American radicalism played an important role in shaping the nation’s political development between 1900 and 1930. Radicalism can be defined as opposition to the dominant economic, political, and social structures of the country. At the turn of the century, this meant opposition to the poverty and social inequality created by mass production industry, free-market capitalism, and emerging consumerism. Radicalism in the United States had several different strains, including anarchism, socialism, labor militancy, feminism, and cultural radicalism. The upsurge in radicalism between 1900 and 1920 did not, however, result in an attempt to overthrow the government or the formation of a permanent third political party. Radicals tended to support gradual reform, rather than violent revolution. The Red Scare and political repression in the 1920s kept radicals divided throughout the decade.
The radicalism of the early 20th century drew on the concerns and tactics of its predecessors. The emergence of the industrial revolution, urbanization, and the demise of small, independent farming resulted in social and political unrest in the 1880s and 1890s. Several political movements attempted to address the concerns of workers, farmers, and immigrants. In the 1880s, the Knights Of Labor attempted to organize the new industrial workers, southern African-
American sharecroppers, and farmers struggling to maintain their independence. In the 1890s, the populists also attempted to address the plight of farmers by attacking the power of the railroads and the banks. Both the Knights and the populists advocated that the federal government play a larger role in ensuring social harmony by redistributing wealth and property more equally, but they refrained from calling for the abolition of private property or from seeking violent means for social change. In the same period of time, women continued to organize for woman suffrage and Prohibition, among other reforms.
A more class-based form of radicalism emerged at the dawn of the 20th century. Support for socialism grew rapidly among new immigrants, intellectuals, agrarian activists, and industrial workers. This new socialism was by no means confined to the working class, but it did highlight workers’ concerns. Between 1890 and 1910, business and industry actively worked to suppress unionism by employing company spies to infiltrate unions, blacklisting suspected radicals and union supporters, forcing workers to sign anti-union contracts, and using labor injunctions to break strikes. Added to this were changes in the pace of work and how work was organized. As workers began to resist these changes, some found the efforts of the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) to be insufficient. Socialists, both in the labor movement and outside the labor movement, argued that industry and wealth should benefit all of society, not just a wealthy elite. In 1901, the Socialist Labor Party, led by Morris Hillquit and Daniel De Leon, merged with the Social Democratic Party, led by Eugene V. Debs, to form the Socialist Party of America (SPA). The SPA grew steadily between 1900 and 1912. Its goals were diffuse, from supporting political reform and labor legislation to municipal ownership of utilities and urban transportation.
Syndicalism, or revolutionary industrial unionism, was another form of socialism that gained support among workers. Its ultimate goal was to organize society and government on an industrial basis. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the leading voice of syndicalism in the United States, emerged in 1905 and quickly challenged the dominance of the AFL. In its most radical form, the IWW supported the general strike, producer cooperatives, workers’ control of production, and the abolition of capitalism. More typically, the IWW directed its energies toward forms of direct action, including massive strikes at McKees Rocks in 1909 and the Lawrence Strike in 1912. Its membership grew steadily until World War I, when it declined in the face of government repression under the Espionage Act and Sedition Act and state criminal syndicalism laws, but it never seriously threatened the dominance of the AFL.
Anarchism, another form of radicalism, advocated extreme means of opposing capitalism and the status quo.
Some individualist anarchists feared that the rise of modern, urban, and industrial society threatened to undermine individual rights. The majority of American anarchists were followers of Peter Kropotkin, a Russian communitarian anarchist. In general, they opposed centralized government, because it inevitably led to economic exploitation, militarism, and war.
Finally, some socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists gravitated toward communism, particularly after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1919, two competing factions—the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party—split from the Socialist Party and its international sections. Each claimed to be the legitimate representative of the worldwide communist revolution. The two factions merged in 1924. By 1929 the party was known as the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Between 1919 and 1930, American communists focused their efforts on recruiting industrial workers in core industries such as steel, coal, and automobiles, and—to a lesser extent—organized among African-American sharecroppers. Prior to 1930, support for communism among union members remained very small.
Several key factors ensured that American radicalism failed to have the impact radicalism had in Europe. Judged by the absence of an independent working-class or labor politics, American radicalism failed. There were reasons for this failure. The national economy, despite cyclical depressions, grew at a faster rate than did the economies of Europe. Though workers and poorer Americans did not share equally in the nation’s economic growth, many workers and recently arrived immigrants saw improvements in their standard of living. The result was that many ordinary men and women were reluctant to support efforts for greater state intervention in the economy, and indeed, there was a commonly held distrust of government among both working-class and middle-class Americans. Few advocated the abolition of private property. Socialists and Social Democrats, who generally advocated more moderate reforms, were able to generate much more widespread support. Even the million votes for Eugene Debs in 1912 could not compare in political dominance with the two mainstream political parties.
Possibly the most significant reason why radicalism failed to have a greater impact in the United States was that radicals encountered a coordinated resistance from the government, the courts, and employers. Employers fired and blacklisted suspected radicals. When violence did occur, judges sought to ensure that radical leaders were convicted and either deported or sentenced to long prison terms. Both federal troops and state militias as well as private corporate arming were used to violently repress strikes. Finally, at the outbreak of World War I, federal legislation made it illegal to criticize the government or to oppose American involvement in the war. Socialist Eugene Debs and anarchist Emma Goldman both were arrested and convicted of violating these laws. Attacks against radicals and radicalism continued after the end of the war in 1918.
The fear that radicals were behind the massive postwar strikes fueled the Red Scare of 1919-20. Led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the government launched a series of raids against radicals, which specifically targeted the offices of the IWW and the Communist Party. The largest raid took place on January 2, 1920, when approximately 10,000 suspected communists and communist sympathizers were arrested and held without bail. Many of those arrested, particularly those who were recent immigrants, were deported from the country. Afterward the labor movement and other radical political organizations were in a shambles; longtime SPA leader Eugene Debs was serving a prison sentence for treason, and fear of deportation and blacklisting silenced many immigrants and workers.
At the same time, radical ideas did change the way that government and society functioned in the United States. Socialist thought influenced the reform movement of PRO-GRESSIVISM and helped to shape legislation to regulate business and protect women and child wage earners. Reformers such as the National Consumer League’s Florence Kelley and Social Gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch read socialist texts and moved to incorporate the more humanitarian strains of radical thinking. Feminist thinkers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and civil rights advocate W. E. B. DuBoiS contributed to both mainstream and radical social thought. Sexual mores, gender norms, and racial etiquette were altered by the radical culture of the early 20th century. When the Republican administrations of William Howard Taet and Calvin Coolidge argued that it was time to return the country to normalcy and economic prosperity, they spoke of retaking the government. But as the radical revival during the Great Depression would show, radicalism did not die in the 1920s; it just shifted ground.
See also radical and labor PRESS; women’s status and rights.
Further reading: John Button, The Radicalism Handbook: A Complete Guide to the Radical Movement in the Twentieth Century (London: Cassell, 1995); Sidney Lens, Radicalism in America (New York: Crowell, 1966); Robert K. Murray, Red Scare; A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955).
—Robert Gordon
World History
