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Hornets in the Hive: Socialists in Early Twentieth-Century Utah
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 50, 1982, No. 3
Hornets in the Hive: Socialists in Early Twentieth-Century Utah
BY JOHN S. MCCORMICK
SOCIALISM IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD in Utah today, and it is easy to assume that it always has been. Yet, in the early twentieth century, the Socialist Party of America was active throughout the state, attracted widespread support, and had considerable impact. Few people realize this, however, and historians have written little about it. This article proposes to sketch the scope of Socialist party activity in Utah in the first two decades of the twentieth century, look at the kinds of people who belonged to the party, and suggest areas for further research.
Throughout the nineteenth century Socialist groups in the United States were small and isolated and had little impact on American life. Around the turn of the century that began to change. In 1901 the Socialist Party of America was founded. During the next decade it enjoyed continuous growth. By 1912 it had a membership of 118,000 people, its presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, received nearly one million votes, 340 cities and towns throughout the country elected more than 1,200 Socialists to office, and 2 Socialists were serving in the U.S. Congress. At the same time, more than 300 Socialist papers were published throughout the country. One of them, the Appeal to Reason, published in Girard, Kansas, reached a circulation of 761,000 a week. Socialists found much support within the labor movement. They dominated several important unions, had considerable influence in others, and received the official endorsement of five state federations of labor. Socialists were also involved in most of the reform movements of the early twentieth century. The founders of the NAACP, for example, were mostly Socialists, and party members made up most of its leadership in its early years; the first articles on birth control to be widely circulated in the United States were published in a Socialist newspaper, the New York Call; and the Socialist party was an important force in the victory of women's suffrage in many states.
The Socialist Party of America's growth in its first decade of existence filled many of its members with untroubled optimism. Convinced that the expansion would continue indefinitely, they looked forward to the emergence of the party as the dominant force in American politics. After 1912, however, a leveling off occurred. The party ceased to expand and by 1922 had all but ceased to exist. The reason why this happened is a source of continuing scholarly debate and the basic question the historian of American socialism must address.
A branch of the Socialist party was organized in Utah in 1901, and local groups began springing up within a few months. Ultimately, Socialist locals existed in twenty of Utah's twenty-nine counties. The counties not organized were rural, isolated, and thinly populated. The party was particularly successful in mining areas of the state. It was strongest between 1905 and 1912 and was in rapid decline after 1916.
In the fall of 1901 Socialists elected three people to office: Hans P. Hansen as justice of the peace in Elsinore; Henry East as marshal in Lehi; and Jonas Mattson as president of Salina's town board. In the next twenty-two years the party elected at least ninety-four more officials in nineteen locations throughout the state. The high point came in 1911 when it elected thirty-three people in ten communities, including entire city administrations in Eureka, Mammoth, Murray, Stockton, and Joseph, the mayor and city treasurer in Cedar City, and city councilmen in Fillmore, Monroe, Bingham, and Salt Lake City.
Utah's Socialist party had considerable strength in the state's labor organizations and among its working class. Avowed Socialists were often elected to union offices; in 1906 union members in Salt Lake City and Ogden formed a Union Socialist Labor and Propaganda League to promote socialism and help elect Socialists to public office, and for several years both the Salt Lake Federation of Labor and the Utah State Federation of Labor officially endorsed the party. At its annual convention in September 1911, for example, the Utah State Federation of Labor, "with little opposition," adopted a resolution that read in part:
While the labor movement in Utah in the early twentieth century supported the Socialist party, the party likewise supported the labor movement. In 1911, for example, it pledged aid to striking railroad workers, held a rally and parade through downtown Salt Lake City, and promised to expel members of the party who aided the railroad in any way; and in the fall of 1912 the party petitioned the Salt Lake City Commission to provide jobs for the unemployed, establish a free city employment bureau, and end the practice of using convicts as workers on city projects.
Utah's Socialist party was most visible during election campaigns when it sponsored regular speeches and rallies, distributed literature, took out advertisements in local newspapers, and otherwise engaged in conventional political activity. In 1902 Salt Lake City Socialists sponsored a "soap-box campaign" with local party members and national party speakers addressing crowds from a soap-box at the corner of Main Street and Second South in downtown Salt Lake every night for two weeks before election. During the campaign of 1904 Socialists in Nephi held a series of weekly rallies and published a regular "Socialist Column" in the Nephi newspaper. According to the paper's editor, "We had not thought that socialism was so interesting a theme or we would have catered somewhat to the public taste long 'ere this." During that same year, Socialists in Richfield held a series of what the newspaper described as "rousing rallies." At one of them, a California Socialist named Harry McKee, who made regular speaking tours of Utah, "presented the clearest and most logical exposition of socialist principles of any speaker that has ever visited the section." During the course of his remarks he argued that the common charge made against Socialists "that they were anarchists and that they believed in destroying the government was made by people who did not read or study the principles of socialism. He advised them to read more and talk less."
The Socialist party functioned not only during elections, however, but carried on a range of activities throughout the year, many of them designed to provide mutual support for party members. While the party sought to spread the gospel of socialism, it also tried to establish a network of associations and activities to sustain its members through isolation and hard times. Dozens of examples could be noted. As part of Duchesne County's Fourth of July celebration in 1915, for instance, the Socialist local there held a three-day encampment. An estimated 1,000 people attended. The three days were "devoted to outdoor exercises and a dozen socialist speakers made the beautiful valley resound with their eloquence." The next year, Duchesne Socialists made their county convention a three-day affair and scheduled a variety of activities. On Saturday evening "a very enjoyable dance was attended by a large number of people, but the dancing stopped promptly at midnight." All day Sunday convention delegates heard political speeches. Monday morning they named a county ticket and adopted a county platform. Monday afternoon a Dr. Herold "delivered a very interesting lecture on Character Analysis." On Monday night "the dancing continued until the exhausted dancers cried 'enough.' Two orchestras relieved each other, and when both orchestras w r ere 'played out,' the piano player was brought into service."
What kind of people belonged to the Socialist party in Utah? What kind of people were attracted to a political party that viewed capitalism as inhuman and unjust and looked forward to a completely different kind of economic and social system? What kind of people, for example, wrote and subscribed to the Juab County Socialist Platform of 1908, which stated in part that "The present capitalistic system of government with its consequent evils of public competition and private monopolies is productive of practically all the poverty, suffering, and crime which makes our present society a reproach to our boasted civilization," and which went on to urge people to "vote against a social and economic system that gives wealth to a handful of parasites w : hile toiling millions must content themselves with a meager and uncertain subsistence."
Debate among historians about the membership of the Socialist party throughout the United States during its golden age centers on these questions: Were Socialists "aliens," that is, were they either foreigners or dropouts from respectable society? And, what was the class composition of the party? Was it largely middle class, as, for example, David
Shannon and Daniel Bell suggest, based on their examinations of the Socialist party's national leadership? Or has the middle-class presence in the party been exaggerated, as recent studies by Melvin Dubofsky, James Weinstein, John H. M. Laslett, and James R. Green suggest? 12 To what extent were women active in the party? Were party members largely native born, or were they "old immigrants" from the British Isles and northern and western Europe? Did the "new immigrants" who came to the United States in increasing numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries join the party? In general, historians have found questions like these difficult to answer; the generalizations they have made have been based on limited evidence, and there have been no studies of state or local membership.
In order to find out about the membership of the Socialist party in Utah, the names of every person who ran for office on the Socialist ticket anywhere in Utah between 1900 and 1923 or who was active in the party organization in any way were collected. In all, 1,423 such people were identified and biographical information gathered on as many of them as possible: sex, marital status, date and place of birth, date of immigration to the United States if foreign-born, religion, dates active in the party, date and place of election to public office, and occupation. The main sources from which the data were drawn were the 1900 manuscript census, obituaries, and records of the Mormon church, including membership records, deceased member records, and family group sheets. Miscellaneous sources supplemented these, including local and family histories, biographical encyclopedias, diaries, and oral interviews. It was not possible to get all the information wanted on every person, but at least some information on everybody was obtained.
Briefly, the results of the study were these: The Socialist party in Utah was not a product of foreign influences imported from abroad. It was not an extraneous movement that European immigrants brought to Utah that had no relevance to the Utah scene. It was not a party of people on the fringes of respectable society. Neither was it a party of dentists, as Lenin once derisively charged about the party in the United States. Rather, it appealed to a wide cross section of people and had a strong working-class base. Specifically, about 90 percent of the members were men. Ninety percent were married. Two-thirds were native-born, and 70 percent of them were born in Utah. Of the foreign-born, half were born in the British Isles and almost all of the rest in Scandinavia and western Europe. The overwhelming majority were not recent immigrants. Ninety percent had been in the United States more than ten years before they joined the party and over half more than twenty years. In terms of occupation, 4 percent were professionals, 8 percent were white-collar workers, another 8 percent were proprietors, 40 percent were skilled manual workers, 20 percent were semi-skilled or unskilled workers, and 20 percent were farmers. One in eight worked in the mining industry.
What is perhaps most interesting is that over 40 percent of Utah's Socialists were Mormons. Many of their names give them away: Joseph Smith Jessop, Parley Pratt Washburn, Wilford Woodruff Freckleton. More important, many were active and faithful members who held important positions on the ward and stake level. At one time, for example, the bishop of the Eureka Ward, his first counselor, and one of the ward clerks were all active Socialists.
The following table summarizes findings about the membership of the Socialist party in Utah. *
Brief biographical sketches of a dozen or so Utah Socialists add light and color to the statistical picture.
Andrew Mitchell was elected mayor of Eureka in 1907 and again in 1911. A non-Mormon, he was born in Scotland in 1859, came to Utah as a young man, worked briefly on the Salt Lake LDS Temple, and then settled in Eureka where he worked as a carpenter for various mining com- panies until his death in 1915. Active in the local carpenters union, he served as its president for several years. Prior to his election as mayor in 1907 the Salt Lake Tribune described him as "an energetic Socialist, . . . and he stands high in the estimation of the working men of the camp." Other Socialists elected in Eureka in 1907 included Annabell Mooney, the town's first grade schoolteacher, who was a non-Mormon native of Kansas; C. C. Stillman, the town's Baptist minister; and a miner named Wilford Woodruff Freckleton. Halfway through his term on the city council, the Mormon church called Freckleton on a mission to England. Upon his return two years later, he resumed his activity in the Socialist party and in 1917 was again elected to the city council on the Socialist ticket.
Frank Defa was born in Rome in 1880. He came to Utah in the 1890s and worked for the railroads as a machinist. When the federal government opened the Uintah Indian Reservation to white settlement in 1905, Defa moved to what in 1914 would become Duchesne County and opened a saloon in a tent. Eventually, he became a prominent rancher and businessman, owning a general store, a garage, a restaurant, a dance hall, and a theatre. Following the demise of the Socialist party after World War I, he became active in the Democratic party and in the 1930s served several terms in the state legislature.
Henry and Jacob Gease were active in the Socialist party in both Carbon and Utah counties. While living in Provo the brothers owned and operated a cigar factory. According to a guidebook to the city, their leading cigars were the "Henry VI," the "Best People," and the "Provo Girl" and were sold "in every first class establishment handling cigars and tobacco throughout the central and southern section of the state." The Gease brothers themselves, the book noted, were "practical cigarmakers," "personally well-liked by everyone," and "numbered] among Provo's most progressive citizens."
Walter J. Lemon was a brakeman and conductor for the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad. Active in the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, he also edited its journal for several years. In 1922 he emigrated to the Soviet Union with several thousand other Americans whom the Soviets had recruited to work on a project to rebuild and expand an old industrial complex in the Ural Mountains. The director of the project was William D. ("Big Bill") Haywood, a Salt Lake native who had helped found the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905 and who was one of the best-known radicals in the United States. While in Russia, Lemon met and married Mrs. Ida Seldon, also a former resident of Salt Lake who had worked for several years as a seamstress. Lemon died in Russia in 1925.
William Knerr was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1877, the son of a Methodist minister. He studied briefly for the ministry but left school following his father's death and came west. He worked first in Colorado as a telegrapher for the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad, then as a sheepherder in Wyoming, and in 1900 came to Salt Lake City. For twelve years he drove a laundry wagon and then in 1912 went to work in the city recorder's office. Active early in Utah's labor movement, he was an organizer for the American Federation of Labor and president of Utah's Federation of Labor for three years. He was named a member of the Utah State Industrial Commission in 1917 when it was organized and was its chairman from 1927 until his death in 1942. The commission's main function was to administer the state's Workman's Compensation Act. Knerr's wife, Laura Ann Walker, was also an active Socialist. Born in Salt Lake City in 1887, she graduated from the LDS Business College in 1906 and went to work as a bookkeeper. At the time of her marriage in 1910, she was secretary of the Utah Socialist party.
Gottlieb Berger, whose family converted to the Mormon church in Switzerland and were among the early settlers of the Murray area of the Salt Lake Valley, was first elected to the Murray City Commission as a Socialist in 1911 and served continuously until 1932. During that time he was active in local Mormon church affairs, serving as president of the high priest's quorum and assistant Sunday School superintendent. He made his living as railroad brakeman, a farmer, and a smelter worker.
Joseph Q. Dart on, Sr., was a prominent musician and an active Mormon. Born in Nephi in 1864, he was an accomplished violinist by age nine. When he was fourteen, however, he lost an arm in a railroad accident and turned to the coronet. During his career, he organized Darton's Silver Band of Provo, led the Nephi City Band and the Eureka City Band, and was associated with most of Utah's early "name" bands, including those of Anton Pederson, John Held, and Owen Sweeten.
Murray E. King edited the Intermountain Worker and ran for public office several times during his nearly four decades of involvement with the Socialist party. He was born in Fillmore, Utah, in 1876, came to Salt Lake City in 1894, and was one of the pioneers of socialism in Utah. In 1909 the Salt Lake Tribune said that he had "a wide reputation as a writer and speaker on political and economic conditions." He described himself as a "constructive socialist," meaning that he believed that capitalism should be abolished, but through the ballot, not through force. After the Intermountain Worker ceased publication in 1916 he left Utah. During the next decade or so he worked and wrote for the left-wing Farmer-Labor party in North Dakota and Minnesota, was managing editor of the Socialist party's American Appeal, worked on the staff of another radical paper, the New Leader, and wrote extensively for both the Nation and the New Republic. His best-known book, however, written after he returned to Utah in the 1930s and published soon after his death in 1940, was The Last of the Bandit Riders, a biography Of Matt Warner, Utah outlaw and, later, a sheriff.
Ole Arilson was secretary of Mount Pleasant's Socialist party from 1901 until 1914 and was several times a candidate for office on the Socialist ticket. A non-Mormon in predominantly Mormon Sanpete County, he was born in Denmark in 1849, came to the United States in 1862, and settled in Utah. He worked most of his life as an unskilled laborer and operated a small farm.
The two Utah Socialists about whom the most is known are Henry W. Lawrence and William Thurston Brown. Lawrence was a prominent Salt Lake City businessman and once-active Mormon. Born in Canada in 1835, he joined the Mormon church with his parents in the mid-1840s and came to Utah in 1852. In 1859 he and his brother-in-law, John L. Kimball, founded the firm of Kimball and Lawrence, which quickly became one of the leading mercantile establishments in Utah. The firm advertised in the 1879-80 Utah Directory and Gazetteer as a
Following its establishment, Lawrence became involved in an increasing number of business enterprises, including mining. By the late nineteenth century he was a millionaire. In addition to his business activities, he was active in civic and Mormon church affairs. He served in the bishopric of the Eighth Ward in Salt Lake, was a member of the first board of directors of ZCMI, served as territorial marshal in the early 1860s, and was a member of the Salt Lake City Council from 1865 to 1869. In 1869 Mormon authorities excommunicated him and other members of the dissident Godbeites. In 1870 he was a founder of the anti-Mormon Liberal party and in that year ran for mayor of Salt Lake on the Liberal ticket, receiving 302 votes. Daniel H. W T ells, the candidate of the Mormon church's People's party, received 1,999. Lawrence remained an active Liberal and in 1892 was elected to the Utah Territorial Senate.
With the dissolution of the People's party in 1890 and the Liberal party three years later, national political parties emerged in Utah. Lawrence joined neither the Republican nor the Democratic party, however, but instead helped found Utah's Populist party. An agrarian-based leftist party in most areas of the United States, it found its greatest strength in Utah in urban areas. Organized in Salt Lake City in the fall of 1893, it concentrated on furthering the cause of organized labor and the unemployed. The party had only limited success in Utah, electing a mayor in Sandy and city councilmen in Ogden and Vernal. Lawrence ran on the Populist ticket for governor in 1895 and for Salt Lake mayor in 1897.
With the demise of the Populist party in Utah and the rest of the United States in the late 1890s, Lawrence, like many former Populists, turned to socialism, and in 1901 he helped found Utah's Socialist party. Several times a candidate for public office as a Socialist, his election to the Salt Lake City Commission in 1911 completed his evolution from political and religious orthodoxy to political radicalism.
William Thurston Brown served as minister of Salt Lake's Unitarian church during his three-year stay in Utah from 1907 until 1910. During that time he was one of the state's most articulate and widely read Socialists. Born in 1861, the son of a New York clergyman, he studied for the ministry at Yale University and was a Congregational minister, first in Connecticut and then in Rochester, New York, in the 1890s. By the turn of the century he was a Unitarian, a Christian Socialist, a vigorous opponent of the Spanish-American War, and, with Bolton Hall and Ernest Howard Crosby (America's leading apostle of Tolstoyan nonresistance), an editor of The Social Gospel. In the early years of the twentieth century he was an organizer for the Socialist party and traveled throughout the country, as Paul Avrich notes, "denouncing the evils of capitalism and upholding the rights of labor, free speech, and free sex." A prolific writer, he contributed to a wide range of radical journals, from anarchist publications to Socialist ones, and wrote a dozen or more lengthy pamphlets, including How Capitalism Has Hypnotized Society and What Socialism Means as a Philosophy and as a Movement. While in Utah he directed much of his writing at churches in general and the Mormon church in particular for failing to confront social problems and work for economic justice.
In the fall of 1910 he helped organize the Modern School, a private elementary and secondary school based on the educational theories of a Spanish anarchist, Francisco Ferrer, whom the Spanish government had executed in 1909 after finding him guilty of fomenting a popular insurrection. During the next decade members of the Francisco Ferrer Association of the United States established Modern Schools throughout the country. The first one was in Philadelphia. The second was in Salt Lake City. In addition to Brown, its main organizers were Kate S. Hilliard and Virginia Snow Stephen. Hilliard was an early leader of the Socialist party in Ogden and editor of the "Socialist Column" that ran weekly in the Ogden Morning Examiner from 1905 until 1909. By the time of her involvement in the Modern School, however, she and a group of other Ogden Socialists had left the Socialist Party of America, charging that it had become too "reformist," and had joined the more radical Socialist Labor party of Daniel De Leon. Stephen was an art instructor at the University of Utah and daughter of Lorenzo Snow, fifth president of the Mormon church. "Do you believe there is justice for the poor working factory girl, or for the ill-paid person in other employment?" she wrote a friend. "If you knew and had seen right here in Salt Lake City what I have seen with my own eyes, you might change your view." 21 Emma Goldman, America's best-known anarchist, called her "a very courageous and able woman," 22 and in 1914 she became involved in the struggle to save Joe Hill, a songwriter and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. After he was executed in 1916, the university fired her. She married another member of the IWW r and moved to California.
Salt Lake's Modern School was not as long-lived as its founders had hoped, closing within a year after its establishment. William Thurston Brown, at least, remained undiscouraged. He left Salt Lake City in 1911 and in the next few years founded Modern Schools in Portland and. Los Angeles and tried to revive the one in Chicago. From 1916 until 1919 he was the director of the Modern School at Stelton, New Jersey. The most successful of the Modern Schools in the United States, it lasted until the 1950s. In the 1920s Brown moved to California and joined the Communist party. He spent the last years of his life teaching at a private boys' school in Menlo Park.
The history of the Socialist party in Utah is beginning to unfold, but there is much more to learn about the ideas and activities of individual Socialists; what motivated them to support the party and the degree to which their commitment was maintained in later years; the extent of the connection, if any, between the Mormon church's United Order and the Socialist party; the actions of Socialists in office. Recent studies of the party elsewhere in the United States in the early twentieth century, for example, have uncovered an ambivalence at the core of the movement. Socialists tended to be radicals in theory, but "gas and water" Socialists in practice. Once in office they tended to adopt a reformist orientation, seeking to win elections, stay in power, and work within the existing system. More needs to be known about internal divisions within the party. Factionalism was always a problem for the Socialist movement in the United States, but little is known about the situation in Utah, beyond a few incidents. We need to find out about governmental repression of the party in Utah. In some places and at some times, particularly during World War I, efforts of governmental bodies at all levels to suppress Socialists presented a serious problem to them. What happened in Utah is unclear, beyond the fact that in the summer of 1910 Salt Lake City police attempted to deny Socialists the right to speak on street corners and arrested several who did; and then, in 1913, the Salt Lake City Commission denied Socialists the right to hold rallies at Liberty Park, which led the IWW to launch one of their "free speech" campaigns in Salt Lake. Socialist party efforts to support the working class in their struggles and activities also need to be examined. Did the party have a consistent program of support? What did they do in specific instances? How effective were they? Here it might be fruitful to look at areas of the state where the party met with initial success but then faded. It was active early in the coal fields of Carbon County, for example, and elected several people in 1904. After that, however, coal miners ceased to see the Socialist party as a vehicle for them, and the party faded away. The ideology of the party is another area ripe for investigation. Recent studies of the Socialist Party of America suggest that its ideology was poorly developed at best. Debate centers around the question of whether that was a weakness or a strength and in what ways. The little known about Utah Socialists suggests that socialism here was more a mood than a theory, and an important part of that mood was anti-Mormonism. Briefly, Socialists sometimes characterized the Mormon church as an authoritarian and reactionary institution that posed an obstacle to progress in general and to the advance of socialism in particular. There was also some attempt to develop a theory of the relationship between religious institutions and capitalism within which to fit the features and actions of the Mormon church. Finally, a great deal more needs to be known about the relationship between the Socialist party in Utah and the Mormon church, since in the early twentieth century the church was still the dominant force in the social, economic, and political affairs of the state, and church leaders were increasingly critical of radical politics and even union organization by workers.
The history of the Socialist party in Utah is an intriguing subject. Further investigation into it promises to yield new insight into a number of aspects of Utah history. It also has wider implications. Americans today think radicalism strange, alien, and irrelevant. As Michael Harrington recently said, "Socialists in this country are dismissed as either totalitarians or as nuts, marginal people, or dilettantes." The attitude Harrington identifies is itself peculiar, since the United States is the only highly developed country in the world without a strong Socialist or Labor party. As Lloyd C. Gardner and William L. O'Neill point out, "What needs explaining is not why other countries at least pay lip service to socialism but why the United States does not." The early twentieth century — the only period in American history when a mass movement for socialism existed and also the time when comparably developed countries, especially in Europe, acquired powerful Socialist movements — is the place to look for answers. In the search, local studies will be important.
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