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The photo at left was taken in 1912. At photo left, on the platform leaning over the banner, is Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president. The collections at Indiana State University are full of pictures just like this one, with Debs inciting standing-room only crowds in towns large and small: Knoxville, Tennessee; Waterbury, Connecticut; Canton, Ohio; his hometown, Terre Haute, Indiana. Over 15,000 people paid between 5 cents and $1 to hear him speak in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Debs would receive almost 1 million popular votes that year (of the “counted” Socialist votes)—6% of the popular votes cast in that election. His appeal was greatest in states traditionally thought of as the American Heartland—Ohio, Illinois, Oklahoma, Indiana, Wisconsin. In 1920, Debs drew slightly larger popular vote totals: remarkable, considering that Debs campaigned from a prison cell. He had been jailed on charges of “sedition,” a consequence of his opposition to World War I, and had to be transferred from the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville—where he received sympathetic treatment from both the warden and his jailors—to a maximum security penitentiary in Atlanta.
At the turn of the last century, socialism was far from the crackpot hobby or rhetorical bugaboo it has since become. In 1910, the citizens of Milwaukee elected Emil Seidel, the nation’s first Socialist mayor: by 1911, there were seventy-three elected Socialist mayors. Socialists on the municipal level lobbied for, and won, control of local waterworks and streetcar lines—hence the term “public
utilities”. “Nationalist” or “Bellamy” clubs, based on the socialist utopia expressed in Edward Bellamy’s best-selling novel Looking Backward, were commonplace, and other popular writers like Jack London and Upton Sinclair advanced Socialist ideas. Coal, copper and silver miners; farmers and railway workers; middle-class merchants—all could and did vote Socialist.
So, where did Socialism—the political movement—go?
World War I became the first of many serious public relations hits. Labor unions aligned with Socialist politics—first the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), then the larger Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, popularly known as “the Wobblies”)—resisted mobilization. Striking for eight-hour workdays, an end to child labor, and minimum wage laws during wartime became synonymous with disloyalty—a perception aided by frequent and bloody clashes between troops and strikers.
Industry management formed “loyalty leagues” and forced employees to choose: enroll and continue working, or be seen as “pro-I.W.W”. In 1917 in Bisbee, Arizona, 1,187 striking miners were instructed to return to work or be deported. The twelve hundred who refused to return to work were put into cattle cars and sent to Hermanas, New Mexico, where they remained, under armed guard, for two months. I.W.W. offices across the country were raided by Civilian Protective Leagues, and the Centralia, Oregon offices of the I.W.W. were twice ransacked by members of the local American Legion—once on Red Cross Parade Day in 1918, then on Armistice Day in 1919. The second raid ended in bloodshed when one of the Centralia Wobblies, determined not to lose the second I.W.W. headquarters to vandalism, fired on and killed one of the Legionnaires. The shooter, Wesley Everest, was dragged from his cell, castrated, and lynched from a local bridge. His lifeless body was used for target practice, a fate similar to that of Butte, Montana labor organizer Frank Little.
I’ve often said that I see broad similarities in the turn of the last century and the turn of this century. While the role of labor unions in American life has diminished, political polarization and radicalization is on the rise. The uncertainty that attends the dawn of a new century, much less a new millennium, accounts for much. The loss of social organizations—secular and religious—that once answered these anxieties is another contributor. But the outlook of the respective generations has fundamentally changed. That Edward Bellamy titled his novel Looking Backward is deceptive: his characters are not in the least bit sentimental. The past that Julian West reflects upon is a kind of Dark Age; the future is an opportunity to leave the worst behind. Even the grimmest social reformer believed in the progression of humanity—through science, through common cause—as an article of faith. Eugene Debs is famous for saying, “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”—a mirror, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, of the Sermon on the Mount, Debs’ unique evangelism.
In our own era, I know what most of my fellow citizens are against. I hear less about what drives them forward. We are more backlash and less revolutionary, and there is no convenient scapegoat—no seventy-three Socialist mayors, no great union for them to infiltrate, no broad culture to support their popular literature, much less sophisticated economic theory. And no faith in progress. We are a mob without a monster to chase.