Some people espoused more radical views. The hard times of the 1890s and the callous reactions of conservatives to the victims of that depression pushed many toward Marxian socialism. In 1900 the labor leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president on the Socialist ticket. He polled fewer than 100,000 votes. When he ran again in 1904 he got more than 400,000, and in later elections still more. Labor leaders hoping to organize unskilled workers in heavy industry were increasingly frustrated by the craft orientation of the American Federation of Labor, and some saw in socialism a way to win rank-and-file backing.
In 1905 Debs, William “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (a former organizer for the United Mine Workers), Daniel De Leon of the Socialist Labor party, and a few others organized a new union: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW was openly anticapitalist. The preamble to its constitution began: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”
But the IWW never attracted many ordinary workers. Haywood, its most prominent leader, was usually a general in search of an army. His forte was attracting attention to spontaneous strikes by unorganized workers, not the patient recruiting of workers and the pursuit of practical goals. Shortly after the founding of the IWW, he was charged with complicity in the murder of an antiunion governor of Idaho after an earlier strike but was acquitted. In 1912 he was closely involved in a bitter and, at times, bloody strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which was settled with some benefit to the strikers; he was also involved in a failed strike the following winter and spring by silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey.
Other “advanced” European ideas affected the thinking and behavior of some important progressive intellectuals. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories attracted numbers of Americans, especially after G. Stanley Hall invited Freud and some of his disciples to lecture at Clark University in 1909. Not many progressives actually read The Interpretation of Dreams or any of Freud’s other works, none of which were translated into English before 1909, but many picked up enough of the vocabulary of psychoanalysis
This issue of The Masses, a leading Socialist magazine, featured a cover by Ashcan artist John Sloan, as well as articles by Max Eastman and John Reed. Sloan depicted the conflagration that took the lives of women and children who lived in a tent city erected by miners who were striking near Ludlow, Colorado. The state militia, seeking to crush the strike, burned down the tent city.
Source: ©2011 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
To discourse impressively about the significance of slips of the tongue, sublimation, and infant sexuality.
Some saw in Freud’s ideas reason to effect a “revolution of manners and morals” that would have shocked (or at least embarrassed) Freud, who was personally quite conventional. They advocated easy divorce, trial marriage, and doing away with the double standard in all matters relating to sex. They rejected Victorian reticence and what they incorrectly identified as “puritan” morality out of hand, and they called for programs of sex education, especially the dissemination of information about methods of birth control.
Most large cities boasted groups of these “bohemian” thinkers, by far the most famous being the one centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The dancer Isadora Duncan, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the novelist Floyd Dell, several of the Ashcan artists, and the playwright Eugene O’Neill rubbed shoulders with Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, the anarchist Emma Goldman, the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, the militant feminist advocate of birth control Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman (editor of their organ, The Masses), and John Reed, a young Harvard graduate who was soon to become famous for his eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World.
Goldman, Haywood, Sanger, and a few others in this group were genuine radicals who sought basic changes in bourgeois society, but most of the Greenwich Village intellectuals were as much concerned with aesthetic as social issues. The Masses described itself as “a revolutionary and not a reform magazine... a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases.” Nearly all of them came from middle-class backgrounds. They found the far-different world of the Italian and Jewish immigrants of the Village and its surrounding neighborhoods charming. But they did not become involved in the immigrants’ lives the way the settlement house workers did. Their influence on their own times, therefore, was limited. “Do as I say, not as I do” is not an effective way to change minds. They are historically important, however, because many of them were genuinely creative people and because many of the ideas and practices they advocated were adopted by later generations.
The creative writers ofthe era, applying the spirit of progressivism to the realism they had inherited from Howells and the naturalists, tended to adopt an optimistic tone. The poet Ezra Pound, for example, at this time talked grandly of an American renaissance and fashioned a new kind of poetry called imagism, which, while not appearing to be realistic, rejected all abstract generalizations and concentrated on concrete word pictures to convey meaning. “Little” magazines and experimental theatrical companies sprang to life by the dozen, each convinced that it would revolutionize its art. The poet Carl Sandburg, the best-known representative of
Milwaukee
Embraces
Socialism,
1916
I I Wards giving Socialist candidate, Daniel Hoan, 50% or more of votes in mayoral election German predominant
Polish
Predominant
Urban Socialism By 1912, Socialists had been elected mayor of dozens of cities, including Milwaukee. This map shows that Dan Hoan, the Socialist mayor, received strong support from the predominantly Polish and German wards. Opponents used such results to argue that socialism was a "foreign” concept.
Rural Socialism Socialist strength extended far beyond the cities. Socialists in rural areas called for tenants to be allowed to work on state-owned plots of land. In 1912, Socialist candidates received nearly half the vote in southern Oklahoma.
The Chicago school, denounced the local plutocrats but sang the praises of the city they had made: “Hog Butcher for the World,” “City of the Big Shoulders.” Most writers eagerly adopted Freudian psychology without understanding it. Freud’s teachings seemed only to mean that they should cast off the restrictions of Victorian prudery; they ignored his essentially dark view of human nature. Theirs was an “innocent rebellion,” exuberant and rather muddleheaded.
World History
