Main Body

The Leftist Context: The Identity of a People and their City

Until 1920 Cleveland had long been a community with a substantial foreign-born population.  In 1870, 41.8 percent of the total city population was born in a foreign country.  In 1910, the foreign-born and their offspring composed almost 75 percent of the population. [1]  While the foreign-born population dipped to 30.1 percent by 1920, the overall number of immigrants residing in the city had increased.[2] There was simply no mistaking it: Cleveland was a true cosmopolitan city in the early-twentieth century, and any attempt to construe “the foreign-born” as an Other stood as little more than uninformed nativism.  When the oft-repeated Red Scare stereotype of the “foreign-born radical,” invoked in this time to help justify new immigration restrictions,[3]was introduced to Cleveland, it meant that a substantial portion of the population might be suspect.  Because of these demographic facts, it is difficult to justify claims that such identities were inimical to Cleveland, rather than actually being constitutive of the city.  Nonetheless, foreign birth and the suspicion of radicalism played a key role in the construction of the May Day riots’ image.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s report, that only four percent of the socialists arrested on May 1 were “native born” and that the rest should be deported, typified the mainstream reaction.[4]But what evidence did the paper have for this characterization?  Just who were these radicals?  Historians of American socialism traditionally find that the Socialist Party and its affiliated unions in the Midwest principally had their bases in the older immigrant communities of Anglo-Saxons and German, as well as skilled laborers.[5] Did Charles Ruthenberg, a securely middle-class, American-born, educated former-sales manager, have command of a particular ethnic group, neighborhood, or trade union?  Additionally, what did the character of the Cleveland socialists say about Cleveland socialism? 

Fortunately for historians, the Cleveland Press produced a comprehensive list of all those arrested (all reports agree loyalists were not arrested), noting their age, occupation, home address, country of birth, and even marital status.[6] Additionally, it later printed a list of bystanders who were accidentally arrested and were not affiliated with the socialists.[7] What these two lists provide is, essentially, a randomly selected sample of 111 leftists that provides the basis for an analysis of the city’s radical milieu (Figure 1; see Appendix). 

In line with the Plain Dealer’s report, the Cleveland Press reports a very small percentage of American-born rioters, here found to be about five percent.  However, the published list of individuals is somewhat problematic since it is based on national birthplace, rather than ethnicity.  Thus it conceals a huge diversity, particularly among immigrants from the multi-ethnic empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia.  When these immigrants arrived in Cleveland, they often settled into culturally- rather than nationally-defined neighborhoods; they were Czechs and Poles, not Austro-Hungarians and Russians.[8]Fortunately, the Federal census schedules for 1910, 1920, and 1930 provide a form of cultural identification by listing the language of the individuals.  When the names listed in the newspaper are traced through the census, a fuller picture of ethnic identity appears (Figure 2; see Appendix). 

When the vague categories of “Russia” and “Hungary” are dissolved, at least as the records allow, a much greater degree of ethnic diversity appears. Most important is the emergence of the Poles as the third largest ethnic category among the rioters, falling behind Magyar-speakers and the unclarified “Russian” category. The addition of language also reveals a large Yiddish-speaking grouping from several different national backgrounds. When these Yiddish-speakers of different nationalities are added together, they turn out to form a principal component of the marcher milieu. Overall, the preponderance of these groups is not at all surprising, given that they dominated the foreign-born demographic in Cleveland: the 1920 census recorded 800,000 Clevelanders, of which 240,000 were foreign-born, or about thirty percent[9]. Of that 240,000, 58,000 were “Austrian,” 42,000 “Russian,” and 42,000 “Hungarian.” Again, the lack of specificity caused by the multi-ethnic empires complicates comparison, but the sample of leftist “rioters,” as a selection of Cleveland foreigners, roughly correlates with the foreign-born population as a whole. And despite the predominance of these three groups, they still composed only about sixty percent of the Red Rioters sample, the rest of which was a cornucopia of national origins and linguistic variety. As a matter of demographic fact, it can be said that the leftists were statistically representative of Cleveland’s ethnic variety. The leftists were not dominated by any one ethnic group to any extent greater than the relative weight of those local ethnic populations. Thus, the socialists participating in the march can be characterized as a genuine political movement, rather than a particularity of any one cultural grouping.

The heterogeneity of the leftists is also displayed in their geographic distribution throughout the city and its immediate suburbs.  While one might expect a large concentration in a single or several ethnic neighborhoods or working-class districts, the actual distribution is visibly dispersed when mapped.  Ignoring cases of untraceable addresses and several homeless workers, the home locations appear as shown in Figure 3 (see Appendix).  While there were certain concentrations in the East Side neighborhoods between Carnegie Avenue and Kinsman Road (possibly favored by the selection because it is near the locations where the riots first broke out), a large and scattered collection of leftists is apparent: most notable are the Italian from as far as the hamlet of Euclid Village (1920 population: 3,300) and an ethnically-varied collection of participants from the far West Side neighborhoods.
The final observation to be made from the Cleveland Press data is the surprising variety of occupations among the Red Rioters.  As will be established below, the Cleveland Socialists were one of the most radical branches regionally.  It might be argued that those who were willing to march in the growing Red Scare atmosphere would have had to possess a level of political dedication only expected from unskilled laborers (“You have nothing to lose but your chains.”)  And yet, while the category of “Laborer” dominates, one also comes across many machinists, carpenters, tailors, bakers, a female social worker, chauffeurs, the unemployed, and others.  This conforms with the Ohio Socialist’s coverage of the riots, reporting that a baker’s union, machinists union, “one local of the Carpenters” and “members of the Workmen’s Sick and Death Benefit Fund” marched on May 1.[10]

In the categories of ethnicity, geography, and occupation, the participants in the May Day march of 1919 were a truly variegated group of the radical left.  Contrary to the traditional thesis of historians of Midwestern radicalism, who contend that socialism was largely dominated by older immigrant groups, grew on the basis of a single ethnic group, or was strongest among skilled workers, the “Red Rioters” were as Slavic as Cleveland, but also multi-ethnic, and employed in jobs of varying skill level.[11] And contrary to Lipset and Marks’s sociological finding that socialist politics depended upon workers pre-existing communalism derived from “cultural homogeneity,” the “Red Rioters” were culturally- and geographically-eclectic, but successfully united.  Even factious leftist groups and labor unions came together for a march under the duress of growing Red Scare oppression.[12] The conservative conspiracies that these “Bolsheviki” constituted a group of foreign infiltrators sent by Moscow also becomes a more obvious farce.  The fact that census records were available for most of these individuals shows that they lived in the country either decades before or after the riots.[13] This makes problematic the media assertion that they were foreign radicals.  Certainly, they were not recently imported Bolsheviki.  

Subsection: The First Among Equals—Charles Ruthenberg, a Cleveland Radical 

In many ways the biography of the movement’s leader, Charles Ruthenberg, fits this multifaceted and diverse characterization of those who followed him on May 1.  It also illuminates the character and history of Cleveland socialism.  Coming from a middle-class background, Ruthenberg began his political life as a supporter of Democratic reform mayor Tom Johnson.[14]For the future American-born head of a largely foreign-born socialist movement, Ruthenberg’s socialism had distinctly European origins.  Around 1904, a friend had suggested he read the work of the British socialist and Fabian, Robert Blatchford.  Impressed by Blatchford’s arguments for socialism, Ruthenberg proceeded then directly to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.[15] In his journey from a Progressive political stance, then to a Fabian intellectual introduction to socialism, and finally to Marx, it becomes perhaps obvious that Ruthenberg derived his political views from a social-evolutionary, reformist socialist tendency.  As Stephen Millett puts it, Ruthenberg initially saw capitalism’s injustice coming from its inefficiency, which would be solved through centralized planning.[16] Nonetheless, Ruthenberg’s ideological development constantly shifted him further to the left.  In 1912, when the question of tactics arose, whether to restrict the Socialist Party to purely political action at the ballot box or to pursue direct action in the workplace, Ruthenberg adopted a middle ground by accepting all tactics: he both defended the tactics of the IWW and stressed party unity.[17]By the time of his pamphlet Are We Growing Towards Socialism? (1917), Ruthenberg distanced himself even further from his Progressive past.  In the pamphlet, he distilled the insights of Das Kapital into common American parlance, focusing most notably on the theory of surplus value so as to convince the reader of his/her own exploitation and Marx’s theory of history, which proposes a historical progression from primitive communism to feudalism to capitalism to socialism.  Through his description of the transition from capitalism to socialism especially, Ruthenberg positions his own Progressive beginnings as the starting point for a larger political program.  As he put it, “Capitalism has developed from individual production to collective, co-operative production.”[18] The drive towards centralization, integration of industries, and mechanization leads to both greater production and greater exploitative capability; this was simply a repetition of Marx, but Ruthenberg added to these processes of “collectivism” the development of municipal ownership of water, gas, and electric utilities, as well as ownership of industries brought on by World War I.  While this “collectivism” and planning might have sated the Progressive Ruthenberg of 1901, he rejected the social-democratic hubris of reform-towards-socialism and the inevitability of utopia:

This collectivism, which is developing in the shape of municipal and state ownership, is not, however, Socialism.  With a powerful working class movement, strongly organized on the political and industrial field, developing with it, it may become the means of facilitating the establishment of Socialism. Without such a movement it may well become the basis for more extreme exploitation and oppression of the workers than that which existed in the days of capitalist competition.[19]

Ruthenberg’s radical apogee occurred during the fire of the left-wing revolutions in Russia, Hungary, and Bavaria from 1917 to 1919 and the entrance of the United States into the war, a period during which Ruthenberg achieved national notice for his radical pacifism.  During his 1917 Cleveland mayoral campaign, he directly invoked Karl Liebknecht, the only German Social Democrat to oppose Germany’s entrance into the war in 1914, as a figure of emulation:

I am speaking to you as Karl Liebknecht spoke in the German nation . . . when he denounced the war as a war of the ruling class and stated his unalterable opposition to that war… If you are inspired with that which will bring a better world, then you must stand up and fight for that ideal. You must fight with those who are fighting against the war.[20]

Ruthenberg attained national celebrity status within the Socialist Party through this and other public speeches against the war, becoming one of the writers of its resolution condemning the war and thus earning national acrimony from those outside the party.  In 1917, he was indicted under the Espionage Act for subversive activity for a speech he delivered on Cleveland’s Public Square on May 27, 1917: “This is not a war for democracy.  This is not a war for freedom…It is a war to secure the investment and profits of the ruling class of this country.”[21] The U.S. Supreme Court’s support of the indictment in Ruthenberg et al. v. United States set the precedent allowing the Espionage Act to imprison many more socialists in the years to come.  Later that year, presaging the much more violent May Day of 1919, Cleveland’s mayoral candidates assembled in Luna Park on Labor Day, 1917 to give speeches.  When Ruthenberg took the podium, he was assaulted by “uniformed soldiers,” escaping injury through the efforts of “vaudeville entertainers” who hid him backstage.  Notwithstanding, Ruthenberg had his most successful campaign that year, polling 27,685 votes, about one fourth of those cast.[22]

Ruthenberg’s Bolshevism assuredly emerged during the winter of 1918-19, the period when he served his prison sentence for the May 27 speech.  One possible radicalizing event was a Socialist Party convention in Canton, Ohio, held in the park across from the prison in which he was detained.[23] Ruthenberg was visited by Eugene Debs, himself subsequently arrested for a speech that day extolling Ruthenberg and others for their imprisonment for exercising free speech.[24] Thus, a cycle emerges, linking Ruthenberg, Debs, and the Espionage Act: Ruthenberg as the first victim of the Act and the case under which it was constitutionally-confirmed; Debs as its most famous victim, in part caused by expressing sympathy with Ruthenberg; and Ruthenberg’s marshalling of the May Day march to protest Debs own imprisonment, for which he would again be arrested.   

Ruthenberg’s path to Bolshevism mirrored that of the Cleveland branch of the Socialist Party (Local Cleveland).  During the winter of 1918-19, American socialists debated how to respond to the emerging success of the Bolsheviks and their calls for similar “mass action” revolutions in the industrial West.[25]The Socialist Party left-wing vacillated, debating whether to splinter from the right-wing, à la Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, or to capture the whole party by changing the party platform to advocate revolution.[26] Ruthenberg would end up declaring Local Cleveland’s support of Bolshevik tactics in April, 1919: “As set forth in the Left Wing program, political action, revolutionary and emphasizing the implacable character of class struggle, has now overthrown the old idea of attempting to carry out various local reforms such as better housing or municipal ownership of street car lines…It is the mass action that will count in the future warfare against the capitalist state.”[27] These pronouncements were a far cry from his earlier passive consent to municipal ownership and centralization! 

It might have been intellectual engagement, with rigorous texts like Das Kapital, that propelled Ruthenberg to a general socialist position, but he was radicalized through the push of state oppression of free speech and the pull of Bolshevik success in Russia.  It is in this context that Ruthenberg, a former Progressive and sales manager, came to head a far-left party branch, leading a march of Socialists, IWW members, and left-leaning AFL unions, composed of Cleveland’s ethnically-eclectic working-class, to call for Eugene Debs’s freedom, an end to all imperialist wars, and revolutionary socialism.

 

  1. Richard Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 162 ↵
  2. Federal Census Bureau, “Tech Paper 29: Table 22.  Nativity of the Population for Urban Places Among the 50 Largest Urban Places Since 1870: 1850 to 1990.” ↵
  3. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99-100 ↵
  4. Plain Dealer, May 3, 1919 ↵
  5. For a collection of essays examining the practices and demographics of other Midwestern towns and cities, including Milwaukee, WI, Marion, IN, Minneapolis, MN, and others, see Donald Critchlow, ed.,  Socialism in the Heartland (Notre Dame:  Notre Dame Press, 1986).  One of the guiding theses that connect the essays, as Critchlow says in his introduction, is that “American socialism should be seen as a political and social experiment on the part of certain worker and ethnic groups to preserve their dignity and sense of freedom.” (15) ↵
  6. Cleveland Press, May 2, 1919 ↵
  7. Ibid., May 3, 1919 ↵
  8. Edward Miggins and Mary Morgenthaler, “The Ethnic Mosaic: The Settlement of Cleveland by the Immigrants and Migrants” in Thomas Campbell and Edward Miggins, eds. The Birth of Modern Cleveland 1865-1930, (Cleveland: Cleveland Historical Society, 1988), 106 ↵
  9. Federal Census Bureau, “Tech Paper 29: Table 22. Nativity of the Population for Urban Places Among the 50 Largest Urban Places Since 1870: 1850 to 1990.” ↵
  10. The Ohio Socialist, May 8, 1919 ↵
  11. Critchlow, Socialism in the Heartland, 15 ↵
  12. Seymour Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 135 ↵
  13. Census Schedules for 1910 & 1930, accessed through ancestry.com ↵
  14. Millett, “Charles E. Ruthenberg”: 195 ↵
  15. Ibid., 194-5 ↵
  16. Ibid., 196 ↵
  17. Ibid., 197 ↵
  18. Charles Ruthenberg, Are We Growing Towards Socialism? (Cleveland: Local Cleveland, Socialist Party, 1917), 18 ↵
  19. Ibid., 32-3 ↵
  20. Millett, “Charles Ruthenberg,” 198 ↵
  21. Ibid., 198 ↵
  22. Ibid., 200 ↵
  23. Nick Salvatore, Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 291 ↵
  24. Ibid., 294 ↵
  25. Salavatore, Debs, 297 ↵
  26. Ibid., 298 ↵
  27. Revolutionary Age, April 26, 1919 ↵

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