A People's History of the United States

by Howard Zinn

  James Green describes these Southwest radicals, in his book Grass-Roots Socialism, as "indebted homesteaders, migratory tenant farmers, coal miners and railroad workers, 'redbone' lumberjacks from the piney woods, preachers and school teachers from the sunbaked prairies ... village artisans and atheists ... the unknown people who created the strongest regional Socialist movement in United States history." Green continues:

  The Socialist movement . . . was painstakingly organized by scores of former Populists, militant miners, and blacklisted railroad workers, who were assisted by a remarkable cadre of professional agitators and educators and inspired by occasional visits from national figures like Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones. . . . This core of organizers grew to include indigenous dissenters. ... a much larger group of amateur agitators who canvassed the region selling newspapers, forming reading groups, organising locals, and making soapbox speeches.

  There was almost a religious fervor to the movement, as in the eloquence of Debs. In 1906, after the imprisonment hi Idaho of Bill Haywood and rwo other officers of the Western Federation of Miners on an apparently faked murder charge, Debs wrote a naming article in the Appeal to Reason:

  Murder has been plotted and is about to be executed in the name and under the forms of law. . ..

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  Tt is a foul plot; a damnable conspiracy; a hellish outrage. ...

  If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns. .. .

  Capitalist courts never have done, and never will do, anything for the working class. . . .

  A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat . .. would be in order, and, if extreme measures arc required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising.

  If the plutocrats begin the program, we will end it.

  Theodore Roosevelt, after reading this, sent a copy to his Attorney General, W. II. Moody, with a note: "is it possible to proceed against Debs and the proprietor of this paper criminally?"

  As the Socialists became more successful at the polls (Debs got 900,000 votes in 1912, double what he had in 1908), and more concerned with increasing that appeal, they became more critical of IWW tactics of "sabotage" and "violence," and in 1913 removed Bill Haywood from the Socialist Party Executive Committee, claiming he advocated violence (although some of Debs's writings were far more inflammatory).

  Women were active in the socialist movement, more as rank-and-file workers than as leaders—and, sometimes, as sharp critics of socialist policy. Helen Keller, for instance, the girted blind-mute-deaf woman with her extraordinary social vision, commented on the expulsion of Bill Haywood in a letter to the New York Call:

  It is with the deepest regret that I have read the attacks upon Comrade Haywood . .. such an ignoble strife between two factions which should be one, and that, too, at a must critical period in the struggle of the proletariat. ...

  What? Are we to put difference of party tactics before the desperate needs of the workers? ... While countless women and children are breaking their hearts and ruining their bodies in long days of toil, we are fighting one another. Shame upon us!

  Only 3 percent of the Socialist party's members were women in 1904. At the national convention that year, there were only eight women delegates. But in a few years, local socialist women's organizations, and a national magazine, Socialist Woman, began bringing more women into the party, so that by 1913, 15 percent of the membership was women. The editor of Socialist Woman, Josephine Conger-Kaneko, insisted on the importance of separate groups for women:

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  A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

  In the separate organization the most unsophisticated little woman may soon learn to preside over a meeting, to make motions, and to defend her stand with a little "speech". After a year or two of this sort of practice she is ready to work with the men. And there is a mighty difference between working ivifh the men, and simply sitting in obedient reverence under the shadow of their aggressive power.

  Socialist women were active in the feminist movement of the early 1990s. According to Kate Richards O'Hare, the Socialist leader from Oklahoma, New York women socialists were superhly organized. During the 1915 campaign in New York for a referendum on women's suffrage, in one day at the climax of the campaign, they distributed 60,000 English leaflets, 50,000 Yiddish leaflets, sold 2,500 one-cent books and 1,500 five-cent hooks, put up 40,000 stickers, and held 100 meetings.

  But were there problems of women that went beyond politics and economics, that would not be solved automatically by a socialist system? Once the economic base of sexual oppression was corrected, would equality follow? Battling for the vote, or for anything less than revolutionary change—was that pointless? The argument became sharper as the women's movement of the early twentieth century grew, as women spoke out more, organized, protested, paraded—for the vote, and for recognition as equals in every sphere, including sexual relations and

  marriage.

  Charlotte Perkins Oilman, whose writing emphasized the crucial question of economic equality between the sexes, wrote a poem called "The Socialist and the Suffragist," ending with:

  "A lifted world lifts women up,"

  The Socialist explained.

  "You cannot lift the world at all

  While half of it is kept so small,"

  the Suffragist maintained.

  The world awoke, and tartly spoke:

  "Your work is all die same;

  Work together or work apart,

  Work, each of you, with all your heart—

  Just gel into the game!"

  When Susan Anthony, at eighty, went to hear Eugene Debs speak (twenty-five years before, he had gone to hear her speak, and they had not met since then), they clasped hands warmly, then had a brief

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  exchange. She said, laughing: "Give us suffrage, and we'll give you socialism," Debs replied: "Give us socialism and we'll give you suffrage."

  There were women who insisted on uniting the two aims of socialism and feminism, like Crystal Eastman, who imagined new ways of men and women living together and retaining their independence, different from traditional marriage. She was a socialist, but wrote once that a woman "knows that the whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in die profit system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism."

  Tn the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, there were more women in the labor force, more with experience in labor struggles. Some middle-class women, conscious of women's oppression and wanting to do something, were going to college and becoming aware of themselves as not just housewives. The historian William Chafe writes (Women and Equality):

  Female college students were infused with a self-conscious sense of mission and a passionate commitment to improve the world. They became doctors, college professors, settlement house workers, business women, lawyers, and architects. Spirited by an intense sense of purpose as well as camaraderie, they set a remarkable record of accomplishment in the face of overwhelming odds. Jane Addams, Grace and Edith Abbott, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley—all came out of this pioneering generation and set the agenda of social reform for the first two decades of the 20th century.

  They were defying the culture of mass magazines, which were spreading the message of woman as companion, wife, homemakcr. Some of these feminists married; some did not. All struggled with the problem of relations with men, like Margaret Sanger, pioneer of birth control education, who suffered a nervous breakdown inside an apparently happy but confining marriage; she had to leave husband and children to make a career for herself and feel whole again. Sanger had written in Woman and the New Race: "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose conscientiously whether she will or will not be a mother
."

  It was a complicated problem. Kate Richards O'Hare, for example, believed in the home, but thought socialism would make that better. When she ran for Congress in 1910 in Kansas City she said: "I long for domestic life, borne and children with every fiber of my being.. . . Socialism is needed to restore the home."

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  On the other hand, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote in her autobiography, Rebel Girl:

  A domestic life and possibly a large family had no attraction for me. ... 1 wanted to speak and write, to travel, to meet people, to see places, to organize for the I.W.W. 1 saw no reason why I, as a woman, should give up my work for diis. . . .

  While many women in this time were radicals, socialists, anarchists, an even larger number were involved in the campaign for suffrage, and the mass support for feminism came from them. Veterans of trade union struggles joined the suffrage movement, like Rose Schneiderman of the Garment Workers. At a Cooper Union meeting in New York, she replied to a politician who said that women, given the vote, would lose their femininity:

  Women in die laundries .. . stand for thirteen or fourteen hours in the terrible steam and heat with dieir hands in hot starch. Surely diese women won't lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round.

  Every spring in New York, the parades for women's suffrage kept growing. In 1912, a news report:

  All along Fifdi Avenue from Washington Square, where the parade formed, to 57th Street, where it disbanded, were gathered thousands of men and women of New York. They blocked every cross street on the line of inarch. Many were inclined to laugh and jeer, but none did. The sight of the impressive column of women striding five abreast up the middle of the street stifled all thought of ridicule. .. . women doctors, women lawyers . . . women architects, women artists, actresses and sculptors; women waitresses, domestics; a huge division of industrial workers ... all marched with an intensity and purpose that astonished the crowds that lined the streets.

  From Washington, in the spring of 1913, came a New York Times report:

  In a woman's suffrage demonstration to-day die capital saw the greatest parade of women hi its history.... In the parade over 5000 women passed down Pennsylvania Avenue.... It was an astonishing demonstration. It was estimated ... that 500,000 persons watched the women march for their cause.

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  Some women radicals were skeptical. Emma Goldman, the anarchist and feminist, spoke her mind forcefully, as always, on the subject of women's suffrage:

  Our modern fetish is universal suffrage.. . . The women of Australia and New Zealand can vote, and help make the laws. Are the labor conditions better there?. . .

  The history of the political activities of man proves that they have given him absolutely nothing that he could not have achieved in a more direct, less costly, and more lasting manner. As a matter of fact, every inch of ground he has gained has been through a constant fight, a ceaseless struggle for self-assertion, and not through suffrage. There is no reason whatever to assume diat woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot. . ..

  Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality. Second, by refusing die right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, die State, society, the husband, the family, etc. by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer.. . . Only diat, and not the ballot, will set woman free.. . .

  And Helen Keller, writing in 1911 to a suffragist in England:

  Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.. . .

  You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

  Emma Goldman was not postponing the changing of woman's condition to some future socialist era—she wanted action more direct, more immediate, than the vote. Helen Keller, while not an anarchist, also believed in continuous struggle outside the ballot box. Blind, deaf, she fought with her spirit, her pen. When she became active and openly socialist, the Brooklyn Eagle, which had previously treated her as a heroine, wrote that "her mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development." Her response was not accepted by the Eagle, but printed hi the New York Call. She wrote that when once she met the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle he complimented her lavishly. "But now

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  A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UMITKD STATES^

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  that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that T am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. . . ." She added:

  Oh, ridiculous Urooklyn Eagle What an ungallant bird it is! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent. .. . The Eagle and I are at war. 1 hate the system which it represents.. .. When it fights back, let it fight fair.... It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear. I can read. 1 can read all the socialist books I have time tot in English, German and French. If the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle should read some of them, he might be a wiser man, and make a better newspaper. If I ever contribute to the Socialist movement the book that 1 sometimes dream of, T know what I shall name it: Industrial Blindness and Social Deafness.

  Mother Jones did not seem especially interested in the feminist movement. She was busy organizing textile workers and miners, and organizing their wives and children. One of her many feats was the organization of a children's march to Washington to demand the end of child labor (as the twentieth century opened, 284,000 children between the ages of ten and fifteen worked in mines, mills, factories). She described this:

  In die spring of 1903,1 went to Kensington, Pennsylvania, where seventy-five thousand textile workers were on strike. Of this number at least ten thousand were litde children. The workers were striking for more pay and shorter hours. Every day little children came into Union Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped little things, round shouldered

  and skinny.. - .

  I asked some of the parents if they would let me have their htde hoys and girls for a week or ten days, promising to bring them back safe and sound. ... A man named Sweeny was marshall.... A few men and women went with me. .. . The children carried knapsacks on dieir backs in which was a knife and fork, a tin cup and plate.. .. One little fellow had a drum and another had a fife.... We carried banners dial said: .. - "We want time to play... .

  The children marched through New Jersey and New York and down to Oyster Bay to try to see President Theodore Roosevelt, but he refused to see them. "But our march bad done its work. We had drawn the attention of the nation to the crime of child labor."

  That same year, children working sixty hours a week in textile mills in Philadelphia went on strike, carrying signs: "WK WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL!" "55 HOURS OR NOTHING!"

  One gets a sense of tlie energy and fire of some of those tum-of-the-century radicals by looking at the police record of Elizabeth Gtirley Flynn:

  1906-16, Organizer, lecturer for I.W.W.

  191H-24, Organizer, Workers Defense Union

  Arrested in New York, 1906, free-speech case, dismissed; active in Spokane, Washington, free-speech fight, 1909; arrested, Missoula, Montana, 1909, in free-speech fight of I.W.W., Spokane, Washington, free-speech fight of I.W.W, hundreds arrested; in Philadelphia arrested three times, 1911, at strike;
meetings of Baldwin Locomotive Works; active in Lawrence textile strike, 1912; hotel-workers strike, 1912, New York; Paterson textile strike, 1913; defense work for Ettor-Giovanitti case, 1912; Mesaba Range strike, Minnesota, 1916; Everctt IWW case, Spokane, Washington, 1916; Joe Hill defense, 1914. Arrested Dulutii, Minnesota, 1917, charged with vagrancy under law passed to stop I.W.W. and pacifist speakers, case dismissed. Indicted in Chicago IWW case, 1917... .

  Black women faced double oppression. A Negro nurse wrote to a newspaper in 1912:

  We poor colored women wage-earners in the South are fighting a terrible battle. ... On the one hand, we are assailed by black men, who should be our natural protectors; and, whether in the cook kitchen, at the washtub, over the sewing machine, behind the baby carriage, or at the ironing board, we are but little more than pack horses, beasts of burden, slaves! ...

  In this early part of the twentieth century, labeled by generations of white scholars as "the Progressive period," lynchings were reported every week; it was the low point for Negroes, North and South, "the nadir," as Rayford Logan, a black historian, put it. In 19)0 there were 10 million Negroes in the United States, and 9 million of them were in the South.

  The government of the United States (between 1901 and 1921, the Presidents were Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson)—whether Republican or Democrat—watched Negroes being lynched, observed murderous riots against blacks in Statcshoro, Georgia, Brownsville, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, and did nothing.

  There were Negroes in the Socialist party, hut the Socialist party did not go much out of its way to act on the race question. As Ray Ginger

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  A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES^

  writes of Debs: "When race prejudice was thrust at Debs, he always publicly repudiated it. He always insisted on absolute equality. But he failed to accept the view that special measures were sometimes needed to achieve this equality."