Main Body

Coda: The Echoes of 1919 and The Dissolution of Cleveland’s American Radicalism

But what exactly happened after 1919?  Surely a movement based around the idea of a socialistic civic-nationalism, which could mobilize thousands of Clevelanders and thrive under increased government pressure, would not simply disintegrate in a matter of months.  What became of Cleveland’s radicals?  Just as any event has historical precedence, so too does it have a legacy.  What was the legacy of the May Day riots, and May Day in general, in Cleveland?

 Splits among the American left in 1919-20 and government persecution of leftist leaders devastated the organizational and leadership capabilities of the American socialists.  As noted above, this factionalism would result in the irony that Charles Ruthenberg and Alfred Wagenknecht, radical Ohio socialists who had suffered the Canton workhouse together in 1917, would come to be leaders of opposing American communist parties in 1920.[1] Combined with constantly shifting political strategies, as dictated from the Comintern office in Moscow, the eventually united Communist Party USA (CPUSA) endured the 1920s dismally.  By March of 1929, the national membership of the CPUSA stood at 9,300, which was a fraction of what the communist movement could boast even during its semi-legal underground period from 1920-23 (15,000 by 1923).[2] Likewise, non-Bolshevik radical groups like the IWW were decimated by Red Scare operations like the Palmer Raids and the overall decline in union activity during the 1920s.  In terms of nationwide activity, the IWW has been an empty husk ever since 1920.[3] But what about the Great Depression?  Never before was the plight of the American worker so great, the unemployed so many, or capitalism’s contradiction of poverty-within-overproduction so stark and lucid.  If the remnants of 1919 were to revive themselves, this would have been their chance.  In what ways, if any, did the specter of the Cleveland radical left which was on display in 1919 show itself during the Great Depression?

Given the factious nature of the American left during the 1930s, there are a multitude of groups one could use to draw out the legacy of the Cleveland radicals of 1919.  Two vital organizations to follow are the CPUSA, the party led by Ruthenberg until his death in 1927, and the IWW.  No other national leftist group held as much of the public attention as the CPUSA, given its direct ties to the USSR through the Comintern.  The IWW remains notable in the Cleveland context because, in the period from 1934 to 1950, the Cleveland IWW’s Metal and Machine Workers’ Industrial Union 440 (IU 440) was exceptional for being the only IWW local to dominate any major industry after the 1920 collapse of the organization.  These two groups, in their failures and successes in the 1930s, indicate the two paths the legacy of Cleveland radicalism took: a slavish devotion to the prestige of Russian Bolshevism and a reformist recuperation under the labor-friendly politics of the New Deal coalition.

Subsection: The CPUSA and The Decline of May Day in Cleveland 

With the onset of the Great Depression with Black Tuesday in October, 1929, the United States and Cleveland were beset by massive unemployment.  The prosperity and growth of the 1920s in Cleveland gave way to the Depression at an astounding rate, resulting in about 41,000 unemployed in April, 1930, and 100,000 in January, 1931, in a city of about 900,000 people.[4] While $200 million in direct aid and work relief were provided from 1928 to 1937, this paled in comparison to Cuyahoga County’s loss of $1.2 billion in salaries and wages during that period.[5]At least initially, it seemed that the CPUSA was poised to exploit this disaster and grow its membership in the midst of disaster, just as Ruthenberg had grown the party during the economic and political stresses of World War I.  The CPUSA sought to expand its membership, after Black Tuesday, by organizing the unemployed, appealing to those most vulgarized by capitalist crises.  This took the form of putting together “Unemployed Councils” which would agitate and use protests to prod officials for relief. [6] Most importantly the CPUSA, in conjunction with its Comintern affiliates, organized an International Unemployment Day on March 6, 1930, in which thousands marched, demanding various forms of relief, as well as diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.  It turned out to be a greater success than the CPUSA could have hoped.  Between preparations with the Unemployed Councils and spontaneous support from bystanders, the marches in major cities defied expectations and the New York City demonstration was noted for devolving into a large riot and brawl with the police while other cities remained more passive in their confrontations.[7]

In Cleveland, March 6, 1930 was a similar “success.”  Dubbed “Red Thursday” by the press, the official Communist demonstrations in Ohio concluded without any violence.  The Plain Dealer estimated there were a total of 10,000 people, about 2,500 Communists and 7,500 bystanders and interested onlookers.[8] The Communists assembled in Public Square, marched to City Hall, gave speeches, read demands, talked with the mayor, and dispersed peacefully.  The demands communicated by John Adams, district organizer of the Communist Party for Ohio and West Virginia, included “appropriation of funds to be placed at the disposal of the unemployed workers for relief, unemployment insurance, establishment of the seven-hour day and five day week…abolition of the criminal syndicalist law and recognition of Soviet Russia.”[9] As far as the Plain Dealer was concerned, there were two notable aspects to March 6 in Cleveland.  The first was the personage of Lil Andrews, “Girl Communist” and leader of the district’s Youth Communist League, who engaged in a witty dialogue with Cleveland Mayor John Marshall (brackets indicate paraphrasing by the Plain Dealer):

Marshall: “There’s no use of my trying to fool you people.  Suppose we put everybody in this crowd to work.  Tomorrow we’d have twice as many unemployed here from other cities.  So far as putting money at your disposal, there is no legal way in which that could be done, even if the [city] Council wanted to do it.  The five-day week is a matter of agreement.  The abolition of child labor is a matter of state or federal law.  You surely must realize that the city government has nothing to do with the recognition of Russia.”

Andrews: [I don’t see why the city cannot levy a tax on the profits of Cleveland businesses from last year.]

Marshall: “Suppose for the sake of argument that we did that.  It would take a year or a year and a half to collect the tax, and you want relief now.  Maybe a year from now you won’t need it.”

Andrews: “Then, you admit the inability of the city to meet our demands?”

Marshall: [Yes]

Andrews: “Therefore you admit the government is no good for the workers.”

Marshall: “I wouldn’t say that.”

Andrews: “That’s what we think.”[10]

The second notable aspect of March 6 in Cleveland was that, after the official demonstration, there was “a crowd of about 500 hangers-on lingering in Public Square” whom the police violently dispersed with mounted police.  As the Dealer put it: “There was no riot…But for about 3 minutes Public Square was the scene of greater confusion than at any time since the May Day riot of 1919.”[11] International Unemployment Day was the closest to a repeat of May Day 1919 the city would ever see, but the Plain Dealer displayed none of the wrath or fear of its earlier coverage.  Even with the unexpected outpouring of support for March 6, the Communists elicited curiosity in bystanders, not political reaction.   As one article concluded, “by 4:30 the pigeons reigned in the Square once more.”[12]

March 6 proved to be a flash in the pan and was not indicative of stupendous growth for the CPUSA in Cleveland or elsewhere.  May Day, 1930 registered as a nonevent: “May Day in Cleveland broke no heads and made no history…The police were ready but found nothing to do.  Everybody was satisfied, unless it be some unsung hotspur thirsting for martyrdom.  From his standpoint the disappointing feature of the day was that no martyrs to Communism were made.”[13] March 6 proved itself an anomaly and the newspaper which once bristled with demands to restrict the rights of leftists, in response to a tepid May Day of about 600 Communists, now declared that “The right of petition and of free assemblage is so fundamental to liberty that any effort to suppress it is not only unfair but unsafe.”[14]  May Day 1933 was similarly languid.  About 1,500 Communists assembled in Public Square, made demands for unemployment relief, denounced Nazi persecution of Jews, and sang songs like “Solidarity Forever” and “Wave, Scarlet Banner Triumphantly (Bandiera Rossa)”; seemingly gone were the days of leftists singing “Star-Spangled Banner.”[15] Gone also, or for the most part, was the obsession with flags as symbols.  When “some city employee had hauled down the [American or Cleveland] flag from the Public Square flag pole just before the meeting,” only the local American Legion chairman seemed to care about the symbolism of such an act.[16] This trend of the Cleveland Communists making a poor show of their political acumen continued through the decade.  While “campaigning” for Ohio Governor, Cleveland CPUSA leader Andrew Onda was stereotypically assaulted with vegetables while speaking in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1936[17] and the anti-fascist periodical FIGHT publicly shamed Cleveland for its poor sales, notably being out-ordered by much smaller cities at a rate of 20:1.  As they put it:

Where are the trade unionists of Cleveland?  Where are the students and professional groups?  Where are the Socialists and Communists?  Where are the militant workers?  Is Cleveland with a population of one million sastified with a sale of 25 copies of FIGHT?  Is there no struggle against War and Fascism in Cleveland?[18]

The closest the CPUSA ever came to re-approaching the socialist civic-nationalism of old was while acting under the “Popular Front” policy of the Comintern, which dictated that Communist parties align with non-proletarian groups, up to and including liberal and conservative political parties, to counteract the expansion of fascism.  Accepted hesitantly by the CPUSA leader during the 1930s and early 40s, Earl Browder, this resulted in the CPUSA becoming more “patriotic,” at least in public.  Thus, on January 22, 1939, Cleveland was the stage for the national leader of the CPUSA publicly singing “Star Spangled Banner” while welcoming back Cleveland veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades from the Spanish Civil War.[19] Tellingly, the May Day in Cleveland for that year was restricted to the protest by several hundred Communists of the German consulate, itself closed for the holiday.[20] In other words, it was only under pressure from the Comintern to “be more American” that the CPUSA adopted the trappings of the civic-nationalism which defined the political tenor of the movement two decades prior, creating phrases like “Communism is 20th century Americanism”.  During this period Cleveland’s May Day, with the exception of the one-off International Unemployment Day, had degraded from a city-trembling march to a petty-protest done mostly on the part of Moscow-signed directives.  When assessing the legacy of Cleveland May Day, 1919, the CPUSA represents one direction toward which that radicalism developed: rigid Stalinist ideology, tepid tactics and demonstrations, and the marginalization of Cleveland as a center of American leftism.

Subsection: The IWW and The Recuperation of Industrial Action 

Of course, the CPUSA was not the only radical group to survive the leftist disasters of 1919-20.  While the CPUSA had focused its efforts on organizing the unemployed during the Great Depression, its membership often being primarily unemployed,[21] the remnants of the Industrial Workers of the World, also often being unemployed, remained ideologically centered in the labor movement, particularly in Cleveland.  In contrast to the unity of the 1910s, the Russian Bolshevik persecution of anarchists and IWW refugees sowed great animosity between the Wobblies and their Bolshevik-inspired neighbors, often criticizing the later for being unlike the civic-nationalists they once were: the likes of the CPUSA had taken up “traditional Russian icon worship” in their veneration of the great Bolshevik revolutionaries, had become dictatorial in party structure, dogmatic in ideology, and disconnected from the “essence of the American people.”[22] In the eyes of the Depression-era IWW, their own moribund group was the only sufficiently democratic radical leftist organization in the U.S.

Finally, by 1934, it seemed as if the IWW would make its return.  Though it lost union control of Detroit to the UAW, the IWW’s IU 440 began to win strikes and shop-control in the metal working sector of Cleveland, gaining a membership that ranged from 1,600 to 10,000 in the period from 1934-1950.[23] This success came under the leadership of the Cedervall brothers, Frank and Tor, who built up 440 with an ideology of anti-Communist and anti-fascist unionism, but also dissociated from the IWW’s original anarchist and utopian ideology which had advocated vigorous struggles to build a syndicalist polity.[24] In his own words, Frank Cedervall described his ideology as “non-political, not anti-political…non-religious, not anti-religious…against nationalism and for the recognition of the universal brotherhood of all men…opposed to violence whether committed by government or individual men.”[25] The goals of the Cleveland IWW during the Great Depression were to be an effective union for its members and to not let the organization’s past utopian dreams hamper that.  In practice, this resulted in IU 440 taking full advantage of the pro-labor political climate of the Roosevelt years, including participation in the National Labor Relations Board system.  In a twist of historical irony, an IWW local won labor representation for the Draper Manufacturing Company over the AFL through the auspices the NLRB, in other words, the federal government.[26]

IU 440’s pragmatism also resulted in it breaking one of the sacred doctrines of the IWW, namely the signing of labor contracts.  While contracts were originally conceived as a “capitulation to capitalism,” the IWW justified its signing of contracts with the American Stove Company with the claim that “Contract Protects Solidarity.”[27] Through a willingness to bend principles to present realities, IU 440 had achieved success no other IWW local in the country had had since 1920, becoming the largest source of membership and dues for the national organization.[28]

Nonetheless, this turn towards “pragmatism” was not merely the employment of labor legislation and legal structures to advance “radical trade unionism,” but represented a fundamental de-ideological shift in the Cleveland IWW.  As Frank Cedervall reflected, “Idealism is a wonderful thing, but job control is a far more practical factor in holding a dues-paying membership in good standing.”[29] By the 1940s, IU 440 was seen as the IWW’s rightwing anomaly.  The national organization noted that there was “a very slight absorption of IWW philosophy” by the membership.[30] Put differently, “to place a Wobbly union card in a man’s pocket was an easier task than to inculcate IWW ideals in his heart.”[31] This ideological-pragmatic difference of opinion ultimately came to a head in the late 1940s with arguments over the practice of signing labor contracts and the passage of the Taft-Hartley law which, among other labor-union restrictions, required union officials to sign non-Communist affidavits.[32] Despite being anti-Communist, the IWW national office had leftist principles and an organizational history of opposition to such state-driven witch hunts, as well as political issues with the other provisions of Taft-Hartley.  Attached to a national office which refused to sign the affidavits, and thus gain union recognition for the NLRB, Cleveland’s pragmatic IU 440, which served their non-ideological workers as well as their ideologists, successfully voted to split from the national IWW in November 1950.  By signing the affidavits, the Cleveland IWW fully integrated itself into the American labor mainstream, incorporating itself into larger unions until it became part of the AFL-CIO.[33] Through the Cleveland IWW, one segment of the Cleveland radical tradition of 1919 came in from the cold, but at the cost of anything that would have identified it with that IWW which marched along with Ruthenberg and the broader Cleveland radical left.

The CPUSA and IWW of Cleveland represent the two extremes of what ultimately became of that radical political tradition of Cleveland and the Midwest that was on display in the May Day riots of 1919.  The CPUSA remained at the fringes, becoming the “foreign ideology” the left was always derided as, with the exception of the Comintern-dictated Popular Front period which prescribed patriotism as a USSR foreign policy.  The success of the CPUSA among Cleveland’s unemployed were spectacular, but was ultimately measured in hours.  The IWW kept its democratic character, and in that sense remained “American,” but the manner in which Cleveland’s “One Big Union” took advantage of the Great Depression and the New Deal sacrificed the political content of “radical trade unionism.”  The Plain Dealer editors and letter writers’ original portrayal of America’s relation to radicalism, where it was a distinction between “Americanism” and “foreignism,” proved true in more ways than one; the left itself came to conform to this dichotomy.  In time, this divide became a reality and the Cleveland left(s) took up positions on either side of the Cold War split.  The sort of “radical-center” which united proto-Bolsheviks, Wobblies, and left-AFLs around leaders like Debs and Ruthenberg did not hold after 1919, and the subsequent history of American radicalism until at least the 1960s’ New Left was Soviet Bolshevism or left-liberal capitalism.  With the decline of socialistic civic-nationalism in Cleveland, May Day dissolved as a notable event in the city; after 1919, it was all downhill.

  1. Millett, “Charles E. Ruthenberg”: 205 ↵
  2. Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade, (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 5 ↵
  3. Roy Wortman, From Syndicalism To Trade Unionism: The IWW in Ohio 1905-1950, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 101 ↵
  4. Carol Miller and Robert Wheeler, Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796-1996, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 136 ↵
  5. Ibid ↵
  6. Klehr, Heyday, 49-50 ↵
  7. Ibid., 34 ↵
  8. Plain Dealer, March 7, 1930 ↵
  9. Ibid ↵
  10. Ibid ↵
  11. Ibid ↵
  12. Ibid ↵
  13. Plain Dealer, May 2, 1930 ↵
  14. Ibid ↵
  15. Ibid., May 2, 1933 ↵
  16. Ibid ↵
  17. Ibid., Oct 4, 1936 ↵
  18. Fight – Against War and Fascism, May, 1934 ↵
  19. Plain Dealer, January 23, 1939 ↵
  20. Ibid., May 2, 1939 ↵
  21. Klehr, Heyday, 161 ↵
  22. Wortman, IWW in Ohio, 102-3 ↵
  23. Ibid 108 ↵
  24. Ibid 110 ↵
  25. Ibid 111 ↵
  26. Ibid. 129 ↵
  27. Industrial Worker, May 29, 1937; as quoted in Ibid., 133 ↵
  28. Ibid 180 ↵
  29. Ibid 154 ↵
  30. Ibid 125 ↵
  31. Ibid 125 ↵
  32. Ibid., 176 ↵
  33. Ibid 180 ↵

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