Linda J. Lumsden. Black, White, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2015. 440 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-60635-206-9.
Reviewed by Nicholas A. Stark (Florida State University)
Published on H-Socialisms (August, 2015)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
US Paper Wars: Creation of the Radical Press
The fact that the capitalist, bourgeois government of the United States of America lived out the twentieth century does not erase the fact that it has faced strong opposition from within. From communists to socialists to anarchists, radicals in the United States have struggled for over a century to enact fundamental change to the country’s social and political structures. As Linda J. Lumsden discusses in her new book, one of the weapons of choice for these radicals in the early twentieth century was the establishment of their own press. The author’s work is an in-depth study of major radical publications from 1900 to 1917, or in episodic terms, from the end of the Gilded Age until US entry into the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It is an analysis not of scholastic works, but rather of the popular press, from magazines to newspapers, including Industrial Worker (Industrial Workers of the World), Masses (socialist), and Mother Earth (anarchist). The book is divided roughly by political purview and issue, from socialism to anarchism to racism to women’s rights, rather than flowing purely chronologically, an approach that works well as the discussion moves fluidly and facilitates critical analysis without losing a sense of events.
Primarily, the work roots the present tactic of radicals utilizing instantaneous social media for the advancement of social movements, especially in reference to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, in the radical print culture of the early twentieth century. The radical press served not only as a popular means of political education but also as a forum for political discussion, with readers often encouraged to write in response to articles and to discuss the issues their own communities faced. In essence, the radical press was more about activism than about recording events or serving academic standards of journalism. While the content of most of the publications is not exceptional by Lumsden’s standards, the authors still developed a grassroots media culture linked to social movements that would develop with evolving technology. The Internet would revolutionize the industry, but the culture subsequently associated with it had strong historic roots.
In the process of linking the pre-World War I radical press to Occupy, Lumsden redefines the wealthiest capitalists at the close of the Gilded Age as “the one percent,” directly borrowing the popular, if misleading, Occupy phrase (p. 2). While the expression has some validity today, with the richest 1 percent sharing 48 percent of global wealth as of 2014, in the United States the top 20 percent control 72 percent of the nation’s wealth as of 2013.[1] Therefore, while the concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent has been staggering in the past century, the usage of the term is both inadequately justified in the context of the early twentieth century and politically problematic in the present sense, as the wealth gap issue is much larger than the 1 percent.
More directly in terms of the substance of the work, while the coverage of socialist papers is impressive, charting countless debates and schisms, there are problems with the analysis of socialism, especially in relation to the international movement outside of the United States. In one glaring instance, Lumsden attributes Edward Bellamy, author of the novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), with “Americanizing” socialist thought with the concept of “the peaceful evolution of voluntary cooperative societies,” thus diverging from a “Marxist emphasis on class conflict” (p. 17). This rings false on a number of levels. Similar strains of utopianism predate Bellamy and find their roots outside of the Americas. To make this into an American innovation would be to overlook people like Henri Saint Simon and François Fourier, among others, who pioneered utopian socialism in Europe half-a-century earlier. Such a claim also falsely attributes to primarily European socialism a cohesiveness and militancy that was notably absent. Evolutionary socialism, social democracy, and reformism all were present in European socialist thought before Bellamy. Eduard Bernstein, a German, is the commonly accepted founder of evolutionary socialism, and social democratic parties in Europe predate Bellamy’s publication, such as the General German Workers’ Association (1863), the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France (1879), and the British Social Democratic Federation (1881). In terms of policy, the debate over reformism was very lively in Europe, with reformism ultimately claiming the leadership of the Second International by the early twentieth century (1889-1916), for which it was publicly condemned by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. On top of that, it is a false dichotomy to juxtapose Marxism with social democracy as inherently antithetical, unless by “Marxism” one is using shorthand for Marxism-Leninism. Many social democratic parties have made claims to also be Marxist, such as the French Socialist Party during the period in question.[2] Later, the author revives this troublesome distinction between the United States and Europe when she uses the 1901 split between Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party and Eugene V. Debs’s Social Democratic Party as representative of a larger clash between “democratic American values” and “inflexible European socialism” (p. 22).
Further on in the discussion on socialist periodicals, the author runs into difficulty when she addresses the issue of agriculture. On the discussion of Algie Simons as editor of the International Socialist Review, she writes that he, unlike the “urban, eastern socialists,” understood that the class struggle was not limited to industrial workers versus capitalists, that the United States was unique for its “agricultural heritage,” and that farmers were not petit bourgeois but rather comrades in the struggle against capitalism (pp. 31-32). This criticism is not strictly true. To pick apart the vague concept of “agricultural heritage,” the United States was not unique in still being heavily rural and agricultural by the turn of the twentieth century. Among others, France and Germany, the largest socialist bases of Europe, were still highly agricultural, let alone considering lands further east. Furthermore, as Irish socialist James Connolly noted at the time, what distinguished US agriculture was its company form, where capitalist-managed estates absorbed working farmers, so that the farmers, already with larger lands than their foreign counterparts, were threatened with absorption, rather than agriculture as a native industry being at risk of extinction in the face of foreign competition.[3] It is also a false implication that Marxists did not value the role of farmers in opposing capitalism. For example, Russian Marxist Lenin wrote in 1905 on the need for a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry for a decisive victory of the democratic revolution over tsarism.[4] Likewise in 1906, Joseph Stalin wrote in support of militant peasants fighting landlords and encouraged the rural proletariat to join with the urban proletariat in fighting against the bourgeoisie, whether they were peasants or landlords.[5] The question, therefore, is not whether the peasants (or the vague “farmer”) are or should be part of the struggle against capitalism and for socialism, but whether they as a class could organize and lead such a struggle, and just how far the proletariat and the peasantry’s interests coincided. The issue of the peasantry has also been richly covered in Maoist studies, which, looking forward, could offer further significant insights.
As the subject turns to religion, the author writes that the 1908 decision of the US Socialist Party to officially deem religion a private matter marked a crucial line between “American sensibilities” and “strict Marxism, which rejected religion as the opiate of the people” (p. 51). To clarify, Karl Marx’s quote, while indeed being a critique of religion, was more importantly a commentary on the nature of religion as being “the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering,” emphasizing the need to address the fundamental conditions of society rather than fixating on religion, which came as a result.[6] Moreover, Marxism, even at the time, was hardly rigidly atheistic by definition, let alone anti-theistic. Prior to the US Socialist Party’s resolution, in 1891 the German Social Democratic Party adopted the Erfurt Program, which included the demand for a “Declaration that religion is a private matter.”[7] Prominent French socialist Jules Guesde, who cowrote the program for the French Workers’ Party with Marx, when discussing secularizing education in France, argued against scapegoating religion while school promoted a “Gospel of worker’s servitude,” denouncing instead “the worst of religions, the religion of capital!”[8] Likewise, Paul Lafargue, another leading French socialist, while denouncing clerics as exploiters and capitalist allies, foremost emphasized the need for Marxian socialists to aim their efforts against middle-class idealism, which was “far more dangerous than Christianity.”[9] While socialists and Marxists were not always shy in criticizing theism or religion (primarily the latter), they were not all atheists, nor were their organizations generally closed to religious groups.
The stance of socialists is oversimplified again when discussing racism. In this instance, the socialists are portrayed as largely subject to delusions of white supremacy, whose Marxist economic determinism “further blinded” them by reducing race to a symptom of class (pp. 213-214). It is entirely true that socialists were not inherently free from the dominant ideology of white supremacy, to which too many succumbed, and that their theories on race on the whole were undeveloped. However, those non-racist socialists were also not entirely incorrect in linking race and class. While racism exists outside of capitalism, capitalism is inextricable from racism, upon which it is built and on which it leans. The development of ghettos and gentrification, among a boundless host of other issues, clearly demonstrate that there is a class element to racism, despite race not being purely a matter of class. The socialists of the period did not completely overlook the distinct nature of racism, nor were they inactive concerning race issues. As the author later admits, the socialist press, in direct contradistinction to the mainstream media, took strides to report on and condemn lynching, while the Socialist Party at the turn of the century officially accepted African Americans as equals and desegregated their own ranks. To go further, US socialist leader Debs, while too heavily emphasizing race as an offshoot of class as the author abundantly demonstrates, went further than just declaring “the Negro” as equal. He argued that for the party to pander to racial prejudice of any kind would mean their own demise, and should make African Americans not only welcome but also necessary for the movement.[10] In looking toward the legacy of the radical press, Lumsden, while condemning Marxism for derailing race theory at the turn of the century, is all-too-quick to pass over the direct contributions of Marxist theory to the civil rights movement and Black Liberation. She briefly mentions that Marxism marked the Black Panthers, but does not put any real stock in the matter. There is no discussion of the strong emphasis leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. placed on labor issues, or the Marxist sympathies of others like Malcolm X. Marxism has advanced since that time, especially on race theory, and a modern study of antiracism and decolonization could not be undertaken without reference to Marxism.
By the conclusion, the author is effective in demonstrating the persistence of the legacy of the prewar radical press in today’s social media, providing a voice for the voiceless, creating a rich culture and community for social movements, and comforting the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. For all the faults of the radical press, it still contributed to important social change across the twentieth century. In the end, however, the reader is still left with a question: what has Occupy learned from the history of the radical press? The author lauds Occupy, with worldwide coverage and protests in hundreds of cities around the world, but does not point to any concrete accomplishments either achieved or anticipated. Moreover, she admits the vagueness of its program, and seemingly approves of the fact that unlike the prewar socialists, the present movement’s anticapitalists, rejecting labels like “socialist” and “Marxist,” do not explicitly call for abolishing capitalism. By calling for a “capitalism that serves people,” Occupy moved itself closer into the liberal orbit, prey to be exploited, among others, by the Democratic Party, which has thoroughly established itself as the graveyard of social movements (p. 304). More convincing than the author’s own argument on this matter is her cited counterargument by historian James Weinstein, that “‘false consciousness of the nature of American liberalism has been one of the most powerful ideological weapons that America has had in maintaining its hegemony’” (p. 298).[11] This theoretical waffling and the underlying want for praxis evidenced by these developments in Occupy harken to the similar problems that haunted the prewar socialists, especially when dealing with racism. While it may still be too early to discern the legacy of Occupy, it is clear that no immediate institutional changes resulted. Whatever lessons the history of the radical press can teach have yet to be learned, or at least fully appreciated.
For all of these reservations concerning the larger international picture of the socialist movement and Marxist theory, the direct content of the work, the coverage of numerous periodicals and newspapers, Black, White, and Red All Over is well worth the read. The historiography of radical movements in the United States, long a taboo subject, is an underappreciated area of study. While not exceedingly sympathetic with her radicals, Lumsden, demonstrating a more liberal temperament, avoids the pitfalls of anticommunist mania that is all too prevalent in US historiographies even today and presents the subject fairly. Furthermore, it must be added that Marxists and communists are not the only radicals discussed, although they are prevalent. The coverage of racism and women’s rights especially is most impressive, and alone earn the book applause. Moreover, the openness of the work in setting forth to interject into modern discourse and assert the significance of the study of history is greatly appreciated. So long as one is conscious of the issues in comparative history and Marxist analysis, it is a useful contribution to both journalism and US history, as well as an enjoyable read.
Notes
[1]. Jon Slater, “Richest 1% Will Own More Than the Rest by 2016 - Oxfam,” Oxfam (January 19, 2015), http://www.oxfam.org.uk/blogs/2015/01/richest-1-per-cent-will-own-more-than-all-the-rest-by-2016; and Robert Lenzner, “The Wealthiest 20% Own 72%; The Poorest 20% Only 3%,” Forbes (April 19, 2013), http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/04/19/the-growing-disparity-in-wealth-made-the-great-recession-worse-and-the-recovery-weaker-than-ever-before/.
[2]. The French Socialist Party here refers specifically to the French Section of the Workers’ International, created in 1905.
[3]. James Connolly, “America and Ireland: Farmers’ Demands (1898),” October 21, 1899, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1899/10/amerire.htm.
[4]. Vladimir Lenin, “‘Revolutionary Communes’ and the Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry,” in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, July 1905, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/index.htm#ch10.
[5]. Joseph Stalin, “The Agrarian Question: March, 1906,” 1906, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1906/03/x01.htm.
[6]. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” February 7 and 10, 1844, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.
[7]. “The Erfurt Program,” 1891, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm.
[8]. Jules Guesde, “The Secularization Yet to Be Done,” October 22, 1887, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/guesde/1887/oct/secularisation.htm.
[9]. Paul Lafargue, “Clericalism and Socialism,” 1902, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1902/xx/clericalism.htm.
[10]. Eugene V. Debs, “Danger Ahead,” November 1903, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1903/negro.htm.
[11]. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), xi.
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Citation:
Nicholas A. Stark. Review of Lumsden, Linda J., Black, White, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42419
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