Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

to grapple with American reality. He urged them to “doff   every 
remnant of their foreign garb,” “go to the Americans who are the 
vast majority” and “on all accounts learn English.”
146
 
Th
  e advice Engels off ered, though entirely justifi ed, was also ele-
mentary and even simplistic. Programmatic thinking was not entirely 
lacking in the United States, but it was throttled by the given forms 
of the labor movement. In many trade unions there was a formal 
ban on any political discussion, on the grounds that it would prove 
divisive. Th
  e largest working-class organization, the Noble Order 
of the Knights of Labor, had a similar ban. Th
  e Knights of Labor 
only emerged from clandestinity in 1881 and never entirely shook 
off  its roots as a secret society. Security threats distracted them from 
public debate of their objectives. Terence Powderley, the Knights’ 
leader, was intensely hostile to foreign-born doctrinaires and strove 
to exclude or neutralize them. Th
  e unions and the Knights made 
eff orts to organize African American and female workers but had 
no discussion of how to campaign for respect for their rights.
147
 
Engels’s text was most likely to be read by the members of the 
Socialist Labor Party, but he did not go far enough in pressing them 
to become relevant to US conditions. His insistence that the US 
labor party would have to commit itself to public ownership of the 
railways and steel was timely—and if it had been heeded by some 
progressive coalition it might have averted the disaster awaiting 
these industries in the mid to late twentieth century. His brief list 
should have included the banks, since they were critical to industry 
and agriculture. His call for the nationalization of land short-
circuited the tangled problems of the county’s three million farmers 
and four million tenants and laborers. By the time of the 1870 cen-
sus there were 4.9 million wage earners, some of them white-collar, 
but the agricultural sector was still hugely important. Th
 e spread 
of the Farmers’ Alliance in the 1880s and 1890s showed the huge 
scope there was for mobilizing indebted farmers and rack-rented 
tenants or sharecroppers, both black and white. Engels endorsed 
the idea that a US labor party should aim to win a majority in 
Congress and elect its candidate to the White House, but without 
146  Ibid., p. 14.
147 Davis, 
Prisoners of the American Dream, pp. 30–1.
88  an unfinished revolution

---

an appeal to farmers, tenants, and rural laborers—and many others 
besides—this was a pipe dream. While Marx and Engels were quite 
right to shun many of the “Sentimental reformers” with their pat-
ented cure-alls, some of these individuals focused on critical issues 
of taxation and banking, or security and democracy. Th
  e milieu of 
labor reformers had identifi ed and skillfully exploited the issue of 
the eight-hour day, a programmatic demand that had a mobilizing 
and universalist impulse (though enforcement was often diffi
  cult 
under US conditions).
Th
 e London International had cordial relations with Richard 
Hinton, a labor reformer and organizer of the Washington, D.C., 
Section. When the German Marxist leader Sorge sought to bring 
this section under his control, the General Council in London 
declared that this was going too far and that the Washington 
Section should run its own aff airs. Th
  is section refused to back 
Sorge’s expulsion of Section 12. Th
  e British-born Hinton was a 
former companion of John Brown’s and offi
  cer of the First Kansas 
Colored Regiment, and he was fascinated by Edward Kellogg’s plan 
for a network of public banks and Osborn Ward’s proposals for 
cooperative agriculture and industry. In late-nineteenth-century 
conditions the smallholder was on a hiding to nothing—cooper-
atives with some public support could have made a lot of sense. 
Hinton’s section included many civil servants, who would actually 
have to implement any massive program of nationalization. Th
 ey 
were probably aware that the country only had 60,000 civil serv-
ants and any socialist plan must stimulate local publicly or socially 
owned enterprises and bottom-up initiatives.
148
 Hinton was later 
to be associated with Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party, as editor of its 
magazine.
In his survey Engels developed a very polite critique of the ideas 
of Henry George, even conceding that the land tax might have 
some role. Another radical taxation proposal that merited examina-
tion was Schuyler Colfax’s idea (mentioned above) of a levy on all 
shareholding capital.
149
 Finally, there was the issue of Lincoln’s very 
unfi nished revolution in the American South. Prior to the triumph 
148 Montgomery, Beyond Equality, pp. 387–477.
149 Brownlee, 
Federal Taxation, p. 26.
introduction  89

---

of the ultraracists in 1900 there were several movements which 
showed that white and black farmers and laborers could support 
the same goals; these included the Readjusters movement, which 
gained power in Virginia in the late 1870s, the Farmers’ Alliance, 
the “fusion” movement in North Carolina, and many branches 
of Populism. It is striking that these moments of interracial 
cooperation were targeted at the banks, the railroad corporations, 
and (in the case of Virginia) the large bondholders.
150
  Th
 e coal 
mines of Tennessee also witnessed trade union battles that brought 
together black and white workers opposed to their employers’ 
leasing of convict labor.
151
 
Th
  e years 1886–96 witnessed the rise and fall of the People’s 
Party, mounting the most serious third party challenge to the 
post–Civil War US political regime. Th
  e Populist movement was 
born out of bitterness at the depressed condition of farming and 
at the venality of Wormley House politics. Farmers in all parts of 
the Union, but most particularly in the Midwest and South, called 
on the Federal and state authorities to come to the aid of farmers 
devastated by low prices, high freight rates and expensive credit. 
Among the demands launched by the movement were nationali-
zation of the railroads, the coining of silver and the setting up of 
“sub-treasuries” at state and federal level which would serve as mar-
keting boards for the main cash crops. Th
  e farmers’ produce would 
be held in public warehouses in each county; against this collateral 
they would be able to take out publicly-guaranteed, low interest 
loans. Th
  e People’s Party proved attractive enough to elect some 
Senators and Governors, and scores of state level legislators. It 
did particularly well in the South, especially where it reached tacit 
agreements with the Republican party to combine forces against the 
dominant Democrats.Th
  e party’s standard bearers were white but 
it received signifi cant black support, partly thanks to tactical deals 
with the Republicans. Th
  e Democratic party responded with alarm 
and ferocity to Populist success, on the one hand adopting some 
of its more eye-catching proposals (e.g. monetizing silver in order 
to avoid “crucifying mankind on a cross of gold”) and on the other 
150 Evans, 
Open Wound, pp. 175–87. 
151 Karen 
Shapiro, 
A New South Rebellion, 1871–1896, Chapel Hill 1998. 
90  an unfinished revolution

---