The Local Context: The Crimson Midwest, Red Ohio, and Reddest Cleveland

In order to view the May Day riots properly, the riots need to be placed in the larger regional and historical context of the growth of Midwestern radicalism and the Socialist Party in Ohio, as well as Local Cleveland’s place in the party.  The Ohio Valley, with convenient access to river systems, its proximity to the East Coast and the Midwestern heartland and Chicago, as well as rail access to Appalachia, made it an industrial center^[1] and earned the moniker “Ruhr of America.”^[2] And like the German Ruhr, the Midwest was a hotbed of the country’s socialist movement.^[3] The national railroad strike of 1877, settled only through violent militia mobilization, spread throughout the Midwest with flashpoints in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis.  Arguably, it was this strike, which shut down large parts of the national economy, that birthed modern unionism and socialist tendencies in the United States.^[4] It was in Haymarket Square, Chicago, 1886, where the international worker’s holiday itself was bombed into existence.^[5] The Midwest also produced several notables of American socialism’s national leadership (perhaps only matched per capita by the Pacific Northwest), most important Eugene Debs of Indiana.  As Richard Judd recounts in great detail in Socialist Cities, the Socialist Party of America (founded in 1901), which became the most successful left-wing party in American history in the early twentieth century, attained great electoral success throughout the country.  In the case of Ohio and its surrounding areas, Judd shows that the Socialist Party achieved its electoral victories mostly at the municipal level through a complex relationship with the Democratic, Republican, and Progressive political forces: “While Ohio contained neither the greatest number of socialist victories nor the largest ‘socialized’ cities, gains there were the most representative of Socialist successes in urban politics.  Ohio socialists managed to elect city council minorities in major cities such as Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, and Akron, and to elect more mayors to office in small and medium-sized cities than any other state.”^[6] Most of these victories occurred in small mining or farm communities, those typical areas of Populism that the Socialists captured for themselves.

The trend of Socialist triumphs in Ohio, and nationally, fit the following pattern: the Socialists had great success in electing municipal positions, like council and mayoral seats, between 1909 and 1913.  After stagnating in the following years, they revived significantly in 1917 to monopolize the anti-war vote, but fell apart almost completely due to party splits and state oppression.  Though Ohio and the Midwest generally followed this trend, it is not representative of individual cases or Cleveland in particular.  In the 1911 elections, Ohio Socialists won office in “93 cities and towns” with 17 new mayors from “a wide spectrum of communities ranging from villages of a few hundred people to cities of forty thousand.”^[7] The political character of these campaigns, rather than being radical, were actually quite reformist and similar to the programs proposed by the more ‘bourgeois’ Progressive party.  A successful campaign platform in Martins Ferry, Ohio, included city “democratization,” cheaper utility rates, free textbooks, and “eventually municipal ownership.”  Likewise, the Socialist mayor of Toronto, Ohio, Robert Murray, “campaigned to wipe out the village debt and reduce the tax rate.”^[8] Radical socialists, these were not.  Nonetheless, these victories were building the party’s rapport and filling a political niche in small working-class towns that was normally occupied in the big cities by reform-minded Progressives, Republicans, and Democrats fighting corrupt political machines.   The predominance of this “pre-existing bourgeois reformism” explains why Ohio Socialists in the major cities merely captured council seats in 1911 (4 in Columbus, 2 in Akron, 3 in Dayton, 1 in Toledo).^[9] The significant middle-class vote, interested in improving city maintenance and breaking-up political machines, relied on traditional parties to voice its discontent.  The Socialists could garner the workers and get partial victories, but they also needed the shopkeeper and salesman to take an entire city.

The Socialist success of 1911 was fleeting however: only two of the seventeen Socialist mayors elected in Ohio in 1911, Newton Wycoff of Martins Ferry and Robert Murray of Toronto, survived the 1913 elections, though these elections won eleven new mayors to soften the electoral losses.^[10] In many cases, the deciding middle-class vote on the local-scale were swept by “fusion tickets,” single candidates appointed by a combination of Republicans, Democrats, or third-parties specifically meant to defeat the Socialist incumbent.^[11] A Socialist in Ohio could win a plurality when Democrats and Republicans split their bases within economic classes, but they nearly universally lost two-way elections.  However, while the state generally was having these successes, the Cleveland Socialists had none of their own.  In Cleveland, a city dominated by local party machines run on ethnic lines, the Socialists had no easy way to enter the city council.  Neither could they achieve success in the ballot for the mayor’s office, since reform politics had dominated the competition between Republicans and Democrats since the administration of Tom Johnson beginning in 1901.  If a Cleveland Socialist wanted to achieve any meaningful progress, he must make it in the workplace, through a union; about half of the 1910 Socialist Party membership of one thousand Clevelanders were also union members.^[12]

While this analysis focuses on Ruthenberg’s Socialists, these electoral failures also worked to create the radical IWW, whose tactics were to reject political action completely and focus on industrial activity in preparation for direct worker ownership of industry.  The focus on industrial action seemed to be the logical conclusion of the ineffective politics the Socialists struggled with, at least until the Bolshevik inspiration.  Notably, the Cleveland IWW was the home to the unknown, possibly Slovenian, illustrators “Nedeljkovich, Brashich, & Kuharich,” who produced the famous American rendition of the “Pyramid of Capitalist System” propaganda poster in 1911 (Figure 5; see Appendix).^[13] The same illustrators produced other political posters, which better evince an ideology that would fit Cleveland’s suppression of effective Socialist political participation (Figures 6 and 7; see Appendix).  It is important to note not only the critique of reformist policies, like Teddy Roosevelt-style trust-busting failing to go to the “root” of the problems of industrial woes, but also the utopic ideal of “Co-operative Commonwealth,” a term Ruthenberg also used in Growing.^[14] One can only speculate to the degree to which local and active IWW ideologues and union activity played in helping radicalize the Cleveland Socialists and AFL unions into left-wing, mass action, and industrial action contingents of their respective organizations.

Local Cleveland’s tactics during the pre-war years readily contrasted with those of Dayton.  While the institution of scientific management techniques by cash register magnate John Patterson and organization of an Employer’s Association under John Kirby suppressed union action in the Dayton industries, the political establishment and industrialists tolerated Socialist political action.  The Socialists built their own political machine, adopted a “moderate program centered around municipal ownership”, and “came within a hair’s breadth [of electoral success] several times in the prewar years.”^[15]Through a greater adherence to the strictures of liberal democracy, the Dayton Local came ever closer to victory, thereby softening the Socialist’s radical end goals.  For Cleveland, the reverse was true.  Industrial action became the realm of meaningful improvement on worker’s lives, while progressive figures like Tom L. Johnson and Newton D. Baker prevented Dayton-style socialist compromise a chance at municipal rule.^[16] The radicalization of Local Cleveland, and Ruthenberg as well, would come through the stymieing of possibly-successful political action:

A perhaps more significant comparison to the Cleveland Socialists than Dayton are the highly successful Milwaukee Socialists at the same time.  The Milwaukee Socialists, unlike those of Cleveland, were able to grab the middle-class Progressive milieu that was usually captured by the Progressives, Democrats, or Republicans, principally through watering down their radical socialist rhetoric and platform to pure municipalism.  As the Wisconsin Historical Society puts it, the “Milwaukee Socialists played down social theory and, like the Progressives, emphasized the need for honest government, a popular appeal in a city long notorious for corruption and administrative inefficiency.”^[18] Thus, the Milwaukee Socialists attained offices — socialist Emil Seidel became a multi-term mayor and Victor Berger the first socialist Congressman — by becoming the municipal reformers: “Many professional people supported a Socialist mayor because he helped give Milwaukee a reputation as the best-governed city in the United States.”^[19] The Milwaukee Socialists would wind up on the right-wing of the Socialist Party’s splits in mid-1919, rejecting a revolutionary platform in order to prevent being labeled un-American radicals and losing their domination of the ballot box.  Whereas the left-wing(s) would fizzle out over lost enthusiasm after 1919 and sectarian strife, the right wing in Milwaukee would very slowly fade through guilt-by-association and a realignment of the reform-minded professional class with the traditional parties.

In Ohio, with the beginning of the war years and eventual U.S. entry into the war, Socialists began to come into direct conflict with their more nationalist political contenders.  The national Socialist party had declared its strident anti-war position in April, 1917 in response to U.S. involvement, thus opening up all the local parties to charges of unpatriotic sentiment and pro-Germanism.^[20] Moderate socialist centers like Dayton and Milwaukee restricted their anti-war stance to basic issues like war inflation and food shortages.^[21] Local Cleveland, a party largely built on first- and second-generation immigrants with close familial ties to the (German/Austro-Hungarian) homeland, stuck to its anti-war rhetoric, which would eventually land Ruthenberg and others in jail.  Regardless of Dayton and Milwaukee’s reservations, the anti-war stance gave life to the Ohio and Cleveland left by increasing Ohio Socialist membership by fifty percent, doubling Local Cleveland’s membership in the six months after the anti-war declaration, accruing to Ruthenberg’s 1917 mayoral campaign one fourth of the total vote, and finally winning Cleveland city council seats.  Those seats, however, were not to be held.  Instructed to emulate the standard moderate role fulfilled by the Milwaukee Socialists, Socialist councilmen John Willert and Noah Mandelkorn were supposed to “attend strictly to their civic duties” to thwart the growing wartime oppression of radicals.  Nevertheless, the rest of the council forced the socialists out by bring forward a measure supporting the war effort.  When the Socialists voted against it as a measure outside the jurisdiction of a municipal government, the council ejected the Socialists from their seats citing an “unwritten law requiring support of patriotic measures.”^[22] Such anti-Socialist tactics predominated throughout Ohio and only served to further radicalize the Ohio Socialists in general and Local Cleveland in particular.  As the Miami Valley Socialist later put it in 1920 after the Red Scare repressions and collapse of the Socialist Party apparatus and municipal presence: “[workingmen] scratch their heads and say ‘what’s the use?’  As soon as the workers do manage to elect somebody to office the plutes kick him out.”^[23]

It was in this historical context of political action’s constant failure — of failing to obtain enough votes or actually accomplishing anything in office — that Ohio and especially Cleveland was radicalized.  Despite greater local setbacks, Local Cleveland grew rapidly during the war: after February 1917 Local Cleveland gained a new membership of 200-275 per month (more than the rest of the state combined), including a growth of the Russian-language branch from 2,300 to 7,800 between December 1918 and April 1919.^[24]Revolutionary success in Russia, the Seattle general strike, and the New York Socialist Party’s publication of the Left-Wing Manifesto “repudiating ‘reformist’ measures and advocating revolutionary mass action” pointed towards a tactical alternative to Local Cleveland’s problems at the ballot box.^[25] Local Cleveland announced its support of the manifesto in the April 26, 1919 issue of Revolutionary Age: “It is the mass action that will count in the future warfare against the capitalist state.”^[26] Later that year in June, the Ohio Socialists, in response to the moderate National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party expelling the radical Michigan Socialist Party, passed a motion reinstating them, thus earning the Ohio party its own expulsion from the national party.^[27]

The May Day riots represent the apotheosis of a radicalization process in the rise and fall of the Ohio Socialist Party and Local Cleveland.  Some parts of the state, like Dayton, resembled the “sewer socialism” of Milwaukee, focusing on the reformist nature of municipal ownership and thereby filling the role of progressive reformers where no “bourgeois” party had.  But Local Cleveland, due to the forces of existing reformist mayors, powerful political machine control over council seats, and near instant expulsion from the few offices they did win, had no reason to temporize or refrain from engaging in industrial action.  The reason why Cleveland developed a politics so radical was that it possessed a milieu that would convince an IWW, a Socialist, and even an AFL union man that direct revolutionary action was the most logical political position.  The reason why Local Cleveland “aligned themselves with the Bolsheviki of Russia and the Spartaceans of Germany” was not because there were many Germans and Russians in Cleveland.^[28] From the view of any sort of leftist politics, a Clevelander had nothing to lose but their chains and a useless ballot.  The May Day riots were a confirmation and statement of that radical program.  They were also the reaction such a declared political position would receive from a city that had not and would not parley in the slightest with socialists.

The impressive size of the May Day march, its place in Cleveland’s political history, and the violent response to growing socialist power, also represent an exception to the historiographical consensus on Midwestern radicalism.  Histories dealing with American radical “success,” particularly in the Midwest, tend to focus on and generalize the case of Milwaukee’s electorally-successful “sewer socialism.”  Because of this focus on winning mayoral power or city councils, historians like Donald Critchlow paint most Midwestern socialists as moderates and depict individual radical leaders like Ruthenberg or Marguerite Prevey of Akron as outliers.^[29] However, the case of Local Cleveland and the leftist movement that grew in membership and popularity as it became more radical, not less, completely contradicts this existing model.  After the riots, i.e. after growing radicalism and conflict, Local Cleveland gained 335 new members, roughly 50% more than the normal monthly rate, in May, 1919.^[30]This exception, coming from one of the key Midwestern cities, suggests that further research into the Midwestern radicalism of the early-twentieth century should operate on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the differing types of conservative opposition the leftists faced, the demographic makeup of the locality, and the dynamic created by the response, radicalizing or moderating, of the individual local branches and organizations.  A synthetic history of these differing cases, from Milwaukee to Cleveland, would have to focus on the processes which were capable of producing variegated experiences throughout the Midwest, rather than simply generalizing the Milwaukee paradigm.

The May Day riots, however, were also the beginning of the end of Local Cleveland.  In August, the party splintered: Ruthenberg brought a majority of the foreign language leagues and the party’s assets into the Communist Party, Alfred Wagenknecht led most of the English-speaking contingent into John Reed’s Communist Labor Party, and the Finnish and Jewish language federations would constitute the remaining husk of the Socialist Party in Cleveland.^[31] The Ohio Socialist Party as well would split into obscurity over the course of the period from 1919 to 1924.^[32] As a summation of this period, one can do little better than Max Hayes of the Cleveland Citizen newspaper.  A moderate at odds with the Socialist Party as a whole and the left-wing in particular by 1920, though he blamed the May Day riots on Ruthenberg and his radicalism, he admitted that aside from Cleveland as a radical epicenter, Ohio cities had “about as live a bunch of workers as you can find in any graveyard, politically speaking.”^[33] From the mass grassroots activity and success of the 1911 elections, red Ohio had faded except for Cleveland, sustained only by a radicalism built up from constant obstructions, persecution, and a modicum of ballot success.  The declaration of Local Cleveland for the left-wing and the subsequent May Day riots represented the ultimate break between Ohio and socialism; Ohio socialism’s most neglected section rejecting the political process and the city’s continued rejection in kind.