Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

unleashing a campaign of physical intimidation against Southern 
Populists (in the Georgia campaign in 1892 fi fteen men were killed 
because of their politics). Carl Degler suggests that the Democrat 
leaders saw the Populist challenge as a “second Reconstruction” 
and were determined to stamp it out.
152
 Th
  e defeat of the Southern 
Populists was accompanied by a further tightening of racial oppres-
sion and the consolidation of the Democrats as the unquestioned 
ruling party of the South. Th
  e Populists did try to reach out to the 
urban workers. Th
  ey supported two policies cherished by organized 
labor—the eight hour agitation and opposition to the leasing of 
convicts to private employers. A group of Populists wanted Eugene 
Debs, the labor organizer, to become the party’s presidential can-
didate in the 1896 election but he declined. Th
  e Populists did not 
challenge the racial order and were easily deterred from coming to 
the defense of blacks. Th
  eir leaders sometimes couched their appeals 
in a stridently Protestant idiom that did not appeal to Catholics. 
Th
  e party’s most radical proposal was for the “sub-treasury” scheme 
but key leaders kept their distance from this. Th
  e rise and fall of the 
Populists showed that the idea of a Farmer-Labor party was not 
just an ideological fi gment but it also demonstrated the resilience 
of the reigning political regime.
153
In private correspondence Engels had a poor view of the theoreti-
cal grasp of the American Marxists and socialists. However, Engels 
was hugely impressed by the anthropological studies of Lewis Henry 
Morgan and Marx took seriously Henry Carey’s economic writings. 
Within a little more or less than a decade of Engels’s death, three 
outstanding works appeared that would very likely have improved 
his view of critical thought in the United States: Louis Boudin, Th e 
Th
  eoretical System of Karl Marx (1907); Th
 orsten Veblen, Th e Th eory 
of Business Enterprise (1904); and W.E.B. Du Bois, Th
  e Souls of Black 
Folk (1903). 
Th
 e eruption of titanic class struggles also had an impact on 
152 Carl Degler, Th e Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth 
Century, Boston 1982, pp. 316–70.
153  See Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: Th e Populist Movement 
in America, New York 1976; Michael Kazin, Th
  e Populist Persuasion, Ithaca 
1998; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London 2005, pp. 200–08; Robert 
McMath, American Populism: a Social History, 1877–98, London 1990. 
introduction  91

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currents in US intellectual life far removed from Marxism. Eugene 
Debs’s American Railway Union (ARU) broke with the caution of 
craft unionism and tried to organize the entire railroad industry. In 
1892 the ARU forced major concessions from the Northern Union 
railroad, and its membership grew to 150,000. However, when the 
ARU showed that it could paralyze one half of the entire rail net-
work, the administration of Grover Cleveland stepped in to break 
the strike through injunctions and imprisonments. A conversation 
with an ARU picket had an electrifying impact on the philosopher 
John Dewey: “My nerves were more thrilled than they had been for 
years; I felt as if I had better resign my job teaching and follow him 
round till I got into life. One lost all sense of the right and wrong 
of things in admiration of his absolute, almost fanatic, sincerity 
and earnestness, and in admiration of the magnifi cent combination 
that was going on. Simply as an aesthetic matter, I don’t believe the 
world has been but few times such a spectacle of magnifi cent union 
of men about a common interest, as this strike evinces…Th
 e govt 
is evidently going to take a hand in and the men will be beaten 
almost to a certainty—but it’s a great thing and the beginning of 
greater.”
154
Eugene Debs was arrested for defying the government injunction, 
and read Marx’s work in jail. Marx’s ideas were themselves begin-
ning to infl uence the culture of US radicalism, just as they were also, 
in their turn, shaped by the American experience of robber baron 
capitalism and desperate class struggle. Marx’s dark vision clearly 
supplies the central themes of Jack London’s extraordinarily power-
ful novel Th e Iron Heel, a book read by millions in a large number 
of languages—and which many claimed had changed their lives. 
Th
  e history of the United States in the Gilded Age had resonated 
with such epic class struggles that they fl eshed out the social imagi-
nary of socialists and other radicals, not just in North America but 
also in Europe and far beyond—Latin America, Asia, and Africa. 
Th
  e New World had always tapped into European utopian long-
ings, sometimes accompanied by dystopian fears. Th
  e United States 
of the great capitalist trusts and their Congressional marionettes 
154 Menand, 
Th
 e Metaphysical Club, p. 295; see also Archer, Why Is Th
 ere No 
Labor Party in the United States?, pp. 112–42.
92  an unfinished revolution

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off ered an awesome spectacle—but so did the resistance of US 
workers and farmers. Th
  e international day of the working class, 
May 1, after all, memorializes US workers—the Haymarket mar-
tyrs of May 1886. So just as the US capitalist, with his top hat and 
cigar, typifi ed the boss class, so the US workingman, with his shirt 
and jeans or overalls, became the image of the proletarian (and Lucy 
Parsons, Mother Jones, and “Rosie the Riveter” supplied his female 
counterpart). Th
  e set-piece battles in industrial America between 
the two sides were typically on a larger scale than European indus-
trial disputes. Th
  ere is, of course, irony in the fact that the iconic US 
worker was ultimately defeated or contained, while organized labor 
in Europe and the antipodes secured representation and even some 
social gains.
Albert Parsons, the Haymarket martyr, and his wife, Lucy Parsons, 
who did so much to defend the memory of her husband and his 
colleagues, had both participated in the Internationalist movement 
of the 1870s. Th
 ey fi rst met in Texas. Albert had volunteered for 
the Confederate army at the age of 13, but later came to apologize 
for this. Because of his military experience, he was made colo-
nel of a militia regiment formed to defend Reconstruction. Lucy 
Parsons was a woman of mixed race (with indigenous, African and 
European forbears), who may have been born a slave. Th
 ey moved 
to Chicago in the mid-1870s, where they were at fi rst  active  as 
socialist agitators in the International Working People’s Association 
(IWPA), which saw itself fi rst as a branch of the International and 
later were self-described anarchists. Th
  ey were strongly committed 
to the idea that the workers needed to emancipate themselves. Th
 ey 
were subsequently associated with a double attempt to radicalize 
the program and method of the trade unions. Th
  ey insisted that the 
eight-hour day should mean “eight for ten,” that is, ten hours’ pay 
for eight hours’ work, or an eight-hour day with no loss of pay. Th
 is 
way of shaping the demand had not always been so sharply pursued 
before. Th
  ey also propagated the idea that workers should support 
one another’s struggles with boycotts and sympathy strikes. 
Albert Parsons was a gifted orator and journalist, but he also 
assisted in the formation of a workers’ militia that would protect 
political meetings and demonstrations. Th
  e Chicago businessmen 
had already formed their own militia, equipped with carbines and 
introduction  93

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