How American Socialists Fought for Labor Using Control over Local Government

[Ichingcarpenter]

ballot“Socialist administrations were most often elected in small or medium-sized railroad, mining, or industrial centers. Where the worker was not a worker or trade unionist himself, others in the administration often were. In Butte, Montana, the Socialist mayor was a minister; the police judge and city treasurer elected with him in 1911 were miners. In Lackawanna, New York where a socialist mayor (occupation unknown) was elected in 1919, the two Socialist councilmen were trade unionists. Similarly in Davenport, Iowa, which elected a Socialist doctor to the mayoralty in 1920, the Socialist city clerk was a machinist.

“Actively pro-labor, these Socialist administrations aided unions in many ways. One of the first acts of the Socialist mayor of Eureka, Utah, for example, had been to arrest and fine a Pinkerton man for carrying a concealed weapon. More substantial was the approach of Marshall E. Kirkpatrick, Socialist mayor of Granite, Illinois (1911, 1913, 1917), a railroad and metal-processing suburb of St. Louis. During strikes, Kirkland wrote, the city administration could not be neutral; true to his Socialist principles, he supported the workers. This could almost always be done by using the police power to allow a ‘fair fight.’ When three hundred metal workers struck, Kirkpatrick followed his own advice and refused a company request for running scabs through a picket line. Similarly, during the Paterson textile strike of 1913, when IWW strikers were refused permission to speak in Paterson, the Socialist mayor of nearby Haledon invited the workers to hold their meetings on his territory. And during the IWW strike in Little Falls, New York, [Socialist] Mayor [George R.] Lunn of Schenectady [New York] helped organize a relief committee to supply the nearby strikes with money, food, and clothing. For this, Bill Haywood praised the Lunn administration and noted that the strikers ‘deeply appreciated’ what these right-wing Socialists had done, even though they could not vote Socialist, ‘as most of them were women and children.’ Finally, in 1917, the Socialist Mayor of Camas, Washington, appointed two strikers at Crown Paper as special deputies, and thereby lost his own job at the mills.”


https://revolutionaryds.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/how-american-socialists-used-local-government-to-labor/

[merrily]

1. I am a lot more optimistic about working local than I am about the kabuki in D.C.

Then again, I live in a blue city in a blue state.

[postulater]

2. Milwaukee has a rich history of Socialism.

http://expressmilwaukee.com/blog-3038-john-gurda-on-how-the-socialists-saved-milwaukee.html

[TBF]

3. I'm convinced the proximity to Chicago

is the thing that helped us. I grew up in mid-Wisconsin in the 70s. Folks worked in both small and larger factories and they belonged to the unions. They were serious about organizing - and I think that came straight from the strong labor tradition in Chicago. Now all of that has been outsourced or weakened. Along with it the salaries that could actually support a family.

I look at folks there now, in their 20's-40s, working at Walmart, McDonalds, etc ... and think about how we tried to warn them. Instead they elected Scott Walker. Smh ...

[TBF]

4. Now this is interesting -

because in my experience it definitely fanned out from Milwaukee. Maybe not to the farmers (although many of them voted based on subsidies alone!) but definitely to the working class in the small towns.

Shepherd: Why did the Socialists take root in Milwaukee and not other parts of the state?

Gurda: The background is that you have a couple factors. You have a huge German population and a number of Germans who came here had fled a failed revolt in 1848. So there was at least a kind of intellectual seedbed for leftist ideas. People had read Marx and Lassalle. The Turners, who go way back to the mid-1800s, they were a Socialist organization in the early years. So you have the German intellectual tradition here, and you've got a huge working-class population, so you had a great deal of receptiveness to appeals to class consciousness. You have the shootings of 1886, when at least five demonstrators were shot dead by the state militia marching for the eight-hour workday. The voters did not forget that event. Then you had a guy named Victor Berger, who becomes kind of the presiding genius of the Socialist movement in Milwaukee. You put all of these things together and it was a city ripe for reform.

Anyway, very interesting article, thanks for posting.