That's great to hear! I can honestly say that this is one of the most unique scenarios I have ever seen, and I absolutely cannot wait to see more.
The Stomach of Man Under Socialism: A Culinary History of Socialist America
- Thread starter JesterBL
- Start date
As early as 1909, the New York Times was decrying the withdrawal of meat from the American breakfast table in favor of cold cereal softened in milk. That battle was already won, by and large, by the time period after which I am largely concerned. Kellogg won at the breakfast table.
Many of Kellogg's actual views (especially on sex but also alcohol and tobacco, not to mention race) are probably much maligned in this timeline, although I believe this America will be pulled at least as much if not more to quackery as OTL's*, so some of his ideas and treatments are likely to be revived (as some of them already do seem to cycle in and out of fashion).
His many experiments with nut butters and soy products will be particularly influential/useful to a US striving for meat substitutes, as will his early pioneering of L. acidophilus in food production.
That's really all I am willing/ready to say at this point.
*Homeopathy for one is a larger phenomenon than in OTL's US for demographic reasons, mostly and hydropathy has more staying around power for a few reasons.
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Chapter 3: Turning The Tables
Chapter 3: Turning The Tables
“[T]he Americans have, with singular good sense and good taste, discarded to a great extent the common English, or plain roast and boiled cookery, which is that of a half-civilized people, and adopted the scientific and elaborate cuisine of France, which must always be admired and appreciated wherever taste is not mere gross appetite (...)”- Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in North and South America (1853)
If the editors of Pippin and the literati of British food writing are to be believed [1], American haute cuisine is a museum piece, a relic of a bygone era, St Fagans with béchamel sauce. This is not an uncommon viewpoint- in fact, much of the coverage of our American cousins centers on their supposed backwardness, with socialism as the spectre having set them behind the times in dress, music and food [2].
It is true that the distinctly American idea of French food as the height of sophistication is old-fashioned. The readers of Pippin (and shoppers at Waitrose) have long ago set their sights on Italy as the height of culinary sophistication, while London’s young and beautiful have abandoned the rustic warmth of Tuscany for the daring heights of Peru and the cool minimalism of the Nye Nordiske (although they still go for a curry when sufficiently gassed). Even the French consider Franco-American cuisine and its focus on la grande cuisine passé (and although they will not admit it, their confidence in French cuisine itself is shaken in the wake of the nouvelle cuisine, changing consumer tastes towards la malbouffe, and the rise of other formidable world cuisines).
Franco-American cuisine is by and large, pre-nouvelle cuisine but perhaps even more interestingly, pre-Escoffier. Escoffier had of course published his Le Guide Culinaire (1903) before the Revolution, but his esteemed guide to restaurant cooking of la grande cuisine had not meaningfully made its way across the Atlantic before ties were severed. Following the Revolution, there was no longer a cultural exchange (often done in the manner of personnel) between the French cuisine of the European continent and the Franco-American food of America’s many hotels and restaurants, the aspirational cuisine of the America British traveler Alexander Marjoribanks had visited. Franco-American cuisine following the Revolution found itself defined- and if some arguments are to be accepted, frozen in time and space- by the work of Charles Ranhofer, America’s own Escoffier, and The Epicurean (1894), his own wide ranging encyclopedia of Franco-American cuisine.
Ranhofer was himself a product of that trans-Atlantic exchange between French and American cuisine. Born in Saint-Denis outside of Paris in 1836, he apprenticed in pastry-making in Paris proper before accepting a position as private chef to Simon-Gérard d'Alsace de Hénin-Liétard, Prince d'Hénin, Comte d'Alsace. He would work in America for a Russian consul from 1856 to 1860, before returning to France to work in the court of Napoleon III at the Palais des Tuileries. He returned to America in 1862 and was hired by Lorenzo Delmonico to be his chef de cuisine. He would serve as chef de cuisine at Delmonico’s from 1862 until 1896, with a brief return to France from 1876 to 1879 in which he owned the Hotel American in Enghien-les-Bains, a spa town on the outskirts of Paris. Nonetheless, when introducing himself in the opening of The Epicurean, Ranhofer called himself simply the “Former Chef of Delmonico’s”.
Ranhofer was not particularly hidebound when compared to Escoffier. He was an accomplished chef writing in the shadow of Marie Antoine Careme, as was Escoffier, and neither deviated hugely from the norms set down by their gastronomic forebears. The Epicurean spends more time focusing on front-of-house service, especially the particular demands of fin-de-siècle American elites, and less on the actual organization of the kitchen than does Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire. American restaurant kitchens tend more towards the chaotic than the disciplined French kitchens, although this may have as much to do with American temperaments towards muckety-mucks as anything else, and American restaurant kitchens use an assembly-line system of organization that resembles the “brigade system” pioneered by Escoffier. Ranhofer is, if anything, less traditional than Escoffier in his ingredients; he has no problem using the bounty of America in his menus. Manhattan fawn, Baltimore terrapins, Chesapeake canvasback ducks; all grace the menus of The Epicurean. Nor does he set his sights solely on the East Coast of the country- he was an early popularizer of the alligator pear[3] (which sadly does not feature on any of the menus in The Epicurean) and featured a soup called crème de maïs vert à la Mendocino, a seemingly enigmatic reference to an American backwater to which he had certainly never traveled. I was able to try a version of this soup and it was the highlight of an otherwise culinarily unremarkable trip to San Francisco.
Ranhofer differed from Escoffier in two key aspects. The first was seasonality- a focus which the chefs of nouvelle cuisine would be surprised to learn of in American cooking, but which takes up many of the charts and tables Ranhofer sets forth in The Epicurean. A focus on seasonality is arguably the dividing line between American high and low dining, and America’s many supper clubs and cooperative kitchens often aspire to seasonality on their menus even between such absurdities as strawberries Romanov in January. Part of why Ranhofer focused on seasonality was because when he was writing and cooking one had to- even the 9 years between his own book and Escoffier’s saw major advances in preservation and shipping- but when Americans set out to revive the cuisine of Ranhofer, seasonality was one of the guiding principles they seized upon. The second area in which he differs from Escoffier- and which rather ironically explains the nouvelle cuisine’s contempt for Franco-American cuisine- is in sauces. Escoffier, presaging the nouvelle cuisine, moved many of his recipes away from the heavier, cream and flour based sauces and more towards sauces intended to accentuate the flavors of the dish, fumets made from the cooking liquid of meat, fish or game. Ranhofer did not and Franco-American cuisine abounds with the rich, flour-thickened sauces of an older French fashion. This is also true of other cookbooks which would become part of the canon of a Franco-American cuisine revival, particularly Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (3rd ed, 1918).
The food writers of Britain imagine a certain profundity to their claim that American fine dining is a museum piece. What they leave out is that Delmonico’s- the establishment at which many of them have dined and described- makes no pretense of not being a museum. Most of the dinners and banquets served at Delmonico’s are historical recreations of past dinners and banquets. The menus are painstakingly created from the pages of The Epicurean. The Hotel and Restaurant Workers Section of International Union No. 460 chooses to operate all four Delmonico’s locations as hard-currency establishments, targeted primarily at foreigners and at the recapture of foreign currency from Americans living in New York City. I have attended recreations as diverse as a feast for Napoleon III, an Evacuation Day dinner (which I believe was a joke by the American who invited me) and a literary themed dinner for Charles Dickens [4] (the menu in French which I have appended to the end of this chapter.) All of this is to say that Delmonico’s as it exists today is meant to be enjoyed as a novelty, a chance to live as the robber-barons did, to gorge oneself on a course running from oysters to soups to hors d'oeuvres to fish to game to viands to terrines to salads to a dessert of beautifully sculpted pièces montées. The menus are printed in French on sturdy card stock to be taken home as a memento.[5] One does not dine at Delmonico’s with the intent of understanding how Americans actually approach fine dining in the present day.
A more withering critique of American fine dining is that which comes from the Tories and was particularly popular around the 1984 Olympics in Boston- and that is that American fine dining is a Potemkin village of a cuisine which could not differ more from how Americans actually eat. Their line of attack is that American fine dining is displayed to foreign diplomats and journalists- much like high-minded jazz classique concerts and the coverage of America’s backgammon and bridge tournaments- to give an illusion of glamour and sophistication that belies the crudeness and drudgery of American life. (One can imagine the horror of Socialist Labor Party officials when the British press latched on to the American Olympic Weightlifting team instead of contract bridge champions Alan Truscott and Fred Alder). This critique is largely true when applied solely to Delmonico’s and other hard-currency establishments- but the Tories imagine that the rising prominence and cultural penetration of hard-currency establishments is not itself debated by Americans [6] and completely ignore the many other venues by which Americans- especially those outside of New York City and the Eastern Seaboard- experience fine dining.
To better understand that, one must look at union-owned restaurants (the most refined and famous of which is Le Carnaval, with locations across the Cooperative Commonwealth) and at American supper clubs. To understand those, one must look at the history of restaurants in America. Before the Revolution, America (and particularly American cities) had a lively restaurant culture, often centered around hotels. A common European complaint about American lodging was that meals were often included with the cost of a room, although this likely subsidized the cost to diners to the benefit of quality. There were exceptions- Boston’s dining in the period was defined primarily by aristocratic and exclusive supper clubs such as the Somerset Club and the ladies’ Chilton Club, to the exclusion of ‘public’ restaurants and hotels. The Revolution did not end this- petty entrepreneurship was not in the sights of the early Wobblies, although many restaurants did fail due to disruptions of supply and flagging consumer demand. Delmonico’s failed in the late 1920s primarily due to rising food prices and a refusal to adapt to the changing demographics of a post-Revolution New York City. The Delmonico’s name would surface again in Havana, catering to Blue emigres before Cuba’s own Revolution, as well as in various unconnected restaurants owned by petty capitalists within New York City. Between the Revolution and the Special Period, the worst American restaurant owners had to deal with were the restrictions on private employers and the requirement to purchase many of their supplies through union distributors and wholesalers (there were also restrictions on private real estate ownership but this was arguably a boon for many restaurateurs who found themselves paying controlled rates).
The Special Period and its remarkable focus on food waste and conspicuous consumption largely ended petty entrepreneurship in restaurants. Cities across the country created ‘public restaurants’ rather similar to British Restaurants of World War II and after. Many privately owned restaurants were turned over to be ‘public restaurants’ and the remainder could by and large not survive with discriminatory pricing by union wholesalers and distributors. America’s famed community bakeries would grow out of the relief bakeries of the period, many of which were also housed and equipped by what were previously privately owned restaurants. Union canteens expanded their services for the workingman. Factory-kitchens found their first place of priority in an Emergency Program. Supper clubs (largely Midwestern and distinct from the aristocratic Bostonian model) were exempt from many of the more onerous restrictions and from discriminatory pricing, as were cooperative kitchens and other ‘socially administered’ food providers. Supper clubs were democratically administered and owned by dues-paying members, with meals being charged at or near cost to members and at a mark-up to non-members. The exact line between supper club and cooperative kitchen can be fuzzy, but often supper clubs will hire labor while cooperative kitchens rely more heavily on member-volunteers. [7] Supper clubs would thus become the default form of restaurant in America post-Special Period.
Union-owned restaurants (distinct from union canteens attached to a factory or a factory district in that these were meant to be self-sustaining enterprises open to the public, funded from union funds, and employing union workers) were a later innovation, only really coming about in the late 1960s and early 1970s as American planners identified rising expectations of American city-dwellers and potentially worrisome trends in savings rates among American wage-earners. That time period was actually a remarkable period of experimentation in concepts- beyond the scope of this work, as many of them did not survive into the modern day- but Le Carnaval (and in a more middlebrow fashion open to American and specifically Black Southern influences, Hen House) built upon Francophilic trends bubbling up within American culture. The late 1960s had seen Francophilic revisions of The Science of Easier Living and The Principles of Cookery for the Cooperative and the Home, against a more proletarian and all-American ethos in previous editions of those domestic science manuals.
Dining out at Le Carnaval is not a museum experience- a Le Carnaval could be dropped into London or Berlin and not seem particularly out of place. Dinners are at most 3 or 4 courses, menus are a la carte and table service is relatively modern. American waiters are as a general rule ruder than British waiters, although not quite rude enough to pass for the standard of French service. The food would be seen as oversauced and overcooked in France and has some uniquely American dishes (pain au maïs and tofu avec caramel au vinaigre are two of the dishes I have encountered which would most likely cause a Frenchman to blanche) but everything served save the wine is recognizably French. Supper clubs are less uniform and raffiné than Le Carnaval. Franco-American cuisine sits on the commanding heights of American supper club menus, often atop a more plainly American “steak and potatoes” base, and is sometimes joined by the exotica of German food, Italian food and the dubiously Chinese dish of “chop suey”. American supper clubs (especially the ones with membership bases in America’s larger towns and cities) provide a dining experience that would not be seen as particularly out of place anywhere in Britain or Europe, even as their menus use extraneous French (a marker of sophistication and quality to an American diner [8]) that would be passé anywhere in Europe.
Rather than representing a country stuck in the past, American fine dining and particularly the dominant Franco-American current within American fine dining represents merely a parallel or alternate evolution of French cuisine, divorced from the elegance of Escoffier’s fumets, the strident manifestos of the nouvelle cuisine and the localisms of French cuisine in France proper, but an heir to la grand cuisine of La Varenne, Carême and Ranhofer nonetheless. Franco-American cuisine as it exists today is not merely a snapshot in time of Franco-American cuisine as it existed at the dawn of the early 20th century but is instead a cuisine that survived and adapted to the Revolution, the loss of cultural exchange with French cuisine in France, and the privations of the Special Period. Franco-American cuisine flowered into its own after being preserved and popularized by America’s domestic scientists and then further sustained and developed by the efforts of Restaurant Workers Section of Industrial Union No. 460. It is a distinct cuisine worth valuing and evaluating and it is still evolving- as my experience with tofu avec caramel au vinaigre can attest to. What’s more, America’s system of membership-based supper clubs bring fine (if not truly raffiné) dining to the masses in a way which is truly without parallel in France or Britain. While Franco-American cuisine may not be quite as sophisticated as that which can be found in Paris, it equals anything that a shopper at Waitrose may hope to dine out on, while being accessible to many who in Britain would be resigned to Tesco. This is to say nothing of what the working class of Paris may afford, with French hand-wringing about la malbouffe largely focusing on individuals with déclassé tastes rather than the material circumstances of those individuals. While Delmonico’s and others like it may be museum pieces, other parts of the fine dining experience in America point instead to a more accessible future in food from which we could all learn.
[1] Charles Coldstream (pseudonym), “On The Menu in New York: Overwrought Nostalgia for The Gilded Age” Pippin, May 1987
[2] The stagnancy of American music is popularly remarked upon, even as British and Commonwealth bands playing American derived styles have great popularity in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. If you are interested in an analysis of American music that gives a more balanced approach, I would recommend The Birth and The Death of the Cool: A Revisionist History of American Music by Eric Hobsbawn (Cambridge University Press). His work Primitive Rebels: Proletarian And Avant-Garde Currents In The Creation Of Jazz Classique is more academic but still accessible.
[3] More popularly called the avocado or the palta in American and British English, respectively, although “alligator pear” and “Jamaican pear” may be familiar to members of my parent’s generation
[4] Dickens was not fond of his experiences dining in America, describing Americans as “dirty feeders” and lamenting an American custom of proclaiming dinner with “an awful gong which shakes the window-frames as it reverberates through the house and horribly disturbs nervous Foreigners” (American Notes for General Circulation, 1842). I have not found gongs in many American establishments, although I share Dickens’ assessment of the food in Boston being “indigestible matter”.
[5]The English language version is flimsier and includes the legally prescribed weights and measures of flour, butter and meat for each dish, which is far from helpful for even the least waistline conscious of diners.
[6] See Appendix I: Understanding America's Hard-Currency Shops and Services- particularly the section dealing with the film The Millionaire (1982)
[7] Cooperative kitchens, a dream of the Bellamy Clubs and of domestic science advocates, will be covered in more detail in Chapter 5: The Lonely Crowd, along with other forms of dining out in America such as the automat, the union canteen and the roadhouse.
[8] Perhaps my favorite expression of this is the pre-cooked, frozen food delight known as Chicken à la Maryland. See Sidebar: The High and Low Culture of Fried Chicken.
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Restaurants running on the Costco model-- that's interesting, and unexpected.
This question of hired labor-- I'm guessing the unions' own involvement in running supper clubs makes this a moot point, but before they were involved did the supper clubs fit into the union superstructure at all? Owned by dues-paying members, hiring labor from outside-- so would those outsiders be people who actually had other jobs, but took this one as well in order to earn more? Would the unions they belonged to get a say in management, or would they form a new sort of informal union in parallel with the due-paying customers, or would they represent themselves totally individually? If the second option, would these informal unions be able to become recognized and join the superstructure as owners of the supper club? How often are unions permitted to be born, split up, or fuse together-- does the order to found a new one always have to come from above?
Agreed that the supper club is an interesting model but makes a lot of sense. Do these supper clubs specialize in particular cuisines or are they somewhat eclectic in their menus given the mention of Italian and even Chinese dishes. Speaking of which, the state of Asian food in TTL would be interesting and probably heavily dependent on which Asian countries the American government enjoys good relations with.
RE: Costco- realistically Costco was a co-opting of the consumer co-op model by a for-profit company. Supper clubs (as existed historically in the Midwest) were not consciously organized as consumer cooperatives but develop more in that direction here (member ownership being a key point here), and they also absorb a number of other American voluntary organizations under their umbrella (men's lunch clubs, which historically were often organized by profession, as one example).
Now, as to the rest- a few points are in order. First, supper clubs are member owned, not union owned, so they can be organized by men and women regardless of workplace or industrial union affiliation. Some supper clubs are organized around union membership or workplace affiliation, but that is not always or even usually the case. They therefore differ from union-owned restaurants (often chains, essentially) where the owners are the employees and the sponsoring union.
As to the hired labor- as mentioned in Chapter 2: The Closest Thing To Home, many food establishments are serviced by what Americans call "the bummery". Many of these men and women will carry a Red Card (possess IWW membership, which often helps when trying to find a job) and will have a roving delegate (as their workplaces often have too few personnel) assigned to and sometimes working alongside them and possess regional and national voting rights for their respective industrial union, but often they don't exercise those rights. Some supper clubs offer discounted membership to their staff (far from universal) or a position on the board for a representative of the staff (may be a roving delegate or an elected or appointed staff member). Supper clubs usually tread cautiously on labor issues (while they are non-profit, they are still private employers), although the fact is that any one supper club usually doesn't have very many employees in the grand scheme of things.
The question of about how unions are allowed to be formed, split up or fused is actually a huge question and will be covered in part in one of the Appendices. Suffice it to say that a union's affiliation with an Industrial Union is more or less mandatory and the right of an individual to union representation is universal (IOTL, one of the more unique features of IWW membership was the idea of universal transfer- one union, one card, once a union man, always a union man).
To the first part- most supper clubs try to please everyone and tend to have large, crowd-pleasing menus. Their menus may also be dictated by members and by staff. The author here mentioned Italian and German because the higher echelons of American cooking by and large remove those ethnic influences. Larger cities do have supper clubs with more specialized menus and focuses, although they of course have to be able to keep the lights on with sufficient food sales and still try to appeal to non-members.
As regards chop suey, it was a thoroughly Americanized dish by the 1920s or so. It was a catch-all term for a number of dishes that are all very different. It can run the gamut from something not too dissimilar to chili mac (ground beef, tomato paste, macaroni) to something at least trying to approximate Chinese food (thinly sliced beef cooked at high heat quickly, served with mushrooms, vegetables and a brown gravy over rice or fried noodles). Hence, "dubiously Chinese".
With all the talk so far as the Special Period as a sort of bottleneck moment in the history of institutions, I think it's interesting that the Midwest (I'm assuming the term here refers more to the Upper Missouri than the Upper Mississippi) is credited with originating one of the big winners (although it's safe to say the model was also probably experimented on or developed independently elsewhere in response to the same stresses?). Either way, this from what I'd assume would be a region better known for rural insurgency, and maybe something that people from there like to point out in conversation?
I assume the state tries to break up regionalism by rotating governors between... subnational units but in China this had the side effect of creating cliques of people pushed together in an unfamiliar environment and forming strong bonds as they pull each other up (e.g. Xi Jinping's group of colleagues from his time holding office in Fujian and Zhejiang, despite not being from either province himself). Since restaurants are overall more responsive to the tastes of their patron-owners, I wonder if the in-universe author might find some haunt of Californians or Midwesterners come out east, and willing to challenge this sort of New York/New England - reliant definition of what high cuisine is. Less sauces and more sushi maybe.
Sounds like an awfully hard and thankless job, but interestingly puts them in the position closest to the labor organizers of the previous century. I'm guessing they're treated something like social workers, maybe have a hand in running rehab centers and the like?
I haven't finished reading this, but may I say that this is exactly the kind of innovative social history that makes the board a richer place.
Repeatedly returned delegates *detest* the bummery and roving delegates. The Bummery are everything the union and party elite hate about themselves. The Bummery are the real threat to actually existing American industrial unionism. It isn't supper clubs of lawyers or doctors. Hallelujah I'm a bum, hallelujah bum again, in the big rock candy mountain.
Gee I wonder what works songs are sung by special preventative detainees?
Gee I wonder what works songs are sung by special preventative detainees?
Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
Little nitpick: Frikadeller is Swedish, the German form is Frikadelle (plural: Frikadellen).
In German, a hamburger is a 'he', while a frikadelle is a 'she'; putting an -r on the end would make it a masculine word, which it isn't; the term frikadeller is Danish – there, it is the plural of frikadelle(n).
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Thank you! I'm not much of a language person (editing for proper accent marks in Chapter 3 was exhausting and I'm sure I missed plenty). It has been edited per your recommendation.
These are all great questions. To the first- the author here is using the term Midwest, but the kinds of supper clubs he is referring to were popular in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois. This is important to note because TTL's political center of gravity is actually Chicago (where the SLP is headquartered), while the cultural center of gravity is arguably New York (and that is also America's most internationally focused city). The in-universe author lived in New York.
I'm not going to get too much into the specifics of the Special Period at this time. The "supper club" is not exactly a straight-line descendant of Midwestern supper clubs (it basically just absorbed a number of different forms of social dining in America), but when America's food historians tackle the topic it is usually where they go. A 1907 description of a "dining club" in Carthage, Missouri paid for a manager, two cooks, two waitresses and a dishwasher from membership dues and two boarders and could accommodate up to 60 diners*. That would likely be described as a supper club ITL. So too would many "cooperative kitchens" (which had been a nascent movement since at least the 1880s, and were tied up with the utopian socialism of the Bellamy Clubs and the rising discipline of domestic science/home economics)- cooperative kitchens that stuck to being a community center for canning or a distribution center for meals from factory-kitchens are still called "cooperative kitchens", while those which took on staff and offer in-person dining came to be referred to as "supper clubs". ITTL the "cooperative kitchens" are a socialist project from the beginning, but like "supper clubs" end up benefiting from the Special Period and the squeezing out of private restaurateurs (which was mostly an accident of favoring "socially administered" food providers rather than an intentional policy).
TTL's "subnational units" do not exactly correspond to the states as we know them (which are still known as sort of cultural markers, rather like the provinces of France). The government absolutely tries to break up regionalism and this results in precisely what you are describing, although I was thinking more of the Soviet experience than the Chinese (which I will admit to far less familiarity with). The SLP's disdain for geographical representation is also part of this.
As to whether some Californians will end up bringing a unique 'California cuisine' to the state banquets of the Cooperative Commonwealth, I don't really think so. The concept of 'California cuisine' is not so much a natural outgrowth of California's agricultural bounty but rather an accumulation of historical events (including the Francophilia of OTL's 1950s and 1960s finding expression through Alice Waters and Jeremiah Towers) and the changing cultural landscape of California towards something more bohemian and less culturally conservative (and the changing racial demographics of the state which can't be ignored). I don't think those are necessarily a given for how California will develop. I think if there was an 'alternative' cuisine that could break through the hegemony of Franco-American haute cuisine it would be the food of the South and particularly of Black Southerners ('soul food' is of course an OTL neologism), especially because that particular dynamic is going to have a lot more salience than whatever regional grievances a Californian may have but as of the time of the timeline's writing that has not occurred.**
*The Grand Domestic Revolution, Chapter 10
**Maybe the Nearing Movement is a part of this, although that particular movement was largely composed of young white people
This is a really good way of thinking of them. Historically they were workers who wore a lot of hats- fundraiser, agitator, Literature Department, organizer- and I don't think 'social worker' would fall far outside of that here.
Thank you- I'm glad you've enjoyed it so far!
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:
You will eat, bye and bye
When you've learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye
I wonder whether menus in restaurants in a communist USA would follow the peculiar habit of listing the precise weight of every component of the meals usual in most restaurants in communist eastern Europe. Menus there usually read like this: Salmon caviar (25g) with white bread (75g) and butter (15g) - Mushroom cream soup (300ml) - Roast beef (150g) with dill sauce (100ml), cabbage (200g) and bread dumplings (250g) - apple studel (150g) with vanilla sauce (75ml).
Love your timeline. I just have one question. What are race relations like in this TL? Given the south's conservative bent, was there a lot of southern pushback to the revolution?
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There probably isn't a bigger question in American history, no matter the timeline.
Starting from known history, the IWW was strongly opposed to segregation and organized white and black workers within the same industries under the same union, a notable departure from the practice of other unions. The SLP, meanwhile, suffered from an issue rather common to Marxian thinkers and tended towards what we would today call class-reductionism. Their framework of historical materialism simply doesn't offer much of a framework for understanding racism as a historical force. What writings we do have on the topic basically call racial hatred a bourgeois distraction from the 'real' challenge of class struggle. The SLP's saving grace is that they never really dabbled in the distinctly non-Marxian 'race science' and eugenics of the SP of A's right and center, despite De Leon's attachment to Darwin. All of this is to say that an IWW-SLP led America would likely be ahead of the curve of OTL's America, especially through to the 1960s, on race relations. A black man is guaranteed the same rights of organization and representation as a white man, lynching is made officially illegal well ahead of OTL and miscegenation laws are abolished also well ahead of OTL (the past being a different country, DuBois' argument in the time period was that it was primarily a women's rights issue, as it would allow a black woman to compel her white ruiner to marriage)
Where Marxian thinkers did eventually come to a broader understanding of race, they did so through adopting other discipline's frameworks (see: Frantz Fanon's theories which pulled, as many critical theorists did, from Freud and Lacan). The US ITTL has a much freer academic environment than any officially Marxist country IOTL and I expect that you would see an intellectual flowering of academic Marxism and a willingness to experiment with other schools of thought, even as the more staid departments consign themselves to translating and debating in the original German. That being said, rare and foolish is the government that relies primarily on the intellectual for support, and so 'official' understandings of the immortal science of Marxism-DeLeonism tend to lag the theories on university campuses, sometimes by decades.
One thing which I have posited and hinted at is a much slower Great Migration (actually if you view the Great Migration as two distinct waves, it is only a slowing of the Second). This means that the Black population of America remains more rural and more Southern than IOTL. The IWW-SLP rules the South with a light touch and underinvests and truly neglects rural areas essentially until the point of crisis (which I understand to be the most controversial part of my writing but I stand by it) and it isn't until the Nearing Movement (If you want to imagine it, part Virgin Lands campaign, part Subsistence Homestead Division, part Freedom Ride, part WPA) that the youthful cadres of the SLP really encounter rural poverty and racialized poverty as experienced in the South. That has its own reckoning in this America's history, and I don’t know that it is a story I wish to write just now.
To wrap it up, the Cooperative Commonwealth is ahead of OTL's United States at least into the Sixties but struggles with the more rural nature of their black population and struggles with an official understanding of race as a historical force. By the time that the author is writing in the late 1980s, there is much less of a wealth gap (and less inequality period) between White and Black Americans, less disparity in infant deaths, less disparity in health outcomes- many of the things that we point to today- but Black Americans still suffer from underrepresentation in politics and culture, even as a generation of white sympathizers (and black participants!) advance in the Party and in academia.