see his aide with a fresh report that the House had failed at another round of balloting.

    Instead, it was Philander Knox.

    “Mr. Knox,” McKinley said, weakly.

    Knox nodded and approached. He clutched a newspaper in his hand.

    “Mr. President.”

    McKinley beckoned him closer.

    “What is it, Mr. Knox? Is everything alright?” he managed to chuckle at his own joke.

    “Sir, I’ve an idea. I do not think it is a very good idea, but I doubt anyone has got a better one.”

    McKinley narrowed his eyes. He nodded. “Go ahead.”

    “I believe we can deliver the House to Roosevelt.”

    McKinley snapped to attention at that.

    “How might we do that?”

    Knox took a deep breath, as if steeling himself to say whatever came next.

    “You must outlaw the Socialists, sir.”

    He balked. The Socialists were madmen. They could all go to hell for what he cared. But to simply outlaw a party based on—it was the stuff of despots.

    “Sir, I cannot do that. On what grounds w—”

    “Look at what that man DeLeon has written, now,” Knox said. He tossed down the paper he held before McKinley. The President saw now that it was the day’s edition of The Daily People, the SLP mouthpiece. The headline read, “TO ARMS!”

    His eyes bulged, alarmed.

    “Go on, sir,” Knox urged. “Take a look.”

    With trembling hands, McKinley raised the paper. He gave the editorial a quick once-over. The words leapt out; “rise,” “arms,” “blood,” “march,” “revolution.”

    “Sir—” McKinley began to say.

    “It is sedition,” Knox interrupted. “Treason, even.”

    “It is not treason—” McKinley said. “Who is Mr. DeLeon betraying us to?”

    “You hear them out there,” Knox gestured wildly at the window. McKinley cocked his ear towards the singing mob. “That is his army. He is calling them to revolt. That is the levying of war against the United States, sir. That is treason.”

    McKinley sighed and closed his eyes.

    “And if I outlaw the Socialists? How will you give Roosevelt the House?”

    “Listen—look here,” Knox said, speaking with frantic fever in his voice. “Frick has now 17 state delegations. Darrow has taken 15, and Roosevelt only 13. But there are four states with delegations comprised entirely of Socialists. If you outlaw the party—if we arrest these men— four delegations are entirely removed from the count. And so are the Socialists infesting the remaining 41. And I am familiar with the men in Congress, I have toyed with the numbers. Granting no man changes his vote—and they have not been disposed to do that in the past week—if you do what I propose, 19 delegations will go to Roosevelt, as against 22 for Frick—”

    “Mr. Knox,” McKinley cut him off. “I am not sure if you are aware, but 22 is a majority of 41, while 19 is not. And—”

    “Wait,” Knox urged. “Except that I am assured the men who have turned the delegations of Wyoming and Vermont for Frick can be compelled to vote our way. That will give Roosevelt the majority. If only by one.”

    McKinley could only be repulsed. It all smacked of European courts. All the rotten games and alliances.

    But then—he could hear that mob just without.

    “I cannot do it, Mr. Knox.”

    “You must do it, sir! For God’s sakes—if this goes on, if they are still balloting come March 4th—then the congress elected in November will take their place. Are you familiar with its composition, Mr. President?”

    Of course he was. The November elections had returned a clear majority of Nationalists and Socialists.

    “Yes,” McKinley said, weakly.

    “Then it will be Frick or Darrow, and the third selection will be civil war. That is all.”

    There was a long quiet between the two men. The President buried his face in his hands.

    “How shall the order read?”
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Philadelphia, USA
    19 December, 1904    ​

    Andrew Mellon was still huffing when he crested the final flight of stairs and burst in on the study. Frick was at the window, a paper and pen abandoned on a writing desk six feet away. The governor’s eyes swept over the streets of Philadelphia, as if he was looking for something in particular.

    Three stories below them, the militiamen guarding the governor’s mansion had established a perimeter two lines strong around the stately house, and even piled up sandbags. It might seem paranoid, but then someone had tried to kill Frick with a bomb only a week before. Again.

    “Mr. Frick,” Mellon called.

    Frick turned, saw him, and smiled. “Andy! They said you were coming.” He strolled over to his old friend and put an arm around his shoulders. “You said you had ‘bad news,’ eh?”

    “Yes. Yes, sir. I do.”

    “How bad?”

    “My friends in Washington have…advised me that McKinley plans to outlaw the Socialists come the 21st.”

    Frick’s eyes widened. Then he smiled through his sharp black beard. His grey eyes crinkled.

    “Well!” he slapped the nearest table. “The man finally grows a spine!”

    “But with the Socialists out of congress—”

    Frick’s smile died instantly. And he understood. “The son of a bitch. Which congressmen do they plan to pay off? Is i—”

    “Mondell from Wyoming. Both men from New Hampshire. Without the Socialist congressmen that is enough to—”

    “I can count,” Frick snapped. The man took to pacing, grumbling, brows knitted in concentration. Outside, Mellon could hear National Guard cavalry clopping through the street.

    Then Frick raised his head, a light in his eyes. “Ah!”

    “Yes?” Mellon inquired.

    Frick whirled around.

    “Listen, man—if they flip two states, we need only flip one. That will return the majority to us.”

    “Certainly—”

    “Are you familiar with James Watson?”

    Andrew Mellon leaned in, certain his friend had something in mind. He always did.

    “The congressman from Indiana? Yessir.”

    “Last I heard, Indiana went for Roosevelt by a single vote. If Watson can be persuaded—”

    “What makes you think he can be?”

    Frick patted Mellon’s shoulder.

    “Andy, I’m quite sure he can. Can you get in touch with the man?”

    “He’s holed up in the Capitol with the rest of them surrounded by that anarchist mob, but I will certainly do what I can.”

    “I know you will. Tell him to name his price.”

    “Will he go in for it?”

    “He will.” Frick read the concern and uncertainty on Mellon’s face. “Trust me, Andy. Everything will be quite alright.”
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    William McKinley's Executive Order No. 287​

    DECEMBER 21ST, 1904

    It is hereby determined that in calling on its armed partisans to affect the overthrow of the United States federal government by means of civil insurrection, the leadership of the so-called Socialist Labor Party has levied war against the United States, and is thus guilty of treason as defined by Article III, Section 3 of the United States constitution. All adherents to this so-called party and its associated leagues or unions, are liable to arrest as traitors to the United States of America.

    WILLIAM MCKINLEY
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    The Last Days of the Republic as I Lived Them, by Harry Skinner, former Populist Representative from North Carolina
    (©1938, Penguin Books)    ​

    …having rested for a time considered by all reasonable, we reconvened in the chamber for the miserable task of casting yet another ballot. This would be the 42nd ballot, and there was little reason to expect it would look any different from the previous 41.

    I was seated next to Mr. Matchett, a Socialist from New York. He had, in fact, run for president on the Socialist ticket in ’96, but in the turmoil of the past several years I think most had forgotten him.

    The balloting began with Alabama. Her delegation voted Frick, of course. We went down the line. Cannon looked exhausted.

    I wonder if I was the first to hear it. At first, I figured it for thunder, because it was a stormy evening. It was the winter solstice, in fact, and darkness fell quickly.

    But it was not thunder. It was, in fact, the tramp of soldiers’ boots.

    California had just called out its vote for Frick.

    Then the doors to the chamber blew open. In stormed some fifteen soldiers in their blue coats. They were all soaked through with rainwater and tracked the grime and mud of Washington’s streets over the fine carpeting. A few elder congressmen in fact offered protests to that effect. The greater part of us was simply too stunned to offer any sort of reaction.

    I suppose many took it for some kind of joke, as I heard a number of affrighted giggles.

    A young officer stepped forward who I later learned was Captain McClelland. He drew his revolver, I suppose in the interest of theatrical flair, and he declared, “you men of the Socialists are all under arrest.”

    We remained seated, all of us. Stunned. My first thought, my primal instinct, was to thank God I was only a Populist.

    No Socialist stood. I suppose they may have still not understood the reality of it.

    Then a corporal went over and jammed his bayonet at Mr. Hillquit, holding it an inch or two from the man’s face. “Get up!” ordered the young man with his great rifle.

    Mr. Hillquit rose, staggering, not quite lucid.

    Not all of the Socialists were quite so compliant.

    “This is not Russia!” cried Mr. Hayes of Ohio.

    A soldier took him by his collar and compelled him to his feet.

    Mr. Matchett, who you will recall sat beside me, turned to look me in the eye. He said nothing and did not look particularly afraid. His face held only a sort of vague confusion. I could say nothing to him, in such a state was I. When the soldiers came round to him, he stood.

    Mr. Allen of Florida was not quite so insouciant. He gripped his desk tight and roared, “Cossacks! Cossacks!” as two privates quite literally pried his fingers from the desk and pulled him away. It might have been a comical sight were it not so terrible.

    Not all of us who were not Socialists were as acquiescent in the travesty as I was (to my eternal shame).

    Mr. Pharr, a Populist from Louisiana, rose to his feet. He was a conservative by the standards of his party, and a rich man. But even he could not countenance this defilement of republican government in its supposed sacred seat.

    “But you cannot do this!” Pharr protested.

    One of the soldiers aimed his rifle at him, and he returned to his seat, quaking.

    Soon enough, all 99 Socialists were corralled together and marched out of the chamber like common criminals. Then Cpt. McClelland turned to us. “Well, you gentlemen may return to your work,” he said. And he and his soldiers left us, on the tail of their prisoners.

    That left a yawning gap where our colleagues had sat. It was bizarre, as if they had simply vanished. We looked at one another. For some time, no one spoke except in brief mutterings to his neighbor.

    Then, we realized, there was little to do but return to the ballot.

    I tried feverishly to perform some simple arithmetic and so discover the inevitable winner, now that the Socialist delegations were no longer of any account. But my mind failed me, sickened and confused as I was.

    I only realized when the ballot was all but completed, long after I had called out my “Theodore Roosevelt!”

    “For Henry Frick!” trumpeted Mr. Watson from Illinois, thus seizing a state that had been ours.

    We neared the end of the count.

    Conspicuously absent were the cries “for Clarence Darrow!” from the Socialists we had grown so accustomed to over the past forty ballots.

    I had hardly registered the horrible reality when Speaker Cannon rose, his face half-triumph and half-dread.

    And he announced, “Henry Clay Frick is elected President of the United States of America.”
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    “…We never abrogated the laws of the United States. All we did was provided for by the Constitution.

    DeLeon and his comrades were rebels. Can you deny this? DeLeon and his comrades did seek the destruction of the United States and its institutions. Can you deny this?

    Hell, do you think we wanted the poor bastards dragged out of the chamber in that manner? We didn’t have a choice. Not a congressman had left the building in a week for that goddamned red mob outside—there was nowhere else we might have apprehended them…

    …It is not a crime to make a private donation to the State of Montana. We never went to Mondell, nor to any of the gentlemen from New Hampshire and said, “vote for Roosevelt, and we shall shower you with gold.”

    Ask Frick! Ask Frick what he paid Watson for the Presidency! I’ll tell you! $30 million dollars! Henry Clay Frick bought the Presidency for $30 million dollars!”

    - Philander C. Knox, 1924​
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    A British Times of London cartoon depicts the United States congress staring down the bayonets of some fifty soldiers. The captain in command calls “all in favor of the motion, raise your hands.”

    The congressmen’s hands are thrown up in surrender.

    The caption reads, “    lately in the land of liberty.”
     
    • Americans in the Second International

    • Iggies

    The International Workingman’s Association (soon known as ‘the International’ and then ‘the First International’) was founded in 1864 in London by a smattering of European radicals and trade unionists, mostly exiles fled to Britain beyond the reach of continental secret police. Its aim was, simply enough, the coordination of the international proletariat towards the destruction of the present order and the establishment of some manner of socialist society. There was little agreement beyond this. Anarchists, utopians, Blanquists, Proudhonists, and proto-Marxists (most notably Marx himself) clashed bitterly through the International’s thirteen years of existence, and as much time was consumed by petty partisan squabbling as by serious deliberation.

    The First International ultimately held five congresses, ostensibly representative of the global working class but in reality, heavily weighted towards Germany, France, and Britain, who provided by far the lion’s share of the delegates to each. In 1871, in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune, the International became the object of the hysterical fear of Europe’s reactionary forces, who blamed its shadowy machinations for the turmoil (there had been representatives of the International in Paris at the time, but their role was far from decisive). It and its members were outlawed in France and other countries besides.

    Ultimately the First International foundered on internal dissent, primarily that between the factions led by Marx, and those led by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. It finally splintered in 1872 and dissolved entirely four years later.

    Though at its peak some six million workers in various trade unions, labor associations, and socialist parties over Europe and the Americas had been affiliated with the International in some capacity or another, it failed to ever really put itself at the head of the global proletariat as it had hoped.

    American representation to the International’s various congresses did exist, but as the American socialist movement was itself tiny and largely immigrant in composition, it was of little account.

    Though the First International was not a smashing success, the dream if not the reality remained alluring, and it was only a matter of time until a second attempt at a unification of the international working-class movement.

    The dream came to a second fruition in 1889, when the founding congresses of a Second International were held in Paris. ‘Congresses’ in plural, because once again the fissures in the movement ran deep. An irreconcilable split had developed amid the French socialists, between one Paul Brousse and his ‘possibilists,’ who took the reformist line that socialists ought to struggle for incremental improvements within existing parliamentary systems and the hardnosed Jules Guesde and his doctrinaire Marxist (insofar as Marxism yet existed as a doctrine) ‘impossibilists’ who insisted on the revolution as the only salve for the workers’ ills.

    The possibilists announced an international socialist congress to be convened in Paris on 14 July on the rue de Lancry, only to be immediately attacked by the likes of – along with Guesde - Friedrich Engels, who denounced them as toadies of the bourgeoisie and discouraged all revolutionary socialists from attending.

    Ultimately, Guesde’s impossibilists summoned their own congress, on the rue Petrelle, to be pointedly opened on the same day.

    The day unfolded as something of a farce – possibilists were supposed to have waited at the railway station to lead hapless delegates intended for the rue Petrelle to the rue de Lancry instead. Delegates chose which congress to attend based on personal animosities rather than any theoretical conviction. Marxists invaded the rue de Lancry congress and disrupted the proceedings. The French Blanquist Edouard Vaillant roomed with Wilhelm Liebknecht, leader of the German Social Democrats, to make sure he did not defect to the possibilists.

    Ultimately, the rue de Lancry congress is generally taken as the Second International’s founding congress, since in 1891 the two branches relented and unified at a second congress in Brussels, at the behest of the possibilists.

    The Second International was soon moving in a decidedly reformist direction. The German Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – SPD) were the largest Socialist party in Europe and the world, and thus the dominating force in any international congress. The Anti-Socialist Law of Bismarck at last lapsed in 1890, and the Social Democrats were leery of any rash action that might lead again to their delegitimization. The SPD ballooned in the wake of its legalization, swelling up with millions of members as the German proletariat flocked to the one party that seemed to have its interests at heart. German workers were immersed culturally, socially, and politically in the SPD milieu – they kept abreast of the world through Socialist papers, taught their children from Socialist readers, labored alongside Socialist comrades, drank in Socialist workingman’s clubs, and subsisted on Socialist trade union funds in times of strike or unemployment. The SPD did not want to jeopardize this enviable position with insurrectionary adventurism.

    The French socialists lagged behind their German comrades, but soon found themselves nearly as intoxicated by bourgeois politics. In 1894, Jean Jaurés and even Jules Guesde and Edouard Vaillant were elected to the Republic’s Chamber of Deputies, despite their earlier (the latter two at least) staunch opposition to reformism. The parliamentary French socialists soon began even to unite with the Radicals and Independents in the Chamber in the interest of certain legislation (generally that directed against the church), much to the horror of their unreconstructed revolutionary militants.

    The young German anarchist Gustav Landauer was expelled from the Second International at its third congress in Zurich when he viciously opposed this manner of collusion with the bourgeois state. Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis was regularly shouted down when he attempted to introduce motions pledging the International and its constituents to revolutionary struggle. The controversial ‘Zurich resolution’ introduced at that congress attempted to make a commitment to parliamentary action a requisite for membership in the International.

    This sluggish reformist tendency would receive a serious upset in the aftermath of America’s Red Summer.

    Americans had again been a negligible element in the Second International, for the weakness of their native movement. But the scenes in Chicago and New Orleans in July of 1894 caught the eye of the world.

    The first Second International congress held in the aftermath of ’94 was the 1896 conference in London. The 795 delegates were, as always, heavily weighted towards France, Germany, and Britain (which as host country furnished more than half this time around). But the SLP sent a respectable deputation of thirty-seven from across the sea, headed by Matthew Maguire, a New Jersey machinist and SLP organizer, and Daniel DeLeon himself.

    The entrance of the American delegates was greeted with an “awed silence,” recalled English observer Bernard Shaw. “As if we were graced with the presence of conquering heroes.”

    The tumult began on the very first day – Keir Hardie of the British ILP moved to confirm the Zurich Resolution, which would result in the expulsion or submission of the many anarchists and other ‘anti-parliamentarians’ gathered in the hall that day, including the fiery Italian Enico Malatesta, Gustav Landauer, and the ever-present Domela Nieuwenheis. H. N. Hyndman of the English Social Democratic Federation stood and spoke in support of the resolution, as did Jaurés and also the German Liebknecht.

    Nieuwenheis, Malatesta, the Englishman Tom Mann, and the Frenchman Jean Allemane spoke against it.

    Then all eyes turned to the American delegation, from which DeLeon rose to make his own position known. He vociferously attacked the possibilist tendencies of the congress and defended the anti-parliamentarians, to great cheers from the Italian and French sections.

    The congress erupted into further disputation. Two years earlier it would have been easy to tar DeLeon as ornery and out of touch. But now, blooded in the chaos of ’94, it was difficult to dismiss all appeals to insurrectionary action as mere romantic sentiment.

    When Hyndman demanded “what present and feasible alternative” existed to parliamentary reform, the American Maguire bluntly answered; “Chicago.”

    Louise Michel, the great ‘Red Virgin’ of the Paris Commune, stood and compared in glowing terms the insurrection of that city twenty years before to the ‘heroic assault’ of the American workers ‘on the citadel of privilege.’ Then, on behalf of the French delegation, she threatened to walk out if the Zurich Resolution was confirmed.

    This annoyed the staunchly parliamentarian element among the French, but they were now a distinct minority, smaller than they had been in 1893.

    When the vote was taken, the Zurich Resolution passed, but not overwhelmingly – by a vote of 384 to 411, carried only on the votes of the numerically dominant English delegates, in which ran a distinctly reformist tendency. Many who had intended to vote for the resolution were swayed by the descriptions of Chicago street-fighting and the speechifying of those like DeLeon or Malatesta.

    A mass walk-out of the deputies from the American, French, and Italian delegations was avoided when the congress decided instead to table the resolution for the time being.

    The congress continued for another week, but the motion was never revived, and the anti-parliamentarians were not ejected from the International.

    The next congress of was held in Paris, four years later in 1896. 952 delegates attended. This time, the possibilist slant afforded by the preponderance of English delegates was gone. French socialists who made up the lion’s share of this congress - even their parliamentarian wing considered - were significantly more radical. And the strength of the revolutionary wing, headed by the likes of Allemane, Guesde, and Vaillant, was growing, bolstered by the example of their American comrades and the failure of the International to condemn anti-parliamentarianism.

    The central point of dispute was, again, reformism. In France, the socialist Millerand had been brought into Prime Minister Waldeck-Rousseau’s cabinet as Minister of Commerce, a deeply controversial decision that had forced the possibilist and impossibilist schools of thought and practice further apart than ever before. Allemane and Guesde tarred him as a loose cannon, verging on a traitor. Jaurés staunchly defended him.

    The congress heatedly debated whether or not it was ever acceptable for socialists to not only stand for election in bourgeois parliaments (which most at least agreed was tactically permissible) but actually participate in bourgeois governments.

    The German social democrats, despite the fact that they had themselves largely disclaimed violent action for the time being, vociferously opposed out and out participation in bourgeois administration after the fashion of Millerand, and heaped scorn on the French socialists to that effect.

    The Russians and the Americans went further. Both sections stood generally to the left of international socialism, particularly the Russians, who enjoyed no legality whatsoever and existed like hunted rats within the borders of the Romanov Tsardom. V. I. Lenin accused Millerand of being a ‘treacherous renegade.’

    The Polish-Jewish Socialist Rosa Luxemburg asked what Millerand would do if the French Army marched off to ‘slaughter German or Italian workers.’ The German Karl Kautsky heartily agreed and then asked what would become of socialism if there was ‘a Millerand in every land.’

    Jaurés fired back by accusing the enemies of Millerand of speaking on a situation they could not comprehend. It was easy enough for Socialists in countries where they had no hope of grasping political power by parliamentary means to criticize those who did – even in Germany, where the SPD was legal and advancing in the Reichstag by leaps and bounds, the Kaiser would never allow it to actually govern.

    But the mood was hard. The Second International had shifted decidedly to the left since 1894. The 600 French delegates were disproportionately disciples of Allemane or Guesde and hostile towards Jaurés and Millerand. The affirmation that participation in bourgeois governments was beyond the pale passed resoundingly. Another motion to threaten the Jaurés faction of the with expulsion should they not recant their support of Millerand failed, but narrowly.

    Notably and loudly speaking in favor of the French possibilists were the English delegates, including the usual Mr. Hyndman, not to mention the middle-class Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. English labor had been of a decidedly more reformist slant than continental labor for some time, and it showed at the 1900 congress, where British delegates voted 72 – 26 against the anti-Millerand resolution.

    Though one sign of unity emerged from Paris, the establishment of the ‘International Socialist Bureau’ to coordinate the affairs of the association between congresses, a clear split was emerging already in the Second International, similar to that which had destroyed the first. On the reformist wing were the Socialists of Britain, many of those of France, and those of various smaller democracies such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Nordic states. On the revolutionary wing were the Socialists of the despotisms and autocracies – the Russian, the Austrians, the Italians, the Spanish, and increasingly, the Americans. Somewhere in the middle hung the indomitable Germans led by Bebel and Liebknecht, who were all for parliamentary participation, but firmly against actual entry into capitalist government.

    Sometimes, Jaurés was heard to curse the Americans, whose fiery action and rhetoric he said had “reignited illusions of 1871” in the hearts of European socialists.

    Back home in America, the SLP’s affiliation to the Second International did little but increase the suspicion of other Americans that the party was nothing but a tool of alien subversives. In The New York Journal Hearst charged that “the first loyalties of Mr. Darrow, Mr. DeLeon, and all the rest, are to their dread International.”

    Lofty international politicking was of little interest to most rank and file American Socialists, who were more concerned with ameliorating their own immediately miserable situations.

    Then in 1901, the American stock market crashed. Britain was hit hard. The Crisis stretched also to the continent. There was a slump in production and consequently in employment in France. While not as severe as that in the Anglosphere, it hit French workers in the port cities of the west and in the northern industrial belt especially hard, and these were the populations already most sympathetic to socialist philosophies.

    The Crisis in France plumbed its lowest depths in 1903, and abated soon after, but in that year or so, much support was drawn from the reformist Jaurés faction of the Socialists towards the intransigents of Allemane and Guesde. At rallies of jobless coal miners in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, cries of “down with the Chamber and the Senate” and “vive l’Internationale!” could be heard.

    In Britain, it drove a wedge between Labour and their Liberal allies in parliament, in the wake of Asquith’s betrayal. Keir Hardie, hitherto rather moderate, swore to never again join hands with the Liberal Party in anything. Tom Mann charged that they were worse than the Conservatives, because “a knife in the breast is always preferred to a knife in the back.” The radical strains in British labor represented by men like Mann were, if not brought to the fore, at least strengthened.

    The next congress of the Second International was to be held in Stuttgart Germany in November 1904. Unfortunately, the Kaiser was rather jittery that year, and conscious of the ‘havoc’ the Socialists were wreaking in America, he was unwilling to countenance the same in his country. Consequently, the delegates were all stopped at the border and promptly turned back.

    By necessity the congress was again held in Zurich, and only convened in early December. It was scheduled in the midst of the American constitutional crisis of that winter. Occupied by that all-important drama, DeLeon, Clark, Hillquit, and most of the party leadership was compelled to stay put. Thus the 1904 American delegation was less luminous than in previous years.

    It was headed by a young Socialist journalist named Upton Sinclair, accompanied by Caroline Pemberton, who ran guns and money to revolutionary fugitives, along with George Washington Woodbey, a former slave and one of the leaders of the embattled black Socialists of the south, and thirty more minor representatives besides.

    A number of issues were on the table in 1904 – colonialism and the proper socialist attitude towards it, wars and how to prevent them, and the question of women’s and minorities’ rights. Many, including Lenin himself, noted that the American delegation was short-tempered and nervous, distracted as their minds were by the turmoil back home.

    Tensions exploded on the matter of war. Jean Jaurés, who was a convinced pacifist, introduced a motion to confirm that the International and its constituent parties would call a general strike in the event of an international conflict, and refuse to take up arms against foreign workers.

    This was fiercely resisted by many, including Bebel of the SPD, who said that, “if Russia, the champion of cruelty and barbarity, the enemy of all human culture were to attack Germany. . . . we are as much and more interested than those who stand at the head of Germany, and we would resist Russia, for a Russian victory means the defeat of social democracy.” Likewise (and perhaps ironically, considering he was much to the left of Jaurés on most issues) Guesde swore that in the event of war the French workers would defend the Fatherland ‘to their last breaths.’

    The most vociferous critics of such ‘social patriotism’ were the Russians and the Americans, and the delegations’ unit in that regard was perhaps the first glimpse of the iron alliance between Russian and American socialism that would shape the twentieth century.

    The American Socialists were for the most part staunch anti-militarists, particularly in consideration of the ongoing, grinding war to subjugate the Philippines, which had by 1904 claimed more than 10,000 American lives, not to mention the 100,000+ dead natives. This was only compounded by the bitter clashes with federal troops that now colored the SLP’s history.

    In this, they were joined by the Russian Bolsheviks (newly named after Lenin split the RSDLP), similarly short on patriotism thanks to the blunt despotism under which they lived.

    Sinclair flatly stated that “if we must take up arms at all, the American workers will only ever take up arms against the capitalist class.”

    Lenin and his second Maxim Litvinov heartily agreed, denouncing the ‘national chauvinism’ of their German and French comrades.

    In a heated moment, Bebel snapped, “don’t you Americans love your country?”

    George Woodbey pointedly replied, “sometimes we feel as if we haven’t got one.”

    Rosa Luxemburg also jumped in for the anti-war faction, opining that even the national liberation of Poland from Russian oppression was not worth a drop of workers’ blood.

    The dispute dragged on for some days, but in the end, the anti-war motion was carried, and the International pledged all its constituents not to vote war credits nor to campaign for war should their respective governments demand it.

    There was much grumbling, and even talk of another split. But the ‘national chauvinists’ acceded for the time being.

    In the aftermath of the vote, Lenin formally introduced himself to Sinclair and the rest of the American delegation for the first time. He congratulated the Americans on their principled intransigence and lamented the ‘gutless’ currents in the International of which he was growing increasingly contemptuous. In fact, Lenin was at this point preparing for a return to Russia, where revolution looked to be brewing, and where it would eventually explode early the next year. He and the Americans wished each other luck.

    Then, on 22 December, just as the conference wrapped up, news came from America of the mass arrest of SLP congressmen, and the House’s election of President Frick. The American delegates were shocked and dismayed. With good reason, they feared to return home.

    Eleven of the delegates did return to the United States within the next six months. All were promptly arrested upon disembarking (though most were eventually released).

    Sinclair, along with Woodbey, and the rest of the delegates, remained abroad. Most would not return to America until the revolution, if ever. Pemberton was an exception – she returned to the US in mid-1905, and spent the next decade working in the underground.

    At the next three congresses of the Second International, the American Socialist movement was represented by those exiles already abroad. Sinclair would attend all three up to 1912. Haywood, who fled the United States again in 1905, would attend two.

    The congresses would continue until the War, but the Americans had done their work. With their revolutionary fire they had fractured the association, dividing the International like a river, into reformist and revolutionary tributaries. That done, they set the International on the path to its ultimate fate.
     
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    • PART II: The Iron Heel

    • Iggies

    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.”

    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    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 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.​

    The Senate would have hosted:

    9 Socialists

    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.​

    The new Senate’s composition was as follows:

    33 Nationalists

    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​


    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.​

    The new Senate’s composition was as follows:

    48 Nationalists

    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.
     
    • The Growth of the Repressive Apparatuses in the Frick Administration

    • Iggies

    In the meantime, Frick and his gang went on consolidating their power over the nation.

    The ‘safe’ labor unions that existed under Kearney in California soon became a model for similar associations across the country.

    In early 1906, John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers of America, met with Secretary of Labor Samuel Gompers in Baltimore, Maryland. Here, he received an unofficial blessing to establish a national federation of trade unions that would operate (conditionally) without harassment from the state. Frick must have countersigned this, though no record exists of it.

    On 4 November of 1906, Mitchell officially founded, with himself at its head, the League of American Trade Unions (LATU) in Indianapolis (‘red’ Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Chicago being consciously rejected as potential venues), at a conference attended by the heads of various trades unions that remained un-proscribed.

    There was some grumbling and groaning from nervous bourgeois, but it was allowed to go on unimpeded.

    Soon, almost every union across the country still in operation was affiliated with the LATU. Striking, it was clear, was all but entirely prohibited, and the LATU and its constituent unions were limited to polite bargaining with the bosses.

    The SLP gone, the LATU moved towards the closest available substitute in the contemporary political climate – the Populists. With the Socialists banned, the Democrats long reduced, and the Republicans in a state of collapse, Bryan’s party was the only credible opposition left to the Nationalists.

    Nervous as he had been of Socialist ‘entryism’ into the Populists, Bryan now allowed the unions to woo his party. He was conscious that only with such a broad, mass constituency could he hope to pose a challenge to the ruling party in the next round of elections.

    The LATU would thus support Populist candidates for the House in the 1906 midterms, and in the various by-elections, of which the years after 1904 saw an inordinate number. This was a reasonably successful policy – various Populists were elected to state legislatures and local government, and they maintained a respectable presence in congress. In states like Florida and North Carolina, enough Populists clung to their seats to at least prevent sweeping changes at the hands of growing Nationalist majorities.

    In 1907, William Bryan spoke to a chapter of the American Ironworkers Union in Richmond, promising to “defend hearth and home from the creeping onslaught of the great industries and lords of capital.” It was a strangely anachronistic message, tailored towards his old base of smallholding farmers. “Hearth and home” struck an unfamiliar chord with urban workers who had never had a fireplace, and the attacks on “industry” alienated those who had no problem with industry in and of itself, of which they were part and parcel, but rather with its bosses.

    Still, Bryan was the ‘next best thing.’

    Many ex-socialists, particularly those who had been to the right of the SLP, made the best of a bad situation and urged workers to affiliate with the LATU and vote for the Populists where they could. Among these compromisers were men like Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger, conservatives (by socialist standards) who had yet to forgive their still-imprisoned comrade DeLeon for what they saw as the recklessness that had led to the disaster of 1904.

    This pragmatism would leave a black mark on their legacies in the eyes of their revolutionary counterparts.

    And while the embers of resistance struggled to accommodate the onerous new restrictions of Frick’s regime, the regime itself worked to integrate what remained of labor into the state apparatus. In early 1907, the ‘Economic Regulatory Office’ was founded in Washington, under the indirect auspices of Secretary Gompers’ Department of Capital and Labor. The ERO was essentially the elevation of the LDP to a governmental body – the LDP’s board of directors and the ERO’s commissioners were by and large identical. Representatives of Standard Oil, Anaconda Copper, AT&T, Union Pacific, and the other great cartels staffed the new office, with the supposed task of ‘coordinating’ economic activity with the president and with congress.

    But in line with Frick’s corporate vision, representatives of the various LATU unions were also given seats at the ‘table’ of the ERO, for the ostensible purpose of speaking for the workers as the cartels spoke for the capitalists. John Mitchell in fact served as both leader of the LATU and the chairman of the ERO, though his position in the latter was largely ceremonial.

    Frick himself, and various members of his cabinet, often sat in on ERO sessions. Some of them, certainly Gompers at least and probably Taft, among a few others, seem to have been sincere in their hopes that it would serve as a legitimate forum for capital and labor to advance their respective interests in a peaceful fashion.

    Occasionally, victories were won through the ERO. In May of 1908, as the economy improved and election day neared, an agreement was reached among the commissioners to affect a general pay raise across the various industries they represented. John Rockefeller, ever the philanthropist, led the charge along with Mitchell, and the resolution was accompanied with much fanfare and press photography.

    But of course, the decision was not legally binding, and depended entirely on the largesse of the Cartel. And more often than not, even such concessions could not be extracted. A push spearheaded by the young John L. Lewis, representing the United Mine Workers in the LATU, to establish pensions for men injured on the job, was stonewalled by the capitalists and died a quick death. The ERO, fundamentally, remained a tool of the bosses.

    And its primary job, of defusing revolutionary energies and subsuming organized labor in the capitalist state, was largely achieved for the time being.

    But pacification was not enough – the Nationalist-dominated federal government also looked towards beefing up its tools of violent repression. At the center of this counterrevolutionary push was the BIS.

    From its establishment in 1905, the BIS honed its security apparatus, planting spies in every labor union that remained, and rifling through ostensibly sacrosanct civilian mail in search of evasive revolutionists. By 1907, the BIS maintained nearly 9,000 employees, making it one of the larger federal services. These included clerks, detectives, and analysts, but also CS toughs meant to deal with subversives on the ‘street level.’

    Chief Bell had become aware of the existence of the underground IWW in early 1907 and was immediately obsessed with its destruction. BIS men swooped down on every whisper of strike or unionization, arresting ringleaders and harshly interrogating the rest.

    In Buffalo, New York, in June of 1907, the workers of a US Steel plant walked off the job after management upped the hours without a commiserate raise in pay. A strike committee was formed, chaired by a molder called Frank Green.

    The evening after the first official convocation of the committee, Green was picked up from work by BIS agents. He was threatened harshly, as were his wife and children, and questioned as to any “revolutionary contacts” that he maintained. When he denied having any revolutionary intention or knowing anyone who did, he was arrested and detained without trial for nearly six months.

    Outright violence was not exceptionally common in the beginning. But as usual, the south served as a bellwether in the national class conflict.

    BIS offices south of the Mason-Dixon line often recruited ‘informants’ and muscle from the Klan and other vigilante organizations known to be viciously opposed to socialism and organized labor. In early 1909, just after the 1908 elections, three black farmworkers were kidnapped by Klansmen outside Little Rock, Arkansas after supposedly boasting that they knew ‘underground wobblies.’ The men were taken to an abandoned rock quarry, beaten for information, and then shot dead. Their corpses were dumped outside a local cemetery – no one was ever arrested or charged.

    The Klansmen responsible, though it was not public knowledge at the time, were on the BIS payroll.

    In the north, CS men generally filled that role. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, coal miner Charles Andrassy went missing on his way home from work in mid-1909. He had been a Socialist and member of the STLA in its days of legality and had been arrested and released in the aftermath of the December Decree. Andrassy’s fate remained a mystery, until the opening of the BIS archives after the revolution revealed he had been arrested by CS agents, held without trial for nearly four years in a Colorado prison, and then most likely executed quietly in the course of the draft riots of 1914. His sad story was hardly unique.

    The repressive initiatives of Frick’s government would become worse and worse as time went on and dissent began to bubble again. But not yet.
     
    • INTERLUDE: England at a Glance

    • Iggies

    When the American economy cratered in the winter of 1901, the shockwaves were immediately felt on the far side of the Atlantic. Within a day of the NYSE’s disastrous opening on 19 December, the LSE registered similar lows as panicked British businessmen dumped American stocks and bonds.

    By autumn of 1902, Britain was quick following the United States into depression.

    The Crisis came at an inopportune time, as the mighty British Empire struggled to accommodate itself to the twentieth century.

    Unemployment was never as severe in Britain as it was in America, topping out at 18% in 1905. But it was still severe and played havoc with the already volatile British political scene.

    In 1902, Britain was experiencing the dissolution of the two-party system that had endured since the mid-19th century, that perennial struggle between the parochial, aristocratic Conservatives and the cosmopolitan, bourgeois liberals. The growth and increasing organization of the industrial proletariat had resulted in a variety of trade-unions and working class leagues, most notably the Labour Representation Committee, which true to its name, represented various British unions, and leagued with the small Independent Labour Party and the Liberals to make itself heard at Westminster.

    For decades, the Conservative-Liberal dynamic had been simple and consistent enough – the Conservatives urged caution in all spheres and supported the protection of British culture and economy from rash action and outside influence. They defended the established church, the interests of the old landed aristocrats, and the territorial integrity of Great Britain. They were the party of the ancien régime. The Liberals were the party of the modern world. Their battle cry was inevitably ‘free trade,’ they pushed for the extension of the franchise, and though they were not necessarily hostile to the church, tended to be more so than the Conservatives.

    But by 1900, Britain was becoming increasingly polarized along class lines. The granting of suffrage to working class men meant the inevitable shift leftwards of the existing system, as trade union and even socialist sponsored candidates were elevated to the House of Commons. The 1889 dockers’ strike had scandalized many in the upper classes, and America’s Red Summer and subsequent bloodshed had done little to ease nerves. The Liberals, who found themselves naturally allied to the growing labor movement by dint of being the most left-wing force in mainstream politics, suddenly found that their traditional brand of laissez faire, hands off management was not enough for many of their grindingly poor new proletarian constituents. Certain Liberals like Lloyd George and Winston Churchill were galvanized to push for social legislation that would alleviate the sufferings of English workers, much to the chagrin of most Conservatives and not a few of their own party men, who saw ‘socialistic’ measures at play.

    Conscious they were not yet a force able to contest power itself, the small minority of British socialists in the ILP and the LRC were, as mentioned, generally forced into coalition with the Liberals.

    Also polarizing the British parliament was the question of Ireland – for decades now the Irish had agitated for some measure of independence from London, a goal that came to be known as ‘Home Rule,’ which would entail the creation of a local Irish parliament and and practical autonomy on the Emerald Isle. The issue became a standard for the Liberals, and the bête noire of the Conservatives, who feared the dissolution of the Empire.

    In the past few years, the Irish Nationalist party had risen to prominence, dedicated single-mindedly to the achievement of Home Rule and siding always with the Liberals in parliament. Home Rule was massively popular with the Catholic majority of Ireland. But it was just as unpopular with the Protestant Ulstermen in the north, who had enjoyed political and economic ascendancy on the isle for generations and feared to be left at the mercy of their ‘Fenian’ counterparts, who they tended to view as not only religiously but even racially inferior.

    Some Conservatives began to see the Liberals as the harbingers of centrifugal forces – class and ethnic hatred – that would ultimately tear Britain apart if left to fester.

    That was the Britain on which the Crisis came.

    By 1905 unemployment in the British Isles neared 15% (higher in Ireland), and things seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Looking across the ocean, many British Liberals and certainly socialists were horrified by what they saw as the dictatorial suppression of their American fellows by McKinley with the December Decree, and the incoming of Frick soon after. Keir Hardie, Scottish trade unionist and head of the LRC, wrote sadly that “America is sliding backwards into barbarism – God willing England will not follow.” H.H Asquith, leader of the Liberal Party but certainly no socialist, was almost as upset, condemning the mass arrest of SLP congressmen as “shameful and infamous.” It also greatly lessened the trust British Liberals and socialists put into their own domestic right, who they feared might try a similar gamble here at home as strikes wracked London and northern England, and crime skyrocketed in working class slums.

    Many Conservatives did little to assuage those fears. Even as the Liberals were forced left by their growing working-class base, certain Conservatives decided that the traditional party line was insufficient to rescue Britain from the new and unprecedented dangers facing her. Lord Richard Grenville Verney, 19th Baron Willoughby de Broke, was typical of these ‘New Right’ politicians. Willoughby de Broke was alarmed by the ascendancy of labor on the one hand and Irish nationalism on the other, and subsequently a staunch opponent of both socialism and Home Rule. Breaking to an extent from the aristocratic tradition of the Conservatives, he charged that the English proletariat had been left in the lurch, and vulnerable to the appeal of leftist demagogues. Their alliance with cosmopolitanism and Irish rebels was unnatural, and British workers could be won back to a good, conservative patriotism, he was sure, if only the Conservatives would reach out a hand. The explosive growth of socialism in America shook him, and he became convinced that such had to be headed off in Britain by any means necessary.

    Behind Willoughby de Broke were men such as Lord Alfred Milner, Governor of the Transvaal, Hilaire Belloc, the Franco-British Catholic writer, and fiery journalists like Arnold White and Leopold Maxse, of The Daily Express and The National Review, respectively.

    This New Right wished for Conservatives to come down from their ‘palaces’ and build up a mass base of the common people to combat that of the left. They warned that Britain was in grave peril from radical agitators and ‘alien’ influences, which ultimately ran to a fierce xenophobia initially directed mostly at Jews (stereotyped as ‘Asiatic’ invaders carrying the plague of radicalism) and Germans (as Germany's military buildup and ambitious Kaiser convinced many an Englishman that she was the premier threat to British interests in the world).

    Maxse’s National Review spoke in favor of the social services for English workers that many Conservatives had disdained, but also violently denounced the LRC, the left-Liberals, Irish Home rule, and applauded the American suppression of the SLP. Arnold White vituperated against ‘East End Jews’ that he accused of spreading ‘communistic’ ideas among English workmen in exchange for German coin.

    By 1906, the New Right, increasingly coalescing behind Lord Milner, had found an eager audience among Britons shaken by economic chaos and frightened by the increased agitation of the working classes and the Irish.

    That summer, mass layoffs of miners resulted in a wave of violence through the Welsh countryside, ultimately resulting in ten deaths. A few months later, workers in the northern English coalfields went on strike, much to the horror of Arnold White, who hysterically demanded the troops be sent in lest ‘America’s Cripple Creek replay here in England.’ It was not an uncommon sentiment.

    The 1906 coal strike petered out within months without much violence, but things came to a head in early 1907.

    In 1906, a general election had brought in a large Liberal majority in the House of Commons, and H.H Asquith was invited to form a government, which he did in coalition with the Irish Nationalists and the LRC, much to the chagrin of the Conservatives.

    With joblessness stubbornly refusing to abate, in February 1907, the Liberal-dominated parliament marshaled support for a ‘People’s Budget,’ which would tax the land holdings of the British aristocracy along with the foundries and factories of the industrialists, with an eye towards improving the miserable condition of the British poor. The Conservatives set themselves staunchly against what they saw as an unprecedented attack on their traditional rights and liberties.

    The Conservative-dominated House of Lords predictably vetoed the bill when the time came. The Liberals were just as predictably indignant – Lloyd George accused the Tories of ‘starving Britain for their own gratification.’ Arthur Balfour, then-head of the Conservatives, but increasingly under the influence of Lord Milner and the New Right wing of the party, shot back that Britain’s ‘men of means’ would be happy to do what they could to alleviate the Crisis, but that it would never be done by ‘communistic compulsion.’

    Asquith petitioned the king to side with the Liberals (and thus, the electorate) and threaten to flood the House of Lords with dozens of newly created Liberal peers if the Conservatives did not budge. But George was himself shaken by the strikes and tumult of recent years, not to mention the American chaos, and he took the side of the Conservatives.

    The United Kingdom settled into a stand-off, as the House of Lords flatly refused to pass the People’s Budget, and Asquith’s Liberals floundered helplessly in opposition. Meanwhile, millions of British workers continued to languish in pauperdom. Public opinion hardened against the Lords, and shouts of “hang the peers!” become commonplace at labor and even Liberal rallies in the East End and the northern coal country.

    Finally, in April 1907, the LRC, the TUC and the ILP unilaterally called a general strike until the House of Lords agreed to approve the People’s Budget. Asquith, who had not been consulted, was deeply alarmed. He asked Ramsay MacDonald, one of the ILP’s leaders and an associate of Hardie’s, to ‘call off the mob.’ MacDonald refused and said that Hardie would refuse also, adamant that ‘the Lords will come to terms only when the bread is snatched from their own mouths.’

    The response was haphazard. British labor was not as militant or well-organized as German workers were or American workers had been. In many places, men and women went on working in defiance of the summons.

    But in many other places, especially the northern industrial regions and the port cities, the call to arms was answered. Miners downed their pickaxes and longshoremen refused to load or unload ships. An estimated 200,000 workers participated in the strike.

    Hysteria gripped the middle classes and the usual comparisons to 1871 in Paris and 1894 in Chicago were again trotted out.

    The general restiveness was worrying enough, but a new development made the 1907 strike an unprecedented terror to British conservatives.

    The call to strike was answered not only in England, Scotland, and Wales, but also in Ireland. Workers in Belfast occupied their factories and unfurled Irish national flags. Clashes with militias of Ulstermen left about a dozen dead, but most dreadfully of all, the striking workers in England and Wales heartily expressed satisfaction with their Irish ‘comrades.’ In a few scattered instances in Northumberland and South Wales, the press reported chants of “long live free Ireland!” from demonstrating laborers.

    Such sentiment was rare, and probably meant more to irritate than express a sincere desire for Irish independence. But it was enough to utterly horrify Conservatives and especially hardline Ulster unionists, who saw the dual phantoms of a disordered proletariat and restive Irishmen combined into one.

    Joseph Chamberlain led Conservative and Unionist MPs in demanding Asquith call out the army to disperse the strikers and do the work they would not. Particularly critical was coal, without which Britain could not live. But the prime minister, uncomfortable as he was with the radical action, was beginning to think Hardie had been right, and that there could be no better weapon to force the Lords to the table.

    Balfour in turn pressed the king to dismiss Asquith and his government, who were “bringing Britain down to ruin.” The king had not unilaterally dismissed a government in seventy years. George tarried here, too.

    Grassroots ‘self-defense’ militias sprang up across the country to protect against the ‘reds,’ and probably about a dozen were killed in small skirmishes nationwide, and many more injured.

    Finally, Lord Milner made a desperate decision. He approached Asquith with a proposal: if the prime minister would call out the army and crush the strike, perhaps the Lords could be persuaded to approve the People’s Budget.

    Asquith and the rest of the Liberal Party leadership deliberated for only a short while before acquiescence. The young Liberal Home Secretary Winston Churchill, in particular, was horrified by the ‘revolution.’ Despite having been himself slandered as a ‘red’ by Conservatives in parliament, he was fully supportive of putting down the ‘insurgent’ workers.

    What happened next would be immortalized as the great betrayal of the British left.

    Asquith initially considered asking Hardie and the rest of the strike leadership once more to back down, to inform them of the deal struck, and to warn them that a refusal would mean the deployment of the army. But Liberal acquiescence in the strike had fired the hatred of the Conservatives and the Unionists over the past several months. They were being called ‘revolutionists.’ The National Review had even accused the Liberal Party and the strikers of taking German money to destabilize Britain.

    In the end, Asquith, along with Chancellor Lloyd George, Home Secretary Churchill, and Chief Secretary for Ireland James Bryce, decided a show of force would be needed to restore the respectability of the Liberals.

    MacDonald, Hardie, and the rest of the labor leaders were left in the dark until the troops came thundering down. Most of the strikers dispersed without a fight, taken by surprise and utterly demoralized. But in some places, there was violence. eight men were shot dead in Northumberland after stones were thrown at a column of passing soldiers. A similar incident occurred in Clyde, where one civilian man and two women, along with a soldier, were killed in an altercation between miners and troops.

    The worst was in Belfast, where the Coldstream Guards were deployed to quell street fighting between Irish nationalists and loyalist Ulstermen. Twenty-two people died.

    The strike was suppressed within the week, and true to their word, the Lords passed the People’s Budget.

    But the LRC, ILP, and union workers as a whole, were stunned by the treachery of their erstwhile allies.

    Hardie denounced Asquith and the rest of the Liberals as snakes and blackguards. The Irish Nationalists were similarly furious, feeling that the Liberals bore responsibility for what was already being called the ‘Belfast massacre.’

    Ironically, Asquith’s bid to save face and maintain the position of his party instead dealt an incalculably damaging blow to the Liberals.

    In winter 1907, despite all his efforts, parliament passed a vote of no confidence in the government. It was supported both by the Conservatives, who were hardly mollified that Asquith had eventually restored order after allowing ‘anarchists’ to run riot for weeks, and by vengeful Labour and Irish Nationalists.

    Asquith’s government fell.

    A snap election was held in January 1908. It swept the Conservatives back to power in a landslide, winning an absolute majority of 352 seats in the House of Commons. Many workers and even Irish nationalists are supposed to have voted for the Conservatives out of spite. Few Conservatives tried to make up the difference by voting Liberal in gratitude.

    Balfour was invited to become Prime Minister again, and he dutifully formed a government.

    Balfour cannot himself be said to have been on the New Right of his party. But that faction loomed ever larger behind him, headed up by Lord Milner along with Joseph Chamberlain, Willoughby de Broke, L.S Amery, and Arnold White, among others. The crisis of 1907 had convinced many Conservatives of the necessity of social reform in the interest of the lower orders, if similar episodes were not to become regular occurrences. At the same time, they were convinced of the necessity of cracking down – and brutally – on ‘agitators’ who sought to stir up the working class to such tumult. This mingled with the aforementioned growing xenophobia directed towards continentals (which meant, in practice, Germans and Jews) as the exporters of those radical agitators, and also towards the Irish as a disloyal element in the rear. On top of this reactionary confection was layered a renewed imperialist aggression, which meant to direct the violent energies of Englishmen outwards rather than inwards, towards racial and cultural inferiors. It would be some years yet before the New Right came to be a decisive force in British politics, but its contours were already taking shape when Balfour regained the premiership in 1908.
     
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    • 1905 in Russia

    • Iggies

    Russia was, in the early twentieth century, generally considered the most backward state in Europe. She was the only European nation still languishing under the dictates of an absolute monarch, responsible to God alone. Over 70% of her vast population, stretching from the Bug River in the west to the icy Kamchatka on the Pacific, was composed of simple peasants, who lived much as their fathers had for centuries. The repressive state apparatus of the Romanov tsar was legendary, with its legions of police spies, rigid censorship, and the ever-looming specter of a Siberian exile hanging over the heads of dissidents.

    But if Russia had fallen behind, she was also racing to catch up.

    In 1894, the new tsar Nicholas II had been raised to the throne. Though the crown he inherited proved to be his misfortune, the emperor was also fortunate enough to inherit a singularly able finance minister by the name of Sergei Witte, who had been appointed to his position by the last tsar.

    Witte was a whirlwind, who set about bringing Russia ‘up to speed’. He raised tariffs, which not only protected native industry and labor, but also sought to entice foreigners to – rather than dump finished goods on Russia - set up their enterprises inside the bounds of the empire itself. He also moved Russia onto the gold standard, raising the confidence of European investors in the rouble. The result was billions of roubles poured into the old ‘gendarme of Europe’ from without, jump-starting the empire’s transition into modernity. Industrial productivity, ranging from coal to steel to oil, increased many times over during his tenure, spanning the decade from 1890 to 1900. The length of railway trackage doubled. On the eve of the Ten-Year War, Russia ranked fifth among the industrial powers of the world.

    The drawback to Witte’s schemes was that they made the Russian Empire’s burgeoning economy almost entirely dependent on foreign capital. By 1900, nearly half of the investments made in Russian industry were of foreign origin – in oil, steel, and other extractive enterprises, the percentage was far higher.

    That meant economic fibrillations in the west were bound to be felt in Russia and felt hard.

    Sitting at the peak of this unstable but upsurging swell of prosperity was Russia’s unhappy tsar, Nicholas II. It has often been said that Nicholas would have done better to have been born a middling bourgeois in the west. Unfortunately for himself, his family, and Russia, he was not.

    Nicholas’ ill-starred reign was defined by the inability of his wife, the one-time German princess Alexandra (familiarly ‘Alix’) of Hesse and by Rhine, to conceive a son and heir.

    In 1895, the royal couple joyously welcomed their first child into the world: Olga, a girl.

    Two years later, Alix was again pregnant, and this time bore Tatiana. Another daughter.

    In 1899, Maria was born, and in 1901, Anastasia, and by then, the Russian people had begun to wonder if the empire was not cursed.

    The tsar and tsarina loved their daughters, who proved to be as charming, beautiful, and intelligent as princesses ought to be. But they worried dearly for the future of the dynasty if no son should be produced. After the birth of Anastasia, Nicholas was moved to revoke the century-old Pauline laws which prohibited the ascension to the throne of any woman so long as a male relation in the direct line of succession remained alive. He did so over the vociferous opposition of many a reactionary aristocrat and courtier but was more strongly determined to see a child of his own inherit the autocracy than he was devoted to primogeniture. So, in January of 1905, when it developed that Alix was pregnant yet again, Grand Duchess Olga was the heir presumptive. For now, anyways.

    Nicholas and all Russia prayed fervently for a son at last.

    But fortune was not yet finished with the Romanovs.

    The American crisis had begun in 1901, deepened in 1902 and early 1903, and finally reached its nadir in 1904.

    As the knock-on effects were felt in England and France, the vast amount of Franco-British capital ploughed into in Russia was similarly impacted. Investments began to shrivel up. Many of the empire’s more primitive inhabitants, who scratched their living from the earth, hardly noticed. But in the great cities of Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, and Kiev, industry suffered, as did its workers.

    Unemployment spiked to 8% in 1904, higher among industrial laborers. Grumbling and talk of strike began.

    As if this was not enough, earlier in the year Russia had entered into an ill-advised war with the Japanese on the other side of the continent. A war it was becoming increasingly clear as the year ground on that Russia was going to lose. Bureaucratic inefficiency, logistical difficulties, international disapproval, and lack of popular enthusiasm combined to result in an embarrassing series of defeats for Nicholas, culminating in the near-annihilation of the Russian Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan, in late April of 1905.

    This, combined with continuing economic duress back home, proved the spark to ignite the flame of revolution.

    On May Day of 1905, workers at Petersburg’s Putilov walked out on strike, in protest of recent pay cuts. By nightfall, this had blossomed into a wave of similar strikes throughout Petersburg, and clashes with police and mounted Cossacks left scores dead. Within the week, the tumult had spread to Russia’s other urban centers; Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Tfilis.

    By the time the peasantry joined in, and rural landlords found their mansions sacked and burned and their estates occupied and divided by former tenants, it was clear revolution had come to Russia.

    The banners in the streets of Petersburg and Moscow reiterated not only the usual demands for higher wages and labor protections, but now mixed them with ominous calls for “political liberty” and some even damned the tsar for the “humiliations” in the east.

    Especially consternating was that the disturbances were not confined to the “popular” classes. Middle class professionals, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, joined their social inferiors in the streets, calling for political and economic reform, and an end to the war.

    Even some of the wealthiest men in Russia, like the industrialist Alexander Guchkov (who privately despised the tsar) and Alexei Putilov himself, joined in on calls that the tsar legalize trade unions, proclaim an amnesty for Siberian exiles, and worst of all, acquiesce to an elected parliament.

    In cities and towns across the empire, workers and peasants and even many bourgeois elected local councils – the first of the famous ‘soviets’ – to represent their interests and pressure the established authorities. First and foremost was the great Petersburg Soviet, soon chaired by a returned émigré called Lev Trotsky, born of wealthy Ukrainian-Jewish farmers, but also a committed Marxist.

    Nicholas was deeply shaken by all of this and remained locked away in his country retreat at Tsarskoe Selo a few miles out of Petersburg while the country blazed around him.

    Alix, a convinced enemy of reform, and certainly of revolution, urged her husband to concede nothing to the mob and the dark powers she imagined directed it, and to disperse the revolutionaries by force and confirm the power of the autocracy.

    Nicholas wavered.

    Meanwhile, the western press, which was largely embarrassed by the tsardom’s “backwardness” if not outright hostile, applauded what they hoped was Russia’s move towards liberal, parliamentary respectability. Optimistic articles by the Times of London and Paris’ Le Temps downplayed involvement of red ‘incendiaries’ and focused on the part played by middle-class reformers like Pavel Milyukov and Guchkov. Nevertheless, the obvious distaste abroad for the autocracy only deepened convictions in reactionary Russian circles (and that included the empress at least) that there was an international conspiracy directed against Holy Russia.

    Indeed, certain foreign forces were working against the autocracy. The American millionaire Jacob Schiff, a devout Jew and thus sworn foe of the famously anti-semitic tsardom, publicly applauded what he called “a great people risen against the terrible tyranny that has oppressed them for generations,” and financed Russian émigré organizations seeking Russian democratization.

    The bureau of the Socialist International extended “heartfelt congratulations and full sympathy to our Russian brothers struggling for liberty.”

    While soldiers clashed with insurgent workers and peasants across the empire, leaving dead scores that soon became hundreds, Nicholas continued his indecision.

    Men like Sergei Witte and the emperor’s own cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai, urged him to bow to public and foreign pressure and establishment a parliament (a ‘Duma’) and submit to a constitution. The tsarina and the Minister of the Interior, a convinced reactionary named Peter Durnovo, begged the tsar to stand fast.

    Meanwhile, Lenin returned from a Swiss exile to revolutionary Petersburg, where he gave a number of speeches before the Soviet (including at least one debate with Trotsky) and issued various declarations blasting his rivals for opportunism or reformism.

    National minorities joined in the restiveness – in the Baltics, Latvian and Estonian farmworkers occupied the estates of their noble German landlords and refused to decamp. When the Cossacks and private militia of the lords marched in to restore order, they fought back. Even as far afield as Central Asia, imperial military outposts were attacked by Kazakh and Turkmen insurgents.

    In Petersburg, by mid-June, the police presence had been largely uprooted, and the city was in the hands of the revolutionaries. Red flags flew from every spire and balcony, and the decrees of the Soviet had infinitely more weight than those of the tsar, still cowering in Tsarskoe Seloe.

    But as the revolution grew stronger, so did its enemies.

    Amid the chaos, a Russian doctor called Alexander Dubrovin founded an organization he called “The Union of the Russian People.” This would be a hardline reactionary league, dedicated to the defense of throne and altar against creeping modernity, liberalism, and socialism. Rabidly anti-Semitic, the URP insisted Russia was in the crosshairs of a godless international conspiracy spearheaded by Jewish revolutionaries, who sought to destroy the tsardom and ruin the empire. Founded in May of 1905, only a few weeks after the first strikes in Petersburg, the URP’s ranks swelled with anxious rightists, ranging from wealthy bourgeois to fervently religious but impoverished peasants.

    Though the URP was without a doubt the largest and the most prominent, many similar organizations sprouted up across the Russian Empire like mushrooms in the succeeding months. Collectively, they garnered the nickname, “the Black Hundred,” or “the Black One-Hundred.”

    Soon, Black-Hundredist militants clashed with revolutionary workers or socialist students in the streets of major cities and shored up the manpower of the army when it rode in to suppress peasant unrest.

    By mid-August of that year, probably some 3,000 at least had already died in the disturbances over the empire.

    Then, in early September, as Russia continued in a state of low-intensity warfare, the liberal activist and newspaperman V.D Nabokov got an idea. His plan was to assemble a few thousand (or at least a few hundred) demonstrators, unarmed and free of red flags, and march them out to Tsarskoe Seloe to see the tsar. This inoffensive but formidable crowd would affirm their loyalty to Russia and the throne, but at the same time insist upon the most widely agreed upon revolutionary watchwords: an elected parliament, labor rights, and an amnesty for political prisoners.

    From the beginning, Nabokov’s scheme faltered. He had intended upon a handpicked crowd of well-dressed workers and wholesome peasants with icons of the tsar and had also intended that the march be disproportionately composed of older individuals and women. But the march had been widely publicized, not only in the liberal paper Rech, which Nabokov edited, but also in a number of radical publications such as the Social Democratic Izvestia and even the Black Hundredist Eagle. On 18 September (O.S), as the marchers – some 4,000 in all – assembled in Petersburg to begin the trek out to Nicholas’ estate, the crowd was swelled by masses of young men, many of them drunk and many of them deserting soldiers, waving red banners and singing revolutionary songs.

    The demonstrators’ numbers grew yet larger as the march went on, and by the time they actually reached Tsarskoe Seloe there may have been as many as 10,000 marchers present, and a number of them armed.

    When it first came within sight of the Catherine Palace, the demonstration was greeted by two squadrons of the tsar’s palace Horse Guard, and promptly ordered to disperse and go home by the commanding officers.

    They refused.

    As is so common with such tragedies, who precisely bore responsibility for the ensuing bloodshed has been argued for decades.

    Some of the more truculent marchers traded insults with the troops. The singing of “God Save the Tsar” was drowned out by “the Marseillaise.”

    Finally, someone – soldier or revolutionary – fired a shot, and the massacre began.

    The Horse Guards fired into the crowd. Unfortunately for them, they were vastly outnumbered and though many fled straightaway, many of the marchers were only galvanized by the outrage.

    Men with armed with pistols pushed forward and shot back.

    A full-scale battle was soon playing out on the palace green.

    The tsar and his pregnant wife heard the gunfire from their bedroom, where they had been resting.

    From a second-story window, six-year-old Grand Duchess Maria watched the Horse Guard ride into the crowd, sabers drawn and carbines blazing.

    When the smoke cleared and the last of the demonstrators were put to flight, nearly a hundred corpses littered the palace lawns, and sixteen of these were of the tsar’s guard.

    It was in this atmosphere that Alix gave finally birth.

    The torturous, stress-induced thirty-two-hour labor bore tragic fruit, even as the corpses were still being cleared away from the palace grounds: the tsar had a son at last, but the boy was stillborn.

    The doctors insisted – rightly or wrongly – that the stress of 18 September was responsible for a premature labor and for the death of the boy.

    The grief and horror of it all finally ended the tsar’s vacillations. There would be no concessions, and certainly no elected parliament.

    A week later, on 30 September, two divisions and several attached units of the Russian Army converged on St. Petersburg. It never being considered that the revolutionaries who held the city might go peacefully, Petersburg was shelled prior to the issue of any demand for surrender.

    Five days of brutal street-fighting ensued. Lenin only just slipped out of the city with his life, disguised as a bagman.

    By the time the city was reduced, the red flags ripped down, the indiscriminate shelling and shooting over with, some 5,000 were dead in Petersburg and the surrounding provinces alone. Half of the Petersburg Soviet was shot out of hand on the orders of General A.A. Orlov, who was made military governor of Petersburg. The other half was packed off to Siberian exile.

    Among those unilaterally sentenced to death was the soviet’s fiery chairman, Trotsky, who died at the age of twenty-six, shouting curses at the firing squad.

    The same scenes were repeated in Russia’s other great urban centers – Moscow, Kiev, and Warsaw, where the participation of Polish nationalists in the disturbances merited an especially brutal crackdown.

    Cossacks rode into the countryside and dispersed rural soviets with the same ferocity.

    Black Hundredist militias joined in the repression and acted with the tacit approval and occasional full cooperation of the military and police. In the Pale of Settlement, the reaction coalesced into another round of pogroms, as Jews were identified with the revolutionaries.

    Orthodox priests led mobs in attacks on Jewish homes and shops, to the traditional cry of “beat the Yids.”

    Some 80 Jews were killed in an Odessa pogrom that spanned from 1 to 3 October, and in Kiev as many as 100 died.

    Nicholas promptly fired Witte for encouraging rapprochement with the revolutionaries.

    A wave of arrests swept the country.

    Nabokov was taken into custody for his part in the organization of the disastrous march. Alix, beside herself with grief over the loss of her infant son, insisted he be hanged. Nicholas was inclined to agree. Even Durnovo was reluctant to do this, as Nabokov was a wealthy man from a respectable family with powerful friends.

    But in the end the imperial family won out. Nabokov went before a military tribunal, was charged and convicted of treason in a trial lasting about thirty minutes, and summarily hanged a few hours later.

    Thousands of less prominent figures met the same fates.

    In October of 1905, Nicholas dismissed Durnovo and appointed a new Interior Minister, Peter Stolypin. Much like Witte, Stolypin considered himself an enlightened figure who wanted to modernize Russia. But he was also happy to organize this new wave of repressions for the tsar.

    Stolypin saw to it that particularly restive regions, including most of the major cities, and large swathes of the Ukrainian countryside, along with Central Asia and the Baltic territories, were placed under military government. The military governors were empowered to act with absolute authority, and Stolypin encouraged them to show “splendid brutality” so that “the rebels” would learn the folly of resistance quickly and thus “no further blood be spilled.”

    General A.N Meller-Zakomellsky, made military governor of the Ukrainian provinces, issued a directive to his officers to the effect that “rebels and incendiaries” were to be treated “utterly without pity.” All fifty representatives of the railwayman’s strike committee in Kiev, which had controlled the rail-lines connecting to the city since mid-May, were shot after a brief collective military trial. Hundreds more railwaymen who had participated in the strike were arrested, many sent into Siberia, to the point that the rail lines of central Ukraine suffered severely for lack of men to work them.

    When a village in the Kherson province refused to disband its soviet, and refused to vacate the land seized from the local landlord, Meller-Zakomellsky ordered the whole town razed.

    In the Baltics, General Orlov boasted of hanging “rebels” all along the road to Reval for miles and miles, “just like Spartacus.” Rebellious Latvian farmworkers were rounded up by the coordinated actions of tsarist troops and the militias of local landed noblemen. Thousands were killed and tens of thousands subjected to various punitive measures.

    The repression stretched well into 1906, and by mid-1907, when the battles and the mass executions were tallied up, it was estimated that some 30,000 lost their lives in what became known among Russian dissidents as the Terror. Many more were injured, millions of roubles’ worth of property destroyed, and as many as 300,000 may have become political prisoners.

    Even world-famous figures such as the writer Maxim Gorky were not safe – Gorky, who had written in favor of the Petersburg Soviet and was friendly with many prominent revolutionaries, was arrested in the fall of 1905. He was very nearly executed, but an international outcry managed to save his life, and he was allowed to go into exile.

    The émigré papers and enemies of the Russian autocracy abroad found much grist for the anti-tsarist propaganda mill in all this horror. The bloody repression was almost universally condemned in the west, save for among certain sectors of the extreme right.

    British Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain, a convinced Unionist who would fully support the British Army's crackdown on the 1907 strike, denounced the “stupid despotism” of the tsar.

    President Henry Frick, who was currently overseeing the dismantling of the organized left in his own country, stated that the tsar’s actions were "not those of a Christian and civilized government.”

    The Russian left itself was in full retreat, as the autocracy seemed firmer than ever over the ashes of 1905. But the revolutionaries were not beaten, and in the end the great setback would only serve to fire their determination.

    Six-year-old Maria Romanova asked her mother why all the bloodshed and suffering, and the tsarina informed her daughter that the Jews and freemasons sought to rule Russia and stirred up the revolution to that end.

    Meanwhile, six-year-old Vladimir V. Nabokov asked his own mother who had taken father away. She tearfully replied that the tsar had murdered him, and young Nabokov thus swore to hate the tsar forevermore.
     
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    • The Election of 1908

    • Iggies

    With the SLP smashed and scattered, and the IWW a persecuted band of wanted criminals, what remained of politically minded labor sought a new outlet for the expression of their interests.

    Any organization or party explicitly dedicated to socialism, or one that might even plausibly be read as such, would fall afoul of the new laws proscribing radicalism. But a deep consciousness had been awakened among many American workers in the preceding decade, one that could not simply be crushed down and forgotten.

    Between 1904 and 1908, there were a number of short-lived parties and associations created with the vague intention of replacing the banned SLP.

    In 1906, the recently-released-from-prison Victor Berger attempted to found the ‘American Workers’ Party’ in Niagara, New York. It enjoyed two months of legitimate existence before it was banned by the New York State legislature.

    There was also the ‘Western Labor Association’ founded in Carson City the same year, which met a similar fate.

    The organizers of such parties were generally not arrested straightaway, but invariably became the subject of BIS surveillance and files stashed away in a Washington cabinet somewhere.

    It was not until mid-1907 that this began to change, with the establishment of the LATU.

    The Populist and Republican parties had disambiguated once more in the aftermath of the disastrous 1904 election. They rather puddled along in the next four years, forced aside as Frick and the Nationalists bulled through all obstacles to absolute power. But now, they were again ready to contest the highest office in the land, and a number of other offices besides.

    Bill Bryan was prepared for another run, if less enthusiastically so than in previous years. Privately, he feared the Populists might suffer the same sort of repression the Socialists had, if they dared to mount a serious challenge to Frick’s reelection. But he pressed on, since to do otherwise would be surrender.’

    Bryan announced his bid for the presidency in early 1907, and he would remain the only serious challenger to Frick.

    The Republican Party had continued its staggered dissolution since 1904, following its old Democratic rival to the grave, as its members bled away to either the Populists or the Nationalists. The right wing of the GOP melted away faster than the left, attracted as its many partisans were towards the might of Frick’s party. The progressive wing, despite its support of Roosevelt and Bryan’s joint run in 1904, was not as inclined towards the Populists as the conservatives were towards the Nationalists. Thus, the Republicans that remained in 1907-08 were generally to the left of the party that had existed before the crisis.

    Some progressive Republicans floated the idea of another fusion ticket with the Populists, and perhaps as a show of deference to Bryan, this time around backing him for president and Roosevelt for his vice president hopeful.

    But Roosevelt was so embarrassed by the events of 1904 that he refused. The former governor retired from public life, closing himself off in his Catskills estate.

    Despite Roosevelt’s reticence, many Republicans still suggested that the party ought to back the Populist bid for office, as the only reasonable avenue to unseating Frick. However, this line of argument proved unpopular. The panic of 1904 had faded, now that the specter of social revolution was exorcised. Many decided Frick was not as bad as feared (of course, well-to-do Republicans hardly bore the brunt of his policies). It simply did not seem as urgent. Furthermore, with the mass exodus of the party’s conservative faction, the GOP was falling increasingly under the influence of one man: Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge was a proud reformer, a proponent of labor rights and increased commercial oversight. He was also a fierce immigration restrictionist, both for the reason that it ‘debased’ American labor and that it "diluted the nation's founding Anglo-Saxon racial stock". Many of his positions certainly put him at odds with Frick. But Lodge was also a staunch supporter of the gold standard and was a proponent of increased tariff to protect American manufacturing and workers. On top of this, he was an enthusiastic imperialist, pushing for a harder hand in the Philippines and of turning back at all costs encroaching European influence in the Americas. These put him at odds with Bryan, still devoted to his free silver, still an enemy of tariffs, and a convinced anti-imperialist. And Lodge was less willing to compromise than Roosevelt had been in 1904.

    Thus, the idea of another joint ticket soon foundered.

    In a largely uncontested convention, the GOP nominated Lodge for the presidency, with fellow progressive Albert Beveridge as his running mate.

    The Democrats, that small handful of which had not yet deserted to the Nationalists and still steadfastly refused to admit that the party was dead and still contested some regional elections in the deep south, nominated no presidential candidate and instead endorsed Frick again.

    Few expected Frick could lose reelection. In his speeches, the President was content to remind voters of the nightmare of 1903-04, and then to point out that it had come to end under his administration, just as he had promised. It was a resounding message.

    But he did not want to chance a defeat, either. Nationalist governors and mayors greased the wheels for Frick’s campaigners, and obstructed Republican and Populist activists at every turn. Even Bryan found himself under BIS surveillance. Especially in the south, Bryan supporters were occasionally brought in on trumped up charges of violence and tried under the Red Act.

    Despite all this, by and large the campaign season largely went off smoothly. There were no great riots, no shootings. The SLP’s mass base was still demoralized, and the economic upswing meant less political and ideological desperation.

    Henry Lodge used his own considerable wealth to fund his campaign, slamming Frick for ‘economic irresponsibility’ and the ‘abominable’ establishment of the ERO. He, like Bryan, pointed to the poverty so many workers still endured, and demanded a redress in the form of anti-trust legislation. He also charged Frick with countenancing the ‘inundation’ of ‘our race’ because the administration had not capped immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries to the extent wished by hardline restrictionists.

    But attacks, Lodgist or Bryanite alike, bounced off of Frick. He was likely at the height of his popularity in 1908, even if he owed that popularity almost entirely to the illusory connection between a sitting president and an economic rebound. Many were also glad that the ‘reds’ had been evidently suppressed, and credited this to Frick (though of course, lame duck McKinley had been the one to outlaw the SLP). Most saw a president easily coasting to reelection.

    Things changed in July 1908, when Bryan did something unprecedented – he knew, as did his staffers, that running against an incumbent president, and with Lodge splitting the anti-Frick vote, his chances of victory were slim to none. So, that month, he challenged Frick to a public debate, to be held at the venue of the President’s choice.

    Frick at first laughed it off and refused to respond to his opponent. But the press got wind of the story.

    Bryan had something in mind along the lines of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of the 1850s, an opportunity to deploy his renowned silver tongue in an arena where Frick’s millions would profit him nothing. Even before any official recognition that his down-thrown gauntlet had been accepted, the Great Commoner was preparing for the showdown with regular recitations before a mirror.

    An annoyed Frick soon realized he could not back down without appearing a coward. Grudgingly, he accepted Bryan’s challenge.

    The debate was held on 7 September 1908, at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. It was heavily publicized by most every newspaper in the nation, and tickets to the show sold out within a few hours. Thousands who could not afford such tickets crowded around outside the building, hoping to get a quick rundown once the thing was through.

    The theater was packed, and in attendance were such figures as Supreme Court justice Wendell Holmes, industrialist and prominent Nationalist Henry Ford, congressman Joseph Cannon, journalist Ida Tarbell, socialists Daniel Hoan and Victor Berger, and even an intrigued Henry Lodge.

    The format was that of an hour-long statement by each candidate, and then a half-hour response from the other.

    Frick got the first word and went on the attack. He accused Bryan and the Populists of ‘inexcusable naivete,’ and charged that their ‘demagoguery’ had paved the way for the Socialists. He further warned that free silver was a ‘dangerous anachronism’ and then pointed out that even most progressives had abandoned it. Finally, he appealed to the accomplishments of his own administration, reminding the audience that ‘revolutionist incendiaries are treated like the criminals that they are.’

    Bryan struck back. Most had expected that Frick would use his time to draw connections between the Populists and the SLP, and that Bryan would be kept busy defending himself against such smears. Instead, he did what few, including apparently most of his own campaign staffers, had expected him to, and provisionally defended the socialists. He insisted that even if he personally deplored the "communistic philosophy" of the Socialists, "under the flag I have loved, every man has the right to decide his doctrine for himself," even

    Then he dragged into light the egregious violations of civil liberties so far laid at the feet of the Frick administration. Bryan recited a memorized list of twenty men and women who had been, in the last year, detained and held without a writ of habeas corpus. Then he informed the audience that this was only a fraction of the total.

    At one particularly heated juncture, Bryan asked his opponent whether he was “President Frick or King Henry?”

    According to the New York Times, the barb “left the president for a minute red of face.”

    In the end, almost all agreed that Bryan had handily won the debates. Even the actual points of fact aside, Bryan was by far the superior orator. Frick’s icy certitude with which he had sometimes captivated a crowd was entirely unsuited to the heated format of a public dispute.

    The men shook hands at the conclusion, but in private Frick was furious that he had been ‘humiliated’ and would not forget it.

    So resounding was the perceived defeat that some began to wonder if, even if Frick’s chances were excellent, he might not be in for a rougher fight than anticipated.

    The nation went to the polls on 3 November 1908. It was far more orderly than had been the elections of either 1900 or 1904. Only five deaths were reported across the United States in connection with the voting process.

    In more than a few precincts, CS men or even state militia stood ‘guard’ at ballot boxes. There seem to have been irregularities in a number of counties, particularly in (as usual) the deep south. But the ultimate outcome was evidently not tilted very far by fraud.

    In the end, Frick walked away with 55.3% of the popular vote. Bryan had 25.9% and Lodge took 18.8%.

    Frick won with a massive 436 electoral votes, taking every state except Washington, Colorado, Nevada, and (much to his chagrin) his home state of Pennsylvania, all of which went to Bryan, except for Pennsylvania which fell to Lodge’s Republicans. At 90.3% of the electoral college, it was the biggest landslide since Lincoln’s victory over George McClellan in 1864.

    As mentioned, fraud and intimidation, though existent, were far from decisive in Frick’s reelection. He had, in the four years since his tumultuous rise to the office, become a genuinely popular president, even if much of that popularity was based in simple relief that the horror of the Crisis had begun to pass.

    President Frick celebrated his victory with a great parade in Manhattan, and Bryan coolly congratulated his opponent.

    Secretary of the Treasury Mellon gleefully announced to the press that, “the American people have displayed their confidence in the leadership of my friend Mr. Frick.”

    The vote of confidence in the Nationalists extended to congress, where the Nationalists expanded their representation in the House to 302, giving them a two-thirds majority, largely boosted by the defections of more sympathetic Republicans. In the Senate the NP soon had its majority, as well, at 52 senators.

    Much ink has been spilled in the century since over what might have happened if there had been no split opposition, perhaps a weaker campaign on the incumbent’s part, and Frick had gone down to defeat in 1908. Would he have conceded? It is difficult to say – Frick’s tightening stranglehold on power in later years speaks against the possibility, but as many have rightly pointed out, the Frick of 1908 was not the Frick of 1912, and certainly not the Frick of 1916 or later.

    Such questions must, in the end, remain the preserve of fantasists.
     
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