SOCIALISM

Socialism had its roots in the social and economic changes wrought by the rapidly increasing industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. As factory owners became increasingly wealthy and workers grew impoverished, many workers sought a more-collective and less-competitive organization of the means of production and distribution of goods. Whether grounded in the theories of Robert Owen (1771–1858), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), Karl Marx (1818–1883), or homegrown socialists, America in the period of 1870 to 1920 saw an increasing—and increasingly diverse—array of socialist movements, which strongly affected American politics, economics, and culture.

SOCIALIST COMMUNITIES

Friendship Community, Mississippi, 1872–1877 Bennett Cooperative Colony, Mississippi, 1873–1877

Social Freedom Community, Virginia, 1874–1880 Hays City Danish Colony, Kansas, 1877 Mutual Aid Community, Mississippi, 1883–1887 Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, California, 1885–1922

Cooperative Brotherhood, California, 1893–1898 Hiawatha Village Association, Michigan 1893–1896 Altruria, California, 1894–1895 Ruskin Cooperative Association, Tennessee, 1894–1899

Home Employment Cooperative Colony, Mississippi, 1894–1906

Christian Corporation, Nebraska, 1896–1897

Freedom Colony, Vermont 1897–1905

Equality, Washington, 1897–1907

Cooperative Brotherhood, Washington, 1898–1908

Ruskin Commonwealth, Georgia, 1899–1901

Friedheim, Virginia, 1899–1906

Niksur Cooperative Association, Minnesota, 1899–1899

Kinder Lou, Georgia, 1900–1901

Freeland Association, Washington, 1900–1906

Southern Cooperative Association, Florida, 1900–1904

Helicon Hall, New Jersey, 1906–1907

Fruit Crest, Missouri, 1911–1912

Llano del Rio Company, California, 1914–1918

Army of Industry, California, 1914–1918

Llano del Rio Company, Nevada, 1916–1918

Newllano Cooperative Colony, Louisiana, 1917–1938

Brian J. Berry, America's Utopian Experiments: Communal Havens from Long-Wave Crises, p. 165.

SOCIALIST ORGANIZATIONS

In October 1883 delegates from a number of American socialist groups, comprised mostly of recent immigrants, gathered in Pittsburgh to form the International Working People's Association (IWPA). Their "manifesto" proclaimed opposition to capitalism and promotion of Marxist revolution. Page Smith gauges the effects of the International Working People's Association, which he says did not result in a mass movement but did spread some of its ideas through the more radical elements of the labor movement (p. 234). In subsequent years the IWPA sponsored meetings and published journals. Less militant and radical was the International Workingmen's Association, formed in San Francisco in 1881 and devoted to education and self-help; they called for a "scientific system of governmental co-operation of the working-people" (Smith, p. 235).

In 1877 the Workingmen's Party changed its name to the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), and by the end of 1879 it had a membership of ten thousand people. The party's hopes quickly faded, however, as economic conditions improved; membership dipped to fifteen hundred in the early 1880s when the "Black International," the anarchist wing of the SLP, split off. Events of 1886, though, occasioned gains for the SLP, which supported Henry George for mayor of New York. His loss led to yet another split in 1888. Daniel De Leon reinvigorated the SLP, which through his efforts nominated a candidate for president in 1892 who received twenty-one thousand votes. Yet De Leon's leadership led to a split in 1899 when Morris Hillquit, Job Harriman, and Eugene V. Debs formed the Socialist Party. Debs, who had risen to prominence in the Pullman strike of 1894 and who helped form the Social Democratic Party in 1897, was the most popular of the Socialist Party leaders and its nominee for president most years from 1900 to 1920. He presided over what Daniel Bell in Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952) calls "the 'golden age' of American Socialism" (p. 55), 1902 through 1912. In Socialism and America (1977) Irving Howe says that Debs's brand of socialism was very attractive to many workers in that it offered solidarity and tolerance to a wide variety of groups, from strikers to farmers to miners (pp. 18–19). Debs's popularity as a presidential candidate is indicative of the Socialist Party's success in the first decades of the century: he received 96,000 votes in 1900; 402,000 in 1904; 875,000 in 1912; and even 920,000 in 1920 while in prison for sedition.

Having a more openly and concertedly socialist agenda than many other socialist organizations was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, the "Wobblies"), founded in Chicago in 1905. Its members included the Western Federation of Miners and the more revolutionary elements of the labor movement and were led by William D. ("Big Bill") Haywood, Debs, Thomas J. Hagerty, and De Leon. The central purpose of the IWW was to unite all workers, skilled and unskilled; as Debs said at the founding convention, "Without solidarity nothing is possible . . . with it nothing is impossible." By 1906, however, the IWW was split between a faction focusing on unionism and one calling for more radical practices. This feud was compounded by events of 1905 and 1906, when Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg was assassinated by a bomb and Haywood and others were dragged to Idaho and tried. The Western Federation withdrew from the IWW, and subsequent conferences of the organization saw a decline in socialist involvement. Bell indicates that the IWW eventually became an organization of unskilled workers, a transformation completed in 1908 with the ouster of De Leon (p. 68). De Leon formed the Detroit faction of the IWW, while Haywood and Vincent St. John formed the Chicago IWW, promoting sabotage and other direct action.

SOCIALIST THEORIES

Robert V. Hine outlines the various communitarian experiments of the last half of the nineteenth century and shows the rise of the Social Gospel and Christian socialism (Berry, p. 139). Brian J. Berry discusses the former movement as focused on planning as a means of social justice; its most prominent minister was Rev. Washington Gladden (1836–1918). In The Working People and Their Employers (1876) he summarizes his view of history as follows: "The subjugation of labor by capital is the first stage in the progress of industry; the second stage is the warfare between capital and labor; the third is the identification of labor and capital by some application of the principle of cooperation" (Cort, p. 227). Boston, the center of much Christian socialism, was the site of the founding of the Christian Labor Union in 1872 by Rev. Jesse James, who edited the monthly Equity from 1874 to 1875 and the LaborBalance from 1877 to 1879. The Christian Labor Union advocated mutual benefit societies, support of unions by churches, and an economic system based on labor. Other Christian organizations included the Society of Christian Socialists, which was founded in 1889 and which published the journal the Dawn from 1889 to 1896, and the Christian Social Union, which was founded in 1890. Another advocate of Christian socialism was Richard T. Ely (1854–1943), one of the leading economists of the period. A professor at Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins, Ely based his socialism, which included public ownership of monopolies, on the New Testament's emphasis on caring for the poor. The controversial (due to his views on sexuality) minister Edward Ellis edited the Christian Socialist from 1905 to 1922. He was, as John C. Cort says in Christian Socialism (1988), a major figure in Christian socialism, one whom the Socialist Party sponsored on a number of lecture tours (p. 241). Flourishing particularly during the Third Great Awakening of the 1890s, Christian socialism spawned a number of utopian communities across the nation—twenty-four in the period from 1875 to 1920. Secular communes also flourished during this period, connecting socialism to such diverse beliefs as free love, vegetarianism, spiritualism, feminism, and celibacy.

Utopian communities also arose out of the "Scientific Socialism" movement, particularly as responses to economic crises of the 1870s, 1890s, and 1907. For example, between 1893 and World War I twenty-one socialist communities were established, the most significant of which was likely the Ruskin Colony, founded in 1894 in Tennessee by Julius A. Wayland (1854–1912). Berry traces the development of the Ruskin Cooperative Association, which gave some Americans hopes that a viable communal life could be an answer to the growing problems of urbanization and industrialization. However, with an increased population, the usual quarrels and splits set in, and Ruskin ended in 1899. Berry speculates about "An Epidemic of Socialism?" and concludes: "Having rejected politics, government, and other institutions of society, many reformers adopted some form of cooperative organization as their instrument of change, with the hope that by forming one successful cooperative community they could begin the conversion of a troubled world. Each community viewed itself as instruments of broader social and economic change" (p. 161).

Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) argued that rent was the major cause of poverty. Daniel Bell summarizes George's proposal as based upon the concept that natural and social reasons were the basis of the value of land; therefore, no individual should profit from it. Instead, George favored a single tax as the land's full rental value, which he thought would lead to more productive use. George's single tax ideas, which can be traced back to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's Communist Manifesto (1848), were popular during the turbulent 1880s. In 1886 the Central Labor Union of New York nominated George for mayor.

Incorporating the theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer into their mainly Marxist ideology, many evolutionary socialists of the period were faced with serious contradiction between progressive and revolutionary aims. Mark Pittenger says that "very few Gilded Age socialist evolutionists would join the Socialist Party after its founding" (p. 10). Into the twentieth century more vigorous debates over the possibility of reconciling socialism and evolutionism were held by A. M. Simons, Ernest Untermann, Arthur M. Lewis, and Robert Rives La Monte, whose scientific socialist theories were highly sophisticated (Pittenger, p. 11). For example, Lewis, working-class and self-educated, wrote several volumes—most notably Evolution Social and Organic (1908)—that popularized the idea that the sciences could be effectively used by socialists. Pittenger indicates that Lewis's significance resulted from his effectiveness in conveying complex socialist theories to the working classes (p. 143).

SOCIALIST LITERATURE

Much of the socialist theories were disseminated by the plethora of newspapers and magazines devoted to the cause. The Massachusetts Episcopalian minister W. D. P. Bliss became interested in the publications of the British Fabians and formed the Fabian Society of Boston and its magazine the American Fabian in 1895. In it Bliss called for a league of Fabian Societies, which, as Howard H. Quint says in The Forging of American Socialism (1953), aimed to bring together those socialists committed to gradualism, forming a genuinely American version of socialism (p. 121). The journal continued until 1900, directed mainly at the middle class. One of the most effective socialist propagandists was Julius Augustus Wayland, "the One Hoss Editor." Through his weekly newspapers, the Coming Nation (Greensburg, Indiana, and Ruskin, Tennessee) and Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), Wayland gained a national audience from the 1890s until his death in 1919. In them Wayland promoted what Quint calls "grass roots socialism," which was generally unconcerned with theoretical consistency but was persuasive in spreading the doctrine of the cooperative commonwealth (p. 209). Also influential was the Masses, which, according to Christine Stansell in American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000), blended socialism with the ideas of the bohemian avant-garde of Greenwich Village (p. 166). Beginning in 1911 under the editor Piet Vlag, the journal was a conventional socialist outlet until Max Eastman took over in 1912, when it became more of a feminist and modernist magazine, though retaining its leftist politics, which led to its suppression by the postal authorities in 1917. Summing up these developments, Morris Hillquit's History of Socialism in the United States (1903) aimed to provide a thorough and complete account of the rise of socialism in the nineteenth century and its place in turn-of-the-century America.

The IWW published six newspapers, the most enduring of which were Solidarity (1909–1917) and the Industrial Worker (1909–1913). Wobbly songs, gathered in the Little Red Songbook: Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent (1909), also helped to popularize the organization. The songwriter Joe Hill (born Joseph Emmanuel Haaglund) was the most famous of the Wobbly singers from the time of his immigration in 1902 until his controversial execution in Utah in 1915. Called "the hobo's poet laureate," Hill promoted through his verse the IWW's call for solidarity and direct action. One of the most visible of the IWW's literary enterprises was the 7 June 1913 Paterson Strike Pageant, organized by Haywood along with Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Walter Lippman, and Joan Sloan. The pageant, held to support and help striking workers in the Paterson, New Jersey, textile mills, included poems, songs, essays, and dramatic performances. According to Martin Green in New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant, the participants "had cast a new truth and a strong demand in the teeth of Manhattan: a truth of class conflict and a demand for radical change, which contradicted the pleasant half-truths of the politicians, theaters, and newspapers of the establishment" (p. 203).

Perhaps the most influential socialist work of the period is Edward Bellamy's (1850–1898) utopian fantasy Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), which presents an essentially socialist—though Bellamy terms it "nationalist"—vision of the future. His narrator, Julian West, falls into a coma in 1887 and awakes in 2000. Guided by Dr. Leete, West learns that the trusts have been consolidated and nationalized and the "national organization of labor under one direction" (p. 57) has solved the labor problems of the nineteenth century. Every citizen has a period of "industrial service" from age twenty-one to forty-five. What the service is depends on "natural endowments," but the administration constantly seeks to equalize the trades and insure that all work is equivalent. In addition to his portrayal of the utopia, Bellamy, through his narrator's recollections, gives a thorough critique of the social ills of 1880s America.

Other writers also promoted socialism through utopian novels. William Dean Howells's (1837–1920) A Traveler from Altruria (1894) is structured around conversations among the narrator and others with Mr. Homos, an Altrurian whose socialist utopia is sharply contrasted with conditions in America. Mr. Homos tells the others, "We have found that it is human nature to work cheerfully, willingly, eagerly, at the tasks which all share for the supply of common necessities. . . . It is nowise possible for the individual to separate his good from the common good" (pp. 196–197). Howells's more conventional novels Annie Kilburn (1889) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) also take up socialist themes. In the former the title character works to implement a Social Union for factory workers, whereas the latter portrays the socialist Lindau and the violence of a strike by streetcar workers. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's (1860–1935) Herland (1915) depicts a feminist utopia, where children are raised and educated by experts in early childhood development, particular talents are channeled into occupations best suited for them, and they live together communally without private property. In her earlier Women and Economics (1898) Gilman insisted that "the economic progress of the race, its maintenance at any period, its continued advance, involve the collective activities of all trades, crafts, arts, manufactures, inventions, discoveries, and all the civil and military institutions that go to maintain them" (p. 8).

In his chapter "The Philomaths" (a club), Jack London presents a sustained argument between the "Plutocrats," primarily Colonel Van Gilbert and Mr. Wickson, and London's hero, Ernest Everhard. The following is Everhard's final response.

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 it shall 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 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.

London, The Iron Heel, p. 54.

Socialism is a prevalent theme in much of Jack London's (1876–1915) writing but is perhaps most fully represented in The Iron Heel (1908), a futuristic projection of the conflicts between the socialists and the capitalists beginning in 1912. The novel's hero is Ernest Everhard, a London-like philosopher and author of Working-Class Philosopher. Besides arguing against the Plutocracy (bankers and corporate heads) with textbook Marxist theory, Everhard leads two revolts against the Oligarchy, whose Iron Heel mercilessly crushes the revolutionaries. A longtime member of the Socialist Labor Party, London nevertheless had a strained relationship with it. In his resignation letter of 1916, he complains that the party has lost its "fire and fight," while London "believed that the working class, by fighting, by never . . . making terms with the enemy, could emancipate itself " (Letters, p. 1538).

Like The Iron Heel, Upton Sinclair's (1878–1968) The Jungle (1906) ruthlessly exposes the abuses workers were subjected to under the capitalist system. Sinclair details the life of stockyard worker Jurgis Rudkus, who experiences all of the effects of poverty, degradation, and despair, finding in the end hope through socialism.

See alsoAnarchism; The Jungle; Labor; Poverty

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward 2000–1887. 1887. New York: New American Library, 1966.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland and Selected Stories. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1992.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics. 1898. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

Howells, William Dean. A Traveler from Altruria. 1894. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957.

London, Jack. The Iron Heel. 1904. Ware, Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 1966.

London, Jack. The Letters of Jack London. 3 vols. Edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and Milo I. Shepard. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Secondary Works

Bell, Daniel. Marxian Socialism in the United States. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Berry, Brian J. America's Utopian Experiments: Communal Havens from Long-Wave Crises. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992.

Chambers, John Whiteclay, II. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era. 1992. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Cort, John C. Christian Socialism. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988.

Ginger, Ray. Age of Excess: The United States from 1877 to 1914. New York: Macmillan, 1965.

Green, Martin. New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant. New York: Scribners, 1988.

Herreshoff, David. Origins of American Marxism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967.

Howe, Irving. Socialism and America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977.

Johnson, Oakley C. Marxism in United States History before the Russian Revolution (1876–1917). New York: Humanities Press, 1974.

Jones, Howard Mumford. The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1915. New York: Viking, 1971.

Painter, Nell. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919. New York: Norton, 1987.

Pittenger, Mark. American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

Quint, Howard H. The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953.

Smith, Page. The Rise of Industrial America: A People's History of the Post-Reconstruction Era. 1984. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.

John Samson