{"id":40,"date":"2022-01-31T21:13:36","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T21:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/?post_type=chapter&p=40"},"modified":"2022-03-11T19:32:53","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T19:32:53","slug":"the-local-context-the-crimson-midwest-red-ohio-and-reddest-cleveland","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/chapter\/the-local-context-the-crimson-midwest-red-ohio-and-reddest-cleveland\/","title":{"rendered":"The Local Context: The Crimson Midwest, Red Ohio, and Reddest Cleveland"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n\r\nIn 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\u2019s place in the party.\u00a0 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[footnote]Ronald Weiner and Carol Beal, \u201cThe Sixth City: Cleveland in Three Stages of Urbanization,\u201d in Thomas Campbell and Edward Miggins, eds. The Birth of Modern Cleveland 1865-1930<\/em> (Cleveland: Cleveland Historical Society, 1988), 27[\/footnote] and earned the moniker \u201cRuhr of America.\u201d[footnote]The moniker \u201cRuhr of America\u201d for the Ohio Valley has an as-of-yet unidentified origin.\u00a0 James Casto in Towboat on the Ohio (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995) claims that the term was invented by Kentucky federal Senator Thruston Morton in a 1957 speech on the Ohio River.\u00a0 However, as early as 1934 the Alabama newspaper Florence Times (Nov. 23, 1934) referred to the Tennessee Valley, after the development of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as a \u201cpossible \u2018Ruhr of America.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Later, the Milwaukee Journal<\/em> (Dec. 20, 1945), mentioning an economic development foundation in Youngstown, refers to the Ohio area as the \u201cRuhr of America\u201d and Youngstown as its center.\u00a0 Clearly, the term was used rather loosely and served as a claim of economic prestige long before Morton.[\/footnote] And like the German Ruhr, the Midwest was a hotbed of the country\u2019s socialist movement.[footnote]Werner Angress, \u201cWeimar Coalition and Ruhr Insurrection, March-April 1920: A Study of Government Policy.\u201d The Journal of Modern History<\/em> 29, 1 (1957): 1. ; Critchlow, Heartland, 9-10[\/footnote] The national railroad strike of 1877, settled only through violent militia mobilization, spread throughout the Midwest with flashpoints in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis.\u00a0 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.[footnote]The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History<\/em> (2009): John Llloyd, \u201cThe Strike Wave of 1877,\u201d 190[\/footnote] It was in Haymarket Square, Chicago, 1886, where the international worker\u2019s holiday itself was bombed into existence.[footnote]Philip Foner,\u00a0May Day: A Short History of the International Workers\u2019 Holiday<\/em>\u00a0(New York: International Publishers, 1986), 27[\/footnote] The Midwest also produced several notables of American socialism\u2019s national leadership (perhaps only matched per capita by the Pacific Northwest), most important Eugene Debs of Indiana.\u00a0 As Richard Judd recounts in great detail in Socialist Cities<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 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: \u201cWhile Ohio contained neither the greatest number of socialist victories nor the largest \u2018socialized\u2019 cities, gains there were the most representative of Socialist successes in urban politics.\u00a0 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.\u201d[footnote]Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 24[\/footnote] Most of these victories occurred in small mining or farm communities, those typical areas of Populism that the Socialists captured for themselves.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Though Ohio and the Midwest generally followed this trend, it is not representative of individual cases or Cleveland in particular.\u00a0 In the 1911 elections, Ohio Socialists won office in \u201c93 cities and towns\u201d with 17 new mayors from \u201ca wide spectrum of communities ranging from villages of a few hundred people to cities of forty thousand.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 73[\/footnote] The political character of these campaigns, rather than being radical, were actually quite reformist and similar to the programs proposed by the more \u2018bourgeois\u2019 Progressive party.\u00a0 A successful campaign platform in Martins Ferry, Ohio, included city \u201cdemocratization,\u201d cheaper utility rates, free textbooks, and \u201ceventually municipal ownership.\u201d\u00a0 Likewise, the Socialist mayor of Toronto, Ohio, Robert Murray, \u201ccampaigned to wipe out the village debt and reduce the tax rate.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 73[\/footnote] Radical socialists, these were not.\u00a0 Nonetheless, these victories were building the party\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0 The predominance of this \u201cpre-existing bourgeois reformism\u201d 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).[footnote]Ibid., 73-74.[\/footnote] The significant middle-class vote, interested in improving city maintenance and breaking-up political machines, relied on traditional parties to voice its discontent.\u00a0 The Socialists could garner the workers and get partial victories, but they also needed the shopkeeper and salesman to take an entire city.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe 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.[footnote]Ibid., 74, 88-89[\/footnote] In many cases, the deciding middle-class vote on the local-scale were swept by \u201cfusion tickets,\u201d single candidates appointed by a combination of Republicans, Democrats, or third-parties specifically meant to defeat the Socialist incumbent.[footnote]Ibid., 76[\/footnote] 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.\u00a0 However, while the state generally was having these successes, the Cleveland Socialists had none of their own.\u00a0 In Cleveland, a city dominated by local party machines run on ethnic lines, the Socialists had no easy way to enter the city council.\u00a0 Neither could they achieve success in the ballot for the mayor\u2019s office, since reform politics had dominated the competition between Republicans and Democrats since the administration of Tom Johnson beginning in 1901.\u00a0 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.[footnote]Ibid., 162-3[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nWhile this analysis focuses on Ruthenberg\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Notably, the Cleveland IWW was the home to the unknown, possibly Slovenian, illustrators \u201cNedeljkovich, Brashich, & Kuharich,\u201d who produced the famous American rendition of the \u201cPyramid of Capitalist System\u201d propaganda poster in 1911 (Figure 5; see Appendix).[footnote]N, B, & K are listed as the publishers in the bottom left of the poster in Figure 5[\/footnote] The same illustrators produced other political posters, which better evince an ideology that would fit Cleveland\u2019s suppression of effective Socialist political participation (Figures 6 and 7; see Appendix).\u00a0 It is important to note not only the critique of reformist policies, like Teddy Roosevelt-style trust-busting failing to go to the \u201croot\u201d of the problems of industrial woes, but also the utopic ideal of \u201cCo-operative Commonwealth,\u201d a term Ruthenberg also used in Growing<\/em>.[footnote]The history of the term \u201cCooperative Commonwealth\u201d in American radicalism is varied.\u00a0 The term accompanied the first introduction of Marx\u2019s ideas from Kapital<\/em> through Laurence Gronlund\u2019s Co-operative<\/em> Commonwealth<\/em> (1884), ultimately wrapped up in conservative, reformist politics.\u00a0 Debs is known to have read Gronlund, but such politics would be antithetical to the IWW and Ruthenberg is not known to have read him.\u00a0 It very likely represented one of those terms, though analytically suggesting anarcho-syndicalism, which remained vague enough for a broad-left description of the socialist utopia pursued by all branches of American radicalism[\/footnote]\u00a0One 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.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nLocal Cleveland\u2019s tactics during the pre-war years readily contrasted with those of Dayton.\u00a0 While the institution of scientific management techniques by cash register magnate John Patterson and organization of an Employer\u2019s Association under John Kirby suppressed union action in the Dayton industries, the political establishment and industrialists tolerated Socialist political action.\u00a0 The Socialists built their own political machine, adopted a \u201cmoderate program centered around municipal ownership\u201d, and \u201ccame within a hair\u2019s breadth [of electoral success] several times in the prewar years.\u201d[footnote]Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 162[\/footnote]Through a greater adherence to the strictures of liberal democracy, the Dayton Local came ever closer to victory, thereby softening the Socialist\u2019s radical end goals.\u00a0 For Cleveland, the reverse was true.\u00a0 Industrial action became the realm of meaningful improvement on worker\u2019s lives, while progressive figures like Tom L. Johnson and Newton D. Baker prevented Dayton-style socialist compromise a chance at municipal rule.[footnote]Ibid., 162-3[\/footnote]\u00a0The radicalization of Local Cleveland, and Ruthenberg as well, would come through the stymieing of possibly-successful political action:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n
Rather than stress the narrow and confusing points of contention between Socialists and reformers, the Cleveland Socialist party issued bolder, more abstract ideological declarations.\u00a0 They adopted the left-wing rationale for politics, fighting political battles not to win office but to instill a working-class spirit that would carry the movement to its ultimate goal: abolition of the capitalist system and the creation of the Cooperative Commonwealth.[footnote]Ibid.,163[\/footnote]<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nA perhaps more significant comparison to the Cleveland Socialists than Dayton are the highly successful Milwaukee Socialists at the same time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As the Wisconsin Historical Society puts it, the \u201cMilwaukee 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.\u201d[footnote]Wisconsin Historical Society: Turning Points in Wisconsin History,<\/em> \u201cMilwaukee Sewer Socialism.[\/footnote]\u00a0Thus, the Milwaukee Socialists attained offices \u2014 socialist Emil Seidel became a multi-term mayor and Victor Berger the first socialist Congressman \u2014 by becoming the<\/em> municipal reformers: \u201cMany professional people supported a Socialist mayor because he helped give Milwaukee a reputation as the best-governed city in the United States.\u201d[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote]\u00a0The Milwaukee Socialists would wind up on the right-wing of the Socialist Party\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nIn 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.\u00a0 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.[footnote]Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 165[\/footnote] Moderate socialist centers like Dayton and Milwaukee restricted their anti-war stance to basic issues like war inflation and food shortages.[footnote]Ibid., 167[\/footnote] 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.\u00a0 Regardless of Dayton and Milwaukee\u2019s reservations, the anti-war stance gave life to the Ohio and Cleveland left by increasing Ohio Socialist membership by fifty percent, doubling Local Cleveland\u2019s membership in the six months after the anti-war declaration, accruing to Ruthenberg\u2019s 1917 mayoral campaign one fourth of the total vote, and finally winning Cleveland city council seats.\u00a0 Those seats, however, were not to be held.\u00a0 Instructed to emulate the standard moderate role fulfilled by the Milwaukee Socialists, Socialist councilmen John Willert and Noah Mandelkorn were supposed to \u201cattend strictly to their civic duties\u201d to thwart the growing wartime oppression of radicals.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the rest of the council forced the socialists out by bring forward a measure supporting the war effort.\u00a0 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 \u201cunwritten law requiring support of patriotic measures.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 165-6[\/footnote]\u00a0Such anti-Socialist tactics predominated throughout Ohio and only served to further radicalize the Ohio Socialists in general and Local Cleveland in particular.\u00a0 As the Miami Valley Socialist<\/em> later put it in 1920 after the Red Scare repressions and collapse of the Socialist Party apparatus and municipal presence: \u201c[workingmen] scratch their heads and say \u2018what\u2019s the use?\u2019\u00a0 As soon as the workers do manage to elect somebody to office the plutes kick him out.\u201d[footnote]Miami Valley Socialist<\/em>, April 9, 1920; as quoted in Ibid., 169[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nIt was in this historical context of political action\u2019s constant failure \u2014 of failing to obtain enough votes or actually accomplishing anything in office \u2014 that Ohio and especially Cleveland was radicalized.\u00a0 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.[footnote]Ibid., 169[\/footnote]Revolutionary success in Russia, the Seattle general strike, and the New York Socialist Party\u2019s publication of the Left-Wing Manifesto \u201crepudiating \u2018reformist\u2019 measures and advocating revolutionary mass action\u201d pointed towards a tactical alternative to Local Cleveland\u2019s problems at the ballot box.[footnote]Ibid., 170[\/footnote]\u00a0Local Cleveland announced its support of the manifesto in the April 26, 1919 issue of Revolutionary Age<\/em>: \u201cIt is the mass action that will count in the future warfare against the capitalist state.\u201d[footnote]The Revolutionary Age<\/em>, April 26, 1919[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 171[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe May Day riots represent the apotheosis of a radicalization process in the rise and fall of the Ohio Socialist Party and Local Cleveland.\u00a0 Some parts of the state, like Dayton, resembled the \u201csewer socialism\u201d of Milwaukee, focusing on the reformist nature of municipal ownership and thereby filling the role of progressive reformers where no \u201cbourgeois\u201d party had.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The reason why Local Cleveland \u201caligned themselves with the Bolsheviki of Russia and the Spartaceans of Germany\u201d was not because there were many Germans and Russians in Cleveland.[footnote]Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919[\/footnote] From the view of any sort of leftist politics, a Clevelander had nothing to lose but their chains and a useless ballot.\u00a0 The May Day riots were a confirmation and statement of that radical program.\u00a0 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.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe impressive size of the May Day march, its place in Cleveland\u2019s political history, and the violent response to growing socialist power, also represent an exception to the historiographical consensus on Midwestern radicalism.\u00a0 Histories dealing with American radical \u201csuccess,\u201d particularly in the Midwest, tend to focus on and generalize the case of Milwaukee\u2019s electorally-successful \u201csewer socialism.\u201d\u00a0 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.[footnote]Critchlow, Heartland<\/em>, 7[\/footnote] However, the case of Local Cleveland and the leftist movement that grew in membership and popularity as it became more<\/em> radical, not less, completely contradicts this existing model.\u00a0 After the riots, i.e. after growing radicalism and conflict, Local Cleveland gained 335 new members, roughly 50% more<\/em> than the normal monthly rate, in May, 1919.[footnote]Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 171[\/footnote]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.\u00a0 A synthetic history of these differing cases, from Milwaukee to Cleveland, would have to focus on the processes which were capable of producing variegated<\/em> experiences throughout the Midwest, rather than simply generalizing the Milwaukee paradigm.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe May Day riots, however, were also the beginning of the end of Local Cleveland.\u00a0 In August, the party splintered: Ruthenberg brought a majority of the foreign language leagues and the party\u2019s assets into the Communist Party, Alfred Wagenknecht led most of the English-speaking contingent into John Reed\u2019s Communist Labor Party, and the Finnish and Jewish language federations would constitute the remaining husk of the Socialist Party in Cleveland.[footnote]Ibid., 172[\/footnote] The Ohio Socialist Party as well would split into obscurity over the course of the period from 1919 to 1924.[footnote]Ibid., 181[\/footnote] As a summation of this period, one can do little better than Max Hayes of the Cleveland Citizen<\/em> newspaper.\u00a0 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 \u201cabout as live a bunch of workers as you can find in any graveyard, politically speaking.\u201d[footnote]Cleveland Citizen<\/em>, July 31, 1920; as quoted in Judd, Socialist Cities, 173.[\/footnote]\u00a0From 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s most neglected section rejecting the political process and the city\u2019s continued rejection in kind.\r\n\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"
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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\u2019s place in the party.\u00a0 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]<\/sup><\/a> and earned the moniker \u201cRuhr of America.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a> And like the German Ruhr, the Midwest was a hotbed of the country\u2019s socialist movement.[3]<\/sup><\/a> The national railroad strike of 1877, settled only through violent militia mobilization, spread throughout the Midwest with flashpoints in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis.\u00a0 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]<\/sup><\/a> It was in Haymarket Square, Chicago, 1886, where the international worker\u2019s holiday itself was bombed into existence.[5]<\/sup><\/a> The Midwest also produced several notables of American socialism\u2019s national leadership (perhaps only matched per capita by the Pacific Northwest), most important Eugene Debs of Indiana.\u00a0 As Richard Judd recounts in great detail in Socialist Cities<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 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: \u201cWhile Ohio contained neither the greatest number of socialist victories nor the largest \u2018socialized\u2019 cities, gains there were the most representative of Socialist successes in urban politics.\u00a0 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.\u201d[6]<\/sup><\/a> Most of these victories occurred in small mining or farm communities, those typical areas of Populism that the Socialists captured for themselves.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Though Ohio and the Midwest generally followed this trend, it is not representative of individual cases or Cleveland in particular.\u00a0 In the 1911 elections, Ohio Socialists won office in \u201c93 cities and towns\u201d with 17 new mayors from \u201ca wide spectrum of communities ranging from villages of a few hundred people to cities of forty thousand.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/a> The political character of these campaigns, rather than being radical, were actually quite reformist and similar to the programs proposed by the more \u2018bourgeois\u2019 Progressive party.\u00a0 A successful campaign platform in Martins Ferry, Ohio, included city \u201cdemocratization,\u201d cheaper utility rates, free textbooks, and \u201ceventually municipal ownership.\u201d\u00a0 Likewise, the Socialist mayor of Toronto, Ohio, Robert Murray, \u201ccampaigned to wipe out the village debt and reduce the tax rate.\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/a> Radical socialists, these were not.\u00a0 Nonetheless, these victories were building the party\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0 The predominance of this \u201cpre-existing bourgeois reformism\u201d 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]<\/sup><\/a> The significant middle-class vote, interested in improving city maintenance and breaking-up political machines, relied on traditional parties to voice its discontent.\u00a0 The Socialists could garner the workers and get partial victories, but they also needed the shopkeeper and salesman to take an entire city.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

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]<\/sup><\/a> In many cases, the deciding middle-class vote on the local-scale were swept by \u201cfusion tickets,\u201d single candidates appointed by a combination of Republicans, Democrats, or third-parties specifically meant to defeat the Socialist incumbent.[11]<\/sup><\/a> 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.\u00a0 However, while the state generally was having these successes, the Cleveland Socialists had none of their own.\u00a0 In Cleveland, a city dominated by local party machines run on ethnic lines, the Socialists had no easy way to enter the city council.\u00a0 Neither could they achieve success in the ballot for the mayor\u2019s office, since reform politics had dominated the competition between Republicans and Democrats since the administration of Tom Johnson beginning in 1901.\u00a0 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]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

While this analysis focuses on Ruthenberg\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Notably, the Cleveland IWW was the home to the unknown, possibly Slovenian, illustrators \u201cNedeljkovich, Brashich, & Kuharich,\u201d who produced the famous American rendition of the \u201cPyramid of Capitalist System\u201d propaganda poster in 1911 (Figure 5; see Appendix).[13]<\/sup><\/a> The same illustrators produced other political posters, which better evince an ideology that would fit Cleveland\u2019s suppression of effective Socialist political participation (Figures 6 and 7; see Appendix).\u00a0 It is important to note not only the critique of reformist policies, like Teddy Roosevelt-style trust-busting failing to go to the \u201croot\u201d of the problems of industrial woes, but also the utopic ideal of \u201cCo-operative Commonwealth,\u201d a term Ruthenberg also used in Growing<\/em>.[14]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0One 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Local Cleveland\u2019s tactics during the pre-war years readily contrasted with those of Dayton.\u00a0 While the institution of scientific management techniques by cash register magnate John Patterson and organization of an Employer\u2019s Association under John Kirby suppressed union action in the Dayton industries, the political establishment and industrialists tolerated Socialist political action.\u00a0 The Socialists built their own political machine, adopted a \u201cmoderate program centered around municipal ownership\u201d, and \u201ccame within a hair\u2019s breadth [of electoral success] several times in the prewar years.\u201d[15]<\/sup><\/a>Through a greater adherence to the strictures of liberal democracy, the Dayton Local came ever closer to victory, thereby softening the Socialist\u2019s radical end goals.\u00a0 For Cleveland, the reverse was true.\u00a0 Industrial action became the realm of meaningful improvement on worker\u2019s lives, while progressive figures like Tom L. Johnson and Newton D. Baker prevented Dayton-style socialist compromise a chance at municipal rule.[16]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0The radicalization of Local Cleveland, and Ruthenberg as well, would come through the stymieing of possibly-successful political action:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
Rather than stress the narrow and confusing points of contention between Socialists and reformers, the Cleveland Socialist party issued bolder, more abstract ideological declarations.\u00a0 They adopted the left-wing rationale for politics, fighting political battles not to win office but to instill a working-class spirit that would carry the movement to its ultimate goal: abolition of the capitalist system and the creation of the Cooperative Commonwealth.[17]<\/sup><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

A perhaps more significant comparison to the Cleveland Socialists than Dayton are the highly successful Milwaukee Socialists at the same time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As the Wisconsin Historical Society puts it, the \u201cMilwaukee 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.\u201d[18]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Thus, the Milwaukee Socialists attained offices \u2014 socialist Emil Seidel became a multi-term mayor and Victor Berger the first socialist Congressman \u2014 by becoming the<\/em> municipal reformers: \u201cMany professional people supported a Socialist mayor because he helped give Milwaukee a reputation as the best-governed city in the United States.\u201d[19]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0The Milwaukee Socialists would wind up on the right-wing of the Socialist Party\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

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.\u00a0 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]<\/sup><\/a> Moderate socialist centers like Dayton and Milwaukee restricted their anti-war stance to basic issues like war inflation and food shortages.[21]<\/sup><\/a> 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.\u00a0 Regardless of Dayton and Milwaukee\u2019s reservations, the anti-war stance gave life to the Ohio and Cleveland left by increasing Ohio Socialist membership by fifty percent, doubling Local Cleveland\u2019s membership in the six months after the anti-war declaration, accruing to Ruthenberg\u2019s 1917 mayoral campaign one fourth of the total vote, and finally winning Cleveland city council seats.\u00a0 Those seats, however, were not to be held.\u00a0 Instructed to emulate the standard moderate role fulfilled by the Milwaukee Socialists, Socialist councilmen John Willert and Noah Mandelkorn were supposed to \u201cattend strictly to their civic duties\u201d to thwart the growing wartime oppression of radicals.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the rest of the council forced the socialists out by bring forward a measure supporting the war effort.\u00a0 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 \u201cunwritten law requiring support of patriotic measures.\u201d[22]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Such anti-Socialist tactics predominated throughout Ohio and only served to further radicalize the Ohio Socialists in general and Local Cleveland in particular.\u00a0 As the Miami Valley Socialist<\/em> later put it in 1920 after the Red Scare repressions and collapse of the Socialist Party apparatus and municipal presence: \u201c[workingmen] scratch their heads and say \u2018what\u2019s the use?\u2019\u00a0 As soon as the workers do manage to elect somebody to office the plutes kick him out.\u201d[23]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

It was in this historical context of political action\u2019s constant failure \u2014 of failing to obtain enough votes or actually accomplishing anything in office \u2014 that Ohio and especially Cleveland was radicalized.\u00a0 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]<\/sup><\/a>Revolutionary success in Russia, the Seattle general strike, and the New York Socialist Party\u2019s publication of the Left-Wing Manifesto \u201crepudiating \u2018reformist\u2019 measures and advocating revolutionary mass action\u201d pointed towards a tactical alternative to Local Cleveland\u2019s problems at the ballot box.[25]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Local Cleveland announced its support of the manifesto in the April 26, 1919 issue of Revolutionary Age<\/em>: \u201cIt is the mass action that will count in the future warfare against the capitalist state.\u201d[26]<\/sup><\/a> 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]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The May Day riots represent the apotheosis of a radicalization process in the rise and fall of the Ohio Socialist Party and Local Cleveland.\u00a0 Some parts of the state, like Dayton, resembled the \u201csewer socialism\u201d of Milwaukee, focusing on the reformist nature of municipal ownership and thereby filling the role of progressive reformers where no \u201cbourgeois\u201d party had.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The reason why Local Cleveland \u201caligned themselves with the Bolsheviki of Russia and the Spartaceans of Germany\u201d was not because there were many Germans and Russians in Cleveland.[28]<\/sup><\/a> From the view of any sort of leftist politics, a Clevelander had nothing to lose but their chains and a useless ballot.\u00a0 The May Day riots were a confirmation and statement of that radical program.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The impressive size of the May Day march, its place in Cleveland\u2019s political history, and the violent response to growing socialist power, also represent an exception to the historiographical consensus on Midwestern radicalism.\u00a0 Histories dealing with American radical \u201csuccess,\u201d particularly in the Midwest, tend to focus on and generalize the case of Milwaukee\u2019s electorally-successful \u201csewer socialism.\u201d\u00a0 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]<\/sup><\/a> However, the case of Local Cleveland and the leftist movement that grew in membership and popularity as it became more<\/em> radical, not less, completely contradicts this existing model.\u00a0 After the riots, i.e. after growing radicalism and conflict, Local Cleveland gained 335 new members, roughly 50% more<\/em> than the normal monthly rate, in May, 1919.[30]<\/sup><\/a>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.\u00a0 A synthetic history of these differing cases, from Milwaukee to Cleveland, would have to focus on the processes which were capable of producing variegated<\/em> experiences throughout the Midwest, rather than simply generalizing the Milwaukee paradigm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The May Day riots, however, were also the beginning of the end of Local Cleveland.\u00a0 In August, the party splintered: Ruthenberg brought a majority of the foreign language leagues and the party\u2019s assets into the Communist Party, Alfred Wagenknecht led most of the English-speaking contingent into John Reed\u2019s Communist Labor Party, and the Finnish and Jewish language federations would constitute the remaining husk of the Socialist Party in Cleveland.[31]<\/sup><\/a> The Ohio Socialist Party as well would split into obscurity over the course of the period from 1919 to 1924.[32]<\/sup><\/a> As a summation of this period, one can do little better than Max Hayes of the Cleveland Citizen<\/em> newspaper.\u00a0 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 \u201cabout as live a bunch of workers as you can find in any graveyard, politically speaking.\u201d[33]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0From 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s most neglected section rejecting the political process and the city\u2019s continued rejection in kind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

  1. Ronald Weiner and Carol Beal, \u201cThe Sixth City: Cleveland in Three Stages of Urbanization,\u201d in Thomas Campbell and Edward Miggins, eds. The Birth of Modern Cleveland 1865-1930<\/em> (Cleveland: Cleveland Historical Society, 1988), 27 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  2. The moniker \u201cRuhr of America\u201d for the Ohio Valley has an as-of-yet unidentified origin.\u00a0 James Casto in Towboat on the Ohio (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995) claims that the term was invented by Kentucky federal Senator Thruston Morton in a 1957 speech on the Ohio River.\u00a0 However, as early as 1934 the Alabama newspaper Florence Times (Nov. 23, 1934) referred to the Tennessee Valley, after the development of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as a \u201cpossible \u2018Ruhr of America.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Later, the Milwaukee Journal<\/em> (Dec. 20, 1945), mentioning an economic development foundation in Youngstown, refers to the Ohio area as the \u201cRuhr of America\u201d and Youngstown as its center.\u00a0 Clearly, the term was used rather loosely and served as a claim of economic prestige long before Morton. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  3. Werner Angress, \u201cWeimar Coalition and Ruhr Insurrection, March-April 1920: A Study of Government Policy.\u201d The Journal of Modern History<\/em> 29, 1 (1957): 1. ; Critchlow, Heartland, 9-10 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  4. The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History<\/em> (2009): John Llloyd, \u201cThe Strike Wave of 1877,\u201d 190 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  5. Philip Foner,\u00a0May Day: A Short History of the International Workers\u2019 Holiday<\/em>\u00a0(New York: International Publishers, 1986), 27 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  6. Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 24 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  7. Ibid., 73 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  8. Ibid., 73 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  9. Ibid., 73-74. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  10. Ibid., 74, 88-89 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  11. Ibid., 76 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  12. Ibid., 162-3 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  13. N, B, & K are listed as the publishers in the bottom left of the poster in Figure 5 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  14. The history of the term \u201cCooperative Commonwealth\u201d in American radicalism is varied.\u00a0 The term accompanied the first introduction of Marx\u2019s ideas from Kapital<\/em> through Laurence Gronlund\u2019s Co-operative<\/em> Commonwealth<\/em> (1884), ultimately wrapped up in conservative, reformist politics.\u00a0 Debs is known to have read Gronlund, but such politics would be antithetical to the IWW and Ruthenberg is not known to have read him.\u00a0 It very likely represented one of those terms, though analytically suggesting anarcho-syndicalism, which remained vague enough for a broad-left description of the socialist utopia pursued by all branches of American radicalism ↵<\/a><\/li>
  15. Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 162 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  16. Ibid., 162-3 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  17. Ibid.,163 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  18. Wisconsin Historical Society: Turning Points in Wisconsin History,<\/em> \u201cMilwaukee Sewer Socialism. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  19. Ibid. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  20. Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 165 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  21. Ibid., 167 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  22. Ibid., 165-6 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  23. Miami Valley Socialist<\/em>, April 9, 1920; as quoted in Ibid., 169 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  24. Ibid., 169 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  25. Ibid., 170 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  26. The Revolutionary Age<\/em>, April 26, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  27. Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 171 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  28. Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  29. Critchlow, Heartland<\/em>, 7 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  30. Judd, Socialist Cities<\/em>, 171 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  31. Ibid., 172 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  32. Ibid., 181 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  33. Cleveland Citizen<\/em>, July 31, 1920; as quoted in Judd, Socialist Cities, 173. ↵<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"author":3,"menu_order":3,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-40","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/40\/revisions\/153"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/40\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}