Oppositional Politics in the Pre-War Era

I. Socialist Party – the so-called “left-wing” of Progressivism was an important source of opposition to the government as it was then constituted, and attempted to give voice to the discontents of a number of workers.

1. Eugene V. Debs – the perennial Presidential candidate of the party, former labor leader (founder of the American Railway Union, which was a leading force in the Pullman Strike in 1894), who turned to politics after being placed in jail for a year after the Pullman Strike.

a. 1900 Social Democratic Party – presidential candidate

b. 1901 Socialist Party founded – from the ashes of the Socialist Labor Party

c. 1912 Presidential election – Deb’s polled over 900,000 votes, 6% of the total that year; he was gaining substantial support not only in New York City and Chicago, but also in places like Butte, Montana, Oklahoma City, OK, Milwaukee, WI, and Schnectady, NY.



II. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

A. “Continental Congress of the Working Class” – founding convention held in Chicago in 1905, which was attended by a number of leading leftists: Debs, Mother Jones, Daniel DeLeon, and “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners.Many of the early leaders of the organization came out of the WFM

B. Egalitarian in Nature

1. Organized without regard to race, ethnicity – organized workers from lumber “bums” in the Pacific Northwest to turpentine camps in Louisiana to textile workers on the east coast (Lawrence, MA and Patterson, NJ)

2. Organized without regard to gender – calls for equal pay for women many years before it became fashionable.


C. Oppositional Culture

1. Abolish the wage system

2. Refusal to sign contracts – this idea went along with abolishing the wage system; thinking went along the lines of why sign any contracts, since the ultimate end was to get rid of the owning classes althogether?

3. Free speech fight – fought mainly on the West Coast, the bastion of personal liberty.

4. Belief in unions as a revolutionary vehicle – most member of the IWW believed that society needed to be revolutionarily changed, and that that change would be fostered by a labor union rather that a political party; this belief is called syndicalism.


5. Song – Joe Hill and “Solidarity Forever,” “Pie in the Sky Bye and Bye” and other which were compiled in the “Little Red Songbook.”

D. IWW “Organization” Drives

1. 1910 McKees Rocks, PA – led strike of immigrant railcar workers

2. 1912 Lawrence, MA – the famous “Bread and Roses” strike, when the IWW led members of numerous ethnic groups, who previously had been hostile to one another, on a huge strike.

a. Large number of workers who were women and children

b. Organized strike and relief committees for each of the different ethnic groups, and provided translators for the speeches given at the daily strike rallies, as well as for strike literature.

c. Striking pickets were able to surround the factories, forcing them to close down, which brought out state repression

d. Attempts to starve strikers into submission led to families placing their children with sympathizers around the country, which in turn led the state and companies to attempt to stop this practice, which led to sympathetic coverage in the press

3. 1913 Patterson NJ strike – the strike by Patterson’s silk workers followed much the same pattern as the Lawrence strike the previous year.

a. Seven month strike, again led by IWW after the workers had walked out

b. Betrayal by native workers – each of these strikes was eventually defeated by native white workers betraying their fellow workers and going back to work, allowing production to begin again.

E. Other worker rebellions

1. United Mine Workers – although miners were skilled workers, their lack of an apprentice system meant that they had little control over who entered the field, which therefore led the organization to be more receptive to organizing African Americans and southern and eastern European immigrants, since they were in the mines anyway.

2. 1914 Ludlow CO Massacre

a. Strike began in late 1913, at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company; this company was owned by John D. Rockefeller,Jr., who also owned much of Standard Oil and was the richest man in the world.

b. Miners were evicted from their company owned homes, and forced to live in tents in the middle of the Rocky Mountain Colorado winter; mine owners pay for the Colorado militia to be brought in the quell “disturbances” – mainly picketing.

c. Easter night, militia moved in on the tent city, raked it with machine gun fire and set many of the tents on fire, killing sixteen people, including twelve children.

d. Touched off ten day gun battle between militia and miners, which was only ended when Federal troops were brought in and disarmed the miners.

e. Aftermath – resultant bad publicity spurs the development of professionalization of employee relations.

III. Race and the Progressive Movement

A. Booker T. Washington – former slave, founder of the Tuskegee Institute

1. 1895 Cotton States Exposition speech – “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers on a hand, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

2. Tacit acceptance of Jim Crow and voter disenfranchisement

B. W.E.B. DuBois – first African American granted Ph.D degree from Harvard.

1. Souls of Black Folks – contained as essay entitled “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” which challenged the views of Washington and his followers.

2. 1903 Niagara Movement – meeting at Niagara Falls, Canada, because no hotels on the American side would allow African Americans to register; meeting drew up a list of demands to end segregation and discrimination in unions, courts, and public accommodations.

C. Progressive Era Race Riots


1. 1906 Atlanta – newspapers exploited alleged black on white rapes, which whipped a large crowd into a murderous rampage.

a. Georgia State militia – marched on “Brownsville,” home to a large population of middle class black (including, at this time, one W.E.B. DuBois) as well as a number of black colleges; professors and students were rounded up at gunpoint and marched downtown to prevent white “retaliations.”

b. Eventually, 26 people were killed in the rioting, 25 of those black, including four who were beaten to death.

c. Atlanta an ill-policed city – muckraker Ray Stannard Baker investigated this riot, and found Atlanta ill-policed, with high rates of crime which affected all citizens; his investigation of the reported rapes found two actual and three attempted rapes of white women by black men; he also discovered three cases of white on white rape which the newspapers had failed to report at all.

2. 1908 Springfield Illinois – white riot again provoked by rumors of black on white rapes, which resulted in three days of rioting and one black death.

D. Founding of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – in response to these widely reported riots, a meeting was “Called to Discuss Means for Securing Political and Civil Equality of the Negro,” which involved both whites and African Americans who had been involved in the Niagara Movement; became the NAACP in 1911.