Introduction

May 1, 1919 in Cleveland, Ohio, seemed like any other day.  The weather was clear and the city, like much of the world, was getting accustomed to peace rather than war.  However, the day would be anything but peaceful — as one reporter later put it, the day was characterized by “mounted police at the gallop wielding truncheons on the heads of Bolsheviki, citizens and soldiers tearing red flags and trampling them in the mud, [and] tanks from the western battle front charging crowds in the front of the statue of Tom Johnson.”[1] An American city from the “heartland” had become the scene of a large, politically-inflected street battle, an event commonly associated with post-war Germany in this era.  This event, the Cleveland May Day riots of 1919, offers a historical scene which reveals cross-ethnic solidarity, the beginnings of modern veteran culture, the radicalization of a city, and an ignored tradition of civic-nationalism, all processes which defined one of America’s largest cities during a critical period in the “American Century.”   

The days and months leading up to May Day, 1919 in Cleveland were anything but calm.  American entry into World War I and the following mobilization introduced patriotic fervor and suppression of political and pacifist dissent, most notably through the Espionage and Sedition Acts.  These new laws criminalized, among other activities, anti-war speech as a nationally-subversive action.  While these restrictions would not be a problem for the ardent patriot who followed Woodrow Wilson’s claim that the United States made World War I into a war for democracy and against tyranny; such laws were utterly problematic for the confirmed isolationist, pacifist, or socialist.  Just as America became involved in the war, Russia retreated from it, first after the February Revolution, then definitively after the October Revolution and the Bolshevik policy of an immediate end to Russian involvement.  The Bolshevik Revolution, the first major seizure of political power by radical leftists since the Paris Commune of 1871, had electrified the international left.  It was soon followed by leftist revolutions in Hungary and Bavaria, which took the Russian cue in naming their form of government “Soviets/councils.”[2] By May of 1919, the Bolsheviks had established a firm grasp on many parts of Russia, though they were still engaged in a brutal war against Russian counter-revolutionaries.  Constant news coverage on the expansion of the revolution appeared side by side with coverage of the ongoing Paris Peace Conference that would ultimately produce the Treaty of Versailles. 

While President Woodrow Wilson was in Paris trying to forge an equitable peace settlement, the United States, like many other nations, was in the midst of economic and social upheaval.  Economic troubles, low wages, and shortages were quietly suffered during the war by “patriots” and protested by many anti-war liberals and leftists.  With the war at an end, the conflicts endemic to industrial society erupted again.  In April, a vast anarchist letter-bomb conspiracy revealed itself, which targeted, but failed to kill, a swath of anti-radical and anti-immigrant public figures, including federal officials like Attorney General A. M. Palmer, the governor of Mississippi, the mayors of Seattle and New York, and the businessmen J. D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan Jr.[3]The nation sank into a state of terror, and a similar bomb plot occurred in June that year.  The Seattle general strike, which lasted from February 6 through 11, also entered the forefront of the national consciousness.  Initiated by radical unions associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for a modest wage increase, even conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions joined in a sympathy strike that effectively shut down the city for a quiet week, during which the conservative press and mayor Ole Hanson feared a Bolshevik revolution was underway in the Pacific Northwest.[4] As Hanson later recalled:

The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact…The intent, openly and covertly announced, was for the overthrow of the industrial system; here first, then everywhere…True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn’t need violence. The general strike, as practiced in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed, it must suspend everything; stop the entire life stream of a community…That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt-no matter how achieved.[5]

The strike quickly fell apart, mostly on account of the AFL and Teamster unions capitulating to pressure from the national leadership and local fears that the state and federal troops called out to prevent a suspected revolution would inevitably turn violently against the striking workers.[6] Revolution or not, Ole Hanson became a self-proclaimed American hero, subsequently quitting his office as mayor to go on the speaking circuit to warn his fellow citizens of the dangers of the American “Bolsheviki.”[7] This counter-revolutionary fame would lead him to take part in the traveling Victory Bond campaign, which continued to raise funds to supply America’s still partially-mobilized draft army.  Thus, Ole Hanson became one of the main attractions (another was an army tank from the Western Front) of a Victory Bond campaign in Cleveland which was promoted in advertisements in all the city’s major newspapers on May 1.[8] 

For their celebration of the first of May, otherwise known as International Workers’ Day, various left-wing groups from Cleveland planned to march through the city, led by frequent mayoral candidate and head of the Cleveland branch of the Socialist Party, Charles Ruthenberg.[9] The Socialists planned four parades, which would meet at the socialist meeting hall, Acme Hall, then march together to Public Square for speeches, and then dissemble for more festivities later that evening[10]. Come the morning of May 1, everything had proceeded smoothly.  An estimated 30,000 marchers had gathered at Acme Hall and begun the march to the city’s center[11].  Bearing flags and bedazzled in red pennants and ribbons, workers from various Socialist, IWW,[12] and AFL[13] unions and Great War veterans who were there to announce their anti-capitalist politics, protest the ongoing American expedition into Civil War Siberia, and demand the release of Eugene V. Debs, Socialist icon and victim of government suppression of anti-war speech.[14] 

While planned as a peaceful demonstration, there were concerns about possible trouble.  As the New York Times would later recall, “two machine-gun companies, equipped with motor trucks” were stationed outside the city “in the event the police proved unable to cope with [May Day].”[15] Police were on hand to maintain the peace; regardless, conflict arose.  Fights broke out before all of the parade column had reached Public Square.  As one part of the column passed by, a uniformed soldier who had been watching the parade approached another uniformed soldier who was marching with a red flag and attempted to take the flag.  Allies of each and the police came to break the small struggle, but it expanded into a larger brawl.  A massive fight developed between the “Bolsheviki” marchers and the, as the Cleveland Press referred to them, “loyalist” citizens, veterans, and policemen.[16]Pitched battles then spread across the city.  Fighting erupted at Public Square, where a public stand previously used by the Victory Bond campaign days earlier was commandeered by Ruthenberg and his followers.  Almost immediately, soldiers and citizens assaulted them, demanding the destruction of red flags.[17] As part of its efforts to clear out the mobs of people, the police mobilized police trucks, cars, and even the Victory Bond tank.[18] The results of the violence were one-sided, with just over a hundred socialists, including Ruthenberg, arrested (no “loyalists” were arrested), two socialists killed, many people wounded, and the Socialist headquarters at Acme Hall ransacked.[19]

The Cleveland May Day riots, one of the more dramatic and violent events in the United States during the globally tumultuous year of 1919, opens many questions about the city and the nation during that period.  Possible inquiries extend from broad questions of political symbolism to more detailed issues relating to individual identity and intent.  While the narrative of the riot is fairly well documented, the socialists of Cleveland who participated in it, along with issues of personal motivation, remain historical cyphers.

Cleveland was one of the leading American cities in this era, yet conflicting reports from the time implied that Cleveland was either a thoroughly “American” city, or a home to a set of foreign-born revolutionaries eager and immediately able to install a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat.  This paper probes this dichotomy of historical image by examining four different “contexts” relating to the city, the riots, and their participants.  The first is the identity of the marchers, or “Red Rioters,” and how this identity fits into different conceptions of Cleveland, American or alien, in the early twentieth century.  The second is the split image of the soldier or veteran during the immediate post-war era, an issue prompted by the fact that it was soldiers who acted as the vanguard in attacking a group of protestors that also included men in uniform.  The third is the place of the riots in the overall political history of the Socialist Party in particular and the leftist movement in general in Cleveland, as well as Cleveland’s relation to the movement throughout Ohio and the Midwest.  The final context is the nature of the ideology embodied in the march.  Rather than an expression of Bolshevism, the May Day marchers and their leftist movement adhered to a sort of American-socialist civic-nationalism, in contradistinction to a competing concept of a “blood and soil” nationalism that developed in the course of the Great War and Red Scare.  While the Cleveland May Day riots are admittedly only a single event in American history, it has links to larger national and international questions, particularly those that relate to words and labels such as radical, patriot, alien, and American.  When Ole Hanson, Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party, the Victory Bond campaign, tanks, red flags, and the immigrant and radical heritages of Cleveland, the Midwest, and the United States came together on May 1, 1919, the mixture proved to be both volatile and of more than local historical consequence.

  1. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 5, 1919. ↵
  2. Eliza Ablovatski, “The 1919 Central European revolutions and the Judeo-Bolshevik myth,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 17, 3 (2010): 474. ↵
  3. Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1919. ↵
  4. Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books 1972), 111. ↵
  5. Ibid., 111. ↵
  6. Ibid., 113-4 ↵
  7. Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 65-66 . ↵
  8. Cleveland Press, May 6, 1919 ↵
  9. Stephen Millett, “Charles E. Ruthenberg: The Development of an American Communist, 1909-1927,” Ohio History Journal, 81 (1972): 197 ↵
  10. Charles Ruthenberg, “Cleveland May Day Demonstration,” Revolutionary Age, May 10, 1919. ↵
  11. The most conservative estimate for the parade’s size is 5,000 (see: Millet, 202) and the most liberal is Ruthenberg’s rough 50,000 people (see: Revolutionary Age, May 10, 1919), with several newspapers estimating somewhere between these two numbers, from about 10,000 or 20,000. As is noted elsewhere in this paper, even the Russian language branch of the Socialist Party exceeded 5,000, so Millett’s conservative estimate appears false. Given that Ruthenberg has every reason to inflate the number, this author has chosen to take the average at around 30,000. Also accounting for the fact, cited below, that police arrested many bystanders by accident once the riots started, it seems impossible to ever get a truly accurate estimate from the contemporary historical accounts, because they had trouble differentiating bystanders from socialists. ↵
  12. The IWW, or International Workers of the World, a union confederation, advocated a strain of radical socialism termed “anarcho-syndicalism,” which envisions the tactical transition beyond capitalism to necessarily come from direct action by workers in the workplace.  By organizing every type of worker in every industry, unions pave the way for a new type of society centered on the democratic control of factories and shops by workers, organized on the macro level by groups like the IWW as the “One Big Union.”  Their most powerful weapon was the general strike of its various workers, as seen in Seattle 1919.  Also present at the May Day riots were Daniel DeLeon’s WIIU, or Workers' International Industrial Union, a splinter of the IWW who supported some measure of political participation in the IWW platform ↵
  13. The AFL, or American Federation of Labor, another union confederation, was politically eclectic, though nationally conservative under its long term leader Samuel Gompers from 1886 to 1924. A much larger organization than the IWW or Socialist Party, many debates by Socialists centered on the issue as to whether to work with, within, or against a “pro-business” union that coordinated with the U.S. government during World War I. Due to its size, one could likely find the most “patriotic” and the most radical unions in a region to both participate in the AFL. ↵
  14. Charles Ruthenberg, “Cleveland May Day Demonstration,” Revolutionary Age, May 10, 1919 ↵
  15. The New York Times, May 3, 1919 ↵
  16. Cleveland Press, May 2, 1919 ↵
  17. Revolutionary Age, May 10, 1919 ↵
  18. Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 2, 1919 ↵
  19. Revolutionary Age, May 10, 1919 ↵

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"Until Victory is Achieved" by Emerson Bodde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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