AMERICAN SOCIALISTS DURING the PROGRESSIVE ERA by THOMAS FREDERICK JORSCH Bachelor of Science Carroll
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MODERNIZED REPUBLICANISM: AMERICAN SOCIALISTS DURING THE PROGRESSIVE ERA By THOMAS FREDERICK JORSCH Bachelor of Science Carroll College Waukesh~ Wisconsin 1993 Master of Arts University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee,. Wisconsin 1996 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May,2004 MODERNIZED REPUBLICANISM: AMERICAN SOCIALISTS DURING THE PROGRESSIVE ERA .. " ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express gratitude to my dissertation advisor, Dr. Ronald Petrin. Thank you for your guidance, wisdom, and :friendship during this fulfilling, if at times difficult, process. The rest of my dissertation committee, Dr. Laura Belmonte, Dr. Joseph Byrnes, and Dr. Michael Taylor, inspired me to explore ideas and concepts that allowed me to look at old concepts in new ways. I appreciate your teaching and insight as well. Members of the Oklahoma State University faculty and my fellow graduate students contributed to the completion of my dissertation through thoughtful criticism and friendly encouragement. Among the faculty I would like to thank Dr. Ted Agnew, Dr. Matt Bokovoy, Dr. James Huston, Dr. L.G. Moses, Dr. Richard Rohrs, Dr. John Shook, Dr. Michael Willard, and Dr. Elizabeth Williams. All the graduate students provided encouragement in some way, but I want to especially thank Aaron Christensen, Stefanie Decker, Tom Franzmann, Dr. Steve Kite, Dr. Jim Klein, and Dr. Todd Leahy. I also wish to thank my parents and brother for their continued support through my educational journey. I especially want to thank Lisa Guinn for her love, encouragement, and sympathy. You helped me immensely in finishing my dissertation. Finally, I wish to thank the Oklahoma State University History Department and Graduate College for, financial assistance in the form of scholarships, assistantships, and fellowships. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INl'R.ODUCTION............................................................... 1 IL UNDERSTANDING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM: THE SOCIALIST CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN HISTORY........................................................................ 28 III. IDENTIFYING THE SOCIAL PROBLEM: REPUBLICAN CRITIQUE OF PROGRESSIVE ERA LIFE................................. 74 N. REPUBLICAN REMEDIES FOR LIBERAL PROBLEMS: THE SOCIALIST VISION OF THE COOPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH............................................................ 121 V. WHERE CLASS FAILS: FARMERS, BLACKS, IMMIGRANTS, WOMEN, AND THE SOCIALIST MESSAGE............................. 158 VI. THE EMERGENCE OF STATISM: PROGRESSNE REFORM AND THE SOCIALIST CRITIQUE.......................................... 199 VII. CONCLUSION................................................................... 233 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................... :.................................................. 238 IV Chapter 1 Introduction In April 1902, Eugene Debs described how he became a socialist in an article published in The Comrade. Debs detailed how he climbed the ranks of the local locomotive fireman's brotherhood in his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana, where he began working for railroads in his mid teens. Over the ensuing years Debs earned greater responsibility on the lines and within the national trade union. He later left the brotherhood to take on an influential role in the fledgling industrial union, the American Railway Union. In 1894, Debs led the ARU in a national boycott of trains carrying Pullman palace cars in sympathy with the strikers at the Pullman Company outside of Chicago. The Pullman strikers were not part of the ARU, but the industrial union helped in their effort nonetheless. Debs wrote that the infamous Pullman Strike was a success for the workers until forces he previously misunderstood became apparent. With the Pullman Company on the verge of capitulating to the workers' demands the United States government supported Pullman through court injunctions calling for an end to the picketing and the National Guard being mustered to protect Pullman's interests. The government arrested Debs and other ARU leaders. The court sentenced the ARU leaders to six months in the Woodstock jail. While in jail Debs contemplated lessons from the Pullman Strike. He realized that capital always won in battles with labor. Capital was better organized as demonstrated by their ability to successfully stifle the insurgency in 1 Illinois. They also had the powers of government on their side as shown by the effective use of the injunction. Fighting for higher wages, shorter hours, and better conditions were not enough against the forces of capital, nor would these battles ever let the workingman become completely independent. Debs ended his article with these words: "[The American Railway Union] lives and pulsates in the socialist movement, and its defeat but blazed the way to economic freedom and hastened the dawn of human brotherhood. " 1 Debs' choice of words was significant in at least two ways. First, it revealed his historical materialism or Marxism. By associating the socialist movement with the ARU, Debs clearly envisaged socialism as a working class movement. Furthermore, the ARU's defeat was a necessary step in the evolution of history, rather than a random occurrence that existed, failed, and ultimately left little imprint on history. Second, Debs' words emphasized a connection to America's republican past. For Debs, socialism embodied the ideals of freedom and brotherhood, something an earlier generation of Americans may have called liberty and fraternity. In relating his story of how he became a socialist, Debs asked for no less than an end to corrupt governmental practices orchestrated by a privileged group of economic elites whose practices forced American workers into a state of dependency. His move to socialism demonstrated his awareness that reforming the present economic system offered little but temporary relief for American workers and nothing short of a revolution would fix the debauched system. Did not American revolutionaries offer ~e same critique of their society and demand the same? 1 Eugene V. Debs, "How I became a Socialist," in Eugene V. Debs Speaks, ed. Jean Y. Tussey (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 39-45. 2 That Debs evoked the spirit of republicanism was not a new argument. In his 1982 biography of Debs, Nick Salvatore emphasized the republican part of Debs' intellect. Salvatore wrote of Debs' outlook: "If technological progress was achieved at the price of American democratic tradition, then that 'victory' signalled [sic] the destruction of American republicanism," a result that smacked against Debs' · "commitment to democratic thought." The Debs who emerged in Salvatore's book was a man who believed passionately in democracy, egalitarianism, and political and economic equality. Debs owed this outlook "more to a dissenting American tradition than to Socialist or Marxist thinkers." This differentiated Debs from ''many radicals" of his own day who posited "a concept of class or a vision of Socialism based on determinism." In short, Debs' brand of republicanism made him different than most socialists. His way of thinking did not always mesh easily with the Marxist foundations of his comrades - whichever interpretation they espoused - within the movement, although many Americans responded favorably to Debs' orations.2 Salvatore wrote a convincing argument about Debs' republicanism-dominated ideology; however, he assumed a Marxist minimum for American socialism in general and Debs was by no means the sole expounder of democratic rhetoric within the socialist movement. The Debs that Salvatore depicted had a unique quality among socialists because of his republicanism. Salvatore uncovered the essence of Debs' thought, but he erred in construing the rest of the socialists as having a Marxist foundation. Historians of American socialism ~ways assumed a Marxist minimum; that is, socialists were first and foremost Marxists who had their Marxist core altered in some respect. Generally, the 2 Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University oflliinois Press, 1982), xii, 344. 3 argument had been that socialists had their Marxism "Americanized," thus making them less revolutionary than doctrine called for. For example, by focusing on the electoral function of the Socialist Party American socialists became too much like their American political counterparts who worried about winning elections instead of working more directly for the inevitable revolution. Thus for historians socialists were Marxists who got their Marxism wrong, leading to the failure of the socialist movement to create a communist society as history mandated. Consequently, a whole slew of studies emerged to find out what went wrong. This approach only made sense if you were a Marxist scholar or American socialists of the early twentieth century were in fact Marxists at their core. The former was generally a truism, but the latter may be disputed. Debs was a republican at his intellectual roots, as Salvatore noted. But this did not make him unique in the socialist movement, for in fact socialists generally shared this republican viewpoint. Republicanism united socialists whatever their backgrounds or opinions on tactics. Marxism affected their republicanism, rather than the other way around. From this point of view it becomes more tenable to analyze the long-lasting influence of socialism in the United States rather than seeking to understand why Marxist