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Why Violence Matters: Radicalism,

Politics, and Class War in the Gilded Age
and Progressive Era
■ Beverly Gage, Yale University

n his 1966 article “Violence in American Labor Disputes,” Philip Taft laid

I out a paradox for American history. 1 On one hand, he wrote, class relations
in the United States have been among the least ideological in the world. On
the other hand, American labor conflicts have been among the world’s most
violent. “It may appear anomalous,” Taft commented, “that the United States, a
country in which class feeling and class ideology are almost entirely absent, has
experienced a considerable amount of violence in labor disputes.” 2 He resolved
this anomaly by arguing that class violence in the United States was mainly an
adaptation to structural circumstances: In conflicts where vital interests, espe-
cially union recognition, were at stake, workers and employers tended to resort
to brute force. By this logic, the intense violence of the Gilded Age and Pro-
gressive Era fit quite comfortably within the exceptionalist narrative of the
United States as a nation largely free from ideological conflict.
In the 40 years since Taft wrote his article, this has remained largely the con-
ventional wisdom regarding ideological violence in the United States. To the
degree that violence of any sort has figured into a story of American class rela-
tions, it has often been framed as a structural issue, the product of a weak state
and a frontier culture rather than of an ideological commitment on the part of
American workers to revolution or class war. And as with all conventional wis-
dom, there is a great deal of truth to this view. Certainly the United States never
experienced anything like a viable revolutionary assault on the capitalist sys-
tem, even during the turmoil of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Nor did
most violence, in any age, stem from preexisting ideological commitments.

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100 Beverly Gage

And yet there is something very strange about the suggestion that ideologi-
cally motivated violence did not much matter in American history, particularly
when applied to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far from
being a period of ideological timidity, the years between 1877 and 1920 were a
time when major national controversies over the use of violence by left-wing
radical and revolutionary groups—anarchists, syndicalists, Wobblies, militant
trade unionists—erupted with remarkable frequency. Many of the events that
inspired these controversies are well known to historians: the Haymarket
bombing of 1886; the attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick by
anarchist Alexander Berkman during the Homestead strike in 1892; the 1901
assassination of President William McKinley by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon
Czolgosz; the murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg in
December, 1905, for which Big Bill Haywood was eventually tried and acquit-
ted; the 1910 dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times headquarters, which resulted
in the conviction of nearly the entire leadership of the International
Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers; the 1916 Preparedness Day
bombing, for which radical Tom Mooney served decades in jail; the May
Day and June 2 conspiracies of 1919, including the bombing of Attorney
General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home; and the 1920 Wall Street explosion, which
killed 39 people in the heart of the country’s financial district. In addition to
these relatively famous events, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of lesser-
known, smaller-scale incidents. The newspapers of the era were filled with
reports and rumors of violent attacks on the symbols of American government
and business: bombs mailed to mayors and governors; dynamite found
beneath railroad tracks or outside a factory door; threatening notes sent to
police chiefs; mysterious explosions near an industrialist’s home.
The interesting question, then, is not why the United States has experienced
so little ideological violence, but why historians of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era, especially labor historians, have agreed so uniformly that it
was not a major factor in American political life. That question provides the
starting point for this essay.
To some degree, the disjuncture between Taft’s view of an ideology-free
working class and the existence of targeted acts of radical violence is a matter
of definition. When Taft wrote about industrial violence, he was referring to
armed clashes between strikers and strikebreakers, between workers and fed-
eral troops or armed guards. My main concern is violence of a different sort:
the often secretive and highly organized campaigns of bombing and assassina-
tion carried out by a range of radical individuals and groups—what was,
already by 1920, often referred to as left-wing “terrorism.” But if the subjects are
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Why Violence Matters 101

somewhat different, they are not unrelated. Indeed, it is precisely the exclusion
of radical terrorism and violence from the discussion of labor conflicts that
seems so peculiar, and so deeply at odds with the way in which many
Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experienced the
problem of “class war.”
I should say at the outset that, while I am engaged in studying the subject of
radical violence for a book focusing on the 1920 Wall Street explosion, my
intent in this article is not to showcase primary research. Rather, I have two
intertwined goals for this article. The first is to explore some of the historio-
graphical questions raised by the problem of radical terrorism during the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era, especially within the historiography of
American labor. The second is to outline very briefly a few of the reasons why
such ideological violence deserves a greater place in our understanding of the
period.
The marginalization of radical violence from the mainstream of American
history, and especially American labor history, is in many ways a relatively recent
development. For the progressive historians of the early twentieth century, the
notion of class conflict within the United States, of a fierce struggle between “the
people” and “the powers,” was nothing if not an article of faith. Indeed, the first
major synthetic work of American labor history, John Commons’s History of
Labor in the United States, incorporated both radical movements and acts of tar-
geted radical violence as part of a general story of American class relations.
Intertwined with discussions of the Knights of Labor and the rise of employer
associations are detailed dissections of socialism, anarchism, and pivotal events
like the Haymarket Affair and the Haywood trial.3
In part, the easy integration of these subjects was the product of a particu-
lar methodological approach. The Commons school emphasized leaders, insti-
tutions, and major events; it was history from above, even if many of the
leaders and institutions discussed were not terribly far up the hierarchy of
American power. From this vantage point, the importance of highly publicized
events like the Haymarket bombing was self-evident. This is not to say that
either the Commons school or the progressive historians more broadly viewed
all violence in ideological terms. Indeed, the central premise of Commons’s
Wisconsin school—of which Philip Taft was a product—was that both labor
violence and radicalism itself were, with a few exceptions, pragmatic adapta-
tions to American conditions. Nonetheless, the historiography of the period
generally recognized the ways in which controversies over bombings and assas-
sinations helped to shape the political context in which American labor was
able to operate. The most notable book in this regard was Louis Adamic’s
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102 Beverly Gage

Dynamite! The Story of Class Violence in America, which presented anarchist,

syndicalist, and other revolutionary violence as critical factors in the ongoing
struggle “of the have-nots against the haves in the United States.”4
But if Dynamite! was the first major work to incorporate such violence into
a broad story of rebellion by the “have-nots,” it was also the last. By the post-
war years, with the rise of the short-lived consensus school, the subject of
class violence, and radical terrorism in particular, had begun its retreat to the
margins of the historical literature. For consensus scholars, who argued that a
relative harmony of interests and ideas had dominated American political life,
violent conflict of all sorts seemed like little more than an unfortunate disrup-
tion, the exception to an otherwise placid rule. From this perspective, both acts
of radical violence and the response to them seemed like little more than inter-
twined political delusions: for those who supported such acts, a woeful mis-
judgment of the Americans’ paltry revolutionary potential; for those who
opposed them, a “hysterical” overreaction to a nonexistent radical threat. Here,
Robert Murray’s Red Scare: A Study of National Hysteria, 1919‒1920 offers a case
in point.5 Because Murray, like many consensus historians, began from the
premise that the United States had neither a history of radicalism nor a history
of ideological conflict, the unprecedented turmoil of 1919—including the furor
over the 1919 dynamite conspiracies—could be explained only as a near-
pathological misunderstanding of American conditions. “Harassed by the
rantings and ravings of small group of radicals, buffeted by the dire warnings
of business and employer organizations, and assaulted daily by the scare prop-
aganda of the patriotic societies and the general press,” he concluded, “the
national mind ultimately succumbed to hysteria.”6
This exceptionalist interpretation went hand-in-hand with what has been
perhaps the most enduring view of radical violence in the United States: that
such violence was the product, in Chester McArthur Destler’s words, of “alien,
proletarian philosophies of revolution” with their roots in European thought
and politics.7 As historians such as M. J. Heale have argued, the link between
radicalism and foreignness in the American mind can be identified as early as
the 1830s.8 By 1886, when Haymarket thrust the question of ideological violence
into the forefront of national politics, many Americans were primed to under-
stand not only the Chicago bombing, but all radicalism, as a symptom of
European infection. In this sense, mid-century historians such as Destler were
merely following an established cultural tradition in their claims that ideolog-
ical violence was by definition un-American.
As with many persistent myths, this one had some basis in fact. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many radicals, especially anarchist
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Why Violence Matters 103

devotees of “propaganda by deed,” were, in fact, immigrants, and they often

saw themselves as participants in a revolutionary struggle that went far beyond
the bounds of the United States. Beginning in the 1960s, however, historians
began to question whether or not this emphasis on immigrants offered suffi-
cient explanation for the range and diversity of American radical movements.
This concern was particularly acute for New Left historians, who sought to
rediscover indigenous American traditions of dissent and rebellion.
For the most part, however, this new interest in radicalism did not extend to
the bombings and assassinations that had been so much a part of the public
image of radical movements—especially anarchists and Wobblies—during the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Rather, the new labor and social history
focused on uncovering alternative cultures and broad patterns of resistance to
capitalism. This was true even, or perhaps especially, in cases where the move-
ments in question had long been plagued by reputations for violence. Melvyn
Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All, still the most important general history of the
Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), was at least in part an effort to refute
the myth of Wobbly violence. “Wobblies did not carry bombs, nor burn har-
vest fields, nor destroy timber, nor depend upon the machine that works with
a trigger,” Dubofsky wrote. “Instead they tried in their own ways to compre-
hend the nature and dynamics of capitalist society, and through increased
knowledge, as well as through revolutionary activism, to develop a better sys-
tem for the organization and functioning of the American economy.”9
This movement toward marginalizing ideologically motivated violence was
in some sense perverse, since many New Left historians prided themselves on
the rediscovery of conflict and violence more generally. For the most part,
though, they preferred to focus on acts of mass violence—general strikes,
armed insurrections—rather than the more sensational and far more contro-
versial phenomenon of left-wing terrorism.10 This decision emerged in part
from an admirable desire to move beyond stereotypes of bomb-throwing anar-
chists and Wobblies. It may have resulted as well from the discomfort that the
subject of radical terrorism entailed; in their search for a “usable” radical past,
New Left historians may have seen little point in reminding Americans of ear-
lier movements’ violent deeds and reputations.
But the shift in emphasis went far beyond such immediate political con-
cerns. For the new social historians, the historical profession’s long-standing
focus on big events, leaders, and institutions gave way to a focus on everyday
life and mass experience, a change that served to marginalize revolutionary ter-
rorism as an extremely unusual—and therefore unrevealing—act. In this sense,
the near disappearance of acts like the Wall Street explosion from labor and
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104 Beverly Gage

political syntheses during this period was merely a casualty of the social history
turn.11 It was a casualty as well of the new “organizational synthesis,” which
suggested that bureaucratic trends and large organizations—not moments of
disruption and conflict, and certainly not political radicals—were the movers
and shakers of American history.12
One should not, of course, overstate the disappearance of radical violence
and terrorism from the American historiography in subsequent years. Over the
past four decades, there have been numerous “event histories” focusing on par-
ticular moments of national drama, though many of these have been the work
of journalists rather than academic historians.13 There have also been scattered
“movement” histories that incorporate the issue of radical commitments to
violence; Paul Avrich’s excellent work on American anarchism offers one exam-
ple.14 In recent years, too, there has been a resurgence of interest in questions
of violence and radicalism more generally, as evidenced not only by this jour-
nal issue but by such works as Jeremy Varon’s Bringing the War Home, a study
of the Weather Underground, and James Green’s new narrative history of
Haymarket.15
Still, until very recently the dominant trend, both in labor history and in
political history more generally, has been toward writing radical violence out
of the American past, marginalizing it as a perhaps sensational but ultimately
insignificant aside to more important events.16 The question then arises as to
whether or not this has been a good thing: Does the radical violence of the era
deserve to be consigned to irrelevance? Or does it merit a more prominent
place in our story of America’s industrial age?
In attempting to assess the relative importance of acts of radical terrorism,
a few words of caution may be in order. First of all, by certain numerical meas-
ures it was not very significant: the most deadly act of radical violence during
these years, the Wall Street explosion, killed 39 people and wounded a few hun-
dred. This was a shocking figure for an act of terrorism, but, as many activists
have argued then and since, it was but a drop in the bucket compared to the
sheer violence on American industry, which killed an estimated 35,000 Ameri-
can workers in accidents each year at the turn of the century.
Nor can it be said that radical violence was in any way representative of
American class or labor relations as a whole. As Taft pointed out, violent
conflicts made up only a small proportion of even the most dramatic labor
disputes during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.17 And within these
conflicts, violence on the part of employers and police far outnumbered any
sort of violence committed by workers or union members. In the extremely
small number of cases when workers used violence, that violence was rarely
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Why Violence Matters 105

ideological—which is to say it was rarely carried out by anarchists, syndical-

ists, or other political radicals in the name of either revolution or class war.
Indeed, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
extent of radical violence was often exaggerated by those who wished to do
harm to labor, reform, and revolutionary movements—an inclination to over-
statement that responsible historians should surely be concerned to avoid.18
Historians also encounter a problem of conflation, of lumping together a
wide range of groups and ideologies that by some measures had very little in
common. Did Italian anarchists in New York, for instance, really share anything
with the Western Federation of Miners—other than the fact that both used
explosives and guns, in one form or another, in the name of the working class?
In some sense, to throw them all together under the term “radical” is to do just
what their enemies did at the time: to suggest that “Reds” were all one undif-
ferentiated mass. Here, too, the forms of highly stylized, propagandistic vio-
lence favored by anarchists must be distinguished from the much more
utilitarian acts of, for instance, the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. Indeed,
the Homestead strikers, no strangers to armed conflict, utterly rejected anar-
chist Alexander Berkman’s attempt to assassinate Henry Clay Frick.19
Finally, there is a basic problem of evidence. In many cases, questions of
responsibility for acts of violence were unbearably complicated and difficult to
prove. Furthermore, even organizations that sometimes used violence—like
the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, or the I.W.W.—often denied quite
forthrightly any intention to do so. The famous Haywood trial of 1907 is a case
in point. Though there is little doubt that the Western Federation of Miners
(WFM) used bombings and assassinations as organized tools, Haywood him-
self, a WFM leader, was found innocent of ordering the murder of WFM
enemy and former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in court.
In some sense, however, questions of representativeness, or statistical sig-
nificance, or even definitive evidence, are rather beside the point. The fact
remains that there was at least some ideological violence in the United States—
and this alone has widespread implications for American history. During this
same period, European nations witnessed a long string of revolutionary bomb-
ings and assassinations. Merely pointing out that the United States was not
immune from such events goes a long way toward refuting exceptionalist
claims that Americans were uniquely free of concerns over revolutionary ter-
rorism and class war.
The question of whether the violence was representative is irrelevant in
another sense as well. Whatever we may think of the relative numerical signifi-
cance of radical bombings and assassinations, many Americans in the late
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106 Beverly Gage

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries identified this sort of violence as part
of an ongoing crisis—one that thrust the country perilously close to anarchy
and civil war. In my own work, I divide the years from 1877 to 1920 into three
distinct periods: an “Age of Anarchy” stretching roughly from the 1880s to 1901,
in which the public associated bombing and assassination primarily with
immigrant anarchists, especially Germans and Russians; an “Age of Labor”
between 1901 and 1915, when terrorist violence was increasingly linked to radi-
cal unions such as the Western Federation of Miners and the I.W.W.; and an
“Age of War” stretching through the early 1920s, when previous concerns about
violence became linked to national security concerns, first as a result of World
War I and later the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is important to remember, however, that many Americans experienced
these events not as nicely differentiated historical periods, or occasional bumps
on the path of industrial progress, but as terrifying events with potentially dis-
astrous consequences. Here, a parallel with present-day politics may be apt.
Speaking statistically, it is probably absurd that Americans spend as much time
as they do thinking about terrorism. If the goal is the simple avoidance of death
or injury, our time, as numerous experts have pointed out, would be far better
spent getting a few more minutes of exercise or taking the time not to run a red
light. Yet none of this has any bearing on the valence of terrorism as a political
issue. For a variety of reasons, among them the highly unpredictable and the-
atrical nature of terrorist violence, the issue of terrorism has a unique grip on
the current political imagination.
The situation was not entirely dissimilar a century ago. Rightly or wrongly,
many Americans viewed radical violence as a major political and social prob-
lem. This is no less true of business elites like J. P. Morgan, who understood
themselves as potential targets of attack, than of trade unions, who organized
their strategies in part to avoid too close an association with both radicalism
and violence. It is true, too, of the remarkable diversity of groups on the radi-
cal and revolutionary left for whom the question of violence—when to use it,
and against whom—was a source of ever-fractious debate. Indeed, some of the
major institutional splits among left-wing groups during the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era occurred over this very question—most notably the Socialists’
1912 purge of “any member . . . who opposes political action or advocates
crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working
class,” a move that permanently alienated most Wobblies.20
The perception of a growing problem of radical violence had perhaps
its most dramatic impact on the police agencies, private detective firms,
law enforcement, and legal bodies charged with responding to these events.
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Why Violence Matters 107

Beginning in the 1870s, the prevention of violence, especially radical violence,

became the logic around which relatively weak police agencies, courts, and leg-
islative bodies constructed a whole raft of restrictive laws aimed at curbing the
activities of labor unions and various radical movements. The path of these
laws followed the broader administrative trends of the era, moving from local,
municipal efforts in the 1880s to new federal laws and agencies by the 1920s.
Many historians have noted the importance of the language of violence pre-
vention in curbing labor and radical activities. For the most part, however, they
have dismissed such language as either “hysteria,” a panicked response to an
imaginary threat, or pure opportunism, a sinister, bureaucratic effort to take
advantage of public fears. While neither of these aspects can be ruled out
entirely (especially where private detectives are concerned), in many ways the
response to radical violence is far more straightforward. In the context of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Americans understood acts
of radical terrorism not as a series of isolated, criminal deeds, but as a phenom-
enon intimately tied to much broader and far more popular labor and reform
movements. Indeed, it was precisely because hostility to Wall Street, and to
industrial capitalism, was not limited to radical circles that the problem of
violence seemed so acute, and potentially so disastrous.
And while it is true that incidents of violence often proved extremely dam-
aging to these broader movements by alienating public opinion and providing
the excuse for legal crackdowns, this, too, is not the whole story. Whatever else
they did, acts of radical violence invariably provoked widespread debate over
the nature and fate of industrial capitalism. Especially for anarchists, this was
one of the goals of political violence: to dramatize the deep conflicts at work in
American society, to make it impossible for the nation to avoid questions of
social and industrial justice.
In the end, this is perhaps the most important reason to incorporate the his-
tory of radical violence more fully into our understandings of the political
dynamics of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. However tempting it may be
to view the story of those years as one of gradual progress, of an increasing
recognition of social inequities and democratic rights, history is in many ways
far less kind than that. To the degree that Americans during these years came
to an understanding that new laws and new institutions would be necessary to
ameliorate the excesses of industrial capitalism, they were motivated not only
by a recognition of the need for change, but by a fear of what might follow if
change was not forthcoming.
They understood radical violence as an important factor in American class
relations, even if historians have not always done the same.
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108 Beverly Gage

NOTES

1. Philip Taft, “Violence in American Labor Disputes,” Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 364 (March 1966): 127–40.
2. Ibid., 128.
3. John Commons, History of Labor in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: The Macmillian
Company, 1918, 1935). Though Commons is usually referred to as the primary author, the
series was actually a multiauthor, four-volume work published in two parts. Part I, comprising
the first two volumes, was published in 1918; authors included David Saposs, Helen L. Sumner,
John B. Andrews, and Selig Perlman. Part II, published in 1935, included Taft as well as Perlman
among its primary authors.
4. Louis Adamic, Dynamite! The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Press, 1931):
48.
5. Robert Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1955/1964).
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Charles McArthur Destler, American Radicalism, 1865–1901 (Menasha, WI: The Collegiate
Press, 1946), 78. Originally published as “Shall Red and Black Unite? An American
Revolutionary Document of 1883,” The Pacific Historical Review XIV (December 1945): 434–51.
8. M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
9. Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988, orig. 1969), 147. The phrase “the machine that works with a
trigger” is a reference to I.W.W. martyr Joe Hill’s claim that American workers “may find out that
the only ‘machine’ worth while is the one which the capitalists use on us when we ask for more
bread for ourselves and our families. The one that works with a trigger.” See Dubofsky, 146.
10. In his seminal New left labor history Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), for
instance, Jeremy Brecher puts the question of violence in the form of general strikes at the
center of American labor history while generally excluding more targeted acts of left-wing
violence.
11. Perhaps the best example of the turn away from high politics, including the issue of violence,
within the new labor history is David Montgomery’s groundbreaking The Fall of the House of
Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Paris: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), which gives only brief mentions to events such as Haymarket and the
McNamara trial.
12. The classic work of the organizational synthesis school is Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for
Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
13. See, for instance, J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off
a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Geoffrey Cowan, The
People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America’s Greatest Lawyer (New York: Times
Books, 1993); Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968);
Curt Gentry, Frame Up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings (New York:
Norton, 1967).
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Why Violence Matters 109

14. Avrich has been by far the most important historian of American anarchists’ commitment to
terrorism and propaganda by deed. See, especially: Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), and Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Back-
ground (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
15. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and
Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and
the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon, 2006). Another recent
example of the renewed interest in radical violence and American politics is Eric Rauchway,
Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang,
2003). For a literary perspective on radical violence in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, see
Jeffory Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
16. One example of this shift within labor historiography is Eileen Boris and Nelson Lichtenstein’s
Major Problems in the History of American Workers: Documents and Essays (Lexington, MA:
D.C. Heath, 1991), a compendium of primary documents as well as essays by major historians.
The collection contains not a single essay on violence (radical or not), though it addresses such
issues as “The Cultures of First-Generation Industrial Workers” and “The Labor Movement’s
Failure to Organize Women Workers.”
17. Taft, “Violence in American Labor Disputes,” 128.
18. Even today, in our own volatile “age of terrorism,” there may be a legitimate concern that
emphasizing radical violence will result in a simplistic game of “gotcha”—that, for instance,
discussing anarchist commitments to propaganda by deed carries with it the implicit message
that those Haymarket anarchists (and, by the way, all leftists and labor activists) were a bunch
of terrorists who deserved what they got.
19. Berkman recalled the Homestead workers’ denunciation of his act as a crushing blow in his
autobiography. See Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, in Life of an Anarchist:
The Alexander Berkman Reader, ed. Gene Fellner (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992),
5–17.
20. Socialist Party of America, Proceedings, National Convention of the Socialist Party, Indiana-
polis, IN, May 12 to 18, 1912 (Chicago, 1912): 60, cited in David Shannon, The Socialist Party
of America: A History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1955), 72.
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