Green's Grass-Roots Socialism
"The Lord spake unto the children of Moses...Go forward, forward into the CIO!"
The choice of Grass-Roots Socialism may seem a strange one with respect to the larger “St. Louis labor history project”. The initial reason for reading Green’s book was derived from my reading of Rosemary Feurer and Walter Johnson, both of whom focused on rather bespoke or institution-peculiar “regions” in which to include St. Louis at various historical periods. For Feurer, the region in question was the organizing territory of UE8 between the wars, which does not quite correspond with the Sooner Socialist realm in Grass-Roots Socialism, but does offer a fascinating pointedness to the old adage about regional labor pools, so important in economic geography; that is, at least for some labor organizers, St. Louis was a city bound up in a shared fate with towns in Iowa, Illinois, and Arkansas. From Johnson’s Broken Heart I found that in the post-Reconstruction years St. Louis capital looked directly down the Santa Fe line towards new fortunes to be had in the Oklahoma Territory and beyond, just now opening up for speculation. Finally, I turn back to Feurer, who quotes William Sentner in identifying the radical heritage of class struggle in the region stretching down and out to encompass the revolutionary farmers of the Green Corn Rebellion and beyond. This book is not, however, about that rebellion, but a long tradition of organizing that simultaneously existed behind the back of the industrial unionism of the time while also in some senses being its vanguard (especially within the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which joined the IWW and early on accepted membership from women and black workers in a continuation from the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers) and in another being some of its most retrograde elements (riven by segregationist impulses at the highest level, including within the gigantic newspapers, namely Wayland’s Appeal to Reason out of Girard, KS and the O’Hare’s and Debs’ The National Rip-Saw out of St. Louis.
Grass-Roots Socialism makes sense by focusing on three main elements, the first being the core organizer coterie connected to the Socialist Party and especially the Appeal to Reason: Eugene Debs, Covington Hall, Oscar Ameringer, Frank and Kate Richards O’Hare, Walter Thomas Mills (author of The Struggle for Existence), and “Red Tom” Hickey, along with an asterism of other organizers and the hundreds strong “Appeal Army” who both delivered and sold subscriptions to the paper, roving in endless trips throughout Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. In presenting their biographies, he is able to illustrate how the Socialist Party in the region remained curiously resilient in the face of repression, reformist temptation, and general disbelief from the national party that land tenants, sharecroppers, and waged workers on a crop lien system could ever be true socialists. More importantly, he shows how all of these, all foreign to the region (save Kate Richards O’Hare), embedded themselves in homestead life, modifying the tenets and principles of the national to work in the area. As Kate Richards O’Hare said, the area required effective Socialist propaganda to be “expounded in King James Bible words and quotations” and in the “language of Populism”. It wasn’t enough to just develop a “land plank” here – the “holiness preachers” and the Populist Party of yesteryear had both done that, and passed from relevance. As Green puts it, here organizers and proselytizers were charged with “adapting the labor theory of value to American conditions” to the dirt farmers, the New Orleans “water rats”, the scrub loggers, and the scattered miners, all of which fell outside the usual definition of an industrial proletariat, but suffered under the blades of the “parasites” all the same.
The two other major elements in Green’s account appear in O’Hare’s quote above – the religious and Populist tendencies present. Ameringer was fond of claiming that the tenant and farm laborer was assured of a “natural right” to the full product of their toil by “scriptural law in Leviticus”. These tenants and laborers saw themselves as victims of a rug pull perpetuated by capitalist interests, namely speculators, creditors, and “absentee landlords” who had promised the bounty of the recently-cleared, formerly native nations territory with the “abortive Homestead Act” and instead ground them down horribly with draconian conditions, violent expropriation, and miserable tenancy on top of the original settler colonial sin visited upon the indigenous people that had been there before. They had become “feudal serfs”. Prior to the real appearance of the Socialist parties, and even after their appearance, the full spiritual register of the Sooner question in Socialism was not fully understood by the majority of these organizers; it wasn’t until the development of the annual “encampments” at Grand Saline, Texas (lasting for 13 years!) that they truly got it, so to speak. Besides Grand Saline there were many other smaller, more local events – 125 in Texas in 1914 alone. Debs in the September 1914 Rip-Saw wrote movingly about the “Socialist spirits” of one of these, painting a picture of the wagons of destitute farmers rolling for, in some cases, hundreds of miles, coming in off the prairies under red flags waving in the breeze.
These encampments built perfectly upon the need/desire for some semblance of community among the principally lonely tenant farmers, isolated and subjected, of course, to back breaking work, often too distant from each other to even attend church services. By throwing a grand fete, the Socialists could both expound upon the Cooperative Commonwealth – the “Coming Nation” of so many local daydreams, sponsored by a general familiarity with Bellamy’s Looking Backward – and play into a syncretic brand of “Bible socialism”, while using both to sell and distribute newspapers. For example, E. O. Meitzen’s Rebel employed Reverend M. A. Smith’s “Five Minute Sermons”, who regularly promoted a Socialist millennialism promising the collapse of the capitalist parasites. The Rebel and the Texas Socialists in general spawned a whole gaggle of field preachers armed with pertinent passages and verses from Leviticus and Ecclesiastes in favor of a “Socialism of the Bible” to, as the August 1911 Rebel put it, “prove that capitalist rent, interest, and profit [were] condemned by the word of God”. These preachers and their regular encampments turned socialism into a new religion, one which Ameringer said made its adherents fanatics: “they fought and sacrificed for the spreading of the new faith like the martyrs of other faiths”. One worker wrote “I am a Socialist from the bible standpoint and also the political standpoint. And I fully believe that the Socialist movement is the forerunner of the second coming of Jesus Christ”. Another wrote: “Capitalism has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. As sure as God reigns, Babylon is falling to rise no more. The international socialist commonwealth – God’s Kingdom – shall rise on the wrech and ruin of the world’s present ruling powers”. And finally, another:
I am only a common, hard working, dollar-a-day (often less) wage slave, but I have read after the Nazarene a little, and he told of a Golden Happy Day that was coming on earth. Those eighteen hundred years have rolled by without its realization. But now, today, unworthy though we may be, we are brought face to face with what generations have longed, hoped, prayed, yes, even died for: the Brotherhood of Man, which means the fulfillment of the Nazarene’s promise – the Milliennium.
Sounds like a little Theses on the Concept of History-style messianism down Texas way to me.
Finally, Green speaks at length of Populism as a legacy, roadblock, and katechon of Sooner Socialism. The populism of William Jennings Bryan and later Theodore Roosevelt caught on in the region, especially Oklahoma and Texas, in a major way in the 1890s, spawning some of the first renter’s unions. These organizations were of a deficient quality, lacking a true class analysis to the point of allowing speculative landlords membership (and a vote!) within their organization. What the Socialist Party originally set out to do was to pick up the tactics, and in some cases even the organizers, of the Populist Party, and convert them to socialism by providing a class analysis framework. However, this often proved mutually corrupting, with socialists taking on the inveterate racism and tacit Know-Nothing tendencies of that particular brand of Populist. However, for the most part, a nominally egalitarian (if actually not) socialism did win out, especially under the aegis of Eugene Debs’ stumping and presidential campaigns. But the transition from populism to socialism disappeared just as the Socialist Party began to be challenged from its left, in particular by the upstart Wobblies and later the CIO. Part of this is due to the fact that the Socialist Party derived support from locals and also union backing, but did not care or have cause to define and refine what these constituent entities actually did; during the heyday of Debs, there was a rough adherence to a general platform, but the syndicalist split slowly shifted the goalposts. What ultimately arose was a gradient between IWW “Reds” and Socialist Party “Yellows”. When the Depression hit, and on up to World War II, this never-mended schism made the entire region’s left vulnerable to attacks in employment, coupled with the general destitution of the Depression itself, and finally its wholesale destruction by both the advancing frontier and, finally, the Millennial appearance of advanced industrial farming, liquidating the tenant altogether.