1 The Workingmen’s Party was formed in the summer of 1877 at a “Unity Congress”—attended by seven delegates—that aimed to unite the nation’s socialist groups, including the Social Democratic Workingmen’s Party (which had been organized in 1874) and adherents of the recently disbanded International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). Socialists from the International—led by Friedrich Sorge—generally adhered to the Marxist position that the party should avoid political campaigns (until “strong enough to exercise a perceptible influence”) and instead focus in the short term on organizing trade unions and supporting striking workers. The Social Democrats generally took the Lassallean position that “pure and simple” unionism was insufficient to end the exploitation of labor, and that independent political action was necessary. Up until 1890, Lassalleans typically held the upper hand in the Socialist Labor Party. Commons, John et al., History of Labor in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1926) 2:270 Google Scholar.

2 For its first decade the party was known as the Socialistic Labor Party, but by 1887 it was called the Socialist Labor Party.

3 SLP of North America, National Platform, adopted by the First National Convention, at Newark, NJ, Dec. 26–31, 1877, http://www.slp.org/pdf/platforms/plat1877.pdf (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). The three political process demands were conspicuously absent from the eleven demands made in July 1877 at the “Unity Congress,” in which the Marxist position prevailed that workers should “abstain from all political movements for the present and … turn their back on the ballot box.” Foner, Philip S., The Workingmen’s Party of the United States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the Americas (Minneapolis, MN: MEP Publications, 1984), 34 Google Scholar. At the December 1877 convention in Newark, the Lassallean faction won out (“Science the Arsenal, Reason the Weapon, the Ballot the Missile” was the adopted motto) and shortly thereafter the Marxist faction led by Sorge withdrew from the SLP (104–05).

4 The 1876 platform of the SDWP included a call for the compulsory referendum, but not the initiative. Specifically, it demanded that “All enactments shall be laid before the people for ratification or rejection.” “Platform of the Social Democratic Workingmen’s Party of North America,” http://www.marxisthistory.org/history/usa/parties/slp/1876/0000-sdworkingmensparty-platform.pdf (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). The SDWP’s demand for a mandatory referendum reflected the platform of the German Social Democrats—discussed more later in the article—and perhaps also the influence of several veterans of the English-speaking sections of the First International, notably William West, who before joining the SDWP had been a leader of the New York City-based Section 12 of the International. West advocated for the mandatory referendum as far back as the 1840s, when he was a leader in George Henry Evans’s National Reform Association, and also as a leader of the “New Democracy” in the late 1860s. See Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), esp. 92; and Messer-Kruse, Timothy, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1998), esp. 249 Google Scholar. Although West and other “Yankee radicals” from Section 12 were regarded with suspicion by the German-speaking Marxists in the SLP, Messer-Kruse shows that West was nonetheless permitted to join the SLP in November 1878, by which time Sorge and his allies had left the SLP (250).

5 From 1877 through 1889, the party’s national convention was held every other year. The party also held national conventions in 1893 and 1896, as well as its first national nominating convention in August 1892 to nominate a presidential and vice-presidential candidate.

6 Platform of the SLP, in “Socialistic Labor Party, Platform, Constitution, and Resolutions, together with a condensed report of the Proceedings of the National Convention held at Allegheney, PA, Dec. 26, 1879, to Jan. 1, 1880” (Detroit, MI, Apr. 1880), 2, https://archive.org/details/PlatformConstitutionAndResolutionsTogetherWithACondensedReportOf/page/n1/mode/2up (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). For the 1881 platform (in German), see https://archive.org/details/CongressDerSozialistichenArbeiterparteiDec.26-291881 (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023); and for the 1883 demands, see “A Socialistic Congress,” Baltimore Sun, Dec. 27, 1883, 3, and “What the Socialists Want,” New York Times, Dec. 29, 1883, 5.

7 Socialistic Labor Party of North America, National Platform, adopted by the Fifth National Convention, at Cincinnati, OH, Oct. 5–8, 1885, http://www.slp.org/pdf/platforms/plat1885.pdf (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). This language was retained in the 1887 platform, and in 1889, the language was changed to read: “The people to have the right to propose laws and to vote upon all measures of importance, according to the Referendum principle.” The 1885, 1887, and 1889 platforms can be found at http://www.slp.org/slp_hist.htm (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). For the proceedings of the 1887 convention, see https://archive.org/details/ReportOfTheProceedingsOfTheNationalConventionOfTheSocialisticLabor/page/n1 (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). The 1889 convention split in two but both the regular and the dissident conventions included planks endorsing the initiative and referendum. For the dissident convention, see the national and state platforms in the Proceedings of the National Convention, Sept. 28, 1889, https://archive.org/details/ProceedingsOfTheSocialistLaborParty1889Convention (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023).

8 Piott, Steven L., Giving Voters a Voice: The Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 13 Google Scholar. In 1896, support for the initiative and referendum become an official plank of the People’s Party’s platform.

9 Bridges, Amy, Democratic Beginnings: Founding the Western States (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similarly, Hanspeter Kriesi and Dominique Wisler write that “In the United States, the movement for direct legislation started … under the impulse of the populist movement [which] was followed by that of the progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century.” “The Impact of Social Movements on Political Institutions: A Comparison of the Introduction of Direct Legislation in Switzerland and the United States,” in How Social Movements Matter, eds. Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 44.

10 Thomas Cronin, Direct Democracy: The Politics of the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 43–45. In a later section, however, Cronin does credit “the socialists and the People’s Party” with being the “first proponents” of the initiative and referendum (50).

11 Cronin, Direct Democracy, 52; Goebel, Thomas, A Government by the People: Direct Democracy in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Goebel’s “economic” interpretation of the origins of the initiative and referendum highlights the centrality of what he calls “populist republicanism” (4, 18).

12 Piott, Giving Voters a Voice, 7n12. In his valuable 1963 master’s thesis, “Organized Labor and the Initiative and Referendum Movement, 1885-1920” (Seattle: University of Washington), Richard G. Jones highlighted the Socialist Labor Party’s 1885’s platform, which he found in an appendix to Richard T. Ely’s 1890 book, The Labor Movement in America. However, Jones mistakenly assumed that this was the first platform in which the SLP had called for direct legislation, although he does note that “Undoubtedly, as individuals, many members of the SLP had called for the I&R long before 1885” (35).

13 Schmidt, David D., Citizen Lawmakers: The Ballot Initiative Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989), 5–6 Google Scholar. Strictly speaking, the delegates were selected by the People’s Union, not the People’s Power League.

14 The wording in the SLP 1892 platform was identical to the wording used in the 1889 platform: “The people to have the right to propose laws and to vote upon all measures of importance, according to the Referendum principle.” The 1892 platform can be found in Kirk H. Porter, ed., National Party Platforms (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 179. Also misleading is the claim by Altman, David, that “ by the early 1890s, the platform of the Socialist Labor Party included the initiative and referendum.” Citizenship and Contemporary Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 36 Google Scholar; emphasis added.

15 Porter, National Party Platforms.

16 The SLP’s third national convention in 1881 had all of seventeen delegates, and two years later the SLP national convention in Baltimore counted sixteen delegates, while the party’s heavily German-born membership dwindled to about 1,500 members, down from a high of around 10,000 in the late 1870s. Quint, Howard H., The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 18 Google Scholar, 23, 24; Bell, Daniel, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 24–25 Google Scholar.

17 Particularly influential has been J.W. Arrowsmith’s oft-cited “The Direct Legislation Movement in New Jersey,” Direct Legislation Record (May 1894), 2–3. A prominent prohibitionist, Arrowsmith does note in passing that the SLP had a plank in its platform prior to 1892, although he does not specify when the SLP first adopted this plank.

18 One study that does highlight socialism’s importance in the origins of direct legislation is Eric D. Lawrence, Todd Donovan, and Shaun Bowler, “Adopting Direct Democracy: Tests of Competing Explanations of Institutional Change,” American Politics Research (Nov. 2009), 1024–47. Using the statistical technique of “event history analysis,” Lawrence, Donovan, and Bowler find that “electoral support for the Socialist Party had an important association with the success of [initiative] reform efforts, above and beyond support for Populists and Progressives” (1025).

19 Piott, Giving Voters a Voice, 13.

20 Arrowsmith, “The Direct Legislation Movement in New Jersey,” 2. The same account, without any identifying information about Buchanan, is offered in Eltweed Pomeroy, “The Direct Legislation Movement and Its Leaders,” Arena (June 1896), 38. Contrary to Arrowsmith’s account, Buchanan did not achieve this feat on his own. In fact, after James W. Sullivan, in his “For Justice and the State” column in the Twentieth Century (NY), credited Buchanan, “the only trades-unionist on the [platform] committee,” with having “put through” the direct legislation resolution (July 28, 1892, 4), Buchanan wrote to Sullivan to share the credit with John B. Ware of Alabama, who “introduced the subject in the committee, and worked day and night to secure its adoption.” (“Correspondence,” Twentieth Century, Sept.1, 1892, 12). Ware became a convert to direct legislation by being a “regular reader” of James W. Sullivan’s columns in the Twentieth Century (Sullivan, “The Direct Legislation Question in Practical Politics,” Twentieth Century, Sept. 1, 1892, 5). Ware, who had recently started up a cooperative bank as well as a land company in Birmingham, was nominated for Congress in the summer of 1892 by his county’s People’s Party, but at a district convention he was “shoved aside” in favor of a candidate who supported fusion with the Republican Party (Birmingham Daily News [MD], Sept., 29, 1892, 2). Ware refused to drop out of the race, however, and ran an energetic if futile independent campaign as an exponent of “straightout Populism,” but received only a handful of votes (0.3 percent).

21 Schmidt’s account makes no mention of Buchanan. Quoting Eric Goldman’s account in Rendezvous with Destiny, Piott describes Buchanan only as “a representative of a New Jersey workingman’s organization” (Giving Voters a Voice, 13). Buchanan is not mentioned in either Cronin, Direct Democracy, or Goebel, A Government by the People.

22 Enyeart, John Paul, The Quest for ‘Just and Pure Law’: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870-1924 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Joseph R. Buchanan, “Direct Legislation,” Bloomfield Record (NJ), Jan. 13, 1893, 1.

24 During the 1840s, Buchanan’s grandfather and father published the Whig paper, the Hannibal Journal, which they sold in 1850 to Orion Clemens, who employed—as typesetter and contributor—his younger brother, who the world would come to know as Mark Twain.

25 James R. Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator (New York: Outlook, 1903), chapter 1 (“My First Strike”), quotations at 4, 9, 15. On Leadville circa 1880, see “Cities of Colorado,” 3, Doing History, Keeping the Past: Essays in Colorado History and Historic Preservation, https://www.unco.edu/hewit/doing-history/pdf/essays/cities.pdf (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). Buchanan’s life and work is explored in depth in Gene Ronald Marlatt, “Joseph R. Buchanan: Spokesman for Labor during the Populist and Progressive Eras” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 1975).

26 Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 45, 47, 49; Enyeart, The Quest for ‘Just and Pure Law’, 25, 69.

27 Enyeart, The Quest for ‘Just and Pure Law,’ 15–16, 27, 41, 50, 52; the unionization estimate is based on a report issued in 1888 by the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics (cited at 50); Hild, Matthew, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 66–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 49; Commons, History of Labor, 2:368; Robert E. Weir, Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 75–79, 96.

28 Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 68, 103.

29 The Black International (the International Working People’s Association) was an international anarchist organization established in London in 1881. It was hoped it would be a kind of Second International that could take the place of the now-defunct socialist International Workingmen’s Organization (known as the First International, which endured from 1864 to 1876), which had expelled Bakunin and his fellow anarchists.

30 Quint, Forging of American Socialism, 20; Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 267, 256. See also Chester McArthur Destler, American Radicalism, 1865-1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966 [1946]), 79; Commons, History of Labor, 2:299. When Buchanan moved to Chicago in January 1887, Denver’s fledgling SLP assumed control over the Rocky Mountain Social League. Enyeart, The Quest for ‘Just and Pure Law’, 81.

31 Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 264; Destler, American Radicalism, 80, 102 (quotation at 102). Although Buchanan generally foreswore the violence preached by the anarchists of the Black International, the doctrinal differences did not stop him from using his editorial page to advertise the price of dynamite rather than gold. As he himself admitted, he “came very close to the line that divided reform from revolution.” Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 264.

32 Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 295–96, 322; Enyeart, The Quest for ‘Just and Pure Law’, 66.

33 Destler, American Radicalism, 101–02; Enyeart, The Quest for ‘Just and Pure Law’, 66; Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 361.

34 Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 328, 343, 449; Destler, American Radicalism, 101; Weir, Knights Unhorsed, 86–87, 89–90.

35 Commons, History of Labor, 300n38.

36 Destler, American Radicalism, 103–04; Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 447–57; Schneirov, Richard, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 245–46Google Scholar. As Destler points out, Buchanan’s autobiography, written in 1903, does “much to obscure the true character of Buchanan’s own career and of the left-wing movement within the Knights of Labor before 1887” (104). The manner in which Buchanan’s autobiography often obscured the full extent of his earlier radicalism is also stressed in Marlatt, “Joseph R. Buchanan.”

37 Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator, 69. Marlatt suggests that some of this shift in rhetoric was dictated by his new position as a syndicated columnist for the American Press Association. After penning a glowing review of Henry Demarest Lloyd’s A Strike of Millionaires Against Miners (1890), which showed that the plutocratic mine owners had “squeezed the life blood out of the workers,” Buchanan confided privately to Lloyd that had he a paper of his own he would have included a “more sanguineous denunciation of the mine owners” in his review but “as it is … I must be conservative.” Marlatt, “Joseph R. Buchanan,” 317 (emphasis in original).

38 Boston Globe, May 19 1889, 16. Dana was sympathetic to Buchanan’s labor radicalism, having voted for Butler in 1884. In his youth, Dana had a strong interest in the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier and lived at the Fourierist colony Brooke Farm in the 1840s. Buchanan himself had an interest in utopian colonies, being a nonresident member of the Kaweah colony in central California (Commercial Advertiser [Canton, NY], Apr. 22, 1891, 2), which was founded in 1886 by Buchanan’s IWA comrade, Burnette Haskell. The colony was inspired by the ideas of one of the most prominent SLP members, Laurence Gronlund, particularly his book The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), which also inspired Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and the Bellamyite Nationalist movement. In the spring of 1890, while a resident at Kaweah Colony, Haskell (who founded a Bellamyite Nationalist Club in San Francisco the previous spring) was a delegate at the first California Nationalist state convention, which included among its eleven demands an advisory initiative process, specifically “The right of initiative, by which, upon the petition of a certain number, any public question shall be submitted at a general election to the people, to obtain the views of the people as a guide or instruction to legislation.” “California Nationalists,” Workmen’s Advocate, May 3, 1890, 3.

39 Both Gompers and Buchanan were featured speakers at a conference of labor editors in New York City in the fall of 1899. “Editors Form a Pool,” Boston Globe, Oct. 13, 1889, 6.

40 Buchanan wrote sympathetically about Beckmeyer’s ideas for achieving “the ultimate co-operative commonwealth” by uniting producers and consumers through a labeling system that would allow consumers to know which products had been produced through fair labor practices. “Consumers’ Circle,” Kentucky Leader (Lexington), Apr. 1, 1894, 10.

41 Arrowsmith, “The Direct Legislation Movement in New Jersey,” 2; also see “Jersey Politics,” Trenton Times (NJ), June 24, 1892, 8. The platform of the People’s Power League, as it appeared on membership enrollment forms, read, “The people shall have the power to propose legislation and to vote direct upon all laws passed by legislative bodies.” Evening World (NY), July 30, 1892, 5. Given that the People’s Power League was still seeking to enroll members in July 1892, it appears that the league did not immediately merge into the new People’s Union.

42 Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955)Google Scholar.

43 Winchester, Boyd, The Swiss Republic (Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott, 1891)Google Scholar; W.D. McCrackan, “The Swiss Referendum,” Arena (Mar. 1891); McCrackan, W.D., The Rise of the Swiss Republic (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1892)Google Scholar; J. W. Sullivan,” The Referendum in Switzerland,” The Chautauquan (Apr. 1891), 29–34; J.W. Sullivan, Direct Legislation by the Citizenship Through the Initiative and Referendum (New York: Twentieth Century Publishing Company, 1892).

44 There is no mention, for instance, of the Gotha Program, Rittinghausen, Considerant, or Bürkli in Cronin, Direct Democracy; Goebel, A Government by the People; Piott, Giving Voters a Voice. A welcome exception is the explicitly cross-national perspective in Altman, Citizenship and Contemporary Direct Democracy.

45 Alexander Harvey, “Rittinghausen and His Work,” in Direct Legislation by the People, trans. Andrew Harvey (New York: Humboldt Library, 1897), 9; Rittinghausen, Martin, Three Letters on Direct Legislation by the People; or, True Democracy (London: James Watson, 1851).Google Scholar The Three Letters, which make up the first three (of eight) chapters in the 1897 Humboldt Library edition, originally appeared in Democratie Pacifique on September 8, 15, and 22, 1850. Beecher, Jonathan, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2001), 284 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 502n43.

46 Victor Considerant, The Difficulty Solved; or, The Government of the People by Themselves Democracy (London: James Watson, 1951). Considerant admitted that, “blinded by the common prejudice,” he initially doubted the practicability of direct legislation” outside of a “world reorganized and regenerated by association,” but that those doubts quickly melted away upon reading and reflecting upon Rittinghausen’s arguments (78–79). Considerant’s own essays that comprised The Difficulty Solved originally appeared in Democratie Pacifique on November 17 and 24 and December 8, 1850. Beecher, Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism, 287, 502n44.

47 Bateman, David A., Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 283 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beecher, Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism, 283, 285.

48 “Fourth Study,” in P.J. Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Freedom Press, 1923), 100–69.

49 “The Latest Continental Theory of Legislation,” Westminster Review (London) (Jan. 1852), 161.

50 Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, Aug. 8, 1851, in Marx and Engels: Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 38:411, http://www.koorosh-modaresi.com/MarxEngels/V38.pdf (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023).

51 Fossedal, Gregory A., Direct Democracy in Switzerland (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 88–90 Google Scholar.

52 Bürkli, Karl, Direct Legislation by the People, versus Representative Government, translated from the original Swiss pamphlets by Eugene Oswald (London: Cherry & Fletcher, 1870), 7–9 Google Scholar.

53 Schiedt, Hans-Ulrich, Die Welt neu erfinden: Karl Bürkli (1823-1901) und seine Schriften (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2002), 235–36Google Scholar.

54 Altman, Citizenship and Contemporary Direct Democracy, 32 (quoting Bruno Kaufmann et al. in their 2010 Guidebook to Direct Democracy in Switzerland and Beyond).

55 Nippel, Wilfried, Ancient and Modern Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 300 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quoting Lange).

56 Founded in 1864, the First International was divided over whether to participate in elections and party politics. Those who believed with Marx in seizing the power of the state generally answered yes, whereas those who advocated the destruction of the state (whether styled anarchists or “libertarian socialists”) preferred direct action. Neither side had much interest in direct legislation, with followers of Marx tending to deride it as utopian, and anarchists typically agreeing with Proudhon that it was pointless since it did not touch state power.

57 G.M. Stekloff, History of the First International (New York: International Publishers, 1928), 138, https://www.marxists.org/archive/steklov/history-first-international/ch10.htm (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). Kriesi and Wisler, “Impact of Social Movements,” 52.

58 Schiedt, Die Welt neu erfinden, 243–44; Altman, Citizenship and Contemporary Direct Democracy, 32, 39. For the text of the Eisenach Program, see https://archive.org/stream/EisenachProgram/725_socDemWorkersParty_230_djvu.txt (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). This language mirrored Bürkli’s own conviction that without “the political fulcrum,” the “social lever” was powerless to “lift from off its hinges the old form of society, with its poverty of the masses and its individual wealth.” Bürkli, Direct Legislation by the People, 5.

59 The Gotha Program can be found at https://archive.org/stream/GothaProgramme/726_socWrkrsParty_gothaProgram_231_djvu.txt (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023).

60 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm (accessed on Jan. 17, 2023).

61 Nippel, Ancient and Modern Democracy, 300n117.

62 The irrelevance of the Swiss experience for Germany was argued in 1893 by Karl Kautsky, who allowed that while direct legislation might work in Switzerland where “the preconditions for it [are] perfectly developed,” “one thing does not work for everyone. We Germans and Austrians have other things to do. We have a great and bitter struggle to fight against militarism and absolutism.” Quoted in Altman, Citizenship and Contemporary Direct Democracy, 40.

63 Kriesi and Wisler, “Impact of Social Movements,” 50–51; also see 64.

64 A list of the states that adopted the initiative and referendum as well as the year of adoption can be found in Cronin, Direct Democracy, 51 (Table 3.1).

65 For an example of the single taxers’ frantic efforts in the late 1880s to avoid any association with socialism, see William Croasdale’s “Socialism vs. the Single Tax,” published in Henry George’s The Standard (NY). “Whosever attempts to identify us with the socialists and anarchists,” Croasdale wrote, “outrages truth and strikes at our cause a blow that should only be delivered by the hand of the acknowledged enemy” (Apr. 27, 1889, 4).

66 The resolutions recommending direct legislation at the New Jersey State Prohibition Convention were introduced by Arrowsmith and George Strobell and called for the recall of elected officials, the initiative by petition at the city, state, and national level, the mandatory referendum at the city, state, and national level, and for the election of office-holders to be held on a separate day from any direct legislation elections. James W. Sullivan, “For Justice in the State,” Twentieth Century, June 9, 1982, 4.

67 Pomeroy, “The Direct Legislation Movement and Its Leaders,” 37. Ironically, Pomeroy closed his article with a quotation from George D. Herron (“History is the progressive disclosure of the self-government of man as the providential design” [43]), who at the time Pomeroy wrote was a supporter of the Socialist Labor Party.

68 The American remnant of the IWA was officially dissolved at a congress in Philadelphia in July 1876. Commons, History of Labor, 2:222.

69 Gotha Program; Socialistic Labor Party, National Platform, adopted by the First National Convention.

70 SLP Party Congress, Dec. 1881, 7, https://archive.org/details/CongressDerSozialistichenArbeiterparteiDec.26-291881 (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023). The 1881 convention proceedings appear to have been published only in German; my thanks to Bill Smaldone for the translation. There was, however, some coverage of the proceedings in the English language press. See, for instance, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Dec. 29, 1881, 1.

71 Socialistic Labor Party of North America, National Platform, adopted by the Fifth National Convention, at Cincinnati, OH, Oct. 5-8, 1885, http://www.slp.org/pdf/platforms/plat1885.pdf (accessed on Jan. 5, 2023).

72 The Workmen’s Advocate, which had been the newspaper for the New Haven Connecticut Trades Council, assumed the role of official English-language organ of the SLP on November 21, 1886. In March 1891, it was replaced by the New York City-based The People.

73 See, for instance, the “immense mass meeting of socialists” called by the SLP in New York City to protest against Bismarck’s repressive anti-Socialist laws that were aimed at arresting the growing strength of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany. Speeches were made in English (by John Swinton and Henry Drury), German, French, and Czech (what was then called Bohemian). “Bismarck Denounced,” New York Herald, Jan. 23, 1879, 10.

74 On the interactions between the SLP and Greenbackism between 1878 and 1880, see Lause, Mark A., The Civil War’s Last Campaign: James B. Weaver, the Greenback-Labor Party and the Politics of Race and Section (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), esp. 40–49 Google Scholar, 170–77. Lause notes, for instance, that in 1879 the Greenback-Labor Party’s “celebrations of the Fourth of July from rural Iowa to Detroit accorded a central role to the SLP. At Detroit, a comrade read the Declaration of Independence, the Greenback-Labor platform, and that of the SLP to show how the one clears the way for the other” (41).

75 Fred E. Haynes, Social Politics in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 57–58; Lause, The Civil War’s Last Campaign, 70, 73.

76 Among those who joined the SLP in 1880 was Terence Powderly. Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 66–67.

77 Jones, “Organized Labor and the Initiative and Referendum Movement,” 39. Also see “The Socialist View,” Direct Legislation Record (Dec. 1900), 61–62, including the complaint from J.W. Wells, secretary of the Illinois Executive Committee of the Union Reform Party, which “stands for nothing but D.L” (59). Wells complained to Pomeroy that “the Socialist Labor party pretend to favor the initiative and referendum, but in every instance where we have met them in discussion they have combatted it … clinging to the party method, or government by party” (62).

78 See, for example, “The Communists,” Buffalo Sunday Morning News, May 5, 1878, 1; “The Commune,” Boston Globe, May 6, 1878, 1; “What the Commune Is,” Topic (Leonoir, NC), July 27, 1878, 3. For another example of an SLP advocate—Alexander Longley, editor of the St. Louis-based Communist and founder of the short-lived Reunion Colony in Jasper County, Missouri—giving a press interview that resulted in frontpage coverage of the direct legislation plank in a major newspaper, see the “The Local Commune: What the Socialists and Communists of St. Louis are Doing,” St. Louis Evening Post, Apr. 25, 1878, 1.

79 Of course, many radical newspapers printed the SLP platform. See, for instance, the Star of Hope (Urbana, KS), Apr. 1, 1878, 2; and the Workingman’s Friend (Leavenworth, KS), Dec.14, 1878, 4. But so, too, did conservative newspapers eager to sound the alarm of the dangers of communism in America. See, e.g., “Communism in America,” Daily Messenger (Saint Albans, VT), Apr. 28, 1878, 2; and “Labor Against Capital,” New York Herald, July 1, 1879, 5; the Herald article was also reprinted in the Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1879, 6. Among the many other papers in the spring and summer of 1878 that printed the 1877 SLP platform, including the direct legislation plank, were the Weekly Observer, May 14, 1878, 1; Owensboro Examiner (KY), May 17, 1878, 4; Southern Standard (Arkadelphia, AK), May 25, 1878, 4; Denton Journal, May 18, 1878, 2; Oshkosh Northwestern, May 27, 1878, 2; Huntsville Weekly Democrat, May 29, 1878, 4; Memphis Evening Herald, May 29, 1848, 2; Kansas Chief (Troy, KS), May 30, 1878, 1; the Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 3, 1878, 1; Pee Dee Herald (Wadesboro, NC), June 26, 1878, 3; Weekly Democrat-Times (Greenville, MS) June 29, 1878, 4; New Orleans Daily Democrat, July 8, 1878, 4; “The Spread of Communism,” St. Mary’s Beacon (Leonardtown, MD), Apr. 26, 1878, 1 (from the Baltimore Evening Bulletin).

80 “Workingmen in Council,” Harrisburg Independent, July 8, 1879, 1. Biographical information about C. Osborne Ward is from Fink, Leon, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 292n7. Also see Lause, Civil War’s Last Campaign, 40. In 1869, Ward had accompanied Andrew Cameron to the Basle Congress of the IWA. Montgomery, David, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 415 Google Scholar.

81 Pittsburg Kansan, Mar. 25, 1891, 4; “The Platform Moving On,” Workmen’s Advocate, Mar. 28, 1891, 2; “Rhode Island Again,” The New Nation, Apr. 4, 1891, 150. Also see J.W. Sullivan, “Our Weekly Newsletter,” Twentieth Century, Apr. 2, 1891, 15. Apparently, the platform was also used by the Nationalists in Cleveland. The Workmen’s Advocate crowed, “We trust that in the course of time this platform will be adopted by every labor and reform organization in the land. By that time, perhaps the name of ‘Socialist’ will have lost its terrors.” The Workmen’s Advocate printed the party platform in its entirety in almost every issue between 1888 and 1891. For examples of other newspapers publishing the 1885, 1887, or 1889 SLP platforms, see the New York Sun, Aug. 21, 1887, 4; Los Angeles Evening Express, June 16, 1888, 2; Inter Ocean (Chicago), Oct. 3 1889, 5; Buffalo Enquirer, May 28, 1891, 6.

82 “Chicago: Interesting Public Meeting of the American Section,” Workmen’s Advocate, June 1, 1889, 1. The initiative and referendum also featured prominently in the section’s wide-ranging debate on May 31 about the abolition of the Senate and the role of the executive in a system in which the laws are “made and ratified by the people through the principles of the initiative and referendum.”

83 “The Troublesome Trusts,” Workmen’s Advocate, Sept. 1, 1888, 2.

84 The first two terms are employed by Cronin, Direct Democracy, 40, 43, and the latter two concepts are central to Goebel, A Government by the People, 4, 10.

85 Among the most important figures in this process of adaptation and diffusion was James W. Sullivan, whose story is told in Richard J. Ellis, “The Opportunist: James W. Sullivan and the Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in the United States,” American Political Thought 11(Winter 2022): 1–47.