Conclusion

Writing on the May Day riots for the May 10, 1919 issue of Revolutionary Age, Ruthenberg expressed optimism in light of the violence perpetrated against his march.  Terming the riots the Cleveland workers’ “baptism in blood,” he saw this violence as yet another event confirming his left-Socialist principles and a chance to more sharply draw the contrast between radicals and the opposing capitalist forces.^[1] The worker’s revolution, per Marxist theory, was inevitable and the riots confirmed the revolutionary stirrings in his society.  The reason the socialists were met with violent opposition was not because they were insignificant.  The loyalists confronted the Cleveland marchers, unlike the years previous and afterwards, because they feared the socialists; one fears the powerful and growing Cleveland Socialists of 1919, not the powerless Cleveland Socialists of 1911 or the fringe Communists of 1930.  Social conflict augmented the socialists as Local Cleveland gained more members in May that year, not less.^[2] In light of Local Cleveland’s thriving under stress Ruthenberg concluded his coverage of the riots rallying, “The Socialist organization remains intact in spite of the destruction of party headquarters…The workers have had their lesson. They have learned how ‘democracy’ meets a peaceable protest. They know from the thousands who marched that their power is greater than ever. Another day is coming. They will go on until victory is achieved.”^[3] Despite the blood, bruises, prison time, and death, the May Day riots were a cause for celebration: a celebration that the Cleveland radicals had come so far as a political unit and organization that they warranted such treatment.  Such counter-revolution could only herald revolution and a further reason to be on the left-wing of American socialism.

The perennial question of all historians of the Socialist Party and leftism in the United States, first asked by the German economist Werner Sombart in 1905, is some version of “Why did socialism not happen in America?”^[4]Of course, the first clarification should be what the question means by “socialism?”  Often, the implication is “American Exceptionalism,” an American version of the Sonderweg thesis: large “socialist” parties grew in other industrialized nations, but not in the United States.  However, this version of the question actually means “Other countries have social-democratic parties, but the U.S. does not,” thereby ignoring the later New Deal Coalition and the development of a Fordist economy in the US, similar to Western Europe.  The real question, for which the U.S. was actually an exception to the rest of the industrial world in the early twentieth century, is “Why did the U.S. never have a large revolutionary-socialist political party,” like the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Spartacists in Germany, the anarcho-syndicalists in France and Spain, or the left-wing of the Labour Party in Britain?  The case of the Cleveland radicals shows that there was such a movement growing in the U.S., but it was met with the “May Day riots,” informal violence from counter-revolutionary veterans’ groups, and later the formally-directed Red Scare, most notably the Palmer raids in late 1919 and early 1920.  The various answers offered to the question of why there is/was no “socialism” in the United States have included American workers being inherently non-ideological, the social mobility in the U.S. dissuaded radical opposition of capitalism, the U.S. being an essentially liberal society, the difficulty in building a new political movement in the first-past-the-post electoral system, and the repressive measures taken by the American state in responding to unionizing, strikes, and socialist organizing.^[5]Though the truth is most certainly a combination of these, the case of May Day, 1919, in Cleveland adds further force to the “suppression” explanation in this historiographical debate.  In response to the question “Why is there no socialism,” a Cleveland leftist would have responded: “Because it was killed.”

Aside from this central historiographical question, Ruthenberg, the Cleveland radicals, and the May Day riots bring many historical processes into clear focus.  They reveal the cultural and intellectual character of the “Red Rioters,” which reflected the foreign-born identity of Cleveland as a city in 1919.  They show the beginnings of a veteran culture contested between an anti-radical patriotism of the American Legion and the revolutionary character of the “Great War veteran” who the socialists hoped would carry the European revolutions stateside.  The May Day riots were also the culmination of Midwestern radicalism, of which Ohio served as an epicenter, but Cleveland as its most electorally-impotent, and thus radical, exponent.  The riots help to expose two conflicting nationalist projects pulsating through early-twentieth century America: a “civic-nationalism” of socialism informed by the founding principles of American political culture; and an “ethno-nationalism” of anti-immigrant, racialized “Americanism” that defined itself through anti-Bolshevism, thus making it a novel category in American thought.  Finally, a comparison of May Day 1919 to the activities and marches of Cleveland’s radicals during the Great Depression show that the organizational success and socialistic-republicanism of the 1900s and 1910s did not continue: the city’s left could either become fringe Communists, devoted to the Russian example, or accede to the left-liberal trade-unionism of the New Deal society.  May Day 1919 did not herald the birth or death of the “Cleveland Commune,” nor did it overthrow a bourgeois-republic or monarchy.  It was a distinctly American event, riven by the same contradictions that would both end and give rise to the general movements of (inter)national history.  All of America was in those streets, in Public Square, in Cleveland, observing and acting for both good and ill.