{"id":42,"date":"2022-01-31T21:14:12","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T21:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/?post_type=chapter&p=42"},"modified":"2022-03-25T19:06:04","modified_gmt":"2022-03-25T19:06:04","slug":"the-national-context-socialism-as-civic-nationalism-loyalism-as-ethno-nationalism","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/chapter\/the-national-context-socialism-as-civic-nationalism-loyalism-as-ethno-nationalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The National Context: Socialism as Civic-Nationalism; Loyalism as Ethno-Nationalism"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n\r\nWhen 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.[footnote]For work on the importance of political symbolism, see the many works of Murray Edelman.\u00a0 As he says in one article: \u201cIt is language about political events and developments that people experience; even events that are close by take their meaning from the language used to depict them. So political language is political reality; there is no\u00a0 other so far as the meaning of events to actor and spectators is concerned.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0Murray Edelman. \u201cPolitical Language and Political Reality\u201d. American Political Science Association<\/em> 18, 1 (1985): 10[\/footnote] Importantly, notions of nationalism and radical socialism are communicated through how one presents or reacts to a political symbol.\u00a0 To conservatives and radicals, a red flag was much more than just a flag.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The most pertinent binary for the May Day riots and the general case of socialism in America was internationalism and nationalism.\u00a0 Those who attacked the marchers were \u2018loyalists\u2019 and \u2018100 percent American,\u2019 while the socialists were foreigners or \u2018internationalists.\u2019\u00a0 Looking back, we can easily discard loyalist epithets for socialists like \u201cBismarckians\u201d or \u201cpro-German,\u201d but it is harder to dismiss the idea that socialism was something international, European, and if not un-American then at least non-American.\u00a0 After all, a common trope of American socialist commentary and historiography is \u201cWhy didn\u2019t socialism happen here?\u201d\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nContrary 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.\u00a0 Ultimately, the consternation over red flags by conservative Americans was the flip side to this interpretation.\u00a0 While socialists were developing a sort of socialist civic-nationalism, the conservatives contested it with an alternative militant ethno-nationalism.\u00a0 This argument is a revision on Gary Gerstle\u2019s assertion in American Crucible<\/em> that presents American history as a struggle between American civic- and ethno-nationalism.\u00a0 While this paper reads this same dichotomy into twentieth-century American history, Gerstle focuses exclusively on the civic-nationalism of liberals and mainstream politics.\u00a0 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<\/em> was a type of civic-nationalism.[footnote]Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 83[\/footnote]\u00a0And 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.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nSo, what were the symbols which the socialists used to interpret for themselves a distinctly American socialism?\u00a0 Given that the riots began as a march, the socialist symbols used during their International Workers\u2019 Day should be examined first.\u00a0 The first important symbol is of course the red flag, which was the source of the brawls that ignited the riots.\u00a0 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\u2019 and Sailors\u2019 Monument.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Cleveland Press<\/em> declared: \u201cThe red flag was their symbol of revolution, terrorism, disorder, anarchy, and chaos.\u00a0 It expressed a hate of all established institutions and a determination to overthrow the United States\u2026The public against which the threat was made recognized the red flag for what it is.\u201d[footnote]Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919[\/footnote]And as the same paper delighted in concluding its coverage: \u201cBits of red flags which caused the riots littered the gutters of the downtown section all evening.\u00a0 Bolsheviki, who had started out to demonstrate their power had lost all stomach for that.\u00a0 They had preached disorder, but the taste they got of its practice was enough.\u00a0 So far was known there was not a red flag flying in all Cleveland one hour after the riots started.\u201d\u00a0[footnote]Ibid[\/footnote] After the event, Police Chief Frank Smith told the Plain Dealer<\/em> that \u201cthe police will be ordered to forbid the display of red flags, ribbons or other emblems\u2014that started the trouble Friday\u2026Even the Socialists ought to know that the appearance of red would start a riot.\u201d[footnote]Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 3, 1919[\/footnote] 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.\u00a0 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.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nNow, 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?\u00a0 Of course, there is the red flag, that symbol of internationalism and socialism.\u00a0 But at the head of the march were American soldiers carrying \u201cthree American flags and three Socialist red flags,\u201d one of which was a gift from the Ukrainian socialists.[footnote]Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 2, 1919[\/footnote] It was reported that the band played \u201cMaryland, My Maryland,\u201d \u201cThe Marseillaise,\u201d and \u201cThe Stars and Stripes Forever.\u201d[footnote]Ibid[\/footnote]\u00a0One would struggle to build a more patriotic, but yet socialist, playlist of pre-1919 tunes: \u201cMaryland,\u201d a common battle hymn and the state song of Maryland sharing the same tune as the British Labour song \u201cRed Flag,\u201d would invoke a martial mood, but remains distinctly-American and labor-centric; \u201cThe Marseillaise\u201d is the classic song of French republicanism; and \u201cStars and Stripes\u201d is an incredibly \u201cAmerican\u201d song, yet it heralded the beginning of the riots.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThrough this combination of symbols \u2014 both red and American flags \u2014 socialists were expressing a notion of civic-nationalism that connected their political ideals with the idea of American nationhood founded upon political ideals.\u00a0 In theories of nationalism, this conception of nationalism contrasts with the typical \u201cblood and soil\u201d nationalism of Europe and elsewhere, in which the historical continuity of a race in a geographic location bequeaths the power of \u201cnationhood:\u201d \u201cGermany\u201d is the combination of the German people as a biological concept and the physical land termed \u201cGermany.\u201d[footnote]Fulbrook, Germany<\/em>, 311[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Gerstle, Crucible<\/em>, 4.[\/footnote] 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.\u00a0 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: \u201cWith 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.\u201d\u00a0[footnote]Salvatore, Eugene Debs<\/em>, 25[\/footnote] \u00a0American 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.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe 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\u2019 central figures.\u00a0 Eugene Debs was the very embodiment of this \u201cAmericanism-as-socialism\u201d ideal.\u00a0 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.\u00a0[footnote]Eugene Debs\u2019s Defense Speech, 27-31, in David Karsner, Debs: His Authorized Life and Letters<\/em> (New York: Boni and Liveright Publishers, 1919), 14-58[\/footnote] Invoking Abraham Lincoln\u2019s critique of President Polk\u2019s war against Mexico in 1848 to defend his own \u201cunpatriotic\u201d war opposition,[footnote]Ibid., 34[\/footnote] Debs crystallized the civic-nationalist critique of his times: \u201cI believe in patriotism.\u00a0 I have never uttered a word against the flag.\u00a0 I love the flag as a symbol of freedom.\u00a0 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.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 32[\/footnote] Further stressing his loyalty to American ideals, he added: \u201cI believe in the Constitution of the United States.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it strange that we socialists stand almost alone today in defending the Constitution of the United States?\u00a0 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.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 35[\/footnote] Debs, as the moral center and fulcrum of the American socialist movement prior to its dissolution in the 1920\u2019s, embodied the ideas that animated the immigrant citizens with a twin display of American and socialist flags.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nRuthenberg\u2019s socialism, while certainly of a more intellectualized and Marx-derived variety than Debs\u2019, also evinced this quintessentially American character.\u00a0 In his depiction of Marx\u2019s stages of history, Ruthenberg openly quoted Lincoln declaring that \u201cno society\u2026can remain in existence permanently, which is part slave and part free\u201d to explain the necessary transition of historical stages.[footnote]Ruthenberg, Growing<\/em>, 10-11[\/footnote] In addition, his strong adherence to the socialist tactic of political action \u2014 the belief that socialism will be attained through the ballot box \u2014 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 na\u00efve to continue doing so.\u00a0 And more so than Debs, Ruthenberg was the rallying-point of a cosmopolitan city made of immigrants.\u00a0 Ruthenberg\u2019s marshalling of Cleveland\u2019s diverse radical communities into a single radical wing expressed what can be called the reverse side of the American nativism: American foreignism.[footnote]\u201cAmerican foreignism,\u201d my own term, is chosen for its oxymoronic meaning.\u00a0 Same as Bellamy, cited below, notes the classic American policy of \u201clet alone,\u201d American foreignism is a willing embrace of the foreign into collective identity recognized as particular.\u00a0 In other words, \u201cAmerica\u201d conveyed as an ideal can accommodate the foreign, where the foreign is not foreign ideals but merely foreign cultural practices, languages, etc.\u00a0 This is in lieu of using the term \u201cAmerican internationalism\u201d because internationalism is vague enough to allow for a particular American identity to stand separate of other cultures; an ethno-chauvinist can be internationalist enough to help his global neighbors so they do not intrude upon his national territory.\u00a0 An \u201cAmerican foreignist\u201d would accept all foreign peoples into the national community, when that community is defined by adherence to a common democratic ideal.[\/footnote] The creation of a party branch of America\u2019s diverse foreigners in an American city mostly made of diverse foreigners is tautologically \u201cAmerican.\u201d\u00a0 Whereas Debs and his conveyance of American-socialism grew out of the classic American ideals, Ruthenberg\u2019s organization of an ethnically-heterogeneous city around such ideals is the political enactment of civic-nationalism.\u00a0[footnote]Cleveland may even be more exceptional in this regard than other possible contemporary examples.\u00a0 In 1919, Cleveland was only just beginning to receive African-American migration from the South into the industrial north to form a sizeable minority in the city.\u00a0 Not yet a presence in industrial labor, African Americans were a source of possible and actual scabbing during the national steel strike in the summer of 1919; though not in Cleveland, where they \u201cstrongly supported the union,\u201d\u2014Encyclopedia of Strikes<\/em>, 356.\u00a0 Ruthenberg\u2019s diplomatic leadership of Local Cleveland may help explain this Cleveland exception[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nStanding opposite to the socialist civic-nationalism is a type of American nationalism closer to the ethno-linguistic, \u201cblood and soil\u201d nationalism of Europe.\u00a0 Of course, an actual \u201cour ancestors, since time immemorial\u2026\u201d myth is impossible in the American context.\u00a0 Given shape by the wartime measures, the loyalists and anti-socialists that broke up the May Day marchers framed their ideas of \u201cthe nation\u201d mostly in the language of \u201cAmericanism\u201d and a negative stance toward socialists.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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, \u201cIsn\u2019t it strange that we socialists stand almost alone today in defending the Constitution of the United States?\u201d\u00a0[footnote]Debs\u2019s Defense Speech; in Karsner, Authorized Life<\/em>, 35[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nOther 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.\u00a0 The May 4 edition of the Plain Dealer<\/em> announced that in response to the May Day riots, a \u201cLoyalty Parade\u201d would be held in June by loyal laborers to show their patriotism.\u00a0 Combined with this axis of simple loyalty, however, is the declared imminent necessity of Americanization:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Cleveland\u2019s May Day riots brought home to the city the menace of the Red flag \u2014 the flat issue of whether this nation shall have one emblem or two \u2014 whether it shall be a nation of order or anarchy.\u00a0 Cleveland accepted the challenge splendidly.\u00a0 But the problem is not yet solved.\u00a0 One man out of every ten in Cleveland is an un-naturalized foreigner.\u00a0 He isn\u2019t a citizen.\u00a0 He can\u2019t vote.\u00a0 Often he is un-American in spirit\u2026All these vitally important questions are discussed in an Americanization series, written by Paul Bellamy of The Plain Dealer staff.[footnote]Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 4, 1919[\/footnote]<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nIn the \u201cAmericanization\u201d series, Paul Bellamy, son of the famous Edward Bellamy, utopian writer and early socialist of a self-declared \u201cnationalist\u201d variety,[footnote]Edward Bellamy, \u201cTHE \"CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH\" Mr. Gronlund's New Edition of this Important Work Reviewed,\u201d The New Nation<\/em> Volume 1, (1891): 224-5[\/footnote] laid out the problem:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Cleveland\u2019s May Day riots\u2026woke the city with a jar to the critical Americanization problem confronting it.\u00a0 For after the shots and blows had subsided, when the police could take stock of results, one fact loomed ominously above all the rest \u2014 the disturbers were predominantly eastern European importations, just as their ideas were imported European ideas. \u2026 Is Cleveland to remain a thoroughly patriotic, progressive American city?[footnote]Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 5, 1919[\/footnote]<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nBellamy\u2019s article is helpful not just in showing the well-known prejudice against the Eastern European, here dehumanized as an \u201cimportation,\u201d but also for showing his confused handling of the American and Cleveland traditions.\u00a0 As noted above, Cleveland had been anything but \u201cthoroughly American\u201d in the sense of being composed of pure Anglo-Saxon conservatives.\u00a0 Bellamy was engaged in nationalist myth-construction which ignored social complexities \u2014 \u201cthe great war emphasized the absolute necessity of producing somehow, one people with one mind consecrated to the national task\u201d \u2014 but even he admitted that the American traditions, which preserved an ethnic diversity he did not recognize, must also be abandoned: \u201cThe time honored American doctrine of \u2018Let alone\u2019 as applied to the immigrant has broken down.\u201d[footnote]Ibid[\/footnote] Bellamy is just one of many who, throughout the course of the war and Red Scare, produced an ad hoc<\/em> \u201cblood and soil\u201d nationalism which, in its confrontation with the socialist civic-nationalism, disparaged certain American traditions and ideals, attesting to its comparative novelty.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\nA less nuanced version of Bellamy\u2019s project is seen in one of the letters to the editor in that day\u2019s issue.\u00a0 In \u201cDown with the Red Flag,\u201d the writer displays the binary nationalist logic and obsession with symbols combined with distaste for free speech and the police who (initially) protected it:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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\r\n\r\nThe Socialist demonstration in Cleveland yesterday was a direct challenge to loyal Americanism that should not have been permitted by the police.\u00a0 For the tragic consequences of the waving of the red flag the authorities of that city must bear responsibility\u2026Free the Socialists are to meet and within proper limits discuss their theories of government.\u00a0 But their every meeting is of a revolutionary nature, and not to be regarded as of peaceful intent.\u00a0 Where they hoist any standard except the Stars and Stripes, save that the emblem of a friendly nation may be displayed together with Old Glory, they announce their enmity to this country, their purpose to destroy American institutions.\u00a0 They should be dispersed and their leaders punished\u2026The police officers of Cleveland who permitted the Socialists to fare forth under the banner of anarchy should be made to suffer for their stupidity and worse.\u00a0 All honor to the loyal men who resented the insult to America! [footnote]Ibid[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nCombined with such rabble-rousing is the contemporary institution of the \u201cVictory Loan,\u201d which absolutely pervaded the mainstream Cleveland papers.\u00a0 Both the Press<\/em> and Dealer<\/em>, as part of the Loan campaign, announced on the front page of every issue Cleveland\u2019s progress towards raising the loan goals by city district.\u00a0 In addition, almost every single article in the Press ended with signature-like ads for bonds: \u201cV Bonds Pay $4.75.\u201d\u00a0 Within the comics section, pro-bond messages invoked a non-violent message of \u201csupport the troops\u201d in the Press<\/em>, as in Figure 8 (see Appendix).\u00a0 Nonetheless, the anti-leftist ethno-nationalist project adorned the front page of the Dealer<\/em> on May 3 (Figure 9; see Appendix).\u00a0 As the man in the cartoon suggests, the obverse of Bolshevism is nationalism, so pummel Bolsheviki to death and buy Victory Bonds![footnote]Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 3, 1919[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nAnother dimension of the Americanization project took the form of education initiatives stressing language and civics classes to Americanize the foreign masses.\u00a0 This dimension also served the goal of undermining the typical labor concerns animating socialist politics.\u00a0 Reporting on the initiatives, the Cleveland Press<\/em> cited Fred C. Croxton of the Ohio Institute for Public Efficiency that \u201cmost of the industrial accidents, and especially those in the mining districts, are caused by the inability of workmen to read signs of warning and direction.\u201d[footnote]Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919[\/footnote]\u00a0Ipso facto<\/em>, Bolsheviks can only appeal to those who cannot read so a bare minimum of English education makes a patriot and inoculates against Bolshevism.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe conservative national-myth project was not entirely one-sided.\u00a0 Good liberals of conscience could still voice their reservations in the public sphere.\u00a0 Gerstle\u2019s liberal civic-nationalists had disappeared with the beginning of the war and when they did communicate their discontents, it was in the terms of the novel and growing anti-radical ethno-nationalism.\u00a0 The Dealer reported on a meeting of social scientists and their reaction to the ongoing Americanization project:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Dr. H. A. Miller of Oberlin College said that immigrants should be allowed to speak their own tongues.\u00a0 Contentment will follow the opportunity to express their ideals, where a sense of oppression and discontent would follow any effort to compel them to speak only English, he said. \u2026How are you going to prevent them from speaking their own language except by using the methods of Bismarck?[footnote]Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 4, 1919[\/footnote]<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe paper made sure to note all the academics at the meeting denounced Bolshevism, but here was a liberal academic embracing the cosmopolitan American ideal, while using the non-leftist language of popular anti-German sentiment.\u00a0 The ethno-chauvinism of those like Bellamy was something new, to which liberals had to react.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nIn their own press, the rank-and-file socialists likewise proved that they were aware of this ethno-nationalist ideological project and dealt with it in kind with their civic-nationalism.\u00a0 In the \u201cViews\u201d section of the Ohio Socialist<\/em>\u2019s May 8 edition, one letter in particular countered the \u201cGet right or get out\u201d phrase and sentiment:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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The proclamation issued by the patriots to the Reds of Cleveland said a speaker at the Public Square since the May Day riots, is \u201cGet right or get out,\u201d \u201cGet right or get out\u201d\u2014just what does it mean?\u00a0 The speaker meant this \u201cIf you don\u2019t like the government we have, get out of the country.\u201d\u2026 We are here.\u00a0 Brought here by the same forces that brought the parasites here.\u00a0 We mean to stay\u2026All the wealth and well-being of the world is the produce of our hands and brains.<\/em>\u00a0 The world\u2019s heroes are those men and women who did not run.\u00a0 They stay.\u00a0 They stayed at Valley Forge.\u00a0 They stayed at Gettysburg.<\/em>\u00a0 They stayed throughout history in the face of fulmination and oppression.\u00a0 They stayed and through them and the principles they stood for the world reaped a harvest of happiness and well-being.[footnote]Ohio Socialist<\/em>, May 8, 1919[\/footnote]<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nWhereas the ethno-nationalists struggled to draw upon their national heritage, merely noting the red flags threatened \u201cour institutions,\u201d the civic-nationalists readily recalled Revolutionary and Civil War ideals and language.\u00a0 Other examples of this conversation with the ethno-nationalist project and its amorphous binaries mid-construction were humorously confronted in the same paper\u2019s \u201cRiotisms\u201d section:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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\r\n\r\nAnd now we know what a \u201cloyalist\u201d is.\u00a0 An assaulter, a rock thrower, a breaker of law, an insulter of women, a frightener of children, a maniac, a beast.\u00a0 A thief, a button snatcher, a bully, a hoodlum. They are welcome to the honors but to what or to whom they are loyal is a pertinent question.<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nDeport the Reds.\u00a0 Yes, but what to do with those American Reds who are being deported home?<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nCleveland daily press now says we should Americanize the foreigner.\u00a0 And we assent. An Americanized Bolshevik could do wonders with a ballot<\/em>.[footnote]Ibid[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe socialists may have lost the battle of fists, but examples such as these shows they had the upper-hand in the battle of wit and satire.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nIn the context of competing national projects of a socialist civic-nationalism with an organic connection to American republicanism and a newly-constructed ethno-nationalism with ideals of \u201cAmericanism\u201d as anti-radicalism, the May Day riots represented the clash in the streets of these ideas.\u00a0 Such a clash, however, was not to last.\u00a0 State oppression, widespread adoption of \u201cAmericanism,\u201d and continuing setbacks in 1919, including many failed strikes, internal divisions, and loss of leadership to imprisonment, deportation, and murder, heralded the end of an authentic American socialism that could house the Socialist Party, IWW, and AFL under one roof.\u00a0 From then on, the international prestige of the Russian Bolsheviks, institutionalized through the Comintern and its policy-dictating influence on the American Communist Party, smothered any widespread adoption of leftist politics on any basis other than Leninism, let alone a Debsian American democratic culture.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"
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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]<\/sup><\/a> Importantly, notions of nationalism and radical socialism are communicated through how one presents or reacts to a political symbol.\u00a0 To conservatives and radicals, a red flag was much more than just a flag.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The most pertinent binary for the May Day riots and the general case of socialism in America was internationalism and nationalism.\u00a0 Those who attacked the marchers were \u2018loyalists\u2019 and \u2018100 percent American,\u2019 while the socialists were foreigners or \u2018internationalists.\u2019\u00a0 Looking back, we can easily discard loyalist epithets for socialists like \u201cBismarckians\u201d or \u201cpro-German,\u201d but it is harder to dismiss the idea that socialism was something international, European, and if not un-American then at least non-American.\u00a0 After all, a common trope of American socialist commentary and historiography is \u201cWhy didn\u2019t socialism happen here?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.\u00a0 Ultimately, the consternation over red flags by conservative Americans was the flip side to this interpretation.\u00a0 While socialists were developing a sort of socialist civic-nationalism, the conservatives contested it with an alternative militant ethno-nationalism.\u00a0 This argument is a revision on Gary Gerstle\u2019s assertion in American Crucible<\/em> that presents American history as a struggle between American civic- and ethno-nationalism.\u00a0 While this paper reads this same dichotomy into twentieth-century American history, Gerstle focuses exclusively on the civic-nationalism of liberals and mainstream politics.\u00a0 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<\/em> was a type of civic-nationalism.[2]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, what were the symbols which the socialists used to interpret for themselves a distinctly American socialism?\u00a0 Given that the riots began as a march, the socialist symbols used during their International Workers\u2019 Day should be examined first.\u00a0 The first important symbol is of course the red flag, which was the source of the brawls that ignited the riots.\u00a0 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\u2019 and Sailors\u2019 Monument.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Cleveland Press<\/em> declared: \u201cThe red flag was their symbol of revolution, terrorism, disorder, anarchy, and chaos.\u00a0 It expressed a hate of all established institutions and a determination to overthrow the United States\u2026The public against which the threat was made recognized the red flag for what it is.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a>And as the same paper delighted in concluding its coverage: \u201cBits of red flags which caused the riots littered the gutters of the downtown section all evening.\u00a0 Bolsheviki, who had started out to demonstrate their power had lost all stomach for that.\u00a0 They had preached disorder, but the taste they got of its practice was enough.\u00a0 So far was known there was not a red flag flying in all Cleveland one hour after the riots started.\u201d\u00a0[4]<\/sup><\/a> After the event, Police Chief Frank Smith told the Plain Dealer<\/em> that \u201cthe police will be ordered to forbid the display of red flags, ribbons or other emblems\u2014that started the trouble Friday\u2026Even the Socialists ought to know that the appearance of red would start a riot.\u201d[5]<\/sup><\/a> 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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?\u00a0 Of course, there is the red flag, that symbol of internationalism and socialism.\u00a0 But at the head of the march were American soldiers carrying \u201cthree American flags and three Socialist red flags,\u201d one of which was a gift from the Ukrainian socialists.[6]<\/sup><\/a> It was reported that the band played \u201cMaryland, My Maryland,\u201d \u201cThe Marseillaise,\u201d and \u201cThe Stars and Stripes Forever.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0One would struggle to build a more patriotic, but yet socialist, playlist of pre-1919 tunes: \u201cMaryland,\u201d a common battle hymn and the state song of Maryland sharing the same tune as the British Labour song \u201cRed Flag,\u201d would invoke a martial mood, but remains distinctly-American and labor-centric; \u201cThe Marseillaise\u201d is the classic song of French republicanism; and \u201cStars and Stripes\u201d is an incredibly \u201cAmerican\u201d song, yet it heralded the beginning of the riots.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Through this combination of symbols \u2014 both red and American flags \u2014 socialists were expressing a notion of civic-nationalism that connected their political ideals with the idea of American nationhood founded upon political ideals.\u00a0 In theories of nationalism, this conception of nationalism contrasts with the typical \u201cblood and soil\u201d nationalism of Europe and elsewhere, in which the historical continuity of a race in a geographic location bequeaths the power of \u201cnationhood:\u201d \u201cGermany\u201d is the combination of the German people as a biological concept and the physical land termed \u201cGermany.\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/a> 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]<\/sup><\/a> 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.\u00a0 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: \u201cWith 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.\u201d\u00a0[10]<\/sup><\/a> \u00a0American 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019 central figures.\u00a0 Eugene Debs was the very embodiment of this \u201cAmericanism-as-socialism\u201d ideal.\u00a0 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.\u00a0[11]<\/sup><\/a> Invoking Abraham Lincoln\u2019s critique of President Polk\u2019s war against Mexico in 1848 to defend his own \u201cunpatriotic\u201d war opposition,[12]<\/sup><\/a> Debs crystallized the civic-nationalist critique of his times: \u201cI believe in patriotism.\u00a0 I have never uttered a word against the flag.\u00a0 I love the flag as a symbol of freedom.\u00a0 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.\u201d[13]<\/sup><\/a> Further stressing his loyalty to American ideals, he added: \u201cI believe in the Constitution of the United States.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it strange that we socialists stand almost alone today in defending the Constitution of the United States?\u00a0 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.\u201d[14]<\/sup><\/a> Debs, as the moral center and fulcrum of the American socialist movement prior to its dissolution in the 1920\u2019s, embodied the ideas that animated the immigrant citizens with a twin display of American and socialist flags.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ruthenberg\u2019s socialism, while certainly of a more intellectualized and Marx-derived variety than Debs\u2019, also evinced this quintessentially American character.\u00a0 In his depiction of Marx\u2019s stages of history, Ruthenberg openly quoted Lincoln declaring that \u201cno society\u2026can remain in existence permanently, which is part slave and part free\u201d to explain the necessary transition of historical stages.[15]<\/sup><\/a> In addition, his strong adherence to the socialist tactic of political action \u2014 the belief that socialism will be attained through the ballot box \u2014 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 na\u00efve to continue doing so.\u00a0 And more so than Debs, Ruthenberg was the rallying-point of a cosmopolitan city made of immigrants.\u00a0 Ruthenberg\u2019s marshalling of Cleveland\u2019s diverse radical communities into a single radical wing expressed what can be called the reverse side of the American nativism: American foreignism.[16]<\/sup><\/a> The creation of a party branch of America\u2019s diverse foreigners in an American city mostly made of diverse foreigners is tautologically \u201cAmerican.\u201d\u00a0 Whereas Debs and his conveyance of American-socialism grew out of the classic American ideals, Ruthenberg\u2019s organization of an ethnically-heterogeneous city around such ideals is the political enactment of civic-nationalism.\u00a0[17]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Standing opposite to the socialist civic-nationalism is a type of American nationalism closer to the ethno-linguistic, \u201cblood and soil\u201d nationalism of Europe.\u00a0 Of course, an actual \u201cour ancestors, since time immemorial\u2026\u201d myth is impossible in the American context.\u00a0 Given shape by the wartime measures, the loyalists and anti-socialists that broke up the May Day marchers framed their ideas of \u201cthe nation\u201d mostly in the language of \u201cAmericanism\u201d and a negative stance toward socialists.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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, \u201cIsn\u2019t it strange that we socialists stand almost alone today in defending the Constitution of the United States?\u201d\u00a0[18]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.\u00a0 The May 4 edition of the Plain Dealer<\/em> announced that in response to the May Day riots, a \u201cLoyalty Parade\u201d would be held in June by loyal laborers to show their patriotism.\u00a0 Combined with this axis of simple loyalty, however, is the declared imminent necessity of Americanization:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cleveland\u2019s May Day riots brought home to the city the menace of the Red flag \u2014 the flat issue of whether this nation shall have one emblem or two \u2014 whether it shall be a nation of order or anarchy.\u00a0 Cleveland accepted the challenge splendidly.\u00a0 But the problem is not yet solved.\u00a0 One man out of every ten in Cleveland is an un-naturalized foreigner.\u00a0 He isn\u2019t a citizen.\u00a0 He can\u2019t vote.\u00a0 Often he is un-American in spirit\u2026All these vitally important questions are discussed in an Americanization series, written by Paul Bellamy of The Plain Dealer staff.[19]<\/sup><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In the \u201cAmericanization\u201d series, Paul Bellamy, son of the famous Edward Bellamy, utopian writer and early socialist of a self-declared \u201cnationalist\u201d variety,[20]<\/sup><\/a> laid out the problem:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cleveland\u2019s May Day riots\u2026woke the city with a jar to the critical Americanization problem confronting it.\u00a0 For after the shots and blows had subsided, when the police could take stock of results, one fact loomed ominously above all the rest \u2014 the disturbers were predominantly eastern European importations, just as their ideas were imported European ideas. \u2026 Is Cleveland to remain a thoroughly patriotic, progressive American city?[21]<\/sup><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Bellamy\u2019s article is helpful not just in showing the well-known prejudice against the Eastern European, here dehumanized as an \u201cimportation,\u201d but also for showing his confused handling of the American and Cleveland traditions.\u00a0 As noted above, Cleveland had been anything but \u201cthoroughly American\u201d in the sense of being composed of pure Anglo-Saxon conservatives.\u00a0 Bellamy was engaged in nationalist myth-construction which ignored social complexities \u2014 \u201cthe great war emphasized the absolute necessity of producing somehow, one people with one mind consecrated to the national task\u201d \u2014 but even he admitted that the American traditions, which preserved an ethnic diversity he did not recognize, must also be abandoned: \u201cThe time honored American doctrine of \u2018Let alone\u2019 as applied to the immigrant has broken down.\u201d[22]<\/sup><\/a> Bellamy is just one of many who, throughout the course of the war and Red Scare, produced an ad hoc<\/em> \u201cblood and soil\u201d nationalism which, in its confrontation with the socialist civic-nationalism, disparaged certain American traditions and ideals, attesting to its comparative novelty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A less nuanced version of Bellamy\u2019s project is seen in one of the letters to the editor in that day\u2019s issue.\u00a0 In \u201cDown with the Red Flag,\u201d the writer displays the binary nationalist logic and obsession with symbols combined with distaste for free speech and the police who (initially) protected it:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Socialist demonstration in Cleveland yesterday was a direct challenge to loyal Americanism that should not have been permitted by the police.\u00a0 For the tragic consequences of the waving of the red flag the authorities of that city must bear responsibility\u2026Free the Socialists are to meet and within proper limits discuss their theories of government.\u00a0 But their every meeting is of a revolutionary nature, and not to be regarded as of peaceful intent.\u00a0 Where they hoist any standard except the Stars and Stripes, save that the emblem of a friendly nation may be displayed together with Old Glory, they announce their enmity to this country, their purpose to destroy American institutions.\u00a0 They should be dispersed and their leaders punished\u2026The police officers of Cleveland who permitted the Socialists to fare forth under the banner of anarchy should be made to suffer for their stupidity and worse.\u00a0 All honor to the loyal men who resented the insult to America! [23]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Combined with such rabble-rousing is the contemporary institution of the \u201cVictory Loan,\u201d which absolutely pervaded the mainstream Cleveland papers.\u00a0 Both the Press<\/em> and Dealer<\/em>, as part of the Loan campaign, announced on the front page of every issue Cleveland\u2019s progress towards raising the loan goals by city district.\u00a0 In addition, almost every single article in the Press ended with signature-like ads for bonds: \u201cV Bonds Pay $4.75.\u201d\u00a0 Within the comics section, pro-bond messages invoked a non-violent message of \u201csupport the troops\u201d in the Press<\/em>, as in Figure 8 (see Appendix).\u00a0 Nonetheless, the anti-leftist ethno-nationalist project adorned the front page of the Dealer<\/em> on May 3 (Figure 9; see Appendix).\u00a0 As the man in the cartoon suggests, the obverse of Bolshevism is nationalism, so pummel Bolsheviki to death and buy Victory Bonds![24]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Another dimension of the Americanization project took the form of education initiatives stressing language and civics classes to Americanize the foreign masses.\u00a0 This dimension also served the goal of undermining the typical labor concerns animating socialist politics.\u00a0 Reporting on the initiatives, the Cleveland Press<\/em> cited Fred C. Croxton of the Ohio Institute for Public Efficiency that \u201cmost of the industrial accidents, and especially those in the mining districts, are caused by the inability of workmen to read signs of warning and direction.\u201d[25]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Ipso facto<\/em>, Bolsheviks can only appeal to those who cannot read so a bare minimum of English education makes a patriot and inoculates against Bolshevism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The conservative national-myth project was not entirely one-sided.\u00a0 Good liberals of conscience could still voice their reservations in the public sphere.\u00a0 Gerstle\u2019s liberal civic-nationalists had disappeared with the beginning of the war and when they did communicate their discontents, it was in the terms of the novel and growing anti-radical ethno-nationalism.\u00a0 The Dealer reported on a meeting of social scientists and their reaction to the ongoing Americanization project:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Dr. H. A. Miller of Oberlin College said that immigrants should be allowed to speak their own tongues.\u00a0 Contentment will follow the opportunity to express their ideals, where a sense of oppression and discontent would follow any effort to compel them to speak only English, he said. \u2026How are you going to prevent them from speaking their own language except by using the methods of Bismarck?[26]<\/sup><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The paper made sure to note all the academics at the meeting denounced Bolshevism, but here was a liberal academic embracing the cosmopolitan American ideal, while using the non-leftist language of popular anti-German sentiment.\u00a0 The ethno-chauvinism of those like Bellamy was something new, to which liberals had to react.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In their own press, the rank-and-file socialists likewise proved that they were aware of this ethno-nationalist ideological project and dealt with it in kind with their civic-nationalism.\u00a0 In the \u201cViews\u201d section of the Ohio Socialist<\/em>\u2019s May 8 edition, one letter in particular countered the \u201cGet right or get out\u201d phrase and sentiment:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The proclamation issued by the patriots to the Reds of Cleveland said a speaker at the Public Square since the May Day riots, is \u201cGet right or get out,\u201d \u201cGet right or get out\u201d\u2014just what does it mean?\u00a0 The speaker meant this \u201cIf you don\u2019t like the government we have, get out of the country.\u201d\u2026 We are here.\u00a0 Brought here by the same forces that brought the parasites here.\u00a0 We mean to stay\u2026All the wealth and well-being of the world is the produce of our hands and brains.<\/em>\u00a0 The world\u2019s heroes are those men and women who did not run.\u00a0 They stay.\u00a0 They stayed at Valley Forge.\u00a0 They stayed at Gettysburg.<\/em>\u00a0 They stayed throughout history in the face of fulmination and oppression.\u00a0 They stayed and through them and the principles they stood for the world reaped a harvest of happiness and well-being.[27]<\/sup><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Whereas the ethno-nationalists struggled to draw upon their national heritage, merely noting the red flags threatened \u201cour institutions,\u201d the civic-nationalists readily recalled Revolutionary and Civil War ideals and language.\u00a0 Other examples of this conversation with the ethno-nationalist project and its amorphous binaries mid-construction were humorously confronted in the same paper\u2019s \u201cRiotisms\u201d section:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And now we know what a \u201cloyalist\u201d is.\u00a0 An assaulter, a rock thrower, a breaker of law, an insulter of women, a frightener of children, a maniac, a beast.\u00a0 A thief, a button snatcher, a bully, a hoodlum. They are welcome to the honors but to what or to whom they are loyal is a pertinent question.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Deport the Reds.\u00a0 Yes, but what to do with those American Reds who are being deported home?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cleveland daily press now says we should Americanize the foreigner.\u00a0 And we assent. An Americanized Bolshevik could do wonders with a ballot<\/em>.[28]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The socialists may have lost the battle of fists, but examples such as these shows they had the upper-hand in the battle of wit and satire.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the context of competing national projects of a socialist civic-nationalism with an organic connection to American republicanism and a newly-constructed ethno-nationalism with ideals of \u201cAmericanism\u201d as anti-radicalism, the May Day riots represented the clash in the streets of these ideas.\u00a0 Such a clash, however, was not to last.\u00a0 State oppression, widespread adoption of \u201cAmericanism,\u201d and continuing setbacks in 1919, including many failed strikes, internal divisions, and loss of leadership to imprisonment, deportation, and murder, heralded the end of an authentic American socialism that could house the Socialist Party, IWW, and AFL under one roof.\u00a0 From then on, the international prestige of the Russian Bolsheviks, institutionalized through the Comintern and its policy-dictating influence on the American Communist Party, smothered any widespread adoption of leftist politics on any basis other than Leninism, let alone a Debsian American democratic culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

  1. For work on the importance of political symbolism, see the many works of Murray Edelman.\u00a0 As he says in one article: \u201cIt is language about political events and developments that people experience; even events that are close by take their meaning from the language used to depict them. So political language is political reality; there is no\u00a0 other so far as the meaning of events to actor and spectators is concerned.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0Murray Edelman. \u201cPolitical Language and Political Reality\u201d. American Political Science Association<\/em> 18, 1 (1985): 10 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  2. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 83 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  3. Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  4. Ibid ↵<\/a><\/li>
  5. Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 3, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  6. Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 2, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  7. Ibid ↵<\/a><\/li>
  8. Fulbrook, Germany<\/em>, 311 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  9. Gerstle, Crucible<\/em>, 4. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  10. Salvatore, Eugene Debs<\/em>, 25 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  11. Eugene Debs\u2019s Defense Speech, 27-31, in David Karsner, Debs: His Authorized Life and Letters<\/em> (New York: Boni and Liveright Publishers, 1919), 14-58 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  12. Ibid., 34 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  13. Ibid., 32 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  14. Ibid., 35 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  15. Ruthenberg, Growing<\/em>, 10-11 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  16. \u201cAmerican foreignism,\u201d my own term, is chosen for its oxymoronic meaning.\u00a0 Same as Bellamy, cited below, notes the classic American policy of \u201clet alone,\u201d American foreignism is a willing embrace of the foreign into collective identity recognized as particular.\u00a0 In other words, \u201cAmerica\u201d conveyed as an ideal can accommodate the foreign, where the foreign is not foreign ideals but merely foreign cultural practices, languages, etc.\u00a0 This is in lieu of using the term \u201cAmerican internationalism\u201d because internationalism is vague enough to allow for a particular American identity to stand separate of other cultures; an ethno-chauvinist can be internationalist enough to help his global neighbors so they do not intrude upon his national territory.\u00a0 An \u201cAmerican foreignist\u201d would accept all foreign peoples into the national community, when that community is defined by adherence to a common democratic ideal. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  17. Cleveland may even be more exceptional in this regard than other possible contemporary examples.\u00a0 In 1919, Cleveland was only just beginning to receive African-American migration from the South into the industrial north to form a sizeable minority in the city.\u00a0 Not yet a presence in industrial labor, African Americans were a source of possible and actual scabbing during the national steel strike in the summer of 1919; though not in Cleveland, where they \u201cstrongly supported the union,\u201d\u2014Encyclopedia of Strikes<\/em>, 356.\u00a0 Ruthenberg\u2019s diplomatic leadership of Local Cleveland may help explain this Cleveland exception ↵<\/a><\/li>
  18. Debs\u2019s Defense Speech; in Karsner, Authorized Life<\/em>, 35 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  19. Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 4, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  20. Edward Bellamy, \u201cTHE \"CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH\" Mr. Gronlund's New Edition of this Important Work Reviewed,\u201d The New Nation<\/em> Volume 1, (1891): 224-5 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  21. Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 5, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  22. Ibid ↵<\/a><\/li>
  23. Ibid ↵<\/a><\/li>
  24. Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 3, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  25. Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  26. Plain Dealer<\/em>, May 4, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  27. Ohio Socialist<\/em>, May 8, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  28. Ibid ↵<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"author":3,"menu_order":4,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-42","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\/42","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":15,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/42\/revisions\/161"}],"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\/42\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}