"Socialist stronghold": the Socialist party, labor, and the making of U.S. politics from the gilded age to the New deal, 1890-1947
Creators: name: Gavigan, Ian Noah
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: Organized socialists, from the Gilded Age and up until the New Deal, played pivotal roles in shaping American Political Development. At the core of the industrial economy—Pennsylvania—the Socialist Party (SP) drove nearly four decades of mass politics. There, SP organizers and elected officials were savvier about building power in the context of U.S. federalism than most scholars of U.S. labor and the state have recognized. This dissertation demonstrates how they contested and shaped key processes of political development by wielding local and state level institutions of authority, through electoral, labor, and mass movement organizing. Further, it opens a new view onto the forces that limited the SP’s durability, especially during the 1930s when the New Deal transformed U.S. statecraft and absorbed much of the previously independent political structures that party organizers and members had spent decades building. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from traditional archives to oral histories to corporate espionage, this dissertation weaves together a fresh account of class formation situated in and sometimes against processes of statebuilding. It traces the arc of labor radicals’ shifts from the Gilded Age to the New Deal Era as organized socialists confronted structural changes in industrial production and new dynamics of gender, ethnicity, and race. The dissertation opens with a social history of Reading, the key site for SP power in Pennsylvania. Chapter two demonstrates how Reading’s SP organizers, in particular James Maurer, led a dramatic statewide fight to unite a multi-ethnic working-class force around a call to abolish the country’s first State Police agency, which was infamous for brutal strikebreaking. This early abolition effort lost by a small margin, but it transformed the Progressive Era labor movement in ways that scholars of labor and policing have yet to appreciate. Abolitionist mobilizing galvanized a diverse array of working-class men and women into an anti-State Police coalition, which succeeded in flipping the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor (PFL) and transforming it into an engine of social reform. Chapter three uncovers the PFL’s major victories, which anticipated and experimented with social policies that would come to define the New Deal’s social democratic impulse, including the first major state-level old age pension law—later, a model for Social Security. Chapter four explores the continuities of socialists’ anti-police politics with broader currents of anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, and labor radicalism from the mid-1910s through the strike wave of 1919-20 and the 1920s development of the workers’ education movement that followed World War I. As chapters five and six show, in the interwar years, often thought of as a time of retreat, the SP worked closely with women hosiery workers to lay the groundwork for a major Depression-era revival of SP electoral prospects and working-class power. In the course of a major, and almost entirely unstudied, 1933 hosiery strike, SP organizers established the first secret-ballot union representation election in the U.S., setting the national precedent for collective bargaining under the New Deal. Chapter seven shows how, even as SP leaders swept municipal elections in the mid-1930s, the New Deal Democratic Party narrowed the SP’s room for maneuver as municipal SP officials found themselves yoked to the Democratic national administration. Despite setting the table for the New Deal, the SP’s distinctive political community unraveled as national statebuilding and Democratic competitors ultimately subsumed its municipal-level power. Socialist Stronghold reveals how calls for social transformation and demands for change—from combating police violence to building welfare programs, to resisting war, to fighting for workers’ rights, to socialist governance at the local and state level—shaped U.S. politics in ways that reverberate up to the present. It is not only a history of a single organization but a window onto the larger relationship between working-class radicalism and political change in U.S. history.