Table LIII
Socialist Vote for Presidents in Nine States, from 1900 to 1916
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| Year | Total Socialist Vote | Per Cent of Socialist Vote in the Nine States |
| ——— | ||
| 1900 | 96,116 | 55.6 |
| 1904 | 402,321 | 58.2 |
| 1908 | 420,973 | 50.5 |
| 1912 | 897,011 | 48.0 |
| 1916 | 585,113 | 45.8 |
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| ——— | ||
It appears, then, that these nine states—New York and New Jersey, containing the large cities of Greater New York, Jersey City, and Newark; Wisconsin, containing the great German population of Milwaukee; Illinois, containing Chicago; Ohio, containing Cleveland and Cincinnati; Nebraska, containing Omaha; Pennsylvania, containing Philadelphia and Pittsburgh; Missouri, containing St. Louis and Kansas City; Minnesota, containing Minneapolis and St. Paul; to say nothing of the smaller cities and rural districts, largely inhabited by immigrants of German birth—have contained more than half of the voting strength of the Socialist parties. Some discount must be allowed for the fact that these large cities contain also large numbers of foreign-born voters of other races; but even a generous discount for this fact does not nullify the predominance of the German element in the Socialist voting strength. These nine states account also for about half of the dues-paying membership in the Socialist party; according to the American Socialist of January 23, 1916, there were 44,132, or 47 per cent, of the total of dues-paying membership of the party, in 1914, and 38,194, or 48 per cent, in 1915, in the nine states.
Jews in Socialism
It is also true that the active propaganda of political Socialism has increasingly attracted young Jews of foreign extraction. It appeals to them in two ways. There is a tremendous fund of idealism in the Jewish mind. For ages they have been taught to dream of an earthly millennium, in which the freedom denied them by the world everywhere would be attained, and the social ideals set forth by their prophets in their Scripture could be effectuated. Also, they have been bred to interminable discussion of abstractions and theoretical relationships regardless of the practical things of social life from which they were excluded by rigorous governmental restrictions and the race prejudice under which they have suffered, especially in Russia. It was to be expected that with the freedom of movement and expression which they have enjoyed in America, together with the tense economic and industrial conditions under which they labor here, they would respond to the propaganda of Socialism with its idealistic background, its promise of an economic millennium, and its minutiæ of theory and inexhaustible material for debate. There are no reliable statistics—little data of any kind—on which to base an estimate of the number or activity of Jews of any or all national extraction in the Socialist movement; nevertheless, it is a matter of common knowledge that they are both numerous and aggressive in its councils and its propaganda.
Effect of the War on Socialism
What might have been the development of political Socialism in the United States had there been no war in Europe it is impossible to say. To what extent the Germanization, not only of the Socialist party, but of large elements of politics in the old parties, might have gone on, it is impossible to say. The reactions of the war spirit, and of the variants of sympathy among the racial groups, produced profound effects. They were marked in the Socialist movement, tending to drive into the “left” or extreme radical wing, and even out of the party into the nonpolitical and antipolitical movements, many of the foreign-born Socialists who during past years have been trying to make the Socialist parties and the labor organizations of various sorts more and more radical, less and less patient toward political methods and measures. Inevitably these ultraradicals took on, or were regarded as taking on, the aspect of opposition to the cause of the Allies, to the participation of the United States in the war—to out-and-out pro-Germanism. That this pro-Germanism among the ultraradicals was not imaginary may be illustrated by one episode reported by an investigator for the Americanization Study:
In 1915, in the capacity of a field investigator of the conditions of unskilled labor for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, I happened to visit Port Arthur in the eastern part of Texas, where a Standard Oil refinery is located. There was some labor excitement. A young German, 22 or 23 years of age, who had come to this country when a small boy and who was one of the local leaders of the I. W. W., addressed a meeting. In attacking all capitalists of all countries he also spoke of the war which, according to him, was started and prosecuted by the czars, kaisers, kings, and capitalists of all countries at the expense of the working classes, etc., etc..
After the meeting I interviewed a number of local labor leaders. The youthful orator was sitting on a lumber pile a few feet from me. Oil barges were passing back and forth on the canal, carrying oil from the refinery to a large British tanker in the harbor. The boy intently watched the barges, and exclaimed, as if to himself, in a low tone of disgust and desperation:
“Hm! Britain gets all the oil; Germany—nothing!”
All his reasoning, based upon international class solidarity, had given way to his patriotic German heart!
There was, further, the inevitable influence of the fact that the German Social Democracy has, on the whole, been more close-knit, more effective in propaganda, and the German Socialist literature, from Marx down, more widespread in its distribution, than the propaganda in any other language. Even now, the Germans and pro-Germans in the Socialist ranks habitually declare that the war was ended by the German Social Democrats through a revolt against the Kaiser.
The native-born Americans, English, and other English-speaking Socialists, most of whom had been in sympathy with the cause of the Allies, revolted against the pacifist, antiwar, and pro-German element in the Socialist party, and the turmoil shook the organization to its foundation. The end of this is not yet; but one big result in the Socialist party itself has been to reinforce the influence of the moderate element and to some extent to drive the extremists into the so-called Communist parties and the I. W. W., which, whatever else may be said of them, do not exercise themselves directly about political affairs.
To the deep rift in the Socialist ranks on this account may be attributed in large part the failure of the Socialists to live up to their expectations and promises in the presidential election of 1920. It is far too soon to speculate with any confidence upon what may be the course of political Socialism in the United States in the years immediately before us when the emotions excited by the war die down, the hysterical opposition to immigrants as such fades out, and economic and industrial forces are permitted to operate “normally” in their effects upon the motives of the working people and their expression of those motives through their ballots.
The Single-Tax and Agrarian Movements
At the root of all the radical movements in the United States lies, actually or potentially, an unsatisfied land hunger, a feeling that somehow the opportunity to have access to a standing on God’s footstool is circumscribed by man-made restrictions and injustice. It is to be remembered that the great majority of immigrants to this country are peasants, whose whole life and social background have reference to making, or being prevented from making, a living from the soil. Even the Russian and other Jews, who, generally speaking, have little or no actual experience of agriculture, come here with a vision of a land where there is satisfaction for their deepest longings, and at the bottom lies the longing to own a piece of the face of the earth as a basis for subsistence. Generally speaking, the first disillusionment that many a modern immigrant experiences is in the fact that he cannot step from the ship into the ownership of land out of which to dig his living. It is a short step from that state of mind into one of general discontent with the difficulty of finding the opportunity which, he had been told, waited for him in the United States at every street corner and crossroad.
In the earlier days, when industrialism was younger in this country and immigrants could pass more easily into agriculture and into access to actual land, there was a wider and quicker interest on the part of the immigrant in the land question as such. Probably that is why he responded more than he does now to such movements as the individualist single-tax agitation precipitated by Henry George. In recent years, when his opportunities for employment came to be more and more restricted to the cities and to great industrial plants and mines, the appeal of the Socialist agitation seemed more applicable to his situation. Furthermore, the single-tax movement represents, on the whole, an earlier stage in the development of radical theory.
The same might be said of Greenbackism, Populism, and the present-day Nonpartisan League movement. All three of these movements find the body of their rank and file among the small farmers, small producers, and the dissatisfied lower grades of the merchandising class, who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are getting the worst of it in the development of law, taxation, finance, monopoly, or what not. The contented foreign born, or the contented anybody else, does not participate in or respond to radical agitation or movements for drastic reform. There are thousands of foreign-born members in the Nonpartisan League, but they are in it not as foreign born of any race, but as farmers who think they are not getting a square deal.
The farmers of the Northwest, who make up the bulk of the Nonpartisan League, are not at present amenable to Socialist doctrine. The foreign born among them are largely Scandinavian and old-stock Germans who have won their way to ownership of land and a measure of personal prosperity. They might stand for the expropriation of the powerful Eastern capitalist, but they are not willing to consider the confiscation of their own hard-earned farms. Peter Alexander Speek, in his monograph on “The Single Tax and the Labor Movement,”174 puts it well:
It may be said that the Socialists understood the labor movement, its meaning and nature, better than did the Single-taxers. But what the Socialists failed in was this, that their philosophy, emphasizing as it did the social side of human life, was not acceptable to the majority of American wage-earners, who, though wage conscious and organized as a separate class, still were not yet class conscious—wage-earners among whom the individualistic spirit and a desire to become independent small producers prevailed.
Even so early there was visible a racial line of demarkation. The Irish never have taken kindly to Socialism. Preponderantly of the Roman Catholic faith, they were impervious to the implications of the Socialist doctrines as affecting religion and marriage, and nothing in their experience tended to modify their interest in the ownership of land. Mr. Speek says:
It is necessary to mention the fact that nationality of the members of the party (the United Labor party) also played its role in the conflict. The majority of the Irish element lined up with the Single Tax faction, the majority of the German element with the Socialist.
This division by nationalities was itself quite comprehensive. The Germans have always had a strong communal sentiment and social viewpoint upon human life, both being inherited from the centuries long gone by. Furthermore, many of them, before they came to America, were industrial wage earners in Germany—the homeland of Marxian Socialism.
The majority of the Irish immigrants had been formerly land tenants in Ireland. They had an individualistic viewpoint, and were devoted Catholics. Hence their lining up with Henry George, as a land reformer and agitator for the Irish cause in Ireland, and with McGlynn, as a Catholic priest.
A large proportion of the farmers of the Northwest are Scandinavians. They are of a naturally conservative type, they have been successful in establishing themselves as individual property owners, and the property owner does not as a rule afford good material for the Socialist seed-sowing. You may regard the propaganda of the Nonpartisan League, for example, as radical and in a general way “Socialistic,” but it does not satisfy the Socialist.
The importance of this consideration is fundamental. There are great areas, even whole states, in the Northwest particularly, where the saturation of the foreign born is so complete that the foreign-born and second-generation folk themselves are the state. As one newspaper man in St. Paul put it:
It is not a question of “we” and “they”; they are the whole thing. In Minnesota there is no “Scandinavian problem”—they are us. In a large measure they have become the best kind of Americans; others have not advanced beyond the grade of the ordinary American, but they are the people and the government, and the comparative handful of Yankees cannot pretend to draw a line around them and set them apart as “foreigners.” They are the voters, the legislature, the producers, the farmers, the merchants, and they represent all of us at Washington.
On the other hand, there has been a tendency in the Northwest, as elsewhere, for little racial groups to center in special localities. There are whole towns in Minnesota which are virtually entirely German; others are entirely Bohemian. There is one community which is entirely Belgian. This is partly due to the fact that many sections were settled by colonies sent forth as a part of church missionary effort, especially by the Lutherans and Catholics.
Out of this situation the war suddenly crystallized a real American sentiment and enthusiasm. There was much shocking injustice and mob hysteria in those parts, and many accusations of disloyalty; but the fact that emerges upon any candid investigation is that these folk of various foreign races gave a good account of themselves in every form of war participation, whether in the furnishing of volunteers or otherwise. North Dakota, a hotbed of Nonpartisan League sentiment, and a preponderantly foreign-born population, nearly doubled its Liberty Bond allotments and exceeded its quotas in contributions to the Red Cross and the war-chest funds.
The Nonpartisan League
In December, 1918, Oliver S. Morris, editor of the National Magazine of the Nonpartisan League, gave to an investigator of the Americanization Study an analysis of approximate membership of the League. (See Table LIV.)