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For White Men Only: The Socialist Party of America and Issues of Gender, Ethnicity and Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Sally M. Miller
Affiliation:
University of the Pacific

Extract

This article examines the experience of distinct groups within the Socialist Party of America, considering the period from its founding in 1901 to the eve of World War One. The Socialist Party, befitting its membership in the international socialist movement of that era, was committed to representing the workers of the world in the Marxist struggle to achieve political and economic equality within a cooperative commonwealth. Accordingly, variables of gender, ethnicity and race were subsumed within the Social Question. Ideally, workers in every capacity and of all backgrounds would march together under the Red Flag and create a new egalitarian society. While, indeed, many lawyers, ministers and others of the middle-class belonged to the Socialist Party and often held office within it, thereby derisively being likened by critics to an assemblage of dentists, the party was very much working class in composition, as shown by James R. Green and others.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2003

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References

1 The author expresses her gratitude for suggestions for revisions of this article to James Barrett, Jacob H. Dorn, and Richard Schneirov.

2 See, for example, Green, James R., “The ‘Salesmen-Soldiers’ of the Appeal Army: A Profile of Rank and File Socialist Agitators,” in Socialism and the Cities, ed., Stave, Bruce M. (Port Washington. NY, 1975): 1340.Google Scholar

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11 The best way to trace arguments over the dissolution of the Woman's National Committee is to review the weekly issues of the American Socialist from January to September, 1915. The dissolution of the WNC after a few years of operation paralleled the earlier fate of official woman's programming of the German Social Democratic Party. See on this topic, Jean Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton, 1979).

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16 Leinenweber, “The American Socialist Party,” 258–61; Kipnis, , The American Socialist Movement, 272–76Google Scholar; Miller, Sally M., “Germans on the Mississippi: the Socialist Party of St. Louis,” in Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Socialism, ed., Miller, Sally M. (New York, 1996): 77.Google Scholar Most of the foreign-language federations included women, from a high of 33 percent in the Finnish Federation, 15 percent among the Germans and Scandinavians to 1 percent among the South Slavs and Italians.

17 Mary E. Cygan, “The Polish-American Left,” in Buhle, and Georgakas, , The Immigrant Left in the United States, 148–84Google Scholar; Miller, Sally M., “Casting a Wide Net: The Milwaukee Movement to 1920,” in Socialism in the Heartland: the Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925, ed., Critchlow, Donald T. (Notre Dame, IN, 1986): 2021Google Scholar, 26, 35; Pienkos, Donald E., “The Polish Americans in Milwaukee Politics,” in Ethnic Politics in Urban America: the Polish Experience in Four Cities, ed., Pienkos, Angela T. (Chicago, 1978): 6668Google Scholar, 70–72, 90; Pienkos, Donald E., “Politics, Religion and Change in Polish Milwaukee, 1900–1930,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 61 (Spring 1978): 181Google Scholar; Miller, , “Germans on the Mississippi,” 7778Google Scholar, and St. Louis Labor, July 22, 1910. On the career of a Polish socialist in Milwaukee, see Krzycki, Leo in Biographical Dictionary of American Labor Leaders, ed., Fink, Gary M. (Westport, CT, 1974): 194.Google Scholar For work on other groups, see Michael Miller Topp, “The Italian-American Left: Transnationalism and the Quest for Italy,” in Buhle, and Georgakas, , The Immigrant Left, 119–47Google Scholar; and see Ivan Cizmic, “Yugoslav Immigrants in the U.S. Labor Movement, 1880–1920,” in Hoerder, , American Labor and Immigration History, 185–89.Google Scholar

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24 Woodbey, G.W., “The New Emancipation,” Chicago Daily Socialist, January 18, 1909Google Scholar; George W. Slater, “How I Became a Socialist,” ibid., September 8, 1908; Foner, , American Socialism and Black Americans, 151–73.Google Scholar

25 Harrison, Hubert H., “Socialism and the Negro,” International Socialist Review 12 (March 1912): 6572Google Scholar and “The Black Man's Burden,” ibid. (April 1912): 660–63 and (May 1912): 762–63; DuBois, W.E.B., “Negro and Socialism,” The Horizon 1 (February 1907): 78Google Scholar; ibid., “Socialism and the Negro Problem,” The New Review 1 (February 1, 1913): 138–41; Lewis, David Levering, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1869–1919 (New York, 1993), 420–21Google Scholar; “Some Reasons Why Negroes Should Vote the Socialist Ticket,” The Messenger (November, 1917); Foner, , American Socialism and Black Americans, 204–19Google Scholar,271–87; Naison, , Communists in Harlem, 45Google Scholar; Solomon, Mark, The Cry was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–36 (Jackson, MS, 1998), 311Google Scholar; Berland, Oscar, “The Emergence of the Communist Perspective on the ‘Negro Question’ in America, 1919–31,” Science and Society 63 (Winter 19992000): 411–15.Google Scholar See also Kornweibel, Theodore, No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917–28 (Westport, CT, 1975).Google Scholar A recent useful anthology is Wilson, Sondra Kathryn, ed., The Messenger Reader. Stories, Poetry, and Essays from The Messenger Magazine (New York, 2000).Google Scholar See also Jordan, William G., Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2001), 96Google Scholar, 112–13.

26 Ameringer, , If You Don't Weaken, 279–80Google Scholar; Meredith, H.L., “Agrarian Socialism and the Negro in Oldahoma, 1900–1918,” Labor History 11 (Summer 1970): 277–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Sally M., From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O'Hare (Columbia, MO, 1993), 5657Google Scholar, 38–44; Shannon, , The Socialist Party of America, 3436.Google Scholar See also Burbank, Garin, When Farmers Voted Red: the Gospel of Socialism in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1910–1924 (Westport, CT, 1976), 100–24.Google Scholar

27 For an introduction to whiteness studies, see Roediger, David R., The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991), 17Google Scholar, 19, 177–80. For the most expansive analysis of the weaknesses found in the field of whiteness studies, see Arnesen, Eric, “Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (October 2001): 332.Google Scholar