The National Context: Socialism as Civic-Nationalism; Loyalism as Ethno-Nationalism

When reading politically opinionated papers, publications, and writings of individuals, conservative and radical, from the early twentieth century, one thing becomes readily apparent: a deep appreciation, perhaps even an obsession, with symbolism and iconography.^[1] Importantly, notions of nationalism and radical socialism are communicated through how one presents or reacts to a political symbol.  To conservatives and radicals, a red flag was much more than just a flag.  It represented a certain set of ideas and associations: utopia or anarchy; industrial suffering or disrespect for traditional institutions; egalitarianism or the world turned upside down.  But while some of these dichotomies were certainly accurate, it is easy to be drawn into a binary logic that may favor one over the other.  The most pertinent binary for the May Day riots and the general case of socialism in America was internationalism and nationalism.  Those who attacked the marchers were ‘loyalists’ and ‘100 percent American,’ while the socialists were foreigners or ‘internationalists.’  Looking back, we can easily discard loyalist epithets for socialists like “Bismarckians” or “pro-German,” but it is harder to dismiss the idea that socialism was something international, European, and if not un-American then at least non-American.  After all, a common trope of American socialist commentary and historiography is “Why didn’t socialism happen here?”

Contrary to these simplistic binaries, taking the May Day riots as a starting point, the socialism of 1919 carried for American socialists themselves a distinctly American tradition of democratic values into the industrial era.  Ultimately, the consternation over red flags by conservative Americans was the flip side to this interpretation.  While socialists were developing a sort of socialist civic-nationalism, the conservatives contested it with an alternative militant ethno-nationalism.  This argument is a revision on Gary Gerstle’s assertion in American Crucible that presents American history as a struggle between American civic- and ethno-nationalism.  While this paper reads this same dichotomy into twentieth-century American history, Gerstle focuses exclusively on the civic-nationalism of liberals and mainstream politics.  When he covers the period of World War I and the 1920s, Gerstle recognizes that [liberal] civic-nationalism was in decline, but misses the ways in which American socialism was a type of civic-nationalism.^[2] And because Gerstle focuses on American liberals and an ethno-nationalism focused on race, he misses how the concept of American ethno-nationalism was essentially defined by its anti-radicalism, in addition to the racial chauvinism which Gerstle focuses on. The May Day riots, and the subsequent squelching of the indigenous socialist movement by the forces of international Soviet Bolshevism and Red Scare nationalism, thus represent the death of a tradition of American civic-nationalism that did not survive the turmoil 1919.

So, what were the symbols which the socialists used to interpret for themselves a distinctly American socialism?  Given that the riots began as a march, the socialist symbols used during their International Workers’ Day should be examined first.  The first important symbol is of course the red flag, which was the source of the brawls that ignited the riots.  Soldiers and citizens assaulted marchers to take their flags and, once the riots subsided, those loyalists burned, ripped, and tore red flags throughout town, most notably in Public Square at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument.  In almost every case, journalists, public commentators, and police cite the absolutely unbearable nature of the flag itself as the cause of the bedlam, rather than individuals who carried it.  The Cleveland Press declared: “The red flag was their symbol of revolution, terrorism, disorder, anarchy, and chaos.  It expressed a hate of all established institutions and a determination to overthrow the United States…The public against which the threat was made recognized the red flag for what it is.”^[3]And as the same paper delighted in concluding its coverage: “Bits of red flags which caused the riots littered the gutters of the downtown section all evening.  Bolsheviki, who had started out to demonstrate their power had lost all stomach for that.  They had preached disorder, but the taste they got of its practice was enough.  So far was known there was not a red flag flying in all Cleveland one hour after the riots started.” ^[4] After the event, Police Chief Frank Smith told the Plain Dealer that “the police will be ordered to forbid the display of red flags, ribbons or other emblems—that started the trouble Friday…Even the Socialists ought to know that the appearance of red would start a riot.”^[5] While it would be almost intuitively clear that a populace wrapped up in patriotic fervor after a war would react negatively to a flag construed as anti-American, the test case of the obsession with the red flag shows a strong psychic awareness of symbolism.  The loyalists reacted so viciously to what was ostensibly a peaceful march because symbols such as the red flag were viscerally evocative of controversial political ideals.

Now, if one were to impute the same appreciation of symbolic connotation that launched some into a vicious rage onto the marchers themselves, what kind of message might be interpreted?  Of course, there is the red flag, that symbol of internationalism and socialism.  But at the head of the march were American soldiers carrying “three American flags and three Socialist red flags,” one of which was a gift from the Ukrainian socialists.^[6] It was reported that the band played “Maryland, My Maryland,” “The Marseillaise,” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”^[7] One would struggle to build a more patriotic, but yet socialist, playlist of pre-1919 tunes: “Maryland,” a common battle hymn and the state song of Maryland sharing the same tune as the British Labour song “Red Flag,” would invoke a martial mood, but remains distinctly-American and labor-centric; “The Marseillaise” is the classic song of French republicanism; and “Stars and Stripes” is an incredibly “American” song, yet it heralded the beginning of the riots.

Through this combination of symbols — both red and American flags — socialists were expressing a notion of civic-nationalism that connected their political ideals with the idea of American nationhood founded upon political ideals.  In theories of nationalism, this conception of nationalism contrasts with the typical “blood and soil” nationalism of Europe and elsewhere, in which the historical continuity of a race in a geographic location bequeaths the power of “nationhood:” “Germany” is the combination of the German people as a biological concept and the physical land termed “Germany.”^[8] The United States, lacking such a blood and soil myth, has the myth of the American Revolution embodied in sacred texts like the Declaration of Independence.^[9] Quite certainly, the actual politics of the twentieth-century socialists differed from those of the Founding Fathers, but the political ideals were seen as compatible, if not interdependent in order to remain viable in modern industrial society.  Tracing the genesis of socialist tendencies in 1870s industrial strife, Nick Salvatore finds that this dynamic happened through the political and religious ideals of harmony: “With the emergence of an industrialized society, one that threatened the republican and religious foundations of the older culture, many workers saw in this concept of justice [as harmony] a stringent critique of the new order.” ^[10]  American civic-nationalism was the translation of the abstract ideals of the American foundation into an ideological background used to criticize the exploitative industrial conditions which ill-suited the United States as an idyllic Jeffersonian democracy.

The idea of American socialist civic-nationalism was present not only in the symbols of the May Day march and the vague ideals of nineteenth century American life, but also in the vocabulary of the riots’ central figures.  Eugene Debs was the very embodiment of this “Americanism-as-socialism” ideal.  In his defense speech in 1918, he invoked the figures of Washington, Adams, Patrick Henry, Thaddeus Stevens, and Christ, all heroes of post-Civil War Americana, and favorably compared them to the Bolsheviks, thereby accepting accusations that Debs was one as well. ^[11] Invoking Abraham Lincoln’s critique of President Polk’s war against Mexico in 1848 to defend his own “unpatriotic” war opposition,^[12] Debs crystallized the civic-nationalist critique of his times: “I believe in patriotism.  I have never uttered a word against the flag.  I love the flag as a symbol of freedom.  I object only when that flag is prostituted to base purposes, to sordid ends, by those who, in the name of patriotism, would keep the people in subjugation.”^[13] Further stressing his loyalty to American ideals, he added: “I believe in the Constitution of the United States.  Isn’t it strange that we socialists stand almost alone today in defending the Constitution of the United States?  The revolutionary fathers who had been oppressed under king rule understood that free speech and free press and the right of free assemblage by the people were the fundamental principles of democratic government.”^[14] Debs, as the moral center and fulcrum of the American socialist movement prior to its dissolution in the 1920’s, embodied the ideas that animated the immigrant citizens with a twin display of American and socialist flags.

Ruthenberg’s socialism, while certainly of a more intellectualized and Marx-derived variety than Debs’, also evinced this quintessentially American character.  In his depiction of Marx’s stages of history, Ruthenberg openly quoted Lincoln declaring that “no society…can remain in existence permanently, which is part slave and part free” to explain the necessary transition of historical stages.^[15] In addition, his strong adherence to the socialist tactic of political action — the belief that socialism will be attained through the ballot box — up until the state threw him in jail and Lenin showed a successful alternative, places Ruthenberg and the socialist movement as Americans who were assured of the justice of their political institutions until it would be naïve to continue doing so.  And more so than Debs, Ruthenberg was the rallying-point of a cosmopolitan city made of immigrants.  Ruthenberg’s marshalling of Cleveland’s diverse radical communities into a single radical wing expressed what can be called the reverse side of the American nativism: American foreignism.^[16] The creation of a party branch of America’s diverse foreigners in an American city mostly made of diverse foreigners is tautologically “American.”  Whereas Debs and his conveyance of American-socialism grew out of the classic American ideals, Ruthenberg’s organization of an ethnically-heterogeneous city around such ideals is the political enactment of civic-nationalism. ^[17]

Standing opposite to the socialist civic-nationalism is a type of American nationalism closer to the ethno-linguistic, “blood and soil” nationalism of Europe.  Of course, an actual “our ancestors, since time immemorial…” myth is impossible in the American context.  Given shape by the wartime measures, the loyalists and anti-socialists that broke up the May Day marchers framed their ideas of “the nation” mostly in the language of “Americanism” and a negative stance toward socialists.  Through this novel construction of an American identity, the conservatives engaged in a project of otherizing those foreigners who had always been a part of America.  This negative and deconstructive stance, directed towards a socialism that grew naturally out of classic American republican values, produced the scenario wherein Debs could legitimately exclaim, “Isn’t it strange that we socialists stand almost alone today in defending the Constitution of the United States?” ^[18]

Other than the simple demonization of the foreign-born socialist marchers, the newspapers reporting on the events serve as excellent conduits to track the ideological constructions of Americanism, as well as its debated status.  The May 4 edition of the Plain Dealer announced that in response to the May Day riots, a “Loyalty Parade” would be held in June by loyal laborers to show their patriotism.  Combined with this axis of simple loyalty, however, is the declared imminent necessity of Americanization:

In the “Americanization” series, Paul Bellamy, son of the famous Edward Bellamy, utopian writer and early socialist of a self-declared “nationalist” variety,^[20] laid out the problem:

Bellamy’s article is helpful not just in showing the well-known prejudice against the Eastern European, here dehumanized as an “importation,” but also for showing his confused handling of the American and Cleveland traditions.  As noted above, Cleveland had been anything but “thoroughly American” in the sense of being composed of pure Anglo-Saxon conservatives.  Bellamy was engaged in nationalist myth-construction which ignored social complexities — “the great war emphasized the absolute necessity of producing somehow, one people with one mind consecrated to the national task” — but even he admitted that the American traditions, which preserved an ethnic diversity he did not recognize, must also be abandoned: “The time honored American doctrine of ‘Let alone’ as applied to the immigrant has broken down.”^[22] Bellamy is just one of many who, throughout the course of the war and Red Scare, produced an ad hoc “blood and soil” nationalism which, in its confrontation with the socialist civic-nationalism, disparaged certain American traditions and ideals, attesting to its comparative novelty.