Claiming the City

Claiming the City

A Global History of Workers’ Fight
for Municipal Socialism

Shelton Stromquist

First published by Verso 2023

© Shelton Stromquist 2023

Cover photo by Sydney Charles Smith (1888–1972): Photographs of New Zealand.

Ref: 1/2-048931-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23116109

A generous grant from the Center for Recent United States History (CRUSH) at the University of Iowa supported publication of this book in its final stages.

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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For Ann

Municipal Socialism

“The future looks bright with hope, for we see shining in the distance the lights of our New Jerusalem; the city whose wealth consists not in the fortunes of its millionaires, but in the health and happiness of the men and women who inhabit it.”

H. Russell Smart, “Municipal Socialism”
(Manchester: Manchester Labour Library, 1895)

“The municipality is around them, is part of their daily lives, ministers to their comfort and their health, and is (to coin a word) watchable by them individually. Therefore, if anywhere, they can learn the first lessons of that social co-operation which has to be learnt if Socialism is going to succeed … But, even on the present restricted and unfair franchise, they have a majority in nearly every metropolitan area, and could, by electing councils wholly composed of Labour men, provide a most excellent training ground in finance and public economy for their future political candidates. Let the recent defeats prove incentives to immediate action in these respects, and they will turn out to have been victories in disguise.”

“Think Municipally,” Tocsin (Melbourne), August 31, 1905

“Of all the fields of political activity the municipal one is in some respects the most important inasmuch as it is nearer to us than any other, touches our daily life closer, and has the most intimate bearing on the great social problem we are all striving to solve. Our municipalities are in fact the nearest thing to practical Socialism we possess.”

“Reforms That We Wanted,” The Worker (Sydney), January 13, 1911

“Let us remember a few things; that this movement at the present time is a municipal movement; it will grow and develop within the states, and you will take possession of them long before you do of the national government. The municipalities are the natural homes of the proletariat. It will first assert its strength there. You will first be obliged to assume a constructive course and constructive propaganda there. We are going to have new conditions.”

Seymour Stedman, Delegate, Illinois,
Socialist Party of America, National Convention, 1904

“We see the city as an essential form for the social system that must exhibit autonomy in a democratic sense. The city is an alliance of citizens with the objective of sustaining community and grasping their common interests.”

Franz Schuhmeier, Arbeiter Zeitung (Vienna), June 9, 1900

“In a country where the principle of adult franchise has been so emphatically recognised as it has in New Zealand, it is surely a curious contradiction that the local franchise should be limited to such a small proportion of the population … Our system is based on property and we allow plural voting … the administration of local affairs [has] a more important relation to property values than to human conditions.”

Stella May Henderson, “Local Government Reform,” 3rd Session,
Proceedings, National Council of the Women
of New Zealand, April 20–28, 1898, Wellington

“[Cities] have outlasted empires and states. As often as the houses in our villages were burned, the population left homeless and for a time were dispersed, on the ruins they again established the city and took up and pursued the old work. When during the storm of wartime the state is occupied by the enemy and ceases to function, the city remains and becomes the only primary supporter of the public business … In wartime the fundamental nature of the city breaks through. That the city is the community of its residents, who for better or for worse live together, is impressed upon the consciousness of the individual, more so than in peace time. From there it follows that the city must take on an abundance of new tasks, that above all spring from the deepest character of the community.”

Dr. Hugo Lindemann, Die deutsche
Stadtgemeinde im Kriege (Tübingen, 1917)

“Through democratization of local and municipal government, by increasing the functions and powers of local elected bodies, through a proper system of devolution and delegation of powers the state was to be changed into a real commonwealth—not a power above Society, but a tool in the hands of an organized Democracy.”

Eduard Bernstein, “Karl Marx and Social Reform,”
published in The Progressive Review, II (1897)

“The Socialist most hated in Vienna by the well-to-do is certainly Hugo Breitner. Speak to them of Lenin, Trotsky, or Liebknecht, and they will listen with perfect calm, but mention the name Breitner and the calm is replaced by fury and hate … He is credited with the intention of destroying the whole economic life of Vienna, etc., etc.

In reality he is merely the author of the financial policy of the municipal council … Breitner’s new tax scheme introduces some 18 new taxes, which chiefly hit those who can afford to pay, and abolishes one or two old taxes which burdened the workers unfairly—for instance the house tax and various taxes on food.”

Australian Worker, 19 August 1925

“If local administration is not the basis for world shattering events and dramatic tensions, it is nevertheless the grounds for real work and honest fulfillment of duty; and it is not the great world political events alone that reorder human society, it can also be the inconspicuous, unnoticed, simple everyday work in narrowly-bounded space.”

Die Gemeinde (Vienna), nr. 1, April 4, 1914

Contents

Introduction: Cities and the Origins of Labor Politics

Part I

MUNICIPAL ORIGINS AND THE RISE OF LABOR

Introduction: “Paris Is Burning”: The Paris Commune and Historical Memory

  1  The Rise of Cities and Elite Traditions of Urban Governance

  2  Labor Conflict and the New Working-Class Politics

Part II

CITY POLITICS, MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM, AND LABOR’S FIGHT FOR URBAN SPACE

Introduction: Claiming Political Space: The Municipal Franchise and the Limits of Urban Citizenship

  3  Laborism and a New Urban Politics: England

  4  “Like a Pike in a Carp Pond”: Municipal Socialism in Germany

  5  Contested Cities Down Under: New Zealand and Australia

  6  Battling for Labor’s Local Political Space: United States

  7  Promises of Power: Internationalism from Below

Part III

THE CRISES OF WAR, NATIONALISM, AND THE SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF CITIES

Introduction: “The Brink of the Abyss”: The Great War and the Collapse of the Second International

  8  War! Shifting Currents of Localism, Nationalism, and Internationalism

  9  The Wartime Politics of Everyday Life in Britain

10  Opposing Conscription and War on the Urban Periphery: The Antipodes and the United States

11  War and Revolution: The Home Front in Germany’s Wartime Cities

12  A Democratic Moment: “Red Vienna” and the Promise of Social Democratic Cities in the Postwar Era

Epilogue: Whither Social Democracy in Cities?

Acknowledgments

Lists of Maps and Photos

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Introduction:
Cities and the Origins of Labor Politics

Intersecting Worlds of E. R. Hartley and Jim Thorn

Early in the twentieth century, E. R. Hartley and Jim Thorn joined a transnational circuit of socialist agitators. They came from worlds apart, but they had much in common. Not the least was an abiding commitment to remake cities into humane spaces where workers like themselves might create a new politics that addressed the most pressing issues of everyday life. Their paths crossed in England as agitational speakers with Robert Blatchford’s Clarion Van.

Hartley, a master butcher by trade, had been a city councillor and an active member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Bradford, England, for a decade and a half before he set off on a recuperative “holiday” in 1911 to lecture and observe the work of fellow socialists in cities across New Zealand and Australia. Thorn, a younger railway shop worker from Christchurch, New Zealand, had been actively organizing workers around municipal issues in his hometown since 1905. He departed for England in 1909 on what would become a four-year sojourn to observe and ultimately participate in the local political work of the ILP.¹ Hartley’s trip came at a moment of exhaustion and illness brought on by his unceasing political work in the industrial boroughs of West Yorkshire. Besides holding down his council seat in Manningham Mills Ward, he was an inveterate speaker on behalf of other local candidates. On arrival in New Zealand, he plunged with his usual enthusiasm into the local labor scene and eventually in Melbourne, Australia, he became in short order a popular speaker and regular columnist on municipal issues. At the request of local activists, he extended his initial stay of a year for an additional six months. Jim Thorn, after more than a year speaking to London crowds about the virtues of socialism, joined the Forward van in Scotland for another three years where he came to be regarded as “one of the finest propagandists in the country.” At a farewell social in his honor, shortly before he embarked on his return journey to New Zealand in September 1913, Thorn was lauded for his “urbanity and his cheery optimism.” He assured his comrades “that whatever energy and capacity he had would not be lost to Socialism. As he would soon be in the thick of the fight after he landed in New Zealand.”²

Jim Thorn Speaking for the ILP with the Clarion Van in the UK, c. 1911

Although Hartley and Thorn would both run for parliament at some point in their careers, each invested their political energies significantly in the municipal realm. It was in cities where they saw most clearly the conditions confronting workers’ daily lives that desperately needed attention, and it was there they believed local elites most aggressively defended their propertied interests. They both relished the hand-to-hand political combat inside council chambers and in the streets over issues of immediate interest to their working-class constituents—decent housing, sanitation, an expanding public sector of municipal services, respectable wages for city employees, and the use of public space for agitational purposes. They regularly shattered the decorum and procedures that had long ruled city council chambers and had stifled direct participation by workers in local governance.²

Hartley and Thorn represent a sphere of political activism that has been neglected in most accounts of the rise of a new labor and socialist politics in much of the industrialized world around the turn of the century. The dominant narratives have been national, focused on the building of competitive parliamentary labor and socialist parties and on the cast of characters whose emergence as national political actors shaped and colored those narratives.

*  *  *

Creating a New Politics—An Alternative Narrative

This book offers an alternative perspective with a different set of characters. Its points of reference are fundamentally local yet simultaneously transnational. It revolves around the actions of local actors (like Hartley and Thorn), many of them unheralded, and the movements in which they were embedded. It takes us inside burgeoning cities around the globe whose economic structure, social complexion, and government institutions were being challenged and reconstructed as industrialization unfolded across large swaths of Europe, North America, and in more distant settler colonies. Searching for the promise of economic opportunity, working-class migrants flooded the neighborhoods and the factories of places like Redfern (Sydney) and Christchurch, Altona (Hamburg), and Ottakring (Vienna), Malmö and Bradford, Cleveland and Butte. Instead of opportunity in the 1890s, they found job insecurity, dangerous and often fatal working conditions, congested tenements or bungalows, inadequate sanitation, an absence of public amenities (parks, baths, garbage collection), and city governments run as private sanctuaries by propertied elites determined to maintain their privileges. Amid filthy streets, the rank smell of untreated sewage, and crowded houses in disrepair, workers claimed a new sphere of political activism. Energized by the mass strikes that swept through docks, coal mines, rail yards, building sites, and textile factories, local activists set about creating a new politics that might become the vehicle for an urban peoples’ agenda and that promised fundamental transformation of these city landscapes.

Cleveland, Central Woodland Public Housing Area c. 1900

The 1890s: A Moment of Political Transformation

Across the industrializing world in the late nineteenth century, political change was in the air. One symptom was an upsurge in mass strikes. A strong whiff of internationalism drifted across Europe with the formation of a new, more robust socialist international. The lifting of Bismarck’s onerous anti-socialist laws in 1890 unleashed pent-up socialist political mobilization in Germany. The Swedish Social Democratic Party, Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti (SAP) had formed in 1889 on the cusp of a wave of strikes that swept the country. And in the United Kingdom, a massive dockers’ strike and rapidly forming general unions set the stage for a new Independent Labour Party (ILP) that was already taking shape in numerous industrial towns across the West Riding. Australia’s own “Great Maritime Strike” in 1891 and the collective actions of miners and sheepshearers pushed forward local political initiatives in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and more remote outposts like Broken Hill and Barcaldine. In New Zealand, the maritime strike had similar catalytic effects, although in the short run Richard Seddon and his liberal allies seized the political initiative and managed to channel that enthusiasm into a refurbished Liberal Party. The massive strike wave and new unionism in the United States that produced a “Great Upheaval” (1877–1894) precipitated intense political debate in 1893–94 over independent labor politics that promised, along with the Populist revolt, to shake the American two-party system to its foundations.

This global “moment” of political transformation has been widely acknowledged in its respective national contexts.³ But two transnational aspects of that transformation have been neglected or wholly ignored. First, the global dimension of this movement reflected not simply the existence of a new socialist international, or the obvious simultaneity of developments here and there in different national contexts. Local, municipal activists understood their circumstances to be linked by a global economy that increasingly set the terms for capital flow, international labor migration, and the economic environment in which they fought to improve the lives of their working-class compatriots. The global depression of the 1890s became for them an object lesson of the first order.

A second feature of that global transformation lay in the grassroots efforts of municipal labor and socialist activists to forge international connections of their own making. With benefit of telegraphic communications, expanding railway networks, and faster steamship travel, they shared organizing experience and read each other’s pamphlets and news reports. They closely followed the “drama of the streets,” whether in the back alleys of Hamburg and Berlin, on the docks in Sydney, in the hard-rock mining communities of the Rocky Mountains, or in the strikes of miners in Broken Hill, New South Wales, or Blackball and Runanga in the Grey District of New Zealand. They organized along similar lines in the workshops of Malmö and the textile mills of Bradford, Halifax, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Stuttgart, Germany. They wove an internationalism from below stamped by the experience of industrialization and its consequences. What we might call translocal political activism stimulated widespread local activism and gave fiber and context to the periodic gatherings of socialist leaders from their respective national movements under the auspices of the Second International.⁴

It is no surprise that this translocal political awakening manifested itself most forcefully in cities. The industrial revolution made cities sites of profound social and economic change. By 1890—much earlier in some places—the magnetic pull of urban labor markets and insecure conditions of employment had intensified problems of congestion, epidemic disease, squalid housing, inadequate urban transit, unreliable supplies of water, milk, and essential foodstuffs, and chronic unemployment. If onerous working conditions precipitated new forms of labor organization, the conditions of daily living also produced new forms of urban politics.

The most striking feature of labor and socialist politics at the municipal level in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lay in the remarkable uniformity of its programmatic vision. Labor, socialist, and feminist activists across the industrializing world crafted programs that promised immediate relief and popular, democratic control of the local urban worlds they inhabited.

Women, although widely denied suffrage, nonetheless played pivotal roles as social investigators, propagandists for reform, theoreticians, and outspoken advocates for universal suffrage. Where the franchise permitted women to participate in local government and school board elections, they seized the opportunity not only to vote but to run for office. Despite residual and at times debilitating hegemonic masculine cultures in the new labor and socialist parties, political openings at the local level proved attractive to women who sought to address the problems of daily life and expand the sphere of women’s activism.⁵

Remarkably congruent political programs cropped up repeatedly in different urban contexts in the late nineteenth century.⁶ Early municipal socialists believed that “localism … prefigured the socialist society,” and, as Warren Magnusson has argued, took advantage of the “geographically uneven development of capitalist society” to take initiatives around widely shared urban concerns. Their vision prescribed a shift from a local capitalist marketplace to a collectivist world of consumption and public ownership, mediated by local government. In such cities, they imagined, workers

could live in public housing, ride public transit, rely on public utilities for water, power, lighting and telecommunications, send their children to public schools, get health care at public hospitals and clinics, go to the public swimming baths, recreation centres, parks and theatres, eat at public restaurants, and depend on public pensions and other benefits for people with inadequate incomes.

Local authorities would directly employ citizens on public works, and workers’ organizations would “participate in planning and developing their own community.”⁷ In London, “radical Progressives” who gained control of the London County Council (LCC) in 1889 articulated a similar vision. As historian Pat Thane has noted, “fundamental issues of human survival—death and sickness rates, levels of income, the quality of living space—became politicized as never before.” The LCC sponsored “house-building, purified water supplies, work creation, a commitment to … ‘fair wages and conditions’ ” in all city contracts, and improved conditions of employment for “the growing army of municipal employees.”⁸ Although many leading German social democrats regarded municipal politics skeptically, some voices in the SPD envisioned a more transformative, locality-based socialism and crafted municipal programs that reflected those goals.⁹ A Hamburg delegate told the 1902 Party Congress that he hoped

cities in substantial numbers will contribute to the transformation of social relationships and create a wholly new social organism, and that democratic self-determination of cities can serve as a means to create a new social order.¹⁰

Similar programmatic outcroppings appeared everywhere across the industrial world at the turn of the century.¹¹

Local Contexts and National Narratives

In this book, the stories of these municipal socialists are not marginal additions to the national narrative. Nor does their importance lie in the extent to which they became highly visible players in the national domains of parliamentary politics.¹² Rather, I argue that the vibrant realm of municipal politics illustrates how we might fundamentally recast the story of the emergence of a new labor and socialist politics across urban landscapes subject to the most intensive phase of the industrial revolution in the period 1890–1925. These local accounts do not simply provide colorful building blocks for national political narratives. They illuminate an alternative politics that, at times, clashed with the agendas of the national leadership in emerging labor and socialist parties. These local actors embodied a local social democratic politics dedicated to building grassroots democracy. Their movements were not the “parochial” politics of backwaters and out-of-the-way places, although their cities were often far removed from national centers of power. We think, for instance, of Broken Hill, deep in the outback of New South Wales, or Bradford, Halifax, and Keighley in England’s industrial North, or Butte, Montana; Davenport, Iowa; and Two Harbors, Minnesota. Rather, these municipal spaces embodied an assertively local politics that simultaneously defined itself in internationalist terms. They formed a scattered army of local political activists who, despite differences in culture and geography, spoke a common language of municipal socialism. We might say they practiced a translocal socialist politics.¹³ And, amid the horrors of a world at war, it was often among those locally grounded internationalists that opposition to the war and conscription first emerged, along with demands for adequate employment, food, housing, and other life essentials, even as many of their parliamentary comrades negotiated a more prominent role for themselves and their parties in the war-making machinery of their respective nations.¹⁴

The Contingency of Nations and Working-Class Internationalism

Social democracy came of age with the high tide of late nineteenth-century nationalism. Not surprisingly, aspiring social democratic politicians and theoreticians inevitably framed their project in national terms, however much they may still have gestured toward local mobilization and internationalist principles. Drawn to the quintessentially “modern” project of bourgeois nationalists, social democratic leaders readily adopted the orientation of cosmopolitan moderns. British labour parliamentarians fit this “modern” model perfectly. Detached from local constituencies and placed in competition for seats for which they had no specific local claims, they sought parliamentary office based solely on national political strategy.¹⁵

Although the debates over nationalism as a “modernist” ideology and the nation-state as an “invented” or “imagined” community continue, there can be little doubt that for many political activists in the late nineteenth century, including those in emerging social democratic movements, the “nation” seemed a given.¹⁶ But, as Hobsbawm cautioned, “whatever the social groups first captured by ‘national consciousness,’ the popular masses—workers, servants, peasants—are the last to be affected by it.”¹⁷ Indeed, we might argue that class identity and consciousness could provide some insulation against the appeals of nationalists.¹⁸

The nation-state in this period has drawn considerable attention from historians and political theorists, but I argue that the city was a more important crucible of working-class identity and the formation of an alternative civic consciousness. Whether urban community was “organic” or “invented,” the city, for many workers in the late nineteenth century, became arguably their first sphere of political mobilization. And, as Henri Lefebvre has argued, at the city level “the pressure of the working class has been … necessary” for “the recognition of [their] rights, for their entry into customs, for their inscription into codes.” In short, “the right to the city” does not imply some return to traditional political norms, but “can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life.”¹⁹ By claiming civic power in their own name and for their own agenda, workers and their political allies challenged the existing structures of civic authority in the city. To do so meant rejecting the “antiquity” and therefore the presumptive legitimacy of elite rule clothed though it may have been in symbols and rhetoric of past power.²⁰ Lefebvre reminds us that Friedrich Engels powerfully evoked the “surprise” of the bourgeoisie at the revolutionary stirrings in their own backyards of privilege. While the treatment of working-class mobilization in cities is fragmentary in Engels (and even more so in Marx), he did conceptualize the city and its social conditions as a crucible of revolutionary consciousness. “The great cities are the birthplaces of labor movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest.”²¹

However, liberal nationalism had a significant impact on the orientation of social democrats in their parties’ formative stages. As Stefan Berger put it, “a certain ‘great state’ nationalism lurked behind the internationalist rhetoric” to which social democrats were reflexively committed.²² Leading social democrats conceived “civic nationalism” as a building block for internationalism and an antidote to ethnic parochialism, as well as a “vehicle for democratic emancipation.” Reinforcing this naturalization of the national has been an increasingly dense historiography of social democracy that defines the national arena as the only political arena worth the serious investment of organizational and ideological energy. Even as historians focused on class and the formation of class identity, they typically did so within a national framework. Berger notes, “Their class narratives were alternative national narratives including different visions of national identity rather than an attempt to overcome national identity.”²³ The parliamentary labor or socialist party inevitably became the story; its history provided the narrative spine. Localist and internationalist arenas had significance only in relation to the master national political narrative.²⁴

The minutes of state party gatherings in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, Australia, as well as early twentieth-century national meetings of the SAP in Sweden, and national and state meetings of the SPD in Germany are replete with the objections of local activists to the parliamentary undertow that submerged their municipal agendas, belittled their struggles, and washed their platforms to the margins of nationalizing parties.²⁵ In the 1890s and 1900s, local political activists struggled to define the spirit and soul of social democracy, a struggle whose roots lay partly in the memory and legacy of the Paris Commune, in the ongoing anarcho-syndicalist affirmation of the importance of local control, and in the “communitarian” challenge to nationalizing elites within and outside the movement itself.²⁶

Bourgeois social reformers in the United States and elsewhere, as Daniel Rodgers has shown and as I demonstrate in another work, likewise seized the national mantle, while drawing on international models of social reform. They sought to construct and rehabilitate “the people” as a unifying, cross-class presence in civic life, in part, at least, to transcend what they saw as “parochial” class identities and conflict. Such reformers’ agendas, while not aggressively or defensively nationalist in the ways they would become with the outbreak of World War I, did invest national political communities with special meaning.²⁷

In this book, I argue that social democrats’ aspiration to parliamentary power became a Faustian bargain in which they accepted, even celebrated, nationalism and the nation-state’s dominion at the expense of workers’ local power and international class solidarity. Social democratic parties could become simply reform parties, their socialism diluted and subdued. Their bargains with liberals, especially problematic in England and Australia, undergirded the growth of their parties and provided a continuing path that beckoned them to power-sharing and ultimately in the context of war subverted their internationalist rhetoric.

Reaffirming “the Local”—Theoretical Underpinnings

Recent attention to the globalization of capital and labor has, ironically, reaffirmed the importance of local studies that examine the tangible inequalities of everyday life—“the frictions of daily life” as E. P. Thompson called them—and the ways working people have mobilized locally and internationally to address their grievances. If we “see like a city,” as Warren Magnusson suggests, we must inevitably focus on politics rooted in the “micro-practices” of self-government and a place-centered citizenship that engages local centers of authority.²⁸ At the same time, the history of struggles over “home rule” and municipal “Selbstverwaltung” (self-government) remind us that cities had to contend perpetually with the power that state and national governments exerted over their capacity to govern themselves.

An influential and cross-disciplinary group of urban scholars, including Magnusson, Saskia Sassen, Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, and others, have identified urban space as constitutive of a politics that is both “localized and globalized.”²⁹ David Harvey has argued that the “anti-capitalist struggle” must “reclaim the city” and break from a Marxist tradition in which “urban struggles tend to be either ignored or dismissed as devoid of revolutionary potential or significance.” To the contrary, he argues, “urban social movements … derive from the way in which the perpetuation of class power is organized around living as well as around working. [They] therefore always have a class content even when they are primarily articulated in terms of rights, citizenship, and the travails of social reproduction.” In his view, even as activists wrestle with the challenges of “how to organize a city,” they also need to acknowledge the relevance of “a long and distinguished history of ‘municipal socialism’ ” and “recuperate” that tradition “as central to the history both of left reformism and of more revolutionary movements.”³⁰ Contesting the neoliberal reorganization of urban space—and what Neil Brenner calls capitalist urbanization’s “relentless, if systematically uneven, forward movement of creative destruction”—becomes the challenge of “imagining, mapping and pursuing alter-urbanizations.”³¹

Attention to the contested organization of urban spaces and new geographies of power bring us back to the political history of cities and to the often-neglected history of the fight for municipal socialism. Geographer Andrew Herod notes that political ideas “do not float in the ether but are grounded in particular places—they ‘take place’ in specific locales.” Attentiveness to place as a locus of worker self-activity, according to Jane Wills, requires that we draw “new contour lines on the map of class power,” and understand differently how workers’ actions can “shape the terrain in which economic processes and social relationships unfold.”³²

We have also come to see city spaces within complex networks of political and economic relationships, neither wholly transnational nor strictly local. Here, the term “translocal” again seems especially relevant. Saskia Sassen is particularly attuned to the ways in which “translocal” solidarities create new understandings of citizenship “that arise out of cross-border affiliations, especially those associated with oppositional politics” and that produce a “multi-scaler politics of the local” that is “not confined to moving through a set of nested scales from the local to the national to the international but can directly access other such local actors in the same country or across borders.”³³ Important as translocal ties may be in the construction of new labor solidarities in the present, they also have a history—one, I would argue, that lies at the foundation of the new labor politics that emerged in the late nineteenth century across much of the industrializing world.

The importance of “place” as a crucible of class formation has for some time drawn the attention of social and labor historians worldwide. “Local study” has been at the heart of the new labor history and has given it a richness, depth, and complexity lacking in national institutional studies.³⁴ But a focus on the local does not imply a parochial, gemeinschaftliches world of organic solidarities and face-to-face relationships devoid of power structures and social hierarchies. Rather, as Margaret Kohn has demonstrated in her insightful account of Milan’s municipal working-class politics, citizenship in emerging municipalities “is not passively inherited but actively (re)created” as “a distinct domain constituted through political action.” By her account, “the power of local government was ‘capillary,’ that is, it arose out of a series of semiautonomous workers’ organizations that were linked together in overlapping sites of integration and coordination.” Despite what might be seen as modest achievements in the municipal realm, Joan Scott has argued that “capturing a city hall meant enlarging the domain of resistance to capitalism and creating a protected enclave within which resistance might be organized.” Or as Kohn described it, “part tactic and part outcome, socialist municipalities were the nodal points of uneven geographies of power.”³⁵

Municipal labor politics functioned within locally constituted proletarian public spheres that have received less attention than they deserve.³⁶ Such an alternative public sphere and its politicization was particularly threatening to local elites, who premised their “habit” of governance on a closed world of municipal council deliberations largely invisible to the wider public, holding council meetings during business hours when most workers could not participate, and ritually affirming ostensibly “nonpartisan” governance in which elite rule went unquestioned and any intrusion by workers or their elected representatives was perceived to be partisan and a direct threat to local propertied interests.

The nature of that threat may seem relatively modest in hindsight, at least for the early years of the twentieth century, but not so to contemporaries. Giuseppe Zibordi argued in 1910 that municipal socialism’s progress in Italy may have been “about little struggles, humble battles that would make an outside observer laugh. But still there, where socialism vanquished the stupid competition of personalistic parties … there is in these immediate struggles an immense moral value.” This notion of the “popular commune” as a sphere of workers’ material lives and political activism, which, as Italian socialist Filippo Turati asserted, “can and should be under our control,” animated a new species of local political activism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around the world.³⁷

The substantive framework of local politics centered fundamentally on three axes of contention. The first had as its centerpiece urban elites’ traditional defense of property and resistance to any increase in the burden of local taxation. Challenges to their rule inevitably hinged on questions of expanding municipal revenues, and many workers’ movements focused on some version of Henry George’s “single tax,” or a tax on the “unearned increment” of speculatively driven land values, as one form of taxing property. The success of “Red Vienna” in the 1920s graphically demonstrated the centrality of taxation to municipal socialist reconstruction. The second axis revolved around expansion of the local public sector into ownership and management of water, gas, electricity, sanitation, and urban transit; the provision of public baths and public parks; the elimination of private contracting for city improvements; expanded public education; public work for the unemployed; and the provision of workers’ housing.³⁸ In all of this expansion of public services, workers’ movements demanded trade union standards for wages and hours of municipal employees. As Margaret Kohn has put it,

the municipality had the capacity to serve as a break on the downward spiral of wages. Although the individual firm could not unilaterally raise wages without itself succumbing to the pressures of competition, the commune was not constrained by this same dynamic. The wages of public workers were paid from tax revenues and could be set based on alternate criteria, such as community consensus about an appropriate standard of living. This increase could initiate a cycle of competition to attract employees, which would raise the overall wages.³⁹

Third, workers demanded an expanded municipal franchise and the elimination of all voting provisions that gave greater weight to the votes of property owners and the wealthy. The challenge of democratizing the franchise in this period lay at the foundation of labor’s municipal efforts.⁴⁰

Within this framework of municipal politics, labor and socialist activists around the industrial world constructed ties of solidarity among cities and across national boundaries through traveling emissaries, rank and file workers’ migrations, the circulation of newspapers and pamphlets, and their party-building activities. Those ties of locally grounded transnational solidarity survived the collapse of the Second International and the nationalist alignments the Great War reinvigorated. Slowly, quietly at first, municipal socialists reasserted their political vision during wartime and rebuilt their translocal ties in the name of a new postwar internationalism animated by democratic reforms and the opportunities for social reconstruction beginning in the realm of cities.

*  *  *

In the chapters that follow, I examine the origins of propertied elite governance in cities and the new, at first fledgling, challenges to that governance. I look in on the fragile labor and socialist parties that put forward brash proposals for remaking cities. Though badly outnumbered at first, they won handfuls of early electoral contests and pushed ahead with the painstaking tasks of local party building. Like Hartley and Thorn they engaged their elite opponents in the halls of city councils, school boards, and poor-relief agencies in what were often perceived to be disruptive ways. For example, after his election in 1901 to the city council in Frankfurt am Main, Max Quarck, a local socialist newspaper editor, was reported to have “worn out the nerves of his colleagues” through his constant interventions in council business.⁴¹ Though often marginalized within the ranks of their own parties, these colorful local activists battled on, asserting the importance of the issues of everyday life that cramped and disrupted the lives of workers.

Against all odds, during the opening years of the new century, these municipal political movements experienced a quickening pace of success, in some cases winning power and in many more strengthening their voice in city government in ways that city elites could no longer ignore. Under the broad umbrella of their national parties affiliated with the Second Socialist International, they built their own networks, which enabled them to share experience and become actors within a widening sphere of municipal social democratic movements that transcended national boundaries. By the eve of a “Great War” that would deepen the misery of workers globally, municipal socialists under whatever political label they adopted had achieved much and had much to lose as the world descended into dark years of war.

The collapse of the Second International and the renewed siren song of nationalism created political crises for the world’s social democrats. But, at the city level, in one country after another, they pragmatically took stock of their options. Many opposed the war and conscription outright; others narrowed their focus and renewed their commitment to addressing the wartime material needs of workers and their families. They challenged the wartime economic terms being offered workers—skyrocketing prices, insecure employment, curtailment of public social services, and constraints or outright prohibition of freedom of expression. In initiatives often led by women, they confronted the greed of landlords and employers; and in food riots, strikes, and in the “trenches” of city councils they fought to maintain and advance their own municipal socialist agenda.

In the end, the war not only shattered the lives of millions of working-class families, it also produced both political transformation and reaction. Many achieved the long-sought unlimited franchise and one person, one vote without gender distinctions. But nowhere was the dismantling of franchise restrictions more consequential than in cities, where property ownership, residency requirements, multiple voting based on wealth, and other measures favoring the maintenance of elite rule fell by the way. But, as municipal socialists sought to seize the initiative at the war’s end and bring to fruition the vision of democratized and socialized cities, they faced an uneven and, in some cases, perilous terrain. At one extreme, the German “revolution” through the agency of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils and left-wing factions of the Social Democratic Party took up the challenges of postwar reconstruction in cities. And, in Austria, those impulses reached even deeper with the eventual creation of “Red Vienna” as a model socialist municipality. At the other extreme, what had been a robust prewar municipal socialist movement in the United States confronted massive and disabling disruption at the hands of a punitive state and its employer allies during and after the war. Socialists’ wartime “disloyalty” in the United States helped fuel a postwar “Red Scare.” With massive lost strikes, the deportation of immigrant radicals, and a renewed “open shop” movement, American socialists found little space to rebuild their movement whether in municipalities or nationally. By contrast, in Australia, New Zealand, and Britain labor parties rediscovered their municipal legs and strengthened their local electoral effectiveness. The same held for the social democrats in Sweden.

As the twentieth century unfolded, cities would continue to be important arenas of political contention, and municipal socialists would grapple with barriers to fully realizing their vision. At various times, state governments imposed limits on municipal “home rule.” And socialist and labor parties continued to privilege their parliamentary wings in ways that marginalized the agendas of their municipally activist members. Urban elites persistently fought to restrict municipal and local taxes and consequently impoverish cities’ financial capacity to expand the public sector.⁴² Nonetheless, cities had now become islands of democratic governance in ways they had not been before the war. Despite the uncontrolled sprawl of megacities around the world and a climate crisis that only deepens with, at best, a patchwork of half-hearted neoliberal solutions, some urban theorists see glimmers of hope that the city can be “its own solution.” As Mike Davis argues, there is “no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ ” but only “if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality.” As Davis noted, the ideas surrounding “socialist cities” put forward by locally organized workers’ movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “provide invaluable starting points for thinking about the current crisis.”⁴³ In this book, I argue that the promise of a truly “public city” that would meet the needs of its citizens in collective and humane ways—the legacy in many ways of the Paris Commune, Red Vienna, and countless other municipal socialist experiments—has remained a dream worthy of realization.

PART I:

Municipal Origins
and the Rise of Labor

Introduction

“Paris Is Burning”: The Paris
Commune and Historical Memory

It’s the final struggle,

Keep together, and tomorrow

The International

Will be the human race.¹

“L’Internationale,” Eugène Pottier, 1871

Commune de Paris—Origins

The “Commune de Paris” ended in mass violence with the slaughter of thousands of Communards on the barricades and the burning of much of the city. This final struggle forged “the Commune” as an iconic event in the history of socialism and the collective memory of popular struggle. Yet, it is now only vaguely remembered that before the Commune’s demise, the people of Paris had set about reconstructing authority and governance in the city along unprecedentedly revolutionary lines, grounded in the popular euphoria surrounding the central government’s retreat from Paris on March 18, 1871. Despite near-constant threats to its existence from the rival government occupying Versailles, and surrounded by a victorious German army, the audacious common folk of Paris imagined and began to constitute a new city and a new politics of their own design. Time, as it turned out, was short.

The surrender of Napoleon III to the Prussian army on the outskirts of Paris in early September 1870 had set the stage. A provisional government faced little choice but to mobilize the population in defense of Paris and other major cities. Into this political space a broadly republican popular movement leapt forward to provide organization for resistance and to claim the right to self-governance. This meant enhancing the National Guard, organized in neighborhood-based units and only minimally under a central leadership already badly discredited by the military debacle of the previous weeks. Encircled by the Prussian army, Parisians endured months of privation unequally distributed along class lines. At the same time, cut off from outside political and military support, Parisians invested local government, reinforced by the National Guard, with greater authority, through the “localization of activity.” That strategy included the formation of cooperatives, local political clubs, and secularized public schools. November municipal elections brought a significant augmentation of the left’s influence, though well short of a dominating presence except in a handful of arrondissements.

The advent of the Commune de Paris came only in the aftermath of a succession of events that profoundly altered the political stakes for a besieged Paris. First came the signing of an armistice on January 28, 1871, between the provisional national government ensconced outside the city at Versailles and the Prussians. The terms of the armistice proved humiliating and included the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, a substantial indemnity payment, and a brief symbolic march of Prussian troops through the heart of Paris. A newly emboldened, broadly republican movement in which the left’s influence had grown dramatically seized the role of defending the “fatherland” by asserting Paris’s autonomy. The months of resistance and hunger, now mitigated ironically by ample shipments of food under the terms of the hated armistice, set the stage not only for national resistance but for a civil war. On the one hand stood the Communards, and on the other, a discredited national government—nominally under the protection of its former Prussian adversaries—barricaded with its middle-class supporters at Versailles and in the rural areas adjacent to Paris. The government’s failure to recapture cannons that were under the control of the Central Committee of the Parisian National Guard crystallized an already polarized politics. The central government added fuel to the fire by rescinding the Commune’s moratoriums on the sale of goods in government pawnshops and reinstituting the payment of rents and other bills that had accrued during the siege.²

Urban Revolution?

Historians have debated the relative importance of contingency, political choice, and structural change that may have contributed to these developments. In some respects, they were overdetermined, or as Robert Tombs has written, “The problem with this Parisian revolution is that it has too many causes.”³ But what is clear is that, for an all-too-brief period, and before being overtaken by brutal and ultimately cataclysmic suppression at the hands of central government troops under the command of Adolphe Thiers, the Paris Commune provided a unique setting for new forms of local governance to crystallize and challenge the traditions of urban bourgeois hegemony. It is that development that interests us here.

Following the final withdrawal of the central government in March, the Commune issued a succession of declarations outlining in broad principles what was already being carried out to varying degrees in the streets and arrondissements. The first order of business was to establish viable democratic polities and governing procedures in the spirit of the Proudhonist vision of local associationism, which had deep roots among Parisian working people. Municipal elections on March 26 produced a new governing council for the self-declared Commune of Paris.⁴ While attacking bureaucratic control by setting maximum salaries of officials and breaking lines of authority from the central government, the Commune also limited the claims of landlords and creditors, affirmed “municipal liberties,” and circumscribed religious authority.⁵ Journalist and communard Prosper Lissagaray argued vehemently for the Commune to clarify its programme and specify “the conditions necessary for the setting up of the social republic.”⁶

The communal vision came somewhat more sharply into focus with the famous April 19 Declaration, even as the prospects for all-out civil war deepened. A month of political contention and two municipal elections had set the stage for a programmatic statement of far-reaching scope. The former mayors and deputies had shown their class colors and largely retreated to the protective embrace of Adolphe Thiers’s Versailles government-in-waiting. In his compelling but critical “instant” history of the Commune, Lissagaray conveyed the disdain of the First International for the localist vision embodied in the Declaration, calling it a “sad but characteristic symbol” of the Commune’s isolation.⁷ “What does Paris want?” asked the authors of the Declaration to the French People.

The recognition and consolidation of the Republic, the only form of government compatible with the rights of the people and the regular and free development of society;

The absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all localities in France, assuring to each the integrity of its rights and to each Frenchman the exercise of his faculties and his aptitudes as man, citizen and worker;

…

The rights inherent in the Commune are:

The vote of the communal budget, receipts and expenses; fixing and distributing taxation; directing local services, organizing its judiciary, internal police and education; the administration of the assets belonging to the Commune;

…

The permanent intervention of the citizens in communal affairs through the free manifestation of their ideas, free defense of their interests: these rights will be guaranteed by the Commune, alone responsible for supervising and assuring the free and just exercise of the right of assembly and publicity;

…

But, by the use of its autonomy and profiting from its freedom of action, Paris reserves the right to carry out as it sees fit in its own domain the administrative and economic reforms that its population demands; to create institutions suitable to develop and propagate education, production, exchange and credit; to universalize power and property, according to the necessities of the moment, the wish of those concerned, and the data provided by experience.⁸

While municipal autonomy and the reform of municipal governance may have represented one tendency among the diverse constituencies of the Commune, such a focus altogether misses the aspect of “social regeneration” and the imperative of creating a “social republic” that were fundamental to the vision of the Commune in its earliest days.⁹ The Declaration of April 19 was vague at key points, and its aspirations were ultimately overwhelmed by the imperative to defend militarily the fragile social and political space within which the Commune defined itself. Nonetheless, it delineated the outlines of an alternative social order. This was to be a city within a federation of similarly constituted cities. Such a locally constituted republic (Lissagaray belittled it as a would-be Hanseatic League) would forge an alternative unity of French citizens.¹⁰ Through the free exercise of liberties within self-governing municipalities, cities would claim democratic control of their own budgets and administration. They would expand municipal services, create a whole new set of institutions ranging from public schools to cooperative workshops, and while not directly attacking property, would “universalize power and property,” as circumstances might dictate. Their vision was prescriptive, open-ended, and optimistic about the promise of municipal self-government. Future generations of municipal socialists would draw inspiration from that promise and the project of “social regeneration.” More importantly, the experience of governing in those early days suggested more powerfully than prescriptive declarations the tangible meaning of the municipal social republic envisioned.

Though piecemeal and incomplete, the Commune took some concrete steps to implement this vision both before and after the declaration. Some initiatives had been rooted in communal resistance to monarchist authority over the years immediately preceding the Commune. The massive reconstruction of Paris at the hands of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the prior two decades took on legendary status, thanks in part to his own self-promotion. The combination of the construction of wide boulevards less susceptible to barricading and the destruction of many old, central working-class neighborhoods created a new urban landscape into which the rapidly expanding population of Paris flowed with not entirely predictable consequences.¹¹ That expanded population included large numbers of construction workers and stonemasons, some of whom had long been part of regular seasonal migrations to Paris from other parts of the country, like the Creuse. Their slow displacement from the central boarding houses and hiring fairs of the Place de Grève accompanied more permanent settlement in the new working-class neighborhoods on the periphery. Either by reputation for chronic contention with authorities or because of the new solidarities in their adopted neighborhoods, the stonemasons and other building workers were overrepresented among the arrested and deported Communards following the final street battles in late May.¹² Systematic studies by Jacques Rougerie, Manuel Castells, and others confirm that this “urban revolution” was not driven by a new proletariat but rather, as Rougerie termed it, “an intermediate working class” which included building workers, traditional artisans, and a significant component of shopkeepers, clerks, and professionals. As Castells put it, “They were the people of a great city in the process of mutation, and the citizens of a Republic in quest of its institutions.”¹³

David Harvey has shown that the “Haussmannization” of Paris in the years after 1848 produced urban space more starkly organized on class lines that set the stage for the upheaval of 1871. Ironically, the bourgeois transformation of Paris created conditions that promoted a diverse new citywide working class infused with the scent of a broader internationalism that potentially challenged the bourgeoisie’s “superior command of space.”¹⁴ And that challenge, as Roger Gould has argued, grew precisely out of the neighborhood solidarities of these new “urban villages” that encompassed a new class.¹⁵

Harvey and others have enumerated workers’ urban initiatives in the Commune that reflected their own claims over the control of Parisian space.

The organization of municipal workshops for women; the encouragement given to producer and consumer cooperatives; the suspension of the night work in the bakeries; and the moratorium on rent payments, debt collections, and the sale of items from the municipal pawnshop at Mont-de-Piété reflected the sore points that had bothered working-class Paris for years.¹⁶

In some cases, during the days immediately following March 18, as Lissagaray recounted, “former subordinate employés” assumed new responsibilities, as happened for instance in the postal service. They had to improvise with limited resources in the face of sabotage by departing higher officials. One such lower postal official, Albert Theisz, on March 30 abruptly assumed new duties “with promptitude and energy,” and had within “forty-eight hours the collection and distribution of letters for Paris reorganised.” Of more long-term consequence, a new council of postal employees took charge and “raised the wages of postmen, sorters, porters, caretakers of the bureau, shortened the time of service as supernumeraries,” and determined to institute an examination system for promotions. In the face of constant efforts by the Versailles government to prevent mail distribution, Theisz and his allies devised a method for circumventing the blockade. “Secret agents went to throw [the letters for the provinces] into the boxes of the offices for ten miles around,” beyond the blockade perimeter, thereby thwarting the central government’s efforts.¹⁷

The Commune’s brutal denouement has, in some respects, obscured the innovative, localist social and political reforms that it briefly instituted and that it passed on to social democratic reformers who, in the 1890s and beyond, sought to craft a municipal socialism shorn of the revolutionary aspirations and the risks that were all-too-brutally embodied in the crushing of the Commune.

The Legacy of the Commune and Its Meaning

Memory of the Commune lingered for decades, not only in the nightmares of the bourgeoisie and their reformist allies but among social democrats who, like their Communard forbearers, saw in the city the opportunity to address the immediate grievances workers continued to face and to dream of an alternative social and political order they might constitute in cities.¹⁸ The paradox of brutal defeat in defense of what increasingly came to seem the utopian promise of municipal revolution was not lost on subsequent commentators.

Contestation over the memory and meaning of the Commune unfolded most vigorously among socialists themselves, not the least between Marx and Engels, their anarchist rivals, and ultimately Lenin. Marx’s The Civil War in France in its earliest editions provided almost instant history of the events in Paris as they unfolded. Drawing on what limited sources he could find—newspaper accounts, smuggled letters, and occasional firsthand reports—Marx cobbled together a report to the General Council of the First International delivered in late May 1871 just days after the final massacre of Communards. Marx’s agenda was multilayered, and each layer subsequently fed into the memory and constructed meaning of the Commune. First, he sought to assert the proletarian character of the revolt, though he would subsequently revise that assessment.¹⁹ Second, and perhaps most basically, he defended the nobility of the Communards’ revolt and sacrifice, seeing it as a watershed event in the promulgation of socialism, though its immediate consequences were clearly more ambiguous. Third, he stressed the state-dismantling and state-building features of the Commune in ways that implicitly challenged the anarchists’ celebration of what they asserted was its nation-state-destroying character. Subsequently, he would belittle the moderation and “feel-good” measures undertaken by the Commune in the days and weeks following its initial creation. Even as the Commune took shape, Marx wrote to Wilhelm Liebknecht of its “too great decency” and “want of centralization and authority,” and in the heady aftermath of the 1905 Russian revolution Lenin asserted that the Communards had “ ‘stopped half way … led astray by dreams of … justice’; their ‘excessive magnanimity’ had prevented them from ‘destroying’ the class enemy through ‘ruthless extermination’, and so they themselves had been massacred.”²⁰

A further subtext in the responses of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, and other Marxists was the continuing ideological war with Proudhonist associational influences, which, in their view, had been all-too-manifest in the Commune. Its emphases on localism, decentralized democracy, and producerist cooperative economy were seen as harbingers of a different socialist order, one that subsequently would continue to animate the practical reform programs of municipal socialists.

That perspective is amply demonstrated in a surviving proposal for the “Organization of Producer Cooperatives for Women” issued by Communards in mid-May, with support of Central Committee member Léo Frankel, shortly before the carnage consumed them. Seeking to dispel the impression purveyed by some commentators that the Commune was simply “a spontaneous outburst without implications or aims,” they disputed the view of “others [who] have persuaded themselves of the notion that this revolution is simply a demand for what they call municipal franchise.” Challenging the “governmental fiction” of “so-called parliamentary representation,” they upheld their goal to create “a new social order of equality, solidarity and of freedom.” Although the “urgent needs of military defense” seemed all-consuming, they called on the Commune to “complete the partial victory of the People … by embarking unequivocally on the path of social reform.” The Commune, they argued, had a special responsibility to “the workers, who brought it into existence … The Commune will not be fulfilling its mandate if it does not immediately find the means for satisfying these urgent and legitimate needs.” One specific measure advocated was the creation of workshops for women and retail centers to distribute their products cooperatively.²¹ Herein, even in the Commune’s most dire circumstances, could be found echoes of a Proudhonist vision that affirmed the centrality of a locally constituted workers’ state based on cooperative production.

The horrific scenes of the Commune’s suppression between May 21 and 28 provided ample material for the elevation of those events to legend. Estimates of those slaughtered in battle or by execution ranged from 17,000 to 40,000. Nearly 50,000 were arrested, many sent into exile as far away as the French colony of New Caledonia in the South Seas.²²

Subsequent observers would continue over the next decade and more to attempt to make sense of the stirring events in Paris or, in the case of anti-Communard bourgeois commentators, to contest or efface its memory.²³ In France, socialist politics became a tangled web in which the Commune served as a touchstone for both possibilist and impossibilist factions. Paul Brousse, who served a “political apprenticeship” as an anarchist, came to believe in the revolutionary promise cities held, despite the failure of the Paris Commune. He advocated “le Socialisme Pratique” wherein “meaningful socialist measures could be achieved on the local level prior to revolution at the centre.” According to David Stafford, Brousse came to believe that “if the working class could capture control of a Commune (in this case a big city), and apply within it the principles of a socialist society, then the Revolution was divisible.”²⁴ The key was a shift in tactical thinking away from violence toward politics. Others drew parallel conclusions, albeit in different contexts. Mary Putnam, an American living in Paris as the events of May 1871 unfolded, enjoyed close ties to a family sympathetic to the Commune and believed the events she witnessed signified a legitimate defense of “municipal rights.” More than a decade later, a well-traveled European-trained young American economist, Richard T. Ely, in something of an understatement looked back at the “insurrection in Paris” as simply a form of “extreme local self-government.”²⁵

Commemoration and Socialist Polarization

The Commune continued to be honored as a moment of socialist martyrdom, and anniversaries and other symbolic occasions provided opportunities to affirm the sacrifices of the Communards on behalf of socialism. International commemoration of the Commune and particularly the date of March 18 became, in the words of Georges Haupt, “an idea, a profession of faith, and a confirmation of a historical future, of the inevitable victory of the proletarian revolution.”²⁶ But even as commemoration of the Commune became a fixture of socialist rhetoric and iconography, so did the debates over its meaning intensify.

The relevance of the Commune to the ongoing project of socialist transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the deep polarization within the movement itself. Marx could celebrate the Communards “storming heaven” while criticizing their “too honourable scrupulosity,” but more soberly he concluded “the great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people.”²⁷ He read the experience as affirming a political rather than an insurrectionary path to revolution and perceived its greatest significance to have been its attack on central state authority.²⁸ And Schulkind argues that, for Marx, “the core of the Commune’s historical significance” was “that for the first time in history, this new kind of state placed all facets of state power under electoral control of the majority of the population … the working class of Paris.”²⁹ Friedrich Engels in the 1890s came to support the “parliamentary importance of social democracy,” or what Karl Kautsky termed “the so-called peaceful methods of conducting the class struggle,” and by implication treated the Commune as a “counter example.” And for much of the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), a focus on the “Kommune” was simply a distraction from the more important agenda of contesting for national power.³⁰ Rosa Luxemburg saw in the Commune’s failure evidence of its premature, almost accidental claim to power, and the absence of “the social conditions” for the “conquest of power.” In short, it was an “exceptional” case, “where the proletariat did not obtain power after a conscious struggle, but where power fell to it like a commodity that nobody wanted anymore.”³¹

The shift toward politics as the path to revolution emphasized by Marx and Engels, taken up by Kautsky, and refashioned by Bernstein was both negation and affirmation of the Commune as a model. Bernstein is thought to have “detect[ed] the premises of a communal socialism in the 1871 insurrection,” but, at least in the view of Haupt, he also noted after their defeat a decline “in mutualism.” He believed “the whole working-class movement” took on “a different, almost exclusively political nature.”³²

Bernstein would come to believe that the views of Marx and Proudhon converged on the necessity for local “autonomy as the preliminary condition of social emancipation” and “how the democratic organization from the bottom upwards is depicted as the way to the realization of socialism.” Impressed as he was at the importance of municipalities and of their expanding duties “under a complete democracy,” he also drew sober lessons from the Commune, the suddenness with which “they came into possession of their freedom,” and the mistakes that came from their “experiments” and “in violence.” Drawing on almost three decades of political experimentation after the fall of the Commune, he concluded “the more experience the working-class democracy has had in the school of self-government, the more cautiously and practically will it proceed.”³³

The Commune had, among other things, signaled a moment in which the customary rule of municipal elites and the capitalist class was powerfully called into question. Marx spoke of “the serene working men’s Paris of the Commune” and the wonderous “change the Commune had wrought.” He recounted that one member of the Commune council observed, “We hear no longer of assassination, theft, and personal assault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged with it to Versailles all its conservative friends.” It was the work of “plain working men” who “dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their ‘natural superiors,’ ” and who carried out their duties “modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently.” The “real women of Paris” demonstrated impressively, and the city was “almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society,” of the “cannibals at its gates.” In the face of such working-class municipal self-governance, “the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the red flag, the symbol of the republic of labour, floating over the Hôtel de Ville [city hall].”³⁴

Remembrance of the Paris Commune in the decades that followed provided a powerful point of reference for municipal socialists who by other methods sought to overturn centuries of governance by propertied interests and their unlimited claims to rule cities. In the aftermath of the Red Feds’ historic general strike in Wellington, New Zealand, one of its leaders and editor of the Maoriland Worker, H. E. Holland, published in 1915 an admiringly detailed account of the Commune as the “First Great Socialist Revolution” that described its transformation of the government of Paris.³⁵ American socialist Phillips Russell, visiting Paris in May 1914, on what turned out to be the eve of the Great War, joined a procession of “thirty, perhaps forty thousand … working men and women, and children too,” in commemoration of the Commune. The huge crowd grew suddenly silent as it approached a wall in the Père Lachaise cemetery. “Here the workingmen and women, who took charge of Paris forty-three years ago and ran it peacefully and well, [had been] lined up … and mowed down, their bodies piling in heaps against the wall.” Deeply impressed by the commemoration, in the face of a massive police presence, Russell “learned that the spirit of the Commune still lives in the hearts of its working people.”³⁶

Revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917 breathed new life into the tradition of the Commune as revolutionary insurrection and affirmed Lenin’s narrower interpretation of Marx’s opaque concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But for much of the socialist movement the path blazed by the Communards lay not as “cells for revolutionary combat” but as locally grounded “militant electoral associations” and bearers of a radical ideal of “direct popular sovereignty.”³⁷ That ideal would come to life again across much of the industrializing world as workers challenged governing elites for control of the urban worlds in which they lived day to day.

1

The Rise of Cities and Elite
Traditions of Urban Governance

The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent. For the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires that the people should have property.

John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government¹

A large ratepayer, a man of thorough business habits, enlarged views and marked ability, belonging indeed to precisely the class of burgesses most desirable to the Council.

J. T. Bunce on the qualities Joseph Chamberlain had embodied as a candidate for Birmingham City Council, in Local Government and Taxation in the United Kingdom (1882)²

When municipal socialists confronted the political task of empowering workers to remake cities into humane political spaces that would address their basic needs, their first order of business was to undo the long traditions of elite governance that reached back centuries to the very origins of cities as market centers and sheltered reserves of property owners. In their desire to protect their property, to subvert reforms that might raise taxes, and to undercut the capacity of workers to implement them, they defended their own inherent right to govern locally in a fictive spirit of nonpartisanship. Even in the industrializing era, when urban elites acceded to limited democratizing reforms and opened the doors of local government to new representatives of an emerging entrepreneurial class, they fought persistently to limit the municipal franchise and exclude the vast majority of urban working-class residents from participation. Originating in Europe, these struggles over urban governance came to characterize growing cities globally in the colonies and the postcolonial world.

Cities, or what came to be recognized as cities, in Europe evolved out of ancient self-governing states, imperial fortifications, and way stations on long-distance trade routes. The impressive urban networks of imperial Rome had collapsed in the Dark Ages. Across large swaths of the European continent cities would have to be reinvented. For centuries, Roman ruins provided “the anachronism of a society occupying the shell of a previous civilization with which it could compete neither technically nor intellectually,” according to Leonardo Benevolo.³ In medieval Europe, clusters of traders and artisanal-goods producers serviced commerce in ways that fostered their autonomy. They simultaneously benefited and undermined royal authority and the privileged status of rural landed aristocrats.⁴

Reinventing Cities: Commerce and Propertied Elites

In trade lay the roots of an urban propertied elite, and cities formed the bastion for their property’s defense. It was the historical trajectory of elite claims to governance in the name of property that profoundly stamped urban life to the twentieth century. As the eminent historian of medieval urban life, Henri Pirenne, argued, cities were first and foremost constituted by a class of merchants who stood in ambiguous relationship to the countryside and its landed gentry.⁵ Subsequent historians of medieval cities have complicated the story of how cities constituted themselves. They have documented a more conflicted, locally grounded evolution, frequently independent of the influence of long-distance trade and entangled in the politics of seigniorial and ecclesiastical authority.⁶

Seeking to establish an independent footing, urban dwellers were able to evade the obligations imposed on peasants by landed aristocrats. What Benevolo describes as “this appropriation of responsibility” or what subsequent urban advocates would call “self-government” had a distinctly European flavor with lasting implications for the future of European cities and their seemingly endless fight with states for the right to govern themselves. The formal declaration of a “commune,” in Cambria, Flanders, in 1077, for instance, set the stage for the establishment of communes in towns across northern France. Within limits, the idea of “communal” local self-government took shape across northern Europe in the twelfth century. The limits, set by ruling clergy and kings, were conditional on cities’ maintenance of “order, custom and law.”⁷

Following the Norman Conquest, the “revolutionary” transformation of urban life in England produced a whole new generation of boroughs whose development had less to do with older Roman fortified towns than with the new twelfth-century breath of commercial revival that “was sweeping Europe” and whose influence was felt with particular force under Norman influence. According to Carl Stephenson,

A borough of this sort could arise only in an age that had become extensively commercial. Such a complex institution could not be wrought by King or by army; it could not be created by official pronouncement. Nor could it grow from a mere cattle market. The development of urban life required commerce on a larger scale—on a European scale.⁸

But the emerging power of cities, their capacity to generate wealth and revenue, was held in check by wary kings, who, out of political insecurity or economic necessity, reined in city authorities through carefully circumscribed charters or on occasion by direct intervention. When city mayors or councils proved incapable of containing urban discontent or preventing riots, royal authorities threatened to curtail liberties or even rule directly, as Henry VII did in the case of York as late as 1495, asserting, “I must and woll put in other rewlers that woll rewle and govern the citie according to my lawz.”⁹

Rural/Urban Differentiation

Across continental Europe and parts of the Mediterranean, however, a sharp rural-urban distinction did not develop at once or with uniformity, as Fernand Braudel notes. Cities of varying size and concentrations of population appeared as nodes of commercial congestion in the countryside, only marginally distinct from rural villages in function and density. Intertwined in the economy and social relations of the countryside at the outset, they gradually differentiated themselves and in turn took their place in a more complex hierarchy of urban trading and service centers.¹⁰ Urban-dwelling landowners enjoyed a privileged position in early cities, even as new elites from among more prominent merchant families formed exclusive guilds that exercised degrees of increasing autonomy. In Cologne, for instance, leading merchants intermarried with noble and ministerial families but also within strata of their own emerging commercial class. The prominence of many of those lineages would continue for centuries hence.¹¹

These new urban places were infected by the spirit of commerce and also populated by a class of traders whose access to the fruits of long- and short-distance trade made them increasingly a class apart from the “footloose adventurers” and petty traders from among whom many had sprung. Detached from dependent status on the land, they came to acquire the presumptive freedom of “one who could not be ascribed to a master.” Freedom was not so much demanded as acquired “by usage and limitation.” As Pirenne noted,

In short, just as agrarian civilization had made of the peasant a man whose normal state was servitude, trade made of the merchant a man whose normal condition was liberty. From that time on, in place of being subject to seigniorial and demesnial jurisdiction, he was answerable only to public jurisdiction.¹²

Although too categorical, Pirenne’s formulation, nonetheless, captured a trajectory of change that across centuries produced a considerable degree of urban independence from traditional sources of authority.¹³

The preeminent commercial cities that emerged in medieval Europe and flourished during the Renaissance were the city-states of Italy. As Joel Kotkin has noted, “in a world where imperial boundaries were vague and often meaningless, cities constituted the one reliably defined space.”¹⁴ The trading cities of Venice, Genoa, Florence, and Milan reached through Mediterranean portals and along established Muslim trading routes to gather and distribute the exotic and abundant goods of the East, from spices to quality manufactured goods that Europe was yet incapable of producing for itself. The primary role played by commercial interests in the governance of these cities ensured both their relative affluence and the regulation of their affairs so as to further promote their commercial supremacy. As Pirenne wrote, “Their love of gain was allied, in them, with local patriotism.”¹⁵ And that local patriotism extended their influence into their hinterlands in ways quite distinct from the more localized spheres of their urban brethren to the north.¹⁶

The question of when cities achieved self-government vexed historians in part because the historical record is so uneven and incomplete. Evidence suggests that on the continent self-government by groups of designated “selectmen” or “consuls” came earlier than in England and may indeed have served as something of a model for others. Guilds or groups of influential traders frequently vied with appointed officers of the royal court, typically bailiffs, to execute what limited public responsibilities might be required. In Stephenson’s view, it was the formal recognition of the “London Commune” by the Crown in 1191 that gave sanction to that city’s self-governing status and by implication to other towns whose elected councillors and eventually mayors represented distinct municipal, corporate entities. Henceforth, the town would be its own body politic, the self-governing expression of the commercial elites whose implicit status and leadership had long been acknowledged. But royal intervention in municipal affairs would continue to be a fact of urban life, especially in England.¹⁷

The structure of urban governance was a work in progress in medieval Europe. Conflicting interests of lords, bishops, kings, and leading merchants produced shifting and hybrid forms of urban government that varied over time from one region to another. Early open assemblies of urban dwellers proved threatening to good order in some circumstances, where “ ‘the sons of divers mothers, many of them born outside the city and many of servile condition’ … yelled ‘ya, ya’ or ‘nay, nay’ in answer to proposals put to them.” They were superseded by indirect election of “the better, more discreet, and more powerful men” to councils that claimed governing authority and, in the process, circumvented the dangers of corruption and “mob rule.” The nearly universal institutions of consuls or aldermen were hardly democratic. The “best men” regarded as having “the duty as well as the right to take the lead in running their communities” occupied these offices, often on a rotating basis as a brake on popular disorder and the reassertion of royal authority.¹⁸ The movement in the twelfth century toward the formation of “communes” pushed the autonomy of cities farther than lords or royal and ecclesiastical authorities were prepared to tolerate, resulting in their sudden curtailment. And, in the view of some historians, the impulse toward autonomy represented by the declaration of a “commune” was more longstanding but the “revolutionary” character of the actual transformation more limited and contained.¹⁹

In many regions of Europe, commercial cities thrived where princely authority was weak. Cities’ capacity to mobilize capital lent them a degree of political autonomy that enabled the formation of countervailing city alliances of merchants—Hanses.²⁰ In other cases, city autonomy was more subject to bargaining with royal authorities who nonetheless might tolerate degrees of independence. In Toulouse, for instance, prior to 1560, members of “the bourgeois elite … upheld a strong tradition of municipal republicanism through feasts, royal entries, and the ornamentation of public buildings.”²¹

With expanding networks of trade and growing populations, cities had to adopt a more active, even interventionist posture in order, as Reynolds has pointed out, to maintain food supplies and regulate prices, manage tolls, standardize weights and measures, and fix wages and conditions of work, often through guilds or tradesmen’s associations. They also bore responsibility for some minimal conditions of public health and an infrastructure of roads, walls, markets, town halls, and latrines. All of this might amount, as she noted (quoting Pirenne), to “une sorte de socialisme municipale,” albeit in the interest of property holders.²²

Contending Authorities: Relations of Cities and States

The shifting power relations between cities and states made a significant shift around 1500 with the rise of consolidated states, whose military capacity increasingly matched their expansive ambitions. As the capital requirements for sustaining more professional armies grew, states’ appetite for urban revenues increased and their tolerance of municipal autonomy declined. Charles Tilly summarized these developments in the broadest of strokes.

The proliferation of cities facilitated a state-making strategy of divide and conquer, the gradual monopolization of coercive means by consolidated states weakened the defensive positions of cities vis-àvis national authorities, and the expansion of state administrative apparatus (which was itself largely a consequence of war and the preparation for war) gave those authorities increasing ability to monitor and control the urban population.²³

Cities, according to Blockmans, “paid protection costs” to states as a defense against the continued threat posed by a feudal nobility that sought to retain some grip on city resources.²⁴ But states also took on new functions or subsumed those formerly held by cities—“coinage, economic regulation, taxation, diplomacy, and the monopoly of coercive means.”²⁵

As urban elites came to face challenges to their rule from rising classes of guild masters and even on occasion protests of the laboring poor, town councils became more centralized and less representative of popular interests. According to Rigby, “urban patriciates” had their social roots in the landowning classes and governing structures of feudal society. “They were then transformed into plutocracies of the richer merchants and traders which by the late fifteenth century were beginning to change their form, if not their essential content, through ‘a deliberate policy of oligarchy.’ ”²⁶

Changing patterns of urban elite formation marked the transition from feudalism to early capitalism across Europe and within emerging state structures.²⁷ A shift from autonomously derived municipal authority to authority derived from royal recognition may have bolstered local elites while nevertheless tying them more firmly to patronage networks controlled by central state administrators. In the face of growing urban problems and increasing demand for poor relief, education, and hospitals, urban elites valued the patronage networks of the crown and at the same time concentrated local control in increasingly “oligarchical councils” chosen by indirect means under a more restrictive municipal franchise.²⁸

The robust growth of European cities into the fifteenth century was followed by their decline amid crises associated with depression, famine, and plague, but most critically the rise of territorial states with low thresholds of tolerance for excessive city autonomy. While royal authorities may have acceded to communes as a buffer against ecclesiastical and princely centers of power and a stimulus to wealth accumulation, they also regarded their advent with some wariness. Amid multiple crises of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, cities, “though maintaining importance, passed into guardianship” of regional and national kingdoms. The process by which cities came to be chartered by royal authority in the sixteenth century was a piecemeal and protracted one.²⁹ The benefits of incorporation were mutual. The crown might gain access to needed revenues and the clientage of urban elites, while the towns enjoyed access to a central authority as an arbiter of disputes with local landed gentry over revenues and control of lands, or as a means of controlling local patricians and guilds aspiring to assert their economic interests in the name of the community.³⁰

The eventual result, as Braudel put it, was that

the cities were no longer undisputed rulers of the world. Their reign, which had lasted throughout the early rise of Europe and the Mediterranean, from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, was beginning to be challenged at the threshold of modern times by the territorial states which had developed slowly during the previous centuries but which modern times suddenly projected to the centre of the stage.³¹

Yet, despite the emergence of national states claiming wide and contested territorial jurisdictions, some cities survived with a measure of self-regulation intact. These cities, many serving as capitals or regional entrepôts of their respective new nations, proved essential economic engines. The “incapacity” of states to effectively administer the territories they claimed, “again opened the door to the towns and their merchants.”³² In these fraught relations between cities and states lie the roots of persistent struggles over municipal self-government and “home rule” that have continued into the twenty-first century.

Shifting Configurations of Cities

Persistent ebb and flow characterized not only the growth and decline of cities across the period 1000 to 1800 but also the reconfiguration of the global urban map. As Tilly has noted, the early “commercial-imperial” hub linked city-states of the Mediterranean to India, China, and the Pacific, with tentative “urban tendrils” that connected trading centers in Southwest Germany, Flanders, and France to the southern commercial network. By the sixteenth century and beyond, the center of urban dynamism was shifting northward. Commercial cities servicing imperial ambitions and expanding trade grew denser in the Low Countries, the Hansa cities of Germany, and in Northern France and Southern England. The onset of industrial revolution from 1750 onward would accentuate those differences and bring a whole new set of urban dynamics in its wake.³³

Cities now had come to occupy positions of ambiguous status within an emerging structure of nation-states. No longer independent operators, they nonetheless continued to fuel economic growth through commercial linkages and industrial investment. Broad regional differences characterized the late medieval and early modern landscape of cities.³⁴ The political and juridical structures that governed the relations of cities and nation-states grew cumulatively convoluted and idiosyncratically varied. The social standing of their governing elites was a comparably complex mix of autonomy and subordination. If some of that authority now derived from the center, a good deal of cities’ stature and real power continued to grow from the property and trade they controlled.

Who Governed? Emerging Structures of Urban Government

These state-city relationships—enabled by the self-government established in city charters granted them by royal authorities—promoted the consolidation of urban oligarchies. But as Christopher Friedrichs has pointed out, these relations were never a “zero-sum” game. In the give-and-take between cities and states, cities were neither as autonomous in the Middle Ages as some historians have argued, nor as subject to central state control in the early modern period as others have argued. On the shifting terrain of urban governance, the granting of charters by royal authorities gave some codification to those relations. But, over time, literally centuries, cities acquired multiple and sometimes conflicting sanctions for their powers to act. According to Friedrichs, “a city could have hundreds of charters all carefully catalogued and zealously preserved in the belfry of the town hall, but no charter gave a city unlimited freedom.” Frequently, they granted quite specific and often mundane powers—the right to decide when fairs or markets might be held, the right to charge tolls, or impose fines. “Each time a new ruler came to power the city would seek confirmation of all its existing privileges and, perhaps a few new ones as well—all for a stiff price, of course.”³⁵

While governing urban elites did not necessarily comprise a closed clique of families, the boundaries to civic participation were sharply drawn and even the enfranchisement of “freemen” had the effect of excluding the unfree, who might comprise 60 to 70 percent of households.³⁶ As Ian Archer has noted, the recorder of Nottingham in 1512 voiced a common prejudice that the “vulgar sort” undermined civic order and, if they held office, lowered the reputation of the town: “If you suffer the commons to rule and follow their appetite and desire, farewell good order.”³⁷ Although women might come to rule by inheritance, particularly through royal lineages, they were universally excluded where “election or selection” obtained, as in city affairs.³⁸ However, women’s presence in crowds that exercised extramural power on occasion was significant, as was their influence over city affairs in more indirect ways. The prominence of women, especially in market and food riots of the early modern period, is well-documented. But so too has been the incidence of gendered imagery and gender-bending collective action, such as the “Rebecca” riots in nineteenth-century Wales, suggesting a more prominent and more potent tradition of women’s protest activity, not confined strictly to a women’s sphere and infused with political meaning.³⁹ Anna Clark has argued that “food riots, in which women had always participated vigorously, sometimes acquired a radical context.” In 1793, the magistrates expressed deepening concern over their politicization. “Of liberty and equality they are constantly talking, and of making laws and fixing prices on every necessity of life.”⁴⁰

Early in the self-governing life of towns, elites established rituals designed to legitimize their position and affirm a set of obligations that came with governing authority.⁴¹ Ceremony reaffirmed city officials’ authority by signifying to the wider society and a town’s own citizens their honor and dignity.⁴² Rituals of civic authority, though modified, continued to be widely practiced in cities throughout the industrializing world well into the twentieth century.⁴³

Evolving Local Government in an Era of Nation-State Consolidation

The aftermath of the “Glorious Revolution” in seventeenth-century England did little to sort out or rationalize the structures and status of local government. Remnants of manorial and ecclesiastical institutions—court leets and parish vestries, for instance—remained in place or even expanded their jurisdictions alongside more recently constituted chartered corporations and their governing councils.⁴⁴ In the new post-revolution political climate of the eighteenth century, the authority to charter cities shifted from crown to parliament and was further entangled with the partisan conflict of Whigs and Tories.⁴⁵ As urban growth accelerated, the national and imperial preoccupations of the British state gave towns and cities considerable autonomy from customary royal meddling. But autonomy brought with it once again unsettling responsibilities for town elites and “nightmarish fears over the rising tide of vagrants and the disorderly.” Deepening levels of poverty, the “urban scourge” of epidemic disease, and infant mortality made towns “killing fields” for the dispossessed.⁴⁶

Elites consolidated governing authority in eighteenth-century cities, though not without increasing intra-elite competition. Central government appointment of certain key local officials coexisted with self-election from within incorporated bodies that gave local elites a measure of self-perpetuating control of local governance. In many towns a key step toward centralization of local authority and professional specialization in local government came with the rise of the “town clerk,” in whom local notables vested considerable authority to act in their name. But well into the nineteenth century, a veritable hodgepodge of local government institutions with overlapping functions and variable pedigrees structured local governance in Britain—corporations, seigneurial boroughs, magistrates, parish vestries, and a whole range of “special purpose statutory authorities that managed everything from street lighting and watching to supervision of poor relief.”⁴⁷

Popular unrest periodically boiled to the surface of urban life in ways that both threatened the power of local elites and reinforced their claims to authority.⁴⁸ Revolts against corrupt officialdom were commonplace but generally called for restoration of a legitimate elite political authority that would live up to “its obligations to lesser members of the community.”⁴⁹ Local authorities could find themselves severely impinged, as E. P. Thompson has shown, by a “moral economy” of reciprocal obligations in defense of which the threat of “riot” exercised considerable force to ensure supplies of bread and just prices, at least until the end of the eighteenth century. By “suasion or by force,” crowds might enlist “a magistrate, parish constable, or some figure of authority to preside over the taxation populaire.” Even the sheriff of Gloucestershire could somewhat grudgingly acknowledge in 1766 that, although mobs had committed acts of violence, including “some of wantonness and excess,” in other instances, their actions had shown, “courage, prudence, justice and a consistency toward which they profess to obtain” a fair price.⁵⁰ While crowds had been enlisted by elites as ceremonial “clients” for partisan political purposes, they also, on occasion, acted on their own behalf to challenge “political oligarchy” and defend a “more open style of politics” in urban political spaces. But, at least down to the municipal reforms of the 1830s, elite control of local government went largely unchallenged and, if anything, came to be more firmly entrenched.⁵¹

Urban capital and mercantile elites drove what historians have come to call “proto-industrialization” of the countryside that unsettled population and fed the process of class formation in both cities and their rural hinterlands. Although some evidence suggests that the early dynamism of capitalist industrialization was most pronounced in rural areas, it is also clear that rural surpluses fed both urban capital formation and an expanding market that stimulated urban growth and the political power of its elites.⁵²

Local Government Reform during the Early Industrial Revolution—The Case of England

No historians have devoted more systematic attention to the development of the institutions of local government than did Sidney and Beatrice Webb at the end of the nineteenth century. Embarking on what they fully expected to be a survey of nineteenth-century local government as background for their own multifaceted municipal reform efforts in the 1890s, they found themselves drawn back to the years preceding the great reform efforts of 1832–35, and ultimately even farther back to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. For nearly thirty years from the time they embarked on the project in 1899, shortly after their grand tour of the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, they gathered a massive amount of data, scrutinized the local records of countless boroughs and counties, and with help of a team of assistants eventually published nine volumes of their History of English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act.⁵³ Filtered through their own reform sensibilities, these studies offer an unromanticized and at times harsh account of a chaotic “system” of local government, the byproduct of longstanding tradition and piecemeal reform. Indeed, the opening page of the first volume offers a provocative reconfiguring of where the center of gravity in the administration of local affairs lay—not in the municipal corporations, nor the decaying manorial courts, nor, for that matter, with the county justices, but rather in the parochial organization of the parishes.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb—Fabian Socialists and Local Government Reformers

The parish officers were to be found exercising their manifold functions among and beneath all other authorities in town and country alike; within the walls of powerful chartered municipalities; among the fens and marshes governed by ancient Courts of Sewers, and from end to end of the most highly organised counties.

Whether measured in taxes or expenditures, the parish budget “outweighed all other local governing authorities” together and just under one-fifth of the national government’s budget.⁵⁴

English parish “government” would prove to be a casualty of changing social conditions and the escalating need for poor relief, much to the chagrin of the Webbs, who viewed the “open vestry,” despite its faults, as a species of local democracy. Piecemeal, special parliamentary acts had nibbled away at the autonomy and key functions of the parish after 1695, not the least through the creation in some localities of incorporated Guardians of the Poor, with their own rate-levying authority. Critics of parish government made a convincing case to Parliament that effective administration was “utterly beyond the capacity of the supine and ignorant rural oligarchy, of the corrupt gang of uncontrolled parish officials, of the turbulent Open Vestry, or even of the unstable extra-legal constitutions devised by the better parishes.” In the face of sharply escalating poor rates after 1815, aggrieved large ratepayers pushed Parliament to institute a series of reforms, through the so-called Sturges Bourne Acts, that created the “Select Vestry,” as a newly empowered executive committee of the parish with specific responsibility for managing poor rates and relief. Most consequentially, they instituted a scaled plural voting system for electing members of the Select Vestry that gave disproportionate power to the largest ratepayers and provided for an appeal to a formal referendum (with weighted voting), if the open voting system of the semi-annual Open Vestry meeting proved unwieldy. The call for a “poll” frequently turned an already contentious vestry meeting into pandemonium. The responsibility for allocating poor relief was given to a select group—essentially a new local authority—that represented elites in the parish. With concerted national efforts in the early 1830s to reform poor relief, parish government, for all intents and purposes according to the Webbs, was “strangled.”⁵⁵

The Webbs also detailed with marked and painstaking disdain “an anarchy of local autonomy” embodied in what they termed “Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes.” These entities, they argued, derived what authority they possessed both from traditional accretions of power and from the sanction of particular “local acts” of Parliament granting one or another local body the authority to enforce some regulation or impose a special-purpose levy, often at the expense of the parish or other traditional local authorities. To put it mildly, nothing approaching a uniform system of local government could be found, whether in municipal corporations or in the hundreds of municipalities functioning without benefit of a corporate charter.⁵⁶ The Webbs playfully imagined a Dutch gentleman landing at Torbay in the company of William III and asking any local official they might have encountered to describe “the Local Government of England,” only to have been met with “a blank ignorance of any such order of things.”⁵⁷

But, as the Webbs brilliantly and ironically recounted, local affairs were managed strictly on the basis of “an obligation to serve” and local government, as such, was simply “a unit of obligation,” in which it was “taken for granted that every respectable male resident” of appropriate status fell under that obligation.⁵⁸ The legacy of “obligation” to serve and the rotation of office among men of proper status were integral to the elite practice of local government even as the rubicon of municipal reform would be crossed and recrossed and a modern “system” of local government devised.

With population turnover, even members of the elite lost a sense of place and the traditional obligations that went with it.⁵⁹ But the changing conditions in the industrial boroughs created a new environment that demanded attention. The Webbs noted that

the public business of the Parish was becoming every day more complicated and difficult; that the mere number of the paupers was becoming overwhelming; that new buildings of diverse kinds were springing up on all sides; that paving, cleansing, lighting and watching were alike wanting; that the crowding together of tens of thousands of poverty-stricken persons was creating unspeakable nuisances; and that the amount of rates levied on the inhabitants was at the same time doubling and trebling, it will be easily understood why, in one district after another, the situation became intolerable.

In these circumstances, associations of goods producers involved in manufacture and trade constituted themselves as voluntary clubs whose private interests became synonymous with the public’s business.⁶⁰

Rising urban discontent

Municipal corporations faced gathering public discontent on a variety of fronts. In tumultuous years, especially after 1815, central government officials and local elites expressed grave concern over “the manifest incapacity of the Borough Justices to preserve order” in the face of “the turbulence of the mob in the industrial centers.” In 1831, Bristol was wracked by days of destructive rioting in the struggle to enlarge the franchise. Similarly, in the corporations of Nottingham, Derby, Worcester, Exeter, Coventry, and Preston, the “Justices proved incapable of maintaining order,” a condition that precipitated action by the Tory home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, to intervene with a “preventive police.” But the corporations were also subjects of criticism over the self-selected elite that governed them, what a Whig newspaper called, “a shabby, mongrel aristocracy.” Nonconformists challenged “the Tory Churchmen who ran the corporations,” arguing for access by new, rising manufacturers and other members of a new elite, irrespective of religious or political affiliation.⁶¹ But some recent scholarship suggests that, from the late eighteenth century forward, local government bodies showed considerable improvement in “standards, procedure and efficiency” irrespective of corporate status. Nevertheless, would-be reformers found much grist for their mills in the habits of corporate officers who treated public property as their own, in the elites’ lavish feasting in financially strapped times, and, most consequentially, in the failure of town officers to meet the challenges of urban disorder.⁶²

The new phase of a growing social crisis ignited by agitation around the Reform Bill of 1832 provided context for the push to reform municipal governance. Francis Place, like other uneasy but sympathetic observers, noted “the systematic way in which the people proceeded, their steady perseverance” in organizing “meetings of almost every description,” in cities and towns, “by journeymen tradesmen in their clubs, and by common workmen who had no trade clubs or associations of any kind.”⁶³ In the aftermath of the Reform Bill’s passage, the radical Poor Man’s Guardian characterized its intent. “The promoters of the Reform Bill projected it, not with a view to subvert, or even remodel our aristocratic institutions, but to consolidate them by a reinforcement of the sub-aristocracy from the middle-classes.”⁶⁴ How close England was to a precipice of revolution is a matter of some dispute. Clearly discontents ran deep and potential alliances between disfranchised small property holders and the wholly dispossessed seemed possible. One Midlands observer noted at the beginning of 1832,

Walk into any lane or public-house, where a number of operatives are congregated together and listen, for ten minutes, to the conversation … In at least seven out of every ten cases, the subjects of debate will be found to bear upon the appalling question of whether it would be more advantageous to attack the lives or the property of the rich? ⁶⁵

According to Thompson, Whig proponents of the Reform Bill managed to capture and bring into the reform fold an emergent middle class more “conservative” and “more narrowly self-interested than in any other industrialized nation.”⁶⁶ The crisis precipitated by the Reform Bill of 1832 passed but in the minds of Whig activists the work of “reform” remained incomplete. For Francis Place, the Municipal Reform Act had a mixed return. While the original version was diluted by the House of Lords and a more restrictive franchise inserted, it still represented for many radicals like Place an important step forward in dismantling the power of the “aristocracy” within municipal corporations. In his view, the Reform Act “broke the neck” of the “Aristocratical conspiracy against the People.” Although burdened with “anomalies and absurdities” by the Lords, he believed the Reform Act “narrowed the Oligarchy, concentrated it, and made its proceedings apparent to all … Everyone now sees where the root of the mischief lies.”⁶⁷

Turning to municipal reform

Momentum behind municipal reform rose dramatically in the early 1830s. The radical press drove home the case “that the Municipal Corporations were everywhere ‘self-elect’; that they had all become so by usurpation of the popular rights; that their property belonged ‘of right’ to the people; that they all misused their powers and squandered the ‘Town Stock’ in feasting and corruption.” Despite Tory misgivings, a series of measures passed through Parliament that removed the required profession of faith in the Church of England by corporate office-holders; another prevented the use of corporation property on behalf of the election of its members to Parliament; a broader trial reform measure applying only to Scottish boroughs; and, finally, the appointment of a Royal Select Committee of the House of Commons to broaden the inquiry and propose legislation applying to all municipal corporations.⁶⁸

The scope of the concern led to the appointment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry whose painstakingly detailed on-site investigations of 285 towns formed the backbone of hard data, much admired by the Webbs for its scrupulously objective quality, from which recommendations and ultimately parliamentary legislation were drawn. The commission itself was heavily weighted toward Whig interests, inflected with a critique of Tory town government. New intellectual and material interests shaped the critique—Benthamite utilitarianism, Lockean defense of property stewardship, new entrepreneurial interest in freeing trade and investment, and a semi-radical whiff of more radical democratization.⁶⁹

The outcome proved hardly revolutionary, despite a veneer of rhetorical criticism directed at municipal corporate corruption.⁷⁰ By setting new standards, if even for only a fraction of local government bodies, the English and Welsh Municipal Reform Act of 1835 mandated the replacement of closed, self-elected corporation bodies with town councils elected by ratepayers, generally more restrictive than the £10 householder parliamentary franchise. Additionally, would-be councillors had to meet a significantly larger property-holding requirement. An upper chamber of alderman would be indirectly elected by the councillors for longer, six-year terms, thereby lending further elite ballast to local government. Executive authority would reside in a mayor elected from within the town council. The act did not directly address the procedures of administration or issues of local government finance. Establishing a police force and, by implication, ensuring public order became, according to Derek Fraser, a required function of the new town councils. On a practical level, the new electoral requirements, as Rosemary Sweet argues, ensured a “significant changeover” among officeholders, “especially in the larger industrial towns, where the newly rich manufacturers, who were often dissenters” now became the governing majority. The more open, reformed municipal corporation provided an avenue of access to local political influence by a new elite.⁷¹ While the incorporated towns became, in Fraser’s term, “the forcing house of municipal reform” after 1835, the larger number of unincorporated boroughs remained creatures of county governance and unelected authorities. No less bustling industrial towns than Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield would eventually petition to join the chartered ranks, alongside the likes of Liverpool, Leeds, and Nottingham, but others would linger in the netherworld of their counties well into the latter half of the nineteenth century.⁷²

For the Webbs, herein lay the commission’s deepest defects. It had failed, in their words, to provide “a place in the National Hierarchy of authorities” for all urban places subject to “external audit, inspection, and control” and “enforcement in every department of social life that National Minimum of efficiency without which the well-being of the whole will be impaired.” The incompleteness of the “municipal revolution” left in place impaired democracies but also the closed, unincorporated bodies in which “unappropriated surpluses” were treated as property to be distributed as “due consideration” for the individual members of the body.⁷³

Local government found itself caught in the crossfire of a changing political culture, as Rosemary Sweet has argued, in which public scrutiny and accountability shone new light on the previously obscure inner workings of municipal government.⁷⁴ The reforms of 1835 had modest effect, except for the intensified partisanship that they encouraged and the new structures of urban governance they imposed on incorporated municipalities, which remained a small proportion of all towns and even large cities. While abolishing the role of “freemen,” the new, reformed system of elected councillors and indirectly elected aldermen preserved the privileged role of ratepaying property holders. If anything, the new property requirements for holding office opened the door even more widely for control by “newly rich manufacturers” to the exclusion of the “less substantial middling sort.” In sum, Sweet notes, aside from breaking the Tory grip on local corporations, “the main achievement of municipal reform was to clear up some of the anomalies of corporate constitutions, to establish the elective principle more firmly, and to create a more direct correspondence between civic office and urban wealth.”⁷⁵

In many ways, reform functioned to politicize local government by empowering and emboldening a new class of nonconformist, Whig businessmen intent on rationalizing and reducing the expense of local government in the interest of the largest ratepayers. Virtually all of the commission appointees were, in the words of Tory Lord Lyndhurst, “Whigs and something more.” According to Derek Fraser, only two commission members out of twenty were not politically aligned with Whigs or Radicals. Such a challenge to the largely Tory governing status quo inevitably intensified the partisan polarization of the local elections that followed close on the heels of reform.⁷⁶

“Reform” held new, more far-reaching and more radically democratic implications for some. Contemporary proponents of reform, including the venerable radical Francis Place, believed that these municipal reforms established a local platform that would transform the lives of working people through a species of municipal collectivism. Inclined to believe that the extension of the franchise opened new democratic opportunities, Place, like J. A. Roebuck and others of a Benthamite persuasion, saw in the modernization and democratization of existing municipal corporations a major step forward. Joseph Parkes, the Whig secretary to the Royal Commission, linked municipal reform to the Reform Act of 1832 by suggesting “Municipal Reform is the steam engine for the Mill built by Parliamentary Reform.”⁷⁷ Given the pervasiveness of corruption in some notable municipal corporations, the Times argued that without municipal reform, the parliamentary electoral reform of 1832 “would have been literally a dead letter.”⁷⁸

But some historians, including Fraser, have taken a more skeptical view of the impact of municipal reform. First, the act applied only to those already incorporated towns, not the vast number of unincorporated towns and cities, including Birmingham and Sheffield, where parliamentary sanctioned, specialized local authorities still held sway. In Fraser’s words, “it was not the system of English local government which was reformed in 1835, but the government of 178 named incorporated boroughs.”⁷⁹

Second, reform of the municipal franchise in 1835, in the eyes of some observers, did significantly broaden eligibility for municipal voting, although still hedged by minimum ratepayer and residency requirements. Others, however, stress the largely exclusionary effects of these requirements that precluded virtually all workers and many citizens of middling status from casting municipal ballots.⁸⁰

Third, the reform of municipal corporations had the partisan political effect of strengthening the hand of Whigs in local government to the detriment of Tories, whose influence still largely reigned unchallenged in unincorporated towns and boroughs. But in many industrial towns a new class of wealthy elite manufacturers sought political influence in municipal government at the expense of older elites. According to Commission Secretary Joseph Parkes, reform brought the “breath of life” to town government. Whether its effects were as immediate as reform enthusiasts claimed, the reforms of 1835 in the view of most historians set the stage for ongoing reform of municipal government and the transfer of more and more functions to local government. If this was a “revolution” in municipal government, it came decidedly from the top. And, as Fraser noted, the rapid entry into town government by new industrial elites meant that “there was no great difference in the social composition of unreformed corporations and elected town councils.”⁸¹

Liberal reformers generally saw incorporation as an essential step in the rationalization and standardization of municipal government. In this they typically faced opposition from conservatives (Tories) and, in many cases, working-class radicals. Conservatives sought to protect the traditions and privileges of an older elite governing class despite the chaos and inefficiency produced by overlapping jurisdictions of traditional bodies. Radicals regarded liberals’ plans for centralization and rationalization with suspicion, as simply another way of perpetuating elite hegemony. For them “extension of suffrage” held the chief protection against “the tyranny of the bloated rich.”⁸²

But, even as cities moved ahead under Liberal-dominated governance, they encountered an even more profound challenge that separated them from politically mobilized working-class constituencies. “Improvement” typically implied public and collective solutions to the dysfunctions of urban industrial life and that in turn implied taxing the “bloated rich” whether they be Tories or Liberals. Thomas Avery, a leading businessman in Birmingham during the 1860s and ’70s, had championed reform but always with an appeal to “the ratepayers as a control over municipal expenditure.”⁸³ Fear of rising taxes as a consequence of “improvement” was a dominant theme in the thinking of conservatives and liberals alike.

The range of new Liberal municipal regimes varied widely.⁸⁴ Jeffrey Cox has documented a significant strain of nonconformist liberalism committed to reformism that appeared before the turn of the century and reshaped local politics in Lambeth, a London suburb, with an infusion of progressive sentiment anchored in one social segment of a splintering nonconformism.⁸⁵ The city of Birmingham, although a latecomer to incorporation, became in the short space of a few years in the early 1870s a leading model for civic renewal and the embodiment of a municipal “gospel” of improvement. Spurred by the engagement of nonconformist ministers, the city embraced a kind of “municipal collectivism,” within the limits of Liberal imagination, that “became the new religion.” The movement was above all energized by the mayoral leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, who, by the time he resigned as mayor to serve in Parliament, could say, “I think I have now almost completed my municipal programme … The town will be parked, paved, assized, marketed, gas and watered and improved—all the result of three years’ active work.”⁸⁶ Chamberlain has been given great credit for, among other things, “the recruitment to the Town Council of the social and economic elite of the town.” In this view it was their “abilities” that “made the actual administrative improvements possible.”⁸⁷ And, in this, Sidney and Beatrice Webb would certainly concur.

Liberal and Fabian legacies of the Municipal Reform Act of 1835

In the Webbs’ view, the reforms of 1835 barely set the stage for the transformation in scale, function, and expertise of local government that was to follow in the next three-quarters of a century. From a limited “ratepayers’ democracy,” which the 1835 reforms had prescribed, came in due course what the Webbs termed a “consumers’ democracy,” more inclusive and broad-based than anything that had preceded it, though still hemmed in by municipal franchise restrictions and the narrow pecuniary interest of ratepayers. In a word, “English Local Government, in 1832–36” was given over “to a particular stratum of the Middle Class,” and despite its limitations had “gradually become representative of all the best sections of English life.”⁸⁸ But, at the same time, they had little patience with what they saw as the ruling spirit of the “trading Middle Class” that came to be a contending influence in local government for much of the period following the reforms of the 1830s.⁸⁹

Like many reformers of a “progressive” bent, the Webbs, according to Keith-Lucas, “were in some ways authoritarian in their impatience for social reform and distrustful of popular elections as a means of achieving it.”⁹⁰ What they neglected to see was the persistence of elite rule through governance by the most privileged members of local society.⁹¹ Class rule continued to take the form of a bourgeois leadership in which large capital held the winning cards. What the Webbs also failed to detail, was the political process by which this local bourgeois hegemony came to be challenged at the end of the nineteenth century by working-class activists in the municipality. By their reckoning the rise to the top by an educated, professional class of municipal experts—many of them children of the working class—would claim power naturally, without political contest or serious class warfare.⁹²

The Webbs smoothed out a contested politics of municipal governance, the partisan, working-class edge of which deserved far more credit than they were prepared to concede. Writing early in the new century, they failed to adequately note the continuing struggles of working-class constituencies with local propertied elites that gave substance to what “progress” those elites might grudgingly concede. This is especially ironic given the Webbs’ intense early involvement in the efforts to expand the functions and local control of the London County Council and their observation of its demise in 1907.⁹³

As a case in point, Beatrice Webb cited her own investigation of the town Leicester. A new corporation assumed power there in 1835, led by “a remarkably able town Clerk … and a set of able, honest and socially influential men” all of whom were “Liberal and Nonconformist, mostly Unitarian.” They came from the ranks of an industrial upper-middle class—“bankers, hosiery manufacturers and professional men.” She cited as their “dominant idea” an aspiration “to administer public property honestly and economically.” But, in doing so, they sought “to pay low salaries, to contract wherever possible, to pay off debt by prudent land sales … They had a horror of overgrown establishments, and thus shrank from enlarging functions.” She noted that they appointed all Liberals to key offices and followed good procedures but constituted a kind of closed governing clique. But she also noted, approvingly, that “the relationships would have been invidious, if they had not been men of high honour; they were simultaneously chairmen and directors of railway, water and gas companies, which they as a [city] corporation had to control and deal with … But they left a tradition of highest integrity and always doing their best for the town.” With the election of a new Leicester council in 1891, now in the expanded boundaries of the city, “two new elements came to the front—the new capitalist trades and boot manufacturers … and the workmen.” The “net result” was that “the Council” had grown “more progressive and democratic in sympathy, but with “the defect” of being “more discordant and worse-mannered.”⁹⁴

Sidney Webb’s involvement in London education through his chairmanship of the Technical Education Board, during his elected service on the London County Council in the 1890s and his founding of the London School of Economics, provided the ideal venue for pursuit of his meritocratic conception of municipal change. As a biographer wrote, “he wanted to be able to detect who might become one of the new breed of ‘experts’, provide them with a rigorous training, then insure that they played their allotted role in the overall increase in national efficiency.”⁹⁵ On the questions of centralized county control, management of school affairs, and local government reform, Sidney Webb’s support for centralization and rationalization alienated some progressive allies, who denounced his pragmatic willingness to align with conservatives, but also would-be Labour Party allies as well.⁹⁶ According to historian Alan McBriar, many Labour Party activists in London, among them Ramsay MacDonald, “had come to dislike Webb [and] had found new virtues in the ‘primary democracy’ of ad hoc local authorities.”⁹⁷ Among other things, such divisions reflected divergence within the broad ranks of labor and socialist activists, including the Fabians, over how best to pursue power and what vision of the place of the municipality such a pursuit implied. Sidney Webb’s conception of the method of improving society distinguished him sharply from William Morris and the strain of utopian socialism Morris upheld, but also from Labour Party activists who themselves split over the primacy and place of municipal political activism. As Webb wrote before his own courtship of progressives in pursuit of a seat on the London County Council in 1890, “Prophets nowadays do not found a partial community which adopts the whole faith; they cause rather the partial adoption of their own faith by the whole community.”⁹⁸

No formulation better distinguishes two distinct strands of municipal reform. One required the empowerment of a new working class prepared to engage in municipal combat with the political agents of a propertied elite determined to defend its hold on governance. The other, a strand of liberal, progressive reform promoted by the Webbs, embraced the prospect of the rise to power and influence of educated and socially conscious middle-class professionals prepared to act on behalf of what they understood to be the general good.

Municipal Reform: Germany and Sweden

Outside the British Isles, municipal governance followed similar but distinctive paths, a product of different local-state relations and a pace of industrial change that lagged behind Britain. Eighteenth-century German states witnessed a fluid and shifting realignment of political power driven in part by a new demographic and economic dynamism in their cities. New states claimed authority at the expense of a steadily declining old regime—the Holy Roman Empire—whose function to “restrain, limit and conciliate” subsidiary sites of political authority gave way to more aggressive states that sought to “regulate, conquer and control.”⁹⁹ Free cities within the old imperial order had enjoyed a measure of autonomy, as they had in other parts of Europe, but rising, revenue-hungry states both challenged the authority of the empire and the potentially “subversive” independence of cities. In James Sheehan’s view, as “the outlines of the sovereign state” took shape, “boundaries were clarified, loopholes closed, [and] institutional ambiguities clarified.”

The urban social crises precipitated by the Thirty Years’ War (1618– 1648) had left openings for state rulers to reclaim local authority and impose their wills (and collect their taxes.) Prussian monarchs, for instance, appointed magistrates and military governors, who, alongside mayors, made most decisions regarding municipal affairs ranging from market regulation to street cleaning to poor relief.

Municipal autonomy had been eroded significantly. Only in a handful of Hanoverian cities and the coastal trading entrepôts of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck did traditions of independent urban governance survive the encroachments of state authority. As Sheehan noted, “These outposts of urban autonomy were merely reminders of a vanished era, the vestiges of an age when central Europe was filled with city-states, each conscious of its corporate identity and jealous of its sovereign rights.”¹⁰⁰

Cities varied in the composition of their local elites, from “a relatively closed case of patricians” in the old city of Nuremberg; to “more open commercial oligarchy” of the bustling, outward-looking port city of Hamburg; to a forward-looking, emergent city like Frankfurt, governed, according to one observer, by “a moderate aristocracy, a combination of democracy and aristocracy.” In smaller “home towns,” more open and direct systems of local governance could be found, in which guilds functioned as essential vehicles of influence for a somewhat expanded sphere of citizens.¹⁰¹

Nevertheless, absolutist rule over municipalities remained virtually intact until a triumphant Napoleon created a semblance of autonomous civil authority in conquered cities.¹⁰² The imperial crisis brought on by defeat at the hands of Napoleon precipitated latent reform sentiments and a reinvigoration of municipalities. The Prussian ministerial reformer Karl Freiherr vom Stein played a strategic role in crafting a far-reaching municipal reform program, the Städteordnung of 1808, whose impact would be felt for the next fifty years and more. But, as Hefft er argued, municipal renewal was anticipated to be the foundation for more far-reaching and comprehensive reform of the absolutist state at all levels, “related to the spirit and the sweep of the French revolution.”¹⁰³ However, this “revolution from above” enacted only limited measures of self-government, carefully circumscribed to maintain power in the hands of local propertied interests. It did, however, shift authority in some significant ways to locally constituted bodies. Stein hoped, according to Dawson, to promote “decentralization of State authority” and strengthen civic life, “without organically weakening the central power.” The hybrid system, adopted first in the cities at the core Kingdom of Prussia that lay beyond direct French control, eventually spread after 1815 to other Prussian states and beyond, though in gradual and even more piecemeal fashion.¹⁰⁴ Although the system drew inspiration from English public life and local government, the imprint of the French revolution’s Municipal Decree of December 1789 was more evident. The Städteordnung provided for representative institutions of mayor and council to be elected by freemen possessed of a substantial amount of property, and it mandated that representatives themselves be householders. All those residents without property, the Schutzverwandter, were deprived of any rights to participate in the selection of representatives or to serve in public office. With seemingly full “administrative” control, local authorities supervised municipal finance, taxation, schools, matters of public health, and poor relief, but importantly not the police, which stayed within the domain of the state. In Stein’s words, state supervision remained overriding “lest a number of small republics be created.” His memorandum interpreting the decree specified: “The citizens are charged with the undivided administration of their communal affairs. The influence of the State is entirely restricted to supervision, with a view to seeing that nothing is done contrary to the purpose of the State and that the existing laws are observed.”¹⁰⁵ In practice, this meant confirmation of elected representatives by the crown, or candidates for the election drawn from lists preselected by the crown. Revisions of the system of local government in 1831 and a more far-reaching Gemeindeordnung adopted in 1845 substituted direct appointment of local executives in place of election by municipal assemblies. Exceptions were the few remaining free cities of Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, where local patriciates continued to rule.¹⁰⁶

The impact of industrial change came more slowly to German than British cities. A fundamentally similar if somewhat later-developing class structure was evident by the end of the Napoleonic era. The effects of proto-industrialization on rural hinterlands were notable as was a congealing of capital and entrepreneurial initiative in cities of varying sizes.¹⁰⁷ A new class of laborers beyond the jurisdiction of guild organizations grew larger as did a more diverse Bürgertum (middle class), of both Besitz- and Bildungs- (property and education) varieties. Expanded state bureaucracy at all levels of government gave Prussian elite formation a somewhat distinctive character. The influence of guilds in local economic and political life eroded most dramatically where “bureaucratic centralization, population growth and intense commercial activity” most threatened local autonomy. In practice these patterns characterized much of Prussia but especially those territories in the Rhineland and Westphalia that had been occupied and directly administered by the French.¹⁰⁸

The adoption of a municipal Dreiklassensystem (three-class voting system) in Prussia and Prussian-influenced states dramatically symbolized the drift toward greater empowerment of local elites and the state bureaucracy in local affairs. Beginning in Baden and spreading eventually to all Prussian states, the system provided for three classes of voters based on levels of property ownership, with each class having equal electoral strength despite representing very different shares of population. The policy was an amalgam of plutocratic and democratic principles, but “it largely strengthened the plutocratic interest.” In certain respects, it did enlarge the electorate (among the propertied) even as it skewed electoral influence toward the wealthiest classes.¹⁰⁹

The political constitution of German cities revolved very much around the associational life of local notables (“Honoratioren”) whose customary influence infused local administration. “Liberal” influences favoring greater urban autonomy, free expression, the exercise of civic rights, and expanding social provision enjoyed growing influence in urban political life of German cities. Johannes Miquel, elected mayor by the Frankfurt city council in 1880, claimed not to be a “political man” but “a man of administration.” In his view, municipal administration had “nothing to do with political, social and confessional conflicts, and … it should remain a neutral area in which everyone can work together for the good of the whole, unhindered by differences of opinion.”¹¹⁰

Such views pervaded ruling elites across much of Europe and the settler colonies. In Germany they fueled a succession of municipal reform efforts dating from Stein in 1808. The aborted “revolution of 1848” did not undermine the beachhead positions liberals claimed in cities like Frankfurt, though it encouraged a degree of moderation thereafter.¹¹¹

Closed though this bourgeois world became—and on this point there is considerable dispute—three points are critical. First, evidence suggests that despite their diminishing influence in state and national political realms, liberals maintained a firm grip on city governance until faced with the challenge of “party politics” in the form of the social democratic and confessional center parties towards the end of the century.¹¹² Second, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century this urban liberalism took different forms and manifested considerable ideological range from conservative to radical.¹¹³ And third, liberals came to be heavily invested in a political status quo that would protect their governing position. Despite the fact that liberal regimes pursued significant measures of social provision and local state intervention, in the words of Dieter Langewiesche, “Municipal social policy was implemented behind the walls of political illiberality, without which municipal liberalism would have been forced to sacrifice its strong position in the municipalities, as it had at state and above all at Reich level.” Restricted suffrage was its “crutch” and primary means of ensuring the continuity of rule by the Honoratioren.¹¹⁴ It took many forms.¹¹⁵ But, the net effect was that liberals maintained a highly restrictive municipal franchise and defended it against proposed reforms that might undermine their position. The Prussian “three-class” system ensured that more than 90 percent of the electorate voted as members of one class with a collective vote equal to the remaining 5 to 10 percent of voters in each of the two other classes.¹¹⁶

Sweden had a relatively truncated network of towns in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century. Active royal intervention in the seventeenth century enabled the state to manage and relocate towns for military and commercial purposes, the net effect of which was to concentrate trade in towns and facilitate royal taxation.¹¹⁷ But, with growing urban autonomy in the eighteenth century, political power came to reside with the class of burghers, whose numbers were dominated by merchants, a sprinkling of well-connected craftsmen, and a smaller class of magistrates headed by a mayor, formally selected by the king. Burghers elected the town council with voting, either in a general meeting or later by ballot, based on property. Below merchants and craftsmen, in a city like Malmö, were “other inhabitants of the town,” who, according to historian Lars Edgren, “in a political and symbolic sense were made almost invisible.”¹¹⁸

After 1862, the Swedish franchise for both municipal and parliamentary elections was heavily weighted toward large property holders with significant taxable income. The effect was to severely restrict the eligible electorate, especially in towns that saw rapidly increasing wealth from new industries. And the new industries themselves could, in some cases, cast extraordinarily large numbers of votes based on their wealth. For example, several timber companies in Norrland cast respectively 30,480, 35,318, and 48,114 votes in local elections.¹¹⁹ In more rural districts with some manufacturing, other factors contributed to the depression of the popular vote: debt over nonpayment of taxes and, where the tradition of community meetings persisted, the scheduling of meetings during daytime hours when wage earners could not attend.¹²⁰ Although as much as 20 percent of the voting age population was technically eligible to vote, the “party of non-voters” hovered at roughly 95 percent until the franchise reforms of 1908.¹²¹

In Stockholm the political effect of growing urban concentrations of workers in particular neighborhoods was muted in municipal elections because electoral districts were drawn to reflect differential representation based on taxable incomes. As Madeleine Hurd has noted, “Small, rich districts had as many city council representatives as large, poor ones.” A city’s “grande bourgeoisie,” its financial and merchant class, controlled local politics to an even greater extent than in German cities, and unlike German states, the franchise law for Riksdag (parliamentary) elections, drafted in 1866, was equally restrictive. Each large property-holding voter possessed multiple votes based on tax payments, and large corporations (acting as individuals) could cast large numbers of votes, dwarfing even the 100 votes of wealthy individuals themselves, in a system where only about twenty percent of adult males were eligible to vote at all.¹²²

For liberals in Germany as well as Britain, and to a lesser degree in Sweden, the city loomed as the primary site of industrial transformation and potential social instability and as a crucible in which the refashioning of social relations might occur while the fundamental hierarchies of power and property remained protected. This required, within limits, liberalizing representative governance (less so in Germany than Britain), professionalizing the administration of civic affairs (more so in Germany than Britain), and instituting programs of social amelioration that might stave off more far-reaching changes and the politicization of local government. Continuity was deemed crucial. The new men of power—industrial managers, directors of mines and steel mills, large merchants, and lawyers—adopted the social trappings of traditional elite influence. In Dortmund and Munster, for instance, social clubs comprised of a significant number of elected local officials and civic leaders functioned as “the place where town issues could be settled in advance.”¹²³

New entrepreneurial classes might ease themselves into positions of power at the expense of older notables and representatives of central authority, but such shifts in the make-up of ruling elites would not entail significant political or social leveling. Cities would remain safe zones for capital and property, the holders of which could be assured that their voices would ring loudest in the corridors of city halls and the freedom of the local marketplace would remain relatively unencumbered by regulation and an encroaching public sector in ways that might harm their interests. Tax rates would remain low and public initiatives to increase social provision or expand municipal services would be aggressively resisted.¹²⁴

Municipal Governance in the Settler Colonies

Settler colonies typically carried the imprint of local government from the metropolitan homeland. Settlement bore the distinctive traces of each era’s urban development, but as with other aspects of colonial life, the constraints of the particular colonial context led settlers to selectively adapt the institutions of local governance in the metropolis to meet local needs, while paying some deference to colonial authority and tradition.

North America

In the early coastal cities of colonial North America, the “municipal corporation was a community of trade and industry” not unlike its counterparts in England and on the European continent. The body of “freemen” held exclusive trading privileges and rights to governance. The “commercial class” and the “governing class” were synonymous.¹²⁵ However, the granting of corporate charters directly by the British crown, or indirectly through colonial governors, gave such towns a degree of conferred autonomy in the exercise of powers to regulate local commercial practices, to tax, and where necessary to adjudicate disputes. William Penn, for example, granted a corporate charter in 1701 to Chester, Pennsylvania, “for the better encouragement of settlers and regulation of trade,” and, in 1720, Pennsylvania governor William Keith, in the name of George I, incorporated the town of Bristol in order “to promote trade, industry, rule and good order amongst all our loving subjects.”¹²⁶ But, in the dynamic colonial trading towns and cities, oligarchic traditions of governance that restricted participation to a self-selected group of freemen eroded. Competitive pressures challenged the freemen’s monopoly of trade and craft production. Royal authorities continued to exercise significant powers in the appointment of local officials in many colonies well into the eighteenth century (in contrast to England). But, in some regions, especially New England, provincial assemblies and local bodies of freemen along with large property owners used the franchise to select their own local councillors and aldermen.¹²⁷

The economic environment of the coastal cities in colonial North America worked at cross-purposes with efforts to sustain customary practices of local government regulation in the eighteenth century. In principle, the standard means of regulating the local economy and labor market remained in place—poor relief, regulation of wages and prices, admission to the freedom of the city, apprenticeship, and “warning out” paupers and indigents. Under conditions of labor scarcity in dynamic colonial cities, such regulations proved difficult to enforce.¹²⁸ In New York City, carpenters organized in 1747 to prevent outsiders (“Jerseys”) from practicing the trade in the city, claiming that they did not pay taxes and could therefore charge lower prices for their labor. But “freedom of the city” proved porous. As Samuel McKee has noted, “Without guilds and without an organized effort to confine the charter benefits of the city to freemen, the system seemingly never established itself.”¹²⁹ Even by the early eighteenth century, the price to purchase freeman status had fallen to as low as six shillings (two days’ work) for an artificer, although it would rise in periods of depression. By 1740, many craftsmen simply ignored the requirement to register and purchase freedom. However, during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, a large number registered in order to exercise the franchise.¹³⁰

The American Revolution proved a watershed moment in local government. While the chartering of municipalities had been a royal affair, generally conveyed through colonial governors, military occupation by the British, and their subsequent evacuation effectively nullified the existing charters. In their place, newly constituted state legislatures assumed effective jurisdiction over towns and cities. Municipal autonomy was now reined in. As the leading historian of American local government described these developments,

The concept of confederation and then federation automatically gave the states rather than the national government residual powers over local government. The national government was said to have only specified powers (by the Tenth Amendment), and these did not include authority relative to local governments.¹³¹

The emergence of “special-act charters” granted individually to cities by state legislatures opened the door to potential favoritism, special pleading, and ultimately corruption that would mark the state-local relations for much of the nineteenth century.

Three features of this revolutionized system of local governance in the United States deserve specific mention. First, the powers granted to cities required specific state-government sanction and frequently the direct administrative intrusion of state legislatures. For example, in 1861, the Missouri legislature removed control of the police from the city government of St. Louis and placed it in the hands of a state-appointed Board of Police, while nonetheless requiring the city to pay from local revenues for police services.¹³²

Second, the removal of property requirements for the franchise in most jurisdictions in the 1830s applied to all levels of government, thereby giving white males, regardless of class standing, the right to vote in local elections.¹³³ This early democratization of the municipal franchise, still within limits, set the United States apart from virtually all other countries. However, during the “Progressive Era” of the early twentieth century, states imposed a host of franchise restrictions that effectively dampened working-class and immigrant voter participation.¹³⁴

Third, the combination of state legislative control, the negotiation of individual city-specific charters, the growing urban concentrations of impoverished immigrant workers, and the universal white male franchise created conditions in the short term that called into being local political machines capable of “purchasing” from state legislatures a measure of local control and a degree of social integration. Over the course of the nineteenth century, local property-owning elites would reassert their interests in local government through alliances with political machines or alternatively through certain forms of municipal reform that promised to undermine the power of machines and restore city governance to a propertied elite.¹³⁵ The vision of municipal governance, cleansed of the corrupting influence of machine politics, rallied elite reformers around a program of limited government, new forms of suffrage restriction, an upward distribution of income through a shift from special purpose to general taxation, professionalization of police and fire services to ensure greater security to property, and the reliance on private, “scientific” charity as a means of disciplining the poor. Local bourgeois interests also actively sought limits on the municipal franchise but achieved them in only modest ways.¹³⁶ While patterns varied from one city to another, elite reformers—the so-called “best men”—reached accommodations with local machines that left largely intact the “private” city of antebellum years, now overlaid with “structural” reforms that would protect property holders from the potential demands of a more expansive “public interest.”¹³⁷ What they had not anticipated was the appearance of grassroots working-class political challenges to elite municipal governance, energized by an unprecedented wave of mass strikes.¹³⁸

Australia

The early modern legacies of local government in Britain played out differently in British colonies “down under.” It took nearly fifty years from the beginning of white settlement in New South Wales (NSW) for local government in Sydney to be incorporated. In 1842, state government authorized an elected council with appointed officers to do the town’s business. Prior to incorporation, the town’s business had been carried out on an ad hoc basis by colonial authorities and private interests.¹³⁹ In the case of the colonies’ other urban settlements, a gradual process of formally constituting local government from informal experiments in self-governance ensued, usually over decades, as localities acquired population and more diversified economic activity. The municipality of Adelaide in South Australia had been incorporated two years before Sydney; Melbourne followed in the same year, and Perth would follow more than a decade later in 1858. The story of the northern convict settlement at Moreton Bay on the Brisbane River is more complicated. Originally under the jurisdiction of the New South Wales colony, it functioned as a “colony within a colony” until 1842 under a strict prohibition baring free settlement. According to one early historian, its voice in the NSW Legislative Council amounted “only to a very inaudible squeak.” Even with the arrival of the last convict ship in 1850, it would be nearly a decade until Queensland formally separated from New South Wales on orders of the British colonial secretary and then within months proclaimed the municipality of Brisbane.¹⁴⁰

Eastern Australia: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria

Prolonged though the process of municipal incorporation may have been in Australia’s coastal municipalities, the imprint of Britain’s experimentations with the reform of municipal government proved noteworthy. Stimulated by the Municipal Reform Act of 1835 in Britain, successive governors in New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke and Sir George Gibbs, sought to apply the model of incorporated cities in the colony. According to Bourke, the time had come for the cities “to administer to their own convenience and comfort … by means of a body elected among themselves.” A select committee of the NSW Legislative Council upon investigating the Sydney municipal corporation found it to be “an impediment to the improvement of the city” and recommended its dissolution. A patchwork of legislative initiatives attempted to rationalize city administration, in part by transferring more authority to state-appointed commissioners.¹⁴¹ With rapidly growing population and deteriorating social conditions, colonial authorities struggled to maintain law and order in these former “convict colonies.” By conferring significant authority on locally elected officials to raise revenues through rates on property holders, colonial authorities hoped to transfer a significant share of the costs of maintaining jails and an appropriately large police force still under state jurisdiction.¹⁴² The growth of satellite industrial municipalities surrounding both Sydney and Melbourne produced a proliferation of local governments unable to address the urban problems of increasingly congested and polluted environments. For the town of Glebe in Sydney’s orbit, as early as the 1840s, “slaughterhouses, boiling-down works, tanneries and other noxious trades” polluted the community where residences intermingled with industries, and infectious disease was rampant. A Glebe councillor and local chemist, William Pinhey, reported at a public meeting that the “ ‘effluvia which arose’ from the swamp, ‘was at times intolerable giving rise to miasmatic and other fevers and placing Glebe in an unenviable position in mortality tables of the Statistical Register.’ ” To the chagrin of local councillors in Melbourne’s independent municipality of Footscray, who encouraged rampant riverfront development of revenue-generating “noxious trades premises,” the town acquired a colorful nickname, “Stinkopolis, the Cologne of the Antipodes.”¹⁴³

The struggle between state and local interests, so characteristic of the rise of cities within the bosom of royal states in Europe, played a significant part in the incorporation of Australian cities and the allocation of state authority for their governance.¹⁴⁴ As creatures of state government, Australia’s municipalities functioned during the nineteenth century under severe constraints, subject to periodic circumscription by state legislative acts.¹⁴⁵ This pattern led to an accretion of power to colonial legislatures, stronger in some states than others.¹⁴⁶

Efforts by cities to reclaim a greater degree of control came in several forms. Local business elites—especially contractors, manufacturers, and merchants—who largely monopolized local elective offices sought to control local rates and the responsibilities of local government in ways that would limit the burden on propertied interests; other reform-oriented groups, inspired by ideas about metropolitan government in Britain and elsewhere, pushed for expanded local government, both in scope and function—most notably the “Greater Sydney” and “Greater Melbourne” movements at the turn of the century.¹⁴⁷ And, finally, strong Labor Party contingents emerged in some municipalities where support for local government was linked to growth of a public sector and to “ideas of participatory democracy and local control.”¹⁴⁸

As in European states, a significant barrier to the democratization of cities lay in a municipal franchise that was more restrictive than in state elections and even more skewed toward the interests of large property holders than in the British Isles. Despite the fact that near-universal manhood suffrage governed state elections after 1858 and federal elections after federation in 1902, municipal elections were from the outset tied to property ownership and at various times and places included procedures for “plural” and “cumulative” voting that gave persons with diverse and multiple properties even greater electoral weight. Property qualifications for voting in city council elections were not eliminated in Sydney until 1941.¹⁴⁹ Although in Sydney the initial property thresholds adopted in the first Corporation Act in 1842 were reasonably low, with an annual assessed value of £25 and no plural or cumulative voting, requirements became more restrictive over time. The 1857 act differentiated quite specifically the “ratepayer” from the “occupier,” and, in 1879, cumulative voting was introduced. Daniel O’Connor, a state legislative assembly member from West Sydney and an advocate for a broadened franchise, claimed in 1887 that “landlords distribute the votes, not among the people who live in the houses, but among whom they please” and that “about seven hundred men controlled the Council, casting about eight thousand votes between them.”¹⁵⁰ The municipal franchise was liberalized somewhat in 1900, with lodgers (the so-called “rabble element”) and other renters admitted, providing they had resided in premises valued at a minimum of £10 for six to twelve months. Women won the municipal franchise under the same property restrictions but were not permitted to stand for elective municipal office because, in the view of the NSW premier, “I do not think it is right.” The Labor Party mobilized to make the municipal franchise and labor’s agenda for municipal affairs a major plank in its program but faced entrenched opposition from property-owning elites. The collapse of the Greater Sydney reform movement stemmed in part from class divisions over the franchise question. A renewed effort to introduce the universal adult franchise in 1912 was met by the argument that it “would add another 20,000 irresponsibles with ‘no interest in municipal government beyond the question of public health.’ ”¹⁵¹

Brisbane and Melbourne followed essentially similar patterns whereby the municipal franchise, although initially restricted to rate-payers, underwent some liberalization in mid-century. But in the face of rising concerns about urban social conditions and the potential power of a propertyless class, restrictions were tightened. In Melbourne, the Municipal Institutions Amendment Act of 1863 introduced plural voting and effectively shut out “occupiers,” even if they, in reality, paid the landlord’s rates. Brisbane, too, had adopted plural voting by property holders, who, under the Local Authorities Act of 1902, had to be “adult natural-born or naturalized rate-payers.”¹⁵²

New Zealand

The fledgling colony of New Zealand declared its independence from New South Wales just a year after its founding in 1840. It had been caught between a colonial administration eager to devolve fiscal and administrative responsibility onto the sparse population that gathered at Waitemata Harbour and the colonists skeptical of taking on self-governing responsibility.¹⁵³ The actual settler community, according to one observer, was largely “a collection of land-sharks, Pecksniffs, and jackals, who were on the alert for what could be picked up.”¹⁵⁴ The sorry state of roads and other essential public works, and the massive expenditure from local rates that improvement would require, provided a healthy dose of caution for many Aucklanders. An “Old Settler” writing in late 1842 preferred to see “local government” remain in the hands of the colony. “We Aucklanders are not at all ambitious for the honor in our present and infantine state.” The colonial administration’s enthusiasm for municipal incorporation, modeled on the freshly minted Municipal Reform of 1835 in Britain, vied with the realities of life on the ground in the new colony, where settlers and local resources were initially scarce and where the ambitions of the New Zealand Company’s settlements elsewhere in the colony threatened a major uprising of Indigenous Maori peoples.¹⁵⁵ Although Wellington began as a settlement sponsored by the New Zealand Company, it quickly fell under the jurisdiction of colonial authorities, subject to the continuing debates over the virtues and liabilities of local self-government.¹⁵⁶

New Zealand—Political Jurisdictions

Locals, confronted with immense infrastructural needs, preferred “representation without taxation,” as historian Graham Bush has put it. The colonial administrator R. H. Wynyard may have disguised the full implications of conferring responsibility for “self-government and self-taxation” in what one commentator described as “a glossing over of words through which taxation oozed out.”¹⁵⁷ In the meantime, this town, which had recently been described as having streets “knee deep in mud” and a “slatternly and neglected look,” with “shapeless streets, tortuous alleys, and huddled by-lands, exhaling their fragrance to the sky,” navigated a circuitous path toward genuine self-government.¹⁵⁸ This mismatch between colonial and local expectations saw the repeated reversion of government responsibility to colonial and eventually provincial authorities.

For nearly three decades, governing authority shifted between the colony, the provinces, and an assortment of local bodies—including municipal councils, town boards, and a host of special-purpose bodies, the appeal of which grew as municipalities struggled to find the means to meet local needs. But as cities evolved and the powers of central government enlarged, the provinces themselves saw their power erode. Neither Wellington’s (after 1865 the colonial capitol) nor Auckland’s ratepayers were initially eager to incorporate, but both eventually did so in the early 1870s, and the latter’s first councils were, according to Bush, “hyperactive, issuing a torrent of bylaws, constructing reclamations, forming a municipal fire brigade, fighting a war of attrition with mud, and slogging towards the provision of a piped water supply.”¹⁵⁹

However ineffective initially, municipal government as first constituted had a broad, participatory quality. Under the provisional incorporation of Auckland in 1851, the “burgesses” (eligible electors) of the municipality were all resident adult males, including Maoris. The elected councillors then selected a mayor and four aldermen, who served as justices of the peace. At the first election, a remarkable 72 percent of those eligible turned out to vote and chose a council that, when compared to later councils and boards, “was notably deficient in merchants and retailers.”¹⁶⁰ In Wellington, any adult male resident was eligible to vote upon paying “an enrollment fee of £1,” which could be deducted from rate-payers’ obligations. This comparatively generous franchise was subject to intense debate over the best means to achieve and maintain social harmony.¹⁶¹

The “radical” democratic character of the early municipality did not long survive. The growth of a substantial war economy in the 1860s, colonization of rural hinterlands by major agriculturalists and pastoral interests, and the extension of trade domestically and abroad with growing wool exports inevitably produced a rising class of entrepreneurs who sought more control over the municipalities where commercial and manufacturing enterprise concentrated. Both Wellington and Auckland felt the political imprint of a “mercantile elite and sea- and credit-borne links with non-contiguous hinterlands.” Dunedin and Christchurch proved even more dynamic economies in their first decades, the beneficiaries of a gold boom in Otago and substantial rail building and pastoral settlement.¹⁶² While future prime minister Richard J. Seddon might claim in the early 1880s that it seemed “every fifth man … met in the street would be a member of some local body or another,” in fact local government had come to be “dominated by the propertied classes.” The engine of that domination was a more restrictive municipal franchise. The local government acts of 1876 affirmed a propertied basis of the franchise and instituted plural voting, up to five votes, based on the valuation of property holdings, but, at the same time, provided for direct election of mayors with a non-plural franchise. In Wellington, ratepayers could veto any proposal for the city to incur significant debt. The propertied basis of the franchise for most local bodies would last until reform legislation passed in 1910, though still thereafter with a residency requirement. After 1876, property-owning women could vote in local elections and were eligible to hold office; the first woman mayor was elected in 1893, and the parliamentary vote for women would follow that same year.¹⁶³

“Enclosing” the City and its Popular Politics¹⁶⁴

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parliaments contained and subordinated the self-governing authority of cities, most decisively in Britain and its imperial domains, but also in Germany under the imprint of the reforms promulgated by Stein. Reform of city governance was undertaken at the parliamentary level in ways that also promised to secure the power of the property-owning elites, especially the new class of manufacturers, whose interests were deemed especially in need of protection.¹⁶⁵ With interesting variation, the pattern in other European countries and European settler states bore great similarity to the English experience.¹⁶⁶

Gerald Frug, a leading authority on the legal history of US cities, has carefully dissected the submergence of the city as a legal entity to the nation-state and the concomitant elevation of “individual” rights over group rights in an urban context. Royal and eventually parliamentary chartering of cities as corporations was a method by which the state might control the emergent and contested autonomy of cities. Political theorists—Hobbes and Locke particularly—conceptualized society divided between individuals, with their rights to property deemed worthy of protection, and the state. The chief responsibilities of the state lay in the protection of property rights and the maintenance of public order.¹⁶⁷

Cities in the Anglo-American world came to occupy an intermediate position, not fully accounted for in political theory. The subordination of cities to state power evolved in United States law over the course of the nineteenth century, until by the early twentieth century the curtailment of cities’ “home rule” had become the subject of seemingly ironclad constitutional interpretation.¹⁶⁸

Among the factors fueling the narrowing of cities’ right of self-government was a growing fear in England and the United States that popular sovereignty locally might pose a threat to property. Madison reflected that fear, of course, in the tenth Federalist paper. And while Jefferson viewed cities as “elementary republics,” he also worried that “the mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” And Tocqueville warned that large cities and their residents could pose a political threat that on occasion might necessitate “an armed force which, while remaining subject to the wishes of the national majority, is independent of the peoples of the towns and capable of suppressing their excesses.”¹⁶⁹

Conclusion

The early development of cities created economic space in which market-oriented property owners established themselves with a significant degree of political and social autonomy. Their relationships to existing centers of royal or princely authority were always fraught with tension and ambiguity. The ability of local trading elites to channel and control long-distance trade contributed to their autonomy, but their economic strength and accumulation of property also made them potentially dangerous as competing centers of power and authority. In early modern Europe, as states grew in size and ambition, they inevitably sought to curtail or regulate the autonomy that cities might claim. They did so by issuing charters or other instruments for sanctioning but also by limiting specific functions cities might carry out. Cities and their governing elites grew restive with such limits on their self-governance.

It turns out that the engines of trade and economic diversification that fueled the growth of cities were not so easily regulated or decelerated. The transformation of the countryside, the advent of proto-industrialization, the dislocation and migration of rural peoples, and the growth of capital set in motion changes, largely centered in cities, that made containment and regulation even more problematic. Additionally, as sites of rapid social change, faced with growing social congestion, deteriorating infrastructure, and polarizing social relations, cities also posed a danger to social and political stability more generally. In this dynamic environment, new classes of rising entrepreneurs and propertyless, increasingly impoverished working classes created volatile political conditions that begged for some measure of reform but also regularization of the status and governance of cities in their relations with state and national governments.

Although the timing varied from one national or regional context to another, states adopted a variety of reforms that sought to stabilize and standardize local governance. The most noteworthy and in some ways most influential was the Municipal Reform Act of 1835 in Britain. Britain’s settler colonies would follow a similar path of reform over the decades that followed. And, in Germany and Sweden, the engines of reform also fired in the nineteenth century but with more uneven and incomplete outcomes. In general, states granted to cities a measure of self-governance—a combination of elected and appointed bodies that opened access to political power for a rising class of entrepreneurs and property holders, but they also circumscribed the domain of self-government in ways that gave ultimate power and oversight to states. Within the domain of municipal self-government, the rights of property were secured by a franchise that effectively shut out or reduced the political influence of working-class and poor residents, and effectively limited their rights of citizenship.

The climate of “reform” led some liberal urban elites to adopt measures of social amelioration without opening wide the door to broad civic participation. To varying degrees these measures—improvements in the system of poor relief, the advent of some municipal enterprise in basic services, housing, and health regulation—sought to stem the rising discontent of the propertyless and foster cross-class alliances that might nevertheless maintain the essential fabric of elite governance. Those measures and that strategy worked better in some contexts than others. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, economic and social upheaval, much of it concentrated in cities, threatened the security of liberal and conservative elites alike. They found their ability to govern on an ostensibly “nonpartisan” basis in the interest of the whole community threatened. Growing demand for the expansion of the public sector and the higher taxes that entailed posed new threats to property. The worldwide depression of the 1890s and the economic and social crises it precipitated set the stage for an unprecedented new politics of class that germinated in cities where the hardships of daily life and irrationalities of the new industrial order were most in evidence.

Strikes and rising levels of working-class politicization reflected the deepening problems of urban life and the restiveness of urban workers. The symptoms could be seen everywhere, from the tragic drama of the Paris Commune, to the growth of the German Social Democratic Party, the great railway strikes in the United States, spreading trade unionism in all countries, and the new mobilization of less skilled workers, deeply influenced by the Knights of Labor in the United States and around the globe. These developments heralded a break in the traditional order of civic life and municipal governance.

2

Labor Conflict and the New
Working-Class Politics

“Class War—the Commune”

Twenty years ago the civilized world was struck with horror on seeing the defeated Communards of Paris in the frenzy of discomfiture trying to destroy the national monuments of greatness and the treasures of art, and to involve society in one common ruin. Little was it then supposed possible that in the happy Australian colonies our working classes—the most fortunate, the best paid, and the most prosperous body of workers in the world—would be summoned by their leaders to take part in a ruinous war against society, inspired by similarly desperate feelings and just as destitute of any rational purpose.

Sydney Morning Herald, September 16, 1890¹

Maritime Strikes Down Under

The strike of Sydney maritime workers in August 1890 began modestly enough when exasperated members of the Marine Officers Association grew tired of the Steamship Owners Association’s duplicity over a wage dispute. Even as the owners settled wage issues with other maritime trades, including the wharf laborers, seamen, and stewards, the officers were told that their low pay was adequately compensated by their higher social status. Although the officers had stood apart from the Trades and Labor Council (TLC) in New South Wales, now in their time of need they turned to its members for assistance. The demands of sheepshearers in New South Wales for a closed shop and other maritime trades’ claims for pay increases heightened tension at a critical moment. Facing an ultimatum to foreswear any contacts with the labor movement and the sudden appearance of an alternative company-instigated union, the marine officers appealed to the TLC. Soon after receiving the TLC delegates’ affirmation of support, the officers issued their own ultimatum: “If concessions asked for are not granted … all labour will be withdrawn from the vessels.”²

The Great Maritime Strike began on August 17, 1890, but rapidly spread to other industries. Labor conflict had continued to brew among sheepshearers across the colonies, culminating simultaneously in the summer of 1890. The shearers appealed to maritime workers to prevent the shipment of “black wool” that came to the port in Sydney from the minority of nonunion shearing sheds that remained at work in New South Wales. Parallel struggles developed in the Victoria sheds and somewhat later among Queensland shearers in the legendary and dramatic military showdown and arrest of strike leaders at the pivotal bush station of Barcaldine. Coal miners in New South Wales also walked out in support of the maritime trades’ struggle. And in Broken Hill, NSW, silver miners, building on a successful strike in 1889, struck again in September for shorter hours in tandem with maritime struggle.³

The most serious arena of the maritime struggle was Sydney, but conflict spread geographically to other shipping hubs in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane and internationally to the key ports at Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin in New Zealand, where Blackball miners also came out in support of the maritime trades.⁴

Industrial conflict of unprecedented scope that spread across colonial borders and conventional boundaries between crafts and industries signaled a new era of industrial relations. The strikers’ defeat in 1890, after a period of unparalleled union growth and some success in the 1880s, may not have been quite the “industrial holocaust” that Ray Markey has termed it, but the alchemy of employer solidarity, state repression, and deepening economic depression created conditions that led to new thinking among workers about the relevance of politics to their worsening condition and the options available to them.⁵

Strikers’ Library, Barcaldine, Queensland, 1891

The shearers’ strike at Barcaldine brought home vividly the role of the state in defense of property when fourteen of the strikers were charged under an ancient British conspiracy law and sentenced to three years hard labor in Queensland. The judge who presided over the case also acted as the prosecutor on behalf of the “squatters’ ” (sheep raisers). A strike leader, William Lane, who would soon lead a group of workers inspired by utopian socialism to found the nucleus of a new society in South America, described the workers’ utter disfranchisement evident in the proceedings against the shearers in a Rockhampton courtroom.

The judge and the police, the lawyers and the squatters, are all so sleek and so prim; the walls are so white and the ceiling so carefully painted and the whole surroundings so utterly philistine that the bushman has no more show here than has a butterfly in a sixpenny restaurant. So he looks rough and uncouth—the squatter looks as though the building was made for him—Now do you see the connection and how it is that Judge Harding can be grossly prejudiced without being willfully or consciously unfair?⁶

It was toward the capture of such institutions that the labor movements in Australia and, by a different path, in New Zealand, would turn their attention to politics.

Although historians have debated with some profit the “strikes-caused-the-Labor-Parties” argument, as Verity Burgmann has termed it, there can be no question that deeper currents of industrial and social change, the gathering strength of unions in the 1880s, and the recurrence of depression worldwide in the 1890s, created a climate in which workers turned more readily to strikes and in which the experience of industrial solidarity together with unprecedentedly harsh state and employer repression produced conditions that favored new political thinking.⁷ The circulation of a popular literature that inspired and encouraged such thinking—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England—fed the movement and encouraged an internationalist disposition. So, too, did the formation of a new Socialist International in 1889 and the advent of May Day, associated with the general strike for the eight-hour day and the Haymarket incident of 1886 in Chicago, as a workers’ self-proclaimed holiday. With unprecedented numbers of workers’ newspapers appearing in cities around the world and access to telegraphic news services becoming more widespread, workers and their union leaders could see, as never before, the links between their local struggles, which now took on wider meaning.⁸

A Global Strike Wave: 1885–1894

Something new was in the air by the late 1880s. The long traditions of crowd action around community and consumers’ grievances—a source of great consternation for municipal elites—had largely given way to new, more disciplined forms of workers’ collective action. But those traditions of crowd action were neither as spontaneous nor irrational as they were once portrayed, nor were they neatly segregated from employment-based forms of collective action that became more widespread with the expansion of industrialization.⁹ Organized trades found themselves at the vortex of rapid changes in the production and transportation of goods. They crafted strike techniques that proved, at times, highly effective in extracting concessions from employers whose own economic positions were vulnerable to larger, more integrated and innovative firms.¹⁰ But, surrounded by rising numbers of factory laborers and semi-skilled operatives in key industries undergoing transformation—such as iron and steel, machine building, textiles, dock work, railroads, and hard rock and coal mining—the industrial craftsmen faced new, more adverse circumstances.¹¹ In this shifting economic context, already evident in the most advanced industrial countries like Britain, the United States, and Germany, but also in Australia, France, and Sweden, workers experimented with new forms of collective action and organization that fractured old craft boundaries and forged new alliances. As large strikes erupted and spread from one industry to another, workers encountered new forms of employer and state repression that acted as an accelerant further inflaming class relations.¹²

The reemergence in 1889 of a more coherent and broadly representative international socialist movement, the Second Socialist International, provided a new political context for the labor struggles worldwide and a set of international linkages and opportunities for communication that allowed workers’ movements to learn from each other and build a sense of international solidarity that transcended their immediate national contexts. Emerging from dark years of banishment under Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) provided crucial theoretical and organizational leadership, joined by French, Dutch, Belgian, and other continental socialists, but also drawing representation from fledgling parties and workers’ organizations worldwide.¹³

Adding to the sense of common condition and purpose animating workers’ movements in these years was the worldwide depression whose ebb and flow from the early 1870s had seen the erosion of wages and workers’ standard of living, the concentration and globalization of capital on a scale not seen before, and an era of insecurity that precipitated the migration of “globe-hopping proletarians” in unprecedented numbers. Migrating workers often carried with them prior experience of deteriorating conditions of urban life and industrial work that accelerated their adaptation to new but not altogether foreign industrial environments. Many also brought with them some exposure to new forms of labor and socialist thinking and political organization that contributed materially to the spread of an increasingly powerful working-class culture of opposition.¹⁴

Data on the strike wave of the late nineteenth century consists for the most part of largely qualitative descriptions of specific, usually large strikes and their immediate repercussions. More systematic data for this period have been assembled for the United States, France, Britain, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries.¹⁵ Analysis of the origins and unfolding patterns of strikes has focused on a number of hypotheses to account for changing behavior. Early studies emphasized the presumed correlations between the business cycle and strike activity, with periods of economic downturn (and high unemployment) being generally less favorable for striking than periods of rising prosperity and tight labor markets. A more recent variant suggests that “fluctuations” in economic growth are most conducive to periods of increased strike activity.¹⁶ Proponents of one or another variation of “modernization theory” argue that long-term growth in scale of firm, levels of organization among workers and employers, and rising experience and “sophistication” led to declines in the propensity to strike. Workers learned “the rules of the game” in ways that enabled them to act more strategically and with greater discipline. As economist Clark Kerr put it, “worker protest in the course of industrialization tends to peak relatively early and to decline in intensity thereafter.”¹⁷ But, as a number of critics have suggested, workers who had learned “the rules of the game” could in fact produce rising levels of strikes and more effective and concerted collective action. For Hobsbawm, “the habit of industrial solidarity must be learned, like that of working a regular week, [and] so must the common sense of demanding concessions when conditions are favourable, not when hunger suggests. There is thus a natural time-lag, before workers become an ‘effective’ labour movement.”¹⁸

The clustering of strikes in periods of crisis is a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of scholars across a number of countries. For the United States, economists Gordon, Reich, and Edwards developed a model based on Kondratieff cycles of economic consolidation and crisis that posited periods of growth and decay in what they termed “social structures of accumulation” specific to different phases of industrial development. For the nineteenth century, a period of decay and crisis (1873–1897) followed a period of consolidation (1840–1870). In the period of “decay and crisis,” short-term panics and depression combined with structural reorganization of firms and markets to produce wrenching changes in labor relations and sharply increasing levels of labor conflict.¹⁹

What might be termed a “rolling” global panic and depression had begun in 1890 with the failure of one of Britain’s leading financial institutions, Baring Brothers, as a result of precarious investments in politically unstable Argentina. Business liquidations followed in Britain, then Germany, and to a lesser degree in France. Reduced trade, poor harvests, declining prices, volatile gold prices, and rising unemployment spread across Europe between 1891 and 1894, as strikes rose dramatically. Bank failures and business prostration followed in Australia and in the United States, where one-sixth of the railroads, six hundred banks, and thirty-two iron and steel firms failed in 1893 alone. Even as Europe began a gradual recovery by the end of 1894, the United States found itself still in the trough of depression with high unemployment (conservatively estimated at 20 percent), low agricultural prices, and disruptions to trade and manufacturing from nationwide strikes in bituminous coal and the railroads. Although the US economy saw some improvement in 1895, a second wave of the depression hit in 1896 and did not recede until late 1897.²⁰

While the conditions of worldwide depression in the 1890s are unmistakable, the upsurge in strike activity globally had multiple causes, as numerous country-specific studies have revealed. For the United States, P. K. Edwards found a significant cluster of strikes in the late 1880s and early 1890s, followed by a depression-era trough and then for nearly twenty years the highest number of strikes per capita in American history.²¹ In Britain, Hobsbawm and Cronin both found a notable increase in strikes with a “snowball effect” following the hugely important London dock strike (1889) and other strikes by new “general unions.”²² Germany witnessed a gradual and then sharply rising level of strike activity during the decade, peaking in 1898–99 and then briefly subsiding, before accelerating to unprecedented heights in the years before 1914.²³ France and the Scandinavian countries followed roughly similar trajectories, with strike frequency reaching significantly higher levels in France during two periods of political crisis in the 1890s.²⁴ Strike frequency shows industry-specific spikes in Denmark and Sweden during the 1890s, the former more sustained and the latter more volatile and discontinuous.²⁵ In Australia, as already noted, strikes of maritime workers, silver miners, and sheepshearers rocked the economy and state and local politics in New South Wales and Queensland during the early 1890s.

Historians have noted the “jumpy” and “discontinuous” tendency of industrial conflict to occur in “explosive” bursts that reflect profound underlying “qualitative as well as quantitative changes in the business cycle, labor market, technological innovation, and the movement of profits.” But, as Hobsbawm points out, they do not neatly correlate with specific indices. “The crux of the matter is whether the whole labour situation is sufficiently flammable to ignite.” That accumulation of discontent took a variety of forms across different industries. The British crisis of 1889, set off by the dockers strike, appears “to have been dominated by the peculiar Great Depression pattern of technical stagnation, expanding business activity and falling profits.” Not to be neglected, however, is “the part played by bodies of agitators, propagandists and organizers armed with new ideas and new methods, and ready to carry them into hitherto inert and unorganized areas.”²⁶

Moments of intensifying strike activity, according to Montgomery, had a contagious quality and an “audacity” that belied the practical calculations that often underlay them. The 1877 railroad strikes in the United States, for instance, leapt quickly from one major rail center to another in Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, and other points, taking on a quasi-insurrectionary quality that “brought the soldiers back out of their barracks” when local authorities proved unable to quell the rebellion. The spreading strikes of the period 1886–1894 revealed rising levels of sympathy striking, new claims for control over production, and an era of experimental activism that drew on the experience of workers in other trades and industries, despite declining levels of success. Montgomery notes that Michelle Perrot found workers in such periods to be “fascinated by the possibilities of the strike” and their participation “a moment of liberation from employers’ discipline and bourgeois norms, of psychic release, and of self-direction … which permits them to manifest their sentiments and their human potential in ways no opinion polls or voting behavior could ever reveal.”²⁷ Local and regional patterns of “contagion” appear to have also shaped these explosive moments, whether a byproduct of industrial concentration, the changing structure of class relations in communities of a certain size and interrelatedness, or as a result of shifting labor markets within particular industries. US railroad workers, for instance, evidenced rising propensities to strike in the West as labor market congestion increased after 1885 and single-industry railroad towns, linked by a shared rail system and its employment relations, mobilized with a measure of cross-class support.²⁸

For Britain, the strike wave from 1889 to 1893 appeared to represent a convergence of accumulated grievances over nearly fifteen years of depression that, despite uneven development across industries, nonetheless saw “breakthroughs in union structure and strategy” that fed successful organizing among less skilled workers and renewed demand for shorter hours and union recognition.²⁹ The “great depression,” whose depths would not be reached until the mid-1890s, produced profound and widespread insecurity, despite rising “real wages” (largely a function of falling prices.) The resulting strike wave was a product of creative adaptation to new circumstances, what the Webbs called “a working on minds” that were “awakened by an industrial contraction of exceptional character.”³⁰

Two other factors fueled the explosion of labor conflict in the early 1890s. The first was involvement of what Hobsbawm called “general unions” as distinct from craft or artisanal unions. Such general unions embraced laborers and semi-skilled workers who lacked the leverage of skill and whose numbers expanded rapidly in the late nineteenth century, especially under conditions of rapid technological advance and labor market volatility. Unable to restrict the labor market through craft regulation, they sought, alternately, to “create a vast closed shop.” Frequently led by socialists, they relied significantly on political and legislative action to address their needs. In Britain, these unions included the Dockers, Gas-Workers, and Amalgamated Labourers.³¹ In the United States, the preeminent “general union” was the Knights of Labor (KOL), succeeded eventually by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but in the period of intensifying labor conflict a wide range of hybrid, amalgamated, and industrial unions emerged in specific industries: the American Railway Union, the Boot and Shoe Workers Union, the United Mineworkers, the Western Federation of Miners, and the Brewery Workers. Former local assemblies of the KOL often reorganized as local branches of new industrial or general unions. Workers experimented with new forms of organization that could meet their economic and political needs. In Australia, quasi-industrial unions among dockers, miners, and sheepshearers expanded rapidly in the crisis years 1890–1894.³²

The other factor that made the “contagion” of the early 1890s distinctive was its transnational dimension and workers’ consciousness of the movement as a worldwide phenomenon. If the cycles of national economies were not precisely synchronized, they did follow broadly similar trajectories, with the Great Depression of the 1890s functioning as a shared point of reference for the ongoing hardships workers faced worldwide.³³ The new Socialist International provided an opportunity for socialist activists to meet and compare notes on a regular basis. The rising popularity of a socialist-oriented labor press, facilitated by rapid telegraphic communication, enabled workers half a world away to read of each other’s struggles, whether in triumph or defeat. Hobsbawm had an acute eye for this new international “dispersal of unrest” in which “news of unrest elsewhere, once it penetrates a new area, may set it off.”³⁴ Preceding the rise of “international” craft unions were the international organizing efforts of the Knights of Labor and later the IWW, which built concrete ties of organization and ideological affiliation that fostered a sense for local activists of being part of a vast solidarity that reached around the globe. That such activists and those they sought to organize read many of the same inspirational tracts reinforced the sense of participation in a political discourse that transcended national boundaries and defined a programmatic vision to which workers regardless of nationality might subscribe.³⁵

As strikes spread in the early 1890s across the industrializing world, the columns of labor papers as widely dispersed as Malmö, Sweden, Sydney, Australia, Manchester, England, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, carried reports of the struggles to their readers, many of whom were embroiled in their own conflagrations. Axel Danielsson, the militant editor of Arbetet: Organ för Klassmedveten Arbetarrörelse [Work: Publication for the Class-Conscious Labor Movement] in Malmö reported during the fall of 1890 on strikes of shoemakers in Orebro and Landskrona, glove workers in Lund, and many other locales in Sweden, but also about the “labor war” in Australia, dock workers in Scotland, and a Vienna tram strike. Danielsson noted that his socialist colleague and sometime rival, Hjalmar Branting, had spoken recently in Malmö about German social democracy following his return from the meeting of the Second Socialist International in Halle. And Arbetet took favorable notice of the formation of a “Jewish National Workers Union” in the US.³⁶ Half a world away, in Sydney, Australia, the fledgling Australian Workman took time away from its own saturation coverage of the maritime strike in Australia and New Zealand to report on Ben Tillett, John Burns, and Tom Mann and the political fallout of the London Dockers strike in England, to support the call for an “Intercolonial” labor conference, and to applaud the lifting of anti-socialist laws in Germany.³⁷

The strike wave had an infectious quality evident in the participation of less skilled workers and in the spike in sympathy strikes. But it also reflected ongoing, unsettled labor relations in key industries around the world. Railroad workers, coal miners, and above all dock workers were especially prominent.³⁸ In other industries such as iron and steel, new, revolutionizing technologies, driven forward at breathtaking speed in the United States by the Carnegie Steel empire, directly challenged the traditional control of industrial craftsmen.³⁹ In Australia, with wool prices plummeting, sheepshearers faced downward pressure on their wages and challenges to their control of the labor market.⁴⁰ As world demand for coal rose sharply and firms sought to deploy new drilling and blasting technologies that put the lives and livelihoods of miners increasingly at risk, an outbreak of miners’ strikes—in Germany, Australia, the UK, and the US—signaled workers’ preparedness to defend their status and the fledgling industrial unions that were threatened.⁴¹

In other cases, workers in traditional crafts—shoemakers and glove makers in Sweden, glassworkers in France, construction trades in the United States, tram workers in Austria, and food trades (butchers, bakers, brewery workers) in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere—aggressively defended craft traditions and control of production when threatened by employers’ schemes to dilute craft control.

Socialist Debate over the “Mass Strike”

The great debate that shaped socialist practice in the 1890s and the early twentieth century, second only to “revisionism,” centered on the question of the role of the “mass” or “general” strike in struggles against capitalist hegemony. Although not centrally engaged in this debate, Eduard Bernstein nonetheless recognized that intense moments of political change “have also their advantages—they clear away in a day the dust and the rubbish that else would take generations to remove.”⁴²

With strike activity rising worldwide in the 1880s and 1890s, the political dimensions of those strikes also rose. Three points are critical. First, when forced to intervene in defense of capital, the state immediately lent to such struggles a political dimension. Even when workers’ goals may have been strictly “economic,” the entry of the state through court injunctions and the deployment of the police or the military forced workers to consider their status as citizens as well as strikers. For many, it became clear that the defense of their rights as workers required their mobilization as citizens. As Eugene Debs recalled, during the Pullman strike, the workers in the strike’s early days clearly had the upper hand, but “at this juncture there was delivered, from wholly unexpected quarters, a swift succession of blows that blinded me for an instant and then opened wide my eyes—and with the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed.”⁴³ In circumstances where workers faced franchise restrictions, their capacity to defend themselves as citizen-workers came up against significant barriers and fueled more sustained, concerted working-class efforts to achieve the full franchise and enhance their power as citizens.⁴⁴

Pullman Strike, July 1894—Deployment of Federal Troops

Second, as strikes became more massive and solidarities crossed traditional lines of craft and industry, the possibilities for class-wide action through general strikes in a locality or across an industry enlivened the collective imagination of workers. Mass strikes also made capital and politicians increasingly nervous about the potential power of such mobilization in pursuit of more expansive political goals.⁴⁵

Third, some issues—notably the eight-hour day—around which workers made little headway through conventional strikes seemed to invite broader action to pressure the state for legislative action. Mass strikes for shorter hours in the United States (the Philadelphia ten-hour strike in 1835, or post–Civil War strikes in Chicago and Boston) had achieved, at best, limited and temporary success legislatively. The general strike for the eight-hour day in 1886 was cut short by the repression surrounding the Haymarket incident but had ignited new levels of working-class mobilization around the world that seemed to grow with each succeeding year.⁴⁶ With the formation of the Second Socialist International, May 1 became a symbolic moment with clear political implications for class-wide action.

But many social democrats, including Friedrich Engels himself, decried the premature calling out of workers in general strikes on behalf of political objectives. Engels at one point in 1891 referred to the “Belgian idiocy” and wrote to Friedrich Sorge that, “I almost wish that the Walloon coal workers, who have provoked the general strike nonsense this time, will put it into practice in Belgium to try to win universal suffrage. They will be mercilessly cut up, and the nonsense will be buried.”⁴⁷ Others, including Eduard Bernstein, continued to argue for the strategic value of political mass strikes when circumstances properly aligned. Such a strategy seemed to be confirmed in the Belgian workers’ struggle for the universal franchise in 1893, when Parliament capitulated in the face of a massive general strike to pass legislation incrementally broadening the franchise. The limits of that victory would be cause for renewed mobilization (and renewed debate among social democrats) around a new Belgian general strike in 1901–2 for full enfranchisement.⁴⁸

The debate over the appropriateness of the “political mass strike” created strange bedfellows. Engels, uneasy over the vulnerability of the SPD in Germany, took an especially vehement line against what he saw as utopian or anarchist adventurism associated with the general strike. He went so far as to try to dissuade Kautsky from publishing the essay by Bernstein on the general strike, which Kautsky had commissioned for Die Neue Zeit in 1894.⁴⁹

Bernstein’s analysis in that essay, which Kautsky chose to publish, foreshadowed his pragmatic revisionist disposition that placed emphasis on a careful analysis of the specific historical circumstances in which the political general strike might be successfully deployed. Unlike Engels, he saw the recent Belgian crisis as a successful case in point. Indeed, the political crisis that unfolded from the precipitant of the Belgian general strike brought into play liberal reformers who helped engineer a parliamentary expansion of the franchise. Bernstein then used that case to offer a more general analysis of how political mass strikes could, if properly timed and strategically led, effect significant changes. But he rejected out of hand the romantic call to the barricades of the past. Instead, he stressed the contingent circumstances that might warrant its use and the necessity for “great discretion, cool calculation” if the two-edged sword of the political mass strike were to succeed.

There arise moments where the ruling classes and powers that be miscalculate, where in some nations a succession of industrial crises, political mismanagement, deep discontent prevail, in the course of which confusion, disunity and inclination towards concessions reign. These are situations where the political strike can work.⁵⁰

He also emphasized the need for a self-conscious, disciplined, organized working class capable of influencing unorganized workers. “In the choice of the right moment everything follows.” As in the Belgian case, the circumstances of a working class denied the franchise or hemmed in by a partial franchise could be especially propitious. Just as he had assessed the formation of an independent labor party in Britain for the potential it held to advance the interests of workers, so Bernstein also took stock of the lessons of a strike wave in the previous decade that had produced a new political environment for workers and further opportunities to pursue the promise of social revolution and an expansion of workers’ democratic claims. In doing so he separated himself from his mentor, Friedrich Engels, who late in life wrote a new introduction to Marx’s Civil War in France, in which he again stressed caution in the pursuit of political objectives through mass collective action.⁵¹

Eduard Bernstein, Friedrichshain, Berlin, April 10, 1910. Rosa Luxemburg, Second Socialist International’s Congress, Stuttgart 1907.

Rosa Luxemburg, based on her reading of the events surrounding the 1905 Russian revolution, argued in her famous treatise on the “mass strike” that it was not the ignition point for a revolution but rather part of the ongoing struggle for “political rights.”

The mass strike in Russia has been realized not as a means of political struggle of the working class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism.

Such a struggle must be “conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working class Marx and Engels first pointed out.”⁵² While Luxemburg argued furiously against the revisionist currents in social democracy and against the proponents of municipal socialism, she, like they, saw in the political consequences of mass strike activity opportunities to advance a new revolutionary politics.

Mass Strikes and the Invention of a New Politics

The wave of mass strikes in the late 1880s and early 1890s generated in their wake newly energized working-class political mobilization and new confidence that, despite the historic barriers to participation in politics, workers might realign governance at all levels. Because such strikes had a specifically local dynamic, the class polarization they produced translated most directly into municipal politics. The capacity of social democratic parties to capture such local class anger and give it political voice varied enormously between and within countries. But, for many working-class activists, the city loomed as the most immediate, accessible, and potentially relevant political arena.⁵³ The deteriorating circumstances of daily life in cities produced a tinderbox of issues around which a new locally relevant politics could crystallize—the need for clean water and food, pure milk, basic sanitation, cheap urban transit, dust control, adequate housing, and decent wages for the growing army of municipal workers.⁵⁴

This new local politics destabilized the political environment in ways that opened space for wider-ranging political experimentation. The birth of a vibrant working-class politics and aggressive challenges to elite rule at local, state, and national levels owed their existence in significant measure to local strike leaders and political activists, who envisioned a new set of opportunities to transform their world. That those aspirations were disappointed in some cases by aspiring parliamentary leaders who elbowed their way to the forefront of the new movements is not surprising, but neither does it diminish the hopes bred by the circumstances local activists confronted in their daily lives.

At the same time, many leading social democrats shrank from the prospect of general strikes that might prematurely produce crises that could crush fledgling workers’ movements.⁵⁵ In some measure, such caution stood at odds with the firestorm of political enthusiasm that strikes unleashed among local activists. Mingling strains of utopian insurrectionism and locally focused class anger with a measure of city-centered pragmatic politics, workers and their radical political allies moved into the new political space that the municipality offered and began building alternative political movements from below.

In this ongoing and intensely polarizing debate, revolutionary syndicalists and “evolutionary” socialists alike failed to take adequate account of the unfolding political practice on the ground, frequently the byproduct of strikes, that channeled this new political energy and gave it tangible meaning. Revolutionary it may not have been, but nor was it captive to the parliamentary leaders who came to dominate most of the world’s socialist and labor parties. These efforts to craft a new politics of every day and every place that embodied the local solidarities bred in strikes represented a new opening for politicized workers to pursue their collective interests. Closer examination of a few cases bears this out.

Local Cases:
The Great Maritime Strike of 1890 and New Labor Politics in Sydney and Melbourne

Dockworkers’ strikes, whose international scope was unmistakable, proved a critical catalyst to the development of new unionism and new labor politics in the early 1890s. The maritime strikes—in England, Australia, New Zealand, and the US—heralded the rise of a new general unionism whose influence spread to other sectors and paralleled developments among railroad and iron and steel workers in the United States, gas workers in Britain, sheepshearers and silver miners in Australia, coal miners in Germany, glassworkers in France, and a variety of crafts in Sweden. While the strikes are noteworthy in themselves, it was their catalytic effect on labor politics that is of particular interest here.

The Australian case is worthy of attention in part because the sequence of developments connected so tightly, but also because the formation of labor parties in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria brought to the surface ideological debates over the nature and substance of the new politics that would also appear elsewhere. Specifically, these debates reflected an underlying tension between the claims of emerging social democratic parliamentary leaders and labor activists committed to local politics as the foundation of labor’s political interests.

The Great Maritime Strike of 1890 has been a defining moment in the history of labor party formation “down under.”⁵⁶ Recent historical writing has tended to situate both the strike and the advent of labor politics in a context of pre-strike parliamentary initiatives and trade union politicization. The strike of some 50,000 Australian workers between August 1890 and January 1891 has in turn been indelibly connected to the dramatically rising fortunes a few months later of the Australian Labor Party in New South Wales (NSW) and in June 1891 with the election of thirty-five ALP members to the state parliament.⁵⁷ But, no sooner had the party entered parliament with numbers sufficient to hold the balance of power, than its latent factions became all too manifest in splits between protectionists and free traders, pro– and anti–Single Taxers, and over the maintenance of party discipline itself.⁵⁸ These splits took an especially bitter turn when, in the aftermath of a silver miners’ strike at Broken Hill in the NSW bush and the use of state government forces to suppress the strike, a segment of “labor” parliamentarians, sufficient to block a motion of censure, voted with the government. The NSW Trades and Labor Council called it “execrable conduct.”⁵⁹

Historians’ attention has largely remained riveted on the parliamentary story. Nonetheless, some have drawn attention to the vibrant urban socialist and radical milieu in which other political tendencies continued to brew. Single taxers, among them most prominently the influential stonemason John Grant, and socialists and radical trade unionists committed to inventing a “new politics” argued for political alternatives, some of which were seized upon by their colleagues.⁶⁰ When sheep-shearers in Queensland and New South Wales joined dock workers and their urban sympathizers in what quickly took on the trappings of a general strike, a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald erupted with an analogy that may well have been on the minds of members of more than one class: “Class War—the Commune.”⁶¹

Discussions of the political fallout from the Great Maritime Strike and its aftermath have largely neglected the extent to which working-class activists in many places claimed the municipal arena as a primary focus. Even as the strike unfolded, the Australian Socialist League distributed a platform that gave significant prominence to municipal issues, including the elimination of contract work, municipal ownership of gas and other utilities, the construction of municipal housing, and free tramways. In the fledgling Australian Workman John Grant drew the attention of workers to the forthcoming municipal election in early 1891 and the desire of “all workers” to select “their candidates” and to be “directly represented on the city council by workmen.” The editor himself took up the cudgel in a subsequent editorial urging the newly formed Labor Party not to “lose sight of the municipal elections as a field for Labour candidates.”

One thing is certain that many of the decisions of Municipal Councils are averse to Labour and, if for no other reason, Labour men should be returned in order that they might guard against the letting of contracts to sweating contractors. Workers! Pay more attention to the municipal elections. Don’t allow a walk over to well-to-do publicans and merchants, whose only ability is a desire to add a sort of aldermanic luster to the family name.⁶²

Over the course of the next two years, numerous local Labour Electoral Leagues (LEL) put forward municipal candidates, drafted municipal platforms, revised a utopian proposal for a “Labor Town” (half an hour from the central city) proffered by the Socialist League, and repeatedly expressed frustration about the labor parliamentarians wrangling over the “financial question.” The Australian Workman railed that the “organs of the boodle party” continued to hide the real issues, “lest the people of the colony should be placed in possession of the fact that it is no longer Free trade against Protection but Labour against Free Trade, Protection, clap-trap boodle, cant and Capital.”⁶³ Wearily, John Miller expressed a “Worker Opinion” that the “early ardor of the party had been wasted” by January 1892. “The enthusiasm of its first appearance on the stage of politics was lost in bowing to plaudits. And the result has been that oneman, one-vote is as far off as ever—that the fiscal question has cropped up and shattered solidarity, and that a feeling of ineffectiveness is beginning to have its influence.”⁶⁴

Intra-party tensions simmered within state gatherings of the LEL and its successor, the Political Labor League (PLL) during the 1890s. At the annual conference of the NSW PLL held at Newcastle in early 1898, delegates rejected a number of land-value tax reform proposals submitted by John Grant but approved a “fighting platform,” including a prominent “local government” section. However, when J. S. T. McGowen, railway shop boilermaker and labor member of state parliament from the working-class municipality of Redfern, proposed that the whole of the Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP)—all sitting labor members of the NSW parliament—should have seats on the Political Labor League (PLL) Executive Committee, a vigorous debate erupted. One delegate, Mr. Butler, called the proposal “preposterous.” He warned that “if adopted, the Parliamentary Party would have the whole show in their hands and could do what they pleased.” In this view, he was supported by John Grant and other trade unionists. For city workers whose primary focus remained municipal issues, this step represented an attempt to undermine their influence. Clearly a measure of distrust between the parliamentarians and municipal members of the Political Labor League had infected the party. A fear of the parliamentarians’ domination seemed reflected in the comments of many. Eventually, delegates agreed to a compromise—all Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP) members could sit on the executive, ex officio, but only five could vote.⁶⁵

Attention to the municipal platform of the PLL had increased over the 1890s, despite relatively modest success. Nonetheless, successes, particularly in Sydney’s industrial suburbs like Petersham and MacDonaldtown, were notable, and many others fielded candidates with increasing frequency.⁶⁶ By the 1901 Annual Conference in Sydney, pressure to draft a comprehensive, self-standing municipal platform had grown. An appointed drafting committee reported that given “the present state of the law it was not possible to advocate an advanced municipal platform.” But this outcome “did not satisfy the Conference” and the executive was instructed to take up the drafting of a comprehensive platform. During the subsequent year, the PLL executive, as instructed by the conference, did draft a comprehensive municipal platform with fourteen separate planks covering everything from reform of the municipal franchise to “municipalization of industries” to land and tax reform.⁶⁷

Increasing agitation around municipal politics was not limited to New South Wales. The new focus on local politics appeared in other places as well. In Melbourne the Tocsin editorialized regularly on municipal politics and in particular the “Democratisation of Municipalities.”

The theory of Government is that representation should always accompany taxation. Municipal ratepayers claim that, being more taxed they should be more represented. Carried to its logical conclusion, this means closed oligarchy. Strictly speaking, there is no value but life, with all its possibilities of love and enjoyment. We claim the unit of representation should be not wealth, but life—the life of the individual, male or female. A property owner has no right to peril existence by neglecting sanitary improvements. We should have equal representation in the municipal council; he should have no special license to make vicious by-laws regulating traffic or sanitation which militate against my equal right to life; this is the basis of democracy, national or municipal. [emphasis in original]⁶⁸

The Tocsin went on to argue for the primacy of the municipal realm and by implication the subordination of parliamentary work. “Municipal democracy means more to the people because it partakes more of the detail of administration; its acts come nearer to the mass of the people than do acts of Legislature, dealing with more varied interests. Municipal government is more personal; hence the need for personal interest and control.”

In Melbourne, as in other municipalities during the 1890s, a new local labor politics promised opportunities for labor to set a new agenda for civic improvement and challenge liberals and conservatives to break with established rule by ratepayers. This proved a challenge labor’s opponents were rarely inclined or able to meet. In Victoria, the liberals, at least initially, suffocated labor’s success. However, labor’s emerging contestation of municipal governance defined the outlines of a new politics.⁶⁹ By the turn of the century, a Labor Party presence was evident in a number of Greater Melbourne municipalities, including Richmond, Footscray, and North Melbourne. By 1902, that presence had been expanded to council representation in South Melbourne, Port Melbourne, and Collingwood as well.⁷⁰ At the foundation of the Labor Party’s growth lay the efforts of municipal activists to connect their politics to the immediate concerns of workers’ daily lives and to comparable struggles internationally.

In Melbourne, Ben Tillett, the legendary British docker and a significant presence in the state of Victoria during an extended stay in Australia, lectured in mid-April 1898 on “Municipal and State Socialism. Christmas and other Geese.” As reported in the Tocsin, he argued that all municipal work was fundamentally “socialistic.”

Your Mayor, in his robes of office, etc., etc., won’t own it, of course … He’s an individualist in Socialist clothing. He’s there to look after the interests of his class, to look after his own interests. I don’t blame him. I wish you’d do the same. (Applause) … Our enemy is not one nation or another but the Army of Fatmen … If you tell the Fatmen that the police is a Socialistic institution, they will indignantly deny it. “What are they for then?” you say. “To protect property.” “Whose?” “Oh, ours of course.” (Laughter). Their very property thus depends on a piece of Socialistic machinery.⁷¹

For Tillett the city and its politics loomed as an essential if often-neglected arena of socialist agitation. He urged his working-class audience to seize that opportunity.

For other cities “down under,” the ignition point of strikes as a stimulus to local political activism varied a good deal. In Brisbane, a tram strike in 1912 reshaped and reenergized local politics, emboldening the city’s single Labor Party councillor to push forward even more aggressively labor’s municipal agenda. In Wellington, New Zealand, a tram strike, also in 1912, stiffened the resolve of the two labor councillors to settle the strike on terms favorable to the workers, elect the city’s first “labor” mayor, David McLaren (one of the two labor councillors), and get on with their advocacy of a municipal socialist program for the city.⁷²

Broken Hill, NSW, Australia: An Early Model of Municipal Labor Governance

When Tillett visited Broken Hill, New South Wales, in 1897 to dedicate a new trades hall, he took the opportunity to remind local workers about the importance of municipal politics. He thought “the municipal problem was coequal in seriousness to the Parliamentary problem,” and believed it quite unacceptable “that so advanced a set as the workers of Broken Hill had only two representatives in the council.” The following year bore significant fruit that would lead, in short order, to labor’s control of local government, but the Barrier Truth, the local labor organ, asserted that it was less Tillett than the persistent and dedicated organizing and campaigning of local workers that produced this result.⁷³

Tocsin Pioneers and Ben Tillett (front row, center), Melbourne, 1898.

Whatever the combination of factors, the most stunning municipal victory of the 1890s in Australia came in this silver-mining town deep in the outback of New South Wales. Remote, seemingly barren save the huge slag heap (the “broken hill”), the city was inhabited overwhelmingly by miners, whose grit and persistence could be seen on every town block but was borne home especially in the yearly toll of miners’ deaths.⁷⁴ After two partial strike victories in quick succession in 1889 and 1890, the miners lost a bitter eighteen-week strike in 1892 where the introduction of strikebreakers and the heavy-handed intervention of the state played a decisive role. But the strike had set the stage for new political assertiveness by labor at both the state parliamentary and the municipal level. In 1894, two Labor Electoral League candidates won seats in the NSW parliament. What differentiated Broken Hill, however, was the dramatic victory and sustained record of achievement after 1900 of labor’s first municipal government in Australia.⁷⁵ Jabez Wright, a local undertaker with trade union roots, was first elected to the Broken Hill City Council on a labor platform in 1896. Almost immediately, even as a single councilman, he made his presence felt through a cascade of motions to improve the water supply, hire city workers instead of contracting out, and build a municipal tramway.⁷⁶ Joined the next year by another labor councillor, they then witnessed the addition of two labor councilmen in 1898. By 1899, the additional labor seats produced a council chamber evenly divided between labor and the mining company “independents.”⁷⁷ The stage was set for labor’s dramatic victory in 1900.⁷⁸

Broken Hill Strike, NSW 1892—“Women assaulting a non-unionist.”

Jabez Wright, City Councillor and Future Mayor of Broken Hill, New South Wales, 1899

In reporting the stunning victory, the Tocsin in Melbourne noted, “The defeat of the miners … at Broken Hill, some few years ago, was really a blessing in disguise.” The miners had thereafter devoted themselves to politics with some success at both the municipal and state parliamentary levels. Specifically, they seized “the immense possibilities there are for securing reforms in the local council.” With a majority of eight (“two miners, a teamster, an ore-dresser, a cabinet maker, a labourer, an undertaker, and the secretary of the Miners’ Association”) in a council of twelve, they could move with some freedom to implement their agenda, the first step of which was to elect as mayor the person the mining companies referred to as “that meddlesome old agitator,” Jabez Wright. According to contemporary historian George Dale, it appeared the companies might actually be forced to “disgorge to the community the actual amount of rates annually” that they owed the city.⁷⁹ After six months of local labor government, the Tocsin enumerated its frst fruits.

With the advent of the Labour majority, the contractor disappeared, and all the work required by the council is now done direct by its own employees on the day labour system. The council has its own workshops, builds its own drays, and effects all necessary repairs, etc., in connection with its property. The trades union wage for labourers at Broken Hill is 7s. 6d per day; the council’s minimum wage for labourers is 8s.4d. per day … and the trades union wage and the eight hours principle are rigidly observed for all kinds of mechanics in the employ of the Council.⁸⁰

The excitement generated by the new municipal regime was palpable, despite the fact that the mining companies immediately challenged in court the new rates imposed on them. Nevertheless, the council had plans afoot for a new public bath, a municipal slaughterhouse, and a publicly owned sanitary water system. And this would be just a start.

Manningham Mills strike and the municipal origins of the ILP in Britain

Just a year after the collapse of the Great Maritime Strike in Australia and not long after the British dockers’ and gas workers’ strikes, a large strike erupted in the heart of England’s West Yorkshire textile region in December 1890 at the Manningham woolen mill in Bradford. In soil that E. P. Thompson has argued was well prepared over a number of years by the work of grassroots working-class agitators across the West Riding, a nineteen-week strike “cracked” the two-party system and led directly to the formation of an “Independent Labour Party” whose first notable victories came in the municipal arena.⁸¹

The strike itself began on December 17 with a walkout of skilled silk and plush weavers over wage cuts of between 15 and 33 percent, imposed by the highly profitable S. C. Lister & Co., ostensibly because of the expected effect of the McKinley tariff on the market for British textiles in the US. Several thousand predominantly female weavers and factory hands joined the skilled weavers in sympathy actions and were subsequently locked out. With as many as 5,000 strikers involved, the strike had an electric effect across the textile towns of the West Riding, drawing some of the most talented organizers and speakers in the region to its support. Through the winter months, the strikers bore up under the hardships of the strike and did much to provide their own support through active brigades of “strike lasses” soliciting support in neighboring towns and mining communities. By most accounts, the critical moment in the strike came when city authorities in Bradford—the chief constable, the watch committee of the council, and the mayor—repeatedly ordered the dispersal of mass meetings that gathered on the grounds of Town Hall Square, traditionally used for such purposes. A meeting on April 13, violently broken up by the military called in to preserve “law and order,” led to scenes of masses of unarmed workers, men and women, driven at bayonet point up the narrow streets away from the city center. At a series of protest meetings, the issues of “free speech” and right of assembly moved front and center, as did a new resolve to politically challenge the manufacturers’ grip on local government. With the strikers now largely defeated, they and their allies focused their anger on the repressive actions of the local state. Ben Tillett, speaking at a mass rally on April 23, warned, “At election times the people can teach would-be Caesars—town clerks and Mayors and watch committees—a salutary lesson.” Local leader Charlie Glyde declaimed, “We have had two parties in the past; the can’t and the won’ts and it’s time we had a party that will.” Even Samuel Shaftoe, the Liberal president of the TUC, whose support for the strikers’ call for independent political action would wane over the following weeks, asserted that “the Labour Party intended to have labour representation in the Town Council and to take the whip out of the hands of those who have been flogging them in the past fortnight.”⁸²

Manningham Mills Strike, 1890–91, Bradford, England

In the short run, however, the strikers found their cause marginalized and their ability to sustain themselves largely broken. Within days, some trades began to drift back to work, and, on April 27, the strike committee called an end to it. In the words of a recent historian of the strike, “After 19 weeks, the politics of free speech had taken over center stage and cut into the strike’s financial lifeline.” The remarkable solidarity that had crossed gender and skill lines was a further casualty of the strike. Blacklisted strikers desperately sought other employment, left the area, or, in the case of many of the skilled silk and plush weavers, migrated abroad.⁸³

In the weeks and months that followed, placards covered the town with a call “Workmen, Remember November.” By the end of April a meeting had convened at Firth’s Temperance Hotel to move toward formal organization of what would become the Bradford Labour Union, calling for “direct Labour representation on Local Bodies and in Parliament.”⁸⁴ Tom Mann, whom the Colne Valley Labour Union had solicited as a parliamentary candidate beginning in July 1891 and continuing into 1892, urged the local and others to “get down to trade unionism and municipal action before they talked of Parliament.” They, in turn, applauded his position expressed on more than one occasion in the Yorkshire Factory Times.⁸⁵

Get down to “municipal action” they did in the elections that immediately followed. The Bradford town council by-election following the Manningham strike brought initial victory to Bradford Labour Union (BLU) stalwart C. L. Robinson, a cabinetmaker and labor radical. Trades council leader W. H. Drew, a former machine wool comber and worsted weaver, won a seat on the school board. These initial victories paved the way for a second council victory the next year by socialist F. W. Jowett, a moving force in the Bradford Labour Union. As Reynolds and Laybourn have noted, despite routine failure in Bradford’s parliamentary contests, the BLU and its successor the ILP made “steady, if unspectacular progress” in municipal campaigns. According to Thompson, it became possible in these contests, around “questions in the immediate, everyday experience of the working people” to confront “the face—sometimes complacent, sometimes oppressive, sometimes just plain stupid—of established Liberalism” and to carve out space for a new independent labor politics.⁸⁶

With the re-formation of the Bradford Labour Union after the Manningham strike defeat, Bradford activists soon thereafter called into being a local Independent Labour Party, two years before its founding national party congress. Robert Blatchford, the popular socialist publicist, was to have made the first run as the party candidate for the East Bradford parliamentary seat, but he withdrew. Ben Tillett, the leader of the 1889 London dockers’ strike, stepped in to contest the seat. Although he lost to the Liberal candidate by a scant 557 votes in November 1892, in the same election Fred Jowett, the local woolen worker and socialist agitator, won the contest for city councillor from Manningham Ward itself, handily defeating the Liberal 1201 to 751. This was the first victory of the new ILP in a Bradford City Council election.⁸⁷

Similar municipal campaigns in the West Riding, fueled by the strike defeat at Manningham Mills, defined in important ways the character of the early ILP. As Thompson noted, municipal campaigns had a variety of appeals; not the least was the opportunity they afforded to address in concrete ways the effects of pervasive poverty, “on unemployment, against the half-time system, for ‘fair contracts’, school milk and medical services, on sanitary problems and artisan’s dwellings, nursery schools and slum clearance.” E. R. Hartley would be elected repeatedly to the Bradford council after 1895 and proved to be a thorn in the sides of both his Liberal and Conservative fellow councillors as well as a critic of the emerging parliamentary leadership of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) after 1900. As a councillor he fought for free secondary education and school meals, improved conditions for city employees, and for municipalization of hospitals, coal supply, insurance, banking and telephones. He irritated his fellow councillors with his blunt and contentious manner. And he sharply criticized the secret national agreement between LRC leader Ramsay MacDonald and the Liberal Party to divide contested constituencies.⁸⁸

In the hothouse years of 1891–92, Tom Mann had expressed skepticism to Colne Valley workers about the value of parliamentary work and urged them instead to build trade unions and focus on municipal political action. Tillett issued a searing indictment of the Labour Party’s national leadership in 1908 for neglecting the unemployment issue, while currying Liberal favor over temperance.

Revolt and high hopes gave birth to the Party, a distinction it has ignored up to the present moment, suffering itself to assimilate the worst qualities of the ordinary political party. It would appear that deterioration sets in once men assume dignity and place. It is so in Australia, for there both cause and people are surrendered to the mercies of the self-seeking Labour politician, who is often of a lower type of intellect and character than the vilest of the capitalist class.⁸⁹

E. P. Thompson believed that when the “piercing ethical appeal” of those years “was taken out of its direct social context and transformed into platform rhetoric” by national Labour Party leaders, “it was to smudge political understanding and weaken the movement.”⁹⁰

Malmö: Swedish cities and the burden of municipal franchise restrictions

In 1890, twenty-seven-year-old Axel Danielsson embodied a strong current of radicalism and audacious class consciousness in the Swedish Social Democratic Party, founded just the year before. As the editor of a labor paper in Malmö that rivaled the more staid Social-Demokraten in Stockholm, Danielsson kindled a rebellious spirit fueled by spreading strikes in Sweden’s smaller industrial towns and channeled that class anger toward local politics.

Axel Danielsson, Socialist Militant and Journalist, Malmö, Sweden, c. 1887

In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party (SAP) leadership showed little support for municipal contests, even when a formal municipal program, stripped of its militant edges, became embedded in the party programs adopted by national party congresses.⁹¹ The marginalization of such early enthusiasm for municipal contests in fledgling labor and socialist parties followed a pattern found in other countries as well.

Malmö and Southern Sweden

Malmö, an industrial city in the south of Sweden, emerged as an early center of socialist labor activism with a distinctively local and militant edge. A strike in 1889 against one of the city’s largest firms, the Skånska cement factory, led to reprisals against the workers and the jailing of Axel Danielsson for his attacks on the “cement-hearted” factory owner, R. F. Berg.⁹² Malmö would grow rapidly from a trading entrepot serving a rich agricultural district and small manufacturing center of 48,000 in 1890 to a bustling industrial city of 114,000 in 1920. Its working class came to be concentrated in textiles, shipbuilding, and cement manufacturing. The city’s most powerful economic institution was the Skånes Enskilda Bank, the largest commercial bank in Sweden in the late nineteenth century that, “like a spider web,” according to one historian, was a dominant political presence in the city’s local government.⁹³

The barriers to mounting an effective local socialist politics in Malmö and in other Swedish cities were formidable. As Danielsson put it in Arbetet, “It is almost as impossible to have labor elected to the city as it is to take down the moon.”⁹⁴ With an impending city council election in December 1890, Danielsson nevertheless urged workers in Malmö to gather in protest of the election and to formulate their own alternative municipal political program. Even though the “city council coterie” would be “reelecting themselves” because workers were denied the franchise, he noted that it might be “more meaningful” if the people had equal voting rights in municipal elections than representation in the National Assembly.⁹⁵ At a pre-election meeting of 400 workers, he urged the minority eligible to vote to boycott the upcoming election of city council members, well known for their “manifold harassments, misbehavings and brutal decisions that one day shall be revenged.” He proposed and the meeting unanimously adopted its own “community program” that struck a responsive chord on issues of pressing local concern, while also expressing support for striking miners and shoemakers.

Private contractors should not be used for public works;

The 8–hour day and standard wages for city employees;

Take decisive measures against unemployment;

Municipalize tramways;

Municipalize the city market;

City to provide food to impoverished school children;

Appointment of a city official under direction of the unions to provide assistance to the poor;

Heated cottages for the unemployed during the daytime;

Improvements to make the sewer system hygienic;

Free clinic for poor TB patients;

Full sympathy for the miners’ strike in Ljungsgarde and the shoemakers’ strike in Malmö.⁹⁶

Danielsson represented a popular, utopian socialist current in the early SAP, at once committed to class struggle and to meeting the immediate needs of workers through concerted municipal action. In a subsequent issue of Arbetet he noted with some bitterness the predictable results of the city election. All but one of the twenty-seven incumbents had been reelected, with 715 voters casting large numbers of multiple votes, a total of 35,552, and the top vote-getters gathering virtually all of them. “This coterie” that so dominated local elections consisted of the Skånes Bank and “the shop owners and businessmen who are dependents of the bank.” Even the middle class feared “these gentlemen from Malmö with full wallets.” And, to make his point entirely clear, Danielsson reminded his readers that the city “is living under a huge money interest from which only the revolt for general and equal voting rights can save us.”⁹⁷

In subsequent years, Danielsson continued to report on the municipal campaigns with pointed reminders of their undemocratic results. Other Swedish cities during the 1890s showed some evidence of municipal socialist activity but with similarly limited results. By 1897, inspired in part by the work of party organizers who encouraged local campaigns where they could be mounted, the national SAP formulated a municipal program that reflected the aspirations of local labor communities (Arbetarekommun.)⁹⁸ Over time that program would be trimmed and subordinated to the primary parliamentary thrust of the party’s activity and priorities. Danielsson had warned as early as 1889 about the danger of socialism becoming “a paltry program for a purely parliamentary party,” and, in the years immediately before the outbreak of World War I, the parliamentary wing of the party worked closely with the Liberal government in ways that reinforced the party’s bureaucratic and moderate character.⁹⁹

Independent labor politics and the Great Upheaval in the United States

In the United States, the three largest strikes of the late nineteenth century—the 1877 railroad strikes, the eight-hour strikes of May 1, 1886, and the Pullman boycott—ignited new political mobilization by workers around grievances that went beyond those of the strikes themselves. Each had a different character and meaning. The 1877 strikes were, by most accounts, a relatively spontaneous, unplanned outburst of class anger that swept from city to city.¹⁰⁰ The strikes of 1886 represented a concerted attempt through nationally coordinated strikes to force employers to adopt the eight-hour day. For some, notably the syndicalist movement in Chicago, the planned general strike had distinct political, even revolutionary, purposes. The growing influence of the Knights of Labor, together with the strikes, ignited working-class political mobilization in a host of cities in 1886 and 1887.¹⁰¹ The Pullman boycott, a gesture of sympathy for striking American Railway Union (ARU) shop craft workers, quickly took on the character of a national confrontation between the major rail systems and an audacious new industrial union of rail workers. Although a broader nationwide general strike seemed for a time possible—a prospect that many trade unionists feared but some hoped might produce a genuinely revolutionary moment—Samuel Gompers and the AFL backed away from such a prospect.¹⁰²

“King Debs.” Eugene V. Debs, President, American Railway Union.

Pullman Strike, Chicago, 1894—Conflagration

Political objectives did not initially drive these “mass strikes” (except possibly the 1886 strike), but in each case their political repercussions were unmistakable.¹⁰³ The class anger embodied in the strikes found a political channel in their immediate aftermath most directly in local politics. The peculiarities of the US state system may have contributed to this largely local focus. The solidarity bred by mass strikes translated readily into a working-class politics focused around issues that were of immediate concern. Local Greenback-Labor parties appeared in dozens of railroad towns up and down the trunk lines in 1877–78 and enjoyed brief but notable success.¹⁰⁴ In 1886–88, a similar eruption of local labor politics under the auspices of the Knights of Labor and Union Labor parties witnessed the election of labor tickets in dozens of industrial towns.¹⁰⁵ And, in 1894, just months after the collapse of the Pullman boycott, workers infused the Populist Party with new life in a series of urban contests.¹⁰⁶ In cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland populists aligned with locally-mobilized socialists to contest for municipal office. Bitter strikes on streetcar lines fueled political mobilization in working-class neighborhoods with deep-seated grievances against streetcar monopolies grown fat on exclusive franchises granted by city governments.¹⁰⁷ Nationally, the AFL convention in 1894 came very close to adopting a socialist program favoring independent labor politics on the model of the recently formed Independent Labour Party in Britain. The convention did vote in support of the municipalization of “natural monopolies” and the nationalization of railroads, telephones, telegraphs, and mines.¹⁰⁸ Cumulatively, this threat from a new politics of farmers and workers harmed by the accelerating process of capitalist industrialization, as Walter Dean Burnham has argued, precipitated a realignment of partisan politics in 1896 that largely, if only briefly, squeezed this locally grounded insurgency out of the national party system.¹⁰⁹

Conclusion: Global Economic Crisis and Political Upheaval

These cases illuminate the global crisis of capitalism in the late nineteenth century that spawned a period of intensifying labor conflict, the political consequences of which have not been fully assessed. In one country after another, new forms of labor and socialist politics emerged from the streets and barricades, the coffee houses and pubs, the labor churches and trade union halls. Hemmed in by entrenched partisan loyalties, patronage networks, restrictive franchises, and outright political suppression, these emerging parties sought self-definition through debates at party congresses; on occasion, they negotiated compromises with liberals, struggled over party discipline, and experimented with local politics. A cohort of municipal political activists found itself buffeted, on the one hand, by comrades who rejected any reformist politics as an alternative to purer forms of direct industrial action and, on the other, by aspiring parliamentarians in their own ranks whose personal political ambition mingled with their advocacy of national political goals. In response, local activists crafted a new politics that addressed the immediate and tangible needs of workers’ daily lives in cities. This “politics of every day”—the outgrowth in many instances of bitterly fought strikes—opened political space at the local level for workers to challenge traditions of urban elites’ governance in which, for centuries, protection of the “rights of property” had been the guiding principle. This new urban politics gave definition to new party formations. In doing so, it engendered struggles for the political soul of social democracy in the years before and after the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

PART II

City Politics, Municipal
Socialism, and Labor’s
Fight for Urban Space

Introduction

Claiming Political Space: The
Municipal Franchise and the
Limits of Urban Citizenship

Jim Sutch and the Perils of the Municipal Franchise

By the turn of the century, Jim Sutch had established himself as an effective labor city councillor in Richmond, the working-class suburb of Melbourne. As secretary of the Timber Yard and Sawmill Employees’ Union and vice-president of the Victoria Political Labor Council (PLC), he won election to city council in 1900 with strong working-class support and immediately began pushing forward labor’s municipal agenda.

His initial successes as a councillor were modest: opening public access to council and committee meetings, increasing wages for city-employed laborers, and eliminating restrictions on public use of city hall and parks. But Sutch, and two other labor councillors elected the next year, served notice that they would challenge city elites on several additional fronts: ending private labor contracting by the city, municipalizing utilities, ending Sunday labor, and most crucially, broadening the municipal franchise.¹

Between 1902 and 1905, labor poured increasing energy into municipal campaigns in Melbourne’s working-class suburbs, and year by year those efforts bore significant fruit. In 1905 the Political Labor Council authorized seventeen candidacies for city councils.² But, when only four were elected, the reason seemed immediately apparent. The barrier posed by a municipal franchise that granted plural votes to absentee business interests and large property holders was fully on display. Incumbent Jim Sutch fell victim to employers who circulated lists of targeted labor candidates, including Sutch. Although he won forty-seven more votes among resident ratepayers, as the labor paper Tocsin reported, his opponent eked out a twenty-vote victory with the votes of “a large number of absentees, such as Tram Co. directors, Gas Co. representatives, vacant lot owners, etc.”³

The Struggle for Urban Citizenship

As the case of Sutch and his labor colleagues illustrates, the struggle for suffrage defined the boundaries of urban citizenship. In cities with a restricted municipal franchise whether one owned property (and how much), what taxes one paid, how frequently one moved or had been in residence for a specified period of time, whether one received poor relief, whether one was a woman or an alien, determined one’s access to a voice in city affairs. Even if one met the restrictive standards for municipal voting (and even more so for holding office) one’s vote might be overwhelmed by the multiple votes of those who owned many properties, or whose total assets were considerable. Municipal franchise restrictions were not standardized across cities around the globe, and they changed over time. But virtually everywhere access to the vote in cities was limited until the end of World War I, and in some cases well after.

Workers faced severe constraints in their pursuit of municipal reform. In Germany and Sweden, the franchise was so restrictive that municipal socialists, especially in Prussia, had to make suffrage reform their first and primary goal. In the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), some argued that any considerable effort in city affairs was pointless until the universal municipal franchise was achieved. Others in Germany and elsewhere saw opportunities in the interstices of the political process and in concentrated working-class constituencies to win some victories and to make their voices heard in local government.⁴

Woman suffrage and the city

The fight for woman suffrage connected directly to the struggle for working-class suffrage more generally. Because women’s political engagement typically came first in the municipal realm and overlapped with their multifaceted urban reform activity, the municipal franchise and the fight to hold local public office often became the first line of engagement in the broader fight for suffrage.⁵ It is not surprising that many women cut their political teeth in local realms; notable examples include Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters in Manchester, Vida Goldstein and Lilian Locke in Melbourne, Stella Henderson in Wellington, and countless US women through the leadership of Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women.⁶

For women active in socialist and labor parties, the fight for suffrage frequently expanded into a “domestic” battle for their own voice and leadership within the party organizations that were the vehicle for the realization of their wider class agenda. Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg battled for political space within the SPD as did Kate Richards O’Hare in SPUSA and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Pearl McGill, and Clara Lemlich in the IWW and the garment trades unions. For them, the class agenda for transformative change was inseparable from the assertion of their rights as women.⁷

Where women won the municipal franchise, they were still subject to the same property and residency restrictions as men, but many did not hold property in their own name. As journalist and feminist activist Stella Henderson told the National Council of Women of New Zealand in 1898,

Stella Henderson, Christchurch and Melbourne Journalist and Feminist

In a country where the principle of adult franchise has been so emphatically recognised as it has in New Zealand, it is surely a curious contradiction that the local franchise should be limited to such a small proportion of the population … Our system is based on property and we allow plural voting … the administration of local affairs [has] a more important relation to property values than to human conditions.⁸

In New Zealand, the propertied basis of the franchise for most local bodies would last until the passage of new reform legislation in 1910, though even thereafter with a residency requirement. After 1876, property-owning women had been able to vote in local elections and were eligible to hold office; the first woman mayor was elected in 1893, and the parliamentary vote for women would follow that same year. But, from Henderson’s viewpoint, the system conspired to keep most women from holding local office and to block their path to appointment in other municipal institutions like the Charitable Aid and Hospital Boards where their absence “militates against the best interests of the community.” Indeed, it was not until the 1909 Hospital and Charitable Institutions Act that women began to be elected to such boards on a piecemeal basis.⁹

Patterns of women’s municipal enfranchisement varied enormously elsewhere. In Britain, the Municipal Franchise Act of 1869 granted women the local franchise providing they met other (property and ratepaying) qualifications, but the courts had long excluded married women from owning property apart from their husbands. They could not sit on city councils until 1907 and were not awarded the universal municipal franchise until 1918.¹⁰ Women in New South Wales did not become eligible to hold local office until 1918 but, even then, were denied the municipal franchise unless independently qualified. A general local franchise did not become law until 1927.¹¹ In the United States, because of the transcendent power of states in determining who was eligible to vote, the municipal voting rights for women varied from one state and one period to another. By 1890, twenty states had adopted some form of partial franchise for women. And, in 1893, Michigan granted the vote to “literate women” for school and city elections. New York authorized votes on bond issues by “property owners” in 1906 and in Florida voting was authorized “for offices and on issues determined by city or town” in 1915. Not until 1920 would full suffrage for women be granted.¹²

Women’s enfranchisement at the municipal level in Sweden after 1862 conformed to the same property requirements as those for men. Still relatively few women could exercise the franchise or hold office before the “earthquake” of 1918 when universal suffrage at the municipal level was adopted. However, as more recent work of feminist historians has amply demonstrated, the theoretical support during the 1890s of the Social Democratic Party (SAP) for woman suffrage was not matched by practice within the party itself. Women faced marginalization within trade unions and within the party structure itself. As a local study of Örebro illustrates, men gained party membership through their trade union affiliation but most women, excluded from union membership, had to join the party as individuals or through the Social Democratic Women’s Club. As Gunnela Björk argues, “political parties were imprinted by male power.” In practice, the restricted political space for women as citizens was especially notable in the SAP, even after universal suffrage. Rarely did women hold local elective office even after the 1909 reforms.¹³

Defining urban citizenship

Traditionally, citizenship has been conceived as the status of individuals in nation-states codified in federal or state constitutions and through legislation. Citizenship has typically entailed a combination of rights and obligations that include the right to serve on juries, to be secure in one’s person and property, and to vote, along with the obligation to abide by laws, to serve in defense of the state (for men), and to pay taxes.¹⁴ The determination of rights and obligations has a history that varies from one nation to another, as does the extension of rights to subaltern groups—minority populations, migrants, women, and those owning little or no property. The nation-state is taken for granted as the crucible for rights and obligations.

Less attention has been given to the ways in which those rights and obligations vary within nations and their sub-units, most notably cities and states.¹⁵ “Citizens” in cities are typically obliged to pay municipal taxes, though determination of what such levies should be may reside with one or another level of government.¹⁶ The eligibility of citizens to vote for elected officials at each level also varied over time and between nations.¹⁷

Of immediate interest is how municipal governance came to be constituted, and how “urban citizenship,” including eligibility to vote for municipal offices, was differentiated from national citizenship, and why that was the case. The inherited configuration of municipal government institutions and the nature of municipal “citizenship” became contested in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as urban working classes made new rights claims and challenged the very structure and function of the cities they inhabited. Who could vote in cities mattered, and progress in municipal affairs hinged on the expansion of the city franchise.

Elites’ control of city politics, discussed in chapter 1, served to protect their privileges and the right of the propertied classes to govern. And that control was buttressed by a highly restrictive municipal franchise in much of Europe and Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, with its broader franchise—at least for white men after the 1840s—cities posed a different set of challenges for elites to manage. The defense of property was also critical in the increasingly class-stratified urban political spaces of US cities in the late nineteenth century. Political machines channeled civic participation through party organizations that used networks of patronage to maintain loyalty and diffuse discontent away from working-class political insurgencies.¹⁸

Within the elite-controlled space of cities globally, women—or at least elite women—often enjoyed a degree of “citizenship” before they won general suffrage. But in the face of limited or partial municipal franchise, working-class women and their male counterparts typically had to exert influence in municipal affairs by other means: through reform campaigns for better sanitation, schools, or public health measures, or in the streets on behalf of rights in the workplace, access to food, or for the right to vote itself.¹⁹ Central to the campaigns of municipal socialist and labor parties was an expanding notion of “rights” that encompassed “social and economic rights” integral to improving the quality of life in cities for working people.²⁰

The Municipal Franchise

At the top of the platforms and central to the agitational efforts of labor and socialist municipal reformers in the years before the Great War were proposals to batter down restrictions on municipal voting that excluded workers.²¹ Two features of such municipal franchise restrictions are particularly striking. First, they commonly coexisted with a less restrictive parliamentary franchise, under which workers’ votes, diluted in a broader electorate, might maintain the competitive position of “liberal” parties. But, by the eve of World War I, workers were helping to elect labor and socialist parliamentarians in growing numbers.²² Second, local elites fiercely resisted efforts to broaden the municipal franchise despite repeated efforts by coalitions of laborites and liberals.²³ Not until the World War I era, and, in some contexts, not until the immediate postwar years, did state and federal parliaments or legislatures eliminate the last municipal restrictions and open the door to the more widespread election of municipal labor and socialist governments.²⁴

Cities and their Governance: Limiting the Working-Class Electorate

As cities grew in complexity and their social problems deepened, commercial and propertied elites continued to assert a disproportionate right to occupy the seats of government in city councils as “ ‘Lord’ mayors,” councillors, aldermen, and members of boards overseeing the poor, the schools, and important city services. However, city councils remained potentially the most accessible point of democratic influence. They offered opportunities to protest and seek redress for intolerable economic circumstances and to defend free speech in public space. During wartime this took on added significance.

Australia

In Australia, municipal franchise restrictions varied from one state to another. Plural voting by large property holders and owners of multiple properties to a large degree blocked the paths to municipal power for Melbourne workers. In New South Wales, reforms in 1906 eliminated plural voting and lowered the property requirements for exercise of the franchise, but some restrictions remained. In Brisbane and Queensland, plural voting and a “rate-payers” franchise remained until the Local Authorities Reform Act of 1920 instituted a universal franchise for municipalities. Consistent pressure from the Labor Party had finally produced concessions to labor’s longstanding demand.²⁵

Britain

In Britain, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) vigorously contested municipal elections and, by 1905, that effort had borne significant fruit. An emerging parliamentary leadership that formed the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 (and the Labour Party in 1906) grudgingly recognized that the party’s local vitality and its prospects at the parliamentary level were tied to success in municipal campaigns.²⁶

The franchise in Britain has a long and storied history of reform efforts that fell dramatically short of full universal adult suffrage. Despite major reforms in 1867 and 1884, significant segments of the population remained excluded from the right to vote not only in municipal but in parliamentary elections as well. Would-be voters had to qualify under one of a number of categories based on the value of property owned, the value of the domicile they lodged in, or their status as a university graduate. Anyone receiving Poor Law relief, or considered a dependent population (lunatics, criminals), but also sons living with parents and domestic servants resident with employers, were by definition excluded.²⁷ Plural voting tended to exaggerate even further the class bias of franchise restrictions. The percentage of adult males enfranchised nationally rose only slightly from 66.9 percent in 1892 to 68.1 percent in 1915. Registration levels in boroughs lagged farther behind at 59.7 percent and 61.9 percent.²⁸ While British historians dispute the impact of the Representation of the People Act of 1918 on the respective fortunes of the Liberal and Labour Parties, adult male suffrage did increase dramatically, and, by fall 1921, stood at 94.9 percent. Levels of female enfranchisement, limited to those over thirty years of age, stood at 79.5 percent for England and 84.1 percent for Wales. The Labour Party showed marked gains in both parliamentary and municipal elections after World War I related to expansion of the franchise. But the municipal franchise continued to exclude men (overwhelmingly young men) who lived in furnished rooms or were residentially unstable.²⁹

Sweden

In Sweden, municipal franchise restrictions had a particularly stifling effect on local labor politics.³⁰ Even so, the first socialist city councillors were elected in the Swedish cities of Helsingborg and Västerås in 1899, in Malmö in 1901, and in 1905 a social democratic bricklayer won a seat in Jönköping.³¹ An electoral franchise reform measure in 1909, pushed through with liberal parliamentary support, reduced the voting scale from a maximum of 100 to a maximum of 40 votes for the largest property owners and lowered minimum property requirements for a single vote to 500 kr. The impact was almost immediate, with the number of SAP-affiliated city councillors nationwide rising from 48 in 1909 to 153 in 1910. By 1911, the SAP had elected 229 city councillors and 1754 members of other boards or commissions, and in 1912, the numbers were 339 and 1910 respectively. Those numbers continued to rise from one municipal election cycle to another. Between 1911 and 1919 the social democrats made dramatic progress at all levels of the electorate. But still restrictions remained a factor in industrial communities like Nyköping, where only 19 percent of the adult male population had the right to vote in municipal elections.³²

Workers living rural areas and small industrial towns navigated a complicated political environment in which the open “community meeting” by tradition functioned as an electoral body from which “community boards” (local city councils) and committees overseeing taxation, poor relief, and other matters were elected. In the glassmaking towns of Kosta and Älghult in Kronoberg County, members of the Arbetarekommun (alliance of local labor interests) deliberated over how best to exert their collective interests in the “community meeting.” On occasion, they selected candidates to nominate or to support from other parties. A bitter labor conflict in 1906–07, led primarily by younger workers, deepened class divisions in Kosta. Their victory palpably changed the political environment going forward. They led organized protests of the government’s proposed limited franchise reform. And, when the new franchise law went into effect after 1909, they deliberated over whether to field joint slates with Liberals and “Temperance People” (“The United Left and Temperance People”) or under their own name as the Arbetarekommun itself. In 1910, they decided on the latter course, signaling increased confidence in their independent political influence.³³

Kronoberg County, Sweden

A breakthrough, or “earthquake,” in local elections finally came with the elections of 1919 as a direct consequence of new “one-man, one-vote” national legislation passed in 1918. In the central Swedish textile town and railroad center of Borås, for instance, the electorate tripled and the number of SAP-affiliated councillors rose from nine to twenty-two out of a total of forty-two. In Malmö, the Social Democrats in 1919 won thirty-four of the fifty-four city council seats. In many industrial cities, the workers’ hand was strengthened considerably but still fell short of a majority.³⁴ The path to Social Democratic municipal governance in Sweden had opened and would widen further in the decade to come. Changes in the municipal franchise in 1909 and 1918 had proved key, but so too did the growing confidence, independence, and cumulative experience of workers in municipal affairs over two decades.

Germany

In Germany, stark differences in the reform of the municipal franchise marked the experience of the South and the North.³⁵ Divisions in the Social Democratic Party over reformism and municipal politics erupted to a significant degree along a similar North-South axis.³⁶ For party activists in Prussia and the Prussian-dominated states, where some variation of the three-class voting franchise obtained, agitation around fundamental voting rights occupied the primary position in party programs. The emphasis on “Selbstbestimmung” (self-determination) held sway over any prospect for achieving substantive municipal reforms. In the eyes of many party leaders, the relative powerlessness of the party in the municipal arena posed a risk of diluting fundamental party principles in the interest of municipal reform. But other segments of the party—the practical revisionists—focused their attention less exclusively on “self-determination” and more on “Selbstverwaltung” (self-government). The two terms clearly embodied their different emphases. Many municipal activists, especially in the southern states, stressed concrete reform measures that addressed the material hardships that workers faced while not ignoring the barrier that a more open but still restrictive municipal franchise posed.³⁷

United States

In the United States, workers faced fewer formal barriers to participation in municipal elections. But the “party of nonvoters” rose dramatically after 1900, due in part to electoral “reforms” advanced by “progressive” reformers that stifled participation of “new immigrant” workers. African Americans, Asians, and women faced longstanding impediments. Some estimates suggest that voting in immigrant working-class districts of northern cities may have been depressed by as much as 40–50 percent in the early twentieth century. Gwendolyn Mink has argued that “the electoral system had effectively sealed itself off from the entry of any significant numbers of new voters.”³⁸ The social and political crises of the 1890s produced a wave of franchise “reforms” designed in theory to cleanse the political process of corrupting partisan influence, but the net effect was to reduce voter participation significantly. Some changes—most notably in the South—directly limited the franchise for African Americans and the poor through poll taxes, “literacy” tests, and outright voter intimidation. Other reforms in many states undercut the ability of parties to mobilize voters by eliminating the alien franchise, requiring prior registration, adopting the “Australian” ballot, and instituting direct primary elections. Cities also began to abolish ward-based elections in preference to at-large elections, and business interests sought to weaken municipal elected bodies by pushing for city manager and commission forms of government.³⁹ Even in the face of widespread municipal franchise restrictions, municipal socialists made substantial gains in the United States before the outbreak of World War I.

Urban Citizenship after World War I

Despite the success of municipal socialists and labor party advocates in the United States before the nation entered the war, they soon found themselves isolated and marginalized. By the end of the war, their outspoken wartime opposition and the concerted efforts of municipal elites to curtail their influence left them badly weakened. The record was strikingly different in some other parts of the war-torn world. Through wartime activism around home front concerns—housing, rising prices, access to food, employment issues, freedom of expression, and conscription—labor and socialist activists positioned themselves to increase their representation in countless municipalities at the war’s end. For some, it was a return to the political power they enjoyed before the war, as in Broken Hill, NSW, or Bradford, England. For others, labor’s municipal advance hinged on battering down municipal franchise restrictions and the broadening of the franchise for women. For workers in Brisbane, new postwar legislation in Queensland effectively established one person, one vote in the cities. More modest changes in Sydney and Melbourne nonetheless gave workers significant new electoral power. In British municipalities, only very slight residency requirements remained by the war’s end, and many cities began to elect labor majorities or near majorities. Although not as directly influenced by the war, Sweden saw municipal franchise restrictions fall in 1918, and workers began to elect larger SAP delegations to local councils. Most dramatic, of course, were the changes in the Central Powers—Germany and Austria. With the collapse of the Reich and the formation of social democratic regimes, locally and nationally, municipal socialists moved to the front rank in city governance. The fate of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (Arbeiterund Soldatenräte) shaped but, in most cities, could not sustain the revolutionary promise of the November overthrow of the Reich. The Prussian-style three-tiered franchise had been among the most restrictive in the world. Its elimination suddenly opened a new world of opportunity for German municipal socialists. The most prominent success came in Austria with the creation of “Red Vienna,” a new beacon for municipal socialists worldwide.⁴⁰

Faced with new perils to their property and increasing tax burdens, municipal elites globally were forced to begin to replicate indirect measures for containing working-class power comparable to those adopted by their American counterparts. Now they sought to construct new boundaries limiting the full democratic exercise of “urban citizenship” by their working classes. A worldwide struggle to undermine municipal home rule and thereby limit the “rights” of cities became for many the new battleground.

3

Laborism and a New
Urban Politics: England

E. R. Hartley in the Trenches of the Bradford City Council

E. R. Hartley, member of the Independent Labour Party, proved to be a contentious presence on the Bradford (England) City Council after his election in 1895. By his own account, he shattered the clubby decorum that ruled the chambers whether liberals or tories dominated. He challenged the routine election of committee chairs, balked at salary increases for city engineers when employees who collected night soil had been denied raises, and gave a fellow councillor “such a basting [as] he will never forget and probably never forgive” over a proposal by the councillor that unsanitary conditions in poor neighborhoods should simply be subject to “natural evolution.” On one occasion, faced with constant interruptions and heckling from conservatives on the council “who had evidently been in the club room” and who challenged the facts in his comments on the water supply for poor neighborhoods, an exasperated Hartley turned on them and declared, “If you’d get less whiskey, you’d soon know a good deal more.” He noted in his diary, “there was a silence one c’d feel.”¹

Campaign Flyer for E. R. Hartley and Bradford ILP Municipal Platform, 1900

As one of a small minority of labor men on the Bradford Council, Hartley’s campaign for “municipal socialism” seemed a perpetual, all-consuming, and at times quixotic battle. He and his Independent Labour Party colleagues, on occasion, gathered to recharge their spirits with an inspiring lecture on a Sunday afternoon at the Labour Church and visit a local pub, where they sat “at the tea table” and in good humor exchanged war stories of the latest fights in council. Savoring small procedural and occasional substantive victories, they battled on.² As the Bradford Labour Echo reported, the Labour councillors in one session lost lopsided votes over providing land for subsistence farming by the “outdoor poor,” demanding closer inspection of the leasing of municipal lands to private interests, and constructing a new art gallery. The editor reflected on these results and dominance of a council majority representing propertied interests.

It would be easy to hold our local Councillors—or those who form the majority—up to ridicule on account of their attitude towards the matters mentioned. But we must remember that the Council is what the people make it. Our work lies with the Electors. When we have done our work with the electors, different men will be sent to the Council Chamber, and with the advent of another order of municipal representation will come more enlarged and enlightened views of the possibilities of municipal government.³

Hartley and his comrades in Bradford were neither alone nor as inconsequential as they may at times have appeared.

Bradford ILP Conference and the Politics of Working-Class Independence

An observer of the founding conference of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Bradford on January 13 and 14, 1893 would have been struck by the seriousness of purpose that united the working-class activists who gathered and the backgrounds that guided them. They came predominantly from across Britain’s North, with a smattering of delegates from London, the Midlands, and Scotland. They came from industrial villages and textile manufacturing towns; 75 of the 123 delegates hailed from Yorkshire and Lancashire, 22 from Bradford alone. Ideologically, they were a mongrel group: socialists and disaffected liberals, Fabians and trade unionists, Congregationalists and secularists. But they shared a conviction that the Liberal Party, for all of its posturing in support of workers’ interests, had failed to acknowledge the depth of workers’ grievances and was unprepared to allow them or their representatives to assume positions of power.⁴

Organizers’ preparations for the gathering had revealed significant tensions, not the least between North and South. It was a long-standing divide in British working-class history and politics whose fundamental importance Edward Thompson compellingly documented.⁵ In the summer of 1892, developments favoring independent working-class politics coalesced around the initiation of a national organization, first, and “rather prematurely,” as David Howell has argued, with the formation of the London Executive of the National ILP. Its leaders, all based in London, included the likes of Tom Mann, Harry Quelch, Ben Tillett, H. H. Champion, and Joseph Burgess. They did make provision that “the Midlands and the North of England could nominate some Midlander or Northerner, residing in London to act on their behalf.” To these London-based radicals, it seemed entirely normal and appropriate that the center of gravity and leadership for any national initiative should come from the metropolis. Northerners, however, held a different view. As W. H. Drew, president of the Bradford Labour Union, wrote to Burgess shortly thereafter,

Depend upon it, no executive will suit the provincials that they have had no part in forming. What you should set your face toward is a conference of provincial men and Londoners, and you cockneys ought to unbend, and come, say to Bradford, a central town, where you will find plenty of food for reflection.⁶

Drew had a point. The North was already honeycombed with local “labor unions,” socialist clubs, labor churches, and nascent political organizations calling themselves “Independent Labour Party.” Indeed, candidates who had broken free from the Liberal Electoral Association (LEA) had already run for municipal office in Bolton, Bradford, Halifax, and elsewhere. And a few had won.⁷

The much-anticipated conference to establish an Independent Labour Party did convene in Bradford on January 13, 1893. But North-South tensions had not altogether quieted. On the podium to welcome delegates was Drew, president of the Bradford Labour Union and acting chairman of the conference, along with other members of the leadership group. According to some accounts, a group of Bradford delegates put forward Drew as permanent chairman. Others proposed Keir Hardie, who was chosen in a show of hands by what one newspaper reported was “a large majority,” and another claimed fifty-five to twenty-seven.⁸ In his address to the conference on the first day, Hardie sought to allay the fears of the northerners about the new party’s commitment to local control. He believed that the organization “would leave to every locality the fullest and most ample freedom to develop along its own lines” and “only sought to bind localities to such central and general principles as were indispensable to the progress of the movement.” But he also urged delegates to trust their leadership.

He pleaded for a wise confidence in those who they might select as their executive. Confidence was of slow growth, but unless they were to have ample and complete confidence in the men who were to be at the head and to be their representatives in the intervals between conferences, much better to have no committee at all. (Hear, hear.)⁹

Other issues reared their heads for debate on that first day. Should the name include the explicit label “Socialist” as some proposed? Should local organizations “federate” or “amalgamate … into one national Independent Labour Party”? And should the party assert its commitment to “the collective ownership of all means of production, distribution and exchange,” or merely its intention to hew a path of independence politically? On the first, general sentiment opposed the name “Socialist Labour Party,” and favored “Independent.” Delegates also preferred federation to amalgamation, even if it precipitated the withdrawal of London Fabians and representatives of the Social Democratic Federation from formal membership in the “federation.” And they stood by the principle of “collective ownership” against those who would dilute it.¹⁰ On the second day of the conference, the tension between Londoners and “provincials” appeared again more openly. Mr. Donald from London moved rejection of the proposal to elect the party executive on a regional basis, “on the ground that its adoption would mean an enormous expenditure to carry out a fantastic idea.” Alternatively, he suggested, “it was quite possible to get a body of men together in London—(‘Oh, oh’)—to carry out the limited amount of work they proposed to entrust the executive with.” As a conservative journal argued, “It was, in effect, a proposal that the labour interest throughout the country should efface itself, so far as practical control of the movement goes—that Scotland, Lancashire, and the Midlands should become so many cyphers adding merely to the importance of London as the sole integer.” Delegates from Tyneside, Bradford, and Leeds forcefully opposed the proposition, and it was defeated.¹¹

One of the convention’s more colorful moments came in the debate over whether the party should adopt a “socialist” name. The volatile Ben Tillett, leader of the dockers and strong advocate for independent labor politics, who had run an independent campaign for the West Bradford parliamentary seat just the year before, rose to his feet to speak against the proposition. His remarks veered off into a screed against continental socialists (and, by implication, members of the Social Democratic Federation in Britain). As a Liverpool paper reported:

Alderman Tillett objected to the motion and described the Continental Socialist organisations as mere chatter and blabber without effective working powers. English trades unionism was the right sort of Socialism. He wished to capture the trade organisations, which were worth 50 red-hot revolutionary parties in Germany, which had not the courage of their convictions, and which would hide under the first bed post if put to the test.¹²

According to a Sheffield reporter, he called the continental socialists “chattering hair-brained magpies,” which brought forth remarks of “strong disapproval in several quarters of the hall.” Undeterred, he praised by comparison the effective organization of Lancashire cotton operatives. The “advanced” views of some socialists should not be used to “insult” the trade unionists. Tillett reportedly then said he was “tired of people painting Socialism on their foreheads who were no more Socialistic than Bismarck, and for that reason he did not want them to add another Socialistic party to the movement.” As circumstances had it, seated on the speakers’ platform was Eduard Bernstein, an exiled leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and an invited guest of the conference. Chairman Hardie, with some embarrassment, introduced the honored guest, who later was invited to offer remarks.

Mr. Bernstein, who was cordially received, said that harsh words had that morning been used about the continental Socialists. He did not claim infallibility for their movement on the continent, but much good had been done, and he was sorry such a speech as that delivered earlier in the day could have been uttered by a representative of the working classes. (Hear, hear)”¹³

Robert Blatchford reported that Tillett’s remarks were “universally deplored.” He also affirmed the internationalism of labor’s cause. “The Labour cause is the Labour cause in Germany as in England. Justice is not a geographical idea. We cannot quarrel with our Continental comrades. Socialism is only half won until it has made brothers of us all.” Nevertheless, Tillett’s histrionics illuminated the gulf that lay between London socialists and the trade unionists, particularly in the North, seeking to craft an inclusive independent politics outside the orbit of liberalism. Class-based and pragmatic in its orientation, that perspective drew nourishment from regional pride and the ferment that labor conflict and economic crisis had bred in communities across the industrial North. Much of this new political energy focused on municipal contests.¹⁴

The program drafted by committee during the conference and read to the delegates for approval on the second day focused on economic more than political reform and was consistent with the spirit of Hardie’s opening speech.

The demand of the labour party was for economic freedom. It was the natural outcome of political enfranchisement. It was possible to have a mockery of freedom in the form of people exercising a State franchise, and yet bound by economic conditions more hurtful and more cruel in their operation than any want of a vote or State privilege could possibly impose.

He directed attention to the problem of “how to restore to the working classes the capital and the land without which they could not live.”¹⁵

The draft program stressed economic grievances—the need to abolish overtime, piecework, and child labor; institute the eight-hour day; expand social welfare; and provide free nonsectarian education and unemployed relief. To finance these programs, it proposed a graduated income tax and a tax on unearned increments of land values.¹⁶ Passed with near unanimity, the program represented a preliminary agenda for independent political action whose scope in municipal and parliamentary realms would grow over time.

Independent Labour Politics—Breaking with Liberalism in Practice

The ground had been well prepared for this new political departure not only in Bradford but in much of the West Riding and parts of Lancashire and the Midlands. Three developments proved crucial. First, traditional craft unions and trade union councils were drawn into the deepening class polarization in part by the challenges new general unions and their socialist allies posed. As a result of these conflicts, the historic attachment of labor to the Liberal Party was called into question. Second, a new cultural energy infused workers’ clubs and associations and pushed them farther in the direction of a distinctive class milieu—labor clubs, labor churches, cooperatives, and independent labor politics—separate from the worlds of bourgeois liberals. Third, city councils, school boards, and poor relief bodies traditionally under elite control became a testing ground and first line of skirmish for a new politics in which workers asserted their claims to a better life. As Thompson noted,

West Yorkshire Cities

If the causes of poverty could not be removed, its effects could be tackled by resolute independent action in the field of local government: hence the great importance of the early campaigns of the I.L.P. in the West Riding on unemployment, against the half-time system, for “fair contracts”, school milk and medical services, on sanitary problems and artisan’s dwellings, nursery schools and slum clearance.¹⁷

Mounting frustrations with the Liberal Party rose from several directions. The historic ties between Trades Union Councils (TUC) and the Liberal Party, long established in many industrial cities, came under duress. A rising tide of new unionism among the unskilled produced a series of polarizing strikes and either the collapse of old TUCs or their absorption of new unionists and their grievances. These shifts intensified conflict with liberal employers and liberals controlling interest in local government bodies. Socialist clubs that had met for years but with little influence beyond a small circle of unionists now found a pathway to greater clout by virtue of support of the unskilled. And, in a number of cities, socialists organized through a Fabian Society “disguise” that bore little similarity to the London-based mother society, whose members watched these developments with a degree of unease.¹⁸

Leeds

Several pivotal struggles accelerated the dissolution of labor’s ties to liberalism. A lockout of gas workers in Leeds during June and July 1890—fueled by national organizing in the trade—turned especially bitter when the city council’s Gas Committee decided to reject concessions previously granted, brought in strike breakers, and mobilized local police and cavalry to protect them. Nevertheless, the ham-fisted, liberal-dominated council proved unable to impose its will in the face of community-wide support for the gas workers. Ultimately, they conceded on all issues at considerable cost to their ratepayer constituents. The political implications of the struggle were transparent. Speaking to a mass demonstration during the strike, Tom Maguire spelled them out. If the city fathers persisted, he said, “ ‘the Liberal party of the town would get such a knockdown blow as they would never recover from … ‘ How long (he asked) are the working classes of this town ‘going to return people to the Council who, when returned, use the forces of the town against the working classes?’ ” As Thompson noted, “From this point on, many skilled unionists in Leeds began to turn away from Liberalism.”¹⁹

The process proved more protracted and convoluted than might have been anticipated following the gas strike. The Liberal Party’s advocacy of home rule made separation problematic for many Irish laborers who populated the Gasworkers’ and General Labourers’ Union. Only gradually did would-be labor candidates, emboldened by socialist voices like that of Maguire and John Mahon, move toward forthright independence.²⁰ Speaking in July 1891 to a demonstration of gas workers and laborers, Maguire stressed the consequences of liberal elite dominance in municipal politics. “Men of an antagonistic class were sent upon their various public bodies to manage their town’s affairs. Men who polluted rivers and filled the air with smoke from their chimneys were sent to their Council chambers to carry out the Acts of Parliament to prevent the pollution of rivers and the air.”²¹

Much of the antagonism toward liberalism focused on its local manifestations. Liberal elites, despite gestures of sympathy toward workers, dominated local governance in ways that reinforced working-class dependency. The reality of Liberal dominance in local matters, which came to the fore during moments of intense labor conflict, accounts for why the new independent politics focused on municipal and local body elections.

Halifax

The disengagement of working-class political activists from liberals varied in its particulars from one northern city to another, but the broad trends were remarkably congruent. In Halifax, liberal nonconformist employers, like John Patchett and James Booth, achieved dominance over the Liberal Party in the early 1890s by submerging both older paternalist and newer “radical” reform currents in the party. They also confronted a growing wave of strikes that spread new unionism not just among dyers and spindle workers in the textile factories but among some of the skilled and traditionally more conservative trades. The rebellious spirit of gas workers in London and Leeds energized their Halifax counterparts and fostered a “spirit of anti-exclusivity” that colored the newly formed Halifax Trades Council after 1889. Even so, it took rejection of labor candidacies by Liberal “wire pullers” to push the Labour Electoral Association (LEA) into a direct challenge. The moment came over a candidacy for the local school board. When the Liberals rebuffed the proposition to put forward even a single “labour representative,” the LEA put up two independent candidates, James Tattersall and Albert Thornton. Both rode a surge of trade union voting to victory on a platform of “free education” and “fair wages.” James Beever, a “Labour” candidate for town council in a by-election in 1891, had the Liberal rug pulled from underneath him and out of spite ran as an independent. The subsequent dismissals of Beever and Tattersall from employment as silk dressers in obvious retribution for political disloyalty to their liberal employers produced massive popular mobilization, including a May Day demonstration that drew an estimated 10,000 people.²²

The Halifax Labour Union, formed in 1892, led directly to the six independent candidacies for town council and the election in the fall contest of three councillors (including Beever) and one alderman (Tattersall) on a decidedly “collectivist” platform that demanded “fair contracts” and enforcement of the town’s Housing Act.²³ John Lister, a local notable and Fabian socialist who would eventually be selected as national treasurer of the ILP, grasped the enthusiasm in the victorious municipal campaign. He recorded in his reminiscence a newspaper report of the election-day events.

“Perhaps,” wrote the Guardian of that date, “no previous election in the history of the municipality has occasioned so much interest.” And this certainly was the case, for excitement ran high, and the polling was of a most spirited character. The Labour people with their red, white and green rosette badges were everywhere in evidence and worked most unanimously and enthusiastically together. And their five candidates [sic] were all carried triumphantly [into local offices].

Lister also remembered the “hearty enthusiastic” cheering at a postelection gathering in the Labour Union rooms. “The scene was one that will never die from one’s memory. Labour had at last asserted its right to independent representation for practically the first time, and the two political parties began to see that would be likely to be a force to be reckoned with and faced in future days.”²⁴

These heady times for the nascent ILP were not long lived. By 1893– 94, Labour’s elected representatives to the Halifax town council found themselves under intense pressure from the Liberal and Conservative Parties to realign their interests. These maneuvers and the vacillation of Labour’s new representatives signified the unstable party system of the mid-1890s and the absence of firmly established party discipline in Labour’s own ranks. Its ebbing strength would reverse by the latter years of the decade as Labour again rebuilt its base through municipal activism.²⁵

At its second national convention in Manchester during February 1894, the ILP leadership reinforced the call for workers to not wait for “public control and ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” before tackling the immediate problems facing workers. “We do not think it necessary to wait … before any improvement can take place in the conditions of the workers, on the contrary, all wisely directed and combined effort put forth by the workers, through voluntary, municipal or political agencies can do much to reduce working hours and raise the purchasing power of wages.” The National Administrative Committee (NAC) could report “very promising results upon municipal, vestry, school board, and other local elections all over the kingdom.” Noteworthy was the ILP’s success in forcing many local bodies to adopt a “Fair Contracts Clause.”²⁶

Huddersfield

Workers in some northern communities faced a more deeply entrenched liberalism. Huddersfield’s employers showed little of the liberal reforming zeal evident in parts of Lancashire. Despite the steady growth of a trades council, the city’s union density stood at half the rate in Yorkshire generally. The Liberal Party’s dominance in 1890 “was complete,” according to Robert Perks, but its arrogant rejection of the candidacy of Allen Gee, a former weaver and writer for the Yorkshire Factory Times and by 1890 president of the Huddersfield Trades Council, set the stage for a move toward political independence by the city’s organized workers. Liberal refusal to endorse his candidacy for a seat on the borough council led Gee to ask, “Is it to be a disqualification that a man has worked on a loom?” His defeat led a Liberal paper to offer the conventional liberal mythology that local governance operated above any partisan interests. “The electors evidently do not think that the time has come for giving labour, any more than any other interests, a direct and special share of the representation of the municipal borough.”²⁷

Acrimony between the Huddersfield Labour Union (HLU) and intransigent elements of the Liberal governing party persisted in 1891 when the borough council’s Tramways Committee dismissed a tramways union official. At a union meeting called to protest the dismissal, Allen Gee pushed through a resolution to the effect that “the time has arrived when labour candidates should be brought forward for the Council, school Board, and other elective bodies in the town.” Later that year the HLU, functioning as an independent labor party, put forward its first candidate for municipal council, Allen’s brother John Gee. The new party’s program advocated “the Eight-hour day, more holidays, a six day week, a super-tax, a free library, payment of council members and ‘free urinals and water closets for both sexes.’ ” Although John Gee was soundly defeated, another HLU candidate won a resounding victory for school board just months later. But symptomatic of liberalism’s adaptability to the shifting political environment in the early 1890s, Allen Gee stood as an independent labor candidate in the following November’s municipal election only to see the Liberals strategically decline to put up an opponent and endorse his candidacy. With his inevitable election, Gee entered council nonetheless a determined Labour representative, the only one of eighteen Labour candidates elected in Huddersfield until 1904. Nonetheless, Gee used his council position to persistently fight for “fair Contracts, evening Council meetings, municipal provision of work to the unemployed” and other immediate concerns to Labour.²⁸

Keighley

Like other West Yorkshire woolen manufacturing towns, Keighley had a deeply entrenched Liberal Party that could boast of its dominance even in the years of growing Labour independence between 1890 and 1893. The key to its success lay in the support of skilled workers and Irish voters drawn to the Liberals’ support for Irish “home rule.” Nevertheless, three factors common to other northern manufacturing cities contributed to Labour’s new independent mindset. First, following a polarizing engineers’ strike in 1889, “new unions” formed in industries outside the domain of traditional trades unions among machine workers, gas workers, general laborers, and railway workers. And in early 1890 a new trades council formed, embodying the new organizing spirit. Second, the Liberals proved themselves unwilling to support working men for local office. Two aspiring Labour candidates for school board positions in 1893 chose an independent path after being denied support of the Liberals, and they were elected. Third, Liberal dominance of local government produced direct clashes with Labour and highlighted the municipality as an arena not only of industrial but political struggle. Gas workers had a series of bitter confrontations with the municipal council’s Gas Committee in 1892 and 1893, and following a strike of textile workers against the Merralls firm, three women activists were brought before the employers serving as magistrates and were convicted of leaving work without authorization. In both cases, ILP members provided agitational support. In a subsequent bitter engineers’ strike, leaders pointed to the role of the local state in thwarting workers’ interests. “The magistrates were often either employers or relatives of shareholders in similar concerns. The bench, the Watch Committee of the Town and County Councils and Parliament itself were in the hands of capitalists who controlled the police and the naval and military forces.”²⁹

Given the relative weakness of unions, especially in the textile industry, it often fell to the ILP, acting with greater independence, to push a workers’ political agenda. In 1895 and subsequent annual campaigns, the ILP put forward a concrete, well-formulated municipal program. The party opposed high salaries for local officials and favored direct employment of municipal workers, the eight-hour day, and the right to unionize; they argued for municipal retention of land resources and the provision of a municipal coal depot and workers’ housing; they favored taxation of ground values (the unearned increment), and supported the employment of medical officers and sanitary inspectors. The last demand stemmed from the fact that the “employers … of whom there are far too many on the Council … want to keep these officials between their finger and their thumb.” The ILP hoped that with greater independence “the fouling of the becks and of the atmosphere would be more strictly watched and penalties enforced.”³⁰

Bradford

By any account, the lynchpin of independent working-class politics was the woolen manufacturing city of Bradford situated in a West Yorkshire valley. The long rows of working-class housing snaked up the slopes from the city center to outlying villages of former outworkers who made the daily trek to the city’s mills. At the city center stood the imposing town hall, a symbol of elite municipal governance. Socialist and independent labor representative F. W. Jowett recalled the social conditions in Bradford when he was elected to the town council in 1892.

The houses in which a very large proportion, if not the majority, of the working people lived were like the one in which I was born twenty-eight years before—one room upstairs, one downstairs, and a windowless cellar … The houses were in long streets, intersected by passages, with privy middens for each block of houses in the backyards. All these houses were built back-to-back and therefore they had no through draught for ventilation … The dreaded workhouse, still commonly referred to by people of the working class as “the bastille,” and regarded as such. The terrible disease of anthrax, a “woolsorters’ disease,” well-known by that name. Slums and cellar dwellings. Poverty and poverty diseases rampant.³¹

By the early 1890s, Jowett’s Bradford had come alive with new political fervor. The elements of its working-class political independence did not differ fundamentally from those in other West Yorkshire towns, but they took shape earlier and with greater force. The Socialist League had a presence in Bradford after 1886 and stimulated growing interest in municipal politics. According to Reynolds and Laybourn, it “injected into the movement that sense of utopian idealism which lifted the ILP above the level of simple bread-and-butter issues.” But it was in the realm of trades unionism that activists honed their message initially and broadened their appeal. New unionism reinvigorated the trades council, but the political fault lines did not neatly follow the line between old and new unions. Samuel Shaftoe, a skipmaker, and after 1888 president of the Trades Union Council, attempted to guide the TUC toward maintaining allegiance with the Liberal Party and gained support in that effort from some new unionists in the Machine Woolcombers’ Society and the National Woolsorters’ Society. But other new unionists, including the Gas Workers and General Labourers, supported the move toward political independence. As in other northern towns, the Liberal Party rebuffed early efforts to put forward workingmen as candidates for local office. In 1885, Liberals rejected outright a journeyman tailor and president of the older trades council for school board candidacy. Three years later in 1888 two candidates, Shaftoe and Irish typographer James Bartley, were again rejected by the Liberals. Shaftoe acquiesced, but Bartley directly challenged Shaftoe for leadership of the TUC and moved the council toward more explicit support of independence.³²

The pace of political separation from the liberals might have moved gradually save for the explosive effect of the Manningham Mills strike, which by most accounts fundamentally altered the political landscape.³³ Before the Manningham strike, working men had either offered themselves as Liberal Party stalwarts (usually disavowed by the Liberals) or as independents put forward by a trades council or an ad hoc committee. After Manningham, the movement toward a formally constituted independent labor party accelerated with a decidedly municipal focus in many of the textile towns of the West Riding. The initial form assumed was a local labor union with an explicit political identity. And it was such locally constituted labor unions that called the national ILP into existence.

A Culture of Laborism

The hothouse years, 1889–1893, witnessed the gestation of this new politics. It arose not simply, or perhaps even largely, from deteriorating economic circumstances or timely political calculation. Something new was in the air, especially in the textile towns and villages of West Yorkshire. A “decade of socialist revivalism,” as David Howell has termed it, and a rising generation of workers impatient with the compromises imposed by affiliation with the Liberals underlay a cracking in the social order. Ethical socialists found an expanding working-class audience through a range of new forums, from labor churches and cycling clubs, to vocal unions, Clarion “scouts,” and massive May Day demonstrations. Youthful activists came forward in these towns and established networks of support and mutual aid that brought talented organizers and gifted speakers into conflicts that might otherwise have festered unaided locally. They conveyed a contagious spirit that promised a new world, or as one writer for the Keighley Labour Journal put it, the “realization of the kingdom of Heaven on Earth.”³⁴ Fred Jowett later remembered the contagion of those days. “Sometimes in summertime the joint forces of Leeds and Bradford Socialism tramped together to spread the gospel by printed and spoken word in neighboring villages. And at eventide on the way home, as we walked in country lanes, or on river bank we sang.”³⁵

Their organizing effectiveness drew directly on their ability to expand the network of support in novel ways and construct a new sense of brotherhood. The Clarion Cycling Clubs were a case in point. “Apart, however, from the social advantages to be acquired by membership, there is work to be done which only cyclists can do … This can be most easily developed by a well disciplined Clarion Cycling club, composed of men who are willing to do something, however humble, to spread the truth of socialism.”³⁶

The sense of new possibilities for deep and abiding change buoyed the sentiment of activists, who now saw their mundane organizational work linked to a larger purpose. Robert Blatchford, whose Clarion began publication in late 1891, captured much of this new spirit. He marveled a few years later at the spread of socialism. In Manchester alone, he estimated a growth from 500 to 30,000 supporters in the space of five years. Memoirs of those touched by the movement invariably recalled “a labour of joy, for the workers seemed awake” or as a Nottingham worker remembered:

Glad, creative days … Even those of us who lived through them did not realize how happy and privileged we were … Arid minded highbrows thought that it was trivial, the politically orthodox disliked it, Socialist doctrinaires declared that its economic basis was not sound, but the man in the street accepted its teaching to which he gave the intense fervor of a happy convert.

At times, the Clarion seemed the very storm center of this new energy that transformed “the early Socialist movement in Britain from a mere exercise in economic thinking into a crusade for a more excellent way of living.”³⁷ Through its agitational vans, its cycling clubs and its vocal choruses, the newspaper spread the movement into new quarters that seemed to gather strength over time. A vocal union veteran recalled a visit to Ilkley.

At half past two we wended our way to the fountain in the centre of the pleasure seekers, and there the Clarion vocal Union rendered some splendid music to the astonishment of a crowd of people who quickly gathered round with many enquiries as to who these singers might be. None seemed to know until one of the party began to give out “Merrie England” when one old gent who evidently had seen better days cried out “Why they are Socialist” and an echo answered “Right old friend.”³⁸

The gathering momentum of labor churches in the 1890s infused the political movement with vitality and gave fiber to its ethical claims, especially in Lancashire and the West Riding where workers in growing numbers turned away from liberalism.³⁹ The first labor church appeared in Manchester in October 1891. Others formed shortly thereafter, reaching as many as fifty active congregations, whose attendance ranged from 100 to 500 on a given Sunday. The churches offered a refuge from nonconformist congregations whose leading members were often manufacturers and Liberal politicians, influential in local government. The Bradford Labour Church explicitly rejected the leading nonconformist ministers who had appeared at a public meeting in support of the Liberal opposition to Ben Tillett’s independent candidacy for parliament in 1892.⁴⁰ Their action embodied a revivalist spirit that drew on “the religion of socialism” whose spiritual underpinnings ran deep. The conversion experiences of scores of activists and ordinary participants, who the Clarion called “the great unattached,” infused the movement with a spirituality and emotion that no mere political party could claim. As one contemporary observer later recalled,

The men and women who were [the movement’s] members and workers … were in the grip of a new and compelling faith. It appealed to the emotional side of their natures and they became, in imagination, citizens of a new and better world … the possibility of creating a social environment in which men would live “with the light of knowledge in the eyes” released in them hidden stores of moral energy.⁴¹

Only such testimonies can account for the stirring enthusiasm, the deep personal commitments, and the extraordinary burst of organizing energies these years unleashed. The labour church provided more than a mere meeting place; it embraced and magnified the spiritual awakening that accounts for the extraordinary reach of the movement. The diverse range of participants was evident at a Labour Church gathering in Manchester at the beginning of 1894, according to a contemporary observer.

Every variety of type was represented, the shrew stunted weaver, the powerful labourer, square and set with heavy toil, dapper intelligent men who might be clerks and shop-men, men with strong earnest faces – one whom I knew to be a popular journalist – quiet, depressed men, and men with discontented burning eyes. Steady attention, riveted on the speaker, was common to all alike, and the one expression I failed to note was that of sarcastic mockery, which so often characterizes the keen-witted democrat in any sort of religious assemblage. Each man seemed, as it were, to be off his guard, and to have given in his allegiance. Applause and laughter had their way freely, and every telling point was caught up. They were leaning forward in the seats below, hanging over the rails in the galleries, heads resting upon hands, brows knitted, eyes anxiously strained. Close to me one night, sat a mean, ill-grown worker with sad eyes, to which at certain words of the preacher he furtively lifted his worn hand again and again to clear away the tears.⁴²

The movement’s leading figures invariably conveyed in their speech and bearing a religious leading that connected with the movement’s rank and file. Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden, William Morris, Bruce Glasier, Fred Brocklehurst, Ben Turner, and a notable group of women including Katharine St. John Conway, Margaret McMillan, and Caroline Martyn were in constant demand as speakers at mass demonstrations, Labour Church gatherings, and political rallies. For many, the women’s message carried a particularly powerful and transformative meaning. One observer in Eagley heard Caroline Martyn, the much-admired ILP lecturer and leader, at an outdoor meeting in 1894.

I knew nothing of the subject of Socialism and did not care to learn much about it, but for curiosity’s sake I took my seat on a tree-stump that Friday evening when Caroline Martyn came to Eagley to speak in the open air. In company with some two or three hundred people I listened to an exposition of socialistic principles, illustrated and interspersed with the sayings and doings of the Carpenter of Nazareth. My wonder at what seemed to me the intrepidity and courage of a young and defenceless woman grew and changed to amazement at myself that I had never seen these things in this light before. She had spoken as no woman ever spoke before in my hearing. Scales fell from my eyes and ere long I was a Socialist.⁴³

Municipal Beachheads: Challenging Elite Control

That independent labor activists would set their sights on the municipality seemed natural for this locally grounded movement. Initial victories, and even spirited losses, kept in motion and gave bite to the new politics. Gradually a smattering of labor-elected officials now sought to carry the momentum of the movement into the citadels of local government power. In Bradford, for example, the ILP won a seat on council in 1891 and gained two more the following year. By 1893 the ILP controlled four seats and by 1896, six. Still a small minority in a city council that numbered sixty, Labour’s presence nonetheless grew. From 1891 to 1904, the Bradford ILP always held at least one seat on the school board, and thereafter, with the dissolution of local school boards, always had a member on the city council’s Education Committee.⁴⁴

The appeal of municipal politics to this fledgling movement stemmed from various factors. After a decade and a half as a municipal councillor in Bradford, F. W. Jowett reflected on the objectives that socialists brought to the city. “Private enterprise has failed in the domain of municipal life. It has driven the people into ugly, inconvenient, jerry-built dwellings. It provides adulterated food in such quantities that numerous officials have to be maintained by the public for its detection, and even these it will corrupt if it can.” Alternatively, Jowett argued, “[The socialist] believes that the public should own and manage every service which provides for the common good. He believes that all should co-operate to supply their common needs, rather than leave the work of providing for those needs to the chance operations of the conflicting interests of individuals, whose sole object is the making of profit.” The opponents wanted to limit city functions to “the mere protection of life and property” and relief of the “overburdened rate-payer.” Though still driven by images of the desperate inhabitants of “a wretched slum on a cold damp day,” Jowett by 1907 had come to a more pragmatic agenda. As a socialist he might still aspire to “establish a Socialist City, where there will be bread for all, work for all, and no fireless grates,” but the toll taken on the “stunted victims” themselves necessitated a more practical, if circuitous, path forward; “He must needs work his passage to the Socialist City by means of municipal trading, housing reform, municipal coal, municipal milk supply, and—education.”⁴⁵

City politics offered other benefits besides the hard-won though mostly piecemeal gains that Labour found in municipal contests. For local party organizations, it provided the opportunity for annual mobilization and regular outreach to constituents. The sheer activity around local campaigns provided training for a cadre of party stalwarts, and educated constituents about the nature and function of local governments that affected their lives in so many ways. The exercise of formulating and debating programmes and bringing them into public discussion elevated and engaged the public. It raised civic consciousness and voter participation in local elections. Jowett observed that in many northern towns levels of voter participation had gradually risen to between 75 percent and 85 percent of the eligible electorate in council elections. The same could not be said for the election of poor law bodies (Guardians of the Poor) in which Labour did rather less well.⁴⁶ Rising civic consciousness among workers made the fight to eliminate municipal franchise restrictions even more imperative.

Initial euphoria surrounding the formation of the ILP and some scattered success in municipal contests gave way to the more mundane work of party building and maintenance. Disappointment punctuated the years between 1894 and 1897, most evident in the parliamentary contests of 1895 that saw liberal resurgence, especially among trade union allies. Financial exigency produced a decline in support for the ILP at the local level. But there were also bright spots. In Bradford, although the Labour vote declined in the 1895 and 1896 municipal campaigns, the ILP managed to elect two additional councillors in by-elections and by the end of 1895 held six seats on council. In 1897 the Labour vote began a rebound and in 1904 the Labour Party “became a powerful force on the Bradford City Council,” holding the balance of power between Liberals and Conservatives.⁴⁷

Other northern towns did not fare quite as well. Halifax experienced erosion of support due in part to internal conflicts over party discipline. But by 1900 the party was on the road to electoral recovery with the formation of a Workers’ Electoral Committee (WEC) and winning two seats on city council and four on the Board of Guardians. In Huddersfield, membership in local Labour clubs declined sharply between 1895 and 1901; the ILP contested only two municipal council seats and won neither. Keighley showed more robust local activity with Labour having entered sixteen municipal contests by 1899 and having won seven. By 1900 the ILP had four municipal councillors, three school board members, one seat on the Board of Guardians, and the city auditor. But ILP council representation disappeared altogether between 1904 and 1912, though its strength increased on the Board of Guardians.⁴⁸

The national picture for the ILP was one of increasing strength and widening influence. Yet the party faced significant barriers. The fear of victimization was real. As a Crewe ILPer noted, “There are tyranny and toadyism everywhere. Men are in perpetual fear of losing their employment and the officials play upon that fear … it is considered a bold thing to be an ILP man at Crewe.” In rural areas and among the most destitute populations of the large cities the party seemed to make little headway. Economic distress led to nonpayment of dues and financial exigency for many local party branches.⁴⁹

Despite these barriers, the ILP’s progress at the local level was notable just three years after its founding convention. In the early months of 1896, the Bradford Labour Echo reported at least 181 local office–holders across the country.⁵⁰ By the next year, the party began publishing a “Directory of ILP Members on Local Bodies” as a regular feature of the minutes of the annual conference. The report for 1897 named 34 members of Boards of Guardians, 7 borough auditors, 4 members of Burial Boards, 2 members of county councils, 48 members of parish councils, 1 serving on a rural district council, 52 school board members, 45 on town councils, 24 on urban district councils, 2 on Workhouse Visiting Committees, and 4 members of vestries (London). The total of 223 included a number of the most active and notable members of the young party who clearly invested their energies locally: Mrs. Pankhurst (Guardians, Manchester), John Lister (county council, West Riding), Philip Snowden (parish council and school board, Cowling), Robert Smillie (parish council, Larkall), Margaret McMillan (school board, Bradford), Ben Turner (town council, Batley), Joseph Hayhurst, F. W. Jowett, A. Priestman, and C. L. Robinson (town council, Bradford), Herbert Horner (town council, Keighley), and Jesse Butler and John E. Sutton (town council, Manchester). There were 13 women in local elected positions (7 members of Guardians, 1 parish council, 3 school board, and 2 Workhouse Visiting Committee). Seven communities had multiple members of Boards of Guardians, including 5 in Middlesborough alone; ten communities had more than one elected representative on parish councils as did five on school boards, including 3 members alone in Aberdeen; thirteen town councils had multiple ILP members: Aberdeen (4), Bradford (4), Gateshead (2), Glasgow (5), Glossop (2), Keighley (2), Manchester (2), Rutherglen (2), Stalybridge (2), Stockton (2), West Ham (2), and Wolverhampton (2); and five urban district councils, including Spen (3) and Thornhill Lees (4).⁵¹

Most striking in this accounting of local electoral activity is the breadth of activity geographically across the spectrum of local bodies. Although the party’s strength continued to be most notable in the West Riding and Lancashire, it clearly had established footholds across the country, in larger cities and rural hamlets alike, from which to challenge the reigning Liberal and Conservative elite control of local government. From the ranks of these local activists would come some of the party’s most noteworthy national leaders. Others continued to be deeply engaged locally for years to come.

Succeeding years saw additional progress. The total number of elected officials the next year (1898) rose to 271 as did the number of women elected to office, 18. By the century’s last year, 286 ILP members held local office, though the numbers of women officeholders had declined slightly to 16. The turn of the century brought some retrenchment (or at least a decline in reporting), with 248 ILP members serving on local bodies and again only 16 women. However, a number of towns and cities had larger delegations on town councils and growing pockets of strength: Bradford (5), Glasgow (5), Keighley (4), Leicester (4), West Ham (6), Wolverhampton (4), and Workington (5). The next year (1901) brought a modest increase to 255, most notably on Boards of Guardians and parish councils. The numbers of women hovered at 17, exclusively on Boards of Guardians and school boards, and single parish council.⁵² Between 1902 and 1905 the numbers on town councils again rose significantly, from 70 in 1902, to 94 in 1903, to 106 in 1904 and then a spectacular jump to 157 in 1905.

Life of the Party: The Local Branches

After the ILP founding convention in 1893, the political ferment and industrial turmoil of the early 1890s gave way to a period of uneven growth. Even as the National Administrative Committee (NAC) attempted to steer an unsteady course toward a national party that could credibly assert working-class interests independent of liberals and conservatives, it could meet only twice a year and had lost all thirty-five parliamentary candidacies in 1895 including the only seat held by the party, Keir Hardie’s in West Ham. The party’s national claims seemed shaky at best. By contrast, the party’s local “branches” had surfaced as if by spontaneous combustion from the raft of city “Labour Unions” and a dense network of “Labour Clubs” that came to approximate ward-level organizations. Although labour clubs and ILP branches became centers of diverse activity, a primary emphasis quickly became municipal politics, which, according to David Howell, “in the more stable branches … was some form of ballast.”⁵³

The evolving structure of the ILP had from the outset evidenced tension between centralizing impulses of the emerging national leadership and the interests of local branches. As Pelling noted, for a number of years the party resembled “a collection of virtually autonomous bodies, absorbed in their own local affairs.” Their contact with national political developments came primarily through the labor press and “the agency of the little band of Socialist lecturers who circulated throughout the country like itinerant Methodist preachers.”⁵⁴ A case in point came to the attention of Tom Mann from an ILP activist in Gateshead near Newcastle in early January 1895. Like many young branches in perilous economic times, Gateshead found itself in difficult financial straits, given the ambitious local agenda it had set for itself. Indeed, the branch voted to decline the request from the NAC for a £5 subscription to help finance the impending parliamentary campaign. The reply from branch secretary John Kennedy spelled out the predicament.

We are unable to pledge ourselves to contribute any fixed sum towards this fund but will certainly make an honest endeavor to contribute. Our position is as follows. Our membership consists of about sixty, our average attendance is about 30 and our list of financial members through so many being out of work will hardly total 30. With £3–10 in our funds we fought two seats on the town council in November, won one seat & were only defeated by 14 for the other. In the school board election we assisted two candidates who were returned 1st and 3rd on the poll and in the Guardians election we ran eight candidates, six of whom were returned.

He told Mann “the cause is spreading in our borough” but “we are short of funds.”⁵⁵

With labour unions evolving into party branches and labour clubs constituting ward-based party organizations, the ILP’s organizational structure congealed around regular activities: branch meetings, the drafting of municipal programmes, candidate selection, campaign mobilization, educational (propaganda) work, mass gatherings on special occasions, and sponsorship of touring speakers. A “shortage of funds” was chronic. But leisure activities and socials enlivened the party branch and provided much-needed support. These events could draw large participation that reached to the fringes of Labour’s support. At Halifax, for instance, in 1896 alone, branch propaganda activities included forty-eight meetings and lectures in collaboration with union and cooperative societies, designed to create a “family of Labour.” Cultural activities, like sporting events, carnivals, and dances drew participation of the Clarion Society and the Labour Church, whose growing congregations by 1898 numbered between one and two thousand.⁵⁶

Local election victories became occasions for celebrations. In Bradford, following “the elevation of Councillors Jowett and Robinson to the aldermanic bench” there was “no end of hubbub in the various [Labour] clubs.” Many of the city’s Labour clubs held victory “socials,” with the successful candidates making the rounds. “At the Manningham (Salt Street) Club in particular things were pretty lively,” wrote the editor of The Labour Echo. Among the entertainments, “Comrade J. Watson presided at the piano, and his musical abilities went a long way to making the gathering an unqualified success.” Also reported was a “Salt Streeters” club that engaged in high-spirited mimicry of the city council; it consisted of “a mayor, a macebearer (I should like to see the mace), and 18 aldermen, and presented a very imposing and dignified appearance when in full meeting assembled.”⁵⁷ Election victories revitalized the organization, with “old members coming back, new joining as a result of the election enthusiasm.” Speeches by the elected councillors enlivened the meetings, as did special lectures, such as that by a club member and ex-soldier, who described his journey from York to Bombay “in a very entertaining manner to a large and appreciative audience.” The club happily reported that 600 tickets had been sold for “the usual Christmas cheer.”⁵⁸

For many party branches, activity and enthusiasm fluctuated from year to year and even season to season. The Wallasey District Branch, near Liverpool, entertained the well-known national figure Katharine St. John Conway (Mrs. Bruce Glasier) for a speech on “Liberalism: True or False” that drew 200, “cheering enthusiastically” at various points and pointedly not singing “God Save the Queen” at the conclusion of the event. By early spring, the members actively canvassed door-to-door, selling copies of Blatchford’s “Merrie England,” and held regular Saturday-night rallies at the Seacombe ferry that drew as many as 100. But less than a year later, in early January 1896, meeting attendance had dwindled to a handful and the branch held only occasional meetings and outdoor rallies.⁵⁹ By September and October, the branch stirred to life again with a new winter schedule of lectures and weekly business meetings and fundraising events. And by the following year, 1897, the branch demonstrated a more pointed focus on municipal issues and selection of candidates for district council. Now calling itself the “Wallasey Socialist Society,” in a provocative handbill it challenged the premise of private fundraising to support local charities through a forthcoming “Wallasey Cycle Carnival.”

While contributing to the Local Charities remember that it is a disgrace to a Mighty Empire that Hospitals, etc., should have to largely depend for funds raised in this manner. The Wallasey Socialist Society advocates the administration and control of all Hospitals, etc., by the Local Authorities, and as a means of providing the funds, urges the public ownership of monopolies, such as Tramways, etc., a part of the profits to go to support the Hospitals.⁶⁰

Despite disappointing results in its first candidacy for district council, the branch focused its agitational work in succeeding months around raising municipal fair wages, promoting educational reform, increasing voter registration of lodgers, and pressuring sitting district Councillors who might be sympathetic to its positions. In the spring of 1898, election meetings again swelled to 150 with lively questioning of candidates and despite another defeat, the branch organized to collect data from other towns on the wages and working conditions of municipal workers. The branch publicized lectures by visiting ILP dignitaries in local papers and the Clarion and “on the pavements in chalk.”⁶¹ In the face of electoral disappointment, the branch, for the time being, settled on a strategy of posing public questions to candidates of other parties in school board and council elections, and publicizing the results. For the school board they asked whether candidates supported free meals for children and free evening classes; opposed child labor; supported payment of standard rates to assistant teachers and “fair wage” clauses in school board contracts. By the early months of 1899, the branch busily sponsored public events that drew audiences of quite respectable size: a lecture by Bruce Glasier on “Some Immediate Measures of Socialism” attracted 120; the event included songs by members, “Mrs. Hughes, Mr. McDonald and the Wallasey Clarion Glee Club.” The next month, 168 attended a “Soire and Dance” sponsored by the branch at the Vienna Hall in Seacombe. And, with the new year, members again engaged in fervent debate over the advisability of running one or more candidates for district council in March.⁶² With results similar to those of the previous year, the branch assessed its losses and refocused its energies on the demand for sanitary municipal housing. But, at least for 1900 and 1901, the branch decided to refrain from running its own candidates, instead agreeing “that members should do their utmost to bring necessary reforms before the electors by questioning candidates, writing to the papers, etc.”⁶³

Larger branches possessed advantages of resources and membership that enabled them to pursue campaigns with greater results. Their energy and creativity forged a constituency more engaged with municipal affairs and capable of sustaining electoral momentum from one election to the next. In a city like Leicester, the election of a lone city councillor in an 1895 by-election and another the next year represented a tenuous “toehold” that would only slowly enable a broader challenge to Liberal dominance.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, the vitality of municipal election campaigning was much in evidence by 1898. A Leicester ILP member enthusiastically reported:

We paraded the ward with a homemade lantern three-foot square, set upon two poles, with mottoes on each side and a naphtha lamp inside, and accompanied by an ILP Brass Band. Others do canvassing … and we insist on a good energetic canvass. Whilst one portion are doing this, and addressing circulars, the agitators are holding fifteen to twenty minute meetings, and we make a point of holding a meeting in each street in the ward, and often four or five upon a good, central spot … On the polling day, we insist that all poll and give them no peace till they do.⁶⁵

Modest though the results may have been, such tactics brought the election of a third councillor in 1899 and a fourth with the century’s turn. With these gains, the ILP councillors began a concerted push for improvements in sanitation, better workers’ housing, and higher pay for municipal workers. The ILP News could report that thanks to the councillors’ efforts the city now held “the premier position by paying the street sweepers and labourers a half-penny more than any town within sixty miles.”⁶⁶

David Howell has argued that the party’s increasing “preoccupation with electoral effectiveness” conflicted with a commitment to asserting its principled identity through educational work (lectures and public gatherings) and direct action. In 1895, Ben Tillett, who was almost always on the edge of the party leadership’s good graces, reported to the National Administrative Council word of an ILP engineered local mobilization of the unemployed to challenge the Board of Guardians in Tottenham.

Deputation from 1500 persons applied to Tottenham Guardians for assistance. Offer made of finding work for 50 men per day at gravel pits, 6 hrs at 4d an hour, no man to work more than two days per week. When deputation reported at meeting the whole, 1500 (police estimate) marched to workhouse & demanded to go before relief committee with a view to entering the house. Guardians refused to see any one, and it was only owing to Kenny of the Gasworkers Executive, who was leading, that the crowd were prevented from breaking the gates down.⁶⁷

Such incidents may not have been the norm, but public pressure and active, popular scrutiny of local government affairs grew more common as the ILP and its allies in the labor movement focused more on municipal issues. By the middle of the first decade in the new century, with a growing independent labor presence on town councils, boards of guardians, and other public bodies, local branches, and “workers municipal election committees” inserted themselves into local governance in a variety of ways between electoral contests.

Manchester ILP branch members showed increasing interest in a range of municipal issues that included school feeding programs, the rights of municipalities to “trade” (operate municipal enterprises), the payment of standard rates to municipal employees, women’s enfranchisement, the administration of Labour Bureau services to women as well as men, and unemployed relief. The branch called for regular meetings with the Labour members of the Manchester City Council, who by 1905 numbered six, to review issues before the council. It appointed a special committee to “watch the proceedings of the Education Committee and the Board of Guardians and to act as they deem necessary.”⁶⁸

In Halifax, the ILP by mid-decade had demonstrated its strength in municipal politics. By 1905, the party had five years with five or six elected members of the city council. Two members had held positions on the Board of Guardians since 1898, and two school board members served from 1898 until independent boards were disbanded in 1903.⁶⁹ The Halifax Workers Municipal Election Committee, a combined effort of the ILP and the trades council, became the electoral engine of the party after early 1903. At its first meeting in March of that year, the organization devoted attention to a proposed May Day demonstration and soon thereafter to plans for the impending Board of Guardians election. Detailed and well-organized municipal electoral campaigns became a feature of the organization’s identity, with the appointment of campaign committees, plans for distribution of literature, and carefully plotted canvassing. Amid its regular round of electoral work, the committee devoted considerable time to planning for May Day demonstrations and organized protest of the unemployed. Most tellingly, the branch told its members serving on the Guardians and the town council what positions to take or legislation to introduce—on the eight-hour day for municipal employees, public works for the unemployed, school feeding, and halfpence tram fares for children. The branch expected the six Labour councillors to meet prior to council sessions and “show a united front at all meetings.” Likewise, they were expected to provide “reports of their work on Council and Guardians” at branch meetings.⁷⁰

Crafting Municipal Programs

Branches had autonomy in the formulation of their municipal programs, but certain common concerns united their disparate efforts. Early in the life of the ILP, Russell Smart was elected at the founding convention to serve on a platform drafting committee, but in time he would grow critical of the centralizing propensities of his colleagues on the National Administrative Committee. In 1895, he authored a pamphlet that put forth the core principles behind the party’s commitment to “Municipal Socialism.” “The Socialist,” he argued, “looks to the Municipality and the Parish Council rather than to the national government as the means whereby the problems of democracy may be successfully solved.”⁷¹ He echoed Keir Hardie’s call for a “thorough-going Collectivism” but also stressed the importance of “decentralization” in the movement for “English Democracy.” Smart came to be a critic of oligarchical tendencies in the party’s leadership group and the National Administrative Council in particular.⁷² He proceeded to detail the key areas for municipal work: “municipalisation of monopolies” (gas and waterworks, electric lighting, tram and omnibus service); workers’ municipal housing (sanitary artisan dwellings, municipal lodging houses) constructed by an expanded city Works Department; municipal clothing factories, coal yards, laundries, bakeries, trams (subsidized from rates); municipal collective farming; free meals for destitute children; taxation of “ground values” (unearned increment of land values); and work relief through expanded municipal enterprise. Smart acknowledged the need for selecting good candidates and training them in the details of municipal affairs. He also realized that the path from “competitive anarchy” to “orderly collectivism” was gradual, and he “depicted nothing heroic, nothing to captivate the senses and charm the imagination.” Victory would come not in a single showdown, but the campaign would involve a “never-ending series of desultory fights between the well-disciplined, officered forces of the enemy, amply supplied with the sinews of war, and the looser formed battalions of the labour army blindly struggling for social justice.” But the struggle held out promise to those “whose mental vision can pierce the darkness of the present.” He concluded, “The future looks bright with hope, for we see shining in the distance the lights of our New Jerusalem; the city whose wealth consists not in the fortunes of its millionaires, but in the health and happiness of the men and women who inhabit it.”⁷³

And “pierce the darkness” local activists did, with wide-ranging proposals that fertilized municipal electoral fields across the country but especially in the new party’s heartland. In Bradford the municipal election platform for 1895 largely echoed the principles put forward by Russell Smart but placed particular stress on a call for increased “sanitary inspection” and the construction of municipal dwellings for workers. Along with an increase in municipal enterprise (tramways, bath-houses, and direct employment of “all night-soil men”), the ILP called for exemplary treatment of municipal workers by provision of the eight-hour day, abolition of overtime, and adoption of a “fair contracts” resolution that would make payment of “trade union rates” the basis of any contracts undertaken by the city. In a letter to the editor of the Labour Echo, a “citizen” recognized that the four Labour members of the council in 1895 may be “powerless to carry any of their ideas into practice in the face of the constant hostility of the vast majority of members” but nevertheless urged them “to bring—and to keep—any subject before the attention of the Council and the public if they will only decide what subjects are to have preference.” Highest priority should be given to the matter of “insanitary dwellings.” If they “should collect all possible information regarding particularly offensive districts—the rents paid, the measurements of yards, alleys, courts, or passages, together with the number of inhabitants and the nature of the sanitary accommodations,” the information put before the town council “would astound and alarm people who have hitherto remained in blissful ignorance of the conditions of life in the slums of Bradford.”⁷⁴ Just such an investigation would be undertaken in 1901, halfway around the world in Wellington, New Zealand, by the Labour Party’s first elected councillor in that city.

In some cities, like Keighley, the range of issues addressed in municipal election programs grew significantly from one election to another. By 1899 the regulatory functions and extent of municipal ownership envisioned had expanded significantly to include: a municipal slaughterhouse and markets, public baths, the inspection of dairies and cowsheds, and municipalization of the “liquor traffic.”⁷⁵ A common point of concern in Bradford and some other municipalities as early as 1893 was the scheduling of evening meetings for town councils to allow workers to attend and lobby “to obtain a fairer share of the public work of our city.” From 1893 to 1898 socialist councillors persistently pressured the city to take over the night soil contract using the city’s own laborers; the successful “socialistic resolution,” as one councillor called it, represented “a splendid finish to a hard fight.”⁷⁶

Across the urban landscape, notable demands called for the substantial expansion of the public sector to eventually include hospitals, insurance, banking, and telephones. In Rochdale, Labour candidate Thomas Whittaker in 1905 also called for expanded public leisure: public bowling greens, free baths, and free concerts in the town hall.⁷⁷ An increasingly widespread concern was the problem of workers’ housing and the need for municipalities to intervene directly in the market. At the 1903 ILP Conference in York, Alderman Jowett from Bradford moved a resolution that would commit the party to using the financial returns from expanded municipal enterprises not to lower rates but to address the housing problem: “That, in the opinion of this Conference, a substantial portion of the profits from municipal productive concerns should be invested by the municipalities where such profits are available in building workmen’s dwellings, instead of in the reduction of rates.”⁷⁸ After some debate, the conference approved.

ILP candidates brought a very different set of proposals than did their Liberal and Conservative opponents to their campaigns for local Boards of Guardians. In the 1907 contest Huddersfield ILP candidates T. N. Bentley and George Brown flatly declared the “Poor Law System” to be “a gigantic failure and should be abolished.” To the electors their message was simple: the industries must be organized so that workers received the “whole wealth they create and not be used to produce profits for others to enjoy, while they and their children become ‘cases’ for middle class Guardians to send to the ‘House.’ ” They called for universal oldage pensions, maintenance for children, and useful work for adults. Additionally, they advocated specific immediate reforms, including a minimum level of sustenance for outdoor relief and no disfranchisement for recipients. In short, “We believe that applicants for relief are only demanding their rights, and should be treated as human beings and not as criminals, or branded as paupers.” In Rochdale by comparison, J. P. Walker and John Law, running with support of both Liberals and Conservatives for seats on the Guardians, argued strenuously and repeatedly to “keep down the Rates,” by not building quarters that were “too sumptuous and luxurious.” They wanted to encourage emigration or boarding out of pauper children, as well as “minimize” any increase in expenditure for diets and impose stricter scrutiny of those seeking employment under the board.⁷⁹

Sentiment that favored actively contesting local elections and aggressive educational campaigns around labor’s issues rose with their victories. Within the ILP some activists argued that “it is just as important to put [members] on Town Councils,” as “to get Labour men into Parliament.” The town councils “connected with the lives and conditions of working people” and therefore represented an essential undertaking. “Labour men have a high idea of municipal life. They want to see the Municipality doing a great many more things than it does today.”⁸⁰

Municipalism and Parliamentarism: A Tale of Two Parties?

From the vantage point of the 1890s, the Independent Labour Party had taken root in many municipalities across the UK but had only an anemic national identity. Despite numbers of parliamentary candidacies in 1895 and in scattered by-elections, the party had secured not a single seat in Parliament. Keir Hardie would gain a seat in 1900, representing Merthyr Tydfil, a Welsh coal-mining community, and Richard Bell, a Liberal and head of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was elected in Derby. Even as local constituencies began to pile up electoral victories in local body elections—for town councils, guardians of the poor, and school boards—the national party, represented by an elected National Administrative Committee, searched for an identity.⁸¹ Irregular meetings and limited finances initially hampered the national leadership, but so did the wariness of local “branches” about any potential centralization of authority. The first ILP constitution enshrined the independence of local branches: “Each section of the party shall have local autonomy giving full control over policy and finance within the Constitution … The Administrative Council shall not interfere with the rules, constitution or internal affairs of any local organization.” That may have been well and good in principle, but the leadership quickly discovered that effective organization required stronger central leadership and control of finances. With the second convention in Manchester came the election of a new, smaller NAC with key national figures represented—among them Hardie, Mann, Curran, Tillett—but still with a strong northern flavor. In fact, the proposal for a restructured NAC came from two stalwart northern activists, Fred Jowett (Bradford) and Ben Turner (Batley).⁸²

Party centralization moved forward inexorably after the parliamentary defeats in 1895. Party branches were redefined to conform with parliamentary constituencies, while leaving open the option of more localized clubs or party sections. But proposals to adopt a federated structure of districts that might coordinate the work of their branches was perceived as a threat to the authority of the NAC.⁸³ At the leadership core by the late ’90s were four men, whose role in shaping the direction of the party would only grow with time. Despite their differences, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, and Bruce Glasier had similar aspirations and overlapping concerns. According to Howell, they “wished to keep the party away from fusion with the SDF and were anxious to court trade union, and to some extent Radical—Liberal opinion.” They strengthened the NAC Parliamentary (Elections) Committee, which was empowered to give final authorization for any campaigns. Although local branches and rank and file activists supported broader socialist unity—specifically federation or even fusion with the Social Democratic Federation—the NAC managed to circumvent the mandate from an informal ballot in 1897 favoring fusion and utilized its dominance of annual conferences to have the vote reversed in 1898. By 1899, the NAC was guiding the ILP toward cooperation with Labour Representation Committees, using “every means at its command, consistent with the Constitution, to bring about joint action with the Trade Union, Cooperative and Socialist Societies in both Municipal and Parliamentary elections.” In short order the NAC instituted more formal and strategic electoral collaboration with the trade union–dominated Labour Representation Committee and approved the secret agreement between MacDonald and Gladstone to coordinate ILP and Liberal candidacies.⁸⁴

Beneath the surface, local activists already heavily invested in municipal politics faced a constricted field for shaping the party’s national direction. Even the agendas of annual party conferences became subject to tighter NAC control. The NAC required branches to submit agenda items three months prior to a conference and empowered an appointed committee to “revise and classify” any agenda items.⁸⁵ Blatchford remained critical of the leadership in the columns of the Clarion through the late ’90s. Others, like Russell Smart, saw distinct oligarchical tendencies emerging in the centralizing propensities of “the big four” and their domination of the party.

The NAC is an organised body, knowing what it wants, and how to get it, while the Conference is an amorphous mass of well-intentioned inexperienced men with no common understanding, and no opportunity of consultation prior to the Conference. Under such circumstances, a strict adherence to the rules of debate unduly favours the Executive.⁸⁶

Socialists, who were frustrated with the failure to achieve “socialist unity” in 1897, remained suspicious of courting Liberals. But the party branches continued the day-to-day work of contesting town council, Guardian, and school board offices and using their toeholds to challenge elite governance across an expanding front of municipalities. While the NAC affirmed the grassroots vitality of local electoral activity, it sought to place greater emphasis on a parliamentary agenda. The NAC in 1899 acknowledged the progress made in some municipalities but not others. Nevertheless, it believed that “the election of a few I.L.P. members to the House of Commons” would lead to “the creation of a new national spirit which would stir into new life and activity every Socialist group and rally every Progressive force.” But other party activists continued to assert that the party’s vitality would continue to be built from below not above. Two years later, the party’s ILP News trumpeted the “advance of socialism” by pointing to the range of municipal enterprises “owned and managed by our elected authorities.” Socialists, they argued, were “working to level up their districts” by imitating “the good points from every other town” while seeking to “set the pace” in new areas. The editors proudly pointed to the ILP members who were at “the fore in developing and aiding this spirit.”⁸⁷ A special Conference of Socialist and Labour Elected Persons was pronounced a success, leading the party in cooperation with the Fabians to establish a Local Government Information Bureau. However, the Committee of Management headed by J. Ramsay MacDonald would not undertake “the financial risk” of publishing and circulating the proceedings of that conference.⁸⁸

The formation of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) moved the focus of Labour’s political attention decisively toward the parliamentary realm. The alliance of unions, the ILP, the SDF, and the Fabian Society signaled a more organized and closely vetted effort to marshal parliamentary candidates and support their campaigns. Ramsay MacDonald and Frederick Rogers, secretary and chairman respectively of the first LRC conference in February 1900, issued a circular appealing to trade unions, cooperatives, and socialist and labor societies to affiliate with this national effort “to establish a distinct Labour Group in Parliament” in order to promote “legislation in the direct interests of labour.” The circular produced varying responses. Some were quite lukewarm to the parliamentary strategy. The Bristol Trades’ Council Labour Electoral Association reported its lack of success recruiting a candidate for the East Bristol constituency and favored local work instead.

We do not see our way to taking any further steps in that direction at present, and indeed we find our hands pretty full with local elections in which we have achieved a fair measure of success, having secured 4 members on the town council and 3 on the Guardians, who are able to do some practical work, and are to a great degree controlled by those who elect and run them.

Nearly two months later, the Bristol association professed to be “very keen on the subject of Labour Representation here, especially local Representation, where one is least liable to be sold. My executive are anxious to compile questions for Local Party candidates and I am instructed to ask if you can kindly provide me with a good up-to-date list.” (Emphasis in original.) The Nottingham and District Trades Council submitted resolutions to a public meeting on “Direct Labour Representation” May 24, 1900, the first of which directly bypassed the call for parliamentary work.

That as municipal industrial enterprise is rapidly developing, and the number of employees directly under the control of our local bodies is continually increasing, this meeting considers it advisable to secure direct representation of the working classes upon the various local administrative Councils, so that the rights of Labour may be adequately defended.

Other trade unions and local associations cautiously expressed encouragement of the national effort.⁸⁹

After the disappointing returns in 1900, the LRC stressed the experimental nature of its organization and the importance of concentrating energies on parliamentary constituencies where they might “take steps to get themselves into political trim.” For some, like the Jarrow [on Tyne] division, this meant a reaffirmation of the value of both local and parliamentary elections, but the problems they identified had a distinct local flavor and urgency.

Jarrow Division is essentially a working class constituency, and ought to have a Labour Member in the House of Commons. We venture to say that local problems, such as overcrowding, insanitary dwellings, at high rents will not be thoroughly solved, until working men and women organize for the purpose of sending representatives of their own to look after their welfare.⁹⁰

Between 1900 and 1906, parliamentary “Labour representation” coalesced into a more formal party organization, although at the local level the party consisted largely of ILP branches or local Labour Representation Committees in which the ILP played a central role.⁹¹ With the election of a significant Labour Party parliamentary delegation in 1906, local branches pressed harder for legislation that would expand the power of municipalities to undertake and manage their own enterprises without formal sanction of the Local Government Board. A delegate from Newcastle moved a resolution to that effect at the 1907 Annual Conference in Derby and in doing so echoed the fight for municipal home rule embraced by urban activists around the world: “Whenever municipalities wanted to develop or undertake some new enterprise, they found legal disabilities in their way. It is only right to assume that the people of a locality knew what was calculated to serve their own interests without interference of any Government department, or even of Parliament itself.”⁹²

The NAC had pleaded overwork in 1906, given the demands of the national campaign, and in 1907 it could only report “our members in Parliament have continued to give attention to all matters relating to municipal management and the Local Government.” Delegates noted that because of their continuing local successes, candidates faced opposition that was more unified and “more bitter and virulent than ever.”⁹³

Labour’s parliamentary victories of 1906 and the more formal constitution of a Parliamentary Labour Party crystallized trends toward party centralization that had been in evidence at least since the formation of the Labour Representation Committee.⁹⁴ As noted above, Russell Smart, one of the ILP’s strongest advocates for municipal socialism, came to be a critic of the oligarchic tendencies in the party’s leadership group and the NAC in particular. In 1908, he wrote that the party had become

a mere machine for registering the decrees of the three or four able men who for so many years, have formed the inner circle of the NAC … all the wires are in their hands, the newspaper is theirs, one of them always occupies the chair at the annual Conference, one of them is on the Agenda Committee, and the power that they have acquired enables them to impose their will upon the Conference and the party, even when the general sentiment of the Party is in opposition to them.⁹⁵

As the “big four” jockeyed for leadership of the party and assessed its capacity to take further ground after what had also been impressive Liberal Party gains in 1906, party leaders deemed it essential to gather what intelligence might be available about the party’s strength in the constituencies, its organizational capacities, the comparative strength of its Liberal and Tory opponents, and the barriers to further advances with which it had to contend going forward. What better barometer might there be than the annual contests for local office, which had shown impressive and rather steadily increasing success in virtually all parts of the country?

Plumbing the Depths: The Municipalities in 1908

Anticipating another early general election in a newly destabilized political environment, Independent Labour Party chairman J. Ramsay MacDonald directed the party agent, Mr. Arthur Peters, to circularize ILP and LRC branches following the fall 1908 municipal elections. He posed a set of specific questions concerning the outcome of the contests. MacDonald asked the branches to assess 1) the state of their organizations and their “concentration of efforts,” 2) the methods of attack they faced from opponents, and 3) other circumstances that may have influenced the outcomes of the municipal election. MacDonald made the queries, aware that the election results had been less than optimal that year. The number of “municipal borough” seats contested rose from 340 (274 Labour/Socialist, 66 SDP) in 1907 to 397 (313 Labour/Socialist, 84 SDP), but the total number elected increased only from 86 to 109. Another disturbing result was that while Labour’s candidates gained 45 new seats (not including the reelection of incumbents), Labour lost 78 seats of sitting Labour councillors. Also troubling was the fact that while the total Labour vote had increased significantly, the total number of candidates elected had risen only modestly and the number of existing seats lost outstripped those gained.⁹⁶

MacDonald clearly hoped to use the intelligence gathered from the municipal electoral activity of the branches to build a broader and more strategically effective parliamentary campaign in the anticipated general election. What he got, sometimes in extraordinarily detailed and insightful reports, was a picture of a party with widely varying pockets of strength and weakness, deeply engaged in municipal contests that local branches perceived to have value in their own right and improvising their political choices based on the local circumstances they faced.⁹⁷ While some letters were brief and cursory, others offered extraordinary detail. In many cases the letters reflected the personal perspective and biases of the local activist who was reporting; they also contain strikingly insightful and honest descriptions of the challenges the party’s local base faced.

Several reports emphasized that despite losing seats, local activists were not discouraged. Their total vote had increased, in some cases substantially. D. O. Jones from Bedford noted that they were “not anyway discouraged,” in part because the “movement [is] comparatively young” and they had brought out the second largest poll ever. The report from the Newton division, like many, stressed a well-funded and highly organized opposition—“we have Pub and Pulpit against us”—but claimed, “we are not downhearted and hope for better results in the future.” And despite a “poor showing” in Burnley the branch professed confidence after three years of contesting every seat. “The time is coming when all we shall have to do will be to put our men in the field … and people will go to the poll.” Like many, Ben Turner from Batley emphasized the challenge of finding strong candidates. “We are troubled by lack of men to stand.” The chief obstacle in recruitment, the correspondent from Bedford noted, was finding candidates who would be able to attend morning council meetings. “Our opponents are old members of the Council and have large business interests in town.”⁹⁸

By far the most common complaint of the correspondents was what Fred Plant, the registration agent for the Stockport Labour Party, called the “compromise” between the Liberals and Tories, which “centred their efforts upon the four wards to keep us out.” This pattern of local “fusion” appeared in many, if not most, constituencies—in Bradford and Blackburn, Clitheroe and Crewe, Manchester and Norwich, Oldham and Wakefield, and countless other towns. But fusion could take other forms as well, as Ben Turner reported from Batley, where “teetotalers and publicans joined hands,” or in the Albert Park Ward in Salford, where J. Nuttal, secretary of the LRC, reported that his own defeat resulted from “a combination of forces consisting of Doctors, Catholic Priests, Church of England ministers, etc., who worked up a strong anti-socialist feeling with the usual lies, misrepresentations, etc.”⁹⁹

Many other local branches also reported on the anti-socialist propaganda efforts they faced. The Coventry LRC reported that their opponents had “called up all their reserves,” but the Labour candidates had “held their own” in the face of “unclean tactics” including accusations that “we are all enemies of religion, morality, the home, etc.” In Oldham, the opposition distributed propaganda “attacking socialism and claiming to show the results of socialist rule in West Ham, Poplar, and other places in England and many places in France, America and other countries.” The Poole and Branksome Federated TLC noted attacks on Labour’s commitment to municipal trading and its acquisition of the local waterworks. “We were said by the other side to be Socialists (as we were.)”¹⁰⁰

More troubling, and also surprising, to many locals, especially in the Northeast, was the “defection” of Catholic workers and the Irish from the ranks of labor. Some attributed the defections directly to “our Secular Solution of the Education Question” as Jowett reported for Heaton Ward in Bradford. “There is a Catholic Church and Catholic day school with a strong Irish vote in this ward.” The Clitheroe Trades and Labour Council also cited the “religious education question” as a point of concentrated agitation by the Conservatives. Two of the Tory candidates, prominent Catholics, made a thorough canvass of the town “playing the Secular Education and Godless Nation game for all they are worth.” In one of the few replies by Peters, on behalf of MacDonald, he noted that the influence of Catholic opinion appeared to have been “an experience which seems to be particularly common in the Lancashire Boroughs.” Correspondents widely reported the Irish Catholic concern, as in Blackburn—“Catholicism is very strong here”—and Hartlepoole, where the Catholic vote was “very heavy against us.” John Macrae, the secretary of the Leeds LRC, included a detailed and insightful analysis of the circumstances in each ward. He pointed out that New Wortley Ward

was a Labour stronghold, having sent three Labour men to the Council, but is dominated by the Catholic vote, which has been cast for the Tory during the last two elections, owing to the action of the Labour Party refusing to recommend the higher grant to the Catholics for their secondary schools. The Catholics insisted upon Catholic control and religious tests for their teachers. Splendid Labour organization.

In Liverpool/Fairfield, John Morrisey added that his own candidacy faced an opponent backed by Liberals and Tories but also saw a “Catholic vote defection,” despite the fact of being Catholic himself. The same appeared in Wakefield, where the Labour candidate, Finnegan, whose “children go to Catholic school,” declared himself “Irish.” More disheartening, the secretary from Oldham reported, “We shall have to fight the R.C. [Roman Catholics] sooner or later and may as well start now.” The Stockton Labour Party noted simply “Lost Irish vote.”¹⁰¹

The Labour Party’s problems in 1908 also reflected the challenges of party building and ongoing tensions among its constituent elements—socialist and non-socialist, trade unionists and Lib-Labs, critics and supporters of the volatile Colne Valley ILPer Victor Grayson, and militants and calculating politicians.¹⁰² The most persistent source of friction reported in many localities was with a contentious Social Democratic Federation (SDF/SDP). Many of those responding to MacDonald saw themselves as party stalwarts seeking to hold together a fractious coalition. James Frankland, the Blackburn TLC secretary, reported, “There is no doubt but what the recent bickerings about Grayson and the wild talk indulged in has caused many who vote with us often to go against us.” James Hope, from the Carlisle TLC, noted that the two council candidates, both SDP members, had only lukewarm support from the Labour Party because of the “extreme programmes” they put forward. In some places the ILP and LRC acted independently of the trades council (Chester); in others separate SDP candidates pulled votes away from Labour Party candidates (Clitheroe division). In Coventry, the LRC “being averse to dividing the movement” let the SDP contest in All Saints Ward, a self-proclaimed “SDP cockpit,” where, by their own account, “they had educated them to socialism.” They lost badly with “a sharp decline in vote from previous years.” Despite gaining a seat with an increased majority, Darlington also “suffered most in those constituencies where the so-called ‘pure and unadulterated socialism’ has been preached by adopting the tactics of the SDP.”¹⁰³

MacDonald undertook his survey in a time of deepening unemployment and widening distress. The returns, more revealing in some cases than others, showed a party whose base of strength lay among “a good class of artizans” and employees in large engineering and railway works (Bedford) but where traditions of Tory or Liberal voting among segments of the working class in places also ran deep. Such was the case among Liberal-inclined miners (Ilkeston division) or Tory-leaning textile trades (Oldham). But hard times and rising unemployment also cut into the party’s support. In Swindon the Great Western Railway discharged 1800 men, including TLC secretary C. R. Palmer, who reported they included many of those “who has [sic] taken a lively interest in our ILP” and found that “the heart is knocked out of the people.” Some concluded “that moneybags are the people to support and then if elected times would be better.” The problem of deference among the very poor eroded what support the Labour Party might have claimed in poorer districts. In Reading a trades council candidate scrupulously “avoided talking socialism” in a ward “which is the slumdom of Reading and the word Socialist was fatal as unfortunately it is nearly always amongst the poorest as they appear to be impregnated by the doles from Tory Party until anything in the way of independence frightens them.” In Bedford the main streets of tradesmen “at the back of which are our slums” were places where “we lose heavily” and in Burnley the “exceptional distress in the cotton industry” created openings for a charity organization, the “Guild of Help,” to use its influence against Labour.¹⁰⁴

Contrary to the drift of the national Parliamentary Labour Party towards an expedient alliance with the Liberals, many local branches saw a deepening class polarization in their own realms of municipal politics.¹⁰⁵ W. H. Boocock of the Clitheroe division put it simply: “We find now that the fights in Municipal Elections are fights of Labour v. Capital.” Huddersfield labor activists had to fight the resources and influence of “large manufacturers living in all the wards.” But nothing revealed the class basis of local politics more than the increasing and widespread unification of Liberals and Tories to defeat Labour at any cost.¹⁰⁶

Taking Power: Nelson, NE Lancashire

Some bastions of Labour’s strength reveal the capacity of local activists to craft a municipal program that captured the imagination of workers and afforded an opportunity to move their communities toward a different future. Bradford, Sheffield, Manchester, and wards in many other cities demonstrated organization that was, as J. E. Sutton from Manchester put it, “very fine,” with results that showed a capacity to overwhelm an opposition of “Drink, Property Owners, Capitalist … & every shop keeper as well.” But, in Nelson, not only did the Labourites march to an important victory, they did so on the basis of an already well-established record of municipal governance.¹⁰⁷

Nelson was largest of a chain of cotton-manufacturing towns on the Liverpool canal deep in “the wilds” of northeast Lancashire. Although its traditions of trade union militancy reached back into the 1880s, Nelson’s history of municipal self-governance dated only from 1890 when it was awarded a municipal charter. The absence of a “legacy of municipal electoral attachments,” as David Howell termed it, encouraged the trades council formed that same year to field two candidates for municipal council whose success in turn laid a foundation for Labour’s local representation in the future.¹⁰⁸ The trades council’s early success with municipal representation led in 1893 to its participation in school board and parliamentary contests, but it foundered in 1895 on divisions over whether to exclusively support independent labor candidates affiliated with the ILP or SDF. With the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in the Clitheroe division in 1900 attention shifted for the moment away from the municipal toward the parliamentary arena. Delicate negotiations with the United Textile Factory Workers Association (UTFWA) produced the withdrawal of a Liberal candidate in favor of a weavers’ official and onetime Liberal, David Shackleton. He pledged independence and was able to win the somewhat skeptical support of the ILP. Shackleton indeed became the third “Labour” representative in Parliament. His electoral success in 1902 had been preceded in the 1901 municipal elections by encouraging results in both Nelson and Colne.¹⁰⁹

The new municipal momentum began in Nelson when ILPers in 1900 elected one of their own to the school board and in 1901 added Mrs. S. J. Cooper as a member of the Board of Guardians. Holding these seats in 1902 and winning a single seat on the town council, the ILP then elected an astonishing six members to the town council in 1903. With this election the municipal dam broke in Nelson.¹¹⁰ When the secretary of the Nelson LRC replied to Ramsay MacDonald’s inquiry following the 1908 municipal elections, he could survey “the facts” of a fundamentally altered municipal government. “We have had a Labour majority in Nelson for the last three years” [actually since the fall 1903 elections] when the party had “fought the whole of the 6 wards of the borough” over “the Aldermanic question.” Conventionally, the upper branch of municipal councils had been composed of aldermen, elected from among the sitting councillors. Given the strong council majorities held by Liberals and Tories in most towns, rarely could a Labour member be selected as alderman. But, in Nelson, the ILP had insisted on a new procedure requiring any alderman sitting for six or more years to “come before the electors before being reelected an alderman.” In addition to selecting a mayor from among their majority, the Labour members also demanded that the mayor be paid a salary of £100, so that a working person could afford to occupy the position. Although the LRC initially offered to pay the salary, the council deemed it more appropriate that the funds for a public official should come from the taxpayer rates.¹¹¹

With Labour in the council majority, local government in Nelson began to address other elements of Labour’s municipal programme. The council stipulated that all city employees receive a minimum wage of at least 25s per week and municipal employment be expanded to include “shoeing our own horses and doing our own blacksmiths, wheelwright and joinering work,” also maintaining the city-owned mains for gas, water, and sewerage “instead of letting it out by tender.” They thereby “proved that it can be done better and cheaper.” The city made its own brick for the “refuse destructor” and hired a chemist to treat the filter beds in the sewerage works. It also replaced the graduated water rates, which had favored larger and wealthier users, with a flat rate that also produced substantially more revenue. The LRC secretary noted that “the Labour men have proved a dicided sucess [sic] of which their previous Liberal majority greatly envy them.” These advances produced a deeply polarized council. “You can see that it has been a terrible battle between capital & Labour.” He bemoaned the fact that the workers “do not realize [their interests] as they ought to do, while the capitulists [sic] do to the full extent and are determined to resist these things to the utmost.” Although Labour lost two seats in the 1908 election in the most expensive and hotly fought contest in memory, it still retained a slim majority. “At any rate we waged a good hard fight both men and women did all it were possible to do.” The secretary noted that “at the annual meeting of the council which was the most heated in the history of the town as there were only 2 partys [sic] Capital and Labour … in spite of it all we still have a majority in good fighting form which intends to show the workers who are their friends.” The Labour-led municipality moved ahead to take on the feeding of needy school children, and they were “dealing with unemployment in a very Practical manner.”¹¹² Ample evidence suggests that the strength of the ILP undergirded the militant strikes of Nelson’s weavers between 1911 and 1914.¹¹³

The Politics of Public Space: Manchester, England

Fred Brocklehurst may have seemed an unlikely candidate for jailing in the summer of 1896. From being a piecer in a silk mill at the age of ten and subsequently a printer’s devil on the Manchester Courier, he had found his way to Queen’s College, Cambridge, in 1890. After earning a degree he became secretary for the Labour Church in Manchester. By the mid-1890s, he was an active member of the Independent Labour Party.¹¹⁴ In Manchester two party members had been elected to the city council in 1894 and two more, including Brocklehurst, would follow in 1897. By the latter year, Bradford ILPers, like their comrades in Manchester, had four seats in their council. Keighley, Stockton, Leicester, Wolverhampton, and a number of other towns across the UK had elected two. School boards and boards of guardians were likewise being infiltrated by Independent Laborites.¹¹⁵

But Brocklehurst’s “criminal” notoriety in 1896 arose from a principled stand on behalf of labor’s right to freedom of speech and the use of public space for agitational purposes. The battle that year revolved around a challenge over the ILP’s unauthorized use of a natural amphitheater for public meetings in a secluded public park, Boggart Hole Clough. As early as 1893, the Manchester City Council had debated and rejected a petition from “an outside body” to use Alexandria Park for a Sunday celebration of May Day. In that debate, Alderman John Harwood had argued that “the parks were intended for the use chiefly of children and ladies and those who were in need of quiet recreation and he hoped that they would never be allowed to be used for public meetings of any kind.”¹¹⁶

In 1896 the conflict over the use of Boggart Hole Clough reappeared on a grander scale, though the local Fabian Society had held public gatherings in the park as far back as 1892.¹¹⁷ In May of 1896, the Parks Committee under its chairman George Needham decided to force discontinuance of such meetings conducted by “a certain party.” City authorities issued summonses against leaders of the ILP who had appeared at the most recent gathering. In the face of fines and threats of imprisonment, party activists pushed ahead with a new series of meetings in June for which additional summonses were issued. Fred Brocklehurst reported lightheartedly in the Clarion the “offenses” for which the accused were cited.

Harker … was prosecuted for writing a note and passing it to the speaker; Brierley for holding an umbrella over his head when it rained; Smalley for helping a park attendant in keeping order; Vowers for “nothing in particular”; Tweedale and Moss for standing quietly for ten minutes at the edge of the crowd; Hempsall for smoking a cigar within six yards of the speaker; Mrs. Pankhurst for lending her umbrella for the purposes of the collection; and Hall “for the unpardonable crime of opening his mouth.”¹¹⁸

Brocklehurst and Hall eventually served a month under brutal conditions in the Strangeways Gaol. Others received varying fines, though the prosecuting authorities, including the grandson of William Cobbett, declined to press charges against the prominent women involved, including Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia. Mrs. Pankhurst, as an ILP member, already held an elected position on the board of Poor Law Guardians. She made her first major public speech in what was fast becoming a nationally significant protest. Before the dust settled, Boggart Hole Clough attracted to its now-weekly meetings such Labour notables as Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, J. Bruce Glasier, and Pete Curran, with crowds ranging from 10,000 to 50,000.¹¹⁹

Over the summer, the issue continued to percolate through council proceedings with a report on how other municipalities in the UK regulated public spaces and a series of contentious votes over the conditions under which activities in the parks were to be allowed. The ILP weighed in with the view that “the parks of this City are the common property of all the citizens” and asserted the right to hold meetings in parks. It asked that no new bylaw be adopted without a direct vote of the citizens. A petition of 1670 citizens calling such meetings “an intolerable nuisance” asked the mayor to “support the Parks Committee in their arduous duty of upholding the honour, dignity, and independence of the Council.”¹²⁰ A counterpetition, signed by 2,644, called on the mayor to convene a public meeting in the evening, “to the end that it may be attended by citizens whose avocations prevent them from attending a meeting held in the day time,” in order to affirm the right to hold meetings in open spaces. In the end a substantial council majority overrode the sentiments of the ILP councillors and their Liberal allies and instituted regulations that denied the right of persons to “sing, preach, lecture, or take part in any meeting for political, religious, or other purposes, or take part in any public show, performance, or demonstration in the park.” Over Labor’s opposition, a caveat provided an avenue for grants of special permission on a case-by-case basis. The ILP councillors did secure the deletion of an obnoxious addendum that would have permitted the exclusion of any person “not dressed in decent clothes.”¹²¹ While passage of the bylaw appeared to be a defeat for the ILP and its allies, attempts by Chairman Needham to block ILP meetings in the coming year proved unsuccessful. Even more tellingly, in the November 1897 election Councillor Needham lost his seat in Harpurhey Ward, near Boggart Hole Clough, to none other than Frederick Brocklehurst. With the entry of two additional ILPers into the Manchester City Council and with the changed political climate after the Boggart Hole Clough controversy, the terrain of municipal affairs became an even more contentious battleground for labor.¹²²

Brocklehurst joined fellow ILPers on the council, including recently elected William Maben, a joiner, and continuing councillors J. E. Sutton, a former miner and checkweighman, and Jesse Butler, a union secretary.¹²³ Although still a small minority, the Labor councillors set about making their presence felt. Brocklehurst and Maben entered into the proceedings energetically. Speaking with notable “effect” to the full council, Brocklehurst “never failed to gain the respectful attention of his fellow members.” In so doing, he “disregarded the unwritten ‘rule’ that new members should be silent for at least twelve months.”¹²⁴

Building on the efforts of Sutton and Butler the ILP, councillors forced consideration of the eight-hour day for city street employees, the construction of new city-owned housing for workers displaced by slum clearance, and the ongoing efforts to use public space for political gatherings. They may have lost on these issues, but the new Labour quartet managed to assemble a majority to protect the right to have music in the parks on Sundays, and they pushed forward a plan to curtail tramway franchises so as to enable municipalization in the near future. They also forced repeated scrutiny by council of wages and working conditions of city employees, and blocked efforts to give “rate-paying companies” a vote in municipal and parliamentary elections.¹²⁵ Although defeated in their attempts to institute a local single tax on all unoccupied properties held by private interests, to abolish the office of Alderman and to adopt a trade union “standard” of wages and hours for all contractors with the city, the Labour group injected a new set of issues into the business of governing the city. In the process they challenged longstanding “rules” regulating the decorum and procedures of the body. Brocklehurst was also elected the same year to the school board and agitated for the abolition of school fees in the primary grades, for higher salaries for assistant teachers, and for the curtailment of subsidies for “voluntary” religious schools. Brocklehurst demanded that the schools “give the children of the poor an equal chance educationally with the children of the rich.” He was joined on the school board in 1900 by fellow ILPer Emmeline Pankhurst, though both lost their seats in 1902 when local school boards were abolished by national legislation.¹²⁶

The impact of municipal labor representation should not be underestimated in Manchester, or other industrial cities such as Bradford, Halifax, Rochdale, Keighley, and Huddersfield, as well as Liverpool and Leeds, where similar inroads were made.¹²⁷ Brocklehurst’s quieter but no less effective ILP colleague on the council, William Maben, mounted effective agitation around the demand for new sanitary municipal housing, opposed the “smoke nuisance” and other poisonous contaminations of poor neighborhoods, and advocated for better wages for city laborers. But at the age of fifty-one, during his second term, he succumbed to bronchitis.¹²⁸ His funeral was well attended by city officials including the Lord Mayor and a deputation from the council, along with activist colleagues from the SDF and ILP. But as the labor journal Justice reported, “more touching was the presence of some two to three hundred poor people, who had come some four to five miles on this bitterly cold day to testify their love and respect for, as one of them said, ‘One who was a poor man like ourselves, and who worked for the like of us.’ ”¹²⁹

In the Municipal Trenches: Bradford and the West Riding

Across the industrial towns and villages of the West Riding, the spirit of this new local politics took particularly energetic and creative forms. By the turn of the century, ILP members had been elected in growing numbers to the full range of local bodies.¹³⁰

Bradford, the cradle of the ILP, also served as the beacon for the new municipal politics germinating at the party’s grassroots. Bradford’s urban problems dated at least from the first half of the nineteenth century. As Britain’s fastest-growing industrial city, it had ready access to coal that fueled the industrial revolution in woolen manufacturing. Drawing a workforce largely from surrounding rural areas and hamlets, Bradford’s congested mill districts had the dreary appearance of a town overcommitted to manufacturing. As early as 1822, according to one observer, inhabitants “suffered considerable annoyance from the smoke emitted from steam engines.” Slow to incorporate, the town had seen a protracted battle over the issue in the 1840s between liberal “modernizing” elites and an alliance of anti-corporation interests that included Tory philanthropists and working-class radicals, and even some former Chartists. They pointed out that the improving class of entrepreneurs had every opportunity to clean up the town by paying higher wages. Instead, they noted, “the Liberal capitalists had taken the profits of economic growth but expected the community of ratepayers to bear the costs.” Their liberal opponents argued that opposition to incorporation was a vote for the status quo, a city “exposed to the burglar, covered with dirt, and wrapt in pestilential disease.”¹³¹ Within a few years the Liberals’ renewed application for incorporation was approved, and the underlying conditions for municipal self-improvement, as they were envisioned under Liberal governance, had been met. Nevertheless, an inspector’s report in 1851 suggested the magnitude of the problems the municipality faced:

Defective street pavements, confined courts, contaminated open water-courses, crowded cellar dwellings, unregulated common lodging houses, open and closed privies and middens crowded upon dwelling-houses and under them with large spaces unoccupied and unenclosed covered with refuse and filth so as to form a nuisance to the whole neighbourhood … the slaughterhouses are confined and crowded in amongst houses and warehouse property.¹³²

Years later, Fred Jowett, who had been first elected to the Bradford Town Council in 1892, recalled the conditions of his childhood with high rates of child mortality, “insanitary” and poorly ventilated cellar or back-to-back dwellings, widespread disfiguration from childhood smallpox, and the knock-kneed and bowlegged gait of youngsters lacking adequate nutrition, conditions that persisted in the 1890s when he entered and served in the town council.¹³³ In many parts of what J. B. Priestley called this “most cosmopolitan of English provincial cities,” members of the upper classes “lived cheek by jowl with their workpeople.” Jowett’s eventual parliamentary constituency, Bradford West, in which the Manningham Mills were situated, illustrated the larger pattern. There in the heartland of the ILP, the proximity of the classes produced “friction,” which, according to Pelling, “led to a revolt of the factory operatives in a fashion which would not have been necessary in a constituency entirely dominated by the working class.”¹³⁴

Although Bradford was among the centers of ILP/LP strength in municipal campaigns, the challenges the party faced grew with its success. F. W. Jowett reported those challenges to MacDonald after the 1908 contest. Most difficult was the problem confronted elsewhere, namely the unity forged by Liberals and Conservatives behind a single anti-Labour candidate in virtually all of the contested wards. Jowett noted that despite fundamentally solid organization in the wards, the difficulty finding strong, suitable candidates also remained a problem. Manningham Ward, the ILP’s strongest base of support, had elected a Labour man against united opposition in 1907 by a slim 82-vote margin. However, in 1908 the ILP lost the seat by an even slimmer margin of 44 votes in a contest that Jowett believed should have been won by a 200-to 400-vote margin. In his view, the party’s supporters had overreached and alienated support that should have been theirs.

Large numbers of our People persistently attend our opponents meetings, behaved to say the least in a manner not creditable to us and thus give the press a Splendid chance to boom our opponent. The Local press never report our meetings not even give us a single line during the whole campaign. Again our people was all Cock Sure and did not exert that influence they ought to have done.¹³⁵

Despite the defeats of 1908, the Labour bloc in the town council retained its hold and would continue to grow incrementally up to the eve of the Great War.

Bradford Housing Conditions c. 1903

Jowett and Hartley campaign for city renewal

But how did Labour acquit itself in the council? What measure of success could a minority interest claim? Councillors E. R. Hartley and F. W. Jowett have left us accounts that provide some insight. In the early years, Jowett was a persistent critic of council affairs over which he could exercise little control. In 1895, he challenged Alderman Hill’s assertion that “business capacity” was required of members of the governing body. Point by point Jowett showed that the council had not demonstrated real “business capacity” in its failure to hold public lands that appreciated in value, in squandering the value of municipal improvements on adjoining lands as a giveaway to the private tramway companies, and in refusing to use its power to condemn slum properties. Instead council had subsidized “Street Improvement operations under which the property owner has it in his power to make the public pay enormous prices for his benefit. Business capacity!” In sum, he noted, “the majority of members of the County Council have proved themselves to have been true custodians of the interests of property and wealth, but where the welfare of the workers has met with their support it is impossible to see.”¹³⁶

Jowett’s ability to thwart the machinations of the council majority would have to await an enlarged Labour delegation. Nevertheless, he pressed his city council colleagues to support the local Labour Council request to hold its annual demonstration in Lister Park (defeated thirty-seven to seven) and require private contractors who submitted tenders for city work to pay workmen “the minimum standard rate of wages in each branch of his trade” (“negative”—no vote recorded).¹³⁷ In the interim, Jowett and his Labour colleague C. L. Robinson cobbled together enough support from divided Liberals on the council for both to be chosen for aldermanic seats, a controversial move among ILP comrades. But the “Echoist” (editor of the Labour Echo) disagreed with those who “believe our party should have nothing to do with the aldermanic bench.”

We may disagree with the present working of the political machinery, but we must take advantage of the few openings we get to put men in the position of being able to minimize the evil effects of the same … No we cannot afford to wait until reform comes to us but help to bring it. There are many things we disagree with in this world of ours, but we are none the less compelled to be parties to them because we desire to change them.

He noted that without two aldermen committed to Labour the entire body would be “opposed to our work.” He minced no words about the conflicts that lay ahead. “Our entrance into political warfare will in itself secure for us many desirable reforms, not because our opponents love us better, but because they fear us more.”¹³⁸ In the by-elections that followed, the party’s aldermanic strategy won some vindication when longtime candidates E. R. Hartley and Arthur Priestman won seats on the council, replacing Jowett and Robinson, who assumed positions of alderman. The victories were cause for celebration in the local labour clubs throughout the city, but most especially in Manningham.¹³⁹

Over the course of the next months, the new Labour councillors and aldermen made themselves felt on a series of issues that came before council. The sitting councillors Minty and Hayhurst, now joined by Jowett and Robinson as aldermen, moved an amendment to the standing orders that would change the council meeting time from 3 pm to 5 pm, a measure long advocated by Labour to enable workers to participate in local governance as elected representatives or observers. Although they were handily defeated thirty-eight to twelve, they managed to win support from a handful of liberals.¹⁴⁰ Early in the New Year, the hardy band opposed an increase in the salary of the chief waterworks engineer, because “it was not a year ago that the Council practically told the public that it could not afford to pay a living wage to the nightsoil men.” Although they lost the vote by forty-one to fourteen, they reaffirmed a fundamental principle that “paying high salaries to leading officials whilst the remuneration of subordinates is fixed at low figures is a bad one.” The next issue proved equally polarizing although it emanated from a proposal by the elite-dominated Board of Guardians, who requested the use of farmlands at Bowling Green Park to provide work for the “outdoor poor.” Councillor Hartley favored the proposal but was opposed by Alderman Holdsworth who suggested that such a use of park land “would not be to the advantage of either the Parks Committee or the Waterworks Committee.” The proposal was “scouted” by a somewhat less lopsided vote of thirty-two against twenty-one.

Two more issues occupied the council in this session. Alderman Jowett proposed that the city lease rather than sell municipal lands whose value had grown with the increase in population and economic activity. This proposal also went down to defeat. The Echoist noted that the Labour representatives would have the last laugh, as “time undoubtedly fights with the cause so ably championed by Alderman Jowett and his little band of colleagues.” Also defeated was a proposal for the construction of a new municipal art gallery. The measure would “remain a little while longer in the domain of ‘things that are to come.’ ” Ever optimistic, the Echoist argued that the council is “what people make of it. Our work lies with the Electors.” When the electors select different men to council, then “will come more enlarged and enlightened views of the possibilities of municipal government.” As an afterword, he noted that the “worthy gentleman”—an outspoken opponent of Labour—“after getting the worst of a verbal argument, fell back on his brute strength and wanted to fight one of the Labour representatives.” He also described the “gentlemen councillors” routinely attending committee meetings and council sessions while drunk.¹⁴¹

No issue better symbolized the persistent struggle of the Labour minority in the Bradford Council to meaningfully address the conditions of working-class life in the city than Fred Jowett’s campaign for municipal housing. Jowett had managed to secure committee appointments to the council’s Sanitary and Health Committees, which had typically shown little initiative beyond the traditionally narrow definition of their committees’ scope. What Fenner Brockway called “the blackest blot on Bradford … those rows of soot-covered back-to-back houses, separated only by brick yards and middens, unrelieved by a flower or a tree,” were also the site of the highest infant mortality and population density rates. Jowett’s first efforts to invoke the powers of the “Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890” led to a walkout by conservative members of the council, who sought to prevent discussion by denying him a quorum. By 1899, Jowett had become chairman of the Sanitary Committee and used that position to force through the conversion of privy middens (outdoor toilets) into water closets, something that landlords and their representatives strenuously objected to.

With support of the city medical officer, Jowett focused public attention on a notorious slum, Longlands, which from 1898 had become a concerted object of his attention. Declared an “insanitary area” by health officials, the district drew greater public attention. Jowett won support of the Housing Committee for a modest clearance and relocation scheme but in the face of property owners’ intransigence, the council voted thirty-three to nineteen to refer the proposal back to committee. Such action normally killed a proposal. But working with the committee and the health officer, Jowett came back a year later with a detailed scheme for demolition and the siting of new housing. The proposal squeaked through the council by a single vote on October 27, 1899. But, at the subsequent meeting, a Tory majority, emboldened by the November elections, reversed the decision by a forty-three to twenty-three margin, complaining that “the insanitation was due to the people rather than to their condition” and seeking greater compensation for property owners if any scheme were to advance. The indefatigable Jowett returned to the barricades and in 1901 brought forward still another plan for demolition and the erection of new dwellings to accommodate 1350 tenants, at an annual cost to the city of “little more than the salaries of certain officials.” With a strong majority of the Health Committee behind him, he maneuvered the defeat of another re-referral motion, and the plan was enacted. Jowett’s biographer, after hearing his account of the battle more than forty years later, went to see Longlands, “still drab and black with the workers’ houses and warehouses, but no longer a breeding ground of disease, destroying children in their infancy, denying health to others all their lives.” The dwellings may by then have been dated, “but they are well-built, clean, healthy and must have seemed palatial to those Irish families removed from cellars and attics and vermin-infested rooms.”¹⁴²

The power of the reigning parties in city council and the beleaguered status of the Labour minority called forth acrimonious exchanges and creative maneuvers in pursuit of what limited victories Labour might claim. Their youthful energy and aplomb and their commitment to municipal affairs quickened their efforts. Jowett’s colleague E. R. Hartley had been an unsuccessful candidate for council in four successive elections until he finally gained a seat in the 1895 by-election, only to lose it in the following regular election and win again the next year. Through hard-fought contests he won successive elections thereafter. On occasion, he recorded in his diary the seemingly endless and at times exhausting round of committee meetings, which often offered little immediate return for the effort.

Monday. 26 March 1900

Sewage at 10:30, followed by Finance at 11:30 lasting till nearly 1 o’clock. Trams at 4:30 then straight to School Board attendance, followed by Bd. Meeting. Brought Fair Contract forward … Hamnott 2nd but no one else voted for it.

Spoke for ½ an hour at [Choel] School on behalf of J.W. Waterhouse, C. Beardsall and Joe Walker. Was tired out.¹⁴³

After a hard-fought election the next year, which he won with a larger majority, he took stock of the toll the busy year had taken on his health and financial condition. He had given ninety-two lectures and speeches, and attended 200 committee, council, and school board meetings. Early in the year he was “more in bed than out” with bronchitis. Delegations from the ILP and Bradford Moor Ward rebuffed his efforts to retire from public work. They promised to raise money to clear his debts and replace the income he lost through inattention to his butcher business.¹⁴⁴

Hartley generally supported the initiatives taken by his fellow Labour councillors, though his style and demeanor at times unsettled his colleagues. At one point in the debate over the report of the Health Committee regarding Jowett’s housing initiative, Hartley demanded that other councillors cease their interruptions and if they would do so, “then I will try & be as mild as poss.” On another occasion, by his own account, he recorded, “we had a rather lively time” again over the housing issue.

[I] was subjected to usual interruptions and on threatening to make things hot we had a little scene. Ald Dobson just as last month rose to a pretended point of order, taking occasion to make a personal attack on me. This he was allowed to do in a speech which the chair … didn’t wish me to answer. I insisted on doing so and on further interruption from chair and others, told him to keep them sober as I couldn’t deal with drunken men. Wouldn’t withdraw … Rat [Ratcliffe] got up and moved … [I] no longer heard—then [I] defied them to stop me and after a haggle was allowed to finish.¹⁴⁵

Hartley’s contentiousness may have been partly congenital but also reflected a degree of calculation and self-deprecating humor. On one occasion, he observed that a Tory councillor was “very outspoken and could scarcely be kept in order; afterwards it was said reason was he sat in my chair.” But the battle was wearing and at times he ventured a note of discouragement. “I am beginning to wonder if the Bradford folks really want me. I have honestly tried to give my best in every sense to our people here and when chances to leave [Bradford] came in my way, said, no! my work is here.”¹⁴⁶

The way forward for the little band of Bradford councillors may have required a degree of cooperation and compromise, but Hartley at times resisted even his comrade Jowett. At a party meeting to decide whether to accept a quid pro quo with the Liberals and not contest a constituency, a debate ensued.

Fred Jowitt [sic] moved we didn’t fight, through an excellent speech for his side, which was indeed a bit of splendid special pleading ‘special circumstances … ingratitude, etc.’ but really it was the old old issue, shall we be true to our principles or shall we turn our sails to every breeze—policy v. principle. I spoke as quietly as possible though heavily burdened with the feeling of the real seriousness of the issue and policy was well beaten. Another fight will probably settle the matter for good, but next fight will be a stiffer one.¹⁴⁷

As the ILP made gains in the Bradford Council early in the new century, Hartley’s position stiffened further. His commitment to unadulterated socialism and his suspicion of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s pact with the Gladstonian Liberals led him eventually to join and briefly lead the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In 1909 he wrote, “The parliamentarians hold that the platform given by their membership of the House of Commons is worth all the little compromises to get there.” But seats taken with Liberal acquiescence could only be held with Labour’s continuing acquiescence to Liberalism. “If the Socialist-Labour Party is not to become a mere wing of the Liberals their next battle cry must be: ‘Death to Liberalism.’ ”¹⁴⁸

A Path Forward

Jowett but not Hartley would live to witness the new era of Labour’s municipal assertiveness in the postwar era. With only modest victories in the early years of the century, the “Labour group” in the city council claimed new power following the elections in November 1919. The group comprised twenty-seven members and caucused in advance of each council meeting to agree on strategy and objectives. With a sense of power to assert their interests, they resolved “to ignore the other two parties in any suggestion to secure chairmanships” of committees. And in a specially called meeting they agreed to support the construction of a new reservoir but to push the principle of “carrying out the works by direct labour.” A request from the secretary of the Labour Party to attend the group meetings of councillors was not granted, although they resolved to send a report of group activities to the local Labour Party at the end of each year.¹⁴⁹

A threshold of labor power, parallel to but distinct from Labour’s parliamentary presence, had been defined in cities and towns across Britain. The gains made by local labor parties in the immediate prewar years would be augmented by the wartime struggles of Labour at the local level to produce a new and determined independence of municipal Labourites in the postwar era. Labour’s role in city councils may have seemed constrained in prewar Britain and elsewhere, but with an incrementally growing strength they placed before the voters a vigorous and multifaceted agenda of municipal socialist measures. In time and with a broadened municipal franchise they would see to its implementation.

4

“Like a Pike in a Carp Pond”:
Municipal Socialism in Germany¹

Rosa Luxemburg and the Polemics of Revisionism

Rosa Luxemburg, the talented, ambitious Polish émigré, already seasoned in the revolutionary politics of Polish and Russian exile communities in Switzerland, sought more fertile fields for her revolutionary aspirations. German social democracy appeared to offer this new world of opportunity. But her introduction was not without difficult adjustments. When she arrived in Berlin on May 20, 1898, she found a “strange, friendless city with straight streets and stiff-backed people,” as biographer Peter Nettl described it. “She disliked the place from the moment she arrived.” But it offered the compensation of “serious socialism in a cold climate.”² As luck would have it, she arrived amid the emerging controversy over revisionism in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and she immediately made her views felt through a series of articles in the prominent Leipziger Volkszeitung that appeared in September 1898 and April 1899. She was first out of the gate in a systematic and unqualified critique of Eduard Bernstein’s perspective on the tasks facing socialists at the end of the 1890s and the theoretical implications they held for Marxism.³

An assertive and talented immigrant woman, Luxemburg was eager to plant roots and become influential in the German SPD. But she experienced repeated and, in some ways, humiliating “failures” to establish herself as an influential editor at one or another prominent SPD newspaper. Her resilience and her ambition were undeterred as she tacked between a strident polemical posture and accommodation to the party’s established leadership. As Nettl phrased it, “she had to put up with it or shut up” in pursuit of influence within the party. “She had made her position clear from the start. Her sex was irrelevant; she indignantly refuted the official suggestion that, like Clara Zetkin, she might find her natural habitat in the women’s movement.”⁴

Through active participation in the party’s electoral campaigns, she navigated toward a greater position of influence at the leadership core of the party—especially drawing on her ability to mobilize Polish workers in Upper Silesia. She jockeyed for opportunities to speak at party congresses and pointedly attacked political opponents in prominent SPD publications. As she wrote to her sometime lover, Leo Jogiches, in May 1899, “I badly need to write in such a way as to act on people like a thunderclap, to grip them by the head—not of course through declamation, but by the breadth of outlook, the power of conviction and the strong impressions that I make on them.”⁵

The party’s “revisionist” controversy provided just such an opportunity. In the Leipziger Volkszeitung, a publication for which she would eventually serve briefly as co-editor with Franz Mehring, she led the attack on Eduard Bernstein’s theoretical challenge to party orthodoxy. She framed the dispute with Bernstein as a conflict between the traditional Marxist view that the inevitable contradictions of capitalist development would produce a collapse and open the door for revolutionary socialist transformation, and the revisionist view that a gradual process of socialist-inspired reform, the byproduct of rising working-class consciousness, would ultimately erode and eventually displace capitalism. For Luxemburg, the critical failing of Bernstein was his apparent abandonment of a final goal of proletarian revolution, as Manfred Steger and others have pointed out. Indeed, Bernstein was quite explicit. “The final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me, the movement is everything.”⁶ Luxemburg argued that the revisionists harbored a misguided faith that “the trade union struggle for hours and wages and the political struggle for reforms will lead to a progressively more extensive control over the conditions of production,” and that the “capitalist proprietor” will be consigned to “the role of a simple administrator.” To the contrary, she asserted the state does not represent “society” or the interest of “the rising working class,” but rather is “the representative of capitalist society.” And “the so-called social reforms are enacted in the interests of capital.”⁷ Her attack on Bernstein’s argument and her affirmation of the “traditional” view of capitalism’s inevitable decline catapulted her into the front rank of the critics of revisionism and made her a major voice for party orthodoxy, less timid than other, more cautious leaders like Kautsky and Bebel. However, despite the credit she gained as a polemicist, she found herself marginalized within the party, navigating the treacherous shoals of internal division. The “old men” leading the party alternately encouraged her and stifled her ambitions.

After a short tenure as editor of two prominent social democratic publications, Luxemburg adjusted her goals. As Peter Nettl put it, “Henceforward Rosa Luxemburg would accept the implications of her temperament and remain an outsider seeking influence but despising power, attacking the hierarchy’s inevitable efforts to cover up for its members, finally attacking the hierarchy—or ‘ruling clique’ as she called it—for its very existence.”⁸

For Luxemburg, a central challenge was refuting the persistent impulses within the SPD to invest more confidence in parliamentary strategies than warranted by political conditions of bourgeois “democracy.” “In bourgeois society Social Democracy is confined by definition to the role of an opposition party; it can only appear as a ruling party on the ruins of that bourgeois society.”⁹ A challenge to party orthodoxy came with the “special conditions” posed by the participation of the SPD in South German state and local elections, or what Nettl termed, “an established tradition of co-operation and participation by the SPD in communal affairs, with the party providing its electoral quota of local government officials.”¹⁰ Here too, Luxemburg’s voice would be heard loud and clear.

“Der Fall Lindemann”

Municipal socialism had no more persistent advocate in Germany than Hugo Lindemann. He challenged the party leadership over the importance of municipal work during the 1890s. He was the point person in the debates over municipal issues at the party congresses in 1902 and 1904. His pamphlets, books, and articles in Kommunale Praxis, the party journal devoted to municipal politics, enjoyed wide circulation. He authored an influential book on municipal socialism and city governance in Britain, based on a three-year sojourn in that country during the 1890s. And, like many of his prominent party comrades, including left-wingers Paul Singer and Wilhelm Liebknecht but also Eduard Bernstein in Berlin, Lindemann served as a city councillor in his home city, Stuttgart.¹¹ In 1911, he decided to run for Oberbürgermeister (mayor) of Stuttgart and received the backing of his local party organization. Almost immediately, debate erupted in the columns of the party press.¹²

Campaign Flyer, Hugo Lindemann for Oberbürgermeister (Mayor) in Stuttgart, 1911

Rosa Luxemburg weighed in with a polemic in the columns of the Leipziger Volkszeitung warning that a Social Democrat in such an office would make it difficult for party members to criticize the administration of city affairs. He would also open up the party to charges of corruption in the distribution of major and minor appointed offices. She, and other correspondents writing in the chief party organ, Vorwärts, insisted that party discipline be exercised and his candidacy be opposed. Karl Kautsky titled his essay in Die Neue Zeit, ‘Ein Parteigenosse auf Urlaub’ (“An Errant Comrade,” or literally “A Comrade on Holiday”). He worried that contending for a position of limited power constituted a breach in party discipline and would undermine its capacity to be an effective oppositional voice. Eduard Bernstein agonized over the controversy, expressing respect for Lindemann’s competence, but voicing reservations over the value of holding such a fundamentally powerless office in a city where the municipal council had a bourgeois majority. At the same time, he defended Lindemann against the attacks of Luxemburg and Kautsky over his disloyalty to the party. In the end, the debate proved moot because Lindemann lost to the Liberal candidate, though by only a slim margin (13,154 to 12,278).¹³ Lindemann’s near victory in a major city demonstrated the growing influence of social democrats in city politics more generally, but especially in the southern and western states, where municipal socialism showed resilience and some success.¹⁴

But the problem of how and under what circumstances socialists might assume co-responsibility for governance with bourgeois liberals, when the SPD lacked a governing majority, persisted as a point of contention from the earliest efforts of some Berlin activists to the eve of the world war. This issue was a source of conflict among socialists in every country where their electoral performance showed improvement but fell short of achieving governing majorities. The so-called “Fall Lindemann” in 1911 brought those debates to a critical point. By some accounts, as many as 8,000 SPD members held municipal elective office by 1914.¹⁵

The SPD: Structure and Internal Schisms

During the prewar era, social democratic politics in Germany acquired legendary status as the preeminent model of socialist electoral success in the industrial world. Facing severe political restrictions under the anti-socialist law of 1878 and with a number of its key leaders in exile until the lifting of the ban in 1890, the SPD nonetheless built a formidable party structure. As Adam Przeworski notes, the SPD was already the largest party in Germany when the anti-socialist law was lifted in 1890 and by 1912 had increased its share of the Reichstag vote to 34.8 percent, more than double that of its closest competitor.¹⁶ Guided by the Erfurt Program adopted in 1891, the party had prescribed an uncompromising electoral strategy focused on gaining strength nationally in the Reichstag. Erfurt’s “bipolar” emphasis on theoretical revolutionary transformation alongside practical democratic and social reforms left the party with contradictions that internal struggles would only exacerbate in the years that followed. Nonetheless, the “Erfurter Programm” contained language that left a place for the democratization of city politics, including support for direct legislation by referendum and recall, and more broadly, “self-determination and self-government by the people in empire, state, province and municipality.”¹⁷

The rhetoric from both the revolutionary and reformist wings of the SPD acknowledged a place for municipal socialism, but the party nevertheless largely treated city politics as a stepchild and a distraction from the main tasks of national party-building and political agitation.¹⁸ The revisionist controversy brought to the surface the fundamental division embedded in the Erfurt Programm. The program papered over political differences but left in place a party leadership committed to building what Peter Nettl has called a “pariah” or “inheritor” party insulated within cultural and political limits of its oppositional posture that precluded cooperation with reformers. The leadership “advocated strength through abstinence and the growth of the party in isolation.”¹⁹ At the same time, in some regions and certain cities, party activists continued to function in ways that challenged the disengagement of the party’s central functionaries from practical politics. This split between an intransigent and uncompromising core and a pragmatic and reformist periphery within the party never went entirely away. Its presence animated debate at party congresses. It found its way into competing party organs, most notably Die Neue Zeit and Sozialistische Monatsheft. But the processes of party building reinforced the isolation of the SPD and its members. The inability of party leaders to acknowledge the struggles of local activists within the political arena of cities signified a party that had lost touch with some segments of its own rank and file.²⁰ Symptomatic of the insular SPD leadership was its failure to acknowledge the extent of municipal-level activity as reported in its own semiofficial organ, Kommunale Praxis, founded in 1901. That journal functioned largely outside the orbit of official party discourse. Its marginalization is reflected in the failure of standard histories of the SPD to mention the publication or the extent of municipal mobilization. The strengthening of the party and its bureaucratization reinforced inward centralizing tendencies that diminished ideological debate and made the party leadership even less assailable. What a number of historians have described as a “state within a state” came increasingly to mimic its antithesis, as Ritter has observed:

One can see on the other hand (for example) in the organization of the Social Democratic Executive and its permanent/standing election officials an unintended reflection of the constitutional structures of Imperial Germany and its system of political management in which ministers delegate authority to subordinate officials.²¹

Robert Michels, a participant-observer in the SPD, described a working-class leadership that had transcended its class position. For them, at least, the organization functioned as a Klassenerhöhungsmaschine (a mechanism for class mobility) and “the fate of the social democrats was chiefly determined by the party’s parliamentary leadership in the interval between the seven-day-long party congresses.”²² This development, in Michels’s view, was not without consequence for the future development and isolation of the party leadership from the rank and file and the model it offered for other social democratic movements.²³ Robust though the party became in the years before the Great War, its isolation and its bureaucratic and intellectual centralization consigned it to a position of relative powerlessness. That posture was not without its critics from the left, most notably the radical faction that coalesced around Rosa Luxemburg. But “localist” elements also perceived in the realm of the city openings for claiming some measure of power and for improving the day-to-day lives of workers, in spite of the suffrage restrictions imposed on municipalities.²⁴

SPD Political Practice Before 1890

German socialists’ interest in municipal politics had its origins in the party’s early years. From the outset, locally oriented activists confronted an ideology that privileged state and national political action and viewed municipal politics as marginal to the party’s revolutionary aspirations. The Lassallean tradition harbored deep-seated suspicion of the influence of bourgeois reformers and the essential powerlessness of municipalities in the Prussian state system. They feared workers’ representatives in the municipal Rathaus could be simply treated as Bettler (beggars). But, as Volker Wünderich has argued, “These understandable reservations regarding municipal politics produced a current in social democracy that up to 1890 only slowly subsided and even thereafter remained firmly embedded in the hearts of partisan party members.”²⁵

Berlin

The onset of the anti-socialist laws in 1878 crystallized a division in the movement between an underground “inner” wing whose activities were sharply curtailed, its ideology deeply skeptical of any compromise with bourgeois political interests, and a public wing that engaged in political mobilization through Arbeiterwahlverein (workers’ electoral associations). After a tentative countermobilization in 1878, when the anti-socialist laws had not yet been fully put into effect, the associations in Berlin advanced a platform signed by eleven prospective Social Democratic candidates for municipal council. They pledged principles that focused on substantive reform of municipal taxes and municipalization of key services. As a last point, they addressed reform of the exclusionary municipal franchise. The workers’ electoral associations emphasized their distinctive commitment to electing workers to municipal office, “something that the Progressive Party had made no attempt to do.”²⁶ The November 1883 municipal contest witnessed the election of five party members to city council in Berlin, among them the emerging party leader, Paul Singer. This breakthrough intensified the internal party debate over the value and place of municipal politics.²⁷

Singer was well-situated to lead the Social Democrats’ entry into municipal politics. Experienced in the ways of municipal administration through his work with the Asylvereins (Organization for Asylum Seekers), worldly and well-versed in the manners of the local bourgeoisie, he was nonetheless deeply loved by the working class as an articulate and compassionate social democrat. Most importantly, he saw value in the working class asserting its interests within the municipal realm. On the eve of the municipal election in 1884 he put forward a defense of social democrats’ attention to municipal politics.

The workers must be aware that the city is of serious consequence to them, that they have a voice in the administration of the city, and that each worker should put forward the essential truth of his condition. Nor should the councillors representing the workers’ party hold back from expressing fully their convictions.²⁸

In 1887, faced with an impending reelection campaign for the seats held by the Social Democratic councillors in Berlin, party activists engaged in a spirited debate over the value and meaning of continued minority representation. Critics, especially from the “inner movement,” worried that some of the representatives, excluding Singer, did not fully defend party principles. Singer offered a strong defense of the importance of continuing to contest for municipal office. He cited the “agitational value” of the elections themselves and the need to block “harmful measures.” “Far from overestimating the work of city management based on its decisive influence or still other assumptions, some good can also be achieved through resistance and that is, in our opinion, the primary task for the present time.”²⁹

The “inner movement” undertook to block municipal efforts by calling for a boycott of the special municipal election in 1887, occasioned by the resignation of three socialist councillors. They argued in the columns of the Berliner Volkstribune that participation in the municipal campaign could only have trivial significance since all important questions pertaining to capital and labor had to be addressed legislatively at the level of the Bundesstaaten (state governments) or the Reich. Such local activism represented a distraction for the party.

Municipalities have virtually no power to achieve any of the substantial political objectives of our party, so neither for socialism nor for democratic reform could there be hope of success that would be meaningful for working people. Therefore, be unified to a person and defend the complete election boycott.

The rival Berliner Volksblatt responded by asserting the importance of the municipality as an employer, arbitrator, and provider of social insurance, as well as other welfare services. In the end, a large majority of the assembled party activists voted to select candidates for the municipal contest.³⁰

Singer and his socialist colleagues on the council continued to use what influence they could muster among reforming liberal members of the majority to consider key elements of the program. These initiatives included challenging the practice of magistrates denying voting rights to those who were granted poor relief but were incapable of repaying by installments. They advocated using municipal employees to carry out city services; and they pushed for the reform of municipal taxes through a progressive income tax as opposed to the tax on renters. The results were mixed at best, and although the entry of Social Democrats into the council chambers “would shatter the homogeneity of the previous elite governing committees,” Singer made every effort to ease the transition, while maintaining the commitment of the socialists to implementing their principles.³¹

Saxony and Bavaria

Berlin was not alone as local socialists probed the possibilities for municipal political action under the suffocating influence of the anti-socialist laws in the 1880s. By 1890, those limits had been tested in diverse cities across the Reich—including Magdeburg, Kiel, Potsdam, München, and Leipzig. In Bremen the SPD by 1890 had elected nine members to the upper chamber of the city council, and in Fürth (Bavaria) the SPD formally entered the city’s governing coalition.³²

Modest though these victories were, municipal campaigns nonetheless precipitated sharp controversy over reformism between municipal activists, like Singer, and the party’s inner circle during 1887–88, and again at the first party congress after the lifting of the anti-socialist laws in 1890 at Halle, stimulated in part by the “youth” revolt” against party orthodoxy. But, at least after the removal of the anti-socialist laws, party leaders acknowledged that for the time being the principled pursuit of a municipal socialist agenda would maintain a place, however tenuous, in the overall political agenda of the party.

The peculiar political environment dictated by the period of anti-socialist repression from 1878 to 1890 had channeled political energies into limited spheres but also fostered a culture of revolutionary aspiration in which survival as a party required caution, circumspection, and secrecy.³³ The party leadership feared that corruption and fatal compromise might necessarily accompany any cooperation with bourgeois reform parties. Kautsky’s “sozialdemokratischer Katechismus” perfectly captured the ambiguity of “a revolutionary but not revolution-making party.”³⁴ Gerhard A. Ritter classically characterized the insular, revolutionary party that emerged in the 1890s, profoundly stamped by the experience of anti-socialist repression.

The character of the party as a state within a state acquired its identity during these years. In the local party and trade union organizations socialist workers found not only an organization to fulfill their political and economic interests but also a spiritual home and a community of likeminded, which shaped their social life and the use of their free time.³⁵

Nonetheless, a countercurrent, stronger in some localities and regions than others, continued to affirm the value of local political engagement and practical reform in the municipal arena.

The “Revisionist Controversy” and a New Politics of Urban Reform

The burgeoning growth of the party after 1890 and the enrollment of a larger and more diverse membership produced a deepening contradiction between theory and daily practice. As historian Volker Wünderich has perceptively noted, “In addition to the radical program, which would be retained, a reformist practice spread that placed greater emphasis on the value of their activity in the daily give and take on a path toward the conquest of political power.”³⁶ While the party professed skepticism or outright hostility toward collaboration with bourgeois reform interests, those within the party committed to practical reform in the municipality created their own nexus of activism. It provided a springboard for the revisionist position Bernstein would articulate. Exiled in England, Bernstein drew both on his observations from afar of German conditions and closer at hand the political practice of the recently-formed Independent Labour Party. Ritter noted that “revisionism” must be understood as a complex of different streams of criticism directed at the received orthodoxy of the party. In his view, “the slow crumbling of this enclosed world of ideas of the Social Democratic Party under the impact of these cumulative critiques could hardly be masked by the weak attempt to reformulate the theoretical foundation of the party’s tactics.” Historian Adelheid von Saldern noted the contradictions within the party regarding the pursuit of municipal socialist reform. In her view, it is problematic to see municipal socialism as a unifying bond between the Bernstein and Kautsky wings of the party, while, at the same time the dominant centrists sustained their revolutionary self-image.

Even if revisionism had assimilated municipal politics as a legitimate branch of the theory of social revolution and municipal work been alloted greater meaning in the present circumstance, the position of the party centrists around Karl Kautsky would still have been characterized by uncertainty and vague discourse.³⁷

These contradictions would be sharpened in a series of debates over tactics that erupted during the 1890s around whether to participate in or boycott the Prussian Landtag (state legislature) elections, whether to abstain from voting on state budgets, and whether under any circumstances to ally with reform elements of the bourgeois parties.³⁸

Unacknowledged in most of the historical writing on the party’s development in these formative years is the implicit challenge to leadership from those who argued for expanded engagement with municipal politics. Bernstein spoke approvingly on occasion of Kommunalpolitik as “a school in which workers learned to share political responsibility.” Bernstein also spoke from experience as an elected city councillor in Schöneberg (Berlin) in defense of the relevance of cities and the importance of municipal franchise reform. Others argued for a municipal elections program, initially as a propaganda tool, but also noted its rising practical effect locally. Municipal activism represented for many the most concrete manifestation of socialist engagement with practical politics.³⁹

The worldwide strike wave of the 1890s coincided with critical theoretical and practical shifts in the world socialist movement that lay the groundwork for a new era of political experimentation. Fueled as these political experiments were by a new collective confidence and by renewed internationalism embodied in the formation of the Second International, working-class activists also benefited from more forthright debate over the political uses of mass strikes and the possibilities for reform as alternate paths to socialist transformation. The social democratic leadership in Germany and in exile cast a rather long theoretical shadow that reaffirmed proletarian revolution as the outcome of an inevitable weakening and ultimate collapse of capitalism, but it also defined a minimum program of agitation for reforms that might set the stage for but not in fact produce revolution.

The Erfurt Program, adopted by the SPD in 1891, reflected precisely the dualism that would eventually play out in the “revisionist controversy” later in the decade. The “theoretical” portion was drafted by Kautsky, while Bernstein’s “fingerprints” (with Engels’s concurrence) were all over the practical “social-democratic program of action.” The specific planks drafted by Bernstein placed highest priority on the adoption of “general, equal, direct voting rights” at all levels of government, including the municipality, as well as the people’s right to “Selbstbestimmung und Selbstverwaltung” (self-determination and self-government) in “the empire, the state, the province and the city.” The program further called for protecting the right to free speech, women’s rights, free secular education, free medical care, and progressive tax increases based on valuation of property, estates, and incomes.⁴⁰ As political theorist Manfred Steger has noted, Bernstein’s moderate portion of the program “stood in marked contrast to the radical language of its ‘theoretical’ part.” This dualism reflected “Engels’ solution of endorsing tactical reformism ‘on the way’ to revolution.” But Erfurt “did little to bridge the party’s growing gap between radical theory and grad-ualist practice.”⁴¹ During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Bernstein’s inclinations toward programmatic reform would feed his latent doubts about the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse. Economic recovery in the capitalist economies of the late 1890s reinforced those convictions. As Steger has observed, for Bernstein, the iron logic of Marx and Engels’s metaphysics, “spinning out the ‘logical somersaults of Hegelianism,’ ” belied the “ ‘concrete facts’ of specific economic developments which would have provided the necessary empirical correction to ‘self-deceptions they entertained about the actual course of [current] events.’ ” In somewhat contradictory fashion, Bernstein at once affirmed their “final goal” but also claimed that the “ ‘final goal cannot be constructed a priori in abstract fashion,’ but had to be formed ‘from within the practical struggles of the movement itself.’ ”⁴² Bernstein’s pragmatism fed his perception that the way forward in the social struggle had to come from experimentation and flexible adaptation to the changing circumstances of world capitalism, not a rigidly prescribed formula drawn from another historical moment and circumstance. That view reflected the historical circumstances of the 1890s when his “evolutionary socialist” thinking diverged from his SPD colleagues ideas. It also grew naturally from his vantage point as an internationalist observing and digesting the implications of a rising tide of working-class political mobilization beyond German borders.

Although Bernstein rankled at the term “scientific socialism” as rigidly prescriptive, he believed strongly that ethical commitment to socialist ideals (and even party discipline) must be combined with open scientific inquiry into the shifting circumstances the socialist movement faced. To adhere, as Steger notes, to the “speculative metaphysics” of a closed Marxist teleology, as Kautsky and Bebel did, was a “threat to the future political viability of the labor movement.”⁴³

Bernstein found himself an exile in Britain after his expulsion from Switzerland in 1888. He remained an exile even after the expiration of the anti-socialist laws in Germany, and the experience further fed his appetite for a theoretically coherent revision of orthodox Marxism. Bernstein’s memory of his arrival in London is marked by his recollection that the London County Council (LCC), “elected upon a fairly democratic suffrage,” came into being as a centralizing force out of a “heterogeneity” and “promiscuity” of individual villages and towns that had coalesced into “this mighty metropolis.” Bernstein noted that the LCC “soon acquired a certain notoriety as a novelty in the sphere of Municipal Socialism.” He vividly remembered the lay of the urban landscape and “a few streets” in the neighborhood of King’s Cross, “which belonged to the category of slums—that is the spawning-places of outward and inward demoralization and depravity.”⁴⁴ In such an environment, a municipal version of socialism made all kinds of sense.

Bernstein’s observation of the rise of the ILP, including while he was a guest at the party’s founding convention, and his ongoing debates with Fabian socialists reinforced the direction of his thinking. He found the “drawing-room socialism” and the superior air of the Fabians disconcerting, “as though two different worlds were indulging in a polite exchange of opinion without the advantage of a common terminology.” But he also found Bernard Shaw’s critical mind and adaptive ideology appealing in its own way.⁴⁵ However much he respected and had learned from the detailed studies of “des Ehepaars Webb,” (the distinguished couple, the Webbs) he would nonetheless claim that Fabianism had little to do with the emergence of his own “revisionism.”

It had marginal influence on my socialist ideas. The widely assumed view, for example, that English Fabianism was a prototype for the development of my revisionism is completely erroneous. I have truly learned from my close acquaintance with the Fabian association and its prominent leader and his work but I have never been confused about the fact that its particular form of agitation was so adapted to English conditions that any attempt to adopt it on the continent must necessarily fail.⁴⁶

Nonetheless, Bernstein’s own writings in 1893–94 suggest the powerful imprint developments in England had on his thinking. In a series of articles, “Briefe aus England,” Bernstein subjected the shifting parliamentary currents and inter-party maneuvering in Britain to close and astute analysis. He was particularly attentive to the emergence of an “unabhängige Arbeiterpartei” (Independent Labour Party) in the “the large industrial towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire.” He continued to follow developments of this new party that had been created “with a thoroughly socialist program” but appeared vulnerable to pressures from existing socialist factions that had, in his view, a record of tactical failure. Bernstein’s flexibility and generally positive assessment of the new party signified his as yet not fully developed revisionist sensibility.⁴⁷ He seemed fascinated by the tactical maneuverings of the ILP, its incorporation of non-working-class socialist reformers, like John Lister from Halifax, and by the new popular enthusiasm stirred by such working-class leaders as Ben Tillett and Tom Mann. While his SPD comrades back in Germany settled into a principled if passive parliamentarism that in theory broached no ideological compromise, Bernstein asserted the virtues of adaptation and pragmatism. “’What made sense yesterday can be nonsense today,’” he argued. Without discounting the strategic value of capitalist crises, he believed “it would be irresponsible to let the expectation of a revolutionary crisis prevent the party from ‘doing whatever is necessary to foster the interests of the working class.’ ”⁴⁸ As Henry Tudor has perceptively noted, Bernstein may have been correct to deny that he had come to see Germany “through English spectacles,” but

he was particularly struck by the way the English establishment had accepted the socialist movement as a legitimate participant in the give-and-take of normal politics, and it seemed to him that popular pressure channeled through democratic institutions had achieved reforms which were not just window-dressing but had changed the very nature of society. In England, at least, the capitalist system was being modified, and it was being modified in the direction of socialism.⁴⁹

A particularly fruitful and often misinterpreted moment in the evolution of Bernstein’s revisionism came early in 1897 in a polemical defense of Marxism against the perceived vulgarization perpetrated by Wilhelm Liebknecht and his British disciple, H. M. Hyndman. After scrapping a proposed article, “War Marx ein Marxist?” (Was Marx a Marxist?) originally intended for publication in Die Neue Zeit during the fall of 1896, Bernstein offered the same views in a January 1897 speech before the London Fabian Society, entitled “What Marx Really Taught.” It was subsequently published in the Progressive Review as “Karl Marx and Social Reform.”⁵⁰ Bernstein offered an interpretation of Marx and Engels’s theory of practical revolutionary work that emphasized their adaptability to the changing historical circumstances they faced. Calling Marx a “revolutionary evolutionist,” Bernstein noted that Marx had acknowledged his overestimation of the ripeness for fundamental change that the circumstances of 1848 had appeared to present. He emphasized Marx’s method and his astute reading of the actual conditions faced. “To study the given economic conditions of society, to closely follow their march, to ascertain what to do—not from an imaginary perfect Socialist world, but from the very imperfect world we live in and its actual requirements—is therefore the task of the disciples of Marx.”⁵¹

While denying that Marx foresaw the advent of socialism as the result of “one great cataclysm,” he also did not discount class struggle as “the locomotive of history,” though he thought it might be manifested in contests for the control of legislation or the state itself. “But the class struggle is no less a reality because it has taken the shape of continuous barter and compromise.”⁵² In what, for the purposes of this study, may be his most telling passage, Bernstein argued that Marx had moved from an early unequivocal position advocating the conquest of state machinery, to opposing central state control of certain key functions like education, whose management was better “left to the municipalities or similar popular bodies.” In short, Bernstein said,

through democratization of local and municipal government, by increasing the functions and powers of local elected bodies, through a proper system of devolution and delegation of powers, the state was to be changed into a real commonwealth—not a power above Society, but a tool in the hands of an organized Democracy.⁵³

Even as Bernstein was drawn more deeply into intra-party ideological combat, he maintained the importance of the political engagement of workers in their own cities. In an 1899 interview in the Jewish Chronicle, he affirmed the importance of daily democratic struggles in the “State and Community.” “I contend that the immediate duty of Social Democracy is the battle for the political rights of the workers, the political participation of the workers in town and community in the interest of their class, and the economic organization of the workers.”⁵⁴

At roughly the same time, he more fully articulated the value of municipal political action by workers in his classic, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Prerequisites of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy). The “borough or municipal policy” of social democracy had for too long been “the step-child of the socialist movement.” Of necessity, social democrats would need to demand enhanced powers for the municipality, including “an extension of the right of expropriation … if a socialist policy of local government is to be possible.” Historically, in England (but only later in Germany) “social democracy found in the municipalities a rich field of fruitful activity before it succeeded in sending its own representatives to Parliament.” In short, he found “municipal socialism” to be “an indispensable lever for forming or completely realizing … ‘the democratic right of labour.’ ”⁵⁵

A Rising Tide of Controversy over Kommunalpolitik

By the early 1890s, the Erfurt Program, together with the practical political experience of Social Democrats in several cities, had opened political space and ideological cover for the municipal activism of local socialists. This was most notably the case in Berlin but also in southern cities that lay beyond the suffocating effects of the Prussian “three-class” voting system. But, as the debates at both the Halle (1890) and Erfurt (1891) party congresses showed, party regulars only conceded the legitimacy of socialist municipal politics in contingent and qualified ways. Opponents had voiced persistent concerns that municipal work held no promise of success. As Joachim Drogmann has noted, party leaders believed that “neither for socialism nor for democratic reform could there be hope of success that would be meaningful for working people.” City councillors risked dangerously compromising socialism through collaboration with bourgeois interests. Despite the opposition, a rising chorus of supporters argued for the practical utility of contesting municipal elections to demonstrate the party’s viability and its capacity to use these contests for agitational purposes. A delegate from Dreesbach argued that despite socialists’ inability to implement their proposals for municipal governance, “we must show that we are a viable party and intend to make the widest possible use of the vote.”⁵⁶

While the Halle and Erfurt party congresses secured a place for municipal politics, the leadership remained skeptical of its value. However, the growth of municipal activism and modest success in municipal elections created new pressures on party leaders. In their report to the 1896 party congress, they were forced to acknowledge the extent of that success. Still, they remained deeply concerned that cooperation with bourgeois councillors in municipal bodies might lead to the infiltration of opportunists in the ranks of the party and the muddling of socialist consciousness. As August Bebel told the 1892 Berlin Party Congress, “We cannot prevent it that today ‘every Tom, Dick and Harry’ aligns himself with social democracy. These people believe themselves to be socialists, even though they are not, and we run the risk that their confusion will bring disorder into our ranks.”⁵⁷

In the aftermath of the Frankfurt congress in 1894, Kautsky sought to clarify the meaning of the Erfurt Program. He acknowledged that there was much in the second half of the program that was consistent with bourgeois democratic and social reform ideas. But he held that what distinguished the socialist program was not the individual demands but the “overall character of our movement,” arguing that “they were shaped by the class struggle of the revolutionary proletariat and as a result stand in direct opposition to bourgeois democracy as well as bourgeois social reforms.” In his review of “so-called municipal socialism” he noted the strategic location of the proletariat concentrated in cities with large-scale enterprises and commercial connections to the world market, but also that the power of the proletariat was severely circumscribed there compared to cities in France or England. “It is self-evident that under otherwise similar circumstances, namely similar voting rights, the proletariat could have as decisive power in the local governments of the major industrial cities, as it might in the imperial government.”⁵⁸ This qualified and largely hypothetical support for Gemeindesozialismus (municipal socialism) complemented his more thoroughgoing critique of the backward-looking and even reactionary position of agrarian advocates of “Dorfkommunismus” (village communism) and “Genossenschaftswesen” (producer cooperatives.)⁵⁹

Even as the SPD turned inward to purify itself as a bona fide “revolutionary” party, some elements of the party turned outward to consider the relevance of other socialist models. In response to depression conditions and rising working-class discontent, the party’s “radicals” embraced the possibilities of the “mass strike” as a revolutionary tool. (See discussion in chapter 2.) While the challenge posed by “die Jugend” (the youth movement) at the Halle Congress in 1890 had largely been defused, they remained a significant presence in the party’s ranks, stronger in some locales than others.⁶⁰ Party members in Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg took up the challenge of making the SPD relevant to farmers and smallholders. Continuing debate over die Agrarfrage (the rural question) and the willingness of party activists to participate in deliberations over budgetary matters in the Landtage (state legislatures) posed a direct challenge to party orthodoxy and figured prominently in the congress debates during the mid-1890s. At Frankfurt in 1894, Georg von Vollmar, who had emerged as the spokesman for southern dissenters, argued that the Bavarian SPD had acquired significant influence because “we tore ourselves away from all mechanical forms of agitation, studied the country and the people, and accommodated our agitation accordingly. If we were to change our tactic … our successes would disappear.”⁶¹ Or as Ritter argued unequivocally,

The decisive impulse for renewal of the politically weakened workers’ movement emerged not from the core of the party—its parliamentary faction and the central leadership—but was the consequence of the practical work of the social democratic state parliamentary factions in the south German states.⁶²

Hugo Lindemann, Karl Kautsky, and the Cities

Largely missing from the accounts of party factionalism in the 1890s is the emergence of a segment of the party that seized the opening provided by the Erfurt Program to focus on the reform possibilities in municipalities. Paul Singer and his cluster of SPD city councillors in Berlin had pioneered this strategy in the 1880s, along with scattered elected local officials in a number of other cities. From exile in England, Eduard Bernstein cautiously articulated views that rationalized local reform efforts, even as he protected his position as a voice for central party theoretical regularity. Also in England between 1892 and 1896, Hugo Lindemann, writing under the pseudonym “C. Hugo,” explicitly advocated party engagement with regional and municipal reform. He would also eventually criticize more broadly the party’s turn toward centralization. As Schorske noted, he warned that the party’s concentration of authority in the center “would give the central executive the same position in the party which the bureaucracy had in the state, that Social Democracy was in danger of imitating the autocratic state which it opposed.”⁶³ Lindemann argued for the party to strengthen its state and local organizations and to cease attacking “particularism.” He saw virtue in decentralization and local autonomy.

Municipal autonomy obviously assumes administration by the elected representatives of the people, not through the bureaucrats. In autonomous self government we have the strongest organizational bulwark against the authoritarian state … Clearly the task is now to turn them into self-supporting independent entities that are capable of pushing forward in the institutions of local self-government their own powerful local politics without always waiting for directives from above.⁶⁴

Lindemann would emerge as the leading SPD advocate for Gemeindepolitik⁶⁵ (municipal politics) in the mid-1890s. Born in Brazil in 1867, he had studied economics at various universities in Germany before graduating in 1889. Between 1892 and 1896 he pursued advanced studies in England, but even before returning to Germany his writing had appeared in Neue Zeit. Like Eduard Bernstein he was deeply influenced by his sojourn in England. In 1894 he published Handbuch des Sozialismus. But increasingly he was inclined to view the city as the critical realm of socialist engagement. That perspective would be fully on display with the publication in 1897 of his study of municipal socialism in England, Städteverwaltung und Municipalsozialismus in England (City Administration and Municipal Socialism in England.)⁶⁶

By 1895, he had joined Eduard Bernstein as a contributor to Die Neue Zeit of articles on English politics and social conditions. In anticipation of Lindemann’s imminent return to Germany, Bernstein asked Kautsky to consider him for an assistant editor position in the periodical’s Stuttgart offices. While both Kautsky and Bernstein indicated some reservations about him personally—Bernstein described him as “inexperienced” and requiring close supervision—they nonetheless treated him as a worthy candidate. Joining the editorial staff in February 1896, Lindemann managed over the course of the next year to assume increasing responsibility, and a close association developed between his family and Kautsky’s. By late 1897, some evidence of distrust of Lindemann surfaced in the letters between Kautsky and Bernstein. Kautsky expressed a reluctance to permit Lindemann to review a new book by the Webbs, about whom Kautsky also had increasing reservations, claiming that reviewing their work “violates our principles.”⁶⁷

In early 1897, dissonant perspectives were already infiltrating the columns of Die Neue Zeit. Bernstein, still sequestered in England in April 1897, wrote columns in successive issues that explored the “problems of socialism. The social/political meaning of space and numbers,” in which he affirmed the political significance of the municipality as opposed to the state. Shortly thereafter, an extended article by “C. Hugo” appeared comparing city governance in Germany and England. Celebrating the progress of socialism in British municipalities like Glasgow, Lindemann also prescribed an optimistic future for German cities enlivened by a new politics.⁶⁸

So it goes for German city governance. They need the force of fresh, powerful currents of life, by which they do not break down the old barriers with force and froth, but require new forms … A new free urban order for the German cities—that is the demand which the advance of democracy makes imperative.⁶⁹

Eduard Bernstein’s emerging revisionism, as noted above, was punctuated in January 1897 by his speech to the Fabian Society, “What Marx Really Taught.”

Among other things, Bernstein chose to highlight Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune and the historical logic of state unification. But he did so in a way that stressed the value of new democratic forces welling up within “local and municipal government” and the potential for transforming the state from below “into a real commonwealth.” This current in Bernstein’s early revisionist thinking, even if largely unacknowledged at the time, was clearly influenced by the growing experimentation with Kommunalpolitik among members of the SPD. That affirmation fore-shadowed the more explicit defense of municipal socialism that would come with the publication of his complete revisionist treatise in 1899.⁷⁰

By 1898, the party faced growing disharmony within its ranks. Overshadowed in some respects was the growing strength of municipal political activism. The number of cities in which local socialist Kommunalprogramme had been put forward grew significantly despite their generally limited electoral success. As Dieter Rebentisch has argued, local activists also established significant regional linkages as they sought some insurance against charges of parochialism. “The turn toward the creation of regional guidelines arose from widespread concern that the concrete work in the municipalities could lead to an excessive emphasis on local affairs.”⁷¹

Revisionism and municipalism

The revisionist challenge in the party had moved front and center by the fall 1898 party congress in Stuttgart. The party’s growing unease with Bernstein’s theoretical deviation, which in hindsight was evident at least since 1896, had become more pointed in the early months of 1898. An essay he published in Die Neue Zeit early that year contained the clearest statement yet on the course of capitalist development and its implications for the socialist movement. In perhaps his most famous lines yet, Bernstein wrote:

I frankly admit that I have extraordinarily little feeling for, or interest in, what is usually termed “the final goal of socialism.” This goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me, the movement is everything. And by movement I mean both the general movement of society, i.e. social progress, and the political and economic agitation and organization to bring about this social progress.⁷²

Routinely overlooked is another passage in the essay in which he directly disputed the contention of British socialist Belfort Bax, who had accused Bernstein of relegating the triumph of socialism to a distant doomsday, postponed for many generations. Bernstein argued that the fulfillment of a fully realized socialism may indeed be “a long way off yet.” But he outlined his alternative conception of socialist progress, which included a substantial focus on local political activity.

On the other hand, it is my firm conviction that even the present generation will see the realization of a good deal of socialism, if not in the patented form, then at least in fact. The steady expansion of the sphere of social obligations (i.e. the obligations of the individual towards society, his corresponding rights, and the obligations of society towards individual(s), the extension of the right of society, as organized in the nation or the state, to regulate economic life; the growth of democratic self-government in municipality, district, and province, and the extended responsibilities of these bodies—for me all these things mean development towards socialism or, if you will, piecemeal realization of socialism.⁷³

From this point, a straight line connects his “Problems of Socialism” essays in the spring, to the Stuttgart party congress in the fall 1898. Bebel had come to recognize by summer that, in his view, Bernstein was “beyond redemption” (unbekehrbar). He attempted to persuade Kautsky of Bernstein’s “fall from grace” (Sündenfall) and the necessity to distance himself from his comrade. Bebel now perceived that a narrowed circle of party leaders—Kautsky, Singer, Adler, Liebknecht, and himself—must gird for the looming battle with “Opportunismus.”⁷⁴ The ground was now well prepared for Stuttgart that October.

When the Social Democrats convened for their biannual congress on October 3, 1898, in Stuttgart, the atmosphere was already weighted with anticipation of a looming battle over “Revisionismus,” prefigured in party journals and in the correspondence and public comments by leading figures in the party. Although Bernstein’s views were not on the formal agenda—he after all remained in exile—debate surfaced almost from the outset in the discussion of the Reichstag elections and the role of the party press. Battle lines were drawn over the place, if any, of theory and ultimate goals in guiding the party’s program of practical reform. Heinrich Peus, a party delegate from Dessau, echoed Bernstein’s skepticism about a focus on “final goals.” Calling for attention to “the present needs of the masses,” Peus provocatively asserted, “In fact, I find the whole concept of a final goal repugnant, for there are no final goals.” Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg rose to challenge these “possibilists” and the notion that incremental reform might lead to socialism without a cataclysm. What gave the party its socialist identity, according to Luxemburg, was not the immediate reforms it advocated but rather a final goal, “the conquest of political power.” This would “ultimately necessitate an explosion, a collapse, at which point we will play the role of the syndic who liquidates a bankrupt company.”⁷⁵

Even though “die Bernsteiniade” dominated much of the debate at the congress and, in retrospect, was the catalyst for ongoing ideological fratricide in the party, Bebel’s decision to read a missive from Bernstein himself and the response to it by Karl Kautsky provided the most electric moment in the proceedings. Bernstein attempted to reiterate his central argument. “I have opposed the view that we stand on the threshold of an imminent collapse of bourgeois society, and that Social Democracy should allow its tactics to be determined by, or made dependent upon, the prospect of any such forthcoming major catastrophe.” In support of his argument, he drew on but also criticized the predictive value of “The Communist Manifesto.” He pointed to the historical tendencies that had strengthened, not weakened, capitalism. He even deployed Engels’s 1895 view that the Paris Commune had demonstrated that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Further,

the time for surprise political attacks, or “revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses” had now passed and … a large-scale confrontation with the military would be the means of delaying, even reversing for a while, the steady growth of Social Democracy; in short, that Social Democracy would flourish “far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow.”⁷⁶

Bernstein made clear at two different points in his letter that a democratic revolution from below would be the seedbed for reform. “We are seeing the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie gradually giving way to democratic institutions.” As specific examples, he cited factory legislation, “the democratization of local government and the expansion of its domain,” along with the freeing of trade unions and cooperatives from legal restrictions, and the consulting of labor organizations by public authorities in carrying out the work. At a second point in his statement, he made even clearer his conviction that the efforts of Social Democrats must be focused first and foremost on die Gemeinde.

As I am convinced that important stages in the development of nations cannot be leapt over, I set the greatest possible store by the immediate tasks of Social Democracy, viz. the struggle for the political rights of the worker, the political activity of workers in towns and municipalities for the interests of their class, as well as the work of organizing workers economically.⁷⁷

Bernstein’s statement set the stage for a more forthright debate on his views than the party had yet seen. For some, like Bebel and Kautsky, it was a painful moment of reckoning with the views of a dear comrade who had now directly challenged the party orthodoxy with which they were closely identified. For others, like Singer, whose extensive municipal political activity in Berlin seemed in many ways the embodiment of the prescription for reform Bernstein offered, it was a moment that called for ambiguity and circumspection. During the day of debate following the presentation of Bernstein’s letter and the immediate responses to it, Singer went out of his way to stress his fundamental support of party unity around the dominant faction led by Bebel and Kautsky. Year in and year out, he asserted, the party congresses had affirmed the point of view that

we are not in parliament for the sake of parliament, rather we are in parliament in order to represent and struggle for the demands of the working class. (Very true!) If this fundamental position is correct, then it is out of the question for those in Parliament to engage in tactical compromises, as many have advocated, but by the same token nor can we ever speak of exchanging cannons for popular legal methods.

But, even as he affirmed the principles he believed reflected party orthodoxy, he also warned against strict conformity. The immediate fulfillment of the party’s program would depend on the specific circumstances that presented themselves within parliament.

We are not after all a faction of automatons. We are a faction of living human beings, each with its own perspective. What unites us, what we all have in common, is our program. That is the duty we must fulfill. That is the battle to free the working classes … I would like to direct the appeal more generally toward the Party Congress for consideration that the fulfillment of the tasks put forward by the Party Congress faction are also dependent on the circumstances within parliament itself (Very true!).⁷⁸

Like the seasoned parliamentarian and municipal councillor that he was, Singer spoke, in the end, for tolerance toward the messy business of pursuing the party’s goals in a context that permitted only modest achievements. And this was precisely what he and his colleagues in the municipal trenches had been doing for a number of years.

A Kommunalprogramm Seeks Its Place

As the revisionism debate revealed, the gulf within the party between theory and practice was substantial. And the reigning theory imposed significant limitations on municipal practice. Its uncompromising position regarding votes on budgetary matters and its conviction that without franchise reform any substantive progress on concrete municipal issues would entail collaboration with bourgeois parties, still left a potential minefield of tactical choices. Some municipal activists were already probing paths into that field of reform that challenged the party leadership.

Not long after the close of the Stuttgart Party Congress, in December 1898, a conference of Social Democratic elected municipal officials (Gemeindevertreter) from Brandenburg convened and declared its intention to meet biannually and to establish a Kommission furthering the work of “the movement that is today very much in flux.” According to Ritter, these events coincided with growing involvement in local politics by local labor movements and surging international interest in such local activism in France, Belgium, and Switzerland.⁷⁹

Paul Singer opened the proceedings at the Brandenburg conference with a warning to the delegates that “we have before us the enticement that can undoubtedly be achieved through practical tactics but that must not bring us to cross the line that social democrats have defined. For a small gain we will not sell our principles.”

And he offered up a stark picture of the position in which local socialist elected officials must find themselves. “We stand alone in local government bodies in which we are divided by a deep cleavage from the bourgeois representatives over the expansion of the rights of the working class in the domain of the municipality.”⁸⁰

When the leadership of the conference presented a draft municipal program, Hugo Lindemann rose to challenge the narrowness of the program as a mere repetition of the party’s existing “action program.” During the course of the debate, Lindemann argued for a more expansive conception of municipal rights and powers. He advocated a wide-ranging municipal autonomy that would seize new domains of municipal administration. As Drogmann has noted, “[Lindemann] formulated the leading ideas for a social democratic municipal politics of the time that in combination with the municipalization of city services gave substance to the conception of municipal socialism.” Out of the conference came proposals, following the Belgian model, for a commission to guide the party’s municipal work and for a publication that might provide expert information to elected officials.⁸¹

Lindemann had emerged from the inner turmoil of the party as the leading voice for a cadre of party activists committed to furthering work in the municipal arena. Reflecting on the promising gathering in Brandenburg, he published an essay in a February 1899 issue of Die Neue Zeit. In the essay, “Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalverwaltung,” he called for the party to commit itself in a more concerted way to municipal politics. He drew inspiration from the conference, “hopefully as the first step of a gradual development of an all-embracing organization, first in Prussia and then throughout Germany in which active representatives of social democracy will leave a mark on municipal governance.” But to his disappointment, the proposal to develop a journal devoted specifically to “kommunale praxis” went largely unaddressed. An earlier publication, “Blättern für soziale Praxis,” had partially met this need from 1893 to 1895 but had eventually receded into obscurity and was taken over by a liberal journal, “Soziale Praxis,” no longer reflecting a social democratic view of urban problems. He spoke passionately of the isolation that socialist municipal activists in smaller towns and villages felt. The party had devoted itself extensively over the years to debate and documentation of the Agrarfrage (the agrarian question) but “over the whole sphere of municipal politics the old silence reigns.” He criticized the party leadership for condemning and occasionally expelling isolated individuals for deviation from party principles.

Who bears responsibility? The municipal councillor in the small city, who was not so well versed on the basic social democratic principles as the men of distinction in the large cities and the editors of metropolitan publications, and who in the middle of the conflict between practice and principles would be discredited? Or the whole party, whose countless and widely dispersed functionaries gave no directives for practical action, gave no enduring assistance, which alone might enable them, in the spirit of the party, to be able to carry out the essential work?

Lindemann proposed the formation of state associations of Social Democratic municipal officials (Gemeindevertreterverbände) and the publication of municipal materials in a periodical and in other forms that would provide guidance and best practices to local officials. He concluded with a challenge. “One can lead investigations through pamphlets and books. But discussion necessitates a periodical. And that we lack. How much longer?”⁸²

When the conference of Brandenburger SPD officials reconvened in late 1900, 93 out of a total of 130 elected local socialist officials in the province attended. The gathering had before it a series of specific proposals drafted by Paul Hirsch, who like Lindemann had emerged as a leading advocate for a more aggressive municipal politics.⁸³ Some proposals focused on expansion of municipally owned land, the acquisition of building sites, and the construction of inexpensive workers’ housing. Although Singer worried that with home ownership workers’ appetite for participation in the labor movement might diminish and they would bow “out of the great proletarian battles,” a majority of the delegates supported the proposal. Ironically, as Rebentisch has noted, Singer had done battle for twenty-seven years as a member of the Berlin City Council and even had fought for reforms that

set out to improve housing conditions, aspired to reform the maintenance of hospitals, put through a claim for city workers’ retirement funds, adopted a transportation system of “municipally-owned” streetcars, promoted a “Greater Berlin” consolidated organization, and formed coalitions with the liberals in a Progressive Peoples’ Party.

In short, “he conducted himself in practice as an unadulterated socialist reformer.”⁸⁴

Lindemann sensed that demands for a coherent municipal program were pressing forward on a number of fronts in the aftermath of the Brandenburg gathering in 1898. By 1900, the province could claim 550 elected SPD municipal officials. The local activists in Saxony, where a more lenient municipal franchise had been in effect for some years, pressed for the drafting of a unified Kommunalprogramm and called for a conference of local officials in March 1900 in Chemnitz. A Zentral-Agitationskomitee sent a draft program to Karl Kautsky for comment. He proceeded to redraft the introduction to emphasize his view of the limitations and contradictions inherent in municipal politics. He stressed the fundamental powerlessness of cities and the control ruling elites held over municipal affairs. These changes circulated to delegates at the conference sowed confusion. At the party’s regional conference a few weeks later, the delegates voted with only a handful of dissenters to reinstate the previous draft without Kautsky’s changes. Further challenges to Kautsky’s views appeared at the 1901 Schleswig-Holstein party congress in Kiel.⁸⁵ In Niederrhein, Kautsky’s view found more resonance but not without dissent. Clearly, by the first years of the new century, a strengthened independent party faction devoted to municipal work had emerged.⁸⁶ Kautsky himself seemed to acknowledge the growing support for municipal initiatives when, in a short essay in Die Neue Zeit entitled “Bürgermeister und Minister,” he attempted to differentiate local efforts to elect a municipal administrative officer from the entry of a single prominent Social Democrat into a central government cabinet as a minister in the governing coalition of an opposing party, as was currently being debated in the case of France with the Millerand case.⁸⁷ He knew of no statement by a party official that claimed it was “inconsistent with party principles” for social democrats to run for and win local positions such as Bürgermeister. But “it is an obvious demand of our tactics that every position we can win through our own strength, we must win.” For Kautsky the question was not “whether” the party should occupy governing positions or not, but “how” they should take possession of such positions. “The mayor is elected by the people and, indebted to them for his office, he is dependent on the voters.” Thereby his position is fundamentally different from the minister who owes his position to the power and authority of the president by whom he is appointed. He alerted, for instance, the “Hessian comrades” that “when the necessary conditions obtained” and “their assault on Bürgermeister positions” was undertaken, “every party comrade would rejoice and wish them well.” This question would be hotly contested within the party a decade later when Lindemann himself sought the position of Oberbürgermeister in Stuttgart and when Kautsky would take a more critical position on such undertakings.⁸⁸

The establishment of the new SPD periodical, Kommunale Praxis, in 1901 provided precisely the vehicle for which Lindemann had called in 1899. Under the editorship of Albert Südekum and with the close collaboration of Hugo Lindemann and Paul Hirsch, it became the locus for discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information on socialist approaches to municipal reform.⁸⁹ These developments seemed to reflect the emergence of a party faction that embodied key features of the practical action program adopted at Erfurt in 1891; they gave further substance to the revisionist call for the day-to-day work of democratizing and socializing German society. The SPD had become a divided party under one organizational umbrella.

The growing prominence of German social democrats’ activism in the municipal arena took on an international dimension with the unanimous adoption of a resolution supporting pursuit of “socialism in the cities” put forward by the Belgian delegation, at the International Socialist Congress in Paris in 1900. The resolution called for all socialists to engage the politics of municipal reform, even though “the reforms achieved through these activities represented only steps on the way toward the realization of a socialist society.” The carefully worded Belgian resolution prescribed a larger role for municipal activism as a staging ground for broader challenges to centralized state power:

Fuller municipal self-government is not only a fruitful field of activity around economic issues but also can be a superb foothold for socialists in opposition to the centralized power of the bourgeois state.

The Paris congress of the Second International approved recommendations to support a broad program of “achievable reforms” in all cities, to establish national bureaus that could disseminate information and expertise on municipal questions, and to call an “international conference of socialist city councillors.”⁹⁰

The first two years of the new century produced palpable progress for the advocates of a more vigorous municipal politics in Germany. Lindemann, in a review of developments, noted that the SPD had for too long neglected “Communalpolitik;” nonetheless he observed that “even more gratifying, in the last few years there has been a full-blown reversal of interest in the central questions pertaining to municipal politics.”⁹¹ Historically, he argued, the overriding focus in the SPD on the principle of centralization (Centralisationsgedankens) had been a long-established fact, rooted in reaction to the utopian beginnings of socialism. It gained strength because of the historical development of the state and the ongoing battle with the economic ideology of the bourgeoisie that powerfully shaped the methods of state governance. One measure of the progress in the movement was the increasing coherence and sophistication of the Communalprogramme that had been drafted for various localities. The initial programs for Stuttgart (1891), Leipzig (1892), and Dortmund (1893), for example, had lacked the inner organization and theoretical depth that characterized later programs for cities in Brandenburg or Schleswig-Holstein.

Lindemann identified the issues of greatest concern for furthering the democratization and socialization of the municipality. He recognized that first was “achievement of full self-government by cities,” which must include ultimate jurisdiction of city councils over their own affairs and local control of the police. In the interest of greater popular control, the assertion of local instead of state responsibility for the city’s own functionaries must be accompanied by reducing the unchecked authority of the council upper chambers (Magistrat) and mayors. He supported longer terms for councillors to enable them to acquire the expertise needed to manage complex urban responsibilities (the building and maintenance of water, gas, and electric utilities, streetcars, canals, etc.) and to effectively combat “the heightened danger of an official autocracy.”⁹² Wading into the morass of municipal finance, Lindemann subjected to critique the various tax proposals put forward in socialist municipal programs for a variety of cities. In principle, he argued for simplification and clarity and for progressive income, property, and estate taxes as well as taxes on the unearned increment of property values. He also asserted the need for sharply differentiating socialist tax principles from those of bourgeois social reformers. Like so much else in municipal affairs, this required a reordering of state and local legal responsibilities.

Many of Lindemann’s proposals had been foreshadowed in the program drafted by the Landeskonferenz der Sozialdemokratie Sachsens (State Social Democratic Conference in Saxony) in April 1900. The conference program, summarized by Ritter,

had to do with an unadulterated action program whose demands related to democratization of municipal election laws, reform measures for school, health and poor relief, revision of methods for contracting, betterment of the condition of city workers, municipalization of natural monopolies, and fundamental adjustment of fiscal matters through the elimination of all consumption and poll taxes. Also the individual proposals of the considerably broader Saxon municipal program demanded the realignment of the relationships between the state and cities with an eye toward increasing municipal autonomy.⁹³

With diverse initiatives coming from many local localities, some dissonance in programmatic direction was inevitable. In the conclusion to a subsequent essay in 1902, Lindemann acknowledged that diversity of views, but affirmed the argument of his comrade Paul Hirsch “that it is necessary for the healthy development of our municipal politics that we come to clarity and unity over the principal issues.”⁹⁴ The new party journal, Kommunale Praxis, provided an outlet for that diversity of voices and from its earliest days of publication situated the German experience in an international context. But the gathering momentum behind a new municipal socialist politics ultimately demanded legitimation in the national party congress. That discussion would come with mixed results at the party gatherings of 1902 in München and 1904 in Bremen.

Debating Municipalism at the 1902 and 1904 SPD Congresses

When the SPD Parteitag opened in Munich on September 14, 1902, the ground had been well prepared for discussion of a unified Kommunalprogramme. Hugo Lindemann, as spokesman for the municipally engaged faction of the party, appeared before the congress late in the afternoon of the fourth day to argue for adoption of a unified program. He began by acknowledging the interdependence of city and state. And he mocked the notion that cities could seek some kind of absolute autonomy.

The individual city is dependent on the economic structure of the state; not only is the power structure within the city decisive for progress but also for the division of power among the classes within the whole state political system. Just as we can hardly found communist colonies, so can we hardly have a communist city government within today’s political system, in which government and the legislative process would make quick work of such experiments.

Having acknowledged the power of the state, he asserted the municipalities’ interdependence. He claimed that the direct administration of cities by the state was laughable and that “the state would be helpless without the cities and would make the entire public administration patently bankrupt.” In contrast to England (which he obviously knew intimately), where collaboration between a segment of the bourgeoisie and the working class had produced a degree of accommodation to democratic principles, in Germany the bourgeoisie had made its peace with the empire and state bureaucracy and governed in fear of democratization and the working class. This circumstance dictated socialists’ priorities. “Our task must now be to bring to fruition the basic principles of democracy as part of a reorganization of municipal administration.”⁹⁵ Noting that “we place this proposition at the fore-front of our demands,” he proceeded to discuss in considerable detail the specific provisions of the Kommunalprogramm as formulated over the previous months and as he had discussed in his articles in Sozialistische Monatshefte earlier in the year. The already lengthy presentation broke off at 7 pm to be resumed the next morning. Having explored issues related to municipal self-government and the franchise, city-state relations, municipalization, and taxation, the next morning he in turn discussed other specific municipal concerns: housing, popular education, poor relief, higher-level schooling, municipal employment, the management of bids for municipal work, and other social legislation. In conclusion, Lindemann called on the party to take up the challenge of Kommunalpolitik. “In no other area of our party’s activity is there greater danger that the great democratic and socialist principles of our politics will be buried under the minutiae.” He called for a commitment to fundamental principles and the means of achieving them through unified action.

His lengthy presentation then opened a debate in which a number of specific resolutions were offered, including (from Clara Zetkin) advocacy of universal voting rights without respect to gender, (from a Hamburg delegate) the abandonment of all bidding in favor of direct municipal employment, and (from a Berlin delegate) the right of all municipal employees to self-organization. Delegate Frohme from Hamburg spoke in support of a focus on municipal politics, while acknowledging the diversity of circumstances and the imperfect programs that some localities had developed. He observed that the party risked bourgeois reformers “stealing the wind from their sails” in the municipalities. And, finally, in a peroration, he declared, “It is a truth … that the cities as an exemplary mass can cooperate in the overturning of existing social/political circumstances and create a new political system, and municipal self-government is a means to create a new social order. (Bravo!)”

At this point, as co-chair of the congress, Paul Singer acknowledged the significance of the discussion, the diverse circumstances and perspectives the party faced, and the urgency to reaffirm that comrades serving as local government officials, “sit in these representative bodies as Social Democrats.” But he argued that delegates must consider the matter in more deliberate fashion. He proposed a resolution delegating to a Kommission of the party leadership responsibility for working with diverse party members to arrive at a coherent program after thorough discussion in the press and at party gatherings. This might take some time. “Since it has taken us so long to get to this point, we can take another year or two to move this along.” Singer’s proposal to defer consideration of adoption of a municipal program had to have been disheartening to Lindemann and his allies. The next serious debate would come two years hence at the 1904 Party Congress in Bremen. In the meantime, party organizations in many localities, most notably in the South (Württemberg, Bavaria), but also in Brandenburg and Saxony, pushed forward with their municipal work, duly reported in the weekly columns of Kommunale Praxis.⁹⁶

In those intervening years, the party leadership remained obsessed with the challenge posed by Bernstein’s revisionism. For Bebel and Kautsky, the flashpoint of conflict came in a series of battles over the parliamentary strategy of a party emboldened by continuing impressive victories in Reichstag elections. The debates over the tariff, the pursuit of election to the vice presidency of the Reichstag, and “free speech” for party activists in nonofficial SPD publications like the revisionist Sozialistische Monatshefte threatened to push the party towards a split from which Kautsky, Adler, and even Bebel himself ultimately backed away.⁹⁷ The concerted attack by party leaders on the revisionist heresy came with full force at the 1903 Dresden Party Congress. Emboldened by victories in the Reichstag election of that year, the leadership evinced little inclination to compromise with the revisionists on matters of theory or support of the existing order. But, as one revisionist editor noted, the key resolution, number 103, was “in reality only an empty shell” of uncompromising opposition to political accommodation. The resolution’s final sentence suggested precisely the tactic many revision-ists advocated, that comrades “work more energetically than has heretofore been possible for the broadening of social legislation and the realization of the political and cultural aspirations of the working class.” The central tension woven into the fabric of the Erfurt Program remained intact. Albert Südekum commented somewhat cynically afterwards to Vollmar, “Now that the party is definitively rescued, it follows the old gait. August B. [Bebel] is the die-hard revisionist in the whole faction.” It was in the words of one commentator “Ein Schauspiel des Jammers” (a pitiful drama) or simply “ein Fiasko.”⁹⁸

The question of appropriate parliamentary tactics remained a live issue when the Bremen party congress opened in September 1904. In a recent issue of Die Neue Zeit, Johannes Timm from Munich had accused the parliamentary faction of adopting a purely defensive, unproductive posture in the Reichstag and failing to pursue adoption of legislation for tax reform and protection of home workers. In response Georg Ledebour, an SPD Reichstag member from Berlin, answered that as a minority the SPD faction could not push through its proposals. Timm erred “when he believed that a mere tax reform could unleash a peoples’ movement.” In Ledebour’s view the question went to the very heart of what the party’s role should be in relation to its mass base and to the governing party.

The influence of the party is not dependent on the goodwill of any bourgeois representative or minister; we renounce that. Our influence also does not depend on 78 representatives, rather instead we exist in enduring connection with the great mass of party comrades. We could not be happier than if this connection grew tighter and stronger through the influence of the proletarian movement for emancipation, so that it finally overwhelmed the opposition.⁹⁹

Bebel also rose to challenge the posture advocated by Comrade Timm. In so doing he enumerated “no fewer than fourteen legislative measures” that SPD representatives had presented to the Reichstag in the first ten days of the session. The proposals addressed such issues as the eight-hour day, women’s working conditions, factory inspection, and a range of other social legislation. However valuable such an exercise might be, by simply bringing to bear the three million voices and their eighty representatives for their shock value on the opponents and suffocating the legislative process in such an abundance of resolutions, it could not achieve the passage of any single item. Consequently, Bebel warned against either overvaluing or undervaluing parliamentary activity.¹⁰⁰

In the peculiar ideological context that defined the SPD’s parliamentary work as both essential and of limited value, the report of the party leadership to the Bremen party congress reviewed with some pride the electoral record of the previous year. Although the results did not match the electoral triumph of the previous year, they were nonetheless noteworthy.¹⁰¹ The achievements in the Reichstag and Landtag off-year elections were however overshadowed by the measured optimism of the report on advances in the municipal realm. Citing the results in Baden as indicative, the leadership noted that in fifty-six towns or cities party members had a total of more than 800 elected representatives in municipal bodies, 28 in the upper chambers of city councils, and 3 mayors. Despite a decline in the Prussian Landtag vote, the municipal gains showed a “powerfully rising wave of support.” After citing the electoral successes in various Brandenburg municipal constituencies, they also took note of the exemplary constructive work that at least one prominent Social Democrat had accomplished in Frankfurt.

Comrade Quark, who sat in the Frankfurt city council like a pike in a carp pond (goading them on), had through his steady criticism won approval of a resolution in the municipal council whereby the lowest taxable income, which determined voting rights, would be reduced from 1200 to 900 marks. If the decision is accepted by the municipal executive committee, then Comrade Quark would obtain social democratic reinforcements.¹⁰²

Begrudgingly or not, the party leaders acknowledged municipal gains and implicitly at least the important work of advancing a democratic and socialist municipal agenda even if only by a single elected official. Such advances won some recognition even if they contradicted the theoretical position of the party with respect to the value of piecemeal reforms. Nevertheless, when it came to the leadership’s detailed review of the party press (Vorwärts, Die Gleichheit, Die Neue Zeit, Der Wahre Jakob) for the previous year, Kommunale Praxis was nowhere to be found.

Among the formal resolutions presented for the congress’s consideration was a lengthy set pertaining to “Kommunalpolitik” drafted by “Comrade Dr. Lindemann.” Initially he acknowledged that both the state and city were governed “in the interest of the ruling class” and only the overthrow of class rule could produce democratic organization and achieve general well-being for all. In carefully measured phrases, Lindemann outlined the demands for an unrestricted and fully democratic municipal franchise. In the interest of local self-government he also argued for strict limitations on the state’s capacity to control municipal affairs. While he acknowledged state jurisdiction over tax policy, he asserted the right of cities to institute their own taxes, including a tax on the unearned increment of value in property, a “single tax” measure.¹⁰³ The resolution also addressed municipal ownership and the operation of essential services and facilities, including light, heat, and streetcars, as well as health and sanitation, education, library facilities, and public housing. These services should be free or subject to minimal charges. The resolution further addressed the need to protect the rights of workers and their unions, whether employed by the city or private contractors, specifically their right to living wages, the eight-hour day, workplace health and safety, pensions, unemployment insurance, and the right to organize collectively. And, finally, the resolution called on local elected Social Democrats to use these principles as a framework for their municipal activism and, where they faced resistance in their individual cities, to form alliances among cities.¹⁰⁴

Not until the end of the fourth day of the party congress did Hugo Lindemann step forward to discuss and defend his comprehensive resolution on municipal politics. After wide-ranging discussions of parliamentary tactics and organization, municipal activism was the sixth of nine major agenda items the congress had set before it. Lindemann’s tone was unmistakably frustrated. “The proposal supported by Singer in Munich [1902] for a commission to work out a municipal program has not taken shape. And judging from the discussion of municipal politics in the press not much has happened.”¹⁰⁵ He noted that he had been asked by the party leadership to outline a resolution on municipal politics, which he understood should focus on general principles rather than specialized questions. But he also noted that the party press had paid little attention to the resolution once drafted. Nonetheless, he proceeded to review the key issues raised in the proposed program. He began by emphasizing democratization of the municipality and the implementation of the universal franchise for all residents. He called for creation of a single governing body warranted by the increasing complexity of municipal affairs and the need for more efficient decision-making. Treading carefully, he next undertook to delineate the tension between the centralization and decentralization of governing functions between the state and the city. He argued for greater municipal autonomy in some areas—control of the police, schooling—but acknowledged that the reality was more complex in the area of taxation. Because of the controlling interest that local elites exercised in most municipalities, tax policy should be controlled at the state level in the interest of fairness and uniformity. Supplementary taxes might be appropriate at the municipal level. He defended the utility of a municipal tax on the unearned increment of landed property and discussed at some length the necessity to operate municipal enterprises according to fair business principles.

Lindemann’s resolution precipitated a lively debate among the delegates. Two delegates from Munich and Leipzig argued that conditions varied so greatly from one city and one state to another that any general principles had to be qualified in their application. They noted that Lindemann manifested great distrust of the ruling elites in municipalities and believed that in matters of tax, policy workers might have greater confidence in state-originated policies. But as comrade Lange from Leipzig observed, the power of the state bureaucracy would overwhelm the workers’ interest.

Lindemann insisted that city tax policies would be dictated by the state. In Saxony that has happened and comrades have unanimously fought it. This proposal may work for southern Germany, where we sit in the state parliament, but not in Saxony, where reactionaries dominate. There the municipal administration is often better than the state.

Albert Südekum, editor of Kommunale Praxis, rose to defend his colleague Lindemann. He acknowledged the power of elites in the municipal domain as well as the state. But he asserted the overriding importance of municipal work. “It is without doubt that in no political realm is the class struggle fought with greater intensity than in municipal politics. Our opponents strive to use all state and local political means to oppress the working classes and prevent their participation in municipal governance.”¹⁰⁶ He believed a general program of municipal objectives could be readily adapted to specific local circumstances and constraints. He appealed, in particular, for attention to the needs and unique problems faced in “kleineren Orten” (smaller places). He offered Kommunale Praxis as a vehicle for addressing the needs of individual cities, and he urged adoption of Lindemann’s resolution.

Continuing debate, much of it focused on the limitations of one provision or another, led finally to a proposal that Lindemann’s resolution be referred, without formal adoption by the congress, to the attention of socialist local officials and that it be considered further by a special commission of “practical” locally active comrades. Despite Lindemann’s final appeal not to put the matter over for yet another year and to adopt the resolution as it stood, even allowing for its continued refinement, the convention closed with the final words on the matter from the chairman, J. H. W. Dietz.

In the matter of municipal politics—one of the most challenging areas—for the time being engagement with Lindemann’s resolution is concluded. But these questions will not rest. To the extent that they are of current interest and engage all of our political measures, they will again and again be discussed. The attention they have received here will doubtless carry their effect forward.¹⁰⁷

And so ended this phase of the central party’s toleration for discussion of municipal matters that it generally viewed as insufficiently theoretical and potentially contaminating of the party’s revolutionary aspirations. Lindemann, Südekum, and their colleagues in countless municipalities turned away from the effort to win central party approval and back to the practical day-to-day work of building a locally grounded municipal socialist movement.

Practicing Kommunalsozialismus in the Towns and Cities

Hammering out a unified program for Kommunalpolitik may have been contentious work at party congresses, as Hugo Lindemann and his comrades discovered, but locally the formulation of municipal programs had proceeded apace. Those programs may have reflected the peculiarities of local conditions and movements whose origins varied, as party leaders argued at Bremen, but they addressed common themes grounded in the harsh realities of working-class lives in cities large and small across Germany’s new industrial landscape, where the process of proletarianization in all its human dimensions reached deeply into the urban social fabric. This was, in some ways, what Marx and Engels had predicted based on their observations of the early industrialization of England. What they had not predicted, as Bernstein and the revisionists bluntly pointed out, was the emergence of a social reform movement within the bourgeoisie that not only acknowledged the problems but, drawing on new science and expertise, proposed technocratic solutions to soften industrialization’s impact and ameliorate class polarization. Municipal socialists in Germany and elsewhere had to grapple with these initiatives, aware that class power and elite hegemony remained a paramount political reality. Solutions to urban problems that did not also recognize workers’ legitimate claims to power had to be contested. To the dismay of their central party comrades, the municipal socialists themselves at times drifted toward technocratic language and bureaucratic solutions that sounded much like the urban social reformers with whom they were competing and occasionally allied. But, drawing inspiration from the second part of the party’s Erfurt Program and finding their voice during the course of the revisionist debate, they insisted that their programs be grounded in the day-to-day life struggles workers faced, even as they sought to move society, step by step, toward the socialist dream of fundamental social transformation.

The Kommunalpolitik Programmen, with modest variations from city to city, had remarkable consistency over time. That consistency held not only within Germany but around the globe. Ongoing capital accumulation and industrial concentration, the widespread recruitment of workers from rural areas irrespective of national borders, and their concentration in cities whose infrastructure was deteriorating, produced a common agenda which growing numbers of labor and social democratic elected officials took up. These municipal activists confronted structures and traditions of entrenched elite rule that necessitated constant challenges not only to the substance of urban policy but also the procedures by which councils and city officials conducted government in ways designed to ensure continuing elite domination.

North-South Divisions

Party divisions over reformism and municipal politics erupted to a significant degree along a North-South axis. For party activists in Prussia and the Prussian-dominated states, who faced some variation of the three-class voting franchise, agitation around fundamental voting rights held the primary, if not exclusive, position in party programs. The emphasis on “Selbstbestimmung” (self-determination) held sway over any prospect for achieving substantive municipal reforms. The relative powerlessness of the party in the municipal arena posed a risk to the integrity of fundamental party principles. As Paul Singer had noted in 1898, “It would be better that our proposals be rejected than that we agree to propositions that do not agree with our fundamental principles.”¹⁰⁸ But, as previously noted, other factions in the party—the practical revisionists—defined their objectives primarily in terms of “Selbstverwaltung” (self-government) and the pursuit of concrete improvements in workers’ lives through social reform, even while also attacking the restrictive municipal franchise.

New, less restrictive election laws instituted in Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden between 1904 and 1907 lay the foundation for significant municipal gains in those states. By 1913, well over 75 percent of the 320 socialist members of the upper chambers in municipal councils throughout the country had been elected in the three southern states, where more democratic representation had been adopted.¹⁰⁹ In the Prussian or Prussian-influenced states of the North, municipal franchise “reform” moved in precisely the opposite direction. The strengthening of the three-tiered voting system further limited the power of the lowest third of the population. In these states the wealthiest 1 to 4 percent of the population typically elected one-third of the councillors, the next wealthiest 10 to 15 percent another third, and the bottom 85 to 90 percent of those eligible to vote elected the final third. In Berlin, a city of more than two million with a mere 386,736 eligible voters, .2 percent formed the first tier of eligible voters, 8.5 percent the second, and 91.5 percent the third. The concentration of electoral strength among the wealthy in smaller industrial or mining towns could be even more extreme. In a mining town in Westphalia, the colliery company itself (as a voting entity) occupied the first tier, another company the second, and all other individuals eligible to vote the third. In a manufacturing town, the owner voted alone on behalf of the company in the first tier, then on his own behalf in the second. The power of local government to regulate taxes provided a strong incentive for local elites to restrict the voting strength of the working classes.¹¹⁰ After 1908, the North-South differences sharpened further as electoral reform advanced while many states in the North retreated further into restrictive voting. In Prussia, only rarely could Social Democrats elect officials to the Magistrat or to school boards.¹¹¹ The advances in the South were not without barriers, however. To varying degrees, cities in the southern states imposed a poll tax on municipal voters. In Munich the tax amounted on average to a half month’s pay for a worker, and in 1907–8, after some liberalization of voting rules, the municipal electorate eligible to vote still amounted to only 19,000, compared to 56,000 in state elections and 107,000 in Reichstag elections.¹¹²

The willingness of southern party activists to enter the municipal political arena not simply in opposition but to seek concrete reforms, form alliances with other reform factions, and on occasion assume governing responsibility set them apart from their comrades in the North. This tactical bifurcation remained to a significant degree regional in character. Amid the overheated rhetoric in debates over the value of the mass strike as a means of shattering the anti-democratic franchise in Prussia, alternative voices could be heard, urging caution, step-by-step reform, and acknowledgment of the progress the party had achieved through patient party building. In the 1913 debate at the Jena party congress, Bernstein pointed to the varied circumstances the party faced. “In every province one is constrained by what the traditions and the spirit of the movement in that land accord. We do not have great revolutions to draw upon but we nevertheless have great things to refer to.”¹¹³

In the South, the fruits of that posture were borne out by some practical political experience and a noteworthy record of electoral success. In Württemberg, none other than Hugo Lindemann, serving on a special commission of the state parliament and in close cooperation with government officials, managed the adoption of new state building regulations that lay the foundation for a more advanced program to address the housing needs of the working class, despite strenuous objections from liberals.

The SPD’s electoral achievements were reported in statistical detail at the 1913 party congress. The preponderance of SPD members elected to positions in the Magistrat lay in North and South Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden. Equally striking, SPD members were overrepresented in rural districts, again notably in the South. The absence of significant numbers of SPD councillors in Prussia and Prussian-dominated states, especially in city council upper chambers, is also notable.¹¹⁴ Even with growing numbers of socialist municipal officeholders, party congresses paid scant attention to municipal affairs—they did little more than tabulate officeholders—reflecting a party officialdom that continued to minimize the significance of municipal work. Ironically, as Ritter has observed, Prussian hegemony in the Reich found its parallel in the Prussian domination of the party. If we set aside ideological differences—and they were of course deeply entrenched—the posture of the party leadership reflected the massive barrier posed by the three-class voting system in Prussian states. The leadership continued to show little inclination to take municipal work seriously.

These regional political differences were rooted in social and economic conditions that divided the regions. According to Ritter it was no accident that Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg should be states in which Social Democrats would be attractive coalition partners for reformers in other parties. Despite class polarization in the larger cities, class differences in the South were, on the whole, less pronounced, a byproduct of stronger agrarian and artisanal influence in smaller towns and industries and a more diversified industrial structure that strengthened workers’ labor market position even in the larger cities. By contrast, a deeper class polarization characterized the heavy industrial cities of the Ruhrgebiet, Saarland, and Oberschlesien, bringing with it greater political isolation of workers and their Social Democratic Party.¹¹⁵ This striking North-South comparison must of course be qualified. Some level of municipal political mobilization could be found with varying outcomes in virtually all of the party’s districts.¹¹⁶

Bavaria and the South

By contrast with cities in the North, the record of social democrats in the municipalities of Bavaria, especially after 1908, demonstrated astounding results, representing a veritable “social democratic storm in city hall.” The “Minimalprogramm” adopted by the state party congress at Erlangen in 1910 revealed a core program that could be adapted to municipalities of varying sizes and circumstances in the state.¹¹⁷ The program called for significant municipal autonomy from state interference in city affairs, for direct election of all city officials, and for an unrestricted franchise, including women and all who received state assistance. Cities should have full authority over policing, and the responsibility for absorbing military personnel into municipal service should be ended. In the realm of taxes, the Bavarian Social Democrats favored a tax on the unearned increment of land values and opposed indirect taxes on consumption. An issue of great import in Bavaria involved creating religiously neutral public schools free of clerical influence, but support for free elementary and night schools created divisions over how such education should be funded. The Erlangen program also proposed a public-private partnership to expand available housing for the working class, a proposal that typified the reform orientation of South German Social Democrats in this period. The southerners operated with an expanded definition of the working class that included all those who were “dependent, exploited or suppressed by capital.” The program also bore the stamp of significant trade union influence—a minimum wage based on trade union rates, the eight-hour day, the right to organize, and trade union participation in setting wage levels. This influence, according to Hennig, also accounts for “why the Bavarian SPD steered a reformist course, that left the ‘class state’ largely intact.”¹¹⁸

The distinctive approach to local politics of the SPD in the South is evident in three features: first, the persistent debate over agrarian issues; second, the reformist cast of the municipal programs crafted in southern states; and third, the challenge that electoral success posed for participation in the governance of a bourgeois state. Ritter framed that dilemma nicely. Noting that by 1913, 10,981 Social Democrats served in local government bodies (a high proportion of them in the South) and 320 held office as magistrates or on council executive committees, he argued that party members became schooled in problems of modern administration and learned to collaborate with divergent interests in an open-ended setting. But this experience had consequences. “It is difficult on Sundays to speak of class warfare and revolution in a party meeting, when in the previous days one was finding common ground with one’s liberal colleagues in the city council over the necessity for putting up lights in a dark city street.”¹¹⁹

By the new century, the SPD’s engagement with municipal politics in the South was already well established and would grow even more distinctive in the years immediately before the war. In Württemberg, the party already held thirty-three seats in municipal councils by 1899. And, by 1909, as Christ-Gmelin observed, “There were more municipal councillors [in Württemberg] than East Prussia, West Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Posen and Breslau had together.”¹²⁰ Nonetheless, even in Bavaria, working-class municipal representation lagged because of franchise restrictions. The editors of Kommunale Praxis pointed out that in 1908, socialists in the city of Nuremberg had won their first Reichstag seat in 1881 and gained significant representation in the Bavarian state parliament in 1893. In the most recent Reichstag election, the Social Democrats had 35,000 votes in the city compared to a mere 6000 for the combined bourgeois parties. Nonetheless, “although the class-conscious working class in all other domains moved from one success to another, it had little influence over the management of municipal affairs. It is a similar circumstance in most of the other cities of Bavaria.”¹²¹ That circumstance was attributable most importantly to the restrictions on the municipal franchise that endured unaltered until 1908.

The Bavarian electoral reforms of 1908 provided what Karl Heinrich Pohl has described as “an engine for the municipal advance of the Social Democrats.” A reduction in the poll tax made municipal voting more affordable. In larger towns and cities of more than 4,000 residents the new law instituted proportional representation, a longstanding demand of the SPD. The results of these changes were felt almost immediately. In the long-established liberal strongholds of Regensburg and Straubing, Center Party representation grew significantly. For the Social Democrats the same was true in Munich, Fürth, Würzburg, and Nuremberg. By 1912 the party’s gains in some municipalities had reached significant heights: in Fürth the number of socialist councillors stood at nineteen compared to twenty-three for their bourgeois opponents; in Nuremberg “a nearly revolutionary development” ensued with socialists electing one-third of the councillors.¹²²

Success posed the inevitable dilemma for the Social Democrats: How far and on what terms would they be prepared to compromise their ideals? As delegate Ehrharts put it to the Landesparteitag in Fürth, the municipal program of 1900 reaffirmed “the will of the Bavarian party to shift from a municipal ‘abstinence politics’ to practical work and to put forward large claims ‘within the realm of the possible without fantasy, so that it would be understandable to the masses.’ ” The party wrestled perpetually with this dilemma of how to harness “radical wishful thinking” to “a reformist path of urban political development.” Or, in the view of one critic, it would be comical if “a profoundly scientific [socialist] demand would simply raise the question of how frequently the streets should be cleaned or how rationally the ditch-digging is carried out.”¹²³

The program crafted in 1896, like others from that period, provided a set of goals for which the party might strive. They included, for example, thoroughgoing franchise reform, municipal autonomy, tax reform, and school reforms, along with significant improvements in public health and the provision of poor relief. They envisioned a city that would institute public housing and, to further an expanded public sector, municipalize markets for milk, meat, baked goods, and coal. The concrete realization of these and other programs moved slowly through a local political process in which the Social Democrats remained a minority presence.

Two program planks suggest both the possibilities and limits of municipal socialist success. In Munich a rapid expansion of municipal employment, through the municipalization of electricity generation (1893–95), gas works (1899), and tram service (1892–1907) was one consequence of an expanding municipal sector in which liberals were active participants or even in some cases promoters. In the interests of making municipal employment a model for the labor market generally, the trade unions and their elected Social Democratic allies pushed for increased wages for the lowest-paid municipal workers, the eight-hour day, provision of vacations, old age assistance, and reductions of employment strictly by seniority. These measures, after lengthy debate in city council, made some headway. With some support from the “Social Commission” and the Magistrat a nine-hour day for municipal employees was adopted to begin on January 1, 1907. Despite the generally “cooperative climate” for what came to be known as the “Münchener System” of municipal labor relations including toleration of public employee unions, a new administration in 1914 attempted to push through a prohibition of trade union representation and restrictions on open expression of political views. Only the members of the Center Party joined Social Democrats in opposition to this measure, and they failed.

A second area of concern for Social Democrats in Munich (and elsewhere) was housing reform. Living conditions had deteriorated rapidly, especially for a large transient working-class population in the rapidly growing city. The SPD had not historically placed great emphasis on housing reform but the end of the 1890s witnessed an upswing in interest. Initially the SPD focused on systematic investigation of housing conditions. Of particular concern were uninhabitable dwellings, the lack of adequate fresh air, dense overcrowding, and cyclical patterns of high rents. A tentative system of inspection, instituted in 1908, followed an investigation. A city housing agency first proposed in 1910 eventually came into being in 1912 to facilitate gathering and distributing housing information. But rising opposition to direct housing aid stymied further progress, most notably to any proposals for public housing.¹²⁴ On this issue the municipal socialists’ efforts stalled.¹²⁵

Stuttgart—Impoverished Family with Visiting Nurse

Before the outbreak of World War I, socialists in Munich made only incremental progress on one of their central concerns—public housing. The tension between ultimate goals and immediate accomplishments remained even as they strengthened their numbers in local governing bodies. As one municipal party activist argued,

We don’t want to eliminate the contradictions of capitalist society, since we recognize these contradictions are the basis of its existence, rather we want to neutralize a mainspring of capitalist society through each reform. Each public restriction on private property—which is the heart of social democratic housing policy—is a blow to the heart of the capitalist society.¹²⁶

Stuttgart

As was the case in other southern cities, the SPD in Stuttgart developed an early interest in municipal politics. Since the national party paid only lip service to municipal concerns, the local party was largely left to its own devices in formulating a concrete political program for the city. The local SPDers mounted a forceful challenge to existing elite rule and the reigning fiction that party affiliation should have no bearing on local governance.¹²⁷

Stuttgart was home to vibrant revisionist and revolutionary wings of the party and to the socialist publishing empire of J. W. H. Dietz & Co. It also served as the editorial headquarters of a key party organ, Die Neue Zeit, and home to its editor in chief, Karl Kautsky, who by the late 1890s was increasingly discomforted by the reformist political culture of the provinces. He yearned to relocate to Berlin.

Stuttgart was also the birthplace of the regional socialist periodical Schwäbische Tagwacht, whose editor, Wilhelm Keil, became a major revisionist political actor in the region. Keil had grown up in a small village and then apprenticed as a lathe operator in Kassel. After moving to Mannheim, he encountered the trade union and socialist movements that served as a milieu for his own politicization. By his own account, he was an eager learner but, from early on, “advocated moderate and prudent political views.” This, as his biographer has noted, may have been a retrospective reading of his political orientation. He encountered a range of views in the working-class debating clubs of Mannheim and through interaction with moderate parliamentarians like Paul Umbreit. Keil’s own views evolved slowly and through his increasingly active participation as a public speaker in political campaigns. Even as he left Mannheim for Stuttgart in 1896, according to historian Jürgen Mittag, “some counted him as one of the ‘ultraradicals.’ ” His relocation to Stuttgart resulted from his dismissal by a liberal employer in Mannheim for election-day political activity and from his own personal reckoning over his future work.¹²⁸

Stuttgart had grown dramatically in the last decades of the nineteenth century, from a city of 90,000 in 1871 to 175,000 by the turn of the century. While, in comparative terms, the city was a late industrializer, lacking significant raw materials and serving primarily as a regional commercial hub, by the 1890s textile manufacturing had surged forward. But a significant share of the labor force in the city worked in secondary small-scale firms. Class relations were not as sharply polarized as in northern industrial cities. According to one somewhat romanticized study of Daimler auto workers in 1911,

the Württemberg workers are not all living on top of one another in endless identical residential streets with their dreary tenement blocks, but instead they live in cozy small cities or in more remote villages among their blooming orchards … rooted firmly and with ease in good swabian comfort.¹²⁹

Social and industrial conditions in Southwest Germany had bred a liberal reform culture—a “cooperative constitutionalism”—that was not without consequence for the development of social democracy in the region. As Mittag notes, the practical liberalism of the Southwest had led to a less strict application of the anti-socialist legislation after 1881 and in turn made the region, and Stuttgart in particular, a refuge for persecuted socialists, like Clara Zetkin and Karl Kautsky, driven from other regions along with their publications. Into this milieu stepped Wilhelm Keil, who, through a series of openings that grew out of his freelance writing for socialist periodicals, eventually became an assistant editor and then, by 1902, editor in chief of the influential Schwäbische Tagwacht.¹³⁰

Stuttgart also became a hub for internal divisions within the SPD and struggles to define the direction of the party and its key institutions. The local branch in 1891 formulated one of the earliest municipal programs in the country, and its four candidates for city council garnered 23 percent of the vote, double the party’s vote from 1889. Although the party elected a member to the Bürgerausschuss (Citizens’ Commission) in 1892, it was not until 1897 that two members won seats on the Gemeinderat (city council.) Over time the responsibilities of the two bodies shifted with new legislation, as some administrative tasks were reallocated to delegated authorities.¹³¹

By 1908, an increasingly vocal left wing of the local party, headlined by Clara Zetkin, questioned the inclination of SPD reformers toward accommodations with the Volkspartei (Peoples’ Party), even if undertaken in the interest of strengthening the party’s claim to seats on the council. In fact, the reform faction demonstrated some success by electing twenty-four members, the largest party bloc in the council. Nevertheless, they were denied the chairmanship by the unified opposition of all the bourgeois parties. The big test came in 1911, with the contest that year for Oberbürgermeister and the candidacy of Hugo Lindemann, which unified the reform wing of the local SPD and the party press, but also brought together in opposition a not-fully-unified coalition of bourgeois parties, whose candidate, the National Liberal Karl Lautenschlager, barely squeaked into office.¹³² The municipal socialist faction of the party in Stuttgart drew great satisfaction from the near victory of their standard-bearer, while the revolutionary wing took the reformers severely to task.¹³³

The party press throughout Germany had erupted in controversy before and even after the election.¹³⁴ The militant Leipziger Volkszeitung (LV) was unremitting in its criticism of Lindemann and his supporters, including the Schwäbische Tagwacht. Quoting the very pointed comments of a correspondent to the socialist Hamburger Echo, the LV editors wondered whether in the name of “practical politics” the “comrade-Mayor” would with a “bent back and uncovered head” take part in the reception of the German monarch on an official visit to the city. The Schwäbische Tagwacht dismissed “with high-minded indignation” the LV’s description of “social democratic lackeys bowing in the royal anteroom … as besmirching the reputation of Dr. Lindemann.” The left-wing editors of LV mocked the reformist pretentions of Lindemann and the South German supporters of reformism. Criticism was also leveled at Südekum’s Kommunale Praxis, with mocking complaints that “the shackles of party principles and party discipline” impeded their “Icarus-like flight into the sun of National Liberal politics,” and at Südekum himself, who envisioned “the bold advance of revisionism as the dawning of a ‘new era.’ ”¹³⁵ In the aftermath of the election, party leaders worried about the deep schism in the party. Vorwärts reported two deeply divided local party gatherings in Stuttgart, with more than 1000 members in attendance at the second. Loyalists of the national party leadership presented an official resolution calling for unswerving faithfulness to party principles, above all that “the proletarian class conflict is and remains the unshakeable foundation for the struggle and practice of party organization and social democratic representatives in all positions.” Local leaders spoke forcefully in defense of Dr. Lindemann. When a vote was taken on the official party resolution the extent of the division was apparent—586 to 451. The editors urged unity and asked members to put the present bitter divisions aside.¹³⁶

But even as the party’s internal conflict swirled around the candidacy of Lindemann, he and his Social Democratic colleagues continued their own ongoing class war in the trenches of the Gemeinderat and the Bürgerausschuss. For their left-wing opponents in the party, it must have seemed like small potatoes. But, for them, the battles had a seriousness and purpose that gave them enlarged meaning. Lindemann’s program as a candidate for Oberbürgermeister, like the programs of municipal socialists around the globe, was pointedly detailed. He outlined specific positions on city problems—housing, school reform, unemployment, employment standards for city workers, increasing the tax base, and public enterprise. While his speeches were not laced with ideological posturing, he spoke unequivocally as a candidate of the Social Democratic Party.¹³⁷

By 1911, the SPD had an established presence in the city council. And party affiliation was no longer unacknowledged in the deliberations of the city’s governing bodies. During 1909 and in the early months of 1910, the SPD representatives made repeated challenges to the ruling parties over representation on key committees, winning some battles and losing others: the Trades School Commission (lost), a commission for supervising city budgets (won), and continuing review of police affairs and budgeting (won).¹³⁸ In May and June 1911, during and immediately following Lindemann’s campaign, socialist councillors in the municipal bodies repeatedly challenged their bourgeois opponents over issues that ranged from providing poor children reduced streetcar fares, to extravagant proposals from other parties for city purchases (an automobile for the city’s electricity enterprise and the proposed construction of a new and, in the socialists’ view, unneeded fire station). Such conflicts were both routine and constant suggesting the continuing class polarization within city governance.¹³⁹ Stuttgart was little different from other municipalities in Germany and around the world where socialists and labor representatives had established a foothold in the years before the outbreak of World War I.

Prussia and Cities of the North

Northern cities under Prussian influence or direct rule presented social democrats with a different set of challenges. In many of these cities, burdened with a three-tier voting system, municipal socialists could hardly imagine the kind of local electoral success that might enable them to implement a robust socialist program of urban reform like that put forward by Hugo Lindemann and his supporters in Stuttgart.

Concentrated in densely inhabited working-class districts of heavy industrial cities or isolated mining communities, workers faced a polarized social world in which class boundaries seemed virtually unbreachable. A politics of reform that might involve even contingent cross-class alliances seemed largely unimaginable. The class-skewed voting system had further entrenched the rule of elites over a rapidly growing, transient working class of operatives and unskilled workers. As politicization of urban affairs rose, some cities, like Köln and Essen but also “liberal” bastions like Leipzig and Dresden, moved toward further restriction of the already-unequal municipal franchise.¹⁴⁰ With little voting capacity in most northern and western municipalities, social democrats could hardly look beyond franchise reform as a political program. The dominant SPD faction showed little patience for or interest in advocacy of a broader socialist municipal reform program.¹⁴¹ Nevertheless, the record of socialist municipal activism in the North proved to be more varied than a sharply drawn North-South dichotomy might predict. Cities like Bielefeld complicate the picture.

Bielefeld

Carl Severing remembered vividly his contentious days as a city councillor in the textile and metal manufacturing city of Bielefeld.¹⁴² Even before he entered council with seven other colleagues in the election of 1905, Social Democrats had made themselves felt in the chambers.¹⁴³

In Severing’s Bielefeld as early as 1895 the Social Democrats formulated a concrete municipal program for the impending election with a “firm will and some hope for success.” Although they recognized that a few city councillors could not accomplish the destruction of “the capitalist system of exploitation,” they did believe that “help in matters of daily life and real political struggle could be accomplished.”¹⁴⁴ Like other early social democratic municipal programs, the Bielefelders’ proposals focused on the needs of workers for a labor exchange, relief work for the unemployed, an increase in the level of poor relief, and the eight-hour day for public employees. They envisioned a significant increase in public services—municipal water, sewerage, lighting, public baths, a new public hospital, and free schooling—but with no imposition of “indirect taxes” on consumption. Some points in their program converged with those of the left liberals and freethinkers, but because the program was couched in the “phraseology of class warfare,” it generally gained the enmity of bourgeois interests, despite its resonance with their views on particular points. Although the SPD increased its share of the popular vote in 1895, its candidates fell to defeat against the Liberals and the Kartellpartei (Conservatives). Their fortunes would improve in the elections of 1897 and beyond.¹⁴⁵

Carl Severing, 1898 Police Identification Photo, Bielefeld

With six socialists elected to the Bielefeld council in 1897, the Social Democrats “carried on good work,” though perceived by the ruling majority “als ‘Hechte im Karpfenteich’ ” (as “pikes in the carp pond”). The “quietude and leisure” of council deliberations were gone; “a wave of fresh air came into the chambers.” And in 1905, despite the best efforts of the bourgeois parties to discredit and defeat the SPD slate, the ruling parties lost abysmally. “The vote was a disgraceful washout for the party leaders of the united bourgeois parties.” The Social Democrats won eleven of the fifteen seats in the third class of voters. But with control of first-and second-class votes for council, the bourgeois parties continued to dominate. As the Bielefeld Volkswacht reported, the extraordinarily high turnout of 62.8 percent of eligible voters in the third class for a municipal election was largely attributable to the mobilization of social democratic supporters. By 1908, and for the rest of the prewar period, the SPD captured and held all fifteen seats, though still overall a minority within the municipal council of forty-five seats.¹⁴⁶

The bourgeois press showed some interest in the newly elected socialist councillors and Severing in particular.

Severing, who took his seat next to his comrade Hoffman, manifested a distinctive presence. He is perhaps the most interesting phenomenon of Bielefeld’s social democracy. Unusually hardworking, unusually well-read, he left his mark on the metalworkers’ union. As a speaker he combined toughness with enthusiasm. A man that the masses follow.¹⁴⁷

Severing himself was not inclined to treat his office as a sinecure but as a position from which to instigate and work for measures that would benefit the common good. He desired, he recalled, to work with others: “I wanted to collaborate but was aware of the narrow boundaries that constrained the work on city affairs.”

The Bielefeld socialist councillors quickly discovered how challenging their task would be, but despite repeated obstacles they persisted in their efforts to change the tenor and substance of local governance. Just two weeks after entering the council, Severing took up the grievances of city employees over irregularities in their payment. In this first “Waffenganges” (armed conflict) he brought up the city’s self-promotion as a progressive municipality in the front rank on matters of social policy and wage compensation. His first proposal to raise the wages of city workers to match their peers in the private sector met firm opposition in the council. He stood accused of threatening to organize city workers and destabilize their good relations with the city.¹⁴⁸ His previous efforts to organize city workers had led to the acquiescence of the Oberbürgermeister, a member of the old Prussian elite, who saw himself as a paternalist and benefactor of working people. On occasion in the past, he had treated workers with some generosity. But, in the matter of appointment to key city council committees, the Social Democrats found themselves largely shut out, despite the popular mandate they enjoyed. Their legislative proposals to utilize expertise to develop appropriate social legislation, although actively pursued in other cities and badly needed in Bielefeld, met concerted opposition. Even the “progressives” in the council opposed the proposals because they originated from the Social Democrats. As Severing recalled,

the words social reform functioned as a red cape for the Executive Committee and the majority of the city councillors. And then came the challenge, also from the Social Democrats. They did not ask what the issue was, or where it came from, which identity it carried. Because it came from Social Democrats, that was a sufficient basis for rejection. The progressives joined in against the petition, even though it resonated with their own professed basic ideas.¹⁴⁹

The stubborn resistance of the majority even incurred ridicule of some in the bourgeois press, but they persisted in blocking initiatives in areas such as construction of model municipal housing (Gartenstadt), school reform, purchase of municipal lands, even revision of the council’s own rules of procedure, and construction of a central public bath.¹⁵⁰

Severing recalled that the bourgeois councillors claimed the entrance of Social Democrats into city council politicized its deliberations.¹⁵¹ The Social Democrats frequently pointed out the political implications of policies pertaining to the city, state, and nation. Such revelations took them out of the “narrow confines and back alleys” of established procedure. And the bourgeois councillors were forced to acknowledge longstanding divisions and more forthrightly use politically inflected rhetoric as well as the methods of parliamentary combat, including, ironically, obstruction. “It required of us some sacrifice of time, effort and nerves,” Severing recalled. “But the provocations of the privileged could not any longer go unanswered.” Deliberations typically began with substantive arguments and discussion that was well within customary procedure and the framework of the council’s agenda but then devolved into procedural wrangling. In the case, for example, of selecting someone to assess the value of cattle lost in an epidemic, a matter that should have taken only a minute, the deliberations stretched into two hours. Issue after issue precipitated verbal combat between the Rechtsparteien (right-wing parties) and the Sozialdemokraten. When the Social Democrats objected to the council ignoring its own rules of procedure, they were overridden by stalling tactics that shortened the time for debate and subjected them to ridicule. In their attempts to bring real-life issues into the proceedings and to the attention of the community, they illuminated the nature of this elite-dominated governance.¹⁵² “Such carrying on and turbulent scenes that developed out of this—that was no life, that was parliamentary garbage, because we could never gather and never speak without constraint.”¹⁵³ Through years of frustration, the patient but determined Social Democrats in the council pushed back over issues pertaining to the needs of the working class in the areas of public housing and unemployment insurance, especially for seasonally unemployed construction workers. Modest breakthroughs, however, eventually came with the special circumstances of the war years and with the growing influence of the Social Democrats in city politics during the postwar years.¹⁵⁴

Saxony

Saxony provides additional points of reference for the evolution of municipal politics in the North. The significance of its cities emerged in the early debates over the programmatic direction of municipal socialism. Social democratic activist Fanny Imle in 1900 reported noteworthy progress in Saxony toward the goal of creating a unified municipal program that nevertheless protected the autonomy and self-direction of specific localities.¹⁵⁵ She pointed out that yearly conferences had contributed to a record of 800 contests for local offices in 300 towns and cities. A productive conference of Brandenburg’s municipal councillors in early 1899 had formulated a unified “Communalprogramm.” Delegates from municipalities throughout the state gathered at Chemnitz to craft the program. While the conferees outlined a few general principles, they deliberately focused on practical, concrete demands. They argued for fundamental principles of “full independence from outside and absolute self-reliance internally.” They asserted that capitalist economic development had stripped cities of their independence, and their governance had fallen into the hands of the propertied classes at the expense of the vast majority of citizens who were propertyless. They envisioned a city with socialized production in which social welfare would be provided for all in need. But some delegates claimed that fundamental differences in conditions separated large cities, smaller cities, and rural towns and villages, and that those differences required different agendas. Another debate raised the question of whether priority should be given to demands directed at the state, in what were termed “Kautskyschen Abänderungs” (Kautskyesque amendments) and be separated from and given greater emphasis than purely municipal demands. The conference in the end supported programmatic standardization and the overriding need to further democratize the franchise as a necessary precondition for socialist advances on other fronts.¹⁵⁶ However, even while gesturing toward the central party emphasis on electoral reforms in the Landestage and the Reichstag and acknowledging the profound barriers imposed by the Prussian three-class voting system, the program from Saxony nonetheless stressed the need for municipal autonomy and initiative in areas of social and economic reform.

Election reform in Saxony, dubbed Germany’s “Red” province, had been redirected by ruling elites amid deepening concern over the rising strength of the Social Democrats at all levels of government in the 1890s.¹⁵⁷ The Social-Democratic municipal vote had doubled between 1891 and 1892. And by 1893, with a rising protest vote and despite the formation of a “cartel” of bourgeois parties, the threat from the SPD seemed even greater and potentially a challenge to elite control of the municipalities.¹⁵⁸ Under the previous “direct” system of three-class voting, the Social Democrats had seen rising success and eventually dominance in the third class. But, well before 1890, a universal three-mark tax threshold had been adopted for Landtag elections. In local elections the “parties of order” also recognized the growing threat, when in Leipzig in 1890 socialists won 20 percent of the vote. National Liberals claimed socialists sought “to impose something akin to the Paris Commune in Leipzig.” When measures to limit SPD success, including gerrymandering, raising the voting age, extending the residency requirement, and complicating the process of gaining “citizenship” in the locality, seemed to be failing, state and municipal assemblies adopted the draconian three-tier municipal voting system in 1894. Although Social Democratic representation in the municipal council continued to rise, with the party winning almost one-third of the total seats, the combination of reforms did contain and dilute their success.¹⁵⁹

With the imposition of a Prussian-style three-class municipal voting system through the “reforms” in 1894, what appeared to have been a rising SPD vote in the early 1890s was stemmed. SPD success was now more strictly contained and less of a threat to bourgeois hegemony. With only a minority of councillors the SPD struggled to make its agenda felt in Leipzig along with other cities in Saxony. As socialist activist Friedrich Seger noted in 1912, “Germany’s largest cities are the fundamental supports of bourgeois society, and the working class constitutes the great majority of their residents. This is not reflected in the city administration; here a handful of bourgeois leaders rule over the whole citizenry. This holds true especially for Leipzig with its ignominious three-class franchise.”¹⁶⁰ However, as Thomas Adam has noted, the three-class system virtually guaranteed some working-class representation “driven into the arms” of the SPD. And that would have political consequences during and especially after the war, when the three-class system was abolished.¹⁶¹

Municipalities in Saxony, like those in other states, provided a crucible for the development of a new liberalism (sächsische Jungliberalen) that was a byproduct of industrial transformation and positioned itself between right and left. On different occasions, it could serve as a partner or opponent of the social democrat.¹⁶²

The dynamic growth and transformation of cities throughout the German Reich created new imperatives for social and economic reform and new conditions for political mobilization. Liberals and Social Democrats responded in varied and overlapping ways from one city and region to another. Changing urban-industrial conditions engendered unmistakable urgency to address the deteriorating conditions in cities and the rising expectations of workers.

Even smaller cities shared in the poverty that was endemic in Wilhelmine cities. Göttingen, in the former kingdom of Hanover but since 1866 under Prussian jurisdiction, had a bifurcated working class of old declining crafts and new agricultural migrant laborers. Low wages were compounded by the high cost of living, pushed up by taxes on essential foodstuffs.¹⁶³ With the implementation of state-sponsored social insurance and works councils, Göttingen’s workers, according to von Saldern, pushed reform of voting rights to the foreground of their priorities for state legislative reform.¹⁶⁴

Berlin

In Berlin and its surrounding municipalities, the dynamics of urban growth and differentiation were particularly evident. Growth in the old city stagnated between 1890 and 1905, while a host of surrounding municipalities (such as Charlottenburg, Rixdorf, and Schöneberg) exploded with a fourfold increase in population.¹⁶⁵ Berlin, like many cities, witnessed both physical expansion and spatial differentiation along class lines. Within what came to be called Gross-Berlin the working class was increasingly located in peripheral residential zones isolated from the middling and upper classes. Sharp increases in the transient population—nearly doubling from 505,482 in 1890 to 1,004,774 in 1905—produced a growing strain on municipal lodging houses. Over the same period the number of homeless using the facilities on a nightly basis rose by 130 percent.¹⁶⁶ The city’s dynamic growth, increasing politicization of its working class, especially after the lifting of the anti-socialist laws, and a restrictive municipal franchise produced a densely organized but inwardly focused working-class milieu. Workers’ grievances led to recurrent confrontations with the authorities and the police in the combustible “Unruheviertel” (unruly districts) or “Streikviertel” (strike districts).¹⁶⁷

However, despite the local electoral impediments, working-class representation in the third-class seats of the city council grew year by year, spurred by the city’s growth and deepening poverty and some early electoral success. Population pressure forced the creation of new electoral districts in which the Social Democrats also saw increasing success. In 1901, in addition to the eight seats previously held, SPD candidates won nine seats in new districts. Karl Liebknecht was selected in two districts but replaced in one of the seats by his comrade Karl Leid, editor of Vorwärts.¹⁶⁸ A few years later, voters elected Eduard Bernstein himself to the city council in Schöneberg.¹⁶⁹ While the Social-Democratic vote continued to climb in both old districts and new, a comparison in sixteen districts established by 1899 of their voting returns in 1899 and 1905 suggest the dimensions of the Social-Democratic increase.

Municipal by-election vote (3rd class) in Berlin’s new districts, 1899–1905

Social Democrats

Opponents (combined)

1899

18,599

15,149

1905

30,681

10,573

Gain/Loss

+12,082

–4,576

Source: Eduard Bernstein, Die Geschichte der Berliner Arbeiter-Bewegung (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1910)

However, as Bernstein ruefully noted, under the existing franchise system, with Social Democrats largely restricted to the third class, would have had dramatically higher representation under the not-fully-democratic Reichstag franchise. Their city council seats would likely have numbered ninety-six instead of thirty-five. Berlin may have been the “Red City” in terms of its parliamentary representation, but its committed municipal socialists fought an uphill battle in the effort to enact their municipal agenda.¹⁷⁰

Hamburg

The old Hansa city of Hamburg had an upper class deeply embedded in municipal government. Although highly factionalized, the city elite’s customary hegemony had been only slightly eroded by the growth of new industries. As a “free city,” its relationship with Prussia was ambivalent and at times contested.¹⁷¹ But, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the city underwent profound changes as its more diversified and more deeply impoverished population grew in size and density. Growth in shipbuilding, general manufacturing, and construction supplemented old harbor employments. New laborers from the countryside met the growing demand for labor and acted as a brake on rising wages. By the 1890s, more than 50 percent of the city’s rapidly growing population of 623,000 (1890) had been born outside the city, and in the years before the outbreak of WWI the total population would pass one million, 66 percent of whom were migrants. According to 1890 estimates, 70 percent of the employed population fell below the poverty line.¹⁷² Rising costs of housing pushed large numbers of new urban migrants into settlements on the city’s periphery, outside the Altstadt (also Neustadt) but also beyond the nearer suburbs colonized by a growing and diverse middle class. In parts of the city center, harbor workers still predominated in “alley quarters” or Gängeviertel, which were comprised of “tumbledown slums inhabited by some of the poorest of the city’s population.” But beyond the next tier of bourgeois inner suburbs, on the city’s outskirts, lay fast-expanding, densely packed, multi-story “rent barracks” next to adjoining agricultural lands whose lower rents drew the city’s very poorest residents, many of them new migrants.¹⁷³ As in other German cities after the 1890s, Hamburg’s workers faced rising poverty, growing congestion, a lack of affordable housing, and a tax structure that bore most heavily on the poorest consumers. Compounding these problems were massive environmental degradation and deteriorating public health conditions, highlighted by the catastrophic cholera epidemic of 1892.

Chronic problems of human and animal waste, impure water supplies, air pollution, dust, and lack of access to pure food increased massively after the 1880s with rapid population growth and spatial expansion in all of Germany’s major towns and cities. Visitors to Hamburg spoke of viewing the city “as if through a veil of smoke,” and a citizens’ club noted that even in the 1870s in the outlying, impoverished district of Billwärder Ausschlag citizens had to “wade through a morass” in a major thoroughfare that consisted of sewerage, animal waste, and garbage.

Hamburg, Germany Alley Quarters

Efforts at reform were frequently hamstrung between the claims of different propertied interests. Landlords, factory owners, and middle-class property owners exchanged blame for the horrific conditions but generally agreed that government assumption of responsibilities as basic as street cleaning and garbage collection, which had been carried out by private contractors, “would demand the most exorbitant financial commitments” by property owners. Piecemeal reforms—the provision of a single public bathhouse, for instance, where a dozen facilities would have been required to minimally address the need—moved forward in the 1890s and early twentieth century, fueled by epidemics and the threat of social disorder. The reluctance of liberal reformers to significantly encumber local government and increase property taxes proved a major political fault line that intensified the efforts of municipal socialists globally.¹⁷⁴

Hamburg socialists, who gained their first city council seat in 1901, had put forward a municipal program in 1897 that called for “state regulation of real estate speculation, the legal working day, state purchase of land, workable housing inspection laws, income tax reform and social measures on behalf of workers, teachers, and civil servants.” They offered outspoken support to harbor strikers in 1897 and a militant renters’ association that had re-formed after 1899. They put forward a reform vision involving government intervention that went significantly beyond the Liberals’ program.¹⁷⁵ The socialist Hamburger Echo, paraphrased by historian Madeline Hurd, envisioned that

a true workers’ city would have free schools, meeting rooms, gymnastic halls, folk baths, and folk kitchens, all administered by city inspectors. Its pleasant homes, tasteful furniture, and good pictures would instruct children in the appreciation of elevated culture; the worker would be drawn away from the bar to his home and family.¹⁷⁶

As in other cities that had some version of the Prussian electoral franchise, in Hamburg the limited opportunities for the SPD to channel local political energies into municipal contests reinforced the tendency of party activists to focus on national questions and theoretical debates that had little relationship to the day-to-day survival struggles of workers and their families. Between 1880 and 1890, under the relatively liberal franchise governing elections to the Reichstag, the SPD, despite Bismarck’s anti-socialist law, had captured all three Hamburg seats, electing among others August Bebel. Changes to the rules governing municipal “citizenship” in 1896 opened the gates somewhat to increasing numbers of eligible voters. By 1902–4, 23 percent of those eligible to vote in Reichstag elections could cast votes in city elections, with some workers reportedly declaring an inflated income solely to vote in local elections. The first city councillor elected in 1901 was followed by twelve more in 1905 when the municipal SPD vote comprised 38 percent of its vote in Reichstag elections.¹⁷⁷

The success of the Social Democrats prompted proposals in 1906 by other parties to further restrict the franchise. Liberals framed the issue as preserving an older system of representation that protected the role of “interests” rather than parties. “One did not want to declare war against Social Democracy, but one could see in its continued growth a threat that would ultimately lead to complete politicization.”¹⁷⁸ In one of the most dramatic episodes of mass action in opposition to franchise restrictions, workers in Hamburg-Altona took to the streets on January 17, 1906, to protest a proposed further restriction of the municipal franchise, a “suffrage robbery,” undertaken because of the Social Democrats’ rising success.¹⁷⁹ The ensuing general strike called to protest the curtailment of workers’ access to the ballot produced a remarkable outpouring. In the words of historian Johannes Schult,

It was even quieter than on a Sunday. The inner city was practically dead. An eerie feeling possessed the inhabitants. After four in the afternoon loose groups of workers from the peripheral districts dressed in their Sunday best were drawn toward the city hall market square. It was a kind of silent march … The masses were like a boiling kettle. But nowhere was order disturbed. The throng of people continually broke out in cheers for social democracy, first here, then there. That was not organized, rather improvised.¹⁸⁰

But in the midst of the peaceful protest, a lone well-dressed woman, a leader of the women’s franchise organization, sought entrance to the city hall, where the final debate over the franchise reform was underway. Blocked by the police, she used her umbrella to force her way in, only to be arrested and taken away. The ensuing police riot and arrests took on a more massive, violent dimension. Roving bands of rioters looted stores and arbitrary police actions targeted innocent bystanders as well as rioters. In totality the event revealed the city’s deep, underlying class divisions.¹⁸¹ While the city’s bourgeoisie pushed through suffrage restriction and continued to dominate city government, the Social Democrats’ strength would continue to grow and set the stage for another, even more consequential, general strike at the end of the war in November 1918.¹⁸²

In the working-class suburb Altona, despite the franchise limitations, SPD candidates for the municipal council won a dramatic victory in 1909.¹⁸³ Led by the talented barrister Carl Herz, five Social Democrats gained seats on the council. They would be joined by five more in 1914. Herz had gradually gained prominence in the party after joining in 1900. In 1906 he began running in successive years for city council, each year increasing his vote as the party itself grew. His talent as a speaker and a legal defender of workers’ rights positioned him for success in 1909, in the context of scandals over the management of the city’s gas and electricity enterprises.¹⁸⁴ But, almost from the outset, the newly elected SPD councillors found themselves isolated and excluded from the key committees on which they sought to sit.¹⁸⁵ As Herz subsequently reported to a conference of Social Democratic city councillors in Schleswig-Holstein, the newly elected councillors in Altona were mindful of the example provided by “the practice of our six comrades in the state parliament, who through their relentless efforts secured power and recognition.” In their example, he saw the path forward for the city councillors in Altona.

The social democratic city councillors represented the only effective opposition, and they can only advance on the basis of an energetic offensive. What we lack in numbers, we must make up for with the energy of our attack … In all cities our representatives have thus far offered evidence that debunks claims of the negative character of their activity. They have put forward positive proposals in large numbers, which the other councillors simply denied, because their bourgeois class consciousness stood in the way.¹⁸⁶

The new socialist city councillors in Altona wasted no time making their views felt. The Hamburger Echo raved about their impact. “Compared to the speeches in earlier council meetings, the interventions of the social democratic speakers were truly refreshing.” They challenged the council for attending only to “technische Details” but not to the Arbeitslose (unemployed). Like their municipal socialist colleagues around the world, when frustrated by their minority status, they challenged the arcane and elitist procedures of the governing body itself. Herz complained that “the good condition of the fish market appeared endlessly more important than the good health of the proletarians.” They ferreted out corruption and mismanagement in the city’s gas and water works enterprises. And they withstood the onslaught against them by the bourgeois press and party leaders in the council.¹⁸⁷

Limited though their power was to shape local governance before the war, they found new openings in the revolutionary events of November 1918 and the early years of the Weimar Republic. They made Altona, according to one observer, an “exemplary achievement of Social Democratic municipal politics.” By the local elections of 1919 and 1920, the social democrats (MSDP and USDP) held 53 percent of all council seats in the thirteen largest towns and cities in Saxony, and comparable victories followed elsewhere in the former Reich.¹⁸⁸

In other German cities that fell under the Prussian three-tiered municipal voting system, the story followed similar lines. As historian Mary Nolan has suggested, the modest success Social Democrats enjoyed in some North German Protestant towns hardly matched the party’s dramatic victories and its role in shaping social policy in cities of the Catholic South (in Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria). In Düsseldorf, events followed a pattern consistent with northern towns.¹⁸⁹ Largely stifled in their municipal aspirations, as Nolan put it, “the Social Democrats publicized, politicized, and factionalized local politics, but ultimately despite their efforts they failed to break out of their isolation and to dent the ‘old municipal system.’ ”¹⁹⁰ Cases in other national contexts reveal the varied accommodations that social democrats and liberals crafted during the contentious early twentieth century in which the constraints on working-class political power at the local level were tested and in some circumstances breached.¹⁹¹ Frankfurt am Main is another case in point.

Frankfurt am Main—The Challenges of Liberal Reform

In Frankfurt am Main, the socialists and the dominant left-liberal reformers demonstrated some capacity for cooperation during the 1890s, as long as the SPD strength remained marginal. The left liberals perceived their greatest rivals to be a coalition of conservative interests, who they believed lacked the capacity to govern a “modern” city and its complex affairs. But a growing segment within the Frankfurt SPD chafed under the status of junior partners to the Liberals, and in 1900 socialists shocked the dominant Liberals by electing their first councillor to local office and contributing to the election of two other (non-Liberal) Catholic right-wing candidates.¹⁹² Despite encouragement from Liberal reformers promoting cooperation with reformist elements among Social Democrats, sentiment in the SPD early in the new century shifted to a more open struggle with all “bourgeois” parties. Toward that end, the Social Democrats crafted a program in 1900 that lay the basis for a separate political identity. They called for an unrestricted franchise, municipalization of utilities, construction of public markets in outlying working-class districts, improved working conditions for municipal workers and other reforms in housing, streetcar fares, school administration, and even free burial in the city cemetery. Nonetheless, they framed their demands in moderate, reformist language.¹⁹³

With each successive biennial council election, the Social Democrats demonstrated increasing confidence. Despite franchise restrictions, they believed they had the capacity through effective organization to mobilize support among workers and win some backing from lower-middle-class constituencies to which the conservative parties had also appealed. Simultaneously, the left liberals moved to unify a broad bourgeois coalition in opposition to what they perceived to be a rising “red tide” in the municipality. They sharpened their differences with the Social Democrats by emphasizing their experience and competence in managing municipal affairs. When the SPD came out of the 1908 election with fifteen seats compared to the combined total of twenty-nine seats for Democrats and Progressives, the Liberals accused the SPD councillors in 1910 of proposing expensive projects to favor workers’ interests without a realistic plan for financing them. Most tellingly they attacked the Social Democrats’ class “utopianism,” its “financial” impact on city budgets and in particular the pocketbooks of larger propertied interests. The liberal Kleine Presse warned that with a socialist majority,

there would be only two possibilities: either the Social Democrats would proceed with the present means and proven methods of administration, in which case things would remain pretty much the same, the only difference being that the city council would have suffered a great loss of expertise and experience; … or the Socialists would actually try to realize their utopian program, would establish the one-sided tyranny of the working class, would transform all communal conditions according to their party standpoint, would fulfill only some of their boundless wishes, and would shift the tax burden according to their impractical ideas.¹⁹⁴

With impressive victories in 1910 and 1912, the Social Democrats raised their number of municipal councillors to twenty-two on the eve of the Great War.¹⁹⁵ Leading the Social Democrats’ political charge in city council was Dr. Max Quarck, first elected to the council in 1900. As editor of the Volkstimme he had been a prominent voice for revisionism in the ranks of the local party.¹⁹⁶ He made his presence felt from the outset. Councillor Wedel of the Democratic Party claimed to have “welcomed the entrance of the social democrat [Quarck] to the council but ‘his ideas would have been better received, if a representative of the social democrats had been elected who had been less provocative and had instead put forward practical proposals.’ ”¹⁹⁷

With fifteen Social Democrats on the city council in 1908, debate intensified revealing a sharp class polarization within the council. During the campaign the left liberal Wedel had countered the Social Democrats’ criticisms of the council’s inaction. “The Social Democrats are always putting forward proposals. These contemptible measures, that inevitably raise taxes, we reject. This ‘division of labor’ we decline.”¹⁹⁸ The early sessions of the new council revealed an aggressive posture on the part of the newly-elected Social Democrats who challenged everything from attempts by the city to regulate the educational pursuits of the socialist-aligned Turnvereine to the council’s inaction and insensitivity in addressing the chronic unemployment problem.¹⁹⁹ Debates over expanding the membership in the Executive Committee and payment of members reflected the Social Democrats’ ambition to further democratize the city administration. During their first few months in office, the SPD caucus left little doubt that their growing strength in the council meant a new capacity to challenge the established order across a whole range of issues.²⁰⁰ By 1910, the Social Democrats were inserting themselves into a wider set of concerns that bore more directly on the well-being of their working-class constituents: insuring the health and safety of municipal employees, improving working conditions among dock and warehouse workers, and reducing the hours of work for city employees. In each case, after extensive debate, the council majority referred the issues to committees in which Social Democrats had little ability to control the outcomes.²⁰¹

The immediate prewar years saw continuing local political strife but also some gestures towards rapprochement. Within the limitations imposed by franchise restrictions and local government procedures, socialists and left liberals managed to define a reformist common ground that reshaped urban social policy in some concrete if limited ways. The council moved to impose some price regulation on foodstuffs, improve wages of domestic servants, and establish a commission to address community housing needs. The new spirit of collaboration around certain social policies did not diminish the parties’ fundamentally different perspectives on the role of government. As Rolling framed it, “The bourgeois reformers preferred to ‘influence’ the private market,” while “the Social Democrats … worked to establish the idea that the masses had a right to claim protection from the community.”²⁰² As Ralf Roth has argued, “Common interests in such fundamental political questions as the reform of the Prussian electoral franchise and opposition to the conservative bloc, created some measure, however wavering, of social/political advance and cultural harmony as a basis for left-liberal and social democratic collaboration.”²⁰³ The advance of such municipal socialist politics in Frankfurt but also in many cities in the South hardly conforms to the widely accepted image of a “negatively integrated” SPD fundamentally separated from Liberal reformers.

Frankfurt blazed a unique path in the relations between a social democratic movement of growing strength and left liberals with whom they might on occasion cooperate in pursuit of a reformist agenda, as Roth and others have argued. The city stood between the contrasting experiences of North and South, as Ritter described them. Regarding the SPD efforts in the Landtage to liberalize the franchise in states and cities, he noted:

While Social Democrats in the South deemed it possible to participate in the gradual transformation of the states through working class influence, the north German Social Democrats, where the party was shut out of state legislatures because of their weakness and the strength of conservative parties, saw the state as an instrument of class rule that could not be changed unless overthrown by a victorious proletariat. Voting for a specific state budget and support for official proposals of the ruling circles became for the South German Social Democrats questions of political tactics and expediency that in the interest of broadening the influence of the party should be decided from case to case; for the majority of North German Social Democrats these were questions in which the party had to demonstrate its fundamental opposition to the class state and the monarchy.²⁰⁴

The tactical experimentation practiced in the South was evident in countless local settings wherever a somewhat more liberal franchise permitted and where a spirit of cooperation, however tenuous, seemed possible between left liberals, Catholic Centrists, and Social Democrats. The patterns of accommodation varied, however, from state to state and locality to locality. In some cases, as Niehuss observed about the SPD in the South, while they were “achieving a maximum social and political integration, at times it appeared at the price of nearly losing their political identity.”²⁰⁵ Noteworthy exceptions to this pattern could be found in the cases of some mixed industrial towns such as Mühlhausen in Alsace and Offenbach in Hesse. Like their comrades in Frankfurt, the Social Democrats in these towns enjoyed some modest early success during the 1890s in municipal campaigns, and their bourgeois opponents reacted with a degree of panic. But, in both cases, the SPD elected majorities during the first decade of the twentieth century and demonstrated what possibilities the future held for implementing a fuller municipal socialist agenda.²⁰⁶

Offenbach am Main—Socialism in One City

By the late nineteenth century, Offenbach am Main, Frankfurt’s neighbor just across the river Main, had become an industrial city of some consequence with a working class concentrated in the machinery and leather-goods industries. While Liberals enjoyed considerable strength, and the Social Democrats, once they had unified in the mid-1870s, began to demonstrate increasing appeal. Emboldened by the establishment of their own newspaper and despite the repressive effects of the anti-socialist legislation, Social Democrats ran candidates for city council on a number of occasions after 1880. Wilhelm Liebknecht was defeated for the parliamentary seat in 1877, despite a strong showing in the city itself, but won the seat in 1881.²⁰⁷

By all accounts, Carl Ulrich became the leading force within the Offenbach SPD. He had come to the city in 1873 as a twenty year old, already an experienced metalworker and lathe operator, but also an emerging political activist. He attended the socialist congress of the Eisenacher SPD faction in Coburg that year. In the following year, he faced indictment and imprisonment in Darmstadt for “inciting class hatred.” Under the anti-socialist laws, Ulrich, as editor of the Neuen Offenbacher Zeitung (later Abendblatt) found himself repeatedly charged with violating state prohibitions on socialist activity. On at least one occasion, he served his prison term with national SPD leaders August Bebel and Ignaz Auer. It was not until 1895 that Ulrich, now the leader of the local party and publisher of the Offenbacher Abendblatt, became the first locally elected socialist official in the city.²⁰⁸ Within three years the highly mobilized local party elected its entire list of sixteen candidates to city council at the expense of the badly divided bourgeois parties.

The party had formulated a municipal program in 1897 for the Wahlkreis (election district) Offenbach-Dieburg. It laid out a set of ambitious goals for the local party, very much in the spirit of municipal programs adopted during these same years in cities throughout the Reich. The program called for greater municipal autonomy from the state, replacement of consumption taxes with higher graduated income taxes, economies in the upper levels of the city administration, school reforms to better meet the needs of working-class children, and expanded municipal services—water, transportation, hospitals, public health, midwifery, burial, public housing, more generous poor relief and unemployed assistance, and expanded municipal employment with standard union wages and workday instead of private contracting.²⁰⁹

As one of two municipalities (Mühlhausen in Alsace being the other) where Social Democrats won early majorities, Offenbach became “a perfect example of the battlefield between social democrats and their bourgeois opponents.”²¹⁰ Almost immediately the Social Democrats, in a sharply divided council, pursued a complex maneuver to raise direct income taxes and reduce taxes on foodstuffs including meat, flour, and coal. After a running battle, they acquiesced in short-term consumption tax increases but longer-term increases in progressive income taxes. They also turned their attention to implementation of new local laws that would provide free midwifery and burial services. Importantly, the provision would not be considered “poor relief” and would therefore avoid endangering the right to vote for those who used the services. (A standing rule in many cities was that those who received poor relief in any year could not have a municipal vote.)²¹¹ The SPD councillors experienced mixed success in their first term. With some Liberals and members of the Center Party supporting aspects of the SPD agenda, the city moved ahead with plans for municipal electricity and water plants and for a school dental clinic and a school for children with special needs. Despite their essentially moderate efforts at reform, the SPD in the next election faced a concerted challenge from a unified coalition of the bourgeois parties, complicated by factionalism within their own ranks and a growing municipal deficit. In the 1901 municipal campaign, they lost all fifteen contested seats and their near majority in council. But when the new bourgeois majority failed to adequately address the deficit problems, while raising taxes on consumption, the Liberals in 1904 now found themselves in an adverse electoral position. In this election, the SPD swept back into power with an unprecedentedly strong majority of twenty-five out of thirty-six seats. The victory received little acknowledgment outside the city itself. The Sozialistische Monatshefte gave it barely a mention, as one historian has noted, “an indication of the negligible significance that the general public and the inner circles of the SPD attached to municipal politics at the time.”²¹²

On the strength of its new majority, the SPD moved quickly to address the needs of the city’s poor and working class. They passed school reforms to provide better access for children of workers to special speech therapy programs, school baths, and milk stations. Council legislation also instituted publicly managed markets for fish and coal, required contractors doing city business to pay higher wages, and instituted a nine-hour day standard for city employees, a compromise on the eight-hour ideal. They undertook major capital improvements to the city’s municipal electric and gas utilities, and modernization of the city-owned hospital. The socialists’ ambitious agenda ignited a polarizing debate over how the city’s ballooning budget should be financed. A fundamental reorientation of local taxation inevitably came into play with capital and land, as well as income taxes that displaced the regressive consumption taxes the bourgeois-governed city had depended on. Offenbach moved from being one of the least-taxed Hessian cities in 1896 to the city with the state’s highest tax rates by 1907.²¹³

The pattern of oscillating majorities would continue in the next election, which brought the renewed triumph of a bourgeois coalition, but with a difference. The Liberals and Centrists after 1907 quickly distanced themselves from the Conservatives and pursued an agenda more closely parallel to that of the Social Democrats. None of the programs adopted in the previous election cycle were abandoned, and indeed an increase in the graduated income tax was pushed through over Conservative resistance.²¹⁴ Over time the electoral oscillations produced a willingness on the part of some Liberals and some Social Democrats to constitute an effective, if episodic, ad hoc majority on behalf of an urban reform program. One consequence was an inevitable splintering in the ranks of each. Another was that “small reform steps” and “confrontation over questions of detail” ruled the day. Quoting Adelheid von Saldern on the implications for the SPD, Huber summed it up thus: “So the municipality became not the instrument for social revolution but much more ‘an immediate basis for achieving reform within the SPD.’ ”²¹⁵

Conclusion

That the considerable strength and ambition of the municipal socialists in Germany remained underappreciated and to a large degree unacknowledged in the leadership ranks of the SPD on the eve of World War I is one of the historical ironies of the socialists’ history. Its consequences would unfold in quite unexpected ways during and after the war.

Labor and socialist activists in the cities across the industrializing world, like their counterparts in Germany, probed the new opportunities for independent labor to define a “practical program” that might lead to more robust local politics and significant reforms in the day-to-day circumstances that workers faced. But that political practice also put them at odds with party comrades who viewed such reformist activity as diluting or even undermining the party’s national revolutionary aspirations. “Grassroots” political mobilization could lead at times to collaboration with reform-minded liberals, but at other times it pointed toward an authentic working-class politics committed to the socialization of cities. That mobilization shaped a new national politics from below and ultimately contributed to a robust and deeply interconnected transnational movement of municipal socialists.

5

Contested Cities Down Under:
New Zealand and Australia

So, I am pleased to see that in Ch Ch [Christchurch] the prospects of an Independent Labour Party are more hopeful. I have read the new platform. With one or two exceptions it is excellent and in most matters it is much more revolutionary than the views of the German Social Democracy in the Copenhagen Congress. But we must drop parochialism. We must throw off the superciliousness of our isolation. We must link up our movement with the world outside and we must not be frightened of our Socialism … Now let us get to work. We have a world to win and a whole people to save. What a cause and what an inspiration.¹

—“Jimmy” Thorn, Christchurch labor activist, writing home from London, England, October 3, 1910

Lilian Locke and Vida Goldstein: Navigating the Gender-Class Divide in Melbourne

In a labor movement largely dominated by men, Lilian Locke emerged as a compelling voice for women workers in Victoria. The early years of the century had seen a few women rising to positions of some prominence in the Victoria Political Labor Council (PLC). Locke was the only “lady member” of the Trades Hall Council.² Widely recognized as an energetic organizer on behalf of the PLC in Victoria, she was a staunch advocate for women.³

Locke had simultaneously maintained close ties to the rising woman’s suffrage movement led in Victoria by her friend Vida Goldstein.⁴ She faced conflicting pressures over whether to support a nonpartisan women’s campaign for public office that made a cross-class appeal, or a partisan labor movement increasingly committed to including newly enfranchised women in a broader class movement. She chose the latter. She resigned her position as secretary of the Women’s Federal Political Association (WFPA), and she actively campaigned for candidates endorsed by the Political Labor Council (PLC) of Victoria. In doing so, she also opposed the independent parliamentary candidacy of her friend Vida in 1903.⁵

Goldstein had been an active participant in the Women’s Franchise League before the turn of the century. In August 1900 she was appointed general secretary of the United Council for Women’s Suffrage and, a month later, established the movement’s leading publication, the Australian Woman’s Sphere. In 1902, she made a high-profile seven-month lecture tour of the United States as an invited guest of the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Conference. Women’s suffrage had been granted for federal elections in Australia in 1902 but rejected in Victoria and other states except New South Wales. Urged on by others in the movement, Goldstein had decided to run for a parliamentary seat in the December 1903 election. She saw herself as a proponent of “organizing the women’s vote in Victoria on democratic lines.” According to her biographer Janette Bomford, Goldstein had returned from the United States with a “commitment to non-party politics.” She wanted a “non-party political association so that women of all political persuasions could join and to prevent women being ‘torn in all directions’ whenever they wanted to take political action.” Although Goldstein had been a friend of the labor movement, had offered to work with Trades Hall to organize women workers, and returned from the United States convinced that labor support was crucial to the fight for suffrage, she now found herself at odds with the Political Labor Council.⁶ The PLC had moved to organize women’s branches within the labor council. It was precisely that task Lilian Locke felt called to undertake. On the recommendation of visiting British trade unionist Tom Mann “that no encouragement should be given to separate organization of the women,” the PLC voted to approve a resolution “that the women be recommended to join branches of the PLC and that the Platform of the PLC be adopted.”⁷ The question of whether to organize separately as women and to run women candidates apart from labor’s slate would remain an issue that bedeviled relations between leading suffragists and labor for years to come.⁸

Lilian Locke (L), Labor Organizer and Woman Suffragist, Melbourne, c. 1905, and Vida Goldstein, Journalist and Women’s Rights Advocate, Melbourne, c. 1901

For her part, Lilian Locke, as organizing secretary of the women’s branch of the PLC, played a leading role in mobilizing women’s votes for Labor’s candidates in the 1903 campaign. An election pamphlet she may have had a hand in writing argued that the Labor Party was “fighting humanity’s battle for all women and all men.” Indeed, “one vote for Vida Goldstein is as effectual against Labor as one vote for any of the Argus four” (the Liberal opponents of Labor).⁹ Despite some recognition of common ground, the rhetoric of the campaign revealed the underlying polarization between suffragists and labor. The Brisbane Worker urged workers to reject “the high priestess of the Victorian Women’s no-party movement.” It argued that if Goldstein claimed that only the Labor Party had ever done anything for women, “then why shouldn’t the emancipated female be doing something for the Labour Party.” Isabella Goldstein sympathized with her sister’s circumstances: “To rub shoulders only with the uncultured must be very trying.” And in retrospect, Vida herself noted, “Although I regret that the broad basis of the Women’s Federal Political Association is not acceptable to Labour women, I rejoice to see women organizing on any lines, even conservative lines.”¹⁰

Locke had navigated the delicate and at times contentious relations between a suffrage movement committed to organizing women (and men) in support of women’s rights irrespective of class, and a political labor movement supportive of woman’s suffrage but that put class issues first. In the end, Locke affirmed her primary commitment to labor (and withdrew from an organizing role with the Women’s Political Association), but in doing so she managed to retain close ties to the leaders of the women’s movement.¹¹

Transnational Comings and Goings

Labor and feminist activists in Australia and New Zealand, by virtue of their history and geographical location, experienced both isolation and a strong imperative to connect with their comrades elsewhere. Vida Goldstein imbibed both feminist and labor perspectives from a crucial visit to the United States, and that experience shaped her suffrage campaign in Victoria. Christchurch organizer Jim Thorn, Melbourne’s railway labor activist and Broken Hill editor, Claude Thompson, and New Zealand’s Gray District miner, Pat Hickey, went forth to engage the wider world of labor. They brought transnational experience in municipal politics and industrial unionism back to their own domains.¹² Activists from elsewhere also found a ready welcome for their ideas and perspectives Down Under. Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, fresh from trade union and ILP organizing in Britain, made multiple visits and joined organizing work in Melbourne and in Broken Hill, New South Wales.¹³ American socialist “Professor” Walter Thomas Mills from Milwaukee and Edward R. Hartley, the Bradford Labour city councillor, came to Australia and New Zealand in 1911. Both found a ready audience for their ideas on labor municipalism during invited lecture tours in Australia and New Zealand. Such comings and goings fueled a translocal consciousness that enriched and stimulated further organizing efforts of labor and socialist activists, for whom the municipality had become the foundation for a new politics.

Shifting Currents of New Zealand Labor Politics, 1908–1916

Developments peculiar to the historical and political context in New Zealand cities fed the fire of independent labor politics. But the defeat of maritime workers in the 1890 strike also revitalized the Liberal Party in New Zealand. Under Richard Seddon’s leadership the Liberal Party had appeal for workers, especially after the establishment of a Labor Arbitration Board.¹⁴ Not much political space was left for labor at local and parliamentary levels in the 1890s. Only around the turn of the century in some places (Wellington) and somewhat later in others (Christchurch and Auckland) did a direct independent labor electoral challenge to the Liberals emerge. The New Zealand Socialist Party (NZSP) played a key role in that challenge, along with the Independent Political Labour League (IPLL), despite the absence of a formally constituted labor party. By 1905 the Liberal government’s framework for labor arbitration and the relative labor peace it had managed began to erode. Between 1908 and 1913, a series of strikes rocked the New Zealand economy further politicizing but also polarizing the labor movement between syndicalist (“Red Feds”) and Socialist/Labour Party factions. Periodic attempts at unification failed to establish a durable, broadly supported New Zealand Labour Party until 1916. Despite turmoil, the grassroots work of party building at the municipal level, especially in the four major cities—Wellington, Christchurch, Auckland, and Dunedin—proceeded apace.¹⁵

A key ignition point lay among the miners of the Grey region on the west coast of the South Island. The incremental battles of local laborites in the political trenches of Wellington and Christchurch were suddenly overshadowed by the miners’ militancy in the bitter strike of 1908. A sporadically organized New Zealand Socialist Party, which had enjoyed little electoral success during the century’s first years, provided a refuge for labor militants who increasingly envisioned a path to revolutionary transformation through the organization of broader industrial unions and the catalytic effect of mass strikes. Migrating Australian miners, whose numbers increased sharply in the early years of the century, and New Zealanders like Patrick Hickey infused the New Zealand movement with transnational enthusiasm. Returning from the western United States, Hickey was brimming with enthusiasm for the syndicalist ideas permeating the Western Federation of Miners and the emerging Industrial Workers of the World.¹⁶ The Grey district miners would assume a leading role in New Zealand’s “Red Feds” movement.

Leaders like Hickey and Australian immigrants Bob Semple and Paddy Webb fired the opening salvo for a new style of unionism. On February 27, 1908, miners at Blackball struck to defend leaders who were fired for presenting the miners’ grievances, including a demand for more “crib time” (meal time), to the minister of lands and the mine manager. But in the background lay rising frustrations with the Arbitration Court, whose hostility to workers’ grievances had become increasingly apparent. The strike represented a frontal challenge to the authority of the court, under whose award the existing restriction on crib time had been certified.¹⁷

The legendary Blackball strike set the stage for increasing polarization in the New Zealand labor movement and a political bright line between liberals and labor. The syndicalist orientation of the fledgling New Zealand Federation of Labour and its critique of the more conventional path of trade union organization blazed by local trades and labor councils paralleled the split between the IWW and the AFL in the American context. As proponents of revolutionary unionism, the “Red Feds” looked toward mass strikes as the path to labor’s redemption. Their opponents, though equally frustrated with the Arbitration Court, moved more cautiously. In the period 1909–13, a concurrent debate over the place and utility of politics in the movement developed. The New Zealand Socialist Party had run candidates on a radical platform in both municipal and parliamentary campaigns with limited success and varying enthusiasm from one city to another. It now aligned with the Red Feds in championing the primacy of the industrial struggle.¹⁸ As the mine workers’ leader, Pat Hickey, put it in a series of propositions,

political action without industrial organisation is suicidal … to force political action upon a people who have no organisation whatever is madness, and … the political aspect of our movement should be a reflexion of our industrial organisation. We do not decry political action but we say that the most important factor is industrial organisation and that once industrial organisation is upon a sound footing then we can consider political action—not before.¹⁹

But, during the early years of the century, an alternative political course emerged with some local vitality under the auspices of the IPLL. Its candidates enjoyed scattered success, in Wellington for instance, through the municipal candidacies of David McLaren and Alfred Hindmarsh. By 1910, IPLL activists, whose identities were largely shaped by their local political milieus, formed a New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) to push a broader national reform agenda and to distinguish themselves from both the anti-political posture of the Red Feds and a Liberal Party whose allegiance to capital was increasingly unequivocal.²⁰

At the local level, these lines of division were never quite so sharply drawn. In Christchurch, for instance, an activist core—McCullough, Thorn, McCombs, Taylor, and others—moved easily among IPLL, the local Fabian Society, labor-aligned Liberals, and the Socialists. They emerged as a branch of the “Social Democratic Party” in 1912–13.²¹ While never wholly embracing the Red Feds, neither were they entirely comfortable with the more cautious Trades and Labour Assembly.²² Their class anger and hostility toward propertied interests sharply differentiated them from the liberals. Much of their energy continued to focus on contesting for power within city government and crafting local programs around which workers could rally.²³ In Auckland, the Red Feds and the NZSP enjoyed a stronger presence.²⁴ In 1912, Michael Savage resisted a powerful call by a mass workers’ meeting to run for mayor. In an argument that echoed the view of German leaders of the SPD, Savage declined. The Auckland Socialist Party refused to participate on the grounds that middle-class control of the city council would preclude effective activity by the mayor. But, three years later, following the disastrous strike defeats of Auckland laborers, the Waihi miners, and a general strike, Savage and the newly constituted Auckland Labour Representation Committee took a different tack toward political action. Supported by the Social Democratic Party, the LRC fielded six candidates for city council and three for the hospital board.²⁵ In Wellington, the polarities were more sharply drawn and the alienation between IPLL/NZLP and the Red Feds greater. David McLaren proved to be something of a lightning rod in the controversy. As a labor-aligned city councillor, member of Parliament, and for one term, mayor (1911), he navigated an independent political path for labor that to the Red Feds embodied the perils of compromise and reformism they despised.²⁶

Deepening polarization between syndicalist and political socialist factions created an opening for repeated but unsuccessful efforts to forge unity. Oddly, in some respects, a central player in this process was the American evangelical socialist Walter Thomas Mills, who arrived in New Zealand after a sojourn of several months first in England and then in Australia. Initially, moderate forces embraced Mills. They viewed his message of conciliation and political independence as a basis for unity. But ultimately, he proved an unreliable and somewhat self-interested partner, who pragmatically tacked between factions and alternative paths to “unity.” He realigned his efforts in support of the alliance of the New Zealand Federation of Labour and a newly constituted Social Democratic Party in the second “Unity Conference” of January 1913.²⁷ The failure of the Waihi miners’ strike in 1912 and the abortive general strike in 1913, appeared to ripen the conditions for forging a new unity in the labor movement around a carefully crafted political program. That process would unfold over several years—war years to be sure. The organization and politicization of unskilled workers in the major cities produced by the turmoil and division of the prewar years created conditions that enabled the formation of a heretofore elusive unified labor party.²⁸

While the election of “Labour mayors” in Wellington and Christchurch in 1911 and 1912 was without precedent in New Zealand, these municipal victories and the politicization of municipal affairs followed a trend that can be discerned in many municipalities in Australia and New Zealand during the prewar years.²⁹ Differences in timing and local circumstance must be taken into account, but the intensifying pace of contests for municipal office and challenges to elite governance and ratepayer interests in the halls of local government reflect a widely shared pattern of local political mobilization.

In the burgeoning cities of both countries, municipal labor politics provided a foundation for a vibrant labor movement to focus its attention on issues of immediate relevance to the lives of workers and their families. Although the experience of individual cities varied, their labor movements shared a common programmatic orientation and a degree of political success. But, in most cases, they fell short of winning power. A handful of cities in each country help to illustrate the relevant broader global patterns of municipal socialist activism.

Wellington, New Zealand: a beachhead for municipal labor politics

In New Zealand, electoral franchise reform in 1901 partially opened the door to participation of non-ratepayers in municipal elections. That reform coalesced what might be termed pre-party interest groups focusing on municipal issues and seeking candidates sympathetic to their interests. In 1901, the Wellington Ratepayers’ Association and the Wellington Progressive Municipal Association (PMA) each fielded slates for city council. Both professed a desire to cooperate in preventing party politics from intruding on municipal affairs. The PMA supported for city council two candidates associated with the labor movement, David McLaren and Alfred Hindmarsh. Of the two, only McLaren, with close ties to waterfront workers’ unions and a founding member of the New Zealand Socialist Party, was elected.³⁰

Although Wellington had served as New Zealand’s capital since 1865, the city’s urban growth lagged behind its South Island urban rivals, Christchurch and Dunedin, and its North Island competitor, Auckland. But, even as the country’s fourth city, it hardly lacked for urban problems common to late nineteenth-century cites worldwide. Its problems came in part from a unique geography. A spectacularly beautiful and generously accommodating deep-water harbor is surrounded by a belt of sharply etched foothills that functioned, according to more than one observer, as a “medieval wall” that made the city center “probably as accessible to the more residentially-remote of its citizens as dwellers in the shadow of the medieval city wall were to their city’s civic centre.”³¹

The defining feature of Wellington’s economy, like that of the country’s other major towns, was its harbor, which acted as a funnel for export of the islands’ agricultural bounty. Associated enterprises clustered around the port facilities. The port, controlled by a powerful harbor board housed in a large, stolid structure overlooking the wharves, saw 30 percent of the country’s trade in 1903 moving through its facilities and warehouses. Increasing demand for “wharfies, crane operators, and other service people” fueled the city’s robust population growth. Wharf laborers’ and tramway drivers’ grievances lay at the heart of major strikes in 1912 and 1913 that recast labor politics locally and nationally. Their actions consolidated an opposing class alignment of small and large property owners.³² Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the basic need for adequate housing and a healthful environment grew especially pressing. Historians Adrian Humphris and Geoff Mew note that “this increasing workforce” produced increasing demand for scarce housing fit for habitation. Workers “had to live somewhere … usually within walking distance of their workplace and the shops.”³³

Promoted at times as an “invalid’s paradise,” New Zealand (and Wellington) had a not-entirely-warranted reputation as a comparatively healthy environment. While life expectancy, infant mortality, and disease rates were somewhat better than those of European and US metropolises, in the view of many residents and visitors, urban sanitation facilities, “almost as low as Britain,” cried out for improvement. One visiting physician in 1874 observed that one of the cleanest water tanks in a provincial town of the South Island was seriously contaminated by “the debris of what had evidently passed through the alimentary canal of a horse.”³⁴ In Wellington, the early problems of water impurity and open sewers persisted in congested areas of settlement near the harbor, marked by narrow streets, subdivided dwellings, and crowded cul-de-sacs in neighborhoods such as Te Aro and Grainger Street. Sewage might be buried in cramped backyards or piped directly into open streams or storm sewers. In 1889, the city’s Inspector of Nuisances sounded an alarm that went largely unheeded for nearly another decade.

There are spots outside of premises, and, in some cases, inside yards and under houses, of open, filthy drains, over which the residents have no control at all … and which cannot be properly and efficiently removed till a thorough drainage of the city takes place and the localities freed from the daily fear of typhus or other highly dangerous diseases.³⁵

Wellington, New Zealand Impoverished District, 1898 Source: Wellington Harbor Board report

Facing fears of a potential bubonic plague outbreak, Liberal premier Richard Seddon ordered the Wellington City Council to “purify the city.” To do so required breaking the grip that traditional property-owning elites held over city government. The legislature diluted proposals to liberalize the municipal franchise and limit the ratepayers’ effective veto over new capital expenditures originating locally. Although the new legislation eliminated the weighted voting system (based on rates paid), it maintained a franchise restricted to householders and the requirement for “loan polls” with voting limited to ratepayers. Only the vote of a majority of all registered property owners could encumber city debt, and Wellington ratepayers repeatedly refused to do so.³⁶ Despite these limitations, the municipal election of 1901 had an electorate substantially increased by many non-ratepaying householders. Wellington elites were relieved that the electoral reforms “went no further,” but now they faced what one member termed the prospect of “ ‘that perilous innovation in our municipal life’—party politics.”³⁷ The shift from ward to at-large representation may have promoted party organization in municipal politics, but it also favored representation by municipal elites whose status and visibility inevitably contributed to their political advantage.³⁸ What the new politics of governing the city would mean quickly became evident after 1901. Less than a year after being welcomed ambivalently by his fellow councillors, David McLaren, a seasoned trade unionist not yet thirty years old, surprised his council colleagues with an unprecedented proposal.³⁹ He put before the council a motion to appoint a special committee to “enquire into the existing provisions for the housing of the people within the city,” adding that the council might then be asked to take “such action … as may be deemed necessary.”⁴⁰ Unable to come up with a good reason not to approve the motion, the council appointed a “Housing of the Poor Committee,” with McLaren as chair. Nine months later, with a completed housing census in hand, McLaren reported the results of the investigation to the council. He described the housing for the poor as wholly unsatisfactory and managed to have the entire report, including a house-by-house inventory, transcribed into the minutes of the council. The conclusion issued a ringing indictment of the conditions he documented.

Having regard to the facts that a large proportion of the houses visited are unfit for habitation under conditions of cleanliness, decency, and health; that the rents charged are in excess of what the tenants are in a position to pay; that the existence of a large number of small houses at the rear of other buildings; [therefore] the existence of general bad conditions in many narrow lanes and the overcrowding of several dwellings make for the maintenance and increase of slum conditions.⁴¹

The final line of report asked the council to retain the committee “for the purpose of advising on the best means of improving the housing accommodations for the working class.”

Commissioning a report was one thing, but granting the committee power to lobby for remedies was quite another. Under duress, in order to get council acknowledgment of the report at all, McLaren substituted a more palatable alternative resolution—that the “facts as tabulated should receive serious consideration of the incoming Council with a view to improving the housing conditions of the working classes.” Seconded by one of his opponents on the council, the motion passed. Although the council reappointed McLaren to the Housing Committee following his reelection the next month, the report lay dormant in the council minutes, the subject of no further action.⁴² McLaren had tested the limits of what a single Labour councillor might do on an issue of pressing concern to his working-class constituents. He would continue to challenge the council’s governing majority during the course of his municipal political career.

By the municipal election of 1903, the Progressive Municipal Association had disappeared as an interested party. In its place the New Zealand Socialist Party with support of the Wellington Trades and Labour Council sponsored the same two candidates as in 1901. They now ran on an explicitly “labour platform.” From this point, the axis of mobilization in municipal campaigns revolved more directly around labor’s interests, with an unequivocal party identity.⁴³ McLaren alone was elected, now as a Labour councillor. But he continued to press the council to open its affairs to public scrutiny. He put forward motions that would report the hours city laborers worked (successful); he requested the authority from Parliament for council to acquire the Wellington Gas Company (unsuccessful); he initiated a study of the feasibility of a pension fund for city employees (successful); he investigated concerns over building occupancy and overcrowding (unsuccessful); and he called for better protection from inclement weather for tramway employees (successful).⁴⁴

Working-class activists established a New Zealand Socialist Party in the early years of the new century, but support proved spotty. A labor party emerged more slowly and in fits and starts.⁴⁵ The Independent Political Labour League (IPLL), formed in September 1904 with the support of trades and labor councils in various New Zealand cities, pushed for labor representation independent of the Liberal Party in parliamentary and municipal elections. The Wellington branch moved aggressively to put forward a more ambitious labor slate—the so-called “Labour Six”—for the April 1905 city council elections.⁴⁶ Within the broad contours of the IPLL’s “municipal platform,” several Wellington branches drafted their own program on behalf of the labor candidates. In the spirit of the strategy Bradford (England) municipal Labour Party activist E. R. Hartley would articulate during his subsequent New Zealand visit, they recognized that “socialists … must see that every step altering the material conditions for the better is a step forward.” The Wellington activists chose precisely that path to address the concrete needs workers faced.⁴⁷

Fighting Municipal Platform (of the “Labour Six” in 1905)

(1) a. No further sale of municipal lands;
b. The housing of the people at reasonable rents.

(2) a. The establishment of abatoirs and workingmen’s houses;
b. The establishment of fruit, fish, vegetable and meat markets;
c. The establishment of wood and coal depots;

(3) The acquisition and extension of works for the manufacture of gas and electricity and the supply thereof as light and power.

(4) All works to be performed by day labour, and trade-union rates of pay and hours to be observed.

(5) The closing of shops on Saturday for the weekly half-holiday.

(6) Free music in public places at suitable times.⁴⁸

The “Labour Six” conducted a vigorous campaign of public speeches and mass gatherings of voters. Even as they emphasized different aspects of the IPLL program, they repeatedly argued that their election would bring a different tenor to the conduct of city affairs. One of the candidates, Mr. J. Brown, attacked “the fossilized idea that only businessmen could govern the city.” He noted labor representation on municipal bodies had grown more common in “the Old Country” and should be emulated in New Zealand. Alfred Hindmarsh attacked the secretive methods of the current council and ridiculed its “business methods.” It conducted virtually all business behind a screen of committees whose work was not open to public scrutiny, and the committees had proliferated to a “ridiculous” extent. He argued that, if the council’s work were done with greater publicity, “the public would begin to take an interest in the city’s affairs.” He indicted the council for failing to take up the municipalization of tramways and extension of municipal trading, and for burying the McLaren report on the state of workers’ housing. Mr. Brown also criticized the lax borrowing methods of the city as typical of “the old party who had directed the city affairs for so long.”⁴⁹

The IPLL candidates for Wellington City Council stressed the non-revolutionary character of their demands. While arguing that their municipal platform served “the interests of every class,” they decried the anti-labor bias of the current council, its unwillingness to deal fairly with tramway workers, and its exclusion of Councillor McLaren from the Tramways Committee.⁵⁰

Despite their concerted campaign, only two of the six labor candidates were elected. Alfred Hindmarsh now joined David McLaren in the effort to move city governance toward greater responsiveness to labor’s concerns.⁵¹ During the campaign, local socialists had continued to debate the advisability of running candidates for local office, in terms that echoed debates in the ranks of German social democrats and American socialists. At one open meeting in Socialist Hall, Mr. Wolstenholme criticized what he called “Labour Misrepresentatives” because they ultimately served the capitalist class. “Every measure of reform they advocated would bring greater security to the capitalist.” Instead, a straight-out campaign to abolish the capitalist class was needed.⁵²

Hindmarsh and McLaren served on the Wellington City Council between 1905 and 1912. Spirited municipal campaigns in 1907, 1909, and 1911 consolidated labor support and interest in municipal affairs but failed to elect additional councillors.⁵³ In council, they agitated for a range of concerns that included a public fish market, revision of the residential requirements for electors, protection and improved pay for tramway workers, and lower fares and better tram service for residents in working-class districts, while simultaneously objecting to their exclusion from key committees. Both Hindmarsh and McLaren did successfully run for seats in Parliament.

Wellington’s municipal labor activists hardly operated in a vacuum. Working first under the fledgling New Zealand Socialist Party and later through the Independent Political Labour League, modeled directly on the Political Labor Leagues in the Australian states, they crafted a municipal platform that bore the hallmarks of widely circulating platforms from cities in the UK, Australia, and the United States. They closely followed developments in the “old country.”⁵⁴

After serving on city council for more than a decade as a labor representative and sometime member of the New Zealand Socialist Party, McLaren played a key role in settling a bitter Tramway strike in Wellington from January 31 to February 5, 1912, over the union workers’ demand to dismiss an inspector for “want of tact” toward tramway employees under his charge. A solid council majority was initially hostile toward the strikers. However, McLaren, assisted in the later stages by Prime Minister Joseph Ward, crafted a carefully worded settlement that protected the strikers from victimization and ensured the transfer of the inspector to a position where he would have no contact with the members of the Tramway Union.⁵⁵ Following this triumph, McLaren was elected Wellington’s first labor mayor in the spring with 41 percent of the vote in a three-cornered race. He served a single one-year term before local elites regrouped to defeat him. Although he polled more votes (9948) the following year, he lost in a two-way race by a mere 508 votes. Even as city government remained contested ground in 1912, socialists and Labour Party activists focused increasingly on their own internal political conflicts and polarization that stemmed from a series of bitter strikes.⁵⁶ Further gains for labor in the Wellington municipal arena would await the shifting political tides of the postwar period.

Christchurch, New Zealand: “Which side are you on?”

Christchurch had sprung to life on the South Island in the mid-nineteenth century as an urban settlement of distinctly English and Anglican identity in a pastoral countryside whose commercial vitality required a thriving city and port. The city’s elite leadership of the local Canterbury Association envisaged a “model English community” and promoted it as a “garden” city. They hoped to draw migrants who were disproportionately English, in contrast to Auckland and Otago, which were tied more directly to the Australian frontier.⁵⁷ The city, like many in Australia and New Zealand, had a deliberately suburban cast, but with a distinctly urban economy built around transporting, processing, handling, and storing the rapidly expanding volume of wool, grain, and meat from the countryside. Its dispersed layout of modest homes and subsistence gardens reinforced the image of a relatively egalitarian, small-propertied social order. This “artisanal vision” fueled a fibrous economy in which a skilled home-owning working class provided the engine of economic growth through the construction and maintenance of the city’s housing and transportation infrastructure.⁵⁸

Representative of the skilled, “respectable” working class that took shape in Christchurch was Jack McCullough, a renowned local labor leader, socialist, and eventually a prominent workers’ representative on the New Zealand Labour Arbitration Court. A tinsmith for many years in the massive Addington Railway shops, McCullough achieved the “homeownership ideal,” according to historian and biographer Melanie Nolan, by moving from a cottage to a small house near the shops where he “and [his wife] Maggie kept a large garden, fowls and a cow.” They were “respectable, propertied, urban radicals who wanted to nationalize land but in the meantime ‘played by the legal rules.’ ”⁵⁹ Deeply influenced by the writings of Robert Blatchford and Edward Bellamy, McCullough described himself as a “socialist” and believed “that the only thing that will really benefit the wage earners and wealth producers is the National Ownership and the Democratic control of the means of life.”⁶⁰

Industrial transformation restructured the spatial fabric of Christchurch in ways that reinforced class boundaries. Inner and northwest suburbs became zones of elite and affluent residence, while “suburbs in an arc from Addington in the southwest through Sydenham to Woolston in the southeast” became concentrated areas of industrial production and working-class residence. In Sydenham, the intrusion of railways and proximity to the central city made it a concentrated zone of working-class housing, close to a range of workplaces. According to historian Libby Plumridge, “The original two-roomed cottages of working people deteriorated with rail and industry: houses decayed, factories arose, ill-formed and undrained alleys abounded.” The daughter of an Anglican vicar reported being able to see from her bedroom window only one two-story house in the midst of all the modest cottages.⁶¹

By the 1890s, Christchurch was well on its way to becoming the manufacturing hub of New Zealand’s economy and its most industrialized city. Its textiles (woolens), metal industries (railway shops and iron molding), meat processing, and boot and shoe fabrication had grown in scale of production. Unionization kept pace with the formation of the Canterbury Trades and Labor Council in 1890 and constituent unions in a host of trades and among railwaymen and waterside workers. Although defeat of the maritime strike in 1890 led to a significant hiatus in labor organization, by the turn of the century, changes in manufacturing labor processes and the scale of factory production displaced some skilled workers and increased use of unskilled labor in more regimented and standardized production processes. These changes prompted increasing unionization. What one historian has called a “managerial offensive” unsettled industrial relations the newly constituted Arbitration Court could not stabilize. Mechanization, the manipulation of piece rates, and the introduction of bonus payment schemes undermined the position of skilled crafts, including molders and engineers (machinists), boot and shoe workers, and tailors.⁶² With rising levels of labor conflict between 1906 and 1911, employer intransigence, and the tendency of the Arbitration Court (despite McCullough’s presence) to rule against labor, skilled and unskilled workers, some of whom were employed by the municipality, turned toward politics for redress.

As elsewhere in New Zealand, in Christchurch, workers’ politics in the early twentieth century took significant twists and turns on the way to the formation of a stable labor party. One significant faction of workers lingered on the radical fringes of the Liberal Party at the end of the nineteenth century, but in the new century, they began experimenting with forms of independent working-class political organization in which socialist ideas loomed large. Jack McCullough, for instance, moved from leadership in the fledgling Socialist Party after 1901 to participation in the Political Labour League (PLL) (1904) and its successor, the Independent Political Labour League (IPPL), and eventually the first Labour Party of 1910, followed by the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1913. Christchurch workers’ loyalty to the SDP would be cemented by wartime opposition but eventually aligned in 1918 with the New Zealand Labour Party formed two years before.⁶³ Neglected in these accounts is sustained attention to the place of municipal electoral activism as a vehicle for addressing workers’ immediate day-to-day needs and building a base for wider electoral initiatives.⁶⁴ This shortcoming is by no means unique to the New Zealand cases.

The Christchurch municipal election of 1913 was a breakthrough for labor, but, as we have seen, it did not stand alone in the universe of early twentieth-century municipal politics. In Christchurch, candidates had run for council seats with explicit labor backing before 1913. In 1907, for instance, James Thorn, the unquenchable local labor activist, reported a plan afoot to contest the municipal election with support of a dozen local unions. He wrote to his mentor J. T. Paul in Dunedin that he had “kicked up a shindig” in a city council meeting by speaking of “the mediocrities of which it was composed,” and claiming that it lay “in the hands of greedy rack rent landlords and money grubbing employers.”⁶⁵ Thorn belittled his Liberal-Labour colleagues who professed to see “nothing wrong,” and he also chided those social democrats who “would have us waste our strength with shadows.” As he prepared a stump speech to his fellow socialists about “Socialism and Municipal Politics,” he proclaimed to the contrary, “I’ve got a catalogue of woes to talk about. That Labour man that has no grievances is a Liberal.”⁶⁶ Although the campaign yielded no victories in that election cycle, it set the stage for future campaigns.

Between election campaigns, the interests of labor remained focused on municipal issues with periodic petitions and interventions in city council affairs. In the fall of 1908, the Trades and Labour Council protested the city raising fees to exorbitant levels for the city baths, and, after months of petition-gathering among trade unions, the IPLL sent a delegation to council asking it to institute a municipally owned market for fresh and inexpensive vegetables and fish. “His Worship the Mayor” referred the matter to committee where it apparently disappeared.⁶⁷ Reports in late 1908 that the police had interfered with the distribution of socialist literature in the central Cathedral Square precipitated a call for immediate joint action by the IPLL and the Socialist Party to field candidates in the next council election. More immediately, Thorn proposed challenging the police action directly. “He moved that a meeting be held in Cathedral Square on Saturday afternoon for the disposal of socialist literature. Carried.”⁶⁸ In 1909, the annual pre-election ritual of city officials stripping innumerable lodgers, home-residing sons, and other unqualified municipal voters from the rolls produced a large number of challenges to reinstate would-be voters for the impending referendum on the Saturday half-holiday for shop workers. Months before, labor supporters T. E. Taylor and J. McCombs had addressed the city council on that very issue in support of the clerks and office workers, many of whom were disfranchised.⁶⁹ Business supporters on the city council saw strict interpretation of franchise restrictions as a necessary tool for defeating the half-holiday referendum.

The politicization of council business continued apace in 1910 with petitions and deputations from the Canterbury Trades and Labour Council and other labor sympathizers over the pay and hours for city laborers and drivers.⁷⁰ Seeking first to exclude such deputations and ignore the petitions, the council divided over the extent to which interested citizens, such as “New Zealand Labour Party, South Christchurch Branch,” and trade unions should be heard during council meetings. Unaccustomedly polarized in votes at successive meetings between March through June, the council in close votes chose to exclude deputations of interested parties and turned down the wages and hours recommendations of its own Works Committee. Hundreds of trade unionists demonstrated twice outside city council. Frustrated by the council’s unresponsiveness, they gave voice to the need to elect their own representatives.⁷¹ Clearly the business of governing the city had become more contested. And it would become more so in the coming years.

The city council repeatedly upheld measures that limited democratic participation in municipal affairs. National legislation reinforced local propensities in such matters. In 1900 amendments to the Municipal Corporations Bill required that candidates for local offices pay a substantial fee (£10 for mayor; £5 for councillors) refundable only if candidates polled at least one-eighth of the vote. For loan referenda the legislation mandated a plural franchise for property owners in all wards where they owned property. The city council defeated a proposal to sponsor ward-level open forums for municipal candidates and strictly enforced franchise restrictions based on residency and owner/renter status.⁷²

By the election of 1911, after years of agitation, a new political environment seemed in the offing. The council permitted voter-enrollment tables to be placed in central public locations and declared a half-holiday on Election Day. A number of the petitioners from the previous year entered the contest directly as candidates for city council, and T. E. Taylor, the highly respected MP from Christchurch and vocal advocate for labor’s interest, stood for mayor. Responding to a petition, the council permitted more generous enrollment of electors, and, either as a matter of policy or out of deference, the town clerk disqualified fewer of them. The election results proved impressive. T. E. Taylor was resoundingly elected mayor, his allegiance to labor clear but his formal party association somewhat less so. A united labor coalition also elected five councillors, four from the Sydenham ward and one from Linwood. The Canterbury Trades and Labour Council subsequently congratulated the new “Labour Councillors” and the “Municipal Representation Committee” that had worked so diligently on their behalf.⁷³

The ascension of T.E. Taylor as mayor promised a new day. His predecessor acknowledged an unprecedented “swing in the pendulum of municipal politics.” And, accepting the office, Taylor noted “the attempts of Labour to secure representation on the Council had aroused interest in municipal affairs.” While acknowledging that “the Labour Party” had not achieved its full objectives, he pointedly observed that now “there was a little leaven in the Council that might ultimately leaven the whole lump.” He enumerated the issues he hoped to pursue: street improvements, especially in poor neighborhoods, higher wages for city employees, a better water supply, public markets and milk supply, and this without raising local rates.⁷⁴

No sooner had Taylor and his labor colleagues assumed their positions in the Christchurch Council chambers than they began to challenge both the procedures and substance of city council business. In a series of tie votes broken by the mayor, council granted permission for a variety of organizations to hold public meetings in the central Cathedral Square, a public space previously denied them for such purposes. The successful petitioners ranged from the Salvation Army and the Sydenham Gospel Mission to the Industrial Workers of the World, the New Zealand Socialist Party, and the Christchurch Prohibition League. The mayor also submitted a lengthy report on his proposal for major street reconstruction throughout the city, including in working-class neighborhoods, and he proposed to hold mass meetings to build support for his proposals. (Dust and muck were perpetual problems in poorer neighborhoods where macadam roads were unknown.) On other matters, the mayor and the minority of Labour councillors had more difficulty mustering a majority in the closely divided council. Improvement in the wages of city employees continued to be stymied.⁷⁵

Mayor T. E. Taylor’s sudden death just three months after his election dealt the insurgents a devastating blow. An outpouring of grief from all segments of the community proved truly unprecedented. A local newspaper reported the testimonial of Mr. Hunter, a Labour councillor and the head of the City Tramway Drivers’ Union.

One of Mr. Taylor’s first duties was to find out the duties and powers of the city inspectors with the view of having the city thoroughly investigated from a health point of view, and in order to ensure that absolute cleanliness was observed. Mr. Taylor was also strong on the question of the elimination of slums, and the establishment of a municipal quarry. He also proposed to provide a municipal fish supply. In fact, Cr. Hunter said, there was not a plank in the Labour platform that Mr. Taylor overlooked.⁷⁶

But the unprecedented public grieving over Taylor’s sudden death did not lessen the polarization in local politics. Mayor-elect Dougall, a political opponent of labor, did not mince words on the occasion of his installation. Enumerating the faults of the fallen mayor, Dougall stressed his “lack of balance,” and “his great defect … a somewhat reckless impetuosity and an impatience and a disregard of the opinions of others.”⁷⁷

Christchurch Municipal Elections 1913, Social Democratic Platform

By the spring of 1913, the forces of labor again mobilized through a Municipal Labour Representation Committee (LRC) to reclaim and enlarge the territory they had won with Taylor’s election in 1911, but then lost so abruptly when Dougall and then conservative businessman Henry Holland succeeded him as mayor.⁷⁸ An election broadside on behalf of candidates “known as the Social-Democratic candidates or Labour ‘ticket’ ” claimed the support of a coalition that included the North Canterbury Labour Representation Committee, the Socialist Party, Fabian Society, Unity Committee, Trades and Labour Council, and the Women’s Institute, all united “for the purpose of securing adequate representation of the wage-earners of Christchurch.” They belittled the notion that “businessmen” were somehow more capable of efficiently running city affairs than practical workingmen. They claimed the administration that succeeded Taylor had squandered the opportunity to acquire the gas monopoly, to increase access to electricity in workers’ homes, to arrest the spread of disease by controlling the milk supply, and limit the profiteering of middlemen by instituting a public market.⁷⁹

As the dust settled in early May 1913 after the hard-fought municipal election, local labor activists surveyed the results with some satisfaction. They had elected five of their members—referred to in the liberal press as “Social Democrats”—and garnered nearly 6,000 votes, 40 percent of the total. Additionally, in neighboring boroughs, they had elected five councillors, three in Riccarton and two in Woolston. Though still a minority on the Christchurch Council, they clearly felt empowered by the victory.⁸⁰ And in the election’s aftermath the traditionally staid tenor of council deliberations took a dramatic turn.

The election of the council’s standing committees, usually a routine and uncontested matter following city elections, “caused a lengthy and at times warm discussion” according to one press report, “in which party feeling now and then ran high.”⁸¹ The aura of an unspoken tradition of nonpartisanship had been shattered. The governing class regarded parties as an inappropriate and unwelcome intrusion in municipal affairs. When Labour member James McCombs accused the “Citizens’ Association” of taking more than its share of committee positions, Mayor Holland lashed back, “There is no Citizens’ Association here … I want to say here that there are no parties in the Council.” Another Labour councillor asserted that “there was no use disputing the fact that party had become a clear-cut issue,” and he was prepared to stay all night if necessary to settle the matter. The partisan tone of the floor debate brought the boisterous public gallery into play and produced a threat from the mayor to clear the hall if decorum were not promptly restored. Finally, Jim McCullough, newly elected Labour member and brother of local labor notable, J. A. McCullough, pointed out that some councillors could be seen consulting typewritten slips of paper with preselected names for different committees. It appeared that after all “things were cut and dried.” Then McCullough raised the temperature of the debate a few more degrees. “If the other party wanted to fight they would get it on the floor of the Council. The Social Democrats were not there to be snuffed out and if they could not get justice one way they would fight it out on the floor of the Council.” Before the councillors resorted to fisticuffs, cooler heads prevailed, a compromise was reached, and the councillors agreed to increase the membership of each committee to six, each having at least two labor members.⁸²

The LRC did not achieve Labour control of city council, but the elected Labour councillors brought a new level of popular interest to municipal affairs and a new recognition of the underlying polarities that might govern such affairs in the future. As sitting Labour councillor, Hiram Hunter had written before the election, “By their insults to the workers’ representatives, their accusations of incapacity, their solemn warnings to the public to beware of electing working men, our opponents have themselves made this election a class struggle, and every worker must take up the challenge.” And further, “it is no use to try and evade the fact that there are two parties in municipal as well as general politics … Which side are you on? There is no middle course. Either you are of the exploiting class, or you are being exploited.”⁸³

Australian Labor and the Politics of Municipalism

The experiences of New Zealand and Australian workers in the 1890s after the maritime strike of 1890 moved initially in different directions. Both faced political repercussions, but in Australia, and especially New South Wales, the outcome was a robust Labor Party movement at both state and local levels. The challenge of liberalism seemed more muted, although some labor parliamentarians drifted into what many activists saw as “unholy alliances” with liberals that subverted labor’s agenda. Preoccupation with party discipline in the selection of candidates and fealty to the party’s programmatic priorities dominated the Australian Labor Party’s internal debates. And in Australia, as in New Zealand, activism at the municipal level fueled ongoing political mobilization and the crystallization of an independent local labor political presence.⁸⁴

The virus of racism and “White Australia”

In Australia, like the United States, laborism and socialism were deeply inflected with racial ideology.⁸⁵ The dominant ideology of “White Australia” found an echo in labor’s mobilization of its largely working-class constituency, though with noteworthy anti-racist opposition in some organizations and some regions.⁸⁶ But, as Bruce Scates has observed, at least for the 1890s, anti-racist, internationalist sentiments became “confined to the fringes of even radical society.” The racial boundaries within the working class created not just rivalries over employment but the treatment of “the Chinese, the islanders or any other of these ‘alien races’ [as] a source of moral and physical contamination, ‘a menace to the [white] community.’ ” But although “the language of white labour fraternalism, qualified [working-class men’s] socialism with an exclusive Australian nationalism,” other more diverse ideological strands coexisted and leavened the dominant racism, as, for instance, the liberal internationalism of the Single Tax Leagues, or the “cosmopolitanism” of Melbourne’s Anarchist Club or Sydney’s Socialist League.⁸⁷ Neville Kirk has powerfully demonstrated the contrasting anti-racist internationalism of Tom Mann and the nationalist commitment to “racial purity, white superiority, and ‘coloured’ inferiority” of his comrade Bob Ross. Their views reflected the complex currents and countercurrents within the Australian working class. In Kirk’s view, however, “the racism of whiteness was probably more variable, contingent and contested than globally monolithic, unchanging and consensual.”⁸⁸ The debate over the reach of racism within the white working class in the Anglophone world continues to be an essential feature in treatments of working-class ideology and experience in Britain, Australia, and the United States.⁸⁹

Municipal labor and socialist activists were not immune to the racial virus, but nor did they reflexively give voice to the dominant racial ideology. As Frank Bongiorno has noted, Bob Solly, a socialist bootmaker, future city councillor, and state parliament member from the Melbourne industrial suburb of Richmond, spoke out against a Trades Hall Council resolution that called for the “total exclusion of coloured and other undesirable races.” He believed “the Britisher should rather aim at raising the coloured alien to his own level.” Although joined by some other dissenters, Solly saw the resolution pass.⁹⁰

”The Bushman’s Future,” The Worker (Brisbane), 14 May 1892

Victoria: “Marvellous” Melbourne (“Smelbourne”)

As beleaguered labor activists in Melbourne’s industrial suburbs fought to “create new cities” out of the “old disease-haunted, slum inhabited places,” they faced challenges that were similar in many respects to those confronted by municipal socialists in other cities around the world. The peculiarities of Australian urban development and governance compounded those challenges. Nonetheless, around the turn of the century in Richmond, Collingwood, North Melbourne, Flemington, Footscray, Fitzroy and other close-in industrial suburbs that surrounded Melbourne City, labor sent candidates into battle for what one editorialist termed “a Cinderella-like transformation” that would result in “better sanitary conditions, better wage conditions, and larger opportunities for the rooting out of slums, disease, dirt and monopolies of whatever kind.”⁹¹ Against all odds, some of them were elected to their city councils.

Melbourne Metropolitan Area, c. 1890s

The roots of Melbourne’s urban problems date from its origins. The unauthorized settlement of Port Phillip by squatters from Tasmania in 1835 gave them access to what seemed promising opportunities for land speculation, trade, and pastoral pursuits. They gave little attention to constituting civic authority. Essential functions grew by accretion, sanctioned by the distant colonial authorities in New South Wales. These functions included the appointment of a police magistrate, a pound keeper, and in due course a public market administered by an elected market commission.⁹² The needs and interests of early property owners—the proprietors—shaped the growth of local government and the definition of its role in the emerging urban community. They also dictated who could claim the right of elector and elected. With the establishment of municipal corporations for both Melbourne and Sydney in 1842, the NSW Legislative Assembly created space for political activity that would eventually require greater autonomy in local affairs. Shifting coalitions among proprietors marked the relationship between the city of Melbourne and the state of Victoria, formally established in 1851. Almost from the outset a cluster of emerging suburbs strove to define their identities as self-standing, self-governing communities in relation to Melbourne city. Their significance would only grow as urban population density and the economic robustness of the towns grew.

Early city councillors were required to possess a minimum of £1000 in property. They included “publicans” whose business interests enabled them to cultivate wide-ranging networks of supporters and more established merchants, whose status and wealth created privileges of their own. Some men of influence abandoned municipal governance out of despair over the limited powers colonial legislatures conferred on cities.⁹³ Despite these limitations, the necessary improvements in the life of a growing city fostered an atmosphere rife with private jobbery and contractual relations that offered great opportunities for corruption. The Argus noted in 1855 that the city councillors “devote their attention to intrigues and cabals, for the purpose of obtaining as much as possible of the public money to increase the value of the properties of their immediate friends and supporters and sometimes of their own.”⁹⁴ Another local paper documented the double standard practiced by private parties seeking access to public monies. “There is a loose and corrupt doctrine, floating in the minds of some people, that there is less of guilt and rascality in robbing the treasury of a government or a [municipal] corporation than in purloining from the till of a private citizen.”⁹⁵ City councils saw a gradual shift from more youthful to older, more established businessmen and from shorter contested terms to longer uncontested service. In Collingwood, for instance, by the late 1870s most seats went uncontested and incumbents might serve as long as twelve or fifteen years.⁹⁶

By 1880, Australia had one of the highest urban densities in the world. Its cities and towns comprised nearly half of the colonies’ population. But urban settlement, at least in the major municipalities of Melbourne and Sydney, took on a fragmentary quality that created political openings for labor’s municipal activists, but also thwarted their efforts to achieve solutions to their cities’ problems.⁹⁷ As one historian of municipal government in Melbourne has noted, the separation of the Colony of Victoria from New South Wales together with the extraordinarily rapid growth of the city’s population relative to its thinly-settled colony led the colonial parliament to limit the capacity of the city to govern its own affairs.

We can hypothesize that, given Melbourne’s size relative to that of the Colony, an autonomous city-state could have, and probably would have, stood up to the Government of Victoria. Equally, an autonomous city-state could have, and probably would have, diminished the central government’s role and revenues.⁹⁸

In addition to extensive state involvement in decisions about urban public works and revenue, the colony under new legislation in 1854 encouraged Melbourne’s suburbs to break away from the corporation and form their own municipalities, “thereby ensuring the division of local authority in the territorially expanded urban area.” In “new cities” like Collingwood, businessmen saw value in managing their own affairs “to minimize [property] taxation and to maximize returns.”⁹⁹

Converging imperatives shaped the structure of local governance. Rapid urban growth created inexorable pressures to improve local infrastructure and basic amenities of urban life. Local imagery shifted from the self-promotional “Marvellous Melbourne” of the 1880s—a city of some glamour, even on the “civic frontier”—to “Smelbourne,” a city “wallowing in its own filth … [where] sickness and death became a hideous reminder of the fundamental interdependency of the social areas of the metropolis.”¹⁰⁰ But horrific conditions of urban life were only part of the story. The persistent tug of businessmen’s laissez-faire desire for limiting local rates continued to bias the choices made by elected local bodies against expanding public sector services. In early suburban Richmond, for instance, candidates for office were expected to commit to open evening meetings and affirm that “the ratepayers are to be consulted previous to the contraction of loans” and that “economy is of paramount importance in the collection and expenditure of the public money.”¹⁰¹ While the structures of local government may have enjoyed a degree of formal autonomy, the “realpolitik” of the legislature’s overriding authority in the funding of public works and improvements hamstrung local self-government, despite periodic demands locally for greater autonomy.¹⁰²

Necessity created some measure of metropolitan cooperation even if the much-debated idea of metropolitan government eluded reformers.¹⁰³ One concrete step toward metropolitan-wide coordination in the critical area of water and sanitation was achieved in 1890 through the creation of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (M & MBOW). Progress came slowly as Melbourne’s municipalities only gradually joined the sewerage network. The skepticism of ratepayers, wary about increased taxation and contractors committed to existing methods of sanitary disposal, hobbled the undertaking. In the meantime, the unsanitary disposal of night soil created a hygienic hazard, and the use of private contractors with ties to city councillors continued to infect the suburbs’ politics. By 1887, Melbourne had become known as “the typhoid capital of Australia,” and Footscray with 11 typhoid deaths per 1,000 had the next-highest rate in the metropolis. Collingwood, the last to join the M & MBOW, was not “sewered” until 1903.¹⁰⁴

The spreading effects of industry created conditions that cried out for attention of some public body. Regulating the so-called “noxious trades” and particularly the processing of meat and animal byproducts posed the most urgent need. The city of Footscray, in particular, came to be known as the “Stinkopolis” among the Melbourne municipalities. But despite that reputation, the suburb’s council liberally dispensed licenses to “driven-out capitalists” from other suburbs like Collingwood and Richmond, with “bone mills, manure works and boiling-down places” being the “most notorious of the newcomers.” The Footscray Council acted as a “welcoming committee” and in 1883 sacked the Inspector of Nuisances for sending “too many reports.” The shocking consequences were graphically reported in a story, “Out in a Gondola,” published in the Footscray Independent in the spring of 1887.

It was a bright sunshiney [sic] morning when we sailed away in a gallant bark, over the odiferous surface of the Saltwater River … Above the Railway Bridge … [p]ieces of rancid fat, paunches, lights, dead lambs, dogs, etc., line the shores, that are burrowed in all directions with the holes of water rats. The gut factory pours in a stream of excrement and gut scrapings … Next the glue works swamp the shore with hair and parings from hides, and a large pile on shore has accumulated for the rats, ready for removal or being swept into the river when convenient … At about fifty feet from the bank opposite this drain an oar could be pushed down for several feet in the accumulated deposit of decaying putrescence, and even at high water the keel of the boat raised a trail of blood showing how great the deposit was.¹⁰⁵

Whatever gains working people in the industrial districts achieved during the “marvelous” decade of the 1880s—and among other things a significant number of trades won, at least temporarily, the eight-hour day—the dismal economy of the 1890s sent incomes and employment sharply downward. With spreading misery, the fabric of the organized labor movement, especially the unions of skilled workers, disintegrated leaving workers substantially unprotected against employers’ efforts to reduce wages or substitute cheaper workers.¹⁰⁶ In Footscray factory employment fell by as much as a quarter between 1890 and 1892. By mid-1893, some estimates suggested that perhaps 40 percent of the male population over fourteen years of age was unemployed. A haughty attitude by some leading public officials inflamed the local unemployed. The premier of Victoria, J. B. Patterson, came to Footscray in February 1894 and proclaimed “the irreligious character of the unemployed as a significant fact in their present impecunious condition” and urged that “the townspeople capable of furnishing employment to their fellows should do so, as labor could not be more cheaply procured than at the present time.”¹⁰⁷ Class tensions may have simmered or even on occasion exploded during hard times, but with the return of prosperity, those tensions re-energized the labor movement and pushed forward a new politics of labor, now hardened for struggle as never before.

Reform currents in the Liberal Party complicated the emergence of a Labor Party presence at both municipal and parliamentary levels. A series of organizational initiatives in the 1890s pointed toward the emergence of a “radical” laborist wing of the Liberal Party, but in each case labor activists pulled back from an actual break with liberalism. After the Great Maritime Strike of 1890 and with deepening depression, politically active workers and their allies formed the Progressive Political League (PPL). But wedded to protectionism, lacking strong trade union financial support, and hobbled by its own liberal leanings, the PPL virtually disappeared into a new formation, the United Labor and Liberal Party, in 1894. With their attention focused on parliamentary affairs and determined to defeat the anti-labor ministry of Patterson, laborites crafted a strategy that still enabled liberals to lead. Liberal reformers spearheaded the Factory and Shops Act of 1896 with labor very much a junior partner. But its passage created a new appetite for strengthening labor’s independent status, now through a United Labor Party (ULP), formed in 1896. Despite a platform that was more strident in its demands on behalf of workers—a universal eight-hour day, abolition of the upper legislative chamber, state pensions, land nationalization, and collective ownership of the means of production—the ULP’s demands were diluted or dropped in the parliamentary campaigns of 1897 and 1900. With the return of relative prosperity and facing a war in South Africa, the labor movement pursued a full break with its erstwhile liberal compatriots. The process had been slow. It involved a changing of the guard in the Trades Hall Council and the appearance of a publication, the Tocsin, that gave voice to radicals’ discontents.¹⁰⁸

Labor’s independence in municipalities was constrained by a restrictive municipal franchise and requirements for office-holding that privileged propertied businessmen. But it was nevertheless enhanced by the deepening urban crisis and the failure of liberal policies to adequately address the day-to-day concerns of workers. The coziness of aspiring labor politicians to liberal colleagues and their inability to resist the entreaties for compromise once in office bolstered the radicals in labor’s ranks and reinforced their wariness toward an aspiring parliamentary Labor Party. Liberals preached against the rise of a new, class-conscious politics. As historian Frank Bongiorno noted, “They regarded liberalism as a civil creed, a philosophy that encompassed the interests and ideals of all useful sections of the community.” They treated labor as a “sectional interest” whose parochialism held the risk of self-serving corruption. The Age warned that

too often it has been shown that the workman, who is necessarily not steeled against temptations which are inoperative on men of different training, deteriorates rapidly both as a man and a member after a session or two in Parliament … he has a well oiled tongue, and no scruples about vilifying anyone who stands between him and the only billet in which a workman’s wages are fixed by law.”¹⁰⁹

Labor’s claims to a new, assertive class-conscious independence displayed itself most graphically in the energy it poured into municipal politics.

Beginning in 1900 and accelerating in the annual municipal elections prior to World War I, Melbourne’s suburbs witnessed labor-aligned candidates increasingly contest for municipal office. A handful of labor’s first city councillors played a strategic role in the shaping of local government policy and functions. With the municipal elections in August 1901—and with tacit sanction of the Political Labor Council of Victoria—labor acquired a foothold in the city councils of North Melbourne (three seats), Richmond (two seats), South Melbourne, Port Melbourne, and Collingwood (one seat each).¹¹⁰ By the following year anticipation of further success was palpable. As the editors of the Tocsin noted, too often labor had considered the municipal arena unworthy of effort. “Doubtless this delusion is due to the ‘vested-interest’ class so long keeping the Councils a close preserve” and to the restrictive municipal franchise. But the editors argued for labor to show more interest in municipal matters.

Many details are missed by the various Parliaments which can only be properly treated by the municipalities. Such details as healthy homes for the citizens; well-kept streets and parks; control of electric light, gas works, and trams; libraries, swimming baths, gymnasia, and other important and necessary factors in promoting the comfort of the people are evidences of what municipal power may and does mean.

A successful campaign would represent a “big attempt in the direction of Municipal Socialism” and with it a “new era will dawn for the Victorian worker.”¹¹¹ The results that year showed scattered labor victories but no breakthrough. The gains in Richmond yielded two additional council seats and nearly a third. With that Richmond became a beacon for other suburbs in the years ahead.

In the municipal trenches of Richmond (Greater Melbourne)

Richmond had a hardscrabble, gritty working-class identity at the turn of the century. In the years to come, it would become a symbol of working-class politics gone awry among reformers and anti-corruption purists. However undeserved that reputation may have been, it would color and largely obscure for subsequent commentators and some historians a vibrant, principled municipal labor politics that produced bitter, polarizing fights in city council and in the municipal elections. These contests suddenly acquired a new class meaning.¹¹²

Just two months after winning a by-election for a Richmond city council seat in late 1900, James Sutch, secretary of the Timber Yard and Sawmill Employees’ Union and vice president of the Victoria Political Labor Council (PLC), made a colorful entry into council politics. He introduced a motion that the wages paid to city laborers be increased to seven shillings, only to be ruled out of order by the mayor. Undeterred, Sutch submitted notice of four motions that were procedurally more complete. Unable to gather the two-thirds majority required to rescind the previous established wage rate, Sutch and his allies nevertheless secured passage of a motion increasing the pay for laborers employed as drivers with horses and drays. Most importantly, they served notice that they would challenge the council majority on a range of issues of concern to labor.¹¹³

Before 1900, Richmond had been quite accustomed to governance by a propertied “resident and visible ruling class” that dominated city council and “exerted social leadership through the churches and local organizations.” But the older elite families were moving out or being displaced by new, upstart entrepreneurs, like former butcher and soon-to-be-mayor Charles Jago, or local influential Edwin Crawcour, a pawnshop owner turned real estate magnate. As Janet McCalman has perceptively noted, “Working-class Richmond people remained fascinated by success in fellow Richmondites, relishing their disgraces, deploring their pretensions, revering their triumphs over poverty and insignificance.” But the capacity of these aspiring defenders of property to govern uncontested faced new challenges with the rise of a more organized “labor interest.”¹¹⁴

Even before Jim Sutch pushed the council to increase the wage of city laborers, skirmishes between labor-aligned councillors and their opponents had erupted over council meeting times, cancelling the library subscription to the Tocsin, and pushing for an increase in city quarry workers’ wages.¹¹⁵ Battle lines emerged around a whole set of issues not heretofore addressed in council chambers. A small but growing core of labor councillors maneuvered through and around council procedures to push new initiatives and defend the modest gains they achieved. On occasion they could count on support from a shifting group of liberals.

Sutch urged his council colleagues to support reductions in railway fares for students attending the Working Men’s College and provide shelter for old age pensioners on paydays. When conservative councillors pushed a resolution supporting the parliamentary reprimand of the editor of the Tocsin for publishing allegedly libelous comments about “His Most Gracious Majesty King Edward VII,” Sutch and labor councillor Carter attempted unsuccessfully to block the motion.¹¹⁶ The annual ritual of appointing standing committees also became a point of conflict. In August 1901 Sutch attempted to push through a motion making the all-powerful Finance Committee a committee of the whole. Instead, council passed an amendment appointing a committee of five that largely represented labor’s opponents. But one year later, with the election of two additional labor councillors (Solly and Hunter), the laborites, in a sophisticated tactical maneuver, moved the selection of a new finance committee that would consist of a majority of three labor councillors (Tatnall, Solly, and Sutch). The motion was withdrawn in deference to an amendment put forward by conservative former mayor Jago, that would make the Finance Committee a committee of the whole. This having been labor’s objective in the first place, Sutch seconded the amendment, and it passed.¹¹⁷

The battle over city laborers’ wages formed part of a larger struggle over whether the city should employ private contractors or city employees to do essential work. Here labor made remarkable headway. The original motion by Sutch to increase laborers’ wages to seven shillings per day never disappeared altogether and was quietly adopted as part of a more general set of recommendations by the Estimates Committee in late 1901. But when no tenders (bids) were received for the construction of rights-of-way, council moved to solicit fresh tenders and turned down a recommendation from labor that the work be done by city day labor. When the Lighting Committee recommended that the upkeep of the city’s gas lamps be done by contract rather than day labor, the council divided evenly and thereby maintained the existing day labor arrangement. As further insurance that low-wage contractors would not be employed by the city, Sutch pushed through a motion that required a minimum wage clause in all contracts. In October of 1902, the Baths Committee chaired by Sutch recommended that the city swimming baths be managed by the city rather than a lessee. When conservatives tried to refer the matter to the Public Works Committee, which they dominated, the amendment was defeated in council, and the city took over management of the baths.¹¹⁸

One of the most contentious issues before council in these years was the Sunday operation of the city’s abattoirs (slaughterhouses). In September 1901, the Amalgamated Butchers’ Union requested elimination of Sunday labor during the summers. A report from the Public Works Committee asserted that Richmond’s policy was no different from the City of Melbourne. There the matter lay for nearly a year. Again, the butchers’ union requested abolition of Sunday labor and council permitted the union’s leaders to present evidence directly. A recommendation from the Public Works Committee precluding action until a refrigerating unit could be constructed was sidelined when the labor councillors pushed through the elimination of Sunday labor generally and promotion of joint action with the other city-owned abattoirs in Melbourne and South Melbourne. However, the Master Butchers’ Association objected, and the City of Melbourne backed away from the initiative. For the time being, the effort collapsed.¹¹⁹

Labor injected a challenging new agenda into the staid atmosphere of municipal governance. As their numbers grew from one election to the next, labor councillors made increasingly astute efforts to build alliances, adopt more open and transparent council procedures, and expand the range of issues they addressed. Securing a majority on a special committee appointed to consider applications for the use of town hall, they pushed for freedom of expression and the free use of town hall by a wide range of community groups. They also won council’s acquiescence to the participation of city laborers in city-wide demonstration for the eight-hour day. They advocated a registry of unemployed workers and provision of work for the unemployed at stone-breaking over the holiday season.¹²⁰ Despite some gains, labor also suffered defeats, but served notice of its plans for future action. A council majority declined to consult with the Collingwood Council on a joint, municipally owned gas/light works. And a proposal for direct election of the mayor by the ratepayers also fell to defeat. Because of complaints over “abusive language” directed at the Liberal Irvine government during an open political meeting at the town hall, the council took responsibility for authorizing use of the hall away from the labor-dominated Town Hall Committee and gave it to the Ways and Means Committee.¹²¹

Measured against the aspirations of the Political Labor Council’s “Municipal Labor Platform,” the initial record of labor councillors in Richmond may seem modest. Universal adult suffrage and direct election of mayors, although certainly put forward for consideration, were not achieved. The same could be said of municipalization of trams, lighting, water supply, and markets. On the direct employment of city labor some progress had been made, along with improvements in municipal wage rates for city and contract employees. By demanding, and for a time achieving, open access to town hall and city parks, labor made some measurable progress towards creating “recreation reserves” and “regular entertainment of the people.” Direct democracy in the form of initiative and referendum had been neither proposed nor achieved, but meetings of council and its committees had been opened to the public and held at evening hours. The movement toward a “Greater Melbourne” scheme of metropolitan government had been pushed to the fore and some joint meetings convened with other municipalities to further the scheme.¹²²

Beginning in 1902 and in succeeding years, the Central Executive of the Victoria PLC devoted increasing attention to the recruitment, vetting, and active support of candidates for municipal office. Members celebrated the election of the first labor mayor in Victoria (G. M. Prendergast in North Melbourne, September 1902), and approved candidacies for council in regular and by-elections and for school boards and the Harbour Trust. They also approved “fighting planks” for the municipal platform in upcoming elections and gave financial support to authorized municipal candidates.¹²³ The president of the PLC reported that the organization fielded an unprecedented number (seventeen) of municipal council candidates in 1905, though only four were elected. And some branches demonstrated heightened levels of interest in municipal issues and annual campaigns.¹²⁴ Despite growing attention to municipal affairs and expanded agitation on behalf of a “municipal socialist” agenda, large property owners limited labor’s advance by casting plural votes on behalf of a slate of “anti-labor” candidates. That advantage was borne home in 1905, as noted previously, when none other than Jim Sutch lost his seat by a slim margin. Employers had circulated lists of targeted labor candidates. The victorious C. Jones benefited from plural votes cast by “a large number of absentees, such as Tram Co. directors, Gas Co. representatives, vacant lot owners, etc.” And although Sutch had forty-seven more ratepayers’ votes than his opponent, he lost by twenty votes, the margin attributable to plural property-holders’ votes.¹²⁵

In a moment of self-reflection following the municipal elections of 1905, the Tocsin editors weighed what they saw as the cause underlying the comparative weakness of the labor vote. “Labourites” had missed a crucial stage in their political evolution; they could think individually and nationally but had not yet learned to think “municipally.”

The municipality is around them, is part of their daily lives, ministers to their comfort and their health, and is (to coin a word) watchable by them individually. Therefore, if anywhere, they can learn the first lessons of that social co-operation which has to be learnt if Socialism is going to succeed … But, even on the present restricted and unfair franchise, they have a majority in nearly every metropolitan area, and could, by electing councils wholly composed of Labour men, provide a most excellent training ground in finance and public economy for their future political candidates. Let the recent defeats prove incentives to immediate action in these respects, and they will turn out to have been victories in disguise.¹²⁶

In the cities of Victoria, across Australia, and throughout much of the industrial world at the turn of the century, municipal activists learned this lesson by tending the scars of their initial political battles in the chambers of city councils and other local elected bodies. The years immediately ahead would see more substantial success.

New South Wales: Sydney and its industrial suburban “squalor”

On the surface, Sydney’s development as a city bore some resemblance to Melbourne. Its early history as a penal colony and administrative center gave the city wide political jurisdiction over the development of other colonies. However, its embeddedness in the rural economy of New South Wales and some geographic impediments to urban growth enabled the robust economy of Melbourne to push well ahead by 1891. It may not have been a “country town” by comparison with Melbourne, as some claimed, but its population of 383,283 (about 34 percent of New South Wales) made it the “second city” to Melbourne’s 473,000 (41 percent of Victoria).¹²⁷ Both cities, nevertheless, were surrounded by rapidly expanding concentrations of industry and population in a belt of inner suburbs, whose growth outstripped the old central cities. Sydney’s suburbs grew at a much faster pace than the city, and their population quickly became more working-class in composition. In 1871 the city itself had almost 65 percent of the metropolis’s population but by 1891 that percentage had fallen to only 29 percent. Parts of “Old Sydney” acquired an occupationally more diverse population between 1870 and 1890 even as the concentration of workers and the poor grew in many suburbs, notably Redfern, Balmain, Darlington, and Waterloo.¹²⁸

Local self-government in New South Wales developed more slowly and inconsistently than in the “model” municipalities of Victoria. The earliest municipal governing bodies elected were market commissions and road trusts, but they quickly lapsed. The incorporation of Sydney as a city in 1842 failed to establish stable local government over the course of the 1840s and early 1850s for lack of citizen interest and administrative capacity. Municipalities Acts of 1858 and 1867 attempted to establish municipal governance on a firmer financial footing by mandating that municipalities meet minimum requirements for population and area. Plural voting by ratepayers based on the extent of their holdings guaranteed a large measure of control to property owners. Preoccupied initially with basic functions of managing the care of streets, bridges, and wharves, councillors reluctantly made efforts to improve water and sewerage and, under legislative mandate, the provision of libraries.¹²⁹

Sydney Metropolis, c. 1870

The New South Wales parliament had been inclined to leave municipalities to their own devices. But as Sydney and its suburbs grew into a robust metropolis, the state moved to curtail its autonomy and its capacity to govern its own affairs in such areas as the regulation of trams and abattoirs. This “erosion of local power” proved especially challenging to an emerging labor party that sought to strengthen its hand in local government and address the material needs workers confronted. In 1900 reformer Dr. James Graham, an alderman and future mayor of Sydney, decried this lack of municipal autonomy.

Imagine a local governing body having no control over noxious trades. Imagine a local governing body having no control over sewerage. If anything goes wrong, if typhoid springs up, the finger of blame is always pointed to the incompetent governing body, who are held responsible for the outbreak … If they are to have the blame for the consequences of defective sewerage, they certainly should have the control of the sewerage system.¹³⁰

Although the city continued to be subject to a range of piecemeal legislation defining its powers, the early twentieth century did witness an increase in the powers exercised by local government. And this increase is associated with the rise of the NSW Labor Party and its heightened interest in municipal concerns. As Fitzgerald has observed, business interests had not generally supported the “idea of local government” but rather held a more limited vision of “administering” the city efficiently and with minimal expenditure on behalf of commercial interests. Historian Alan Mayne has put it simply, “The common sense of the businessman determined public policy-making: other viewpoints were unaired in Council.”¹³¹

The advent of Sydney’s industrial suburbs had come close on the heels of passage of the Municipalities Act of 1858. They reflected the rapid spread of population and economic activity into fringe areas that quickly became thickly settled. Swamps and sandhills pockmarked many of the less attractive areas into which noxious industries and a predominantly working-class population moved. In Redfern, for instance, early development of extensive nurseries gave way to “fellmongers, tanners, and the like.” The residual “smell of the flowers may not have adequately compensated for the stench of the local industries” or the “open sewer” for tannery wastes that Shea’s Creek had become.¹³² In Sydney itself, public officials encouraged night soil and garbage collectors to dump their loads as fill in vacant low-lying areas, thereby incurring the wrath of the state health officer.

All the care and cost expended to secure a pure water supply and safe sewerage are here to be nullified by an illegal, but practically unavoidable, collusion between municipal councils and housebuilders … the poorer classes are the sufferers while the rich reap the profit, whether they be incorporated bodies, or landowners.¹³³

Panic over the spread of infectious disease set in motion a series of investigations with testimony of clergymen and police officials who had intimate knowledge of the poorest neighborhoods. Most disquieting to the investigators was the possibility that “fevers” produced “by the filth and squalor of the poor” would “extend to the rich.” Committee members of the state sewerage and health board collected evidence in 1875 that confirmed these fears in gripping detail.

Peering down narrow passageways opening off the busy thoroughfares of the City’s business centre, committeemen found tenement blocks squeezed among crazily patterned canyons formed by the blank walls and paling fences of surrounding buildings, where the trapped air was fouled by the stench from uncollected house rubbish and accumulations of slops and the sewage from defective closets and drains.¹³⁴

Such conditions and the concerns aroused by reformers led to cycles of local government activity that produced short spasms of action by councils and even prosecutions of offending property owners or their occupants, followed by the relaxation of local regulation when businessmen and manufacturers reasserted their interests. Eventually, new revelations would ignite another cycle of reform.¹³⁵

The obvious problems spawned by urban congestion and noxious industries collided with the fragmented authority of local government and its limited capacity to shape public policy. Not surprisingly, public apathy over the prospects for substantial reform discouraged concerted action. That apathy was rooted in the assessment of local government as “a closed preserve monopolized by a propertied elite,” and what one reforming alderman argued was “the overprudence” of aldermen representing cost-conscious ratepayers who were “in some instances too careful how they handled the citizens’ money.”¹³⁶

Labor’s municipal “experimentalism” in a new reform era

The strikes of the early 1890s and the subsequent failure by labor’s first parliamentarians in New South Wales to sustain a coherent labor agenda produced among local activists a period of internal division and debate and an abiding suspicion of “professional politicians.” One manifestation of that sentiment came in the organization of the Active Service Brigade by its inspired but idiosyncratic founder, John Dwyer. Under the title “Chief Worker” he circulated a manifesto in 1896 addressed to “Comrades … who desire better conditions.”

We have no faith whatever in a system that produces rascally politicians, Parliamentary humbug, banking trades, Exchange jobbers, land, farm and household grabbers, jingo imperialists, shady lords and aristocrats, mining sharks, Chamber of Commerce boodlers, Joint Stock robbers, Shent per Shenters, abettors of starvation, manufacturers of prostitution and the criminal classes, multitudes of paupers, hypocritical Church organizations and other ghastly plutocratic institutions …

We remain the straightout enemies of the Fat Man and the Vampire Class, and reiterate our undying hostility to all their capitalistic monopolies and combinations private and public in City, Suburb, and Bush.¹³⁷

The leadership of the Labour Electoral Leagues (LEL) and its successor Political Labour Leagues (PLL) tried to rehabilitate a parliamentary labor party and give it some legitimacy, but many of its local leagues pushed an agenda that emphasized municipal activism and decentralization of power within the Labour Party and in the governing institutions.¹³⁸

In the ebb and flow of political enthusiasm during the 1890s, a strong undercurrent repeatedly surfaced affirming the primacy of the municipality as a crucible for the Labor Party’s formation. The founding platform of the Labour Electoral Leagues drafted in May 1891 explicitly addressed “local government and decentralization” by calling for extension of municipal employment and the abolition of the current revenue system that represented a “taxation of improvements effected by labour.” At least nine Labor members of parliament elected in 1891 had previous experience as elected officials in their municipalities.¹³⁹ Labor’s success in the parliamentary elections of June 17, 1891, precipitated a redrafting of the platform and discussion among LELs about the “advisableness of adopting a Labour Platform for municipal elections.” The “general feeling” on the matter was embodied in the expansive platform adopted by one local league. It significantly expanded local demands for universal suffrage, an end to cumulative voting, direct election of mayors, elimination of contract labor, a tax on unimproved lands, provision for municipal hospitals, schools, and cultural facilities “free to the people,” and exclusive city council control of sanitation, lighting, roads, “and all works required for the comfort or convenience of the people.”¹⁴⁰ A correspondent (probably John Dwyer) to the Mittagong Express, a suburban Sydney newspaper, wrote enthusiastically under the pseudonym “Mark Time” that in the aftermath of the elections, “it is useless to effect disguise, the mandate is gone forth and in every town throughout Australia Labour knows that it is war, not peace.” Less than a year later he ridiculed a correspondent for protesting the local labor league’s interest in the municipality, as if only the council and its aldermen had a “right to speak about such sacred things” as the administration of the municipality, by virtue of having “an interest at stake in the community.” He gave notice that “a widespread feeling of distrust exists against the whole policy of the council” and warned that with better understanding and more united action, league candidates would be successful in future municipal elections.¹⁴¹

For the remainder of the 1890s, local branches, despite limited electoral success, continued to put forward platform planks emphasizing municipal affairs.¹⁴² But a reconstituted Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) showed diminishing interest in local matters. Tensions over such issues occasionally broke the surface at annual party congresses. Local activists criticized the PLP’s inattention to organizing work and indulgence in “banqueting and ministerial junketings.” Such comments surfaced pointedly at the annual conference of the Political Labour League in 1898. In 1901, a committee was appointed to draft a municipal platform, but according to a news story, “they reported that in the present state of the law it was not possible to advocate an advanced municipal platform.” The matter was given over to the PLL executive who compiled a remarkably comprehensive list of “suggestions” submitted by local branches and presented them to the delegates at the next year’s convention. But the PLL leadership largely confined its attention to parliamentary affairs and to promotion of municipal franchise reform in the belief that little could be accomplished without a broadened electorate.¹⁴³ The struggles of municipally-oriented laborites in Australia are remarkably congruent with those of municipal socialists in Germany at the party congresses of 1902 and 1904, and with local Independent Labour Party activists in the towns of West Yorkshire, England, where they sought to claim support and respect from their parliamentary-oriented national party.¹⁴⁴

Local Labor Party branches in New South Wales continued to push for a broader municipal agenda that challenged the propertied interests who dominated local governing institutions. At the annual conferences of the PLL, local branches put forward resolutions that gave prominence of municipal affairs. In 1902, the Budgerebong branch argued for running labor candidates for municipal councils and for making “democratic local government” the “principal plank of the Fighting Platform.” At other conventions, a tax on unimproved lands was regularly addressed as an alternative system of taxation, and the Junee branch argued that local bodies should be able to “raise revenues as they see fit.”¹⁴⁵ The passage of the Local Government Act of 1906 and the loosening of municipal franchise restrictions through the elimination of cumulative voting and the extension of the franchise to occupiers along with the owners of the ratable property opened the door to a renewed push for more active work at the municipal level. That enthusiasm found expression at the 1908 Annual Conference of the PLL in wide-ranging resolutions submitted by local branches. The Randwick PLL put forward two principles, “[First] The cultivation of self-reliance by means of local self-government for the satisfaction of local needs. [Second] The encouragement of self-governing bodies to assist the producers against the ‘rings’ and ‘combines’ which seek to despoil them.” At the 1909 conference of the NSW-PLL an entire last evening was devoted to discussion of an expansive municipal program. An appointed committee gathered proposals from many branches, and the conference adopted them with only a few changes. The platform defined a broad objective of claiming all powers available under the Local Government Act of 1906 and then some by “broadening its scope and extending the powers of council in the direction of communal activity.” The specific suggestions included full suffrage based on one-month residency, all rates based only on unimproved land, ownership and operation of gas and light facilities, infant milk depots, public markets and abattoirs, expansion of public lands for parks and recreation, payment of union wages for all public works, and a host of other provisions.¹⁴⁶

Struggling for a democratic municipal franchise

The root problem in the eyes of many lay in a municipal franchise that weighted voting to the advantage of the largest property holders. The restrictive municipal franchise in New South Wales had a circuitous history. State parliamentary elections had been essentially based on manhood suffrage without property qualification since the mid-nineteenth century and women won the vote in the 1890s. In its earliest years the Sydney Corporation had made all owners, occupiers, or joint tenants of property with an annual rental value of £25 eligible to vote in city elections, and each had only a single vote. But such a democratic franchise was short-lived. The Municipalities Act of 1858 established both plural and cumulative property-based voting that permitted owners to vote in multiple wards where they owned property and granted them up to four votes for each holding based on its value. A series of legislative acts in 1867 and 1879 reinforced and further narrowed the scope of municipal voting based on property. One reforming state legislator claimed in 1887 that some 700 men in Sydney cast roughly 8,000 votes, and after amendments passed that year the numbers rose to 2,300 voters casting 69,000 votes.¹⁴⁷

The state controlled municipal affairs through multiple boards with jurisdiction over different aspects of city life. Such control, when combined with a limited franchise and property owners’ desire to limit rates and expenditures, produced a calcified local system where an “aldermanic elite seemed positively ossified.” Half of the councillors by 1900 had served twenty years or more.¹⁴⁸ With Labour Electoral Leagues’ (LEL) interest in municipal affairs growing in the 1890s, new pressures arose for a broadened municipal franchise based on adult suffrage. Although liberal premier George Reid withdrew reform legislation in 1895 that would have reduced plural voting, new reform measures in 1900 and 1906 eliminated cumulative voting and significantly broadened the franchise by permitting the vote of occupiers and lodgers. And women were granted municipal voting rights based on the same status as men. Propertied voters continued to exert greater influence electorally, but the electorate had been significantly enlarged. The results could be seen almost immediately in some working-class districts.¹⁴⁹ Increasing success in state and federal elections fueled the appetite of laborites “to capture the city.” Fears of such an eventuality fueled opposition to full adult suffrage in the Legislative Assembly in 1912. Sir Thomas Hughes called it “a political fad” and discounted the interest of those who might be enfranchised. Another opponent argued that the municipal council was analogous to “a giant corporation dealing with the amalgamated and concentrated rights of property owners and others interested for the public good.”¹⁵⁰

The renewed energy and focus of the PLL on municipal politics helped generate electoral successes in Sydney and the suburbs in 1908. Most strikingly, Redfern, home of the massive Eveleigh repair shops of the NSW Railways, elected seven labor councillors and a labor mayor.

Redfern District, c. 1870

Municipal “revolution” in Redfern/Sydney

Redfern had progressed from swampland to market gardens in the mid-nineteenth century, but soon enough it came to the attention of noxious industries seeking refuge from more restrictive environs of the established municipalities. Between 1870 and 1890 the municipality’s population density rose from 14.5 to 46.9 persons per acre, making it one of the most congested cities. By the latter year the swamps had been drained, and the noxious traders had moved on to other suburban venues. Redfern “boasted many ill-constructed cottages, most of them wooden, copious surface drainage and heavy pollution from both human and industrial waste.”¹⁵¹ But the most dramatic change in the suburb came with the expansion of the NSW Railway shops and the concentration of workers—more than 2,500—in that industry. State ownership of the railways had come early in NSW (1855), and Redfern became the site of what were initially modest repair shops. But with the construction of massive new shops, completed in 1887, the concentration of skilled and unskilled shop workers in Redfern and immediately adjoining suburbs of Darlington, MacDonaldtown, and Newtown grew dramatically. The railway shops also drew other metal-working industries to the area.¹⁵²

Redfern and neighboring Darlington became in time a well-defined community with a high level of social and political interaction. Residents recalled that “ ‘every evening people would come out the front of their houses’ to socialize and talk about their common plight … They were all in favour of getting their better conditions, always. They were always Labor people.’ ” Street meetings were commonplace, “on the most advantageous corner where there was adequate lighting and adequate space for people to assemble.” Another resident recalled that “all the kids in the street” went to such meetings; “[They] were all politically conscious in those days … it was class warfare … Of course the other class was trying to ground the lower class lower.”¹⁵³

Out of this milieu and the railway workshop itself, a group of legendary leaders of the local Labor Party emerged. Most well-known was J. S. T. McGowen, boilermaker and member of the Trades and Labor Council executive from 1888 to 1891. From 1891 to 1917, he served in the NSW parliament. Living “in the heart” of Redfern, he remained active in the community as a church member (Anglican) and organizer of local cricket competitions. Although his political energies focused largely on the parliamentary arena, as a railway worker and trade unionist in a state-owned industry he inevitably had a direct interest in the immediate municipal arena. He spoke regularly at local political rallies in Redfern and Darlington, as he did on one occasion in 1901 from the balcony of Liversedge’s Hall to several hundred supporters or in 1905 at Hayden’s Hotel on the corner of Codrington and Abercrombie streets in Redfern.¹⁵⁴ On the eve of what would turn out to be a water-shed municipal election in 1908, McGowen called on workers in Redfern and throughout NSW to “load your municipal guns.” Disputing those who claimed workers had little interest in the municipal elections, he told them that there were “some people who had votes and who would see that their guns were fully loaded next Saturday.” He linked labor’s success in local elections to its future success at state and federal levels.¹⁵⁵

Immediately after the 1908 municipal elections, the liberal-leaning Sydney Morning Herald was at pains to interpret the results. Labor’s gains in a number of Sydney municipalities required acknowledgment. The editors denied that the election would “justify the hopes of municipal revolutionaries, if there are any, or the fears of those more conservative aldermen who saw in anticipation their council-rooms invaded by labour.” In Redfern “where the local Labour element has for many years fought for seats, several have at last fallen to them.” The outcome now seemed more potentially challenging. Despite the fact that labor men captured seven of the twelve contested seats in Redfern’s four wards, the newspaper believed “there is no danger of a municipality running to the limit of experimentalism.”¹⁵⁶

The tone of the liberal newspaper’s commentary had been alarmist as the election approached. It stressed the necessity of having

members of councils administer the affairs of the corporation with the care and businesslike method they apply to the management of their own affairs … Considerations such as these point to the wisdom of having on the municipal and shire councils not faddists and experimentalists and persons of no experience, but men of sound business training who have proved their capacity to manage civic affairs by success in the management of their private concerns.¹⁵⁷

But the newspaper had left it to the liberal premier of New South Wales to spell out the most troubling implications. Pointing to what he termed the “ghastly failures” of the labor-led London County Council through its imposition of “rapidly growing increase of rates and municipal indebtedness,” and to the “gross abuses by the municipal authorities of Chicago,” Mr. Wade had directed the attention of municipal electors to the looming dangers for municipalities in New South Wales. “The real, if not avowed, object of these socialist candidates is the widest possible extension of the powers and functions of the local governing bodies, so as ultimately to secure the ownership and control of all the means of production, distribution and exchange throughout the State.”¹⁵⁸ These risks seemed particularly great after the passage of a new Local Government Act in the state that promised municipalities additional powers of taxation and a greater sphere of local government activism.¹⁵⁹

At their first post-election council meeting, the new labor councillors in Redfern seemed prepared to seize these opportunities. In a sharply divided vote, they managed to elect one of their own as mayor on the eve of the town’s celebration of its first fifty years as a municipality.¹⁶⁰ John Leitch, a local builder and now suddenly mayor, had served as chairman of the election committee for Redfern’s labor parliamentarian, J. S. T. McGowen. He had run for council annually since 1905, his vote total rising with each election. But the Local Government Reform Act of 1906 had helped give new momentum to labor’s municipal aspirations. Leitch’s newly elected labor colleagues on city council included a stable man, a blacksmith, a tailor, a tobacconist, an ironmonger, and a coal merchant. Their “invasion” of the council rooms would open doors to the possibility of “experimentalism” in the local governance of one municipality.¹⁶¹

The stunning triumph of seven labor candidates for the Redfern city council in 1908 produced cautious stock taking and rationalization by the ruling liberals. The Sydney Morning Herald observed that “in a constituency where the workers, as they like to be called, are in the majority, they are well within their rights to return men of their own way of thinking.” But, in a veiled warning, the liberal editors suggested a potential object lesson in the offing: as local government inevitably teaches “local responsibility,” newly elected labor councillors will soon discover that “whatever a locality does, its rates will have to pay for.”

In a constituency likely to return a labour council, those rates would spread out pretty evenly over the whole surface, and the worker who has to pay the piper is shrewd enough to call the tune. The great trouble with labour in politics has been that the incidence of its legislative mistakes is not immediately seen; in municipalism they could not be concealed.¹⁶²

The Herald’s attempts to both warn and reassure its readers found an immediate challenge in the stormy opening sessions of the new Redfern council. Beyond the election of a labor mayor, the election gave labor a majority on the powerful finance committee. Sitting liberal and conservative councillors moved to invalidate the election of the mayor on a technicality and to deny the usual mayoral allowance to the new incumbent. Neither motion succeeded. For their part, labor members pushed through motions requiring that all street cleaning be done by day labor directly employed by the city and in other cases required a stipulated minimum wage be paid by private contractors. They also called for a complete review of wages paid to all council employees. In the council’s first month, a new tone had been set.¹⁶³

Once the council settled into its work, the labor leadership put forward new proposals regarding smoke abatement and a more aggressive program of sanitary inspection. They appointed a sanitary inspector authorized to prosecute offenders. Slaughterhouses were among the first sites targeted. Council also moved to increase wages for policemen and laborers, while closely scrutinizing the work of contractors.¹⁶⁴

A new year brought the reelection of John Leitch as mayor, now unopposed, and the appointment of a finance committee entirely composed of labor councillors. Conservatives put forward a motion to merge the city of Redfern with Sydney, thereby hoping to dilute labor’s representation. The motion went down to defeat. A conservative proposal to form a committee to collect funds for a Dreadnought battleship, a hot button issue for many in the Labor Party, fell to defeat in a six to three party-line vote. More directly related to daily life in the city, the labor councillors moved ahead with a series of proposals to have the Department of Health and the Sanitary Inspector analyze samples of milk and other food commodities, to appoint an assistant inspector for the fish market, and to require licenses for butcher shops. Most consequentially, the mayor proposed and council approved an increased rate on the unimproved capital value of land in the city as the basis for meeting city obligations in the coming year. Under the terms of the Local Government Act of 1906, municipalities were now empowered to shift the tax burden from improved to unimproved lands, a long-standing demand of single taxers and the Labor Party. Redfern seized the opportunity.¹⁶⁵

The celebration of Redfern’s fiftieth anniversary “jubilee” fell during the first few months of the second year of the new labor-led local government. In his capacity as mayor, John Leitch officiated at the ceremonies, including a banquet honoring the occasion. In his remarks the mayor lauded the progress of the city on land that had been “practically sandhills and swamps” to a municipality of nearly 25,000 that demonstrated “what could be accomplished under local self-government.” He praised the “indomitable pluck, energy and sound judgment” of those who had charge of municipal government, but he also cited the benefits of municipally owned enterprise, a city-owned metal quarry and light plant. He alluded to recent improvements in “sanitary arrangements” and foreshadowed plans to double the size of the municipal light plant. He “intimated that the ratepayers would shortly be asked to sanction a loan of £20,000 to carry out wood-blocking [of streets] and other works.” In a toast the labor parliamentarian J. S. T. McGowen predicted “that local municipal government would make wonderful strides within the next few years.” The jubilee was memorialized in a celebratory booklet with heavily illustrated profiles of past leaders; it gave overriding credit for the city’s record of success to major businessmen and ratepayers, many of whom in the past had served on city council. The booklet, clearly from the hand of long-serving town clerk R. W. Grierson, made no mention of the recent upheaval in city governance, the contribution of the Labor Party, or the prospects for its future experimentalism.¹⁶⁶

Redfern’s labor councillors continued to push forward a series of proposals aimed at elevating the pay of city workers and setting more demanding terms for contractors, all the while fighting procedural skirmishes that were more annoying than disabling to progress on substantive matters. Failing during the first two weeks in February 1910 to achieve a quorum specified in state legislation for election of a mayor, the city found itself “mayorless” by law, as the Sydney Morning Herald termed it, and the appointment was thrown into the arms of the state public works minister. In the end the labor majority prevailed, and Leitch was reappointed for another one-year term. With an additional rate increase in 1910, the city moved to improve streets, provide library books free to the public, and explore the joint ownership with other municipalities of a “garbage destructor.” A new election in 1911 brought the return of a labor majority to the municipality. John Leitch stepped aside for one of his colleagues, Thomas Holden, to assume the position.¹⁶⁷

The municipal elections of 1911 evidenced a new spirit, energized in part by the notable achievements in some other municipalities. An unprecedented number of labor candidates entered the field in municipalities across NSW. The Worker observed that

of all the fields of political activity the municipal one is in some respects the most important inasmuch as it is nearer to us than any other, touches our daily life closer, and has the most intimate bearing on the great social problem we are all striving to solve. Our municipalities are in fact the nearest thing to practical Socialism we possess.¹⁶⁸

Reflecting on the previous three years, the newspaper noted that “in the face of almost overwhelming difficulties,” the local labor government led by John Leitch “has worked a complete revolution in the finances, established municipal undertakings, increased the efficiency of all the municipal services, and done the monumental work in the ordinary departments of council activity.” By raising the wages of municipal workers, it had proved “the principle that good pay to workmen induces good work.” From light plant revenues, the council replaced key elements of the “obsolete plant it found” and increased the output threefold to the point of selling surplus power to neighboring municipalities. The city refinanced its burdensome debt, on more favorable terms, and with increased revenues on unimproved land that had been historically grossly undervalued it was able to reduce rates on improvements. With the lease of its own quarry, the city broke the monopoly on “blue metal” and brought dramatic improvements to the city streets. Even the “one-sided Hunter Street organ,” the Sydney Morning Herald, termed it a “model borough and one of the best managed in the State.”¹⁶⁹ Although labor did not win all the seats it contested, in Redfern nine of twelve seats were won by the Labor Party, and for a decade and more into the future, labor would continue to govern the municipality.¹⁷⁰

Queensland, Brisbane: A “municipal swamp” in the era of franchise restriction

Not quite a year after a 1912 general strike in Brisbane ignited surprisingly broad working-class support behind the tramway workers’ demand for higher wages, a local labor paper, the Daily Standard, expressed continuing frustration with Queensland’s restrictive municipal franchise law. “A clean city still seems like a mystic dream in the far future. For we are sadly deficient in the first requisite, a clean franchise.”¹⁷¹ As Sydney’s labor paper, the Worker, noted from afar in 1911, “We have the spectacle of a company being allowed to exploit the entire tramway [and] we have on every hand private profit-mongers usurping the functions of the community.”¹⁷² With a plural voting system favoring the city’s largest ratepayers, Brisbane possessed in the eyes of labor activists a “nil” city government in which “monopoly now claims the Divine Right to oppress the people.” The editor noted that plural voting had disappeared in all “British communities” outside the state of Queensland. But in Brisbane and its neighboring municipalities, “the big army of mosquito-bitten and fly-inoculated citizens look dumbly on and have no power to lift a little finger in opposition to a continuance of a brand of civic ‘rule’ which is a byword and a jest. They are helpless and cannot prevent the handing over of the government of our city to a small official bureaucracy.”¹⁷³ Nevertheless, despite the restrictive municipal franchise and a pervasive sense that the municipal cause was “hopeless until the franchise is granted,” the record suggests that elite control of Brisbane’s local government did not go uncontested during the early twentieth century.

Brisbane had emerged slowly from its early status as the northern-most penal colony governed from New South Wales. Known as Moreton Bay, it was supposed to have been, according to Greenwood and Laverty, “a place of exile so dreaded that the potential criminal would be deterred.” But, despite its seasonally oppressive climate, the penal colony proved attractive enough to squatters and other immigrants that by the mid-1840s, a mere two decades after it was first established, it had acquired the trappings of a growing urban place. Although it had the “air and some of the qualities of an urchin,” it had nevertheless “on occasion both the gravity and the cheerful confidence of the street Arab.”¹⁷⁴

Brisbane became the leading municipality in the colony of Queensland by virtue of its location as the transport and commercial link between the rich pastoral economy of the interior and international trading networks. Important though it may have been in Queensland’s economy, the city in 1891 nonetheless had a smaller percentage (23.8 percent) of the urban population in the colony than its metropolitan rivals to the south. Seven other Queensland towns had populations in excess of 10,000. But Brisbane’s population had grown dramatically in the prior decade from 31,109 to 93,657, primarily due to the influx of immigrants, and by 1901 Queensland had a higher proportion of its population born overseas than any other Australian colony. But in a subtropical climate that Bowden referred to as “somewhat better than Bombay” and “somewhat worse than Cairo,” the city had to rely more than others on “assisted migrants” to swell its population.¹⁷⁵

The formal incorporation of Brisbane as a self-governing municipality followed just a few months after Queen Victoria’s declaration of Queensland’s independent colonial status. Concern over its growing urban problems mingled with unease among local property holders over the potential cost of self-government. As the chroniclers of the city’s local government observed, “The lofty affirmations of principle, the assertion of local collective rights, tended to decline into concern about the burden which rates would impose upon the residents.” Local government elections nonetheless attracted a substantial number of candidates prepared to take up the duty, as the Moreton Bay Courier put it, “to look after our ways and keep our gutters clean.” Most were lower middle class initially but with rising ambition to succeed, whether as local builders, butchers, fellmongers, or newspaper editors. They were determined, as newly elected alderman Cribb was reported to have said, to oversee “a cautious expenditure of whatever money the Council might control.”¹⁷⁶

Frustrations with the limits on local control under the 1858 Municipalities Act mingled with growing demands on the fledgling local government to address a host of urban needs. The catalogue of needs was impressive. “The streets were largely unformed; there was no permanent water supply; drainage was virtually non-existent; sanitary conditions were appalling; municipal markets and sale yards had to be established; and the Council itself lacked a permanent headquarters from which to operate.” In 1864 the state government acted to expand the authority of municipalities, but the financial resources available remained largely unchanged. The rates on improved values could float based on annual rents but were fixed on unimproved and unoccupied lands regardless of changes in their speculative value. The franchise continued to be available only to ratepayers, and “plural” voting gained a foothold with up to three votes available to the largest ratepayers. Despite growing opposition from labor, the franchise restrictions adopted in 1864 remained in place with only the slightest modification until the Local Authorities Act in 1920 instituted the system of one person, one vote.¹⁷⁷

Despite its rapid urban growth, Brisbane remained in the 1880s what historian Bradley Bowden has called “a rough-hewn colonial society.” As he noted, “Streets and footpaths were largely unpaved. Open cesspits, inadequate water supplies and unlit back streets characterized even the city’s inner precincts. Most of the commercial and residential premises were crude, often decaying, wood affairs.” Brisbane’s death rate of 26 per 1,000 in the late 1870s was worse than London and Edinburgh, largely because of lagging investment in sewerage and urban infrastructure. As one father testified in 1875:

I myself have lost three out of seven [children] … There is scarcely a house in Brisbane where there has not been one dead, and do you think, Sir, that any sewerage rate would have been begrudged if one of those dear ones could have been saved alive … The landlord of a hotel in Edward Street … told me that during wet weather in the summer, that on occasions there were two or three inches of excrementitious matter on the floor of the kitchen washed out of a cesspit on a higher level.¹⁷⁸

The opposition of local propertied elites in central Brisbane to increased rates on their substantial property holdings stifled progress on public works needed to address the city’s drainage and sewerage problems. A leading spokesman, Alderman William Pettigrew, owner of a substantial sawmill, argued that tax support for such projects “would drive people away.” In the mid-1880s, a popular labor leader in the city’s East Ward, William Galloway, who had become a prosperous businessman in his own right, ran a successful campaign for city council in which he advocated increased spending on the city’s infrastructure. He insisted that “the first duty of the council [is] to provide at whatever cost, for the health of its inhabitants.” Galloway’s service in municipal government proved short-lived when a newly emboldened Brisbane Central Rate-Payers Association reasserted the privileges of elite control over local politics.¹⁷⁹

Organized labor had shallow roots in Brisbane, despite some growth in craft unions during the 1880s. The labor militancy and great strikes of the early 1890s—the Maritime Strike of 1890 and the Shearers’ strike of 1891—were largely confined to narrow sectors outside the metropolitan manufacturing economy. Defeat produced further retrenchment, compounded by the effects of depression and rising levels of transiency. The departure of utopian socialist William Lane and his immediate followers for South America and the collapse of his newspaper, the Worker, which for a time had inspired a vision of “new unionism,” saw the withering of networks of solidarity that might have sustained the initial promise of a robust Labor Party. The leadership of that parliamentary-oriented Labor Party drifted toward alliance and compromise with the Liberal Party from 1896 onward. The structure of the local economy and the traditional power of Brisbane elites retarded the formation of a working class capable of organizing on a broad basis. As Fitzgerald has noted, “Brisbane’s slowness to industrialize,” and its “dependence on primary product processing” nurtured a spirit of laissez-faire, “which hindered factory reform and contributed substantially to the maintenance of the status quo.”¹⁸⁰

The continuing failure of local government to address the hazards of urban life received regular confirmation in newspaper accounts and reports of public officials. After a bubonic plague epidemic in 1900, a North Brisbane Council engineer pointed to the city’s “dilapidated buildings, bad drainage, and the often-abominable closets and urinals.” The health commissioner warned of rising levels of typhoid fever.”¹⁸¹

The formation of a labor party in Queensland proceeded in fits and starts. Two periods of growing enthusiasm and electoral success at the state (and later federal) parliamentary level were separated by a low ebb with contention between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary trade union interests and the persistent effort of labor’s parliamentarians to craft alliances with liberals that might elevate labor to a governing coalition partner. The “labor vote” proved surprisingly robust but perpetually hitched to a reformist platform that diluted the collectivist aspirations of many supporters. Brisbane and its immediate vicinity proved to be perpetually the weakest link in labor’s electoral chain. Its strength lay in the pastoral hinterland and northern coastal towns.¹⁸²

To the extent that municipal interests surfaced within the party, they were most evident at the state Labor-in-Politics conventions beginning in 1898 and not in the Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP) or the Central Political Executive (CPE). The latter proved so consumed by parliamentary candidate selection and negotiations with opposing parties that it paid little if any attention to the substantive political concerns surfacing from below. Periodically, however, protests broke into the recorded minutes of the leadership body.¹⁸³

A notable exception to the pattern of inattention to municipal matters surfaced in the militant meatpacking city of Townsville on the northern coast in an 1896 by-election for city council. E. Y. (Ned) Lowry, a blacklisted and itinerant organizer and day laborer, embodied that militant tradition and in a spontaneous show of local support he was elected to the city council, “to the horror of the other aldermen.” Lowry was already well known for having accused sitting councillors the year before of misappropriating funds to fête the governor. Elected again the next year, Lowry stood for a program of municipal ownership, and he pushed unremittingly for a municipal minimum wage and enforcement of the eight-hour day. Most maddeningly for his fellow aldermen, Lowry subverted custom and the trappings of regal ceremony designed to pay homage to visiting dignitaries like the new governor. He put forward a motion to dispense with a welcoming ceremony, “as generally ordinary citizens come to Townsville without any demonstration being shown on their behalf.” Even more infuriatingly, Lowry challenged the public celebration of Queen Victoria’s “record reign” as one of “hypocrisy, cant, usury, lying and deceit.” In his effort to achieve direct election of the mayor, Lowry used procedural maneuvers in council to delay the February 1898 vote in order to arrange for an election “by the citizens.” When that failed, he took the floor to nominate himself and then sequentially each of his fellow aldermen whom he might support. The point, he said, was to protest the selection of the mayor in a caucus meeting “where the orange blossom was smelt, the lion’s grip given, and priestly influence used.” To the shock of his supporters, Lowry died suddenly in November 1898. The Worker memorialized his passing with the words: “In the turmoil of public life Ned gave and received hard knocks, and the world was not too kind to him.” He had briefly illuminated elements of a municipal agenda that others would take up in the new century.¹⁸⁴

At statewide Labor-in-Politics conventions, resolutions routinely appeared calling for franchise reform and democratization of local government, including direct election of mayors. But rarely did local delegates manage to squeeze into the deliberations more substantive municipal demands. At the 1905 convention, delegates called for “securing of the full results of their industry to all wealth producers by the collective ownership … to be obtained through the extension of the industrial and economic functions of the State and local governing bodies.” The motion passed over the opposition of several members of the party executive committee (CPE). Attention to municipal matters rose at each convention with “agenda papers” submitted by local branches, culminating in the adoption of a substantial “Local Government Reform” platform that addressed a whole range of issues including municipalization of utilities and services, such as tramways and electric lighting, substitution of government employment (with the eight-hour day at union wages) for contracted work, establishment of municipal baths, libraries, abattoirs, and markets, a single tax–style rating on unimproved land values, and city control of all parks and “commonages.” But the convention adjourned before formal adoption. Supporters were forced to send the platform forward to the CPE “for their favorable consideration.”¹⁸⁵ The gradual reorientation of the Labor Party to reflect the demands of municipal activists, despite CPE foot-dragging, stemmed from the growing voice and clarified agenda of local activists in the Queensland Labor-in-Politics conventions who regularly pushed forward a municipal program.¹⁸⁶ Despite indifferent support from the executive committee of the state Parliamentary Labor Party, the “Local Government Reform” platform went significantly beyond the routine demand for a broadened municipal franchise. At Labor-in-Politics conventions beginning at Rockhampton in 1907 and decisively at Townsville in 1910, the local branches moved the Queensland Labor Party aggressively in the direction of a municipal socialist politics, the battle for which had emerged concurrently in early twentieth-century industrial municipalities throughout Australia and New Zealand, in Germany and the UK, and around the globe.¹⁸⁷

Even with the franchise handicap, a solitary city council member, Thomas Wilson, representing labor in Brisbane, managed repeatedly to be elected as alderman between 1905 and 1921, and for one term as mayor in 1909. He challenged the governing consensus on a number of key municipal issues and on rare occasions marshaled a fragile majority of other councillors to support his positions.¹⁸⁸ Wilson came to council with working-class roots and “radical” inclinations. Hailing originally from Victoria, he learned shearing in the Riverine District of New South Wales and worked as a copper miner in the Cobar field before settling in Brisbane. Finding time “to study local government,” he ran successfully for alderman from Merthyr Ward in 1905 and then served in city council until 1921. He also entered Queensland parliament in 1916 and during the Labor government of T. J. Ryan served as minister for public instruction. For most of the period before franchise reform in 1920, Wilson was a lone labor alderman; he was joined in 1916 by Irishman and former Townsville railway worker J. T. McGuire (West Ward) and in 1917 by another transplanted Irishman, M. J. Barry (East Ward).¹⁸⁹

From 1908 to 1920, labor’s interest, largely represented by Wilson, focused on issues familiar in the annals of municipal socialist politics: contract versus municipal labor, municipal ownership of tramways, standardization and improvement of municipal wages, ward versus at-large representation, and expansion of the municipal franchise. Each of these issues became the focus of repeated and at times acrimonious debate. Most remained unresolved, though not without some incremental progress. Clearly fundamental franchise reform and implementation of labor’s key demands would have to await the election of a labor majority in both houses of state government and the passage of the Local Government Act reforms in 1920.¹⁹⁰

The deliberations of the Brisbane City Council provide a window on the efforts of one labor representative to generate debate around key elements of labor’s municipal program. In so doing, he challenged the conduct of local government more generally. On May 6, 1908, Alderman Wilson introduced a motion to require that a drainage works previously approved by the ratepayers should “be constructed by day labor.” In the ensuing debate, he noted that the state government was constructing railways with day labor and the work was “done quite as satisfactorily as by contract.” Opponents attempted to shift the focus of debate to the alleged higher cost of day labor in New South Wales. An effort to refer the matter to committee for further study failed on the tie-breaking vote of Mayor Buchanan, and by the same margin Wilson’s motion squeaked through. Clearly, the issue was one on which he was able to mobilize a fragile majority. Just how fragile became apparent at the meeting on July 13 when council rescinded by a single vote the adoption of its previous motion. But Wilson refused to allow the matter to die. With his allies he brought back the original motion for debate and a new vote in mid-August. Again, the issue of comparative cost loomed large. Opponents of day labor offered an amendment whereby the city engineer might submit a tender along with interested private contractors. In a sign of another shift in the tide of debate, that amendment failed to win a majority (one member abstaining). On Wilson’s motion, the old majority of one reappeared and, at least for the time being, the city was empowered to undertake the work with its own day laborers.¹⁹¹

A persistent issue for Brisbane’s council revolved around another labor plank. The Brisbane Tramways Company was managed by an American expatriate, J. S. Badger, whose notoriety grew over the years. In September 1910 Mayor Hetherington reported sympathetically to council on a proposal that a commission be formed and invested with the authority to negotiate immediate public purchase of the tramway lines or, alternatively, to renegotiate the current franchise agreement on more favorable terms. Frustrated by the poor service and the failure of the company to extend lines into growing areas of the metropolitan district, a minority of councillors pushed for municipalization. With state government opposed to passing the required statutory authority, Badger proposed a renewal of the franchise that would include a municipal profit-sharing provision but leave private ownership intact. The tramway issue circled again and again through council business without resolution.¹⁹²

The local reputation of Badger’s tramway company hardly improved in 1912. His dismissal of tramway workers who challenged an order prohibiting the wearing of union buttons precipitated a general strike of more than a month’s duration that eventually spread to other towns in the province. Brutal police repression visited on the strikers in Brisbane rested primarily at the doorstep of the Liberal Queensland government. Local government had its own business disrupted for the month. To the displeasure of a few councillors, some municipal employees joined the strike, but city officials took no punitive action against them. In fact, the municipality distributed free flour to hard-pressed citizens, for which the local trades hall took credit, irritating some council members. The strike prevented the election of a mayor for nearly a month.¹⁹³ Eventually, the tram workers capitulated, leaving deep scars on the community but intensifying labor’s interest in finding retribution through political action.¹⁹⁴

Frustration over the restrictive municipal franchise continued to fester. A year later, the Daily Standard, which had begun as the strikers’ Bulletin the year before, angrily denounced a municipal system in which “riches are enfranchised; the People are not.” Since municipal expenditures of substantial magnitude could be blocked by twenty ratepayers who might petition for a special poll “as to whether they should be taxed or not,” the Daily Standard could only voice frustration

when out-of-date, insanitary and slothful municipal methods kindle the fires of malignant disease and Death works overtime in our midst … They continue on the even tenor of their way, while whole swathes of non-voting humans are ruthlessly mown, and innocent infants, whose precious lives should be saved, lie hushed in their last sleep.¹⁹⁵

The coming of the Great War and the election of a state Labor government soon thereafter promised some improvement in labor’s fortune.

Conclusion

The evidence from municipalities across New Zealand and Australia in the early twentieth century generally fits a broad pattern they shared with cities in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and the US. In spite of resistance from parliamentary-oriented leaders, local labor party stalwarts pushed forward remarkably congruent municipal socialist programs that addressed a common core of day-to-day needs working people faced. These local activists made some hard-fought gains in the trenches of municipal politics by electing increasing numbers of their members to city councils and in some cities even briefly to mayoral offices. They demonstrated an astute grasp of council procedures, technical knowledge of urban policy, and an ability to outmaneuver their opponents, and even on occasion to assemble working majorities. These victories and a growing sentiment for urban democratization set the stage for more impressive victories under the conditions of war and in a postwar atmosphere rife with enthusiasm for broadening the franchise and expanding the fruits of democratic change, especially in cities.

6

Battling for Labor’s Local
Political Space: United States

Peter Witt’s “Handful of Hotstuff” in Cleveland

Peter Witt had some acquaintance with the rough-and-tumble of class politics and labor strife in Cleveland. Working as an iron molder, he had gone on strike and been blacklisted in the 1890s. He and his labor associates had campaigned vigorously and with some success for local populist candidates. He also developed his own lantern-slide presentation, “Cleveland before St. Peter: A Handful of Hotstuff,” indicting the monopoly rule of local elites. He took the presentation all over the city to gatherings of trade unionists and reformers. When the Democrats recruited businessman and single-taxer Tom Johnson to run for mayor in 1901, Witt joined the campaign, and following the election, Johnson appointed him to run a “tax school” charged with studying the unequal property assessments that favored the rich. Eventually as city clerk in the second Johnson administration, he masterminded a single-tax inspired redesign of the local tax system that shifted the burden significantly to large propertied interests.¹

As Johnson’s enfant terrible, he inspired his boss with his no-holds-barred attacks on privilege. At a memorable city council session in which the private streetcar monopoly rejected out of hand the city’s proposal for gradual municipalization, Johnson recalled,

Witt not only denounced the policy and methods of the railway company, charging that in the past it had bribed councilmen, corrupted legislators, used dishonest judges, and for months had the City Hall watched by a private detective, but one by one he called the men present by name and shaking his finger at them declared the responsibility of each for the particular things of which he held that man to be guilty.²

Witt represented a type of municipal reformer with decidedly socialist inclinations who found a pragmatic home in the administration of a reform Democrat. From that position he could pursue an agenda that differed little in substance from the municipal socialists who contested for power in scores of other cities in Ohio, the United States, and around the world. And, like others, he and Tom Johnson contended with deeply entrenched and powerful economic interests accustomed to running civic affairs for their own benefit.

New York’s Tammany Hall boss, George Washington Plunkitt, memorably referred to municipal reform politicians as “morning glories [that] looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks.”³ Although Plunkitt may have underestimated the staying power and class character of much municipal reform, he did capture something of the evanescent pragmatic reforms that swept through American cities in the period 1890–1920, and beyond. What such movements lacked in unified party organization that extended from one city to the next, they nevertheless embodied in a programmatic consistency that united these “social justice” reformers, whether they were affiliated with Democratic, Republican, Nonpartisan, Socialist, Labor, or Public Ownership Parties. This new municipal political gospel was not identical in Hazen Pingree’s Detroit, Samuel Jones’s Toledo, Tom Johnson’s Cleveland, Victor Berger’s Milwaukee, Eugene Schmitz’s San Francisco, Edward Dunne’s Chicago, and countless other reform and socialist regimes in smaller industrial cities. But, in certain respects, they reflected similar impulses and political outcomes.⁴ It is appropriate to speak of them programmatically in the same breath with the efforts of Labor or Socialist Party activists in Christchurch, NZ, Broken Hill, NSW, Manchester, England, Offenbach, Germany, and hundreds of other cities around the globe.

In an international context, the United States does not immediately come to mind as the site of a vigorous labor and socialist political movement in part because of the long shadow of Werner Sombart and the historiographical legacy of his central question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”⁵ But it also stems from the failure of historians to take seriously the realm of municipal politics and to adequately explain the structural impediments that inhibited labor and socialist municipal activists from ascending the political ladder from city to state and national levels in the United States and some other countries. Voter suppression, franchise restrictions, and contention over municipal home rule may have imposed some limits on oppositional politics at the municipal level in the United States, but the institutional constraints of a federalist system in which states were empowered to regulate political life in cities alsoproved decisive. The absence of a parliamentary system of representation that would have created political space for multiple parties to gain a footing made mobilizing and sustaining third-party opposition at the national level deeply problematic.⁶

Socialists’ Debate over Municipalism and Political Strategy

Like their comrades in Germany, socialists in the United States were deeply divided over a political strategy that focused on municipal victories and incremental reforms. A vocal and at times influential wing of the party echoed the critiques levied by Karl Kautsky and August Bebel against the evolutionary path to socialist transformation articulated in the writings of Eduard Bernstein and embodied in the grassroots work of Germany’s “Gemeindesozialisten” like Hugo Lindemann and his colleagues in places like Stuttgart, Bielefeld, and Offenbach.

The Socialist Party of America took shape immediately after the tumultuous labor conflicts in the late nineteenth century and from diverse ideological influences in the country’s radical tradition. A sectarian Socialist Labor Party had carried the torch of socialism from the conflicted socialist politics of the 1870s into the 1890s, but its capacity to build a broader base beyond urban immigrant enclaves proved limited.⁷ The sprawling Knights of Labor organized more American workers than any previous workers’ movement and, whether acknowledged or not, provided the spark for some of the era’s greatest strikes—the 1877 railroad strikes, the eight-hour day strikes of 1886, and countless others. Their venture into politics at the local level proved impressive though short-lived. Like their heirs in the Socialist Party, the Knights’ municipal victories typically were overwhelmed by major party fusion, and with defeat the enthusiasm of their base eroded.⁸ At the same time, the Farmers’ Alliance and its successor the Peoples’ Party proved a powerful force at all levels of the polity—municipal, state, and national. With deepening depression after 1893, the fragile rural/urban and north/south alliances that held aggrieved farmers and workers together around an agenda of government intervention in the economy proved unstable.⁹

An emergent political progressivism in both Democratic and Republican Parties took the wind out of populist sails in 1896 at the national and state levels. Most critically, in the South, resurgent white supremacy shattered the promise that interracial politics held for a brief time.¹⁰ With the economic crisis ebbing by 1897, a more profoundly sectional party realignment overwhelmed the nascent class politics of the 1890s. The remnants of that class politics fell to an emerging socialist party. Riding a wave of popularity in the West, Eugene Debs, president of the American Railway Union, led surviving local branches of that severely battered industrial union, along with some elements of the Western Federation of Miners, to form a new Social Democratic Party in 1897. After Debs’s first presidential candidacy as a socialist in 1900, Social Democracy of America jettisoned its alliance with the Socialist Labor Party and reconstituted itself in 1901 as the Socialist Party of America (SPA).¹¹

For more than two years before the founding “unity convention” in late July 1901, the socialist movement had been beset by a schism between Social Democratic and Socialist Labor Party factions. Schisms re-erupted in new forms between 1901 and 1904 and shaped the ideological contours of the new party. One of the most prominent divisions was between so-called “constructivists” and “impossibilists.”¹² While operating in a radically different milieu compared to their European brethren, the factions defined positions that, in some respects, paralleled divisions among German Social Democrats and, to a lesser extent, the British Labor Party and the Australian Labor Party.¹³ The affinity between constructivist American socialists and the revisionist posture of Eduard Bernstein and his allies among the SPD’s municipal socialists was unmistakable. They shared a commitment to an evolutionary path of socialist transformation.¹⁴

At the founding convention of the Socialist Party of America, one of the most contentious debates centered on whether the party’s revolutionary platform should include “immediate demands.” Revolutionary stalwarts like the Cleveland printer Max Hayes decried the adoption of immediate demands that might dilute the principle that only socialist revolution could produce meaningful change. He argued by analogy from the emancipation of the slaves. “They did not make immediate demands in the old abolition movement. They did not say ‘Let us free one slave at a time.’ … You know it was no compromise … and that when the crash came the entire slave power was destroyed and all the slaves were thereupon set free.” He noted that, in Cleveland, they were suffering with “too much Johnson” and “Jonesism” with “all sorts of immediate demands” that lead nowhere except into the arms of “Hannaism.” Comrade Lux put the matter squarely, “There is nothing to arbitrate as long as capitalism is on the platform and when socialism is on the platform there will be nothing to compromise or arbitrate.”¹⁵ Morris Hillquit, who chaired the platform committee, argued strenuously for inclusion of immediate demands, so as to avoid the mainstream parties “stealing our thunder,” for instance, by pushing legislation to shorten the hours of labor. If such demands were incorporated into their platform but not that of the SPA, “we are a great deal worse off, because then actually they stand for progress and we stand for dreams.” For Job Harriman of California, the class war was already in full swing and immediate demands must be framed with that understanding. “We must enter the war and take part in that battle, and we must state what we will do in that battle.” He remained skeptical of any “scheme” for bringing about the revolution. “Evolution develops into revolution; you cannot hasten it much, you cannot stop it much, you cannot direct it much; you can some … If the issue is municipal ownership, then it must be clear that it is undertaken to raise workers’ wages and shorten their hours not reduce the taxes on capitalist property.”¹⁶ The legendary socialist warhorse Tommy Morgan, who had led the fight for collective ownership at the 1894 convention of the AFL, also weighed in favoring immediate demands. As a “fossilized” old socialist, he believed that the concrete demands of the trade union movement should not be abandoned by the socialists.

After much contention and with some delegates casting votes “for unity,” the final vote supported the “Herron compromise” put forth by Christian socialist George D. Herron, which supported immediate demands but gave them a more revolutionary cast.¹⁷ This debate fore-shadowed continuing contention that pitted socialists like Victor Berger and Job Harriman, as advocates of a forthright municipal program, against Hayes, Algie Simons, and William English Walling, who remained determined not to dilute the revolutionary thrust of the fledgling SPA.

The debate over “immediate demands” and the drafting of a “municipal and state program” came to a head at the next general party convention in 1904, with presentation of a draft program crafted by a committee appointed at the previous convention. The platform proved a grab bag of demands, the debate over which once again inflamed tensions between the party’s “revolutionary” wing and its more moderate, “constructivist” faction. The constructivists remained committed to a strategy of building the party in the name of socialist principles by contesting for power in local and state elections around issues of immediate interest to workers. Speaking for opponents of the draft program, delegate John Walsh from Lewiston, Montana, argued that it could “have been taken from the last page of Hearst’s Chicago American.” He saw no way for socialist to make use of such a program. “We might as well take it for a hat rack.” Irene Smith of Oregon seconded that sentiment. “The work of the Socialist Party of the world is not to patch up the old system; it is to inaugurate a new system (applause).” But many delegates favored a program to guide local and state socialist elected officials. Ernest Untermann from Illinois, who chaired the committee on the municipal program, cited Marxist chapter and verse in support of a list of immediate demands. He reminded delegates that none other than August Bebel had challenged Wilhelm Liebknecht’s position that socialists elected to parliament should merely walk in, protest, and then walk out. Bebel reportedly said, “No, hold on a minute. I am going to walk in and I am going to stay there, and I am going to fight the capitalists in there, if I am the only socialist member in parliament.” According to delegate Edwin Carr of Danville, IL, the analogy of two factions of a shipwrecked crew fit such a case. One faction only argued for getting to shore and nothing else; the other advocated bailing the boat to get ashore. He cited the success of municipal socialists in France and Germany. “They have been just as firm and clear as we have in the declaration of Socialist principles, but they have realized that when they were elected, they had certain demands that they must meet; demands made by the people … and they started out to meet them.”¹⁸

It was left to Seymour Stedman from Illinois, a member of the Committee on the State and Municipal Program, to put the municipal movement in its proper context. Socialists could not simply say they are for anything that “will benefit the working class.” Any conventional politician could make that claim. He urged a longer view.

This movement at the present time is a municipal movement; it will grow and develop within the states, and you will take possession of them long before you do of the national government. The municipalities are the natural homes of the proletariat. It will first assert its strength there. You will first be obliged to assume a constructive course and constructive propaganda there. We are going to have new conditions.

He argued that success in municipalities would mean new “responsibility thrust upon our shoulders” and upon members’ shoulders. “As Socialist officers increase in number, just to that extent must we assume a constructive course in introducing within the present system all that we can that will enable the proletarians to raise their standard of living and contribute to their well-being.”¹⁹

In lengthy debate, self-described “revolutionists” like Algie Simons, who proclaimed himself “a scientific Socialist and not an idle dreamer,” cast their lot with supporters of a revised program, but others, especially from the New York and Chicago delegations, remained unconvinced. Henry Slobodin, NY, continued to oppose what he saw as a “jumble of various demands made by various parties during the history of the reform movement. It is not a concrete and coherent statement of demands made by a proletarian Socialist Party (applause).” In the end, the party adopted a motion—at the urging of key “constructivists” like Berger but also Hillquit, Herron, and Simons—for the party executive committee to approve the draft platform on state and municipal issues and then send it to the membership for final approval. In principle the party accepted the need for such a program to guide the burgeoning movement in the cities.²⁰ When it finally adopted a revised version of the state and municipal platform in 1906, it did so with an overwhelming vote of 4,000 to 150, indicating, according to Kipnis, that “impossiblism had virtually disappeared.” While that overstates the case, the drift toward a program of pragmatic municipal socialism increasingly capable of contesting for power in the cities was clearly underway.²¹

As the success of the Socialist Party in municipal politics grew, factional divisions over how best to seize the opportunities and limit the shortcomings of those efforts intensified in the years before the outbreak of world war. Debates over the value of municipal activity marked the party conventions in 1901 and 1904 like they marked the congresses of the German Social Democratic Party during the same years. As in Germany, conflict within the party over “revisionism” associated with Eduard Bernstein shadowed the debate.²²

The American “constructivists” put forward programs for practical reform in places like Haverhill, Milwaukee, Schenectady, and Spokane calling for an end to “private franchises for public utilities,” and “the abolition of the contract system on public works.” They sought to make “corporations pay their fair share of taxes” and, at least in Milwaukee, to institute “monthly symphony concerts” open to the public. Their opponents in the party, both “impossibilists” and “left-center” socialists, believed such demands were either simply ameliorative or worse. These measures would disguise and perpetuate capitalist hegemony and delay its inevitable demise.²³ Speaking for the revolutionist, left-center coalition in the Socialist Party, William English Walling recalled the warning of the party’s “most prominent revolutionist,” Eugene V. Debs.

All the votes of the people would do us no good if our party ceased to be a revolutionary party or became only incidentally so, while yielding more and more to the pressure to modify the principles and program of the Party for the sake of swelling the vote and hastening the day of its expected triumph … the Socialist Party wants the votes only of those who want socialism, and that, above all as a revolutionary party of the working class, it discountenances vote seeking for the sake of votes. (Italics are Walling’s.)

And, in words that echoed both Debs and the leadership of the German SPD, Charles Edward Russell put the revolutionary position simply: “The one party [the Socialist Party] [sh]ould be concerned with nothing but making converts to its philosophy and preparing for the revolution that its steadfast course would render inevitable.” After what they regarded as the disastrous compromises that contributed to the election of socialists in the shoe towns of Haverhill and Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1900 and 1902, the revolutionists turned away from “the election of legislative and administrative officers, here and there” and promoted sustaining the “working-class character and the revolutionary integrity” of the party at all costs.²⁴

Whether by design or circumstance, Victor Berger, the immigrant schoolteacher, socialist editor, and advocate for a “constructive” and evolutionary socialist strategy, became a lightning rod for the criticisms of self-described revolutionaries in the party. In Berger’s view, socialism “must conduct the everyday fight for the practical revolution every day.” He did not hesitate to come to the defense of the “Bernstein doctrine”; indeed, he argued in 1902 that it was “absurd” to criticize reforms that might “precede the ‘Great Revolution.’ ” In his view,

progress is not attained by simply waiting for a majority of people, for the general reconstruction, for the promised hour of deliverance … We wicked “opportunists” want action … We want to reconstruct society, and we must go to work without delay, and work ceaselessly for the cooperative Commonwealth, the ideal of the future. But we want to change conditions now.

And, not to be preempted by his left-wing critics, he added, “We stand for scientific Socialism.”²⁵

Berger and his Milwaukee comrades could not easily be pigeonholed, however. What might appear as contradictions to his critics were views that directed attention to the practical work of grassroots movement and party building while remaining faithful to socialist principles. Two issues illustrate that position.

Socialists’ views on direct democracy

Walling and other left-wing critics portrayed the constructivists’ views on the popular progressive reform of direct legislation—the “initiative and referendum”—as contradictory and opportunistic. The Wisconsin socialists’ platform did include a plank supporting direct democracy, but they ultimately regarded it as “the longest way” to socialism. As Berger wrote in the Social Democratic Herald, “The real class-conscious proletariat is still a minority,” and

it can only show results by fighting as a well-organized, compact mass … But the initiative, the referendum, and the right to recall have a tendency to destroy parties and loosen tightly knit political organizations … Therefore, while the Socialist Party stands for direct legislation as a democratic measure, we are well aware that the working class will be helped very little by getting it. We are well aware that the proletariat, before all things, must get more economic and political strength—more education and more wisdom. That, besides teaching cooperation, we must build political machines.

For the “revolutionist” Walling, advocacy of “political machines” seemed anti-democratic, but, for Berger, it represented precisely the class-conscious path to winning political victories in the short-term and socialism in the long-term.²⁶

Class and social equality: Socialists’ views on “the woman question”

Walling and others also saw ambivalence or worse in the Milwaukeeans’ position on feminism, woman suffrage, and racial equality.²⁷ The Milwaukeeans were troubled by the reality that what they termed “intelligent women” (namely politically mobilized middle- and upper-class women) “have always exercised great political power.” They doubted whether in the coming transition to socialism “women’s vote would help the advance of humanity.” Acknowledging that socialists might “honestly differ,” Berger nonetheless argued a strictly class-conscious perspective.

We have woman suffrage in our platform, and we should stand by it. Because in the end it will help to interest the other half of humanity in social and political affairs, and it will be of great educational value on both women and men … Nevertheless, it is asking a great deal of the proletariat when we are requested to delay the efficiency of our movement for generations on that count. And we surely ought not to lay such stress on this one point as to injure the progress of the general political and economic movement—the success of which is bound to help the women as much as the men.²⁸

With these views, Berger manifested skepticism that woman’s suffrage could be achieved anytime soon but also a socialist presumption that class struggle remained the party’s primary focus and ultimately the source of liberation for all workers, men and women. As socialist Max Fruchter wrote to socialist garment worker and influential suffragist Rose Schneiderman, “You cannot possibly serve two Gods … You either work for Socialism and as a result for equality of the sexes or you work for woman suffrage only and neglect Socialism.” Schneiderman’s response was quite simple and direct: without women’s votes, as Annelise Orleck paraphrased it, “the working class would be denied its full share of political power.” As Schneiderman recalled, “My theme in all my suffrage speeches was that I did not expect any revolution when women got the ballot, as men had had it all these years and nothing of great importance had happened. But women needed the vote because they needed protection through laws.”²⁹ And, although working women split over the extent to which they should cooperate with bourgeois women in suffrage campaigns, many still affirmed the fight for suffrage as a socialist program. Anita Block, editor of the Woman’s Page of the socialist New York Call, opened the columns of the periodical for a debate over these questions, but warned her fellow suffragists, “Freedom from sex slavery does not mean freedom from wage slavery.”³⁰

Socialist critics of bourgeois feminism kept odd company with those who criticized them from the left, including class-conscious syndicalists like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). Flynn also professed suspicion of middle-class suffragists but had little faith in the efficacy of any electoral strategy for overthrowing capitalism. “To us society moves in grooves of class not sex.”

We see no basis for feminist mutual interest … the “Queen of the parlor” has no interest in common with the “maid in the kitchen”; the wife of a department store owner shows no sisterly concern for the seventeen-year-old girl who finds prostitution the only door open to a $5 a week clerk job. The sisterhood of women, like the brotherhood of man, is a hollow sham to labor. Behind all its smug hypocrisy and sickly sentimentality loom the sinister outlines of the class war.³¹

While Berger would hardly have put the argument in those terms, he too gave primacy to the class struggle, albeit in the trenches of city councils and at the municipal ballot box.

For all the professed support for egalitarian principles—and Socialist Party platforms and literature were consistent on that point—the party’s own practice fell far short of its principles. As Sally Miller and others have noted, women were woefully underrepresented in party offices, as delegates to conventions, and as candidates for public office. Indeed, its organizational culture was suffused with a paternalism that marginalized women in the life of the party. They were typically consigned to social and supportive roles, or to promoting the organization of separate women’s committees both nationally and locally as the primary venue for their activism within the party.³² In Australia, rising numbers of women in the Political Labor Council (Australian Labor Party) of Victoria sought more autonomy as a Women’s Organizing Committee (WOC) with its own branches and representation in the statewide PLC organization.³³ In the United States, women’s membership in the Socialist Party rose modestly (peaking at 10 percent in 1912) but reliable data on women members were not systematically collected. In some western communities and among some new immigrant groups in the party’s language federations, women’s membership appears to have risen higher. Weinstein points to the prominence of a handful of leading women socialists like Kate Richards O’Hare, Margaret Sanger, and “Mother” Jones herself, as well as scattered cases of women running for and occasionally winning state or local elective office.³⁴ One can argue, as Sally Miller has, that the Women’s National Committee and especially some of its subsidiary branches were “growing into an energetic and imaginative, expansive focus for party activity.” But some voices, like Lena Morrow Lewis, one of only three women to serve on the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee in this period, argued for inclusion rather than separation. “We must never allow our woman’s committees or conferences to be the means of eliminating [the] women from the regular party.” In the context of a masculinist party culture, such separate committees led by women may have provided refuge or even a staging ground for broader assertions of women’s rights within the party or for alliances with feminists outside the party. But, more typically, they served to segregate women on the margins of power within the party.³⁵ In 1914, claiming financial exigency but also giving voice to those who may have feared a growing role for women, the SPA ended support for the WNC. By vote of the National Executive Committee and a party referendum the next year, the SPA shut down the WNC as a quasi-autonomous venue for women’s activism in the party.³⁶ In so doing, socialists may have reaffirmed their fundamental view that only class liberation could produce meaningful liberation for other subordinate groups, but they also eliminated a critical vehicle for women to have their voices heard within the party.

Socialism and racism

If proletarian ideology shaped American socialists’ views on the “woman question” it did so with even more polarizing consequences on issues of race. Socialists, to a very large extent, were adherents of the racial ideologies that characterized their times. Even when acknowledging African Americans as part of the working class, “constructivists” like Berger tended to view skeptically their capacity for self-organization and were quite prepared to consign them to subordinate and segregated status within the movement and in society more generally.³⁷ In some respects, Eugene Debs and Kate Richards O’Hare represented opposing poles in the socialist debate over the “Negro problem” even as both professed that only class mattered in the end. In Debs’s words, “When the working class have triumphed in the class struggle and stand forth economic as well as political free men, the race problem will forever disappear.” And he directly challenged whites’ obsession with the perils of “social equality.”

But of all the senseless agitation in capitalist society, that in respect to “social equality” takes the palm … This phase of the negro question is pure fraud and serves to mask the real issue, which is not social equality, but CONOMIC FREEDOM. There never was any social inferiority that was not the shriveled fruit of economic inequality.³⁸

While Kate O’Hare argued for “equality of opportunity for black and white to have the means of life,” she pandered to Southern race prejudice and professions of black inferiority. In her view “equal opportunity” was “TO PUT THE NEGRO WHERE HE CAN’T COMPETE WITH THE WHITE MAN.” And on the question of “social equality” she was adamant and uncompromising.

I neither love nor hate a negro. I am no more anxious to associate with him than he is to associate with me. I don’t want to associate on terms of social equality with him and I know he is just as willing to dispense with my society as I am with his, but capitalism forces us into social, economic and physical relation which is just as revolting to the negro as it is to me … But you ask what is the solution of the race question? There can be but one. Segregation.³⁹

Despite isolated instances in which the SPA undertook serious organizing in African American communities—in Harlem and Oklahoma, for instance—the party’s dominant posture was one of neglect bordering on racial exclusion.⁴⁰ A small cadre of committed socialists in the African American community actively pursued outreach in their communities but with mixed electoral results. W. E. B. Du Bois expressed frustration with the socialists’ willingness to ignore the plight of “the 10 million” (African Americans) on the assumption that “when the objects of Socialism are achieved, this problem will be settled along with other problems.” He also feared a Faustian bargain in which socialists sought to capture the “radical South” by compromising the race question. He posed the key question: “After you have gotten the radical South and paid the price which they demand, will the result be Socialism?”⁴¹ That price in the South was acquiescence to the widening pattern of Jim Crow disfranchisement and accounted for significant barriers the socialists faced in their appeal to African Americans.⁴² For the most part, with some exceptions in Texas, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, socialists accepted the maintenance of segregated locals. In Oklahoma, led by Oscar Ameringer, they took a principled stand against Democrats’ efforts to disfranchise black voters—specifically the introduction of an infamous “grandfather clause.” Eventually, after twists and turns in the courts and with referenda, they managed to keep “the thing so rotten it stank to heaven” out of the state constitution. In some districts they garnered a significant African American vote.⁴³ And, in some northern constituencies, socialists enjoyed remarkable success among black voters.

Organizing efforts, spearheaded in large part by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen in Harlem, managed to win a quarter of the black vote for socialist mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit in the 1917 New York campaign, despite, as Sally Miller has noted, Hillquit’s own mixed record as an advocate for African Americans in the SPA.⁴⁴ The full-throated support of Randolph and Owen in their new journal, the Messenger, and their street corner organizing yielded significant results for the socialist candidate. “Morris Hillquit represents the working people and 99 per cent of Negroes are working people,” Randolph and Owen wrote. Based on a litany of municipal socialist demands, from providing free food and clothing to schoolchildren, building public housing with fair rents, to municipal ownership that would “reduce the cost of carfare, phone, gas and electricity,” and condemning “riots and lynching of Negroes,” they argued that Hillquit and the socialists deserved the support of black voters.⁴⁵

A. Philip Randolph (L) and Chandler Owen, American Socialist Party Activists, Harlem, c. 1920

Randolph, a migrant to New York from Florida, drew on a deep well of commitment in his family to the fight against racism and the violation of the fundamental rights of African Americans. But soon after his arrival in New York City, he was drawn to the socialists’ critique of American capitalism’s deployment of race to divide and control the working class. Randolph knew something of that exploitation, both from his early years in the South but also as a member of an underclass, subject to the whims of white employers. In the Socialist Party, Randolph found a haven in which racism was for the most part held at bay. His personal contact with Eugene Debs had left a deep impression of the party’s standard-bearer as an individual (and by implication his party) with deeply humanitarian and fiercely anti-capitalist views, for whom race prejudice was entirely foreign. He may have been fundamentally correct about Debs, but the party had a more checkered and compromised record on race. Later, having distanced himself from his own early enthusiasm for the Bolshevik revolution, he expressed views quite consistent with the constructivist tradition in the Socialist Party. Randolph and Owen catalogued and criticized the views of the left and right wings of the Socialist movement. In their view, the “amateur enthusiasm” of the party’s left wing was “not keeping pace with scientific method.”

The mere uttering of the words, “overthrow of capitalism” and “proletarian dictatorship” are not so material. It is the method that counts. Every time we can pull a brick out of the capitalist wall, we are hastening its overthrow, speeding the day when it will topple. Get woman suffrage today. Strike to increase wages and shorten hours. Abolish child labor. Take over your railroads. Take over your telephones and telegraphs. Don’t refuse to strike these blows, because all cannot be gotten at once.”⁴⁶

But, by 1919, Randolph and Owen, though still powerful voices of the left and in the postwar African American community, faced the splintering of their movement, the marginalization of black radicals, and the decimation of the party to which they had committed their energies and their faith. Their lingering support of a constructivist socialist path led them to sharply criticize both the nationalism of the Garveyite movement and the turn toward Bolshevism of some erstwhile comrades.

The class-based “color-blindness” of American socialists—the unwillingness of many to take seriously the special burdens of race faced by working people of color—conveniently fit Americans’ resistance to the idea of “social equality” and the wider myopia of socialists worldwide on matters of race, notably in Australia.⁴⁷

A rising tide of “constructivist” socialism

Constructivist “municipal socialists” witnessed rising success in one city after another, even as the national party stagnated between 1904 and 1908. Their record created something of a crisis for the party’s more “revolutionary” comrades, and this predicament became even more poignant after the triumph of Milwaukee socialists in the municipal campaign of 1910. Walling noted “the national movement gave little attention” to “immediate reforms” in municipalities “until the success of the Milwaukee Socialists (in 1910) in capturing the city government.” The party’s attention had been focused “almost exclusively on its one great demand, the overthrow of capitalist government.” But, as of April 1911, “municipal policy” came to assume “special importance since the installation of Socialist officials” in cities across the country, in California, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Illinois, and other states. Those victories multiplied in November 1911 with victories in scores of other cities.⁴⁸ Beginning in the fall of 1910, the party observed “certain Socialist candidates” in different localities “ran far ahead of the rest of the Socialist ticket.” While, in some instances, the vote seemed a protest and enlisted non-socialist support, Walling acknowledged “that a part of the vote was undoubtedly cast for a type of municipal reform somewhat more radical than other parties” had offered. It seemed, on the face of it, to be the vote of “convinced Socialists.” But, even as the “revolutionists” acknowledged these victories, they remained skeptical of the “constructivist” strategy that underlay them and belittled the Milwaukeeans’ caution and their appeal to the “businessman” and “taxpayer.” Walling claimed “they [the constructivists] want a safe and sane business policy” and “as such branches are captured they will be prevented from doing anything of importance, or forced to act only within the limits fixed by the ruling class.”⁴⁹

Berger’s critics notwithstanding, the “practical” work in Milwaukee bore testimony to the efficacy of socialists contending for power at the municipal level. Despite conditions that many observers regarded as inauspicious for socialist success, socialist activists in some municipalities—like Haverhill and Brockton, Schenectady and Milwaukee—defined municipal programs and conducted campaigns that paralleled those in New Zealand and Australia, as well as Britain, Germany, Austria, and Sweden. Facing different impediments to victory, though typically not formal franchise restrictions for white male voters, and with fewer entrenched urban “liberal” regimes, American socialists and urban populists in the early twentieth century achieved dramatic political victories in a host of municipalities.⁵⁰

Milwaukee’s Municipal Socialists: Building Socialism in One City

The Milwaukeeans’ victory in 1910 had roots that reached back to the late nineteenth century with a deeply grounded, municipally oriented and labor-affiliated local movement that grew out of the remnants of urban populism.⁵¹ Over two decades, socialists in Milwaukee constructed a party of formidable strength in the municipal arena, closely tied to the Milwaukee Federated Trades Council (FTC). Building on the city’s Populist movement and aligning with Eugene Debs’s Social Democracy of America, they had become a political force during the late 1890s.⁵² The Social Democratic Party of Milwaukee (SDM) won endorsement of the AFL-affiliated Milwaukee FTC in February 1900 and provided inspiration to the “constructivist” wing of the Socialist Party of America after 1901. Despite initial optimism, the SDM polled only 2,473 votes in the 1900 city election, a mere 29 votes more than in 1898, and failed to elect a single alderman.⁵³ But with the spring election of 1902, the socialists’ fortunes began to ascend. With 8,400 votes, they claimed a sixth of the electorate, and doubling their vote in 1904, they elected nine aldermen to the Common Council.⁵⁴

Although the new socialist councilmen were a small minority in a city council of forty-five members, they demonstrated discipline and a willingness to challenge the established agenda and procedures by which council conducted its business, a pattern with parallels in Wellington, Brisbane, Bradford, Keighley, Frankfurt, and other municipalities around the world. Their nominees for president and clerk of the council went down to defeat with only the support of the nine Social Democrats. Undeterred, they proposed a remarkable array of initiatives in the face of Democratic mayor-elect David Rose’s warnings about the use of “partisan tongue and partisan pen.” Echoing the traditional view of governing elites, he claimed elected officials had a duty to be responsive to “the whole people rather than to party.” At the second meeting of the council, socialist Frederic Heath, urged on by the Federated Trades Council, moved that city council meetings henceforth be held at 7:30 pm rather than the customary 4 pm in order to facilitate workers’ participation. The chair referred the motion to the Rules Committee, from which it failed to emerge. Reintroduced in early 1905 by another socialist, the proposal met the same fate.⁵⁵ Within their first six months on council, the minority of nine socialists submitted motions for equitable expenditure for street repairs in the wards, and for a municipal ice plant and coal and wood yard; they proposed creating space and speaker stands for open-air meetings in public parks, urged the council to solicit bids for a long-promised children’s “isolation hospital”; they argued for eight hours as the standard for all city workers whether directly employed or on contract, and sought state legislation to tax street railway businesses and light and telephone companies at the high rate established for railways. All these initiatives, except the isolation hospital and the lobby for new tax legislation, disappeared into committee, were recommended for “indefinite postponement,” or were eventually voted down on committee recommendation. Where votes were taken, the nine Social Democrats almost always stood alone as a group.⁵⁶

Municipalizing the electric light plant proved complicated for the Social Democrats but also for their “nonpartisan” opponents. In repeated referenda, Milwaukee voters had asserted their support for a municipally owned electric utility. Democratic mayor Rose acknowledged the mandate in his opening address to the council. After rehearsing the results of the various votes taken, he said simply, “It is now up to us to carry out the instructions of the people and build the plant.” However, the Social Democrats’ motion to appoint a committee of aldermen and experts to visit other municipal plants and develop a concrete proposal failed adoption. When a committee of aldermen and the city engineer did eventually undertake the investigation, the council deferred further action. The socialist councillors repeatedly submitted petitions of citizens in support of erecting a municipal plant, but still the council failed to act. Only the election of a full socialist administration in 1910 would move the city forward after fifteen years in which the public’s desires had been “denied by the men who made the same perennial election pledge.”⁵⁷

The Milwaukee socialists’ forward electoral march continued in 1906 with the capture of five additional aldermanic seats, but victory came at a price. By 1908, the State of Wisconsin imposed an at-large municipal electoral process that meant an even larger socialist vote (nearly one-third of the total vote) produced only nine aldermanic seats once again.⁵⁸

Appealing to a broader social reform constituency, the socialists rebuilt their strength at the ward level and made serious inroads into the southside neighborhoods inhabited by new immigrants, predominantly Polish and Eastern European laborers and their families. Here, the socialists found a winning strategy.⁵⁹ They worked methodically and painstakingly for victory in 1910. Cleveland reformer Frederic Howe, visiting Milwaukee not long after the socialist success in 1910, observed that “the Socialists have been represented in the Council for eight years [sic]. Since 1908 they have had a vigorous group of ten Aldermen [sic] who have given a suggestion of the honesty of the party … The public had grown accustomed to the name and the spectacle of Socialists in office.” Berger put the case more simply: Milwaukee had become a “convinced Socialist city,” its politics “saturated with Socialist doctrine.”⁶⁰

In the end, the Milwaukee Social Democrats won not by virtue of the support of middle-class social reformers but because of their gains among immigrant workers.⁶¹ Berger did not mince words. “Our growth was not among the wards where independent voting is prevalent. Our great gains were among the Poles … And once they have voted the Socialist ticket, the workingmen never desert us.”⁶²

Victor Berger with Emil Seidel and Cleveland Reformer Frederic Howe, c. 1910

Milwaukee’s Social Democratic Party in April 1910 stunned the nation and the world by electing a mayor, twenty-one of thirty-six aldermen, and eleven of sixteen county supervisors. Also impressive were the election of Victor Berger to Congress and thirteen socialists to the state legislature the following November. Both pragmatic and visionary, the Milwaukee Social Democrats worked for urban home rule and immediate, tangible reforms, but they also spoke of “the cooperative commonwealth as a guiding star” of their reform program.⁶³ Mayor-elect Emil Seidel mocked the inefficiencies of capitalism and advocated an expanded public sector. “See how easily we get along when the idea of profit is absent,” he observed. The Social Democratic Herald carried a regular column, entitled “Seidelberg,” on the socialists’ work in the Common Council. They proposed an expanded public sector and largely succeeded in accomplishing it: municipal ownership of streetcars and other city services, a city-owned terminal station, municipal baths, markets, and cold-storage plants, a public garbage disposal plant, a municipal ice plant, public works employment for the unemployed, free medical dispensaries and hospitals, an expanded system of parks and swimming pools, free textbooks, and the opening of schools as community social centers.⁶⁴ Having been burned by the advent of at-large elections in previous cycles, the socialists continued to oppose at-large elections, short ballots, and commission forms of government. Berger in 1911 offered a devastating critique of the political reforms offered by many progressives. Such reforms, he argued, “confuse the minds of the workers regarding the fundamental issue of today—the class struggle between the workers and owners. It tends to make workmen look to ‘good men’ and to reformed methods of election for relief, instead of working for a change of economic conditions.” Speaking as a good machine politician, even if a socialist, he astutely observed that political reforms were “not good mechanical devices for a democracy, for they limit the power of the people and tend to the establishment of an oligarchy.”⁶⁵

In a pattern all too common in other cities, where competing parties temporarily fused in order to defeat them, the Milwaukee Social Democrats did not succeed themselves. By 1916, now in the context of the Great War, the Social Democratic Party did reassert itself and elect as mayor Daniel Hoan who had been city attorney in the first socialist administration. Despite their wartime travails, Social Democrats would play a major role in Milwaukee municipal politics over the next forty years.⁶⁶ They reconstructed the city’s public space and culture in ways that made it, at least in some respects, a “workers’ city.”

Socialists and Charter “Reform”: A Tale of Two (Ohio) Cities

Any overview of urban municipal reform in the Progressive Era must acknowledge the prominence of the socialist administrations elected in literally hundreds of municipalities across the United States. While no systematic overview of those cases exists, individual cities have been studied in some depth.⁶⁷ Ohio had perhaps the largest number of local socialist parties that successfully contested for power in the years 1908– 1917. The state had seventeen socialist mayors elected in 1911 alone, and socialists won major and minor offices in thirty of the state’s ninety-three cities and towns.⁶⁸ The mayoral victories came in such prominent cities as Canton, Lima, Fostoria, Lorain, Columbus, Cuyahoga Falls, Dayton, Hamilton, and Martin’s Ferry. A number of other cities elected more than two city councillors. A comparison of the cities of Hamilton and Dayton illustrates cases that are both congruent and divergent. They demonstrate the formidable challenges local socialists faced and the strategies they pursued in their quest for local power.

Hamilton, Ohio

Hamilton, on the lower Miami River in far southwestern Ohio, had a robust industrial economy based in metalworking. Machine shops and molding enterprises formed its primary sector. Skilled trades predominated in a working-class population which nonetheless had significant numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. Its population had doubled between 1886 and 1900 and then grew in the next decade from 24,000 to 35,000. In one survey of local wage-earning men, 81 percent fell into five occupations: laborers, machine hands, machinists, molders, and painters. The concentration of German immigrants and their children in the working population had a direct bearing on the influence socialists came to have. Of the eligible voting population in 1910, 41 percent were either immigrants or the sons of immigrants, and German ethnicity predominated.⁶⁹

Hamilton had a significant tradition of municipal ownership in the nineteenth century. It established a public waterworks in 1883 and publicly owned gas and electric enterprises in the 1890s. But the socialists’ electoral support grew only slowly in the early twentieth century.⁷⁰ Even the presidential contests of 1904 and 1908 produced only modest socialist totals for Debs (6 percent and 5 percent respectively). But, in the gubernatorial contest of 1910, the socialist percentage suddenly jumped to a robust 29 percent (total of 1980 votes), drawing from both Republican and Democratic voters of two years before, though more so Republicans. A socialist organizer from Dayton recalled during an impressive opening rally for the 1911 municipal elections that merely a few years earlier, “the Socialist headquarters was a lamp post on High Street.” Now it was a “comfortable hall downtown.”⁷¹

The socialists’ success in the 1911 municipal election proved even more impressive. Taking advantage of factionalism within the Democratic Party and an anemic Republican Party, socialists also benefited from surging reform sentiment. Their candidate for mayor won 33 percent of the vote and lost to an incumbent Democrat by a mere 52 votes. More consequentially, after having no representation in city council, the socialists elected five of nine city councillors, who now constituted a working majority. Two were of German immigrant stock, though only one—Ferdinand Aker—came to the United States as an adult immigrant. All were working class—two machinists, one painter, and two stove-manufacturing workers. Walter Hinkel, directly elected president of the council, worked as a safe painter. Their presence produced a dramatic shift in how the council handled its business.⁷²

Almost immediately with the seating of the new council in early January 1912, the socialist majority made its presence felt, electing one of its number to be president pro tempore and selecting the clerk of council. Under his statutory authority as president of the council, Hinkel appointed the standing committees, each of which, except the Library Committee, had a socialist majority. Following the election, in what appeared to be a slap at the newly elected socialists, the lame-duck council voted to cut the salaries of councillors and the president in half. Over the course of the spring, the socialist faction initiated a number of measures designed to open council proceedings to public scrutiny, calling for a general meeting to discuss “civic” and “municipal” improvements and, with the non-socialist minority in opposition, making both the Hamilton Journal (conservative) and the Hamilton Socialist official organs for the publication of city business. For the first time, this provided a crucial revenue stream for the socialist press.⁷³

The Hamilton socialists in council also took initiative to more closely scrutinize and regulate the operation of the city’s public works and reduce the size of the city’s police force. The conservative mayor strenuously objected to both of these initiatives.⁷⁴ Warned by the city solicitor that the council had “no executive or judicial powers” and they were told that if they proceeded to hire an independent engineer “for the purpose of investigating the condition of the municipal water works,” the director of public works would still have sole authority to contract for the services. The Committee on Service, with its socialist majority, also reported finding discrimination in electric rates and demanded an inquiry by the director of public service. Once an investigating engineer had completed his report on the water utility, councillors raised further questions about the provision of adequate clean water to residents. The council approved, on a divided vote, a demand that the streetcar franchisee, the Ohio Electric Railway, make improvements to its line with the cost to be borne solely by the company. Councillors had clearly taken their charge seriously and moved to aggressively scrutinize city operations in ways that had not been customary.⁷⁵

The new year—the second with a socialist majority in council—brought intensifying conflict between council factions. For the most part the socialists voted as a bloc on a series of measures: to raise compensation and lower hours of work for garbage-collection laborers, and to oppose raising the salary of the Gas Department superintendent. With considerable public support, the council passed a city “pure food” ordinance, authorizing city officials to inspect milk and other food commodities.⁷⁶ The socialists pushed for a new smoke ordinance. In a running dispute with the mayor, the council declined to approve his appointments to the Health Department and attempted to transfer its operations to the Board of Public Service. Payments to private contractors continued to be a point of contention that would appear again later in the year.⁷⁷

Like other cities up and down the Miami River, Hamilton experienced a devastating flood on March 25 and 26, 1913. The council and city departments moved quickly to authorize railroads to construct a temporary bridge to replace one destroyed by the raging water. Over the opposition of the Chamber of Commerce it created a publicly-owned “Municipal Supply Store” to assist residents with emergency needs.⁷⁸ Despite reservations about private contracting, they nevertheless agreed to contract for emergency cleanup, but they also stipulated that city’s own laborers be paid no less than $2.50 for an eight-hour day.⁷⁹ By summer, with the city still recovering from the effects of the flood, the council reached an impasse with the mayor over approval of the city appropriation for the last half of 1913. Responding to large numbers of petitions from workers in the community, the socialist councillors insisted that the city’s minimum wage apply not only to its own laborers but “to all contracts where the city has control.” Amid the dissension over the summer, a large number of petitioners requested that the city establish a municipal ice plant, cold storage house, and coal yard, indicating popular sentiment for expanding the public sector. With a bare majority (five to four), the socialists did not have the votes to override repeated vetoes by the mayor. Resolutions claiming collusion among contractors, suits by the city solicitor against the socialist council members, and petitions by departments for their budgeted funds infected the atmosphere of council deliberations.⁸⁰ These issues would come back to hover over the election in November 1913.

With a bare majority in city council in 1912 and 1913, Hamilton socialists nevertheless had made themselves felt on a number of issues, and, although repeatedly thwarted by a mayoral veto, they had defined the outlines of a program for the city that would expand the public sector and more tightly regulate business. As the election in November 1913 loomed, business and its political allies mobilized to defeat the socialists. Some churchmen called on voters to support “men of ability … who have the confidence of the city.” And a newly formed Citizens’ Party put the task more bluntly: “to keep the Socialists out of power in 1913.”⁸¹ With the prospect of a socialist victory looming and an intransigent faction of the Democratic Party unwilling to vacate the field, the campaign grew even more intense and emotional. The Citizens’ Party belittled and made light of the socialist candidates’ qualifications. “Jake Halperin is a good umbrella mender but the people do not want him to run Hamilton,” one Citizens’ Party supporter commented. The leading city newspaper waved a nationalist flag to rally opposition to the socialists. Implicitly attacking the socialists’ immigrant supporters with a nationalist message, a Citizens’ orator cried, “Give me a true citizen who believes above all things in the most beautiful flag that was ever unfurled over a nation.” And, when the Democrats in the final week refused to withdraw their ticket, the Citizens brought in a former Democratic governor for one last appeal. “The duty of every Democrat is to break down socialism at any cost, and to coalesce with any party, or combination of voters to effect that purpose.”⁸² In the end, a socialist tide in Hamilton overwhelmed both the Citizens and the Democrats and gave governing power in the city to the Socialist Party. The vote totals, however, suggested a challenging future for the socialists, if their competitors were to find a way to reconcile their differences. Fred Hinkel, the newly elected mayor, won by a slight plurality with a vote of 2,798 compared to the Citizens’ 2,544 and the Democrats’ 2,278.⁸³

The first order of business for the Socialist mayor and council was the appointment of city administrators who shared their perspective on city governance. Following socialist practice, the Hamilton local vetted prospective administrative appointees before they were presented for council approval, with the understanding that the appointees would serve at the pleasure of the local as well as the council. Visiting socialist speaker James O’Neal noted the involvement of the party local in such appointments as a logical extension of the fact that “this is the victory of the working class and not of those who hold office.”⁸⁴ The party would decide how best to distribute the fruits of office, a common practice in political life, but, in the socialist case, conducted with greater openness and transparency. For each of thirty-three positions, the local nominated at least six candidates, and party members voted on their preferred choice. “Some had technical knowledge acquired in shops and factories. Others had clerical experience in offices. Still others were good mechanics.” The opposition characterized the role of the socialist “Local” as the act of “an unofficial and irresponsible body” composed merely of those who happen to have paid monthly dues of 25 cents as party members. “Hamilton will have government by oligarchy.”⁸⁵ By the time the council took up its appointments in the New Year, those decisions proceeded without controversy. With a council majority, the mayor named a Socialist chair and majority for each committee.⁸⁶ Of the Socialists appointed to top city administrative positions, five were machinists, and one each a painter, umbrella maker, laborer, paper maker, and insurance executive. The new administration retained two officials because of hardships related to their age and the superintendent of the electric plants who had skills no party member could replace was kept on.⁸⁷

As they took up the daunting task of administering a city still struggling with the aftermath of the horrific spring flood, the socialists had few illusions. Their comrades in the sister city of Dayton reported, “They do not expect to inaugurate the cooperative commonwealth in the next two years … However, they are determined to do the very best they can with the degree of political power that has been entrusted to them.” They noted that Hamilton had progressed further than most cities its size in public ownership of utilities. The water, gas, and electric works had all turned a handsome profit for the city. But with all the public plants damaged in the flood, a more modest return was anticipated for the coming year.⁸⁸

Immediately after the election, Mayor Hinkel foreshadowed policies that both reassured and unsettled those in the business community who had feared a socialist administration. He signaled that it was not the policy of socialists to foment strikes; they sought “to settle grievances through the ballot rather than through industrial disturbances.” In the event of “disturbances,” he promised to protect working people but also “the property of manufacturers,”

because it is the hope of Socialists to eventually take over the means of production. We look upon the Captains of Industry not as enemies to society but as men who have built up the system out of which shall grow the cooperative commonwealth.

In short, he asserted, “the conservation of the group and not the individual will be the keynote of the new administration.”⁸⁹

The “era of good feeling” within the Hamilton City Council was not long-lived. Later in January, as the new councillors and mayor settled into their duties, the contentious issue of publishing the city’s official notices arose, as it had routinely in recent years. Only a single non-Socialist councillor joined the Socialists to support dual publication of official city notices in both the Hamilton Evening Journal and the Hamilton Socialist.⁹⁰

Despite considerable optimism in the Socialist administration over transforming the city to have a direct, tangible impact on the lives of its workers, the heavy economic toll of post-flood recovery created major impediments. Economic forces, locally and statewide, proved determined to undermine the Socialist administration early in 1914. That opposition continued unabated as long as the Socialists controlled city government. Authorization for street and storm sewer repairs funded with local resources continued to enjoy unanimous council support, but the Industrial Commission of Ohio consistently rejected bond resolutions for larger recovery projects.⁹¹ Faced with a decline in tax revenues—the byproduct of collapsing property values and tax revenues after the flood—the city had little prospect of debt relief from state authorities or the county budget commission. The city administration struggled to reallocate scarce revenues and to float its own bonds to raise additional funds. At each step, the Socialists faced determined opposition from their council opponents.⁹²

Despite the impediments they faced, the Socialists managed significant accomplishments during their two years governing Hamilton. They quickly disposed of two unresolved issues carried over from the prior administration. The council adopted a minimum wage increase for city employees of $2.50 per day and mandated a universal eight-hour day for its workers and those in the private sector doing city work. The new administration, with council support, also moved to finally reform a bloated police department, reducing the number of officers by one-third and cutting its expense by $15,000 annually. These measures had been blocked by the previous mayor.⁹³ Less calculable but perhaps more impressive were the improvements in the operation of the city’s public works department, which by all accounts had been sorely neglected under the previous administration. Equipment and facilities in the water, gas, and electric works had not been maintained or properly managed; payments owed by major corporate consumers had gone uncollected; and rates charged consumers proved highly inequitable. Refuse and litter on public and private property was ubiquitous.⁹⁴ Under mayoral and council direction, city departments moved quickly to remedy these problems.

After slightly more than a year in office, Mayor Hinkel reflected with some satisfaction on the improvements made. By the end of his term, further improvements would prove to be even more remarkable. Road and street repair, grade clearing, and building of new levees for flood protection moved steadily ahead. The council fought ongoing legal and political battles with private streetcar companies to clear crossings and reconstruct grades. The city inaugurated a new health bureau with powers to inspect housing and require corrections of unsanitary and dangerous conditions. The municipally owned utilities not only recovered from the devastation of the flood, but collectively produced a profit of more than $51,000 in 1914 that went directly into funding city services. By the mayor’s accounting, a substantially leaner police force oversaw a decline in crime by more than half, and the city virtually eliminated organized prostitution rings. Over the surprising resistance of the mayor’s council opponents, the city undertook the construction of a centrally located “comfort station.”⁹⁵

Perhaps the clearest sign of the socialist administration’s sympathies with labor came with the outbreak of a series of strikes during the fall of 1915 that involved as many as 1,400 workers in the city’s machine shops. Employers, aided by the county sheriff’s department, prepared to bring in strikebreakers. Accordingly, the prospect of major violence rose sharply. Mayor Hinkel responded by deputizing forty special officers, all of whom were strikers, and quickly diffused a tense situation.⁹⁶

The “redemption” of Hamilton from socialist rule, as the Evening Journal called it, came with the election of 1915. Not surprisingly, the governing Socialists faced a political situation seen in municipalities across the country and around the world where socialists had established beachheads. The opposition unified just long enough to defeat them. In Hamilton, that support for a mayoral candidate coalesced around a prominent Democratic businessman. The Republicans put forward a token candidate with virtually no support. The Socialists polled 36 percent, virtually the same as in 1913, but, with effectively one opponent, they fell to defeat. Only Socialist councilman Ferdinand Aker carried Socialist aspirations forward into the war years.⁹⁷ Despite defeat through fusion, Hamilton Socialists did maintain a voice in city council throughout the war. Facing fusion again in 1917, they garnered more than 40 percent of the vote. Their success rested significantly on the maintenance of a ward-based system of representation.⁹⁸ A mobilized working-class electorate defeated repeated attempts by their opponents between 1916 and 1926 to “reform” the city charter and adopt comprehensive at-large representation and city manager administration of municipal affairs, as Dayton had done.⁹⁹ They also defeated wartime and postwar attempts by business elites to privatize municipal electric, gas, and natural gas utilities. The local Socialist Party branch supported the national party’s anti-war position, but compared to some other cities, its focus on municipal issues and its continuing voice in city governance may have limited the virulence of the repression its members faced locally during the war years.

Dayton

Hamilton and Dayton offer common points of reference but also striking differences in the development of municipal socialism. Both cities lay on the Miami River in Western Ohio and had robust manufacturing sectors. Both had significant German immigrant populations concentrated in the skilled metal trades. And both developed robust socialist movements in the early twentieth century. Dayton was a substantially larger city with a population in 1910 of 116,500 compared to Hamilton’s 35,000.¹⁰⁰

As an early manufacturing center, Dayton had seen all phases of the industrial revolution—its motive power drawn first from water, then coal, and eventually natural gas. Likewise, its skilled handcraft workers in trades such as saddlery, hat making, and cabinetry, gave way by mid-century to factory-based cotton and woolen production. Eventually, it developed a concentration in metal and machinery manufacturing from which it derived its greatest prominence as an industrial center. Its leading firms, the National Cash Register Company, the Davis Sewing Machine Company, Barney and Smith railroad car works, and Delco automobile parts manufacturing, reflected a mature manufacturing sector.¹⁰¹

Since the 1890s Dayton had been a prominent player in the development of an “open shop movement” led by John H. Patterson, the founder and president of the National Cash Register Company, and John Kirby, Jr., the first president of the aggressively anti-union National Association of Manufacturers.¹⁰² Kirby’s local Employers’ Alliance successfully promoted ironclad agreement among Dayton’s leading employers to deny any recognition to unions. That initiative set the stage for workers’ turn to politics as a means of improving conditions in their day-to-day lives.

The Socialist Party in Dayton grew slowly from 1899, with initial support primarily among skilled metal workers, a significant proportion of whom were of German descent. The most careful study of the party’s local membership found that “the ethnic composition of the Socialist Party in Dayton mirrored the native heritage of the city—that is, it was a political party made up of native stock citizens, yet flavored with a definite Germanic element.”¹⁰³ Little in the Socialist Party’s record during the first decade of the twentieth century suggested that it would become a robust competitor for local political power. Party minutes reveal a compact local capable of conducting routine business with a modest level of local activity—organizing literature distribution, welcoming an occasional guest lecturer, chalking sidewalks with socialist messages, and holding occasional street meetings and fundraising events.¹⁰⁴ But the local remained largely insulated from the mass of Dayton’s working class, who continued for the most part to vote along traditional party lines. As local socialist luminary Joseph Sharts subsequently noted, “American workingmen are slow to abandon their ancient idols.”¹⁰⁵ By 1910, the local party manifested increasing life but also growing internal party conflict between a moderate leadership and more flamboyant radical members.¹⁰⁶

With little forewarning, the socialist vote in 1911 leapt forward dramatically, much as it did in Hamilton and a number of other Ohio cities. With more than 500 members and ample frustration with open shop employers on the industrial front, the party that year elected two councilmen (and nearly a third) as well as three assessors. The party’s mayoral candidate, the stalwart Willard Barringer, came in third but with a respectable vote of 7,306 compared to the Republican victor’s 10,092.¹⁰⁷ With the triumph of the Socialist Party in Milwaukee the year before, alarms began to sound in Dayton’s business circles. Even before the socialists triumphed in Milwaukee such concerns were voiced in a Montgomery County newspaper aligned with Kirby’s local Employers’ Alliance. “It was high time for some citizens, some businessmen, some newspapers, to awaken to a realization of danger, or Dayton may follow the example of Milwaukee.”¹⁰⁸ The Dayton Socialists’ success in 1911 and the local vote for the Socialists’ 1912 presidential candidate, Eugene Debs—who outpolled the Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party—provided sobering testimony for the major parties.¹⁰⁹

Socialist City Program, Dayton, Ohio, November 1911

A foretaste of the Socialists’ potentially decisive role in local government came through the activity of the party’s two new councilmen, Charles Geisler and Gus Happel, in 1912–13. Even before they were seated, the local demonstrated its intention to claim a more active voice in the city’s business. At a December meeting, members of the party local reviewed the current city streetcar franchise agreement and expressed strong support for the “efficiency and economy of municipally-owned car lines.” At a subsequent meeting the local circulated petitions asking the city council to “hold in abeyance” the renewal of the streetcar franchise pending further review. By January, the Socialist councillors would be seated and therefore participants in council.¹¹⁰ With the new year, the local Dayton SP assumed an even more active role. Joseph Sharts, on behalf of the Education Committee, organized a “mock city council”—a kind of shadow council—whose purpose would be “to teach and train speakers for agitation and organization work.” Happel and Geisler, the actual councillors, were also named to the mock council for training purposes. Clearly, the local envisioned a more dominant future role in city governance. Comrade Happel also requested specific guidance from the local and the party’s Third Ward Committee on whether to submit a motion in council to eliminate a dangerous grade crossing and require the street railway to pay for it. (Approval was granted.) Before January was out, the local approved a motion to “investigate our right to initiate legislation” on a whole series of socialists’ municipal concerns. It constituted a de facto municipal program that could guide the councillors’ work in the coming months.¹¹¹

1. Comfort stations and street closets

2. A municipal coal yard

3. School buildings to be used as social centers

4. Free medical service—at least for the 5 most dangerous diseases—diphtheria, tetanus, cerebral spinal meningitis, rabies & small pox

5. Platoon system for Dayton firemen

6. An 8–hour day for all city workers with a minimum wage of $2.00 per day

7. A municipal Public Works Department with direct employment of labor in construction work.

Dayton’s Socialist local expanded its reach in the heady days following their electoral success. Their expectation of a significant role in governing Dayton quickly came up against the harsh reality of their minority representation. Deeply entrenched in power, the business community continued to control the levers of local government. No sooner had the councillors been sworn in than the majority moved to accept the “rules of the council” as recommended by a standing committee. Geisler and Happel immediately followed with an amendment to have the council appoint its own standing committee on committees rather than have its members chosen by the president of the council. The amendment fell to defeat in a thirteen-to-two vote. A series of votes followed for council-appointed administrative positions—president pro tempore, clerk of the council and two assistants, sergeant at arms, and a page—for each of which the Socialists put forward a candidate, but fell to defeat by the now-predictable thirteen-to-two margin.¹¹² When the appointed Committee on Committees reported its slate of nominees two weeks later, the Socialists were shut out of the most powerful committees: finance, health and improvements, along with any committee that might have jurisdiction over areas in which municipalization of services could be an issue: gas, light, street railways, and water works. The Socialists did not constitute a majority on any of the committees of three.¹¹³ Since, under council rules, all matters pertaining to expenditure of city funds first required recommendation from an appropriate committee, there appeared little prospect that the Socialists could move their agenda significantly forward.

Chastened by the obstacles they faced and the overwhelming opposition to their initiatives, even to their very presence on council, Geisler and Happel nevertheless took up key elements of the program adopted by the local Dayton SP. On April 22, Geisler moved to remedy the inequities in the city-owned water system by requiring all users, including large companies that paid a flat rate or got free service, to be metered and pay based on their usage. The motion was referred to the Finance Committee from which it did not emerge. The council received a petition from “the Socialist Movement” on June 17 opposing the construction of an armory on city land, because it would be a notorious “breeding ground for vice” and a “menace to the liberties of common people.” The petition received no further attention. The council sidelined to the relevant city department or committee other resolutions advocating the construction of a levee on the north side of the Miami River (a measure that might have reduced the destructive impact of the flood that came the next year), a proposal to prepare plans for a public bathhouse, a mandate to reduce the hours of city laborers from ten to eight, and a proposal for the concrete paving of a key road serving working-class constituents.¹¹⁴

By summer’s end, not a full year after their election, only Geisler of the two Socialist councillors remained committed to the Socialist agenda. In late summer, Happel volunteered to resign when he declined to support the Socialist agenda. Encouraged by the Democratic and Republican councillors to remain on the council, he now voted more consistently with the Socialists’ opponents.¹¹⁵ A year later, the Miami Valley Socialist reviewed the work that Geisler had done on council in the face of claims by the mainstream local press that he was an obstructionist. His efforts had all been thwarted by council opponents under heavy lobbying by the private, business-funded “Bureau of Municipal Research.” They included not only city employees’ eight-hour day (passed by council but not implemented by city administrators), a municipal bathhouse (never reported out of committee), a municipal slaughterhouse (the Board of Health refused support), a municipal garbage-reduction plant (locked in committee), and post-flood city-employed labor for street repair (given instead to private contractors).¹¹⁶ These efforts by Socialists in the Dayton City Council were quickly overwhelmed by an all-consuming fight over the rewriting of the Dayton city charter and the eventual implementation of a commission form of local government. Among other things, commission government dispensed with ward representation, led to the appointment of a city manager, and fatally undercut the prospects for a democratically elected Socialist government.

The groundwork for this battle over a new city charter had been laid in the fall of 1912. John H. Patterson, who early on had promoted the anti-labor National Association of Manufacturers, took the leadership in establishing the Bureau of Municipal Research with private funding. Shortly after the November elections, the bureau became the lobbying hub against Socialist initiatives and for a new municipal charter. The Dayton Socialists warned of the coming battle over the charter and soon began to put forward their own program for charter reform.¹¹⁷

By the spring 1913, in the aftermath of the disastrous flood, the Socialists faced a well-funded campaign led by the Chamber of Commerce and the Bureau of Municipal Research to elect a charter-drafting committee that would ultimately put forward a plan for a new commission–city manager scheme. The Socialists believed that such a restructuring of local government would effectively disfranchise working-class voters. Beyond the concentration of power in five commissioners elected at large, such a new, ostensibly “nonpartisan” electoral system would handicap working-class candidates. As the Miami Valley Socialist observed,

An individual workman is hardly ever known beyond a small circle. On the other hand, the “leading business men,” the “corporation attorneys,” and the “leading manufacturers,” like John Kirby, Jr. and John H. Patterson are consistently before the public eye. Everybody knows them at least by name.

And, most critically, “Under a commission plan for government with a non-partisan plank to it, the working class would be simply powerless to get a representative upon the board of commissioners.”¹¹⁸ On the eve of the election of fifteen members to a charter drafting committee, the Socialists’ fears seemed borne out. The Chamber of Commerce led efforts on behalf of what its spokesman called “the battle of the just—a rebellion against the spoilsmen.” Their campaign produced a slate that included seven “prominent businessmen,” three “corporation attorneys,” one “negro social worker,” and a physician “who caters to the rich.” By comparison, the Socialists put forward a slate of “workingmen who live by their own labor (of hand or brain)” including eight “tool workers” and four “officers or delegates of trade unions.” They pledged to “write a charter in the interests of the working class” that would allow for municipal ownership, establish the eight-hour day and a union wage scale for city employees, “redeem the city’s franchises from the clutches of private franchise grabbers,” and in the process “break the power of private landlordism” and “private Money Lending.”¹¹⁹ When the votes were counted, the entire slate of the Chamber of Commerce/Citizens’ Committee had been elected with at-large votes averaging 11,077, while the Socialists, although garnering 20.5 percent of the total vote, elected no members of the charter committee.¹²⁰

As predicted, the business-dominated Charter Committee drafted a charter for the voters’ approval on August 12 that created huge, anti-democratic barriers to workers’ influence in the future governance of Dayton.¹²¹ The charter established at-large “nonpartisan” elections for city commissioners; it set prohibitively high thresholds for voters’ initiatives or referenda (the highest percentages of any city charter in Ohio); and it refused to implement proportional representation that would have given some voice to minority interests. Predictably, the Citizens’ Committee—now dubbed the “Citizens’ Party” by the Socialists—rode to victory “on the backs” of the working-class in what the Socialists termed the battle of “Money against American Manhood.” Despite the 13,377 votes cast against them, the Socialists held up their 6,094 votes as a triumph and a benchmark in the ongoing education of the working class. Putting the best face on the disappointment of defeat, the editors of the Miami Valley Socialist reassured their readers, “still the morning of tomorrow is bright upon the mountain tops … the evolution of machinery … the great collective tool which all must use though only a favored few now own, that is teaching the workers the need of collective ownership, of cooperative effort.”¹²² The Socialists’ defiance in the face of the odds they confronted was expressed with the passage of a “Socialist Municipal Platform,” in which the core principles of the party’s platform for the City of Dayton were reaffirmed. They prefaced the specific planks with an acknowledgment:

While we realize that a socialist victory in Dayton will not enable us to establish socialism, nevertheless we pledge ourselves if entrusted with political power to apply this principle of collective ownership and democratic management in city affairs so far as practicable under the new charter and the capitalistic laws.

They called specifically for municipal ownership of streetcars, the gas plant, and other public utilities, but also a municipal slaughterhouse and a publicly owned and operated garbage reduction facility. Such investments would be better positioned to lift the city “from its present bankrupt condition” than the method of so-called “efficiency and economy.” The latter method would see “public work farmed out to grafting contractors” and taxes raised on smallholders, and would also involve “lengthening the hours and reducing the wages of city employees.” In a direct reference to the recent battles over the city charter, they proclaimed: “We denounce all attempts of an invisible government of businessmen dictating laws for the city of Dayton.”¹²³

As the November election approached, the local Dayton Socialist Party affirmed “What socialists have done in city rule!” in places like Milwaukee, Schenectady, Haverhill, Berkeley, Hamilton, St. Mary’s, Ohio, and many other cities. They pointed once again to the sole Socialist councilman, Charles E. Geisler from the Tenth Ward, who “remained true” to his socialist principles, and his record in public office as “a small sample of that real efficiency, practical economy, and true civic vision which may be expected of a Socialist administration.”¹²⁴

The final blow came with the fall election of the new commissioners, now charged with governing the city in concert with a city manager whom they would hire. Although the Socialist candidates garnered on average 35 percent of the citywide vote, they were overwhelmed by Citizens’ candidates who averaged 65 percent. The Socialists’ respectable showing yielded no seats under the at-large terms of the new charter. What Patterson had called for over the years—a municipal government to be operated as a “business enterprise” on a “strict business basis” by elected officials “skilled in business management”—had been achieved.¹²⁵ His opponents, the Socialist Party of Dayton and the city’s organized working class, though defeated, would hardly go away during the polarizing years of World War I.

Both Hamilton and Dayton had experienced the devastating effects of the Miami River flood in the spring of 1913. But, unlike Hamilton, where the socialists remained a political force to be reckoned with and where the voters rejected charter reform and at-large elections, Dayton had adopted a new charter in 1913. And the new charter long sought by the city’s Chamber of Commerce and its powerful “open shop” employers’ association established a “businessman’s government,” now insulated by a professional city manager and a small city commission elected on an at-large basis.

Dayton hardly stood alone in the ranks of cities adopting charters in the name of electoral reform. The city’s business leaders professed the goal of rooting out what they termed a “spoils system.” Nationally supporters of charter reform argued for the value of government by the “better people.”¹²⁶ At a convention of the National Municipal League, a city reformer from Newport, Rhode Island, made just such a case.

Our present system has excluded in large degree the representation of those who have the city’s well-being most at heart … It stands to reason that a man paying $5000 taxes in a town is more interested in the well-being and development of his town than the man who pays no taxes … Shall we be truly democratic and give the property owner a fair show or shall we develop a tyranny of ignorance which shall crush him?¹²⁷

Dayton Socialists would have to wait until the election of 1917 to again make a serious challenge for at-large city commission seats. When the time came, they had to do so in a very different political climate. The city charter, pushed through in 1913, continued to thwart the Socialists’ aspirations. Despite winning 43 percent of the vote city-wide in 1917, they again elected no commissioners.

Hamilton and Dayton represented in different ways a broader rising tide of municipal socialist victories in the United States that, by 1913, had reached substantial proportions. The general trajectory of those victories may have been unmistakable, but, as with their labor and socialist comrades in other countries, their pace was uneven, the regional variation notable, and the barriers to sustaining those victories formidable. As had been the case in Milwaukee during the early years of the century, and somewhat later in Hamilton and Dayton, the socialists initially elected a handful of individual city councillors, who, as a minority, faced severe limitations on their capacity to enact a socialist agenda. Instead, they challenged procedures by which entrenched elites maintained their grip on governing bodies through selection of committees, the scheduling of council meetings, and the stranglehold exercised by key committees on what business reached the council floor. Beyond procedural challenges, they also introduced a blizzard of resolutions and proposed ordinances that if enacted would have advanced their key demands—expanded municipal ownership, shorter hours and better pay for municipal employees, new taxes on the wealthy, and free education and medical service. Despite often-astute maneuvering on behalf of such demands, socialists in city councils rarely saw them enacted. However, in a number of cities, socialists broke through the barriers and won control, at least temporarily, of local government. In those cases, as Milwaukee and Hamilton illustrate, socialists found they could enact measures that made a material difference in the lives of their working-class constituents.¹²⁸

Socialism in the Cities: Regional Patterns, Local Variations

Even before the turn of the century, socialists won victories in the shoemaking towns of Brockton and Haverhill, Massachusetts. In 1898, Haverhill Social Democrats pushed forward a municipal reform program. Side-stepping the ideological harping of their one-time allies in the Socialist Labor Party, they managed to win a stunning if incomplete victory. Their newly elected mayor, John Chase, and three of seven aldermen won with the votes of shoe workers and an assemblage of reformers. They navigated the shoals of rising anti-socialism in the Bay State and governed with limited support from a deeply divided city council through subsequent elections until defeated in 1903. When they stood for reelection in 1900 and swept back into office, as historian Henry Bedford noted, they “were well-known in the community; they had occupied municipal office without taxing churches or abolishing marriage.” They were perceived to be “constructive.”

They had brought the city one step nearer the eight-hour day, the two-dollar wage, and the abolition of grade crossings. They were doggedly pursuing the local gas utility and about to secure cheaper rates for its customers. They had built streets and sewers more cheaply than previous administrations.¹²⁹

In Brockton, a more tenuous story of socialist “triumph” unfolded in the municipal election of 1899 behind a charismatic plumber, Charles Coulter. In both cities, a combination of internal party factionalism and concerted anti-socialist campaigning by businessmen and church leaders brought defeat in 1903. In the years that followed, socialists continued to campaign for municipal office with vigor but less success in the shoe towns and other industrial centers in Massachusetts.¹³⁰

During the first decade of the twentieth century, socialist victories, whether in the East or Midwest, were few. However, the party’s rising success in Milwaukee and some other Wisconsin cities proved the exception. Electoral breakthroughs in midwestern municipalities grew more frequent between 1908 and 1914 as we have seen in a range of Ohio cities. But similar patterns could also be found in Minneapolis, Flint, Michigan, and several towns in the coal and natural gas fields of Indiana and Illinois.¹³¹

US Cities with Socialist Administrations, 1898–1922

Working-class politics in the Rocky Mountain West

The intensity of labor conflict in the hard-rock mining industry of the West fueled a turn toward politics in many towns across Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. The Western Federation of Miners (WFM), despite an ideological predisposition toward syndicalism, nevertheless, where the circumstances warranted, engaged local politics with a pragmatic municipal socialist agenda.¹³² The intensity of class conflict in mining towns across the region, especially in Colorado, bred a conflicted politics. Early populist successes followed by fusion with Democrats created shifting coalitions that could generate transitory support for independent working-class politics. In some bitterly fought strikes the massive intervention of the state and the deployment of national guard forces hobbled and then crushed the support for the strikers, leaving little space for local activists to build “socialism in one city.” Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Cripple Creek, Colorado, legendary in the annals of class warfare were notable examples. In the case of Coeur d’Alene, the legacy of a big strike in 1892 produced a deep current in the city’s politics that resurfaced in 1911 to produce a labor triumph.¹³³ For Cripple Creek, the legacy of the brutal strike of 1903–04 left a crippled labor movement and a fractured local politics. In the face of murdered poll workers, mass deportation of striking miners, and fraud by those in power, the local movement crumbled. Historian Elizabeth Jameson concluded, “The Cripple Creek working class had lost its leadership and the institutional base to act through unions at the workplace or through independent class politics at the polls.”¹³⁴

Despite such extremes, militant miners in scores of Rocky Mountain towns and villages managed to elect their brothers and on occasion their sisters to local office. At times they took power and pursued their agenda of socialist reform and reconstruction in more concerted fashion.¹³⁵ In 1901, Utah socialists elected their first candidates to municipal office in Elsinore, Salina, and Lehi. In Bingham, a mining town and WFM stronghold, miners and their supports won control of city council in 1905 and regularly contested for power until 1911. Despite earning a robust 47 percent of the vote in 1909, local Bingham Socialists met defeat in the face of an abruptly cobbled-together fusion ticket of Democratic and Republican opponents.¹³⁶ Over the course of two decades, Utahans elected at least 115 socialists in municipalities across the state, and in 1911 they swept into power in the additional cities of Eureka, Murray, Stockton, and Joseph.¹³⁷

Perhaps the most durably successful socialist victory came in the legendary mining town of Butte, Montana, in April 1911. After years slogging in the trenches of local politics, a small socialist local of a mere forty members had grown with the strong support of Butte’s miners into a party able to win a plurality of municipal votes and elect a “socialist mayor, councilmen and other local officials.” As one observer reported:

For years persecution has been the lot of the radicals in the mines of Butte …

For them this victory is doubly sweet … They knew the time must come when conditions would force the workers to pay heed. It has come sooner than expected. The laws of evolution have been silently, but none the less surely, at work.¹³⁸

In Butte, as in other Rocky Mountain cities where socialists had some success, the “Milwaukee model” had resonance, and the program they crafted echoed the core municipal socialist themes of expanding municipal ownership, “reducing the city’s debt, eliminating graft, improving the streets, enforcing liquor laws, and improving sanitary conditions in red-light districts” as well as hiring as street cleaners many of the 500 socialist miners fired by the Anaconda Copper Company in the aftermath of the election.¹³⁹

First elected in 1910, Mayor Duncan entered the campaign for re-election in 1912 with a record of dramatic improvements in public health as one measure of the Socialists’ achievements. Cases of contagious disease had fallen from 745 in 1910 to 78 in 1911, and deaths due to such diseases had declined by 17 percent. Mortality among children below twelve years showed the most dramatic decline of 60 percent in the same period. Socialists pointed to a number of initiatives to account for such improvements: “purer milk, cleaner streets and alleys, and fewer cesspools and houseflies.”¹⁴⁰ Better health translated into better economic opportunities. “For the common people, the effect of these policies has been to decrease the cost of their living and to increase the purchasing power of their dollars; which is to say that the Socialist administration has practically raised the wages of the working class of Butte.”¹⁴¹

In some respects, the case of Butte diverged from other Rocky Mountain municipalities. Socialists governed Butte for four years—longer than in most municipalities they contested. The loss of control in city council after 1912 hamstrung the initiatives the Socialist mayor could undertake, including redistricting wards to equalize population. Nevertheless, Duncan managed to win reelection even in the face of fusion, which under most circumstances had proved the party’s death knell at the polls. And, unlike his counterpart in Coeur d’Alene, Duncan at least for a time followed the party’s direction in matters of policy and appointments. He routinely brought such matters before his local party comrades for approval.¹⁴² The mining companies and their business allies eventually engineered his impeachment for “failing to protect property and for tolerating lawless behavior” in the aftermath of the companies’ open shop campaign and the long-simmering violent conflict between rival factions of the Butte Miners’ Union (WFM) that reached a boiling point in the summer of 1914. In his defense, Socialist mayor Duncan simply declared: “I have been ousted, not because I neglected my duty, but because I had the courage to act by a higher and humaner principle than is approved by the capitalistic class. I have regarded human life as of greater moment and value than property.”¹⁴³

Programmatic variation from one city to another highlighted the socialists’ responsiveness to local conditions. In Great Falls, Montana, Socialists not only campaigned for the eight-hour day and a union scale for municipal workers, but also “free water for widows making a living doing laundry work, free legal advice from the city attorney to members of the working class … a municipal owned and controlled ice plant, coal yard, loan office, hospital, dance hall, sanitary department, and free employment office.” Designed to expand the public sector, such programs suggest why socialists perpetually faced inflamed opposition from local elites, entrenched corporate interests, and a wavering community of middle-class reformers.

Socialists in the Rocky Mountains were well aware of the international dimension of their struggle. When local authorities prevented national organizer and popular socialist speaker Anna Maly from street speaking in Kemmerer, Wyoming, she fired back in a letter of protest, “our party is the largest political party of legitimacy in the world, numbering from ten to fifteen millions of voters and more than double this number of followers.”¹⁴⁴

“Social Democratic” cities: From Seattle to Maine

The rising success of the Socialist Party of America already evident in a growing number of US municipalities during the first decade of the twentieth century proved a harbinger of more dramatic advances to come in the years immediately before the outbreak of World War I. Despite impediments to municipal governance—limitations on home rule, the fusion tactics of the major parties facing a socialist challenge, at-large elections, and the absence of proportional representation—socialists drew on the rising discontent of both skilled and unskilled workers and a tide of urban reformism to foster local, pragmatic alliances. On occasion, the results were surprising. Socialists gained municipal victories in urban settings as diverse as Two Harbors, Minnesota, and its metropolitan neighbor, Minneapolis; in Muscatine, Iowa, where button workers engaged in a bitter, yearlong strike; among coal miners in Krebs and a handful of other Oklahoma mining towns; in the hard-pressed Indiana town of Marion as the gas boom faltered, and in the once and future auto-manufacturing boomtown, Flint, Michigan. They advanced despite divisions among their trade union supporters, their own inexperience, and a determined and often well-financed opposition of open shop employers and their community allies.¹⁴⁵ While the timing of the socialist municipal insurgency varied with local circumstances, a wave of socialist victories rose between 1910 and 1917. From Seattle and the Pacific Northwest through Waterloo, Iowa, and Rockford, Illinois, in the Upper Midwest to Schenectady, New York, Barre, Vermont, and Mechanic Falls, Maine, the victories came fast and hard.¹⁴⁶ With good reason, local ruling elites were desperate to stem this tide.

Beyond the noteworthy success that self-declared socialists chalked up in a growing array of towns and cities, other urban political movements in the United States embodied reformist goals fundamentally similar to the programs of “social democrats.” Whether as reformist factions of Republican or Democratic Parties, or as one or another species of “public ownership” or “labor” or “reform” parties, these movements, like their Socialist Party counterparts, pursued an agenda that went significantly beyond the piecemeal reforms advocated by a range of middle-class and business reformers. These parties aligned more closely with socialists in their advocacy of expanding municipal ownership, the rights of municipal workers, and municipal home rule, raising taxes on wealthy property holders, and democratizing workers’ representation in city affairs. Their constituencies were predominantly working-class; in most cases, they supported trade unionists in local strikes; and their efforts to revolutionize city finances directly challenged entrenched property interests. Because their party labels varied and because the charismatic politics of personalized leadership could be ephemeral, these “parties” often proved transitory. Nevertheless, especially in some of the country’s largest cities, they provide essential parts of a broader urban social democratic mosaic. In San Francisco, a fledgling Union Labor Party (ULP) led by Eugene Schmitz took charge of city government in the aftermath of a bitter building trades strike, despite official opposition of union leaders. Remarkably, for ten years, except for a brief hiatus, Schmitz and Patrick McCarthy succeeded in governing the city, with the backing of rank-and-file trade unionists for a program of public ownership of utilities.¹⁴⁷ The Socialist Party played a more central role in the surge of support for Job Harriman as candidate for mayor of Los Angeles and his campaign for a socialist municipal program. With an impressive primary showing in a 1911 three-cornered race, Harriman and his supporters faced an ostensibly “good government” fusion ticket in the general campaign and an electorate deeply polarized along class lines. As his publicity manager, also a city council candidate, subsequently wrote, “The line of demarcation between the exploiters on the one hand and the exploited on the other has never been more sharply drawn … Every local issue raised by the Socialists has challenged the right of the exploiting class to use the city government as a means for increasing its power to exploit the people.”¹⁴⁸

Streetcar labor conflict provided a potent catalyst for insurgent labor politics in a number of cities around the turn of the century. In Milwaukee, streetcar strikes in 1896–97 gave a powerful boost to the city’s infant Social Democratic Party. And, in Chicago, a 1903 strike of streetcar employees congealed a public ownership movement, led by the Chicago Federation of Labor and others, that bore fruit in the 1905 mayoral election of Edward Dunne. In Cleveland, a massive and bitterly fought streetcar strike in 1899 catapulted the single-tax reformer Tom Johnson into the mayoral seat in 1901.¹⁴⁹

In St. Louis, a violent streetcar strike in the summer of 1900 produced clashes that pitted company guards, city police, and a 1,200-man volunteer “Posse Comitatus” against strikers and their supporters. With fifteen deaths, several hundred wounded, and $3,550,000 in property damage, the strike led an aroused public to demand reform.¹⁵⁰ The state labor commissioner, Lee Meriwether, had run an insurgent campaign for mayor in 1897 on a platform that emphasized equitable taxation. In the aftermath of the strike, he now launched a new “Municipal Ownership Party” to take on the entrenched, bribery-riddled Democratic machine in the 1901 municipal election. With support from John Peter Altgeld, the former governor and reform-minded independent Democrat of neighboring Illinois, Meriwether—termed by one newspaperman a “pyrotechnically proletarian” mayoral candidate—mobilized a heavily working-class base of support. He also won support of aggrieved middle-class consumers and anti-monopolists fed up with streetcar company abuses. Though the party managed to win six municipal assembly seats, Meriwether fell to defeat in a three-cornered mayoral race, claiming that as many as 13,000 of his votes had been counted out. The Public Ownership Party would survive through the 1905 election, but its fortunes declined in the face of Democratic Party hegemony.¹⁵¹ The party’s anti-monopoly, anti-corruption reform message was, however, taken up by newly elected “circuit attorney” Joseph Folk who used targeted prosecutions of politicians and corporate leaders for bribery to build a statewide coalition. In 1904, Folk managed to capture the governorship on behalf of an expanded legislative agenda—what he termed the “Missouri Idea”—to cleanse the state of bribery and the corrupting influence of corporate greed.¹⁵²

In the country’s foremost metropolises, the fight for municipal ownership also came forcefully into play as the centerpiece of a new urban insurgent politics. In New York and then Chicago, Hearstism for a few brief years captured the imagination of trade unionists and social reformers. William Randolph Hearst came within a hair’s breadth of winning the New York mayoralty in 1905 (and the governorship the next year) in what the New York Times called “red flag foolishness” behind which stood the city’s “vicious element … the whole of it.” But Hearst’s support faded quickly. For a time, he managed to eat into municipal support for the Socialist Party. In Chicago, Hearstism gathered significant strength, first in support of the successful campaign of Democrat and municipal ownership advocate Edward Dunne, and then as an independent force in its own right. With Dunne’s loss in 1907 and Hearst’s loss of labor support, the city’s municipal ownership movement proved unable to overcome its internal divisions when faced with concerted opposition from employers and local elites.¹⁵³

Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland: Pragmatic Politics in a Municipal Reform Triangle

A triad of cities on the Great Lakes offers the most compelling arena for examining the appearance of this new urban politics. Their political transformation emerged in quick succession, and they embodied the promise and limitations of that reform politics as a specifically American phenomenon. Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland each elected as mayor a maverick politician, whose conscience but also political antennae had been stimulated by the labor upheavals of the late nineteenth century. Hazen Pingree, Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones, and Tom Johnson were or had been industrialists, and all had imbibed reform currents circulating widely in labor and working-class milieus of the late nineteenth century. Henry George’s “single tax” (Johnson was a fervent convert and disciple), municipal ownership of utilities (all three supported), Christian socialism (Jones in particular moved in those circles), and urban populism made some mark during the 1890s in all three cities. As they built or attracted local reform constituencies, they turned away from their conventional party ties (Republican for Pingree and Jones and Democrat for Johnson) and toward cross-party coalitions of reformers, workers, and even socialists. Each served multiple terms as mayor (Pingree for seven years, Jones for six, and Johnson for eight), and all reshaped local politics in ways that lasted well beyond their own mayoral service. Pingree moved on to the governorship in Michigan but left an institutional legacy of reform in Detroit that would survive for decades. Jones ran for governor as a nonpartisan but was succeeded as mayor of Toledo by his protégé, Brand Whitlock. And, although Cleveland’s Tom Johnson died within a year of leaving office in 1909, his political legacy continued in the hands of the cadre of capable and committed operatives he had brought into his administration, not the least of whom were Peter Witt, Newton D. Baker, and Frederic Howe.¹⁵⁴

Each of these reform administrations came up against state-imposed limitations on municipal home rule. State control over cities, reinforced by the influential 1872 treatise of Judge John Dillon, was “supreme and transcendent”; as Dillon had opined, states “breathed into [the city] the breath of life.” The Supreme Court powerfully reinforced that principle in Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, 1907.

The State … at its pleasure may modify or withdraw all [city] powers, may take without compensation [city] property, hold it itself, or vest it in other agencies, expand or contract the territorial area, unite the whole or a part of it with another municipality, repeal the charter and destroy the corporation.¹⁵⁵

Frustrated by their inability to secure the right to municipalize streetcar service, Pingree, Jones, and Johnson each pursued higher office or sought to pressure state legislatures to revise the terms under which cities were chartered and managed their affairs. What is most striking about each of these cases is the consistency in their programs for reform and the extent to which their programs paralleled those of municipal socialists in a host of other cities. Within the limits of the authority they could muster, they municipalized some city services, notably water, electricity, and street maintenance. They built public baths in poor neighborhoods, created parks and recreation spaces that were open for working-class residents’ use, instituted new forms of municipal welfare and employment relief, addressed the problems of poor housing, impure air, and inadequate sanitation, reformed law enforcement and city jails to ensure greater fairness, set in motion public inspection of markets and perishable foods like milk, fish, and meat, and took some steps to regulate and acquire streetcar lines for operation as public utilities. City workers came to be paid standard union wages for a reasonable work-day. In all these respects, cities in this “reform triangle” moved in directions similar to, or even in advance of, their labor and socialist municipal reform colleagues in cities across the industrializing world during the early twentieth century.

Pingree’s Detroit in the 1890s became the model of a humane municipality in which a tradition of service to the needs of its most hard-pressed citizens—dating from the 1880s—became codified as city policy and set it apart from other cities of its class. That codification actually preceded Pingree, but he built upon and expanded the fabric of city institutions that provided dignified and accessible poor relief, publicly owned water, and a central public market. His administration’s initiatives foreshadowed a park system and public bathing facilities that would serve the needs of the poor and working class.¹⁵⁶

Toledo had a long tradition of organization among its skilled trades and “propertied workers.”¹⁵⁷ Out of the turmoil of streetcar strikes in 1891 and 1894 and a bitter fight over renewal of streetcar franchises, the city’s Central Labor Union (CLU) turned to local politics for remedies, electing members as aldermen in 1893, 1894, and 1895 elections, and witnessed Lemuel Harris, a printer and its first alderman, chosen as city clerk in 1896. The Republican Party provided the vehicle for labor’s political success, and from within the ranks of that party a relative newcomer to the city, a manufacturer of oil-drilling equipment and enlightened employer, Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones, emerged from a contested field as the successful candidate for mayor in 1897. Although he enjoyed cross-class support in that election, the “labor element” proved key to his victory. His “socialistic” policies favored not renewal of franchises but public ownership of utilities, and he pushed through an eight-hour day as the standard for municipal employees. With such initiatives he quickly alienated the local Republican Party leadership. Denied the party’s nomination for mayor in 1899, he ran as an independent and won with 70 percent of the vote, his strongest support coming from working-class wards. Jones would continue to fight the streetcar companies and private franchise holders throughout his administration. The issue drove him to run for governor later in 1899 and propelled his reelection as mayor in 1901 and 1903. After Jones’s death in 1904, Brand Whitlock, his chosen successor, sustained his mentor’s “golden rule” tradition in local politics and won the mayoralty in successive elections from 1905 through 1911 by continuing Jones’s pursuit of municipalization and an expanded public sector.

Cleveland: Class conflict and ameliorative reform

That urban transit would serve as a lightning rod for the creation of a new municipal politics came as no surprise. Franchises granted to private corporations for what were called “natural” monopolies provided a classic opportunity for political graft and corporate favoritism that linked local politicians to financial benefactors. These long-term franchises gave private corporations substantial leeway in determining streetcar fares, setting the terms of service, and stipulating working conditions favorable to their bottom line. For a period of twenty years, between roughly 1895 and 1915, streetcar strikes became flashpoints for local political realignment in many cities. The number of transit strikes in this period rose dramatically, punctuated by a series of violent confrontations between street railway companies and the working-class communities they served.¹⁵⁸

In no city did a transit strike have a more catalytic political effect than in Cleveland.¹⁵⁹ A burgeoning industrial city in the late nineteenth century, Cleveland proved a magnet for a diverse immigrant population and witnessed intensifying strike activity.¹⁶⁰ The city’s municipal politics proved equally volatile, with both major parties deeply factionalized and the Democrats faced a persistent risk of losing politicized working-class voters. The city’s workers had been drawn first to the Knights of Labor and then to an urban populist movement that on occasion captured as much as 20 percent of the vote in the 1890s and could therefore hold the balance of power.¹⁶¹ The municipal election of 1899 had produced strange bedfellows, as Mark Hanna’s wing of the Republican Party threw its support to the Democratic contender, John Farley, and the populists made a calculated decision to support the incumbent Republican mayor, Robert McKisson, who occasionally had given rhetorical support to the populists’ demand for municipal ownership. Although victorious, Farley stepped into a vortex of labor conflict brewing on the city’s street railways.¹⁶²

Motormen and conductors on the Big Consolidated Line (Big Con) became fed up with the company’s unwillingness to negotiate and the persistence of unresolved grievances. When they struck in early June 1899, the street railwaymen discovered that a broad cross section of the city’s working class stood behind them for reasons that ran deeply through the community.¹⁶³ A record of arrogance and unresponsiveness to the carnage of children killed or maimed by streetcars in the densely packed immigrant ghettos brought large crowds out to attack the cars driven by scab crews. A provisional agreement appeared to bring a halt to the violence, but the company’s refusal to rehire all the strikers and a continuing string of unresolved grievances brought the strikers and more massive crowds numbering in the thousands into the streets. Symptomatic of the broad support for the strikers were incidents of factory workers hurling missiles from factory windows at the police, local shop owners refusing service to riders on scab streetcars, and strike sympathizers organizing alternative transportation by using wagons, jitneys, and omnibuses.

Cleveland Streetcar Strike, 1899

Women played pivotal roles in the ethnic working-class neighborhoods, serving as spotters, following scab riders into the shops, or placing stakes reading “scabs live here” in their yards. On other occasions, they mobilized neighbors en masse in the streets. In one instance, a report recounted, “in less time than it takes to tell, the crowd had increased to nearly 2000 and commenced charging the cars.” In another, a Polish woman, called by the reporter an “Amazon,” incited men and boys to pelt streetcars with stones.¹⁶⁴

The Democrat Farley bore responsibility for standing behind the company and mobilizing city police and state militia to quell the violence. The strike continued into September and was not called off until later in the fall. By then, a powerful realignment of local politics along class lines had taken shape.¹⁶⁵ One benchmark for that realignment was the independent candidacy in the fall of Toledo’s “Golden Rule” Jones for governor on a “radical” platform. When he considered a run for statewide office, he received strong encouragement from around the state and the country.¹⁶⁶ The campaign that took place in the immediate aftermath of the polarizing streetcar strike generated tremendous enthusiasm among Cleveland workers and apprehension among regular party Democrats. Jones enlisted key local “urban popu-lists” like Peter Witt, Edmund Vail, and Thomas Fitzsimmons. According to one report, he sent dozens of “Jones men” into “the foreign settlements organizing Jones clubs.” Although his candidacy fell short statewide, Jones received a powerful vote from Cleveland’s workers, who gave him 56 percent of the citywide vote (in a three-cornered race). In some working-class wards, he had as much as 76 percent. An indicator of the crisis facing the Democratic Party in Cleveland was the party’s anemic 11 percent of the popular vote in that election. Jones eschewed political labels, and declined the label “socialist,” but at one point early in the campaign he said, “I am just as willing to be called a collectivist, a mutualist or a Brotherhood of man.” He also clearly asserted that the summer disorder in Cleveland was not the fault of the strikers. “It is the inevitable result of allowing our cities to be used for the profit of private corporations.”¹⁶⁷ The Plain Dealer called the campaign “a clearing of the atmosphere,” and warned that “the great mass of people who voted for Jones are now aware of their power and will cause further trouble to leading political parties.” Jones argued that the reform wing of the Democratic Party must be “born again … there may be some kind of upheaval yet that may make it a party of good morals.”¹⁶⁸

Over the course of the next two years, Democrats resurrected their party by adopting significant elements of Jones’s reform program. Agents of this shift were remnants of the working-class populist coalition, including iron molder and strike veteran Peter Witt. Tom Johnson was a relative newcomer to Cleveland city politics, but he was not unknown. He had been a prominent streetcar magnate himself in several cities. In his entrepreneurial role he had a reputation for fighting battles with reformers like Hazen Pingree in Detroit, which hardly boded well for a political career as an urban reformer.¹⁶⁹ But, as a convert to Henry George’s “single tax” ideas he had helped finance George’s Union Labor campaign for mayor of New York in 1886. He served three uneventful terms as a congressman from Ohio, and then hastened to return to private business, confiding in Frederic Howe, his future reform collaborator, that “there is not much to be done there [Washington, DC]. The place to begin is in the city.”¹⁷⁰ In the aftermath of the 1899 streetcar strike, he appeared to jettison his identity as an aggressive capitalist and embraced a program for reforming the governance of cities. By signaling personal support for municipal ownership, opposing franchise extensions, and advocating taxes that would be “made a charge on monopoly and privilege,” his candidacy generated what the Cleveland Plain Dealer termed a “tidal wave” of support that brought Jones’s working-class voters back into the ranks of the Democratic Party.¹⁷¹ But this Democratic Party had now made itself into a reform instrument on behalf of a politically mobilized working class. The agency of workers, through the massive streetcar strike and their support for a well-defined agenda of social democratic reforms in the city, set the stage for the Johnson administration.¹⁷²

Johnson came to be called “the best mayor of the best governed city in the United States” by reform journalist Lincoln Steffens, and while he did not fully live up to that reputation, his program for Cleveland set a high standard—much like that of Jones in Toledo and Pingree in Detroit. Over a remarkable period of eight years in office, Johnson assembled a dedicated group of department heads and community activists to implement a reform agenda that enjoyed deep support among the city’s workers.¹⁷³ Despite opposition from conservatives on the city council and an intransigent state legislature, the Johnson administration made notable progress on a number of municipal fronts. Johnson’s waterworks appointee, longtime reformer and Christian socialist Edward Bemis, transformed the decrepit city water facilities and, in the process, dramatically cut annual deaths from typhoid fever from 472 in 1903 to 64 in 1908. When the state legislature imposed limits on the city’s ability to create municipal utilities, Johnson astutely annexed a neighboring town that had a publicly owned electric utility; his public works department began an aggressive campaign to pave and clean city streets, which at the outset were only 35 percent paved; by 1905 a visiting New York official declared that he “had never visited a city in the United States in which the streets were so uniformly clean.” The new Director of Charities and Corrections, Rev. Harris Cooley, supervised a massive discharge of workhouse and jail inmates held for little reason, and Johnson’s new police chief, Fred Kohler, reported that by the end of Johnson’s final term in 1909, arrests had been reduced by 70 percent by largely eliminating arrests for minor offenses that he believed only “brought disgrace, humiliation, and suffering to countless innocent persons.” Playgrounds, bathhouses, and even a public laundry sprouted in working-class neighborhoods. Under the leadership of Peter Witt, the city comprehensively studied and then fundamentally revised the existing property tax code to shift the burden from homeowners to corporations, a “single tax” inspired reform. And perhaps most dramatically, after years of conflict with the city’s private streetcar companies and a state legislature determined to deny the city’s right to municipalize them, the Johnson administration acquired a small streetcar line. After his impressive electoral victory in 1907, Johnson reached agreement on a two-year lease for the city to operate the Big Con lines as a municipal utility. Within a year, however, Johnson and his appointed head of the new municipal line became embroiled in a complicated and bitter dispute with the members of one of the street railwaymen’s local unions. Though the city emerged “victorious,” the conflict contributed to the erosion of Johnson’s working-class base and ultimately his defeat for reelection in 1909. In 1911 his former city attorney, Newton Baker, reassembled Johnson’s previous base of support and reconstituted a more “consensual” version of his reform program.¹⁷⁴

Conclusion

The achievements of municipal reform administrations like those of Johnson, Jones, and Pingree, operating largely within the two-party system, must be assessed alongside the socialist-governed municipalities and those governed by other independent parties (Union Labor, Public Ownership, or “Hearst Progressive”). Programmatically, they bore a close resemblance to each other. The strength of party organization and discipline varied enormously, as did their capacity to sustain their political viability. They faced a common array of opponents, largely but not exclusively assembled by organized business interests, both local Chambers of Commerce and ad hoc committees, as well as increasingly powerful national organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers.¹⁷⁵ In local political contests, they almost always faced fusion from “citizens’ ” parties cobbled together through temporary alliances of Democrats and Republicans determined to prevent any realignment of the local two-party system along class lines. If the reformers managed to capture and control a major party, as they did in Cleveland and Detroit, they could, at least for the moment, forestall fusion of their opponents. They also faced powerful challenges from state legislatures determined to prevent any serious enhancement of municipal home rule. The reform of city charters, as in the case of Dayton, could dramatically undermine local working-class political power.

Despite the considerable pressures at the local level to create a party system that aligned with class, the counterpressures to absorb or diffuse that class alignment and undermine workers’ emerging power were enormous. Nonetheless, by 1911, municipal socialist and labor political activists in the United States, like their counterparts around the world, seemed to be moving more forcefully and with good effect toward a more powerful presence in municipal affairs.

7

Promises of Power:
Internationalism from Below

“Professor” Mills’s Transnational Circuit

When Walter Thomas Mills, an American socialist activist, arrived in New Zealand in early June 1911, he stepped into a cauldron of political turmoil. A sharply rising tide of labor conflict and political contention would abate only slightly by 1914, the year of his return to the United States. Mills brought some useful “baggage” along with his ambition, audacity, and sense of self-importance. That baggage turned out to have surprising value for his New Zealand compatriots, though with much-debated consequences. He arrived from the United States as an experienced “constructivist” socialist. He self-identified as an emissary from Milwaukee and its recently triumphant municipal socialists.¹ In 1911, Milwaukee’s reputation carried a significant aura for socialists around the world, and Mills’s ties to the city enhanced his status in New Zealand. Remarkably, for a time, he would play a central role in New Zealanders’ efforts to create socialist unity. In the decades around the turn of the century, Mills was hardly alone in the transnational circuit of labor and socialist agitators who had cut their political teeth in municipal campaigns and who readily shared their experience with comrades in other lands.

A Global Web of Socialist Activists

In the period between 1890 and 1925, a diverse, far-flung cadre of locally grounded internationalists spread a gospel of labor and socialist radicalism around the world. Like Mills, they moved readily from one local milieu to another irrespective of national boundaries. Their experience and their participation wove a fibrous skein of internationalism that gave socialists a widely shared sense of purpose. For many, that project was foremost the rebuilding and humanizing of cities within which workers might gain a measure of dignity and governing power. We have already highlighted some of their stories. They included such figures as New Zealand’s “Red Fed” activist Patrick Hickey, who moved with apparent ease between the Grey mining district of New Zealand and the hard-rock mines of Utah and Montana. Returning to New Zealand after several years organizing for the Western Federation of Miners in the United States, Hickey led the Blackball miners’ strike in 1908 and was a major figure in the syndicalist “Red Feds.” But, having observed the miners’ municipal socialist politics in Bingham, Utah, he eventually ran for and held municipal office for the labour parties in both New Zealand and Australia.²

Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb visited Australia and New Zealand in 1898 to survey local government in conjunction with their massive effort to document the history and evolution of municipal government in England.³ They were preceded in Australia by the legendary British docker Ben Tillett and followed soon thereafter by ILP activist and trade union leader Tom Mann, who would return several years later as a Labor Party organizer in Victoria and be arrested in support of strikers and political activists at the mining town and labor stronghold of Broken Hill, New South Wales. Bradford’s ILP city councillor E. R. Hartley also sojourned for more than a year among municipal socialists in Australia and New Zealand and like Mills became briefly, though somewhat less prominently, engaged in New Zealand’s political turmoil.⁴

Tom Mann Speaking at Strike Rally, Broken Hill, 1909

The exchanges moved in other directions as well. As we have noted, the young Christchurch, New Zealand, municipal activist and organizer, Jim Thorn, left home in 1909 for four years to organize with the Forward and Clarion Vans and the Independent Labour Party in Scotland and England. Australian railway union leader Claude Thompson had attended the 1904 Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam, lectured for the Clarion Van in West Yorkshire, observed the work of socialists in thirteen states in the United States, and witnessed the bitter strikes of Colorado miners in Cripple Creek and Leadville. Along the way, he acquired honorary memberships in the American Labor Union and the Western Federation of Miners. Returning to Australia, he was elected to a city council seat in Leederville and for two years edited the Barrier Daily Truth in Broken Hill.⁵

For some activists, international gatherings provided a hospitable medium for their developing internationalism. As early as 1894, local West Yorkshire activist Ben Turner was a regular delegate to congresses of the International Textile Workers’ Federation and at subsequent gatherings allied with delegates from other countries pushing for anti-war resolutions favoring disarmament and international arbitration.⁶

Axel Danielsson from Malmö, Sweden, participated in the Scandinavian Workers Congresses of the early 1890s and with socialists from across Europe in meetings of the Second International. He reported on these internationalist currents to local Swedish readers of his newspaper Arbetet in Malmö, even as he battled against the restrictive municipal franchise that hamstrung local activists in Sweden.⁷

Axel Danielsson (standing, center) with Tom Mann (seated, center), Malmö, Sweden

Evolutionary socialist Eduard Bernstein spent the decade of the 1890s exiled in London but also occupied a prominent seat at the founding convention of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Bradford and shared his own evolving socialist ideas with sympathizers in London. Another SPD member, Hugo Lindemann, as we have seen, also sojourned in Britain during his politically formative years and imbibed deeply the municipal socialist currents within the Independent Labour Party. Returning to Germany, he would become the leading theoretician for municipal socialism, advocacy of which, along with his friendship with Eduard Bernstein, put him at odds with the more orthodox wing of the SPD. The last straw in his recurrent conflicts with Kautsky, Luxemburg, and others was his decision to run as a socialist for Oberbürgermeister (mayor) of Stuttgart in 1911.⁸

For many women activists, a transnational commitment to woman suffrage mingled naturally with their ties to labor, socialist, and anti-war movements. The ubiquitous Pankhurst women—mother Emmeline and daughters Christabel, Sylvia, and Adela—gave international inspiration to the movement for women’s rights, socialism, and suffrage. Their political roots lay in the municipal struggles of the Manchester ILP, where Emmeline was elected as a Labour member of the Manchester School Board. Adela transplanted her political activism to Melbourne and came to be a prominent critic of the Great War, while Sylvia and her mother vocally supported the war in Britain.⁹

The struggle for Irish independence had a distinctly transnational focus into which socialist and labor struggles were also densely woven. Irish socialist and republican leader James Connolly organized for some years in the United States before returning to Dublin and eventually leading the “Easter Rebellion” in 1916. He participated in socialist campaigns for municipal office in Dublin before and after his American sojourn. And Michael Davitt, one of the founders of the Irish Land League, traveled repeatedly to encourage local organizing efforts of Irish workers in Australia, Britain, and the United States.¹⁰

To varying degrees, all of these internationalists became transnational political actors, losing, at least for a time, some measure of their strictly national identification but also carrying with them local experience and an abiding commitment to the value of local politics.

Waves of Internationalism

A spirit of internationalism also manifested itself from the outset in the early congresses of the Second Socialist International. International solidarity reflected deeper social and economic currents that sprang from the transnational migrations of workers themselves, from the internationalization of capital and the experience of global economic crisis in the late nineteenth century, and from the transnational character of social democratic politics at both local and national levels. Socialists also shared a growing recognition that colonialism, the militarization of nation-states, and their global economic competition pointed ominously, if not inevitability, to the possibility of war on a scale never before seen.¹¹ Symptomatic of that internationalist spirit, Paul Singer, chair of the 1890 Congress of the German Social Democratic Party in Halle and a sitting city councillor in Berlin, introduced visiting delegates from Vienna, Paris, Ghent, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Stockholm, and elsewhere. Echoing Marx, Singer set the tone of the proceedings by professing that the “proletarians of all lands” seek to fulfill the shared mission of the working class: “to battle for the liberation of mankind from the chains of ignorance, the yoke of poverty, the slavery of the wage system (enthusiastic applause).”¹²

But, perhaps most importantly, internationalism bubbled up from below, in the locally grounded publications of the labor and socialist movements. Newspapers and journals around the globe—including Barrier Truth in Broken Hill, NSW, Arbetet in Malmö, Sweden, Kommunale Praxis in Berlin, Forward in Glasgow, and Social Democratic Herald in Milwaukee—tied translocal knots of solidarity by carrying regular reports about the struggles and challenges of municipal comrades in distant corners of the world.

Walter Thomas Mills and Translocal Municipal Socialism

Affectionately known as the “Milwaukee Midget,” the diminutive “Professor” Mills acquired quite a reputation as a public orator on behalf of socialist causes. Educated at Oberlin College and from early on immersed in what one historian has called “the relationship between ethics and public life,” Mills had a varied and checkered career as an evangelist for temperance, social reform, and communalism.¹³ By the turn of the century, he had adopted an American brand of “evolutionary socialism” and joined the Socialist Party (SPA) as a touring spokesman for “constructivist” socialism that laid stress on political action at the local level. For a time he served as an SPA national committeeman from Kansas.¹⁴ His major work, The Struggle for Existence, a lengthy but accessible text published in 1904, got wide attention for the moderate path to socialist transformation it prescribed and for its simplicity as a textbook on the rudimentary elements of socialism.¹⁵ Although well-traveled in midwestern constructivist circles, within which Victor Berger’s Milwaukee socialists remained the hub, he did little actual political work in Milwaukee as far as can be determined. By fall 1910, following the Milwaukee socialists’ municipal victory in April, Mills embarked on a “World-Round Lecture Tour,” that took him first to England. In weekly columns to the Milwaukee Social Democratic Herald he commented on everything from class relations on board the passenger liner from New York to labor’s municipal presence in the Welsh mining town of Briton Ferry to cooperatives in Leeds and garden city developments in York and Liverpool. But, beyond his lectures and regular reports on various aspects of British labor politics, Mills felt drawn to participate in the Labour Party’s campaign for seats in Parliament. By his own account, at the urging of “the executives of the Independent Labour Party,” he shifted his efforts to politically “disputed territory” and his lectures were “made campaign rallies.” Alluding to his experience in Milwaukee, he noted, “I was for a second time during this year in the midst of the hottest fight.” An Australian labor paper reported that Mills had spoken ninety-four times in forty days, “in the most hotly contested constituencies” in Britain.¹⁶ Although the parliamentary election proved disappointing, he found much to cheer in local results. “The municipal campaign greatly increased the labor representation in all the municipalities where labor candidates were named and here the gain was for those who had been most active and capable in the Socialist movement.”¹⁷

Mills moved on from Britain to lecture for several months in Australia before accepting an invitation from the Trades and Labour Councils’ Federation in New Zealand. A New Zealand socialist journalist wrote from Sydney, describing Mills in advance of his arrival in Auckland:

Walter Thomas Mills, American Socialist Activist in New Zealand, 1911–13

A most amazing small man (he stood 4’6” high and often quipped that he had been picked before ripe), with a face that radiates goodwill, and eyes that glitter with humour and intelligence. A quaint little figure on the front of the stage, a grey leonine head, startling changes of expression in the magnetic eyes, wonderful modulations in the clear American voice, a penetrating, clutching, arresting influence, a torrent of Socialist oratory—this is Mills. You must make the most of him in New Zealand.¹⁸

The Westralian Worker described “Mills, of Milwaukee,” as “one of the most charming men the Worker has ever met. The learned Socialist has a smile that is reminiscent of the summer days of youth, and his voice is a benison.” The paper quoted Ramsay MacDonald saying Mills “is one of the finest speakers I ever heard.”¹⁹

Whether a charlatan or an inspirational voice for socialism, the “Milwaukee” orator quickly captured the hearts and imagination of his New Zealand hosts, including for a time those revolutionary “Red Feds” who would eventually turn against him.²⁰ Bob Ross, the militant editor of the new Maoriland Worker exuded enthusiasm for Mills, whom he recalled first encountering as the two crossed paths in Melbourne harbor, before Mills’s departure for New Zealand.

The Professor held a meeting, the “soap-box” being bags of potatoes. Didn’t the people stare, and didn’t I blush! I carried with me on the voyage a picture of the genially and, shall I say, bizarre-looking little professor talking internationalism to the astonished Marama’s crew and passengers and to the wharf workers and wharf visitors.²¹

Ross interviewed Mills within weeks of his arrival and commented simply on their exchange, “We talked—Lord did we talk.” Mills adopted the title “Special Commissioner from Milwaukee to Countries Abroad” for a column in the Maoriland Worker, titled “Milwaukee Socialism: Some Statements and the Facts,” in which he responded to twelve inaccuracies “written in New York, published in Great Britain and widely reprinted in this country.”²² In his interview, Ross reported that Mills also took the occasion to stress the value of municipal activism.

Yes, he believed in local governmental activity. Said he: “Go after the smallest subdivision of the body politic first and win confidence to the movement. Lack of confidence in Labor is the drawback to Labor’s acceptance. Fitness must be demonstrated.” I instanced Broken Hill as a city for years under Labor control yet hampered at every step by State legislation. This was to be overcome, the Professor thought, by trying while doing things to gain increased power … He kept harking back to the importance of administration. “The most urgent thing needed in the Labor movement is training in administrative work. The Labor members of the House of Commons got their experience in municipal work. The object of municipal action is to control the State as part of the State.” Then palliatives were worth fighting for? “Palliation is always a worthy fight. A fight for anything we are able to do is better than doing nothing. The greatest way to get everything is by doing something.”²³

Initially at least, Mills got an enthusiastic response, even from the militants. In mid-July, Ross wrote that after Mills’s initial tour and his agreement to stay on in New Zealand, “we would like to say that the half a dozen and more lectures heard [by] us were as good and as sound Socialism as uttered by any speaker we have met, and the matter of them was splendidly calculated to arrest attention and make Socialists.”²⁴ Mills’s “moment” in New Zealand quickly turned into a year and then two and more as he was swept into the conflict between revolutionary industrial unionists (the “Red Feds”) and political socialists intent on pursuing an evolutionary, electoral path toward power. That conflict was not, of course, unique to New Zealand. The discrediting of New Zealand’s Arbitration Court, so beloved by liberal progressives around the world, and the outbreak of bitter, violent strikes—in the Greymouth region coal mines, the Waihi gold mines, and the Wellington docks and tramways, and a general strike in Auckland—intensified the turmoil among socialists and gave “Professor” Mills an extraordinary role, especially for a foreigner. For more than two years, he attempted to bridge the ideological divide. Mills alternately debated revolutionary firebrands like Scott Bennett or Bob Semple, and lectured, for substantial fees, in towns the length and breadth of the North and South Islands, in “almost every public hall in the country.”

Jack McCullough, the legendary railway shop worker and socialist from Christchurch, was drawn to Mills and his efforts to forge unity among disparate socialist and trade union factions. McCullough’s diary is replete with references to attending Mills’s lectures, “yarning” with him on many occasions, and his own efforts to promote Mills’s unity projects among trade unionists and socialist activists. McCullough may well have been instrumental in issuing the invitation for Mills to lecture in New Zealand. As he recalled on February 10, 1911, “After dinner went to Tom Pauls house & enjoyed myself talking to him on books—what were going to do & wether we are drifting. I have got a promise that he would assist in securing an invitation to W Thomas Mills to lecture for Independent Political Action on our lines of policy.” And a little more than a week later, he penned, “Wrote to Walter Thomas Mills, a three-page letter & sent him copy of the Lyttelton Times giving him the constitution of the N Z Federation of Labour & the T & L Council Federation.”²⁵

With support of McCullough, J. T. Paul, and other socialist centrists, Mills eventually presided at a 1913 unity convention in Wellington after the bitter strike defeats. He helped forge two new but allied organizations—the United Federation of Labour and the Social Democratic Party—committed to both revolutionary trade unionism and political socialism. They would eventually constitute the latest version of a New Zealand Labour Party.²⁶ For a time, Mills was a larger-than-life actor on the New Zealand political stage. The aura of “Milwaukee” that he carried with him lent credibility to his efforts. He departed in 1914, almost as abruptly as he had arrived, returning to the United States where he would join with socialists opposing the Great War and American participation in the conflict.²⁷

Like many figures in this book, Walter Thomas Mills signifies both a neglected internationalist dimension of the democratic socialist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the importance of the constructivist program of municipal socialism within that movement, for which Milwaukee served as a beacon.²⁸ Mills’s association with Milwaukee and Victor Berger may have been more significant internationally than it was in the United States, but that fact speaks to both the iconic meaning of events in Milwaukee and the simultaneous surge of socialist successes in municipalities around the world.

The Milwaukee Experiment’s International Impact

The novelty of Milwaukee socialists’ victory in 1910 may have been enhanced by a perception that socialism’s progress in the United States lagged behind other countries, especially following publication in 1906 of Werner Sombart’s provocative 1906 study, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Nonetheless, in the months following the 1910 victory in Milwaukee, congratulations poured in from around the world. In Germany itself, that enthusiasm may have been tempered by the SPD’s own internal struggle over revisionism and the marginalization of its municipal socialists by the party’s central leadership. Albert Südekum, a leading spokesman for the kommunalsozialisten and the editor of Kommunale Praxis, arrived in Milwaukee in November 1910 on an extended lecture tour in the United States. He told the Social Democratic Herald that “from the time I landed in New York until I came here I heard of nothing but Milwaukee. So, you can imagine how much I anticipated my visit here.” He noted the high level of interest in municipal affairs in Germany, more so than in England, though “the English make more fuss about what they do.” He proudly spoke to his Milwaukee hosts about the advanced level of municipal work in Germany:

It is the Socialists who are the propelling power in municipal reform in Germany. We have some 7000 councillors (i.e. officials of about the rank of alderman or supervisor here) who are members of the Social-Democratic party. Though in numbers these are about one third of the total membership of the various local government boards, the influence they wield is about two-thirds, because they are sincere, earnest workers. They make up in zeal and knowledge what they lack in numbers and the other parties continually allow them to shoulder the responsibility.²⁹

In Britain, enthusiasm for Milwaukee, though noteworthy, was somewhat qualified. Harry Quelch, a leader in Champion’s Social Democratic Federation had sent “congratulations to the socialists in Milwaukee” in May.

One swallow does not make a summer, and the capture of a single town by the Social-Democracy in the United States of America does not mean the social revolution; but it is an indication of progress and is a shrewd blow dealt at the citadel of capitalism. It meant more than that. Nothing succeeds like success; and one such victory will inspire hundreds of others and will rally many thousands of erstwhile doubters to the red flag of international Social-Democracy.³⁰

Greetings poured in following Berger’s congressional victory in November. George Barnes, chairman of the Labour Party, wrote to say “Milwaukee has proved itself the pioneer in this as well as in the more local application of socialist principles.”³¹ Others from England joined the chorus of celebration—Ramsay MacDonald, J. S. Middleton, and Keir Hardie (“as much for the movement’s sake as for your own”) and from Germany Karl Liebknecht, Luise Kautsky, and the editors of Die Neue Zeit.³² Early in the new year, the Worker, published in Sydney by the Australian Workers Union (AWU), proclaimed a “Great Socialist Victory in USA.”

By the election of these latter [county officials] the Socialists have taken complete possession of the Milwaukee county courthouse, and now entirely control the local government of the city and the county. This great victory must be taken as an enthusiastic endorsement of the administration of Milwaukee by the Socialists during the past year … This will infuse new life, new hope, and new activity in the Socialist movement throughout the United States and beyond.³³

The next issue of the Worker carried a lengthy, detailed review, “Socialism—Naked and Unashamed,” that recounted the Milwaukee socialists’ progress in the previous six months. The author quoted Mayor Emil Seidel on their practical goals. “We do not expect to usher in the Cooperative Commonwealth in one year or five years, but we intend to do all our limited means permit to make Milwaukee a better place for every citizen. We shall disappoint a few capitalists; we shall not disappoint the working people.”³⁴

The socialist administration’s defeat in 1912 brought postmortems from German municipal socialists that stressed the constraints under which the Milwaukeeans operated. They noted an adverse state legal environment that hamstrung the administration, the anti-socialist fusion of Republicans and Democrats, and nevertheless, an increased socialist vote. Kommunale Praxis argued that there was no basis for claiming a decline of support in “our movement, for which Milwaukee had for two years fought the greatest battle in the United States.” In an extraordinarily detailed review, the editors devoted eleven columns to an analysis of the Seidel administration’s accomplishments, along with much briefer attention to Schenectady and thirteen German cities with socialist majorities.³⁵

Milwaukee Social Democratic Party Municipal Campaign Book, 1912

Municipal Socialists on the March—Globally

Milwaukee was not an anomaly, despite the inordinate attention it received around the world in 1910 and beyond. That attention was in part the byproduct of a surge in municipal activism internationally from the mid-1890s. Municipal socialists gained toeholds and then more solid footing with victories in places like Bradford, England (1892), Bielefeld, Germany (1897), Haverhill and Brockton, Massachusetts (1898–99), Broken Hill, New South Wales (1900), Wellington, New Zealand (1901), and countless other cities.³⁶

Why did socialist municipalism surge, especially between 1910 and 1914? As we have seen, the worldwide crises of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century and the deteriorating infrastructure of cities as a consequence of rapid industrialization fueled flashpoints of industrial conflict and new party formation in the 1890s throughout the industrial world.³⁷ New, locally constituted working-class parties produced coherent and compelling municipal programs of striking similarity that addressed the immediate problems of daily life for workers.³⁸ Liberal parties splintered under the pressure for reform and created openings for new alliances with labor and socialist parties. Workers’ parties, too, faced internal divisions over forming coalitions with liberals and the divergent strategies of municipal activists and their own parliamentary leaders.³⁹

Fueling the upsurge in municipal socialist activism was the rise in labor conflict between 1909 and 1914, comparable, in some ways, to the crisis of the 1890s that had produced the initial turn to independent labor politics across the industrializing world. Ubiquitous streetcar strikes in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Brisbane, Wellington, and elsewhere had an especially catalytic effect. But strike waves featuring the demands of the unskilled and factory laborers swept through the mines and factories in Germany, the docks and trams in New Zealand, the garment and textile industries in the United States, metal manufacturing in Sweden, and engineering and metal trades in Britain.⁴⁰

Britain

In Britain the number of Independent Labour Party members serving in local office—city council, school board, Guardians of the Poor—rose from 223 in 1897 to 424 in 1905, despite the loss of what had been as many as seventy-one school board seats held by socialists when elected boards were eliminated by Parliament in 1903.⁴¹ By 1905, the ILP’s program of contesting for municipal office had borne significant fruit in spite of the parliamentary leadership’s lukewarm attitude toward municipal politics. That record had been surveyed and assessed by Ramsay MacDonald in 1908.⁴²

The record of the ILP/LP success in municipal elections trended strongly upward from 1901 through 1913 despite brief plateaus in 1909– 10 and in 1912. The number of municipalities contested rose from 52 in 1901 to 123 in 1913; the number of Labour candidates elected in those same years increased from 31 to 171 annually.⁴³

New Zealand and Australia

We lack comparable data on labor’s municipal electoral activity in Australia and New Zealand during these years. But anecdotal compilations by Herbert Roth for New Zealand and case studies of Wellington and Christchurch suggest a similar surge in municipal activism in New Zealand. In 1911, the NZLP successfully ran candidates for municipal councils in Greymouth, Invercargill, Timaru, and Wanganui; labor mayors were elected in Wellington and Christchurch and the latter chose five socialist councillors. More victories would follow in 1913.⁴⁴ In 1915, labor suffered significant defeats but still managed to elect scattered members to local bodies in Auckland, Greymouth, Christchurch, and Wellington, and won especially notable victories in Port Chalmers, Dargaville, Runanga, and Woolston, each of which elected a mayor and council majorities.⁴⁵

For Australia, the municipal electoral data are similarly fragmentary but suggest growing engagement with local governance and increasing Labor Party success. The best data come from New South Wales, where in the early 1890s Labor Party candidates ran for municipal office across the state, winning scattered victories in MacDonaldtown (1893), Petersham (1895), Sydney City (1893, 1894), and most dramatically, after a major strike defeat, in the silver-mining town of Broken Hill. Following election victories for councillors in 1896 and 1898, labor won control of city government there in 1900 and would remain in power for years to come.⁴⁶ The pace of labor’s municipal activity in NSW picked up considerably after the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. Labor elected local governments in the working-class towns of Auburn (1908) and Redfern (1908) in addition to Broken Hill. Liverpool joined the ranks in 1911, and Lithgow and Dubbo in 1914. At least 102 candidates contested for office in municipalities across the state in 1910 and in Sydney itself labor elected 5 candidates out of twenty-six contests in 1912 and increased labor representation to 11 in 1915, along with the election of a labor mayor.⁴⁷

Broken Hill’s labor government in 1900 stood as a beacon in Australasia, “the only institution of its kind … where representatives of Labour number two-thirds of its [council] members.” And labor remained in control of the municipality for the next generation and beyond. George Dale could report in his retrospective history in 1918 that the city was electing its seventeenth labor mayor.⁴⁸ Labor’s accomplishments, entirely consistent with its municipal goals elsewhere, provided a balance sheet to which others might aspire: “The erection of the baths, the introduction of the sealed pan system [street paving], the regular removal of all garbage, the establishment of the abattoirs [public meat-slaughtering facilities], street lighting, the improvement of the parks,” and the creation of a free public library, “including perhaps more sociological works than any similar lending library in the Commonwealth.”⁴⁹ The physical fabric of the city changed in dramatic ways—the baths (with an indoor swimming pool, ninety by thirty feet, and Turkish baths) stood “a stone’s throw” from the trades hall, a new public library, a rebuilt technical college, the newspaper offices of the labor paper, the Barrier Truth, and the Social Democratic Club, where workers socialized and heard lectures. In 1904 the club expanded to include a bar and reading and meeting rooms. The editor of the Truth, R. S. Ross, addressed the temperance critics of the bar in socialist terms. “I was willing that there should be collective ownership in beer and that beer should be dispensed for cooperative benefit and not for private profit.” According to historian Brian Kennedy, membership in the club subsequently boomed.⁵⁰

Broken Hill, New South Wales, Labor Party Municipal Program, 1908

But, even as the Barrier Truth faithfully reported each week the hand-to-hand combat on the floor of the Broken Hill municipal council, it carried a prominent weekly column titled “Municipal Socialism” in which it reported the efforts of comrades in municipalities around the globe.⁵¹ The reports conveyed the sense of a common war waged on innumerable municipal fronts. As the paper editorialized, “The fact that other eyes are on us must never be forgotten. A weakness in any one regiment, or even company, is a corresponding weakness in the whole army of labor, while the effects of a victory anywhere must be felt everywhere.”⁵²

Beyond New South Wales, labor’s municipal efforts were constrained by a more restrictive municipal franchise and the smothering effects of liberalism in the battle for labor’s loyalty. In the industrial suburbs surrounding Melbourne, the Political Labor Council of Victoria had managed to win eight council seats in 1901. In the suburb of Richmond, labor augmented its two seats with two more in the subsequent campaign.⁵³ In both communities, labor remained a contentious, at times effective, but minority presence in local government.⁵⁴

The United States

The strength of municipal socialist politics reached new heights in one country after another between 1910 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The United States was no exception, even if the forms of the political movement had a more varied cast than elsewhere. Municipal reform politics in the United States was an untidy stew.⁵⁵ Labor’s engagement with city politics, as the case of Cleveland illustrates, could produce pragmatic alliances between liberal reformers and working-class political activists within the partisan world of one or another major party on behalf of a municipal reform program. Their programs differed little from those of socialists or other “social justice” reformers.⁵⁶ In some cities—San Francisco, Cleveland, Toledo—labor and its allies formed the core of an enduring municipal reform coalition.⁵⁷ In others—Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York, Chicago—the entry of labor reform or municipal ownership parties punctuated and reshaped the cities’ politics.⁵⁸ But as many as 180 cities elected socialist administrations between 1911 and 1920. Milwaukee hardly stood alone. Others included Schenectady, NY, Reading, PA, Flint, MI, Hamilton, OH, Minneapolis, MN, Davenport, IA, Bridgeport, CT, and New Castle, IN. In Ohio alone, 29 cities elected socialist administrations during the decade. According to Richard Judd, the Socialist Party (SPA) estimated in 1911 that 1,141 socialists had been elected to local and state offices in 36 states and 324 municipalities. Those numbers increased significantly in the next few years. But socialists won “majority control” that year alone in at least 23 cities.⁵⁹ The political mobilization and contestation around municipal issues in the United States was formidable, widespread, and comparable to other industrializing countries.

Germany

Progress on the municipal front in Germany was impressive despite the central party leadership’s marginalization of Gemeindepolitik. Its perceived association with Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist critique of party orthodoxy contributed to central leadership’s skepticism. After the mid-1890s, the SPD made steady and impressive gains across a wide range of municipalities.⁶⁰ The party hotly debated the adoption of a general municipal program at party congresses in 1902 (Munich) and 1904 (Bremen) and in party publications.⁶¹ The founding of a weekly party periodical devoted to municipal politics, Kommunale Praxis, signified the growing strength of the campaign for municipal socialism.⁶²

Differences between the party’s success in cities in the North and South were striking, however some level of municipal mobilization could be found in virtually all of the party’s Agitationsbezirke (party mobilization districts). By 1913, 154 socialists served as elected officials in city governments of Brandenburg, and an additional 257 served in the state’s rural public bodies. In metropolitan Berlin 169 served in the city and 283 held rural offices; for Frankfurt am Main, the numbers were 60 and 207. But northern coastal cities of Hamburg and Lübeck elected fewer to local offices.⁶³ Kommunale Praxis reported in 1911 that nationally 410 cities and 2,240 rural hamlets had respectively 2,015 and 6,646 socialist elected councillors, for a total of 8,886 councillors.⁶⁴ Gerhard A. Ritter’s data suggest somewhat lower levels but a significant growth in activity overall between 1909 and 1913.⁶⁵ As previously noted the political differences between the North and South grew fundamentally out of the different patterns and pace of industrialization in the two regions, the degree of class polarization, and the draconian three-class municipal franchise.

Sweden

Franchise barriers to meaningful social democratic participation in Sweden’s city elections proved even more restrictive than the three-tiered municipal voting system in the Prussian states. Franchise reform came slowly in Swedish cities. The 1909 reforms, supported by some liberals, brought a modest reduction in plural voting. Although substantial plural voting advantages for larger property holders remained, social democrats saw immediate results with a tripling of their number of elected city councillors in 1910 and even more dramatic gains in 1911 and 1912. Impressive as these prewar gains were, only a minority of working-class voters in many industrial cities gained the franchise before 1914. The breakthrough only came after World War I and the passage of national legislation providing for a still-qualified universal franchise at both local and national levels. Those changes effectively removed the most severe roadblocks to SAP governance in cities.⁶⁶

Even with the limitations Swedish social democrats faced in prewar cities and towns, they managed with limited numbers of elected representatives to insert themselves into municipal affairs in effective and strategic ways. A case in point is the industrial city of Malmö, where the newspaper Arbetet and its editor, Axel Danielsson, represented an important strand of labor radicalism until his untimely death in 1899. Malmö’s social democrats in 1901, working through the local Arbetarekommun (labor community), were able to elect two city councillors, Nils Persson, a bricklayer, and August Nilsson, who had succeeded Danielsson as editor of Arbetet.⁶⁷ Even before their election to city council, that body confronted a petition from a large group of working-class benefit societies and their members asking the city to subsidize the charges for “the poor” who sought to use the city’s heavily indebted private bath. The issue signified the deep class chasm in the city. For over a decade, council was consumed by protracted debate and delays that pitted proponents of private baths against the social democrats and their allies who favored a publicly constructed and operated bath. Conservatives argued that the city had “too many bathhouses” and a city-built facility would divert funds from other needs. A leading voice opposing a public option was R. F. Berg, the owner of the cement factory, who the workers mockingly referred to as the “Cement Jesus” because of his intense religiosity.⁶⁸ But year by year, support for a publicly owned bath grew as the social democrats continued to push the question. The issue finally reached permanent resolution in 1912–13, when after long debate the council finally decided to acquire and operate the bath as a public facility.⁶⁹

For over a decade, consideration of a public bath had been tortuous. The ruling conservatives had managed to forestall this expansion of the public sector, even as support for their position eroded among liberals. The persistence of the social democrats, even though vastly outnumbered, had ultimately borne fruit, assisted by the new political environment brought on by municipal franchise reform in 1909. It now seemed inevitable that a growing working-class political voice, to which segments of the Liberal Party now felt accountable, would become decisive. The public bath was a first victory; the campaign for public trams and electricity would soon follow. A new sense of workers’ power in the municipal arena set the stage for anticipated gains in the future as the push for more fundamental franchise reform took hold.

Austria

Austrian Social Democrats faced two challenges in the prewar period. Like their German and Swedish comrades, they shouldered the burden of a franchise stacked against workers. They also confronted a powerful Christian Social Party, whose own municipal reform program and explicit anti-Semitism had for a time cut the political ground from under the Social Democrats and limited their ability to broaden their base of support.⁷⁰ Despite daunting franchise limitations, the Social Democrats in 1896 drafted a program for municipal reform that set out an agenda distinct from Karl Lueger’s Christian Socials on which its own candidates might run. The program reflected a pragmatic posture similar to what the Gemeindesozialisten in Germany and municipal socialists elsewhere had defined. As they wrote, “Our municipal program contains only demands that here and now are feasible.”⁷¹

Electoral reform in 1900 created four new voting classes based on property holding and opened the door slightly for Social Democrats in Vienna. The reforms initially proposed in 1899 gave the franchise to men twenty-four years or older who had resided in the city for at least five years. Following massive protests on two different occasions, the state modified the law to impose a three-year residency requirement but only on voters in the lowest (fourth) group and thereby disproportionately disfranchising a significant share of the potential working-class electorate.⁷² In two election districts—Favoriten and Ottakring—with an overwhelmingly working-class population, the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Öesterreichs (SDAPÖ) managed to elect two members, Jakob Reumann and Franz Schuhmeier, to the municipal council. Each would play a foundational role in the creation of a municipal socialist opposition over the course of the next decade and more.⁷³

What Boyer calls “this slow cooking of an increasingly dense political culture” had roots in the reforms of 1867 and in the Christian Social’s mobilization of Vienna’s middle classes in the mid-1890s. Agitation for a broader franchise between 1905 and 1907 by Christian Socials but also the Social Democrats produced electoral reforms of 1907 that achieved a semblance of parliamentary democracy and the structure of a modern state. The fruits of reform blossomed more fully with the adoption of a universal parliamentary franchise after 1907.⁷⁴ Although the 1907 reforms did not democratize the municipal franchise, they increased the Social Democrats’ power in Vienna and other parts of the empire in ways that would allow them to continue to mobilize their constituents and lay the groundwork for wartime and a postwar “revolution.”

Even with municipal franchise restrictions that remained in place after 1900, Social Democrats’ representation made incremental headway. Schuhmeier and Reumann were joined by an additional councilman from the twenty-first district in 1905, and then in 1906 four more, and another in 1912. With the death of Franz Schlinger in 1912 and the tragic assassination of Franz Schuhmeier in 1913, the number of Social Democrats in the Gemeinderat (city council) fell to seven on the eve of World War I. By 1912, they had allied temporarily with the Liberals in the fourth tier of the electorate against the Christian Socials and the German nationalists and managed to win a majority of the total fourth-tier vote, 137,268 out of 267,100. In the top three tiers they did much less well.⁷⁵

The fruits of the SDAPÖ’s day-to-day practice in city government were not immediately to be harvested. As early as 1903, the experience of Schuhmeier and Reumann had led them to the conclusion that for all intents and purposes “the Vienna city council is no more. Lueger and his disciples have pushed ahead, decreed, executed with unrestricted, absolute power.”⁷⁶ But Schuhmeier, Reumann, and the gradually increasing number of Social Democrats began to challenge the established order of business in the council, much as their comrades in other countries were doing. In the process they lay the groundwork for a postwar municipal social democracy—“Red Vienna”—that would give encouragement to socialists around the world, much as Milwaukee had in its own time.⁷⁷

The new periodical, Die Gemeinde, established in 1913 signified the growing confidence and experience of Vienna’s municipal socialists. Like their German comrades some years before with their own periodical, Kommunale Praxis, the SDAPÖ municipal faction used their periodical to outline their tasks in ways that both challenged their comrades’ more revolutionary perspective and put forward a practical socialist program toward which they would doggedly work. As Die Gemeinde editors put it, “If local administration is not the basis for world shattering events and dramatic tensions, it is nevertheless the grounds for real work and honest fulfillment of duty; and it is not the great world political events alone that reorder human society, it can also be the inconspicuous, unnoticed, simple everyday work in narrowly-bounded space.”⁷⁸ Through painstaking work and ongoing battles, the Social Democratic faction held the Christian Socials to account even if they could rarely see their own proposals adopted. Patzer noted, “Alternating with each question—especially during the budget deliberations—the vocal social democratic municipal faction formed a powerful group who overcame their small numbers through determined, tireless enthusiasm for their work, which gave them a competitive advantage.”⁷⁹

The social democrats intervened repeatedly in the proceedings of the Gemeinderat even before they achieved their greatest prewar strength. They challenged the council on a whole host of issues—the eight-hour day for city employees, improved working conditions and vacations for tram workers, management and inspection of city dairies, along with protests over a tax increase on beer and Branntwein! Because the public sector under the Christian Socials had been substantially expanded, Social Democrats had an enlarged territory for intervention.⁸⁰

Vienna’s Slum Housing, c. 1900

By 1912, the SDAPÖ had developed a systematic and by all accounts effective electoral machine for municipal campaigns, especially in districts where the working-class vote, even with franchise restrictions, had become competitive. Of the twenty-one districts contested for Group Four seats in 1912, the social democrats won nine and came within a few hundred votes of winning six more.⁸¹

Like his Ottakring comrade Franz Schuhmeier, Leopold Winarsky won election to the Gemeinderat from his Brigittenau District in 1906 and somewhat later to parliament. Building on the program first put forward by his comrades in 1896, Winarsky outlined a municipal socialist program in 1912 that further distinguished the SDAPÖ apart from its Christian Social rivals.⁸² With benefit of the restrictive municipal franchise, Winarsky argued, Lueger and his loyalists “had not abolished the municipal council but had turned it into a Christian Social Party congress.” He further noted: “The opposition was deliberately shut out of the city’s upper chamber and above all from all important committees, and the Christian Social majority took care of all city business by excluding any disruptive oversight.”⁸³ Winarsky defined a comprehensive agenda for reform that would await the adoption of a “general and equal franchise” (“allgemeine und gleiche Wahlrecht”). Neither Winarsky nor Schuhmeier would live to see that agenda realized in the postwar revolution that brought “Red Vienna” into being, but their efforts had created a foundation for its triumph. As the Arbeiter Zeitung noted with Winarsky’s death at the age of forty-three in November 1915, “We have counted on him for the reconstruction work after the war. [He] will be missed by all.”⁸⁴

Conclusion

Despite the limitations under which municipal socialists everywhere operated in the prewar period, progress at the municipal level of politics across many countries proved noteworthy. In 1908, even before their impressive victory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Social Democrats distributed a campaign advertisement titled “Social-Democracy the only Practical Programme” that highlighted their struggles in the city council and state legislature. “Nine Social-Democrats in the city council of Milwaukee and six in the state legislature of Wisconsin have stimulated more progress, advanced more progressive measures and raised a higher ideal of civic life than all the other parties combined.”⁸⁵

The measure of that “progress” can only be assessed in the local context of the municipal governing bodies where Social Democrats engaged the battle. They carried on that fight in literally thousands of cities around the world. The victory that Milwaukee’s municipal socialists achieved in 1910, however fleeting in the short run, held heightened meaning for socialists and labor party activists around the world. It represented the conquest of a large city and challenged the perception that the US socialist movement faced uniquely impervious barriers. In many ways the socialist victory in Milwaukee fit a broader pattern of municipal gains around the world that made it more exemplary than exceptional in the prewar era. The optimistic message that “the commissioner from Milwaukee,” socialist evangelist Walter Thomas Mills, carried with his travels in 1911 spoke in compelling ways to the circumstances municipal socialist comrades faced in England, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and elsewhere. Their “localist internationalism” drew inspiration from their comrades’ far-flung successes and strengthened their resolve to build a new social democracy from the bottom up in cities across the industrializing world.

PART III

The Crises of War,
Nationalism, and the
Social Reconstruction
of Cities

Introduction

“The Brink of the Abyss” ¹: The
Great War and the Collapse of
the Second International

Franz Schuhmeier and Jean Jaurès —Flames of Hope Extinguished

Late in the evening of February 11, 1913, Franz Schuhmeier, the well-known Vienna Social Democrat, former paper-factory worker and editor, returned from an agitational visit in the lower Austrian town of Stockerau where he had given a fiery speech on behalf of a Social Democratic candidate running in a special election for parliament. Schuhmeier was a widely respected Vienna city councillor and advocate for municipal socialism. According to one account of his speech, Schuhmeier in his usual fashion, “spoke to boisterous cheers, more brilliantly than ever.” On his return to Vienna, after stepping from the train at Nordwestbahnhof, a man accosted and then shot him, crying out as he did so, “That was my revenge.” The assassin turned out to be the fanatical brother of a prominent Christian Social Party parliamentarian. Whatever the assassin’s motive may have been, Schuhmeier’s sudden and senseless death shook Vienna’s Social Democrats to their core. “Franz Schuhmeier, the inspiration and advocate for the workers in Ottakring, the fighter and leader of the workers in venerable Austria, was dead.”²

Schuhmeier symbolized locally-based, proletarian activism through his work as a Vienna municipal councillor where he represented the solidly working-class Ottakring district. By all accounts his devotion to the social democratic cause was unstinting. He had the highest aspirations for the fellow workers he lived among. As historian Ernst Herlitzka has written, “In his time he represented a model for all those who recognized in him the symbol of the proletariat’s capacity to advance. Through him, the workers of Vienna came to appreciate themselves; his presence alone helped them carry their destiny more easily.”

Schuhmeier did not have the international prominence of the French social democratic leader Jean Jaurès, but he had forcefully represented his party at the 1896 German SPD congress in Gotha.³ Together with his comrade Jakob Reumann, he had drafted the party’s initial municipal program in 1896, was elected to the city council in 1900, and subsequently elected to parliament. By 1913, he was universally recognized in Austrian social democratic circles as a man of high principle and unshakable loyalty to his proletarian constituency. His leadership had set the table for the anticipated advance of the city’s municipal socialists to prominence within the party and their hopes to eventually govern the city itself. His death deprived the movement of a courageous and principled anti-militarist voice, who would have proved so critical in the months and years to come.⁴

Jean Jaurès would meet a fate similar to Schuhmeier’s as Europe slid toward the precipice of all-out war in late July 1914. By the opening years of the twentieth century, Jaurès had become the leading voice of French and European social democracy.⁵ In the last frantic days of July 1914, anticipating an unprecedented conflagration, Jaurès had added his powerful call for peace at the emergency meeting of the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) in Brussels. Returning to Paris by train with his comrades on July 30, he felt the weight of the news of general mobilization for war coming from Austria’s and Russia’s anticipated countermobilization. German moderation was fast evaporating in the face of its own militarists’ determination to have war. Jean Longuet, who accompanied Jaurès on the return to Paris after the Brussels meeting, later recalled,

All those fortunate enough to know Jaurès personally had always been struck by his good humor, inspirited by his inexhaustible vitality and his universal curiosity; but now, it seemed to us, he was deeply worried, sad, already full of grief brought on by his clear vision of the horrible catastrophe which was about to overtake mankind … How often I had thought to myself: “What would we do if we lost him, how could our party live and grow without his incomparable genius?”⁶

For a frantic evening and the next day, Jaurès and others cornered the government’s top leadership, some of them former socialist comrades, to petition for withholding support from Russia and signaling a desire to find a path back from total war. But, by the evening of the thirty-first, exhausted by their efforts and demoralized by the latest news of mobilization in Russia, Germany, and now France, Jaurès and a small group retired for a light dinner to the Café du Croissant. As they dined, a troubled and obsessed ultranationalist, Raoul Villain, who had been stalking Jaurès for days, appeared on the sidewalk, pulled out a revolver, and shot him point-blank. Within minutes he was dead. As historian and Jaurès biographer Harvey Goldberg wrote, “Like an uncontrolled flame, the news spread through the street until the rue Montmartre was an inferno of grief.” On the day of Jaurès’s funeral, August 4, “the first total war of the twentieth century began … Everywhere … the Socialist and labor movements submitted to the appeal for national unity. With the speed of light, the ideal of international brotherhood crumbled before resurgent tribalism.”⁷ Qualified though the judgment of its complicity must be, the international socialist movement now faced the complex challenge of navigating a precarious and treacherous path between its internationalist tradition and the pull of its respective national identities.

The Second International and Its Inner Tensions

The route to August 4, 1914, was not foreordained. And the socialist movement—even as its strength grew in municipal councils and national parliaments—had struggled repeatedly at its international congresses to craft a political program that might ensure peace and promote a united opposition to war should its outbreak appear imminent. From the moment of its formation, the Second International had contended with internal divisions that repeatedly fueled at times acrimonious debate at its congresses. While marginalizing the revolutionary posturing of anarchists, other factions within the International struggled to find common ground, that, according to Geoff Eley, “balanced revolutionary principles with practical improvements, allowing maximalist goals and short-term amelioration to inhabit a common political language.”⁸ That balance teetered between seemingly irreconcilable divisions that repeatedly erupted in congresses and within the major national socialist parties themselves during the next two decades. For the French, the Millerand controversy, in which a socialist leader joined a republican government in 1899, pitted socialist reformers like Jaurès against militants like Jules Guesde and ex-Communard Edouard Vaillant. In Germany, the SPD split into three factions aligned respectively with the evolutionary socialist views of Eduard Bernstein, the cautious Marxist orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky, and the revolutionary militancy of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Within the International itself, nationalist predispositions formed the backdrop to debates about militarism, national defense, imperialism, and the parties’ relations to bourgeois state power. As international crises intensified in the new century—with the Boer War, the 1905 Russian Revolution, French-German rivalry in Morocco, and persistent conflict in the Balkans—the dangers of world war grew. The imperative for socialists to agree on a coherent anti-war program escalated dramatically in 1913 as did debate over a plan of action should conflict spin out of control.⁹

The Threat of War and the International

How would the Second International respond to the immediate threat of a war that might pit one nation’s workers against others and send them into horrific battle? The answer was not inevitable, but the question hovered over the congresses of the International. At the 1907 Stuttgart Congress, German and French socialists papered over their underlying differences about the proper response to war. Reacting to the French proposal for a general strike, a group of “revolutionaries,” including Luxemburg, Lenin, and Martov, offered alternative language that with some revolutionary posturing masked the absence of any specific commitment to tactics. “Should war nevertheless break out, they shall take measures to bring about its early termination and strive with all their power to use the economic and political crisis, created by the war, to arouse the masses politically and to hasten the overthrow of capitalist class rule.”¹⁰ This 1907 “Stuttgart resolution”—what Haupt called “this blunt conceptual instrument”—resolved none of the divisions in the International between those who, like many German socialists, were prepared to countenance “defensive wars” and the revolutionaries who believed that with the outbreak of war the contradictions of capitalism would create the opportunity for coordinated socialist action, in all likelihood a general strike.

The socialist congress at Copenhagen in 1910 proved no more capable than previous congresses of codifying a common proletarian response to war. The resolution, supported by the German delegation and acquiesced to by others, essentially aligned the socialists with a reformist pacifist program calling for parliamentary measures that included opposition to war credits, support for international arbitration, and limited disarmament. It made no mention of a general strike and left for a future congress to decide how specifically to act if war should break out.¹¹

Just two years later, European socialists called together an “extraordinary Congress” at Basel in late November 1912 to deal with what seemed an escalating risk of the Balkan crisis precipitating a full-scale war. Anti-war demonstrations erupted in the major European capitals on the eve of the congress.¹² Divisions over what action should be taken by the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) and the split between German and French representatives over an explicit call for a general strike in the event of war continued to hobble the capacity of the International for unified action. The congress did manage to adopt a manifesto that served as a warning, if still veiled, to the governments and their capitalist supporters who might bring on such a conflagration. Jaurès noted that “ ‘because of the enormous variety of possibilities’ the resolution envisaged no particular course of action but at the same time ‘did not exclude a single one.’ ”¹³ While calling for diplomatic resolution of the issues threatening to tear Europe apart, the Basel Congress manifesto warned of the revolutionary possibilities that war might precipitate.

Governments must not forget that, in the present frame of mind of the workers, war will not be without disaster for themselves … It would be madness if the governments did not comprehend that the mere notion of a European war will call forth resentment and fierce protest from the workers who consider it a crime to shoot each other down in the interest, and for the profit of capitalism, or for the sake of dynastic ambition and of secret diplomatic treaties.¹⁴

But by mid-December, in part at the urging of Austrian social democrat Victor Adler, whose finger on the pulse of events in Vienna was regarded as reliable and reassuring, the sense of crisis eased. “Calm down,” he wrote to the ISB in Brussels, “the situation is less threatening than ever.”¹⁵ As the sense of imminent crisis dissipated, the French delegates remained deeply concerned about the ongoing rearmament of the major powers, and although unable to persuade their German colleagues to commit to joint action, they nevertheless managed to draft a joint manifesto opposing rearmament. Adler and many in the German SPD believed that action “in parliament and at rallies in every country” more than any efforts by the ISB was all that the situation called for.¹⁶ Here matters would stand until the feared conflagration once again appeared more imminent in July 1914.

Against the backdrop of the deepening international crisis following the assassination of Austrian archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, socialist parties and the ISB gathered in emergency session in Brussels in late July 1914 and called for the relocation of the impending Congress of the International from Vienna, which Adler now believed an impossible site, to Paris and further that the date be moved up from the end of August to the ninth. The resolution from the emergency conference called on “the proletariat of all countries … to intensify their demonstrations against war and for peace.”¹⁷ Given the absence of “war enthusiasm” among European workers, many leaders believed that such demonstrations could still have a salutary effect.¹⁸ But the resolution fell short of the demand for a “general strike” advocated by some French and English militants, including Vaillant and Keir Hardie, but which the majority still opposed. Even as the socialist leaders returned to their respective capitals, the onrush of war mobilization quickly overtook their efforts at countermobilization. On June 30, Russia began full mobilization; the next day, Germany declared a “state of threatened war.”

Socialists’ Dilemmas with the Onset of War

In short order, the war was on. The socialists now had to balance national defense—on all sides—against socialist internationalism. At the funeral gathering to mourn the death of Jean Jaurès, Louis Dubreuilh, secretary of the French socialist party, attempted to frame the dilemma they faced. “But we will not forget on the other hand that we are members of the workers and socialist International. It is a war of defense that a sinister destiny has forced upon us. We will accept it, but with the sole objective to guarantee the right of existence of our French fatherland. Without thinking of revenge and with the firm conviction to respect the fatherland of others.”¹⁹

Even if the prospect of an anti-militarist general strike in France, let alone in the other soon-to-be-warring countries, dimmed, countermobilization nevertheless spread and not just in the capital cities. As Paul Miller has astutely observed regarding France, “Through all the customary language of revolutionary working-class political culture that suffused the propaganda, antimilitarism ultimately worked, flourished, and put the government on edge because it was a forceful means to address grave injustices committed by the state against her people.”²⁰

Even if the left and its militant trade union allies in France, like their German and English comrades, reluctantly joined the “sacred union,” they would look ahead to another phase of the revolutionary struggle. For the time being, the war itself and its hardships occupied their attention. By late August, Georges Yvetot, the revolutionary syndicalist, argued, “We do not have to reaffirm the horror of a war we did everything we could to prevent, but we have to ward off, other than by resolutions, the misery that rages everywhere as a consequence of the war.”²¹ Some of their German socialist colleagues, immersed in the wartime hardships concentrated in cities, would within weeks echo a similar refrain. Municipal socialists, like their parliamentary colleagues, searched for ways to reconcile their commitment to socialist municipalism with the new imperatives imposed by a national war-making state. In so doing, they struggled to preserve and even extend the gains they had made in prewar municipal politics.

Some recent scholarship has called us to move beyond a historiography of the Second International that focuses on conflicting national identities, most manifest in its congresses, and the seemingly inevitable collapse of internationalism that came with the outbreak of war. A new approach identifies strong cultural bonds and networks of familiarity that tied socialist activists together internationally and that served as a countercurrent to the posturing and debates of national leaders at the congresses.²² The new scholarship, however, remains focused almost exclusively on national political activism. Kevin Callahan, for example, has argued that socialist parties in the midst of the intensifying crisis “were able to carve out a significant space in the national public and influence the tenor of national discourse.”²³ Even if true, such agitation rested on the strength the parties had built in localities and through the daily contestation for municipal power that had spread widely in the years before the outbreak of war. Some of the largest anti-militarist demonstrations may have been in the capital cities with national visibility, but widespread agitation also erupted in provincial towns and cities where the concentration of workers was greater and where socialist parties had enjoyed considerable electoral success. Miller notes, for instance, the spread of anti-war demonstrations to the French provinces. “In Brest, at the behest of the Bourse du Travail and Socialist Party more than 5000 marched through the streets shouting down the nationalist warmongers.”²⁴ In Britain large protest meetings were held under broad sponsorship that included the ILP and British Socialist Party in Matlock, Blackburn, Cheshire, and Huddersfield among others. In a small mill village of New Mill near Huddersfield 500 residents—virtually the entire adult population—turned out on August 4 to hear town councillors, a nonconformist minister, and Ben Riley of the ILP, demand British neutrality.²⁵

A rising tide of municipal socialist activism from one country to another in the early twentieth century had forged new international ties grounded in firsthand transnational encounters, collaborative grassroots organizing, the exchange of party programs, and widely circulated news of municipal victories around the globe in the socialist and labor press. Writing in 1911, labor economist Robert Hoxie found municipal socialism in the United States “markedly pervasive, its widespread successes indicating that beneath the surface it is a force developing throughout the country.”²⁶ The outbreak of war and the call to national arms in August 1914 across Europe came at an especially inopportune moment for local socialist activists, just as their momentum seemed to be ascending.

American Socialists and the Drift to Wartime Opposition

Some American socialist leaders had never been great fans of the triannual gatherings of the international socialist congresses. Victor Berger voiced frustration with the posturing and resolution-making at congress sessions where the day-to-day agitation that engaged socialists working at the urban grassroots was largely ignored. Even before the opening of the 1910 congress in Copenhagen, Berger was disconcerted that in his visit to Berlin before the congress began, “the chance to investigate municipal affairs” was cut short to accommodate attendance at meeting of the International Socialist Bureau (ISB).²⁷ Although feted at the Copenhagen gathering as the prominent leader of the now-renowned “Milwaukee socialists,” Berger, in letters to his wife, Meta, expressed disappointment with the tenor of the gathering and eagerness to return to the important political work at home. “I was never so sick of a convention in my life,” he wrote, and he found that “the actual work the Congress has accomplished is very little. Most of the time was taken up with the settlement of petty disputes among petty ‘parties’ in petty committees.”²⁸ He declined speaking engagements after the congress in order to get “the next and quickest boat back to the U.S … The moment the International Congress closes my work (and important work at that) is in Milwaukee and not in Hamburg or Berlin.”²⁹

Nevertheless, in early August 1914, a delegation of American socialists, including Berger, met up in New York and prepared to depart for the anticipated Congress of the International, originally planned for Vienna in later August but now moved to Paris and scheduled for August 9. As the American delegation struggled to get up-to-date information about conditions on the ground in Europe and the imminent outbreak of war, they debated whether to go ahead with the trip. The composition of the delegation was heavily weighted toward the municipal, constructivist wing of the American party. It included, besides Berger and the now-former mayor of Milwaukee, Emil Seidel, George Lunn, socialist mayor of Schenectady; Meyer London, congressman from New York’s Lower East Side; Oscar Ameringer, a German American party activist with local experience in Milwaukee and Oklahoma; Morris Hillquit, who would run for mayor of New York City in 1917; and socialist journalist Charles Edward Russell. In a gesture of solidarity with their European comrades, they voted to proceed with the trip. Soon after boarding a British liner, they received telegraphic word that the congress had been cancelled, and all but Meyer London returned to the United States.³⁰

Confusion and disorientation confronted other municipal socialists around the world as the prospect of world war hit home. Left-wing socialist Anton Pannekoek, writing from Germany to his American comrades, bemoaned the compromise that SPD parliamentarians had entered into with the German government in the hope of saving their party from persecution. As a result, he noted, “the socialist soul has thereby been sacrificed.” Presciently, he foresaw the end of the authorities’ ability to sustain the support of the masses. “Soon enough this condition will change and when the necessities of the government are past, the persecutions will begin again. But when that comes the party cannot simply turn back again to its old ways. The scars of this unnatural war compact will remain.”³¹

American socialists had the luxury, at the war’s outset, of criticizing their European comrades from afar. For the time being, they could maintain a principled opposition to the war and European socialists’ acquiescence to it without risking state repression and being tarred by their class opponents as unpatriotic. They may have rhetorically supported a general strike about which European socialists could not find agreement, but such action was neither plausible nor warranted in the context of American neutrality.³² That, of course, would change in April 1917 and the months thereafter. For the moment, the ongoing political work in their municipalities occupied the socialists’ primary attention. Even in Dayton, Ohio, a prominent site of war manufacturing during the preparedness campaign of 1915–16, socialists “pursued a pragmatic, cautious, albeit dissenting course through these troubled times,” still largely unaffected by the war and the quickening war hysteria.³³ A similar response characterized the socialist administration in Two Harbors, Minnesota, where, first as a Public Ownership Party and then in their own name, socialists enjoyed rising success after 1907 and won full control of the city in 1911, 1913, and 1915 based on municipal campaigns that focused on a pragmatic public ownership platform. Not until 1917 did the war and anti-socialist hysteria rear its head as a countervailing current in local politics.³⁴ In the socialist stronghold of Butte, Montana, and numerous towns and cities in Idaho and Washington State, socialist success in 1912–14 was followed by a troubling pattern of defeat in 1915–16 as socialist unity gave way to factionalism and the storm clouds of war loomed on the horizon.³⁵

The early months of war initially distracted local activists from the immediate and promising work in the class “trenches” of their local governing bodies and for a time muted their internationalist orientation. As the American party struggled to define its position on the war, its membership plummeted by nearly a quarter before stabilizing and eventually growing again with support from a broader public skeptical of US involvement in the war. The party’s peace program, issued in January 1915, set the course for its principled opposition to the war that culminated in the April 1917 manifesto and the referendum that unequivocally codified its opposition.³⁶

But the war also provided an opening for municipal socialists around the world to address the desperate human needs engendered by war, most glaringly manifest in cities. They also sought to reforge intercity and international connections that could serve to revive their prewar municipal agenda and establish a base for opposition to the war itself. Wartime organizing in cities ultimately produced powerful political momentum for socialist reconstruction after the war and the long-deferred expansion of democratic rights.

8

War!
Shifting Currents of Localism,
Nationalism, and Internationalism

Jack McCullough and His Sons: The Costs of War

By 1915, no end to the war’s stalemate was in sight. With the casualties continuing to mount the stage was set for more organized opposition to the war in local communities of all the warring powers. The optimistic proclamations of political and military leaders rang hollow for many families in the face of very personal losses and their deepening disaffection with the war. Jack McCullough, the Christchurch, New Zealand, labor leader, saw his four sons follow different paths in wartime. Bill received a medical exemption from military service; Frank, a religious objector, went to the United States to avoid persecution; Roy went underground for three years to escape conscription in a war he could not support; and Jim, who had been a Christchurch city councillor, volunteered for military service and after being wounded a second time at the Somme, died in August 1917. Jack’s own objections to the war, even if quietly voiced, had been clear almost from the outset. But he had been hesitant to join his labor comrades’ outspoken campaign of opposition in the local government elections of April 1917, where repeal of the conscription law was made the first plank of the municipal platform. He wrote of his self-doubt in his diary. “I am feeling weary & dejected—& all this morning have tried to analyse these feelings … I have kept out of the fray—what for? I wonder is it fear of the consequences to myself? … I have given money to the movement: this does not give me any satisfaction.” But it was the death of his son from wounds sustained in battle that called forth his deepest feelings, after a silence in his diary of almost eight months. His tone reflected the deep divisions that had opened in the New Zealand home front. Fear of persecution now hovered over his grief.

Since noting anything in this Diary, much has happened: my last note on 23 June refers to my two sons Jim & Roy. Jim fortunately recovered after three weeks in Hospital, only to be wounded again on 14th August & dying on the 26th of that month: My boy Roy is a wanderer on the face of the earth a fugitive from the iniquitous law that would compel him to kill a fellow human being or be killed. These troubles have upset me, but more especially my wife & I have hesitated expressing my views in this book because they are & have been so seditious. I will try & continue to record passing events as they occur to me & try to modify my language so that if it were confiscated I might not be hung.¹

For McCullough, a proud trade unionist and socialist, the war incubated and intensified his opposition born of local activism in his hometown of Christchurch. His service on the national arbitration board had seasoned his views as had his involvement in the prewar strikes and the birthing, however painful, of a unified New Zealand Labour Party capable of leading the fight for workers’ rights in local and national arenas. For him and for his socialist and labor comrades the Great War, in all its unfolding tragedy, opened new possibilities for advancing their cause.

The Great War and Its Meaning

The First World War has posed many challenges for those who seek to write its history. Among them has been a metaphorical dilemma: how to convey the magnitude of the “cataclysm” or the “deluge” or the Weltkrieg that a war of unprecedented proportions visited upon Europe and parts of the rest of the world. For contemporaries, especially in the West, it came to be known as the “Great War.”² More recently, the appropriateness of the term “total war” has been much debated and may seem over-drawn from a post World War II vantage point. But, from the perspective of those living through it, the Great War involved a “total” mobilization and degree of destructiveness beyond anything they had known or could have imagined.³

In the midst of the initial shock and the sobering calls to arms, prescient observers could discern the shattering of old states and empires. For socialists and their labor party allies around the world, who had seen themselves as genuine internationalists, the immediate effects were disorienting as former comrades turned on each other within and between their national parties. These divisions played out locally as well, where the municipal socialists’ prewar political gains had at least matched, or even exceeded, the expectations and achievements of their parliamentary brethren.

It is crucial to understand the municipality as a setting in which opposition to the war congealed around the grievances of daily life. The war inevitably strengthened nation-states and their power to command economic resources for war making. As historian Jay Winter has put it, “The centralization of economic activity in wartime displaced upward the share of gross national product occupied by the state.”⁴ But frustrations produced by war first took discernible shape in local communities through the dislocations of daily life the war imposed on working people, creating initially not outright concerted opposition, which was nearly impossible in the first weeks and months of war, but grudging acquiescence and then more organized resistance to the hardships of a war that most ordinary people had not sought and did not welcome, despite the patriotic urgings from those higher in the social scale. Class remained the substratum of daily existence that differentiated people’s experience of the war, whether in the trenches or the cramped working-class homes and neighborhoods of cities.⁵

Local grievances were not new but took on new urgency in wartime. They provided a point of contact for workers or their local elected representatives with those who opposed the war on principle (pacifists, socialists) or who objected to the curtailment of liberties. A rising crescendo of strikes fueled opposition that drew otherwise “patriotic” workers into the fold of resistance. These allies eventually made conscription an important rallying ground even for many who reluctantly accepted the premise of a necessary war carried on by willing volunteers. Eventually the call to “conscript wealth not men” echoed from one locality to another across national boundaries.⁶

The local contexts in which this opposition crystallized have been largely neglected in the voluminous histories of the war. Important as the nationalizing imperatives of war may have been, translocal comparison helps us understand how a fragile internationalism was rebuilt from below. Shared wartime struggles grounded in local working-class communities drew on prewar ties of solidarity and common understandings that could transcend national boundaries.⁷

Such a translocal analysis of labor’s stiffening opposition provides the foundation for a somewhat different periodization of the war and history of the home front. Conventional chronology distinguishes early and later phases of the war, in which, for the major European powers, “the first two years of the war were strongly characterized by persuasion rather than coercion and by a high degree of ‘self-mobilization’ in civil society,” as John Horne termed it. Later phases of what then became a “long war” saw military recruitment, high casualties, and a military stalemate that required greater state intervention on the home front and more coercive measures in the face of popular war weariness.⁸

We might usefully consider an alternative periodization that gives greater attention to “the local” highlighted by comparative analysis. The early months brought home immediate, disruptive effects of the war and the concomitant mobilization of local labor and socialist activists both for and against the war. Internationalist ties fractured under a steam-roller of nationalist fervor. Confidence eroded in the confusion about how to oppose the war and the extent of support the opposition might have. Tentative steps to assert working-class interests and even opposition appeared, facilitated by the outspoken opposition of some key national figures—Hardie, Jowett, and MacDonald in England; Bernstein and Kautsky, along with Luxemburg and Liebknecht, in Germany; the Red Feds in New Zealand; T. J. Ryan, the Labor premier in Queensland; Berger and Debs in the US.

By 1915, with the war bogging down, the massive loss of life, the drain on resources, and the curtailment of liberties led to beginnings of countermobilization, the probing of new alliances between some women’s organizations and pacifists, and the stirring of labor discontent under the new economic pressures generated by hyper-mobilized war economies.

The winter of 1916–17 brought the imposition or tightening of conscription needed to refill the ranks of the fallen. The death toll continued to rise, and now workers felt more deeply the pinch of economic grievances—rising inflation, housing shortages and rent profiteering, food supply problems, lagging wages, and the resurfacing of other prewar frustrations that continued to go unaddressed. With the failure of local government to cope with these deepening hardships and rising levels of unauthorized strikes, a more emboldened opposition reinvigorated local labor and socialist activists. This intermingling of economic grievances and political opposition at the local level proved crucial.⁹

By 1918, opposition to the war assumed more organized form, but with its own internal divisions. Along with the emergence of revolutionary movements in Germany, Austria, Russia, and in the states of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, the war’s end brought removal of old franchise restrictions and reassertion of an even more vigorous municipal socialist movement in the new political space created by the collapse of the old political order.¹⁰

War! Shock, Disorientation, and First Stirrings of Local Opposition

The rapid mobilization of armies across Europe in early August 1914 following the succession of war declarations produced some initial disorientation but also spontaneous expressions of opposition to the rising war fever on the home fronts of France, Germany, and Britain. By most historians’ accounts, those pockets of opposition gave way to a surge of patriotic fervor and widespread public expression of support for the war. Many argue that popular support remained largely intact until late 1916–17.¹¹ But, in the interstices of national narratives, evidence of foot-dragging abounds alongside resistance to “self-mobilization.”

Much has been made of the collapse of the Second International and the “betrayal” by its leadership of the internationalist and pacifist traditions with which social democrats identified. The pressure of events and the tactical maneuverings of national leaders at first immobilized social democrats, who had continued to believe the outbreak of war unlikely or feared the prospect of government repression.¹²

For the German SPD and the Austrian Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Öesterreichs (SDAPÖ) the lingering memory of the period of the anti-socialist laws stimulated a more conciliatory posture toward their states in the interest of self-preservation. Several years later, Hendrik de Man, the Belgian socialist and supporter of the war, recalled that the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler and others spoke of their dilemma at the last critical meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in late July.

It was curious to learn from hearing them talk that the main reason for their nervousness was their apprehension regarding the threat to their organization … They spoke above all about the organization being threatened by dissolution, the party offices being closed, the press being muzzled, and the delivery vans of the party paper being requisitioned by the army.¹³

In the transcript of the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) meeting on July 29, the Bohemian delegate Nemec argued that “their organizations were at stake,” and Adler warned “that the Bureau not make any fatal decisions.”¹⁴ Robert Michels made much the same point in discussing the ways in which a social democratic party “gradually becomes an endin-itself” especially in times of crisis.

Inevitably such a party is unable to sustain so terrible a test as that of upholding its faith in principles when the state, determined upon war, and resolved to crush anyone who gets in the way, threatens the party in case of disobedience with the dissolution of its branches, the sequestration of its funds, and the slaughter of its best men. The party gives way, hastily sells its internationalist soul, and, impelled by the instinct of self-preservation, undergoes transformation into a patriotic party.¹⁵

Accurate though such an analysis may have been, Georges Haupt makes the important point that Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg sought to enlist the social democrats’ support for the war less through threats than through “winning them over” by negotiation and stressing the necessity for “self-defense” against an aggressive czarist Russia.¹⁶ In France, the psychological immobilization that came in the wake of Jaurès’s assassination was followed quickly by the formation of a so-called “sacred union” against the backdrop of rapidly escalating military action. Almost from the outset, socialists and trade union minoritaires coalesced in local branch meetings to foster “solidarity and mutual aid.”¹⁷ And, in Britain, a last-minute call by the Labour Party for a conference to plan concerted opposition to war quickly gave way to the pragmatic strategy of creating a new body, the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee (WEWNC) to “safeguard working-class interests during the ‘emergency.’ ” The crowds that gathered in London and in provincial towns across the United Kingdom showed more curiosity than enthusiasm for war until the actual declaration on August 4. Even after war was declared, however, considerable anti-war sentiment continued to be voiced.¹⁸

German Social Democracy

The SPD in Germany confronted the most difficult situation. Faced with the prospect of severe repression but also enticed to collaborate with the Reich, the party initially asserted opposition to war and made tentative gestures of solidarity to its European socialist comrades. But quickly, quiescence or despair set in. Although divided, the SPD Reichstag delegation voted together to maintain party unity and discipline. Eduard Bernstein, not a member of the delegation, opposed the decision but subsequently rendered the most persuasive account of the SPD majority’s thinking.

For them, “it was now exclusively a matter of deciding whether at a time when the enemy had already entered the country and [that enemy] anyhow was Russia, a party representing a full third of the German people could deny the means of defence and protection to those called upon to defend them and their families … Impossible.” As against that, a small minority, “between a sixth and a seventh,” felt doubts—not an opposing certainty, but doubts.¹⁹

The extent to which different segments of the SPD and its working-class constituents accepted the nationalist terms of the kaiser’s triumphant Burgfrieden proclamation (“I no more recognize parties; I know only Germans”) remains a matter of some dispute, but, clearly, domestic social peace in wartime meant different things to different classes.²⁰

The left opposition within the SPD, furtively and at considerable risk, attempted to sustain some semblance of factional organization. A handful of opponents—what came to be known to its centrist opponents as “Rosa’s group”—met on August 4 in Rosa Luxemburg’s Berlin apartment, but telegrams to more than 300 local party officials produced virtually no response. The party organ, Vorwärts, served as a focal point for opposition after August 1, even while dancing around the restrictions of censors and the admonitions of centrist party colleagues.²¹ In September, members of this group published in Switzerland a formal declaration of the existence of an opposition. In November, Liebknecht cast the sole dissenting vote against further war credits and by implication Burgfrieden. He distributed a text justifying his vote as a circular in Niederbarnim, a left-leaning electoral district near Berlin. The opponents reestablished lines of communication with other centers of radicalism in Halle, Bremen, Stuttgart, Brunswick, and Leipzig. But the radicals, including Luxemburg, were not willing to celebrate potential German military disaster, given the cost in human terms for proletarian soldiers “temporarily dressed in field grey.”²²

Quiet initial stirrings of opposition to Burgfrieden gradually gave way to more overt actions. Vorwärts continued to defy party discipline by voicing opposition to the war. At least initially, the authorities permitted it to do so. Radicals in Württemberg, notably in Stuttgart, Esslingen, and Göppingen, supported the explicit campaign of the Schwäbische Tagwacht for peace with no annexations. Liebknecht stood alone in the Reichstag delegation to vote against a second war credits bill. In order to limit what appeared to be a widening schism in the party ranks, and to preserve at least the appearance of party unity and support for Burgfrieden, the leadership moved to allow internal debate and permit dissent of Reichstag members, of which there were roughly a dozen, to abstain from voting on war measures.²³

New Zealand and Australian Labor

On the colonial periphery, New Zealand and Australia were initially swept into the maelstrom of Europe’s Great War through ties of culture, imperial loyalty, and their sense of vulnerability as white settlers in a region where, for some, this European outpost appeared threatened by Asia’s “uncounted myriad millions.”²⁴ In the war’s first fervent months, as recruitment proceeded in New Zealand with mixed results, only a few voices spoke out clearly against the war—traditional pacifist organizations like the New Zealand Peace Council, the Anti-Militarist League, and the Women’s Political League along with some elements of New Zealand Social Democratic Party (NZSDP) and the Maoriland Worker. But an influential segment of the socialists’ leadership, including Hiram Hunter, president of the NZSDP, Daniel Sullivan, president of the United Federation of Labour, and David McLaren, a member of Parliament, former mayor, and labor councillor of Wellington, leant their voices to the patriotic surge. For them, as Hunter reportedly said, “my class right or wrong” had become “my country right or wrong.” Others, like trade unionist Jack McCullough, found “this cruel and barbarous war” deeply troubling, noting with disapproval the predominant journalistic tone, where “nothing seems too villainous for them to say about the Germans.”²⁵

Similarly, mixed reactions proved the norm in Australia. The outbreak of war did enable the Labor Party to win another dramatic victory at the federal level and form a government of national unity.²⁶ The initial military recruitment resulted in the enlistment of a higher proportion of trade unionists, including many leaders, than other countrymen. But the uneasiness on the part of some and a sense that “Australia will suffer much in the struggle that seems ahead,” appeared in scattered pockets of opposition. In Victoria, socialists condemned the “fakers, twicers and bloodsuckers” in the federal party who supported war; in Sydney, they warned that “the war-mongering savage in our midst holds sway.”²⁷ In Queensland, the stirrings of labor opposition against a weakened liberal government foreshadowed a formidable political struggle over the war’s consequences for the domestic economy.²⁸

The costs of war quickly bore home on the domestic economies of the settler colonies, in some ways more directly and immediately than they did on the European home fronts. With their export economies dependent on established markets and open channels of commerce, Australia and New Zealand experienced significant disruption from the outset. Unemployment was especially acute in certain pockets of the economy, particularly mining and heavy manufacturing. By the end of the third quarter of 1914, unemployment had doubled to nearly 11 percent, and by year’s end trade unionists estimated more than 10,000 without work across New South Wales and comparable numbers in Melbourne. Clothing and boot manufacturers fared better by expanding to meet the wartime demand for provisioning the first legions of recruits.²⁹

New Zealand, with an economy heavily weighted to the export of foodstuffs, weathered the economic storms of the war’s early months somewhat better. The country’s “protein industry” responded to the urgent, heavy demand for foodstuffs and other agricultural commodities (meat, wool, cheese, butter, and hides) requisitioned by the government on behalf of beleaguered Britain. As a consequence, prices for domestic consumers rose sharply. With the combined effects of heavier rates of wartime taxation, housing shortages, and lagging wage rates in most sectors, the war exacted a rising toll on daily lives of working people in New Zealand and Australia.³⁰ Their colonial lineage translated into identification with Britain’s cause, in some respects exceeding that of the British themselves. The consequences were borne home most painfully in the casualty lists of soldiers killed or wounded.

For the “Anzacs”—combined Australian and New Zealand forces—a turning point in the war came with the catastrophic (and unnecessary) loss of life in the attempted allied conquest of the Turkish Gallipoli peninsula. The war already had become a stalemate on the western front, when the Allies determined to pursue a campaign in the South that sought to remove Turkey from the war and create new pressures on the Central powers. The failed naval effort to open the Dardanelles strait to Constantinople gave way to an ill-conceived and even more poorly executed invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula. On April 25, 1915, a combined force of Australians and New Zealanders landed at what came to be called “Anzac Cove” concurrently with Allied landings at several other beaches on the peninsula. The results, especially for the Anzacs, were horrific. Australia and New Zealand respectively lost 7,595 and 2,431 killed in short order and countless more severely wounded before abandoning the attempt to scale the cliffs overlooking the beaches. The combined force of 410,000 troops from the British Empire suffered 205,000 casualties. A second attempt at Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove in early August also ended in failure with more losses of men. The shocks from Gallipoli resonated across the home fronts for months and years to come.³¹ Anzac losses from other theaters of war magnified the significance of Gallipoli. The losses staggered the public and dampened its support for the war. New Zealand would send nine percent of its total population, or 40 percent of those who were military age, in total almost 100,000 men, to fight. More than half—58 percent—were killed or wounded over the course of the war, 7,500 of them in the Gallipoli campaign alone.³²

1915–16: War of Attrition, Home Front Hardships, and Countermobilization

Nobody had bargained for trench warfare, not the French, the British, or the Germans, let alone the Aussies or Kiwis. By most accounts, trenches evolved from scattered, temporary “foxholes” or rifle pits in what was initially foreseen by all parties as a war of open movement. During the early months, that perception largely held. Large engagements—the battles of the Frontiers, the Marne, the Aisne, and the initial fight for Ypres—had produced massive casualties, on all sides. Thereafter began long years of stasis marked by the digging of extraordinary and increasingly complex networks of defensive trenches from which both sides launched occasional and often horrifically brutal offensive maneuvers, usually with little territorial gain. Military historian John Keegan has described the new status quo at the end of 1914.

A continuous line of trenches, 475 miles long, ran from the North Sea to the mountain frontier of neutral Switzerland. Behind it the opposing combatants, equally exhausted by human loss, equally bereft of re-supplies to replace the peacetime stocks of munitions they had expended in the previous four months of violent and extravagant fighting, crouched in confrontation across a narrow and empty zone of no man’s land.³³

This no-man’s-land between the opposing armies’ parallel and dense networks of meandering trenches could be anywhere from 100 to 400 yards wide but in some places as few as 5 to 10 yards or as many as 1,000.³⁴

Popular support for the increasingly bloody conflict eroded unevenly among the warring powers. Support was a function of the ability of governments to manage information, justify the sacrifice, and meet the most basic needs of their populations, especially for food. The maintenance of the public’s appetite for the war was premised on assumptions that the war would be short and decisively won. With stalemate after four months, those assumptions began to unravel.

Germany and France

In Germany, Burgfrieden gave way to more open debate over war aims, greater secrecy about the course of the war and the extent of casualties, and increasing concern about the domestic economic consequences of all-out mobilization for total war.³⁵ Those consequences became evident when large and at times violent riots over food shortages appeared in Berlin and other cities as early as February 1915 and grew significantly by October.³⁶

Intensifying divisions within the leadership of the SPD deepened with the growing misery the war visited on the home front and the resulting domestic crisis of escalating proportions.³⁷ Early evidence of the schism within the party appeared precisely in regions where local opposition to party leadership had been strongest before the war. In Württemberg, for instance, or in northern cities like Halle, Brunswick, Bremen, and Leipzig, the local SPD leadership aligned with the opposition.³⁸ The desire of the party centrists, even those leaning ever so slightly toward opposition, to maintain party unity limited the strength of their opposition. Although prepared by mid-1915 to advocate a “peace of understanding” and oppose the annexation of territories, they were unwilling to oppose the war outright. Their left-wing opponents now moved to do precisely that by challenging the very “imperialist” premise for war and focusing attention on domestic political and economic issues. As one of their slogans put it, “The chief enemy is at home.” At the end of 1915, in a succession of votes, twenty members of the SPD Reichstag delegation, now for the first time, opposed war credits; the party leadership expelled Karl Liebknecht from the delegation; and the left-wing minority formed itself into a “Spartacist” caucus in a direct challenge to any vestige of party unity.³⁹ These measures established a direct path to a more formal break in the party’s ranks. That came ultimately not from the left but in retaliation from the center. On January 16, 1917, the party council declared that by holding its own conference the opposition had violated party discipline and “separated itself from the party.”

In France, public sentiment initially ran strongly in support of the war, with the nation perceived as the victim of aggression. The Union sacrée, consecrated in the early months of the war and buttressed by the dramatic victory at the Marne, proved remarkably resilient, at least through 1916, despite heavy losses and a stalemate that left Germans occupying large parts of northern France. Part of this unity is attributable to the rigorous management of information about the war and the extent of French casualties. That information, as it gradually leaked out, led to a breakdown of unqualified support. But persistence of support is also attributable to the belief that the war would be short. An inflation-fueled economic expansion meant the deferral of the war’s negative consequences. But, by 1916 and into 1917, enthusiasm waned and opposition to the war aims grew, economic hardships deepened, and awareness of the human costs of the war emerged more forcefully within the ranks of the labor movement and among socialists. Eventually that dissent grew in the general population and perhaps most significantly in the lower ranks of the military.⁴⁰

Britain

In Britain, enthusiasm for the war and the crystallization of labor opposition followed a more complicated course during the early days and the months following the outbreak of war. While British troops suffered heavy losses in some early engagements, the full impact of the war was somewhat muted. For a time, the battlefield seemed more distant. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) had from its earliest days been the local strength and socialist soul of labor politics in Britain. In August 1914 it still represented an organized force both within and outside the Labour Party, particularly strong in certain industrial districts, and, at times, a prickly opponent of the party’s parliamentary wing. As large segments of British society swung sharply in support of the war after Britain’s declaration, it hardly came as a surprise that the ILP would stand apart. Many of the party’s most nationally recognized leaders—Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Bruce Glasier, Fred Jowett—spoke out forcefully against the war, though some, like MacDonald, did so in carefully qualified tones. He opposed, for instance, the diplomacy that produced the war but acquiesced in the necessity to pursue the campaign once undertaken. Nonetheless, MacDonald resigned his leadership position in the Labour Party. Others like Arthur Henderson and Robert Blatchford gave more unqualified and, in Blatchford’s case, enthusiastic support for the war effort.⁴¹ On the streets, the picture in the first days was mixed as well, from the surging, celebratory crowds around Buckingham Palace to the sober counting down as Britain’s ultimatum to Germany expired, “god help us! it was war.” When news of the first major defeat at Mons hit the newsstands in late August, a diarist wrote cryptically, “War news—most appalling—no one can foresee how it will end.”⁴² Robert Roberts recalled that the initial recruiting drives in Salford were met with packed halls, and “Great Enthusiasm prevailed.” But he also remembered the shock of learning the war’s toll.

That week the first general casualty list appeared in the press. Twelve thousand men had been killed, wounded or were missing. The numbers shocked: such slaughter in so short a time. Already among us one heard of a young man “killed in action” from this street, another missing from that. The more thoughtful in the shop looked grave. “This is something” they said, “you can’t see the end of” … By Christmas the first horror of what the war was really came drifting down to us from men returned. This was no holiday. Casualties had soared to more than 104,000.⁴³

The response of the Labour Party proved mixed as well, complicated by its own internal political divisions. But, unlike their labor party comrades in Australia and New Zealand, and the social democrats in Germany and Austria, where differences over the war produced deep and rancorous splits, British Labourites wasted no time crafting a special umbrella committee that served to contain the party’s splintering over support or opposition to the war. The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee (WEWNC) broadly represented different views of the war and took charge of “safeguarding working-class interests during the ‘Emergency.’ ” The committee embraced a membership of trade union and Labour Party leaders who ran the gamut from what historian Royden Harrison has described as “Hun-hating Jingos and ultra-loyalists” along with “sane patriots,” to principled anti-war socialist-humanists and “revolutionary defeatists.” Not all tendencies had equal representation, and much of the WEWNC’s day-to-day work reflected the influence of Sidney Webb (a “sane patriot”) whose views over the course of the war—what he called a “horrid” business—drifted closer to the anti-war position of Beatrice.⁴⁴

The WEWNC provided the labor movement and the Labour Party a vehicle for pressing the government to address the deepening needs of British workers during wartime. Sidney Webb saw this as an opportunity to push for a more far-reaching shift in social policy whose fruits would continue to be harvested in the postwar environment. The committee demanded, for instance, unemployment relief and “the right to work” as an alternative to a bankrupt poor relief system. The committee also argued that local governing bodies should intervene to soak up the unemployed by providing work at union wages and impose controls on food prices in major urban centers.⁴⁵ At other moments, it called for control of rents by building additional public housing and adjudicating tenants’ rights through special Fair Rent Courts. Fielding individual complaints and redirecting them to the appropriate authority occupied the committee staff to a very large extent. But, with Sidney Webb in the lead, the committee also adopted his preferred political style of “pressure and permeation,” as Harrison termed it. “Accordingly, the Committee set out both to raise the waves and to calm them, to arouse the workers on dangers about which they were not yet fully conscious, to menace the government with reference to forces that the Committee itself did not control and with powers which it feared to exercise.” The ILP with its outspoken opposition to the war and its grassroots network of local affiliates served a strategic purpose. Even as the committee sought “to improve the Local Government Board’s regulations” bearing on a whole host of day-to-day grievances at the local level, it also saw them as “agitational points … making use of independent popular forces while simultaneously taking the wind out of their sails.”⁴⁶ Despite its careful efforts to channel growing discontent and maintain its influence with government, the WEWNC gradually assumed a more aggressive posture. By 1916, the committee showed its frustration with more conservative trade unionists’ unqualified support of the war and the willingness of some of their leaders to be “conscripted” as government functionaries, responsible for implementing policies they could not support. The government offered Bob Smillie, the militant mine workers’ leader and the WEWNC’s chairman after September 1915, the position of Food Controller. As he promptly declined the appointment Smillie said that if he had taken the position, he would have been immediately fired for seeking “plenary powers to deal in my own way with the food profiteers. Some I would be content to send to prison; others I should have been obliged to hang.”⁴⁷

The WEWNC, standing outside the government and the Parliamentary Labour Party, functioned both to deflect and at times articulate labor’s opposition to the war. The debate over “conscription” and labor’s ability to refocus that debate around a demand for “conscription of riches” and advocacy for the long-term expansion of the public sector demonstrated its adaptability to the shifting political circumstances of the war. What is less well understood is the extent to which local Labour Party branches, which were directly connected to workers’ daily wartime experience, used their prewar gains in municipal politics to focus political pressure on both the government and the WEWNC.⁴⁸

Australia and New Zealand

More distant from the theaters of war, Australia and New Zealand labor parties nonetheless confronted changing economic and political circumstances that imposed a severe test on their capacity to maintain their initial support for the war and loyalty to the British cause. First came economic hardships—rising unemployment and inflation—and then the attempt of both governments to augment their war powers to lay the groundwork for conscription and other coercive wartime measures. Finally, the shared cataclysm of Gallipoli and the terrible toll of the war intensified opposing factional divisions within both labor parties.

In the case of Australia, the Labor Party won a dramatic victory in the federal elections as war broke out and its national leaders, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher and W. M. Hughes, deputy and attorney general, articulated unqualified support for Britain in the war. In words that became infamous, Fisher pledged Australians to “stand beside our own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.” For the moment, at least, labor seemed unified.⁴⁹ But, within the states, the party’s strength and its support for the war varied almost from the outset. Labor opposition crystallized in New South Wales around the issue of a wage freeze. In South Australia, a new Labor government did little more than the liberals to address labor’s economic concerns. In Victoria, Labor could muster little parliamentary influence as a small minority. But, in Queensland, the story took a dramatically different turn. A Labor government came to power in the spring of 1915, and veteran Labor Party leader T. J. Ryan as premier enjoyed support of a healthy parliamentary majority. Just a year later, the Queenslanders remained the only state Labor government in the Commonwealth. They pursued a labor program that included expansion of the public sector and opposition to the pro-conscription, pro-war policies of Hughes’s federal government. Faced with such opposition, Hughes accused Ryan of disloyalty and attempted to censor publication of his anti-conscription speeches.⁵⁰ Australia’s two conscription referenda in 1916 and 1917 produced stunning defeats for the ruling Labor government that signified the depths of opposition, if not to the war at least to coercing men to fight it. The referenda also revealed substantial state-by-state variation in that opposition.⁵¹

In New Zealand, a tenuous unity of laborites came less from the “Unity Congress” of 1913, presided over by the mercurial American socialist Walter Thomas Mills, than from the hard lessons drawn from the strike defeats of 1913. The “Red Feds” largely refocused their energies through the newly formed Social Democratic Party on a determined challenge to the conservative Massey government that had broken the great strike. Reluctantly, the SDP joined a loose coalition of union-backed candidates constituting a new Labour Representation Committee (LRC) along with remnants of the older New Zealand Labour Party to mount a concerted challenge to Massey’s (conservative) Reform Party. In some places, moderates in the LRC or NZLP forged agreements with the Liberals to avoid direct contests. Despite their efforts, labor gained no additional parliamentary seats beyond the six they held going into the fall 1914 election. SDP made few gains in local contests, except in Christchurch where its presence in the city council remained strong.

But war now hung over the political atmosphere and produced a governing coalition of liberals and conservatives. Although labor refused a token cabinet seat and managed to reassemble its ranks under the banner of still another incarnation of a New Zealand Labour Party in August 1916, the new party remained divided between militants and moderates. The militants largely opposed the march toward conscription and gave voice to workers’ economic grievances in the deteriorating wartime economy. To varying degrees, the moderates supported the war but less wholeheartedly conscription.⁵² As usual, Grey District miners demonstrated the most enduring industrial militancy. When the Massey government introduced a National Registration bill in July 1915, Runanga miners declared the measure a “stealthy step towards conscription,” and their borough council refused the government’s request to reaffirm the national “declaration of war.” More threatening was the state miners’ union’s willingness in late 1915 to oppose conscription with industrial action. The miners accused the government of seeking “to bring on a feeling favourable to conscription of the flesh and blood of the working class in New Zealand while at the same time failing to conscript the wealth and private property of the rich. Furthermore, we are determined to meet such a calamity as conscription by industrial revolt.” Although militant action would be slow to develop, the miners’ awareness of growing mobilization against conscription in Australia and the arrest of militant mine leader Bob Semple for “urging miners not to be ‘lassoed by the Prussian octopus conscription’ ” cast a die that led to a series of strikes in 1917 and 1918. Their opposition to conscription forced compromises from the government that ultimately improved wages and limited miners’ exposure to conscription.⁵³

In the Municipalities: Incubators of Wartime Opposition

In cities, the war was borne home most forcefully in the circumstances of everyday life—the cost of living and daily bread, the disruptions of households and family life, the search for affordable housing, and the need for support of women and children temporarily or permanently without a traditional male breadwinner. In theory, the institutions of local government provided the first line of relief. Social democrats had made significant prewar political inroads in city councils, poor relief agencies, and school boards, and they continued to be contested sites for the provision of public services. As economic grievances mounted and citizens gathered to protest conditions on the home front, issues relating to the use of public space and the enforcement of wartime restrictions of speech and the publication of oppositional views pressed to the fore.⁵⁴ Conditions varied from one country, and indeed one city, to another. The extent of limits on the municipal franchise, or even the suspension of local elections for the duration of the war (as happened in Britain), shaped the course of local events and the forms of protest adopted, as did the nature and extent of hardship. But, across the countries at war, the conflict imposed common stresses and strains on municipalities and their working-class citizens.⁵⁵

Perhaps the most critical challenge faced by the warring powers was feeding their populations in a war that saw unprecedented disruptions of food supplies and international trade. The naval blockade of Germany and submarine attacks on maritime shipping posed direct threats to the food supply. The extraordinary demands of a far-flung battlefield whose entrenched armies stretched across vast swaths of western, central, and eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and the challenges of feeding millions of combatants daily put unprecedented strains on supplies and pushed prices sharply upward. But the extent of the crisis and its longer-term demographic effects varied. Jay Winter has argued that Britain (and presumably the United States, Australia, and New Zealand) actually saw a wartime rise in life expectancy, despite the casualties suffered. This was largely due to improved nutrition and the maintenance of adequate food supplies. But an examination of the three wartime capitals—Berlin, London, and Paris—suggests that food shortages, or “periodic food-supply crises” were endemic to urban economies that had to cope with massive shifts in population and employment, troop movements, and breaks in the supply chain.⁵⁶ For Australia and New Zealand, the demand for food among the other warring powers at times led to shortages of supplies domestically. In New Zealand, for example, prices in the major towns rose by an estimated one-third between 1914 and 1919. In the United States the market-based policies of Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration allowed prices to rise largely uncontrolled. That policy may have bolstered production, but it also contributed significantly to wartime inflation and reduced workers’ purchasing power. France saw no improvement in life expectancy but also essentially no decline, despite losing 1.3 million men, or nearly 17 percent of its armed forces. France’s ability to feed its population improved as the war continued, but it remained largely dependent on infusions of agricultural and industrial commodities that came through British supply lines. For the working-classes of France and Britain, the record was uneven. Some sectors, especially the unskilled and those outside the prioritized munitions industry, experienced greater hardship.⁵⁷

The story for the Central powers took a dramatically different turn. Germany’s loss of 1.6 million men may have represented a slightly smaller percentage (15.4) of its armed services than Britain’s or France’s, but the deaths were more concentrated among young men, a symptom of how deeply conscription had reached into German communities. Real wages fell more sharply in Germany—by as much as half—along with purchasing power, especially among so-called “nonessential” workers and civil servants. Nutrition plummeted as shortages of food became chronic in some regions after 1915, and life expectancy declined sharply. The contrasting trajectories of children’s nutrition in Britain and Germany highlight the differences most dramatically. While children in Britain saw only slight declines in nutrition (and nutrition for the poorest actually rose), in Germany cases of unsatisfactory nutrition rose significantly and by 1918 half of all children showed signs of anemia. The “food front” generated growing tensions over shortages and inequities in distribution and produced local direct actions varying from riots to forcible food seizures that put growing pressure on local governments. A Berlin police report in July 1917 described the origins of a small, spontaneous riot that erupted when “a number of persons who had to leave the market empty-handed exited the market in small groups headed for the city hall” where they were advised to “get bread where they have it to sell.”⁵⁸

Housing conditions deteriorated during the war in many locales with the massive restructuring of employment, shifting labor markets, and the absence of any significant new construction of standard housing. Overcrowded conditions in already-congested urban working-class districts became more widespread. Municipal and state authorities had no resources to devote to the kinds of housing improvements and new publicly subsidized workers’ housing that social democrats and many liberal reformers had pushed for in the prewar period.⁵⁹ Similar patterns developed in the three major capitals, where local governments variously instituted and unevenly maintained rent relief or moratoriums for selected populations, particularly the families of those called for military duty. By 1915–16, as the war settled into stasis, the angry clamor of landlords for rent payments that had been deferred and the growing frustration of tenants produced a wave of conflicts in the form of rent strikes, tenant organizing, and new initiatives for rent control, frequently pushed by labor and socialist local officials. Despite some prewar improvement in the housing stock, largely in suburban settlements that catered mostly to middle-class and skilled working-class tenants, the housing inequalities and hardships of the prewar period continued or intensified during the war. Wartime “patriotism” served as a basis for the widening critique of landlord “selfishness” and the “rapacity of ‘panic-stricken plutocrats.’ ” Housing concerns contributed in no small measure to labor and socialist demands to “conscript wealth” through redistributive social policies.⁶⁰

Free Speech

Efforts by states to manage information, contain discontent, and limit the growth of opposition took a variety of forms that almost always involved controlling the use of public space. In Wellington, New Zealand, the city council, still dominated by propertied elites, took a hard line over the use of public space by excluding the Anti-Conscription League on the grounds that “the speeches may tend to create breaches of the peace in the city,” and applied the same principle to requests from the Labour Representation Committee. By late 1916, leading figures in the New Zealand labor movement faced arrest and incarceration for speeches that openly opposed conscription.⁶¹ In Britain, local police raided the quarters of the Independent Labour Party and its Labour Press Association in London and in Salford/Manchester, carrying warrants issued under the “Defence of the Realm” regulations. The authorities seized a substantial quantity of pamphlets and other publications. In a letter of protest over raids in northern cities that targeted local branches, ILP national secretary Francis Johnson, noted that “instead of prosecuting the publishers of our literature at the Manchester Headquarters, a mean method of annoying and prosecuting humble men in different localities has been resorted to, the evident purpose being to intimidate and to select for punishment men who are least able to stand persecution or to secure justice.”⁶²

Although violent attacks on war opponents and outright prohibition of their public meetings appeared in many towns throughout Britain, some pockets of vigorous anti-war agitation persisted, and with substantial effect. Huddersfield stands out as a noteworthy case. Even the local mainstream press carried only muted criticism of war opponents and offered limited rhetorical support for what a socialist editor called the “shrieking brotherhood of armchair patriots.” When other towns prohibited conscientious objectors from holding positions as teachers, the Huddersfield Town Council resoundingly defeated a similar proposal. A tolerant coalition of labor and liberals with strong support from the local labor movement held firm. In Australia, with a federal labor government in power and labor well represented in a number of states, the formal repression of civil liberties, except for that directed at the IWW, was significantly less severe than in the United States, where the federal government unleashed its full power against labor and socialist war opponents once war was declared in 1917.⁶³

In Germany, the Bethmann-Hollweg regime, intent on maintaining the loyalty of social democratic moderates in the Reichstag, moved initially with some caution to limit public opposition and the use of public space. Social democrats revealed their fear of the censors’ heavy hand in the speech choices party members made, and concern for the potential suppression or confiscation of party publications.⁶⁴ Twice, the party leadership had to intercede to forestall government action against Vorwärts for its outspoken opposition to the war. Eventually, in October 1916, party leaders took over editorial control of the strident Berlin publication. The street as a public site of protest had some history in twentieth-century Berlin, Hamburg, and other major German cities. Although the war initially provided occasions for the use of public space to mobilize the populace in defense of the regime and to ferret out spies and political enemies, the streets quickly became an oppositional site with spreading food riots in 1915 and more organized acts of opposition and strikes. The State of Siege, once strongly enforced in 1916, allowed military commanders to censor socialist publications, and some went so far as to prohibit SPD membership meetings and speeches of any kind by key leaders.⁶⁵

Conclusion

In one country after another, municipal labor and socialist activists, whether anti- or pro-war, focused their work on the local domestic front in five areas: 1) defense of civil liberties and democratic reforms, most notably the extension of suffrage; 2) a continuing fight for labor representation at municipal and parliamentary levels, so as to avoid the erosion of prewar gains; 3) a class program of economic reforms in wartime that reflected an extension of the principles behind their longstanding municipal reform program—around issues of unemployment, expansion of the public sector, trade union standards of employment for city workers, school feeding, relief of distress for the needy, especially the families of those called to service, and relief from escalating rents and expansion of public housing; 4) opposition to conscription (whether of soldiers or workers) and the defense of trade union principles; and 5) support for the “conscription of wealth” through expanded taxation during wartime to promote greater equality. Around this program, from one country to another, they fought to maintain the integrity of their politics and to assert the interests of workers who were so crucial to the war effort. These principles could unite laborites and socialists, despite their differences over the war itself. With variations in emphasis, this program represented a common response of local social democrats around the world to the exigencies of war. It provided a rallying ground for labor that would ultimately enhance its position in municipal as well as parliamentary postwar politics.

9

The Wartime Politics of
Everyday Life in Britain

Fred Jowett and Wartime Internationalism

In early August 1914, Fred Jowett, the Bradford city councillor who had been a Labour member of Parliament since 1906 and would soon be chair of the ILP again, was deeply anguished over the imminent outbreak of hostilities and the collapsing international solidarity of the socialist movement. He spoke to a large crowd at the Manningham Fairgrounds in Bradford on August 3, the day before war ensued.

It will be the greatest war the world has ever seen, a crime against civilization, a disaster compared with which the Napoleonic wars were a mere skirmish. It is the people who will have to suffer. Those who make their money by producing armaments—the gang who make profit by creating jealousies and bad blood between nations—may gain. But the people, the common men and women of all lands who have no cause to quarrel, they will have to pay in millions of lives and in anguish and sorrow. Let us who are Socialists keep our minds calm, our hearts free from hate, and one purpose always before us—to bring peace as soon as possible on a basis that will endure.¹

Jowett remembered vividly the passions unleashed during the Boer War, when he and his municipal council colleague E. R. Hartley had spoken on platforms in Bradford and across West Yorkshire about the Independent Labour Party’s opposition to the South African conflict. At Peckover Walks in Bradford, they faced a hostile crowd hurling invectives and occasional missiles before they withdrew. Hartley recorded the scene in his diary.

The ILP decided to hold a peace and protest meeting. Before the meeting a number of young studs began to amuse themselves by throwing a dead cat about. We began promptly being greeted by a storm of hisses and applause, on rising to speak was hit by a piece of hard frozen dirt and afterwards [hit] by a stone attack on head. Fred [tried] for a long time to get a chance to speak but whenever I made a move the groans began afresh—at the end of 40 minutes Fred Jowett suggested that we had better close. I then made a few remarks in the direction of their protest and we closed.²

By April 1915, Jowett, again serving as national chairman of the Independent Labour Party, presided at the Norwich party conference, where the ILP declared its unequivocal opposition to the war. His principled stance against compromise with the Liberals had roots not only in his active opposition to the Boer War and his criticisms of the Labour Representation Committee’s strategic compromise in 1900, but in his unrelenting criticism of the Liberals’ “secret diplomacy” and commitments to France that he had known would lead inevitably to cataclysmic war. Before the war came, these views had placed him at odds with Robert Blatchford and on occasion with Ramsay MacDonald. His split with Blatchford came over the question of further expansion of the navy, debated in the columns of Blatchford’s Clarion in 1909. “You think,” Jowett wrote to Blatchford, “our rulers will play the international chess game in any case, and you, reluctantly, agree to equip them for it.”³

The brutal dimensions of the war had become evident by 1915. Speaking to delegates at Norwich, Chairman Jowett expressed the sentiments they held with near unanimity. “Now is the time to speak and ensure that never again will the witch’s cauldron of secret diplomacy brew the war broth of Hell for mankind.” He affirmed his defense of “the German people” and his “profound respect [for] that section of the German Socialist Party which has stood true to the International, as we are trying to do.”⁴

F. W. Jowett, Bradford City Councillor and Chairman of Independent Labour Party (UK), 1917

Following the Norwich conference, Jowett, Bruce Glasier, Philip Snowden, and others were joined by Ramsay MacDonald in carrying the party’s message to the country’s far corners. MacDonald, somewhat to the surprise of his colleagues, had resigned his position as chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, when it failed to support his criticisms of the government’s secret diplomacy. With time, his opposition strengthened and, as Jowett said, “his action gave us a new confidence. He had sacrificed his career and faced unpopularity because he would not become a jingo ‘yes-man.’ ” Facing “war-mad crowds” again brought considerable risks and threats of violence, from which hasty retreat was necessary at meetings in London and Cardiff. But in the Welsh district Merthyr Tydfil, which had repeatedly elected Keir Hardie to Parliament, the crowds cheered the ILP opponents of war.⁵

Chairman Jowett would be called on repeatedly to articulate the views of the ILP over the next two years as the carnage mounted. Wearily, in August 1917, he recounted the massive casualties (50 million) and costs of war (£15 billion) and his own call at the Manningham Fairgrounds for the government to state unequivocally its war aims “if we did not wish to pile up corpses ten mountains high.” But he also acknowledged that the burdens of war were “sapping the very life of our people as well as that of enemy peoples,” forming them into a vast “community of suffering.” But he now could see a “bright hope of a better day.”

Many see the truth already, which is that the peoples have all alike been stampeded by fear. The number of the disillusioned grows. The scales are falling from men’s eyes. Churches have failed again but the cross they have thrown down is being taken up by others who will carry it until the cry for war has ceased.⁶

With the tide of national fervor and what Jowett and others decried as “jingoism” running high, labor and socialist critics initially found themselves defending a minority position. Their prewar successes, so notable at the municipal level, now seemed fragile, their voices and their concerns for workers’ daily life struggles muted and marginalized. But, as the costs of war rose sharply, not simply on the battlefield but on the home front, they found renewed support for their reform agenda and even for their opposition to the war itself. As fervor for war flagged and the stream of volunteer soldiers proved inadequate to resupply the ranks of the fallen, one country after another moved toward “conscription” of men, but not wealth, as many on the left demanded.

In the Municipalities: War Emergency Workers’ National Committee (WEWNC)

In the face of nationalist fervor, local labor activists at first hunkered down, refocused their attention, and prepared to assert their claims to economic fairness and democratic rights in a nation at war. Their work in cities proved critical, as it had before the outbreak of hostilities. The key institution devised by Labour for defending workers’ wartime interests proved to be the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee (WEWNC), in which Sidney Webb and others played a crucial role.⁷ The attention given this organization in the historical literature has largely overlooked the arena of the municipalities.⁸

The war became the occasion to pursue a broad working-class reform agenda, significant elements of which had been part of the prewar municipal agenda of the ILP and LP. The WEWNC urged branches to press local authorities to fulfill their responsibilities in wartime. “The money is there if only they will take action.” They called for

public employment at wages in their own trades for as many as possible; work and training at definite allowances for the men and the women for whom situations at wages cannot be found; “baby clinics” and school feeding for the children; relief adequate to full subsistence for every case for which other provision is not made; no one to be driven to the Poor Law—this is the policy to be demanded throughout the kingdom.⁹

Escalating wartime grievances came home to roost in municipalities. It was to local government institutions that workers and their Labour Party allies turned for remedies to the deteriorating conditions of daily life brought on by the war. In some places, local action began in the war’s earliest weeks. The records of the WEWNC provide an extraordinary window on the continuing efforts of workers to address grievances and win representation on local government bodies during wartime.¹⁰

With the onset of hostilities, Britain’s war cabinet and Local Government Board issued a circular to all municipalities mandating the formation of broadly representative “Local Distress Committees.” The just-formed WEWNC urged local labor parties and Trades and Labour Councils to pursue representation on these new committees. They quickly became sites of local political struggle. Many locals reported that labor found itself excluded or marginalized in such bodies. Less than a week after Britain had entered the war, the secretary of the Independent Labour Party in Camberwell Borough wrote that the mayor and town clerk ignored the Trades and Labour Council’s recommendation of five of their members to serve on the Citizens’ Relief Committee. “The Citizen Committee (of about 40 to 50) met last night and we received no invitation to be present … The Trades Council and organized labour have been completely ignored.” In response to their complaint and others, Labour Party secretary J.S. Middleton reported that many places experienced such exclusion of Labour Party and trades union representation.¹¹

Some local labor organizations seized the initiative to prevent price gouging and set an agenda for what a Citizens’ Distress Committee might undertake. August Price, the secretary of the Labour Representation Committee in Eastleigh, reported that when local businessmen “endeavoured to make an immediate profit … by raising their prices,” a public protest meeting “and the subsequent formation of a Vigilance Committee at a ‘Town’ Meeting” caused them to reverse course. He asked that local Distress Committees “deliberate upon schemes of relief work,” ensure that the “Provision of Meals Act” was properly administered, assume responsibilities of a Health Committee where none existed, and “take any action in the matter of food supplies and prices” that may have been necessary. He requested a copy of the Local Government Board’s circular and indicated that Labour’s three representatives on the town council would take these issues before that body.¹²

Clearly, for some, the war crisis offered an opening for labor to expand the scope of its local power. In a self-described “somewhat scrappy epistle” the general secretary of the Leeds Labour Party told his national comrades of the maneuverings they had engaged in to maximize labor’s influence in local war-related matters. The city council declined to form a special committee and instead chose to have its own “General Purposes Committee” assume responsibility for “all matters arising out of the war crisis.” With only a single Labour representative on the committee, the Labour Party pressed for and won a second appointment to the committee of eight. To enhance the effectiveness of the Labour representatives, they devised a plan for a special Labour Party advisory committee to solicit from their ward organizations information about conditions “in their different localities, with a view to strengthening the hands of our two men on the Central Committee.” The Leeds party secretary also noted that women lacked any representation on the committee. With unemployment rising rapidly, especially in the clothing and engineering trades, the Labour councillors pushed for more work sharing and expanded municipal housing.¹³

By September 1914 the extent of economic disruption produced by sudden mobilization for war had become clearer, and Labour’s War Emergency Committee prepared a pamphlet designed to guide local activists in their efforts to address Labour’s wartime needs. They also clarified the WEWNC’s intention to pursue many of Labour’s well-established goals for municipalities. Addressing the problem of unemployment, the committee cited the language of the Local Government Board itself, which had encouraged local authorities to “expedite other schemes of public work and thus absorb a considerable amount of labour.” In the WEWNC’s view, the emphasis on public works employment “at the standard Trade Union rates of wages” would overcome “one of the drawbacks of private capitalism” (its “timidity”), which was already reflected in the discharging of “their ‘hands,’ whether men and women, or putting them on short time.” The WEWNC called for “schemes for the employment of women” affected by wartime labor market disruptions. But the management of any such scheme had to be in the hands of subcommittees that included “a strong representation of women from working class industrial occupations.” Beyond employment, Labour proposed adequate and humane relief, without deducting other incidental income a family might have and without imposing as conditions degrading “tests of destitution” or “moral character.” They argued for a broad definition of unemployment caused by the war, arguing that any unemployment occurring after August 1, 1914, was a consequence of the war as was the inability of the unemployed to get “reemployment.”

As the war unfolded, domestic affairs continued to be deeply imprinted with the local politics of class. In November 1914 the WEWNC received complaints from the Clitheroe Labour Council that one of its members on the local Distress Committee was being denied the right to make or second motions in committee by virtue of his being on relief, a consequence of war-related unemployment. In Tottenham, the local “Vigilance Committee” complained that the local Distress Committee was “overweighted” with representatives from the “COS [Charity Organization Society], churches and chapels, and so on” and ignored Labour’s advice in its decisions to exclude cases.¹⁴ By early 1915, it became clearer that the availability and price of food would be an issue of great public concern. The Salford/Manchester Trades and Labour Assembly reported the local’s intention to pursue these issues by forming a “Food Sub-committee” broadly representative of Labour’s interest. Middleton responded enthusiastically that such a local initiative paralleled developments nationally with the WEWNC, which “has been the means of drawing together in a common cooperation the members of the Labour and Socialist movement.” He believed that “the lessons we are learning” day to day nationally and locally “in this national crisis will be of immense value to us when normal times return.” He urged the committee in Manchester unite “for the purpose of preserving … their industrial interests,” no matter what differences they might have “with respect to military policy.” These differences posed “no reason whatever why they should not unite solidly and preserve the Labour and industrial interests in civil matters.”¹⁵

The War Emergency Committee received numerous complaints from local Labour Party secretaries about the failure of local authorities to abide by previous understandings regarding the appointment of new members to fill vacancies. Under the Elections and Registration Act adopted in August 1915, all local elections were postponed for a year. The government subsequently extended the postponement until the end of the war. The parliamentary debate suggested that the principle of party continuity adopted in 1914 for the “co-option” of parliamentary seats would be applied to local body vacancies as well.¹⁶

A sustained controversy in Eastbourne, Sussex, erupted over the failure of the town’s Board of Guardians to reappoint a Labour member. The dispute highlighted how local elites continued to challenge labor representation during the period in which local elections had been suspended. The Trades and Labour Council submitted its candidate, but the board chose instead a local minister with no labor affiliation. The secretary of the Trades and Labour Council asked the board to appoint a labor-affiliated councillor. “The vacant seat being essentially Labour,” the TLC assumed there would be no opposition “as all parties are now united for the best interests of the country during the war.” But the opposition claimed that Labour’s incumbency was a “fluke” (the result of a three-cornered contest). Further, they alleged that Mr. Marshall had made disloyal comments and that Labour pushed its own agenda in public bodies. A conservative councillor claimed,

These people … came on to public bodies in the name of the Trade and Labour Council but as soon as they got there their action and their programme were Socialistic. That was all it was. He hoped they would not have them there, and the sooner they were off the Town Council the better. Councillor Marshall wanted to come there to blow his own trumpet.¹⁷

In spite of repeated efforts, the Eastbourne TLC was unable to get the appointment reversed and had to deal with the “contemptuous” attitude towards Labour shown by the board. The “party truce” had clearly been shattered. A “war” within the Guardians would continue well into the next year, including TLC accusations of mismanagement and mistreatment of aged and infirm inmates.¹⁸

From July 1915 through most of 1916, WEWNC secretary J. S. Middleton continued to be bombarded by complaints and grievances from local Trades and Labour Councils and Labour Party branches regarding the right of parties to “co-opt” vacant seats held by their members. Cases erupted in South Shields, Llanelly, Rishton, Willesden, Liverpool, Penzance, Burton-on-Trent, and elsewhere pertaining to seats on Boards of Guardians, town or urban councils, and school committees. In some cases, these bodies moved to exclude Labour nominees based on their anti-war views. Some were deemed ineligible because of membership in the Union of Democratic Control or other “no-conscription” organizations or as conscientious objectors to military service. The Labour Representation Committee in Burton stood unanimously behind its nominee and refused to name a substitute. Writing for the Trades and Labour Council, Victor Taylor asserted that

the Council, in nominating Mr. Smith, was not concerned with his militarist views or actions, whether pro or anti, the question being whether he would or would not make an efficient representation of this organization on the Education Committee … This Council having considered the matter in all its bearings, has unanimously decided that it cannot make any substitution for Mr. Smith’s name believing that the position is valuable to the Council only in so far as it is given the right to elect its own representatives.¹⁹

The wider issue had to do with defending during wartime the positions that labor had won in municipal government during the prewar period. Decisions about poor relief, municipal employment, wartime housing or food needs lay at the heart of labor’s municipal agenda. It would become increasingly clear that the exigencies of war also created new opportunities for expanding the public sector and public enterprise (municipal trading). In Walsall, the Board of Guardians sought to select its own labour representative, not of the TLC or LP choosing. The Walsall Labour Association argued that “the deliberate ignoring of labour political organisations in this way is both irritating and mischievous [sic].” It added, with unmistakable implications for labor’s future cooperation in wartime, that such action “does not conduce to the smooth working of either political or industrial truce in the locality affected.” To Middleton, Secretary Fox from the Labour Association added, “We consider that we are intelligent enough to choose who shall represent Labour and we do not intend to allow Liberals and Torys [sic] to do it for us.”²⁰

In the view of many local Labour Party activists, it was only a matter of time until the “political truce” in municipal elections would be overthrown and local labor associations enter into “active propaganda campaigns” on labor’s behalf. As a local union official from Doncaster wrote, “My council are very anxious to place men before the electors in the various wards … Our cause is suffering because our hands are tied with reference to the Metboro Council.” And the secretary of the Pembroke County Labour Party reported that a gathering of 1,500 “rate-payers” protesting a large salary increase to a county official also unanimously supported a motion to “reopen all elections.” Middleton replied that the WEWNC executive committee opposed such a move because of the “hopelessly inadequate” state of the municipal register of voters in most districts.²¹

Other issues pressed forward in cities as labor fought to protect its prewar gains. These included unemployment and concerns about the “conscription of labour,” but also food, housing, and care for the destitute, including the families of soldiers. As casualties mounted, traditional pacifists and advocates of a negotiated peace found new receptivity for their views in a widening circle of opposition that included the dominant faction of the Independent Labour Party, some suffragists, and now local activists who witnessed firsthand the miseries of the home front. Those hardships were borne home unevenly. Even if inflation and wage increases in some sectors had differential effects, a general decline in working-class consumption and further deterioration of an already badly eroded housing stock added fuel to deteriorating wartime industrial relations.²²

Cooperation between the ILP and the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), which had formed in the days immediately following the onset of war, provided a political comfort zone for labor and some liberals to voice opposition to the war. The UDC’s wartime path and the Liberal Party’s disintegration led dissenters inexorably toward labor.²³ Opposition coalesced most notably at the local level.

Bradford

No city in West Yorkshire or in Britain stood more at the center of working-class opposition to the war than Bradford. Although both the Bradford ILP and the Trades and Labour Council were deeply divided over the war, an anti-war majority in each gained greater prominence as the war progressed. With conscription looming on the horizon, opposition deepened. The trades council with ILP support provided the organizational muscle for successive campaigns against inflated food pricing, but also in support of the “Anti-Rent Raising” campaign, for the Lord Mayor’s Relief Fund for the destitute, and to bolster a “Joint Food Vigilance Committee.” The threat of conscription strengthened the hand of war opponents among the trade unionists, who likewise saw in the suspension of trade union rights under the Munitions Act of 1915 a fundamental threat to trade union principles, under the cover of war.²⁴

The complexity of the Bradford opposition to the war is reflected in the position of Fred Jowett, its esteemed city councillor, member of Parliament, and wartime national chairman of the ILP. Jowett, though never a pacifist, was among the earliest and most outspoken opponents of war. But once war was underway, although he continued to fire salvos at the government for its secret diplomacy and urged a speedy and comprehensive peace, he reluctantly, and still critically, supported the prosecution of the war. In his chairman’s address at the Norwich ILP conference in 1915, he acknowledged the changed circumstances labor now confronted. “We conceive that the best we can do now is to protect the worker, whether he is serving in the trenches or in the mine or the factory, and his wife and children, from some of the consequences that usually accompany and follow after war.” In the face of jingoism, he asserted, “it is our duty to dispel misunderstandings, nail down lies, and remove the noxious growth of hate which spreads so rapidly when nations are at war.”²⁵ He never forsook his internationalism and spoke in respectful and comradely ways of his German social democratic colleagues, but he also expressed support for the British and allied troops carrying on the fight.

Jowett and MacDonald still routinely faced hostile crowds. At one “huge” meeting on Carlisle Road in Bradford, they walked out after speaking, only later to learn that a young man standing near the police cordon with a grenade in hand had been disarmed by friends. At an unruly meeting in London, the Daily Express had “practically invited the public to make the meeting impossible,” and at Cardiff, they were forced to escape through a side door, when “hordes of toughs stormed the gathering.”²⁶

With local elections put on hold, Bradford’s party representatives (Conservative, Liberal, and Labour) met on October 5, 1914 to affirm the guiding principle recommended by the government that seats vacated by a sitting councillor “shall be filled by the election unopposed of the nominee of the Party to which such Councillor belongs and similarly in 1915–16 if necessity arises.”²⁷ The agreement essentially froze the status quo in which Labour enjoyed significant but still minority representation.

If local government elections remained suspended, the same could not be said of Labour’s efforts to advance its agenda for municipal reform or the resistance it faced from Conservatives and Liberals. During a series of polarized votes in March and April 1914, the Bradford City Council had jousted over Labour-initiated measures to restrict wage increases of city officials, increase local rates based on revaluation of lands, undertake housing surveys, support a wage increase for street sweepers, and oppose the lending of Bradford city police to other municipalities during strikes.²⁸

The onset of war and the electoral “armistice” left in place local divisions in city council. The Labour councillors favored plans to erect a public bath in a poor district (defeated), supported a request from trade unions to increase public workers’ wages in the face of wartime inflation (referred to committee), proposed that a wage ceiling for high-wage employees be applied to private contractors (approved), that government consider nationalizing the coal industry (approved), and that a proposed committee to recommend “economy in expenditure” for the city be eliminated (defeated).²⁹ Prewar votes in council had generally drawn a consistent core of seventeen to twenty votes in support of Labour. Wartime votes witnessed a somewhat larger core Labour vote of nineteen to twenty-two, on occasion augmented by votes of Liberals to reach a majority as high as thirty-three. At the end of the war, the Labour core in the Bradford council would be further enlarged in 1919 to thirty-two. Hardened by its wartime experience, the “Labour Group” in council was prepared to function in an even more disciplined way after the war.³⁰

The West Riding

Across the West Riding, sentiment about the war varied by community and over time. But certain textile towns, most notably Huddersfield, stood out for the depth and persistence of their opposition. The Huddersfield case, thanks to the work of Cyril Pearce, is especially well-documented.³¹

Anti-war sentiment seemed to hold sway in Huddersfield almost from the outset of the war. That tradition reached as far back as the Boer War, and radicals retained significant influence within the local Liberal Party. They asserted their skepticism over the war and the excesses of jingoist elements within the party. In the town council, they led resistance to “releasing” town employees for military service, deeming it a form of coercion and a form of “Prussianism” that violated English principles of “individual liberty.” They refused to prohibit conscientious objectors from teaching in the schools, and they maintained a strong commitment to freedom of association and assemblage, even for mobilizing against the war.³²

Most labor unions and rank-and-file socialists in town largely opposed the war. The strength of the ILP and the strong anti-war position adopted by the local labor paper, the Worker, nurtured that opposition and facilitated cooperation with other anti-war elements in the local community, even in the face of the pro-war position taken by national leaders and some local activists in the British Socialist Party (BSP). As the war continued into 1915 and beyond, Huddersfield, like other industrial towns, had strikes—especially in textiles—fueled by wartime grievances over wages and lagging overtime compensation.³³

The onset of conscription in February 1916 intensified community-wide opposition. The No-Conscription Fellowship and No Conscription Council acquired a new relevance with the looming implementation of the Military Service Act in January 1916. Pacifist groups including the Society of Friends and the local Union of Democratic Control were now joined by leaders from the ranks of socialists and trade unionists to support conscientious objectors, a majority of whom claimed non-religious, ethical, or socialist grounds for their opposition to military service. By this time, a broad-based community of war opponents had become a powerful force in Huddersfield’s political life.³⁴

In York’s Labour Party, sentiment against the war gathered strength after conscription came into effect. At local party meetings in the months that followed, the Labour Party branch passed resolutions against “compulsory military service” and protested the brutal treatment of conscientious objectors. The party continued to interest itself in municipal affairs by arguing that wartime was an appropriate moment to broaden the municipal franchise and give representation to all of those serving in the military who were without the vote. In addition, the branch advocated payment of county and borough councillors in order to broaden representation and proposed expanded municipal housing. Over the course of 1917, the party continued protests over the treatment of COs and violations of civil liberties. As in Huddersfield, York Labourites drew closer to other anti-war activists after the adoption of conscription. Along with the Society of Friends, they refused to submit public circulars to the censors for prior approval.³⁵

Philip Snowden had returned from a six-month tour of North America and New Zealand after the outbreak of war and joined the vocal opposition to the war from the moment of his return in the first week of February 1915. But, as the conscription issue pushed to the fore, like other prominent opponents of the war, he was frequently confronted by hostile elements in the crowds that he spoke to. At Huddersfield and Hull, as well as town hall meetings in his Blackburn constituency, small contingents of military service personnel attempted to shout him down. Snowden noted in Blackburn that “nowhere had he found any glorification of war, vain boastfulness, lust of blood or territory, but everywhere sorrow, sadness, and shame and a horror that such a thing should be possible between nations professedly civilized and religious.”³⁶ But, at Oldham and Rochdale, Snowden was able to speak without interference, although he was denounced in the local press amid calls to disrupt the local meetings. But in scores of communities, local tribunals insulted and ordered the incarceration of conscientious objectors. Local authorities, with or without direction from the Home Office, used the Defense of the Realm Act to indiscriminately confiscate or prevent publication of material deemed to be inciting opposition to recruitment obstructing the war effort.³⁷

Manchester

Manchester lay at the hub of the northern manufacturing districts. Its economy and urban growth had made it synonymous with the industrial revolution in textiles. Its byproduct was a restive factory proletariat. Although the center of gravity in textile manufacturing moved over time to outlying factory towns and villages of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, Manchester remained the industry’s commercial hub. Its working-class districts continued to be centers of local oppositional politics. The Independent Labour Party in Manchester/Salford had been founded in 1892, a year before the national organization. Its municipal elections had been hotly contested during the 1890s and into the early years of the new century.³⁸ The ILP branch minutes reveal the local’s sustained attention to a whole range of municipal issues, from municipal trading to public works employment to school feeding of “necessitous” children. The Pankhursts, mother and daughters, actively participated in branch affairs, and the branch asserted its strong support of their suffrage campaign.³⁹ The ILP remained the core of the local Labour Representation Council (LRC) after 1906 and included significant representation of the Trades and Labour Council and the Social Democratic Federation.⁴⁰ By the eve of the Great War, the Manchester LRC held fifteen seats on the town council, and at the end of the war the Labour caucus approached a near majority. In Salford, where the prewar LRC had been hobbled by socialist sectarianism, Labour held only one seat in the council, but in the 1919 municipal elections the Salford LRC would claim twelve.⁴¹

Prewar successes had given the ILP/LP reason for optimism locally, but, as was the case in many places, the initial shock of war mobilization, popular jingoism, and public hostility toward war opponents left the party and its trade union allies deeply divided and disoriented. Initially, the ILP and its municipal councillors put up a brave and defiant front, calling for labor demonstrations against the war.⁴² But as war momentum rose, the party’s attention focused on German atrocities in Belgium and on managing the effects of locally surging unemployment and rising prices. Just three weeks into the conflict, Liberals and Conservatives raised the possibility of postponing municipal elections scheduled for November.⁴³ By early in the new year, a broad coalition of labor organizations stirred into action and called for daily demonstrations at some thirty-four major sites of employment in the city to protest rising food prices.⁴⁴ In May, a joint conference of the Manchester and Salford Trades and Labour Council, the local Labour Party, ILP, and Union of Democratic Control unanimously passed peace resolutions despite scattered procedural objections over timing.⁴⁵ And, in early June, the ILP National Council issued a manifesto appealing for British workers to oppose military conscription. “What the conscriptionists want, however, is not recruits, but a system of conscription that will bring the whole male working-class population under the military control of the ruling classes.”⁴⁶

The groundwork for political engagement over issues related to the war and its impact on working people had been laid by the WEWNC in a September 1914 pamphlet, “The War Emergency: Suggestions for Labour Members on Local Committees.” The committee’s pamphlet seized the opportunity to push a municipal program, much of which predated the outbreak of war. The WEWNC now utilized the war emergency to promote an expanded public sector, trade union standards of employment, women’s training and employment, an alternative system of relief, “baby clinics,” and school feeding. The war, the committee noted, “upsets nearly all industries, and private employers are everywhere discharging their ‘hands.’ ” These “drawbacks of private capitalism” required action.

The only effective remedy is for the public employer (that is, the National Government or the Local Authorities) to increase public enterprises and start additional public works of utility, so as to give employment in their own trades, at the standard Trade Union rates of wages, to as many as possible of the men and women who would otherwise be unemployed.

The WEWNC argued that the best remedy lay in employment in their trades for publicly useful work,

not necessarily for the production of “profit,” or, indeed, of anything to be sold in the market, but for the many purposes of public usefulness that are still quite inadequately supplied, such as the execution of all sorts of work of repairing, painting, cleaning, and improving; the provision of additional houses, schools, hospitals, etc.; of more roads, parks, bridges, etc.; of further furniture and equipment for all our institutions and of book-binding for our libraries; the better clothing of the inmates of our asylums, schools, etc.; and ever so many other things that could advantageously be done by public bodies with a view—to use the Government’s own phrase—“to maintaining the volume of employment.”⁴⁷

This call for local activism on behalf of an expanded public sector and to protect workers’ interests came at the outset of the war, four years before the Labour Party itself, in the war’s last year, moved decisively to commit the party to expanded public ownership.⁴⁸ The WEWNC provided a manifesto that would guide activists’ work in local “Distress Committees” but also in town and borough councils, local Guardians of the Poor, and school boards. Their work in municipalities gave content to labor’s agenda and strategically repositioned the Labour Party and the ILP during the course of the war to claim the political space forsaken by a collapsing Liberal Party.

As in other places, Manchester activists inside and outside the town council took up the charge. The first local volleys in this domestic war of position came not over the legitimacy of the war itself but around a set of issues of standing concern to the working class—unemployment, the welfare of the poor, adequate housing for working people, free speech, school feeding, municipal employment at trade union rates, and the provision of public services such as tramways, public baths, libraries, and leisure facilities. War might complicate but not displace this labor agenda. And as the horrors of war unfolded, labor interests in many localities were drawn to defend war dissenters and anti-conscriptionists, and to renew their commitment to internationalism in the interests of free speech and peaceful resolution of the conflict.

With municipal elections postponed under the Elections and Registrations Act of 1915, the partisan alignment in the council remained essentially frozen for the duration of the war. Disputes over the appointment of new members served to maintain awareness that municipal politics, despite the wartime pressures for national unity, would continue to function in partisan ways.⁴⁹

The war may initially have covered the conduct of the Manchester City Council’s business with a cloak of patriotism, but it did not dampen the partisan spirit that engaged the council around the concerns of its labor members. One primary arena of continuing contention was the “Workmen’s Special Committee,” appointed by the Lord Mayor in November 1914 to consider the “desirability” of uniformity in wages and a standard eight-hour day for all city employees, as well as a minimum wage for female employees. The committee would be comprised of all the relevant council committee chairs and some at-large councillors, including Labour member James Johnston, along with former Liberal and now independent member, Margaret Ashton. However, with consistent non-Labour majorities, the committee failed to forward recommendations that would have advanced the wages and shortened the hours of municipal workers. Amendments put forward by Labour councillors to increase minimum wages across the board or specifically for workmen in the electricity department failed in the full body despite garnering some Liberal support.⁵⁰

The acute housing shortage brought on by war produced a coalition of labor, cooperative, women’s, and tenants’ organizations to petition the Sanitary Committee of the council to “take steps with a view to proceeding with the Housing Schemes at present held in abeyance owing to the Treasury restrictions.” Labour councillor Johnston gave notice of his intent to move action by the Local Government Board to permit surplus land held by the city to be used for house building.⁵¹ While demands for publicly subsidized housing had been a staple of the prewar Labour Party’s municipal agitation, the war provided new opportunities for such demands to be aired, even if most non-Labour councillors found such an extension of municipal action into the private sector unimaginable, even under the exigencies of wartime.

Ongoing efforts by city authorities to curtail the use of public facilities by organizations known to oppose the war received repeated reaffirmation in committee and before the council. On December 22, 1915, the Town Hall Committee specifically ordered the city treasurer and town hall steward to refuse use of the hall for the following organizations: Union of Democratic Control, Fellowship of Reconciliation, No-Conscription Fellowship and the Independent Labour Party, all of which had taken positions opposing the war.⁵²

Other areas of contention continued to surface as the war proceeded. Each in its own way tested the boundaries of public and private spheres. Labour members pushed for a public mandate to provide greater supplies of coal and gas to the “poorer classes” in the population, for which a special committee was appointed. They resisted attempts by Conservatives and Liberals to increase the financial contribution from the city’s municipal enterprises—electricity, gas, tramways—to city finances in order to reduce rates on private property. Labour instead argued for lowering prices to consumers. The tax relief to property owners from gas and tramways receipts passed, in each case by close votes. The issue had clear implications for the well-being of poorer people, whose payments for basic city services had more significance for labor and its allies than did tax relief for property owners.⁵³

As the cost of living rose, municipal workers and their trade unions petitioned city council for war bonuses to compensate for the increased prices. These appeals in 1916 and the early months of 1917 largely fell on deaf ears in the respective council committees. But, by mid-August 1917, the demands for wage bonuses had escalated from 12 to 15 shillings per week. Labour councillors continued to be largely excluded from key decision-making positions on the Workmen’s Special Committee (that heard wage appeals) and the Housing Conditions Special Committee.⁵⁴ On the other hand, under the chairmanship of T. R. Marr, a Labour councillor from New Cross, the “Housing and Unhealthy Dwellings Sub-Committee,” with Sanitary Committee approval, successfully resolved issues relating to specific problematic dwellings. The “Municipal Lodging Houses Subcommittee” recommended contracts for supplying basic necessities and guaranteeing “satisfactory means of escape in case of fire” for the inhabitants of these municipal properties.⁵⁵

As the war continued, council proceedings revealed the limits of labor’s capacity to direct events. By late 1917, the sharply rising costs of living produced nearly constant appeals from municipal employees’ unions to the Workmen’s Special Committee and ultimately to the council itself for “war bonus” increases because, as the president of the Amalgamated Association of Tramway and Vehicle Workers wrote, rising prices were “making it almost impossible for the working man to live.” With a tone of some frustration, the Manchester deputy town clerk pushed for a joint meeting of local authorities in Lancashire and Cheshire to coordinate their responses to labor’s demands.⁵⁶

Because the partisan alignment in the council remained frozen for the duration of the war, Labour could do little in the short term to further its municipal agenda beyond occasional skirmishes that it almost always lost. Incremental increases in representation on key committees—war pensions and food control, for instance—did little to shift the balance of power in council.⁵⁷ On the other hand, ruling elites—a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals—could only watch as wartime circumstances deepened the grievances that working people felt over the deteriorating conditions of everyday life.

By 1917–18, the council had to acknowledge contention around issues of consumption that opened a gaping hole in the civic community, but it responded only in piecemeal fashion. That hole was most evident in dramatically rising costs for foodstuffs and other essentials, including housing. Toward the very end of the war, builders and real estate interests weighed in with the Special Housing Committee to encourage repeal of acts imposing special rates on property (1910) and regulating rents (1915). They sought to discourage any move by municipalities to institute public housing as an alternative to the private market. In short, they argued that a “proposal to subsidise the erection of property by the Municipalities will prevent private endeavor helping in the present crisis.” Instead, the committee argued for public subsidies to private builders to “cooperate … in securing the necessary provision of houses for the working classes.” But, even under pressure from tenants for lower rents, the real estate interests, whose testimony before the committee carried great influence, asserted that the “shutting out of private enterprise” would be a “calamity for the country.”⁵⁸

The city council through its respective committees (tramways, electricity, cleansing, etc.) felt pressure to accede to demands for additional wartime wage bonuses as workers’ standard of living deteriorated. Private employers, fearing the impact of new municipal wage standards on the private sector, watched and occasionally intervened to encourage restraint. A wide range of municipal unions continued to focus pressure on the “Workmen Special Committee.” The appeals came from, among others, the Amalgamated Association of Tramway and Vehicle Workers, the Amalgamated Operative Street Masons, and the Paviors and Stone and Sett Dressers’ Society but also by 1918 from broader unions of municipal workers like the Workers’ Union, the National Union of General Workers, and the Manchester Corporation Joint Employees’ Committee. The latter put forward a demand for an across-the-board reduction in the working week to forty-four hours, which the Workmen Special Committee dismissed, saying that it would “deal only with representatives of properly-constituted bodies.”⁵⁹

In the face of increasingly unified working-class demands for wage increases and shorter hours in late 1917, governing elites in municipalities across Lancashire and Cheshire called for municipalities to undertake “united action … for the purpose of resisting” any applications for further wage increases. By mid-1918, the Workmen Special Committee noted with satisfaction that seventeen municipalities were “acting together” in matters pertaining to municipal employment. These cities complained that the national Committee on Production under the jurisdiction of the Local Government Board was agreeing too readily to requests for municipal wage increases, which “are extravagant, have an entire absence of uniformity, and bear no relation to the increased cost of living … The awards appear to be based upon a policy of expediency.” But, when a strike of Manchester/Salford municipal employees broke out in early August 1918, the city authorities quickly convened a meeting with representatives of seven unions to arrive at an agreement “between all parties concerned … subject to the men at once returning to work.” The pattern of local concessions on wages emboldened the masons and paviors to request payment for the August bank holiday, when they were on strike! That far the Workmen Special Committee was not prepared to go.⁶⁰ But tide was clearly moving in labor’s direction by the end of the war in matters of municipal wages and the expansion of the public sector in solving the housing crisis.

Pressure Points of Conflict: Housing, Strikes, Free Speech, and Conscription

Wartime created a stew of popular discontents that weakened the hold of ruling elites locally and nationally, while strengthening the power of the state to intervene in economic and civic life.⁶¹ Such interventions cut in several directions at the local level. Despite early popular support for the war and attempts to curtail dissent, groups harmed by the war forged new coalitions. Hard-pressed tenants, conscientious objectors, free speech advocates, consumers, trade unionists, socialists, and the ILP gravitated toward opposition, at first circumspectly and then more openly.

Housing crisis and tenants’ direct action

Agitation around housing and rent issues predated the outbreak of war. The participating organizations ranged from moderate housing reform groups that sought remedial action for unsanitary housing conditions to Tenants Defense Leagues that adopted more aggressive tactics of exposing slumlords or on occasion promoting rent strikes. The ideal of a “moral economy,” according to historian David Englander, may have been at the root of housing agitation as it had been for claims of access to food by “their riotous forbears.” But, in prewar times, such grievances rarely precipitated direct action. Nonetheless the undercurrent was there, when, for instance, John Benn spoke on housing issues to the Bermondsey Labour League. “In olden times there was a bread famine and a man locked up his corn in order to make more out of it; when people were reduced to extremity his place used to be burned down…. He thought that the man who took advantage of a house famine was just as guilty.”⁶²

Beyond agitation for fair rents, municipal labor activists and their political allies envisioned a path toward state provisioned or municipally owned housing for the working class.⁶³ Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Sidney Webb sought to give a systematic accounting of the “functions of local government” to guide local activists during wartime. Among the routine functions of road and bridge maintenance, provision of tramways, and care for the “defective and dependent,” Webb listed unqualifiedly “the proper housing of the people,” and at another point “the public provision of housing.”⁶⁴

In the first months of the war, the WEWNC solicited the views of local activists about the prospects for continuing to advance “municipal housing schemes.” The results showed remarkably widespread initiatives that had been stifled by the outbreak of war and sharply rising costs for building materials and loan guarantees. In Jarrow, local Labourites reported, “Housing scheme suspended owing to increased cost of building material and high rate of interest. These reasons for delay were most strenuously advanced by house property owners on Council.” In South Shields, “local Labour activity” pressed for adoption of municipal housing and other improvements but conservative opponents asserted government approval would be delayed for months. In Wigan, the borough engineer declined a “scheme for 145 houses” and for “sewage reconstruction” and public “baths enlargement” because of rising labor costs and “increased cost of materials.” The national leadership of the WEWNC wrote urgently to Lloyd George requesting a meeting to discuss how “conflicting [government] policies” on employment and distress were exacerbating the problems.⁶⁵

The immediate demands of war may have put on hold any large-scale initiatives to expand municipal public housing, but the deepening housing crisis in a war-heated economy cried out for remedial action on both national and local levels. Beleaguered war workers, tenants, and their Labour Party and trade union allies watched rents rise sharply. With housing shortages in areas that saw a huge influx of war workers, they seized the initiative.

From the initial days of war, many tenants had assumed that a general but temporary moratorium on commercial debt ought logically to extend to them as well. And, with employment disrupted and prices on the rise, many fell into arrears for reasons they believed justified. Rising levels of “ejectment” followed the informal withholding of rent payments and further fueled more concerted, if still largely unorganized, rent withholding. While trades councils and the WEWNC generally favored ameliorative measures, such as appeals to rent courts or local or national authorities, growing numbers of rent strikes over the course of 1915 signaled working-class impatience with landlords’ intransigence. Conflict grew in London, Birmingham, and elsewhere across the country but, by the fall of 1915, it had become especially intense on the Clydeside, where the prospect of alliance with waterfront and munitions workers appeared most troubling to authorities.⁶⁶

Out of the escalating complaints, a War Rents League formed and focused public attention on literally thousands of cases of landlords raising rents to unconscionable levels, most outrageously on soldiers’ families with few resources who were desperate to stay in their quarters. Responding to this outpouring of frustration, the league sought pressure points in government and the courts for immediate relief. Assembling data on the avalanche of rent increases, most notably in the London suburbs, Dan Rider, who spearheaded the league’s efforts, was shocked. In areas like Enfield and Woolwich, where huge numbers of workers had flocked to work in munitions, “the most extravagant rents were being demanded” not simply from munitions workers but from “everybody who lived there, irrespective of circumstances.” With one hundred percent increases common, “speculative builders” and others “thought their chance of getting easy money had arrived.”⁶⁷ The league drew inspiration and energy from tenants themselves and from the support they garnered in Labour Party circles. Dan Rider, now devoting his full-time energies to the league, recounted an evening excursion to attend a mass meeting in the London neighborhood of Tooting, renamed by aggrieved tenants as “Looting.” Despite a severe attack of lumbago, Rider journeyed to this unfamiliar territory, and on the final leg of his tram ride, he idly remarked to other passengers, “I hear they are raising rents in Tooting”; at once “the whole of the passengers turned round towards me and began speaking all together.” By the time the tram reached its destination, Rider recalled, “I was provided with the family history and detailed records of the crimes of every landlord for miles around,” not only in Tooting but in all the surrounding boroughs.⁶⁸

The appeals of the national leaders of the Labour Party and the WEWNC took on an increasingly assertive tone. Middleton wrote to Prime Minister Asquith in October 1915 complaining about the actions of landlords across the country. Based on reports that “this committee is daily receiving from many different parts,” he observed,

This raising of rents is not only inflicting great hardship likely to affect adversely both the public health and infantile mortality, but it is also (a) arousing ill-feeling and resentment against the war; (b) seriously interfering with recruitment; and c) hindering the increase of output of munitions.⁶⁹

The most serious manifestation of rising discontent came in areas that saw the largest influx of workers in the munitions industry. As occupancy rates rose nearly 100 percent, landlords and their “factors” sought any excuse to raise rents or to eject tenants and seek new tenants at higher prices. In the context of sharply rising prices for food and other commodities and deepening workplace grievances over speedup in the critical war industries, the compounding crises reached explosive proportions. Nowhere was this more the case than on the Clydeside, with its shipbuilding works, munitions factories, and other basic industry.⁷⁰

With construction coming to a virtual halt in the first months of the war, the demand for housing escalated sharply in Glasgow and surrounding communities. But contraction in the housing market had preceded the war. The municipal administration estimated that between 1912 and 1915 the city required upwards of 65,000 new units, but only 1,400 had been built. By early 1915, what the Govan Press called “the stubborn facts within the daily experience of workmen” had set the stage for what would become massive resistance to the actions of landlords.⁷¹

The spring and summer saw the escalation of popular efforts to prevent wartime rent increases. Mass meetings, often organized by women, local organizing on a flat-by-flat basis, and direct action to withhold rent and prevent evictions multiplied. At the same time, activists pressed municipal bodies to undertake what Joseph Melling called a “radical reappraisal in municipal housing programmes.” A crowd estimated at 4,000 prevented the eviction of the McHugh family (with a badly wounded father and two sons serving in the war) for falling behind in its rent payment. When members of the crowd nailed a Union Jack across the doorway to the flat and burned an effigy of the offending landlord, socialist activist John Wheatley saw the case as only the most recent “in a long line of cruel, crushing, insulting treatment to which the Capitalist class has subjected the working class.”⁷² The agitation broadened over the summer to involve the ILP as well as a variety of fair rent organizations. In the city council the Labour representatives, although able to marshal a near majority, ran into an intransigent coalition representing the propertied interests of the boroughs.⁷³

By the fall 1915, rent withholding had taken on new dimensions with a massive strike of 20,000 tenants in the Clydeside. Women undertook aggressive action to thwart sheriff deputies seeking to evict tenants, driving off the officers with “pease meal, flour, and whiting.” The climax came when eighteen munitions workers faced prosecution in the Small Debts Court for rent withholding. Helen Crawford, one of the strike leaders, described the dramatic scene. “I will never forget the sight and sound of those marching men with black faces. Thousands of them marched through the principal streets down to the Sheriff Court and the surrounding streets were packed.”⁷⁴ William Gallacher remembered the outpouring from workshops and factories. “On we went, leaving the factories empty and deserted, shouting and singing.” The size of the crowd made multiple speaker’s stands necessary.

Our platforms were unique. Long poster-boards had been picked up from the front of newspaper shops. These were placed on the shoulders of half a dozen husky, well-matched workers and the speaker was lifted on to them. It was a great experience, speaking from a yielding platform and keeping a measure of balance while flaying the factors and the war-makers. Roar after roar of rage went up as incidents were related showing the robbery of mothers and wives whose sons and husbands were at the front. Roar followed roar as we pictured what would happen if we allowed the attack on our wages.⁷⁵

“White with apprehension,” the sheriff telephoned the minister of munitions, Lloyd George, and was told to stop the prosecution because “a Rent Restriction Act will be introduced immediately.” When word was relayed to the crowd surrounding the court, a celebration of victory, with “shouting, singing, and cheering,” lasted through the night.⁷⁶

The popular revolt had assumed unprecedented proportions. First, agitation now took place throughout the UK, far beyond the initial centers in the Clydeside and some London suburbs, to include Birmingham, Sheffield, Belfast, much of London, Coventry, Birkenhead, and Northampton. Second, sympathetic actions by industrial workers, especially in the shipyards and engineering works, were not simply threatened but undertaken. The prospect of coordinated strikes and tenant actions captured the attention of authorities worried over the interruption of war production, especially in the munitions sector. And third, what had been put forward by cabinet leaders as a compromise position during the spring and summer, namely the creation of “fair rent courts” to hear grievances of tenants, now seemed untenable in the face of swelling discontent. The focus shifted to legislation banning any rent increases beyond prewar levels.⁷⁷

In November, the WEWNC convened a meeting to address the growing crisis through new proposed legislation. In the company of Hyndman, Middleton, and representatives of the Workmen’s National Housing Council, the War Rents League, and the two largest property owners’ associations along with several members of Parliament, Sidney Webb laid out what now seemed a moderate set of proposals that included no rent or mortgage interest increases for the war’s duration and an appeal process to resolve disputes. With pressure growing for a broader attack on private enterprise in housing, the Local Government Board moved quickly to devise an acceptable legislative resolution.⁷⁸

By December the government had adopted what became known as the Rent Act of 1915 that would impose new, if not wholly effective, restraints on landlords. The measure applied only to dwellings with a rental or ratable value of between £26 and £35 depending on region; rents were fixed at levels of August 3, 1914, and the only increases permitted were for a fixed portion of structural improvements or increases in rates. Protection of tenants against “ejectment” did not apply to failure to pay allowable rent or to fulfill the tenants’ legitimate responsibilities.⁷⁹

Attention now turned to enforcement of the Rent Act and longer-term solutions to the housing crisis through expanded public housing. Landlords and their factors continually tested the terms of the Rent Act with unwarranted rent increases and attempts to use the courts to extract payment or authorize eviction.⁸⁰ In some cases, city councils again became the critical venue for addressing housing issues. Prewar public housing proposals, suspended with the war, now received new attention. But initially what progress was made came largely through funding for temporary housing by the Munitions Board to meet the most urgent needs—often in slipshod and poorly constructed dwellings that were virtually uninhabitable. By the end of the war, focus shifted to the prospect that rent controls would be lifted, and with that a renewed threat of massive rent strikes again loomed. The prominence of local Labour Party and ILP activists in the rent struggles contributed to the new political opportunities they faced at the war’s end.⁸¹

Strikes in Wartime

Strike activity in the warring countries followed broadly similar trajectories as did the intertwining of work-related grievances with other wartime burdens.⁸² Opposition to an increasingly stalemated war deepened as casualties rose and as day-to-day hardships became more unbearable. Strikes took on a new political dimension. They became linked to issues of food and housing but also to a system of conscription that highlighted the deep inequalities in war service and the profiteering that seemed a natural byproduct of a largely unregulated capitalist marketplace. Questions proliferated. If working-class men were conscripted, why should not wealth and wartime profits also be conscripted? Why should capital be free to seek its most profitable outlets but workers be denied freedom of movement and the right to quit? And if workers in theory gave up the right to strike during the war and therefore their ability to bargain effectively over the terms of employment, did they not effectively become subject to “industrial conscription” in ways that gave greater power to employers?

Historians have noted the sharp increase in industrial conflict that beset all of the warring countries as the war entered its third year. In its early months, the war produced quiescence, as economies adjusted to the massive drain of military recruitment on manpower. Tightening labor markets followed the early dislocations and generated pockets of unemployment. By 1917, grievances over accelerating inflation in food and housing prices produced growing threats of widespread industrial action. Changing employment conditions compounded consumption-related grievances as employers, particularly in the rapidly expanding munitions sector, introduced “rationalization” techniques that intensified work and undermined longstanding practices of job control exercised by the skilled metal trades, coal miners, and others.⁸³

Wartime grievances over issues of daily life alone are insufficient to explain either the transnational scope or simultaneity of rising levels of labor conflict and the militancy that these mass actions evidenced.⁸⁴ By 1918, the prospects for an international general strike had ripened substantially, and in the case of Germany, the war’s end brought political and economic collapse that threatened a revolutionary transformation analogous to the Bolshevik Revolution just a year prior.⁸⁵ But, if the international dimensions of domestic conflict were stunning, so too were the local struggles that left the social and political order of the late war years pockmarked. John Horne has noted the extent to which new war industries swelled older “proletarian districts.”⁸⁶

Processes of class formation and political mobilization antedating the war must be considered in assessing the impact of the wartime strikes. The incidence of strikes had been trending sharply upward in Britain since 1905 and in France since 1910. For Germany, the notable strike waves of 1905–08 and 1910–14 were, according Boll, a prelude to the postwar crisis.⁸⁷ A “revolt of the laborers” in the United States swept the country from 1909 onward with massive strikes of unskilled immigrant workers in steel, garments, textiles, and coal mining.⁸⁸ Also impressive in fueling strikes had been working-class politicization between 1910 and 1914, evident particularly at the municipal level.⁸⁹ The election of labor and socialist activists to local bodies provided a beachhead of support from which workers drew strength before and during the war, even when a nominal electoral truce for the war’s duration ostensibly suspended formal political competition at the local level, as happened in Britain.

Important as the prewar strike wave may have been, the war produced what some historians regard as a qualitative change that foretold a more militant and politically mobilized working class. Despite British national trade union leaders’ support for the government’s war policies and discouragement of strikes that might interfere with war production, the number of wartime strikes accelerated. In 1912, approximately 1.2 million workers had gone on strike, but three-fourths were miners. By 1919, only one-third of the 2.4 million strikers were miners. Cronin concluded that these patterns suggest that “the period of the war simultaneously strengthened workers enormously, angered them bitterly, and forced them to interpret their problems politically.”⁹⁰

The labor movement achieved a semblance of unity in 1917 despite internal tensions over the war. A militant, expanding shop stewards’ movement in the metal trades linked their struggles to renewed miners’ campaigns for immediate economic demands and against conscription. James Hinton has argued that “jingoes” in the trade union movement and the Labour Party succeeded in excluding anti-war elements of the ILP from a leadership role, but, in the end, found themselves marginalized from the ongoing struggles over consumption and work relations. As Hinton observed,

Unity was maintained, above all, by joint activity over domestic issues. The social consequences of war created tasks and opportunities for the labour movement to which many of its leaders turned with some relief, leaving on one side the contentious issue of the war itself. “Let us do our own work like the French peasant cultivates his fields close to the firing lines,” said Sidney Webb, and he spoke for an uncommonly wide range of opinion on both sides of the pro-war/anti-war divide.⁹¹

While national leaders may have found some comfort in this species of unity, a continuing challenge from below at the local level promised to realign class power and potentially disrupt longstanding elite and employer dominance in local governance. As Cronin has astutely noted, processes of class formation in neighborhoods, intensified by protests over food and housing shortages, cut across segments of the working class and “imparted a wider sense of class loyalty and class antagonism to the events of 1917–20 than probably would have developed in a more purely industrial situation.”⁹²

Early in the war, the cooperative posture of national trade union leaders toward war mobilization may have dampened any eruption of concerted strike action. However, by 1917, as the consequences of intensified war production took hold especially in the munitions industry and diluted the customary practices in the skilled trades, a new climate of conflict took shape. Industrial grievances now intersected with consumption issues and with the state’s conscription of men for military service to shatter industrial peace. While local struggles on the Clyde and in the mining villages of South Wales did not represent the whole of Britain, those sites of conflict were symptomatic of broader discontent that flared in strikes against government policies perceived to be forms of “industrial conscription,” in Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, and elsewhere.⁹³ The extraordinary importance of munitions and shipbuilding in wartime strikes is evident in a comparison with prewar levels. In the decade and a half before the war, only 16 percent of days lost to strikes were in engineering and shipbuilding, but these sectors had nearly one-third of all wartime strikes.⁹⁴

The impositions of the “servile state” through conscription, coercion of workers and their unions, and curtailment of freedoms of speech compounded industrial and consumption conflicts. The challenge to existing inequalities—which had already been gaining force in the prewar years—took on new relevance when the sacrifices demanded by wartime were so patently unequal. This new political alchemy created conditions which, with the eventual broadening of the franchise, opened up unprecedented political space at local and national levels. The new Labour Party constitution of 1918 attempted to codify, albeit in moderate terms, the new claims for public control of the economy that wartime conditions had encouraged.⁹⁵

Crises on the Clyde

Paradoxically, what some historians have called a tradition of “craft conservatism” proved an engine of labor militancy under the rapidly changing economic conditions of wartime. The legendary “Red Clydeside” made this development especially notable. The roots of that militancy lay in the craft control exercised by skilled workers in the engineering workshops during the late nineteenth century. It flowered in the strikes of the immediate prewar years as employers challenged craft control through the dilution of skill, the use of machinery operated by less skilled workers, and, like their counterparts in the United States, through the introduction of Taylorist methods of wresting shopfloor control from skilled engineers (machinists). During the war the battle against dilution became nearly inseparable from the wartime consumption struggles, particularly around housing and food.⁹⁶ And those struggles inevitably took on the coloration of specific localities, fostered alliances that bridged divisions based on skill, and catapulted women into the forefront of leadership in ways that shop floor struggles alone would not have. Community politics and mass mobilization around issues of consumption sprang from what R. J. Morris called “the experience of an interventionist municipality.”⁹⁷ Those interventions may have largely “provided infrastructure and services for a thriving liberal capitalist economy,” but “it took only a little imagination to see that such interventions could direct consumption towards working-class housing, health and nutrition.” It was precisely the clash of values produced by national mobilization for war that sharpened perceptions of unequal sacrifice as a manifestation of deeper class inequality locally. Glasgow may have “developed a decentralized creative and ill-disciplined socialism” out of its own community-based politics and the prewar network of working-class institutions, but it took war conditions to intensify that politics and give it what some, perhaps imprecisely, saw as a revolutionary turn. Whether it was the surging crowds of rent strikers or the strategic actions led by the Clyde Workers’ Committee, ILP political activists invariably stood near the leadership core that gave programmatic support, if not direction, to local political action.⁹⁸

Much of the discussion of wartime labor conflict has focused on struggles over dilution in the munitions industry—nowhere more centrally than on the Clyde. But that story has tended to overshadow the wider disaffection with the government’s war policies that intertwined industrial issues. The rank-and-file shop floor struggles led by socialist activists ended in something of a truce with employers who enjoyed government support. Employers ultimately proved able to resist encroachments on their prerogatives by shop stewards and informal bodies like the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC). Even so, by 1917, workers and their unions had strengthened their collective bargaining claims and their capacity to resist “industrial” conscription, including the most extreme forms of dilution.⁹⁹

The broader struggle over wide-ranging wartime grievances—not the least housing and rents—contributed directly to local political realignment that positioned the ILP and its activists to challenge for power in the postwar years. The campaign against industrial conscription and the Munitions Act of 1915 contributed to a broader mobilization in which the ILP played a central role. Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) leader David Kirkwood told Lloyd George these measures had the “taint of slavery” and branded the brow of workers with a B to signify their attachment to their employer (Beardmore).¹⁰⁰ In Melling’s words, it was the contacts that militant trade union activists had “with the struggles over consumption that changed workers’ sensitivities and gave producers a new awareness of the need for political reconstruction.”¹⁰¹ The ground had been broken in the prewar years around issues of daily life through municipal campaigns focused on the care and feeding of schoolchildren, the selling of contaminated and adulterated food, and the demand that workers’ cottages be funded by surpluses from municipal services.¹⁰² Of no small importance was the prominent role that women played in the wartime consumption struggles. The somewhat facetious story told by Scottish Labour activist Arthur Woodburn signified deeper changes shaking the social order. According to Woodburn, “The most revolutionary thing that ever happened in Scotland at that time was when J.S. Clarke’s wife made Davy Kirkwood wash the dishes—which he had never done before.”¹⁰³

The ILP operated outside the tainted leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party and its collaboration in wartime policy making. In Scotland, in the coal fields of South Wales, and elsewhere, the ILP won new credibility. Melling again notes,

The ILP captured the leadership of different campaigns because it practiced a form of dual politics, simultaneously rooted in everyday life and conventional political arenas, which ignored party boundaries and was based only on the discipline of the specific project, not the party card. This meant that a broad coalition of social groups could be assembled in support of various speakers at Glasgow Green.¹⁰⁴

The ILP’s principled stand against the war, articulated so forcefully by leaders like F. W. Jowett, Ramsay MacDonald, and Philip Snowden, and local figures like Harry Hopkins and Andrew McBride, strengthened its hand further by the war’s last years. ILP membership in the West of Scotland doubled during the early war years and trebled by early 1918.¹⁰⁵

Conscription and free speech

The ILP from the outset had “refused to be a party” to the war. Eight months into the conflict, Bradford city councillor and ILP chairman Fred Jowett, speaking at the Norwich Annual Conference, articulated a cautious path of opposition and one consistent with the party’s record in local struggles. “We conceive that the best we can do now is to protect the worker, whether he is serving in the trenches or in the mine or the factory, and his wife and children, from some of the consequences that usually accompany and follow after war.”¹⁰⁶ When the party reassembled at Newcastle in April 1916, much had changed. The war, now in the ninth month of its second year, had produced more than 13 million casualties. Jowett, still chairman, spoke with a new heaviness. “The war is bringing nothing but the dead sea fruit of decimated manhood and impoverished resources to any of the nations concerned.” But, domestically, much had also changed. A coercive Munitions Act had been pushed through by “Mr. Lloyd George—the Minister for Compulsion.” Dissenting newspaper and party literature had been forcibly confiscated; activists jailed; and militant munitions workers deported. But most tellingly, military conscription had been introduced to feed men into the war machine.¹⁰⁷

Conscription came in stages, as voluntarism faltered and support for the war flagged. When the National Registration Act went into effect on August 15, 1915, military conscription seemed inevitability at hand, and as Joan Smith has argued, “increasingly arguments about conscription took over from arguments about the war.”¹⁰⁸ In each of the warring countries, debate over conscription erupted simultaneously but with different outcomes, notably in Australia and New Zealand.¹⁰⁹

While the British government had moved cautiously against anti-war opposition in the early months of the war, the steps toward outright conscription, first with registration and then the conscription act itself, were associated with a spasm of repressive activity that was quite unprecedented. At least in the short term, these measures were effective. In September 1915, the government arrested John McLean, the legendary Glasgow socialist labor educator and persistent thorn in the authorities’ side. Cited for violations of DORA (Defense of the Realm Act), McLean had responded to a heckler who told him to (en)list by declaiming, “I have been enlisted for fifteen years in the socialist army. It is the only army worth fighting for. God damn all other armies.”¹¹⁰ This was, of course, only a prelude to widening conflict on the Clyde that came with the fall rent strike, the tumultuous meeting with Lloyd George, and the subsequent deepening conflict over conscription. By most accounts, the December 24, 1915, meeting, at which Lloyd George attempted to explain the imperative for increased production of munitions by diluting traditional crafts, provided a flashpoint both for outspoken opponents of conscription and the government’s campaign to silence the movement’s leadership. Biographer Nan Milton provides an account of the ill-fated meeting at which the discredited Labour Party leader Arthur Henderson sought to introduce George in the face of a “hurricane of hissing and booing.” He declared:

I am delighted … to have the opportunity of appearing in this hall with the Minister of Munitions (interruption—what about the hall for the workers?) to lay before you the great issue of the present moment so far as the war is concerned (aye! Profits!) You are all aware of the fact that we are engaged in probably the greatest war (at hame!) that ever the old country has been concerned with.

When George finally took the podium amid “jeers, catcalls and boos,” the audience rose to sing two verses of the “Red Flag” and then despite his efforts and the urgings of David Kirkwood, he could hardly be heard. As Nan Milton recounted, “then Johnny Muir stood up on a bench to address the meeting. There was instant silence. The platform party walked off in disgust and the meeting was left in the hands of the workers.” McLean, Gallacher, and their colleagues energized the surging agitation. According to Gallacher,

McLean was everywhere. His indoor meetings were packed out; until he was forced to run two meetings a night. He was the centre of the anti-war movement … He demanded an immediate armistice, with no annexations and no indemnities; along with this went his drive for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class.¹¹¹

Because the ILP and BSP militants within the Clyde Workers’ Committee connected their campaign against dilution with anti-war and anti-conscription activity, the government responded with an especially harsh round of deportations and incarcerations that sidelined some of the movement’s most effective leaders, including McLean and Gallacher. By January 1916, the Glasgow Trades’ Council had passed an anti-conscription resolution, and with opposition spreading, the government followed the deportations with the suppression of the Forward and the Vanguard. The conflict also spread to the municipal council, which prohibited anti-conscription meetings in city hall, and in turn suspended its protesting Labour city councillors.¹¹² When the Worker, successor to the Forward, published an article titled “Should the Workers Arm?” it too was suppressed. Even though the article answered the question in the negative, its most serious threat was linking “all the political questions facing the Glasgow working class.” According to Joan Smith, “the article was clearly subversive because it connected the ‘chains’ of the Munitions Act, the ‘gate before our lips’ (restrictions on free speech), the ‘plunder of rising food prices,’ and the new conscription law.”¹¹³ The government’s battle against conscription and the attempt to curtail oppositional speech had spread far beyond the Clyde.

When the ILP positioned itself in opposition to conscription in the early weeks of the war, it went further to express skepticism about “voluntary” recruitment. “Much as we detest universal military service, which we shall continue to oppose, that plan would be less discreditable than the general hunting and harrying of young men now taking place, often without knowledge of their individual circumstances and dependents.”¹¹⁴ But by June 1915, with mandatory registration and conscription looming, the ILP leadership reframed the critique of conscription in ways that would shape the campaign in the months ahead. It would also bring down the wrath of the government. “What the conscriptionists want, however, is not recruits, but a system of conscription that will bring the whole male working-class population under the military control of the ruling classes.” The ILP National Council urged workers and their unions to “take action to protect themselves and the nation” from “this attempt compulsorily to militarise the working class.”¹¹⁵

In August 1915, immediately following the adoption of mandatory military registration, the strong arm of government restrictions of speech and publication came quickly to rest on the ILP and UDC. The August 19 issue of the Labour Leader, official organ of the ILP published in Manchester, appeared with a dramatic blank column on page ten along with a preliminary report of the police raid the previous day on the newspaper’s offices and mention of the simultaneous raid on the ILP headquarters in London.¹¹⁶ The next issue of the Leader on August 26 provided a “Full Story of the Raid.” The Manchester offices had been entered by thirty plainclothes detectives from the municipal police. They covered windows with brown paper to shield the ongoing raid. They confiscated all issues of the Labour Leader for August 5 and 12 and examined the proofs of the upcoming issue (August 19), deleting a letter from Clive Bell on “Trade Unionists and Conscription” (hence the blank columns). The police additionally confiscated all copies of pamphlets on their list, including such titles as “British Militarism” (370 copies) and “Nationality and Patriotism” (2,576 copies) by C. H. Norman, “Causes of the War,” (2,540 copies) by “C. P. S.” and one copy of every other pamphlet. The summons, printed in the August 26 issue, declared that the material had been seized for “making statements likely to prejudice his Majesty’s relations with Foreign Powers and the recruiting and discipline of his Majesty’s forces,” offences declared to be in violation of “Regulation 27” of the Defense of the Realm Act.¹¹⁷

Wartime Censorship of Labour Leader, August 19, 1915

The ILP National Administrative Council filed a formal complaint with the government for violating its pledge not to use DORA to “suppress the expression of public opinion of a reasonable and legitimate kind whether it does or does not coincide with the views and declarations of the Government.” The general secretary, Francis Johnson, described a situation in which politically prejudiced magistrates sat in judgment of pamphlets for which “they were quite incapable of giving an opinion which would carry any respect.” Their “indiscriminate condemnation” covered pamphlets on subjects ranging from “baby clinics to Balkan history, from denials that the Labour Party was atheistic to speeches reprinted from Hansard.”¹¹⁸ In the London raid, a police detective seized a copy of the “Communist Manifesto” from a shelf and demanded to know when it had been published. When told 1848, he dropped the matter. The NAC proposed to defy the government’s ban by openly selling additional copies of proscribed pamphlets from its Brighton Ferry branch in the next week.¹¹⁹

By early September, evidence of a partial government retreat seemed clear. Proclaiming “Victory” in a lead article on September 2, the Labour Leader reported that a magistrate had ordered the return of confiscated copies of the newspaper. The seized pamphlets were, however, to be destroyed. The events of August produced an outpouring of public support for the ILP and opponents of conscription, including from the trade unions. Although some raids continued and public speakers at Stockport and other locations were arrested and fined for “prejudicing recruiting,” public opinion seemed to be forcing the government to limit its most aggressive moves. The Labour Leader called for a broad coalition to oppose conscription in all its forms. “If we can pass through the war without it, it will be a great deal more difficult for the Conscriptionists to succeed in imposing it upon us afterwards.”¹²⁰ Nonetheless, despite opposition the government continued to move ahead with plans to institute conscription and isolate its opponents.

Although the membership of the Labour Party and the TUC seemed determined to resist conscription, the leaders early in the new year walked a fine line, first calling for Labour’s ministers to withdraw from the cabinet over the issue and then reversing its position. The Labour Party annual conference in January opposed the Military Services Act but defeated a resolution calling for active efforts to win repeal. In April the Parliamentary Labour Party voted against extension of conscription, but then, under government pressure and weakening resolve of the TUC, it backed away from further opposition. A bitter Ramsay MacDonald confided to his diary in January: “Their feebleness is discouraging. I begin to doubt as to the future of the Party.” And, in May 1916, he wrote to the Labour Leader, “In the history of the reaction this chapter will be headed: ‘How we [the government] succeeded with Labour.’ ”¹²¹

With military conscription now a reality, opposition pivoted to take up the plight of conscientious objectors and refocus the conscription debate around the broader issue of conscription of labor and wealth.¹²² A first line of defense remained the battle to maintain space for the opposition to mobilize and express its continuing opposition to the war. This battle centered on the municipalities and the demand for access to public facilities. In Manchester, the Town Hall Committee of the city council recommended on December 22, 1915, that use of “any of the Public Halls” be denied a number of organizations: the Union of Democratic Control, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the No-Conscription Fellowship, and the Independent Labour Party. Labour members of the council offered a series of amendments to the committee report, when it was presented in January. They sought to delete the restriction on the use of the hall. The amendments were “negatived” on a strictly party line vote with only the fourteen Labour members supporting the amendments.¹²³ The York Labour Party protested repeatedly against conscription, the violation of civil liberties, and the “brutal treatment” and denial of suffrage to conscientious objectors.¹²⁴ On the Clydeside, opposition to the war had a sharper edge. Socialist activist John Maclean went to jail for violating DORA. That same month, the Glasgow municipal council prohibited anti-conscription meetings of the Herald League, the ILP, and the Free Speech Committee. The protesting Labour city councillors were, in turn, suspended.¹²⁵ Despite initially being denied access to public halls, the ILP and the trades council in Huddersfield called a massive anti-conscription demonstration in December 1915. The rally passed by acclamation a resolution expressing “its emphatic opposition to all forms of conscription,” and its pledge “to resist the imposition of any measures of compulsory service, whether industrial or military.”¹²⁶

The extent to which pro-war, pro-conscription sentiments jeopardized free expression and continuing mobilization against the war varied from one community to the next. While the Huddersfield Town Council allowed anti-war groups to use public halls and defended the positions of COs who were public school teachers, other northern towns—including Liverpool, Halifax, and Leeds—were not so tolerant.¹²⁷

Local Military Service Tribunals, created along with the country’s adoption of conscription, heard appeals from individuals seeking exemption from military service—on the grounds of health, hardship, or conscience. The nearly 2,000 local tribunals were comprised of representatives of all political parties but tended to reflect conservative, pro-war attitudes of their largely middle-class business and professional members. Anti-war and labor members of the tribunals were not unknown, but they represented at best a minority voice in the deliberations. In some communities, Labour members of town councils stepped forward to ensure that working-class interests would be represented on the tribunals.¹²⁸

Compared to the vast number of applications for exemption on other grounds, conscientious objectors nationwide numbered between 16,500 and 23,000 from 1916 to the end of the war.¹²⁹ As opposition to the war deepened, COs increasingly framed their objections on political grounds, opposed alternative service on the basis of principle, or went underground to avoid call-up. The standards applied by tribunals varied widely. Many adopted extremely coercive measures, including forced shipment to the war zone of those claiming CO, or threatened execution for refusal to serve. Public support for objectors grew in the face of such threats. In some localities, outright refusal was publicly applauded.¹³⁰ By late 1917, the ILP was routinely urging local branches to pass resolutions condemning the government’s brutal treatment and imprisonment of conscientious objectors.¹³¹ Snowden and, to a lesser extent, MacDonald grew increasingly alienated from the Parliamentary Labour Party, whose association with the wartime government had grown more intimate. While continuing to work closely with the ILP, they also collaborated more directly with the UDC and the No-Conscription Fellowship in opposing conscription and the war.¹³²

Conscripting Wealth and Expanding the Public Sector in Wartime and Beyond

After passage of the Munitions Act, with its restrictions on worker mobility, “conscription of labor” took on expanded, quite specific meaning, as did labor’s call for the “conscription of wealth.” No one made these cases more forcefully than the miners’ leader Bob Smillie, the newly chosen chairman of the WEWNC. In the fall of 1915, the Forward reported that “Bob Smillie, at the Miners’ Congress, declared that before Conscription of Labour, there must be conscription of Land and Capital.”¹³³ And in early January, as the Military Service Act and conscription came up for debate, Smillie distributed a letter to delegates at the Bristol convention of the Labour Party calling for opposition.

Once admit, even by acquiescence, the claim of the State to compulsory military service from any class of men, and you cannot logically defend the voluntary principle in industry. If military conscription is right, upon what solid ground can munition workers, transport workers, railwaymen, miners or those engaged in any vital industry, claim to be exempt from industrial compulsion?¹³⁴

The demand for “conscription of riches” opened the door for a wider debate that had implications for nationalization and municipalization of industries. But it also potentially justified the Labour Party’s continued support of the war effort.¹³⁵ Sidney Webb’s thinking on these questions continued to powerfully influence the policies voiced by the WEWNC and the Labour Party for the remainder of the war. Webb saw in the “universal submission to the national need” in time of war an opening for policies that included conscripting wealth. As he wrote to fellow Fabian George Bernard Shaw in August 1915, if it were up to him, he would conscript “not young men for the trenches only, but also property and possessions—everything to be placed at the disposal of the Government against a mere receipt on paper, and then let the Government Departments organize what they could in each branch.”¹³⁶ Despite the urgings of others, including Hyndman, Webb’s vision in the end fell far short of conscripting wealth that might entail full-scale “ ‘nationalization’ or ‘municipalization’ of production.” These questions would rise again in 1918 as the Labour Party, looking to the war’s end, revised its constitution to make explicit its claims to collective ownership and management of the economy.

That a war economy might lead, if not to socialism, at least to an expanded public sector was an idea that cropped up repeatedly, especially in local contexts in Britain and other warring countries. An obvious solution to the housing crisis, as many noted, was for municipalities to build public housing, the movement for which had been underway before the war. When food shortages impinged sharply on consumption or coal grew scarce, many called for local government to take over the distribution of food and fuel.¹³⁷ In battling against measures like “leaving certificates” and threats to conscript striking workers, the growing ranks of labor’s war opponents shifted the debate from “conscripting labor” to “conscripting wealth” and in so doing opened the door to a broader debate over public control of the economy.¹³⁸

A New Postwar Order: Reinventing the Labour Party and the ILP

With opposition to the war growing, the Labour Party in January 1918 sought to reshape its identity in ways that would enable it to consolidate claims to governance nationally and locally. In doing so, it sought to extrapolate from wartime economic collectivism a future social and economic order in which socialization of economic enterprise would be given a permanent footing.

Arthur Henderson and Sidney Webb drafted “Labour and the New Social Order,” the Labour Party programme “on Reconstruction,” with an eye to “the problem as a whole” and a focus on “definitely held principles.” Addressing the anticipated circumstances of postwar demobilization, unemployment, the needs of disabled soldiers, housing shortages, and a return to free expression, the party programme called into question

the individualist system of capitalist production, based on private ownership and competitive administration of land and capital, which has in the past couple of centuries become the dominant form, with its reckless “profiteering” and wage-slavery; with its glorification of the unhampered struggle for the means of life and its hypocritical pretence of the “survival of the fittest”; with the monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces and the degradation and brutalization, both moral and spiritual, resulting therefrom.

The Labour Party pledged to do nothing to revive the old order, “whether in opposition or in due time called upon to form an Administration.” It asserted, “On the contrary, we shall do our utmost to see that it is buried with the millions whom it has done to death.” Recognizing that this was not the work of a year or two, it nonetheless affirmed “that each brick that it helps to lay shall go to erect the structure that it intends, and no other.”¹³⁹

In language that prefigured “clause four” of the new constitution ratified in February 1918, Henderson and Webb formulated the key public ownership demand, “the progressive elimination from the control of industry of the private capitalist, individual or joint-stock.”

And the Labour Party refuses absolutely to believe that the British people will permanently tolerate any reconstruction or perpetuation of the disorganization, waste and inefficiency involved in the abandonment of British industry to a jostling crowd of separate private employers, with their minds bent, not on the service of the community, but—by the very law of their being—only on the utmost possible profiteering … What the Labour Party looks to is a genuinely scientific reorganization of the nation’s industry, no longer deflected by individual profiteering, on the basis of the Common Ownership of the Means of Production; the equitable sharing of the proceeds among all who participate in any capacity and only among these.¹⁴⁰

The adoption of “clause four” in the new Labour Party constitution has been the focus of much discussion surrounding the new direction taken by Labour. However, it may well have been the redefinition of party membership that had the most lasting effect on the party’s identity and its competitiveness in an expanded electorate. After a century in which the franchise was only very gradually expanded, the passage of the Representation of the People Act on February 6, 1918, further expanded male suffrage and granted the franchise to women over thirty who met certain property criteria. In doing so, it opened an enlarged field for electoral competition, the fruits of which would be seen in local body and parliamentary elections over the course of the next couple of years. But the new measure fell far short of the universal suffrage demanded by labor.¹⁴¹

According to the standard view, the war marginalized the ILP and drove a deep wedge between a largely “loyal” trade union movement and an anti-war opposition with which the ILP was indelibly associated. While that view carries obvious interpretive weight, it neglects the extent of unrest within the labor movement over grievances with housing, food, and the provision of basic needs. The inflated costs of living, the “conscription of labor,” and unprecedented wealth accumulation in the war industries, created widespread disaffection among workers with the war and its consequences. The ILP, despite its alliances with middle-class pacifists in the Union of Democratic Control and the No Conscription Fellowship, remained the very sinew of independent labor politics in many localities, where since the mid-1890s it had given substance and direction to local organization. As G. D. H. Cole noted, “The new Labour Party could by no means afford to do without the I.L.P.’s help, because its members were the tried experts in local organization and had the enthusiasm as well as the skill needed to make the new system work.”¹⁴² The ILP was best positioned to move into active mobilization of workers in local politics. It held the beachhead of labor representation in local bodies blocked for the duration of the war but that now enjoyed the prospect of significant electoral advance. In “Labour and the New Social Order,” Henderson and Webb gave considerable attention to a robust agenda for Labour in “Local Government.” They embraced expanded municipal enterprises and services, well beyond what had conventionally been defined as the sphere of local affairs, including municipal control of “water, gas, electricity and tramways.” The proposals also envisioned an enlarged public role in housing, education, health, and a new system of welfare under direct jurisdiction of “elected County, Borough, and District Councils” that would largely displace the discredited “Guardians of the Poor.”¹⁴³

Recognition of the Labour Party’s centralization and its overriding emphasis on the parliamentary arena has also been neglected. Reinvention of the Labour Party fostered tactical and political maneuvering that reinforced these tendencies. While a Parliamentary Labour Party had been present from the earliest years of the century, its dominance had been held in check to some degree by the vitality of local political activity in which the control of local bodies remained a primary objective. The constitutional vision of Arthur Henderson and Sidney Webb gave increased representation in the national party to its own affiliated branches at the expense of existing local organizations, most notably those affiliated with the ILP. Henderson proposed to transform the Labour Party

quickly and quietly, from a federation of societies, national and local, into a nation-wide political organization with branches in every parliamentary constituency, in which members will be enrolled both as workers and as citizens, whether they be men or women, and whether they belong to any trade union or socialist society or are unattached democrats with no acknowledged allegiance to any industrial or political movement.

He argued for casting a wide net because “real political democracy cannot be organized on the basis of class interest.” While he believed the Labour Party must retain support of its affiliated societies “from which it derives its weight and its fighting funds,” he also argued for creating a new constituency that was “something more than the existing trades council or local labour party.”¹⁴⁴

In voicing its objections to the new draft constitution, the ILP national conference called for amendments to “afford the fairest and most direct representation of the rank and file of the Party.” The revised scheme they proposed would first and foremost provide “that the membership of the Party consist of Local Labour Parties composed of local bodies and individuals at present (or in future) eligible to join the Party.” And further it asserted that delegates to the annual conference of the party should be “directly appointed by the Local Labour Parties.” This alternative vision sought to maintain and strengthen a diverse local base of the party and the ILP to which central and parliamentary leadership would be held accountable.¹⁴⁵

Ramsay MacDonald and many around him, as Cole noted, wanted to keep the ILP “as a foundation” but “wanted, like Henderson, to build up a powerful and nation-wide Labour Party machine.”¹⁴⁶ The national party would create local party chapters that would be held in tight rein and implicitly would function independently of what were now explicitly ILP locals. With centralization the watchword, the national party also reconstructed membership as a relationship between individuals and the national party, not mediated by the independent status and representation of ILP local branches.

ILPers at the local level remained confident in their ability to reclaim and expand their role in local politics despite this tactical refashioning of the Labour Party as a national parliamentary party. In the short term at least, they largely succeeded even if it meant functioning under the label of the “Labour Party.” In October 1917, J. S. Middleton had reflected on the strategic interests of the Labour Party. As secretary he had done much of the WEWNC’s day-to-day work, but he also acknowledged the crucial place that local work had played. “I believe we have done much more permanent work than we quite realise. The keeping together of our local forces in the constituencies, which after all, from a political point-of-view has been a great success, will make our task of re-organising the Labour Party much easier than I fear otherwise would have been the case.”¹⁴⁷

From a different perspective, the ILP, in its communications with local branches in January and again in December 1918, affirmed the growing importance of municipal politics. It reminded local activists that the anticipated resumption of local elections in 1919 gave the ILP the opportunity to increase significantly its prewar representation on local bodies throughout the country.¹⁴⁸ How that power might be exercised is amply illustrated by more aggressive postwar interventions in council matters affecting labor’s interests. The Labour Party councillors elected after the new elections in 1919 carried out cohesive and strategically planned work of their caucuses in Bradford and other Labour strongholds.¹⁴⁹ With a broader electoral base, thanks to franchise reform, and the hardening of class lines brought on by wartime mobilization around issues affecting workers’ daily lives, the Labour Party and its local cadre of ILP members positioned themselves to make significant advances in the realms of local politics after the war, even if they were more disconnected from the parliamentary wing of a party that seemed determined to assert its hegemony.

10

Opposing Conscription and War
on the Urban Periphery: The
Antipodes and the United States

Jim Thorn’s Return

When Christchurch labor activist Jim Thorn stepped off the boat at Wellington Harbour in 1913 after the long return journey home from England, he landed in the middle of a bitter wharfies’ strike that was rapidly developing into a general strike. After four years organizing for the Independent Labour Party in the United Kingdom, he now had to find his bearings in a politically charged environment at home that, in some respects, bore little resemblance to the world he had left in 1909. His sojourn had accomplished what his mentors, J. T. Paul and Jack McCullough, had hoped. He returned a more worldly and seasoned organizer and a more effective public speaker than he had been in Christchurch years before. In addition to his speaking and agitation with the Clarion and Forward vans in England and Scotland, he had been a regular correspondent for both papers as well. His reports from abroad had also appeared regularly in the Maoriland Worker under Bob Ross’s editorship.¹ Over the course of three years with the Forward van in Scotland, he had spoken to “some 360 meetings” and according to his comrades “converted a few thousand people to Socialism.” He was regarded as “one of the finest propagandists in the country.” He assured those gathered that “he would soon be in the thick of the fight after he landed in New Zealand.” In a “departure” column written on the train after leaving Glasgow, he reflected on the lessons of his time in the United Kingdom. The ILPers among whom he had worked seemed to him “the true revolutionary instrument.”

You meet men whose economic conditions are simply terrible … Their lives are limited and bruised. Harsh fate seems to have deprived them of all the conveniences which the better placed think necessary to culture and refinement. And yet here are thousands of men and women who hate disorder, who live righteousness, who, much as their circumstances prevent its realization, aspire after beauty just as they loathe the display and vulgarity of those whose treasures know nothing but sordid pelf. It is a pleasure and an honour to work, feel yourself in deep and subtle ways in harmony with them.²

Within a short time after his return to New Zealand, Thorn signed on to a regular position editing the “country workers’ ” page in the Worker.³ And, in less than a year, the outbreak of war would stir his painful memories of the Boer War. As a seventeen-year-old recruit, he had witnessed the horrific atrocities perpetrated by the British forces against civilians. By November 1914, with the war rapidly intensifying in Europe, Thorn ran for parliament from Palmerston North on the socialist (SDP) ticket and threw himself into the increasingly visible campaign against New Zealand’s commitment to war. As a socialist and an internationalist, he stood firmly with his comrades against the rising tide of war hysteria. Many of the early socialist anti-conscriptionists were erst-while “Red Feds.” After passage by parliament of a National Registration Bill in August 1915, several SDP leaders published statements condemning conscription, and in September Thorn himself published a column, “The Case Against Conscription,” in the Maoriland Worker. Anti-conscription meetings followed in January 1916, and the founding conference of the New Zealand Labour Party in July 1916 provided a new platform for the anti-conscription sentiments of some of the party’s most influential leaders.⁴ As outspoken war opponents, the most militant members of this newest New Zealand Labour Party would soon be seized, incarcerated, or in some cases, like Thorn’s, be eventually driven underground for the duration of the war.

The turmoil in New Zealand’s labor left following the strikes and political schisms of the immediate prewar period, along with the country’s early declaration of war in support of Britain, hobbled the emergence of a vigorous, broad-based anti-war coalition. Elsewhere on Europe’s periphery support for and opposition to the war took varied paths.

The Great War on Europe’s Periphery

Geographical distance from the theaters of war did not signify lack of engagement, especially for Britain’s former colonies on the outer edges of its empire. Australia, now an independent state, and New Zealand, a self-governing dominion within the empire, cherished a deep cultural and political affinity for Britain. That relationship called forth anguish and then strong expressions of commitment as the mother country slid into war with the central powers. Whether through volunteers or conscripts, each country contributed proportionally more troops and suffered more casualties than did Britain itself. However, Australia distinguished itself as the only combatant nation that refused to adopt conscription, while New Zealand not only implemented conscription in August 1916 but instituted some of the harshest measures directed at conscription opponents.

The United States moved more slowly and at first reluctantly to enter the war, but after declaring war on Germany in April 1917 Americans adopted some of the most extreme measures for suppressing dissent. The American state gave free reign to widespread private vigilantism that targeted those deemed potentially or, in the view of the authorities, actually “disloyal.” Particularly suspect were recent immigrants, citizens of German heritage, socialist war opponents, and labor radicals. Wartime suppression of dissent led eventually to the virtual collapse of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in cities across the country where it had established a strong presence before 1917. Some remnants of the party would form rival factions of small competing communist parties. A postwar “Red Scare,” together with the lingering effects of wartime repression and a reinvigorated “open shop” movement, would effectively prevent any postwar social democratic or labor party revival of the sort seen elsewhere in cities around the globe.

Domestic economic hardships developed more slowly but no less painfully on the war’s periphery. Cities and their municipal governing bodies became sites of contention, as they did in Britain. Conflict erupted around the dislocations of unemployment, rising food prices, housing shortages, the hardships experienced by soldiers’ families, and ultimately over conscription and expressions of opposition to the war itself. In Australia and New Zealand rising frustrations on the home front set the stage for a revival of municipal labor politics toward the war’s end, fueled by changes in the electoral franchise that augmented voting power to working-class constituencies. In the United States, socialist war opponents held their own in municipal politics for months even after the declaration of war but then succumbed to repressive forces unleashed by their class enemies who saw in their “disloyalty” the opportunity to undercut their popular support. The franchise itself remained less restricted in a formal sense, with the obvious exceptions of women and African Americans. But the adoption of structural changes in local governance in many municipalities effectively limited the power of urban working-class voters.

The war initially fueled the capitalist economies on Britain’s periphery. Corporate wealth and economic concentration grew to unprecedented levels. But war also fostered a labor and socialist revival, especially at the local level, in ways that would presage broader and more effectively mobilized working-class constituencies. That revival strengthened the parliamentary forces within the social democratic movement transnationally, except in the United States, and invigorated the movement in cities.

In Australia, opposition to the war (or at least to conscription) produced a profound split in the Labor Party, more so in some states than others. But laborites also faced less outright repression of their oppositional views than did socialists in the United States or the IWW in both countries. A Labor Party government at the federal level, while aggressively committed to promoting Australian participation in the war, faced limits on the extent of its repressive actions. Fearing Labor’s potential ability to block conscription legislation, Labor’s own prime minister, “Billy” Hughes, sought to mobilize popular support behind referenda on conscription. Those campaigns stimulated broad-based countermobilization signifying the weakness of the federal government’s position.⁵ In Queensland, the state’s Labor government opposed conscription outright adding fuel to the national mobilization against the conscription referenda.⁶ The anti-conscriptionist movement in Australia provided “cover” for a time to principled opposition to the war itself spearheaded by the small but highly vocal Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a growing segment of the labor movement.⁷ Australian Wobblies, according to some analysts, lent the muscle and energy that gave momentum to the anti-conscription movement.⁸ No such cover materialized in the United States, where anti-war socialists and the Wobblies were exposed and vulnerable to extreme repression and violent retribution.⁹ New Zealand’s labor radicals and anti-conscriptionists became similarly exposed, though less the targets of violent repression.

Although the labor and socialist parties remained a minority presence in most local governments throughout countries on the periphery of the war, their elected councillors still pursued their municipal agendas. Even if their initiatives were largely defeated, they defined a well-recognized program for postwar municipal reform. The adoption of further franchise reform in the postwar period enabled local labor parties in Australian and New Zealand cities to become politically competitive. The restricted powers of municipalities, however, continued to limit the scope for local government initiative.¹⁰

The suppression of the left in the United States did not have an exact counterpart in Australia or New Zealand. Verity Burgmann has noted that “the Australian IWW did not endure to the same extent the privatized retribution inflicted upon their American fellow workers: the beatings, the lynchings, the intimidation and torturings by individual loyalists.” Unlike their American counterparts, Australian Wobblies’ victimization came largely through the agency of state governments controlled by their more conservative opponents within the Labor Party.¹¹ Under the War Precautions Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act, adopted with little opposition during the early months of the war, Australian governments acquired the tools and the potential sanctions to allow for censorship of publications and the mails. The record of suppression of dissent in Australia was, nevertheless, mixed. Prosecutions, let alone imprisonment, were fairly rare for violations of prohibited acts or deeds that “advocate or encourage disloyalty to the British Empire or the cause of the Empire during the war.” Raids against potentially offending labor publications, including the Labor Call, did occur with some frequency. But opponents of conscription conducted their referenda campaigns in 1916 and 1917 with little outright interference from the censor.¹² Popular actions against German immigrants, especially in the aftermath of the massive loss of life in Gallipoli, preceded the internment of many Germans and other “alien enemies” who were reservists in their countries of origin or simply of military age. Their numbers eventually reached 6,739 of all nationalities.¹³ Members of the IWW, like their counterparts in the United States, faced hostility from other segments of the labor movement and direct harassment from employers and the state, including threats of imprisonment. The governing Labor Parties in most states and at the federal level saw in the IWW’s outspoken opposition to the war an opportunity to isolate and ultimately eliminate the organization and its most militant organizers.¹⁴

Economic impact of war

War has peculiar effects on domestic economies, at once invigorating and distorting. The timing and nature of those effects may vary from one country, indeed one locality, to another, and the Great War was no exception. Because Australia and New Zealand committed early and unreservedly to the war, economic disruptions developed quickly with sharp increases in unemployment and spot shortages in foodstuffs and other vital commodities.

Troubled economic circumstances stemmed foremost from the disruptions in trade that came with war. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Belgium had been major consumers of Australian wool and primary metals. Britain’s demand would grow during the war and restore some critical markets for Australian primary goods, and Britain eventually would agree to pay fixed prices for a substantial share of these Australian export commodities.¹⁵ As David Meredith and Barrie Dyster have shown, more subtle effects on domestic consumption also undermined Australia’s economic health during the war. The departure of such a high proportion of high-wage male earners acted as a brake on domestic consumption which now relied on an increasing number of lower-wage women earners. Distance from the theaters of war meant inevitably that other countries, particularly the United States and Britain, would chiefly enjoy the benefits of supplying Australian troops at the front. But distance and trade disruption had their benefits; many manufacturers of textiles, small arms, leather goods, chemicals, and metal products, for instance, experienced a market stimulus from import substitution. Inflation, however, meant declining real wages, and together with sharply rising debt and an expanding currency led to further curtailment of consumption. If this were not enough, the challenge of absorbing such a proportionally large number of returning veterans carried risks of further economic disruption and political volatility.¹⁶

War conditions also gave license to an interventionist posture on the part of federal and state Labor governments that promoted greater economic regulation and financing of public works. But such advances, in what reformers in the United States called “wartime collectivism,” came at a substantial economic and political price. Because the Hughes government was unwilling to substantially increase tax revenues, government debt rose sharply at all levels. And although the federal government in 1916 assumed unprecedented powers to fix prices in order to slow inflation, real wages still fell sharply, contributing to growing industrial unrest. In the official history of World War I, Ernest Scott showed that prices for some commodities nearly doubled, and others increased by half. Nominal wages, by comparison, rose a mere 12 percent for men and 8 percent for women during the war, resulting in lower real wages.¹⁷ The failure to institute a tax on war “profiteers,” along with the adoption of measures to censure and curtail dissent, fueled opposition within the labor movement and the Labor Party and set the stage for the split in the party, even before the decisive battles over conscription.¹⁸

The economic impact of the war on New Zealand workers followed lines parallel to those in Australia, moderated somewhat by New Zealand’s role as a continuing lifeline to Britain and supplier of food and other agricultural commodities. With inflation rearing its head domestically, especially in the first two years of the war, real wages fell by 10 to 15 percent, and the wage differential between skilled and unskilled narrowed.¹⁹ Deepening war debt also meant rising taxes. But, in the profitable agriculture sector, some producers and those who marketed food and wool often profited handsomely. Increasing disparities in wealth and wartime income set the stage for a political attack on war profiteers and more direct government intervention in the economy. Even when the government took over purchasing agricultural commodities and direct sales to Britain, prices and profits in the domestic market continued to rise.²⁰ As one labor leader, Rev. Moses Ayrton, quipped, “When the exploiters are asked by their children: ‘what did you do in the great war?’ their answer will surely be: ‘We did them all.’ ”²¹ The drum-beat for increased socialization of the economy, driven by wartime experience, grew louder. The miners’ militant leader and wartime prisoner of conscience, Bob Semple, asserted on the floor of parliament in 1919: “There is enough wealth, and plenty to spare, for all in this country. There is no need for the hovel; there is no need for the fallen or degraded woman; no need for the neglected and unloved child; no need for unemployment in this country. There is room for all, there is a place at Nature’s table for all if this country is managed on reasonable and democratic lines.”²²

Unlike Australia and New Zealand, the United States stood on the proverbial sidelines of the European war for more than two and a half years. The Wilson administration neither sought a declaration of war nor did it formally lay the groundwork for conscription. But the demand for war materiel and foodstuff drew the American economy inexorably toward the Allies and produced a significant economic stimulus that tightened the labor market and pulled the United States out of the economic doldrums of 1913–14. War production for Europeans mobilized a coalition of corporate and military leaders who lobbied intensively for US “preparedness,” even as President Wilson professed a desire to “keep us out of war.” The preparedness debate took place against a backdrop of rising profits for American manufacturers and suppliers of war materials, including clothing, vehicles, meat, and processed grains but also firearms, fuses, and explosives. Some of the gains came through direct sales to Britain and France; others from claiming markets worldwide that the belligerents had formerly dominated.

Preparedness divided progressive reformers over the prospect of deepening economic commitment to war. War financing created the occasion for debate over the distribution of wealth and an opening to push for new sources of revenue, including a graduated tax on incomes and an excess profits tax on the munitions industry. The prospect of centralized management of a war economy seemed to offer a path toward a higher level of state regulation of private capital. But many progressives saw economic mobilization for war as nothing short of gross profiteering. In the words of Nebraska’s Senator George Norris, the stockbrokers “will be sitting behind mahogany desks, covered with clipped coupons—coupons soiled with the sweat of mothers’ tears, coupons dyed in the lifeblood of their fellow man.”²³

With Wilson’s declaration of war, the conflicting aspirations of reformers collided with the harsh terms of the war itself. Those terms meant sharply rising prices and a higher cost of living for ordinary Americans, the rapid adoption of conscription, and an unprecedented attempt to suppress dissent. Municipal reformers’ agendas for housing, municipalization of city services, and improvements in sanitation, public health, and education were largely shelved for the duration of the war.

For Americans the war’s most immediate economic effect appeared with sharply rising prices, the byproduct of rising demand in the United States and Europe and the federal government’s unwillingness to institute an effective system of price controls. Between 1913 and December of 1918, the wholesale price index more than doubled, while hourly wages rose a paltry 14 percent. The cost of living for an average family rose 65.9 percent, with food (83 percent) and clothing (93 percent) having the highest increases and shelter (20 percent) the lowest.²⁴ Although a “Price Fixing Committee” functioned under the auspices of the War Industries Board (WIB), its “intervention” to control prices, like the WIB policies generally, relied on cooperative action among businessmen to restrain prices. Some officials like Robert Brookings, head of the Finished Products Commodity Section, and George N. Peek, the Bureau of Manufacturing head, argued for a more rigorous approach to price stabilization, but with limited success. A largely ineffectual trial balloon in the form of a single-industry experiment with the shoe and leather industry signified their frustrations. Peek argued for rigorous price controls. He warned that consumer discontent over a rising cost of living “would mean a riot from within our own country. It would mean an intolerable situation, which would force not only State ownership but Government ownership of practically all the basic industries of the country—and that is no theory.” Despite Peek’s hysterics, by the time of the armistice the WIB had only nudged this single industry toward a voluntary agreement for “price restraint” and a “reduction of styles.”²⁵

Wartime economic policy promoted corporate concentration and declining competition. An “associationist” approach to economic regulation best characterized the government’s overall approach.²⁶ Government war agencies encouraged and cajoled industrialists to voluntarily collaborate in setting prices, allocating scarce resources, and dividing market shares. The United States government set firmer limits on the expansion of government economic regulation than happened with the warring European powers. But “war capitalism” gave the federal government unprecedented power to discipline the market behavior of corporations through priority ordering and threats to restrict access to scarce resources, always under the assumption that prices and profits would rise.²⁷ Even if labor shortages produced some upward pressure on wages, war industries had the ability to pass on costs of production, including wages, to consumers. They feared neither intrusive government regulation nor significant price competition.

Declining real wages produced rising levels of worker discontent. Unlike Britain, where popular frustration over the shortage of housing and rising rents led to mass protest and eventually an imperfect system of rent control, in the United States housing shortages resulting from the absence of new construction and the mobility of workers in search of war work produced no rent control and no national housing policy to alleviate distress.²⁸

The Politics of Anti-Conscription

Recruiting and sustaining an army to fight an unpopular and brutal war of attrition proved a challenge for each of the warring powers. At different points each turned from volunteers to conscripts or attempted to do so.²⁹ On the war’s periphery, New Zealand adopted conscription in 1916 despite opposition from a vocal minority of labor radicals and peace activists, many of whom were jailed for their opposition.³⁰ In Australia, after the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, war opponents and skeptics dug in their heels to oppose two national referenda calling for the adoption of conscription. Some, like Thomas P. Ryan, Labor premier of Queensland, threw themselves into the campaign against conscription but actively promoted voluntary recruitment.³¹ Alone among the warring nations Australia did not institute conscription.³²

The United States, latecomer to the war, moved quickly to institute conscription barely a month after the April 6, 1917 declaration of war, before opponents could coalesce. Draconian measures quickly followed to enforce a stringent and unforgiving system of “selective service” that was part of the campaign to isolate and marginalize war opponents. Socialists and labor radicals in the forefront of the opposition were targeted, their publications banned from the mails, their meetings mobbed, and their outspoken leaders jailed. The American Protective League, a private organization made up largely of business and professional men, conceived and executed a number of “slacker raids” in cities across the country between March and September 1918 in which tens of thousands of draft-age men were rounded up and detained. Among the large numbers detained only a few hundred turned out to be actual “draft dodgers,” as they were termed. The raids, nonetheless, sent a shiver down the collective spine of those targeted.³³

Conscription raised the prospect of coercion in democratic societies that had previously affirmed voluntarism.³⁴ In an argument paralleling that of British labor activists, some opponents of conscription in the United States proposed that if conscription could not be blocked, the government should conscript not just men but wealth. And in New Zealand, miners in Point Elizabeth and Liverpool expressed resentment toward “the Ministry and the Press” for “endeavouring to bring on a feeling favourable to conscription of the flesh and blood of the working classes of New Zealand, while at the same time failing to conscript the wealth and private property of the rich.” Joined by their fellow miners from legendary Blackball, they asserted, “furthermore we are determined to meet such a calamity as conscription by industrial revolt.”³⁵ In the United States, the Socialist Party of America declared its opposition to the war at its St. Louis convention in April 1917 and demanded that “the capitalist class, which is responsible for the war, pay its cost. Let those who kindled the fire furnish the fuel.”³⁶

War opponents warned that government appetite for wartime coercive measures might extend to the conscription of labor more generally, especially if employers and the state found it difficult to sustain production in an overheated war economy. In early 1916, a large interstate congress in Australia with representatives of ninety-seven unions expressed “its undying hostility to conscription of life and labour.”³⁷ Local coalitions linked the fight against conscription with the mobilization of opposition to the war itself and its impact on the daily lives of working people.

Women’s Leadership against Conscription and War

The involvement of labor and socialist activists in the anti-conscription movement and ultimately the anti-war fight did not occur in a social vacuum. Leadership flowed into the movement from multiple sources, not the least of which was from among organized women. The first, and, in many ways, the most obvious, arena in which women asserted their presence and leadership was around consumption-related issues—rising rents, housing shortages, and above all the cost and increasing scarcity of essential foodstuffs. Women’s participation in “food riots” had a long history, reaching back as far as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, and the politicization of such crowd actions deeply troubled ruling elites.³⁸ During World War I, women played crucial roles in rent strikes, food riots, and workplace collective action in which consumption and production issues became intertwined—in Berlin, Glasgow, London, Philadelphia, and New York, among many other places.³⁹

One of the most dramatic episodes of popular protest led by women during the war was a succession of food riots in Melbourne in August and September 1917. They contained elements of traditional crowd action to enforce a “moral economy” in the supply of food and the regulation of prices at the height of the war, as historian Judith Smart has shown. They also revealed more modern sensibilities of politicized women who sought fundamental transformation of existing economic institutions.⁴⁰ Adela Pankhurst, who had emigrated from Britain to Australia just before the outbreak of war, brought her experience as a militant suffragist in Britain. She joined a cadre of politically organized women inspired by a syndicalist tradition of direct action given new life by the IWW. Their immediate goals focused on restoration of just and fair prices. The militancy of their actions indicates a perspective that transcended simply restoring a “moral economy” of just prices. Roaming crowds of women (and some men) destroyed property of firms associated with support of the war, and wharfies blocked the shipment of foodstuffs out of the Port of Melbourne. In one of her speeches, taken note of by the authorities, Adela Pankhurst made this broader agenda clear.

We are fighting against the system that is going to make slaves of the people of the community … There are ladies now, who were in front of the procession and carried the red flag right up the steps of Parliament House, and we say we were only too glad, too proud, to get a chance to do it. We know the time is coming when workers are going to say—we will no longer allow the wealth to be in the hands of a few private individuals; we will no longer allow production to be carried on for profit.⁴¹

Women’s involvement in anti-conscription and anti-war mobilization extended well beyond the issues of food and housing that animated some women’s activism. Concerns over unemployment and public welfare also lay at the heart of labor’s municipal electoral engagement before and during the war in Australia and across all of the embattled countries. In tandem with labor, feminists like Vida Goldstein and Adela Pankhurst took an active role in mobilizing material support for women and families hard hit by unemployment and sharply rising food prices. They used the Women’s Political Association and its Women’s Bureau to distribute aid, train women for skilled jobs, and establish a “women’s farm” to promote food self-sufficiency. During 1914–15 they raised private support for the neediest but also pressured local government officials and state government ministers to provide needed financing for these initiatives.⁴²

Important as those concerns may have been, especially early in the war, women activists also entered a hotly contested debate in the public sphere over conscription and the merits of the war itself. Their very presence and participation reshaped the terms of that debate. Although socialist women’s protest focusing on a class critique of the war and profiteering had been initially somewhat immune from hostile reaction, once anti-conscription moved front and center that immunity disappeared. As Joy Damousi has illustrated, their actions at times precipitated violent reaction from men.⁴³ Returning soldiers appeared to find their own masculinity called into question by women’s activism. In repeated instances during 1916 and 1917 prominent activists like Pankhurst, Goldstein, Mary Grant, and Jennie Scott-Griffiths were shouted down, their platforms invaded, and on occasion they were physically assaulted by men.⁴⁴ With labor increasingly mobilized against conscription in the successive conscription referenda campaigns of 1916 and 1917, local branches of the Political Labor Council (PLC) came to the defense of beleaguered women allies and petitioned local government for the continued use of municipal facilities for protest gatherings.⁴⁵ In some local PLCs, women had gained significant representation. In the Victorian mining town of Creswick, women were elected to the three vice president positions in the local PLC and successfully encouraged the local to invite Adela Pankhurst for a public lecture.⁴⁶ Broken Hill’s militant Barrier Daily Truth, edited by Bob Ross, praised the large open-air gatherings to which “a brave and brilliant trio, fair, fearless and free,” (Pankhurst, Goldstein, and Cecilia John) spoke. He suggested “in their militancy they leave Labour women speakers far in the rear.”⁴⁷

The campaign against conscription in Australia that played out during the 1916 and 1917 referenda had the effect of galvanizing a coalition in which women activists played a central role. They built on the groundwork laid in the suffragist movement and on the struggles during 1914–15 over the economic dislocations in the lives of working-class women and their families. Goldstein and her allies in the Women’s Political Association formed a more militant wing of that organization, the Women’s Peace Army, which in turn joined trade unionists, Labor Party branches, and traditional peace activists, to form the Australian Peace Alliance.⁴⁸ As Diane Kirkby has noted, because Australian women had already won the vote, their “voting power became paramount during the national plebiscites over conscription.”⁴⁹ In the United States, although women, especially socialist women, provided important leadership against the war, the mainstream suffrage movement, still deeply immersed in the fight for the franchise, was divided over support for the war. Facing an uphill battle to win the franchise, now in the context of war, key leaders aligned with the Wilson administration, while others continued in opposition. That division, like the acrimonious split between the Pankhursts, complicated the ongoing struggle for suffrage and opposition to the war.⁵⁰

Australia

The fight against conscription in Australia intensified only after the spike in casualties on the Gallipoli peninsula and the disastrous battle at the Somme.⁵¹ Although enlistments remained high, Labor prime minister William Hughes returned from a six-month sojourn in England convinced of the need to deepen the country’s commitment to the war effort. Facing determined opposition within the ranks of his own Labor Party and a majority of Labor senators in the federal parliament, he believed that only a popular referendum could isolate his opponents and swing the country behind his call for conscription.⁵² Radical critics of the war joined forces in opposition alongside more moderate trade unionists and other opponents of conscription. Tom Barker, an IWW leader, even extended his hand to conscription opponent Archbishop Daniel Mannix and his flock. “We might not have followed him to heaven, but we certainly weren’t going to deny him his right as a partner in the battle.”⁵³

In a heated campaign, the government moved to curtail the rights of opponents to advocate their position in public meetings and through printed literature. Except in the case of the IWW, such measures did not approach the levels of repression adopted in New Zealand, the UK, or eventually in the United States. Hughes attempted to make opposition to conscription synonymous with opposition to the war and therefore disloyalty. Targeting the role of the IWW, he called them, “foul parasites [who] have attached themselves to the vitals of labour … They have no nationality; they have no religion. There is only one thing they understand and that is force.” He also accused them of promoting industrial chaos through strikes. Hughes’s analysis cavalierly ignored the widespread opposition to the war within the labor movement and in Labor Party itself.⁵⁴

Labor prime minister Hughes and New South Wales premier William Holman believed that they could isolate the IWW virus from the body of the labor movement, within which it had come to have surprising influence. After the defeat of the first referendum, Holman instituted new state measures such as the Unlawful Associations Act in December 1916 and then a more draconian version in July 1917. But even before these new repressive measures passed, the authorities arrested the IWW “Twelve” under older legislation because “they did ‘feloniously and wickedly compass, imagine, invent, devise or intend to levy war against the King within the State of New South Wales.’ ”⁵⁵ Behind these supposed threats a far more powerful opposition had assembled. The Australian Trade Union Congress had issued a manifesto in early May 1916, warning of the dire consequences conscription had brought to Britain and France and declaring that the same would be visited upon Australia.

In both countries conscription has been used to render null and void all the achievements of Trade Unionism—to destroy customs, rights and practices—to dilute and whittle away—to put unskilled in the place of skilled, women in place of men, children in the place of adults … In principle it is an instrument of national defence; in practice it is made an instrument of working class subjugation … it behooves the organized toilers of Australia to speak and act before the clock of trickery is permitted to strike the hour of doom.⁵⁶

Military authorities confiscated this and other anti-conscription documents in raids on trades halls in July 1916. But after the defeat of the first pro-conscription referendum, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people assembled on the Domain in Sydney to protest in powerful terms the continuing prospect of conscription, in what the Australian Worker called “the greatest gathering of men and women ever witnessed in Australia.”

Let it be no more pretended that the opposition to conscription is an unpopular movement … We only wish that William Hughes had been there! He’d have got a very salutary shock … back of the sprouting and shouting of patriots waxing fat on the cruel necessities of the people; back of it all there’ll be a vision of the Domain meeting with its earnest tens of thousands protesting again the Prussianising of Australia.⁵⁷

With that warning, large sections of the labor movement and the wider public rose up to reject conscription once again in the second referendum of December 1917. The split in the Labor Party in November 1916, following the first referendum, produced a new governing coalition of Labor and Liberals behind the intransigent Hughes, but it also fertilized the seeds of growing alienation of labor’s rank and file from the party’s pro-war leadership.⁵⁸ As John Hirst has argued, the conscription fight had turned the war into a class issue. The militant trade union opposition called the “industrialists” saw the hand of “the enemies of labor” in support of conscription, “capitalists—the fat men—were obviously planning to use conscription to break the unions.” In their view “industrial conscription” could not be far behind the conscription of soldiers.⁵⁹ The persecution to virtual extinction of the IWW and the spreading industrial conflict in 1917–18 became symptomatic of the social costs of the war at home. Deepening discontent accompanied rising casualties and economic hardships. Similar and concurrent levels of discontent emerged in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.⁶⁰

The fight over conscription proved a lightning rod for discontent with the conduct of labor’s parliamentary leadership. Suspicions ran deep over the failure of federal and New South Wales labor governments to follow labor’s platform and their willingness to compromise in key areas, such as industrial relations policy. An underlying suspicion about the character of the parliamentary leadership had been present before the war but grew more intense under wartime pressures. Those concerns crystallized around the government’s push for conscription, the curtailment of freedom of speech, rising unemployment and prices, its failure to “conscript wealth,” and a general humanitarian revulsion towards the war and its conduct—an ethical dimension strikingly present in local labor’s rhetoric.⁶¹

Anti-Conscription League, Melbourne, October 1916

The wartime anti-conscription campaign in Victoria, as in NSW, brought to the fore a new level of energy and activism in local branches. Some branches that had been rather stodgy came to life in the summer of 1916 as the first conscription referendum loomed on the horizon.⁶² They became deeply involved in local mobilization and asserting labor’s public presence in the campaign. The second referendum in 1917 brought another surge of energy. Conscription spilled over into other issues such as the high cost of living, unemployment, free speech, and persecution of the IWW. The views reflected a strong commitment to internationalism and class objections to workers fighting the wars of the wealthy but also a pragmatic nationalism that prioritized defending the homeland over fighting the wars of empire. Some doubted the loyalty of immigrants or indulged in outright racist rationales for defending “White Australia” from the hordes of “colored” workers who might be recruited to replace those Australians sent off to fight. Henry Boote, a leading anti-conscription voice, warned, “BEWARE of the Colored Ocean: IT WILL SWAMP US IF WE DO NOT STOP THE FORCIBLE DEPORTATION OF OUR MEN, WHO ARE THE WHITE WALLS OF AUSTRALIA.”⁶³ The racial argument was particularly virulent in Queensland but also widespread in mainstream anti-conscriptionist literature elsewhere. In Sydney the Leichhardt Political Labor League (PLL) proposed a ban on immigrants of enemy countries, “whether naturalized or not,” from public employment or any establishment “where foodstuffs are prepared.”⁶⁴ As Verity Burgmann has shown, the IWW voiced principled anti-racism with considerable consistency during the war as they had during the prewar period. In an exclusionary strike of waterside workers in the Northern Territories led by the Australian Workers Union (AWU) in 1915 they persistently attempted to organize “coloured labour.” IWW leader Tom Barker accused the AWU of complicity with employers in its posture of racial exclusion. “The Class War is a nobler sentiment than the Race War, for it strives for the abolition of chains and not for their perpetuation.” The IWW categorically rejected the argument that conscription would open the door to greater the importation of “coloured” workers. It proved vocal and effective in its support of the anti-conscription movement. “[We] [do not] oppose conscription merely because the introduction of cheap labor is the motive, but we attack it because it will deprive us of the right to educate and organize our class-brothers, be they black, white or brown.”⁶⁵

The war revitalized the Labor Party even as its divisions intensified. When the split occurred, it was about more than just labor governments’ support for conscription. It was also about a revival of internationalism and an ongoing critique of parliamentarism and elitism in the party.⁶⁶ Hughes and Holman’s new National Labor Party formed with their loyalists in the Labor Party embodied all of labor’s worst fears about coalitional parliamentarism, the lack of party discipline around labor’s core platform, and the distancing of the Parliamentary Labor Party even further from control by local branches. In the “agenda papers” put forward by branches at annual party conferences and in the debates that followed, many argued for reigning in the parliamentarians and subjecting them to local control. At the Victoria PLC Annual Conference, Mr. Smith of the Painters Union said that when members entered Parliament,

they did not show the same “kick” which they possessed when scratching round for a living … Mr. Hughes, as Prime Minister, forgot the aspirations of the working class and talked about the war having solidified all classes. With a different environment Parliamentarians failed to keep to working-class principles.

And Mr. Cosgrove, a delegate from the cycle trades, hoped that the conference would “help clip the wings of members of Parliament, who were exercising too big an influence on Labour, to the detriment of the movement. He considered that members of parliament, whether in the State or Federal sphere, were not in good order with the rank and file at the present time.”⁶⁷

After successfully defeating conscription in the campaigns of 1916 and 1917, the “industrialists” rode into power at the contentious annual conference of the PLL-NSW in June 1917. Described as “unionists” and “those with real working-class sentiments,” labor delegates upended the controlling faction of “parliamentarians,” which had merely “trifled with [the labor platform] when it wasn’t completely ignored.” In what was termed a “clean sweep of all the parliamentarians” from the executive positions at state and federal levels in the PLL, the industrialists proceeded to reaffirm their opposition to conscription, pass a set of “peace proposals,” and hail the call by delegate Willis from Illawarra and Henry Boote, editor of the Australian Worker, for a new internationalism in the labor movement.⁶⁸

Fighting conscription—local struggles

Most tellingly, the anti-conscription fight in Australia reflected the deepening discontent within the Labor Party and the trade union movement over government-imposed coercion at the local level. An Anti-Conscription League of NSW formed in late September 1915 had broad support in the ranks of labor and allied political organizations. From the outset it emphasized the class character of the movement.

That this meeting of working class citizens protests against conscription in any shape or form, and trusts that the Federal Government will not be misled by meetings held by privileged classes advocating compulsory service; as the operations of the War Precautions Act prevent workers from fully discussing questions involved, and the anti Labourites are taking advantage of the situation when the voice of democracy is stifled.⁶⁹

In Leichhardt, NSW (in the Sydney metropolitan area), the Political Labour League, precursor to the local branch of the ALP, manifested a growing restiveness over the effects of the war on employment. That concern mingled with a reflexive anti-foreignism directed particularly at Germans, Austrians, and Turks. Cautiously at first in September 1915, then more explicitly by 1916, the branch had voiced skepticism over the government’s claim that voluntary recruitment was failing. The branch entertained outright opposition to conscription by adjourning and reconvening the branch meeting as an “Anti-conscription Committee.”⁷⁰ Deluged with anti-conscription messages and resolutions from other branches and kindred organizations, the members of the Leichhardt branch moved steadily on the eve of the first referendum toward explicit opposition to conscription.

With hardships induced by war deepening, conflict between “loyalists” and anti-conscriptionists intensified. Opponents of conscription were “jostled, harassed, forcibly removed from platforms and pelted with stones by loyalists and soldiers,” according to local historians of Leichhardt. That conflict would prove a mere prelude to the crisis atmosphere surrounding the second referendum in December 1917. The moment of crisis for the government came amid faltering enlistment, dramatically rising casualties, and intensifying sectarian conflict precipitated in part by the outspoken opposition to conscription of Archbishop Daniel Mannix in Melbourne.⁷¹ Municipal mobilization loomed in the eyes of some activists as a crucial arena for producing “a steadying effect upon any further moves that may be contemplated upon the liberties and rights of the people.”⁷²

Opposition to conscription in Victoria enjoyed strong support from within the labor movement, so much so that Hughes could muster virtually no backing either within the PLC Central Executive and or among members of the federal Labor Party caucus. According to NSW premier Holman the Victorian party had “succumbed almost unanimously to the pressure brought to bear by the workers.”⁷³

Creswick, Victoria

Even in districts like the rural mining town of Creswick, where the Political Labor Council (PLC) had seen limited success, a groundswell of opposition to conscription grew as the date for the first referendum neared. In November 1915, the local PLC sent a unanimous resolution to the prime minister protesting conscription. When D. C. McGrath, the labor member of parliament, enlisted for war service in early 1916, the local branch drafted a letter urging him instead to better serve the country “by staying here and fighting the commercial brigands that were exploiting the nation.” Members protested the suppression of free speech under the War Precautions Act and gave “moral support” to their Broken Hill comrades, who had formed a “Labor Volunteer Army” and “taken a vow that they will face the firing squad rather than be conscripted.”⁷⁴

The Creswick PLC convened a large gathering at the ANA (Australian Natives’ Association) Hall in early October 1916, with the expressed purpose of “devising ways and means to defeat the Military Service Referendum, which, if carried would mean the conscription of Australia’s manhood.” The PLC effectively reconstituted itself as the “No Conscription Committee,” whose leadership was identical to that of the PLC, and which pledged to “organize the town and district so that a big majority may be secured against conscription in this part of Victoria.”⁷⁵ During the next month, the committee organized grassroots canvassing and voter mobilization in all districts. By early November a “no” majority materialized, an outcome celebrated as “wonderful in view of the appalling odds that had to be contended with.”⁷⁶

Over the next year, the local PLC, while remaining somewhat aloof from the Peace Alliance, instructed its delegates to the state PLC conference to “oppose militarism and war” and to support resolutions that would “eliminate compulsion from the Defence Act.” For good measure they refused to support the Red Cross because it was “wrong that soldiers fighting for protection of wealth should be dependent on charity.”⁷⁷ As the prospect of the war’s end came into view, the local branch welcomed home from service its member of parliament, D. C. McGrath, even as it roundly criticized his “rail sitting” on matters of war and peace. With the armistice, the branch passed a unanimous resolution of “gratification at the end of the slaughter of human life” and rejoiced “in the reports of the creation of social republics.” They finally expressed “hope that peace will eventually be signed by the representatives of the workers, who alone can make secure the objects for which the war was said to be fought.”⁷⁸ Emboldened by their successful opposition to conscription, laborites in Creswick and other local branches had come to voice full-throated opposition to the war itself. They were now positioned to fight for a “social republic” in their own locales.

New Zealand

For Jim Thorn, the Christchurch labor activist, a critical turning point in the battle against conscription and the war came at an anti-conscription meeting in Auckland in early December 1916. Given the course of events, he realized that his words might well provoke the authorities to act. He deliberately approached and then crossed that line, noting that the government had made it “exceedingly difficult for an honest man to open his mouth without running a very serious risk of shortly becoming an inhabitant of one of His Majesty’s gaols.” Although his announced talk was to be on “New Zealand and the War,” he declared at the outset of his remarks his intention to confine them “almost entirely to a discussion of conscription,” a topic that on a previous occasion had led to him being labeled a “preacher of treason” in the press. “If I am committing breaches of regulations,” he noted, “by employing arguments that appealed to the majority of Australian people … then New Zealanders are almost miraculously docile, almost cowardly, if they allow those regulations to operate one moment longer (remarks drowned by applause).”⁷⁹ Jack McCullough was in the audience to hear Thorn “speak on NZ & the War,” as he noted in his diary. “It was a fine address so far as it went [sic] much superior to that given by Semple last Sunday.” He believed there had been a police reporter in the audience, “so if the authorities desire it I think Jim gave them sufficient to prosecute under the new regulations … I see trouble coming to many of our young fellows.”⁸⁰ Within the space of two weeks, Thorn, along with Bob Semple, Peter Fraser, Harry Holland, Thomas Brindle, and Fred Cooke, would be arrested and in short order sentenced to a year in prison on a variety of charges related to sedition. As many as twenty others would follow their path by early 1917.⁸¹

The New Zealand labor movement and its political agents had entered the period of the war deeply fractured by the prewar strikes and government repression. The Unity Conference of 1913 may have created a framework for cooperation—a Social Democratic Party and a United Federation of Labour—but significant currents of opposition continued through the remnants of the old United Labour Party and some trades councils that professed loyalty to the war effort.⁸²

Opposing factions in the labor movement and local labor parties discovered common ground in wartime conditions and the inequalities of sacrifice being demanded. Food and other prices soared ahead of wages, and taxes failed to curtail a massive redistribution of wealth fueled by wartime profits. Labor had grown increasingly skeptical of policies that favored continued prosecution of the war rather than pursuit of peace. In early September 1914, a somewhat discouraged Michael Savage, from the Auckland SDP, reported to Peter Fraser, the national secretary/treasurer in Wellington, that despite the “prevailing epidemic—Jingoism” the party “expect[s] to go on as before.” In the face of rising unemployment the Government Labour Bureau offered no remedy, and the city council was “talking a good deal and doing little of an effective nature.” In the meantime, a newly formed Patriotic League, “composed of businessmen, merchants, and 4 union secretaries” moved ahead to mobilize financial support for the war effort. But, over time, class sentiment opposed to the war began to assert itself more forcefully. As a correspondent for the Maoriland Worker wrote in April 1915, “Those who could have prevented it have allowed the unscrupulous money-grabbers to fleece our class.”⁸³

Like their comrades in Australia, labor militants in New Zealand found in the proposals for conscription a more promising basis for mobilizing workers and the public against the war itself. The seemingly inevitable but still-gradual government move toward conscription strengthened the hand of opponents and enabled them to organize more effectively. Introduction of compulsory military training under the Defence Act of 1909 had stirred opposition especially among coal miners of the Grey District. Militant miners in Blackball and Runanga established a powerful presence out of proportion to their actual numbers. Socialist miners dominated the borough council in Runanga by 1914, and the district elected militant Paddy Webb to parliament the same year. Soon after the war declaration, West Coast miners refused to contribute to “patriotic funds” by doing overtime.⁸⁴ Runanga’s militant miners regarded the government’s announcement of a national registration bill in July 1915 as a “stealthy step towards conscription.” Its formal submission for legislative action in August and passage in November galvanized opponents. Although the new branch of the New Zealand Labour Party fielded a full slate of candidates for municipal council in the city of Greymouth and formulated a strong program for municipal action, the election in 1917 proved disappointing. The party secretary summarized the local’s sentiment. “That defeat only shows that more organization and educational work is required and that should now be the first work undertaken by the Branch.”⁸⁵

As opposition to conscription became entangled with other grievances over rising prices and stalled workplace negotiations, miners introduced the prospect of collective action for political ends. In December 1915, members of the Point Elizabeth and Liverpool collieries expressed resentment toward the government and the press for promoting “feeling favourable” toward the conscription of “flesh and blood” while “at the same time failing to conscript the wealth and private property of the rich.” The miners’ challenge seriously troubled the government and war supporters. Their posture would lead the government to step gingerly around the conscription of miners.⁸⁶

The Australian government had moved cautiously toward the adoption of conscription, putting the question to two referenda. Alternatively, the Wilson administration moved immediately to institute conscription in the United States once war had been declared. In New Zealand the adoption of conscription fell somewhere in between with measured but forceful steps taken over more than a year. Opposition also crystallized in a gradual but increasingly forceful way. In response to the adoption of national registration, the Maoriland Worker on September 15, 1915, began publishing a regular column opposing conscription, and in subsequent months leading social democrats and labor leaders published individual statements.⁸⁷

By early 1916, sentiment opposing conscription had risen sharply. The United Federation of Labour called together trade unionists for an anti-conscription conference in Wellington. All trades and labor councils in the country were represented, save the Otago Labour Council from Dunedin.⁸⁸ The manifesto issued by the conference laid out forcefully the case against “conscription of persons” and why “voluntaryism,” though preferable as a means of raising the necessary force, was unworkable without the “conscription of wealth.” Fundamentally, they argued that “when human life is at stake, all men stand equal, and there can be no means of selection devised that can be considered fair.”⁸⁹ Jim Thorn had argued that workers must not succumb to the illusion that conscription would produce equality of sacrifice, or that “it will make the cockies’ sons go.” As he put it, “What is really sought is a conscription which tenderly exempts men of property because ‘they will be ruined,’ but which compels the propertyless, who presumably cannot be ruined because they have touched bottom already, to do the fighting, whatever their will or conscience about the matter.”⁹⁰

The labor conferees believed that conscription was being introduced not so much for war purposes but “to effectively hold the workers in subjection when the critical after-war period is reached.” With labor’s rights already “dangerously invaded,” labor risked losing those rights and liberties permanently once the war had passed. The labor participants noted that based on current evidence, a more-than-adequate volunteer force could be mobilized if the nation provided sufficient compensation, that is “not less than the Trade Union rate for the best paid artisans.” Instead, conscription impoverished the families of inductees and permitted the “financial shirker” to accumulate unconscionable wealth. The attendees resolved, “This Conference urges drastic taxation to the extent of the confiscation to the use of the state of all incomes in excess of a soldier’s pay.” Private property must be made “social property.” Beyond the issue of conscription, the conference called for the statement of peace terms by all belligerents and the seizure by the people themselves of the “olive branch.” It concluded, “The war has reached a stage when the intelligence of the world must assert itself to extricate humanity from the impasse into which military bureaucracy has led it.”⁹¹

As labor’s opposition to conscription became more unified, the government intensified persecution of anti-militarist organizations and activists. The authorities managed to navigate the potential shoals posed by conscription with great, if unacknowledged, caution, because of potential labor opposition. A scheme to intensify recruitment by enlisting local government bodies and officials in canvassing for volunteers largely failed through non-cooperation of local officials. With hesitation, the government then turned to implementing conscription to meet a growing manpower shortage.⁹²

In Wellington, during the prewar years, requests by the Social Democratic Party to hold public meetings on street corners had been routinely granted by city council and that permissiveness continued at least through the early months of 1915. However, a similar request in July 1916, after passage of the conscription law, elicited quite a different response. The town clerk reported simply, “Application refused on the grounds that the speeches may tend to create breaches of the peace in the city.”⁹³ The Wellington City Council continued to refuse permission to the Labour Representation Committee (Labour Party) for use of public space, even while granting such permission to other groups.⁹⁴ And the council just as persistently turned down the party’s requests for adoption of proportional representation instead of at-large city elections. The Labour Party would have to wait until after the war to see gains in municipal representation.⁹⁵

With the space for dissent against conscription and the war narrowing, the government pushed through the Military Service Act on August 1, 1916, a compromise measure that instituted conscription but maintained volunteer recruitment albeit with diminishing emphasis. All Labour members of parliament save one along with a handful of Liberals opposed the act. As the measure moved inexorably toward implementation, opponents now gathered outside the legislative halls and in local electoral campaigns to speak out against conscription. With the actual onset of conscription on November 16, 1916, the risks of opposition rose dramatically.⁹⁶

The arrival of conscription produced some division in the ranks of labor, but, especially after the Australian anti-conscription referendum passed, New Zealand authorities took very seriously the prospect that opposition might grow. Miners voted to strike in Blackball and Paparoa over conscription and for higher wages. Waterside workers and some trades councils continued to agitate against conscription. But in Otago, sentiment favoring conscription remained strong in the labor council.⁹⁷

The reemergence of a militant faction in the labor movement provided the most prominent evidence of the deepening split in the ranks of labor. With ties to the Red Feds, the militants encouraged widespread industrial action to oppose conscription and spoke out publicly and without equivocation against the government’s Military Service Act and its restrictions on free speech during wartime. Regulations promulgated by the government in early December laid out new legal measures that might ensnare opponents of conscription, specifically by prohibiting “any incitement of class ill-will; any interference with recruiting or war production; any discouragement of the prosecution of the war; and any encouragement of opposition to conscription.”⁹⁸ The targeting of miners’ leader Bob Semple, ostensibly for remarks in Christchurch where he encouraged coal miners “not to be lassoed by the Prussian octopus conscription,” appears to have been something of a miscalculation by defense minister James Allen. Semple had, in fact, been a moderating influence among striking miners.⁹⁹ Within days, under its new authority the government began rounding up labor’s most militant leaders and quickly sentenced them.¹⁰⁰

Semple’s early-December speech in Wellington had celebrated “the democracy of Australia,” in which the anti-conscription referendum embodied “the most glorious victory that humanity can ever want to see.” He called on New Zealanders to do likewise, to “resurrect some of the old characteristics of the Red Federation in this country.”

The reckoning day is coming, and when these monsters who have grown rich as the outcome of a tremendous war like this, who have become fat and wealthy as the result of starving women, the wails of the child, and the groans of the dying soldier, when they rattle their sovereigns in their pockets, may it re-echo the squeals of the fatherless child, the sobs of the widow and the cries of the aged mother who gave her last boy in defending the country she loved.

His message could not have been clearer. “The day will come and may it rise out of the dust of to-day when the working-class will say to the Kings and Kaisers, the Czars, dukes and earls: ‘If you are going to fight, cut one another’s throats, we will stop at home.’ ”¹⁰¹

A new anti-conscription conference in early January 1917 drew less support from the labor movement than the previous year’s conference, a possible sign that the government’s strategy of combining caution with selective prosecution of opponents was having some success. Fewer trades councils and just over half as many individual unions sent representatives, though representatives of other peace and anti-conscription organizations somewhat bolstered attendance. Nevertheless, the conference provided the occasion for government agents to continue the arrest of key leaders, including conference secretary and Red Fed leader Peter Fraser, as he attempted to enter the hall. According to the Maoriland Worker, delegates gave “three ringing cheers” for him and sang the “Red Flag,” as he was led away by detectives.¹⁰²

Miners and waterside workers struck over conscription and industrial grievances in Wellington and the Grey District during the early months of 1917, but the government refused to abandon conscription and moved cautiously to eliminate the blanket exemption for miners who continued to strike. Backing off a full-blown confrontation, Minister of Defence James Allen pushed to conscript some key mine leaders, who were then reassigned to the mines as “soldier-miners” in return for a pledge against further industrial action.

Local government elections in the spring produced results that discouraged opponents of conscription and the war. Even though labor mounted municipal campaigns in which anti-conscription sentiment inflected local issues, war supporters who clothed themselves in party identities associated with patriotic “Win the War” rhetoric fared better. Labor would have to wait until the end of the war for favorable conditions to pursue a public ownership agenda in the municipalities. Labor politics in the cities would reawaken in 1919. In Wellington, for instance, none other than Peter Fraser reemerged to lead a determined and increasingly influential labor caucus in city council.¹⁰³

The United States

From early in the European war, conscription had been on the agenda of preparedness advocates in the United States. That prospect figured into the debates about war preparations between 1915 and 1917. Soon after the United States declared war, the draft came with a suddenness that caught many opponents by surprise. A short-lived but vigorous debate in Congress centered largely on whether to pursue expanded volunteerism and simultaneously prepare for a draft or to adopt the draft straightaway. The tide shifted overwhelmingly in favor of Wilson’s proposal to move forward without delay to implement a draft. Only twenty-four members of the House and eight members of the Senate in the end opposed conscription—largely the same group of senators and congressmen who had opposed the war itself. The vote provided little cover for opponents of conscription around the country.¹⁰⁴

The timing and organization of the draft—euphemistically called “Selective Service”—was a byproduct of several influences. First, by 1916, Britain had seen the inadequacy of a volunteer force that faced staggering casualties in the trenches of what had become a total war. No less concerning were the harmful effects on the domestic economy of losing what some believed were the “best and brightest.” The lesson for other warring powers seemed to be the adoption of a more discriminating selection of the portion of the population that was to be thrown into the slaughter. This lesson was not lost on US planners. Second, the defeat of conscription by popular referendum in Australia in 1916 reinforced the views of war proponents in the United States that conscription must be adopted quickly and without opportunity for mass opposition to mobilize. Third, the administration chose to decentralize Selective Service through the mobilization of local elites to serve on 4,647 draft boards, charged with monitoring the registration and conscription of citizens in their local communities. The boards also had responsibility for what one historian has called, “protecting the social order at home.”¹⁰⁵ Opposition to the war itself gathered strength through local countermobilization. Rapid unionization in a tight labor market and increasing socialist strength in municipalities lent muscle to the opposition. Once war was declared, the federal government understood how critical it was to mobilize local elites through business associations, the American Protective League (APL), and vigilante groups. The Wilson administration tasked them not only with implementing conscription and corralling “slackers” but with inhibiting the spread of anti-war sentiment in immigrant and working-class communities capable of disrupting the war effort through strikes and other forms of direct action. The context of the ongoing class struggle in industrial communities loomed large. John Chambers has documented the substantial role of “the new corporate elite and their professional allies” in the leadership of the conscriptionist movement, as they “sought to protect the interests of their group.” Their underlying concerns were transparent. “These conservatives were frightened by the threats posed to the economic order by rapid urban and industrial change, by the massive numbers of immigrants coming to the nation’s cities, and by the rise of socialism and other radical alternatives.”¹⁰⁶

The fight for universal military training (UMT) in the preparedness period had been the opening wedge for what would become a strong push for conscription. However, a powerful strain of “anti-militarism” coursed through many local unions, city central labor bodies, and some national unions. Anti-militarism fueled opposition to an expanded military that employers believed might also be needed to defeat local strikes. Recent memory provided ample precedent for such use of the military and the police in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁰⁷ Such fears were not entirely unfounded. In debate over the liabilities of the volunteer system one Republican from Minnesota noted, it “takes those who had not ought to go, and … exempts those who ought to go.” A Georgia Democrat worried that “we shall have to keep an army at home to protect the country against the men left alone when the best men go to war.”¹⁰⁸ Some associated with the labor movement ventured ideas parallel to those. Basil Manly, who worked closely with chairman Frank Walsh on the US Commission on Industrial Relations, recommended that Walsh speak to the issue in his 1915 Labor Day speech. He suggested that “every union local should be made a voluntary military company and every union hall an armory.” He believed a “ ‘Trade Union army’ would do more to stop war talk than all the platitudes in the world.” And in an aside, which he suggested Walsh refrain from mentioning, “there would be no Colorados or West Virginias with such a democratic army in existence.”¹⁰⁹

Preparedness and the onset of war itself provided a new political milieu that enabled elites in some cities that had been centers of socialist strength to shift the lines of partisanship. Creating “citizens coalitions” professing a broader, cross-class appeal served to isolate the socialists. In Two Harbors, Minnesota, socialists running first as a Public Ownership Party and then as a Socialist Party controlled city government for a decade, from 1907 to 1917, only to be defeated in successive wartime elections by a fusion ticket that ran under the label of a “Citizens’ Progressive League” and proposed to “serve all the people of the city.” To the socialists they were simply “the company ticket,” representing the corporate influence of the Duluth and Iron Range Railroad Company. In Dayton, Ohio, as we have seen, leading figures in the “open shop” movement had challenged the rising strength of the Socialist Party in 1913 and pushed through changes in the city’s charter that instituted structural reforms—commission government, an appointed city manager, and at-large elections. These changes secured the political dominance of a fusion “Citizens’ Committee” throughout the war and postwar period, despite a resilient Socialist Party.¹¹⁰

Local communities felt the bite of repression most severely following the declaration of war and the adoption of conscription in the United States.¹¹¹ The class and racial dynamics within specific communities help to explain the virulence of repression and the overlap between anti-immigrant and anti-radical agitation. John Higham referred to a “loss of confidence” in the capacity of the United States to assimilate the “hordes” of new immigrants arriving in unprecedented numbers in the early twentieth century. “[The prewar revival of nativism] prepared the way for the greater passions of the war years, and it also set in motion trends that reached fulfillment once the war was over.” But the intertwining of nativism, racism, and anti-radicalism that Higham described is only one dimension of the intense persecution the war itself unleashed.¹¹² John Chambers highlighted the opportunity that preparedness advocates saw in universal military training. Military service might promote assimilation of immigrant workers by fostering what the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association termed “our industrial citizenship” and what a leading economist and conscription advocate described as “far more desirable citizens and far more productive laborers.” Frank Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, a leading conscriptionist and critic of Wilson’s efforts to avoid a national rail strike in 1916, made explicit the connection to suppressing class conflict. In so doing, he echoed the views of many “progressive” reformers.

It is the duty of every one of us to do what we can to induce wage earners to examine their relations to the industrial system as a whole and to be loyal to the industrial system as a whole rather than to any narrowly mistaken opinion of class interest. The whole idea of separate class interests is an illusion and, if cherished, fatal to the welfare of all classes.¹¹³

Understanding the local context of class warfare is critical for understanding the nature of wartime repression. In the United States, the agents of that repression first and foremost were local businessmen and politically influential elites for whom the suppression of labor militancy and the movement to municipalize city services flowed naturally into repression of war opponents. The war provided a convenient opportunity to mobilize a broader public against their longstanding labor and socialist foes.

The case of Minneapolis illustrates the polarizing influence of the prewar “open shop” movement, and its effect on wartime political mobilization. The two were integrally linked. The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and its predecessor, the Employers of Machinists Association, grew directly out of a bitter machinists’ strike in 1901. That strike defeat and another in 1907 led the machinists’ union and its leadership to look for remedies in independent labor politics. The fight over the open shop set the stage for a new foray by the socialists into municipal politics. Thomas Van Lear led an increasingly unified labor movement to combat the Citizens Alliance and pursue a class-based municipal agenda that was “flexible, pragmatic, reformist.” A teamsters’ strike in 1916 and the fight to municipalize the city’s street railways set the stage for Van Lear’s success in the 1916 mayoral campaign. He had defined the campaign as a stark polarity “between special privilege, seeking control of all city affairs, and the common people who demand that the people, not the financially powerful, should rule.” The polarizing effects of war would pose a new set of challenges for the Minneapolis socialists in their efforts to stem the open shop tide. Despite divisions over support of the war and concerted attacks by the anti-labor Commission on Public Safety, Van Lear and his socialist allies in the Municipal Non-Partisan League survived as a political force to be reckoned with.¹¹⁴

Economic conditions brought on by the European war precipitated renewed labor conflict—not confined to the West—with the strikes or threatened strikes by East Pittsburgh machinists, Bridgeport munitions workers, Chicago packinghouse workers, and Colorado and West Virginia coal miners. Such conflict constituted the essential context for understanding the intensification of local and state repression of labor and its radical allies once the United States entered the war.¹¹⁵ Many of the most vigorously prosecuted cases against socialists and syndicalists for sedition or espionage only came to trial after the war. Deeper issues and polarities were at play than simply opposition to conscription and the war. The re-emergence of a vigorous postwar open shop campaign in Midwestern industrial towns like the socialist stronghold of Dayton is inseparable from the local successes employers and their allies had in attacking their socialist and labor adversaries over their “disloyalty” during the war. By the war’s end, labor and socialist activists had been stripped of broader community support and made more vulnerable, despite whatever temporary wartime gains in shorter hours and even union recognition they may have won through rulings of the National War Labor Board and its co-chair Frank Walsh.

Comparing Wartime Strikes in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States

Wartime strikes provide a barometer of the impact of the war on workers’ lives in Europe’s periphery. Comparisons of strikes in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand pose significant challenges but are instructive not only for gauging the war’s effects on their respective economies but for explaining the different trajectories in labor’s postwar strength and political clout. Several points of comparison deserve attention.

First, levels of wartime strike activity in the United States rose more sharply and involved more workers in a wider range of industries than did strikes in Australia, despite the notable escalation of strikes among Australian workers in some specific sectors in 1916–17.¹¹⁶ New Zealand saw a surge in prewar strike activity, but the country’s fabled arbitration framework, supplemented by specific wartime regulations governing labor disputes, largely contained conflict at relatively low levels. A handful of larger strikes did erupt among miners, waterside workers, and “freezing workers,” who in some cases faced substantial financial penalties.¹¹⁷ In the United States, widespread labor conflict constituted a greater threat to corporate stability and fueled the viciousness of employers’ response. Second, Australia had not seen a surge in prewar strike activity comparable to the United States. The existence of a federal arbitration board and state wage boards channeled many conflicts into a process of formal dispute resolution that had no counterpart in the freewheeling industrial relations “system” in the United States.¹¹⁸ More workers had unionized and were subject to trade union discipline in Australia (32.8 percent in 1914) than in the United States (11.5 percent in 1914). Although union membership in New Zealand rose to 100,000 even after the big strike defeats in 1913, density remained lower than in Australia. Australia was not without labor conflict under the arbitration system, it simply experienced fewer, less bitterly protracted strikes, marked by lower levels of violence than in the United States.¹¹⁹ Third, the outbreak of war and rapid Australian mobilization initially dampened conflict because of economic disruption and high unemployment. A transitory surge of patriotic fervor also discouraged strikes. In the United States, the economic impact of the war was initially more measured. But labor conflict continued to roil key sectors of the American economy during the preparedness period. After the tumultuous strikes in New Zealand during the immediate prewar years, labor conflict subsided with the outbreak of war.¹²⁰ Fourth, both the United States and Australia experienced rising levels of strike activity in 1916 and 1917. In the United States a tightening labor market before and after the declaration of war contributed to a sharp rise in strikes that included broad sectors of the industrial labor force. Skilled workers aligned their “control” struggles with the economic grievances of the unskilled in basic industry. As David Montgomery noted, the wave of “munitions strikes” that spread out of New England in 1915 took on the character of “outlaw” strikes without official union support. That militancy continued to grow. With the number of strikers increasing exponentially, “the declaration of war had only a minor impact on this militancy.”¹²¹ In Australia, the rise in strike activity was initially concentrated in mining, but the Great Railway Strike of 1917, although ending in abject defeat for the workers, saw railway workers in NSW and in Queensland ignite general strikes that drew in numbers of waterfront workers, coal miners, slaughtermen, engineers, and tramway workers.¹²²

Finally, the collapse of the general strike in Australia in 1917 brought a decline in labor conflict during the last year of the war. The growth of trade union opposition to conscription, allied with segments of the Labor Party, produced a shift in strategy toward political mobilization. In the United States, strike activity continued at historically high levels and carried over into the postwar years, when massive defeats among steel workers, railway shop workers, packinghouse workers, and miners signaled a collapse of trade union membership and virtual, though temporary, extinction of broader organization among industrial workers.¹²³ By comparison, the labor movement in Australia came out of the war strengthened. A growing segment of the movement was now committed to industrial organization. Despite the split in the Labor Party nationally, at the local level the defeat of conscription energized continuing political mobilization that paid dividends in postwar municipal campaigns.¹²⁴ New Zealand, similarly, sustained wartime gains in union membership that served as a foundation for continued growth of the young New Zealand Labour Party.

Comparing Wartime Repression in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States

Any comparison of the wartime home front in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand must come to terms with the differences in the ways governmental authorities and local voluntarist groups responded to opponents of conscription and the war itself. In the United States and to a lesser degree in New Zealand response was harsher than what war opponents faced in Australia. The available data suggest several possible explanations.

First, municipal socialism had gained a stronger foothold in the United States during the prewar period than in Australia or New Zealand. Its growth and vitality appeared more threatening to local and state power structures. However, because of its comparatively weaker presence at state and national levels, socialists’ local strength did not seriously deter state repression. In Australia, the Labor Party’s strength nationally and in several states imposed some restraints on the actions that the Fisher and Hughes federal labor administrations could take against their opponents.¹²⁵ And, in New Zealand, miners and water-front workers flexed their muscle in ways that placed limits on state repression of industrial militancy. According to Len Richardson, their “embryonic resistance to conscription was for them a logical extension of their complaints about the rising cost of living and the exploitation of wage-earners.”¹²⁶ In the United States, municipal socialists were thrown on the defensive by the intensifying repression directed at war opponents, while in Australia, the successful mobilization of anti-conscription forces within the Labor Party set the stage for a revitalization of the Labor Party at local and state levels with the war’s end.¹²⁷ A focus on local arenas helps to account for US–Australia–New Zealand differences in organizing opposition to conscription and the war.

A second explanation for differences in treatment of war opponents may be that in the United States socialists focused their opposition on the war itself, whereas in Australia and New Zealand conscription became the primary object of labor and socialist opposition. In the United States, opposition to the war represented a more direct challenge to state authority and invited a harsher response. The period of opposition after US entry into the war was preceded by two and a half years of neutrality that reinforced deep skepticism within the US working class toward involvement in the war.¹²⁸ Pro-war, preparedness sentiment emanated most strongly from business circles tied to war production. Once war was declared, Samuel Gompers and the leadership of the AFL supported US participation, however significant segments of the labor movement continued in opposition.¹²⁹ US socialists and the relatively small Socialist Party in Australia (and the Independent Labour Party in Britain) stood alone among socialist and labor parties transnationally in their principled opposition to the war. In the case of Australia, the Labor Party’s opposition to “conscription” was quite distinct from opposition to the war itself and did not pose as direct a threat to the country’s support for Britain and its allies. Labor’s election manifesto in August 1914 made the point quite explicitly. “We deplore war! … [But] our interests and our very existence are bound up with those of Empire. In time of war half measures are worse than none. If returned with a majority, we shall pursue with the utmost rigour every course necessary for the defence of the Commonwealth and Empire.”¹³⁰ Indeed, the Fisher and later Hughes Labor governments took on the mantle of war leadership, even as many of their constituents wavered. A bitter opponent of conscription, Queensland’s Labor premier T. J. Ryan actively participated in recruiting volunteers for the war effort until the very end.¹³¹

Third, in the United States, opposition to the war was deeply confounded with ethnicity and particularly with questions regarding the loyalty of the large and influential German American and Irish American populations. State and local voluntarists deployed nativism and racism in more pronounced ways than in Australia. Beginning as a broad-based critique of “hyphenated” Americans, “loyalist” sentiment in the United States evoked a longer nativist tradition that took on a more aggressive edge during the preparedness campaign. With the declaration of war in April 1917, direct action against German immigrant communities in the name of “100 percent Americanism” became the norm and quickly included suppression of the German language in schools, newspapers, churches, and other public venues. On occasion such campaigns precipitated violence—flogging, tarring and feathering, or even lynching or threats to lynch German immigrants themselves. The politics of anti-Germanism in Australia followed some of the same patterns as in the United States, including the racialization of immigrants who prior to the war had been generally welcomed and even respected. The German population was proportionately three times smaller with 33,381 German-born residents out of a population of 4,573,786 (1911), compared to a US German-born population of roughly 2.3 million out of a population of 103,208,000 (1917). A vastly larger number of German Americans were still culturally embedded in immigrant communities. The fact that a segment of working-class Germans in the United States provided a base of support for the Socialist Party intensified the persecution they and the Socialist Party itself faced. While the internment of some categories of Germans became official policy in both countries, Germans and other immigrants did not face the same intense suppression or threat of violence in Australia as they did in the United States.¹³²

Fourth, both the Socialist Party of America and the IWW were stronger in the United States than their counterparts in Australia. While the IWW was viciously repressed in both countries, American socialists’ principled opposition to the war made them especially vulnerable to anti-socialist hysteria as war fever heated up in the United States.¹³³

Municipal Politics in Wartime: Comparing the Limits of Municipal Governance

The history and structure of local governance helps account for the varied responses of local authorities in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand to the crises brought on by the Great War. Australian states historically restricted the activity of local government to a limited set of functions pertaining to “services to property” such as street and footpath repair and garbage collection. However, in some states—notably Queensland and Victoria—local governments fought to expand their responsibilities to include regulation of public health, housing, leisure facilities, and urban transit. Since municipal government was largely funded by property rates, city councils, even when they sought to expand services, faced what Martin Painter called “the hip pocket nerve of ratepayers.”¹³⁴ In the most powerful states, like New South Wales, state government retained full control over police, education, public welfare, and public transportation. Virtually all funding for local government came through state and later federal grants.¹³⁵ Such control did not prevent the Labor Party, once it turned its attention to Sydney, from offering a program intended to “capture the city and implement its policies.” F. A. Larcombe, historian of local government in New South Wales, has provided the best account of labor’s efforts to win control of city government in Sydney between 1912 and 1925. In that latter year, the Labor Party offered a program that went far beyond the traditional limits imposed by the state on local governance.

It promised better housing facilities through provision of modern workers’ dwellings, modern well-equipped children’s playgrounds, cheaper electric power the profits from which would be spent to relieve rates, removal of the “iniquitous” bridge tax, full adult franchise, full civic and political liberty, and a forty-four hour week for council employees, control over food markets and stricter food inspection.¹³⁶

Despite the limited powers of local government during wartime, city councils remained the most accessible point of democratic influence. They provided a forum for workers’ protest and redress for economic circumstances that became intolerable. They were also a site for the defense of the right to exercise free speech in public spaces.

In the United States during the long colonial era, isolated cities “incubated” traditions of self-government that nurtured a strong tradition of “local control.” Despite the commitment to localism that grew out of the American Revolution, the US Constitution was silent on the powers of local government and implicitly privileged the states. This represented, in the words of one historian, “a reversal of the teachings of colonial history, for by it, the anterior governments, the local communities were made secondary, and the derivative governments, the states, became primary.”¹³⁷

In the late 1780s, James Madison in the famous tenth Federalist paper had worried over the potential dangers posed by local governance. “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it, in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district than an entire state.”¹³⁸ Alexis de Tocqueville also gave voice to similar elite fears of local “mob rule.”¹³⁹

The contested status of cities as corporations remained central to state-local government relations throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.¹⁴⁰ A series of decisions by the United States Supreme Court in the early to mid-nineteenth century shifted the locus of governmental authority from cities to states. As the legal scholar Gerald Frug has written, “The subordination of cities to the state turned the political world as it then existed upside down.” This shift of authority from city to state was reinforced by the perceived threat in urban areas posed by changing demographics and the growing concentration of a largely propertyless immigrant working class.¹⁴¹

The most influential ruling on the limits of municipal “home rule” came to be known as “Dillon’s rule,” an opinion authored by Iowa Supreme Court Justice John F. Dillon in 1868. “The true view is this: Municipal Corporations owe their origin to and derive their powers and rights wholly from the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so it may destroy … [Cities] are so to phrase it, mere tenants at will of the legislature.”¹⁴² Dillon’s “rule” became the basis for court decisions and state political practice thereafter, though not without challenge in the early twentieth century. Judge Thomas Cooley (Michigan) in 1871 argued that the right of local self-government antedated state incorporation and could not be limited by it.¹⁴³ He asserted that “local government is a matter of absolute right; the state cannot take it away.” In a treatise on principles of constitutional law, he wrote, “It is axiomatic that the management of purely local affairs belongs to the people concerned, not only because of being their own affairs, but because they will best understand, and be most competent to manage them.” Dillon’s rule did not categorically limit the powers that states might grant to cities. It simply stipulated that the specific rights to municipal home rule required state authorization. It left open the door for considerable state-to-state variation in the actual powers that cities might acquire and exercise. Progressive Era struggles over “home rule” were the byproduct of political demands by cities for a more expanded definition of municipal rights. Within that space urban reformers and socialists moved to claim broader governing authority over municipal life.¹⁴⁴ In so doing they reanimated elite fears for their property at the hands of newly energized and expansive local labor and socialist policies.

In Australia, because the Labor Party had greater strength at state and federal levels during World War I, it could moderate the use of state power and mute repressive actions against war opponents. In the United States, local authorities generally had more direct control over local police forces, and repression of war opponents had freer reign, often with the sanction of state and federal authorities.

At least until the end of WWI, New Zealand stood apart in the extent to which local government and a wide range of special-purpose local bodies enjoyed considerable, though not uncontested, autonomy. As Graham Bush has observed, “until the 1920s local government was left mainly to its own devices.” Local self-government did not, however, extend to policing, as was amply demonstrated in the industrial turmoil of 1913 when the central government brutally manifested its ultimate power to deploy and control both local police and special constablesto suppress the strikes.¹⁴⁵

In the Urban Trenches: The Municipal Home Front

A comparison of cities in wartime reveals the limits and possibilities encountered by labor and socialist political activists in the municipal realm.¹⁴⁶ Among the constraints municipal activists faced, in addition to limited home rule, was a restrictive municipal franchise. However, a war, ostensibly in defense of democracy, opened new possibilities for cities to live up to democratic principles for which soldiers were fighting and dying. The war called on cities to mobilize resources in new and innovative ways to address the needs created by war. We might compare, for example, Ohio towns with a strong socialist presence such as Dayton and Hamilton but also larger cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, and New York, with the Labor Party presence and activity in Sydney and Redfern; Footscray, Fitzroy, and Richmond in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Broken Hill, NSW. In New Zealand, workers exerted influence over wartime social policy in a handful of cities such as Christchurch and the historically militant mining towns of Greymouth and Runanga. The results in Auckland, Wellington, and Dunedin were more limited. Political context mattered. The extent of repression against opponents of conscription or the war made a difference but so, too, did the space created by labor’s ability to shape the day-to-day politics of the home front.

Australia

In prewar Australia, Broken Hill had been the grand exception, although, as previously discussed, some Melbourne municipalities, and Redfern, Sydney, and a handful of other cities demonstrated a robust Labor Party presence in local bodies.¹⁴⁷ War intensified economic grievances, which continued to be aired in municipal bodies. But, because of the party’s minority status in many cities, Labor councillors could do little more than petition for municipalization of services, fight a rearguard battle on behalf of municipal employees’ wages and working conditions, and demand unrestricted access to town halls and parks for use in anti-conscription agitation.¹⁴⁸ Some Labor Party branches, such as the Leichhardt Political Labor League (Sydney) and the Essendon Political Labor Council (Melbourne) regularly petitioned their city councils to relieve distress brought on by the rising cost of living. They called on the city to meet the needs of the unemployed, protect free speech, oppose conscription, and deal fairly with municipal employees.¹⁴⁹ In those municipalities where labor had stronger representation, such as Redfern (Sydney) and Richmond (Melbourne), Labor councillors made headway in defense of labor rights, for the use of public space for anti-conscription agitation, and for unemployed relief. They materially improved the conditions and representation of municipal workers, and they challenged restrictions on what municipalities could do and on the limits of the municipal franchise. In Redfern, Labor councillors were able to raise the wages of day laborers and win the use of the town hall for anti-conscription meetings. And, in Richmond, the Labor councillors pushed an expansive agenda that included unemployed relief, guarantees to trade union representation for municipal employees, and unrestricted use of the town hall for PLC lectures and anti-conscription agitation.¹⁵⁰ Labor candidates for councils in a variety of municipalities during the war did not limit their program to these issues, but challenged the limited powers granted by states to municipalities. Angus McDonell, running in Northcote (Melbourne) in July 1916, argued that “the spirit and programme of socialism” was the way to achieve “modern municipalism” through municipal trading (municipal ownership), day labor rather than private contracting, and municipal baths and markets; in short “they should make the communes of Italy their ideal, where they fixed the prices of food, had their own bakehouses, schools, and even their own doctors and midwives.” Labor candidates for municipal council in Sydney in December 1918 outlined an ambitious program of municipalization that “Labor is pledged to achieve when the citizens by their votes give it the necessary power.”¹⁵¹

The war’s end brought some changes in the municipal franchise. Strengthened by its grassroots wartime mobilization against conscription, the Labor Party made gains at the municipal level. The postwar victories in Queensland and Brisbane were particularly noteworthy but also in Sydney and a large number of other municipalities in New South Wales. In Brisbane, because franchise changes were somewhat modest, the Labor Party did not enjoy initial success until 1924 but then it elected majorities in Brisbane, South Brisbane, Ithaca, and Coorparoo. Individual candidates won office in a range of other municipalities. In NSW, Labor won control in Forbes, Junee, Paddington, and Parkes (1920); Balmain, Lidcombe, Lithgow, Liverpool, Redfern, and Sydney (1922); and Bourke, Canterbury, Erskineville, and Glebe (1925); in addition to seven previous strongholds.¹⁵²

Brisbane, Queensland

With the election of T. J. Ryan’s Labor government in 1915, Labor’s parliamentary fortunes in Queensland improved. The bitter tramway strike of 1912 had left a residue of anger among local citizens and labor activists, who now petitioned for municipalization of tramways, made possible by changes in state law. Not until 1921 did the matter begin to advance, when Labor representation in the council increased substantially. Brisbane’s municipalizers turned their attention again to new state legislation empowering the city to purchase the tramways (and thereby provide a revenue stream that would also give relief to local ratepayers). However, with the legislation hamstrung in a divided parliament, little progress was seen, and local municipalization was not finally achieved until 1923.¹⁵³

Other issues also gained new steam with the wartime election of a state Labor government. In 1915, municipal wages were advanced by 10 percent across the board despite the expressed opposition of some councillors. With support of the Australian Workers Union, local WPOs (Workers’ Political Organizations) throughout Queensland carried on the fight for a “municipal log” that would standardize wages, hours, and conditions of work, despite the concerted resistance from many local government bodies, including the city council in Brisbane.¹⁵⁴ The state Industrial Court issued a ruling in June 1916 mandating a 10 percent across-the-board increase in the wages of municipal employees.¹⁵⁵

Under Ryan’s leadership of the Labor Party, Queensland became a beacon for opponents of conscription in 1916 and 1917. Brisbane workers also drew inspiration from opposition to the war by American socialists and prominent British Laborites, like Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald. They mobilized in massive numbers to defeat conscription, demand employment, and win relief from escalating prices. Patrick Hickey, the itinerant New Zealand labor agitator, whose career had taken him to the hard-rock mines of the western United States, back to Blackball and Wellington, New Zealand, and eventually to Melbourne and Brisbane, celebrated the Australian labor movement’s wartime opposition in 1918 as “one of the most inspiring in the world.”¹⁵⁶

Brisbane mayor Hetherington’s annual address to the council in early 1917 revealed the depth of divisions locally over the war. Speaking on behalf of the governing elite, he acknowledged “the end is not yet in sight” of the “great struggle upon which the Empire entered.” While noting “the sacrifice of human life has been appalling and deplorable in the extreme,” he believed that Australians naturally “as an integral part of the Empire should take part” despite the “loss of property and the fruits of industry” and the “burden of taxation,” and that “our posterity will reap inestimable benefits from our present sacrifices.” He reserved his harshest words for opposition to the war, military recruitment, and conscription, which was rising rapidly in towns and cities across Queensland and many parts of the country and was especially evident after the first referendum on conscription.

Unfortunately, the specious arguments and pernicious doctrines of a class of individuals whose actions proclaim them as traitors and ingrates to the flag which affords them protection and the widest liberty, had the effect of discouraging recruiting.¹⁵⁷

More longstanding and more contentiously resisted was labor’s demand for franchise reform. In late 1915, at the behest of the Local Authorities Association of Queensland, the Brisbane council resolved, with Labor’s Thomas Wilson the sole dissenting vote, to oppose the Ryan government’s proposal of adult suffrage in municipal elections. Despite Ryan’s efforts, local franchise reform remained stalled until Labor majorities in both houses broke the logjam. With the passage of the Local Authorities Amendment Act of 1920, Labor overcame the influence of local councils in the Legislative Assembly.¹⁵⁸ With municipal adult franchise achieved, local government in Brisbane and elsewhere in Queensland stood poised for a new era of local labor rule. The dogged and often beleaguered efforts of Thomas Wilson and his allies in the local Labor Party to create political space for workers’ interests in local government had finally borne fruit.

Broken Hill, New South Wales

In Broken Hill, New South Wales, municipal struggles over employment, housing, the cost of living, and city services took on new relevance and intensity in wartime. Broken Hill, as we have seen, had a long-established and well-deserved reputation as a labor stronghold.¹⁵⁹ In May 1915 the Barrier Daily Truth could proclaim, “Ever since the great strike of ’92 the industrial, municipal and political actions of the people of these parts have been of interest and instructiveness to every other section of the wonderful Labor Movement.” The paper also quoted with some pride the warning published by the liberal Sydney Morning Herald, that with adult suffrage, municipal government in greater Sydney was likely to go the way of the infamous Broken Hill, where the “Barrier Labor Federation, not the [city] Council names the mayor,” and where the city “insists on every [city] employee being a unionist.”¹⁶⁰ Broken Hill had a nearly continuous string of Labor mayors reaching back to the victory in 1900, when a new Labor majority in the city council had selected local undertaker and labor activist Jabez Wright for the office. Wright was followed in succeeding years as the city’s Labor mayor by several miners, a builder, a teamster, a railwayman, and a butcher. Only twice before the early 1920s did the annual council elections fail to produce a labor mayor.

The war initially got a mixed reception in Broken Hill. A patriotic surge swept through some portions of the local population. One report suggested that nearly 600 men had volunteered in the initial three weeks, of whom only 123 were chosen. Their send-offs at the Sulphide Street Station drew both supporters and opponents of the war. At one such farewell in early September 1914 some socialists “booed and hooted.” The war supporters turned on them with jeers of “Red-raggers, Traitors, Never Works, and Mongrels” and chased them to the “Socialist Hall,” where only timely intervention by the municipal police prevented violence. By spring 1915, support for the war was ebbing under the impact of rising casualties—carefully itemized by name and locality in the Barrier Daily Truth. The war also had direct effects on the local economy. Unemployment rose, the product of steep declines in mineral exports to Germany and Belgium. Employment in the mines fell from 11,575 workers in June 1914 to 6,089 in December.¹⁶¹ By spring, local labor leaders and municipal officials openly expressed their concerns about the war and its domestic impact. Bob Ross, editor of the Barrier Daily Truth, called for a “practical peace policy” in which workers and their trade unions should play a leading role. Quoting a prominent Australian labor opponent of the war, Ross called the war “a sordid, ugly, bloody imbecility, without redeeming feature.” He challenged the proposed gag on free speech, put forward by the NSW Labor Minister, and suggested instead that he “should devote all his time and attention to getting rid of the vampires who were trafficking in the necessities of the workers.”¹⁶²

By June, concerns about mass unemployment and skyrocketing prices reached new heights. At a “largely attended” mass meeting outside the Trades Hall, speakers called on the state government to find work “for the innocent sufferers through the war” and appealed to the mayor to put city workers on half-time, so as to spread the work. “Some men are having good innings with the Council, while others were starving … They wanted their whack of the rates to which they were entitled in the form of wages.” Another argued that men were “being forced out of work by the Government, so that they would be compelled to go to the front. It was conscription under the guise of patriotism.” A rally three days later demanded the restricted export of meat and other foodstuffs. A speaker from the crowd called the workers “nothing better than servile slaves” who “had been subdued by the capitalistic and jingo classes.” Within a few days, a “Citizens Anti-Food Combine Committee” convened another protest meeting to demand that state government regulate food prices. In the meantime, Jabez Wright, the city’s first Labor mayor and by then a member of the NSW parliament, reported that he would see that fifteen tons of flour per week were shipped to Broken Hill, its distribution to be overseen by the Australian Miners Association. City council endorsed the resolutions of the mass meeting and called on the mayor to stop wasting time appealing to the Chamber of Commerce for assistance.¹⁶³

With opposition to the war rising sharply, local AMA militants in Broken Hill seized the initiative to press their demands for a shorter workweek and a minimum guaranteed wage as the only security against deteriorating conditions in the domestic economy. With increasing vehemence, Ross denounced the war and the hardships it induced. In words dripping with sarcasm, he wrote,

Hurrah for War! Hurrah for blood and entrails, for lungs shot through and eyes gouged out, for faces torn off and limbs blown sky-high, for weeping mothers and fatherless children, for disease and death abroad, for starvation and destitution at home.¹⁶⁴

The bitter fight against conscription lay only months away, but already the political context of the war at home had shifted. Broken Hill would continue to be a major player in the anti-conscription fight.¹⁶⁵

New Zealand’s cities

The New Zealand Social Democratic Party organization at the war’s outset was not operating from a position of strength, especially in the municipal realm. In the first municipal elections after the outbreak of war during 1915, the party put forward a substantial field of candidates, but the results were mixed. The divisive aftermath of the great strikes of 1912–13 still hung heavy in the air. Members also were deeply divided over whether to support New Zealand’s participation in the war. Nevertheless, whether under a unified banner of the Labour Representation Council or the Social Democratic Party itself, labor managed to elect three mayors (in Port Chalmers, Runanga, and Woolston) and numbers of city councillors, and members of harbor boards and hospital boards. But, in only two smaller mining towns (Dargaville and Runanga), did they elect a controlling majority. The results in the four major cities were disappointing.¹⁶⁶ The municipal platforms for both Auckland and Christchurch did not specifically address issues related to mobilization for war, but rather compiled a by-now-standard set of municipal socialist demands: expansion of public ownership (or municipal trading) into new areas of the urban economy; the elimination of contract work and substitution of municipal employment at trade union standards; taxation on unimproved land; and adoption of proportional representation in elections.¹⁶⁷

As the national government moved toward adopting conscription, war issues elbowed their way into municipal politics, either in the effusive expressions of support by some elected officials or in resolutions of protest from the war’s opponents. Socialists and Labour Representation Councils (LRCs) inserted demands opposing conscription or for protecting freedom of speech or “conscripting wealth” into their campaign literature. In April 1917, the Christchurch LRC, which had succeeded the local SDF, ran a full-page ad on behalf of its full slate of municipal candidates.

We do not believe in War. We do all we can to avert war, but owing to our disorganized state we cannot avert war. Once war is started our work is to end it as soon as possible. Meantime our duty is to protect the economic interest of those who do the fighting. This is the mission of the working class throughout the world. This is OUR mission, war or no war.¹⁶⁸

One of those city council candidates, Mrs. Ada Wells, stood “principally as an anti-conscriptionist” and “an advocate of internationalism.” She had previously been elected to the city’s hospital and charities board. The campaign was energized by a broad coalition of progressive forces that shared among other things opposition to conscription.¹⁶⁹ Despite the “evangelical” zeal of the campaign, the results were again disappointing. Several sitting councillors lost their seats and only Mrs. Wells and Ted Howard were elected to join the remaining handful of LRC councillors.¹⁷⁰ Even before the 1917 election, the SDP councillors put forward resolutions (previously adopted by the Petone City Council) on conscription, trade union standards of pay for enlisted men, and the conscription of “wealth and profits” from war production.¹⁷¹ The handful of elected LRC members regularly introduced motions and resolutions challenging committee assignments, establishing city inspection and control of the milk supply, instituting a municipal market to control prices, criticizing government cost of living policies, but also opposing conscription, demanding the “conscription of wealth,” advocating for those imprisoned on charges of sedition, opposing a patriotic mayoral proclamation on the fourth anniversary of the declaration of war, and defending free speech in public spaces.¹⁷² The strength of labor would grow with the end of the war. Abandoning its old SDP identity for affiliation with the newest New Zealand Labour Party, local activists undertook what Plumridge called “a tremendous proliferation of branch activity and organization” in 1919. “The long political hegemony of Labour in the city had begun.”¹⁷³

Other major cities saw some gains for labor in the first municipal elections in 1919. In Auckland, out of nineteen nominees, three Labour candidates, including labor militant and future prime minister Michael Savage, won seats on the city council. The NZLP in Wellington nearly captured the mayoralty and elected four councillors, including another labor militant and future prime minister, Peter Fraser. Only in Dunedin was the party shut out in the municipal election. Its status was a product of long-simmering divisions in the ranks of labor over the conscription issue and the perception locally of the NZLP and its leadership, including the president and local luminary, J. T. Paul, as being disloyal to the country.¹⁷⁴

United States

Initially, wartime enabled Socialists in the United States to build significantly on their prewar municipal successes by becoming the standard-bearer for opposition to direct US involvement in the Great War. However, the party’s adoption of a strong anti-war platform at its special St. Louis convention shortly after the US declaration of war put it in the government’s crosshairs and precipitated a firestorm of both government and vigilante action to suppress its publications and its public presence.

Viewed transnationally but through the prism of “the local,” the special character and intensity of state and voluntarist repression of war opponents in the United States became especially evident. Local and state agents, both private and public, did much of the dirty work sanctioned by the national state under the Espionage and the Sedition Acts. Operating with the general approval of the federal Justice Department and under the ideological umbrella of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), agents of the American Protective League (APL), who typically represented the “upper social, economic and political crust of each community,” carried out (illegal) private arrests and detentions, wiretapped telephones, opened the mail of socialists and war opponents, and committed acts of “random terror.”¹⁷⁵ The deportation into the desert of more than 1,000 striking copper miners from Bisbee, Arizona, and the lynching of IWW organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana, are only the most famous cases. In these and other instances, local employers and their henchmen successfully linked industrial agitation to disloyalty. As the New York Times editorialized, “These IWW agitators are in effect, and perhaps in fact, agents of Germany. The Federal Authorities should make short work of these treasonable conspirators against the United States.”¹⁷⁶ The disruptive impact of Postmaster General Burleson’s banning of socialist and oppositional publications from the mails was complemented by the work of local postmasters whom historian Christopher Capozzola calls “the bottom-up state builders of the Espionage Act.” The suppression of dissent locally—the violence of attacks on local socialists and members of the IWW, the breaking up of meetings, the destruction of Socialist Party offices—stands out clearly. Robert Goldstein notes that the most aggressive and violent targeting of the Socialist Party came in the aftermath of its victories at the polls in municipalities in November 1917.¹⁷⁷

The US declaration of war, and the adoption of conscription less than two months later, created new political dynamics with which socialists and other war opponents had to contend. During the early months of 1917, opposition to the United States’ entry into the war had been vocal and, at least among socialists, relatively unified. Shortly after taking office in January 1917, Thomas Van Lear, Socialist mayor of Minneapolis, spoke out forcefully against the United States’ impending participation, but would eventually support the war.¹⁷⁸ The Socialist resolution opposing the war produced a split in the party’s ranks. However, a strong majority in the party sustained its opposition in the months that followed. Even in the summer months, after implementation of the draft, a wide cross-section of socialists continued to speak out against both conscription and the war. Some Socialist locals maintained a resolute focus on local issues and only cautiously voiced skepticism about the war. Others took very public stands against conscription and draft registration, and for that their most vocal activists suffered the consequences.¹⁷⁹ By the fall of 1917, repression of dissent over the war, having grown during the summer months, now intensified.¹⁸⁰ In spite of their vulnerable state, many locals pushed ahead with the fall municipal campaign, and saw a surprising surge of success at the polls, fueled by popular anti-war sentiment. The initial electoral fruits in 1917 looked promising. Socialists made gains in their municipal vote compared to 1915–16, especially in those cities of the East and Midwest where, as early as 1911–12, they had shown strength. These included New York City, Schenectady, Buffalo, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee, and numbers of cities in Ohio and Indiana.¹⁸¹

Socialist gains in 1917 appear to have been a byproduct of a deep residual opposition to the war as well as a sentiment favoring expanded municipal services and what Paul Douglas called “economic pressure caused by rising prices.” In New York City, well-known socialist leader Morris Hillquit ran for mayor and ended up with 21.7 percent of the vote, an increase of 425 percent above his 1913 mayoral vote. Anticipating such an “alarming” growth in the socialist vote, Tammany Hall had sought “to cut the ground from under the Socialistic program,” according to the New York World, and gave “paramount importance to the municipal ownership pledge and other vagrant features of the Socialistic doctrine.” Socialist gains in other municipal contests could likewise be attributed both to economic discontent and support for a peaceful resolution of the Great War.¹⁸² The Socialist electoral successes of November 1917 proved a trigger for even more concerted repression of socialist activity by government agents and vigilantes. As the split widened in socialist ranks over support of the war, opponents were more isolated, their meetings disrupted, at times violently, their leaders jailed, and their publications now more systematically banned.

Hamilton, Ohio

Hamilton Socialists, as we have seen, developed significant influence over local government in 1911 with the election of a majority of city councillors. In 1913, they elected the mayor and retained control of council.¹⁸³ Although defeated through fusion in 1915 by a unity ticket of their Democratic and Republican opponents, Socialists maintained a voice in city council throughout the war years. Facing fusion again in 1917, they could make no further gains. Their success had rested on the maintenance of ward-based representation. But, despite losing again in 1917, their working-class constituency managed to defeat repeated attempts by governing elites between 1916 and 1926 to “reform” the city charter and adopt at-large representation and city manager administration municipal affairs.¹⁸⁴ Although the local branch supported the party’s anti-war position, its focus on municipal issues and its voice in city governance, though more limited after 1915, restrained the virulence of the repression its members faced locally.

Facing electoral disadvantages, the Socialists nevertheless continued during wartime to press for expansion of the public sector. Hamilton Socialists and their supporters succeeded in prohibiting the sale of the municipal light plant, natural gas distribution system, and public water-works during and after the war. As the historian of city government in Hamilton noted, “Some of the businessmen, alarmed at the prospect that the city administration should control the expenditure of so much money and fearful that higher taxes might result, began to work for the sale of the light plant and the distribution system to Union Gas and Electric Company.”¹⁸⁵ But in that they failed.

Dayton, Ohio

The city of Dayton, unlike Hamilton, adopted a new charter in 1913 after the flood that devastated the Miami Valley. Bitterly opposed by local socialists and trade unionists, business leaders pushed through a new charter creating a city manager form of local government with a small city commission elected on an at-large basis. This was acknowledged to be a “businessman’s” government spearheaded by a “Citizens’ Committee.” Socialists denounced charter reform “as a scheme of the business interests to gain perpetual control of the government.” In their view, this was an autocratic approach to local government that would “destroy democracy.” They argued that the at-large system “creates an oligarchy to handle the business of the city.”¹⁸⁶ Dayton Socialists would have to wait until the election of 1917 to mount a serious challenge for at-large city commission seats.

For some Socialist Party locals like Dayton, the war and conscription initially came without causing much evident disruption in party activity. Their focus remained on organization-building and local politics. And, in Dayton, the continuing struggle for a voice in city government occupied center stage.¹⁸⁷ With each election cycle the Socialists put forward a slate of candidates for the city commission, and in each cycle Democrats and Republicans united behind a single fusion slate of candidates.¹⁸⁸

The party engaged issues surrounding the war cautiously and gradually. A delegate reported to the local branch on the formation of a citywide “Peace League,” which after the war declaration was pragmatically renamed the “Montgomery County Patriotic League.” The Socialists successfully challenged in court the police chief’s denial of a permit for them to hold open-air meetings on behalf of their local candidates. But the war clearly took a back seat in their efforts overall. Street speaking remained a staple of local agitation, and Dayton SP leader Joseph Sharts took to the streets in late April not to oppose the war but to oppose the city commission/manager government and to sell the local’s pamphlet on the subject.¹⁸⁹ In the meantime, the Socialist Party of America that spring had adopted a forceful anti-war position, declaring that “the Socialist Party of the United States in the present grave crisis solemnly reaffirms its allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working-class solidarity the world over, and proclaims its unalterable opposition to the war just declared by the government of the United States.” The national party further rejected the proposal that workers “should suspend their struggle for better conditions.” Rather, they claimed the circumstance created by the war “calls for an even more vigorous prosecution of the class struggle.” The declaration called specifically for active “public opposition” that would include demonstrations, petitions, and “unyielding opposition to all proposed legislation for military or industrial conscription.”¹⁹⁰

Over the course of the summer months of 1917, the local SP in Dayton kept a steady focus on the impending primary and fall local elections. Wary of the effects of charter reform and the new at-large playing field in local politics, they remained resolute in their determination to contest for local office. Propaganda work continued. They built on the successful January lecture of socialist and outspoken war critic Professor Scott Nearing from Toledo University, for which 1,300 tickets had been sold. While the local focus on the municipal elections remained central, the summer meetings indicated increasing awareness of the persecution that comrades in other places were enduring because of their anti-war activity. The local established a defense fund and sent financial support for jailed comrades in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Tippecanoe City.¹⁹¹ It organized shop and street corner meetings, circulated literature, and mobilized extensively at the ward level to get out the vote first in the August primary and again in the general election in November.

The local mounted a formidable campaign for city elections in 1917 with a focus on rising wartime prices and a renewed push for municipally owned utilities. In a three-sided primary race, the Socialists came out on top by nearly 9,000 votes, with 43 percent of the total. Their success brought hundreds of new members into the local in the following months. The new recruits were overwhelmingly working class in occupation, predominately machinists, assemblers, toolmakers, laborers, and others in the metal trades, and occasionally housewives, clerks, or telegraphers. Framed as an election of “the people” versus “the business interests,” the Socialist prospects of winning control of the council, even under an at-large system, seemed promising. But the tables turned decisively when Democrats joined the Republicans with a “Citizens’ Committee” fusion ticket in the general election and the Socialists went down to defeat for every one of the at-large seats.¹⁹² The most careful, if still biased, studies of charter reform acknowledge that the Socialists’ defeat resulted from massive spending by “business interests” but also the ability of their opponents to bring the Socialists’ anti-war position into play. As Rightor described the situation,

It happened that after the August [primary] election one of the local Socialist leaders wrote an article in the New York Call, the socialist newspaper, in which he stated that the Socialists’ success in Dayton was due to their anti-war attitude. This article was taken by the Citizens Committee as its basis for the final campaign. The issue was made solely one of Americanism. The final result was a decisive victory for all three of the Citizens Committee candidates, insuring the continuance of the present plan for another four years. (Italics in original.)¹⁹³

Although the Socialist vote in the general election was 8,659 votes higher than its primary vote, the party was swamped by the totals of the fusion “Non-Partisan” candidates, losing on average by roughly 12,500 votes.¹⁹⁴

Despite winning the primary vote, their defeat in November 1917 effectively shut the Socialist Party and its working-class constituents out of representation in local affairs. In the months that followed, the party’s anti-war position and its lack of direct influence in the new city commission led to a more insular presence in the municipality. With the business community in full control of Dayton’s municipal government, its leaders could further buttress the city’s “open shop” climate in the post-war period. They succeeded in blocking the renewed development of a strong labor movement that might have undergirded the revival of a competitive municipal socialist challenge. Nevertheless, without missing a beat, after the election the Socialist local turned its attention to reorganizing its affairs and moved ahead with preparations for the next election. The strength of the local in Dayton may have given it a degree of insulation from the rapidly intensifying persecution that socialist activists faced in other parts of the state and country.¹⁹⁵ That pattern of persecution appears to have been more pronounced in some cities than others. Nationally, the Socialists’ electoral successes between 1912 and 1917 did not carry over to many municipalities like Dayton where they failed to win control of local government, and where they might have been expected at least to share power. At the local level, and in the context of the war, municipal socialists found themselves exposed to charges of “disloyalty” because of the national party’s principled and highly visible opposition to the war.¹⁹⁶

Across Ohio

Scattered protests against the war had erupted in cities throughout Ohio during the months before the war declaration. In its April issue, the Ohio Socialist signaled the shifting tide of opinion with a banner headline, “Courage Comrades—Courage.” The statewide organization promoted local anti-conscription meetings, even as it urged locals to nominate candidates and “enter the municipal campaigns” to defend democratic municipal charters and elect socialists as “school directors.”¹⁹⁷ But, very quickly, the tide of repression swelled against socialist war opponents. Charles Baker, from Hamilton, had been arrested on charges of seditious treason well before the war arrived. By June, arrests were multiplying across the state, notably in Cincinnati, Columbus, Tiffin, and Cleveland, and, by July, Marietta, Lorain, and Akron had joined the ranks of cities having jailed comrades. Baker, now statewide organizer for the Socialist Party, was arrested again in June. And the “postal authorities” held up the mailing of Socialist News, the Cleveland local’s newspaper, for reasons they refused to acknowledge.¹⁹⁸

In the prewar period, Cleveland had enjoyed a robust municipal reform tradition under the leadership of Democrat and single-taxer Tom Johnson. Socialists had found the programmatic ground cut from under them by Johnson’s progressive administration, and they struggled to maintain a competitive political identity.¹⁹⁹ Wartime actually improved the Socialists’ electoral position in the city by tripling in 1917 their 1915 vote for mayor. They elected two members to the city council and one to the school board, despite the fact that their candidate for mayor, Charles Ruthenberg, had been arrested in June for speaking against the war at a public meeting. The newly elected Socialist councillors expressed determination to “attend strictly to their civic duties” and avoid issues related to the war. But their opponents on the council forced their hand with a pro-war resolution. When they declined to support the resolution, the Socialists were permanently ejected from their council seats. As historian Richard Judd has noted, a similar “unseating” occurred in Toledo for “disloyalty utterances,” and in Piqua members of the Socialist local government were arrested for violating the Espionage Act.²⁰⁰

Some centers of socialist municipal strength proved able to hold their own despite the patriotic tide and pro-war fever that washed across the country. In Hamilton, as noted earlier, the Socialists held onto two council seats, defeated charter reform despite fusion, and successfully defended city ownership of its utilities.

Milwaukee

In Milwaukee, the paragon of socialist municipal strength, Socialist city attorney Daniel Hoan was elected to successive terms as mayor in 1916 and 1918, even as the party’s strength in city council eroded.²⁰¹ Hoan managed to steer a course on the war between support and opposition. He renamed a “preparedness parade” a “National Civic Demonstration,” over which he presided soon after his election in 1916. While voting against the St. Louis platform in April 1917 and serving as co-chair of the Milwaukee Council of Defense, he focused his energies and those of his administration on meeting the city’s needs for food and coal, while preventing “rent profiteering.” Historian Robert Reinders has noted that Hoan was particularly interested in those measures “that involved extensive interference with the marketing system.”²⁰² The municipality acquired and sold goods in public markets at non-speculative prices, including considerable supplies of basic foodstuffs—fish, potatoes, cheese, and fruit. Like his comrades in Ohio, Hoan spoke out forcefully against abuses of civil liberties, curtailment of socialist mailing privileges, and the arrest of leading socialists. He welcomed the Peoples’ Council of America for Democracy and Peace to Milwaukee when other municipalities turned it away.²⁰³ Although criticized by Berger and other anti-war socialists for his “seat on the fence,” Hoan took a more forceful posture against the war in his second term in 1918. He supported the municipal platform drafted by Berger that defined a strong anti-war position, and in the face of criticism by the pro-war press and his erst-while colleagues on the Council of Defense, he unremittingly criticized the jingoist “paytriots.” The Milwaukee Free Press attributed his victory to “conscious and determined protest on the part of Milwaukee voters against the policy of suppression, persecution, or coercion practiced by certain elements of the community.”²⁰⁴

The US Congress repeatedly denied Milwaukee’s leading Socialist and national party leader, Victor Berger, the seat to which he had been elected. He was sentenced to a twenty-year prison term in early 1919 for “conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act,” but he and his four co-defendants were released on $100,000 bail each. The Supreme Court by a sixto-three majority eventually overturned their case on a technicality, but not until 1921. Like Berger, Socialists in most locals around the country faced harassment and persecution that continued well beyond the conclusion of the war.²⁰⁵

Conclusion

State-imposed limitations on “home rule” and the municipal franchise had placed severe limits before the Great War on the scope for municipal socialist and labor party politics in the United States and Australia but also New Zealand. Nevertheless, in each country, socialists or laborites enjoyed some electoral success in cities, and they had seen scattered and partial implementation of a socialist reform agenda. The extent of those prewar advances had been more impressive in the United States. With intensifying “class war” on the industrial front, employers and their political allies seized the opportunities presented by the outbreak of war in Europe to reassert their interests. The expansion of war production in the United States and a campaign for military “preparedness” provided the opening to move against the “new unionism” and its political allies in the socialist movement. The formal entry into the war by the United States escalated this campaign to new heights. Municipal charter revisions and immigration restriction imposed constraints on labor and socialist activism in many municipalities. With strikes continuing to spread, the federal government created new wartime agencies, the last of which was the War Labor Board, in an effort to settle disputes that threatened war production. At the same time, government and private agents undertook the aggressive suppression of the radical unions and the Socialist Party by shutting down their publications and meetings, arresting leaders, and encouraging physical attacks on immigrant and left-wing activists by local police and vigilantes. Such repression was legitimized in the name of curtailing opposition to the war. “Disloyalty” became the occasion for broader suppression that dramatically eroded the prewar gains labor and its socialist allies had made.

The suppression of wartime dissent in the United States had some parallels in Australia and even more in New Zealand, but in neither case were they as widespread or as effective. The fact that a Labor Party government at the federal and some state levels in Australia orchestrated the campaign against wartime dissent imposed some limits on the extent of the governments’ reach. Much of that effort focused on the government’s largely successful effort to isolate and destroy the relatively small IWW as an agent of working-class mobilization. The fight over conscription further splintered the capacity of Labor governments to suppress dissent over the war. With the formal split in the party, large segments of the labor movement and many Labor Party branches mobilized locally to oppose conscription in ways that reinvigorated local politics and labor’s municipal reform agenda in the immediate postwar period. Reform of the municipal franchise opened the door to labor’s wider participation in local electoral activity.

In New Zealand, the harsh wartime treatment accorded labor’s militant anti-conscription leaders and lingering contention in the fledgling New Zealand Labour Party did not preclude dramatic victories for New Zealand Labour Party militants in several parliamentary by-elections during the last months of 1918. Then, in April 1919, Labour won city council and hospital board seats in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. They also retained control of several key municipalities in the mining district. Of the major cities, only in Dunedin was Labour shut out. The parliamentary elections of 1919 brought more success to the NZLP with a net increase in seats from five to eight and the ascension of key labor militants—Fraser, Savage, Holland, Sullivan, and Howard—to parliamentary positions. The legacy of their anti-conscription identity had served them well.²⁰⁶

In the postwar years, the left and the labor movements in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand followed very different paths, profoundly shaped by the experience of the war and the shifts in power locally and nationally. Socialists and the labor left in the United States entered a dark period of retrenchment and political persecution during the “Red Scare,” with massive strike defeats in 1919–22, and a significant decline in public influence locally and nationally for at least the next decade. In Australia, the Labor Party made electoral gains in municipalities despite continuing structural impediments. The vitality of local grassroots mobilization against conscription helped fueled its growth. The New Zealand Labour Party, drawing on the strength of its wartime opposition, made immediate political gains in a number of municipalities and in parliament after the war.

11

War and Revolution: The Home
Front in Germany’s Wartime Cities

Carl Herz: City Councillor and Independent Socialist

With his 1909 election to city council in Altona (Hamburg), Carl Herz established himself as leader of the social-democratic minority in city council.¹ Like social democratic city councillors in other German cities and around the world where workers had begun to assert themselves, Herz and his socialist comrades dove into the accumulated grievances workers faced: inadequate housing, poor street repair, high food and meat prices, unreliable water and sewerage; but also a city administration, its police, and Magistrat that, by Prussian tradition, remained largely beyond popular control.² But Herz was also known as a critic of the SPD’s centrists in the city and the region. At a 1908 gathering of social democrats in Schleswig-Holstein, he criticized those who would approve state budgets put forward by the ruling parties. “Parliamentarism is not the only method of battle. Behind the elected representatives stands the power of the masses.”³ In the coming years, over the course of war and revolution, Herz’s experience would mirror the tensions within the SPD but also reflect the ways prewar political work of municipal socialists shaped their claims to power during these crises.

The outbreak of war further deepened Herz’s alienation from the party’s centrist leadership and from the editorial posture of the party’s Hamburger Echo. Initially disoriented by the eruption of war and what he saw as the betrayal by his SPD comrades of the party’s principles, he asked himself, “Have I gone mad, or is it the others?” During the war’s first years, he remained at loggerheads with the leadership. After two years of service, he lost election for a new term on the party’s local Presskommission. In frustration, he lashed out at the failure of his party opponents. “The politics of the 4th of August [the SPD declaration of support for the war] is signified by the widening solidarity between the Proletariat and the ruling classes.” And then, for good measure, “The Echo without question has abandoned the radicals and gone over to the extreme right wing.”⁴ In spite of his prominence as a leader of the city council’s SPD caucus, he abruptly offered his resignation and broke his ties with his former colleagues, reproaching them for their “anti-social tax and vision-less municipal politics.” In the following month, November 1916, Herz was conscripted into military service (albeit in a noncombatant role). Even from his military post in East Prussia, he followed the formal split between the party’s “Majority Socialists” (MSPD) and the “Independent Socialists” (USPD). At the first opportunity, he joined the latter. With the end of the war, Herz returned first to Kiel, the initial center of postwar rebellion, thence to Berlin, and finally back to Hamburg, where his fellow left-wingers and members of the USPD quickly seized the opportunity to constitute a Hamburg Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council.⁵ With his former “fellow-travelers” Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, he helped form a new local government parallel to the existing city council and was elected to chair the Workers’ Council’s Justice Commission. From that position, and in the midst of ongoing strife between the competing social democratic parties, Herz steered a moderating course while remaining faithful to the USPD.⁶ Elected under the new municipal franchise to the reconstituted city council in early March 1919, Herz and the six newly elected members of the USPD formed part of what one historian has called an “overwhelming” left majority. Herz functioned as “the SPD’s political conscience on the council.”⁷

War and the Cities

The Great War imposed extraordinary and disabling conditions on working people in the cities of Germany and Austria. Their problems were not unique among the cities of the warring powers, but the challenges of wartime put extreme demands on households to meet basic needs for food and shelter, maintain employment, access municipal services, and cover the escalating need for social welfare, especially among the families of those sent to fight, a high proportion of whom would return home severely disabled or not at all.⁸ As the war followed its bloody course, these conditions turned cities into sites of growing opposition and resistance.

Before the war, social democrats had established themselves as advocates for working-class citizens whose basic needs were going unmet in elite-governed cities. Whether they opposed the war or supported it, and whether they did so reluctantly or enthusiastically, social democrats in cities seized the initiative to fight for enhanced social provision in wartime. They called for immediate relief for their fellow citizens and believed such advocacy would likely enhance the political standing of their party in the cities and towns.

In Germany, no one stood more squarely on this shifting ground of socialist municipal activism than Hugo Lindemann.⁹ As previously noted, he was a municipal advocate of long standing. From years sojourning in Britain during the 1890s, he brought direct experience with Britain’s Independent Labour Party to bear on the revisionist debates about municipalism in the SPD at party congresses in München (1902) and Bremen (1904).¹⁰

Lindemann had worked assiduously to build a robust socialist presence in Stuttgart, and, in 1911, he had run a controversial and nearly successful campaign for Oberbürgermeister.¹¹ The party leadership regarded the campaign as a fool’s errand and violation of party discipline. Socialist orthodoxy stipulated that the party should not put itself in a position of governing responsibility where the bourgeoisie retained the levers of power. Lindemann used the opportunity to quicken debates over the value and principles of municipal socialism.¹² But, with the outbreak of war and declarations of loyalty to the objectives of the Reich by many in the upper ranks of the SPD and its Reichstag delegation, Lindemann and his fellow municipal socialists confronted a dilemma. How could they maintain the political momentum they had achieved during the prewar years in municipalities across the country, despite the crippling effects of a three-tiered municipal franchise? How could they continue to pursue socialist objectives at the municipal grassroots in the face of a declared “Burgfrieden” (community social peace) that sought to sideline the class struggle during the war’s duration?¹³

“War Enthusiasm”?—The “August Experience”

The anticipation of war initially appeared to galvanize the German people with a shared sense grievance, and defensive vulnerability seemed to justify a decisive military response, or so the central government claimed in a torrent of propaganda. After declaration of a state of “imminent war,” massive and enthusiastic crowds gathered in Berlin to greet the return of the Kaiser to the city on July 31. Emotionally, as one historian has noted, Germany had already declared war, though a formal declaration against Russia would only follow the next day. Crowds swelled again in Berlin on August 1, by one estimate to 300,000, in a mood of celebration and fulfillment of what some regarded as a national destiny. Symbols of past glory and anticipation of the future seemed to promise, as Modris Eksteins has written, “the resolution of all domestic strife—party versus party, class against class, sect against sect, church in conflict with the state.”¹⁴

The idea of “war enthusiasm” has deeply colored traditional interpretations of the domestic response to the outbreak of war in all the belligerent countries, but especially Germany. In light of recent local studies, the idea appears to have been exaggerated and the reality laced with ambiguity and foreboding.¹⁵ The spirited crowds that gathered in German cities to digest the latest news from Austria appeared to many observers to be in a boisterously celebratory mood. But the celebrations were tinged with anxiety, marked by an acute shortage of detailed information. They reflected an increasingly orchestrated war fever. At first, opposition to the war was also much in evidence. As the Berliner Post reported, a “Sängerkrieg” (singers’ war) between social democrats and war enthusiasts erupted on a nightly basis on Unter den Linden street. “Of the tens of thousands that marched up and down the ‘Linden’, only a small portion had nationalist inclinations or ventured to reveal them.”¹⁶ Social democratic leader Philipp Scheidemann, who had just returned to Berlin, had a somewhat more measured recollection. “The patriots were sometimes silenced by the Proletarians; then they came out on top again. This choral contest, ‘Unter den Linden,’ went on for days.”¹⁷ Socialists gathered themselves in many German cities to protest the rush toward war. The confrontations, at times violent, gave the SPD a taste of what concerted opposition to war might entail. By the last days of July, anxious consumers had made runs on local shops to accumulate food supplies and withdrew funds from banks. Visitors hurriedly departed for home. A statistical tabulation based on reports in the SPD press indicates that, between July 26 and 31, some 288 anti-war protests involved at least 750,000 participants in at least 163 cities and towns.¹⁸

When Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, following a general mobilization of Russian armies, the sobering reality that war was at hand hit home even to enthusiasts. In Freiburg and elsewhere, the response to the socialists’ street demonstrations protesting the war had revealed what Chickering has called their “political marginalization.” Forced to embrace a different version of their own language of patriotism, socialists had to adopt the new “syntax” that now “prescribed the inversion of [their] traditional political priorities and the subordination of domestic social conflict to the basic, implacable hostility of the nation’s foreign enemies.”¹⁹ In Darmstadt, even as the general mobilization moved forward, citizens and the press cautiously acknowledged the “darker sides” of the “Augusterlebnis”: “a growing food crisis, a bottleneck in social welfare support, and unemployment.”²⁰

Social Democrats’ response

The national SPD leadership wrestled with how to respond to the changed circumstances and ultimately felt, at least initially, driven to support what seemed a mandatory vote for war credits. The August 4 vote in the Reichstag to approve war credits won with a unanimous SPD vote. It had the effect of “rapidly silencing the pacifist or war opposing voices in the labor movement.”²¹ But even as he voted for the credits, Eduard David, a socialist member of the Reichstag, wrote in his diary, “Alongside the militarist-nationalist wave [is] a powerful wave of democratic sentiment.”²²

Local municipal activists faced a different but no-less-wrenching conundrum. In most cases, as a minority presence in city councils, Social Democrats had an even more uphill battle in pursuit of their domestic agenda under the pressures imposed by Burgfrieden. At least in the case of Freiburg, Chickering argues, “if some Socialist leaders persisted in the belief that they could achieve their long-held domestic goals under the new linguistic auspices of patriotic unity, they were indulging, as subsequent events made clear, in their own ‘myth of 1914.’ ”²³

Other evidence, however, suggests a more complicated outcome in many localities. Although the national campaign for Burgfrieden may have seemed irresistible in August, local socialist activists began almost from the outset to understand and ultimately use the new circumstances of war for their own political ends. With what appears to have been prescient insight, comments in some socialist newspapers suggested a local realignment of power that might open the door to achieving socialists’ objectives by the war’s end. Freiburg’s Volkswacht (Peoples’ Watch) as early as August 8 seized upon the rhetoric of Burgfrieden to claim “no difference between rich and poor when it comes to obligations to the whole.” But the socialist periodical warned, “What is now being preached everywhere in the interests of national unity must remain valid when, after the war, it becomes a question of promoting the welfare of the community, eliminating material want and misery, and ending injustice.”²⁴

The war created political space for what some called Kriegssozialismus, as German society prepared at all levels to meet the extraordinary demands of war.²⁵ Germans tacitly accepted some of the principles socialists had long advocated now made necessary by the extraordinary hardships of war—greater central direction of an expanded public economic sector, regulation of vital commodities such as food, expanded public ownership of electricity and gas, and an enlarged social safety net. For many local SPD activists, the demand for expansive social welfare and justice, including the elimination of the restrictive three-tier municipal franchise, could not wait for the war’s end.²⁶

Kaiser Wilhelm’s apocryphal proclamation, “Ich kenne kein parteien mehr,” (“I know no political parties anymore”) narrowed the political space for opposition dramatically. As the Tägliche Rundschau proclaimed, the war had become a “Zauberkunstler” (conjurer) and a “Wundertäter” (miracle worker) that “produced the greatest wonder of all: it drove the Social Democrats to the side of their German brothers. It created a united front from Heydebrand to Scheidemann.”²⁷ If the “Ideen von 1914” was in some respects a deliberate construct, it nonetheless functioned in powerful ways to constrain and channel oppositional thinking in the direction of national unity, at least as long as the prospects for a quick victory could be sustained.²⁸ As it turned out, the memory of celebratory crowds and joyful soldiers departing for the western front was quickly complicated by trains carrying the returning wounded and casualty lists posted daily in public spaces.

Accounts of the early months of the war and the response of the Social Democratic Party have largely focused on the drama that played out at the national level over support for the “war credits” necessary to finance Germany’s war machine. The initial determination of the SPD Reichstag group on August 3 to refuse support for war credits gave way the next day to a unanimous vote in support. Militants like Karl Liebknecht along with their moderate colleagues contributed their votes. Bitter as this pill was for party members, they found the prospect of division in their ranks at this critical stage and the risk of repression of the party and its periodicals to be a greater hazard. Citing the threat of Russian despotism on German soil, Hugo Haase, president of the SPD caucus and an opponent of the credits, nevertheless presented the unified party position in the Reichstag. While rejecting the imperialist policies of all the nations that had brought on the calamity of war, he affirmed that “our task is to ward off this danger [Russian despotism] … We do not leave the Fatherland in the lurch in the hour of danger.”²⁹

The immediate benefits of Burgfrieden seemed to confirm the strategic wisdom of the SPD’s moderates in the Reichstag. Government repression appeared to lessen, and social democratic publications could more freely circulate, even within the military. Vorwärts, the party’s official organ, although outspoken in its opposition, now became available on the streets. And key government officials hinted that further liberalization, even in Prussia’s restrictive electoral system, might be forthcoming as the war played out.³⁰

In this unfolding national drama, a more determined oppositional faction in the SPD Reichstag delegation withdrew its support for credits. Open dissent also found voice in the Prussian Landtag, with a declaration of opposition by Paul Hirsch, a Landtag member and leading municipal socialist, who had previously supported credits.³¹ By early 1915, the important story in the upper ranks of the SPD appeared to be an opposition that emerged, cautiously at first and then more stridently. Some leading figures in the party, including Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, joined Haase and Liebknecht to more openly criticize the war.

Municipal Socialists and the war

Missing in most traditional accounts is recognition that, within cities, where the hardships of war were borne home most heavily, socialists from the outset crafted political strategies that positioned them to seize initiative from their elite opponents.³² Even when they did not openly express opposition to the war, their positions on domestic war issues suggest an effort to claim new political space and to do so with increasing vigor.

Germany’s Gemeindesozialisten had seen their political fortunes rising in the immediate prewar years. The war posed a threat to the progress they had achieved, as it did for their parliamentary comrades in the Reichstag. But, unlike the national party leaders who retreated and adopted a defensive posture designed to minimize risk to the party, many local party leaders saw in the war’s outbreak an opportunity to push ahead with their agenda, which included strengthening the public sector, increasing social provision in cities, and challenging the restrictive municipal franchise. Their years of work in the municipal trenches positioned them to carry advocacy of their programs forward in the context of a war that only compounded the people’s needs.

A close reading of Kommunale Praxis, the official organ of the party’s municipal socialist wing, reveals that local socialists engaged in an ongoing effort to assert the primacy of cities, their right to self-government, the need for democratization, and, ultimately, the achievement of their municipal socialist agenda. The war provided cover for municipal activism—as long as the appropriate professions of support for the troops, war credits, and the war effort were made. The burdens of war, especially the need for expanded social provision, were most obvious in cities, and the socialists believed they had license to pursue their agenda. As Rebentisch has noted, despite the efforts of social democrats to seek greater democratization at the national level, “what mattered for the masses was the practical work in the cities, motivated by a duty to social solidarity and political responsibility that derived from the need to protect the working class, especially the wives and children of the conscripted soldiers, through cooperation in the wartime tasks of the community.”³³ Even though local socialists gained new access to wartime administrative responsibilities in the distribution and management of scarce resources, Carl Severing, longtime socialist councillor from Bielefeld, warned his comrades not to be beguiled by the new responsibilities they had undertaken at the behest of the enemies of socialism. “These are only emergency measures, even if done by socialists, they are still only emergency measures with all their evil symptoms. What socialism wants can only be built organically, not under pressure of the hardships of wartime.”³⁴

The socialists’ municipal adversaries remained the same, as did the nature of their struggle in city councils. Executive committees (Magistrate) continued to have over-riding power in city councils, and hegemonic elites continued to oppose expanded suffrage and greater municipal autonomy. In the context of war, the Gemeindesozialisten, like their comrades in other waring countries, on occasion found allies among social reformers who also recognized the acute needs in cities and from liberals who feared a growing opposition to the war and challenges to their hegemony. On occasion, concessions would be made regarding greater state funding for cities and somewhat greater democratization. But those alliances had limits, and those limits came to be even more sharply etched as local socialists pushed their own agendas.³⁵

The Gemeindesozialisten were not particularly focused on the positions taken by national leaders of the SPD or their debates in the Reichstag, except insofar as they had bearing on municipal funding, self-government, or the franchise. They were reflexively or pragmatically willing to express support for expanded war credits if they were deemed politically essential for meeting the needs of hard-pressed city populations. They believed increased funding for municipalities would meet local human needs but also ultimately augment the power and autonomy of cities. Like their British labor counterparts, Germany’s municipal socialists occupied a range of ideological positions with respect to the war and ultimately even the split in the Social Democratic Party. Albert Südekum stood to the right, Edmund Fischer and Carl Herz were on the left, and in between were Paul Hirsch and Hugo Lindemann.

In September 1914, Lindemann subtly foreshadowed the socialists’ wartime municipal political strategy in response to the war. As the preeminent voice on municipal affairs among socialists, he unequivocally staked out the socialists’ claims for cities. “Under German law,” he wrote, “the first line of responsibility for social welfare of persons in economic distress is with the cities, which carry the burden of poor relief and welfare work.” He argued that especially in wartime, cities must assume this responsibility, and he noted that “until now nothing had been heard from the states.” And the Reich “has limited its welfare responsibility chiefly to the families of soldiers called to serve.”³⁶ Lindemann inventoried the initiatives undertaken by cities to control rents, regulate prices and guarantee supplies of necessary foodstuffs, and meet the emergency need for employment among men and women displaced by economic mobilization for war.³⁷ But even before Lindemann’s intervention, the editors of Kommunale Praxis challenged the state to provide the means necessary for cities to meet the serious conditions they confronted. “The dark side of the capitalist form of economic organization has shown itself with starkest clarity” and “if the production and distribution of goods were so organized, as well as the defense of the borders, then would it be impossible that energetic and joyfully productive men and women would have to run around and seek financial assistance, even as thousands go hungry … Cities must be enabled to organize production in ways that will meet the needs of the population.”³⁸ That posture made cities the front line in the wartime social struggle.

The Terrain of Wartime Municipal Politics: Frankfurt am Main—a Case Study

The candidacy of Max Quarck, editor of Volksstimme, for municipal councillor in 1898 signified the decisive entry of Social Democrats into the local electoral politics of Frankfurt am Main. Party competition had intensified and become more openly acknowledged in the last years of the century, but the election of Quarck to city council in 1900 promised new polarization around issues of concern to Social Democrats. In his first council sessions in 1901, Quarck, according to one source, “had worn out the nerves of his colleagues.” A leading Demokrat suggested that Quarck would have been better served if he had “engaged in less provocation and instead put forward practical proposals.”³⁹ In fact, the Social Democrats’ program for municipal reform was eminently practical, if disagreeable to propertied elites and their representatives on the council.

By the early twentieth century, Frankfurt was undergoing significant social and demographic changes that favored the Social Democrats. Incorporation of densely inhabited industrial suburbs into the city and modestly rising incomes for skilled and unskilled workers elevated many above the 1,200-mark annual income threshold for access to the municipal franchise. The municipal electorate had risen from one-third to two-thirds of the less-restricted Reichstag electorate.⁴⁰ The Social Democrats made steady, if initially unspectacular, electoral progress, from one seat in 1901–2 to three in 1903–4, six in 1907–8, fifteen in 1909–10, and twenty-two in 1911–12. They retained the same number of seats on the eve of World War I. In that year (1913–14), the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (Progressive Peoples’ Party) had twenty-seven seats, the Nationalliberale Partei (National Liberals) twelve, the Mittelstandspartei (Middle Class) eight, and the Zentrum (Centrist) one, in a council of sixty. The political sands had shifted dramatically from 1901, when the Demokratische Partei had twenty-four seats, the Nationalliberale Partei nineteen, the Fortschrittspartei eleven, the Handwerkerpartei (Artisans) six, Zentrum two, and the Sozialdemokratische Partei one, with one Parteilos (no party), in a council of sixty-six.⁴¹

Local politics had become increasingly polarized. The shifting coalitions of liberals were now more sharply demarcated from the Social Democrats. The liberals sought to blunt the growing power of the Social Democrats even as they explored alliances across that ideological divide where cooperation held some promise for limited reforms—in education, social welfare, and city finance. In the end, however, the socialists’ commitment to expanding the public sector and using municipal employment as a model for the treatment of labor across the economy ran up against liberals’ desire to limit taxes and public expenditure and stem the gains of organized labor.⁴²

With the outbreak of the war, Frankfurt’s municipal socialists faced the same dilemma confronted elsewhere by their party comrades. Initial opposition to the war before the actual declaration gave way quickly to assertions of loyalty, in part to protect social democratic organizations. They professed commitment to the local version of Burgfrieden, even as the substantive meaning of municipal social peace remained to be determined. For some local SPD stalwarts, like Max Quarck, it was merely a “truce” in the class war, and after the war “the ruling classes will again follow the path of their economic, social and political interests as we will follow ours.” Others emphasized that the war created a promissory note for redress of injustices borne by social democrats in the past and compensation for their dutiful loyalty during the war. As the Volksstimme wrote on August 7, 1914, “The bourgeois parties should be fully cognizant of this: that the check for this will be drawn up and it will have to be paid promptly [at the end of the war].”⁴³

Despite the rhetoric of Burgfrieden, it did not take long for old battle lines in municipal affairs to be redrawn during the war’s early months. Some voters objected to the plan of having a unified cross-party slate of candidates for city council that would simply maintain the status quo. One voter wrote across his ballot: “An election without a battle is like soup without salt.” And, in city council debates as early as the spring of 1915, Social Democratic councillor Otto Zielowski complained about the city administration’s failure to provide for adequate food distribution and warned that the “deficit economy” would have to be eliminated. A significantly larger tax increase would be required, beyond the planned 10 percent. In wartime, the old issues of adequate social provision and municipal finance again moved front and center, now with greater force. Liberals’ vulnerability on issues of social provision, their reluctance to raise taxes for an expanded public sector, and their ambivalence about improving conditions for municipal workers to make the city a “model employer” had been demonstrated repeatedly in response to SPD initiatives in the prewar period.⁴⁴

Some historians have stressed the common ground that liberals and social democrats had claimed in the years before the outbreak of the war and during the war itself. In their view, the break did not come until the November revolution in 1918. But strong evidence suggests that the veneer of social and political harmony actually masked continuing conflict. Well before November 1918, the social democrats used the unique circumstances of the war to advance their position and their program. Joint administration represented for Social Democrats a new accretion of power. As Max Quarck wrote in the Volksstimme in October 1916, “The world war is a great democratizing agent. Whereas earlier in Prussia a Social Democrat was hardly permitted to serve as a night watchman, the war has brought with it the promotion of Social Democrats to official positions and the joint management by trade unions in city and state economic concerns.”⁴⁵ The ruling bourgeois interests, at least in cosmetic ways, sought to conciliate and incorporate Social Democrats into shared governance of the city, if still in clearly subordinate positions. In early 1915, Socialists were declared eligible to assume the district administrative office of Berzirksvorsteher (chief administrator) and school representative, from which they had been categorically excluded before. Once chosen, their numbers gradually grew, and eventually they served without the mandated police background check.⁴⁶

Such concessions to the Social Democrats may well have had different meaning for members of the SPD caucus in city council. Their interventions in council debates—what bourgeois councillors were inclined to see as obstructionism—proceeded from an assumption that any power they wrested from the governing elites represented a net gain that accumulated over time and enabled them to envision a revolutionized municipality at the end of the war. In this regard, they were more prescient than their opponents. Indeed, their actions are best understood less as accommodation than as accretions of municipal power with which they hoped to transform the city at war’s end.

With the outbreak of war, the city’s Oberbürgermeister had called for unity of the parties in the council and announced the appointment of a Kriegskommission that would assume a leading role in shaping the city government’s response to the war. Three of the nine appointees came from the ranks of the Social Democrats. Otto Zielowski, editor of the Volksstimme and a leading SPD voice in the council, responded by endorsing the appointments and expressing willingness to cooperate. But he also reminded his council colleagues, “we are opponents of the war. The working class has until recently made every effort that this war be avoided. They are not strong enough; the circumstances are more powerful than our will.” While now professing support for the defense of the country and its “cultural assets,” Zielowski nonetheless issued a warning. While he praised the Oberbürgermeister for a willingness to appeal to individual firms not to dismiss workers, he noted that at least one firm had closed down. The appeals should “now also be translated into action.”⁴⁷ During the following months, the Kriegskommission assumed increasing authority and an increasing degree of autonomy from the city council in its deliberations, much to the dissatisfaction of a number of council backbenchers across party lines.⁴⁸

At an early September meeting of the council, with the Kriegskommission still in a formative stage, the Oberbürgermeister gave an extensive report on its initial organization. But SPD Kommission member Zielowski declared that it was functioning with too much autonomy and not enough accountability to the council compared with other cities such as Wiesbaden, where the council maintained authority over matters involving social welfare. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways he offered a running critique of the positions put forward by the Oberbürgermeister. He believed that councillors should be directly involved in connecting Kommission’s work to people in the districts. While rhetorically applauding the proposal for greater public-private cooperation in the provision of social welfare, he clearly tilted toward a greater role for publicly controlled bodies, and he raised concerns about the parsimonious levels of welfare provided to needy classes of the population, including the families of those called to serve.⁴⁹ In this quite extraordinary open debate a series of rejoinders followed from members of the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei and the Oberbürgermeister defending the practices of the Kriegskommission and its members. They went so far as to suggest the inappropriateness of such open criticism, arguing it was detrimental to the cooperative atmosphere needed to successfully prosecute the war. The Social Democrats responded in kind with a vigorous defense of open debate and criticism of the formulation and execution of home front policies by the Kriegskommission. SPD councillor August Möller challenged the attempt of council leadership to cut off debate and leave the Einzelheiten (details) to the Kommission. He noted that “out of details good general principles can be derived.” And, further, councillors deserved a voice in these matters. For example, he cited the organization of municipal welfare, in which the Kriegskommission was bypassing those most experienced in these tasks and turning to honorary officials who lacked any background in such work. “When someone in peacetime had carried out such tasks serving the whole community, so should they be seen in wartime as entirely suitable for service on behalf of the community.” Herr Möller went on to catalogue a series of human needs that were going unmet—the families of streetcar employees and other public workers called to military service, the school fees of “minderbemittelten Familien” (families in need), and the teachers who were performing extraordinary service for no additional compensation. The debate only grew more acrimonious. SPD councillor Frederick Brühne accused those in authority of being unable to understand the predicament faced by the families of poor laborers and craftsmen. SPD councillor and trade union secretary Eduard Gräf criticized the Oberbürgermeister, Voigt, who had censured Zielowski for dwelling on minutia. He also offered “good advice” to Voigt that “he not be giving super patriotic speeches in front of the Opera house at a time when we have lost three ships and a great number of human lives.” And Zielowski added bitterly that he would not enter any further into the issues raised by Voigt, “instead today I will stand with my fallen party comrade Auer who used to say in such moments, L.S. (Leave the prattle).” For this the presiding officer declared him out of order for a “highly unparliamentary outburst.”⁵⁰

This confrontation in the early months of the war makes clear that despite Bürgfrieden and rhetorical professions of common interest in the successful prosecution of the war, the deep fissures in local politics, with roots in the Social Democrats’ prewar challenges to elite governance, continued unabated from the very outset of the war crisis. As the miseries of the home front deepened, so too did the class fissures and the growing prospect of a fundamental challenge over the course of the war to the current governance of the cities and the Reich.

Hotly contested issues continued to surface in the Frankfurt council as war needs escalated. Social Democrats pushed hard for increased municipal subsidies to families of soldiers. Those increases should ultimately generate 100 percent of prewar income (as compared to the current 50 percent), even if that necessarily meant an increase in taxes, something to which the liberals vigorously objected. The SPD councillors opposed reliance on private welfare to meet any shortfall. And they were leading voices for price regulation on potatoes and other essential commodities even if they had to confiscate supplies from hoarding farmers.⁵¹ At a subsequent meeting of the council in mid-November, a union official and SPD councillor, Heinrich Hüttmann, argued strenuously for the city to undertake construction projects to provide aid to the poorest segments of the population on whom the war was taking an especially heavy toll. Reviewing the council’s actions on welfare for soldiers’ families and its efforts to restrict staggering price increases on essential goods, Hüttmann noted, “We have more or less come to the conclusion that it is in the individual locales that everything must be undertaken as much as possible to lighten the burdens of life on the individual citizen.”⁵² Motions for the city to undertake public works with the credit available to the city embodied these sentiments. Hüttmann’s opponents belittled his comments and questioned the capacity of the city to address the extent of the problem. They doubted whether the unemployed had the requisite skills to fill any jobs that might be created. In the end, the council adopted motions framed only in the broadest terms.⁵³ Hüttmann took issue with the complacency of the council over the impact that sharply rising prices was having on the lives of the most hard-pressed in the community. He spoke of a deep urgency for the city to provide work and relieve the suffering of so many.⁵⁴

The social democratic faction reported a “storm of complaints” from the public that raised concerns about the impact of the war on schools and particularly the poorest students. Their well-being would likely suffer with cutbacks in school hours, restrictions on milk distribution, the conscription of ever-larger numbers of teachers, reductions in school construction, and the use of schools for military purposes. While not directly criticizing the war itself, the social democrats continued to lay out an inventory of concerns about the adverse impact of the war on the community and particularly its “less fortunate” members.⁵⁵ While still wrapping themselves in the cloak of patriotism during the early months of the war, these socialist critics collectively pointed toward more explicit objections to the war itself that would surface and intensify in the months and years to come.

In the Municipalities

Over the coming months and years of war, Germany’s municipal socialists took the initiative on multiple fronts, at first cautiously but unmistakably assertive. In so doing, like their counterparts in Britain but also Australia and New Zealand, they laid claim to expanded influence over the future course of urban life in the postwar era. Even in the earliest weeks of the war, local socialists reckoned with the increasing hardships in cities and focused not simply on the needs of families of those serving in the military but also those of the general population. Stressing the hardships of the unemployed and the “great social distress that the war has called forth or deepened,” they inventoried with new vividness the extraordinary needs city-by-city in wartime. In Berlin and its suburbs, one correspondent noted that current efforts might be only a “stop gap.” “The real goal” was to create greater opportunity for work in the cities during wartime “by pushing forward construction and other undertakings, undisturbed.”⁵⁶ As one author in Kommunale Praxis noted, “The socialists insisted that support for soldiers’ families and the unemployed must not be conflated with traditional poor relief. They must be paid the full wages that would be due to them or a reasonable interest on their assets, if by their circumstances they find themselves excluded.”⁵⁷

What has been largely missing in the voluminous studies of Germany’s domestic front during wartime has been systematic attention to the ongoing political struggles in cities to meet the extraordinary human needs that appeared but also attention to the continuing fight for municipal ownership, affordable housing for workers, urban self-government (home rule), and especially franchise reform, for women and all workers. Outbursts of mass mobilization for food relief and affordable housing, growing numbers of strikes, and agitation of the unemployed do not fully capture the simmering opposition to the war. A domestic war of position in the “trenches” of urban institutions reveals from the earliest months of the war a widespread and growing pattern of urban disaffection.

Cities and the food crisis

Even as German troops faced their first discouraging setbacks on the battlefield, most notably in the battle of the Marne, municipal advocates took up truncheons against their own longstanding opponents in the municipal domain. Edmund Fischer, socialist journalist and municipal advocate, disputed the familiar contention that rising municipal debt was attributable to “failure of municipal enterprise.” He disputed proponents of that view who argued for a return to “individualist, capitalist” measures as the route to progress. In fact, the enlargement of cities and their municipally owned enterprises enabled them to undertake the new kinds of tasks presented by the onset of war. “Municipal socialism demonstrates its great value not only through its present achievements but above all in what it could achieve if it were more fully developed!” Writing with a strong measure of socialist optimism, Fischer noted the sharp increase, even before the war, in municipally owned slaughterhouses, fish markets, and bread factories. Well before the wartime food crisis had intensified, he pointed out that “had communal food provision been the standard in all cities … the food supply of the German people during the war would not be in question or worrisome and every emergency would be easily overcome, and for that matter municipal unemployment insurance would have been introduced.”⁵⁸

Early in 1915, the tenor of discussion over the food supply grew more anxious. Paul Hirsch, the noted Prussian municipal socialist, pointed to the ultimate responsibility of cities in matters of food provision and management, but he also acknowledged the importance of attention to rural supply sources.⁵⁹ Because the problem of food supply was of such “colossal meaning,” city councillors’ ability to fulfil their responsibilities would have a significant bearing beyond the war. In succeeding weeks, municipal socialist advocates argued that cities must be given the latitude to manage their own food affairs, with support when necessary from the central government. Portraying themselves as defenders of the fatherland, they argued that municipal enterprise in the cities would produce greater and more efficient results. Although the Reichsregierung had, in the past, opposed the principle of municipal enterprise, “crisis produced adherents nonetheless.” Applying the principle of “Selbstverwaltung” (self-government) broadly to expanded municipal control of the food supply, Hirsch argued that it was inconceivable that the people should be held back from participation in such “inneren Schützengraben” (domestic trenches), while their sons served the fatherland abroad.⁶⁰

Concerns over profiteering in food provision and currency manipulation had surfaced as early as November 1914, when city and national officials sought means to curtail abuses and stimulate self-help through urban gardening. For the critical commodity of bread some municipalities like Hanover had by spring 1915 turned to a free market system of distribution regulated only by the supply of flour provided to bakers. Socialists roundly criticized the inequities of the “Hanover system” and argued for an equalized system of distribution based on bread ration cards.⁶¹ By late summer 1915, Hugo Lindemann warned that despite having entered the war with an adequate food supply, the cities’ most strenuous efforts to meet the challenges of food provision would be necessary, if the country was to endure a second winter of war. Lindemann believed the lessons of the war and the prospects for the postwar period had to be seized. Citing the regulation and equitable provision of the milk supply by the city of Strasbourg as an example, he argued for applying these lessons more widely and more permanently. “It is a logical extension of the necessary wartime social welfare activity of cities that an enduring plan for lasting regulation would grow and be carried forward methodically by the municipal administration.” And, even more pointedly, he claimed that cities had demonstrated their ultimate responsibility for the well-being of their citizens, since the private sector, as evidenced in the management of the milk supply, had failed to meet that responsibility. “If one holds the view that the cities have a responsibility for the food supply of their residents just as they do for the water supply and sewage disposal, then the extraordinary difficulties of war mobilization and collapse of private milk distribution constitute a powerful incentive to create a lasting new order in the interest of the citizenry.”⁶²

By early spring 1916, the food situation had taken a decidedly desperate turn. Price gouging and hoarding of essential foodstuffs were widely reported. As the social democratic editors of Kommunale Praxis noted, “Overall the same experience holds: as soon as a maximum price is firmly established for any commodity, it disappears from the market … This cannot continue any longer.” Noting that most cities had not exercised the authority they possessed to oversee the books and accounts of firms selling vital food commodities, the editors called for social democratic councillors to use their authority to press for improvements. But beyond that lay an opportunity for more than collective oversight and regulation. “The cities must use their influence in the face of the notoriously inadequate and unreliable private firms for public enterprise to secure the food supply for the people.” As in other domains, the war offered an opening for more thoroughgoing socialization in which cities with social democratic leadership might play a leading role.⁶³

Housing and unemployment

In the first months of the war, the twin concerns of unemployment and housing became intertwined. Social Democrats in Berlin recognized almost immediately that the economic upheavals and the massive mobilization of troops accompanying the transition to a war footing placed many ordinary workers and their families in a precarious position. Thrown out of work or faced with losing a primary breadwinner, workers and their families were frequently unable to pay the rent for their dwellings. Such conditions were especially challenging for those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. At the same time, Social Democrats acknowledged that many landlords with substantial mortgages faced precarious conditions of a different sort. Where state or federal subsidies proved inadequate to meet these needs, the city became a staging ground for relief. But the SPD faction in the Berlin City Council believed “the city council should request the mayor to form an alliance with the propertied interests of the Reich and the state” to develop remedies.⁶⁴ And, while such cooperation was critical to meet the needs that arose, the SPD councillors insisted that certain criteria must be met at the municipal level. First must be an assurance that “the municipal subsidy must never be treated as poor relief with the consequence of further shrinking [workers’] voting rights.” Second, they argued that unions must be given responsibility for administering unemployment assistance, not only for their members but for the “unorganisierten” as well. A prewar model for such broadened provision of unemployment relief had been instituted in Kaiserslautern through pressure of SPD councillors. An unspoken consequence of such principles would be to further empower unions and expand the scope of their representation.⁶⁵

State and federal authorities failed to fully realize the depths of the problem of war-induced unemployment. And that became a point of frustration for local authorities struggling to meet the growing need for unemployment assistance through a combination of private charity, modest municipal subsidies, and realignment of local building projects to provide work to the unemployed. The capacity of local authorities to provide assistance varied considerably from one city to another. Smaller working-class towns faced the greatest distress. In Württemberg, an unresponsive state regime meant the only option available was to prod state authorities to take the necessary initiative “through workers organized by political and trade union means, and through their representatives in city halls.”⁶⁶ The strategy implied a degree of political conflict at the municipal level that implicitly challenged the tenets of “Burgfrieden” and customary elite rule.

By the second year of the war, the growing housing crisis, particularly for workers who rented smaller dwellings, foretold deeper problems to come if war continued.⁶⁷ By late summer 1916, housing data revealed a dramatic decline in housing construction from prewar levels. In many cities, the occupancy rate reached nearly 100 percent. An acute housing shortage inevitably meant rising rents. A year later, in August 1917, a further tightening of the occupancy rate gave additional evidence of the shortage, especially for smaller dwellings occupied by poorer classes and the families of war dead. The deepening crisis only continued to spread.⁶⁸

Municipal welfare in wartime

Beyond the crises in food supply, unemployment, and housing, the most consistent evidence of the wartime challenges German cities faced arose from the growing need for social support among those whose lives were most disrupted by the war: the families of the massive numbers of soldiers conscripted to fight. In the first months of the war, Paul Hirsch reported that in cities like Hamburg and Altona social democratic city councillors improvised remedies to meet the growing social needs and pushed for higher income subsidies and rent support both for families directly affected by the war and for the unemployed.⁶⁹ With the dawning of the new year, a deepening sense of the formidable challenges facing Germans and their cities surfaced. The official editorial voice of municipal socialists nevertheless expressed unwavering support for a continuing war of defense against Germany’s numerous enemies, while also focusing on new opportunities that might unfold for cities to fulfill their social aspirations.

So much can one nevertheless maintain, that despite their imperfections German cities by and large still strive to do their duty. Municipal self-government, exactly like the freestanding self-government of the great trade unions, has already won greater recognition … This may only really be fully assessed once peace has been concluded.⁷⁰

Reports from Stuttgart and Berlin in February 1915 suggested the varied improvisational ways individual municipalities cobbled together resources from private charity, municipal subsidies, and different forms of rent control to address the wartime needs of those with fewest means. Along with that improvisation, through much of 1916 Social Democrats consistently argued with an increasingly critical edge for higher levels of support and greater subsidies from central and state governments.⁷¹

Journalist and SPD Reichstag member Edmund Fischer became one of the earliest and boldest advocates for extending into peacetime the communal measures adopted out of necessity during the war.⁷² He reported on the development of communal kitchens to serve families where women were doing war work. Municipalities, he argued, should provide a model of undivided eight-hour workdays as an example to employers in the private sector. “They would, thereby, suggest a social-political arrangement of greater value, especially if it were mandated or taken over by the municipality.” Because “communal food distribution centers” had already established their value before the war, once the war ended they would become even more compelling. Fischer saw virtually unlimited possibilities for municipalization of the food supply based on the war experience. “The great value of the municipal food distribution and food production enterprises during the war was so plainly demonstrated that it should not be long before we have municipal food warehouses and grain storage facilities, municipal bakeries and slaughterhouses, city milk distribution centers and fattening pens.”⁷³ Fischer also foresaw expanded wartime responsibilities for women and other workers who had formerly been excluded from the administration and organization of poor relief and welfare. With a more permanent role they would “bring a new spirit into these institutions.”

The promise of peace—the future of cities

Despite their deep divisions over support for the war and the Reich, socialists in many cities imagined a new, more promising era once peace came. Writing in mid-1917, Paul Hirsch understood the revolutionary potential the war had unleashed, not the least in the cities.

The world war, this greatest revolution of all times, has cleared away old perceptions, opened up new paths, inspired a new spirit of humanity, and this spirit will manifest at last in a new spirit of community participation.

It remains to be seen, whether today’s municipal government will be able to reckon with the needs of a new era, whether it doesn’t need to be thoroughly transformed, whether the time has finally come to put into practice the well-founded demands of democracy that the regime has until now rejected, whether the time has finally come to infuse the whole municipal government with the social spirit.⁷⁴

But even early in the war, Edmund Fischer reminded his comrades of the progress that had been achieved in cities during the previous quarter century. Municipal politics yielded little progress before 1890, but, in the twenty-five years that followed, stunning gains had been made, not the least in the productivity and public good produced by municipally owned enterprises. Using Leipzig as a case in point, Fischer noted that the surplus generated by municipal enterprises over twenty-five years had far outstripped the revenue increases from taxes, 187 percent compared to 49 percent. Under these circumstances, the financial condition of the city had improved, wealth had been augmented, and the individual citizen gained “better schools, cleaner and more beautiful streets, cheaper and better lighting, healthful and cheap water, good traffic management, better care for the poor, the children and infants, provision of housing, artistic appreciation, and so forth.”⁷⁵

Building on the experience of the war, Fischer optimistically foresaw such progress resuming at war’s end. “Although the war brought to an end the first period of modern municipal politics; under changed circumstances after the war new tasks will be established, that will have grown out of the long years of war.”⁷⁶

By late 1916, social democratic commentators, looked to the war’s end with increasing frequency. In part, this reflected the deepening misery the war had brought and the social and political fissures that created new opportunity, even necessity, to put forward socialist remedies. Writing in November 1916, O. May, “a soldier,” presumed that the full replacement of capitalism and complete nationalization might not be feasible in the short term, but social democrats should nonetheless push for state and municipal reorganization of production and distribution of needed goods, to reduce the margin of difference between producer and consumer prices and provide relief to the working class. It was critical for workers to engage these practical questions, if the solutions were not to be left to larger business interests.⁷⁷

Well into the war’s third year, Hugo Lindemann attempted to summarize the centrality of cities in war. While the national government bore chief responsibility for leadership in the war, it was the cities that had the most direct effect on their own domains.

They have outlasted empires and states. As often as the houses in our villages were burned, the population left homeless and for a time were dispersed, on the ruins they again established the city and took up and pursued the old work. When during the storm of wartime the state is occupied by the enemy and ceases to function, the city remains and becomes the only primary supporter of the public business … In wartime the fundamental nature of the city breaks through. That the city is the community of its residents, who for better or for worse live together, is impressed upon the consciousness of the individual, more so than in peace time. From there it follows that the city must take on an abundance of new tasks, that above all spring from the deepest character of the community.⁷⁸

For Lindemann and other municipal activists the war presented new opportunities to affirm the centrality of cities and expand their functions. “So, the war had brought an extraordinary expansion and deepening of the tasks facing cities,” especially in the realm of “Kriegswohlfahrtspflege” (wartime welfare work).⁷⁹

The logical corollary to expanding the responsibilities of cities during wartime was to challenge the constraints imposed by the states and the Reich on the capacity of cities to govern themselves and to mount a frontal assault on the continuing disfranchisement of workers in municipal elections. By late 1917, as disaffection with the war deepened and the split within the SPD widened, advocates for municipal socialism focused their arguments on the intertwined issues of Gemeinde Selbstverwaltung (municipal self-government) and drei klasse Gemeindewahlrecht (three-class municipal franchise). SPD city councillor, editor of the Volksstimme, and Reichstag member from Frankfurt am Main, Max Quarck, posed the question on the minds of others: “Is it wise and correct in the middle of a war to raise constitutional questions regarding the Reich and Prussian states, as well as drive forward questions of governance pertaining to cities?”⁸⁰ Some might argue, he noted, that such initiatives could split or divert energies from the main goal and that municipal reform would follow naturally from national steps taken toward constitutional reform. He dismissed these objections, however. “Nothing happens in politics of its own accord; everything is struggled for.” He noted that already in many central and southern German state legislatures, as well as the city councils of numerous large municipalities, these questions of self-government and voting reform were already being acted upon. Far from opposing national reform, Quarck asserted that reform of Gemeindeverfassung (city constitutions) “von unten” (from below) would bolster the life circumstances of the people, especially their community relationships. Skeptics might claim that municipal action had only scattered and marginal effect, but he argued that Social Democrats must seize the opportunity offered by their numerous elected representatives in city and state bodies. Despite the handicaps of the Prussian three-class voting system and the demonstrated capacity of state legislatures to nullify municipal initiatives, this struggle was urgent. Most importantly, the war had revealed the utter failure of the current structure of city governance to effectively manage war work or meet the needs of the people.⁸¹ Quarck, like his municipal socialist colleagues in many localities, recognized the urgency of the moment and the opportunity it presented to claim the right of cities to govern their own affairs and their own economies. He also noted the rising importance of women’s right to vote, reinforced by the prominent role they played in the war economy, which gave special urgency to the fight for an expanded municipal franchise.

But, for Quarck and other leaders in the municipal socialist movement, the foundational problems for cities lay in the absence of self-government. As early as 1808, Baron vom Stein had prescribed greater autonomy in urban governance. According to Quarck, almost from the outset vom Stein had to yield to “junkerlichen Einflüssen” (influence of large landowners) and the Prussian authoritarian state. “All of the subsequent expansion of Prussian municipal authority goes back to Stein without surpassing him. The old Prussian authoritarian state has repeatedly asserted itself by turning municipal administration into its servant, instead of enabling independent development, so that the present battle must still be carried on from where it was left by Stein.”⁸²

The lack of self-government impinged in direct ways on the authority of locally elected officials. The local police in Prussian states functioned directly under state, not municipal, authority; only in Württemberg, Weimar, and Braunschweig did local control reign. Similarly, state authorities maintained the power to confirm local appointees to local school boards. Quarck himself had been categorically excluded as a Social Democrat from such service, even though permitted to serve on the governing board of higher education institutions. “To that point, I was permitted to carry out the duties of school administration for the privileged classes, but never for the primary school children.”

The unfortunate mistrust toward city authorities and the upper levels of school administration lay in the assumption that they would not be able to deal with a social democratic colleague and this would make it impossible to work together toward the idea of an organic, progressive school administration!⁸³

He argued for the inherent value of local control and administration of schools. “Self-government and local accountability complement each other.”

But the exigencies of war and the lack of local control had heightened the need for reforms that would help solve the food crisis and guarantee greater efficiency. Such measures had to include “the introduction of universal, equal, secret and direct voting rights for all adult residents without distinction based on gender for municipal council representation as for other local bodies.” This also meant eliminating the privileged position of property owners in municipal bodies, as well as shrinking or terminating the oversight by states of municipal governance and its power to restrict the scope of administrative decisions in city or rural self-governing bodies. “By means of such proposals we will be able to awaken ‘the largely slumbering awareness’ of how deeply harmed is ‘our daily life, our nutrition, our schools, our occupations through the undeveloped system of governance.’ ”⁸⁴

By the early months of 1918, calls for self-government at the local level had become increasingly politicized because of the extraordinary demand on municipal resources and the shortcomings of state and federal responses during wartime. Replying to the familiar complaint of conservatives that party politics had a corrupting influence on local public life, Hugo Lindemann argued that, on the contrary, politics had compelled a deeper engagement with urban problems. “The Social Democratic Party, like its opponents, felt compelled to bring the various departments of municipal administration together and align the administration as a whole in the context of broader state politics.” He argued that “the politicization of self-government” was an essential and progressive step forward in the political life of the nation.⁸⁵

Beneath the surface of Burgfrieden, Social Democrats immersed themselves in partisan municipal conflict almost from the outset of the war. In contrast to the image of the SPD’s alignment with its bitter political enemies in the wartime Reichstag, the party’s posture in the municipal realm was hardly that of a quiescent partner. This stemmed in part from the socialists’ immediate prewar successes, which seemed to foretell political gains in cities across the country in spite of the limitations of franchise restriction. And, in part, it was driven by political necessity as municipal socialists witnessed their liberal and conservative opponents seeking to claim new ground at their expense under the cover of war. Ultimately, it also reflected their recognition that the war might well yield—even if under the peculiar guise of a war-fueled Kriegsozialismus—new opportunities for them to advance their own municipal socialist agenda.

The question of postponing municipal elections in the spirit of Burgfrieden had initially produced varied responses locally. Some Social Democrats, in Bavaria for instance, believed that, with so many workers conscripted to military service, they would be disadvantaged if special elections were held to fill vacancies that might result in long new terms for their opponents.⁸⁶ In Saxony, municipalities divided over the advisability of postponing municipal elections. Of those cities scheduled to hold elections, twenty favored going forward and twenty-eight, including most of the larger cities, preferred a postponement for one year. In Württemberg, Social Democrats warily regarded proposals for a general list of candidates as an elite strategy to avoid partisan electoral activism in wartime.⁸⁷ A similar debate erupted in Britain, where a general postponement of municipal contests in 1914 opened the door to intensifying conflict as local elites jockeyed with Labour Party activists over any shift in power that might result from interim openings on local bodies.⁸⁸

As the war proceeded, Social Democrats faced an uneven and somewhat unpredictable playing field in local politics. In Nord Rhine– Westphalia, state authorities confirmed Social Democrats’ representation, indeed their majority control, of school boards in Solingen and nearby municipalities; in Bavaria, the persistent efforts by liberal and conservative parties to exclude Social Democrats from holding municipal office, whether elected or appointed, was deflected only by intervention of state authorities. Official tolerance of SPD representation in local bodies by state authorities may have reflected a strategy to avoid driving socialists into more concerted opposition. As historian Dieter Buse has written, “Social Democracy’s opponents acknowledged that its co-operation was necessary to the war effort and to national morale.” But others took a different view. In December 1914, the Prussian cabinet debated whether Social Democrats should automatically be disqualified from holding state or municipal office because their “social democratic outlook” was incompatible with carrying out official state functions.⁸⁹

Municipal franchise—a reform too far?

No issue had more longstanding preeminence for municipal socialists than franchise reform. Like the national leadership in the party, they also saw women’s suffrage as essential; indeed, a universal franchise without restrictions came to dominate their vision of how socialists might win power.⁹⁰ Greater local authority (selbstverwaltung) or home rule without franchise reform would mean little. As the war proceeded and frustrations mounted in early 1917, the socialists reaffirmed the demand for franchise reform.

Pressures mounted in 1917 to undo the restrictive municipal franchise that had so inhibited Social Democrats’ ability to see the realization of their agenda for cities. Paul Hirsch, serving in the Prussian state parliament, reminded would-be reformers how contingent and relatively recent the imposition of the restrictive franchise had been. Prussian elites in 1824 had challenged the democratizing vision for cities that Baron vom Stein had put forward in 1808. They argued that voting and elected representation should require “requisite landownership or income,” thereby exclusively enfranchising “an educated class.” A few years later, the state expanded its oversight of cities and specifically excluded the “poorer uneducated classes” from participating in city councils or municipal executive councils. A series of “compromise” measures in 1853 produced the new Gemeindeordnung (state laws governing cities) that instituted the Dreiklassenwahlsystem (three-class voting system) based on Steuerleistung (tax level). That system, widely adopted in other provinces, remained in effect more than sixty years later during the Great War.⁹¹ Despite some variation and manipulation of boundaries between voting classes and occasional experiments in liberalization, property ownership remained the basis for a highly restrictive municipal franchise. But, in tandem with the adoption of municipal voting restrictions had come a gradual elimination of the municipal self-government envisioned by vom Stein. By narrowing the scope of municipal self-government and requiring increasing state oversight in virtually all consequential municipal matters, Prussian authorities had made it impossible for cities to fulfill responsibilities that wartime demanded.⁹² Quoting Lindemann, Hirsch noted that the war economy had placed demands on cities that they were unequipped to fulfill by virtue of state constraints on their capacity to function.

Our cities have attempted, as well as they can, to run their old systems of operation. But the more massive our capitalistic enterprises become, the more powerfully they bring the working masses into play, sometimes here and sometimes there, according to their needs; the more recklessly the vertically proliferating syndicates and trusts extend their economic powers and attempt to subjugate or master the public bodies in cities and states, the more inadequate are the makeshift attempts by our cities with their obsolete organization to stand up to the threat of the new economic powers.⁹³

But, in Hirsch’s and Lindemann’s view, the intransigence of state authorities mandated a concerted push for realignment and decentralization of power.

The regime should from now on act accordingly and finally so regulate the cities that they can carry out their functions unhindered and free from ongoing constraints. The prerequisites for that are truly free self-governance in combination with a free municipal franchise. The class voting systems must disappear. (Emphasis in original.)⁹⁴

With the perceived challenges the German people faced in “a world of enemies,” by the spring of 1917 municipal socialists viewed with guarded optimism what seemed to be a new openness to franchise reform articulated by the kaiser and king of Prussia, Wilhelm II. “It is my belief that the class voting system no longer has a place in Prussia,” said Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in responding to the growing pressure for reform. He promised in a speech to the Prussian Landtag that political reforms in Prussia would be undertaken at the end of the war. Such proposals had been made before without any action, and more importantly, in the socialists’ view, they failed to address the municipal franchise specifically. Without reform at both local and state levels, any prospect for legitimate self-government would be foreclosed.⁹⁵ As it turned out, such skepticism was well founded. In early July 1917, a Reichstag special committee on political reforms, chaired by the SPD’s Scheidemann, came forward with recommendations for franchise reform only to be greeted by the removal of Bethmann-Hollweg. The proposals were ignored by his successor.⁹⁶

By late August, state authorities continued their foot-dragging, fearful of “handing over cities to extremist parties.” The frustration of Paul Hirsch and his comrades was palpable.⁹⁷ Highlighting how conservatives and liberals differed from Social Democrats on the franchise and self-government, Hirsch showed that no significant progress had been made on municipal franchise reform, and only half gestures had been made toward limited selbstverwaltung. He noted, “State oversight might well be curbed in this or that specific aspect, but in large part would remain as it had been in the past.” His frustration was compounded by a sense of the enormous achievements of cities during the war “not because of but in spite of this system of state paternalism” and in anticipation of the tasks that awaited cities in the aftermath of war.

And now one can envision after the war the tasks whose solution by the cities can be hoped for and enumerated: to put in order their shattered finances, to take up with renewed determination the battle against common diseases, to organize infant and maternity care, to provide oversight of food supplies, to take care of the health and well-being of the war wounded, to grant to the countless widows and orphans a proper level of social support, to provide employment information through appropriate channels, and to support the unemployed.

These would only be fully realized by “free cities in free states! That must be the goal toward which all democratic interests work together.”⁹⁸

A few modest victories would be recorded in war-weary communities by late 1917. In Hamburg, a special commission appointed by the Bürgerschaft (enfranchised citizens), although wholly unrepresentative of the working class, recommended the elimination of class voting. And, in Köln, while working-class representation in city council had for years been systematically denied, the Center Party and the liberals, under the duress of the war and in recognition of the contributions Social Democrats were making to the war effort, conceded the right of social democratic candidates to compete for seats, resulting in the SPD winning three seats.⁹⁹ Others—including the social democratic caucus in the Frankfurt City Council—continued to assert the unqualified right of cities to a universal, equal, secret, and direct franchise, the elimination of property qualifications for service on local government bodies, the invalidation of requirements for state approval of elected city office-holders, and the limitation of state oversight only to matters involving challenges to illegal acts of municipal authorities as determined by the appropriate court.¹⁰⁰

But in March 1918, nearly a year after his previous report, Hirsch could only reiterate the frustrating terms of debate over franchise reform in the states and cities that continued in the Prussian Landtag.¹⁰¹ Fear of municipalities’ power to over-tax and their jurisdiction over the police, along with other matters, continued to override what to the municipal socialists seemed the transparent achievements and efficiencies of democratically governed cities. Experts had reliably determined “that in the larger cities fully 88 percent of municipal voters vote in the 3rd class and only 12 percent in the first and second classes. This circumstance cannot be sustained.”

Hirsch’s frustration boiled over, and, in the end, he noted that despite the regime’s rhetorical commitment to a “freely elected state parliament” and to a proposed reform of municipal voting, that reform stood no chance of adoption. Already, the prospect of a new political order, if not necessarily a revolution, lay at the forefront of his thinking. “The realization of this measure will fall to a new peoples’ government, that will have the incredibly important task of finding a solution for the democratization of our communities, together with numerous other tasks.”

Rising Opposition in Cities

Popular “war enthusiasm” in its most assertive forms proved transitory after August 4, 1914, particularly as war casualties rose during the fall and the prospect of stalemate grew. However, open opposition to the war crystallized more slowly. That opposition emerged at two levels—national/parliamentary and local/municipality. The SPD parliamentary group, despite the misgivings of a minority, conceded the logic of support for the war by voting for war credits on August 5 and again, with deeper reservations, in early December. The “Declaration of August 4” in which the SPD parliamentary group asserted, “we do not leave the Fatherland in the lurch in the hour of need,” would prove a thorn in the party’s side and be a point of continuing contention between the party’s war supporters—the “majority” faction—and opponents—the “minority.”¹⁰² But, for the time being, Social Democrats bought time and maintained a semblance of unity; fear of a new wave of repression subsided, and the party functioned openly, even if suspicion of its loyalty still lingered.¹⁰³

Such suspicion may have been well placed as open opposition to the war and to the “majority” socialists’ loyalty soon revealed. But political and military authorities nevertheless responded with continuing ambivalence to the first signs of more public expression of opposition. They shut down and then reopened SPD publications, like Vorwärts, that challenged official views. Within months, key leading figures in the party, including Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and party president Hugo Haase, dissociated themselves from the majority faction’s support for the war and staked out positions in opposition. Local meetings of opponents popped up in Berlin, Gotha, Bremen, Hamburg, and Leipzig. And in Stuttgart, party factions fought over control of the SPD paper Schwäbische Tagwacht, which had become a vehicle for opposition views.¹⁰⁴

In early December 1914, Reichstag member Karl Liebknecht cast the solitary vote against new war credits and faced censure from most of his comrades, even those who shared his views, for violating party discipline. By early February, Paul Hirsch, the highly visible proponent of Gemeindesozialismus and member of the Prussian Landtag, stood apart from the SPD majority in his delegation to speak out against the prowar “August 4” resolution. He read an open statement of opposition on February 9, 1915, during only the second session of the Prussian Landtag held since the war’s outbreak. As reported in Vorwärts, Hirsch’s “explanation” was “mild in form but pointed in substance” and affirmed the continuing opposition of the Social Democrats to the politics of the regime. He put forward “a set of programmatic proposals” and censured the government for its “hardheartedness in the matter of electoral reform,” something that had also been raised in the October Landtag session. He closed with a wish for a “secure peace for the benefit of the German people and all of humanity.”

On the 22nd of October, the previous year, we expressed the hope and the heart-felt wish that the dreadful war, in which the people tear each other to pieces, will come to a quick conclusion. This hope sadly has not been fulfilled. We maintain confidence that the voices of peace in all the warring lands will from day-to-day become more numerous, gain widespread respect, and under the influence of the desire for peace, in particular, the working classes of all lands will be able to rapidly secure the peace and heal the wounds of the German people and all mankind.

But then, almost as an afterthought, Hirsch indicated that the Social Democratic caucus would approve the Budget Commission’s draft budget.¹⁰⁵

When still another war credits bill came before the Reichstag in March, Liebknecht was now joined in opposition by nearly thirty fellow delegates. In the end only one additional delegate cast a negative vote, but the other opponents walked out of the Reichstag as a group and publicly abstained from voting.¹⁰⁶

The emergence of this schism in the national SPD has been well-documented and the subject of considerable historiographical debate.¹⁰⁷ Longstanding as divisions in the SPD had been in prewar years, the war clearly intensified those schisms and produced even further splintering after August 1914. The shifting alignments within the party under both internal and external pressures brought on by the war belie any simple account of SPD disintegration or realignment.¹⁰⁸

Less well known and unevenly documented is the rising popular opposition to the war at the local level. The deepening misery on the home front, most noteworthy in the largest cities, correlated directly with the emerging opposition. The first real indicator of the breadth of that local opposition came in early June 1915, in the famous “Manifesto” calling for the war’s end, the abandonment of Burgfrieden, and resumption of the “class war.” Well more than 1,000 local party officials, office holders, and trade union leaders from across the country signed the petition. According to Eugen Prager, one of the founding members of what would eventually emerge as the Independent German Social Democratic Party (USPD), the initiative was not the result of longstanding plans by oppositional elements in the party, who were critical of the stands taken by the party leadership and the SPD Reichstag delegation. Rather, it emerged as an impulse driven by rising anti-war sentiment that coalesced within the party in late May.¹⁰⁹ Susanne Miller documents an intense consultative process in which key party leaders associated with the emerging opposition revised and toned down an initial draft penned by Liebknecht. But, as a first attempt to plumb the level of nationwide support for the opposition, the petition surprised even the authors. According to Miller, “The reverberations from the petition gave them an indication of the footholds of support they possessed across the country.” Signatures gathered on short notice constituted an impressive list; thirty-one cities had 5 or more signatories, ranging from 248 in Berlin to 36 in Hannau, 35 in Düsseldorf, and 5 in Erfurt, Giessen, and Königsberg. Representatives from scores of smaller places also signed in fewer numbers.¹¹⁰ Given the breadth and diversity of support, it is certain that significant numbers of SPD city councillors and other local officials, who were bearing the brunt of the war’s effects on the home front, would have added their signatures. The only listing available does include more than fifty SPD members holding local office—from Stadtverordneter (city councillors) to Gemeindevertreter (municipal delegates) to Mitglied Bildungsausschuss (school committee members). But the numbers were almost certainly larger. Among the more than 1,000 who signed, many have only local identifications with no offices specified. Nevertheless, the sheer numbers and breadth of participation on short notice were impressive.¹¹¹

The manifesto bitterly attacked the SPD majority for continued complicity in support of the regime’s imperial war objectives. “As the leadership of the Social Democracy let itself be driven into the wake of the expansionist politics … so it forsook the last opportunity to exonerate itself from complicity in a merciless war of destruction and blood-letting of the people and the subsequent peace that would only be a prelude to a new world war.” It instructed the leadership not to drive the party into oblivion but rather “to forsake the ‘civic truce’ and following the fundamental prescription of class conflict in the basic principles of the party program and resolutions, to open a socialist campaign for peace.” The manifesto appealed to party members at the grassroots, already war-weary after nearly a year, who saw no path to peace. It appeared to open new political space for opponents to claim allegiance to the party’s fundamental principles and program, to reject Burgfrieden, and return to the class struggle.¹¹²

Yet key national leaders who had already expressed reservations about the war failed to enlist their support. The two most important party organs associated with skeptical views on the war, Vorwärts and the Leipziger Volkszeitung, failed to acknowledge the petition, and although Liebknecht appealed to Bernstein to add his support, he declined to do so after brief “reflection.” According to Miller, others like Kautsky, Haase, and Wilhelm Dittmann supported the general spirit of the petition but could not agree with all the particulars.¹¹³ As an alternative, Bernstein, Haase, and Kautsky published their own manifesto, famously titled, “Das Gebot der Stunde” (the Need of the Hour), on June 19, 1915. The manifesto leveled an explicit attack on the party leadership’s complicity in furthering the regime’s expansionist war objectives in violation of the pledges made in the August 4 (1914) declaration. With brutal language, the authors recounted the war’s horrific toll and the prospects for even greater suffering.

This war has imposed immense sacrifices on the people who have been dragged into it and increases them every day. World history knows no other war that even approximates a similarly murderous outcome. It is the cruelty of a barbarous age, combined with the most ingenious means of modern civilization, that seizes the flower of the people.¹¹⁴

They called upon fellow Social Democrats to join with socialists of other countries to pursue “a genuine and lasting peace” based upon “principles freely agreed upon.” And finally, they warned that if their party lacked the courage to pursue these objectives, then it fell to them to drive these political objectives forward toward whatever end might result. Here, then, unmistakably, was a gauntlet thrown down to the party leadership. The leaders responded, in turn, by attacking Haase, whose prominent position within both the party and its Reichstag delegation made it, in their view, especially incumbent on him not to violate the principle of party unity. Haase fired back in terms that affirmed his right to express his dissent publicly and ridiculed the “politics of indignation” that would suppress disagreements. Although most party organs did not print the manifesto, those that did, like the Leipziger Volkszeitung, were suppressed for a week. “Das Gebot” had a measurable effect in giving legitimacy to an emerging opposition that would only grow more forceful in the next year.¹¹⁵

The Shattering of the SPD, 1915–1917—Overview

Opposition to the war did not first appear in the summer of 1915. Both in the streets and in the Reichstag (and some Landtage) growing disaffection was already evident. But as one historian has written, “the dam burst in June 1915.”¹¹⁶ Much of the literature on the opposition, not surprisingly, has focused on the national party schism that played out in the Reichstag. Because the party “majority,” or what Kautsky came to call the Regierungssozialisten (government socialists), led by Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, had wedded themselves so firmly to the government’s war objectives, opponents were left little option but to oppose, with increasingly aggressive tactics, their leadership and ultimately the party they led.¹¹⁷ In so doing, their own position was reinforced by the mass actions in cities where rank-and-file party members focused on that most immediate of wartime grievances—the food crisis. Food shortages rolled through one crucial commodity after another (bread, potatoes, meat, butter), compounded by the erosion of earnings from the combined effects of unemployment and inflation, along with the shattering of families as the human toll of war rose inexorably.

Between the summer of 1915 and the spring of 1917, when the SPD finally splintered into two parties, a series of cracks emerged that produced the final split.¹¹⁸ While conflict simmered within the Reichstag delegation during the remainder of the summer and into the fall, the Zimmerwald conference in Switzerland during September 1915 seemed to promise a reconstituted Socialist International around a common program for peace, which, by definition, encouraged the German dissidents and further alienated their majority rivals. In early October, the government warned opponents associated with the Liebknecht wing of the party that they were “prohibited from making any speeches either in public or private meetings and from circulating any printed matter.” The orders targeted, among others, those who signed the June 9 manifesto. Two Düsseldorf militants, including the local party secretary, were charged with “exciting class hatred” and sentenced to three months in prison.¹¹⁹ A further step in this process of intra-party alienation came with another war credits vote in the Reichstag on December 21, 1915, when seventeen members of the SPD delegation joined Liebknecht and Rühle in dissent. An additional group of twenty-two left the chambers and abstained from voting. Because of the underlying timidity of that vote—opposing annexation, not the war itself—existing tensions within the oppositional camp were exacerbated. Luxemburg bitterly paraphrased a biblical quotation: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”¹²⁰ A further war credits vote in March 1916 added one more open opponent to the ranks of the opposition, but more significantly led to their expulsion from formal membership in the SPD Reichstag delegation and the formation of the Sozialdemokratischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Social Democratic Working Group). The formation of this faction within the SPD Reichstag delegation, more than any previous development, foretold the shattering of the party. The debate over what constituted a violation of party discipline, so fundamental to the functioning of the party, gave further license for the minority faction to assert its independence. A few days before the critical vote in the Reichstag, a flyer of unknown authorship appeared on the streets under the title “Was wir wollen!” (What We Want). “If the leadership breaks down, then the mass of party comrades must rouse themselves and lead the party back to the fundamental politics of the class struggle. Not simply without such a delinquent leadership but better yet against it, now back to the true social democratic work.” (Emphasis in original.) As early as December 1915, according to Suzanne Miller, two alternative paths forward were envisioned by the opposition. The first foresaw a growing and assertive minority within the party that might be capable of winning control at a new party congress convened after the war. But at the same time, she noted, the left centrists perceived a growing dissatisfaction and restlessness among party members at the grassroots, whose support could be lost without more immediate, decisive action.¹²¹

The “opposition” proved to be a contentious coalition.¹²² Its energy and spark came from its far left wing, now known as the Spartacus faction, led by Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Its organizational capacity, however, was severely limited by arrest and incarceration, suppression of publications, and an inevitable turn toward underground activity. A larger centrist faction, while gaining voice and courage, still hesitated to formally break with the SPD majority. But the arrest of Liebknecht following his May Day speech in 1916 precipitated a move leftward by key members of the centrist faction, including Hugo Haase. Another factor was the expulsion of majority leaders from the party’s Berlin district executive committee.¹²³ Ebert himself spoke more openly of a split in the party, precipitated, in his view, by the efforts of the Spartacus-Gruppe to constitute themselves as a “Sonderorganisation” (alternative organization), and parallel efforts under the oppositional leadership of Adolph Hoffmann to call Reichskonferenzen in specific party and electoral districts. “We see a disordering and exhaustion of the party that could not be worse. Its agitational capacity is disabled, our whole power consumed by inner struggles.”¹²⁴

A party conference in September 1916 revealed a division of delegates—276 to 169 on a key vote—that still left the party very much under the control of the majority. An estimate of the actual membership represented by these delegates suggests the relative strength of the majority-minority to have been much closer, 524,797 versus 516,079.¹²⁵ Ebert made a final appeal on behalf of the majority that all delegates remember that they shared the same goal: “the freeing of the working classes from economic and political oppression.” But, as Prager noted, the “near future would soon teach how little Ebert was serious about these words. He stood at the head of the leadership whose actions shattered the unity of the party.”¹²⁶

Struggle to control party newspapers erupted in many localities, but the most consequential, after months of internal struggle, may have been the reining in of Vorwärts on orders of the military high command, and the appointment of a new editor prepared to live within the harsh dictates of the government censor—what the minority called “the Vorwärts theft.”¹²⁷ In December, some locals of the SPD controlled by the minority—in Bremen and Brunswick, for example—began withholding payments to the central party. At the minority conference in early January a strong majority of delegates opposed withholding payments, despite strong views to the contrary in the Spartacus section.¹²⁸

With the dawn of 1917 and another year at war, the national conference called by the opposition to consider its options stepped back from the precipice of a complete split in the party. The Spartacus faction, however, saw such a split as necessary and inevitable. A little more than a week later the opposition was expelled by the majority. The decision turned ultimately on different interpretations of party discipline. The opposition sought a wider “freedom of activity outside the party.”¹²⁹ Expulsions of opposition-controlled local and district organizations followed, and the opponents finally called for a congress to establish a party.

On April 6, 1917, what was now the congress of a new alternative party met in the historically significant site of Gotha to formally declare itself the USPD (Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands), or the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. An influential minority of delegates continued to argue for remaining within the SPD as an internal opposition. Kautsky believed they must look to the next official party congress and maintain “the necessary elbow room” to insist upon “declaring themselves an opposition within the Party.”¹³⁰ But a motion to that effect by Bernstein was defeated seventy to forty-four. As historian and former USPD and KP militant Arthur Rosenberg would subsequently note, in the summer of 1917, “it was a unique misfortune that at approximately the same time the Social Democratic Party split became an established fact, the actual differences between the two tendencies diminished.”¹³¹ The effect of the appeal for national integration favored by proponents of Burgfrieden and the Augusterlebnis ultimately pushed to the fore what Wolfgang Kruse has called the Gretchenfrage (pivotal question) of social democratic wartime politics: the choice of either “integration into the existing order through principled support of its war or opposition to the war and its supporters.”¹³²

The new party reaffirmed the Erfurt program--with its unrelenting opposition to state authority-- adopted by the “old” Social Democratic Party in 1893, but now updated for wartime. “The party stood ‘in fundamental opposition to the ruling governmental system, to the war policy of the Reich government, and to the policy of the old party which the executive has steered into a governmental course.’ ” The split did not follow the lines of the revisionist/anti-revisionist division in the prewar party.¹³³ Nevertheless, according to historian Frauke Heard-Bey, the centralizing propensities of the left opposition, in particular the Spartacus faction, left little space for “cultivating or mobilizing around a revolutionary Kommunalideologie” (municipal ideology).

Concrete proposals for the reorganization of state government had little interest for them; even less the city as an object of political consideration. They would also not take account of the fact that municipal questions for a large mass of Berlin’s population had made up a significant part of their political experience, until the war overwhelmed everything else.¹³⁴

As Heard-Bey observed, what would later become critical questions concerning the dismantling of the traditional municipal bureaucracy were not once raised at the founding USPD congress. In this respect, the new party’s inattentiveness to municipal political affairs differed little from that of the old party’s, harkening back to the debates at party congresses in 1902 and 1904.¹³⁵

Importantly for the party’s future organization, the USPD would pursue a more radically decentralized form of organization that would severely restrict control by a central party bureaucracy. In the debate over organization, Robert Dissmann, the Metalworkers’ Union leader from Frankfurt, argued for a radically decentralized internal party democracy, whereby all officials and editors of party organs must stand for election. “That is the best method for nurturing democracy.” The party’s central office must have no veto power over district leaders. “The unqualified independence of the localities and districts vis-à-vis the Party Central must be secured.”¹³⁶ As a reflection of this new, more decentralized organization, the 143 participants in the Gotha conference were heavily weighted toward local representatives; fully 124 had been delegated by 91 Wahlkreisen (local election districts) along with 15 Reichstag representatives.¹³⁷

An indicator of the new party’s local orientation was the bitter conflict that erupted within constituencies across the country, revealing in some cases an unanticipated level of support for the USPD in local party organizations. In Düsseldorf, virtually the entire local organization moved into the ranks of the USPD, while retaining control of the Volkszeitung and party funds. A local police official observed that “almost the entire working class, those who are politically organized as well as those in trade unions, have joined the left radical wing.” In Scheidemann’s own constituency of Solingen, a resolution passed rejecting his right to represent the district in the Reichstag. In Magdeburg, a new USPD branch grew from 150 to 500 members by June.¹³⁸ But, despite impressive early gains, the USPD’s strength across local districts was uneven and, in some ways, regionally concentrated. According to Miller, factors such as the dominance of heavy industry and regional cultural barriers, as in the South and Southwest, determined areas of strength and weakness. Other factors included local party leadership, the support of the local party press, and the particular history of local party organizations. Six regional organizations that included thirty-six election districts went over to the USPD—Gross-Berlin, Halle, Erfurt, Leipzig, Braunschweig, and Frankfurt am Main (but not the city). In addition, cities such as Bremen, Düsseldorf, Essen, Potsdam, Solingen, and Weimar aligned with the opposition.¹³⁹

Mass Mobilization

Important as the SPD’s history may be for understanding how opposition to the war grew and shattered party unity, the internal struggle also distorts and ultimately imposes an institutional straitjacket that inhibits a fuller understanding of the roots of that opposition. Popular protest activity around immediate grievances escalated dramatically from 1915 on. It provides less a backdrop than a foundation for the disintegration of Burgfrieden and the renewal of class warfare. Food riots, tenants’ actions, and labor strikes shook the existing order and its political support, with notable effect in the ranks of the SPD.

No comprehensive picture of the growing mass unrest is readily available.¹⁴⁰ A widespread pattern of popular interventions, initially to secure food supplies, threatened what a Berlin police official termed a domestic “economic war,” intensified by allied blockades and the greed of producers and merchants who sought to corner the market on key commodities. The data on the deepening food crisis are unequivocal. Historian Belinda Davis cites skyrocketing prices for basic commodities on the black market and dramatic increases, especially after April 1917, in workers’ expenditures for food. But some commentators, noting public health statistics on mortality, have suggested a less catastrophic picture, one that did not see outright famine. As Avner Offer argued, “The war at its worst caused the loss of not much more than a decade of public health progress.” But, without question, struggles to secure and distribute food supplies moved to center stage in the chaotic last months of the war and the period of upheaval that followed.¹⁴¹

Women and Children Lining up for Bread in Germany, c. 1917

Well before the fall of 1918, “mass protest” frequently developed around food, often ignited by local residents, most often women, standing anxiously in lines to claim some small portion of dwindling, high-priced food supplies. In February 1915, for instance, a Berlin policeman observed such an incident: “Thousands of women and children had gathered at the municipal market hall in Andreas Street to get a few pounds of potatoes. As the sale commenced, everyone stormed the market stands. The police … were powerless against the onslaught.”¹⁴² Such escalating mass demands precipitated action by the Berlin City Council to call for more vigorous state intervention to meet civilian needs, including confiscation of potato supplies. But central government authorities failed to respond, instead urging the population “to watch out for waste within their own households.”¹⁴³ While the government officials deflected demands of SPD Reichstag members for confiscation of potato supplies, they did order what one official termed a “St. Bartholomew’s massacre of the swine” to increase the supply of pork and reduce the diversion of potatoes into animal fodder. What limited effects were evident in the market quickly disappeared as consumers, especially the Minderbemittelte (people of lesser means), confronted renewed shortages.¹⁴⁴ By the summer of 1915, in tandem with the growing disaffection over the war on the part of local SPD officials across the country, the Berlin police commissioner Traugott von Jagow noted that now segments of the poorer population were questioning the war itself and calling for peace. Those profiting from the war economy now came to be popularly known as “war extenders.”¹⁴⁵

In Leipzig, one of the most intensely oppositional cities in the Reich, rank-and-file workers in several electoral districts had voted overwhelmingly against further war credits: 535 to 10 in the thirteenth district on May 9 and 122 to 8 in the twelfth district on July 20.¹⁴⁶ In October 1915, a growing pattern of “unruly street disturbances” took a more ominous turn with widespread protests in front of food stores across the city, leading the state censors to forbid any reference to the disorders in the press. More protests followed shortly thereafter, which the authorities decided to permit as a “ventilation of grievances.” But when 2,000 people turned up for a meeting and some marched to government offices demanding peace and more effective guarantees for adequate food supplies, the police prohibited any food-related protests in the future.¹⁴⁷

Even if a full accounting of mass protest over food shortages and other issues is not available, a partial inventory shows that the numbers and size of such demonstrations increased significantly over the period from 1915 to 1917.¹⁴⁸ Furthermore, as strikes proliferated, they often linked demands for higher wages or shorter hours with demands for food or the curtailment of hoarding. Demands for wage increases became ever more urgent as the cost of living rose sharply.

A chronology of local protest

1915

February

Berlin: potato shortage and demonstrations

Biskupitz (Kreis Zabrze): strike of 800 coal miners for shorter day and higher wages

October

Chemnitz: bloody demonstration and 150 arrests

Berlin: Unrest over food shortages

1916

January

Dortmund: street demonstrations over food shortages

March

Dortmund: 300 women demonstrate over food shortages

May

Berlin: May Day demonstration (Liebknecht arrested)

Dresden, Jena, Hanau und anderen Orten: demonstrations

Braunschweig: strike of young workers against forced savings

Miechowitz (Kreis Beuthen): strike of 1,000 workers for higher wages

Leipzig, Braunschweig, Koblenz: demonstrations by starving workers against foodprofiteers and the war

Leipzig: state of emergency declared

Magdeburg: strikes and demonstrations against forced savings by young workers

June

Kiel: protests and mass demonstrations by longshoremen

Bremen, Braunschweig, Berlin, Essen, Munich Osnabrück, Jena and Hanover: protest over the trial and conviction of Liebknecht

July

Halle-Wittenberg: unrest over food supply

August

Hamborn bei Duisburg: unrest over food and peace

Chemnitz: strike of munitions workers for higher wages and better food supply

Kreis Recklinghausen: strike of coal miners over food shortage

Kreis Dortmund-Hörde: coal miners’ strike and unrest over food supply

Tangermünde (Altmark): unrest over food supply

Kattowitz und Hindenburg: food unrest and coal strike

Westfalen: (two tipples) 3,000 coal miners strike

September

Kiel: unrest among longshoremen

November

Dresden: strike of metal workers and peace demonstration of 7,000 to 8,000

1917

January

Ruhrgebiet: coal miners’ strikes

Harburg: food supply unrest

Lüneburg: food supply unrest

Buer und Gladbeck (Kreis Recklingshausen): coal miners’ strike over food supply

February

Berlin: strike of machine workers over food shortages

Berlin: strikes in many munitions factories for wage increases and better food supply

Hattingen, Wattenscheid und Gelsenkirchen: coal miners’ strikes

Hamburg: food unrest

Recklinghausen: coal miners’ strikes for wage increase

Wandsbeck und Stellingen: food unrest

Barmen: food unrest; large demonstration of soldiers on leave

Dortmund: coal miners’ strike for higher wages and better food supply

Berlin-Wittenau: strike in weapons and munitions factories over food shortages

March

Hamburg, Nuremberg, Barmen und anderen Orten: strikes

Buer: coal miners’ strike for higher wages

Neumünster: food unrest

Blumenthal bei Bremen: food unrest among longshoremen

Elbing: strike of 3,000

Magdeburg: food unrest

Hagen: strikes of thousands in large enterprises

Kiel: strike/demonstration

Braunschweig: munitions workers’ strike

April

Berlin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Hanover, Braunschweig, Dresden und anderen Orten: mass strikes

June

Gelsenkirchen: food unrest and strike

Oppeln: food unrest

Hindenburg: Demonstrations of 2,000 to 3,000; police intervened

Dirschau bei Danzig: strikes of munitions and railroad workers over food shortages

July

Köln: strike movement for higher wages and shorter hours

Gleiwitz und Hindenburg: food unrest; military called out to suppress

Schwientochlowitz (Oberschlesien): mass unrest over food; military called out

Finsterwalde: 5,000 metal workers strike for higher bread ration

August

Rüstersiel (Oldenburg): protest meetings of sailors

Düneburg (Herzogtum Launenburg): strike of 3,000 building trades-men and earth movers for higher wages

Halle-Merseburg: 12,000 demonstrate for higher wages, better food supply and peace

October

Dillingen (Rheinland): strike of 400 workers, members of a Christian metal workers’ union, for higher wages

Schiffbeck bei Hamburg: strike of 1,000 jute factory workers

This accounting conveys the scope of deepening discontent and the intertwining of workplace and consumer grievances, as well as increasing demands for peace. But it also has limitations. Numbers of local studies suggest that even this enumeration understates the extent of grassroots agitation. For whatever practical or ideological reasons, the volume Dokumente und Materialien, produced in East Germany in 1958, ended with the October Revolution in Russia, and the editors declared simply, “The triumphant progress of a new era in human history began.”¹⁴⁹ Subsequent volumes in that series focused on 1919 and its aftermath, but a significant gap in this documentary collection and inventory of mass actions remained, from late 1917 through the New Year in 1919.

An examination of the local contexts of this growing mass discontent provides some measure of its actual extent and cumulative intensity. In Frankfurt, for instance, discontent over food supplies simmered just below the surface, and although public mass protests were relatively few, local authorities and Majority Socialists worried repeatedly over the prospect of uncontrollable protest: a June 1915 rally protesting food speculation was followed in July and then August and September 1917 by further protests, including strikes of metal-trades workers in August 1917 and in sympathy with striking workers in Berlin and elsewhere in January 1918. (None of these incidents were listed in the compilation above.) The harsh winters of 1916–17 and 1917–18 precipitated anxious measures in the Frankfurt City Council to guarantee critical supplies of coal and foodstuffs in order to forestall further anticipated unrest.¹⁵⁰

The early phases of the war brought dramatic declines in SPD party membership and in the membership of trade unions, the consequence in part of massive mobilization of workers for military service and early but transitory enthusiasm for the war. That enthusiasm soon eroded. The initial confusion and then complicity of SPD party leaders and trade union officials led to mass discouragement and confusion among members.

Braunschweig and Hanover illuminate these confusing patterns.¹⁵¹ Although these two cases seemed parallel in the early months of the war, they took different paths as the war unfolded. Braunschweig became a center of organized oppositional strength after 1915, while Hanover’s party and trade unions remained comparatively loyal. What opposition emerged in the latter, did so more spontaneously around the deepening problems of the food supply and without formal organizational leadership. And this local unrest and the challenge to municipal authorities’ management of the food crisis promised to undermine the local Burgfrieden to which SPD party officials remained committed, at least until the summer of 1916.¹⁵² But by early 1917, despite widening unrest in other parts of Germany, local and state authorities seemed confident that a combination of factors: the caution of the local press, increased corporate welfare measures, and the “calming intervention of the leading circles of working-class leaders, would succeed in gaining control of the agitation.” Even though protests over the food supply subsided after January 1917, the weakness of organized opposition meant that dissatisfaction found other spontaneous outlets, like the attempted assassination of municipal director Heinrich Tramm, an upsurge in short spontaneous strikes, and letters and pamphlets threatening the storming of city hall.¹⁵³

The chronology that Boll identifies for the emergence of local opposition is especially helpful. He argues that this pattern, although derived from the Braunschweig experience, applies in many other cities as well.

The food unrest first set in earlier than the great strike movements and … reached its high point in 1916, particularly in the winter 1916–17, while the more or less political mass strikes begun hesitatingly in 1916, experienced their first peak in April 1917 and after a second peak between June and August 1917 reached its greatest expansion and highest level of politicization in January 1918.¹⁵⁴

Boll notes that, while historians have lavished considerable attention on the widespread and politically consequential strikes of April 1917 and January 1918, these should not be seen in isolation but rather as part of an evolving pattern of unrest around food shortages, labor grievances, and ultimately peace itself. A fuller accounting of this unrest, inherently local in nature and focused in significant part on the complicity of state and municipal authorities, is necessary to understand the emergence of the organized opposition of the USPD and the revolution itself in November 1918. This movement did not lack an alternative political vision, spontaneous though many of the mass actions may have been. That vision, rooted in prewar socialist agitation, provided a basis for challenging a centralized state and the largely bankrupt Kriegsozialismus (war socialism) that bore only the slightest resemblance to the real thing.

The June 1916 strikes of metal workers in Berlin, Braunschweig, Bremen, Stuttgart, and other cities and the strikes of munitions workers signaled a new political turn in working-class discontent. These actions also led top trade union and party leaders to directly oppose the strike activity.¹⁵⁵ Deepening hardship during the fall 1916 fueled a demonstration in Dresden of 800 working-class women at the city hall demanding a “fair distribution of food.” At the beginning of November large anti-war demonstrations and a series of short strikes in the city intensified the atmosphere of unrest.¹⁵⁶

Düsseldorf’s militant working class undertook wartime industrial action somewhat more slowly. But by 1917, with food shortages (especially potatoes) now at acute levels, a wave of strikes hit the munitions industry in early February, in spite of stopgap efforts by city government and some large metalworking firms to address the workers’ needs. Working-class leaders who sought to use trade union auspices to discourage strikes now acknowledged their limited capacity to direct or control events, “since,” as they warned, “these demonstrations usually broke out spontaneously, before the working-class leaders knew anything about them.”¹⁵⁷ In Düsseldorf, as in other north German cities, these conflicts served as a prelude to the strike wave of April 1917 to which the newly constituted USPD gave tacit support.

In Berlin, escalating street protests in early 1917 over food shortages, including disruption of the central market, led the police and military to intervene. Police authorities noted that “an enormous portion of the population doesn’t care about the war at all anymore,” and according to Davis, “exhibited a growing lack of faith in the military as well as the civilian authorities.” Somewhat in advance of workers in other cities, Berlin metalworkers conducted one-day strikes in early February with a mix of demands over “wages, food supplies, and the general ‘food calamity.’ ” Women now occupied many of these factory positions.¹⁵⁸ In Mannheim and Baden, the protests of early 1917 focused on the rising cost of living and the administrative failures in food distribution. But, with growing trade union participation, the movement by March began to demand a shorter workday and substantial wage increases. Mannheim strike statistics for 1917 were exceptionally high for the state of Baden, whose overall strike rates were lower than for Germany generally.¹⁵⁹

Wartime strikes

The level of strikes in Germany may initially have masked a deepening wartime crisis. First, and most noteworthy, the number of strikes declined dramatically compared to the levels immediately preceding the war—from a high of 2,500 in 1912 to a mere 137 in 1915. Second, although strike numbers remained low during the war years, they did rise to 561 in 1917 and 531 in 1918. Third, the immediate postwar years brought a substantial escalation in numbers of strikes, surpassing by a significant margin the prewar numbers. Several factors account for the generally low levels of strike activity during the war itself: strong repressive measures by military authorities, including forced conscription of strikers and their leaders; high wages and a general shortage of labor, especially in key war industries; and increasing numbers of women and youth who lacked experience with organized, collective trade union activity entering war work.¹⁶⁰

One of the more intriguing comparisons of wartime strike activity again involves the cities of Hanover and Braunschweig in Lower Saxony. Although both cities had roughly the same number of strikes—Hanover seventeen and Braunschweig fifteen—they contrasted dramatically in size and militancy. In Hanover/Linden, the strikes were, with a few exceptions, comparatively small but included an early wave of small strikes in 1915; they involved relatively few firms, and the strikers were a smaller percentage of those employed in the firms struck. By comparison, the strikes in Braunschweig developed later (1916) and were larger; they included a number of large multi-firm strikes, and the ratio of strikers to all those employed in the firms was significantly larger. However, in Braunschweig, strikes ended abruptly under severe repression in early 1918.¹⁶¹ Both Boll and Grotjahn point to several complementary explanations for these divergences. The strikes in the early war years in Hanover may well have been a continuation of the prewar strike wave, driven primarily by economic concerns of a relatively narrow but well-organized stratum of the labor force. The established leadership in the trade unions and the SPD in Hanover had invested themselves heavily in Burgfrieden and consistently sought to deter and dampen strike sentiment in the city. Although later developing strikes did acquire a political edge in the context of the Sparzwangstreik (forced savings strike),¹⁶² they never wholly superseded fundamentally economic motivations. In Braunschweig, by contrast, a militant working-class leadership coalesced in the spring of 1916 to lead two explicitly political strikes that had widespread support—a Sparzwangstreik in May 1916 and a mass strike protesting the incarceration of Karl Liebknecht in late June 1916. The combination of a radical leadership, a massive influx of younger workers into the factories, and unremitting repression by the military authorities produced repeated flare-ups and increasing politicization of strike activity in Braunschweig.¹⁶³ In the view of the police superintendent, “The workers themselves are harmless; the leaders count for everything. The shortages of potatoes and coal are merely a cover for their political goals.” The big strike of August 15–18, 1917, involving several thousand workers in the metal and canning industries and led by militant editor Sepp Oerter, produced a set of demands in which immediate consumption grievances mingled with political demands for voting rights and peace. They included: “equitable distribution of foodstuffs, reform of voting rights for the state legislature, lifting the state of siege and press censorship, reduction in the hours of work, and that the state government take a stand for immediate peace.”¹⁶⁴ But, this proved a last gasp of militant strike activity for the Braunschweig militants. Under the severe weight of military repression, the movement proved unable to sustain mobilization of local workers on behalf of their demands. The widespread January 1918 strikes made hardly a ripple in Braunschweig. Local militants bided their time until the war unraveled and the Reich collapsed in the waning months of 1918.¹⁶⁵

The Great Strikes of 1917

The strike waves of April 1917 and January 1918 have received considerable attention in most historical accounts of the war, and for good reason. They reflected significant shifts in the popular support for the war and the politicization of the opposition. They came after the split in the SPD and the formation of the USPD, with an explicitly anti-war agenda. But, as the previous pages have shown, they also represented the culmination of widening dissent that at least since 1915 had taken a variety of forms, especially at the local level. The deepening food crisis—graphically symbolized in the “turnip winter” of 1916–17—had produced increasing strike action in which consumption issues intersected with workplace demands for higher wages and shorter hours.¹⁶⁶ Although the leadership of the “Majority Socialists” (MSPD) and significant elements of the trade union hierarchy continued to profess loyalty to Burgfrieden and to the government’s war program, the fracturing of that support at popular levels had become abundantly clear by early 1917.

The outbreak of strikes on April 16, 1917, appeared first in Berlin, where their impact proved greatest. The catalyst turned out to be a cut in bread rations anticipated for the next day and a recent sudden drop in the supply of potatoes. These developments, coming at the end of the bitter “turnip winter,” occurred against the political backdrop of the February Revolution in Russia, the formation of the oppositional USPD, and the entry into the war by the United States.¹⁶⁷ The government, in a state of panic during the days before the anticipated outbreak, had promised to end franchise restrictions at the end of the war and more immediately to enlist workers in the food distribution system. But, as Davis has pointed out, this “gambit to put the onus of food distribution on workers’ shoulders” masqueraded as “espousing democratization while promising greater control.”¹⁶⁸ These measures did not stem the tide of popular unrest that erupted with a degree of spontaneity not just in Berlin, where more than 200,000 workers struck, but also in Leipzig, Danzig, Magdeburg, Braunschweig, and other cities—all centers of radical strength. By most accounts, the strikes were only loosely connected. The authorities were unable to pinpoint the initiation of the strike. The minister of the interior wrote to the Kaiser in early April warning that although “the origin and basis of these rumors cannot be firmly established, the strike was nevertheless in the air.”¹⁶⁹ When the strike came, it still caught the authorities by surprise, if only by its sheer magnitude and broad support in the population of Berlin and other cities.

Police reports of the first day in Berlin suggest that widespread “impromptu” gatherings of factory workers materialized beyond the large demonstrations. Strikers seeking bread attacked bakeries. They also moved close to the hub of government buildings and the central market, although police blocked them from reaching the imperial palace and the major thoroughfares of Wilhelm Street and Unter den Linden.¹⁷⁰ Pleased with the initial results of what many workers perceived as a “demonstration strike” intended to extract concessions from the government, the strikers considered their next steps. Fearing retribution by a government bent on sending them to the trenches, men showed little enthusiasm for a protracted conflict. Consequently, women comprised a very large share of the protesters, both those working in the war industries and women who continued to occupy the front lines in the war on consumption. They were also immune from being sent to the military front.¹⁷¹

In Leipzig, the other major center of agitation, the strike developed more slowly but quickly gathered momentum. By the third day, April 18, it had spread to virtually all trades and factories engaged in war production. As in Berlin, women were heavily represented in the streets. The USPD played a decisive leadership role, serving as an alternative to the “social patriots” who comprised the established trade union leadership. USPD activists injected political concerns more explicitly into the strikers’ demands. Richard Lipinski, the USPD leader, and Arthur Lieberasch, a left-wing leader of the Metalworkers’ Union, formulated political demands in tandem with consumption issues that a large public assembly of workers adopted on April 16.¹⁷² The demands included: providing the population with cheap food and coal; renouncing all annexations; lifting the state of siege and censorship; eliminating all barriers to open meetings and gatherings; freeing political prisoners and ending political persecution; and granting full rights of citizenship, including equal, general, secret, and direct voting rights at all levels of governance—“Reich, Bundesstaaten, und in den Gemeinden.” The meeting directed a delegation to present these demands to Reichskanzler Bethmann Hollweg in Berlin, with the promise that strikers would not resume work until significant concessions had been enacted.¹⁷³ Although the authorities rejected these “political” demands out of hand, Berlin workers’ assemblies also adopted them, leading the Kriegsamt chief in Berlin, Wilhelm Groener, to express “with great annoyance how the political demands of strikers in Leipzig set an example for workers elsewhere.”¹⁷⁴ With promises from the authorities of an increased food supply and employer concessions on hours and wages, the strike came to an end on April 19.

Beyond Berlin and Leipzig, the strike varied considerably from one locality to another. In Braunschweig, women and “Leichtarbeiter” (light industry workers) at AGK arms factory led a spontaneous strike, stimulated by the enthusiasm generated by a general strike call at the founding conference of the USPD in Gotha and by the anticipated cut in bread rations. The authorities scrambled to address the food shortage crisis with stopgap measures. Although a general strike movement appeared in the offing on April 16, local leaders failed to unify a Braunschweiger working-class divided between laborers in heavy and light industries. However, underlying discontent would continue to play out in conflicts during the summer and produce a larger, more disruptive strike in August (as noted above).¹⁷⁵ In Düsseldorf, despite a militant working class and strong support for the USPD, local authorities managed to prevent mass participation in the April strikes. However, ongoing unrest in the munitions industry in February, metalworkers’ strikes, and ransacking of food stores in late June suggested anything but quiescence.¹⁷⁶ Reports from party activists in Magdeburg and Kiel indicated large-scale participation in strikes, and Carl Severing recalled workers in Bielefeld participating in order to express their yearning for peace. But some other industrial centers of USPD strength—Niederrhein, Thüringen, Frankfurt am Main, Offenbach, and Hanau—saw little participation.¹⁷⁷

The increasingly repressive atmosphere and the very real threat of conscription faced by leaders and activists dampened enthusiasm for strikes during the later months of 1917. But new international developments foretold a changing environment. They included the October Revolution in Russia and Bolshevik initiatives for a peace settlement, the aggressive terms being negotiated at Brest-Litovsk by the Germans, and a failed international peace conference in Stockholm that nonetheless led some of the participants to issue a call for an international general strike. Sentiment favoring a new round of mass action appeared to rise in the new year.

The strikes of January 1918

The continuing food crisis in Germany colored everything. Fearing repression, the leadership of the USPD turned to the Reichstag delegation, whose members enjoyed immunity from prosecution, to initiate a strike call.¹⁷⁸ The strike movement, although reliant on local initiative, had significant national and international dimensions as well. In addition to the stimulus of a general strike call conveyed by Georg Ledebour from the Stockholm conference, Austrian workers, between January 14 and 21, undertook a massive general strike of their own that shook the foundations of the regime.¹⁷⁹ The USPD moved cautiously, and in places covertly, to provide leadership for the strike, augmented in some cities, like Berlin, by the top leadership of the SPD. Factory delegates voted Ebert, Scheidemann, and Braun onto the strike committee. By Scheidemann’s account, in the face of an intransigent regime, the leadership sought to channel discontent in decidedly non-revolutionary directions. “The possibility emerged for us to keep the movement in orderly paths and as quickly as possible through negotiations with the government to conclude an agreement.”¹⁸⁰

Leipzig had been a prominent site of mass mobilization during the April 1917 strike, but in late January 1918, heavy police and military repression had taken a toll, and only a few thousand strikers laid down their tools on January 31 in solidarity with workers in Berlin and elsewhere. When 1,000 workers, mostly women, at the aircraft factory in Leipzig-Lindenthal joined the walkout, military authorities seized the plant. All meetings of the USPD had been banned since early January, and the local commander began a massive round-up of activists for transshipment to the front. With political leadership driven underground and trade unions offering little or no support, the strike collapsed on February 2.¹⁸¹

The outpouring of strikers in Berlin represented the largest and most impressive center of the strike, with estimates ranging from 180,000 to 650,000. Mass action, unlike the strikes of April 1917, took on the dimensions of a general strike, brief and unsuccessful though it may have been.¹⁸² Beyond Berlin, workers in significant numbers struck in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Kiel, Mannheim, Danzig, Munich and Köln, but also in some smaller cities like Fürth and Luckenwalde.¹⁸³ In the eastern Ruhrgebiet, as many 13,000 miners in thirty-one mines went on strike, some for as long as seven days. Within forty-eight hours military authorities moved to conscript several hundred leaders. Older centers of opposition appeared exhausted in this phase of the strike, whereas new, previously quiescent districts began to stir. Most significantly, demands regarding wages and hours now were superseded by demands for equal voting rights, freedom of expression, and immediate peace. In Köln, Wilhelm Sollmann, SPD party leader and member of the city council, exulted over the political nature of the strike of Austrian workers and on the floor of the city council warned the “horrified” bourgeois councillors, “Think about it: the equal franchise for cities stands at the forefront of this magnificent movement. The masses prick up their ears. They will and must take action, if the path of progress is not opened up in a timely way.”¹⁸⁴ Party and trade union leaders in Köln wrote to the state interior minister and former mayor in early February warning that the working class had been “aroused to a boiling point” and not simply over the food supply but with a focus on questions of peace and “internal reorganization” in politics. In short, “there is a rumbling in the depths.”¹⁸⁵

In Berlin, restiveness had grown in late 1917 over reported official corruption at the highest levels of government that stemmed from the distribution of food. The crisis promised to align some elements of local government with popular street protests over the continuing food shortages. A delegation of city councillors met with the chancellor during the strike but got no satisfactory response to the demand for more equitable food distribution. Sizeable numbers of strikers and their supporters took to the streets resulting in violent confrontations with the police and hundreds of arrests. The authorities, however, managed to contain the threat without calling out military forces. Even though the strikes collapsed by February 4, authorities remained shaken by what the upheaval seemed to foretell. The police reported a statement by the MSPD in Nuremberg: “If the war goes on much more, then the great impatience demonstrated today by the women and men workers will not be peacefully put down a second time.” And a Berlin police sergeant in the immediate aftermath of the strikes foresaw longer-term, potentially revolutionary implications. “The main consequence of the strikes is not the meaningful work stoppage but, rather, the sharpening of the internal political situation.”¹⁸⁶

“Revolution” and Local Governance

The popular actions in 1917 and 1918 reflect a reenergized opposition within local government that quietly mobilized local and state resources to address human needs early in war. But later, backed by mass action in the streets, local SPD officials assumed a more aggressive and assertive role. In the short run, SPD or USPD city councillors and school representatives may have had only limited leverage within their elected bodies, but, by 1917–18, that influence had grown. By the collapse of the Reich in November 1918, they were in a position to claim new authority and in many cases step into leadership roles in local governing bodies, some of which were embodied in the new grassroots political energy of Workers’ and Soldiers’ councils.¹⁸⁷

Critical to understanding the local contexts of the postwar revolution is the strength that Social Democrats had achieved in many municipalities before the war and the legacy of prewar battles in the trenches of city government as they sought to advance their program, even while in most cases remaining a minority. “Burgfrieden” at least on the surface entailed a wartime “truce” in municipal electoral politics that essentially froze the prewar electoral balance of power. As we have seen, a similar story played out in Britain. The SPD largely held onto its prewar strength, though that required vigilance and the perpetual navigation of the treacherous political terrain of the war. Despite divisions in their own ranks, Social Democrats used the war to further their socialist objectives and define their own local version of “Kriegsozialismus.” The revolution in November 1918 played out at many levels, but not the least in municipalities, where the USPD sought to “revolutionize” municipal government and institute truly democratic elections.

The revolutionary transformation of German cities in November 1918 came quickly but unevenly.¹⁸⁸ In a period of social and political collapse, the struggle for local hegemony between socialists and among other parties led to strikingly different outcomes. But in many cities, the iron grip of old established elites, the “honoratioren,” had been broken.¹⁸⁹ Also called into question was the status of the traditional city administrators, typically aligned with the ruling elites. Under a broadened municipal franchise, governance would fall to popularly elected coalitions that assumed power under dire economic circumstances and amid ongoing political turmoil. Experiments in new, if limited, forms of municipal socialism went forward, even as the crises of postwar reconstruction and rehabilitation continued to impose tremendous burdens on those who would govern through newly democratized local bodies. In a deeply divided political world, Social Democrats struggled to find a balance. They sought to maintain order and essential services, typically the concern of Majority Social Democrats, and push through a more revolutionary program of municipal socialism, reflecting the aspirations of many Independent Social Democrats. More revolutionary still was the program of activists aligned with the Spartacists who envisioned the creation of “Soviets” and local “dictatorships of the proletariat.”

The general outlines of the November Revolution are well understood, if still subject to differing interpretations. Some have emphasized the collapse of the Reich and a revolutionary process “from below” that set in motion the creation of alternative institutions claiming authority to govern through initially ad hoc bodies—soldiers’ and workers’ councils. To varying degrees, the councils pursued accommodation with existing coalitions of parties and the remnants of local government. Local by their very nature, they also varied enormously in their revolutionary aspirations. The splintering of Social Democrats, a process that began in earnest in 1917 with the formation of the USPD and continued in the early months of the revolution as the Independents divided into competing factions, made for a “revolution” that lacked a coherent center. For other historians, the primary focus has been on the high drama of “revolution from above” in which party leaders struggled to create a new national parliamentary republic. They hoped to manage the orderly transfer of power from existing institutions—foremost the military and the monarchy but also influential large corporations—to a constitutionally-constructed state committed to reining in the unruly popular democracy of the streets and the councils. The Majority Socialists’ search for order led to unholy alliances with the military and conservative political forces.¹⁹⁰ The political narratives that have driven these accounts of the revolution have congealed into what Eberhard Kolb described as “a revolution that ran aground” in ways that none of the contending parties sought.¹⁹¹ But, as Klaus Weinhauer has noted, the insulation of studies of the German revolution from newer currents in labor and social history has meant that intensive local studies that focus on “Alltagsgeschichte” and the grassroots cultural and political changes that gave energy to the revolution have been neglected.¹⁹²

Workers’ Councils Spread in Germany, Nov. 4–10, 1918

Incontrovertibly, the revolution had a local character, the product during the later years of the war of rising mass protest in cities large and small and at the war’s end the spontaneous combustion of local resistance. Those local upheavals quickly took the shape of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte) in cities throughout the Reich, where central authority had suddenly lost legitimacy and where workers and soldiers demobilized themselves. The political lay of the land varied dramatically from one region and one locality to another.¹⁹³ But some common patterns are discernible. First, in many cases, existing local authorities stepped aside, at least temporarily, in the face of the new centers of power embodied by the “Räte” (councils). But in others, the Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte (ASr) engaged in a highly choreographed dance with the existing authorities, in which the appearance of a unified local government masked the existence of dual governments, as was the case in Hamburg, Göttingen, and as we shall see, Frankfurt.¹⁹⁴ Second, in the crisis atmosphere of November 1918, local members of the MSPD and the USPD forged contingent and fragile common ground that reflected the uncertainty of the moment, a reckoning with new centers of power in the Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, and a desire to capitalize on the moment to guarantee a measure of social order and advance a longstanding municipal socialist agenda.¹⁹⁵ Third, the unity of the initial weeks of the revolution quickly gave way to an intensifying divergence between those who gave priority to maintaining order (and conserving political power) and those who sought to continue the revolutionary process in the face of resurgent forces of reaction in the military, the police, and bourgeois political parties. The leading question became how to maintain a social democratic republic in the face of persistent structures of autocratic rule both nationally and locally. The answers to that question split social democrats along their already well-established lines of division: the majority SPD aligned with moderates from the USPD and the left wing of the USPD aligned at times with the Spartacists, some elements of which coalesced in a new Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD). The leadership of the SPD and many in the USPD sought as the highest priority the election of a “constituent assembly” and the drafting of a new constitution for the republic. For the left wing of the USPD and for the Spartacists, the immediate goal became consolidating the power of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, calling an assembly of councils, and implementing a socialist program. The convening of a constituent assembly, in their view, had to be postponed until the revolution could be consolidated and new centers of power secured.¹⁹⁶

A predominant interpretation of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils’ role during the first two months of the revolution, according to Eberhard Kolb, deemphasizes their “revolutionary” character and the dominance, in most localities, of Majority Socialists and moderates from the USPD.¹⁹⁷ In this view, the councils supported the early election of a national assembly but also articulated the outlines of a bona fide social democratic program of reforms that included: “ ‘democratization’ of administration, far-reaching changes in the army, and socialization of industries ‘ripe for the purpose.’ ” Given the latitude the councils enjoyed in the vacuum of power during the early weeks of November and December 1918, newer research has speculated on the options available to the new government, which would have included “taking a firm line with the old army leaders, making preparations to socialize the mines at least, and using the potential strength of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils to support a social democratic programme of reform.” However, Friedrich Ebert, as appointed chancellor of the new government, and the majority party’s top leadership failed to pursue this course because of a misplaced belief that “old elites” would “remain loyal to the new holders of power” out of fear of the “spontaneous mass movement” embodied in the councils. According to Kolb, that council movement would indeed take a decisive radical turn, but not until the spring of 1919, and then, at least in part, out of disappointment at the conservative tendencies of the social democratic leadership.¹⁹⁸

The key turning point for the movement’s revolutionary aspirations came, by most accounts, at the much-anticipated Berlin congress of delegates from the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils from December 16 to 20. The central question at stake was whether the path forward lay in the election of a national assembly or in a decentralized system of local councils. From the perspective of the dominant faction in the SPD, a council system would produce “an abhorrent ‘state of lawlessness,’ ” and they demanded “the early establishment of a national assembly which alone could ratify the future constitution.” But Richard Müller, chair of the Berlin council and a leader of the revolutionary shop stewards’ movement that had played a pivotal role in the strikes of 1918, told a meeting of the Berlin council, “I have put my life on the line for the Revolution and will do it again. A national assembly is a path to bourgeois rule, a path to struggle; the path to a national assembly will go over my dead body!”¹⁹⁹

The December Berlin congress proved to be paralyzed by the split that pitted the MSPD and their moderate USPD allies against the left wing of the USPD and the Spartacists. The pragmatic view of many MSPD delegates was captured by delegate Max Cohen-Reuss, who argued for a national assembly and posed the question: “Comrades, do you so underestimate the resistance of the bourgeois circles and their cleverness, such that when we take away their political rights against their will, we will be able to control the economy?” He followed with what Heinrich Winkler has argued was the believable proposition: “It will not be possible to achieve any more socialism than the majority of the people want.” The attachment to “parliamentarism” ran deep among German workers. As Winkler astutely noted, “Since the German people have possessed the national parliamentary vote for more than half a century, it was unthinkable to the great majority of workers that a democratic revolution would give up this democratic achievement. The revolution should bring more not less democracy.”²⁰⁰

For urban workers, however, the democratic franchise remained largely unfulfilled in the realm of city politics. And for local Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, the task of democratizing city governance went hand in hand with socializing workplaces. The commitment of workers’ delegates to the socialization of industry was formally adopted in a resolution pushed through by delegates Hermann Lundemann and Carl Severing.²⁰¹ However, that principle did not translate into a plan of action that would have “turned every street and factory into a parliament.” Instead, the congress adopted what Ralf Hoffrogge has called “passive institutionalism.” By delegating future socialization to an eventual national assembly, they appeared to expect that “the revolution would be executed from above by a benevolent government” rather than through an ongoing revolutionary process in which local Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils would be central players. Despite the adoption of the “Hamburger Punkte” that aimed to restructure the military and its authority, the congress had, in the bitterly disappointed words of Richard Müller, turned into a “political suicide club.”²⁰²

The German revolution took a bifurcated course in the months that followed. On the one hand, an increasingly frustrated left wing pressured the USPD to withdraw from participation in the new interim Central Council and eventually from its cabinet positions. The polarization led a dissident faction of the USPD to align with the insurrectionist-minded Spartacists, which effectively marginalized them from the ongoing process of building a parliamentary republic. The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council essentially now stood outside.²⁰³ On the other hand, the MSPD marched forward in what many on the left viewed as an unholy alliance with a right-wing fraction of the USPD, along with a coalition of bourgeois parties, key leaders of the military, and the traditional state bureaucracy. In the election on January 19, the socialists won only a minority of National Assembly seats. However, they managed to form a coalition government with a mixed cabinet, and chose MSPD leader Friedrich Ebert as president and Philipp Scheidemann as chancellor. Karl Kautsky, speaking as a moderate USPD member, voiced his frustration retrospectively.

Our party presented a grotesque appearance … Its right wing was in the government, and its left wing worked for the downfall of that very government … What kept it together was no longer a common programme, a common tactic, but only a common hatred of the majority socialists which had been inherited from wartime.

The crushing of a sailors’ revolt at the end of 1918, the assassination of Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on January 13 at the hands of the semi-autonomous Freikorps, and revolutionary flare-ups in the Ruhr, Saxony, and Bavaria brutally suppressed by Reichswehr and Freikorps soldiers, saw what remained of the left decimated.²⁰⁴ Nevertheless, at the local level in numerous cities, radicalism continued to flourish and even augment support among rank-and-file workers. That local radicalism cut across what seemed the predictable lines of division based on skill, trade union affiliation, and even alignment with majority or independent social democratic parties within the working class.²⁰⁵

What has been lacking in studies of the revolution is a thorough canvassing of this locally unfolding conflict and its outcomes in both the short and long term. We do have general studies of some major cities, notably Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt, and some states, Baden, Württemberg, Niedersachsen, and Bavaria. But, especially in the revolution’s first months, for most of those cases, we have very few details about the shifting patterns of local governance, and the relationships between established city councils, local administrative bureaucracies, and the new claimants to power in the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils.

The patterns of accommodation or polarization between local authorities and the new councils varied enormously, shaped in part by the strength of the local Social Democrats and by the divisions in their ranks. Geary has observed that “almost everywhere,” Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils displaced “the old order,” but mayors and councils typically continued in office “under the supervision” of the revolutionary councils.²⁰⁶

Frankfurt am Main—unfolding revolution

Frankfurt’s Social Democrats, as we have seen, had already established a significant presence, though not a controlling majority, in the city council before the outbreak of the war. During the war itself, through participation in and defense of the Kriegskommission, they seized the opportunity to claim a more direct role in administering and expanding wartime municipal government and the public sector, especially in the distribution of food and the provision of welfare.²⁰⁷ That role would prepare them for seizing the opportunity to shape local governance in the days and weeks immediately following the revolution of November 9. At the city council session on November 12, social democratic councillor Otto Zielowski warned the standing leadership of the city council and the Magistrat that profound changes in the governance of the city were soon to materialize, driven by the active presence of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils and by the mobilization of formerly disfranchised working-class men and women.²⁰⁸

The split in Frankfurt between the majority and independent social democrats by the fall of 1918 had reached a virtually unbridgeable gap. In the previous year, the MSPD had collaborated with city councillors from the bourgeois parties to exclude USPD councillors, including some of long standing like Heinrich Hüttmann and Robert Dissmann, the leader of the metal workers’ union, from the candidates’ list or from committee assignments once elected.²⁰⁹ With the collapse of the Reich, the SPD and USPD operated on separate tracks and moved, on the one hand, to maintain order (SPD) and, on the other, to drive the revolution forward (USPD). Soldiers in the barracks elected their own council, and with assistance from Dissmann and the USPD, workers in the larger factories elected representatives to a workers’ council. A tentative joint council called by the soldiers demanded that the socialist parties unify their efforts. It is clear that in the heady atmosphere of the revolution’s first days activists from both the SPD and the USPD maneuvered to seize the initiative and that the soldiers and workers found themselves pulled in different directions. As Erhard Lucas has described it, “The SPD representatives in the Frankfurt city hall complemented the constitutional-political success of their party at the local level. But no more than that. They raised no political demands against the liberals and did not seek to commit to a political platform as a basis for cooperation with the USPD.”²¹⁰ The competing USPD scrambled to assert its own political agenda in the context of an unfolding revolution whose scope and impact had caught the authorities and socialists alike by surprise. A call for a USPD meeting at the Schlesinger Eck, drafted by Toni Sender and Georg Plotke, conveyed an uncompromising posture but also cautionary message.

To the working people of Frankfurt!

We are mindful of the sacredness of our tasks … The time of the sabre-rattling powers, the parasites and the exploiters is over. We are preparing to end the chaos.

Workers and soldiers! Let us not be cheated out of the fruits of our proletarian revolution. There are powers at work that seek to ensnare you with false promises and half measures. In these decisive hours we call upon you not to disgrace our work with terrorist acts and foolishness!²¹¹

In short order, a tentative but somewhat fragile plan for integrating existing government institutions with the new authority of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council emerged, as historian Rolling has carefully documented. Members of an ad hoc “Public Safety Committee” representing established centers of authority consulted with the Soldiers Committee and was referred to the provisionally appointed police chief, an MSPD member, city councillor, and professor of social science, Hugo Sinzheimer. Amid conflicting signals, the Räte claimed authority but asked city officials to continue their day-to-day work. Word soon came from the new state president that officials should “subordinate themselves to the authority of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.” At a city council meeting on November 12, a special delegation read a proclamation from the Räte, drafted by young activist Toni Sender, that attempted to clarify the new relationships of authority.

The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council is the supreme authority of the city. It has been established by the revolutionary people and it exercises its powers for the benefit of the productive population.

The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council expects all officials and representative bodies in Frankfurt to recognize the present power relationships. They are to carry out their activities with the agreement and under the supervision of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council.

The city council and the Magistrat are to carry out their activities in their present composition until new institutions are created, at the latest until the establishment of a new structure of local government under the German Socialist Republic.

Toni Sender, Frankfurt, Germany, (c. 1916), Leader in the Revolutionary City Government, 1918–19

The police chief, Sinzheimer, speaking on behalf of the SPD, called for cooperation. “A new time has come. The new men must now take the rudder into their hands to steer the fearfully endangered ship of our people into the harbor of the new legal structure which will bring us a new domestic life and a new respect throughout the entire world.”²¹²

According to Sender, following presentations by delegates from the Räte, “the Mayor, after deliberation with the senior members had announced that the City Council and all officials of the city accepted the Workers’ Council as the highest authority.” Räte activists then hoisted a red flag over the city hall.²¹³ The actual terms under which the city departments functioned and decisions were made evolved during the first weeks of the revolution. The Räte designated eight members (four each from the SPD and the USPD) to “supervise” city departments. Decisions taken in the departments were subject to review and veto by the Räte, although the Magistrat also retained the right of review and could block dismissal of existing department heads. Nonetheless, the eight “supervisors” from the Räte to varying degrees actively intervened in the work of the departments. Sender was appointed to “control” the Magistrat and, through vigilant supervision, managed to direct the herculean efforts to cope with the demands of troop demobilization, rising unemployment, and continuing food shortages.²¹⁴ Deliberations of the city council were not without the contention reminiscent of the pre-revolutionary order. Councillors readily reached agreement to set up and fund a public Arbeitsamt (employment office) to provide emergency employment to demobilized soldiers, and mandated the eight-hour day for all firms in the interest of spreading employment. But liberal councillors questioned how policing should be funded and whether authority should reside with workers’ militias or with the existing police units. They also questioned the provision of public funding for the operations of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. Disagreement continued to flare over the question of how and to what extent public education needed to be revolutionized and older practitioners of a “patriotic” instruction replaced. Even if the liberal councillors grudgingly accepted the exercise of ultimate power by the Räte, they stewed over what they perceived to be the partisan posture of the SPD and its celebratory public rhetoric: “The socialist republic lives.” In the ensuing debate, councillor Moritz Hertz from the Progressive Peoples’ Party (liberal) called such rhetoric a “misuse of power” for purely partisan political purposes by the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council and demanded that it be curtailed. Bürgermeister Luppe ventured the “sober comment” that the Magistrat did not have the power to “set limits” on the Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat, and SPD councillor Zielowski pointed out that “propaganda for the Republic was not partisan political propaganda.”²¹⁵

Many Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils and their USPD allies were beleaguered, especially after their relatively weak showing in the election of National Assembly delegates in January 1919. But in some cities, their local strength gave them an electoral advantage, especially after the Prussian Landesversammlung (state legislature) issued a formal decree on January 26 eliminating the three-class voting system for municipal elections and establishing a universal franchise for all persons, male and female, over twenty years of age. This was the case in many Prussian cities, including Frankfurt. City officials proceeded to plan for a new municipal election on March 2, which would also expand the council from seventy-one to ninety-six members, despite the grumbling of liberals in the council that this required a state constitutional change.²¹⁶

The expanded electorate, long on the agenda of municipal socialists, ignited a vigorous campaign for seats in the newly constituted city council. In their appeal, “the Social Democrats sought to convince their supporters of the importance of municipal-political decisions. Schools, health care, and in particular the provision of housing affect everyone immediately and personally.” They also called for the municipality to take over important firms. As a campaign flyer put it: “The city can be the most powerful promoter of socialization. It is a great economic body that more and more manages to take care of its own needs, and more and more can provide for the needs and comforts of its residents.” In other words, “ ‘municipal socialism’ can only be achieved ‘when socialists take command.’ ”²¹⁷

The election of a national assembly in which social democrats won a near majority (46.4 percent) was followed a week later by the election of a new Prussian state legislature with an equally strong SPD showing. In the municipal election on March 2, the combined socialist vote (SPD and USPD) produced a near majority of forty-four city council seats. (The next largest party—the Deutsche Demokratische Partei—won twenty-three seats.) Of the ninety-six councillors elected, sixty were new to their positions in municipal government. Although the turnout of 57 percent in a vastly expanded electorate fell short of the turnout of voters for the national and state assembly, it signified an unprecedented level of interest in municipal affairs. When it came to electing its own officers, the long-standing chairman of the council, Fritz Friedleben, (FVP) lost to social democrat Heinrich Hopf. In the secret ballot, eight blank ballots were recorded, likely representing the eight newly elected USPD councillors, unwilling to vote for the representative of their rival faction.²¹⁸

Toni Sender was one of the eight USPD members elected to city council under the newly expanded franchise. Although Sender and a few others had “supervised” the existing city council and its departments on behalf of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in the weeks immediately following the revolution, others were “newcomers” to city government. They seized the opportunity as “revolutionaries” to work “constructively” on a whole range of issues of pressing interest to their working-class constituents. Sender found gratification in “arousing the interest of the masses in city affairs … The galleries, always empty in the old times, were now crowded. The public kept close contact with our work.” The city council provided “an interesting scene for the citizens.” And in the view of Frankfurt’s revolutionaries, it was necessarily so, “if we want democracy to be a virile regime.” This municipal work would have some lasting influence through the humane “municipalization of all welfare institutions” and even in the simple act of providing municipal burial services for all, irrespective of class status. Sender’s service on the council’s school committee helped revolutionize a public school system desperately in need of modernization and facilitate the hiring of a teaching corps whose values were more attuned to the times. In her view, a semblance of authentic “municipal self-government” survived until “the dictator came and destroyed” it. Frustrating though it may have been to see the failed promise of “socialization” at the national level, socialists in municipalities to varying degrees took concrete, even if piecemeal and uneven, steps toward realization of that promise.²¹⁹

The municipal “revolution” in Frankfurt may have proceeded with less disruption than in some other cities, but the initial months of socialist governance were not without conflict. Food shortages precipitated riots that were quelled only with difficulty. Lingering tensions between the SPD municipal leadership, the USPD, and remnants of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils produced occasional flashpoints such as the June 13 general strike called by the Arbeiterrat to protest the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, six months before. Although its role in direct governance had diminished with the election in March, the Arbeiterrat did not dissolve until November.²²⁰ At least in Frankfurt, the transition from governance by the revolutionary Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council to socialist leadership of the expanded but still traditional institutions of local government (the city council and the Magistrat) had been relatively smooth. The socialist program of municipal and state ownership (Sozializierung) had, for the time being, been sidelined, except rhetorically, by the dominant Majority Socialist faction. But the promise of further socialist advances remained, particularly with an expanded electorate. The uncertainties surrounding economic recovery in the postwar period, the challenges of the draconian terms of the peace settlement, and the contentious politics of the Weimar Republic’s first years would, of course, complicate and ultimately undermine those aspirations.

The evolution of municipal governance in the period of “revolution” varied from one city to another. In some cities such as Munich, Bremen, Hamburg, and the cities of the Ruhrgebiet, including Düsseldorf but also in Berlin, upheaval of a more profound sort took hold earlier and persisted longer than in Frankfurt. In others, traditional patterns of elite governance, facilitated by a well-oiled and conservative local administrative state, quickly reasserted themselves and constrained the political space within which the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils and their left-wing USPD allies might operate.

Bielefeld

In Bielefeld, the communication between the newly formed Volksrat (the local version of Soldaten-und Arbeitersräte) and the existing city administration proceeded smoothly, at least in the retrospective view of the Majority Socialist and city councillor Carl Severing.²²¹ The socialist newspaper, Volkswacht, reported on November 9 that the “revolution” in Bielefeld had moved ahead without “deaths or destruction of property.” As the editors put it, “The revolution in Bielefeld occurred, without a hair being disturbed or a drop of blood shed.”²²²

Well before the war, Severing had played a crucial role in early contests for municipal power in Bielefeld. However, during wartime, he had drifted squarely into the camp of MSPD leaders who provided support to the war effort. In the moment of upheaval during early November 1918, Severing, again by his own account, argued strenuously for a more inclusive title for the newly formed body—a “Volksund Soldatenrat” or Volksrat (Peoples’ Council), as it came to be known. “We do not want the erection of a proletarian dictatorship, rather we want all powers, who do so with goodwill, to be placed in service to the people.”²²³ Emphasizing the urgent needs of returning soldiers and the ongoing food shortages, Severing and his colleagues pressed for a quick return to the regular order of municipal business. As he noted, “The administration of Bielefeld rested in good hands.” Observing that, during wartime, the Oberbürgermeister and the Magistratsmitglieder had conducted the city’s affairs with great “diligence” and “fresh initiative,” he also noted that they had

allowed room for the principles of social justice. There was not the slightest cause for them now to put off or even displace service through irrelevant controls. First, the young republic had other tasks to undertake, unfortunately more tasks of defense instead of positive reconstruction.²²⁴

In a speech at Münster on November 28, Severing observed that the Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte were “only transitional institutions” until the formation of a National Assembly.²²⁵

Having helped engineer a moderate outcome at the Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils in December and in January a strong MSPD vote for representation in the National Assembly, Severing continued to battle with more militant opponents. At the same time, he asserted that his own ambition did not reach beyond his “previous post and the existing circle of party friends determined to further the ideals and claims of social democracy.” Soon enough, however, he answered the call to serve the new, beleaguered Weimar Republic at a higher level, as Prussian “Reich’s Kommissar” in the besieged province of Nordrhein-Westfalen.²²⁶ In that capacity, he would contend with more radicalized elements of the council movement. He implemented the so-called Bielefeld Agreement that ended a state of emergency, gave workers a presence in regular security forces, and granted amnesty for those incarcerated. He also played a key part in settling strikes of miners in the Ruhr in 1919 and suppressing more serious armed rebellion against the government in 1920.²²⁷

Munich/Bavaria

If Frankfurt and Bielefeld represented more moderate outcomes of the German “revolution,” other cities and regions pointed, at least for a time, toward an upheaval that might more fully revolutionize governance at all levels, including the city. The fluidity of the “revolutionary moment” in late 1918 and early 1919 produced varied results. Several factors shaped those outcomes: the local strength of radicals in the last year of the war; the pressures to find common ground among socialists in the transitional period, either in the Räte or existing local government bodies; and the urgency of the need for basic subsistence, employment, and social services in the distressed urban populace.

In Munich and Bavaria, a revolutionary movement seized power quickly, despite the moderate and revisionist background of its key leaders. Socialist journalist and intellectual Kurt Eisner formed a new revolutionary government following the abdication of Bavaria’s monarch and tacked left even as preparations for the election of a new state government seemed to advantage Majority Socialists. Committed to socialist unity, Eisner argued strenuously for the preeminence of the Räte in the emerging configuration of democratic institutions.²²⁸ But he also crossed swords with Liebknecht, among others, over the imperative to seek terms of peace that might lead to the immediate relief of the population and to work in coalition with other socialists. In Liebknecht’s view, “the implementation of socialism is only possible, when all is completely torn down and then, after the destruction of the whole capitalist system, can the rebuilding take place.”²²⁹

Demonstration of Workers and Soldiers in Munich [Kurt Eisner Riding in Wagon], January 1919

In early February, Eisner seemed committed to “granting the workers’ councils self-assurance and allocating to them a positive mission for the internal consolidation of the republican state.” Kolb suggests that the Bavarian executive committee of workers’ councils “sought to legally anchor the workers’ councils in the constitution” and “to struggle for local workers’ councils to maintain the council system as forms of control and consultation.”²³⁰ Against the hysterical attacks of bourgeois press on the usurpation of the workers’ council, Eisner’s newspaper, Neue Zeitung, sharply defended their right to exercise supervision over the traditional city council. While claiming only “advisory” power for the workers’ council, the paper asserted that they might actually “simplify and streamline city administration” and also through the “moral authority of their vantage point, exercise a positive influence” in the administration of city affairs.²³¹ Immediately after Eisner’s assassination, Neue Zeitung recalled that he had argued that in “the building of a true socialist democracy … I stand and fall with the Council.” He had little patience with the slick argument that substituted “parliamentization” for “democratization.”²³²

As historian David Morgan has noted, Eisner saw the councils

as coordinate or supplementary institutions. The councils [Eisner] said, are “the foundations of democracy, the National Assembly, the Diet, is the crowning of the edifice.” A Diet without councils would mean “an empty, fruitless parliamentarianism … a formal electoral democracy in which the people … remain an onlooker, a powerless onlooker.”²³³

Even as the USPD failed to gain traction in the election of the regional assembly, Eisner had clung to the radical democratic promise of the councils, and within limits continued to push a municipal socialist agenda, if not a more expansive agenda for socialization of production. In his creative “Rätekonzeption,” Eisner had attempted to forge a political vision for local governance that integrated council and parliamentary functions. As biographer Bernard Grau phrased it: “He attempted to comprehend the councils and parliament not as mutually exclusive opposites, but rather to find a synthesis of the two, according to the composition and function of the different bodies.”²³⁴ Because Eisner, according to Grau, never had the opportunity to precisely describe how he imagined this working, he left much room for speculation. Indeed, his views on the role of the councils as agents of democracy in revolutionary Munich evolved over the course of his one hundred days in office. In late November, he dismissed the idea of “formal electoral democracy” by which “every three or five years votes are simply placed in the boxes and everything is given over to leaders and representatives.” Eisner’s vision was different. “This democracy is quite the opposite of a [conventional] democracy. The new democracy should exist in such a way that the masses themselves directly collaborate on the concerns of the whole.”²³⁵

He envisaged such “democracy” being carried out through the councils. But, at other times, he appeared to speak of the councils as transitional bodies necessary to secure and maintain order until a new elected “people’s administration” might come into being. Ultimately, for Eisner, the Räte were the means by which society would be democratized and by which workers would guarantee that the goals of the revolution would not be undermined by parliamentary bodies. In this respect, he envisioned a “Kontrollbefugnis” (controlling authority) that, as Grau has noted, really amounted to a right of “advice and consent.” But his Majority Socialist opponents found even this an objectionable and potentially dictatorial dilution of representative democracy. For Eisner, the Räte were fundamentally instruments of popular mobilization and political activation. Their capacity to engage directly in democratic practice and in governance would be enhanced by such a role. But he did not underestimate the extent to which the Räte as independent actors were an essential guarantee to legitimate democracy. These bodies could not simply be eliminated or crippled. “The Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Councils must consolidate themselves; they must pour the foundations of the future parliamentary practice; the national congress can only shape the end, the final results of the activity of the Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Councils.”²³⁶ With his assassination on February 21, Eisner left behind a “revolution” still very much in flux, though incapable, as it turned out, of reclaiming and holding power, except for a relatively brief uprising in the spring.²³⁷

Revolution and Reconstitution: New Cities?

On the fraying edges of the German revolution, workers’ councils in a host of municipalities for a time constituted themselves as influential players or in some cases governing authorities. Kolb has argued that the “collapse of state authority” created a new “open-legal effectiveness” for workers’ councils based on the “preconditions by which they came into being. Their overriding attributes were their improvisational character and their hybrid structure.” In many cases, the dominant course of events was the legalization of the workers’ councils and the continued functioning of city councils and administrations “alongside each other.”²³⁸ These varied patterns are borne out in a number of local studies: in Hamburg, where councils’ governing authority proved relatively transitory; in Düsseldorf, where control was more sustained, at least until May 1919, but dominated by different left constellations; and in Berlin, where local workers’ councils in the various sub-municipalities renegotiated the terms of municipal governance in ways that produced a net increase in working-class power.²³⁹ But in Prussia, the dismantling of existing local government structures, or at least their democratization, moved painfully slow. Membership in city councils expanded, but their authority to elect the executive council remained limited by the control bourgeois parties continued to exercise. Not until February was the three-class voting system in municipalities officially dismantled and replaced by universal suffrage with new local elections called for early March. New state governments, in which socialists held executive office, moved cautiously toward larger-scale municipal reform and self-government. None other than Paul Hirsch, the highly regarded prewar theoretician of municipal socialism, member of the SPD Zentralrat, and after the war the interior minister and state president in Prussia itself, warned against “too rapid a democratization.” “Whatever laws we create, in the form of emergency measures, must be so formulated as to withstand any criticism. The democratization of the cities cannot be so quickly undertaken, one must for the time being limit oneself to franchise reform.”²⁴⁰ In this context, then, state authorities moved with some dispatch to dismantle whatever controlling authority over local government the workers’ councils continued to exercise.

In some cities, with varying degrees of control, municipal “Räterepubliken” were established and for a time (some very briefly) displaced local governing authorities. According to Kolb, in a number of cities, the councils assumed power within the prescribed constitutional limitations. These included Hamburg, Bremen, Braunschweig, Leipzig, Gotha, and Gera. In a few cities, Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils issued proclamations of local “Council Republics” but their direct governance lasted only briefly: Bremen (twenty-five days), Cuxhaven (five days), Mannheim (one day), Braunschweig (one day), and Munich (twenty-five days).²⁴¹ As Geary has noted, working-class frustration with the stifled course of the revolution, the reimposition of class rule, and the complicity of some former socialist comrades boiled over in the spring of 1919 and the months thereafter.

The bloodiest testimony to increasing working-class discontent was a series of armed insurrections and general strikes: in Berlin in January and March 1919, in Bremen, Brunswick and Cuxhaven in the same January, in Mannheim in February and in Munich in April. The following year, 1920, saw a civil war in the Ruhr and a general strike in Berlin in response to the Kapp putsch.²⁴²

Despite the promise by workers’ councils of new, more radically democratic forms of governance in cities and some expectation of rapid “socialization” (municipalization), the German “revolution” appeared, in most cases, to mean municipal restoration but now with a more democratic franchise. While socialist majorities or near majorities were elected in a number of cities, what power they wielded was largely within existing structures (Stadtverordneten-vesammlungen and Magistrat). The residual city bureaucracies remained closely tied to the bourgeois parties.²⁴³ Reflecting the view of many, social democrat Edmund Fischer in 1919 forcefully wrote, “Democracy is … not just form but above all spirit, the full realization of which demands people animated by freedom, tolerance and solidarity.” But, after its “birth in the travail of revolution,” democracy in Germany “is only in its infancy.” And with a mix of both optimism and foreboding, he warned, “To bring it to maturity is the great task of the coming times.”²⁴⁴

12

A Democratic Moment: “Red
Vienna” and the Promise of Social
Democratic Cities in the Postwar Era

The terrible calamity of the World War has called forth in the whole world a cry for national and political freedom. People who bowed to a distant authority for a century in ignorant indifference or hopeless despair, have thrown off the yoke and won’t let their destinies be controlled by others, but also above all will not submit any further to a clique, a caste, a class or a hegemonic bureaucracy, but instead control and administer their own political, social, economic and cultural interests and affairs in a democratic fashion. And a democratic tide is spreading across the whole earth.

Edmund Fischer, Demokratie, 1919¹

Jakob Reumann and the Origins of “Rote Wien”

In his early years as an organizer, Jakob Reumann recalled that “there was hardly a Vienna district jail cell which he had not seen the inside of.” A skilled wood turner and labor organizer, this self-taught worker was present at the birth of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs (SDAPÖ). Indeed, he became the first secretary of the party and chair of the first party congress in 1890. Like many local activists, he readily grasped the day-to-day problems workers faced in cities like Vienna. The municipality became his primary sphere of political engagement. Known for his practical rhetoric that lacked the “fireworks” of some of his comrades, “he wanted—perhaps because he was aware of his inadequate formal education—to bring everything down to earth.”² He became, in many ways, the prototypical municipal socialist of his generation in Austria. And in time he would preside, under the most challenging of circumstances, over the birth of what the world came to know as “Red Vienna.” He had the distinction of being the city’s first elected socialist Bürgermeister.³

Reumann and his comrade Franz Schuhmeier first ran for seats on the Vienna City Council in 1900 against Karl Lueger’s deeply anti-Semitic Christian Social Party. Despite long odds, the two won a stunning victory. Their municipal platform, “What the Social Democrats from the city propose!” had been drafted in 1896 and became thereafter the official municipal programme of the SDAPÖ.⁴ Electoral reforms designed to contain working-class participation within the bounds of a new fourth voting class (or curia) had opened the door to modest representation by workers in the municipal council.⁵

Jakob Reumann (L), City Councillor, Favoriten, Vienna (c. 1900) and Elected First Socialist Mayor of Vienna, 1919 and Franz Schuhmeier, City Councillor, Ottakring, Vienna, Assassinated February 11, 1913

For the next nineteen years, alongside Schuhmeier, until his assassination in 1913, and with a gradually expanding number of other social-democratic city councillors, Reumann relentlessly advocated on behalf of the hard-pressed working-class constituents in his Favoriten district and throughout the city. By 1906, five additional social democrats had won seats on the municipal council (with fourth curia votes). On the eve of WWI their numbers still stood at a significant though modest seven.⁶ As historian Maren Seliger has noted, because of the limited seats they held in the municipal council, that body served “for the Social Democrats more as a political stage than as a body in which it was possible to achieve practical improvements for their supporters.”⁷ The stormy battles over motions to improve the conditions of work for city employees, the fees charged citizens for city services, the provision of lighting in working-class districts, or the absence of kindergartens for the children of working parents, served notice of their intent to create a radically different city when electoral conditions permitted.⁸ In a report to the party congress of 1909, the social democrats foreshadowed their agenda for the city.

No important matter was concluded without the Social Democrats casting votes on it. Particularly for the budget debates, which had become a tedious farce during the Lueger era, but which our comrades restored to a higher level. The debates gave them the opportunity for a comprehensive engagement with all the problems of municipal politics … In every budget debate they put forward a great number of proposals … whose adoption would have meant the realization of the most important elements of the municipal program.⁹

With the deaths of key comrades Franz Schuhmeier and Leopold Winarsky, Reumann’s distinctive voice and long experience became even more crucial for his fellow municipal socialists during wartime. While Austrian socialists, like their German comrades, formally pledged support for the war, they also stoked an increasingly outspoken anti-war opposition that eventually materialized in the form of mass strikes in May 1917 and January and June 1918. They signaled workers’ growing resistance to the ongoing war and the massive distress in daily life the war engendered.¹⁰ Reumann became an official representative of the SDAPÖ on the city’s Obmänner Konferenz that assumed wartime management in the city by a narrow group of officials dominated by the Christian Socials. This body effectively bypassed any consistent supervision exercised by the elected city council.¹¹ Like many of his municipal socialist colleagues in Germany, Reumann walked a fine line between opposing the war outright and aggressively advocating on behalf of Vienna’s workers for whom the war brought desperate conditions and dramatically deteriorating life circumstances. As Seliger and Ucakar have noted, the Social Democrats in the Obmänner Konferenz expressed early on their willingness to work with the mayor on essential measures for the welfare of the city. But, at a later meeting, when presented with specific proposals, they refused support “in consideration of their principled opposition to the war.” This opposition, however, did not prevent them from “coming to terms with the facts of war.”¹² In comparison with Germany, conditions grew even more desperate later in the war. By 1918, Austria’s food ration cards provided for only 716 calories per day, whereas in Berlin and Munich, residents could claim 1,400. In June 1918, Reumann “blasted” the government over its pathetic potato ration of half a kilogram per week. As Healy has noted (paraphrasing Reumann’s comment to the municipal council), “the people had not failed in their duty to hold out. Rather the state had taken no precautions to make their Durchhalten (survival) possible.”¹³

Despite the compromises struck during the war by Reumann and his social-democratic colleagues on the municipal council, they were in a strong position to seize leadership of postwar reconstruction as the Austrian “revolution” unfolded. Reumann served as one of three Vizebürgermeister in the provisorischen Gemeinderat (provisional municipal council) during 1918–19. His election as Bürgermeister came after the dramatic municipal election of May 4, 1919, when the newly enfranchised citizens of Vienna elected a strong majority of Social Democrats (100 out of 165 seats) to the municipal council. On May 22, the council itself elected Reumann as the first social democratic Bürgermeister of Vienna.¹⁴ On that foundation, they built what would eventually be known as “Red Vienna.” In his first address to the council and the citizens as Bürgermeister, Reumann foreshadowed things to come.

It will for that reason be emphatically taken up, that those residents in this city, each and every one, for whom the war served as a source of enrichment, must take on the burden of their tax responsibilities. In the first instance we must come to an agreement with the state, in order to put an end to the circumstances in which cities are not allowed to utilize their most important powers of taxation. Political upheaval must follow the social revolution. With the socialization of the means of production the greatest tasks fall to the largest cities of the state. We want to begin the work of making the city a great lady from the ground and earth up, provide all households a suitable home, build up commerce, and also require a generous expansion of the schools, the welfare institutions for children and youth!¹⁵

Following the war, Reumann and the social democrats took over responsibility for governing a city in deep distress.¹⁶ City councilman Hugo Breitner, who became the influential social-democratic finance director for the city council, recalled the extraordinary circumstances they inherited.

The war had passed. The dreadful blood-letting had ceased. The guilt-bearing ruling dynasty had to give way to the peoples’ Republic. A breath of freedom swept through the great masses of people in Vienna. Then, however, the crisis of everyday life made itself known … Only then did a period of austerity begin, far more troubling than during the war itself. The people, whose nerves had been completely exhausted, whose thoughts and feelings had been wholly derailed, would and could not any longer endure this new pain … Foodstuffs were only able to make it to Vienna in limited quantities … A deadly plague [influenza epidemic] swept through Vienna.¹⁷

Moving aggressively on several fronts, Reumann and his colleagues took initiatives to oversee the distribution of essential foodstuffs, regulate prices, maintain welfare assistance to the unemployed, and institute municipal factories in order to increase production of meats, bread, and other essentials. The new city government engaged in what Anson Rabinbach describes as “anticipatory socialism” by taking initiatives on a host of fronts within the constitutional limits they faced.¹⁸ The absence of new construction and the in-migration of large numbers of unemployed workers, along with the fiscal constraints under which local government operated, posed an urgent need for housing. But the opportunity to construct large numbers of public housing units to meet the acute housing shortage would have to await changes in the constitution enabling greater self-government of Vienna and enhanced capacity to generate new tax revenues. In the meantime, the enforcement of rent control, distribution of housing to the neediest, and the impersonal mechanics of inflation would be the only sources of relief.¹⁹

The status of Vienna as a self-governing city depended on changes in the national constitution, which became the subject of protracted conflict and debate between late 1919 and the end of 1921, when a new constitution was formally approved. Complicated political maneuvering by both Social Democrats and Christian Socials produced the separation of socialist-governed Vienna from Christian Social–dominated Niederösterreich. A compromise ultimately was agreed upon. As the influential Vienna socialist Robert Danneberg argued in December 1920,

Of greatest importance is to make the social democratic city government independent of the bourgeois state regime. To increase its power by which it will become a state government in its own right, to guide the administration with social democratic ideas, is not only in the interest of Vienna’s workers, but of the whole German-Austrian working class, as Vienna is and remains the center of revolutionary development.²⁰

With that new provincial status, Vienna’s socialist government now had the foundation on which to undertake the implementation of its municipal socialist vision. Most notably, that meant the massive restructuring of local (now provincial) taxes to finance major innovations in housing, education, and public health. For more than two decades, these measures—municipal home rule and the power to raise taxes on property—had been the apex of municipal socialist aspirations worldwide.

Reumann, with his able allies, guided the municipal government through the first phases of this socialist reconstruction. As Breitner recalled,

There was perhaps no one other than Reumann, who as a consequence of his characteristic modesty, was so well-suited to smoothly execute the changes demanded by Vienna’s new constitution and demanded by the creation of the administratively-empowered city council. He remained in the end the authority recognized by all, the person whose experience no one could match, who was endowed by a quarter of a century of service as a city councillor.²¹

On the cusp of his seventieth birthday, with full knowledge that Red Vienna was at a point where its further development had some security, Jakob Reumann declined to run for another term as mayor in 1923. While continuing to serve as a member of the Stadtrat, he died in 1925.²²

Three conditions in Vienna had made these changes possible. First, the collapse of the Austrian monarchy and its political support brought the rapid democratization of the franchise in national and city elections. Second, with their enlarged electoral base, the Social Democrats elected a majority of the city council, displacing their nemesis, the Christian Social Party, and interrupting its longstanding control of local government. Third, under the republic’s new constitution, Vienna became a self-governing province, with the power to levy its own state taxes. This gave enhanced, tangible meaning to “Selbstverwaltung,” or home rule.²³ Such a path to power was not inconceivable to municipal socialists in other countries. Some of them also witnessed dramatic gains, though none were so widely heralded or blessed with circumstances that per mitted them to implement their municipal program with such completeness.

Red Vienna in Historical Perspective

The historiography of Red Vienna has swung between romanticization and critical revisionism. The former dwelt on the noble attempts by the city’s socialists to create “neue Menschen” (new men/people) through housing reform and ambitious programs of cultural uplift. A more critical view, shadowed by the violent overthrow of the socialist experiment in 1934, has focused on the apparent shallowness of rank-and-file support for what, in the eyes of some historians, proved to be a leadership-driven, paternalist culture of social uplift.²⁴ Neither perspective provides an altogether adequate accounting of the meaning or the success of this example of “socialist islands in a capitalist sea.”²⁵ The peculiar circumstances Austrians faced in 1918–19 and the subsequent decade no doubt placed limits on what socialists could accomplish in a single city however inspired their efforts may have been. Significant in shaping but also constraining the success of Red Vienna were a number of factors: the threat of political schism on the left, the desperate economic conditions of the immediate postwar period, the inability of socialists to gain secure national footing in the new republic outside of Vienna, and an intellectual tradition of “Austro-Marxism” that privileged the leadership of theoreticians.²⁶

Municipal socialist governance in Vienna after 1919 must, nevertheless, be understood as the culmination of a long process of political agitation whose origins lay in the working-class districts of the late nineteenth-century city. The municipal political programme drafted by Schuhmeier and Reumann in 1896 bears close resemblance to the agenda outlined by Reumann as he assumed the duties of Bürgermeister in 1919. The persistent efforts of Schuhmeier and Reumann and eventually half a dozen other socialist councillors elected in the years before the war were crucial. They pushed forward the municipal socialist program despite determined and unrelenting opposition from liberals and Christian Socials. Their persistence suggests the extent to which a socialist agenda for social reconstruction of the city had taken deep root in Vienna’s working class during the prewar years. Party organizing propaganda and local activists’ district-by-district analysis of the socialists’ electoral strengths in the prewar period indicate an extraordinary level of sophistication and grassroots mobilization only held in check by the draconian four-curia municipal election limitations.²⁷ It comes as little surprise that in the spring 1919, with the adoption of an equal and universal municipal franchise in the constitution of the new republic, the socialists would surge to victory in Vienna soon thereafter.

The iconic meaning of Red Vienna around the world stemmed from several factors. First, the Austrians’ prewar activity in city politics bore a close resemblance to the practice of municipal socialists around the world; their core programs were essentially identical. Second, Vienna’s socialists achieved in short order, under the most difficult circumstances, the kind of transformation of their city and its political culture that served as a beacon for others to envision what was possible in the immediate postwar years.²⁸ The most notable (but also most criticized) accomplishment of the socialists came with their program to address the acute housing needs of working-class families in Vienna. While reported statistics vary, the city built 63,924 new dwellings (apartments or houses) between 1919 and 1934. Critics also note the concurrent rise in homelessness and the inadequate facilities still occupied by the vast majority of workers.²⁹ Third, the social democrats’ success in Vienna stood in stark contrast to the thwarted efforts of their parliamentary brethren in the national arena. Nationally, the Austromarxist leadership was caught between the socialists’ practical success in Vienna and their inability nationally to win and hold power in new the republic. Nevertheless, as Tom Bottomore has argued, Otto Bauer’s uniquely Austro-Marxist conception of a “slow revolution” by which “the conquest of power by the working class had to be accompanied by a gradual, patient construction of socialist institutions,” closely matched the progress on the ground in socialist-governed Vienna.³⁰ The weakness of the social democrats outside Vienna, however, cast a dark shadow that would ultimately overwhelm even Red Vienna with its violent overthrow in 1934.³¹

Red Vienna—Reumann Hof (Public Housing), built c. 1925

Global Socialist Reconstruction and the Model of “Red Vienna”

Generations of socialists around the globe had looked to the Paris Commune of 1871 as a shining, if transitory, moment of promise for workers who aspired to govern their own cities.³² In the aftermath of World War I, with its horrific bloodletting and desperate daily struggles, workers again looked to an urban site as a model they might emulate in their own fights to humanize and make their cities livable. That site came to be known as “Red Vienna,” though, as some historians have noted, that moniker was applied only later in the 1920s and then rarely by Austrian socialists themselves, who preferred the term “New Vienna.”³³ In New Zealand and Australia, labor papers reported enthusiastically on the accomplishments of Vienna’s socialists. As early as May 1925, the Australian Worker noted the dramatically increasing membership of the Austrian Socialist Party in key districts of what the newspaper referred to as “red Vienna,” before the term became commonplace.³⁴ In August that year, the same paper reported on “Austria’s Bright Spot,” noting that

the Socialist most hated in Vienna by the well-to-do is certainly Hugo Breitner. Speak to them of Lenin, Trotsky, or Liebknecht, and they will listen with perfect calm, but mention the name Breitner and the calm is replaced by fury and hate … He is credited with the intention of destroying the whole economic life of Vienna, etc., etc.

In reality he is merely the author of the financial policy of the municipal council … Breitner’s new tax scheme introduces some 18 new taxes, which chiefly hit those who can afford to pay, and abolishes one or two old taxes which burdened the workers unfairly—for instance the house tax and various taxes on food.³⁵

And a month later, the Australian Worker republished an article from London’s Labour Magazine that chronicled in some detail Vienna’s progress toward democratizing city administration, constructing new housing, revolutionizing tax policy, and vastly expanding public social welfare.³⁶ Brisbane’s Worker also reported extensively on Vienna’s transformation into “the most well-cared for, the cleanest, the healthiest and the most beautiful city in the world.”³⁷ It reprinted “wirelessly” a celebratory article in early 1928 from the New York Times by American journalist Wyke Williams, calling Vienna an “object lesson to [the] world.” Of special note, he reported, was the construction of “thirty-five municipal bathing establishments” and the requirement of swimming instructions for all students. The last facility constructed, “over the protest of the bourgeois parties,” was “the biggest indoor pool in the world,” which compared favorably “with an exclusive athletic club” able to “accommodate 10,000 persons daily” in the “poorest section” of the city.³⁸ Vienna city councillor Robert Danneberg published a lengthy article, “Das Neue Wien” in a Berlin periodical, Die Gesellschaft, in 1924, highlighting the progress socialists were making. The British Labour Party translated and republished the article in three successive editions, as did social democrats in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels. By 1930, a new edition could note that the socialist vote in the city had increased in the election of 1927, producing the party’s strongest showing yet (60.27 percent) with a turnout of 92 percent of eligible voters. Some 30,328 international visitors from thirty-five countries had taken part “in tours conducted by welfare institutions” in the previous year.³⁹

Socialists’ ability to claim ruling authority in Vienna was not exactly duplicated elsewhere, but in 1929 the Brisbane Worker reported enthusiastically that “thousands of the world’s cities” were now “under Socialist rule.” Republishing tabulations from an article in New York’s New Leader, the authors recited a litany of municipal socialist successes worldwide: several London boroughs and 420 British cities in which the Labour Party held majorities; 19 cities in Denmark and in Finland 144 under socialist rule; “hundreds of German and Swedish cities”; 100 in France; and scores in other countries, though only 1 in Canada and none mentioned for the United States.⁴⁰

The familiar outlines of municipal socialist programs enacted in “Red Vienna” looked unusual only in the comprehensiveness of their scope. But the essential elements looked familiar, including the large-scale construction of workers’ housing by the municipality, the provision of public social welfare and unemployment relief, municipalization of essential services, the creation of a redistributive tax structure, and the democratization of public space.

In a transnational context two features of the socialists’ success in Vienna were of particular note. In the face of desperate poverty, hunger, and homelessness at the end of the war, the socialists once in power created a substantial stream of revenue by shifting the tax burden to higher incomes and elite consumption. That made feasible major projects of social reconstruction, the most famous of which was the construction of the new housing blocks for workers in the central city. Redistributive taxes had been the greatest fear that elites around the world harbored should socialists manage to win control in municipalities.

Second, socialist governance of Vienna as a province unto itself and its ability to create fiscal stability took place in the context of a new constitutional order that guaranteed a significant measure of self-government, a goal that had long been on the agenda of socialists (and many urban reformers) globally. Winning “home-rule” liberated the city from the controlling authority of the central state and enabled socialists to move ahead with key elements of their agenda, backed by a highly mobilized working-class constituency whose support had grown progressively in the prewar and wartime years. By comparison, municipal socialists in other countries found their advance at least partially constrained during the postwar years by constitutional limitations on the power of cities to govern their own affairs.⁴¹

Social Democratic Cities in the Postwar World

Municipal socialism had grown and prospered in the years before World War I. Weathering the domestic storms of the war at home, local activists regained footing that enabled them to seize the initiative at the war’s end. Events in Germany and Vienna took the most dramatic turn, but the virtual end of restrictive municipal franchises enabled substantial progress elsewhere as well. War collectivism, although it strengthened the position of large-scale capital, reinvigorated a movement toward socialization that would bear fruit in the coming decade, particularly at the municipal level.

The Great War changed the politics of local democracy in profound ways. Wartime grievances mobilized new urban constituencies as political actors, both within the electoral process and beyond. Food and housing protests (often led by women), strikes over declining real wages and long hours, demands for greater freedom of speech, and increasingly vocal opposition to war itself emboldened these actors. Promises by the politically powerful of an expanded franchise and greater municipal self-determination produced a rising tide of democratic expectations that demanded action and political empowerment.

The economic burdens and the domestic conflicts of wartime also invited realignment of power locally. Although many activists proceeded with caution, especially in the early years of the war, the effects of economic dislocations—rising prices, housing shortages, shifting currents of unemployment, conscription, and restrictions on free speech—emboldened socialist and labor activists to press their agenda and to articulate more forceful opposition to the war itself. This turmoil, and the massive dislocations in the months after the war, precipitated new gains in local body and parliamentary elections.

The postwar world presented labor and socialist activists in the municipal realm with a new set of opportunities. Autocratic structures of power faced fundamental challenges, or outright dismantling, in much of central Europe. But even in the democracies, a broadened franchise eliminated virtually all formal restrictions on the municipal electorate that had been a significant barrier to working-class political empowerment. New fields of electoral opportunity opened in which labor and socialist parties were well positioned to compete. The adoption of woman’s suffrage now in virtually all countries further enhanced the democratic promise of the postwar years.

In Germany, democratization of the municipal franchise was finally achieved in February 1919 after long years of struggle and frustration. The more radical forms of local working-class governance—the Arbeiter und Soldaten-Räte—expired unevenly over the next six months or were incorporated into existing structures of local government. Democratization in many localities proceeded albeit with a persistent, suffocating, and, in most cases, inherently conservative municipal bureaucracy. By the local elections of 1919 and 1920, the Social Democrats (MSDP and USDP) held 53 percent of all council seats in the thirteen largest towns and cities in Saxony, and comparable victories followed elsewhere in the former Reich.⁴² In Berlin, Hamburg (Altona), Frankfurt, and Stuttgart, but also Offenbach, Bielefeld, Braunschweig, Leipzig, and other cities, municipal socialists gained a substantial footing if not outright governing majorities. They moved cautiously to implement elements of their long-standing agendas in the context of the precarious economic and political climate of the Weimar Republic.⁴³

But the political realignments of the postwar period also shifted initiative toward the national arena at the expense of local activism. The clearest case may have been Germany, where the center and right of the Social Democratic Party consolidated its power nationally. Some of the apostles of municipal socialism, including Hugo Lindemann and Paul Hirsch, briefly accepted prominent state political leadership roles serving the Weimar Republic, but soon returned to their primary sphere of political interest, the municipality. Lindemann, after briefly holding office as labor minister in Württemberg, accepted a position as Professor am Kommunalpolitik at the University of Köln until his position was terminated by the Nazis in 1933. Paul Hirsch served as a co-president of the Prussian Staatsministerium, then briefly as welfare minister in Prussia. Subsequently he returned to municipal work as acting mayor of Charlottenburg and then mayor of Dortmund until removed by the Nazis in 1933. Edmund Fischer was initially very active at the end of the war in promoting the vitality of municipally controlled economic institutions, but he grew discouraged, and in 1925 took his own life, as one biographer put it, “out of fear that he would no longer be able to carry out his own self-imposed tasks.”⁴⁴

Hugo Lindemann (second from left), Stuttgart, Labor Minister, 1918 Württemberg Provisional Government

In Britain, municipal franchise reform and the resumption of local elections after the war gave labor added strength in its existing strongholds. In Bradford, for example, with a near majority, Labour members met as a caucus to effectively set the agenda for council business from 1919 on. The number of Labour-governed cities jumped sharply upward.⁴⁵ In New Zealand and Australia, concerted opposition to conscription and eventually the war itself by key segments of the labor parties and the labor movement paid dividends in the postwar period. The lessening of municipal franchise restrictions and the lifting of free speech bans in New Zealand opened the door to more widespread municipal victories than before and during the war. The NZLP won a number of seats on the municipal councils and hospital boards of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, as well as many smaller municipalities. They held controlling majorities in Runanga, Brunnerton, and Foxton. In Australia, Labor won majorities or near majorities in many municipalities. By 1925 the Labor Party in NSW governed Glebe, Canterbury, Erskineville, Paddington, Lithgow, and Broken Hill and it continued to have a strong presence in the Redfern and Sydney councils. In metropolitan Brisbane, labor won governing control in Brisbane, South Brisbane, Ithaca, and Coorparoo.⁴⁶

The franchise reforms of 1918 in Sweden had a particularly dramatic effect at the municipal level. Social Democrats in the larger cities won majorities in Stockholm, Malmö, Gävle, Eskilstune, Lund, and Landskrona, and near majorities in a handful of others: Hälsingborg, Örebro, and Borås. Gains were notable everywhere.⁴⁷ Like their counterparts in Bradford, England, and other cities where labor or social democrats had made significant headway, socialist city councillors in Stockholm, Växjö, Malmö, and other Swedish cities caucused in advance of city council meetings to align their initiatives with their local Arbetarekommun branches and strategize their next moves in council.⁴⁸

Reform of the municipal franchise in Sweden, however, came with restrictions that continued to handicap the exercise of workers’ political power. While women gained voting rights in municipal elections in 1918, full suffrage for women at the national level was delayed until 1921. Although property requirements and multiple voting by corporations disappeared, tax indebtedness, dependence on social support, and bankruptcy were still grounds for disfranchisement. A longstanding requirement that municipal expenditures incurring debt required a two-thirds supermajority for passage significantly constrained the ability of Social Democrats to implement their municipal agenda.⁴⁹

A bitter dispute over how to maneuver around this limitation erupted among Social Democrats in the Malmö city council. With unemployment rising sharply at the end of the war, Social Democrats in the council sought to create jobs through public employment but found their initiative blocked by the two-thirds rule for incurring public debt.⁵⁰ The issue split the Social Democrats, with a small group seeking a compromise with the conservatives that would have reduced the wages below the standard wage for city workers for those newly employed. After acrimonious debate and heated public demonstrations, the caucus accepted the compromise in order to preserve their council majority.⁵¹ As Arbetet editorialized,

Our conviction is that the group’s action is the only one possible because the social democratic city council group cannot allow the resolution to undermine the representation of the Arbetarekommun … From a principled standpoint the victory is that the social democratic party’s communal representatives have established their right, within the framework of the party’s ideology, to independent action.⁵²

In a number of countries during the 1920s, “parliamentarians” reclaimed initiative. Municipal gains were not entirely eclipsed, but party leaders increasingly turned away from a more radically democratic vision, grounded in the municipalities, toward a politics of accommodation and deference to central authority. These developments set off fierce debates within labor and socialist parties. In Austria, Germany, and Sweden, but also in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, internal party debates and a rising tide of parliamentarism threatened again to eclipse local democratic impulses. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party Congress in 1928 saw bitter debate not only over the so-called anti-Soviet “Cossack resolution” but also between municipal socialists who also fell into opposing camps of what one historian has called “ethical” and “rational” municipalists, a division that had been foreshadowed in the bitter 1921 dispute in Malmö.⁵³ Carl Herz, the Independent Socialist from Altona, sounded alarms over the continuing dominance of centralized and anti-democratic bureaucracy as a barrier to full democratization of local government in the Weimar Republic.⁵⁴

In the United States, a reactionary political climate was fostered by wartime repression of socialists and left-wing labor activists. The draconian postwar Red Scare, growing nativism, and endemic racism created uniquely unfavorable political conditions for the advance of socialism. Deepening factionalism between the splintered socialist/communist parties compounded their problems.⁵⁵ Fragmented local left-wing movements survived to contest for power in some cities, including at least briefly with some success in Davenport, IA, Milwaukee, WI, Reading, PA, and Bridgeport, CT.⁵⁶ A renewed “open shop” movement fueled the retreat on municipal “home rule” and narrowed the scope for initiative around a socialist or even a progressive local agenda. Open shop employers operated from a position of strength and managed to further secure local government against left-led movements by hardening limits on municipal home rule and encouraging expanded anti-democratic reforms such as at-large elections and city manager administration.

Conclusion

The advance of municipal socialism on a global scale during the inter-war period, in the short run, stands in marked contrast to the trajectory of the movement in the United States. The elimination of municipal franchise restrictions and the adoption of woman’s suffrage around the world at the end of the war, along with the collapse of autocratic regimes and old empires, gave municipal activists new opportunities to strengthen their gains from the prewar period and augment what ground they claimed during the war. While postwar political contexts varied enormously, municipal socialists, based on their cumulative experience in city affairs, could legitimately claim their capacity to govern cities. The triumphs of Vienna’s municipal socialists over hardship and disorder offered the most vivid testimony to that effect. It was shown as a beacon of hope that cities could be the laboratories for a new socialized order that promised their citizens a voice in public affairs and improved life conditions.⁵⁷

Around the industrialized world in the post–World War I era, “democratized cities,” fueled by a resilient social-democratic vision, were fast becoming the norm after years of popular struggle. Workers demonstrated that they could set supporting pillars for socialized democracy locally and in demonstrable ways improve the conditions of daily life. Their efforts served as a persistent, compelling reminder to their comrades that genuine and sustainable social democracy must be built from below on sturdy foundations grounded in popular activism.

Epilogue

Whither Social Democracy in the Cities?

In this book, I argue for the fundamental importance of social democratic struggles in cities around the globe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Coming out of the massive strikes and economic crises of the late nineteenth century, workers turned their attention to the long-entrenched, undemocratic patterns of elite rule in cities and the increasingly unlivable conditions of urban life. These conditions were the byproduct of rapid industrialization, migration, and elite indifference to an urban environment whose aging infrastructure placed the health, well-being, and life itself of working-class residents in jeopardy. City governance became the hothouse for a new politics by which labor and socialist activists sought to address most directly the issues touching the everyday lives of workers and the poor.

The ubiquity of this new urban politics in the past (but also the present) speaks to the common conditions that local activists have confronted and the similar remedies they have devised. But it also offers testimony to the transnational circulation of the core ideas and programs they developed. My focus has been primarily on the social democratic impulses emanating from working-class movements usually articulated through labor and socialist parties. On occasion, workers’ municipal interests intersected with those of middle-class municipal reformers, whose appetite for social investigation and whose efforts to address specific problems of urban life also had an impact—whether through tenement house reform, improved urban sanitation, parks, and leisure activities, or other public health concerns.¹ Labor and socialist urban movements usually parted company with middle-class reformers over the democratization of urban politics itself, the use of city employment to establish standards for wages and hours that would spill over into the private sector, and expansion of the public sector and municipal ownership, which required overhauling the tax base and increasing taxes on wealthy propertied interests. By tradition, middle-class reformers and urban governing elites saw such tax policies and the expanded public sector they supported as fundamentally confiscatory.²

Local grassroots political mobilization has been the lifeblood of socialist and labor party effectiveness in cities. It was the generative source for the promise of a revitalized urban social democracy. While the interests of labor and socialist parliamentary party leaders and local activists were sometimes at odds, and while municipal politics was frequently treated as a backwater or stepchild by national movements, its vitality has been essential for success at higher political levels. As this earlier history also suggests, urban islands of socialism might have been successful in the short term—as were Milwaukee and Red Vienna (and even very briefly the Paris Commune), but without the capacity to protect and defend their local achievements from reactionary political forces, they were vulnerable. Though the Paris Commune and Red Vienna bookend this study as moments of promise, they also both fell to powerful and violent national and local right-wing forces. Milwaukee survived as a “labor city,” but in doing so diluted its party identity. Eventually, in 1960, its socialist heritage disappeared into the Democratic Party.³

Municipal Socialism in the Interwar Period

During the interwar period across the industrial world, as we have seen in the previous chapter, cities witnessed a surge of democratization and socialization of basic municipal services that had been on the agenda of municipal socialists since the late nineteenth century.⁴ They benefited directly from the battering down of franchise restrictions in virtually all postwar democracies. A new level of municipal professionalism and technical expertise led to the formation of a series of international organizations that built on the more informal and transformative municipal socialist translocalism of the prewar period. The International Union of Local Authorities (IULA) was founded in 1913, but its “golden age” came after renewal in 1925 and for a decade following. Although socialists participated, the dominant influence came from a new class of professional city administrators. A more lasting international municipal socialist influence was sustained by the idealistic French socialist Edgard Milhaud, and his publication Annales de la régie directe (later, in 1925 Annales de l’économie collective). Milhaud believed that “most public services should be under municipal control as mutual, cooperative undertakings.” After surviving two world wars, fascism, and the depths of depression, Milhaud and his colleagues formed the post–World War II Council of European Municipalities, which continued to be an organizational site for advocating municipal control of public services and for maintaining the integrity of local self-government under popular control.⁵

At the same time, socialists and communists continued to build enclaves of socialist governance in smaller working-class communities. This phenomenon of “small-place communism” in regions as diverse as Welsh mining villages or a transplanted commune of Seattle communists in the Russian Don province bore some resemblance to earlier strongholds of social democratic governance in cities such as Broken Hill, NSW, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or Offenbach, Germany, before the wars.⁶

Colonial/Postcolonial Struggles

European and American colonizers had carried with them into their colonies models of urban governance grounded in long traditions of elite rule. The settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand generally adopted structures of local government that were patterned, if somewhat loosely, on municipal reform currents from Britain that privileged the interests of propertied elites, while creating necessary elements of urban infrastructure and limiting an extensive public sector and the taxes that would have supported it. Auckland historian Graham Bush has described their preference as “representation without taxation.”⁷ Social democratic movements in Australia and New Zealand would eventually lay claim to their own right to govern municipalities in the name of socialist principles.⁸

The fundamentally anti-democratic and often racist character of imperial models of municipal government imprinted the governance of cities through much of the Global South. South Africa’s colonial administrators brought with them English models of municipal administration that favored “public” enterprise in the service of mining companies or other corporations. Public policy tended to reinforce urban inequalities and racial segregation.⁹ Even a robust Labour Party in the city of Johannesburg early in the twentieth century served as a political vehicle for white workers, while advocating a program similar to that of municipal socialists in Europe.¹⁰ Social Democrats, though not immune to the virus of racism at home or in colonial settings, also built ties of solidarity and ideological affinity with emerging nationalist movements that sought to challenge colonial governance at all levels. In India, nationalist figures like Jawaharlal Nehru cut their political teeth in municipal administrative bodies with opposition to tax policies that favored the colonizers and wealthy Indians.¹¹ In some cases, imported labor or socialist parties replicated the segregationist practices of the colonial regimes themselves.¹² In others, Indigenous organizers imbibed and modified the municipal socialist agendas of European movements with which they sought to align.¹³ Socialized urban governance in the postcolonial world frequently had to contend with national movements that privileged national over local interests, or rural over urban settings, whether in African socialist Tanzania or in the post-revolutionary states of China and Cuba.¹⁴

The post–World War II challenges of neoliberal urban reconstruction took formidable shape in Europe and North America, but also in Latin America, where popular resistance eventually emerged despite rising levels of violence propagated by the United States and its client elites. Movements advocating democratization eventually produced significant experimentation with municipal socialism across Latin American cities.¹⁵

Renewing Municipal Socialism: The 1960s and Beyond

The 1960s witnessed the reemergence of municipal activism on a global scale and a new grassroots urban politics. Among other things, this movement breathed new life into social democratic and labor parties; it spawned Green Parties prepared to challenge existing governing coalitions around environmental issues; and it promoted radical democratization of government at all levels, not least in municipalities. Workers’ centers, frequently led by immigrants and people of color, expanded the existing boundaries of the established trade union movement. And in this more fertile political environment, “municipal socialism” has generated new interest politically (and historiographically). Urban activists have infused local politics with new agendas for tougher environmental regulation, gun control, minimum wage campaigns, and affordable housing. But they have also uncovered and acknowledged a “hidden” historical inheritance from earlier municipal socialist movements—public ownership of essential municipal services (sewerage, water, waste management, public transit, libraries), unionized public sector workers, and in many cases municipal ownership of electricity and other utilities. While hardly a revolutionary domain, cities have continued to uphold the value of a robust public sector, graduated taxes on the property (and in some cases incomes) of both individuals and corporations, and largely unrestricted democratic participation. They have been bastions of resistance to privatization. The procedures of local governing bodies have long since been opened to public scrutiny, and while many cities continue to have top-down governing structures manifested in at-large elections, city managers, and narrowly based city commissions, many of the largest cities and some smaller municipalities have retained strong mayor- and ward-based councils that are popularly elected. State-imposed limits on home rule, or preemption of local governance by state governments, continues to be contested terrain.

The politics of who governs cities and the contest over state versus local regulatory authority have swung back and forth. At times over the last century, cities have taken significant initiatives to expand the local public sector, municipalize city services, set minimum wages and maximum work hours, expand public employment programs and public housing, regulate and inspect housing and factories, mandate social practices to stem the spread of epidemic disease, expand public health services, and more rigorously regulate air quality. At other times, states have reclaimed authority to restrict the sphere of municipal action.¹⁶ In many cities, actions to set minimum wages or ban plastic bags or regulate firearms have been preempted under existing legislation that grants states the power to define the scope of municipal home rule.¹⁷

Clearly the politics of public action in cities, states, and the nation remain highly volatile. In the face of growing demands for neoliberal privatization in an era of surging anti-statism at state and federal levels, we see workers turning again to their cities as a primary site for civic action.¹⁸ They are finding that their voices, their votes, and their protests are magnified in the municipal realm and that once again cities do matter! These are promising times for civic action in cities across the United States and around the world, perhaps the most exciting time since the heady days just before the outbreak of World War I.¹⁹

Beyond conventional electoral politics, urban activists have sought other alternatives for building grassroots democracy in city affairs. They have, for instance, created new means for workers and other citizens to participate directly in municipal decision-making and exercise some direct control over civic life. A leading example appeared in the 1980s and early ’90s in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and is now being implemented in as many as 1,500 cities worldwide, including some neighborhoods in Brooklyn, NY, and some wards in Chicago. “Participatory budgeting” offers a vehicle for grassroots organizing outside existing structures of governance. It fosters a new model of “state-civil society” relations that has been adopted by municipal activists around the world. In Porto Alegre, this process began with open neighborhood meetings and district “thematic” gatherings where residents defined priorities for a portion of the city budget. Their proposals were eventually forwarded to an elected city-wide Budget Council. The process has drawn thousands of new people into political activity and produced what sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi has called “the dynamism of the unorganized.” Participatory budgeting set in motion powerful redistributive programs and dramatic improvements in the material conditions of daily life for the residents of poor neighborhoods.²⁰

Participatory budgeting may be only one example, but its leading features can guide the approach to other municipal tasks. The keys are grassroots mobilization and “bottom-up” decision making, or as Baiocchi says, distinguishing the “communicative dimension” from empowerment and implementation. It is the latter that makes participatory budgeting transformative. Examples from New York and Chicago illustrate the appeal of participatory budgeting. In New York, twenty-four council districts in 2015 engaged in the process, setting priorities and voting on their own preferences for the expenditure of $25 million in city funds. As the New York Times reported, “the greatest value of participatory budgeting has been as a means of access” especially for those who are routinely excluded from electoral activity, including “the formerly incarcerated and the undocumented.” In one district, “two thirds of the ballots were cast in Spanish and Chinese.” And “of those who voted in participatory budgeting citywide, 39 percent reported household incomes of $35,000 or less. This figure compares with 21 percent of those who voted in local elections in 2013.”²¹ History and the contemporary experience of workers in cities around the world can provide guidance and moral support.

Cities remain vibrant laboratories for the practice of social democracy. If not explicitly drawing on municipal socialism, they nonetheless embody important elements of that tradition and, consciously or not, defend what is in many ways a powerful and ennobling history.²²

Some in the labor movement have reached the “strategic conclusion … that unions must think in terms of organizing cities rather than simply organizing workplaces (or industries),” according to David Harvey. Drawing the analogy between Marx’s vision of the fight for shorter hours “as a first step down a revolutionary path,” he argues that “claiming back the right for everyone to live in a decent house in a decent living environment can be seen as the first step towards a more comprehensive revolutionary movement” that challenges the “secondary forms of exploitation … organized by merchants, landlords, and the financiers.”

In short, as Harvey and other contemporary theorists see it,

the right to the city has to be construed not as a right to that which already exists, but as a right to rebuild and recreate the city as a socialist body politic in a completely different image—one that eradicates poverty and social inequality, and one that heals the wounds of disastrous environmental degradation. For this to happen, the production of the destructive forms of urbanization has to be stopped.²³

And, indeed, the challenge to those destructive forces of neoliberal urbanization has been taken up in our time by diverse community coalitions in support of hotel workers in LA, miners in Northumbria, tenant associations and “excluded workers’ ” alliances in New York and Chicago, precarious workers in El Alto, Bolivia, and workers’ centers dedicated to the fight for fair wages and fair housing in numbers of US cities. In these contexts, “the right to the city” has frequently become a claim made by those who “produce” the city—the laborers who have in some measure “always been temporary, insecure, itinerant, and precarious.” That “production” also takes the form of reproduction outside traditional workplaces, in neighborhoods and living spaces, where “the gender composition of oppositional politics looks very different” from the factory.²⁴ But the local politics of space—the right to the city—must also accommodate, in Lefebvre’s view, a “right to difference” as the antidote to a parochial politics of “intolerance and segregation.”²⁵ In the global context, as Mike Davis argues, any effort “to control global warming” if it is to succeed must converge with “the struggle to raise living standards and abolish world poverty.” And today, but also in the past, this comes down to a popular struggle for a genuinely “democratic control of urban space.”²⁶

In 1911, the editors of the Worker in Sydney, Australia, along with their global compatriots, certainly understood the preeminent value of local activists organizing on behalf of such an alternative urban vision, and they recognized the formidable opposition they faced.²⁷

Of all the fields of political activity the municipal one is in some respects the most important inasmuch as it is nearer to us than any other, touches our daily life closer, and has the most intimate bearing on the great social problem we are all striving to solve. Our municipalities are in fact the nearest thing to practical Socialism we possess.

Those words ring as true in our time, as they did in theirs. Local activists like Jakob Reumann and Axel Danielsson, Jim Thorn and Peter Witt, Franz Schuhmeier and Pat Hickey, Stella May Henderson and Emil Seidel, Lilian Locke and Hugo Lindemann, A. Philip Randolph and E. R. Hartley defined a new politics for their time. They envisioned humane, robust, and democratic cities. The prospect of social democratic cities, in which workers would be able to realize their highest aspirations for self-governance, fired their imaginations. At their core, the claims for the “public city” remain very much alive, as relevant today as they were in their time.

Acknowledgments

First a confession: I do not altogether remember the precise origins of the idea for this book, though assuredly it sprang from several sources. The first was a long-standing interest in the transformation of working-class political culture in the United States during what we often call the “long Progressive Era.” Early probings into the local politics of Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee had convinced me that there was fruit to be harvested in reconstructing the local stories of how workers engaged politics and the ways in which they infused that politics with the imperatives that grew out of the harsh conditions life presented them in the burgeoning cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These early forays reaffirmed my longstanding interest in “local” study and my belief that it can unlock secrets that studies of larger scope often miss.

A second source for this study was, ironically, my exposure to transnational and comparative approaches to labor history, which grew out of my fortuitous engagement in two projects of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Thanks to the generous invitations of Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, I had the good fortune to participate in two comparative labor history initiatives more than a decade apart with a lively group of historians and social scientists who shared interests in the comparative study of labor and working-class history.¹ These projects introduced a global scale to the local comparisons of working-class politics I was already pursuing. From these origins, I think, came my conviction that a “translocal” study of working-class politics might be feasible and could shed important comparative light on the origins and impact of labor and socialist politics in the arena of cities.

Finally, considering the political landscape of our own time, I have also come to recognize how enduring have been the struggles of workers for local democracy, home rule, and municipal socialism. More than ever, the “claims” of workers to their right to govern the cities they inhabit and to make them livable and humane spaces seem of overriding urgency. And to that politics, this history has something to contribute.

On a practical level, with the onset of a new millennium, I finished my extended stint as a department chair at the University of Iowa and discovered renewed energy and interest in pursuing the large-scale comparative and transnational study of urban labor politics that had been taking shape in my mind. I could not have had a better launching pad for the study than a period of residence in Amsterdam and immersion in the collections of the IISH. In my continuing discussions with Marcel and Jan, as well as Aad Blok, Jürgen Rojahn, Lex Heerma von Voss, and Dennis Bos, and under the skilled guidance of several members of the archives staff, I was steered into the institute’s vast collections on the social democratic movements in Europe and beyond. But for my initial investigations, it was the early records, publications, and personal papers of key figures in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had been rescued from Nazi clutches, that proved most enlightening and gave me a chance to freshen up my German after long dormancy.

Over the next decade and more, I pursued my interest and my findings in the local archival sources with multiple trips to Amsterdam, Germany, Sweden, Vienna, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. With each research trip, as my understanding grew and my data piled up, I acquired debts to archivists and librarians and networks of interested scholars whose inspiration, encouragement, and guidance were valuable beyond measure. To recount their names and affiliations does not begin to do justice to the contributions they have made to this study.

In Australia, early in this project, I spent several weeks in residence at the University of Sydney hosted by Greg Patmore and his colleagues at the Center for Work and Management. I gained great value from my discussions with them (then and on several return trips) and with Lucy Taksa, Bruce Scates, and Rae Frances on several occasions at the University of New South Wales. John Shields’s and Braden Ellem’s work stimulated my early fascination with the legendary mining town and labor stronghold of Broken Hill, and Michael Hogan shared his insights into the municipal politics of New South Wales. I was aided in my repeated excavations of the wonderfully rich collections of the Mitchell State Library by several librarians and archivists, among them Lois McEvey. At the Sydney Municipal Archives, Ben Arnfield helped me uncover the valuable council records for the City of Sydney and Redfern. Excursions to Wollongong and Newcastle for visits with the late Ray Markey and Erik Eklund gave me an opportunity to test my very early thinking on a host of questions that proved relevant to this study. And Ray convened a delightful and lively meeting with a local historical society of building tradesmen who generously indulged my reading of portions of a play I had drafted on the life of Martin Irons, Knights of Labor leader of the Great Southwest Railroad Strike in the United States.

Two other Australian cities loomed large in my research. Melbourne’s municipalities hold rich histories of labour’s contention for power at the local level through Political Labor Councils. Ensconced during several visits in the comfortable accommodations of the Women’s College, University of Melbourne, I explored the valuable labor collections of the Victoria State Library, the local government records in Victoria State Archives, and the special collections of the University of Melbourne Library. In each repository I had incredibly helpful assistance from librarians and archivists, without whom I would only have scratched the surface. Melbourne’s labor scholars on several occasions, in a pub or seminar, gave me valuable feedback on what I was uncovering. Deserving special mention are my good friend Verity Burgmann, as well as Stuart Macintyre, Joy Damousi, Peter Love, and Janet McCallum. In Brisbane, I could not have had a better host than Brad Bowden, whose knowledge and writing about the city’s working-class history in its wider Queensland context are unequaled. Several productive days in the John Oxley Library, with the aid of archivist Stephen Bull, and at the Brisbane municipal archives gave me access to another and quite different municipal and state context for understanding the local evolution of Australia’s Labor Party.

Visits to legendary local sites of Labor Party history deepened my understanding of the context of labor conflict so crucial to the political initiative workers undertook. They lay deep in the outback of Queensland and New South Wales. For me, each visit provided an extraordinary encounter with the vastness of the landscape and the isolation that workers faced in creating a new politics. Barcaldine was the center of the sheepshearers’ strike in 1893 that precipitated a new political departure by Queensland’s workers. Its impressive Workers Heritage Center lay a two days’ drive from Brisbane and another two days to Sydney through the haunting harshness of the outback and the perils of roadside kangaroos and massive “road trains.” The same was true for Broken Hill, whose own story of labor politics and municipal labor party governance is unmatched for continuity in Australia. In the case of Broken Hill, the archival holdings of its local library proved a critical resource for unlocking that history. Thanks are due especially for the assistance of city archivist Brian Tonkin.

My four visits to New Zealand over the course of the research enabled me to do substantial work in each of the country’s major cities. In Wellington I made repeated, extensive use of the labor collections at the Turnbull National Library, particularly the voluminous papers of Bert Roth. The municipal archives for the City of Wellington proved invaluable as did the assistance of archivist Adrian Humphris. Because of time constraints my research in Auckland proved circumstantially more limited but nonetheless valuable, at both the Auckland University Archives and the city’s municipal archive. At the University of Auckland, Jim Belich was a knowledgeable and witty guide to the city’s (and the country’s) history. Paul Taillon and Jennifer Frost were delightful hosts and helped organize opportunities to share my research at a very early stage. The “Dean” of New Zealand’s labor historians, Erik Olssen, gave me wonderful advice on two of my visits to Dunedin and led me on a superb guided tour of working-class Caversham. His work in New Zealand labor history continues to be an important model for my own. Alison Breese in the municipal archives gave me some shrewd advice about their collections. And the Hocken Library holds extraordinarily rich collections for the city and some of its leading laborites. Christchurch became an especially important site for my work and the collections of its municipal archive proved extremely valuable, thanks to the assistance of Don Robertson and others. Also important were the Canterbury University Archives. Numbers of New Zealand historians, beyond those already mentioned, generously shared their knowledge and expertise. I mention especially Melanie Nolan, who has moved on to Australian National University, and her valuable work on Christchurch’s Jack McCullough; Jim McAloon, now at Victoria University in Wellington, unlocked the doors to Christchurch’s class politics in his own writing; also parliamentary and labor historian John Martin; and Kerry Taylor, at Massey University, whose advice, friendship, and collaboration I deeply cherish. Peter Clayworth and I became acquainted late in this project but his work on Pat Hickey proved instructive.

In Sweden, my dear friend and colleague, the late Lars Olsson, generously hosted my visits, provided countless hours of consultation about this project, opened his seminars at Linneaus University for me to present early versions of my work, and facilitated my enlistment of two of his graduate students as research assistants for my work in the records of Växjö, Kronoberg County, and Malmö. Lennart Karlsson provided excellent running translations of documentary material we uncovered with the help of Lennart Johansson at the Kronoberg archives in Växjo, and he and Jimmy Engren, on whose graduate thesis committee I served, did the same in Malmö. At the labor archives in Stockholm, early in the research I was greatly aided by the late Klaus Misgeld and on a subsequent visit had the generous help of Silke Neunsinger. Archivists at the city archives in Borås (the town from which my grandmother, Anna Träff, a hosiery worker, emigrated) also provided excellent help, as did the public librarians in that city. During a whirlwind series of visits during the initial phases of my research I had productive visits with Birger Simonson in Göteborg and Bjorn Horgby in Linköping, and I am deeply grateful for the friendship and hospitality shown to Ann and me by good friends Christina and Peter Thoren, in Kungsbacka.

In Germany, during the exploratory phase of this project, I had the good fortune to have conversations with scholars who guided my thinking and my investigation of sources in ways that proved prescient: Adelheid von Saldern (Göttingen), whose own work on municipal socialism has been pathbreaking; the late Klaus Tenfelde (Bochum), whose wide-ranging studies of German workers have been deeply influential in the field; Karl Heinrich Pohl (Kiel); old friend Dirk Hoerder (Bremen); and Ralf Roth (Frankfurt), whose studies of Frankfurt politics have been both challenging and instructive and who on short notice provided hospitality and stimulating conversation to a previously unknown scholar on the tramp. Archivist Hubert Woltering at the Friedrich Ebert Institute (Bonn) helped me track down sources that proved key to my understanding of the SPD’s evolution. During subsequent research visits, most notably to municipal archives, I benefited from the generous help of archivists and scholars: Sigrid Kaempfer (Frankfurt), Jürgen Mittag (Bochum), Antje Maier and former SPD mayor Wolfgang Reuter (Offenbach), Katarina Ernst, Jürgen Lotterer, Roland Müller, and Frau Schrag (Stuttgart), and Bernd Wagner and the late Thomas Welskopp (Bielefeld). Stefan Berger at the Institut für soziale Bewegungen in Bochum and Klaus Weinhauer at Bielefeld Universität, in conjunction with another project, offered helpful insights on a number of occasions at conferences in Germany and the United States.

My work in Britain has likewise benefited from stimulating conversation and guidance of fellow historians working in the vineyards of labor politics. And, again, these conversations shaped my research in powerful ways. I would mention in particular: old friend and fellow graduate student of David Montgomery, Nev Kirk (Manchester), David Howell (York), and the late Sam Davies (Liverpool), all of whose generosity was unbounded; also instructive were conversations with the late Duncan Tanner, John Garrard, Tony Adams, Sheila Rowbotham, Krista Cowman, and Pat Thane. Keith Laybourn from Huddersfield has been a more recent acquaintance but his scholarship on the local labor politics of West Yorkshire has been very instructive. Two archival repositories proved of deep value in repeated visits: the People’s History Museum and Labour Party Archives (Manchester) and its superb archivists, Stephen Bull and Darren Treadwell; also of great value were the holdings of the London School of Economics Archives, which, among other riches, include the papers of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. But other repositories throughout West Yorkshire and beyond yielded incredibly valuable materials. Of special note are the West Yorkshire Archives Service (WYAS) in Bradford, Halifax, Keighley, Huddersfield, and Leeds but also repositories in York, Rochdale, Liverpool, the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth), and in Manchester, in addition to the People’s Museum, the Public Library, and the Municipal Archives. Tom Desmond was of great help at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, and the Municipal Archives of Dublin yielded materials of considerable comparative benefit, though they did not ultimately find a place in the book.

In Vienna, on multiple visits, I found incredibly rich resources on the city’s municipal socialist movement (before Red Vienna!) at the Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung Wien (VGA), thanks to Michaela Maier and Wolfgang Maderthaner, and at the city’s municipal archives, where Barbara Steininger proved especially helpful in locating relevant scholarship and the records of city council debates. I was pleased to participate with a stimulating group of European and American labor historians in the International Conference of Labour and Social History at Linz and owe special thanks to the editorial skills of David Mayer and Jürgen Mittag, who pulled together for publication the collection of conference papers.

I returned home from these far-flung research travels to digest and assimilate all I was learning in relation to my own and others’ case studies in the United States. My work on municipalities in the United States has punctuated and been revised by the global shape this research has taken. As mentioned above, early on I had focused on cases of Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. My work in what I think of as my “second home” at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison) was immensely aided by Harry Miller and Rick Pifer. And in Milwaukee my searches took me into the records of the Socialist Party and the city’s “Common Council” minutes at the Milwaukee Public Library and records of the local Socialist Party at the Milwaukee County Historical Society; in Cleveland, the records of the Western Reserve Historical Society and the city’s municipal archive proved useful, as did the holdings of the University of Cincinnati archives. Eventually, I came back to Ohio, intrigued by the extent of early twentieth-century municipal socialist activity in the state. I now focused close attention on Dayton and Hamilton, and with the valuable assistance of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, Marty Mullin and Tom Cooney, combed through the archival holdings of Wright State University in Dayton and the municipal archives for the City of Hamilton. I also consulted the library holdings of Miami University. Other research excursions took me to the New York Public Library, the Denver Public Library, and the Chicago Historical Society.

Quite late in preparing the manuscript for publication, I incurred a whole new set of debts to colleagues and archivists as we scrambled in the midst of the pandemic to locate and reproduce visual images (maps and photographs) for the book. Enormously helpful and generous with their time have been Australians Graeme Davison, Shirley Fitzgerald, Frank Bongiorno, and Greg Patmore, along with Nina Gosford at the (Mitchell) State Library of New South Wales and Martina Schindler at Broken Hill Library; David Flegg, Lucas Manuell, and Sue Jay at the State Library of Victoria; Jane Beattie at the University of Melbourne Archives; New Zealanders Kerry Taylor, Jim McAloon, Jacquie Matthews, and Melanie Nolan and at the Turnbull National Library in Wellington, Jenni Chrisstoffels; Adrian Humphris at the Wellington Municipal Archives; Daniel Stirland at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch; and David Murray at Hocken Library in Dunedin. At the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), Monique van der Pal gave excellent assistance with photographs. In Britain, I have had great help from Anna Towlson at the London School of Economics Archives, Darren Treadwell, at the People’s Museum and Archives in Manchester, Fiona Marshall at the West Yorkshire Archives Service, Bradford; John Ashton and Natalie Everett at the Bradford Museum and Galleries; in Sweden, Silke Neunsinger and Sara Lagergren at the Swedish Labor Movement’s Archives and Library (ARAB) in Stockholm; in Germany, Joachim Frank at the Hamburg Staatsarchiv; in the United States, Anne Sindelar at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, and the archives staff at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

My base of operations throughout this long undertaking was always the University of Iowa, where the support and encouragement of my colleagues in the History Department, including Colin Gordon, Linda Kerber, Allen Steinberg, Jacki Rand, Landon Storrs, Lisa Heineman, Stephen Vlastos, Leslie Schwalm, and the late Ellis Hawley helped sustain me, as did my collaboration politically and professionally with dear late colleagues Ken Cmiel and Jeff Cox. The staff of the department, Mary Strottman, Pat Goodwin, Sheri Sojka, Kathy O’Neill, and Jean Aikin, have been the best of sports juggling requests for technical assistance and facilitating the submission of grant proposals, travel vouchers, and research reports. Several computer-support staff for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences—Bob Irwin, Isaac Podolefsky, and Peter Franke—provided periodic digital rescue services. What seems like it has been a veritable army of graduate research assistants has taken on one or another piece of this project and done superb work in expanding the scope of my research. They include: David Colman, Matt Mettler, Yucheng Qin, Wo-Yu Liu, Aihua Zheng, the late Jake Hall, Marlino Mubai, Catherine Babikian (my talented undergrad RA), Janet Weaver, Jake Altman, Eric Fure-Slocum, John McKerley, Dennis Deslippe, Arturo Bird-Carmona, Alicia Valenzuela, Russ Johnson, and Martin Breckheimer. Very late in the game, Brianna Smith took time from her post-PhD teaching at Harvard to review and correct my German translations. All of their contributions are fondly remembered and appreciated.

Librarians and archivists at Iowa have helped supply the lifeblood of this project and none more importantly than staff at the University of Iowa Library. I want to thank them all for their varied contributions, but especially Chris Africa, the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department, Don Baxter, Joel Maxey, H. J. Pedelty, David McCartney, Janet Weaver, and University Librarian John Culshaw.

I have been tremendously benefitted by work with my own graduate students, through their scholarship and the insights their own work has given me. Those conversations have been deeply enriching. In particular I thank Eric Fure-Slocum, Dennis Deslippe, and John McKerley for organizing a conference on global labor that drew many colleagues from near and very far to discuss the ways in which our scholarly work intersects our public activity. And for me that connection has been central. In addition, I am also grateful for collaborations over many years with my other former PhD students Jeff Ostler, Dorsey Phelps, Nellie Kremenak, Herb Jones, Arturo Bird-Carmona, Russ Johnson, Steve Reschly, Mark Carlile, John Williams-Searle, Pete Ellen, Brad Byrom, Yucheng Qin, the late Paul Young, Bob Bionaz, Anthony Quiroz, David Colman, Susan Roth Breitzer, Lionel Kimble, Michael Innis-Jimenez, Kristen Anderson, Cliff Weston, Crystal Lewis, Matt Mettler, Jake Altman, the late Jake Hall, and Janet Weaver.

Over the years, colleagues far and wide in the United States who share my interests in labor and working-class history, cities, and global and comparative perspectives have been mentors and always insightful commenters on this work. They include Alice Kessler Harris and Dave Roediger, who gave encouragement and wrote numerous letters on my behalf for grant applications; the late Dave Montgomery, whose interest in the project and whose guidance from the beginning helped sustain me; Leon Fink, Jim Barrett, Julie Greene, Peter Rachleff, and Cele Bucki, have been good comrades and faithful friends in our shared field; Aims McGuiness, Peter Cole, John Enyeart, Daniel Wortel-London, Gail Radford, and Philip Ethington, offered valuable, critical comments on one or another portion of the work at various points along the way. Harvey Kaye (Green Bay), Sam Davies (Liverpool), Lars Olsson (Växjö), Verity Burgmann (Melbourne), Greg Patmore (Sydney), Bruce Scates (Sydney), Ray Markey (Wollongong), and Jim Belich and Paul Taillon (Auckland) invited me to present aspects of this work at different stages of its development in seminars and in guest lectures. I am also grateful for similar opportunities afforded by conferences of the European Social Science History Association, the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, the Society for the Study of Labour History (UK), the (US) Social Science History Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Urban History Association, and on several occasions, the annual meetings of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).

The research and writing for this book would have been impossible to complete without generous support of a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At every stage, sustained support and encouragement from the University of Iowa has been critical: a Global Scholar award and a sabbatical from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences gave me three semesters of research leave and funding for travel; several Arts and Humanities Initiative grants from the University of Iowa and a summer fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies supplemented those travel funds. I spent several semesters in residence at the University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, for which special thanks are due then-director Jay Semel and Lorna Olson.

Some material in this book appeared previously in other publications. I am grateful to Nancy Toff and Oxford University Press for permission to draw from my essay “Claiming Political Space: Workers, Municipal Socialism, and the Reconstruction of Local Democracy in Transnational Perspective,” in Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, Leon Fink, ed., Oxford University Press, 2011; to Donna Haverty-Stacke and Daniel Walkowitz, and Continuum Press (now Bloomsbury) for use of some portions of my essay “Rethinking Working-Class Politics in Comparative-Transnational Contexts,” in their 2010 edited volume, Rethinking US Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756–2009. Thanks to Clare Hooper and Liverpool University Press for permission to draw from my essay “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Municipal Labor and Socialist Activism in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920,” in Labour History Review (December 2009). My colleague from the University of Sydney, Greg Patmore, generously granted permission along with the publishers for use of material from two volumes in which he had an editorial hand, “Making Space: Municipal Socialists’ Challenge to Elite Rule in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, 1890–1920,” in The Past Is Before Us, Greg Patmore, John Shields and Nikola Balnave, eds. (Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2005) and from my essay “Domestic ‘Dogs of War’ Unleashed: The Comparative Fates of Municipal Labor and Socialist Politics in the United States and Australia during the Great War,” in Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia (University of Illinois Press, 2018), which I edited along with Greg. Rolf Bauer, General Secretary of ITH—Internationale Tagung der Historikerinnen der Arbeiter und anderer sozialer Bewegungen—and co-editors David Mayer and Jürgen Mittag granted permission to use material from my essay “Municipal Socialism and the Contested Politics of Everyday Life, 1890–1920,” published in their volume, Interventions: The Impact of Labour Movements on Social and Cultural Development, International Conference of Labour and Social History, Leipzig, 2013. Finally, Marcel van der Linden and Cambridge University Press generously gave their approval for use of some material from my essay “Municipal Socialism,” in the forthcoming two-volume Cambridge History of Socialism, Marcel van der Linden, editor.

Comrades and new colleagues at Verso Books have been exemplary in their commitment to this very long book. I appreciate the dedication and high professional standards that Sebastian Budgen, Melissa Weiss, Julie McCarroll, Dan O’Connor, Anthony Korum and others have brought to this collective effort.

Friends and comrades working in the vineyards of Iowa City local politics have inspired me by their work and their dedication to the idea that social democracy is built from below. They include Peter and Eileen Fisher, former Iowa City councillor Karen Kubby, former mayor and urban geographer Jim Throgmorton, county supervisor Rod Sullivan, New Pioneer Co-op ally Caroline Dieterle, and comrades with the Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa (CWJ) Rafael Morataya, Misty Rebik, Marcella Hurtado, Mazahir Salih, Charlie Eastham, Dan Daly, and the late Barbara Ziegler, and from the UI Labor Center, Robin Clark-Bennett, Jen Sherer, Paul Iverson, Guillermo Morales, John McKerley, and Sarah Clark. Our kind and generous neighbor, the late Burgess Kelly, never failed over these many years to periodically call across the driveway and ask, “So how’s the book coming?” And, somewhat more to the point, “When are you going to be finished?”

Finally, I am humbled by the generosity, forbearance, and persistent enthusiasm my family has showered on me over the course of the more than twenty years this project has been in the works, from conception to completion. Our dearest Elizabeth left us way before her time but her spirit and her love, not to speak of her cheery emails, sustained me. Christopher and Mariana Lee have been generous with their interest in the book, amid their own hectic family and professional lives in Brooklyn. Matthew and Laura Brueck have buoyed my work on the book with their questions and persistent curiosity. Matt carved out time in a busy career as an attorney to read portions of the book and offer always insightful comments and shrewd editing. Grandsons Teo and Liam, Hugo and Lyle injected energy and much-needed diversion over the past decade and more when my spirits needed lifting.

But it is Ann who has accompanied me on this journey from the start. We’ve shared travels to Amsterdam and Sweden, to Australia and New Zealand, to Germany, the UK, Ireland, and Paris. She has been invaluable help in the archives, doing a large share of the digitization of documents and combing sources for valuable nuggets. She has read and offered insightful comments on a number of chapters. Most importantly, we’ve shared highs and lows along the way—the excitement of welcoming four grandchildren into the world, our retirements from research and writing (hers) and from teaching (mine), but also the losses of her mother and our beloved Elizabeth. As I write these acknowledgments, we find ourselves navigating a whole new and unanticipated reality of sheltering together in the face of a worldwide pandemic. This book is for her and for our children and grandchildren, whose world we deeply hope will embody the humane values to which the subjects of this book and we ourselves have aspired, and toward the realization of which their own lives and work are making a real difference.

Lists of Maps and Photos

Maps

p. 87 Eastern Australia: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria. Courtesy of Labour History (Australia)

p. 93 New Zealand—Political Jurisdictions. Opensource.com

p. 139 Malmö and Southern Sweden. Courtesy of Perry-Casteñeda Library, University of Texas-Austin

p. 162 Kronoberg County, Sweden. Openstreetmap.

p. 175 West Yorkshire Cities. Wikimedia

p. 363 Melbourne Metropolitan Area, c. 1890s. Courtesy of Graeme Davison, Marvellous Melbourne (University of Melbourne Press, 1978)

p. 378 Sydney Metropolis, c. 1870. Courtesy of Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney, 1870–90 (Oxford University Press, 1987)

p. 387 Redfern District, c. 1870. Courtesy of Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney, 1870–90 (Oxford University Press, 1987)

p. 457 US Cities with Socialist Administrations, 1898–1922. Shelton Stromquist

p. 764 Workers’ Councils Spread in Germany, Nov. 4–10, 1918. Courtesy of Pathfinder Press

Photos

p. 2 Jim Thorn Speaking for the ILP with the Clarion Van in the UK, c. 1911. Courtesy of Auckland University Press, Elsie Locke and Jacquie Matthews, Stick Out, Keep Left (1997)

p. 4 Cleveland, Central Woodland Public Housing Area c. 1900. Courtesy of Western Reserve Historical Society Archives, Cleveland

p. 59 Sidney and Beatrice Webb—Fabian Socialists and Local Government Reformers. Courtesy of London School of Economics (LSE) Archives

p. 102 Strikers’ Library, Barcaldine, Queensland, 1891. Courtesy of John Oxley Library, Brisbane

p. 116 Pullman Strike, July 1894—Deployment of Federal Troops. Harper’s Weekly, 1894

p. 119 Eduard Bernstein, Friedrichshain, Berlin, April 10, 1910. Courtesy of International Institute of Social History Archives, Amsterdam

p. 119 Rosa Luxemburg, Second Socialist International’s Congress, Stuttgart 1907. Courtesy of International Institute of Social History Archives, Amsterdam

p. 129 Tocsin Pioneers and Ben Tillet (front row, center), Melbourne, 1898. Courtesy of Frank Bongiorno, The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914 (Melbourne University Press, 1996)

p. 131 Broken Hill Strike, NSW 1892—“Women assaulting a non-unionist.” Courtesy of Broken Hill Public Library/Victoria State Library

p. 131 Jabez Wright, City Councillor and Future Mayor of Broken Hill, New South Wales, 1899. Courtesy of Broken Hill Public Library

p. 134 Manningham Mills Strike, 1890–91, Bradford, England. Portsmouth Evening News, April 16, 1891

p. 138 Axel Danielsson, Socialist Militant and Journalist, Malmö, Sweden, c. 1887. Courtesy of Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och Bibliotek (ARAB), Stockholm

p. 143 “King Debs.” Eugene V. Debs, President, American Railway Union, Harper’s Weekly, July 21, 1894.

p. 144 Pullman Strike, Chicago, 1894—Conflagration. Harper’s Weekly, 1894

p. 153 Stella Henderson, Christchurch and Melbourne Journalist and Feminist. Courtesy of Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand

p. 168 Campaign Flyer for E. R. Hartley and Bradford ILP Municipal Platform, 1900. Courtesy of West Yorkshire Archives Service, Bradford

p. 229 Bradford Housing Conditions c. 1903. Courtesy of Bradford Museums and Galleries

p. 242 Campaign Flyer, Hugo Lindemann for Oberbürgermeister (Mayor) in Stuttgart, 1911. Courtesy of Stuttgart Stadtarchiv

p. 296 Stuttgart—Impoverished Family with Visiting Nurse. Courtesy of Stuttgart Stadtarchiv

p. 304 Carl Severing, 1898 Police Identification Photo, Bielefeld. Courtesy of Greven Verlag, Köln (Carl Severing, Mein Lebensweg, 1950)

p. 314 Hamburg, Germany Alley Quarters. Courtesy of Hamburg Staatsarchiv

p. 332 Lilian Locke, Labor Organizer and Woman Suffragist, Melbourne, c. 1905. Public domain, John Oxley Library, Brisbane

p. 332 Vida Goldstein, Journalist and Women’s Rights Advocate, Melbourne, c. 1901. Courtesy of Victoria State Library, Melbourne

p. 343 Wellington, New Zealand Impoverished District, 1898. Source: Wellington Harbor Board report. Courtesy of Wellington City Archives

p. 357 Christchurch Municipal Elections 1913, Social Democratic Platform. Courtesy of Turnbull National Library of New Zealand, Wellington

p. 362 “The Bushman’s Future,” The Worker (Brisbane), 14 May 1892. Courtesy of Mitchell Library of New South Wales

p. 426 A. Philip Randolph (L) and Chandler Owen, American Socialist Party Activists, Harlem, c. 1920. The Messenger, November 1920, University of Iowa Library

p. 433 Victor Berger with Emil Seidel and Cleveland Reformer Frederic Howe, c. 1910. Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society Archives

p. 447 Socialist City Program, Dayton, Ohio November 1911. Miami Valley Socialist, Courtesy of Wright State University Archives, Dayton

p. 471 Cleveland Streetcar Strike, 1899. Courtesy of Western Reserve Historical Society Archives, Cleveland

p. 479 Tom Mann Speaking at Strike Rally, Broken Hill, 1909. Courtesy of Outback Archives, Broken Hill Public Library

p. 481 Axel Danielsson (standing, center) with Tom Mann (seated, center), Malmö, Sweden. Courtesy of Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och Bibliotek (ARAB), Stockholm

p. 486 Walter Thomas Mills, American Socialist Activist in New Zealand, 1911–13. Courtesy of Hocken Library, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

p. 493 Milwaukee Social Democratic Party Municipal Campaign Book, 1912. Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society Library

p. 498 Broken Hill, New South Wales, Labor Party Municipal Program, 1908. Courtesy of University of Melbourne Archives

p. 507 Vienna’s Slum Housing, c. 1900. Courtesy of Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterinnenbewegung (VGA), Vienna

p. 559 F. W. Jowett, Bradford City Councillor and Chairman of Independent Labour Party (UK), 1917. Proceedings of the Independent Labour Party Congress, 1917, Courtesy of LSE Archives

p. 602 Wartime Censorship of Labour Leader, August 19, 1915. Labour Leader (Manchester), Public domain

p. 637 Anti-Conscription League, Melbourne, October 1916. Courtesy of Victoria State Library, Melbourne

p. 743 Women and Children Lining up for Bread in Germany, c. 1917. Courtesy of Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives)

p. 773 Toni Sender, Frankfurt, Germany, (c. 1916), Leader in the Revolutionary City Government, 1918–19. Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society Archives

p. 780 Demonstration of Workers and Soldiers in Munich [Kurt Eisner Riding in Wagon], January 1919. Illustrierte Reichsbanner-Zeitung, Courtesy of International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

p. 788 Jakob Reumann (L), City Councillor, Favoriten, Vienna (c. 1900) and Elected First Socialist Mayor of Vienna, 1919. Courtesy of Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterinnenbewegung (VGA), Vienna

p. 788 Franz Schuhmeier, City Councillor, Ottakring, Vienna, Assassinated February 11, 1913. Courtesy of Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterinnenbewegung (VGA), Vienna

p. 797 Red Vienna—Reumann Hof (Public Housing), built c. 1925, Photograph [2021] Courtesy of Joseph Heathcott

p. 803 Hugo Lindemann (second from left), Stuttgart, Labor Minister, 1918 Württemberg Provisional Government. Courtesy of Stuttgart Stadtarchiv

List of Abbreviations

ALP | Australian Labor Party
ANA | Australian Natives Association
AR | Arbeiterräte (workers’ councils) (Germany)
ASr | Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte (Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils) (Germany)
AWU | Australian Workers Union
BLU | Bradford Labour Union (UK)
CPE | Central Political Executive (Queensland)
CWC | Clyde Workers Committee (UK)
DORA | Defense of the Realm Act (UK)
FTC | Milwaukee Federated Trades Council
IISH | International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam)
ILP | Independent Labour Party (UK)
IPLL | Independent Political Labour League (NZ)
ISB | International Socialist Bureau (Belgium)
IWK | Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung
IWW | Industrial Workers of the World (US)
JOL | John Oxley Library (Brisbane)
KOL | Knights of Labor (US)
KP | Kommunale Praxis (Germany)
KPD | Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Germany)
LCC | London County Council
LDSP | Local Dayton Socialist Party (US)
LEL | Labour Electoral League (NSW)
LEL | Liberal Electoral Association (UK)
LL | Labour Leader (UK)
LRC | Labour Representation Councils (New Zealand)
LRC | Labour Representation Committee (UK)
Labour | Representation Committee (UK)
LSE | London School of Economics
MG | Manchester Guardian (UK)
ML | Mitchell State Library (NSW)
MSPD | Majority Social Democratic Party (Germany)
MVS | Miami Valley Socialist (US)
MW | Maoriland Worker (NZ)
NSW | New South Wales (Australia)
NZ | Die Neue Zeit
NZSDP | New Zealand Social Democratic Party
NZSP | New Zealand Socialist Party
PLC | Political Labor Council (Victoria)
PLL | Political Labor League (New South Wales)
PLP | Parliamentary Labour Party (UK & NSW)
PMA | Progressive Municipal Association (Wellington, NZ)
PM&A | Peoples’ Museum and Archives (Manchester (UK)
SAP | Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbeitareparti (Swedish Social Democratic Party)
SDAPÖ | Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs (Austrian Social Democratic Party)
SDF | Social Democratic Federation (New Zealand)
SDF | Social Democratic Federation (UK)
SDH | Social Democratic Herald (Milwaukee)
SDM | Social Democratic Party of Milwaukee (US)
SDP | Social Democratic Party (New Zealand)
SM | Sozialistische Monatshefte
SMA | Sydney Municipal Archives (Australia)
SMH | Sydney Morning Herald
SPA | Socialist Party of America
SPD | Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Germany)
TL | Turnbull National Library (Wellington, NZ)
TLC | Trades and Labour Council (UK and elsewhere)
UDC | Union of Democratic Control (UK)
UMA | University of Melbourne Archives
USCIR | US Commission on Industrial Relations
USPD | Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party) (Germany)
VGA | Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung Wien (Austria)
VSA | Victoria State Archives (Mebourne)
VSL | Victoria State Library (Melbourne)
WEWNC | War Emergency Workers National Committee (UK)
WFM | Western Federation of Miners (US)
WIB | War Industries Board (US)
WNC | Women’s National Committee (SPA, US)
WOC | Women’s Organizing Committee (Victoria)
WPO | Workers Political Organization (Queensland)
WYAS | West Yorkshire Archives Service (UK)

Notes

1 The basic outlines of Hartley’s and Thorn’s careers may be found in their respective entries, “Edward R. Hartley,” Dictionary of Labour Biography (London: Politicos, 2001), and the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, J. McAloon, “James Thorn,” www.dnzb. govt.nz. Hartley’s granddaughter wrote a brief biographical manuscript, Molly Jackson, ”Edward R. Hartley,” E. R. Hartley Papers, West Yorkshire Archives Service (WYAS, Bradford), and the autobiography of Thorn’s wife, Margaret Thorn, Stick Out, Keep Left, eds., Elsie Locke and Jacquie Matthews (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1997) fills in some critical details on Thorn’s life. As the Forward “vanner” in Scotland, 1911–13, following a year with the Clarion Van in South London and other parts of England, Thorn submitted colorful weekly reports of his propaganda work. In addition, both left manuscripts, E. R. Hartley’s in the WYAS, Bradford; James Thorn’s are more fragmentary, largely letters in the holdings of others, notably J. T. Paul Papers, Hocken Library, Dunedin.

2 E. R. Hartley, Diary, v. 1, 1900, January 9, February 13, 1900. See also Keith Laybourne, “ ‘The Defence of the Bottom Dog’: The Independent Labour Party in Local Politics,” Victorian Bradford (Bradford: City of Bradford Metropolitan Council, 1982), 227–8, 234–5. J. Thorn to J. T. Paul, 23 January 1907, J. T. Paul Papers (MS-982/223), Hocken Library, Dunedin.

3 See, for instance, Edward Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” Essays in Labour History, Asa Briggs and John Saville, eds. (London: Macmillan Press, 1967 [1960]); David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism, and the First Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David Montgomery, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America, 1860–1920,” Le Mouvement Social 111 (Apr.-June 1980): 201–15. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 62–108 raises some of the comparative dimensions of these national movements.

4 See Patrizia Dogliani, “European Municipalism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Socialist Network,” Contemporary European History, II, 4 (2002), 573–96. Also, idem, “The Fate of Socialist Internationalism,” in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 38-60, and Le Socialisme Municipal: en France et en Europe de la Commune á La Grande Guerre (Nancy: Arbre bleu éditions, 2018).

5 See Melanie Nolan, “Gender and the Politics of Keeping Left: Wellington Labour Women and their Community, 1912–1949,” in Communities of Women: Historical Perspectives, Barbara Brookes and Dorothy Page, eds. (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2002), Krista Cowman, “The Battle for the Boulevards: Class, Gender and the Purpose of Public Space in Late Victorian Liverpool,” Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850, Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “the People”: The Progressive Movement, the Labor Problem, and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 107–30; also Mary Beard, Women’s Work in Municipalities (New York: Appleton, 1915), and Stella Henderson, “Local Government Reform,” Conference Proceedings of the National Council of the Women of New Zealand, 3rd Session, April 20–28, 1898 (Wanganui: A. D. Willis, 1898), 25–34.

6 In some cases local politics embodied utopian aspirations. In Queensland, Australia, for instance, utopian William Lane led an exodus of labor activists to found a socialist colony in South America following the bitter defeat of the shearers’ strike in 1892; see D. J. Murphy, “Queensland,” in Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia, 1880–1920, ed. D. J. Murphy (Brisbane: Queensland University Press, 1975), 132–3, 136–7, 150–1, also Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), 19–34; and in Sweden, Herman Quiding provided socialist utopian inspiration to a generation of local activists that included Axel Danielsson in Malmö, see G. H:son-Holmberg, En Svensk “utopist” Nils Herman Quiding (Stockholm: Björck & Börjesson, 1909). On the influence of the Paris Commune, see the introduction to part I of this work.

7 Warren Magnusson, The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 164–5, 167.

8 Pat Thane, “Labour and Local Politics: Radicalism, Democracy and Social Reform, 1880–1914,” in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914, Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid, eds., 246. For a more detailed accounting of the LCC’s efforts, see Susan D. Pennybacker, A Vision for London 1889–1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London: Routledge, 1995).

9 For a detailed examination of these divisions within the SPD, see chapter 4 below.

10 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, München, 14 bis 20, September, 1902, 220. Translations from the German here and elsewhere in this book are my own. See also, Rainer Paetau, “Das erste kommunalpolitische Program der schleswig-holsteinischen SPD von 1901. Eine Dokumentation,” Demokratische Geschichte Jahrbuch zur Arbeiterbewegung und Demokratie in Schleswig-Holstein, 1, 1986, 47. Also, Eduard Bernstein’s comments on municipal socialism, Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (1909; New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 189–199.

11 The evidence is abundant of translocal interest in municipal socialist programs from places like the silver-mining town of Broken Hill in a remote corner of New South Wales, whose workers elected a labor municipal government in 1900 and drew inspiration from workers’ municipal organizing across the globe, faithfully reported each week in their newspaper, the Barrier Truth, or the Milwaukee socialists’ Social Democratic Herald, which in the years before the socialists’ municipal triumph in 1910 carried international reports of local municipal victories from around the globe. Or, for another example, the German SPD’s municipal organ, Kommunale Praxis, whose annual reports similarly celebrated socialist municipal triumphs far beyond Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich.

12 To the extent that the municipal realm draws attention in national historical narratives, scholars typically suggest that city politics provided a training ground for talented labor and socialist activists who went on to make their real contributions in the parliamentary realm.

13 One must be careful, of course, not to suggest that such municipal socialists all saw their local struggles in an international context. Their political orientations varied, as did their ideologies. They included technocratic Fabians, Christian socialists, aspiring parliamentarians, utopians, and syndicalist revolutionaries, as well as progressive reformers drawn to the larger, the more transformative agenda of the socialists. I do suggest a degree of convergence internationally in such locally grounded socialist practice. And, for this, I would argue, the evidence abounds.

14 The war induced or intensified splits in labor and socialist parties, discussion of which follows in chapters below. In Australia, for example, see Maurice Blackburn, “The Conscription Referendum of 1916” (Melbourne: The Anti-Conscription Celebration League, 1919) and special issues of the Australian Worker, September/October, 1916, November/December, 1917; Verity Burgmann, “Antipodean Peculiarities: Comparing the Australian IWW with the American,” Labor History, v. 40, n. 3 (1999), 386–92. The split between the SPD and the USPD in Germany is widely documented and is discussed in chapter 11 of this book; also, Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 217–49.

15 For instance, Ramsay MacDonald’s inquiry into the detailed results of municipal campaigns in 1908 was clearly motivated by the interests of a parliamentary-oriented party organization seeking to build a national strategy. See, “Correspondence, re. Municipal elections, 1908–9,” Labour Party Records, People’s Museum and Archives, Manchester. In Australia, local delegates to the Political Labor Council of Victoria objected to the heavy-handed imposition of state parliamentary candidates on local constituencies, Political Labor Council of Victoria, Annual Conference, Report of Proceedings, 1916 (Melbourne: Labor Call, 1916), pp. 39–40.

16 See, of course, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). Useful reviews of debates over the modernist impulses of nationalism include, Mapping the Nation, Gopal Balakrishnan ed. (London: Verso, 1996), especially Benedict Anderson’s “Introduction,” 1–16; Umut Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), Graham Day and Andrew Thompson, Theorizing Nationalism (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

17 E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and for the other classic statements of the constructedness of nationalism as an ideology, see Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.)

18 For an alternative view, see Gareth Stedman-Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900,” in Stedman-Jones, Languages of Labour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), which emphasizes the ways in which British popular culture reinforced patriotism and loyalty to the nation; for work that asserts the overriding importance of class, see Neville Kirk, Change, Continuity and Class: Labour in British Society 1850–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 143–58, also idem, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia 1880s to 1914 (London: Merlin Press, 2003).

19 Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, Henri Lefebvre, Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, eds. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 157, 158 (italics in original).

20 These ritualized aspects of local governance included the often-ceremonial appointment of committees, investiture of mayors and councillors, rituals of agenda setting and rulemaking that governed meeting procedures, ceremonies, and honorific titles (“his Worship the Mayor”) all of which reinforced elite governance.

21 Henri Lefebvre, Marxist Thought and the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016 [1972]), 17–18, quoting Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1846]), 143, 133. For an insightful application of Marxist theory to the politics of “the right to the city,” see David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso Press, 2019 [2012]), 115–140.

22 Stefan Berger and Angel Smith, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity across Five Continents, 1870–1939,” Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity, 1870–1939, Stefan Berger and Angel Smith, eds. (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), p. 13. Kevin Callahan explores the tensions between nationalism and internationalism in the Second International in, “ ‘Performing Inter-Nationalism’: French and German Socialist Nationalism and the Political Culture of an Internationalist Socialist Congress,” International Review of Social History, April 2000, v. 45:1, 51–88. See also his book, Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914 (Leicester: Troubador Publishing, 2010).

23 Stefan Berger, “The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe,” in Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, Stefan Berger, ed., (Houndsmills, Basingstokes: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 42–3. Berger takes note of the “hypernationalism of German Volksgeschichte, the intense patriotism of leading figures of the Annales school, and the much commented on Englishness of the Webbs.” For essays that suggest alternatives to master narratives, see Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist, Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998).

24 This tradition of national histories of parliamentary labor and socialist parties has deep roots going back to G. D. H. Cole and the Webbs in Britain, Robin Gollan, Bede Nairn, and John Rickard in Australia, and David Shannon and Seymour Martin Lipset for the US; for Germany Carl Schorske, Gerhard A. Ritter, and Jürgen Kocka and for Sweden, Herbert Tingsten and Göran Therborn. In each national historiography, some more recent work has examined local politics but generally without a sense of its internationalist dimensions. See, for instance, David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), J. Reynolds and K. Laybourne, “The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford,” International Review of Social History (1975), in Britain; Greg Patmore, “Localism and Labour: Lithgow, 1869–1932,” Labour History n. 78, May 2000, pp. 53–70, Lucy Taksa, “Workplace, Community, Mobilisation and Labour Politics at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops,” Bradley Bowden, “Hegemony, Transience and Community: Life in Inner City Brisbane, 1879–1885,” Labour and Community: Historical Essays, Raymond Markey, ed. (Wollongong: University of Wollongong Press, 2001) in Australia; and in New Zealand, Erik Olssen, Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995).

25 Political Labor League, New South Wales, “Executive Report for the Year 1901,” New South Wales Political Labor League, Scrapbook (compiled by John Dwyer), Mitchell Library, Sydney; for municipal programs of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, see annual reports of the SAP, Socialdemokratins program, 1897 till 1990 (Stockholm: Arbetärrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek [ARAB], 2001) and, for example, “Utkast till Arbetarepartiets Kommunalprogram,” December, 1900. Thanks to the late Klaus Misgeld, ARAB, for valuable assistance. For the German SPD debates over the municipal program, see Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, München, September, 1902 (Berlin, 1902), 203–23, and Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partie Deuschlands, Bremen, September 1904 (Berlin, 1904), 290–304. See also Patrizia Dogliani, “European Municipalism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Socialist Network.”

26 See Georges Haupt, “The Commune as Symbol and Example,” in Aspects of International Socialism, 1871–1914: Essays by Georges Haupt, Peter Fawcett, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 23–47; see also, H. E. Holland, “The Commune of Paris; the First Socialist Revolution,” (Wellington, NZ: Maoriland Worker, 1915) and Manuel Castells, “Cities and Revolution: The Commune of Paris, 1871,” in Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 15–26.

27 Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “the People”, 1–11, 191–204. As Berger observes for Britain, “the narrative construction of ‘the people’ was often used to defuse the disruptive potential of class and to unify the national narrative around issues of constitutionalism, freedom and individualism,” “The Power of National Pasts,” 42.

28 Warren Magnusson, Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 1, 5, 8–9.

29 A useful guide to theoretical work on urban space and its politics is Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1992); also David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), and idem, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Quotation from Magnusson, Politics of Urbanism, 5.

30 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, 120, 129, 135. See also, Katznelson, Marxism and the City, especially 92–140, for a critique of Harvey and Castells for having “abandoned the project of Marxist social theory” (140).

31 Neil Brenner, “The Problematique of Critique,” in Brenner, The Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2017), 22–3.

32 Andrew Herod, “Placing Labor,” Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America, Daniel Katz and Richard A. Greenwald, eds. (New York: New Press, 2012), 90, and Jane Wills quoted in Herod, 92.

33 Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, 2006), 289, 371. On new transnational labor solidarities, see, among many others, Place, Space and the New Labour Internationalisms, Peter Waterman and Jane Wills, eds. (Oxford, 2001), and Andrew Herod, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally? The Practice of International Labor Solidarity and the Geography of the Global Economy,” in Herod, Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001), 197–221.

34 The new labor history in the US made “community” and “shopfloor” microstudies a central feature of its recasting of labor history in the 1970s and 1980s. For a discussion of these approaches, see Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie, eds., Labor Histories: Class, Politics and Working-Class Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 1–15, and Perspectives on American Labor History: the Problem of Synthesis, Alice Kessler-Harris and J. Carroll Moody, eds. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989). A somewhat later, but parallel tendency in Australian labor history is evident in Labour and Community: Historical Essays, Raymond Markey, ed. (Wollongong: University of Wollongong Press, 2001). Noteworthy in Germany has been the emphasis on Alltagsgeschichte and community-level studies of socialist kommunalpolitik inspired, among others, by the work of Adelheid von Saldern; see, for example, her essay “Die Gemeinde in Theorie und Praxis der deutschen Arbeiterorganisationen 1863–1920. Ein Überblick,” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 12 Jahrgang, September 1976, Heft 3, 295–352, and “Sozialdemokratische Kommunalpolitik in Wilhelminischer Zeit,” in Kommunalpolitik und Sozialdemokratie: Der Beitrag des demokratischen Sozialismus zur kommunalen Selbstverwaltung, Karl-Heinz Nassmacher, Hrsg. (Bonn, 1977), 18–62. An older tradition of local studies in Britain has continued to enrich that field of labor history; see, for example, Keith Laybourn and David James, eds. “The Rising Sun of Socialism”: The Independent Labour Party in the Textile District of the West Riding of Yorkshire between 1890 and 1914 (Bradford: West Yorkshire Archives Service, 1991), and David Clark, Colne Valley, Radicalism to Socialism: The Portrait of a Northern Constituency in the Formative Years of the Labour Party, 1890–1910 (London: Longman, 1981), and many others.

35 Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 133, 140. Joan Scott, “Mayors Versus Police Chiefs: Socialist Municipalities Confront the French State,” in French Cities in the Nineteenth Century, John Merriman, ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 245.

36 The classic account of the formation and functioning of a proletarian public sphere is, of course, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1993 [1972]); see also, Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, ed. (Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 1992), 109–142, and Margaret Kohn, 36–44. For an evocation of workers reclaiming a “passionate city” in the spirit of the “early Marx,” see Andy Merrifield, “Metro Marxism, or Old and Young Marx in the City,” Socialism and Democracy, v. 15:2, July 2001, 63–84.

37 Quoted in Margaret Kohn, 137–8, Giuseppe Zibordi, “Primavera di vita Municipale,” Avanti (1910) and Filippo Turati, “Commune moderato e Commune populare,” Critica Sociale (1910).

38 One or another version of this labor or socialist municipal program is found throughout the industrializing world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See, for instance, Axel Danielsson’s proposal in Arbetet (Malmö), 9 December 1890, or H. Russell Smart, “Municipal Socialism,” ILP pamphlet, 1895, London School of Economics (hereafter LSE) Archives, or Hugo Lindemann’s detailed presentation at the 1902 SPD congress, Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, München, 14 bis 20 September 1902, 203–6, or “Municipal Labour Platform,” Tocsin (Melbourne), August 21, 1902, or Alexander Irvine, “Revolution in Los Angeles, 1911,” pamphlet, New York Public Library, or Algie M. Simons, “What the Socialists Would Do if They Won in This City,” pamphlet, Chicago, 1901, Wisconsin Historical Society.

39 Margaret Kohn, 137. The impact of these public sector standards helps to explain attacks in the US in recent years on public workers and their unions and resistance to cities raising the minimum wage.

40 The municipal franchise was almost universally more restrictive during this period than the parliamentary franchise, a symptom of the threat local elites perceived in expanded working-class voting in cities. The provisions ranged widely across the world from the plural voting of large property holders in Sweden (in Malmö as high as 700 to 1 in 1890), Australia, and New Zealand, to the Prussian three-tier voting system in Germany, to property and residency requirements (in virtually all countries) or in the US the elimination of “alien suffrage” along with the imposition of poll taxes and restrictive voter registration.

41 Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien: Geschichte der Frankfurter Stadtverordnetenversammlung, Bd.II 1901–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1995), 25.

42 For a powerful case in point in which auto manufacturers undercut Detroit’s capacity to maintain robust social services, see Jacob D. Hall, “The Myth of the Motor City: Urban Politics, Public Policy, and the Suburbanization of Detroit’s Auto Industry, 1878–1937,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, December 2013. And on the role of cities in fueling broader social transformation, see Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). On the political challenge of creating alternative models of urban life, see David Harvey, Rebel Cities, 127–64, and for an account of transitory moments of urban resistance in 1871 and 1968, idem, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, 53 (September– October, 2008), 23–40.

43 Mike Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (London: Verso Books, 2018), 217–22 (quotations on 219).

Introduction: “Paris Is Burning”: The Paris Commune and Historical Memory

1 Ibid. “L’Internationale,” 221.

2 David A. Shafer, The Paris Commune: French Politics, Culture and Society at the Crossroads of the Revolutionary Tradition and Revolutionary Socialism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 57–62. For a detailed dramatic account of the government’s maneuvers to capture the cannons and the peoples’ defense of them, see John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 23–32.

3 Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune 1871 (New York: Longman, 1999), 70. For Henri Lefebvre, the Commune was above all a “festival of revolution” or “the grand and supreme attempt of a city raising itself to the measure of human reality,” from Lefebvre, La Proclamation de la Commune (1965), quoted in Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 93.

4 John Merriman, Massacre, 38–42. On the role of local political clubs, see especially Martin Philip Johnson, The Paradise of Association: Political Culture and Popular Organizations in the Paris Commune of 1871 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

5 Tombs, 76–8.

6 Prosper Lissagaray, “The Programme of the Commune,” L’Action, no. 6, April 9, 1871, in The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left, Eugene Schulkind, ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 146–8 (quotation on p. 148).

7 Prosper O. Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871 (transl. Eleanor Marx Aveling) (London, 1886, transl. from the original French, 1876; reprinted Monthly Review Press, 1967), 200.

8 “Declaration to the French People,” April 19, 1871, reprinted in Robert Tombs, 217–19.

9 Donny Gluckstein, The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 168–9. Also, Lissagaray, April 6, in Schulkind, 148.

10 Prosper O. Lissagaray, 200.

11 David Harvey, Paris, the Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), 93–116. Other accounts of the Haussmannization of Paris include, David Pinckney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995).

12 For an astute analysis of the role played by stonemasons from the Creuse in the Commune, see Casey Harison, The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 21–6, 190–202.

13 The term “urban revolution” comes from the work of Henri Lefebvre, especially The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1970]). Manuel Castells draws heavily on that conceptual framework and the systematic data of Jacques Rougerie, Procès des Communards (Paris: Gallimard-Archives, 1978) for his own analysis, “Cities and Revolution: The Commune of Paris, 1871,” in Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 15–26 (quotation from 18).

14 David Harvey, Paris, the Capital of Modernity, 238.

15 Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 198–9.

16 David Harvey, 305–6.

17 Prosper Lissagaray, 218–19, based on a report given by Theisz to Lissagaray, Appendix VII, pp. 471–4 (quotation from 473). This episode is also recounted in less detail in Donny Gluckstein, 9.

18 See for instance, Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), David Stafford, From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse within the First International and the French Socialist Movement, 1870–1890 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 18–21, 78, 202; Günter Grützner, “The Impact of the Commune on Political Thought in Germany,” in Images of the Commune, Images de la Commune (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), 265–90; Martin Philip Johnson, The Paradise of Association, 275–88; Lenard R. Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

19 Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 39–104. Reflecting his later assessment, see his letter to F. Domela-Nieuwenhuis in the Hague, Holland, February 22, 1881, The Paris Commune of 1871: the View from the Left, Eugene Schulkind, ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 244–45, in which he wrote, “The majority of the Commune was in no wise socialist, nor could it be. With a modicum of common sense, however, it could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people—the only thing that could be reached at the time …”

20 Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht, April 6, 1871, Marx and Engels Collected Works, v. 44 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 128 and V. I. Lenin, newspaper article (1908) and notes for a lecture (1905) quoted in Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune 1871, 199–200.

21 “Proposal for Organization of Producer Co-operatives for Women,” (mid-May 1871), in Schulkind, ed. The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left, 178–80. This document is also discussed from a somewhat different perspective in R. Thomas, “Enigmatic Writings: Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France and the Paris Commune of 1871,” History of Political Thought, v. xviii, n. 3, Autumn 1997, 491–2.

22 Martin Phillip Johnson, The Paradise of Association, 276–7. Also, John Merriman, Massacre, 206–23, 251–4.

23 Collette E. Wilson, Paris and the Commune 1871–78: The Politics of Forgetting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 10–16.

24 Brousse and others articulated these views in a series of articles, “Le Socialisme Pratique,” in the anarchist paper La Solidarité Révolutionnaire, published in exile in Barcelona, June–July 1873, quoted in David Stafford, From Anarchism to Reformism 41–4.

25 Mary Putnam to George Haven Putnam, May 7, 1871, and Richard T. Ely, French and German Socialism in Modern Times (New York, 1883), quoted in Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, 52, 189.

26 Georges Haupt, “The Commune As Symbol and Example,” in idem, Aspects of International Socialism, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28.

27 Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, April 12, 1871, in The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left, Eugene Schulkind, ed., 197–8. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, Terrell Carver, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 192.

28 On Marx’s emphasis of the Commune’s attack on the state, see, for instance, Adelheid von Saldern, “Die Gemeinde in Theorie und Praxis der deutschen Arbeiterorganisationen 1863–1920,” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Band 3, September 1976, 300–305; and Dieter Rebentisch, “Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die kommunale Selbstverwaltung. Ein Überblick über Programmdiskussion und Organisationsproblematik 1890–1975,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte XXV Band, 1985, 5–6.

29 This evolution in Marx’s thinking is evident from 1872, according to Günter Grützner in “The Impact of the Commune on Political Thought in Germany,” in Images of the Commune, 284; also Eugene Schulkind, “The Historiography of the Commune: Some Problems,” in Images of the Commune, idem, 329.

30 Adelheid von Saldern, “Die Gemeinde in Theorie und Praxis,” 304–5.

31 Rosa Luxemburg, Correspondence (1898), and Karl Kautsky, The Road to Power (1909), quoted in Georges Haupt, “The Commune as Symbol and Example,” 40–1.

32 Georges Haupt, 43, 37. Martin Johnson argues that Marx “completed his evolution toward advocating mainly parliamentary, rather than revolutionary, means to socialism,” after the Commune. Martin Phillip Johnson, The Paradise of Association, 278.

33 Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 159–61, translated from the original Die Vorausetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Verlag, 1899). Also helpful on the convergence of Bernstein and Kautsky and polarization of Luxemburg’s views, is Günter Grützner, Die Pariser Kommune: Macht und Karriere einer politischen Legende: Auswirkungen auf das politische Denken in Deutschland (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1963), 177–188.

34 Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” 202, 194, 188–9. For a fascinating excursion into the contemporary making of the Commune’s meaning, see Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015).

35 H. E. Holland, “The Paris Commune: The First Great Socialist Revolution,” (Wellington, NZ: Maoriland Worker Press, 1915). The political significance of remembering the Commune was not lost on British workers in cities like Bradford that played a leading role in the formation of the Independent Labour Party. See, for instance, R. S. P., “The Commune: Interesting Facts for Propaganda and Others,” Labour Echo (Bradford), January 11, 25, February 1, 8, 1896.

36 Phillips Russell, “In Memory of the Commune: A Working-Class Demonstration in Paris,” International Socialist Review, v. xv, no. 2, August 1914, 69–71.

37 Quotation from Martin Phillip Johnson, The Paradise Association, 286–7. For debate surrounding the meanings of “dictatorship of the proletariat” and its relevance to the Paris Commune, see, among others, Karl Kautsky, V. I. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” excerpts in Eugene Schulkind, The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left, 268–80. On the debate between Lenin and German social democrats during WWI, see Günter Grützner, Die Pariser Kommune, 196–226. Engels famously but ambiguously closed his introduction to the new edition of The Civil War in France with the line, “Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Engels, “Introduction,” Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, 17–18.

1. The Rise of Cities and Elite Traditions of Urban Governance

1 John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, quoted in Gerald Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Walls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 187–8.

2 J. T. Bunce, “Municipal Boroughs and Urban Districts,” in Local Government and Taxation in the United Kingdom. A Series of Essays, 2nd edition, J. W. Probyn, ed. (1882), quoted in E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 322.

3 Leonardo Benevolo, The European City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 15. See also, D. M. Palliser, “The Origins of British Towns,” in D. M. Palliser, ed., Cambridge Urban History of Britain, v. 1, 600–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17–24.

4 For a helpful portrait of early trade and urban development in a premodern world system, see Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); also, for an engaging perspective on ancient antecedents, see Monica L. Smith, Cities: The First 6000 Years (New York: Viking, 2019).

5 Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth, “Prefatory Remarks: The Theory of the City,” in Max Weber, The City (New York: The Free Press, 1958; originally published 1908), 50.

6 Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 158–61, 181–3.

7 Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952; originally published 1925), 177–9; Benevolo, 24; Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 174–7, 178.

8 Carl Stephenson, Borough and Town: A Study of Urban Origins in England (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1933), 212, 208.

9 D. M. Palliser, “Towns and the English State, 1066–1500,” in The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell, J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser, eds. (London: The Hambledon Press, 2000), 128, 131–3, 134–5; quotation on p. 144, from York Civic Records, Angelo Raine, ed., Series 103 (1941), 115.

10 Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800 (London: Harper & Row, 1973; first published in 1967), 378–81.

11 David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City: From Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), 125–8.

12 Henri Pirenne, 114, 126–7.

13 For critiques of Pirenne, see Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 158–9, David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City, 181, 217.

14 Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2005), 66.

15 Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, as quoted in Joel Kotkin, 66.

16 The distinctive power and reach of the Italian commercial cities is testified to by virtually all historians of the subject. See, for instance, D. M. Palliser, “Towns and the English State,” 128, 134; David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City, 123–5.

17 Carl Stephenson, Borough and Town, 172–4, 178–9, 184–5. On the problems English kings faced in controlling London and some lesser English cities, see David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City, 236–9.

18 Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 188–193 (quotations on 190, 192).

19 Ibid., 176–82; David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City, 146–52.

20 Wim Blockmans, “Voracious States and Obstructing Cities: An Aspect of State Formation in Preindustrial Europe,” in Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800, Charles Tilly and Wim P. Blockmans, eds. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 228–9; on the rise of autonomous city-states in central Europe and the defensive alliances of cities, see William Harbutt Dawson, Municipal Life and Government in Germany (London: Longmans, 1914), 4–5.

21 Blockmans, 231 (quotation), 226, 231, 242–5.

22 Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 200–201, quoting Pirenne from Les Villes es les institutions urbaines (1939). Reynolds discusses the restrictions on the “franchise” to dues-paying permanent residents in many parts of Europe during the 11th through the 14th centuries, 184–8. Also David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City on the property-based definitions of citizenship, 202–4.

23 Charles Tilly, “Entanglements of European Cities and States,” in Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, 1000 to 1800, Tilly and Blockmans, eds., 15–16.

24 Wim Blockmans, “Voracious States and Obstructing Cities,” 241.

25 Ibid., 242.

26 Stephen Rigby, “Urban ‘Oligarchy’ in Late Medieval England,” in Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed., John A. F. Thompson (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), 64, 76–7. For the general argument, see Susan Reynolds, “Medieval Urban History and the History of Political Thought,” Urban History Yearbook, 1982, 20–22. Rigby’s counterargument is on 63–8.

27 P. Benedict, “French Cities from the Sixteenth Century to the Revolution: An Overview,” introduction to Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France, idem, ed. (London, 1989), cited in Penny Roberts, “English and French Towns in the Sixteenth Century,” in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: An Exploration of Historical Themes, Christopher Dyer, et al., eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 168.

28 Penny Roberts, “English and French Towns,” 169–173. See also, Rodney Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and M. P. Holt, “Popular Political Culture and Mayoral Elections in Sixteenth-Century Dijon,” in Society and Institutions in Early Modern France, idem, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).

29 Henri Pirenne, 182–3, 189–192. Quotation from Leonardo Benevolo, 75.

30 Ian A. Archer, “Politics and Government 1540–1700,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, v. II, 1540–1840, Peter Clark, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 236, 238, 240–1; William Harbutt Dawson, Municipal Life and Government in Germany, 5–6.

31 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, v. 1 (London: Harper & Row, 1972; originally published in French 1966), 327.

32 Ibid., 338, 340, 344.

33 Charles Tilly, “Entanglements of European Cities and States,” 13–14.

34 S. R. Epstein, “Introduction. Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800,” in Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16–17; for a discussion of differences between Epstein and Tilly and Blockmans, 16–19.

35 Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450–1750 (London: Longmans, 1995), 44, 51–2. For the trickle-down effects of royal chartering in Sweden’s truncated hierarchy of cities, see Robert Sandberg, “Town and Country in Sweden, 1450–1650,” in Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, S. R. Epstein, ed., 47–53, and Lars Edgren, “Craftsmen in the Political and Symbolic Order: The Case of Eighteenth-Century Malmö,” in The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900, Geoffrey Crossick, ed. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 134–5, 137–8.

36 Ian A. Archer, “Politics and Government 1540–1700,” 242–5.

37 Ibid., 242.

38 Christopher Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 47.

39 Older accounts, while mentioning the presence of women, neglected the deeper gendered significance of women’s roles. See, for instance, George Rudé, The Crowd in History, 1730–1848 (New York: John Wiley, 1964) described the “Rebecca’s Daughters” protests over tolls, poor law enforcement, and church rates, in which Welsh men dressed as women joined women in mass protests 156–63; also, E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, No. 50, February 1971.

40 Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 151. See also, Cynthia A. Bouton, “Gendered Behavior in Subsistence Riots: The French Flour War of 1775.” Journal of Social History 23, no. 4 (1990): 735–54.

41 Ian Archer, “Politics and Government, 1540–1700,” 244.

42 Anne K. Lancashire, “Continuing Civic Ceremonies in 1530s London,” in Civic Ritual and Drama, Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 81–2, 98.

43 Lorraine Attreed, “The Politics of Welcome: Ceremonies and Constitutional Development in Later Medieval English Towns,” City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 210–12, 215, 224. The vestiges of such practices continued, albeit in diluted form, in the ceremonial transitions between municipal administrations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in cities like Melbourne, Manchester, and Milwaukee. See chapters below.

44 Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1860–1840: Government, Society and Culture (Essex: Longman Publishing, 1999), 27–42. Court leets were local courts operating under royal and manorial authority; parish vestries had both religious and secular functions, including a substantial role in poor relief.

45 Nicholas Rogers details the Whig-Tory competition in London of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and in mid-eighteenth-century provincial towns, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 26–40, 230, 256; Ian Archer, 260–1; Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840, 65–6; Joanna Innis and Nicholas Rogers, “Politics and Government 1700–1840,” The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, v. II 1540–1840, Peter Clark ed., 552–3, 555–62.

46 Peter Clark, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, v. II, 1540– 1840, idem, 5, 7, 14.

47 Innis and Rogers, “Politics and Government, 1700–1840,” 530–38; see also Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government (London: Archon Books, 1963; orig. 1922), including volumes: Manor and Borough, Parish and County, and Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes.

48 Innis and Rogers, 539, 553, 561. Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 90–94; also Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities, 347–89.

49 Christopher Friedrichs discusses revolts in seventeenth-century Frankfurt and Cologne as cases in point, The Early Modern City, 311–12.

50 Edward P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, No. 50, February 1971, 79, 112, 136.

51 Nicholas Rogers highlights a more central and contested politics of cities in Hanoverian England in which popular activity was neither wholly orchestrated from above nor wholly independent, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 5, 9, 386–7, 405; also Innes and Rogers, “Politics and Government, 1700–1840,” 559–61, 563–6, 569–72; and, Christopher Friedrichs, “Artisans and Urban Politics in Seventeenth-Century Germany,” in Geoffrey Crossick, The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900, 50–52, on the alliances between merchant guilds and artisan craftsmen to attack “unguilded” rural craftsmen and their patrician patrons who controlled the city council in Lübeck and parallel conflicts in seventeenth-century Frankfurt and Reval.

52 S. R. Epstein, “Introduction. Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800,” in S. R. Epstein, Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4–14, 21–9. On proto-industrialization and its urban consequences, see Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present, 97 (1982), 16–113, and F. Mendels, “Proto-Industrialisation: The First Phase of the Industrialisation Process?” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972), 241–61.

53 B. Keith-Lucas, “Introduction,” Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Parish and the County, v. 1, English Local Government (New York: Archon Books, 1963; first published, 1906), v–vii.

54 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Parish and the County, 3–4. The real and personal property holdings of the parishes included “their churches and burial grounds, their parish cottages and workhouses, their common lands and endowed charities, their market-crosses, pumps, pounds, whipping-posts, stocks, cages, watch-houses, weights and scales, clocks and fire-engines,.” 4.

55 Ibid., 148–57, 166–72.

56 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes, with a Summary of the Development of Local Government Structure; v. 4 English Local Government (London: Archon Books, 1963; first published in 1922), 352–3.

57 Ibid., 353, 355.

58 Ibid., 356, 358–9.

59 Ibid., 363.

60 Ibid., 363–4, 367–8.

61 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Manor and the Borough, v. 3, English Local Government, 697–9, 700–701, and on the tumultuous conditions of the early industrial revolution, 694–705, and, of course, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966; originally published 1963).

62 Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840: Government, Society and Culture (Essex: Longman, 1999), 144–5, 148–50; also David Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government, 1780–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

63 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 808.

64 Poor Man’s Guardian, 25 October 1832, quoted in E. P. Thompson, 812.

65 Poor Man’s Advocate, 21 April 1832, quoted in E. P. Thompson, 816 (emphasis in original).

66 E. P. Thompson, 820, 818.

67 Francis Place, “The Peers and the People: Municipal Reform, Corn Laws, and Taxes on Knowledge,” 29 August 1835, J. A. Roebuck, ed., Pamphlets for the People (London: Charles Ely, 1835), 1–11. Subsequently Place noted bitterly the betrayal by “our Whig, Reform, and Radical members” who joined the Tories and “followed in the train of degradation and disgrace,” to further dilute the Reform Act, 11.

68 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Manor and the Borough, English Local Government, v. 3, 704, 706, 708–9.

69 Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840, 150–54; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Manor and the Borough, v. 3, 712–21.

70 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, v. 3, 718–19. Rosemary Sweet, 155. See also, Report from the Select Committee on Municipal Corporations with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before Them (Shannon, IRE: Irish University Press, 1968 [1833]).

71 Rosemary Sweet, 157–8. See also Derek Fraser, “Introduction: Municipal Reform in Historical Perspective,” in Municipal Reform and the Industrial City, Derek Fraser, ed. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 2–3, 5, and Joanna Innes and Nicholas Rogers, “Politics and Government 1700–1840,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, v. 2, 1540–1840, Peter Clark, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 568–72.

72 Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 1–2.

73 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, “An Alternative Judgment,” The Manor and the Borough, 727–37, 748–55 (quotations on 729, 735).

74 Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840: Government, Society and Culture (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 1999), 142–50, esp. 149.

75 Rosemary Sweet, 152–161, esp. 157, 159 (quotation on 159); Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (New York: St. Martins, 1979), 12–13.

76 Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City, 7. Also, Bryan Keith-Lucas, English Local Government in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: The Historical Association, 1977), 13–14, 16.

77 Francis Place, “The Peers and the People: Municipal Reform, Corn Laws, and Taxes on Knowledge.” J. Parkes to Earl of Durham (Sept. 1835), quoted in Derek Fraser, “Introduction: Municipal Reform in Historical Perspective,” in Municipal Reform and the Industrial City, 4.

78 Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City, 5.

79 Derek Fraser, “Introduction: Municipal Reform in Historical Perspective,” 2.

80 Ibid., 3.

81 Ibid., 4–5, 7 (quote.)

82 Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 92.

83 T. Avery, “Municipal Expenditure of Birmingham,” British Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Birmingham Meeting (1865), quoted in Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City, 100.

84 See, for instance, V. A. C. Gatrell, “Incorporation and the Pursuit of Liberal Hegemony in Manchester 1790–1839,” Brian Barber, “Municipal Government in Leeds 1835–1914,” and Adrian Elliott, “Municipal Government in Bradford in the Mid-nineteenth Century,” in Municipal Reform and the Industrial City, Derek Fraser, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); for Rochdale, Bolton, and Salford, see the excellent study by John Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial towns, 1830–80 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); and for London’s progressive administration, Susan D. Pennybacker, A Vision for London 1889–1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London: Routledge, 1995); the classic study of Manchester is Arthur Redford, The History of Local Government in Manchester, 3 v. (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1940).

85 Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 151–76, 252–5.

86 Fraser, Power and Authority, 102, 109.

87 E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, 171–6 (quotation on 172).

88 B. Keith-Lucas, “Introduction,” Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Parish and the County, English Local Government, v. 1, v–vi, x.

89 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes, English Local Government, v. 4, 481–2.

90 B. Keith-Lucas, “Introduction,” Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Parish and the County, x.

91 See, for instance, the insightful study by Richard H. Trainor, Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialized Area, 1830–1900 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1994); also John Garrard’s analysis of Rochdale, Bolton, and Salford, in Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns, 1830–1880 and V. A. C. Gatrell, “Incorporation and the Pursuit of Liberal Hegemony in Manchester 1790–1839,” in Municipal Reform and the Industrial City, Derek Fraser, ed., 15–60.

92 Webbs, Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes, 485.

93 On the intertwining of the Webbs’ scholarship and civic activism, see Royden J. Harrison, The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1858–1905: The Formative Years (Houndsmills, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 2000); Carole Seymour-Jones, Beatrice Webb: A Life (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992); Margaret Cole, ed., The Webbs and their Work (London: Frederick Muller, 1949).

94 Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership (London: LSE and Cambridge University Press, 1948), 166–7.

95 Lisanne Radice, Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists (London: Macmillan, 1984), 117.

96 Alan McBriar, “Sidney Webb and the LCC,” in Margaret Cole, ed., The Webbs and their Work, 89–92.

97 Ibid., 90.

98 Sidney Webb, Socialism in England, 1890, p. 7, quoted in Royden Harrison, The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1858–1905: The Formative Years, 209. For a fuller treatment of Morris’s ideology, see E. P. Thompson’s biography, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1977 [1955]).

99 James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 23–4.

100 Ibid., 488–9.

101 Ibid., 28–9, 39, 111–12; on the phenomenon of more open governance in smaller “home towns,” see Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 52–9, 137–142. On the decline of artisanal and guild representation on city councils in Germany see Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Artisans and Urban Politics in Seventeenth-Century Germany,” in Geoffrey Crossick, The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900, 47–8; on the expansive territorial designs of urban elites, Tom Scott, “Town and Country in Germany, 1350–1600,” S. R. Epstein, Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, 202–28.

102 William Harbutt Dawson, Municipal Life and Government in Germany (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914), 8–13.

103 Ibid., 13–20; James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866, 296–7, 487–91; Heinrich Hefft er, Die Deutsche Selbstverwaltung im 19. Jahrhundert: Geschichte der Ideen und Institutionen (Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler Verlag, 1950), 84–92, especially 91. For the most comprehensive biography of vom Stein, see Gerhard Ritter, Stein: einer politische Biographie (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958), especially 251–74 on the drafting of a reformist plan for reorganizing municipal government.

104 Dawson, 15–19; James J. Sheehan, “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Past and Present 51, 117–18.

105 Dawson, 19–22 (quotation from 22); and Heinrich Hefft er, Die Deutsche Selbstverwaltung im 19. Jahrhundert, 87–8 on English influences; also, Sheehan, German History 1770–1866, 487–8, 490–91.

106 Sheehan, German History 1770–1866, 487–9. For a discussion of elite formation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities, see Ralf Roth, “German Urban Elites in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Who Ran the Cities: City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750–1940, Ralf Roth and Robert Beachy, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 127–60. For a very helpful historical survey of the evolution of municipal self-government in Germany, see Adelheid von Saldern, “Rückblicke. Zur Geschichte der Kommunalen Selbstverwaltung in Deutschland,” Kommunalpolitik: Politisches Handeln in den Gemeinden (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1999), 23–36.

107 For a helpful set of essays on comparative class formation (primarily Germany, France, and England), see Arbeiter und Bürger im 19. Jahrhundert, Jürgen Kocka, hrsg. (München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1986), especially Kocka, “Bürger und Arbeiter. Brennpunkte und Ergebnisse der Diskussion,” 324–39.

108 Sheehan has a particularly helpful summary of local economic and political changes sweeping the cities of the German states after 1815, 491–523 (quotation 491).

109 Heinrich Hefft er, Die Deutsche Selbstverwaltung, 228, 184. Also, Sheehan, 491. For an overview of the constitutional evolution of municipal self-government, see Georg-Christoph von Unruh, “Die normative Verfassung der kommunalen Selbstverwaltung,” 560–78, and on the scope and practice of municipal self-government and the advent of reformist and socialist programs for city affairs, see Wolfgang Hofmann, “Auggaben und Struktur der kommunalen Selbstverwaltung in der Zeit der Hochindustrialisierung,” 578–644, in Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte. Band 3, Das Deutsche Reich bis zum Ende der Monarchie, Kurt G. A. Jeserich, Hans Pohl, Georg-Christoph von Unruh, hrsg. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1984). For a fuller discussion of three-class voting, see Wolfgang Hoffman, 606–12, and chapters 4 and 11 below.

110 Johannes Miquel, Reden, v. 3, quoted in Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; from German edition, 1988), 226–27; James J. Sheehan, “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” 135; On the politicization of local government in the nineteenth century, see Eberhard Naujokes, “Strukturwandlung kommunaler Selbstverwaltung in württembergischen Gemeinden während der frühen Industrialisierung,” Kommunale Selbstverwaltung—Idee und Wirklichkeit, Bernhard Kirchgässner und Jörg Schadt, hrsg. (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1983), 136–9.

111 Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany: Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 43–5. E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (London: Edward Arnold, 1973) compares British and Prussian nineteenth-century municipal reform and finds a much more closed, insulated system in Prussia. “The Prussian Municipal Ordinances of 1831 and 1856 are in this respect not so different from the English Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. Both provided the towns with a council of unpaid, part-time representatives elected by the tax-paying citizens. The major differences between the two systems were two: the sharper separation of the process of administration from that of representation, and the greater role played by professional civil servants.” But, quoting Wolfgang Hofmann’s study of Bielefeld, he notes that the Prussian reforms had the effect of “legitimising the long-standing group of leading citizens” whose perpetuation in office was then ensured by the three-tiered electoral system, 299–300.

112 Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “The Liberal Power Monopoly in the Cities of Imperial Germany,” in Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives, Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 99; James J. Sheehan, “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” 127–31 offers a more qualified view of liberals’ power in cities; see also Liberalismus und Region: Zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert, Lothar Gall u. Dieter Langewiesche, hrsg (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995).

113 Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany, 46–9.

114 Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 224–5; James J. Sheehan, “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” 131, 134.

115 Wolfgang Hofmann, “Die Entwicklung der kommunalen Selbstverwaltung 1848–1918,” in Handbuch der Kommunalen Wissenschaft und Praxis, vol. 1 (1981), cited in Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 224.

116 Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “Liberal Power Monopoly in the Cities of Imperial Germany,” 104.

117 Robert Sandberg, “Town and Country in Sweden, 1450–1650,” in Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, S. R. Epstein, 51–3.

118 Lars Edgren, “Craftsmen in the Political and Symbolic Order: The Case of Eighteenth-Century Malmö,” in The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900, Geoffrey Crossick, ed., 132–5, 137–8, 146–7.

119 Einar D. Mellquist, Rösträtt efter Förtjänst? Riksdagsdebatten om den Kommunala Rösträtten I Sverige, 1862–1900 (Stockholm: Stadshistoriska Institutet, 1974) (Voting According to Income? The Parliamentary Debate about the Municipal Voting System in Sweden 1862–1900), 324–9 (English summary).

120 Ibid., 325–6. In the small glassmaking towns of Kronoberg County, where the “community meeting” persisted into the twentieth century, see, for instance, the Protokoll of the Kosta Arbetarekommun, 28 Oktober 1908, 5 December 1909, re. meeting times and Protokoll Älghults Arbetarekommun, 21 March 1909, re. proposal for unions to pay back taxes of members to restore voting eligibility. Kronoberg County Arkiv, Växjö, Sweden.

121 Leif Lewin, Bo Jansson, Dag Sörbom, The Swedish Electorate 1887–1968 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972), 47–8; also, Torbjörn Vallinder, I kam för demokratin: Rösträttsrörelsen I Sverige 1886–1900 (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1962) (The Universal Suffrage Movement in Sweden 1886–1900), 280–81, 285–9 (English summary).

122 Madeleine Hurd, Public Spheres, Public Mores, and Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor: Univ of Michigan Press, 2000), 95–7; see also Bo Stråth, “Die bürgerlich Gesellschaft Schwedens im 19. Jahrhundert: Soziale Strucktur und politischer Wandel,” in Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 245–6, on the prolonged process of franchise liberalization.

123 James J. Sheehan, “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” 123–4; Dieter Langewische, Liberalism in Germany, 226 (quotation).

124 See Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City for case studies reflecting the range of municipal responses to the deepening urban crisis.

125 Jon C. Teaford, The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650–1825 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 4–5.

126 M. Carey and J. Bioren, eds., Laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1700–1802, v. 6, 21, quoted in ibid., 17.

127 Ibid., 32–4, 37–8. See also Gerald E. Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 36–8. Frug argues that incorporation of municipalities was not the dominant pattern by which the governance of North American cities was constituted, especially in New England.

128 Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Octagon Books, 1965; original 1946), 44–54, 77–8.

129 Samuel D. McKee, Labor in Colonial New York, 1664–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 45.

130 Ibid., 40–41, 53–4, 179.

131 Ernest S. Griffith, with Charles R. Adrian, A History of American City Government: The Formation of Traditions, 1775–1870 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983), 33–4.

132 Ibid., 36.

133 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 26–52; Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of US Cities and Towns, 1780–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 112; Ernest S. Griffith, et al., A History of American City Government: The Formation of Traditions, 1775–1870, 107–115.

134 Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 67–70.

135 For an important case study of the overriding role of propertied interests in urban governance, see Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). The literature on urban political machines and elite reform is massive. See especially Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Seymour Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed’s New York (New York: J. Wiley, 1965); Martin Shefter, “The Emergence of the Political Machine: An Alternative View,” in Willis Hawley, ed., Theoretical Perspectives on Urban Politics (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976); John Sproat, The “Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford, 1968); Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Zane Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford, 1968); Mark W. Summers, Party Games: Getting, Keeping and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

136 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 30–31, Ernest S. Griffith, et al., A History of American City Government: The Formation of Traditions, 1775–1870, 113–14; Sven Beckert, “Class and Politics: The Case of New York’s Bourgeoisie,” in Who Ran the Cities? Ralf Roth and Robert Beachy, eds., 195–6.

137 On the concept of the “private city” see Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); on the antidemocratic tendencies of bourgeois politics, see Sven Beckert, “Class and Politics: The Case of New York’s Bourgeoisie,” 195–212 and his massively documented, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); on “professionalization” of the police, see Philip J. Ethington, “Vigilantes and the Police: The Creation of a Professional Police Bureaucracy in San Francisco, 1847–1900,” Journal of Social History 21 (1987), 197–227, and his volume, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); also Allen Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice, Philadelphia: 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

138 See chapters 2, 6, and 7 below on local working-class political mobilization in the United States.

139 Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney, 1842–1992 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1992), 52, 140–44; F. A. Larcombe, A History of Local Government in New South Wales (Sydney: Local Government and Shire Association, 1955), 6.

140 Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane 1859–1959: A History of Local Government (Brisbane: Oswald L. Ziegler, 1959), 21–2, 40 (quotation), 50, 54, 64–7; Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41–7; Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982), 104–15; also Brad Bowden, “ ‘Some Mysterious Terror’: The Relationship between Capital and Labour in Ipswich, 1861–96,” Labour History, n. 72, May 1997, 184–9; and “The Emergence of Labour Identity in a Queensland Town: Ipswich, 1861–1912,” Australian Labour History Reconsidered, David Palmer, Ross Shanahan, Martin Shanahan, eds. (South Australia: Australian Humanities Press, 1999), 93–5.

141 F. A. Larcombe, A History of Local Government in New South Wales, 5–6; Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane 1859–1959, 53, 55.

142 Greenwood and Laverty, 55–6.

143 Max Solling and Peter Reynolds, Leichhardt: On the Margins of the City: A Social History of Leichhardt and the Former Municipalities of Annandale, Balmain, and Glebe (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997), 62; see also, Michael Hogan, Local Labor: A History of the Labor Party in Glebe, 1891–2003 (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2004), 7–8; John Lack, “Footscray,” The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain, eds. (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 281.

144 M. A. Jones, Local Government and the People: Challenges for the Eighties (Melbourne: Hargreen Publishers, 1981), 29–32.

145 Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney, 1842–1992, 51; also F. A. Larcombe, A History of Local Government in New South Wales, 5–15, 19–23.

146 Max Solling and Peter Reynolds, Leichhardt on the Margins of the City, 66.

147 On the largely unsuccessful efforts to achieve metropolitan government, except in Brisbane, see Graeme Davison and David Dunstan, “Hobbled by History? The Governmental Gap in Metropolitan Australia,” in Australia’s Metropolitan Imperative: An Agenda for Governance Reform, Richard Tomlinson and Marcus Spiller, eds. (Clayton, Victoria: CSIRO Publishing, 2018), 15–30, especially 22–6.

148 John Lack, “Footscray,” 281; on the Greater Sydney movement, Solling and Reynolds, 66–7, Fitzgerald, 128, and Hilary Golder, Sydney’s Electoral History: A Short Electoral History of Sydney City Council, 1842–1992 (Sydney: Sydney City Council, 1995), 33–7, and on labor’s local government interest, Fitzgerald, 129, Frederick A. Larcombe, “The History and Development of Local Government in New South Wales, 1857–1919,” Thesis for Degree of Master of Economics, 6 March 1944, 281–86, Peter Spearitt, Sydney’s Century: A History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), 25–6, Michael Hogan, Local Labor: A History of the Labor Party in Glebe, 1891– 2003, 41–54; in Melbourne the local labor party flirted with support for a “Greater Melbourne” movement as a means to expand the influence of its program, see “Municipal Labour Program,” Tocsin, August 21, 1902.

149 Hilary Golder, Sydney’s Electoral History, 12, uses “plural” to refer to voting by one property owner in multiple wards (where property was held) and “cumulative” to multiple votes within a single ward based on the value of properties owned.

150 Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney, 1842–1992, 136–8 (quotation on 138).

151 Frederick A. Larcombe, “The History and Development of Local Government in New South Wales, 1857–1919, 279–281 (quotation on 280); Shirley Fitzgerald, 138–9; Hilary Golder, Sydney’s Electoral History, 36–7.

152 Bernard Barrett, The Civic Frontier: The Origin of Local Communities and Local Government in Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979), 293–7; Greenwood and Laverty, 216–18.

153 On the founding of the New Zealand colony and the establishment of Auckland as its colonial capitol, see Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1991; originally 1959), 73–81; Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2003), 164–7. James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 179–211.

154 W. T. Power, Sketches in New Zealand with Pen and Pencil: From a Journal Kept from July 1846 to June 1848, quoted in G. W. A. Bush, Decently and in Order: The Government of the City of Auckland 1840–1971 (Auckland: Collins, 1971), 22.

155 Ibid., 19–26, quotation from 25.

156 G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington: A City and its Politics, R. H. Brookes, ed. (Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1970), 21–6; and for a more detailed account, George Michael Betts, “Participation in Civic Politics: A Study of Wellington City Council and the Part its Elected Representatives and Staff, Together with the Citizens, Play in the Decision-Making Process,” PhD dissertation, Victoria University—Wellington, 1969, especially 7–162.

157 Graham Bush, Local Government and Politics in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), 2; G. W. A. Bush, Decently and in Order, 42.

158 W. T. Power, Sketches in New Zealand, and Southern Cross, 26 February 1850, both quoted in G. W. A. Bush, Decently and in Order, 31, 33.

159 Graham Bush, Local Government and Politics in New Zealand, 6–11, quotations on 6, 9; Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, 154–5. In Wellington, civic enthusiasm was more restrained by ratepayers’ conservatism in the early years of incorporation, G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington, 35–7. On the growth of New Zealand’s four major municipalities, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin, see James Belich, Making Peoples, 188–9, 368–9; Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 172–3, 209.

160 G. W. A. Bush, Decently and in Order, 34–7, quotation on 37. By comparison, the franchise for provincial council elections and county boards, where rural interests of large “runholders” dominated, was notably more restricted to property owners and allocated plural votes to the largest owners, Graham Bush, 10–11; Michael King, 203.

161 G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington, 26–7.

162 James Belich, Making Peoples, 368–70 (quotation on 368). On Wellington’s inner-city congestion and expanding suburbs in the late nineteenth century, see Adrian Humphris and Geoff Mew, Ring around the City: Wellington’s New Suburb, 1900–1930 (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2009), 16–25.

163 Graham Bush, Local Government and Politics in New Zealand, 12 (Seddon quotation), 17–18; G. W. A. Bush, Decently and in Order, 51; G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington, 37–9.

164 Political scientist Warren Magnusson describes the outcome thus: “The municipality is designed to provide an enclosure for popular politics, and so to render that politics safe for the state, the market, and the other forms of government to which we are subject. The state in turn encompasses these enclosures and formally centres politics upon itself.” Magnusson, The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 10.

165 For the English case and the municipal government reforms of 1835, see Bryan Keith-Lucas, English Local Government in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City.

166 Albert Shaw, Municipal Government in Continental Europe (New York: Century, 1895), vi–xii, and also E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, 299–307 on comparison of Germany and Prussia, and R. Andrew Nickson, Local Government in Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995), on the origins and structure of local government in Spain (and Portugal) and across Latin America.

167 Locke is quite clear on this point (as is James Madison). “[The] supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent. For the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires that the people should have property, without which they must be supposed to lose that by entering into society which was the end for which they entered into it; too gross an absurdity for any man to own. Men, therefore, in society having property, they have such a right to the goods which by the law of community are theirs, that nobody hath a right to take them, or any part of them, from them without their own consent; without this they have no property at all.” John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, quoted in Frug, City Making, 35.

168 Justice Moody offered a particularly comprehensive rendering of that view in his majority opinion in Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh (1907). “Municipal corporations are political subdivisions of the State, created as convenient agencies for exercising such of the governmental powers of the State as may be entrusted to them … The power is in the State and those who legislate for the State are alone responsible for any unjust or oppressive exercise of it.” See Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, n. 264, Supreme Court of the United States, 207 US 161, 178-79.

169 Frug, 44.

2. Labor Conflict and the New Working-Class Politics

1 Sydney Morning Herald, September 16, 1890, quoted in Robin Gollan, Radical and Working-Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850–1910 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960), 134.

2 N. B. Nairn, “The 1890 Maritime Strike in New South Wales,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, v. 10:37, November 1961, 9–11; Robin Gollan, Radical and Working-Class Politics, 129–35.

3 The most comprehensive narrative of the maritime strike is Stuart Svensen, The Sinews of War: Hard Cash and the 1890 Maritime Strike (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995), 85–223; also, Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers Union 1886–1994 (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43–55; Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics, 132; Bradon Ellem and John Shields, “Making the ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’: Union Organising and Peak Union Agency in Broken Hill, 1886–1930,” Labour History, n. 83, November 2002, 68–9.

4 Erik Olssen, Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), 174–80; Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 1969; first published 1959); Stuart Svensen, The Sinews of War, 140–2, 161–2, 185–6; also, Erik Olssen and Len Richardson, “The New Zealand Labour Movement, 1880–1920,” in Common Cause: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Labour History (Wellington and Sydney: Port Nicholson Press, 1986), 4–5.

5 Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900 (University of New South Wales Press, 1988), 158–62; Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76–82.

6 Brisbane Worker, May 30, 1891, quoted in Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, One Big Union, 51–2.

7 Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 14.

8 See Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: the Telegraph and Glocalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 88–92 on the impact of telegraphic communication and the distribution of the news and Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions, 1750–2000, Aad Blok and Gregory Downey, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wire: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), and Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 3 vols., Dirk Hoerder and Christiane Harzig, eds. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987).

9 Dick Geary, “Protest and Strike: Recent Research on ‘Collective Action’ in England, Germany and France,” Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung im Vergleich: Berichte zur internationalen historischen Forschung, hrsg. Klaus Tenfelde (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1986), 364–9; see also, E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, v. 50 (1971), 76–136, Georges Rudé, The Crowd in History (New York: Wiley, 1964).

10 On early, emerging forms of collective action growing out of older traditions, see E. J. Hobsbawm, “Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements since 1800,” in, Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (New York: Anchor, 1967; orig. published 1964), 149–184, and David Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Science History, vol. 4:1, February 1980, 81–104.

11 David Montgomery offers, in many ways, the most compelling account of this process of working-class differentiation in early successive chapters of The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9–170.

12 See various national essays on Britain (Richard Price), Sweden (Birger Simonson), France (Jacques Kergoat), Germany (Klaus Tenfelde), Australia (Ray Markey), New Zealand (Erik Olssen), and the US (Shelton Stromquist), in The Formation of Labour Movements 1870–1914: An International Perspective, Marcel van der Linden and Jürgen Rojahn, eds. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990).

13 See the classic studies of the Second Socialist International, G. D. H. Cole, The Second International 1889–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1956) and James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

14 On the Great Depression of the late nineteenth century, 1873–1897, and its political and economic consequences see David Gordon, Michael Reich and Richard Edwards, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.) The work on nineteenth-century labor migration is vast, but an especially useful starting point is Frank Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century,” in Herbert Moller, ed., Population Movements in Modern European History (New York: Macmillan, 1964). On immigrants as carriers of traditions of working-class radicalism, see Eric Foner, “Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish America,” in Foner, ed., Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 150–200; Hartmut Keil and John Jentz, German Workers in Industrial Chicago (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983).

15 For France, the quantitative analysis by Charles Tilly and Edward Shorter, Strikes in France 1830–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) remains the most complete; see also Michelle Perrot, Workers on Strike—France, 1871–1890 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987). For the US a number of older studies exist, including J. H. Griffin, Strikes: A Study in Quantitative Economics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, and more recently, P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); for railroad strikes, see Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 25–47; for Britain, see James Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1979), for Germany, see Klaus Tenfelde und Heinrich Volkmann, Hrsg., Streik: Zur Geschichte des Arbeitskampfes in Deutschland während der Industrialisierung (München: C. H. Beck, 1981), and for Scandinavia, Flemming Mikkelsen, Arbejdskonflikter I Skandinavien 1848–1980 (Københaven: Statens Humanistiske Forskningsråd, 1992).

16 Dick Geary, “Protest and Strike,” 378, and Hartmut Kaelble and Heinrich Volkmann, “Konjunktur und Streik während des Übergangs zum Organisierten Kapitalismus,” in Dieter Langewiesche u. Klaus Schönhoven, hrsg., Arbeiter in Deutschland (Paderborn, 1981), 269–95.

17 Clark Kerr, et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man (1964), as quoted in Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974, 4 and David Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” 93.

18 E. J. Hobsbawm, “Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements since 1800,” 170; see also David Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” 84–5.

19 David Gordon, Michael Reich, and Richard Edwards, Segmented Work, Divided Workers.

20 Wesley C. Mitchell, Business Cycles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1913), 46–62 remains the best guide to the global depression of the 1890s; for the United States, see also Rendigs Fels, American Business Cycles, 1865–1897 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 179–219 for an interpretation that gives considerable weight to the catalytic effects of monetary issues and what he terms “the silver problem.”

21 P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974, 14–16.

22 James E. Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1979) 49–51, 56–9, 94–6. Eric Hobsbawm, “The ‘New Unionism’ in Perspective,” in idem, Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 156–164; Dick Geary, “Protest and Strike,” 379, on “snowball effect.”

23 See Kaelble u. Volkmann, “Konjunktur und Streik,” 272–5; Dieter Groh, “Intensification of Work and Industrial Conflict in Germany, 1896–1914,” Politics and Society, v. 8 (1978), 349–97; also on the great miners’ strike of 1889, Klaus Tenfelde, “Die Traditionen der älteren Bergarbeiterbewegung und der grosse Streik von 1889,” in idem Tenfelde, Sozialgeschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft an der Ruhr im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1977), 573–97.

24 Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1830–1968, 112, 118, and for international comparisons, 306–331.

25 For Scandinavia, see Flemming Mikkelsen, Arbejdskonflikter I Skandinavien, 1848–1980, 46, 57.

26 E. J. Hobsbawm, “Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements since 1800,” 149, 164, 174, 172–3. These “explosions” have also been discussed by Montgomery, “Strikes,” Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Britain, Dieter Groh, “Intensification of Work and Industrial Conflict,” Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France, Bruce Scates, A New Australia, Ray Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900, and Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 and others.

27 David Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” 93, 95–100; on the organizational experimentation, sympathy striking, and “audacious” quality of rising levels of strike activity on US railroads in the period 1885–1894, see Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 24–47, 48–99, 267–8, 272–4.

28 Sari Bennett and Carville Earle, “The Geography of Strikes in the United States, 1881–1894,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, v. 13:1 (Summer 1982), 68–71 noted the regional character of strike contagion. Flemming Mikkelsen, Arbejdskonflikter I Skandinavien, 1848–1980, 67, also detected industry-specific regional patterns of strikes in Sweden. Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France found distinct regional patterns, although over the course of the nineteenth century some dispersal occurred. On American railroads, the Midwest and West saw significant spikes in strike activity and percentages of workers on strike as compared to the East and South; changing labor market conditions and the unique social relations of “railroad towns” were largely responsible, Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 29–30, 127–141, 174–87.

29 James E. Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain, 39, 48–51.

30 Ibid., 49–50, 93–6; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism [1920], quoted in Cronin, 95.

31 E. J. Hobsbawm, “General Labour Unions in Britain, 1889–1914,” in idem, Labouring Men, 211–15.

32 On the Knights of Labor, see Robert Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1996), and idem Knights Down Under: The Knights of Labour in New Zealand (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), and on the Knights and the American Railway Union, Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 48–99. For the emerging hybrid unions and the role of socialist leadership, see John Laslett, Labor and the Left and David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, especially 58–170 and 276–90. On the transition from KOL assemblies to industrial union locals, see Shelton Stromquist, “Looking Both Ways: Ideological Crisis and Working-Class Recomposition in the 1890s,” unpublished paper presented at the conference, “The Future of American Labor History: Toward a Synthesis,” Northern Illinois University, October 1984. And in Australia, Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, 49–68, Robin Gollan, Radical and Working-Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850– 1910, 99–109.

33 See, for instance, Richard Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 46–8, 171–3.

34 Hobsbawm, “Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements since 1800,” 157, 171. See Linda Lumsden, Black, White and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in its Heyday, 1900–1917 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014). Newspapers as widely dispersed as Malmö, Sweden (Arbetet), Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia (Barrier Truth), and Milwaukee (Social Democratic Herald) closely followed worldwide struggles.

35 On the international organizing efforts of the KOL, see Robert E. Weir, The Knights Down-Under: the Knights of Labour in New Zealand; Ken Fones-Wolf, Glass Towns: Industry, Labor and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890s-1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007) and Steven Parfitt, Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), and on the IWW, Peter Cole, David Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer, eds., Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (London: Pluto, 2017); Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For substantial documentation of the extent of these interconnections, see “Edward Bellamy,” “Knights of Labor” folders, Bert Roth Papers, Turnbull Library hereafter TL, Wellington, New Zealand.

36 Arbetet (Malmö), 20, 21, 24, 28, 30 October, 5 November 1890.

37 Australian Workman, October 3, 7, 10, 25, 1890.

38 On railroad workers, see Philip S. Bagwell, The Railwaymen: The History of the National Union of Railwaymen (London: Allen and Unwin 1963); Stromquist, “Railroad Labor and the Global Economy: Historical Patterns,” and on dock work, Lex Heerma van Voss, “ ‘Nothing to Lose but a Harsh and Miserable Life Here on Earth’: Dock Work as a Global Occupation,” in Global Labour History: A State of the Art, Jan Lucassen, ed. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006); see also Dockworkers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970, Sam Davies, Colin Davis, et al., ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), and on coal strikes, Jon Amsden and Stephen Brier, “Coal Miners on Strike: The Transformation of Strike Demands and the Formation of a National Union,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7:4 (Spring 1977), 583–616, Klaus Tenfelde, Sozialgeschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft an der Ruhr.

39 On Carnegie Steel and the Homestead strike of 1892, see David Brody, Steelworkers: The Nonunion Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); also Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1992).

40 Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, One Big Union, 23–77, R. J. and R. A. Sullivan, “The Pastoral Strikes, 1891 and 1894,” in The Big Strikes: Queensland 1889–1965, D. J. Murphy, ed., (Santa Lucia, Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 80–99.

41 Ian Phimister, “Global Labour History in the Twenty-First Century: Coal Mining and its Recent Pasts,” in Global Labour History, Jan Lucassen, ed.; Klaus Tenfelde, Sozialgeschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft; Bradon Ellem and John Shields, “Making the ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’, 65–87.

42 Eduard Bernstein, “Karl Marx and Social Reform,” published in The Progressive Review, II (1897), 40–54, reprinted in H. Kendall Rogers, “Eduard Bernstein Speaks to the Fabians,” 330.

43 Eugene V. Debs, “How I Became a Socialist,” in Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs, Arthur M. Schlesinger, ed. (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948).

44 For the US case, see David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 89–114, 157–162; for other cases, Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

45 The changing character and objectives of strike activity are discussed in David Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” E. J. Hobsbawm, “Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements Since 1800,” James Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain, Michelle Perrot, Workers on Strike—France, 1871–1890, Charles Tilly and Edward Shorter, Strikes in France 1830–1968.

46 Leonard Bernstein, “The Working People of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the General Strike of 1835,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXXIV, n. 3, July, 1950, 336–9; Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989); David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans 1862– 1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967); James Green, Death in the Haymarket (New York: Pantheon, 2006), Phil H. Goodstein, The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 110–115; G. D. H. Cole, The Second International, 1889–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1960), 6–17.

47 Friedrich Engels to Friedrich Sorge, April 8, 1891, quoted in Phil H. Goodstein, The Theory of the General Strike, 116.

48 Phil H. Goodstein, The Theory of the General Strike, 126–131; also Rosa Luxemburg, “Steuerlos!”, Leipzig 1902 in Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 1, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972), 204–7, and Luxemburg, The Mass Strike: The Political Party and the Trade Unions (New York: Harper, 1971); Wilfred Harris Crook, The General Strike: A Study of Labor’s Tragic Weapon in Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931), 57–67.

49 Goodstein, 119–120. Also Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 231–5.

50 Eduard Bernstein, “Der Strike als politisches Kampfmittel,” Die Neue Zeit, 1893–4, 693–5 (quote on p. 694).

51 Friedrich Engels, Introduction, The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1966 [1891]), 15-18.

52 Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike: The Political Party and the Trade Unions (New York: Harper & Row, 1971 [1906]), 12–13. See the astute analysis of Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969 [abridged]), 154–60.

53 Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Progressivism and Municipal Politics in Cleveland,” Journal of Urban History, v. 23:2, January, 1997, 192–220; E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire” in Essays in Labour History, Asa Briggs and John Saville, eds. (London: Macmillan, 1960) for a discussion of how industrial conflict fostered independent labor politics; see also, Keith Laybourn, “ ‘The Defence of the Bottom Dog’: The Independent Labour Party in Local Politics,” in Victorian Bradford: Essays in Honour of Jack Reynolds, D. G. Wright and J. A. Jowitt, eds. (Bradford: City of Bradford, Libraries Division, 1982), 223–44; for Australia, Ray Markey, “The Emergence of the Labour Party at the Municipal Level in NSW, 1891–1900,” Australian Journal of History and Politics 31 (1985), Greg Patmore, “Localism and Labour: Lithgow, 1869– 1932,” Lucy Taksa, “ ‘Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place’: Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops,” Labour History, n. 79, November 2000, for Sweden, see articles in the Malmö newspaper, Arbetet, 24 October, 6–12 December 1890; also Herbert Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats: Their Ideological Development (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1973), 55, 151–4, 189–90, 362–4, 373–4.

54 The municipal programs of labor and socialist parties in this period abound with such concrete concerns. See, for instance, Barrier District Assembly, Australian Labor Party, “Municipal Platform, January 30, 1908,” University of Melbourne Archives.

55 Phil H. Goodstein, The Theory of the General Strike, 107–143.

56 The initial political impact of the maritime strike in New Zealand contributed to a somewhat different outcome by helping to regenerate a liberalism committed to arbitration of industrial disputes. Independent labor politics at the municipal and parliamentary levels would emerge somewhat later as a substantial, influential political movement. For a useful orientation to the debate over this subject, see John E. Martin, “1890: A Turning Point for Labour,” in Pioneering New Zealand Labour History: Essays in Honour of Bert Roth, Pat Walsh, ed. (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore, 1994), pp. 21–51.

57 See N. B. Nairn, “The 1890 Maritime Strike in New South Wales,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, v. 10, n. 37, November 1961, 1–3.

58 F. Picard, “Henry George and the Labour Split of 1891,” Historical Studies, v. 4, n. 21, November 1953. Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism, and the First Republic, pp. 76–97, Noel Bede Nairn, Civilising Capitalism: The Beginnings of the Australian Labor Party (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1989, first published 1973), pp. 43–86.

59 Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party of New South Wales, 1880– 1900, pp. 181–2.

60 Raymond Markey, “The Emergence of the Labour Party at the Municipal Level in NSW, 1891–1900,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, September 1985, v. 31:3, 408–416; Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’, pp. 123–4, 140–41, 177–80, 189–92.

61 Quoted in Robin Gollan, Radical and Working-Class Politics, p. 134.

62 Australian Workman, October 18, 1890, November 22, 1890 (long quote from 10 January 1891). On the Australian usage of “labor” and “labour,” see Ray Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880-1900, xi.

63 Australian Workman, November 21, 1891, January 23, February 6, 20, March 5, 1892 (quotation from February 21, 1891).

64 Australian Workman, January 16, 1892.

65 News clipping: “Political Labor League Conference. A Representative Gathering. Fighting Platform for the Coming Election. 1898,” Annual Conference of the PLL, Newcastle, 26 January 1898, New South Wales Political Labor League, Scrapbook (compiled by John Dwyer), Mitchell Library, Sydney.

66 Ray Markey, “The Emergence of the Labour Party at the Municipal Level in NSW, 1891–1900,” 410–11.

67 PLL NSW, Executive Report for the Year 1901, New South Wales Political Labor League, Scrapbook (compiled by John Dwyer), Mitchell Library, Sydney.

68 The Tocsin, n.d., News cuttings, re. local government, Rose Scott Papers, Scott Family Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

69 Frank Bongiorno, The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1996), pp. 31–45.

70 See council minutes for Richmond and Footscray, 1898–1902, Victorian State Archives, Public Records Office, Melbourne; The Tocsin, July 31, 1902. For a detailed discussion of the growth of municipal political activism in Melbourne and other cities, see chapter 5.

71 The Tocsin, April 14, 1898, News cuttings re. labour movement, 1892–1916, Rose Scott Papers, Scott Family Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

72 On the tram strike in Brisbane, see D. J. Murphy, “The Tramway and General Strike, 1912,” The Big Strikes: Queensland 1889–1965, D. J. Murphy, ed. (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 117–131; A. A. Morrison, “The Brisbane General Strike of 1912,” Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand, 4, no. 14 (May 1950), 125–144; also Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982), 331–5. And on the Wellington strike, G. M. Betts (R. H. Brookes, ed.), Betts on Wellington: A City and Its Politics (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1970), 130–33; Wellington City Council Minutes, January 25, 31, 1912, 149–50; February 1–5, 1912, 151–164.

73 Brian E. Kennedy, Silver, Sin, and Sixpenny Ale: A Social History of Broken Hill, 1883–1921 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 84. The Barrier Truth, March 16, 1900, 2, quoted the local newspaper, the Bulletin, attributing the municipal victory of 1900 as due at least in part to Ben Tillett.

74 Today, a stunning reminder of this early mining carnage stands in a dramatic memorial atop the “broken hill” that recounts year by year the names, dates, and circumstances of each individual miner who died in the mines.

75 The general histories of Broken Hill’s labor heritage include, most notably, George Dale, The Industrial History of Broken Hill (Melbourne: Fraser and Jenkinson, 1918), Brian Kennedy, Silver, Sin, and Sixpenny Ale, and Bradon Ellem and John Shields, “Making the ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’: Union Organising and Peak Union Agency in Broken Hill, 1886–1930.” For the most detailed account of the 1892 strike, see George Dale, 21–67; also, Brian Kennedy, 66–72, and Ellem and Shields, 68–9.

76 Broken Hill City Council Minutes, February 27, March 5, 12, 19, April 9, 1896, Broken Hill Public Library.

77 “Mayors and Councillors of Broken Hill,” compiled by Janette Mackenzie (loose-leaf notebook, 2001), “Nominee List for the Broken Hill Council Elections, 1888–2004 (with occupations),” compiled by Brian Tonkin, 2004, Broken Hill Library.

78 George Dale, The Industrial History of Broken Hill, 251–3; Broken Hill City Council minutes, February 27–April 9, 1896; The Barrier Truth, February 18, 1899.

79 The Tocsin, July 26, 1900; George Dale, The Industrial History of Broken Hill, 252–3; The Barrier Truth, February 17, 24, 1900.

80 The Tocsin, July 26, 1900.

81 E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” in Essays in Labour History, 277–281; see also, Keith Laybourn, “ ‘One of the Little Breezes Blowing across Bradford’: The Bradford Independent Labour Party and Trade Unionism, c. 1890–1914,” in “The Rising Sun of Socialism”: The Independent Labour Party in the Textile District of the West Riding of Yorkshire between 1890 and 1914, Keith Laybourn and David James, ed. (Bradford: West Yorkshire Archives Service, 1991), 9–12; David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 177–84; Cyril Pearce, The Manningham Mills Strike, Bradford, December 1890–April 1891 (Hull: The University of Hull Publications, 1975). In many respects, the most compelling account of the new independent political direction pioneered by West Yorkshire workers is the political biography of Fred Jowett, the first labour councillor elected by the fledgling ILP in Bradford, who went on to serve in the city council for fifteen years, Archibald Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years: The Life of Jowett of Bradford (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), pp. 36–43. For a detailed discussion of the formation of the ILP, see chapter 3 below.

82 J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, “The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford,” International Review of Social History (1975), 329–331 (329, quotations by Shaftoe and Glyde from Bradford Observer, 27, 20 April 1891).

83 See Mary Blewett, “Diversities of Class and Gender Experience and the Shaping of Labor Politics: Yorkshire’s Manningham Mills Strike, 1890–91 and the Independent Labour Party,” Labor History, v. 47:4, November 2006, 519–25 (quotation on 525). Pearce and others argue that the strike was on the verge of collapse when the “free speech fight” erupted, Cyril Pearce, The Manningham Mills Strike, Bradford, December 1890–April 1891 (Hull: The University of Hull Publications, 1975), 44–6, 49–52.

84 E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 306–11 (307, quotation from Ben Tillett, Yorkshire Factory Times, 24 April 1891.)

85 E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 308. Colne Valley Labour Union, Minutes, July 21, October 27, 1891, May 7, 1892, January 14, 1893, West Yorkshire Archives Service, Huddersfield.

86 Reynolds and Laybourn, “The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford,” 323, 342–4; Mary Blewett, “Diversities of Class and Gender Experience and the Shaping of Labour Politics,” 527; E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 311.

87 J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, “The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford,” pp. 327–37; Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years, p. 42. For Jowett’s argument in support of municipal labour electoral activism, see F. W. Jowett, The Socialist and The City (London: George Allen, 1907), 1–7.

88 E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” p. 286; Molly Jackson, “Edward R. Hartley”; for his efforts in city council, see Edward R. Hartley “Diaries, 1900,” and campaign flyer, “A Few Reasons Why you Should Vote for Councillor Hartley,” Bradford City Council Election, 1900, E. R. Hartley Papers, WYAS, Bradford.

89 Ben Tillett, “Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a Failure?” (London: Twentieth Century Press, 1908), p. 12.

90 E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” pp. 308–9, 292.

91 See Kjell Östberg, Byåkrati och reformism: En Studie av svensk socialdemokratis politiska och sociala integrering from till första världskriget, p. 350; also, see the debate between proponents of parliamentarism and anti-parliamentarism in one local glassworkers’ community, Minute Book, Kosta Arbetarekommun, 31 December 1908, Kronoberg Arkiv, Växjo, Sweden. The German SPD, while acknowledging a place for municipal socialism, also treated city politics as a stepchild and gave little recognition to its leaders. See Adelheid von Saldern, ‘SPD und Kommunalpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich,’ Archiv für Kommunalwissenschaften (1984), pp. 198–203. See detailed discussion in chapter 4, below.

92 Peter Billing, Lars Olsson, and Mikael Stigendal, “ ‘Malmö—Our Town’: Local Politics in Social Democracy,” in Klaus Misgeld, Karl Mölin, Klas Åmark, Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992), 271–305. For accounts of strikes across Sweden and around the world, see Arbetet: Organ för Klassmedveten Arbetarrörelse (Work: the publication for the class-conscious labor movement) [Malmö], 20, 24, 28, 30 October, 1890. Public library, Växjö, Sweden.

93 Billing, et al., “Malmö: Our Town,” 276, 279–80, 282.

94 Arbetet, 24 October, 6 December 1890. On Danielsson’s role in the SAP, see Rickard Lindström, Axel Danielsson (Stockholm: Folket i Bilds Förlag, 1950.) My thanks to Lennart Karlsson for assistance with translations.

95 Arbetet, 6 December 1890.

96 Arbetet, 9 December 1890.

97 Arbetet, 15 December 1890.

98 See especially the field reports of party organizer, F. E. Elmgren, whose travels took him to various Arbetarekommun in Småland and Kronoberg, ‘Handlingar rörande valrörler, 1889–1910,’ (F 07 A:004) Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti (SAP) in Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv och Bibliotek [ARAB] (Stockholm); for municipal programs see annual reports of the SAP, Socialdemokratins program, 1897 till 1990 (Stockholm: Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, 2001) and, for example, ‘Utkast till Arbetarepartiets Kommunalprogram’, December, 1900 [ARAB]. Thanks to Klaus Misgeld, ARAB, for assistance. See also, for instance, Arbetet, 10 December 1894, 4 December, 12 December 1896. For the influence of utopian socialist Hermann Quiding on Danielsson and others active in municipal agitation, see G. H:son-Holmberg, En Svensk “utopist” Nils Herman Quiding (Stockholm: Björck & Börjesson, 1909) and thanks to the helpful suggestions of Ulla Eckström von Essen.

99 See Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 8 (Danielsson quote), and on the general development of bureaucratic and parliamentary tendencies in the SAP, see Kjell Östberg, Byåkrati och reformism, pp. 350–51.

100 The latest collection of essays to examine the 1877 strikes and their meaning is David Stowell, ed., The Great Strikes of 1877 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). My own essay in that collection, “ ‘Our Rights as Workingmen’: Class Traditions and Collective Action in a Nineteenth-Century Railroad Town, Hornellsville, New York, 1869–1882,” suggests the deeper roots of the conflict in railroad labor relations in some localities and the organized presence of an elusive “Trainmen’s Union” or “Brakemen’s Brotherhood” that may have served as a nascent industrial union in leading the strikes.

101 See Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

102 See Richard Schneirov, et al., The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999) and for a discussion, in that collection, of the Briggs House conference that considered the call for a wider general strike, see Shelton Stromquist, “The Crisis of 1894 and the Legacies of Producerism,” 179–203. Also, testimony of Samuel Gompers and Eugene V. Debs in the United States Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago Strike of June-July 1894 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 146–55, 189–90.

103 See David Montgomery essay on “Strikes”; Shelton Stromquist, “The United States,” in Marcel van der Linden and Jürgen Rojahn, eds., The Formation of Labour Movements 1870–1914: An International Perspective, v. 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 543–77.

104 An adequate accounting of the politics of Greenback-Laborism, especially in the strike-centered railroad towns, awaits a systematic treatment. For now, see John French, “ ‘Reaping the Whirlwind’: The Origins of the Allegheny County Greenback Labor Party in 1877,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, LXIV, April 1981, Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

105 Leon Fink’s Workingmen’s Democracy remains the most useful study of the labor parties spawned by the momentum generated by the eight-hour strikes, but see also Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, and for classic cases in the Midwest, see Ralph Scharnau, “Workers and Politics: The Knights of Labor in Dubuque, Iowa, 1885–1890,” Annals of Iowa, v. 48, n. 7, 8 (Winter/Spring 1987), 353–77 and Janet K. Weaver, “Pearl McGill and the Promise of Industrial Unionism: Button Workers, the Women’s Trade Union League and the AFL,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2019.

106 Chester Destler’s study, American Radicalism, 1865–1901: Essays and Documents (New London: Connecticut College, 1946) remains the best examination of the 1894 election in Chicago, but see also John P. Enyeart, The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870–1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) for western cities in the volatile 1890s and beyond.

107 On the Milwaukee socialists’ alliance with the Populists, see Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, 204–211; also Forrest McDonald, “Street Cars and Politics in Milwaukee, 1896–1901,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 39 (1955), 166–212, 253–7, 271–3, and on Cleveland streetcar wars, Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” 192–220 and Robert Bionaz, “Streetcar City: Popular Politics and the Shaping of Urban Progressivism in Cleveland, 1880–1910,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2002.

108 Stromquist, “The Crises of 1894 and the Legacies of Producerism,” 192–93; Verbatum [sic] Report of the Discussion on the Political Programme, at the Denver Convention of the American Federation of Labor, December 14, 15, 1894 (Indianapolis: American Federation of Labor, 1895), 8–13.

109 Walter Dean Burnham, “The System of 1896,” in Paul Kleppner, The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).

Introduction: Claiming Political Space: The Municipal Franchise and the Limits of Urban Citizenship

1 “James Sutch,” Samuel Merrifield, Biographies File, Victoria State Library (hereafter VSL); City of Richmond, Council Minutes, March 14, 28, 1901, June 7, 21, July 5, October 25, November 2, 1900, November 20, December 4, 18, 1902, January 29, February 12, March 12, 26, 1903 (VSA); “Municipal Labour Platform,” Tocsin (Melbourne), August 21, 1902. Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Portrait of an Australian Working-Class Community, 1900–1965 (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984), 7–42, provides a valuable portrait of the working-class milieu of Richmond.

2 Central Executive, Political Labor Council of Victoria, Minutes, August 9, September 5, November 1, 1902, July 16, August 13, 1904, VSL.

3 See, for instance, Fitzroy Branch, Victoria Political Labor Council, Minutes, June 14, 1905; President’s Report, Annual Conference of the Political Labor Council, Victoria, April 13, 1906, in Victoria PLC minute book, VSL. “Lessons of the Elections,” Tocsin, August 31, 1905, “Municipal Elections. Richmond East Ward,” Tocsin, September 1, 1904.

4 On the campaigns to win a voice or in some cases control of municipal governing bodies in Britain, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, see chapters 3–7 below.

5 The literature on women’s urban reform activity is enormous. For the United States, see for instance, Mary Ritter Beard, Woman’s Work in Municipalities (New York: Longman’s, 1915), 322–7, who recounted the impressive results of women’s first participation in Chicago municipal elections in 1914; also, Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford, 2000), Maureen Flanagan, Seeing with their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

6 On Emmeline Pankhurst’s municipal labour party activism and election to the Board of Guardians and the school board, see “Directory of the I.L.P. Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of the Fifth Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party, London, April 19–20, 1897, 33–9, Papers of the ILP, Archives, LSE, and June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2002), 39–64; on Vida Goldstein’s notable public career as a suffragist and ally of labor in Melbourne, see Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (Carlton, VC: University of Melbourne Press, 1993), 25–6, 180–84; see also the minutes of the Central Executive of the Political Labor Council, Victoria, Victoria State Library, for example 5/27/05, 9/2/05, 7/26/18, VSL; on New Zealand journalist and feminist Stella May Henderson’s efforts to open up local government to wider participation, end municipal suffrage restrictions, and win municipal ownership, see Coral Broadbent, “Stella May Henderson, 1871–1962,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, www.dnzb.govt.nz and Stella Henderson, “Local Government Reform,” 3rd Session, Proceedings, National Council of the Women of New Zealand, April 20–28, 1898, Wellington (Wanganui: A. D. Willis, 1898), 25–34. And on the fight for working women’s suffrage in the United States, Ellen Carol DuBois, “Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894– 1909,” Journal of American History, 74 (June 1987), 34–58.

7 See Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Sally M. Miller, “Women in the Party Bureaucracy: Subservient Functionaries,” in idem, ed., Flawed Liberation: Socialism and Feminism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 13–35, and idem, “For White Men Only: The Socialist Party of America and Issues of Gender, Ethnicity, and Race,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2–3 (July 2003), 283, 285–90, and idem, From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O’Hare (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 63–73; Janet K. Weaver, “The Road Not Taken: Pearl McGill and the Promise of Inclusive Unionism, 1894-1914,” Labor 19:2 (2022), 15-41; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics, 1900–1985 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); on Luxemburg and Zetkin, see Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 38, 98, 415; Susan Zimmerman, “A Struggle over Gender, Class and the Vote: Unequal International Interactions and the Formation of the ‘Female International’ of Socialist Women (1905– 1907),” in Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders, Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug, eds. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 101–26; Tania Puschnerat, Clara Zetkin: Bürgerlichkeit und Marxismus: eine Biographie (Essen: Klartext, 2003).

8 Stella Henderson, “Local Government Reform,” 28–9.

9 Graham Bush, Local Government and Politics in New Zealand, 12, 17–18; G. W. A. Bush, Decently and in Order, 51; G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington, 37–9; Henderson, 29; Jean Drage, “The Invisible Representatives: Women Members of Hospital and Area Health Boards,” in Women and Politics in New Zealand, Helena Call and Elizabeth McLeay, eds. (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1993), 82–5.

10 E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 11–13.

11 F. A. Larcombe, The Advancement of Local Government in New South Wales 1906 to the Present (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1978), 393–6.

12 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 186–7, 388.

13 Gunnela Björk, Att förhandla sitt medborgarskap: Kvinnor som kollektiva politiska aktörer i Örebro 1900–1950 (Negotiating Conditions of Citizenship: Women as Collective Political Actors in Örebro 1900–1950) (Lund: Arkiv, 1999), 325–31 (English summary), (quotation on 330); also Christina Carlsson, Kvinnosyn och kvinnoplolitik: En studie av svensk socialdemokratie 1880–1910 (Perceptions of Women and Women’s Politics: A Study of Swedish Social Democracy, 1880–1910) (Lund: Lund University Press, 1986), 318–26.

14 Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), xx–xxii. See also Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: Norton, 1988); and on the contested history of suffrage in the US, Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote, xxii–xxiii, 4–5.

15 Gerald E. Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 40–53, on the competing claims of property and citizenship and local vs. state power, and Warren Magnusson, The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 21–4, 164–82 and idem, Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like A City (London: Routledge, 2011) 1–15, 41–54, 116–120.

16 States typically exercise some oversight or prescribe limits on the setting of local property or sales taxes, for instance.

17 Prior to the end of WWI, in most countries eligibility to vote in municipal elections was different, and usually more restrictive, than in state or national parliamentary elections. See, for instance, weighted voting based on property ownership in Sweden and Australian cities, and the three-tiered municipal franchise in Prussian cities.

18 Classic studies of machine politics include Seymour Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed’s New York (New York: Wiley, 1965), Zane Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford, 1968), and Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

19 Working-class women found ways to assert their interests outside the municipal electoral area. See, for instance, the activism of women within the Women’s Organizing Committee (WOC) of the Victoria Political Labor Council (PLC), Minutes of the Executive Council, Victoria PLC, 8/19/05, 5/26/06, or their prominent roles in the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, or in Glasgow rent strikes of 1917, in “food riots,” free speech fights, and protests against conscription. On the role of women in municipal electoral politics, see Melanie Nolan, “Gender and the Politics of Keeping Left: Wellington Labour Women and their Community, 1912–1949,” in Communities of Women: Historical Perspectives, Barbara Brookes and Dorothy Page, eds. (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2002), Krista Cowman, “The Battle for the Boulevards: Class, Gender and the Purpose of Public Space in Late Victorian Liverpool,” Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850, Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “the People,” 107–130; also Mary Beard, Women’s Work in Municipalities, and Stella Henderson, “Local Government Reform,” 25–34.

20 The emerging conception of “rights” that accompanied the idea of full “urban citizenship” would be classed in today’s language of human rights as “social and economic rights,” what are called second-generation human rights. They became a centerpiece of the UN Declaration of Human Rights issued in 1948.

21 Municipal franchise restrictions of varied sorts were found in England, Australia, and New Zealand. On municipal franchise restrictions, for England, see Neal Blewett, “The Franchise in the United Kingdom 1885–1918,” Past and Present, n. 32, December 1965, pp. 27–56, Shena D. Simon, A Century of City Government, Manchester, 1838–1938 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), Appendix I: “The History of the Municipal Franchise,” pp. 425–39. Michael Hogan, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales,” Labour History, n. 72, May 1997, pp. 128–30, G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington: A City and Its Politics (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1970), pp. 37–9. In the US context, municipal voting is treated to a limited extent in Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote.

22 For a discussion of the logic behind a more universal parliamentary franchise in Germany, see Peter Steinbach, “Reichstag Elections in the Kaiserreich: The Prospects for Electoral Research in the Interdisciplinary Context,” Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 131–44. For general patterns of social democratic electoral mobilization in Europe, see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

23 See, for example, Paul Hirsch and Hugo Lindemann, Das Kommunale Wahlrecht (Berlin, 1905) and Paul Hirsch, 25 Jahre sozialdemokratischer Arbeit in der Gemeinde: Die Tätigkeit der Sozialdemokratie in der Berliner Stadtverordnetenversammlung (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1908), 17–51.

24 Gordon Wood and John Laverty, Brisbane 1859–1959: A History of Local Government (Brisbane: Oswald Ziegler, 1959), 296–303. G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington, 38–9.

25 President’s Report, Annual Conference of the Political Labur Council, Victoria, April 13, 1906, in Victoria PLC Minute book (VSL). “Lessons of the Elections,” Tocsin, August 31, 1905, “Municipal Elections: Richmond East Ward,” Tocsin, September 1, 1904. F. A. Larcombe, The Stabilization of Municipal Government in New South Wales, 1858– 1906, v. 2 (A History of Local Government in New South Wales) (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976), 263–4, 268; Hilary Golden, Sydney’s Electoral History, 34–8; Sheila Fitzgerald, Sydney, 1842–1992, 138–9. Minutes, Brisbane City Council, November 8, 1915; September 25, 1916, 85; December 13, 1920. See also Greenwood and Laverty, 297–9.

26 For party debates on the place and value of municipal politics, see ILP, Report of the 14th Annual Conference, Stockton, April 16, 17, 1906, 21, and Report of the 15th Annual Conference, April 1907, Derby, 21–2, 50. ILP Papers, LSE Archives. For the results of a 1908 survey initiated by Ramsay MacDonald, Labour Party secretary, to assess the strength of the party in recent municipal elections is discussed in chapter 3 below.

27 Neal Blewett, “The Franchise in the United Kingdom, 1885–1918,” Past and Present, n. 32 (December 1965), 32–3; H. C. G. Matthew, R. I. McKibbin, J. A. Kay, “The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party,” English Historical Review, October 1976, 726–7. See also, Henry Pelling, Social Geography of British Elections 1885–1910 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 7–8.

28 Matthew, McKibben and Kay, 730.

29 Matthew, McKibben, and Kay, 731–2; Duncan Tanner, “Elections, Statistics, and the Rise of the Labour Party, 1906–1931,” 906–7; idem, Political Change and the Labour Party 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–15, 124–8, 388–9, discusses the differences between the municipal and parliamentary franchise before and after 1918.

30 On the halting progress for reforming municipal franchise restrictions in Sweden during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Einar D. Mellquist, Rösträtt efter Förtjänst? Riksdagsdebatten om den Kommunala Rösträtten I Sverige, 1862– 1900 (Stockholm: Stadhistoriska Institutet, 1974), 322–32 (English summary). Also, Torbjörn Vallinder, I kamp för demokratin: Rösträttsrörelsen in Severige 1886–1900 (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1962), 280–89.

31 Socialdemokratiska Partistyrelsens Redogoerelse (Social Democratic Party Annual Reports), 1899, 1901, 1904, 1906; Smålands Folkblad (Jönköping), January 15, 1905; Peter Billing, Lars Olsson, and Mikael Stigendal, “Malmö—Our Own: Local Politics in Social Democracy,” in Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Party in Sweden, Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molin, and Klas Amark, eds. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992), 281.

32 Leif Lewin, Bo Jansson, Dag Sörbom, The Swedish Electorate 1887–1968 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972), 279–80; Sven Hedenskog, Folkrörelserna i Nyköping 1880–1915: Uppkomst, social struktur och politisk aktivitet (Uppsala, 1973), 158–173.

33 On the lockout and boycott of 1906–7, see Christina Johansson, Glasarbetarna, 1860–1910: Arbete, levnadsförhållanden och facklig verksamhet vid Kosta och andra glasbruk under industrialismiens genombrottsskade (Göteborg: Göteborg Universitet, 1988), 201–206 (English summary); Minutes, Arbetarekommun, Kosta, 29 September 1907, 6 February, 11 March, 18 May 1908, 29 January 1909, 4 February, 11 March 1910, 8 April 1910; also Minutes, Arbetarekommun Älghults, 21 March 1909 and 26 December 1910, where the shift in confidence and enthusiasm for workers’ political impact was very evident. Kronoberg County Archives, Växjö, Sweden.

34 See especially, Kjell Östberg, Kommunerna och den svenska modellen Socialdemokratin och kommunalpolitiken fram till andra världskriget (Eslöv: Böstlings bokförl, 1996), Rune Jungen, Vävarstad i uppror: Arbetarrörelsen i Borås, 1880–1920 (Borås, 1978), 270, 282–3, Socialdemokrtiska Partistyrelsens redogoerelse, 1911, 147; 1912, 97, 110; 1914, 124; 1919, 13.

35 Gerhard A. Ritter, “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in Sozialgeschichticher Perspective,” Historische Zeitschrift, Bd. 249 (1989), 316; William H. Dawson found a high proportion (93 percent) of socialists elected to municipal “magistrat” positions were in the three southern states, Municipal Life and Government in Germany (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1914), 80. For discussion of variations in the municipal franchise by state, that emphasizes the barriers in the South as well as North, see Hartmut Pogge von Strandman, “The Liberal Power Monopoly in the Cities of Imperial Germany,” Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives, Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack, eds., 103–117.

36 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischen Reich, 209–10; William H. Dawson, Municipal Life and Government in Germany, 65–7.

37 Merith Niehuss, “Die Stellung der Sozialdemokratie im Parteisystem Bayerns, Württembergs und Badens,” Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: Sozialdemokratie und Freie Gewerkschaften im Parteinsystem und Sozialmilieu des Kaiserreichs, Gerhard A. Ritter, hrsg. (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990), 121–2.

38 See Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote, but see also Walter Dean Burnham “The System of 1896” in Paul Kleppner, American Electoral Systems (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 147–202; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 153–4.

39 Burnham, 165–9. On the massive disfranchisement of African Americans in the South, see J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 238–46, 250–57 and Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 313–38. On the exaggerated claims of urban political corruption, see Paul Kleppner, Who Voted? The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout (New York: Praeger, 1982), 58–60, and Stromquist, Reinventing “the People,” 67–70.

40 For a fuller discussion of German cities during the war and postwar period, see chapter 11, and for Red Vienna see chapter 12.

3. Laborism and a New Urban Politics: England

1 E. R. Hartley Diary, v. 1, 1900, January 9, February 13, 1900; Minutes of the Bradford City Council, February 11, 1896; Molly Jackson, “Edward R. Hartley, a Monograph Compiled by his Grand-Daughter,” West Yorkshire Archives Service, Bradford Public Library. For an excellent account of Bradford’s local politics, see Keith Laybourne, “ ‘The Defence of the Bottom Dog’: The Independent Labour Party in Local Politics,” D. G. Wright, Victorian Bradford (Bradford: City of Bradford Metropolitan Council, 1982), 223–44.

2 The Labour Echo (Bradford), 5 October 1895.

3 Ibid,. 22 February 1896, 2.

4 David Howell has the most detailed and carefully assembled accounting of the representation at the ILP founding conference. David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 283–300, for the data on delegates, 290–92, 485–6. See also, Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party, 1880–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). On the role of Keir Hardie, Kenneth O. Morgan, Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist (London: Orion, 1997 [1975]); and on Fred Jowett, Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years: The Life of Jowett of Bradford (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946), 42–3.

5 E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963) is honeycombed with North-South distinctions that emphasize sharply different, though at times collaborative, radical traditions; see, for instance, 471, and “Homage to Tom Maguire,” Essays in Labour History, Asa Briggs and John Saville, eds. (London: Macmillan Press, 1967 [1960]), where he noted, “The national historian still tends to have a curiously distorted view of goings-on ‘in the provinces.’ Provincial events are seen as shadowy incidents or unaccountable spontaneous upheavals on the periphery of the national scene, which the London wire-pullers try to cope with and put into their correct historical pattern,” 276–77.

6 Workman’s Times, 30 July, 13 August 1892, quoted in David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 288.

7 E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 278, 310. David Howell, 183 (Bradford), 185–6 (Halifax), 232 (Leicester).

8 Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 14 January, 1893, p. 6. Most accounts ignore the controversy over naming a chair and imply an uncontested selection of Hardie. See, for instance, Northern Echo (Darlington), 14 January, 1893. Pelling alludes to some reservations among delegates about Drew being “less capable as a conference chairman,” without citing any source for the claim; Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party 1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965; 1954), 117. Howell cites Hardie’s recollection in April 1914, David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 293.

9 Daily News (London), 14 January, 1893, p. 2; Glasgow Herald, 14 January, 1893.

10 Northern Echo (Darlington), 14 January 1893; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 14 January 1893, p. 6; Glasgow Herald, 14 January 1893, p. 3.

11 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 16 January 1893, p. 5; Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 16 January 1893, p. 4.

12 Liverpool Mercury, 14 January 1893, p. 5.

13 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 14 January 1893, p. 6.

14 Nunquam [Robert Blatchford], “The Labour Conference,” The Clarion, 23 January 1893, 5. Jonathan Schneer, Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labour Leader (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 99–102, argues for a more charitable interpretation of Tillett’s outburst as strategically calculated to strengthen the trade union support for the new ILP and to win aid for the Bristol dockers who at that very moment were on strike. Eduard Bernstein’s memoir makes no mention of his attendance at the Bradford convention and barely mentions the ILP. His world in exile was very much bounded by London and the socialist intellectuals with whom he interacted, Eduard Bernstein, My Years in Exile: Reminiscences of a Socialist (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921.)

15 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 14 January 1893, p. 6.

16 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 16 January 1893, p. 5; Glasgow Herald, 16 January 1893, p. 4. See also Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party, 119–20, and David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 297–98.

17 E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 286 (emphasis in the original).

18 E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 301–2. In Leeds, the Fabian Society functioned as a bridge from the collapsing Socialist League and the Labour Electoral League to new initiatives by the Leeds Trades Council, see Tom Woodhouse, Nourishing the Liberty Tree: Labour Politics in Leeds, 1880–1914 (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 67–8. John Lister of Halifax recalled the formation of a Fabian Society there in 1891 and the active program of visiting lectures and agitation around labor issues, John Lister, “Article on the Independent Labour Party,” n.d., Lister Papers, West Yorkshire Archives Service (hereafter WYAS), Calderdale Library, Halifax. Thompson says that there were additional functioning Fabian Societies by the end of 1892 in Batley, Bradford, Copley, Holmfirth, Huddersfield, Sowerby Bridge, and by mid-1893 in Castleford and Dewsbury, Thompson, 302.

19 Leeds Mercury, 30 June 1890, quoted in E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 300–1. Tom Woodhouse, Nourishing the Liberty Tree, 65.

20 Tom Woodhouse, Nourishing the Liberty Tree, 68–74.

21 Yorkshire Factory Times, 10 July 1891, quoted in E. P. Thompson, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 309–10.

22 Patricia A. Dawson, “The Halifax Independent Labour Movement: Labour and Liberalism 1890–1914,” in ‘The Rising Sun of Socialism’: The Independent Labour Party in the Textile District of the West Riding of Yorkshire between 1890 and 1914, Keith Laybourn and David James, eds. (Bradford: West Yorkshire Archives Service, 1991), 46–51. See also, The Clarion, 16 January 1892, 1.

23 Ibid.

24 “Article on the Independent Labour Party, by John Lister,” n.d., Lister Collection, Calderdale Library, Halifax, p. 57.

25 Patricia A. Dawson, “The Halifax Independent Labour Movement,” 51–8.

26 The Independent Labour Party, “To the Workers of Great Britain and Ireland. Greeting,” Circular no. 1, April 1894; “Report of the NAC,” Minutes, ILP, 2nd Annual Conference, Manchester, February 2, 3, 1894, 3, Independent Labour Party Papers, LSE Archives.

27 Quotations from the Huddersfield Examiner, cited in Robert B. Perks, “ ‘The Rising Sun of Socialism’: Trade Unionism and the Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Huddersfield,” in ‘The Rising Sun of Socialism’: The Independent Labour Party in the Textile District of the West Riding of Yorkshire between 1890 and 1914, Laybourn and James, eds., 75–9 (quotations on 79).

28 Robert B. Perks, “ ‘The Rising Sun of Socialism’: Trade Unionism and the Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Huddersfield,” 81–5, 89–90 (quotations on 82, 85, 90). A parallel story for neighboring Colne Valley saw similarly early but limited electoral success in local council and school board elections despite a relatively weaker trade union base; see David Clark, Colne Valley, Radicalism to Socialism: The Portrait of a Northern Constituency in the Formative Years of the Labour Party 1890–1910 (London: Longman Group, 1981), 23–4, 35–6 and Minute Book, Colne Valley Division Labour Union, January 23, 1892, March 18, 1893, University of Huddersfield, Archives and Special Collections. See also, Ben Turner, About Myself, 1863–1930 (London: Cayme Press, 1930) on his involvement with Huddersfield and Colne Valley Labour Unions, 75–122.

29 David James, “Local Politics and the Independent Labour Party in Keighley,” in “The Rising Sun of Socialism,” Laybourn and James, eds., 106–7, 110–14; Keighley Labour Journal, 28 August 1897, quoted in James, 113–14. See also, his Class and Politics in a Northern Industrial Town: Keighley, 1880–1914 (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), 72–81, 87–93.

30 David James, Class and Politics in a Northern Industrial Town, 100, 129, quotation from Keighley Labour Journal, 20 October 1905. See also, David James, “Philip Snowden and the Keighley Independent Labour Party,” in Philip Snowden: The First Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Keith Laybourn and David James, eds. (Bradford: Bradford Libraries and Information Service, 1987), 6, 8–10. Also, Keith Laybourn, Philip Snowden: A Biography (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1988), 11–43.

31 F. W. Jowett, “Forward: Bradford Seventy Years Ago,” in Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years: The Life of Jowett of Bradford (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), 15, 24.

32 J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, “The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford,” International Review of Social History, XX (1975), 314, 320–27 (quotation on 320). Also, Keith Laybourn, “ ‘One of the Little Breezes Blowing Across Bradford’: The Bradford Independent Labour Party and Trade Unionism c. 1890–1914,” in “The Rising Sun of Socialism,” 1–27.

33 For a detailed discussion of the Manningham strike and its political impact, see chapter 2. J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, “The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford,” 327–31. For a more recent detailed account of the strike that emphasizes its political outcomes, see Keith Laybourn, “The Manningham Mills Strike, December 1890 to April 1891,” in The Centennial History of the Independent Labour Party: A Collection of Essays, David James, Tony Jowitt, and Keith Laybourn, eds. (Halifax, England: Ryburn Academic Publishing, 1992), 117–36. See also, Cyril Pearce, The Manningham Mills Strike, Bradford, December 1890–April 1891 (Hull: The University of Hull Publications, 1975). E. P. Thompson cites the formation or re-formation of trades councils across the North as a crucial factor in building momentum toward independent political organization: in Halifax (1889), Huddersfield (1890), Keighley (1890), Brighouse (1892), Spen Valley (1891), Dewsbury and Batley (1891), and the Yorkshire Federation of Trades Councils (1893), “Homage to Tom Maguire,” 309.

34 David James, “Local Politics and the Independent Labour Party in Keighley,” 116 (quotation from the Keighley Labour Journal, 16 December 1894).

35 David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906, 336–7 (quotation from F. Jowett, “What Made Me a Socialist,” n.d.).

36 David James, “Local Politics and the Independent Labour Party in Keighley,” 117 (quotation from Keighley Labour Journal, 26 January 1898).

37 Stephen Yeo, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896,” History Workshop, n. 4 (Autumn, 1977), 8, (quotations from Ben Turner, About Myself, 1863–1930, 79–80, and Alex M. Thompson, Here I Lie [London, 1937]).

38 David James, “Local Politics and the Independent Labour Party in Keighley,” (quotation from the Keighley Labour Journal, April 24, 1897).

39 On the development of labour churches, see Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party, 132–44; Tony Jowitt, “Religion and the Independent Labour Party,” in “The Rising Sun of Socialism,” 121–34; Leonard Smith, “Religion and the ILP,” in The Centennial History of the Independent Labour Party, eds. David James, Tony Jowitt, and Keith Laybourn, 259–76; Stephen Yeo, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896,” 5–56.

40 Mark Bevir, “Labour Churches and Ethical Socialism,” History Today, April 1997, v. 47:4, 50–51, 53, 55.

41 Stephen Yeo, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896,” 28 (quotation from Lord Snell, Men, Movements and Myself, London, 1938). Yeo notes the difficulty later interpreters have in grasping the magnitude of this historical moment. “The sheer scale of activity needs stressing, particularly to mid-twentieth century socialists accustomed to working in stonier ground and tempted to patronize the 1880s and 90s as the ‘origins’ of their own grown-up placidity.” 28.

42 Ibid., 29, (quotation from The Spectator, 21 April 1894).

43 Ibid., 30 (quotation from Lena Wallis, Life and Letters of Caroline Martyn, London, 1898).

44 Keith Laybourn, “ ‘The Defence of the Bottom Dog’: The Independent Labour Party in Local Politics,” in Victorian Bradford: Essays in Honour of Jack Reynolds, D. G. Wright and J. A. Jowitt, eds. (Bradford: City of Bradford, Libraries Division, 1982), 226; Keith Laybourn, “ ‘One of the Little Breezes Blowing Across Bradford,’ ” 19.

45 F. W. Jowett, The Socialist and the City (London: George Allen, 1907), 5–7, 34, 87–8.

46 Ibid., 10.

47 David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 328–30; Reynolds and Laybourn, “The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford,” 342–4; Laybourn, “ ‘One of the Little Breezes Blowing across Bradford,’ ” 17–19; Laybourn, “ ‘The Defence of the Bottom Dog,’ ” 227–8.

48 Patricia A. Dawson, “The Halifax Independent Labour Party,” 56–9; Robert B. Perks, “ ‘The Rising Sun of Socialism’: Trade Unionism and the Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Huddersfield,” 89–90; David James, “Local Politics and the Independent Labour Party in Keighley,” 118.

49 David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 333–4, 339–40. Bradford city councillor E. R. Hartley, in frequently quoted remarks, disparaged the apathy of the very poor and the conditions that made them so. J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, “The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford,” 319 (from Bradford Labour Echo, 30 November 1895).

50 Keith Laybourn, “ ‘The Defence of the Bottom Dog,’ ” 224.

51 “Directory of the I.L.P. Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of the Fifth Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party, London, April 19–20, 1897, 33–9, Papers of the ILP, LSE Archives.

52 ILP, “Directory of ILP Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of Annual Conference, May 1898, April 1899, May 1900, May 1901.

53 David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party 1888–1906, 340. See also, David Clark, Colne Valley, Radicalism to Socialism, 32–6; Bill Lancaster, Radicalism, Cooperation and Socialism: Leicester Working-Class Politics, 1860–1906 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), 114–15, 127–33; Tom Woodhouse, Nourishing the Liberty Tree: Labour Politics in Leeds, 1880–1914, 96–8;

54 Henry Pelling, Origin of the Labour Party, 155.

55 John Kennedy to Tom Mann, January 23, 1895, Francis Johnson Papers, Independent Labour Party Papers, Archives, LSE.

56 Patricia A. Dawson, “The Halifax Independent Labour Party,” 57–8.

57 The Labour Echo, 16 November 1895, 4.

58 Ibid., 21 December 1895, 4.

59 ILP, Wallasey District Branch, Minute Book, November 11, 1894, April 23, May 5, 1895. Labour Party Archives, Peoples’ History Museum and Archives, Manchester.

60 Ibid., January 21, 1896, September 7, 1897 (handbill), emphasis in the original.

61 Ibid., June 7, July 5, August 3, October 4, 1898.

62 Ibid., February 8, April 2, June 7, July 5, August 30, October 4, 1898; January 3, 12, 17, 31, 1899.

63 Ibid., February 4, 1900, March 3, 1901 (quotation).

64 Bill Lancaster, Radicalism, Cooperation and Socialism: Leicester Working-Class Politics, 1860–1906, 130–1.

65 David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906, 340 (quotation from Labour Leader, 3 December 1898).

66 “Directory of ILP Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of Seventh and Eighth Annual Conferences of the ILP, April 1899, May 1900; David Cox, “The Labour Party in Leicester: A Study of Branch Development,” 206–7 (quotation from ILP News, February 1899).

67 Ben [Tillett?] to [Tom Mann, Secretary of ILP], [no date, probably 1895?], Francis Johnson Papers (4/1895), ILP Papers, LSE Archives; “Directory of ILP Members on Public Bodies,” September 1905; on adaptations in party branches to local electoral work and alliances, David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906, 341–2. On Ben Tillett’s rocky relations with the ILP leadership, see Jonathan Schneer, Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labour Leader, 105–12.

68 Minutes, Central Branch of the ILP, Manchester, July 28, August 11, October 20, 1903; October 11, December 13, 1904; August 15, 22, October 3, 1905, Manchester Public Library.

69 “Directory of ILP Members on Public Bodies,” ILP Annual Conference Reports, 1897–1905.

70 Minutes, Halifax Workers Municipal Election Committee, March 12, June 11, September 3, October 13, 1903; March 3, April 1, 14, May 12, November 30, 1904; February 16, March 16, May 18, June 22, 1905, Halifax Calderdale Public Library, WYAS.

71 H. Russell Smart, “Municipal Socialism” (Manchester: Manchester Labour Library, 1895), ILP Papers, LSE Archives, 2.

72 H. Russell Smart, “Municipal Socialism,” 2. Smart’s 1908 comment is from the Labour Leader, 22 May 1908, in David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party 1888–1906, 325.

73 H. Russell Smart, “Municipal Socialism,” 16. Smart was the ILP candidate for parliament from Huddersfield in 1895 but, like virtually all other candidates that year, fared rather badly. See David Clark, Colne Valley, Radicalism to Socialism, 45–6, 174. Also, Robert B. Perks, “ ‘The Rising Sun of Socialism’: Trade Unionism and the Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Huddersfield,” 88–9.

74 “Voters … Study this Programme. Municipal Elections, 1895,” Bradford, Labour Echo Supplement, 19 October 1895; Citizen, “The I.L.P. and Municipal Socialism,” Labour Echo, 31 August 1895.

75 David James, Class and Politics in a Northern Industrial Town: Keighley, 1880– 1914, 129–30.

76 “Bradford Independent Labour Party, Municipal Tract No. 1,” by Tolie, 1901. ILP Papers, LSE Archives. “Labour Representation and Evening Sittings. Vote for Sutcliffe,” [n.d.] Rochdale ILP Campaign flyer, West Yorkshire Archives Service, Rochdale.

77 “A Few Reasons Why You Should Vote for Councillor Hartley. Bradford Moor Ward. Municipal Programme,” 1900. Bradford WYAS. “Municipal Election, 1905. To the Electors of Wardleworth Ward South. Thomas Whittaker,” Rochdale, WYAS.

78 Report, Annual ILP National Conference, 1903, 26–7.

79 “Moldreen and Dalton Ward. Board of Guardians Election, 1907. Huddersfield, T. N. Bentley and George Brown,” Campaign flyer, 1907. Elected in 1907, Bentley and Brown ran again successfully in 1910, “Huddersfield Labour and Socialist Election Committee. Dalton Township Guardians Election, 1910,” University of Huddersfield Archives. “Keep Down the Rates. Election of Guardians, 1901. J. P. Walker and John Law,” Campaign flyer. Rochdale, WYAS.

80 “Why Labour Men Should Be on Town Councils,” I.L.P. Municipal Leaflet, No. 1, 1909. ILP Papers. LSE Archives.

81 In 1895, the NAC acknowledged the substantial momentum that had developed in the party around local electoral activity. “In urban and rural districts, members of the ILP are now busily engaged in the work of administration, using to the full the limited opportunities afforded by the machinery of local government.” Report of the NAC, Third Annual ILP Conference, Newcastle, 1895. ILP Papers, LSE Archives.

82 David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906, 301–6 (quotation from 301).

83 See, [N.A.], “A Suggested Method of Organisation for the Independent Labour Party,” June 1894, ILP Papers, LSE Archives; David Howell, 309–10.

84 David Howell, 309–26, especially 315–17 (quotations on 312 and 317). See also, Frank Bealey and Henry Pelling, Labour and Politics, 1900–1906: A History of the Labour Representation Committee (London: Macmillan, 1958), 125–59, and Frank Beasley, “Negotiations between the Liberal Party and the Labour Representation Committee Before the General Election of 1906,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, v. XXIX, no. 80, November 1956, 261–74.

85 ILP, Report of the Annual Conference, Stockton, April 16–17, 1906, 53.

86 David Howell, 322–6 (quotation on 325 from Labour Leader, 22 May 1908).

87 ILP, Report of the Seventh Annual Conference, Leeds, April 3–4, 1899, 4; “The Advance of Socialism,” ILP News, 17 August 1901, LSE Archives.

88 ILP, Report of the Eighth Annual Conference, Glasgow, April 16–17, 1900, 11–12. See the program for the “Conference of Socialist and Labor Elected Persons,” Glasgow, April 13, 14, 1900, ILP Papers, LSE Archives.

89 From a copy of the MacDonald circular, Darwen and District Trades Council, Minutes, General Monthly Meeting, May 17, 1900; response from J. A. Cunnington, Bristol Trades Council Labour Electoral Association to J. Ramsay MacDonald, May 10, 1900; Bristol Association to LRC, July 6, 1900; in support of the LRC, George N. Barnes, Amalgamated Society of Engineers to J. R. MacDonald, May 5, 1900; Amalgamated Society of French Polishers, Great Britain and Ireland, Quarterly Report, June 30, 1900; Nottingham and District Trades Council, “Resolutions to Be Submitted to Public Meeting on Direct Labour Representation,” Labour Representation Committee Records, Labour Party Archives, People’s Museum and Archives, Manchester.

90 National Executive Committee (NEC), Labour Representation Committee, Minutes, May 10, September 21, November 3, 1900, January 10, June 13, 1901; Tom Gibb, Secretary, Jarrow Division, Labour League, December 1, 1900, LRC Records, Labour Party Archives, People’s Museum and Archives, Manchester.

91 See, for example, G. D. H. Cole, “The Rise and Fall of the ILP,” Manchester Guardian, 2 February 1943, ILP Papers, Miscellaneous, LSE Archives. “Right up to 1914 the ILP in effect ran the Labour Party. The ILP had branches all over the country, whereas the Labour Party had no individual membership and no real local organization. Thus, in practice, in most places the ILP branch was the Labour Party’s driving force. When the Labour Party after 1906 became an organized Parliamentary party, leadership in the ILP slipped more and more out of Hardie’s hands (partly because he was ill and aging) into those of Snowden and, above all, of Ramsay MacDonald who was also the Labour Party’s real Parliamentary leader.”

92 Report of the 15th Annual Conference, April 1907, Derby, 21–2, 50. ILP Papers, LSE Archives.

93 ILP, Report of the 14th Annual Conference, Stockton, April 16, 17, 1906, 21. For comparable struggles over home rule in municipalities in Germany and the United States, see chapters 4 and 6.

94 On the development of the Labour Party (and its parliamentary wing) out of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) between 1900 and 1910, see Keith Laybourn, A Century of Labour: A History of the Labour Party 1900–2000 (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2000), 3–12; F. Bealey and Henry Pelling, Labour and Politics 1900–1906: A History of the Labour Representation Committee (London: Macmillan, 1958), Alastair J. Reid and Henry Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party, 12th edition (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9–23; Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, 3rd edition (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 15–27.

95 Labour Leader, 22 May 1908, quoted in David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906, 325.

96 Labour Party Annual Report, 1911, p. 33, includes a summary of municipal election results, and seats gained and lost, between 1907 and 1910. For the longer-term trends and specific yearly index of Labour candidates elected and total Labour vote, see M. G. Sheppard and John L. Halstead, “Labour’s Municipal Election Performance in Provincial England and Wales 1901–13,” 40, 47.

97 [Party branches] to J. Ramsay MacDonald, Correspondence re. municipal elections, 1908–09, Labour Party Archives, People’s Museum and Archives, Manchester. [Numbering of the letters cited below are the numbers assigned to the letters by Arthur Peters, the ILP National Agent.]

98 No. 9: D. O. Jones, Bedford to J. R. MacDonald (hereafter JRM), November 8, 1908; no. 46: L. Rippon, Burnley and District LRC to JRM, November 28, 1908; no. 6: Ben Turner, Batley to JRM, November 7, 1908; no. 144: Newton Division Labour Party to JRM, November 5, 1908, Correspondence re. municipal elections, 1908–9, Labour Party Archives.

99 No. 156: Fred Plant, Registration Agent, Stockport Labour Party to Mr. Peters, November 26, 1908; no. 1 (Bradford), no. 18 (Blackburn), no. 59 (Clitheroe), no. 64 (Crewe), no. 113 (Manchester/Salford), no. 124 (Norwich), no. 128 (Oldham), no. 317 (Wakefield); no. 6: Ben Turner, Batley to JRM, November 7, 1908; J. Nuttal to Mr. Peters, November 5, 1908, Correspondence re. municipal elections, 1908–9, Labour Party Archives.

100 No. 62: T. J. Harris, Secretary, Coventry Labour Representation Committee to Mr. Peters, November 10, 1908; no. 128: Oldham Labour Party to Mr. Peters, n.d.; no. 132: Poole and Branksome Federated TLC to JRM, n.d.

101 No. 2iii: F. W. Jowett to JRM, November 18, 1908; no. 60: Mr. Hargreaves, Clitheroe Trades and Labour Council to Mr. Peters, November 8, 1908; no. 18: James Frankland, Secretary, Blackburn Trades and Labour Council to JRM, November 8, 1908; no. 74: Hartlepool to JRM, November 30, 1908; no. 97: John D. Macrae, Secretary, Leeds and District LRC, November 10, 1908; no. 105: John W. Morrisey, Liverpool/Fairfield to Mr. Peters, November 9, 1908; no. 317: Wakefield and District Labour Party to JRM, November 10, 1908; no. 128: Oldham Labour Party to Mr. Peters, n.d.; no. 156: Fred Plant, Registration Agent, Stockport Labour Party to Mr. Peters, November 26, 1908.

102 The Grayson controversy had erupted with his election as an ILP candidate for Parliament in a Colne Valley by-election in spite of Labour Party opposition and then with his ejection from the House of Commons in October 1908 for challenging the rules. Underlying the Grayson phenomenon was ILP and SDF criticism of the Labour Party’s compromises with the Liberals. See Keith Laybourn, A Century of Labour, 10–11, Alastair J. Reid and Henry Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party, 19–21, Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, 24–5.

103 No. 18: Jas. Frankland, Secretary TLC, Blackburn to JRM, November 8, 1908; no. 52: Jas. Hope, Secretary Carlisle TLC to JRM, November 12, 1908; no. 54: United Trades and Labour Council of Chester to JRM, March 1, 1909; no. 59: W. H. Boocock, Registration Agent, Clitheroe Division, Labour Representation Association to Mr. Peters, November 16, 1908; no. 62: T. J. Harris, Secretary Coventry Labour Representation Committee to Mr. Peters, November 10, 1908; no. 66: Darlington LRC to JRM, November 9, 1908.

104 No. 9: D. O. Jones, Bedford to J. R. MacDonald (hereafter JRM), November 8, 1908; no. 107: Ilkeston Division Labour Party to JRM, February 18, 1909; no. 128: Oldham Labour Party to Mr. Peters, n.d.; no. 161: C. R. Palmer, Secretary, Swindon and District TLC to JRM, November 9, 1908; no. 133: H. Sanderson, Reading Labour Party to JRM, n.d.; no. 46: L. Rippon, Burnley and District LRC to JRM, November 28, 1908.

105 On the Parliamentary Labour Party’s views of class relations, see J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., Socialism and Society (London: Independent Labour Party, 1908), xviii–xix, 184–92; also, Keith Laybourn, A Century of Labour, 11–12.

106 No. 59: W. H. Boocock, Registration Agent, Clitheroe Division, Labour Representation Association to Mr. Peters, November 16, 1908; no. 79: Harry Thomas, Huddersfield LRC to JRM, November 6, 1908; and on Tory-Liberal fusion, see no. 99 and other reports.

107 No. 118: J. E. Sutton, Bradford Ward, Manchester to JRM, November 8, 1908; no. 120: Nelson LRC to JRM, n.d.

108 Frank Bealey and Henry Pelling, Labour and Politics, 1900–1906, 98–9; see Nelson Weavers’ Association Executive Minutes for deliberations on municipal contests, cited in David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906, 61–2. Also, Joseph L. White, The Limits of Trade Union Militancy: The Lancashire Textile Workers, 1910–1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978).

109 David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906, 62–8.

110 “Directory of ILP Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of the Eighth Annual Conferences of the ILP, May 1900; see same reports for 1901–1905.

111 No. 120: Secretary, Nelson LRC to JRM, n.d., Correspondence re. municipal elections, 1908–9, Labour Party Archives, People’s Museum and Archives, Manchester.

112 Ibid.

113 For the role of the ILP in sustaining Nelson cotton operatives’ militancy in the strikes of the next decade, see Joseph L. White, The Limits of Trade Union Militancy, 98, 150, 167–73, 178. However, White neglects to include the ILP’s strength in municipal politics as a central feature of its radical tradition.

114 Naomi Reid, “Brocklehurst, Frederick (1866–1926),” Dictionary of Labour Biography, v. VI, 39–42, and “Mr. Councillor Frederick Brocklehurst, B.A.,” Manchester Faces and Places, v. X (Manchester: J.G. Hammond, 1899), 209–214.

115 “Directory of I.L.P. Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of the Fifth Annual Conference of the I.L.P., London, April 19–20, 1897, 33–9; see also, David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906, 337, 463.

116 Manchester Times, 5 May 1893. Comparable conflicts over the use of public space may be found in many cities. See, for instance, Christchurch, NZ, discussed below in chapter 5; also Worcester, Mass., Roy Rosenzweig, “Eight Hours for What We Will”: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Pittsburgh, Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984).

117 Naomi Reid, “Boggart Hole Clough and Free Speech,” Dictionary of Labour Biography, v. VI, 42–3; see also letters from the Ancoats Lodge of the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners and the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, Minutes of the Parks and Cemeteries Committee, City of Manchester, v. 16, July 3, 1896, 152–3, Manchester Municipal Archives.

118 Clarion, 20 June 1896, quoted in Naomi Reid, “Boggart Hole Clough and Free Speech,” 43.

119 Naomi Reid, “Boggart Hole Clough and Free Speech,” 44–5. On the significance of the Boggart Hole Clough protests for Pankhurst, see June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2002), 46–50, 84–5, and Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London: Routledge, 2002), 57–9.

120 Minutes, Council of the City of Manchester, July 28, 1896, 754–7, Manchester Municipal Archives.

121 Ibid., 757, 760.

122 Naomi Reid, “Boggart Hole Clough and Free Speech,” 45; also Northern Echo (Darlington), 9 November 1897.

123 Tom Regan (alderman), compiler, “The Labour Group: A Chronological and Alphabetical Record of the Labour Group on the Manchester City Council, 1894–1966,” (1967), Manchester Local Studies and Archives, Manchester Public Library.

124 “Mr. Councillor Frederick Brocklehurst, B.A.,” Manchester Faces and Places, 213.

125 Manchester City Council Minutes, v. 1894–95, May 22, 1895, 719, October 2, 1895, 1384; v. 1895–96, July 28, 1896, 741–73, September 9, 1896, 1384; v. 1896–7, January 6, 1897, 243–4, April 7, 1897; v. 1897–8, v. 2, August 3, 1898, 1665, October 5, 1898, 1918– 20; v. 1898–9, February 1, 1899, February 15, 1899, 350, 353–4, April 26, 1899, 515–6, June 21, 1899, 771–3; v. 1899–1900, November 9, 1899, 17–18, December 16, 1899, 141–2, May 2, 1900, 492–3; v. 1900–01, April 3, 1901, Manchester Municipal Archives.

126 Aldermen occupied a second chamber in city government, indirectly elected by members of the council, thereby ensuring, where Labour lacked a majority in council, the dominance of Liberals and Conservatives in the Board of Aldermen. Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 4 November 1897 (quotation); Manchester Guardian, 21 March 1898; Manchester School Board Minutes, v. 52, March 21, 1898, 257–8, v. 53, May 23, 1898, v. 54, November 28, 1898, 393–4, v. 55, December 19, 1898, 130, 135, January 19, 1899, 138–41; also School Management Committee, Manchester School Board, v. 17, April 4, 1898, 321–2, May 2, 1898, 339–40, June 20, 1898, 371, August 29, 1898, 417, Manchester Public Library. Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst, 60–65.

127 Besides the previously cited studies of these cities, see Sam Davies, Liverpool Labour: Social and Political Influences on the Development of the Labour Party in Liverpool, 1900–1930 (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), and Leon Fink, “The Forward March of Labour Started: Building a Politicized Class Culture in West Ham, 1898–1900,” Protest and Survival: The Historical Experience: Essays for E. P. Thompson, John Rule and Robert Malcolmson, eds. (London: Merlin Press, 1993), 279–321.

128 Naomi Reid, “Maben, William (1849–1901),” Dictionary of Labour Biography, v. VI, 179–81.

129 Justice, January 12, 1901, quoted in Naomi Reid, “Maben, William (1849–1901),” 80–81.

130 For the ILP-held seats in West Riding towns, see “Directory of ILP Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of the 8th (1900), 13th (1905), and 15th (1907) Annual Conferences of the ILP. Year-by-year election returns for Bradford from 1891 to 1910 are available in “Municipal Labour Vote Since 1891,” WYAS, Bradford.

131 Jack Reynolds, The Great Paternalist: Titus Salt and the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Bradford (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1983), 25; Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 132–3; Bradford Observer, 7 December 1843, quoted in Adrian Elliott, “Municipal Government in Bradford in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Municipal Reform and the Industrial City, Derek Fraser, ed. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 115.

132 R. Rawlinson, “Report on Street Improvements in Bradford,” 3 February 1851, quoted in Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City, 136.

133 F. W. Jowett, “Bradford Seventy Years Ago,” in Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years, 16, 23.

134 Henry Pelling, Social Geography of British Elections, 298–99.

135 No. 2: Thomas Brown and F. W. Jowett to JRM, November 18, 1908, Correspondence re. Municipal Elections, 1908–09, Labour Party Archives.

136 F. W. Jowett, “Business Capacity,” The Labour Echo, 28 March 1895, p. 2.

137 Bradford City Council Minutes, May 14, 1895, January 9, 1894, WYAS, Bradford Public Library.

138 Echoist, “Where Are We Now?” The Labour Echo, 16 November 1895, p. 4.

139 “The Manningham Victory,” 30 November 1895, pp. 3–4, “Labour Club Echoes,” 21 December 1895, p. 4, The Labour Echo.

140 Minutes, Bradford City Council, November 1, 1895, WYAS, Bradford Public Library.

141 “Bradford County Council and ‘Big Questions,’ ” 22 February 1896, p. 2, and “ ‘Poorly’ County Councillors,” 29 February 1896, p. 1, The Labour Echo. See also, Minutes, Bradford City Council, February 11, 1896.

142 Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years, offers the most detailed account of this episode, based on conversations with Jowett in 1943, 48–53.

143 Entry for March 26, 1900, E. R. Hartley Diary, v. 1, 1900, WYAS, Bradford Public Library.

144 November 1, 1900, January 3, 1901, E. R. Hartley Diary, v. 1.

145 February 13, 1900, July 10, 1900, E. R. Hartley Diary, v. 1.

146 August 14, 1900, v. 1, January 31, 1901, v. 2, E. R. Hartley Diary.

147 February 19, 1900, E. R. Hartley Diary, v. 1.

148 “On the Road to Socialism,” August 5, 1909 (no publication identified), E. R. Hartley Scrapbook, Miscellaneous, 1895–1909; Edward R. Hartley, Train Talks (London: Twentieth-Century Press, 1909), 59; for an overview of Hartley’s political career, Molly Jackson, “Edward R. Hartley,” especially 3–5; also Keith Laybourn and John Saville, “Edward Robertshaw Hartley (1855–1918),” Dictionary of Labour Biography, v. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1976), 97–9.

149 Minutes of Bradford City Labour Group, November 4, 10, December 8, 30, 1919, WYAS, Bradford Public Library. Comparable labor or socialist municipal caucuses appeared elsewhere when the strength of the council membership achieved a potentially dominant number. See, for instance, in Växjö, Kronoberg County, Sweden, Protokoll of the Kommungruppe SAP, April 3, 14, 1919, Kronoberg Archives.

4. “Like a Pike in a Carp Pond”: Municipal Socialism in Germany

1 The phrase referred to the disruptive role that SPD city councillor Max Quarck played in the elite-dominated Frankfurt city council: “als Hecht im Karpfenteich”, Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Abgehalten zu Bremen vom 18. bis 24. September 1904 (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1904), 21–2.

2 Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (abridged edition) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 71. Nettl provides an excellent orientation to the intra-Polish political struggles in which Luxemburg cut her teeth, 36–68.

3 Her two articles in the Leipziger Volkszeitung were republished in 1900 as a pamphlet, Reform or Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973 [1900, 1908].

4 Nettl, 88; for an account of her successive departures as editor of the Sächische Arbeiterzeitung and the Leipziger Volkszeitung, see 102–105 and 121–3.

5 Luxemburg to Leo Jogiches, May 1, 1899, quoted in Nettl, 109.

6 Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 13. Manfred B. Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96.

7 Ibid., 20, 23. Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (New York: Collier, 1962 [1952]), 262–70 provides a helpful analysis of Luxemburg’s critique of revisionism.

8 Nettl, 105.

9 “Eine taktische Frage,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, 6 July 1899, quoted in Nettl, 145. See also, “Sozialdemokratie und Parlamentarismus,” Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 1, Zweiter Halbband (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972), 447–55.

10 Nettl, 144. On the SPD’s “southern problem,” see below in this chapter.

11 Hugo Lindemann had written an influential book introducing German socialists to municipal socialism in England, Städteverwaltung und Munizipal-Sozialismus in England (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1906). For a biographical sketch of Lindemann, see Franz Osterroth, Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus (Hannover: J. H. W. Dietz Verlag, 1960), 198–200, and for a discussion of his role within party debates, see Gerhard A. Ritter, “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspective,” Sonderdruck aus Historische Zeitschrift, bd. 249, 1989, 313–15.

12 Klaus Eppe, “Der Aufstieg. Aus der Verfolgung in den Wartesaal 1. Klasse,” in Siegfried Bassler, Mit uns für die Freiheit: 100 Jahre SPD in Stuttgart (Stuttgart: K. Thienemann Verlag, 1987), 50–51, 65–9. See also the extensive clipping file of reports in the party press from across Germany about this seemingly unprecedented and controversial political choice by a party leader in a major German city to run for Oberbürgermeister, Clipping File on “Das sozialdemokratische Bürgermeisterproblem,” (10 Depot A, 1535), Stuttgart Stadtarchiv.

13 The debate is nicely summarized in Heiner Flues, ‘Kommunalpolitik im Kaiserreich und die Sozialdemokratie,’ (1979), unpublished manuscript, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bonn, 83–8. See also, Karl Kautsky, “Ein Parteigenosse auf Urlaub,” Die Neue Zeit (hereafter NZ) n. 29, 1911, Teil 2, 177–9 (cited in Flues, 86). Eduard Bernstein, ‘Aus Anlass des Falles Lindemann,’ Sozialistische Monatsheft: Internationale Revue des Socialismus (hereafter SM), 1911, Bd. 2, 668–675.

14 See “Sozialdemokratische Gemeindemehrheiten,” Kommunale Praxis. Wochenschrift für Kommunalpolitik und Gemeindesozialismus (hereafter KP), v. 13, n. 38/39, Berlin, 20 September 1913.

15 See discussion in Adelheid von Saldern, “Die Gemeinde in Theorie und Praxis der deutschen Arbeiterorganisationen 1863–1920. Ein Überblick,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 3/76 Sept., 310–13, and Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer (1844–1911): Eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2004), 511–21.

16 Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 18.

17 “Program der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, beschlossen auf dem Parteitag zu Erfurt 1891,” Eduard Bernstein Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. [All translations in this work, unless otherwise noted, are my own.] On the contradictions implicit in the Erfurter Programm, see Susanne Miller and Heinrich Potthoff, A History of German Social Democracy from 1848 to the present (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1986), 38–40, translated from Kleine Geschichte der SPD [1983].

18 For a useful discussion of these views, see Adelheid von Saldern, “SPD und Kommunalpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” Archiv für Kommunalwissenschaften, v. 11 (1984), 198–203.

19 Peter Nettl, “The German Social Democratic Party 1890–1914 as a Political Model,” Past and Present, n. 30, 1 April 1965, 66–7.

20 Peter Nettl, 69, 75. See, for instance, Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955) and Gary P. Steenson, “Not One Man! Not One Penny!” German Social Democracy, 1863–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981). The work of Adelheid von Saldern and Gerhard A. Ritter and a wide range of local studies published in the 1980s and 1990s provide some access to the extent of municipal activity by SPD party members. See, for instance, von Saldern, “SPD und Kommunalpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” 193–213 and Ritter, “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in Sozialgeschichticher Perspective,” Historische Zeitschrift, Bd. 249 (1989), especially 313–17.

21 Peter Nettl, “The German Social Democratic Party 1890–1914 as a Political Model,” 82. For the slightly different version of the original quote, Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischen Reich: Die Sozialdemocratische Partei und die Freien Gewerkschafter 1890–1914 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1959), 52–3.

22 Robert Michels, “Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Bd. 23, 1906, 471–556 (quotations from 549–50, 553).

23 Ibid., 553; some of these ideas prefigure his more developed critique in Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie: Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens (Leipzig: W. Klinkhardt, 1911), or in English translation, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Collier Books, 1962). For a study that argues that Michels’s observations were shaped by his involvement in the peculiar and unrepresentative world of the SPD in his town of Marburg where he taught initially from 1902 to 1907, see Andrew G. Bonnell, “Oligarchy in Miniature? Robert Michels and the Marburg Branch of the German Social Democratic Party,” German History, v. 29:1 (2011), 23–35.

24 Peter Nettl, “The German Social Democratic Party, 1890–1920 as a Political Model,” 85–6. Bonnell quotes Michels’s disparaging reference to “locals” written in a retrospective essay in 1932, “The so-called localists could not count on any great personalities, lacked any dynamism whatsoever, and were really always only ‘local,’ ” Michels, “Eine syndikalistisch gerichtete Unterströmung im deutschen Sozialismus (1903– 1907),” in Max Adler et al., Festschrift für Carl Grünberg (Leipzig, 1932), 361 [343–64], quoted in Bonnell, “Oligarchy in Miniature?” 33.

25 Volker Wünderich, “Von der bürgerlichen zur proletarischen Kommunalpolitik: Zum Defizit der kommunalpolitischen Konzeption in der Arbeiterbewegung vor 1914,” in Provinzialisierung einer Region: Regionale Unterentwicklung and liberale Politik in der Stadt und im Kreis Konstanz im 19. Jahrhunder. Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in der Provinz, hrsg. Gert Zang, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1978), 447. See the accounts of internal party conflict before 1880 in Carl F. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965 [1955]), 2–3. Also, Gary P. Steenson, “Not One Man! Not One Penny!”, 15–16, 22–3, 26–32.

26 Joachim Drogmann, “Zur Geschichte sozialdemokratischer Kommunalpolitik. Grundlagen und Anfänge sozialdemokratischer Kommunalpolitik vor und nach dem Sozialistengesetz (III). Die Kämpfe innerhalb der Berliner Parteiorganisation um die Beteiligung an den Kommunalwahlen,” Die demokratische Gemeinde, v. 9, Sept. 1963, 747–8.

27 Volker Wünderich, “Von der bügerlichen zur proletarischen Kommunalpolitik,” 448–9. Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer (1844–1911), 93–9.

28 Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer (1844–1911), 99–102 (quotation on 102).

29 Ibid., 181–3 (quotation from 182); also Karl Czok, “Ausgangspositionenen und Anfänge revolutionärer Kommunalpolitik in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1891,” in Evolution und Revolution in der Weltgeschichte. Ernst Engelberg zum 65. Geburtstag, Hrsg. Horst Bartel und anders, Band II (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1976), 607–8.

30 Berliner Volkstribüne and Berliner Volksblatt quoted in Joachim Drogmann, “Zur Geschichte sozialdemokratischer Kommunalpolitik. Grundlagen und Anfänge sozialdemokratischer Kommunalpolitik vor und nach dem Sozialistengesetz (III). Die Kämpfe innerhald der Berliner Parteiorganisation um die Beteiligung an den Kommunalwahlen,” 749–50; on the revolt of the Jugend against the party leadership, see Dirk H. Müller, Idealismus und Revolution: Zur Opposition der Jungen gegen den Sozialdemokratischen Parteivorstand 1890 bis 1894 (Berlin: Coloquium Verlag, 1975), 17–19.

31 Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer (1844–1911), 186–7.

32 Karl Czok, “Ausgangspositionenen und Anfänge revolutionärer Kommunalpolitik in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1891,” 609; George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 195. On municipal campaigns in Saxony in the 1880s and early 1890s, see James Retallack, Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 168–9, 285–8.

33 See Clara Zetkin’s letter to Paul Singer, quoted in Wünderich, 450 and Rosa Luxemburg’s collected articles from Leipziger Volkszeitung, 1898–99 published as Social Reform or Revolution, 29–31, 46–8, 52–3, 58–9, reflecting left-wing party leaders’ critique of reformism.

34 Karl Kautsky, “Ein sozialdemokratischer Katechismus,” NZ, 12 (1893–94), 368, quoted in Hedwig Wachenheim, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung 1844 bis 1914 (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1967), 322.

35 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich: Die Sozialdemokratische Partei und die Freien Gewerkschaftern 1890–1900 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1959), 11.

36 Volker Wünderich, “Von der bürgerlichen zur proletarischen Kommunalpolitik,” 450.

37 Adelheid von Saldern, “Die Gemeinde in Theorie und Praxis der deutschen Arbeiterorganisationen 1863–1920,” 295–352 (quotation on 314.) See also, idem, “Sozialdemokratische Kommunalpolitik in Wilhelminischer Zeit. Die Bedeutung der Kommunalpolitik für die Durchsetzung des Reformismus in der SPD,” in Kommunalpolitik und Sozialdemokratie. Der Beitrag des demokratischen Sozialismus zu kommunale Selbstverwaltung, Karl-Heinz Nassmacher, hrsg. (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1977), 18–62.

38 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich, 176. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917, 7.

39 See Dieter Rebentisch, “Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die kommunale Selbstverwaltung,” 11–12; also, George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social, 194–7 [especially 196–7 on the practical work of socialist city councillors.] On Bernstein as city councillor, see debate between Bernstein and city councillors from other parties about municipal rights and the franchise at a gathering of city councillors, when he served on the city council in Schöneberg, a suburb of Berlin, “Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des 33. Ordentlichen Brandenburgischen Städtetages, Landsberg, 6 u. 7 Juni 1910, 22–42, Eduard Bernstein Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

40 “Programm der Sozialdemokratishcen Partei Deutschlands beschlossen auf dem Parteitag zu Erfurt 1891,” Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokrtishcen Partei Deutschlands, Abgehaften zu Erfurt, vom 14. Bis 20. Oktober 1891 (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1891), 5–6; Manfred B. Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism, 64.

41 Steger, 64–5; on Bernstein’s disaffection with orthodoxy as early as 1891, see Eduard Bernstein, “Entwicklungsgang eines Sozialisten,” in Die Volkswirschaftslehre in Selbstdarstellungen, Felix Meiner, ed. (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1924), 18–21.

42 Steger, 100–101, quotations from Bernstein, “Ein Vorwort zur Programm-revision,” (1904) and “Der Revisionismus in der Sozialdemokratie,” in Ein Revisionistisches Sozialismus Bild: Drei Vorträge, Helmut Hirsch, ed. (1976), 23–9.

43 Steger, 106–8 (quotation on 108); see Eduard Bernstein, “Idealismus, Kampftheorie, und Wissenschaft,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (hereafter SM), 5, 1901, 597–608, and “Bildung, Wissenschaft und Partei,” SM, 11, 1907, 706–12.

44 Eduard Bernstein, My Years of Exile: Reminiscences of a Socialist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1921), 175–7.

45 Bernstein attended the founding conference of the ILP in Bradford in 1893, see chapter 2 above, and Steger, 66–71; also, Eduard Bernstein, My Years of Exile, 174–95, 221–82 (quotation from 226), and H. Kendall Rogers, “Eduard Bernstein Speaks to the Fabians: A Turning Point in Social Democratic Thought?” International Review of Social History 28 (1983), 320–338.

46 Eduard Bernstein, “Entwicklungsgang eines Sozialisten,” 23.

47 Eduard Bernstein, “Briefe aus England,” NZ, 11 Jhrg 1892–93, 1 Bd., Nr. 20, 630–31. Bernstein also wrote regularly for the British journal the Clarion.

48 Henry Tudor, “Introduction,” Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896–1898, H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 8 (quotations from E. Bernstein, “Die preussischen Landtagswahlen und die Sozialdemokratie,” NZ, xi, 2 [1893], 778.)

49 Henry Tudor, 10–11; see also Bo Gustafsson, Marxismus und Revisionismus: Eduard Bernsteins Kritik des Marxismus und ihre ideengeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen (Frankfurt: 1972), 127–79.

50 H. Kendall Rogers, “Eduard Bernstein Speaks to the Fabians: A Turning-Point in Social Democratic Thought?” International Review of Social History, v. 28, pt. 3, 1983, 320–338, which includes the full text of “Karl Marx and Social Reform,” The Progressive Review, II (1897), 140–154. Rogers correctly in my view, emphasizes Bernstein’s nascent revisionism, which he viewed as consistent with the adaptability of Marx’s own views. For an alternative view that emphasizes the text as evidence of Bernstein’s break with Marxism, see Manfred Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism, 74–6.

51 Eduard Bernstein, “Karl Marx and Social Reform,” in H. Kendall Rogers, “Eduard Bernstein Speaks to the Fabians,” 330–32.

52 Ibid., 330, 329.

53 Ibid., 336.

54 “Evolutionary Socialism: An Interview with Herr Eduard Bernstein,” The Jewish Chronicle (London), 24 November 1899, 21. Eduard Bernstein Papers, IISG.

55 Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken, 1961 [in German 1899]), 189–194.

56 Joachim Drogmann, “Zur Geschichte sozialdemokratischer Kommunalpolitik. Grundlagen und Anfänge sozialdemokratischer Kommunalpolitik vor und nach dem Sozialistengesetz” (IV), 906–7. See Protokolle über die Verhandlungen der Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Halle, Oktober 1890 (Berlin: Berliner Volksblatt, 1890), 268–70 (quotation on 269).

57 Drogmann, 907. Quotation from Bebel at Berliner Parteitag, 1892.

58 Karl Kautsky, “Unser neuestes Programm. 2. Der Charakter unserer Bewegung,” 560, and Kautsky, “Unser neuestes Programm. 4. Staatssozialismus und Gemeindesozialismus,” 588–9, in NZ, 13:2, nr. 44, 45, 46 (1894–95), 557–65, 586–94, 610–24.

59 Kautsky, 589–90.

60 Dirk H. Müller, Idealismus und Revolution: Zur Opposition der jungen gegen den Sozialdemokratischen Parteivorstand 1890 bis 1894 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1975), 169–77.

61 See Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917, 7–8 (von Vollmar quotation is from Frankfurt Parteitag, 1894).

62 Gerhart A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich, 128.

63 Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917, 26.

64 See original, H. Lindemann, “Zentralismus und Föderalismus in der Sozialdemokratie,” SM, XI Bd. II, 1905, 767–773 (quotation on 772–3).

65 I use the terms Gemeindepolitik and Kommunalpolitik interchangeably as do most German sources.

66 “Hugo Lindemann (1867–1950),” in Franz Osterroth, Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus (Hannover: Dietz Verlag, 1960), 198–200; Dr. H. Lindemann (C. Hugo), Städteverwaltung und Municipal-Sozialismus in England (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Verlag, 1897, published without revision in a second edition, 1906).

67 Hugo Lindemann’s articles, under the pseudonym “C. Hugo”, included a review of the annual report of the English Board of Trade for 1895 and methods of piece-rate and hourly payment, “Standard-Stück-und Zeitlohnsätze in England,” NZ, 14:2 (1895– 96), 600–604; Bernstein to Kautsky, October 26, 1895, Bernstein to Kautsky, February 5, 1896, Kautsky to Bernstein, February 24, 1896, Kautsky to Bernstein, July 18, 1897, Kautsky to Bernstein, August 30, 1897, Kautsky to Bernstein, November 24, 1897, Eduard Bernsteins Briefwechsel mit Karl Kautsky (1895–1905), Till Schelz-Brandenburg, Hg. (Amsterdam: Internationales Institut für Sozialgeschichte, 2003), 15–16, 68, 82–4, 426–7, 460, 511–12.

68 Eduard Bernstein, “Probleme des Sozialismus. Die sozialpolitische Bedeutung von Raum und Zahl,” NZ, 15:2, nr. 30, 31 (1896–97), April 14, 1897, 100–107, 138–43 (translation in Tudor and Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy, 83–98).

69 C. Hugo, “Städte-Verfassung und–Verwaltung in England und Deutschland,” NZ, 15:2, nr. 32 (1896–97), April 28, 1897, 164–71 (quotation on 171).

70 H. Kendall Rogers, “Eduard Bernstein Speaks to the Fabians: A Turning-point in Social Democratic Thought,” 320–25; see also the related Bernstein-Kautsky correspondence, in which Bernstein was quite self-critical of his own remarks, Bernstein to Kautsky, February 7, 1897, and Bernstein to Kautsky, May 17, 1897, 363–4, 405–6. For a fine-grained analysis of the emergence of Bernstein’s revisionism, see H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate 1896–1898, 6–32.

71 Dieter Rebentisch, “Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die kommunale Selbstverwaltung,” 11–12. Rebentisch identifies socialists as putting forward local Kommunalprogramme in the following cities during the early to mid-1890s: Nürnberg (1890), Stuttgart (1891), Chemnitz (1892), Magdeburg (1893), Bielefeld (1893), and Breman (1895).

72 Eduard Bernstein, “The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution: 2. The Theory of Collapse and Colonial Policy,” in the documentary collection by H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896– 1898, 159–170, quotations from 168–9.

73 Ibid., 168.

74 Ursula Reuter, 354, from letters by Bebel to Kautsky, September 24, 1898, and Bebel to Adler, September 29, 1898.

75 H. Tudor, “Introduction,” in H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896–1898, 26–30 (quotations from 27–8).

76 “The Party Conference at Stuttgart: The Debate on the Press,” in H. Tudor and H. M. Tudor, 276–304; Eduard Bernstein’s “Statement,” 287–91. (Emphasis in the original.)

77 Ibid., 290–1; see also original, Protokoll über die Verhandlungen der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, abgehalten zu Stuttgart von 3 bis 8 Oktober 1898 (Berlin: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz, 1898), 122–5 (quotations, 123, 125).

78 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, abgehalten zu Stuttgart von 3 bis 8 Oktober 1898, 141–2; see also Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer (1844–1911), 355.

79 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich, 211–12 and idem, “Die Sozialdemokratie im deutschen Kaiserreich im sozialgeschichtlicher Perspective,” Historische Zeitschrift, Bd. 249: 214–15.

80 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen der Konferenz der sozialdemokratischen Gemendevertreter der Provinz Brandenburg. Abgehalten zu Berlin am 27 Dezember 1898, quoted in Dieter Rebentisch, “Deutsche Sozialdemokfratie und kommunale Selbstverwaltung 1890–1975,” 12; also Joachim Drogmann, “Zur Geschichte sozialdemokratischer Kommunal politik: Grundlagen und Anfänge sozialdemokratischer Kommunalpolitik vor und nach dem Sozialistengesetz (IV),” 908.

81 Ibid., 909; see also, Dieter Rebentisch, “Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die kommunale Selbstverwaltung,” 12–13; and Gerhard A. Ritter, “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspective,” 213–16; and Adelheid von Saldern, “Die Gemeinde in Theorie und Praxis der deutschen Arbeiterorganisationen 1863–1920: Ein Überblick,” 311–13.

82 C. Hugo [Hugo Lindemann], “Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalverwaltung,” NZ, 17:2, nr. 22, 1898–99 (15 Februar 1899), 680–86 (quotations from 680–82, 686). (An editorial note indicated that publication had been delayed because of a lack of space.)

83 Paul Hirsch was an influential journalist writing on municipal socialist topics. He also served as a city councillor from 1900 to 1921 in Charlottenburg (Berlin) and after the war held high positions as a social democrat in the state government of Weimar Prussia. See Franz Osterroth, Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus, 134–5.

84 Dieter Rebentisch, 12–13.

85 “Notizen. Auch ein Programmrevision,” NZ, XX, Bd. 1, 1901–02, 251.

86 Rebentisch is the only historian to analyze these developments in detail, 13–14. See also Fanny Imle, “Das Communalprogramm der sächsischen Socialdemokratie,” SM, 1900, 737–46 and idem, “Das Kommunalprogramm für Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck, und Lauenberg,” NZ, XIX, Bd. 1, Nr. 16, 1900–1901, 500–506; see also Hugo Lindemann, “Zur Kritik der sozialdemokratischen Communalprogramm,” SM, 1902, Heft 4, 277–88, and idem, “Unsere Forderungen an die Communen,” SM, 1902, Heft 6, 437–47. SM, founded in 1895 as Der sozialistischer Akademiker, had by the late 1890s become the primary theoretical vehicle for Bernstein and the revisionists.

87 See, for instance, Rosa Luxemburg, “The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case,” Cahiers de la Quinzaine, n. 11, 1899.

88 Karl Kautsky, “Bürgermeister und Minister,” NZ, September 18, 1901, 794–6. For the later controversy over Lindemann’s candidacy for Bürgermeister in Stuttgart, see above and “Ein Parteigenosse auf Urlaub,” NZ, Mai 12, 1911, 177–9; Maja Christ-Gmelin, Die Württembergische Sozialdemoktratie 1890–1914: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Reformismus und Revisionismus in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, PhD dissertation, Universität Stuttgart, 1976, 166–73.

89 See Kommunale Praxis, 1901; Rebentisch, 12; Drogmann, 996. For a portrait of Südekum and his relationship to the municipal movement and its periodical, see Max Bloch, Albert Südekum (1871–1944): Ein deutscher Sozialdemokrat zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2009), 92–100.

90 Kongress-Protokolle der Zweiten Internationale, Bd. 1, Paris 1889 – Amsterdam 1904 (Glashütten im Taunus: Verlag Detlev, reprint, 1975), 330–31. See also brief discussion of the Paris conference in Rebentisch, 11.

91 Hugo Lindemann, “Zur Kritik der socialdemokratischen Communal programme,” SM, Heft 4, 1902, 277–8.

92 Ibid., 281–2.

93 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischer Reich, 212–13. For a detailed discussion of kommunalprogramm in Saxony, see “Das Communalprogramm der sächsischen Socialdemokratie,” SM, 1900, 737–46.

94 Hugo Lindemann, “Unsere Forderungen an die Communen,” SM, Heft 6, 1902, 437–47. Also, Paul Hirsch, “Sozialdemokratische Kommunalwahlprogramme,” NZ, 1901–1902, Bd. I, No. 20, 612–22.

95 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands. Abgehalten zu München vom 14 bis 20 September 1902 (Berlin: Verlag Vorwärts, 1902), 203, 204, 205–6.

96 Ibid., 218–23; the entire consideration of Kommunalpolitik at the Munich congress covers 203–23. For an analysis of the marginalization of Lindemann and the kommunalpolitiker, see Joachim Drogmann, “Zur Geschichte sozialdemokratische Kommunalpolitik,” 996–8 and a brief discussion of the deliberations at the Munich Parteitag, Dieter Rebentisch, 16–17. Also, Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich, 212–17.

97 For discussion of internal party debates over revisionism and related issues between 1902 and 1904, see William Harvey Maehl, August Bebel: Shadow Emperor of the German Workers (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1980), 366–82; Gary Steenson, Karl Kautsky, 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), 116–31; Hedwig Wachenheim, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung 1844 bis 1914, 368–82; Manfred B. Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism, 176–82; Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx, 224–30, 252–8; Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer, 382–418.

98 Südekum an Vollmar, 21 Dezember 1903, quoted in Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer, 417–18; Hedwig Wachenheim, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung 1844 bis 1914, 379–80.

99 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Abgehalten zu Bremen vom 18. bis 24. September 1904 (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1904), 205–6.

100 Ibid., 210–11; see also William Harvey Maehl, August Bebel, 393–4.

101 Protokoll … des SPD, Breman, 1904, 18–21 (quotation on 21).

102 Ibid., 21–2.

103 The interest of municipal socialists in local tax reform and in particular proposals for a “single tax” (patterned on the ideas of the American Henry George) can be found across the globe, from Cleveland to Malmö to Melbourne and Wellington.

104 Protokoll … des SPD, Breman, 1904, 118–19.

105 Ibid., 290–96.

106 Ibid., the debate covers 296–303 (Südekum’s contribution is on 298–9).

107 Ibid., 303–4, 326. On the 1904 Parteitag and its significance see also Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich, 213–17; for a perspective critical of Lindemann’s resolution, see Volker Wünderich, “Von der bürgerlichen zur proletarischen Kommunalpolitik,” 455–6, and Joachim Drogmann, “Zur Geschichte sozialdemokratischer Kommunalpolitik,” (V), 997–8.

108 Singer quoted in Diethard Hennig, “ ‘Gas- und Wassersozialismus’: Sozialdemokratische Programmatik zur Kommunalpolitik auf dem Landesparteitag 1910 in Erlangen,” “… das der Mensch dem Menschen ein Helfer ist …” 1870–1990: 120 Jahre Sozialdemokratie in Erlangen, Walter Schweigert und Klaus Treuheit, hrsg (Erlangen: SPD –Kreisverband Erlangen, 1990), 31.

109 Gerhard A. Ritter, “Die Sozialdemokratie im deutschen Kaiserreich,” 316; William H. Dawson found a higher proportion (93 percent) of socialists elected to municipal “magistrat” positions in the three southern states, Municipal Life and Government in Germany (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1914), 80.

110 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischen Reich, 209–10; William H. Dawson, Municipal Life and Government in Germany, 65–7.

111 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischen Reich, 210, 216; idem, “Die Sozialdemokratie im deutschen Kaiserreich,” 316.

112 Merith Niehuss, “Die Stellung der Sozialdemokratie im Parteisystem Bayerns, Württembergs und Badens,” Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: Sozialdemokratie und Freie Gewerkschaften im Parteinsystem und Sozialmilieu des Kaiserreichs, Gerhard A. Ritter, hrsg. (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990), 121–2.

113 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, abgehalten in Jena vom 14 bis 20 September 1913 (Berlin: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz, 1913), 284–6 (Bernstein quote on 286), 295–6, 304–6.

114 Ibid., 26–7. On the efforts of Lindemann to develop a worker-centered housing policy in the Landestag of Württemberg, see Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich, 215; Südekum also pushed forward resolutions on the “housing crisis” for adoption at the Lübeck party congress in 1901, as the “ultimate line of battle for working-class power in states and cities,” Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Lübeck, 1901, 99–101, 293–301.

115 Gerhard A. Ritter, “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspective,” 316–17.

116 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutsch-lands, abgehalten in Jena vom 14 bis 20 September 1913, 26–7.

117 Diethard Hennig, “ ‘Gas- und Wassersozialismus’: Sozialdemokratische Program-matik zur Kommunalpolitik auf dem Landesparteitag 1910 in Erlangen,” 31–2.

118 Ibid., 32, 35–6. See also Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischen Reich, 209–17; idem, “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in Sozialgeschichtlicher Perspective,” 315–16, 320–21.

119 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischen Reich, 217.

120 Maja Christ-Gmelin, “Die Württembergische Sozialdemokratie 1890–1914: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Reformismus und Revisionismus in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie,” 64, quoted in Karl Heinrich Pohl, Die Münchener Arbeiterbewegung: Sozialdemokratische Partei, Freie Gewerkschaften, Staat und Gesellschaft in München 1890–1914 (München: K.G. Saur, 1992), 428 (n. 5).

121 “Sozialdemokratie und Gemeindevertretung in Nürnberg,” KP, v. 8, nr. 17, April 18, 1908, 516–17.

122 “Die Gemeindeproporz in Bayern,” KP, v. 8, nr. 12, März 21, 1908, 353–6; “Praktische Arbeit, Vorbemerkung: Bayern, München,” KP, v. 8, nr. 37/38, September 12, 1908, 1179–81; Karl Heinrich Pohl, Die Münchener Arbeiterbewegung, 428–9, 435–6.

123 Protokoll, Bayrische Landesparteitag, Fürth, 1900, 42, quoted in Pohl, 436. Additional quotations from Pohl, 436–7.

124 Pohl, 451–65 (quotation on p. 453).

125 Paul Kampffmeyer, “Zum Wohnungsprogram der deutschen Sozialdemokratie,” SM (1901), 705, quoted in Pohl, 453.

126 Wolfgang R. Krabbe, “Die Anfänge des ‘sozialen Wohnungsbaus’ vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Kommunalpolitische Bemühungen um eine Lösung des Wohnungs-problems,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Witschaftsgeschichte 71 (1984), 44, quoted in Pohl, 454.

127 Claus Eppe, “1890–1914. Der Aufstieg. Aus der Verfolgung in den Wartesaal 1. Klasse,” Mit uns für die Freiheit: 100 Jahre SPD in Stuttgart, Siegried Bassler (Stuttgart: K. Thienemann Verlag, 1987), 50.

128 Jürgen Mittag, Wilhelm Keil (1870–1968): Sozialdemokratischer Parlamentarier zwischen Kaiserreich und Bundesrepublik, Eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2001), 38–56 (quotations on 50 and 52).

129 Fritz Schumann, Die Arbeiter der Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft-Stuttgart-Untertürkheim (Leipzig, 1911), quoted in Jürgen Mittag, Wilhelm Keil, 56–66 (quotation on 58).

130 Jürgen Mittag, Wilhelm Keil, 56–66. The phrase “cooperative constitutionalism” from Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1919, Bd. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (München, 1998), in Mittag, 58.

131 On the development of the city’s administrative structure and the responsibility of elected bodies, see Paul Sauer, Das Werden einer Grossstadt: Stuttgart zwischen Reichsgründung und Erstem Weltkrieg, 1871 bis 1914 (Stuttgart: Silberburg Verlag, 1988), 26–8, 118–19; and on the municipal elections 1885–1914, 125–6.

132 Claus Eppe, “1890–1914. Der Aufstieg. Aus der Verfolgung in den Wartesaal 1. Klasse,” 50–69.

133 Paul Sauer, Das Werden einer Grossstadt, 117. On the factionalism in the local SPD, see Claus Eppe, 68–9 and Jürgen Mittag, 117–21.

134 The extensive (Zeitungsstimmen zur Bürgermeisterwahl) clipping file covering the period May 6 to June 9 reveals how closely followed and deeply polarizing the Lindemann candidacy was throughout the country; see the file, “Das sozialdemokratische Bürgermeister problem,” Stuttgart Stadtarchiv. (The clipping service appears to have been contracted by the Bürgermeister Dr. Rettich, on behalf of the Gemeinderat.)

135 “Praktische Politik,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, 29 Mai 1911, Fall Lindemann clipping file, Stuttgart Stadtarchiv.

136 “Aus der Partei. Nachspiel zur Stuttgarter Bürgermeisterwahl,” (June 9, 1911), Clipping file, Stuttgart Stadtarchiv.

137 “Dr. Lindemann’s Program. Rede gehalten am Montag den 8 Mai 1911 im Feststaal der Liederhalle Stuttgart,” Stuttgart Stadtarchiv.

138 “Auszug aus dem Protokoll des Gemeinderats und Bürgerausschusses” vom 2, 15 Februar 1911” and “Auszug aus dem Protokoll des Gemeinderats vom 1 Juli 1909,” Stuttgart Stadtarchiv.

139 “Öffentlichte Sitzung der Gemeindekollegien,” 4, 11, 18 Mai, 1 Juni 1911, Amts-und Anzeigeblatt der Stadt Stuttgart, Stuttgart Stadtarchiv.

140 Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 20–27. Also, George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social, 188–197. Especially illuminating of the intra-party franchise politics and countervailing reform currents at the state level in Prussia is Thomas Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preussen 1867–1914 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1994), 103–127, 479–92, 575–83; also, idem, “Entwicklungstendenzen der preussischen Wahlkulture im Kaiserreich,” Wahlen und Wahlkämpfe in Deutschland, von den Anfängen im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Bundesrepublik, Hrsg. Gerhard A. Ritter (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1997), 131–67.

141 See discussion above of the ways in which North-South differences colored factional divisions within the SPD, especially Gerhard Ritter, “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspective.”

142 On the process of industrialization in Bielefeld and the early dominance of textile manufacturing, followed in the later nineteenth century by metal work, see Karl Ditt, Industrialisierung, Arbeiterschaft und Arbeiterbewegung in Bielefeld, 1850–1914 (Dortmund: Gesellschaft für westfälische Wirtschaftsgeschichte E.V., 1982), 59–77, 101–22, 281–4.

143 Carl Severing, Mein Lebensweg: Band 1, Vom Schlosser zum Minister (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1950), 132–33. See also the sketch of Severing’s life and philosophy in Reinhard Vogelsang, Geschichte der Stadt Bielefeld, Bd. II (Bielefeld: Verlag Hans Gieselmann, 1988), 173–7. Also, “Carl Severing 1875–1952,” Franz Osterroth, Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus, 286–8.

144 Wolfgang Hofmann, Die Bielefelder Stadtverordneten. Ein Beitrag zu bürgerlicher Selbstverwaltung und sozialem Wandel 1850 bis 1914 (Lübeck und Hamburg: Matthiesen Verlag, 1964), 94.

145 “Der sozialdemokratische Sieg bei den Bielefelder Stadtverordneten-Wahlen,” Volkswacht, 18 November 1905, p. 1; Wolfgang Hofmann, Die Bielefelder Stadtverordneten, 94–5; Reinhard Vogelsang, Geschichte der Stadt Bielefeld, Bd. II, 178–9; also Severing, Mein Lebensweg: Band 1,, 132–48 (quotation on 132).

146 Carl Severing, 132.

147 Ibid., 133, quotation from Westfälische Zeitung.

148 “Stadtverordneten-Sitzung, vom Freitag 9 Februar,” Beilage zur Volkswacht, 12 Februar 1906, 2.

149 Severing, 134–5 (quotation on 135). See original report of the debate over the creation of a special commission to make recommendations on “social-political concerns,” “Stadtverordneten-Sitzung, 25 April 1906,” Volkswacht, 26 April 1906, 2–3.

150 Severing, 135–7.

151 But Wolfgang Hoffmann has demonstrated that party affiliations were acknowledged in municipal politics in the nineteenth century, well before the social democrats had any representation, Die Bielefelder Stadtverordneten, 115–19.

152 See, for example, detailed reports of council proceedings in the SPD periodical, Bielefeld Volkswacht, January 18, February 12, March 23, and April 26.

153 Severing, 139–41 (quotation on 141).

154 Ibid., 136–7, 141–5. See chapter 11 for a detailed discussion of local politics in the war years and their immediate aftermath in Germany.

155 Fanny Imle, “Das Communalprogramm der sächsischen Sozialdemokratie,” SM, 6 1900, 738.

156 Fanny Imle, “Das Communalprogramm der sächsischen Socialdemokratie,” 740–43.

157 On bourgeois fears of the “Red menace” in Saxony, see especially James Retallack, “Mapping the Red Threat: The Politics of Exclusion in Leipzig before 1914,” Central European History 49 (2016), 341–82; and idem, Red Saxony. See also, Von Roland Zeise und Bernd Rüdiger, “Bundesstaat im Deutschen Reich (1871–1917/18),” in Geschichte Sachsens, Hrsg. Karl Czok (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1989), 389–95.

158 Friedrich Seger, Dringliche Reformen: Einige Kapitel Leipziger Kommunalpolitik (Leipzig: Verlag Bezirksvorstand der sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1912), 3–12, provides a colorful account of the rising strength of the SPD during the early 1890s in the Leipzig municipal realm and the fear it engendered among the bourgeois parties, who worried that suddenly “class politics” had entered the city government. Thomas Adam, Arbeitermilieu und Arbeiterbewegung in Leipzig 1871–1933 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1999), 293–6 covers much of this same territory; see also, Gerhard A. Ritter, “Wahlen und Wahlpolitik im Königreich Sachsen 1867–1914,” in Sachsen im Kaiserreich, 61–4.

159 Retallack, “Mapping the Red Threat,” 351, 355–6, 360–65 (quotation from 362); idem, Red Saxony, 285–305.

160 Friedrich Seger, Dringliche Reformen, 9.

161 Thomas Adam, 297–8.

162 Karl Heinrich Pohl, “Politischer Liberalismus und Wirtschaftsbürgertum: zum Aufschwung der sächsischen Liberalen vor 1914,” Sachsen im Kaiserreich, Simone Lässig und Karl Heinrich Pohl, hrsg., 106–7, 114, 124–8.

163 Adelheid von Saldern, “Latent Reformism and Socialist Utopia: The SPD in Göttingen, 1890 to 1920,” Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990, David Barclay and Eric Weitz, eds. (New York: Berghahn Publishers, 1998), 198–9; see also idem, Vom Einwohner zum Bürger: Zur Emanzipation der städtischen Unterschicht Göttingens 1890–1920, Eine sozial-und kommunalhistorische Untersuchung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1971), 227–310.

164 Adelheid von Saldern, Vom Einwohner zum Bürger, 279–281, 302–310.

165 Eduard Bernstein, Die Geschichte der Berliner Arbeiter-Bewegung: Ein Kapitel zur Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Dritter Teil: Fünfzehn Jahre Berliner Arbeiterbewegung unter dem gemeinen Recht (Berlin: Verlag: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1910), 58, 60. See also, Molly Loberg, The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2–7.

166 Eduard Bernstein, Die Geschichte der Berliner Arbeiter-Bewegung, 65–6, 69.

167 On the interactions between the city’s growth and working-class political frustration, see Detlef Lehnert, “Das ‘rote’ Berlin: Hauptstadt der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung?” in Studien zur Arbeiterbwegung und Arbeiterkultur in Berlin, hrsg. Gert-Joachim Glaessner, et al. (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1989), 1–3; and especially, Thomas Lindenberger, Strassenpolitik: zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1995), 13–30, 233–303, 323–59, 385–403.

168 Eduard Bernstein, Die Geschichte der Berliner Arbeiter-Bewegung, 213–17.

169 “Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des 33.” Ordentlichen Brandenburgischen Städtetages, Juni 1910, 22–42.

170 Bernstein, 221, 228–40. See also, Michael Erbe, “Berlin im Kaiserreich (1871– 1918),” in Geschichte Berlins, Zweiter Band: Von der Märzrevolution bis zur Gegenwart (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1987), 763–75.

171 See, for instance, the discussion of its “free city” status in Richard A. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 9–15.

172 Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 33, 52, 73. Clemens Wischermann, Wohnen in Hamburg vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Münster: F. Coppenrath Verlag, 1983), 57.

173 Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg, 53–61 (quotations from 56, 58).

174 Ibid., 109–61 (quotations from 120–1, 136–7). See also, Richard J. Evans, “ ‘Red Wednesday’ in Hamburg: Social Democrats, Police and Lumpenproletariat in the Suffrage Disturbances of 17 January 1906,” Social History, v. 4:1 (January 1979), 20–21.

175 Madeleine Hurd, Public Spheres, Public Mores, and Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 76, 80, 82, 86–7.

176 Hamburger Echo, September 26, 1907 (quoted in Hurd, 87).

177 Johannes Schult, Geschichte der Hamburger Arbeiter 1890–1919 (Hannover: J. H. W. Dietz Verlag, 1967), 52–7, 69–71; Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg, 80–82, 539–46.

178 Richard A. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg, 18–19.

179 Richard J. Evans, “Red Wednesday in Hamburg,” 1–31.

180 Johannes Schult, Geschichte der Hamburger Arbeiter 1890–1919, 76–7; Richard Evans, “Red Wednesday in Hamburg,” offers a more detailed account of the riots that emphasizes the violence of confrontations between the police and the crowd, 7–12.

181 Schult, 77 and Evans, “Red Wednesday,” 22–4.

182 See the discussion of the revolution of 1918 in relation to the suffrage riot of 1906 in Hamburg, in Richard J. Evans, “Red Wednesday in Hamburg,” 24–5.

183 For a discussion of the class basis of local politics in Altona before 1918 (as well as after), see Anthony McElligott, Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 11–21.

184 Christian Hanke, Selbstverwaltung und Sozialismus, Carl Herz, ein Sozialdemokrat (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2006), 41–3, 46–60. See also, the large collection of Carl Herz Papers, International Institute of Social History (IISG), Amsterdam.

185 Carl Herz to Geheimrat Schmidt, November 15, 24, 29, 1909, Carl Herz Papers, IISG, Amsterdam.

186 “Gemeindevertreter=Konferenz im 6 schleswig=holsteiinischen Wahlkreise,” Hamburger Echo, 26 März 1912, clipping file, Carl Herz Papers.

187 Christian Hanke, Selbstverwaltung und Sozialismus, Carl Herz, ein Sozialdemokrat, 61–71. The Hamburger Echo provided blow-by-blow coverage of the battles erupting on the floor of the Altona City Council. (Quotations on 61.)

188 Anthony McElligott, Contested City, 9–10. See chapter 12 for a discussion of the postwar victories won by municipal socialists globally.

189 Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 201.

190 Nolan, pp. 186–9, 208–10, 211–12. “SPD Municipal Program for Düsseldorf,” published in Volkszeitung, August 25, 1905, quoted in Nolan, p. 204.

191 Comparison with England confirms the significance but also tenuousness of such alliances with liberals in a variety of worlds as disparate as the Colne Valley in the North of England and London. See discussion in chapter 3, for instance, David Clark, Colne Valley, Radicalism to Socialism, p. 85, and Susan D. Pennybacker, A Vision for London, 1889–1914, pp. 11, 243. A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884–1918, 187–233; for New Zealand, see discussion in chapter 5.

192 Ralf Roth has documented the common ground forged by a “Liberal-Labor Alliance” in Frankfurt am Main in the early twentieth century; see his “Bürger and Workers: Liberalism and the Labor Movement in Germany, 1848 to 1914,” in Between Reform and Revolution0, David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz, eds., pp. 130–34; also idem, Stadt und Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main: Ein besonderer Weg von der ständischen zur modernen Bürgergesellschaft, 1760–1914 (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996), 620–41; and idem, “Liberalismus in Frankfurt am Main 1814–1914: Probleme seiner Strukturgeschichte,” in Liberalismus und Region: Zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert, Lothar Gall/Dieter Langewiesche, hrsg. (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), 81–5. See also, Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien: Geschichte der Frankfurter Stadtverordnetenversammlung, Bd.II 1901–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1995), 17–22 for an account of the electoral maneuvering in 1900.

193 John D. Rolling, “Liberals, Socialists, and City Government in Imperial Germany: The case of Frankfurt am Main, 1900–1918,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979, 103–4, 110–114, 128–32. See also, Kai Gniffk Genosse Dr. Quarck: Max Quarck, Publizist, Politiker und Patriot im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1999), 204–14.

194 Kleine Presse, n. 257, 2 November 1910, quoted in John D. Rolling, 135. Rolling provides a detailed account of each city election between 1900 and 1912 with close attention to the maneuverings of the Liberal, Conservative, and Socialist Parties.

195 Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien, Bd. II, 1901–1933, 129–35; Rolling, 128–156, 180, 188.

196 Kai Gniffk e, Genosse Dr. Quarck, 193–204.

197 Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien, Bd. II, 1901–1933, 25.

198 Rolling, 130.

199 “Bericht über die Verhandlungen der Stadtverordneten=Versammlung der Stadt Frankfurt am Main nach stenographischer Aufnahme,” Bd. 41, 1908, 93–7, 120–33.

200 Ibid., 361–7.

201 Ibid., Bd. 43, 1910, 111–122, 223–7, 647–9, 835–42.

202 Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien, Bd. II, 190–92; John D. Rolling, “Liberals, Socialists, and City Government in Imperial Germany,” 261–3 (quotation on 262).

203 Ralf Roth, Gewerkschaftskartell und Sozialpolitik in Frankfurt am Main: Arbeiterbewegung vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg zwischen Restauration und liberaler Erneuerung (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1991), 215. For an account of the most important factions among bourgeois social reformers in Frankfurt, see Ralf Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main, 633–40.

204 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischen Reich, 210.

205 Merith Niehuss, “Die Stellung der Sozialdemokratie im Parteiensystem Bayerns, Württembergs und Badens,” 125.

206 On Mühlhausen see Franz Ludwig, Kommunalpolitik und Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Verlagsanstalt und Druckerei “Teutonia,” 1910), 284–332 and William Harbutt Dawson, Municipal Life and Government in Germany, 78–9; on Offenbach, Ludwig, Kommunalpolitik und Sozialdemokratie, 258–83, Rudolf Günter Huber, Sozialer Wandel und politische Konflikte in einer südhessischen Industriestadt: Kommunalpolitik der SPD in Offenbach 1898–1914 (Darmstadt und Marburg: Hessischen Historischen Kommission Darmstadt, 1985), 119–285, and Kommunal-Politisches aus Offenbach am Main, hrsg. vom Wahl-Komitee der Sozialdemokratischen Partei zur Stadtverordnetenwahl 1907 (Offenbach: Verlag Offenbacher Abendblatt, 1907), 5–15.

207 Alfred Kurt, Stadt und Kreis Offenbach in der Geschichte (Offenbach: Bintz Verlag, 1998), 167–71; also “Historischer Kalender der Offenbacher Sozialdemokraties 1866 bis 2007,” Herausgegeben von der Historischen Kommission des SPD-Unterbezirks Offenbach, 2008, 18–19, Offenbach Stadtsarchiv.

208 Wolfgang Reuter, Oberbürgermeister, Offenbach, “Carl Ulrich,” Daten zur Person, 1999, Offenbach Stadtarchiv; see also Carl Ulrich, Errinerungen des ersten hessischen Staatspräsidenten, hrsg. Ludwig Bergsträsser (Offenbach: Bollwerk-Verlag, 1953). Ulrich would serve in both the Hesse state parliament and the Reichstag before WWI and from 1919 to 1928 as Hessen Staatspräsident in the Weimar Republic.

209 “Kommunal-Programm der sozialdemokratischen Gemeinde-vertreter für den Wahlkreis Offenbach-Dieburg, beschlossen auf der Kreiskonferenz vom 26.9.97,” in Rudolf Günter Huber, Sozialer Wandel und politische Konflikte in einer südhessischen Industriestadt, 281–5.

210 Otto Schlander, Offenbach am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs, Offenbacher Geschichtsblätter, nr. 29 (1979), 50–61 (quotation on 50), Offenbach Stadtsarchiv.

211 Franz Ludwig, Kommunalpolitik und Sozialdemokratie, 258–65; Rudolf Günter Huber, Sozialer Wandel und politische Konflikte in einer südhessischen Industriestadt, 148–90.

212 Rudolf Günter Huber, Sozialer Wandel und politische Konflikte in einer sü dhessischen Industriestadt, 191–3.

213 Otto Schlander, Offenbach am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs, 52–8. Wolfgang Reuter, “Soziale Politik in Offenbach vor 100 Jahren,” in Vor 100 Jahren: Schlaglichter auf Arbeiten und Leben, Wohnen und Politik in Offenbach am Main (Offenbach: Verlag Offenbacher Editionen, 2010), 35–42. For a detailed accounting of the party’s agenda for the pivotal campaign of 1907, Kommunal-politisches aus Offenbach am Main, Hrsg. Vom Wahl-Komittee der Sozialdemokratischen Partei zur Stadtverordnetenwahl 1907 (Offenbach: Verlag Offenbacher Abendblatt, 1907), Offenbach Stadtsarchiv.

214 Ludwig, Kommunalpolitik und Sozialdemokratie, 266–71; Huber, Sozialer Wandel und politische Konflikte in einer südhessischen Industriestadt, 191–3, 225–9, 269–79 (quotation on 191–2). See also, Otto Schlander, “Offenbach am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs,” 54–8.

215 Huber, 279, quotation from Adelheid von Saldern, “Sozialdemokratische Kommunalpolitik in Wilhelminischer Zeit,” 18.

5. Contested Cities Down Under: New Zealand and Australia

1 James Thorn to J. T. Paul, 3 October 1910, J. T. Paul Papers, Hocken Library, Dunedin, New Zealand.

2 B. G. Andrews, “Locke, Lilian Sophia (1869–1950),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, adb.anu.edu. au, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online May 21, 2020.

3 Political Labor Council of Victoria, Minutes, May 27, August 19, 1905, December 12, 1905, Victoria State Library (VSL). The Tocsin, November 26, 1903, April 13, 1905. The Worker (NSW), April 1, 1905.

4 On the relationship between Locke and Goldstein, see Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, Vida Goldstein (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), 53, 66–7.

5 Bomford, 53.

6 Bomford, 26, 45–6 (quotation 52).

7 Political Labor Council of Victoria, Minutes, April 14, May 2, 1903. Victoria State Library, Melbourne.

8 A dispute erupted within the PLC during 1914 over whether its Women’s Organizing Committee (WOC) might be permitted to organize separately and hold a convention of its branches; after a polarizing debate, the proposal was rejected by a slim majority. Central Executive, Political Labor Council of Victoria, Minutes, January 7, May 29, 1914, February 19, March 3, 1915 (VSL).

9 Bomford, 66–7.

10 The Tocsin, November 26, 1903, p. 8; Bomford, 66–7; and Goldstein, “The Australian Woman in Politics,” Review of Reviews, January 20, 1904, quoted in Bomford, 67.

11 Locke resigned from her position as an organizer for the PLC in 1906 when she announced her impending marriage to “Mr. Burns,” a Labor member of the Tasmania parliament. The CE reluctantly accepted her resignation but expressed its “very great admiration … for the splendid and self-sacrificing efforts she made in the cause of Labor.” Locke-Burns would eventually return to labor organizing in Tasmania, New South Wales, and Queensland. Minutes, Central Executive, Political Labor Council of Victoria, January 6, 1906 (VSL).

12 See, for instance, Fred J. Hokin, “Twenty Years of Hustling in Nineteen Countries: Claude Thompson—a Character Sketch,” and W. Price, “The Power of Push,” Barrier Daily Truth (Broken Hill, NSW), May 14, 1910; Peter Clayworth, “An Agitator Abroad: P. H. Hickey, Industrial Unionism, and Socialism in the United States, New Zealand and Australia,” in Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia, Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 309–27.

13 Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017) deftly connects the labor activist worlds of Britain and Australia through the lives of Tom Mann and Bob Ross.

14 On Richard J. Seddon, known as “King Dick”, see David Hamer, The New Zealand Liberals: The Years of Power, 1891–1912 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 195–270; also Peter J. Coleman, Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Lincoln: University of Kansas Press, 1987), 35–6, 39–41.

15 The most complete accounting of Labour’s municipal (as well as parliamentary) activity is found in the compilations of Herbert Roth. “Socialist Party Branch Records and Research Notes, 1902–1910” and “Independent Political Labour League (IPLL), 1905–11, Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL.

16 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence: The Origins and Establishment of the New Zealand Labour Party, 1900–1919 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1980), 24–30. Peter Clayworth, “An Agitator Abroad: P.H. Hickey, Industrial Unionism, and Socialism in the US, New Zealand and Australia,” Frontiers of Labor, Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist, eds., 309–27. See biographies of Patrick Hodgens Hickey, Patrick (Paddy) Webb, and Bob Semple, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (www.dnzb.govt.nz).

17 Erik Olssen, The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour, 1908–14 (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–7.

18 “Notes on History of New Zealand Socialist Party,” Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL.

19 P. H. Hickey to R. Ross, September 12, 1910, H. E. Holland Papers, TL.

20 Barry Gustafson, 21–3.

21 Election broadside, “The Social Democratic Press. A Journal Devoted to Municipal Progress,” Christchurch, April 25, 1913, E. J. Howard Papers, Local Body Election Scrapbook, Hocken Library, Dunedin.

22 James Thorn to J. T. Paul, February 11, 1907, J. T. Paul Papers, Hocken Library. On one occasion Thorn had come in for severe criticism in the Trades and Labour Council for remarks made at a public meeting in the square, to wit: “Liberalism has spoiled Trades Unionism. It has reduced the Unions from strong powerful bodies to little coteries of officers who now and again conduct cases in the Arbitration Court.” But, later that year, Thorn was elected president of that body. Minutes, Canterbury Trades and Labour Council, Christchurch, May 22, 1907, January 25, 1908, MacMillan-Brown Archives, Canterbury University, Christchurch.

23 “Political Labour League of New Zealand, Canterbury District: A Manifesto,” March 3, 1905, Howard Papers, Hocken Library; IPLL Minutes, Canterbury District, list Thorn as president, McCullough as an executive committee member and a wide spectrum of socialists and trade unionists among other officers, E. J. Howard Papers.

24 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 27; Erik Olssen, The Red Feds, 190–97.

25 Tom Barker to Secretary, Christchurch Branch, March 25, 1912, New Zealand Socialist Party, Auckland Branch, 1912–1918, Herbert Roth Papers, TL; Barry Gustafson, From the Cradle to the Grave: A Biography of Michael Joseph Savage (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986), 83, 88, 92–3. Savage’s earlier resistance to running for mayor is reminiscent of the debate within the German SPD in 1911 over the candidacy of Hugo Lindemann for Oberbürgermeister in Stuttgart. See chapter 4.

26 Kerry Taylor, “David McLaren, Trade Unionist, Politician,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 307–8. D. McLaren to J. T. Paul, 2–4–14, Folder 18, J. T. Paul Papers, Hocken Library.

27 Erik Olssen, “W.T. Mills, E.J.B. Allen, J.A. Lee and Socialism in New Zealand,” The New Zealand Journal of History, v. 10:2, October 1976, 112–17; On Walter Thomas Mills, see more extended discussion in chapter 7.

28 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 47–58, 67–73 usefully untangles the complex political maneuverings of the years 1911–16. See also the influential views of Dunedin moderate laborite, J. T. Paul. “After the Battle,” Otago Daily Times, December 27, 2013 and “Report to the President and Members of the Board of Management of the Otago Typographical Union,” July 17, 1913, J. T. Paul Papers, Folder 18, Hocken Library; Erik Olssen, The Red Feds, 198–223; for a perspective that emphasizes the local context of labor’s mobilization and revival (in Christchurch), see Jim McAloon, “Workers Control and the Rise of Political Labour: Christchurch and the Labour Movement,” in Culture and the Labour Movement, John E. Martin and Kerry Taylor, eds. (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1991), 158. On the general strike of 1913, see Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand, Melanie Nolan, ed. (Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury University Press, 2005).

29 Political Labor League, Executive Report for the Year 1901, “Municipal Platform,” New South Wales Political Labor League Scrapbook (John Dwyer), Mitchell Library (hereafter ML), Sydney; Proceedings, Queensland Labor-in-Politics Conferences, 1905 Brisbane, 1907 Rockhampton, and especially 1910, Townsville, John Oxley Library (hereafter JOL), Brisbane, and the IPLL, NZSP, and NZLP in Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL.

30 George Michael Betts, “Participation in Civic Politics: A Study of Wellington City Council and the Part Its Elected Representatives and Staff, Together with the Citizens, Play in the Decision-Making Process,” PhD dissertation, Victoria University—Wellington, 1969, 716–18.

31 L. Evans, The Commuter, the Car and Metropolitan Wellington: The Rise and Decline of Public Transport (1972), quoted in Adrian Humphris and Geoff Mew, Ring around the City: Wellington’s New Suburbs, 1900–1930 (Wellington: Steel Roberts, 2009), 13; the “medieval wall” metaphor is also used in James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Allan Lane, 2001), 520.

32 Jim McAloon, “The Making of the New Zealand Ruling Class,” in Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand, Melanie Nolan, ed., 217–18. See also, John Crawford, “A Tale of Two Cities: Military Involvement in the 1913 Strike,” idem, 123–8.

33 Adrian Humphris and Geoff Mew, Ring around the City, 16 (quotation); James Belich, Paradise Reforged, 525–6.

34 Belich, 174.

35 Minutes of Wellington City Council, March 21, 1889 (from unknown newspaper report), quoted in Humphris and Mew, 24.

36 Humphris and Mew, 25; Betts noted that loan polls in the late 1890s for the building of abattoirs, a crematorium, and park improvements were “heavily defeated” by ratepayers, G. M. Betts (R. H. Brookes, ed.), Betts on Wellington: A City and its Politics (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1970), 39.

37 G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington, 38–41; Evening Post (Wellington), 17 April 1901, quoted in Betts, 40.

38 The “obsessive parochialism” of the ward system, as Betts termed it, was the object of attack in the first years of the twentieth century by civic reformers who in 1901 successfully pushed for at-large representation. For the anti-democratic implications of such reforms, see Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Municipal of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (October 1964), 157–69.

39 For a general overview of David McLaren’s career, see Kerry Taylor, “David McLaren, 1867–72? – 1939,” New Zealand Dictionary of Biography v. 3 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 307–8; Erik Olssen, The Red Feds, 77–8.

40 Wellington City Council, Correspondence Files, “Notice of Motion,” May 31, 1902.

41 Wellington City Council Minutes, March 30, 1903.

42 Wellington City Council Minutes, May 7, 1903.

43 George Michael Betts, “Participation in Civic Politics,” 720–21. Also, Herbert Roth, “The New Zealand Socialist Party,” Political Science, v. 9, n. 1, (March 1957), 54–5.

44 Wellington City Council, Correspondence Files, Notices of Motion, August 28, 1903, June 27, 1904, September 7, 1904, May 13, 1905.

45 Roth collections include sources on formation of the Socialist League, clippings from Evening Post and New Zealand Times, 1898; NZSP records and research notes, 1902–1912; Independent Political Labour League (IPLL), 1905, constitution and platforms, Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL.

46 “Political Labour League of New Zealand: A Special General Meeting of the Thorndon Branch” [c. 1905, no specific date], Independent Political Labour League, Summary notes and newspaper clippings, Herbert Roth Papers, TL. See also George Michael Betts, “Participation in Civic Politics,” 721–2.

47 Interview with E. R. Harley, Maoriland Worker, 24 May 1912, quoted in George Michael Betts, 713.

48 IPLL collection, newspaper clippings [c. 1905, no specific date], Roth Papers, TL.

49 IPLL collection, newspaper clippings, “The Mayoral Election: ‘The Labour Six’ ” [c. 1905, no specific date], Roth Papers.

50 IPLL collection, newspaper clippings, “The Mayoral Election,” “Labour and the City Council: Are ‘Business’ Councillors Biased?” [c. 1905; no specific date], Roth Papers, TL.

51 Alfred Hindmarsh, a lawyer, had some association with the labor movement through serving as president of the Wellington branch of the Federated Cooks and Stewards Union and secretary of the Wellington Socialist Education League. From the late 1890s, he had consistently challenged liberals’ claim to represent Labour and had run unsuccessfully for city council in 1901. After his election in 1905, he served until 1915. He was elected to Wellington South parliamentary seat in 1911 and held the position until his death in 1916. See Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, v. 3, 222–3.

52 IPLL collection, newspaper clippings, “The Municipal Elections” [c. 1905; no specific date], Roth Papers, TL.

53 G. M. Betts, Betts on Wellington, 130–33.

54 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 18–23, 40–46. See also Herbert Roth’s voluminous records of the “United Labour Party,” Roth Papers, TL.

55 Wellington City Council Minutes, January 25, 31, 1912, 149–50; February 1–5, 1912, 151–164.

56 On the results of McLaren’s candidacies for mayor of Wellington, Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 54, 68. See Herbert Roth’s biographical notes on McLaren, Roth Papers, TL; Kerry Taylor, “David McLaren,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, v. 3, 307. For a discussion of the political turmoil within the labor and socialist left, see Barry Gustafson, 47–77 and Erik Olssen, The Red Feds, 135–79.

57 John Cookson, “Pilgrims’ Progress—Image, Identity and Myth in Christchurch,” Southern Capital Christchurch: Towards a City Biography, 1850–2000, John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall, eds. (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 14, 16.

58 Trevor Burnard, “An Artisanal Town—the Economic Sinews of Christchurch,” Southern Capital Christchurch, 116–22.

59 Melanie Nolan, “Family and Culture: Jack and Maggie McCullough and the Christchurch Skilled Working Class, 1880s-1920s,” Culture and the Labour Movement, John E. Martin and Kerry Taylor, eds., 166, 168–9.

60 Entry in the McCullough Diary, August 1, 1911, War and Class: The Diary of Jack McCullough, Melanie Nolan, ed. (Wellington: Dunmore Publishing, 2009), 27, 187.

61 Libby Plumridge, “The Necessary but not Sufficient Condition: Christchurch Labour and Working-Class Culture,” New Zealand Journal of History, v. 19:2, 1985, 132–3.

62 Joan Morrison, “The Evolution of a City: The Growth of the City and Suburbs of Christchurch, Capital of Canterbury,” MA Thesis, Canterbury University College, 1944, quoted in Jim McAloon, “Workers Control and the Rise of Political Labour, Christchurch, 1905–1914,” in Culture and the Labour Movement, Martin and Taylor, eds., 142, 151, and on transformation in key industries, 142–52 (quotation on 151); Melanie Nolan, “Introduction,” War and Class: The Diary of Jack McCullough, 24; Melanie Nolan, “Family and Culture: Jack and Maggie McCullough and the Christchurch Skilled Working Class, 1880s-1920s,” in Southern Capital Christchurch, 168; also idem, Katie Pickles, “Workers and Workplaces—Industry and Modernity,” 144–5.

63 Melanie Nolan, “Introduction,” War and Class: the Diaries of Jack McCullough, 29; Jim McAloon, “Radical Christchurch,” 178–81; Libby Plumridge, “Necessary but Not Sufficient Condition: Christchurch Labour and Working-Class Culture,” Southern Capital Christchurch, 148–9; for more general accounts, see Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence; Erik Olssen, “The Origins of the Labour Party: A Reconsideration,” New Zealand Journal of History, v. 21 (1987), 79–96.

64 Municipal platforms frequently appear as an afterthought in national party platforms. See, for example, the Political Labour League of New Zealand, September 21, 1904, or the United Labour Party of New Zealand, April 1912 (982–18), J. T. Paul Papers, Hocken Library, Dunedin.

65 J. Thorn to J. T. Paul, January 23, 1907, J. T. Paul Papers, Hocken Library, Dunedin.

66 Ibid.

67 IPLL Minute Book, Christchurch Branch, March 17, 1906, January 22, March 18, 1908, E. J. Howard Papers, Hocken Library, Dunedin; Canterbury Trades and Labour Council, Minutes, March 21, 1908, MacMillan-Brown Archives, Canterbury University, Christchurch; Christchurch City Council Minutes, April 27, 1908, Christchurch City Archives.

68 IPLL Minute Book, Christchurch Branch, November 25, 1908.

69 Christchurch City Council Minutes, December 21, 1908, March 27 and April 7, 1909.

70 James McAloon, “Workers’ Control and the Rise of Political Labour: Christchurch, 1905–1914,” in Martin and Taylor, 151–4.

71 McAloon, “Radical Christchurch,” Southern Capital Christchurch, 178–9.

72 Christchurch City Council Minutes, September 24, 1900, March 24, 1909, April 19, 1909. See also, Lyttleton Times, 25, 26, 27 March 1909.

73 Christchurch City Council Minutes, March 20, April 3, April 19, 1911; Canterbury Trades and Labour Council, Christchurch Minutes, April 29, 1911. Also, Lyttleton Times, 21 March, 27, 29 April 1911.

74 Christchurch City Council Minutes, May 3, 1911.

75 Christchurch City Council Minutes, May 15, June 26, July 10, 1911.

76 J. A. McCullough Diaries, vol. 4, August 1, 1911 (transcribed by Melanie Nolan), and T. E. Taylor Papers, 1 v., newspaper cuttings, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch. See also Melanie Nolan, War and Class: The Diaries of Jack McCullough (Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2009) and Margaret Thorn, Stick Out, Keep Left, eds., Elsie Locke and Jacquie Matthews (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1997), 19–22, for an account of the popularity of Taylor in Christchurch.

77 Christchurch City Council Minutes, July 31, 1911.

78 J. A. McCullough to “Tom” April 28, 1913, Outward Correspondence; J. A. McCullough Diaries, v. 4, 5, May 15, 1913.

79 “Labour Representation,” by Hiram Hunter and “Parting of the Ways,” in election broadside, “The Social Democratic Press: A Journal Devoted to Municipal Progress,” Christchurch, April 25, 1913, E. J. Howard Papers, Local Body Election Scrapbook, Hocken Library.

80 For an account of the results of the 1913 municipal election in Christchurch, see Jim McAloon, “Working-Class Politics in Christchurch, 1905–1914,” M.A. Thesis, University of Canterbury, 1986, 221. Also, idem, “Workers’ Control and the Rise of Political Labour: Christchurch, 1905–1914,” in Culture and the Labour Movement, John E. Martin and Kerry Taylor, eds., 142–63. And, on the inspirational role of key figures in the Christchurch movement, see Margaret Thorn, Stick Out, Keep Left, 19–22.

81 City Council Minutes, Christchurch May 12, 1913 [report comes from an undated newspaper clipping pasted into the council minute book].

82 Minutes of the Canterbury Trades and Labour Council, Christchurch, May 22, 1913, MacMillan-Brown Archives, carried a report of a rousing resolution of support for the “Social Democratic” councillors in their fight for committee positions.

83 “Labour Representation,” Hiram Hunter.

84 Ray Markey offers the most systematic accounting of the municipal foundations of Labor Party formation during the 1890s in New South Wales, “The Emergence of the Labour Party at the Municipal Level in NSW, 1891–1900,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, September 1985, v. 31:3, 408–17; also Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82–90; and Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 139–41, 176–82.

85 For a foundational history and defense of the “White Australia” policy, see Myra Willard, History of the White Australia Policy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1923); in recent years, a critical scholarship, some of it rooted in “whiteness studies” and reflecting both Indigenous and transnational imperial perspectives has appeared. See, for instance, Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002) and Creating White Australia, Jane Carey and Claire McLiskey, eds. (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009).

86 See, for instance, Verity Burgmann’s discussion of William Lane’s racially tainted utopian campaign, and the deeply divided Australian Socialist League (ASL), ‘In Our Time:’ Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, 24–5, 100–101. For a discussion of the racist currents within the American Socialist Party, see chapter 6.

87 Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism, and the First Republic, 25, 160–62 (quotations on 162, 161).

88 Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 200–25 (quotations on 217, 201).

89 See, for example, Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London: Merlin Press, 2003), Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), and for the United States, David Roediger spawned a proliferation of “whiteness” studies with his now classic study, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991 [2007]).

90 Frank Bongiorno, The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914, 100–101; also idem, “Bernard O’Dowd and the ‘Problem’ of Race,” Labour and Community: Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Robert Hood and Ray Markey, eds. (Wollongong: AASLH, 1999), 32–6.

91 “The Municipal Elections,” The Tocsin (Melbourne), August 28, 1902.

92 Bernard Barrett, The Civic Frontier: The Origin of Local Communities and Local Government in Victoria (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1979), 3, 19, 21.

93 David Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis: Politics, Technology and Social Change in a Victorian City: Melbourne 1850–1891 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1984), 48.

94 Argus [1857], quoted in Bernard Barrett, The Civic Frontier, 202.

95 Melbourne Herald [1856], quoted in ibid., 203.

96 Bernard Barrett, The Inner Suburbs: The Evolution of an Industrial Area (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1971), 9.

97 Ibid., 1; see also Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 285–7.

98 David Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis, 9–10.

99 Bernard Barrett, 9–10; David Dunstan, 9.

100 David Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis, 13; see also, Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1978); and John Lack, “ ‘Worst Smelbourne’: Melbourne’s Noxious Trades,” in The Outcasts of Melbourne: Essays in Social History, Graeme Davison, David Dunstan and Chris McConville, eds. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 172–200.

101 Argus (1855), quoted in Bernard Barrett, The Civic Frontier, 144–6.

102 David Dunstan, 23–6.

103 For the debate over metropolitan government in Australia, see Graeme Davison and David Dunstan, “Hobbled by History? The Governmental Gap in Metropolitan Australia,” in Australia’s Metropolitan Imperative: An Agenda for Governance Reform, Richard Tomlinson and Marcus Spiller, eds. (Clayton, Victoria: CSIRO Publishing, 2018), 15–30.

104 Bernard Barrett, The Inner Suburbs, 130–36; John Lack, A History of Footscray (North Melbourne: Hargreen Publishing Co., 1991), 102–6 (quotation on 102).

105 John Lack, A History of Footscray, 99–100.

106 Frank Bongiorno, The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 62–3.

107 John Lack, A History of Footscray, 135, 138–9.

108 This overview of Lib-Lab politics in Victoria during the 1890s relies heavily on Frank Bongiorno, The Peoples’ Party, see especially, 34–42, 44, 47–8, 50. See also, John Lack, A History of Footscray, 168–72; on the Tocsin group, see Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 120–24.

109 Age (1899, 1900), quoted in Frank Bongiorno, The Peoples’ Party, 49–50. On the effects of franchise restrictions and office-holding requirements, see John Lack, A History of Footscray, 156.

110 Tocsin, August 29, 1901.

111 Tocsin, July 31, 1902, p. 6.

112 Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Portrait of an Australian Working-Class Community, 1900–1965 (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984), 7–42, has done a better job than anyone of unraveling the social context of Richmond’s political culture and the class, ethnic, and social networks that defined it. The underside of Richmond’s political culture received considerable popular notoriety through the Frank Hardy novel Power without Glory (Netley, South Australia: Griffin Press, 1976 [1950]) and his account of the political and legal travails he experienced with the novel’s publication, The Hard Way: The Story Behind Power without Glory (London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1961).

113 “Labour’s Municipal Candidates,” The Tocsin, August 18, 1904, p. 5; “James Sutch,” Samuel Merrifield, Biographies File, Victoria State Library (hereafter VSL); Richmond City Council Minutes, March 14, 28, 1901, Victoria State Archives (hereafter VSA).

114 Janet McCalman, Struggletown, 15–16.

115 Richmond City Council, Minutes, June 7, 21, July 5, October 25, November 2, 1900 (VSA).

116 Richmond City Council, Minutes, June 6, June 20, July 4, 18, 1901. Ted Findley, the nominal publisher of the Tocsin and a labor member of the Victoria Parliament, was expelled from that body when the Tocsin re-published an article from the Irish People suppressed by British authorities, which attacked the king. Labor came unsuccessfully to the defense of Findley. See Frank Bongiorno, The People’s Party, 50–55.

117 Richmond City Council, Minutes, August 28, 1901, September 1, 1902.

118 Richmond City Council, Minutes, September 26, December 5, 1901, January 16, February 27, October 9, 23, 1902.

119 Richmond City Council, Minutes, September 26, October 10, 1901, October 9, 23, November 6, 20, 1902.

120 Richmond City Council, Minutes, April 24, September 1, 25, October 9, 1902; May 22, December 4, 1902.

121 Richmond City Council, Minutes, November 20, December 4, 18, 1902, January 29, February 12, March 12, 26, 1903.

122 “Municipal Labour Platform,” Tocsin, August 21, 1902.

123 Central Executive, Political Labor Council of Victoria, Minutes, August 9, September 5, November 1, 1902, July 16, August 13, 1904(VSL). Prendergast’s election as mayor also saw the North Melbourne Council eliminate the mayor’s stipend of £100 in retaliation. North Melbourne, City Council Minutes, September 1, 1902, (VSA); see also, Samuel Merrifield, Biographical File (VSL). And, Tocsin, August 28 (p. 3), and September 4, 1902 (p. 3).

124 See, for instance, Fitzroy Branch, Victoria Political Labor Council, Minutes, June 14, 1905, April 9, 1906, (VSA). Also, Footscray, City Council, Minutes, August 3, 1903, February 22, 1909 (VSA).

125 President’s Report, Annual Conference of the Political Labor Council, Victoria, April 13, 1906, in Victoria PLC Minute book (VSL). “Lessons of the Elections,” Tocsin, August 31, 1905, “Municipal Elections: Richmond East Ward,” Tocsin, September 1, 1904.

126 “Think Municipally,” Tocsin, August 31, 1905, p. 7.

127 Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney 1870–90 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5–6, 18; Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 7.

128 Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp, 21, 40.

129 F. A. Larcombe, The Origin of Local Government in New South Wales, 1831– 1858 v. 1 in his A History of Local Government in New South Wales (Sydney: Local Government and Shires Association, 1973), 98–102, 251–62, and v. II, The Stabilization of Local Government in New South Wales 1858–1906, 150–67.

130 Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney, 1842–1992 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1992), 51; “Dr. James L. Graham, MLA, debating the Sydney Corporation Amending Bill, NSW Legislative Assembly, 19 July 1900,” quoted in Fitzgerald, 52.

131 Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney, 1842–1992, 129. Also, Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), 98–100.

132 F. A. Larcombe, A History of Local Government in New South Wales, 8–9; Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp, 27–8. “Fellmongers” dealt in sheep skins.

133 Sydney City Council, “The Deposit of Garbage,” Proceedings (1890), quoted in Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp, 79.

134 A. J. C. Mayne, Fever, Squalor and Vice: Sanitation and Social Policy in Victorian Sydney (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982), 89–94 (quotations, 91, 93).

135 Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp, 80.

136 A. J. C. Mayne, Fever, Squalor and Vice, 43, “Commencement of the Blackwattle Swamp Sewer” [1869], quoted in Mayne, 46.

137 “Active Service Brigade Manifesto, 1896,” John Dwyer Papers, v. 2, ML, Sydney; on the ASB and Dwyer, see M. G. Hearn, “Hard Cash: John Dwyer and his Contemporaries, 1890–1914,” unpublished dissertation, University of Sydney, 2000; Bruce Scates, A New Australia, 16, 113, Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988), 246–8, and Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, 63–5.

138 See chapter 2 for discussion of the Great Maritime Strike of 1890 and the first wave of local party activism in New South Wales.

139 Ray Markey, “The Emergence of the Labour Party at the Municipal Level in NSW, 1891–1900,” 410.

140 Thomas R. Roydhouse and H. J. Taperell, The Labour Party in New South Wales: A History of Its Formation and Legislative Career, Together with Biographies of the Members, and the Complete Text of the Trade Disputes Conciliation and Arbitration Act, 1892 (Sydney: Edwards, Dunlap & Co., 1892). See comparable platform suggestions from Merewether Branch, Labour Electoral League, Northumberland, “The Approaching Conference, 1891,” New South Wales Political Labour League, Scrapbook, John Dwyer Papers, ML.

141 “Mark Time,” “Victory Achieved by Labour,” July 17, 1891, and John Dwyer, “The Council and the Labour League,” Mittagong Express, March 18, 1892, News cuttings, John Dwyer Papers, Box 4, ML.

142 See, for example, Minute book, Denison Division, Labour Electoral League, September 17, December 18, 1894, March 13, 1895, ML.

143 “Municipal Platform,” news cutting, PLL Annual Conference, 1901 (newspaper not identified), and PLL-NSW, Executive Report, 1901, New South Wales Political Labour League (scrapbook), John Dwyer Papers, ML. Ray Markey has noted that the “increasingly centralized PLL leadership failed to take any initiative in municipal organization” after 1898, “The Emergence of the Labour Party at the Municipal Level in NSW, 1891–1900,” 415, and for the broader dissatisfaction with the PLP among working-class activists, see idem, The Making of the Labour Party in New South Wales, 1880– 1900, 220–1.

144 See discussion in chapters 3 and 4. Municipal socialists in the United States and Sweden fought similar battles within their own social democratic parties. See chapters 2, 6, and 7.

145 Report, Annual Conference, Political Labour League of New South Wales, January 27, 1902; news clipping, “Political Labour League Conference. A Representative Gathering,” January 26, 1898, New South Wales Political Labour League scrapbook; Minute book, Denison Division, Labour Electoral League, November 15, 1895; Report, Annual Conference, Political Labour League of NSW, January 26, 1912, ML.

146 F. A. Larcombe, A History of Local Government in New South Wales, 16; Michael Hogan, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales,” Labour History, n. 72, May 1997, 128; Report, Annual Conference, Political Labor League of New South Wales, 1908 (Sydney: The Worker, 1908), 15; “Labour Conference: PLL and AWU Conferences,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 2, 1909, news cutting, Miscellaneous ALP Handbills, Press clippings, etc., ML.

147 Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney, 1842–1992, 136–8. And, F. A. Lacombe, The Stabilization of Local Government in New South Wales, 1858–1906, 39–40, 43–4.

148 Hilary Golden, Sydney’s Electoral History: A Short Electoral History of Sydney City Council, 1842–1992 (Sydney: Sydney City Council, 1995), 33.

149 F. A. Larcombe, The Stabilization of Municipal Government in New South Wales, 1858–1906, 263–4, 268; Hilary Golden, Sydney’s Electoral History 34–8; Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney, 1842–1992, 138–9.

150 Frederick A. Larcombe, “The History and Development of Local Government in New South Wales, 1857–1919,” Thesis for Degree of Master of Economics, University of Sydney, March 6, 1944, quotations, 279–281.

151 Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney, 1870–90, 18, 20, 27–31.

152 Lucy Taksa, “ ‘Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place’: Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops,” Labour History, n. 79, November 2000, 18; Sheila Fitzgerald, Rising Damp, 30.

153 Lucy Taksa, oral history interviews with A. Doyle, N. Edwards, and J. Mongan, NSW Bicentennial Oral History Project, quoted in Taksa, “ ‘Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place,’ ” 17.

154 Lucy Taksa, “ ‘A Beacon of Unity’? JST McGowen—Premier of NSW, 1910– 1913,” unpublished paper (n.d.), 7–19. Also, Taksa, “James Sinclair Taylor McGowen,” in The Premiers of New South Wales, 1856–2005, v. 2: 1901–2005, D. Clune and K. Turner, eds. (Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2006) 93–114.

155 “Load Your Municipal Guns,” The Worker (Sydney), January 30, 1908, 20. See also, Lucy Taksa, “Social Capital, Community, and Citizenship at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Sydney, 1880–1932,” unpublished paper, European Social Science History Association, Amsterdam, March 6, 1998, 13; Lucy Taksa, “ ‘Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place,’ ” 22; on McGowen’s career, see Nede Bairn, “McGowen, James Sinclair Taylor (1855–1922),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1891–1939, v. 10 (1986), 273–4, and Lucy Taksa, “ ‘A Beacon of Unity’? JST McGowen—Premier of NSW, 1910–1913.” Also Michael Hogan, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales,” 140–1.

156 Sydney Morning Herald (hereafter SMH), February 3, 1908, p. 8; February 4, 1908, p. 6. Redfern City Council, Minutes, February 7, 1908, Sydney Municipal Archives (hereafter SMA).

157 “Municipal Elections: The Financial Aspect,” SMH, January 29, 1908, p. 9.

158 “Local Government: The Premier’s Manifesto. Election Day.” SMH, January 31, 1908, p. 7.

159 For an analysis of the changes brought by the Local Government Act of 1906, see F. A. Larcombe, The Stabilization of Local Government in New South Wales, 1858– 1906, v. II of his three-volume A History of Local Government in New South Wales, 297–304.

160 Redfern City Council, Minutes, February 7, 1908, SMA; Souvenir of Redfern Municipal Jubilee, 1859–1909 (Sydney: McCarron, Stewart & Co., 1909).

161 Redfern City Council, Minutes, February 7, 1908; December 12, 1910 (SMA).

162 “Local Government,” SMH, February 4, 1908, p. 6.

163 Minutes, Redfern City Council, February 7, 13, 20, 1908 (SMA).

164 Minutes, Redfern City Council, June 25, August 6, September 3, October 1, November 5, 26, December 17, 1908.

165 Minutes, Redfern City Council, February 11, 18, 25, March 4, 18, April 15, 29, July 8, 1909.

166 Souvenir of Redfern Municipal Jubilee, 1859–1909, 49, 51, 55. “Wood blocking” was a form of pavement, a distinct improvement over dirt (and muddy) roads.

167 Minutes, Redfern City Council, February 6, 14, 17, March 3, 17, 31, June 30, July 7, 1910, February 2, March 2, 1911, SMA; “Mayorless Redfern,” SMH, March 4, 1910.

168 The Worker, January 19, 1911, 13.

169 Ibid.

170 The Worker, February 3, 1911. Labor had less success in other Sydney suburbs. See Michael Hogan, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales;” idem, Local Labor: A History of the Labor Party in Glebe, 1891–2003 (Annandale: Federation Press, 2004) and Max Solling and Peter Reynolds, Leichhardt: On the Margins of the City, A Social History of Leichhardt and the Former Municipalities of Annandale, Balmain and Glebe (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997).

171 The Daily Standard (Brisbane), January 17, 1913, p. 6.

172 The Worker (Sydney), January 19, 1911, p. 13.

173 Ibid. The structural and political limitations faced by “radical” labor in Queensland towns have been fruitfully explored by Bradley Bowden, “The Emergence of Labour Identity in a Queensland Town: Ipswich, 1861–1912,” in Australian Labour History Reconsidered, David Palmer, et al., eds. (Unley, SA: Australian Humanities Press, 1999), 92–101; also, idem, “ ‘Some Mysterious Terror’: The Relationship between Capital and Labour in Ipswich, 1861–96,” Labour History, n. 72, May 1997, 77–100.

174 Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane, 1859–1959: A History of Local Government (Brisbane: Oswald Ziegler, 1959), 24, 42.

175 Bradley Bowden, “The Role of Place in Labor-Capital Relations: The Experience of Brisbane (Australia), 1880–1900,” paper presented at the North American Labor History Conference, October 2004, 3–5; idem, “The Emergence of Labour Identity in a Queensland Town: Ipswich, 1861–1912,” 93; and “Hegemony, Transience and Community: Life in Inner City Brisbane 1879–1885,” in Ray Markey, et al., Labour and Community: Historical Essays (Wollongong, Australia: University of Wollongong Press, 2001), 107.

176 Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982), 112; Greenwood and Laverty, Brisbane 1859–1959, 63–4, 67–70; Moreton Bay Courier (1859), quoted on 67.

177 Greenwood and Laverty, 91 (quotation), 97–8, 216–18; G. H. Knibbs, Local Government in Australia (Melbourne: A. J. Mullett, 1919), 52–3, 56–7. The 1902 Local Authorities Act permitted occupiers or owners of ratable property to cast a vote in municipal elections, based on whoever paid the rates.

178 Bradley Bowden, “The Role of Place in Labor-Capital Relations,” 3–4, quotation from Brisbane Courier, July 26, 1875.

179 Bradley Bowden, “Hegemony, Transience and Community,” 112–13, 118–20.

180 Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915, 317–27 (quotation on 325); Bradley Bowden, “The Role of Place in Labor-Capital Relations,” 7–10; D. J. Murphy, “Queensland,” in D. J. Murphy, ed., Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia, 1880–1920 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 129–67.

181 Reported in the Brisbane Courier (1901), as quoted in Ronald Lawson, Brisbane in the 1890s: A Study of an Australian Urban Society (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1973), 14.

182 See Bowden’s work on Brisbane and provincial towns, “The Role of Place in Labor-Capital Relations,” 5–8; idem, “The Emergence of Labour Identity in a Queensland Town: Ipswich, 1861–1912,” Australian Labour History Reconsidered, David Palmer, et al., eds.

183 See, for instance, the Minutes of the Central Political Executive of the Queensland Parliamentary Labor Party, February 21, 1896, July 1, December 2, 1898, JOL. For a useful overview of state labor party development in Queensland, see D. J. Murphy, “Queensland,” 160–178.

184 For a detailed account of Ned Lowry’s municipal efforts, see Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, 177–180 (quotations from the Townsville Democrat and the Worker [Brisbane]); on persistence of Townsville’s militant municipal tradition, see I. N. Moles, “ ‘The Fiery Cross Will Go Forth’: Working-Class Radicalism and Municipal Socialism in Townsville during the 1930s and 1940s,” in Lectures on North Queensland History, 3rd Series, History Department, James Cook University of North Queensland (Townsville, 1978), 101–3.

185 Minutes, Labor-in-Politics Convention, May 2, 1905, 1907 (Rockhampton), 1910 (Townsville), May 16, 1910. JOL. On the shift in attention in 1910, see J. R. Laverty, “Greater Brisbane and Local Government,” Labor in Power: The Labor Party and Governments in Queensland 1915–57, D. J. Murphy, et al., eds. (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1980), 117–18.

186 The prominence of debate over local government reform continued at the seventh and eighth Labor-in-Politics Conventions in 1913 (Brisbane) and 1916 (Rockhampton), Minutes, JOL.

187 Minutes, Labor-in-Politics Convention, Townsville, May 16, 1910, JOL. For discussion of comparable fights in other countries, see chapters 3, 4, and 6.

188 Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane, 1859–1959, 297.

189 F. J. Brewer and R. Dunn, Sixty Years of Municipal Government (Brisbane: H. Pole, 1925), 41, 12–13, 31. See also, James Larcombe, Labor’s Ten Years Progress (Brisbane: The Worker, 1926) and idem, Notes on the Political History of the Labor Movement in Queensland (Brisbane: The Worker, 1934), 112–15. Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane, 1859–1959, 296–7.

190 Greenwood and Laverty, 297; D.J. Murphy, ed., Labor in Politics, 211–12.

191 Minutes, Brisbane City Council, May 6, July 13, and August 17, 1908, pp. 58–9, 97, 113–14. JOL.

192 Minutes, Brisbane City Council, September 13, October 3, 1910, 95–6, 105; “Mayor’s Report for 1911,” 13–15; Minutes, April 29, May 3, 27, 1912, 20, 26, 31–2; August 25, 1913, 82–3; June 16, 1914, 60. On the early history of Brisbane’s tramway service, see Greenwood and Laverty, 280–82.

193 Minutes, Brisbane City Council, February 19, 1912, 160, 162–3, 166; March 6, 1912, 2. For an account of the general strike, see D. J. Murphy, “The Tramway and General Strike, 1912,” The Big Strikes: Queensland, 1889–1965, D. J. Murphy, ed. (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 117–131; A. A. Morrison, “The Brisbane General Strike of 1912,” Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand, 4, no. 14 (May 1950), 125–44; also Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland, 331–5.

194 See, for instance, extensive coverage of the strike and its aftermath in The Worker (Brisbane), March 2 (pp. 20–21), March 9, 1912 (pp. 4, 5, 8, 9).

195 The Daily Standard, January 17, 1913, p. 4.

6. Battling for Labor’s Local Political Space: United States

1 Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Urban History, v. 23:2, January, 1997, 192–220, Robert E. Bionaz, “Streetcar City: Popular Politics and the Shaping of Urban Progressivism in Cleveland, 1880–1910,” PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2002; Peter Witt, Cleveland Before St. Peter, a Handful of Hotstuff (Cleveland, 1899), Louis F. Post, “Notes for a Biography of Peter Witt,” Peter Witt Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society; Carl Wittke, “Peter Witt, Tribune of the People,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 58 (October, 1949), 361–77, Hoyt L. Warner, Progressivism in Ohio, 1897–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964), 65–6, 88–90, and also Frederic Howe, Confessions of a Reformer (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), 189–90, and Tom Johnson, My Story (1911; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970), 84–6, 203, 258–60.

2 Tom Johnson, My Story, 258.

3 William Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1962), 17.

4 See Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “the People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 76–82 on Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Hearst’s New York campaign, and for representative studies of other cities, see Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), Georg Leidenberger, Chicago’s Progressive Alliance: Labor and the Bid for Public Streetcars (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), Melvin Holli, Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), and Marnie Jones, Holy Toledo: Religion and Politics in the Life of “Golden Rule” Jones (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1998); also Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), Donald T. Critchlow, Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).

5 Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906; translated and reprinted, New York: Macmillan Press, 1976); a major voice updating Sombart’s view has been Seymour Martin Lipset, most recently with Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: Norton, 2000), 44–57, 175–9 and the latest entry in this historiographical tradition, with a genuinely comparative twist, is Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also Eric Foner’s still important essay, critical of the Sombart tradition, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop, v. 17:1, 1984, 57–80.

6 See legal historian Gerald Frug, City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) on the constitutional and historical constraints on cities in a federalist system; also Warren Magnusson, Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (London: Routledge, 2011); and Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations and Rising Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). On the problem of home rule, see below.

7 L. Glen Seretan, Daniel De Leon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), Selig Perlman, “Upheaval and Reorganization,” v. 2, History of Labour in the United States, John R. Commons, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1918) and Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

8 See Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), The Great Strikes of 1877, David Stowell, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 55–75, Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

9 Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); see also, Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3–24, and a riveting case of populist vulnerability to white supremacy, Lawrence C. Goodwyn, “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: An East Texas Case Study,” American Historical Review, v. 76, n. 5 (December 1971), 1435–56; on the populists’ appeal to urban workers see Chester M. Destler, American Radicalism: Essays and Documents (New London, CT: Connecticut College, 1946).

10 C. Vann Woodward’s classic, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), of course, had powerful insights into the resurgent politics of white supremacy; also, idem, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Macmillan, 1938). On the realignment of 1896, see foremost Walter Dean Burnham, “The System of 1896: An Analysis,” Paul Kleppner, ed., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), but also Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Knopf, 2006).

11 On ARU and Debs, see Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 73–99; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Socialist and Citizen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), David Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). For a recent, somewhat overstated claim to a general history of the SPA, see Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2015). For developments at the local level see below.

12 Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910– 1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 10–15, adopts this dichotomous description of SPA factions but somewhat problematically places Victor Berger above the factional division, something many other historians dispute. Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 107–23, preferred a three-faction classification—left/center/right—but practically, after 1904, the party was best characterized as having two factions: left/center and right. Kipnis found Berger to have been consistently on the right.

13 For a comparison of the German SPD and the British Labour Party, see Stefan Berger, The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats, 1900–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

14 See, for instance, “The Bernstein Doctrine for America,” Social Democratic Herald (hereafter SDH), October 12, 1901, and “As to Municipal Elections,” SDH, November 16, 1901. Although socialist scientific interest in Darwin’s theory of evolution was widespread, Berger and the party’s right wing were especially drawn to the evolutionary proposition that they were “marching in step with nature” and that the “transition to socialism” was inevitable, Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Th ought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 129–32 (quotation from 132).

15 Socialist Party of America, Unity Convention, Proceedings, August 1901, Sixth Session, 36–7, 32–3. For a discussion of what he calls the center/left and rightwing divisions in the party, see Ira Kipnis, 107–123. Max Hayes’ reference is to Tom Johnson and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones, reform mayors of Cleveland and Toledo respectively.

16 Ibid., Second session, 21, 30–31, 38–9; Third session, 11–14.

17 Ibid., Sixth session, 38–41; Seventh session, 12–14.

18 Proceedings, National Convention of the Socialist Party, at Chicago, May 1 to 6, 1904, 243, 244, 251, 253.

19 Ibid., 258.

20 Ibid., 267–8, 272–3, 277.

21 Ira Kipnis, 160, 166–8.

22 For the German debates, see chapter 4. Also, Victor Berger, “Do We Want Evolution or Revolution? SDH, June 28, 1902; also SDH, August 24, 1901; and Berger, “Not ‘Revolutionary’ Humbugs,” SDH, April 22, 1905.

23 Ira Kipnis, 151–4, 159–61 (quotation on 153). See also, James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 6–8, 24–5.

24 Eugene V. Debs, “The Danger Ahead,” International Socialist Review, January 1, 1911, and Charles Edward Russell, statement in International Socialist Review, March 1912, both quoted in William English Walling, Socialism As It Is: A Survey of the World-Wide Revolutionary Movement (New York: Macmillan Company, 1912), 176–8. (Italics in original transcription by Walling.)

25 Berger’s comments in the SDH from 1910 and February 22, 1902, are quoted in Walling, Socialism As It Is, 179–80.

26 Victor Berger in SDH, October 12, 1901, as quoted in Walling, 184–5.

27 Older studies tend to emphasize the prominence of a relatively small number of activist women in the party. See especially, Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981) and in more limited ways, James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925, especially 53–63.

28 Victor Berger, SDH, v. 12, n. 12, quoted in Walling, 185–6.

29 Max Fruchter to Rose Schneiderman, March 5, 1911, and Rose Schneiderman, All for One, quoted in Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 99–100.

30 Anita Block quoted in Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 191. The debate on women’s suffrage appeared in New York Call, November through December 1909; see Orleck, 330n22.

31 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “The IWW Call to Women,” Solidarity, July 31, 1915, quoted in Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women, 181–2.

32 Sally M. Miller, “For White Men Only: The Socialist Party of America and Issues of Gender, Ethnicity and Race,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, v. 2, n. 3 (July 2003), 283–90.

33 In Melbourne, Australia, some women activists petitioned repeatedly for separate organization within the Political Labor Councils and were rebuffed by male colleagues who perceived separate organization as a threat to the class agenda of the organization. Debate on the issue percolated for several years. Executive Committee, Political Labor Council of Victoria, Minutes, June 3, 1911, November 22, 1913, January 7, 1914. Also, Political Labor Council of Victoria, Proceedings of Annual Conference, April 10, 1914, 31–2, 36–8, 60–61. Victoria State Library, Melbourne. (See also discussion in chapter 5 and Introduction to part II.)

34 James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925, 54–5, 59–60. Also John R. Sillito, “Women and the Socialist Party in Utah, 1900–1920,” Utah Historical Quarterly 49 Summer 1981, 225–40.

35 Sally M. Miller, “Women in the Party Bureaucracy: Subservient Functionaries,” in Flawed Liberation: Socialism and Feminism, Sally M. Miller, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 14, 16, 18, 20, 25.

36 Miller, “Women in the Party Bureaucracy,” 28–9; and Miller, “For White Men Only,” 288–90. Still the most detailed history of the Women’s National Committee and its demise is Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 145–75, 304–17.

37 Victor Berger, “The Misfortunes of the Negro,” SDH, May 31, 1902.

38 Debs, “The Negro in the Class Struggle,” International Socialist Review, November 4, 1903, 260, 259.

39 Kate Richards O’Hare, “ ‘Nigger’ Equality,” in Kate Richards O’Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches, Philip S. Foner and Sally M. Miller, eds. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 45, 48 (emphasis in the original).

40 See especially, Sally M. Miller, “For White Men Only: The Socialist Party of America and Issues of Gender, Ethnicity and Race,” 299–301. For a discussion of parallel patterns of racial exclusion and neglect in the wider “progressive movement,” see Shelton Stromquist, “The Boundaries of Difference,” in Reinventing “the People,” 131–64.

41 W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “Socialism and the Negro Problem,” The New Review, a Weekly Review of International Socialism, v. 1:5, February 1, 1913, 138, 140.

42 See Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888– 1908 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Southern Politics and the Shaping of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

43 Weinstein, 67–8; Oscar Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), 279; H. L. Meredith, “Agrarian Socialism and the Negro in Oklahoma, 1900–1918,” 282–3; James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 236–7, 318–19, 322–3, 386–7; Sally M. Miller, “For White Men Only,” 301. Philip Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans, from the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 226–37 has the most extensive discussion of the protracted fight over the “grandfather clause.”

44 Sally M. Miller, “For White Men Only,” 299–300; Foner, 204–19, 271–87; Du Bois, “Socialism and the Negro Problem,” The New Review 1, February 1, 1913, 138–41.

45 The Messenger, November 1917, 19–20. For an excellent account of the early political development of A. Philip Randolph, see Eric Arnesen, “A. Philip Randolph: Emerging Socialist Radical,” in Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph, Andrew Kersten and Clarence Lang, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 45–71, and on the Hillquit campaign, 61–2. See also, Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934) for Hillquit’s own account of the campaign.

46 The Editors, “The Right and Left Wing Interpreted,” Messenger, May–June 1919, 21; see also Eric Arnesen, “A. Philip Randolph: Emerging Socialist Radical,” 59–60, 68.

47 Kipnis, 130–36 offers a damning critique of the party but in so doing exaggerates the near universality of race prejudice among socialists. For a discussion of Australian labor and socialist activists’ race prejudice and the “white Australia” policy, see chapter 5.

48 For the impressive wins across a wide range of Ohio cities in 1911, see Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, 73–4. Also Robert F. Hoxie, “ ‘The Rising Tide of Socialism’: A Study,” The Journal of Political Economy, v. 19, n. 8 (October 1911), 609–31.

49 William English Walling, Socialism As It Is, 176, 192–3, 197.

50 The term “urban populists,” although not widely used in the early twentieth century, is meant to denote a whole variety of working-class based urban political movements that aimed to construct a program similar to those of municipal socialists and labor parties in other parts of the world. See, for example, Daniel J. Johnson, “ ‘No Make-Believe Class Struggle’: The Socialist Municipal Campaign in Los Angeles, 1911,” Labor History, v. 41:1 (2000), 25–45, Georg Leidenberger, “ ‘The Public is the Labor Union’: Working-Class Progressivism in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago,” Labor History, v. 36:2 1995, 187–210, John Enyeart, The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870–1924 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), Jeffrey A. Johnson, ”They Are All Red Out Here”: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895–1925 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class,” 192–220, and Robert Bionaz, “Streetcar City.”

51 We still have remarkably few studies of “urban” populism. One of the classics is Chester M. Destler’s essay on Chicago in idem, American Radicalism, 1865–1901: Essays and Documents. See also, Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, 204–11.

52 On the Milwaukee socialists’ alliance with the Populists, see “Vote with the Peoples’ Party for Public Ownership of Public Utilities,” and “Platform of the Peoples’ Party, in City Convention, March 20, 1896,” Scrapbook, Frederic Heath Papers, Milwaukee County Historical Society; Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, Frederick I. Olson, “The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897–1941,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1952, 28–38, and on the formation of the Social Democratic Party see Olson, 39–53, Marvin Wachman, History of the Social-Democratic Party of Milwaukee, 1897– 1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1945) 13–29, and Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910–1920.

53 Milwaukee Journal, March 24, April 4, 1900.

54 Selig Perlman, “History of Socialism in Milwaukee (1893–1910),” BA Thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1910, 38–40, 46. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison; also, Proceedings of the Common Council of the City of Milwaukee, April 19, 1904, Milwaukee Public Library; and “History of Milwaukee Social Democratic Victories,” Milwaukee Social Democratic Party, 1910, p. 63, Wisconsin Historical Society.

55 Minutes, Milwaukee Common Council, April 25, 1904, 20; January 9, 1905, 1295.

56 Minutes, Milwaukee Common Council, May 31, July 11, 25, October 24, November 14, December 12; February 6, 20, 1905, 392–3, 515, 936, 1039–40, 1136, 1142–3; 1411–12, 1427.

57 Minutes, Milwaukee Common Council, April 19, July 25, September 19, October 31, 8, 1904, 461, 759, 982; April 19, 1910, 5–6.

58 Selig Perlman, “History of Socialism in Milwaukee (1893–1910),” 41–2, 46; A. W. Mance, “History of Milwaukee Social Democratic Victories,” (Milwaukee: Social-Democratic Herald, 1911), p. 64; on the shift to at-large rather than ward representation as a strategy to undermine working-class electoral strength, see Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (October 1964), 157–69.

59 Social Democratic Herald, March 7, 1908, quoted in Wachman, History of the Social Democratic Party of Milwaukee, 1897–1910, 64. For discussion of 1906 and 1908 campaigns, see Wachman, 58–65, Olson, “The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897–1941,” 155–160.

60 Frederic C. Howe, “Milwaukee, a Socialist City,” The Outlook, June 25, 1910, 414, 416–17.

61 The Milwaukee socialists’ campaign tactics are discussed in Wachman, History of the Social Democratic Party of Milwaukee, 1897–1910, 62; A. W. Mance, “History of the Milwaukee Social-Democratic Victories,” 15–18, and Robert Lewis Mikkelsen, “Immigrants in Politics: Poles, Germans, and the Social Democratic Party of Milwaukee,” in Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies, Dirk Hoerder, ed., (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 289–90.

62 Mikkelsen, “Immigrants in Politics,” 289–2.

63 Wachman, History of the Social Democratic Party of Milwaukee, 1897–1910, 70–73.

64 Howe, “Milwaukee, a Socialist City,” 416, 420–421. A. W. Mance, “History of Milwaukee Social-Democratic Victories,” 50–52.

65 Frederick I. Olson, “The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897–1941,” 115. See also, Sally M. Miller, “Milwaukee: Of Ethnicity and Labor,” in Socialism and the Cities, Bruce M. Stave, ed. (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1975), esp. 51–4. For more on the fight against municipal “reforms” such as at-large elections, commission, and city manager governments, see below.

66 The experience of German social democrats in Bielefeld, Offenbach, and Mühlhausen offers a parallel story, as do Redfern in New South Wales and Nelson in Lancashire. See chapters 3, 4, and 5. For a study that emphasizes the resiliency of Milwaukee’s social democratic politics in a very different era, see Eric Fure-Slocum, Contesting the Postwar City: Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

67 Good collections of local studies include: Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989) (Flint, MI, Dayton, Lima, and Lorain, Ohio, New Castle, IN) Bruce M. Stave, ed., Socialism and the Cities (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975) (Milwaukee, Schenectady, Oklahoma City, Passaic, Reading, and Bridgeport) and Donald T. Critchlow, ed., Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986) (Milwaukee, Marion, IN, Flint, MI, Dayton, OH, Minneapolis, Illinois mining towns). James Weinstein’s The Decline of American Socialism, 116–18, has one of the more complete inventories of local socialist electoral activity. See also the updated and augmented list in Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History.

68 See Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, 69–94, especially 73–4.

69 Annual Report, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ohio, 1911 and Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, cited in James Lehman, “The Socialist Party in Hamilton, Ohio, 1911–1915,” unpublished MA Thesis, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 1964, 9–10. On Hamilton’s other “immigration problem—immigration from the mountains of Kentucky,” see Howard White, “City Manager Government in Hamilton,” in Frederick C. Mosher, et al., City Manager Government in Seven Cities (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940), 174–5.

70 Lehman, “The Socialist Party in Hamilton, Ohio, 1911–1915,” 11. See also Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, and Howard White, “City Manager Government in Hamilton,” 182, 185, 188–9.

71 Lehman, 20–21; Hamilton Journal, September 12, 1911, quoted in Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, 72.

72 Lehman, 19–24; Judd, Socialist Cities, 91–2.

73 Minutes, Hamilton (Ohio) City Council Proceedings, June 5, 19, July 2, 20, 1912, Hamilton Municipal Archives.

74 Ibid., August 7, 21, 1912.

75 Ibid., October 16, November 14, 20, December 18, 1912.

76 Ibid., January 2, 15, February 5, 1913.

77 Ibid., February 19, March 5, 19, 1913.

78 Ibid., March 28, April 9, 1913. Also, Miami Valley Socialist, April 25, 1913.

79 Ibid., April 16, 23, 1913.

80 Ibid., July 9, 11, 16, 30, August 6, 20, 26, September 3, 17, October 1, 1913. Reports in the Hamilton Journal notwithstanding, the socialists on council showed remarkable solidarity and willingness to challenge a status quo to whose defense the mayor and his council minority rallied repeatedly. The account of the socialists’ behavior in council described by Richard Judd, based on mainstream press accounts, does not square with the minutes of council deliberations themselves. See Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, 91–2.

81 Hamilton Journal, October 15, 27, 1913, quoted in Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, 92–3.

82 Hamilton Evening Journal, November 1, 3, 1913, quoted in James Lehman, “The Socialist Party of Hamilton, Ohio, 1911–1915.”

83 Hamilton Socialist, November 8, 1913, cited in Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, 93.

84 “How Hamilton Socialists Fill Appointive Offices for New Administration,” Miami Valley Socialist, December 5, 1913, 1, 4.

85 Hamilton Telegraph, November 27, 1913, quoted in Lehman, 68.

86 Hamilton City Council Minutes, January 3, 1914.

87 Hamilton Telegraph, November 27, 1913, and Lehman interviews, cited in Lehman, 72.

88 “Starting Right: Hamilton Socialists Take Consel [sic] in Preparation for their Administration,” Miami Valley Socialist, January 9, 1914, 3. Also published in The Party Builder, December 27, 1913, p. 3.

89 Hamilton Evening Journal, November 6, 1913; Hamilton Telegraph, January 1, 1914, quoted in Lehman, 81, 83.

90 Hamilton City Council Minutes, January 21, February 4, 1914.

91 Ibid., February 18, March 4, June 17, July 5, 1914.

92 Ibid., October 8, November 10, 18, 1914, January 6, 20, 1915. Also, see discussion of debt and revenue issues by Lehman, 92–4.

93 Fred A. Hinkel, “Here’s Story of What Socialism Can Do Now for the Cities of Nation,” American Socialist, March 20, 1915. Also, see Lehman, 91–2.

94 “Capitalist Dayton and Socialist Hamilton: Fake Efficiency and Economy and the Real Th ing,” Miami Valley Socialist, April 17, 1914; Hinkel, “Here’s Story of What Socialism Can Do,” March 20, 1915, and Lehman, 96–7.

95 Hinkel, “Here’s Story of What Socialism Can Do”; Judd, Socialist Cities, 93–4.

96 For the story of the 1915 strike and Hinkel’s intervention, see Lehman, 97, who draws on stories in the Hamilton Evening Journal, November 17, 26, 27, 29, 1915.

97 See Lehman, 108–109; Judd, Socialist Cities, 94.

98 Socialists believed that ward-based representation ensured working-class access to local government. As one researcher noted, “There had been nothing unapproachable about the old ward aldermen. Every voter had a neighbor on the common council who was interested in serving him … Election at large made a change that, however desirable in other ways, left the voters in the poorer wards with a feeling that they had been deprived of their share of political importance.” Quoted in Samuel P. Hays, 165.

99 James Lehman, “The Socialist Party in Hamilton, Ohio,” 53–64, 104–110. Howard White, “City Manager Government in Hamilton,” 183–5. On Dayton’s experience, see below.

100 Lehman, 9–10; Chester E. Rightor, City Manager in Dayton (New York: Macmillan, 1919).

101 The most useful overview of Dayton’s industrial development comes from one of its most prominent socialist activists, Joseph W. Sharts, Biography of Dayton: An Economic Interpretation of Local History (Dayton: Miami Valley Socialist, 1922), especially 14, 32–3, 52–65, 73–5, 94–6. Also, John T. Walker, “Socialism in Dayton, Ohio, 1912 to 1925: Its Membership, Organization and Demise,” Labor History 26 (Summer 1985), 385–6.

102 James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal of the Liberal State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 15, 17, 93, 96. On Kirby and Patterson’s role in the open shop movement, see also Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 217–19.

103 John T. Walker, “Socialism in Dayton, Ohio, 1912 to 1925,” 390–91.

104 Local Dayton Socialist Party [hereafter LDSP], Minutes, June 21, 1901, December 3, 1905, June 25, and July 23, 1906, Wright State University Archives, Dayton, Ohio.

105 Joseph W. Sharts, Biography of Dayton: An Economic History of Local History, 108–11.

106 LDSP Minutes, May 27, November 18, 25, December 16, 1911. Also, Judd, Socialist Cities, 143.

107 Sharts, Biography of Dayton 111; Judd, Socialist Cities, 143.

108 Cleveland Citizen, December 24, 1910, quoting the Montgomery County Reporter, cited in Judd, Socialist Cities, 143, 233. See, for instance, “The Socialist Vote,” Dayton Daily News, November 11, 1910, clipping in LDSP Minutes, December 16, 1910.

109 See Judd, Socialist Cities, 143.

110 LDSP minutes, December 15, 22, 29, 1911.

111 LDSP minutes, January 5, 12, 26, 1912.

112 Dayton City Council, Minutes, January 1, 1912, Wright State University Archives, Dayton.

113 Ibid., January 15, 1912.

114 Ibid., April 22, June 17, 1912. Also, Miami Valley Socialist, (hereafter MVS) June 7, 14, 21, 28, 1912.

115 “Socialist Councilman Happel attempts to resign because he could not abide by his socialist pledge, but Dem-Rep alliance persuaded him to keep his seat as one of them,” MVS, September 6, 1912. Also, September 13, 1912.

116 “Something Besides Talk! A Record of Socialist Councilman Geisler’s Activities in City Council,” MVS, August 15, 1913. An even more systematic accounting of the socialist councillor’s efforts and their outcomes is in “Socialist Record of Public Service: What Councilman Geisler Has Done and Tried to Do in Council for the People,” MVS, October 31, 1913.

117 On the Bureau of Municipal Research, see Sharts, 113; Judd, 146. “The First Battle of 1913 in Dayton between Workers and Capitalists Will Be on the New City Charter,” MVS, November 15, 1912, January 3, 10, March 21, 1913.

118 “Suggestions for Dayton’s Charter: Why Socialists Oppose the Commission Plan,” MVS, May 3, 1913, p. 1.

119 “Workingmen to the Polls on May 20! Your Fate Is in Your Hands Th at Day! Write the New Charter Yourselves! Vote for the 15 Socialist Candidates! Rebuild Dayton for the Workers!” MVS, May 16, 1913, p. 1.

120 “Money Won on May 20: Socialist Vote, Running Ahead of Democrats, Alarms Capitalists! This Election Strips off All Shams! Henceforth the Fight Is between Employing Class and Workers! Vae Victis!” MVS, May 23, 1913, p. 1.

121 See Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” 157–69; and Robert E. Bionaz, “Trickle-Down Democracy: The Commission Government Contest in Des Moines, 1905–1908,” Annals of Iowa (Summer 1999), 241–71.

122 “To the Polls on August 12! Defend with Ballots What Your Fathers Won for You with Bullets! Vote No!,” MVS, August 8, 1913, p. 1. “Labor Beaten Down Again on August 12! Rich Man’s Charter Adopted by 13,377 to 6094 Votes! But Tomorrow Is Ours!” MVS, August 15, 1913, p. 1.

123 “Report of the Socialist Platform Committee,” MVS, September 12, 1913, p. 1.

124 “What Socialists Have Done in City Rule!” MVS, October 24, 1913; “Socialist Record of Public Service in Dayton: What Councilman Geisler Has Done and Tried to Do in Council for the People,” MVS, October 31, 1913.

125 Landrum R. Bolling, “City Manager Government in Dayton,” 266–7.

126 “Suggestions for Dayton’s Charter: History of Commission Plan of Government Shows Increasing Number of Cities Rejecting It. Only Practical for Small Towns,” MVS, January 10, 1913, 1.

127 Quoted in Samuel P. Hays, 164.

128 See chapter 7 for a summary of the progress of municipal socialists in the US and around the globe in the years immediately before the outbreak of World War I.

129 Henry F. Bedford, Socialism and the Workers in Massachusetts, 1886–1912 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 90–91, 100–101 (quotation). See also, Social Democratic Herald, November 26, December 10, 17, 1898, January 7, February 18, March 18, April 8, June 3, 1899.

130 Bedford, 109–110, 117–20, and on the defeats in 1903, 181–219. Social Democratic Herald, January 13, September 8, 1900.

131 Richard Judd, Socialist Cities, 71–4; David Paul Nord, “Hothouse Socialism: Minneapolis, 1910–1925,” Richard Judd, ”Restoring Consensus in Flint, Michigan: The Socialist Party in Municipal Politics, 1910–1912,” and James R. Simmons, “The Socialist Party in Indiana, 1900–1925,” in Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925, Donald T. Critchlow, ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 133–66, 90–116, 46–67.

132 See, for instance, John P. Enyeart, The Quest for “Just and Pure Law,” 121–2, 170–73, 196–203.

133 Stanley Stewart Phipps, “Building Socialism in One City: Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho’s 1911 Municipal Government,” Museum of North Idaho Quarterly Newsletter 7 (Winter 1986), 1–5; Enyeart, 107. Robert F. Hoxie, “The Rising Tide of Socialism,” Journal of Political Economy 19 (October 1911), 615–16.

134 Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 161–252 (quotation on 246).

135 For a discussion of women and socialism in western municipalities, see John R. Sillito, “Women and the Socialist Party in Utah, 1900–1920,” Utah Historical Quarterly 49 Summer 1981, 225–240, and as candidates for electoral office, 228–9.

136 John S. McCormick and John R. Sillito, A History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2011), 141–2; John S. McCormick, “Hornets in the Hive: Socialists in Early Twentieth-Century Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly, v. 50 (Summer 1982), 225–240; Gunther Peck, “Padrones and Protest: ‘Old’ Radicals and ‘New’ Immigrants in Bingham, Utah, 1905–1912,” Western Historical Quarterly, 24:2, May 1993, 159, 161. Also, for a transnational perspective on Bingham’s socialist politics, see Peter Clayworth, “An Agitator Abroad: P. H. Hickey, Industrial Unionism and Socialism in the United States, New Zealand and Australia, 1900–1930”, in Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist, eds., Frontiers of Labor, 314–15.

137 McCormick and Sillito, A History of Utah Radicalism, 188–207.

138 International Socialist Review, 11 (June 1911), 731 and 13 (August 1912), 128, quoted in D. R. Berman, Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890–1920: Socialists, Populists, Miners and Wobblies (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2007), 186.

139 D. R. Berman, 188. See also Jerry Calvert, The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895–1910 (Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society Press, 1988), 43.

140 “Socialist Campaign Book, City Election, April 1, 1912,” quoted in Jerry Calvert, The Gibraltar, 42.

141 Ibid.

142 D. R. Berman, 185, 187. Also, Stanley Stewart Phipps, “Building Socialism in One City: Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho’s 1911 Municipal Government,” 1–5.

143 Jerry Calvert, 88; see also 81–91 for context of the Butte Miners’ Union conflict.

144 David R. Berman, 188–9, 203.

145 Numerous local studies chronicle the diverse circumstances in which Socialists won municipal victories in the pivotal years 1909–11. See, for instance, Richard Judd, Socialist Cities, 23–9, 33–5; on Two Harbors, Jimmy Engren, Railroading and Labor Migration: Class and Ethnicity in Expanding Capitalism in Northern Minnesota, the 1880s to the mid 1920s (Växjö, Sweden: Växjö University Press, 2007), 297–317; David Paul Nord, “Hothouse Socialism: Minneapolis, 1910–1925,” in Socialism in the Heartland, Critchlow, ed., 133–166; on Muscatine, Janet Weaver, “Pearl McGill and the Promise of Industrial Unionism: Button Workers, the Women’s Trade Union League and the AFL,” unpublished dissertation, University of Iowa, 2019; on Krebs and other Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas mining towns, James R. Green, Grassroots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 196–204; Errol Wayne Stevens, “Main-Street Socialism: The Socialist Party of America in Marion, Indiana, 1900–1921,” in Critchlow, 68–89; Richard W. Judd, “Restoring Consensus in Flint, Michigan: The Socialist Party in Municipal Politics, 1910–1912,” in Critchlow, 90–116.

146 Jeffrey A. Johnson, ”They Are All Red Out Here”: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895–1925, William H. Cumberland, “Red Flag Comes to Iowa,” Annals of Iowa, 23 (1968), 441–54, Robert E. Weir, “Solid Men in the Granite City: Municipal Socialism in Barre, Vermont, 1916–1931,” Vermont History, v. 83:1 (Winter/Spring 2015), 43–81, Charles A. Scontras, The Socialist Alternative: Utopian Experiments and the Socialist Party of Maine, 1895–1914 (Orono, ME: Bureau of Labor Education, University of Maine, 1985), 169–70, James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America remains the most reliable accounting of socialist victories in this period, updated with some additional data in Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History.

147 Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor, 56–9, 150–60.

148 California Social-Democrat, December 2, 1911, quoted in Daniel L. Johnson, “ ‘No Make-Believe Class Struggle’: The Socialist Municipal Campaign in Los Angeles, 1911,” Labor History, v. 41:1 2000, 25–45 (quotation on 45). Johnson persuasively argues that the roots of the 1911 Socialist Party failure in Los Angeles went far deeper than the last-minute confession of the McNamara brothers to the LA Times bombing.

149 Forrest McDonald, “Street Cars and Politics in Milwaukee, 1896–1901,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 39 (1955), 166–212; Georg Leidenberger, Chicago’s Progressive Alliance: Labor and the Bid for Public Streetcars (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 78–98; Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Urban History, 23:2, January 1997, 192–220. Streetcar labor conflict acted as a political catalyst in other cities around the world as well; see, for instance, discussion of Wellington, NZ, and Brisbane, Australia in chapter 5.

150 Ronald L. F. Davis and Harry D. Holmes, “Insurgency and Municipal Reform in St. Louis,” The Midwest Review, Second Series, v. 1, Spring, 1979, 5–6.

151 David Thelen, Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 221–5; Steven L. Piott, The Anti-Monopoly Persuasion: Popular Resistance to the Rise of Big Business in the Midwest (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 59–71.

152 David Thelen, 231–51.

153 New York Times, November 3, 1905, quoted in Roy Everett Littlefield III, William Randolph Hearst: His Role in American Progressivism (Boston: University Press of America, 1980), 186. For a general overview of Hearst’s impact on working-class politics, see Stromquist, Reinventing “the People,” 77–9; also Littlefield, 147–204, and Ferdinand Lundberg, Imperial Hearst: A Social Biography (New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1936); on the municipal ownership movement and Edward Dunne’s political career in Chicago, see Georg Leidenberger, Chicago’s Progressive Alliance: Labor and the Bid for Public Streetcars (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 89–95, 118–34.

154 Melvin Holli, Reform in Detroit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 169; also Hoyt L. Warner, Progressivism in Ohio, 1897–1917 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1964).

155 John Dillon, Treatise on the Law of Municipal Corporations (1972) and Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh (1907), quoted in Gerald Frug, City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls, 46–7, 17.

156 Jacob D. Hall provides a powerful account of the rise of what became Pingreeism before Pingree and the lasting impact of that reform tradition in Detroit politics. See Jacob Dean Hall, “The Myth of the Motor City: Urban Politics, Public Policy and the Suburbanization of Detroit’s Automobile Industry, 1878–1937,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2013. The traditional account of Pingree’s municipal and gubernatorial initiatives is Melvin Holli, Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

157 This account of Toledo’s local politics and the mayoralty of Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones draws on the excellent work of Gregory R. Zieren, “The Propertied Worker: Working Class Formation in Toledo, Ohio, 1870–1900,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 1981, 458–66, 468–79, 486–8, and Marnie Jones, Holy Toledo: Religion and Politics in the Life of “Golden Rule” Jones (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 107–19, 137–55, who gives singular attention to the personal biography and role of Jones.

158 No comprehensive tabulation of streetcar strikes is available. See Motorman and Conductor, the publication of the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees for extensive reports on streetcar strikes throughout the period; also Emerson P. Schmidt, Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1937) for descriptions of some prominent strikes.

159 For a discussion of the political context and impact of the 1899 streetcar strike in Cleveland, see Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class,” 192–220.

160 On the labor conflict in Cleveland, see Louis F. Post, “Notes for a Biography of Peter Witt,” Peter Witt Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society; Leslie Seldon Hough, “The Turbulent Spirit: Violence and Coaction among Cleveland Workers, 1877–1899,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1977, 157–83.

161 See James B. Whipple, “Cleveland in Conflict: A Study of Urban Adolescence, 1876–1900,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Western Reserve University, 1951, 134–45, 198–202; Minutes of the Franklin Club, 1893–1896, Franklin Club Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society.

162 James B. Whipple, 363–5; also, Whipple, “Municipal Government in an Average City: Cleveland, 1876–1900,” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, 62 (January 1953), 18–20.

163 For detailed narratives of the 1899 strike, see Stromquist, “Crucibles of Class,” 200–203; Robert E. Bionaz, “Streetcar City,” 140–79.

164 Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 22, 27, 1899.

165 Daily reports of strike and boycott events and massive rioting are found in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press, as well as the socialist affiliated Cleveland Citizen. See also, Stromquist, “Crucible of Class,” 203–204, and Bionaz, “Streetcar City,” 175–9.

166 H. L. Shyrock to Samuel M. Jones, May 22, 1899, and Jones to N. O. Nelson, May 9, 1899, Samuel M. Jones Papers, Microfilm edition, Wisconsin Historical Society. The standard histories of Cleveland politics—Whipple, Campbell, Finegold, and Hoyt L. Warner—fail to give the Jones gubernatorial campaign the attention it deserves.

167 Samuel M. Jones to Fred Warren, May 13, 1899, Jones Papers; Cleveland Citizen, August 26, 1899.

168 Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 8, 1899.

169 For an excellent analysis of Johnson’s role and reputation as a streetcar entrepreneur, see Robert Bionaz, “Streetcar Politics and Reform Government in Cleveland,” Ohio History, 119 (2012), 5–29 (especially 16–24). Also, Robert E. Bionaz, “Streetcar City,” 237–85.

170 Frederic Howe, Confessions of a Reformer (New York: Scribner, 1925), 97. On his role as “the Monopolist in Congress,” see Tom L. Johnson, My Story (New York: AMS Press, 1911), 59–81.

171 Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 1, 7, and March 7, 14, 17, 23, 28, 29, 30, 1901. For a useful narrative of the campaign, see also Bionaz, “Streetcar City,” 201–17.

172 Lincoln Steffens, “Ohio: A Tale of Two Cities,” McClure’s 25 (July 1905), 301–2.

173 Hoyt L. Warner, Progressivism in Ohio, 1897–1917, 60–70; Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians, 84–8. Both Warner and Finegold give too much weight to the agency of “experts” in crafting Johnson’s reform program and insufficient credit to the working-class and “urban populist” agents of the new program.

174 For a well-formulated inventory of the Johnson administration’s accomplishments, see Bionaz, “Streetcar City,” 337–77; also, Bionaz, “Streetcar Politics and Reform Government in Cleveland,” 24–7. For Tom Johnson’s own account of his achievements, see his autobiography, My Story, 167–84. On Newton Baker and his political orientation as a Johnson protégé and then mayor in his own right from 1911 to 1915, see Finegold, 101–12; also, Warner, 63–4, 252–4, 301–302, 442–3, 482–3.

175 For a fine analysis of the role of employers’ associations in the local politics of Cleveland, see Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement, 91–125.

7. Promises of Power: Internationalism from Below

1 See Maoriland Worker (Wellington, NZ), 2 June, p. 7, 9 June, p. 6, 15 June, p. 8, 30 June, p. 12, 23 June, p. 6, 21 July, p. 11, p. 16, Erik Olssen, “W.T. Mills, E.J.B. Allen, J.A. Lee and Socialism in New Zealand,” The New Zealand Journal of History, v. 10:2, October 1976, 112–17; Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence: The Origins and Establishment of the New Zealand Labour Party, 1900–1919 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1980), 47–58, 67–73.

2 Peter Clayworth, “An Agitator Abroad: P.H. Hickey, Industrial Unionism, and Socialism in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, 1900–1930,” Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia, Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist, eds. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 309–27; also, Erik Olssen, “Hickey, Patrick Hodgens,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, teara.govt.nz.

3 A. G. Austin, ed., The Webbs’ Australian Diary, 1898 (Melbourne: Pitman & Sons, 1965); also, Beatrice Webb, Visit to New Zealand in 1898, with Entries by Sidney Webb (Wellington: Price and Milburn, 1959); on the origins of the Webbs’ investigations into local government, see Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership, Barbara Drake and Margaret Cole, eds. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 147–180 and the Webbs’ multi-volume histories of English local government. (See chapter 1 of this book on the Webbs’ local government studies.)

4 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 157; Chushichi Tsuzuki, Tom Mann, 1856–1941: The Challenges of Labour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 124–40; Jonathan Schneer, Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labour Leader (London: Croon Helm, 1982); E. R. Hartley’s Australian diaries, West Yorkshire Archives Service, Bradford; also, Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 100–110, 136–59.

5 Erik Olssen, The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour, 1908–1914 (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1988), 2–5, James Thorn to J. T. Paul, October 3, 1910, J. T. Paul Papers, Hocken Library, Dunedin; Elsie Locke and Jacquie Matthews, eds., Stick Out, Keep Left: An Autobiography by Margaret Th orn (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1997); “The Forward Van. Vanner’s Report,” James Thorn, May 13, 1911, Forward (Glasgow); Fred J. Hokin, “Twenty Years of Hustling in Nineteen Countries—Claude Thompson, a Character Sketch,” flyer, Box 7, Voltaire Molesworth Papers, Mitchell State Library, New South Wales. (Hokin was an Australian native—from Newtown, NSW—and an immigrant to the United States, who served on the school board of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.)

6 Ben Turner, About Myself, 1863–1930 (London: Humphrey Toulmin, 1930), 152–61.

7 On Danielsson’s internationalism, see his periodical, Arbetet (Malmö, Sweden), 20, 27, 28 October, 5 November, 5 December 1890.

8 On the influence of British Fabians on Bernstein’s evolving revisionism, see discussion in chapter 4 above as well as a fuller discussion of revisionism and municipalism and Lindemann’s mayoral campaign in 1911.

9 June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. 39–50; Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London: Routledge, 2002), 44–67; Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist, and Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013); Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (London: Allen Lane, 2001). See also chapter 3 on Manchester’s local labor politics and chapter 10 on Adela’s political career in Australia.

10 See James Connolly, The Lost Writings, Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh, ed. (London: Pluto Press, 1997); Fintan Lane, The Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 1881–1896 (Crosses Green, IR: Cork University Press, 1997), 197–203, 214–25, James Connolly, “Labour and Politics in Ireland,” The Harp, April 1910, in The Workers’ Republic: A Selection from the Writings of James Connolly, Desmond Ryan, ed. (Dublin: Th ree Candles, 1951), 87–92; John W. Boyle, The Irish Labor Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1988), 171–215; Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt: Revolutionary, Agitator, and Labour Leader (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), 68–9, 95–6, 109–11, 158–60; Carla King, “ ‘I Am Doing Fairly Well in the Lecturing Line’: Michael Davitt and Australia, 1895,” Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 12 (2012), 23–46, Eric Foner, “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish-America,” in idem, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 176–77, 188–94.

11 For the socialist debates over imperialism and the prospect of war, see George Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) and James Joll, The Second International, 1889–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

12 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Halle, 12–18 Oktober, 1890, (Berlin: Berliner Volksblatt, 1890,) 20–23, 25–8.

13 Barry Gustafson, From the Cradle to the Grave: A Biography of Michael Joseph Savage (Auckland: Reed Methuen Publishers, 1986), 81; Erik Olssen, “W.T. Mills, E.J.B. Allen, J.A. Lee and Socialism in New Zealand,” 113–16.

14 Treatments of Mills in the standard histories of American socialism are generally brief and for the most part unflattering. Only Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968 [1952)), 180, refers fleetingly to his “trail” leading to “Australia,” but makes no mention of his more substantial involvement in New Zealand. See also, Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Th ought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 130, 132; David Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan Co., 1955), 27–8; Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (London: Verso, 1987), 91–2; Socialism and American Life, v. II, Donald D. Egbert and Stow Persons, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 286–7.

15 Walter Th omas Mills, The Struggle for Existence (Chicago: The International School of Social Economy, 1904), see, for instance, chapter XXXVI, “Municipal Misrule and Socialism,” 501–13. Erik Olssen, “Walter Th omas Mills,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (online: teara.govt.nz.); also, Olssen, “W.T. Mills, E.J.B. Allen, J.A. Lee and Socialism in New Zealand,” 113–15; Herbert O. Roth, “Buying a Labour Party: Fowlds, Mills and the ULP,” Political Science 20: 1 (July 1968), 27–39.

16 “A Milwaukee Visitor,” The Labor Call (Melbourne), March 9, 1911, p. 3.

17 Social Democratic Herald (Milwaukee), October 22, 29, November 5, 19, December 3, 10, 1910, January 14, 1911, “The British Campaign,” p. 3. See below and chapter 3 for additional detail on the success of British municipal campaigns.

18 Maoriland Worker, 2 June 1911, p. 7 (also quoted in part in Erik Olssen, The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour 1908–1914, 56.

19 Westralian Worker, quoted in The Labor Call (Melbourne), March 9, 1911, p. 3. On May 18, 1911, The Labor Call published a list of “Socialist Activities in Milwaukee” that highlighted the accomplishments of the new administration, p. 8.

20 The argument for charlatan or at least opportunist is made by Herbert Roth, “Buying a Labour Party: Fowlds, Mills and the U.L.P.,” Political Science (Wellington), v. 20:1, July 1968, 27–8, 32–3; a polemic about his various “schemes” in the United States was penned by Thomas J. Morgan, “Walter Th omas Mills—His Record,” The Socialist (Seattle), n. 350, November 2, 1907, p. 3, marxists.org.

21 “Vital Workers: Problems Walter Thomas Mills Yarns with the Editor,” Maoriland Worker, 14 July 1911, p. 6. On the evolving socialism of Bob Ross, see Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism, 113–35.

22 “Milwaukee Socialism: Some Statements and the Facts. By Walter Th omas Mills, Special Commissioner from Milwaukee to Countries Abroad,” Maoriland Worker, 30 June 1911, p. 2.

23 “Vital Workers’ Problems,” Maoriland Worker, 14 July 1911, p. 6.

24 “In Our Opinion,” Maoriland Worker, 21 July 1911, p. 11.

25 See, for instance, entries for 22–06–11, 14–7–11, 15–1–12, 30–5–12, 4–6–12, War & Class: The Diary of Jack McCullough, Melanie Nolan, ed. (Wellington: Dunmore Publishing, 2009), 166, 168, 183, 185, 198, 214.

26 For a summary of the events leading up to the Unity Conference in 1913, and Mills’s role, see Herbert Roth, “Buying a Labour Party,” 32–6; Erik Olssen, The Red Feds, 163–74.

27 Erik Olssen, “Walter Th omas Mills,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; Barry Gutafson, From the Cradle to the Grave, 81–2; Erik Olssen, “W.T. Mills, E.J.B. Allen, J.A. Lee and Socialism in New Zealand,” 113–16; Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 47–8, 67–72.

28 Some recent scholarship has suggested the importance of Milwaukee internationally (though primarily its connections with the German SPD). See Aims McGuiness, “The Revolution Begins Here: Milwaukee and the History of Socialism,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, Margo Anderson and Victor Greene, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 83–6; Gareth A. Shellman, “Toward a Better Beer Hall: Social Democracy from Berlin to Milwaukee,” The Quest for Social Justice II: The Morris Fromkin Memorial Lectures, 1981–1990, Alan D. Corré, ed. (Milwaukee: The Golda Meir Library, 1992), 167–76; and on the transnational significance of Debsian socialism, Stephen Burwood, “Debsian Socialism through a Transnational Lens,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, v. 2:3 (July 2003), 253–82.

29 Social Democratic Herald, November 19, 1910.

30 Social Democratic Herald, May 21, 1910, p. 3.

31 George Barnes to Victor Berger, November 9, 1910, Berger Papers, Box 11 (Mf # 14).

32 Ramsay MacDonald (November 10, 1910), J. S. Middleton (November 10), Keir Hardie (November 19), “Liebknecht” (November 7), Luise Kautsky (November 17), Die Neue Zeit (November 19) to Victor Berger, Berger Papers, Box 11 (Mf # 14). Included in the communications was a fictive letter of congratulations from “Elysian, November 1910,” signed “Paul Grottkau,” Berger’s journalistic predecessor in Milwaukee socialist circles, by then deceased for twelve years.

33 The Worker (Sydney), January 4, 1911.

34 Ibid., January 5, 1911.

35 “Ausland. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (Sozialistische ‘Wahlniederlage,’)” Kommunale Praxis, v. 12, n. 21, Mai 25, 1912, 666, and “Sozialdemokratische Gemeindemehrheiten … Amerika. Milwaukee,” Kommunale Praxis, v. 13, n. 38/39, 20 September 1913, 1235–46.

36 See, for example, F. W. Jowett, “Forward: Bradford Seventy Years Ago,” in Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years: The Life of Jowett of Bradford (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), 15; Carl Severing, Mein Lebensweg: Band 1, Vom Schlosser zum Minister (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1950), 132–3; Henry F. Bedford, Socialism and the Workers in Massachusetts, 1886–1912 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966); The Barrier Truth, (Broken Hill, NSW) 16 March 1900, 2; “David McLaren, 1867[72?]-1939,” (Kerry Taylor), New Zealand Dictionary of Biography, v. 3 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 307–8; Wellington City Council, Correspondence Files, “Notice of Motion,” May 31, 1902, March 30, 1903.

37 See chapter 2 in this volume.

38 Examples of municipal labor and socialist programs were ubiquitous. See, for instance, H. Russell Smart, “Municipal Socialism,” Manchester Labour Library, 1895, ILP Papers, London School of Economics Archives; “A Few Reasons Why You Should Vote for Councillor Hartley. Bradford Moor Ward. Municipal Programme,” 1900. Bradford, West Yorkshire Archives Service; “Das Communalprogramm der sächsischen Socialdemokratie,” Socialistische Monatshefte, 1900, 737–46; “History of the Milwaukee Social-Democratic Victories,” 1911, Milwaukee Social Democratic Publishing Co., 50–1.

39 As we have seen, tensions between municipal activists and new parliamentary leaders appeared in many places at different times. For instance in debates within the Political Labour League of New South Wales, Annual Conference, 1901, NSW PLL, Scrapbook, ML, Sydney; also in the debates at the German SPD party congresses of 1902 and 1904; and for the working-class critique of parliamentarism in Britain, see Ben Tillett, “Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a Failure?” (London: Twentieth Century Press, 1908), Labour Party Archives, PM&A.

40 See, for instance, David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 310–27; James E. Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain, 93–125; Flemming Mikkelsen, Arbejdskonflikter I Skandinavien, 1848–1980 (Odense Universitetsforlag, 1992), 79–168; Elisabeth Jüngling, Streiks in Bayern (1889–1914): Arbeitskampf in der Prinzregentenzeit (München: Stadtarchivs München, 1986), 24–7, 184–8; Erik Olssen, The Red Feds. For a transnational, contemporary view, Andre Tridon, The New Unionism (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1913).

41 “Directory of the I.L.P. Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of the Fifth Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party, London, April 19–20, 1897, 33–9, and “Directory of I.L.P. Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of the Th irteen Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party, 1905, Papers of the ILP, London School of Economics Archives.

42 For party debates on the place and value of municipal politics, see ILP, Report of the Fourteenth Annual Conference, Stockton, April 16, 17, 21, 1906, and Report of the Fifteenth Annual Conference, April 1907, Derby, 21–2, 50. ILP Papers, LSE Archives. For the results of the 1908 survey initiated by Ramsay MacDonald, Labour Party Secretary, to assess the strength of the party in recent municipal elections, see discussion in chapter 3.

43 M. G. Sheppard and John L. Halstead, “Labour’s Municipal Election Performance in Provincial England and Wales 1901–13,” Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, n. 39, Autumn 1979, 39–62.

44 Socialist Party Branch Records and research notes, Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL; Canterbury Trades and Labour Council, Minutes, Christchurch, April 29, 1911; “David McLaren (Wellington),” Biographical notes, Herbert O. Roth Papers; “David McLaren” (Kerry Taylor), Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, v. 3, 307. For discussion of municipal campaigns, see Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 16–19, 36, 68, 82.

45 “NZSP, Notes and documents, 1900–1913 [mostly],” Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL. Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 90.

46 Ray Markey, “The Emergence of the Labour Party at the Municipal Level in NSW, 1891–1900,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, v. 31, n. 3, (1985), 410–12. Most comprehensively for Broken Hill, George Dale, The Industrial History of Broken Hill.

47 Michael Hogan, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales,” Labour History, n. 72, May 1997, 124–5, 128, 131–2.

48 George Dale, The Industrial History of Broken Hill, 260–1.

49 Ibid., 260.

50 Brian E. Kennedy, Silver, Sin and Sixpenny Ale, 93. For an insightful account of the pivotal place that Broken Hill had in the lives of transnational socialist and labor activists, in particular Bob Ross and Tom Mann, see Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross, 6–8, 16–17, 92–4, 120, 124–6, 183–4.

51 See, for instance, The Barrier Truth, January 21, March 11, December 30, 1899, January 13, 27, 1900.

52 Barrier Truth, February 18, 1899, 8.

53 Tocsin (Melbourne), August 29, 1901, July 31, 1902.

54 On labor’s role in Richmond, Victoria, see above, chapter 5 and in particular, Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Portrait of an Australian Working-Class Community, 1900–1965 (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984), 7–42.

55 Gail Radford has shown how diverse the sources of support for “municipal enterprise” were in the early twentieth century, “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” The Journal of American History, v. 90:3, December 2003, 866, 869–73.

56 For a discussion of the distinction between urban “social reformers” and municipal “structural reformers,” see Melvin G. Holli, Reform in Detroit: Hazen Pingree and Urban Politics (New York: Oxford, 1969), 157–81.

57 See discussion and case studies in chapter 6.

58 See, for example, Daniel L. Johnson, “ ‘No Make-Believe Class Struggle’: The Socialist Municipal Campaign in Los Angeles, 1911,” Labor History, v. 41:1 2000, 25–45, Steven L. Piott, The Anti-Monopoly Persuasion: Popular Resistance to the Rise of Big Business in the Midwest (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 59–71, Roy Everett Littlefield III, William Randolph Hearst: His Role in American Progressivism (Boston: University Press of America, 1980), and Georg Leidenberger, Chicago’s Progressive Alliance: Labor and the Bid for Public Streetcars (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006).

59 Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 19. James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1967), 43–5, 93, 103–18, tabulated 174 cities that elected socialist “mayors or other municipal officers” between 1911 and 1920.

60 See, for instance, the programmatic defense of municipal socialism by Hugo Lindemann, C. Hugo [Hugo Lindemann], “Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalverwaltung,” Die Neue Zeit, 17:2, nr. 22, 1898–99 (15 Februar 1899), 680–86.

61 Internal party debate heated up with articles like, Hugo Lindemann, “Zur Kritik der socialdemokratischen Communalprogramme,” SM, Bd. 1, 1902, 277–8 and with the pointed exchanges at party congresses in 1902 and 1904, as discussed in chapter 4.

62 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelmischen Reich: Die Sozialdemokratische Partei und die Freien Gewekschaften 1890–1900 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1959), 217.

63 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, abgehalten in Jena vom 14 bis 20 September 1913, 26–7.

64 Kommunale Praxis, v. 11, n. 36/37, September 9, 1911, 1123–4.

65 Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich, 233.

66 For a more detailed discussion of changes in the Swedish franchise and their impact, see above, Introduction to part II. Also, on the political tensions within the SAP between radical democratic and integrative reformist forces in the party, see Kjell Östberg, Byråkrati och reformism: en studie av svensk socialdemokratis politiska och sociala integrering fram till första världskriget. (Lund: Arkiv., 1990), 347–52 (English summary); Sven Hedenskog, Folkrörelserna i Nyköping 1880–1915: Uppkomst, social struktur och politisk aktivitet (Uppsala, 1973), pp. 158–73, Rune Jungen, Vävarstad i uppror: Arbetarrörelsen i Borås, 1880–1920 (Borås, 1978), pp. 270, 282–3, Social-demokratiska Partistyrelsens redogoerelse, 1911, p. 147, 1912, pp. 97, 110, 1913.

67 Peter Billing, Lars Olsson, and Mikael Stigendal, “ ‘Malmö—Our Town’: Local Politics in Social Democracy,” in Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden, Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molin, and Klas Åmark, eds. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1988), 280–83.

68 Stadsfullmäktige i Malmö, Protokoll, 22 April, 20 Mai, 14 Oktober 1904, Malmö Municipal Archives. I am grateful to Jimmy Engren and Lennart Karlsson for their assistance with translations in the Malmö archives.

69 Ibid., Protokoll, 14 June Juni, 13 December 1912, Bihang N:r 78, 1913. Arbetet closely followed and reported extensively these debates on the bathhouse, and proposed municipalization of trams and gas and electricity, April 13, May 4, June 14, December 2, 1912.

70 Most valuable for understanding the rise and hegemony of the Austrian Christian Socials and their leader Karl Lueger are the two volumes by John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: The Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

71 Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien: Zu einigen Aspekten sozialdemokratischer Politik in der Vor- und Zwischenkriegszeit (Wien: Jugend und Volk Verlagsgesellschaft, 1980), 22–33 (quotation p. 23); “Was die Sozialdemokraten von der Kommue fordern!” Arbeiter Zeitung, 2 Februar 1896, s. 1; Maren Seliger and Karl Ucakar, Wien: politische Geschichte, 1740–1934: Entwicklung und Bestimmungskräfte Grossstädtischer Politik (Wien: Jugend und Volk, 1985), 972–73; “Vor 100 Jahren begann der Kampf um Wien,” Aus dem Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (VGA), Unsere Generation, Juni 1996.

72 Maren Seliger u. Karl Ucakar, Wahlrecht und Wählerverhalten in Wien, 1848– 1932: Privilegien, Partizipationsdruck und Sozialstruktur (Wien: Jugend und Volk, 1984), 52–5; Oswald Knauer, “Der Wiener Gemeinderat 1861–1962: Vom Wahlrecht in die Gemeindevertretung,” Auszug aus dem Handbuch der Stadt Wien, 1962, 77. Jahrgang, 211–12.

73 Franz Patzer, “Die sozialdemokratische Fraktion im Wiener Gemeinderat: seit ihrem Bestehen bis zum ersten Weltkrieg (1900–1914/18),” Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Wien, Jahrbuch, 10 (1952/53), 254–5. Reumann would be elected to serve as the first social-democratic Bürgermeister in the early days of postwar “Red Vienna.” See chapter 12, below.

74 John W. Boyer, “Power, Partisanship, and the Grid of Democratic Politics: 1907 as the Pivot Point of Modern Austrian History,” Austrian History Yearbook 44 (2013), 152–4 (quotation on 153), 156–7, 160–61, 173–4. Also, Karl Ucakar, Demokratie und Wahlrecht in Österreich. Zur Entwicklung von politischer Partizipation und staatlicher Legitmationspolitik (Vienna, 1985) and William A. Jenks, The Austrian Electoral Reform of 1907 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950).

75 Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien, 49–55. Also, Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918, 271–4, 282–4.

76 Arbeiter Zeitung, Dezember 12, 1903, quoted in Pratzer, 271.

77 For a detailed discussion of the advent of “Red Vienna” and its meaning, see chapter 12.

78 Die Gemeinde, nr. 1, April 4, 1914, s. 4, quoted in Patzer, 274–5.

79 Patzer, 275.

80 For example, the Protokolls for the Gemeinderat in 1909 reveal the range of SPD interventions: Nr. 2, 19 Januär 1909, Nr. 11, 30 April 1909, Nr. 12, 19 Mai 1909, Nr. 21, 8 Oktober 1909. Proposals were routinely sent to committees for disposition or to the elite-dominated Stadtrat where the SPD had no representation. The Amtsblatt for these same months provide verbatim records of the proceedings and reveal intense and at times polarizing debate. See, for instance, April 30 and May 19. Vienna Municipal Archives.

81 Franz Patzer, “Die sozialdemokratische Fraktion im Wiener Gemeinderat,” 282. For a rich selection of campaign flyers in contested districts, see Flugblätter, Wiener Gemeinderatswahlen, 1911, 1912, 1914, Mappe 51, Partei Archiv vor 1934, Archiv des Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (VGA), Vienna; and for the party’s organizational documentation by district, see “Wahlanalysen 1907–1911, Wien XIII-XXI, Mappe 55, Partei Archiv vor 1934, VGA.

82 For a biographical sketch of Leopold Winarsky, see Manfred Scheuch, “Leopold Winarsky,” Werk und Widerhall: Grosse Gestalten des öeterreichischen Sozialismus, hrsg. von Norbert Leser (Wien: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1964), 442–6; and for Franz Schuhmeier, Ernst K. Herlitzka, “Franz Schuhmeier” Werk und Widerhall, hrsg. von Norbert Leser (1964), 362–73; and W. Maderthaner, “Schuhmeier, Franz: politiker und journalist,” Öesterreichisches Biographischer Lexikon 1815–1950 (Wien: Verlag der öesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998), 17.50/1–4 VGA.

83 Leopold Winarsky, “Die Gemeinde Wien und die Sozialdemokratie: Sechs Vortragsdispositionen,” Partei Archiv vor 1934, Mappe 54, VGA.

84 Quoted from Arbeiter Zeitung, Manfred Scheuch, “Leopold Winarsky,” 446.

85 La Crosse Leader Press, October 28, 1909, Scrapbook, Victor Berger Papers, Microfilm edition, Reel no. 11, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Introduction: “The Brink of the Abyss”: The Great War and the Collapse of the Second International

1 Quoted in Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 224.

2 Ernst K. Herlitzka, “Franz Schuhmeier,” Werk und Widerhall: Grosse Gestalten des öesterreichischen Sozialismus (Wien: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1964), 372; “Franz Schuhmeier,” Arbeiter Zeitung, 13 Februar 1913, 5–6.

3 Ernst K. Herlitzka, “Franz Schuhmeier und der Gothär Parteitag,” Archiv. Mitteilungsblatt des Vereins für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, Heft 4, 4 Jg. 1964, 70–80.

4 Ernst Herlitzka, 362.

5 The most comprehensive biography in English of Jean Jaurès is Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962). For a recent assessment of Jaurès’s contribution to social democratic thought, see Geoffrey Kurtz, Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2014).

6 Jean Longuet, Le Populaire du centre, August 3, 1916, quoted in Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 467. See also, J. Hampden Jackson, Jean Jaurès: His Life and Work (New York: Norton, 1943), 178–85.

7 Harvey Goldberg, 472, 473.

8 Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 86–7.

9 The deepening conflict and socialists’ dilemmas are well-documented in George Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) and James Joll, The Second International, 1889–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

10 Quoted in Haupt, 21. Texts of all the competing Stuttgart resolutions are available in G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Th ought, v. III (London: Macmillan, 1956), 62–71.

11 Haupt, 27–8.

12 For a detailed accounting of the demonstrations across Europe preceding the Basel Congress and the proceedings of the congress itself, see Kevin Callahan, Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914 (Leicester, UK: Troubador Publishing, 2010).

13 Haupt’s paraphrase of Jaurès’s comment, 89.

14 The Special International Socialist Congress at Basel (1912), “Manifesto,” The Socialists and the War, William English Walling, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972, orig. 1915), 99–104 (quotation, 103–104).

15 Victor Adler telegram to ISB, December 19, 1912, quoted in Haupt, 97.

16 Victor Adler to the ISB, February 26, 1913, quoted in Haupt, 102–103.

17 Appendix, “Official Record of the ISB Session Held at Brussels on 29–30 July 1914,” in Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 250–65, quotation on 264.

18 For a discussion of historians’ debate over “war enthusiasm,” see chapter 11 of this work.

19 Carl Grünberg, ed., Die Internationale und der Weltkrieg (1916), quoted in Kevin J. Callahan, Demonstration Culture, 299.

20 Paul S. Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870– 1914 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 211–12.

21 La Bataille Syndicaliste, August 24, 1914, quoted in Paul Miller, 212.

22 For a helpful review of recent historiography on the Second International and a call to refocus on cultural developments within the International and its member movements rather than national posturing of leaders in the most powerful socialist movements, see Kevin Callahan, “Beyond the Cultural Turn? Revisiting ‘Old’ Labour History through the Example of the Socialist International,” in Interventions: The Impact of Labour Movements on Social and Cultural Development, David Mayer and Jürgen Mittag, hrsg. (Wien: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2013), esp. 153–61; also his book, Kevin Callahan, Demonstration Culture; Laura Polexe, Netzwerke und Freundschaft. Sozialdemokraten in Rumänien, Russland und der Schweiz an der Schwelle zum 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011) is one of the few works to look closely at the cultural ties that bound representatives to the Second International with each other across national boundaries (see especially 67–73).

23 Kevin J. Callahan, Demonstration Culture, 292 (emphasis added).

24 Paul Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens, 204–205. See also Douglas J. Newton, British Labour, European Socialism, and the Struggle for Peace, 1889–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 324–30, Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community’s Opposition to the Great War (London: Francis Boutle, 2001), 56–78. Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration: Eine Neuinterpretation des sozialdemokratischen Burgfriedensschlusses 1914/15 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1993), 31–7; also Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Dover, NH: Berg Publishers, 1985).

25 Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience, 66, 68.

26 Robert F. Hoxie, “The Rising Tide of Socialism: A Study,” The Journal of Political Economy, v. 19:8, October 1911, 609–31, offers a cautionary accounting of socialist success in the US that suggests no single explanation for the appearance of this “young, vigorous and very protean movement … a training school in constructive democracy.” (Quotations on 616, 629, 631.)

27 Victor Berger to “My dear Schatzl” [Meta Berger], August 24, 1910, Victor Berger Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

28 Victor Berger to [Meta Berger], August 31, September 3, 1910.

29 Victor Berger to [Meta Berger], August 24, 1910.

30 Sally Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 177. Oscar Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), 300. Ameringer’s account differs slightly from Miller’s reconstruction of the events of early August 1914.

31 Anton Pannekoek (Bremen), “The Great European War and Socialism,” International Socialist Review, v. xv, n. 4, October 1914, 203–4.

32 See, for instance, Mary M. Marcy’s editorial “Socialist Unpreparedness in Germany,” in the International Socialist Review, XV, n. 4 (October 1914), 245.

33 John T. Walker, “The Dayton Socialists and World War I: Surviving the White Terror,” in Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925, Donald T. Critchlow, ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 118. Joseph W. Sharts, Biography of Dayton: An Economic Interpretation of Local History (Dayton: Miami Valley Socialist, 1922), 111–22; also, Miami Valley Socialist, v. 4, May 7, 14, August 13, October 15, 29, 1915.

34 Jimmy Engren, Railroading and Labor Migration: Class and Ethnicity in Expanding Capitalism in Northern Minnesota, the 1880s to the mid-1920s (Växjö, Sweden: Växjö University Press, 2007), 296–316. See chapter 10 for a detailed discussion of socialist opposition in the United States to the war, conscription, and the repression they faced.

35 Jeffrey A. Johnson, ”They Are All Red out Here”: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895–1925 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 117–41.

36 James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1969), 121–4. Also, The Socialists and the War, William English Walling, editor, 466–70.

8. War! Shifting Currents of Localism, Nationalism, and Internationalism

1 War and Class: The Diary of Jack McCullough, Melanie Nolan, ed., introduction, 15–16; April 25, 1917, p. 347; June 23, 1917, February 17, 1918, 353.

2 David Stephenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004), Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (New York: Norton, 1970 [1965]). On the use of Weltkrieg antedating the war, see Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 31 (reference is to Hew Strachan).

3 On the historical usage of the term “total war,” see John Horne, “Introduction: Mobilizing for ‘Total War’, 1914–1918,” in State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, John Horne, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–5. Also, Roger Chickering, “Total War: The Use and Abuse of a Concept,” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experience, 1871–1914, Manfred F. Boemeke, et. al, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). As Martin Gilbert has written, “The war changed the map and destiny of Europe as much as it seared its skin and scarred its soul,” Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), xv. The outpouring of remembrances of World War I, both fictionalized and in personal memoirs, prose, and poetry, was astounding, and included such classics as Siegfried Sassoon’s 3 volumes, The Memoirs of George Sherston (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1967 [1930]), Robert Graves, Goodbye to All Th at: An Autobiography (1929), Erich Remarque, Im Westen Nichts Neues (Köln: Bertelsmann Lesering, 1957), and The Road Back (Boston: Little Brown, 1946 [Der Weg Zurück, 1931]), Ford Maddox Ford, Parade’s End (New York: Knopf, 1950).

4 Jay Winter, “Some Paradoxes of the First World War,” in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, eds. Richard Wall and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 10.

5 For classic accounts of the daily life in working-class communities during wartime see, Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971), 186–214 and Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Portrait of an Australian Working-Class Community, 1900–1965 (Ring-wood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984), 89–104.

6 See, for instance, Len Richardson, “Politics and War: Coal Miners and Conscription, 1914–18,” in Miners and Militants: Politics in Westland, 1865–1918, Philip Ross May, ed. (Christchurch: University of Canterbury/Whitcoulls Ltd., 1975), 128–55. Bob Smillie, the British miners’ leader and chair of the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, was a leading voice for wartime conscription of property. See Forward, October 16, 1915, quoted in Joan Smith, “Commonsense Th ought and Working-Class Consciousness,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1980481. Also, J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War (Boston: Routledge, 1974), 209.

7 See a useful summary in John Horne, “Mobilizing for ‘Total War’, 1914–1918,” 4–6.

8 Ibid., 5–7.

9 The transnational impact of the Australian anti-conscription referenda in 1916 and 1917 should not be underestimated. Activists in New Zealand and around the world cited the Australian case as evidence of rising opposition to the war more generally. For discussion of rising strike activity, agitation around housing needs, and free speech fights see the chapters that follow.

10 The best-known case is, of course, “Red Vienna,” but the immediate postwar gains of municipal socialist and labor activists elsewhere were also significant. For a discussion of Red Vienna and the postwar success of municipal socialism elsewhere, see chapter 12.

11 See, for instance, Ian F. W. Beckett, The Home Front, 1914–1918: How Britain Survived the Great War (Kew, UK: The National Archives, 2006), 8–16, 146–75; David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy, 215–39. A different view of the climate of opinion in August 1914 is taken by Niall Ferguson, “The August Days: The Myth of War Enthusiasm,” in his The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 174–211.

12 For astute readings of the dilemmas facing social democrats in the prewar crisis, see Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 218, 233, 240–242 and James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 166–8.

13 Hendrik de Man, Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (1927), quoted in Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 241.

14 “Official Record of the ISB Session Held at Brussels on 29–30 July 1914,” appendix, Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, 253.

15 Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962[1915]), 358.

16 Georges Haupt, 240–241 and Joll, 166–7.

17 Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Leamington Spa, Berg, 1985[1983]), 3–4, 64–93, quotation from 67; David Stephenson, Cataclysm, 215–19.

18 Marc Ferro, The Great War, 1914–1918 (London: Routledge, 1973 [1969]), 158–9; David Stevenson, Cataclysm, 31–2; Royden Harrison, “The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, 1914–1920,” in Essays in Labour History, 1886–1923, Asa Briggs and John Saville, eds. (New York: Archon Books, 1971), 211–12; J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 185–206; Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9–19.

19 Eduard Bernstein, in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, II, Kriegsheft 1915, 19–20, quoted in Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (abridged) (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 369.

20 Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1984 [1973]), 43. Like many other historians, Kocka saw little evidence of significant dissent from Burgfrieden in the first weeks or even months of the war.

21 Carl F. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965 [1955]), 294–6; also, Carl Grünberg, “Vor dem Kriege und während der ersten Kriegswochen,” in his Die Internationale und der Weltkrieg (Leipzig: C.L. Hirschfeld,1916).

22 Peter Nettl offers a most nuanced account of factions within the SPD and their views which the war accentuated, see Rosa Luxemburg, 366–79. Also Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917, 285–99.

23 For an account of these internal maneuverings within the SPD during the early months of the war, see Schorske, 291–302.

24 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence: The Origins and Establishment of the New Zealand Labour Party, 1900–1919 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1980), 105–6 (quotation is from Voice of Labour, 19 May 1911).

25 On the lower-than-expected recruitment results, see Erik Olssen, A History of Otago (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1984), 153. Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 106–108. War and Class: The Diary of Jack McCullough, Melanie Nolan, ed., entries for February 2, 1914 and February 28, 1915, 289, 300.

26 The reform agenda of the first Andrew Fisher Labor government has been the subject of critical analysis in a special issue of Labour History, edited by Nick Dyrenfurth and Mark Hearn, n. 102, May 2012. See especially, the essay by Raymond Markey, “Postscript: The Significance of the Fisher Labor Government, 1910–1913.” The second Fisher government, 1914–15, in the context of war, is another story altogether. See chapter 10 below.

27 Socialist (Victoria), August 28, September 4, 1914; International Socialist (Sydney), August 1914, quoted in Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900–1921 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979), 69–71. On wartime opposition of the IWW, see also, Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181–92 and Burgmann and Jeffrey A. Johnson, “Workers against Warfare: The American and Australian Experiences before and during World War I,” in, Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia, Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 39–60.

28 D. J. Murphy, “Queensland,” in Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia 1880–1920, D. J. Murphy, ed. (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 185–6; D. J. Murphy, T.J. Ryan: A Political Biography (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 95–8.

29 Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 71–3; Brian Kennedy, Silver, Sin and Sixpenny Ale, 128–9; Janet McCalman, Struggletown, 89–90.

30 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin Press, 2001), 70–74 on the “proteinising” of the New Zealand economy; Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 100. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History, 226.

31 For standard military accounts of the campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula, see Eric Dorn Brose, A History of the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 161–6, 174–7, David Stevenson, Cataclysm, 94–8 (imperial and Anzac casualty figures, 95), Martin Gilbert, The First World War, 146–53. On the memory of Gallipoli and its meaning, see Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

32 James Belich, Paradise Reforged, 95–6, Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 108.

33 John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 135–6. Casualty figures for the war’s first four months were staggering: the British saw half of the 160,000 sent to France wounded or killed; the French lost an estimated 490,000 and Germany 241,000.

34 Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), 4.

35 L. L. Farrar, Jr., The Short-War Illusion: German Policy, Strategy and Domestic Affairs, August-December 1914 (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1973), 38–50.

36 Jeffrey R. Smith, “The First World War and the Public Sphere in Germany,” in World War I and the Cultures of Modernity, Douglas Mackaman and Michael Mays, eds. (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 74–5. See detailed discussion in chapter 11.

37 For a useful review of alternative interpretations of the wartime schisms in the SPD, see Dieter K. Buse, “Breaking and Remaking a Party. The Division and Militancy of German Social Democracy Reconsidered, 1914–1918,” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Jhrg. 40, März 2004, Heft 1, 2–8. As he notes, greater attention has been given to divisions among leaders, than to the “splitting process … around the party itself,” 7–8.

38 Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917, 299.

39 Ibid., 302–307 (quotation on 302).

40 David Stevenson, Cataclysm, 215–19; a more unqualifiedly optimistic reading of the French experience at the home front that argues “difficult conditions never defeated the essential consensus to continue the war,” is found in Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 53–68 (quotation on 68); also, Jean-Louis Robert, “Mobilizing Labour and Socialist Militants in Paris during the Great War,” in State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, John Horne, ed., 73–88.

41 G. D. H. Cole provides a balanced accounting of divisions within the Labour Party and the ILP over the war, Communism and Social Democracy, 1914–1931, vol. IV, pt. 1, A History of Socialist Th ought (London: MacMillan, 1958), 406–11.

42 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, 25–6, 32.

43 Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, 190–1.

44 Royden Harrison, “The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, 1914– 1920,” 211, 217–24. See also, J. M. Winter, “Sidney Webb and the War Emergency Committee,” in Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 184–233; Lisanne Radice, Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists (London: MacMillan, 1984), 203–16; for a detailed account of the WEWNC and its municipal work, see chapter 9.

45 See Sidney Webb, “The Organisation and Functions of Local Governing Bodies in Peace and War,” (1917), Passfield (Webbs) Papers, LSE Archives. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, argues that the Webbs’ view “that the war could provide the occasion if not the cause of the completion of useful social tasks” was dominant in the committee, 194–6, 199–201 (quotation on 194).

46 Royden Harrison, “The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, 1914– 1920,” 234–6. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912–1918, 203–205.

47 Robert Smillie, My Life of Labour (1924), 177, quoted in Harrison, Ibid., 236–7, 238–45. Winter, 202.

48 See the neglected massive correspondence files of the WEWNC with local party branches in which their grievances were articulated. WEWNC files, Labour Party Records, People’s Museum and Archives, Manchester (hereafter WEWNC Papers). Th is evidence is discussed more fully in chapter 9.

49 F. B. Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, 1916–17 (Melbourne: Victorian Historical Association, 1965), 4–5; J. M. Main, ed., Conscription: The Australian Debate, 1901–1970 (Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1970), 31.

50 Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 74–6; Peter Loveday, “New South Wales,” D. J. Murphy, “Queensland,” Humphrey McQueen, “Victoria,” in Labor in Politics: State Labor Parties in Australia, 1880–1920, 90–102, 185–201, 324–30. On the wartime administration of T. J. Ryan, see D. J. Murphy, T.J. Ryan: A Political Biography (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1974), 95–407; on the conscription fight in Queensland, 186–208.

51 On the 1916 referendum, Roundtable, v. 7, 1916–17, 383–91 and on 1917, v. 8, 1917–18, both reproduced in J. M. Main, Conscription: The Australian Debate, 1901– 1970 (North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1970), 70–76, 100–106. See discussion of conscription referenda in chapter 10.

52 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 78–88, 89, 91–3.

53 Len Richardson, “Politics and War: Coal Miners and Conscription, 1914–18,” in Miners and Militants: Politics in Westland, 1865–1918, Philip Ross May, ed., 133–4, 136–40, 146–55 (quotations on 133, 134).

54 On the suppression of free speech and oppositional publications in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the US, and Germany see chapters 9, 10, and 11 that follow.

55 Sweden’s neutrality and the varied circumstances of other Scandinavian countries, as well as the late entry of the United States into the war, created somewhat different wartime conditions. See chapters 10 and 11 below.

56 Jay Winter, “Some Paradoxes of the First World War,” and Richard Wall, “English and German Families and the First World War, 1914–18,” in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, 10, 15, 27, 36–41, 43–54.

57 Ibid., 16–24. For New Zealand and Australia, see Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 96–7 and Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 71–96. On food supplies and prices in the United States, see David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980 [2004]), 117–23, 143; Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

58 Jay Winter, “Some Paradoxes of the First World War,” and Richard Wall, “English and German Families and the First World War, 1914–18,” in The Upheaval of War, 27–32, 36–41, 43–54. Gerald Feldman, “Mobilizing Economies for War,” in The Great War and the Twentieth Century, Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary R. Habeck, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 178–80; Thierry Bonzon and Belinda Davis, “Feeding the Cities,” Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 308. Tammy M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 84–97; Belinda Davis, “Homefront: Food, Politics, and Women’s Everyday Life during the First World War,” in Proctor, (quotation on 90). On the food crisis in Britain during the war’s last year, see, Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, 214–16.

59 For example, in a September 1914 survey, Britain’s War Emergency Workers’ National Committee (WEWNC) reported in one municipality after another the interruption of work on plans for the construction of workers’ housing due to a variety of war-related circumstances (shortages of materials, financing, delays in formal central government approval); the same held true for the extension or improvement on municipal tramways, “Report on Municipal Housing Schemes, etc.,” War Emergency Workers’ National Committee [September 1914], WEWNC Papers, no. 21/1/121–2.

60 Susanna Magri, “Housing,” in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914– 1919, 375–7, 380, 386–96 (quotation on 396). On the Glasgow rent strike of October 1915, see Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War, 146–7, and Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes: People’s Struggle for Housing in West Scotland, 1890–1916 (Edinburgh: Polygon Press, 1983). For a firsthand account of the spreading agitation for housing “fairness” in Britain, see Dan Rider, Ten Years’ Adventures among Landlords and Tenants: The Story of the Rent Act (London: Methuen, 1927). On New Zealand wartime housing conditions, see Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 100–101.

61 Minutes, Wellington City Council, July 13, 27, 1916, July 12, 1917. “Conscription,” chronological notes by Herbert O. Roth on anti-conscription activities in New Zealand, from Maoriland Worker and New Zealand Herald, “Pacifism in New Zealand,” Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL, Wellington.

62 Summons, Alderman and Justice of the Peace, John Knill, September 10, 1915 and transcript of hearing, September 16, 1915; quotation from Francis Johnson, ILP to Sir ______, n.d. [August 1914], Papers of the Independent Labour Party (3/58), LLSE Archives.

63 Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community’s Opposition to the Great War (London: Francis Boutle, 2001), 200–207 (quotation from 201). On comparative suppression of free speech during wartime in the United States and Australia, see Stromquist, “Domestic Dogs of War Unleashed,” 63–5, 73–4 and Verity Burgmann and Jeffrey A. Johnson, “Workers Against Warfare,” in Frontiers of Labor, 39–48, 52–6.

64 See Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917, 288–9, and as he noted the policies lent additional strength to the party’s center faction,294. Also, Jeffrey R. Smith, “The First World War and the Public Sphere in Germany,” 70–76.

65 Carl Schorske, 296, 308–9. See more detailed discussion in chapter 11.

9. The Wartime Politics of Everyday Life in Britain

1 Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years: The Life of Jowett of Bradford (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), 129.

2 Ibid., 64; E. R. Hartley, Sunday, 25 March, 1900, Diary, v. 1, WYAS, Bradford Public Library.

3 Clarion, 28 May 1909, quoted in Fenner Brockway, 125.

4 Independent Labour Party, Report of the Norwich Conference, April 1915 (London: Independent Labour Party, 1915), 45–6.

5 Fenner Brockway, 130–131, 133–5.

6 “Miscellaneous Notes for Speeches, F.W. Jowett,” ILP Papers—SSRC Deposit (10/7/1), LSE Archives. See also chairman’s speeches, Independent Labour Party, Report of the Annual Conference, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1916, 42–7; ILP, Report of the Annual Conference, Leeds, April 1917, 38–43.

7 On the pivotal role of Sidney Webb in the WEWNC see especially, J. M. Winter, “Sidney Webb and the War Emergency Committee,” in Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 184–233.

8 Royden Harrison, “The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, 1914– 1920” in Essays in Labour History, 1886–1923, Asa Briggs and John Saville, eds. (New York: Archon Books, 1971), 211–59; Lisanne Radice, Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists (London: MacMillan, 1984), 203–16; also, Margaret Cole, ed., Beatrice Webb’s Diaries, 1912–1924 (London: Longman’s, 1952), 45–6.

9 “The War Emergency: Suggestions for Labour Members on Local Committees,” The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, J. S. Middleton, Secretary, September 1914, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/2/57.

10 Historians have given little attention to the work of the WEWNC with local branches on issues arising in municipalities. The suspension of local elections made this avenue for addressing workers’ grievances especially important.

11 J.S. Middleton to R. Wrather, Chadderton Labour Party, Oldham, August 18, 1914, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/2/28; a similar complaint was heard, for example, from H. Perry, Sec. ILP, Walthamston Branch to J. S. Middleton, August 15, 1914, no. 16/2/25.

12 August Price, Secretary, LRC Eastleigh to J. S. Middleton, August 15, 1914, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/2/22.

13 D. B. Foster, Secretary, Leeds Labour Party to the National Labour Party, August 19, 1914, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/2/36.

14 John S. Taylor, Secretary, Clitheroe Trades and Labour Council to J. S. Middleton, November 12, 1914, WEWNC, Papers, no. 16/2/58; A. H. Miller, Secretary, Tottenham Vigilance Committee, Tottenham Trades and Labour Council and British Socialist Party, March 10, 1915, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/2/77.

15 See exchange of letters between W. Mellor, Secretary, Manchester and Salford Trades and Labour Council and J. S. Middleton, February 26, March 1, March 17, March 19, 1915, WEWNC Papers, nos. 16/2/67, 16/2/71, 16/2/73, 16/2/84.

16 “Elections and Registration Act, 1915: Postponement of Local Elections,” Circular, Local Government Board, August 10, 1915, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/3/5/19. An earlier “parliamentary truce” had been adopted in 1914 and was presumably now to extend to local bodies. “Elections and Registration Act. Extract from Speech Delivered by the Rt. Hon. Walter Long, M.P., July 26, 1915, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/3/4/1.

17 Eastbourne Chronicle, n.d., WEWNC Papers, no. 16/3/5/3.

18 See, for instance, F. J. Huggett, Secretary, Eastbourne and District Trades and Labour Council to Secretary, Workers Nat. W. E. Committee [sic], July 21, 1916, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/3/5/56.

19 [Copy] V. W. T. to John B. Chapman, Town Clerk, Burton-on-Trent, November 25, 1916, no. 16/3/13/13; for comparable Labour Council communications see WEWNC Papers, May 28, 1916, no. 16/3/11/1 (Penzance); April 6, 1916, no. 16/3/10/4 (Liverpool); November 4, 1915, no. 16/3/8/1 (Rishton).

20 A. H. Fox, Secretary, Walsall Labour Association to J. S. Middleton, November 22, 1916, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/6/14/3, same, December 12, 1916, no. 16/3/14 7i, “Information Wanted. Local Government Board and Guardians Vacancy,” Walsall Saturday Pioneer, 3 December 1916, no. 16/3/14/7ii.

21 J. W. Kent, Secretary, Doncaster and District Trades and Labour Council to J. S. Middleton, June 15, 1917, WEWNC Papers, no. 16/3/17/10; E. J. Harries to J. S. Middleton and reply, March 24, April 20, 1917, WEWNC Papers, nos. 16/3/18/1 & 3.

22 For a useful analysis of these contradictory impacts within the working-class home front that nonetheless emphasizes overall improvement in standard of living, see Bernard Waites, A Class Society at War: England, 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), 160–162, 168–74, 177–78, 182–204. Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, offers a more critical reading that links the corrosive impact of inflation, especially in food, to rising levels of labor conflict, 194–202. On the evidence of wartime labor conflict, see also below. Although there are comparatively few local studies of local opposition to the war, Cyril Pearce’s work on Huddersfield, Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community’s Opposition to the Great War (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2001) provides an excellent model.

23 On the political trajectory and core principles of the UDC, see Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 25–7.

24 Tony Jowitt and Keith Laybourn, “War and Socialism: The Experience of the Bradford ILP 1914–1918,” in David James, Tony Jowitt, and Keith Laybourn, eds., The Centennial History of the Independent Labour Party (Halifax, England: Ryburn Publishing, 1992), 171–2, and Keith Laybourn, “A Movement Divided: The Labour Movement and the Great War—a Divided Bradford and a United Huddersfield,” in ”Stop the First World War”: Movements Opposed to the 1914–1918 War in Britain, France and Germany, David Morgan, ed. (London: Socialist History Society, 2016), 4–27.

25 Independent Labour Party, Report of the Norwich Conference, April 1915 (London: Independent Labour Party, 1915), 47. On Jowett’s views, see also Tony Jowitt and Keith Laybourn, “War and Socialism: The Experience of the Bradford ILP 1914– 1918,” 168–9.

26 Fenner Brockway, Socialism Over Sixty Years: The Life of Jowett of Bradford, 132–6.

27 “Agreement between the Bradford Liberal Party, the Bradford Conservative Party and the Bradford Labour Party arrived at 5th October 1914: Arrangements in Regard to Municipal Elections Consequent on the Prevalence of the European War.” Labour Party Papers, Miscellaneous Records, PM&A.

28 Bradford City Council Minutes, February 10, March 10, April 7, 1914, WYAS Archives, Bradford.

29 Ibid., January 12, March 16, April 13, June 8, September 14, 1915.

30 See Minutes, Bradford City Labour Group, November 4, 1919–1946, WYAS, Bradford.

31 Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience. Other useful local studies include: W. H. Scott, Leeds in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Leeds, 1923), A. J. Peacock, York in the Great War (York: 1993). See also Tony Jowitt, “Philip Snowden and the First World War,” in, Philip Snowden: The First Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Keith Laybourn and David James, eds. (Bradford: Bradford Libraries, 1987); Alan Clinton, “Trades Councils during the First World War,” International Review of Social History 1970, v. xv, 202–34.

32 Cyril Pearce, “A Community of Resistance: The Anti-War Movement in Huddersfield, 1914–1918,” in The Representation and Reality of War: The British Experience: Essays in Honour of David Wright (Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 173–5.

33 Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience, 102–4; and for the wider context of rising industrial militancy, see James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973); also William Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1936).

34 Cyril Pearce, “A Community of Resistance,” 178–84.

35 Minutes, York Labour Party, April 30, May 28, November 26, December 1, 1916; January 21, 28, May 27, June 24, 29, 1917; January 20, March 3, 1918. York Municipal Archives. For a somewhat idiosyncratic account of the wartime home front in York and some discussion of the ILP, York Trades Council and Quaker opposition that deepened around the conscription issue, see A. J. Peacock, York in the Great War, 1914–1918 (York: York Settlement Trust, 1993), 334–5, 410–16.

36 “Mr. Philip Snowden and the War. The Working Classes and Foreign Policy,” The Manchester Guardian, 15 February 1915.

37 Philip Viscount Snowden, An Autobiography, v. 1, 1864–1919 (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1934), 348, 402–10, 417–24. See discussion below.

38 The Manchester ILP elected its first town councillors (two) in 1897 and by 1905 had six members of the council, “Directory of ILP Members on Public Bodies,” Minutes of the 5th Annual Conference of the ILP, April 19–20, 1897; Revised September 1905. Salford’s ILP representation on its town council rose from one in 1903 to three in 1905 but on the eve of WWI again had only a single councillor.

39 Central Branch Minutes, ILP, Manchester, 1902–8; see, for instance, 26/5/03, 11/8/03, 11/10/04, 10/1/05, 19/9/05, 18/10/05. Manchester Public Library.

40 Declan McHugh, Labour in the City: The Development of the Labour Party in Manchester, 1918–31 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 53–4.

41 See Asa Briggs, “Manchester: Symbol of a New Age,” in Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 102–3. Declan McHugh, Labour in the City, 20–30; also Shena D. Simon, A Century of City Government, Manchester, 1838–1938 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), 19–20, 23–31. For a useful comparison of the LRC’s fortunes in Manchester and Salford, see Declan McHugh, “The Labour Party in Manchester and Salford before the First World War: A Case of Uneven Development,” Manchester Region History Review, 2000, v. 14, 15–23 (especially 15, 22). For postwar election results, see “Local Events and Obituaries, 1919,” The Official Handbook of Manchester and Salford and Surrounding District, 1920 (Manchester: The Manchester Corporation, 1920), 550–551, 553, 556–61.

42 “Labour Protest in Manchester: Proposal to Hold Public Meeting,” Manchester Guardian, (hereafter MG) 3 August 1914, p. 11.

43 “Prevention of Distress: Plans for Absorbing Unemployed Labour,” “Wages Rather than Relief,” “Manchester and the War: Schemes for Public Works,” MG, 20 August 1914, p. 7; “Municipal Elections: No Party Contests,” 27 August 1914, p. 7.

44 “Manchester and the War: The Labour Party and the Price of Food,” MG, 4 February 1915, p. 3.

45 “After the War: Who Shall Frame the Settlement?” MG, 17 May 1915, p. 10.

46 “Against Conscription: An ILP Manifesto,” MG, 7 June 1915, p. 12.

47 The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, “The War Emergency: Suggestions for Labour Members on Local Committees,” September 1914, 3–4, WEWNC Papers.

48 That this push for socialization of the economy and an expanded public sector came at the outset of the war is little recognized in the historical literature that emphasizes the move toward collectivization with the revision of the Labour Party constitution in 1918. On the Labour Party’s adoption of a new constitution in 1918 with clause four on public ownership, see below and Declan McHugh, Labour in the City, 32–49; John N. Horne, Labour at War: France and Britain, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 218–60; J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 234–69; James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867–1974 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Press, 1983), 96–118.

49 “Elections and Registration Act of 1915, Application of the Act to the Election of Certain Councillors,” Walter H. Long, President, Local Government Board, City of Manchester, Proceedings of the Council, 1914–1915, v. 1 (Manchester: Henry Blacklock & Co., 1915), 589–91.

50 Proceedings of the Council, City of Manchester, 1915–1916, v. 1 (Manchester: Henry Blacklock, 1917), 290–92. The vote of May 3, 1916, over an amendment to increase minimum wage for adult male employees by two shillings per week failed, thirty-four to fifty-five, with all fourteen Labour members supporting the amendment. Epitome of Proceedings of Committees, February 15, 1916, 296–7. Party affiliations may be found in The Official Handbook of Manchester and Salford and Surrounding District (Manchester: Blacklock & Co., 1909–1921).

51 City of Manchester, Epitome of the Proceedings of Committees, April 5, 1916, 258–9; Proceedings of the Council, 1915–1916, v. 1, June 7, 1916, 328.

52 City of Manchester, Epitome of the Proceedings of Committees, December 22, 1915, 75.

53 Proceedings of the Council, 1916–17, v. I (1918), 367–75.

54 City of Manchester, Epitome of Proceedings of Committees, December 6, 1919, 47–8; June 6, 1917, 292–3; September 5, 1917, 395–9; October 3, 1917, 436.

55 Ibid., July 4, 1917, 296–7.

56 City of Manchester, Epitome of the Proceedings of Committees, from October 26 to November 3, 1917, 10; November 9, 1917, 12, and March 6, 1918, 194.

57 City of Manchester, Proceedings of the Council, 1917–1918, v. 1, 130, 209–10.

58 City of Manchester, Appendix to Council Minutes, 1917–1918, including reports brought before the Council, v. II, October 18, 1918, 624–31. See also the reports of testimony by builders, architects, realtors, and property holders before the special committee, Epitome of the Proceedings of the Committees, January 9, February 6, 1918, 95, 141.

59 Epitome of Proceedings of the Committees, 1917–1918, Workmen Special Committee, October 30, 1918, 497.

60 Epitome of the Proceedings of the Committees, 1917–1918, November 9, 1917, 12; June 5, 1918, 321–3; August 7, 1918, 390–91; July 24, 1918, 392–3; September 4, 1918, 415–16; October 2, 1918, 421.

61 Jay Winter discusses the ambivalence toward wartime state intervention that Guild Socialists and G. D. H. Cole in particular wrestled with and their participation in debates within the Labour Party over nationalization. See Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 129–35, 138–43.

62 David Englander, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain, 1838–1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 184–9, (quotation from Southwark Recorder, 29 July 1899), 184–5.

63 See, for example, Independent Labour Party, Metropolitan District Council, “Manifesto: London County Council Election, 1907,” p. 3 (“Housing policy”), Fabian Society Papers (B1/7), LSE Archives; also “Borough Councils … Their Powers in Sanitation, Food, Housing, Education, Municipal Enterprise and Finance,” ILP Pamphlet 22, 1918, pp. 8, 12–15.

64 Sidney Webb, “The Organisation and Functioning of Local Governing Bodies in War and Peace,” 2, 5, unpublished essay, Passfield Papers, LSE Archives.

65 War Emergency National Workers’ Committee, “Report on Municipal Housing Schemes, etc.,” J. S. Middleton to Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., September 29, 1914, WEWNC Papers, nos. 21/1/124, 21/1/125.

66 David Englander, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain, 1838–1918 has the most insightful account of the dynamic interplay of spontaneity and organized resistance among tenants and landlords in the months before passage of the Rent Bill of 1915; see especially, 201–10.

67 Dan Rider, Ten Years’ Adventures among Landlords and Tenants: The Story of the Rent Acts (London: Methuen, 1927), 62.

68 Ibid., 33–4.

69 Quoted in J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 203 (from Middleton to Asquith, October 18, 1915, WEWNC Papers).

70 Most helpful on the emerging struggles over housing on the Clydeside are Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes: Peoples’ Struggle for Housing in West Scotland, 1890–1916 (Edinburgh: Polygon Books, 1983) and idem, “Clydeside Housing and the Evolution of State Rent Control, 1900–1939,” in Housing, Social Policy and the State, Joseph Melling, ed. (London: Croom Helm, 1980).

71 Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes, 59, 62.

72 Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes, 66–7.

73 Ibid., 67, 70–72; Joseph Melling, “Clydeside Housing and the Evolution of State Rent Control, 1900–1939,” 149–50.

74 Seán Damer, “State, Class and Housing: Glasgow, 1885–1919,” in Housing, Social Policy and the State, Joseph Melling, ed., 98–9.

75 William Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde: An Autobiography, 55–6.

76 Ibid., 57.

77 Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes, 95, 92–3, 90–1. William Gallacher offers particularly vivid accounts of the industrial conflicts that helped fuel the rent agitation, 32–49, 58–62.

78 Dan Rider, 60–61, 63–4. In the early months of the war, the WEWNC issued a report detailing dozens of towns where schemes to construct municipal housing had been aborted or deferred because of shortages of materials or financial concerns, WEWNC Papers, no. 21/1/122-i-iv.

79 Ibid., 68–70.

80 Ibid., 80–101. Rider, the peripatetic leader of the Fair Rents League, was consumed with advocating on behalf of tenants across the country in the months after passage of the Rent Act in late 1915.

81 Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes, 108–11. David Englander, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain, 263–86, 296–7.

82 James E. Cronin, “Labor Insurgency and Class Formation: Comparative Perspectives on the Crisis of 1917–1920 in Europe,” Social Science History, v. 4:1 (Winter, 1980), 126–7. See below on the war’s end.

83 John N. Horne, Labour at War: France and Britain, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6–10; James E. Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 111, notes that the 1917 Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest cited food prices 170 percent higher than 1914 as the “proximate spur” to unrest. See also, Julie Light, “1917 Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest—A Welsh Report,” Welsh History Review, Dec. 2003, v. 31(4), 704–28. On the rising importance of “control issues” and workplace grievances, see Carmen Sirianni, “Workers’ Control in Europe: A Comparative Sociological Analysis,” Work, Community and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925, Cronin and Siriani, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 254–6. For a similar analysis of control issues in the US context, see David Montgomery, “The ‘new unionism’ and the transformation of workers’ consciousness in America, 1909–1922,” in David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History, Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 91–112.

84 James E. Cronin, “Labor Insurgency and Class Formation,” 126–7, 132–3.

85 See, for example, Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott and Kirsten Heinsohn, Germany 1916–23: A Revolution in Context (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2005 [1971]). The postwar upheavals in Germany are discussed in chapter 11.

86 John N. Horne, Labour at War, 6.

87 Friedhelm Boll, “Streikwellen im europäischen Vergleich,” Auf dem Wege zur Massengewerkschaft, Wolfgang Mommsen and Hans Gerhard-Husung, hrsg. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 109–34 (especially 133–4); Heinrich Volkmann, “Die Streikwellen von 1910–13 und 1919–20: Kontinuität oder Diskontinuität der Arbeitskampfentwicklung?” in Jürgen Bermann, u.a., Arbeit, Mobilität, Partizipation, Protest (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), 220–50.

88 Ibid., 9. David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism,’ ” 93–5; also, Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing ‘the People’: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 167–72.

89 See chapter 7, “Promises of Power.”

90 James E. Cronin, “Workers and Power in Britain, 1870–1920,” in Industrial Conflict: Papers Presented to the Fourth British-Dutch Conference on Labour History, Lex Heerma van Voss and Herman Diederiks, eds. (Amsterdam: Stichtung beheer IISG, 1988), 26.

91 For original quote from Sidney Webb, see B. Webb to [my Dear Friend], May 30, 1915, quoted in Royden Harrison, “The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, 1914–1926,” 222. James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867–1974 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983), 101.

92 James E. Cronin, “Labor Insurgency and Class Formation,” 40. On the tendency to attribute industrial unrest to issues related to consumption, especially food, see the Great Britain, “Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest,” British Parliamentary Papers, 1917–18, XV.

93 James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), 40–1. Industrial unrest on the Clyde had been chronic since the early months of the war; see, for instance, Manchester Guardian, 5, 9 March 1915.

94 Hinton, 54–5.

95 Labour Party, “Labour and the New Social Order: A Report on Reconstruction, Revised in Accordance with the Resolutions of the Labour Party Conference, June, 1918” (London: National Labour Press, 1918); see J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 259–63, and A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884–1918, on the drafting of the new Labour Party Constitution of 1918, 340–45. See further discussion below.

96 This point has been the source of considerable historiographical contention, particularly as some revisionist historians have called into question the “legend” of Clydeside radicalism. James Hinton’s work has been most closely associated with the argument for the radicalism of the shop stewards’ movement and the Clyde Workers Committee, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement. That view found support from John Foster, “Strike Action and Working-Class Politics on Clydeside 1914–1919,” International Review of Social History, v. XXXV, 1990, 33–70. A leading critic has been Iain McLean, The Legend of Red Clydeside (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983); also, Alastair Reid, “Dilution, Trade Unionism, and the State in Britain during the First World War,” Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 46–74. Joseph Melling argues for an alternate view that focuses on a revitalized labor politics as the chief outcome of Clydeside wartime conflict, “Whatever Happened to Red Clydeside? Industrial onflict and the Politics of Skill in the First World War,” International Review of Social History, XXXV, 1990, 3–32.

97 For a particularly insightful analysis of these intersections, see R. J. Morris, “The ILP, 1893–1931: Introduction,” in The ILP on Clydeside, 1893–1932: From Foundation to Disintegration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), esp. 7–16.

98 Ibid., 14–16, 6. See also Joan Smith, “Taking the Leadership of the Labour Movement: The ILP in Glasgow, 1906–1914,” and Joseph Melling, “Work, Culture and Politics on ‘Red Clydeside’: The ILP during the First World War,” in ibid., 56–82, 83–122, and Roots of Red Clydeside, 1910–1914? Labour Unrest and Industrial Relations in West Scotland, William Kenefick and Arthur McIvor, eds. (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1996). Hinton gives greater emphasis to the struggle over dilution at the point of production, see The First Shop Stewards’ Movement, esp. 103–61.

99 Joseph Melling, among others, makes a strong argument along these lines, “Work, Culture and Politics on ‘Red Clydeside’: The ILP during the First World War,” 102–6.

100 David Kirkwood, My Life of Revolt (London: George Harrap, 1935), 108–10.

101 Joseph Melling, “Work, Culture and Politics on the ‘Red Clydeside,’ ” 106. Also, Melling, “Whatever Happened to Red Clydeside?” 26–32.

102 Melling, “Work, Culture and Politics on the ‘Red Clydeside,’ ” 93–4.

103 Kirkwood was one of the core leaders in the Clyde Workers’ Council. Quotation is from an interview with Woodburn conducted by Iain McLean in 1970, Iain McLean, The Legend of Red Clydeside, 239.

104 Melling, “Work, Culture and Politics on the ‘Red Clydeside,’ ” 115.

105 See, for instance, speeches of Jowett, MacDonald, and Snowden, Independent Labour Party, Report of the Annual Conference in Norwich, April 1915, 42–8, Report of the Annual Conference at Leeds, April 1917, 38–43, and Report of the Twenty-sixth Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party at Leicester, April 1 and 2, 1918, 41–7; ILP membership data comes from the Forward, cited in Joan Smith, “Commonsense Thought and Working-class Consciousness,” 499 (reference in Melling, “Work, Culture and Politics on the ‘Red Clydeside,’ ” 122).

106 Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years: The Life of Jowett of Bradford (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946), 131. For Jowett’s full address, see Independent Labour Party, Report of the Annual Conference in Norwich, April 1915, 47.

107 Independent Labour Party, Report of the Annual Conference Held at Newcastle-on-Tyne, April 1916, 42, 45–6.

108 Joan M. Smith, “Commonsense Thought and Working-Class Consciousness,” 481.

109 See chapter 10 below.

110 “Speech from the Dock, 1915 (excerpts),” in John McLean: In the Rapids of Revolution, Essays, Articles and Letters, 1902–1923, Nan Milton, ed. (London: Allison & Busby, 1978), 93–4; also, Nan Milton, John McLean (London: Pluto Press, 1973), 97–9.

111 Nan Milton, John McLean, 114–15.

112 See the account in Joan M. Smith, “Commonsense Thought and Working-Class Consciousness,” 483–5, largely drawn from The Forward. On the impact of the deportations, see Joseph Melling, “Work, Culture and Politics on the ‘Red Clydeside,’ ” 104–6.

113 The article appeared in The Worker, 29 January 1916. See Joan Smith, “Commonsense Thought and Working-Class Consciousness,” 489.

114 “To the Branches of the ILP,” Circular, September 2, 1914, ILP Papers [10/3/2], London School of Economics Archives.

115 “The Peril of Conscription: An Appeal to the Organised Workers of Great Britain, Addressed to Trades Councils, Trade Unions, Labour Party and Socialist Organisations, Brotherhoods, etc. June 5th 1915,” ILP Papers [10/3/2], LSE Archives.

116 “Trade Unionists and Conscription,” column blank, except for message: “A strong force of police searched the offices of Labour Leader on Wednesday afternoon. They asked that page proofs of this issue of the Leader be submitted to them before publication, with results that will be apparent. The police also searched the head office of the ILP in London.” Labour Leader (hereafter LL), 19 August 1915, p. 10.

117 “Full Story of the Raid,” and “The Summons in the County Borough of Salford,” LL, 26 August 1915, pp. 1–2. See also, “Transcript of Hearing, Francis Johnson before Alderman John Knill, 13 Sept. 1915,” ILP Papers, LSE Archives. On police raid of labour party leader’s home in Salford, Manchester Guardian, 19, 25 August 1915.

118 For a full list of the pamphlets seized in the London raid, see “Summons, John Knill, Alderman and Justice of the Peace, City of London,” “Pamphlets Referred to in the Summons”: an itemized and annotated list of pamphlets seized and perused by the court, ILP Papers, LSE Archives.

119 To “Sir … from [Francis Johnson, General Secretary],” ILP Papers, LSE Archives. Anecdote regarding the police detective from the London raid, LL, 26 August 1915, p. 2. Numbers of reports of raids and seized pamphlets from other branches, continuing in 1916, are listed for South Wales, Yorkshire, and Durham, including Rotherham, Tantobie, Port Talbot, Bargoed, Cudworth, ILP papers, LSE Archives.

120 “Victory,” LL, 2 September 1915, pp. 1–2; “Wanted—an Anti-Conscription Campaign,” LL, 26 August 1915.

121 David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), 195–7, quotations, 197. See also Ramsay MacDonald’s criticism of “socialists” who declined to condemn suppression of liberties, “Patriots and Politics,” public speech in Glasgow, April 15, 1917, p. 6, Independent Labour Party Papers, LSE Archives.

122 Th is shift is discussed in J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 209–212, James Hinton, Protests and Visions: Peace Politics in 20th Century Britain (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 50–52, and Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years, 140–45.

123 City of Manchester, Proceedings of the Council, 1915–1916, v. 1, December 22, 1915, January 5, 1916 (Manchester: Henry Blacklock & Co., 1917), 177–9.

124 York Labour Party, Minute book, April 30, May 28, 1916; May 27, June 29, November 25, 1917; January 20, March 3, 1918, York Municipal Archives.

125 Glasgow Trades Council Minutes, November 23, December 8, 1915, and Forward, 1 January 1916, all as cited in Joan Smith, “Commonsense Th ought and Working Class Consciousness,” 458, 483.

126 The Worker (Huddersfield), 18 December 1915, quoted in Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience, 145–6.

127 See Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience, 200–4. For a view that emphasizes the divisions within labor throughout West Yorkshire, see Keith Laybourn, “A Movement Divided: The Labour Movement and the Great War—a Divided Bradford and a United Huddersfield,” in “Stop the First World War!” ed. David Morgan, 4–27.

128 On the origin, functioning, and composition of the Military Service Tribunals, see Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience, 157–63; also T. C. Kennedy, The Hound of Conscience: A History of the No-Conscription Fellowship, 1914–1919 (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1981) and John Rae, Conscience and Politics: the British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service, 1916–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). In Manchester, Labour councillors volunteered to serve on the tribunals. See Manchester City Council Proceedings, November 9, 1916, 120–21.

129 The competing estimates of the numbers of conscientious objectors come from Cyril Pearce and John Rae and stem both from the unreliability of local data and from the definition of what constituted a CO. See discussion by Pearce, 168–9. Laybourn, “A Movement Divided,” has somewhat lower estimates nationally and for the West Riding, 22–3.

130 Ken Weller, ’Don’t Be a Soldier!’ The Radical Anti-war Movement in North London, 1914–1918 (London: Journeyman Press, 1985), 49–53. Also, Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left: Thirty Years of Platform, Press, Prison and Parliament (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942), 66–76 on the organizing of resistance to conscription and 77–119, for a compelling account of his own twenty-eight-month imprisonment for refusing an exemption from service.

131 General Secretary, ILP to branch secretaries, “Memorandum,” December 18, 1917, ILP Papers, p. 2., urged “indignation at the continued imprisonment with hard labour of many conscientious objectors, and called upon the Government to release them, and grant them their discharge from the army.”

132 Keith Laybourn, Philip Snowden: A Biography (Aldershot: Temple Smith, 1988), 72, 78–81. Also, Philip Viscount Snowden, An Autobiography v.1 (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1934), 387–413. On MacDonald’s isolation, see J. M. Winter, “Socialism and Political Independence: The Formulation of the 1918 Labour Party Constitution and Programme,” in Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 234–38.

133 Forward, 16 October 1915, quoted in Joan Smith, 481.

134 Letter signed by Smillie and Langdon-Davies from the National Council Against Conscription, January 1916, quoted in J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 209.

135 See Joan Smith, “Commonsense Thought and Working-Class Consciousness,” 481–3 and J. M. Winter, “Sidney Webb and the War Emergency Committee,” 208–15.

136 Sidney Webb to Shaw, August 18, 1915, quoted in J. M. Winter, “Sidney Webb and the War Emergency Committee,” 210.

137 On public demands in response to food shortages, Cyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience, 212–13.

138 On the prospect of “compulsory industrial service,” Independent Labour Party, “Report of the National Administrative Council, Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference, Leeds, 1917,” 7, and Bradford District Trades and Labour Council, Yearbook 1917 (Bradford: Tetley and Sons, 1917), 25; United Socialist Council (ILP and BSP), “The Menace of Industrial Conscription,” 1917, ILP Papers, LSE archives.

139 Labour Party, “Labour and the New Social Order: A Report on Reconstruction, Revised in Accordance with the Resolutions of the Labour Party Conference, June, 1918” (London: National Labour Press, 1918), 3–4.

140 Labour Party, “Labour and the New Social Order,” 12–13.

141 G. D. H. Cole, A History of the Labour Party from 1914 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969 [1949]), 39–40. Labour Party, “Labour and the New Social Order,” 11–12. For the provisions of the Representation of the People Act, see John Garrard, Democratization in Britain: Elites, Civil Society and Reform since 1800 (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2002), xiv.

142 G. D. H. Cole, A History of the Labour Party from 1914, 46. Ross McKibben, The Evolution of the Labour Party, remains the work most closely associated with the view that the ILP’s anti-war position marginalized its influence over the course of the war. Tony Jowitt and Keith Laybourn have suggested that “other factors played upon the loosening effect of the war” as well, “War and Socialism: The Bradford ILP 1914–1918,” in The Centennial History of the Independent Labour Party, 175. For a still helpful historiographical review of these issues, see Keith Laybourn, The Rise of Labour: The British Labour Party, 1890–1979 (London: Edward Arnold, 1988), 32–46.

143 Labour Party, “Labour and the New Social Order,” 15–17.

144 Arthur Henderson, M.P., The Aims of Labour (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1918 [first printed in England, January 1918]), 21. On the role of the unions, see Robert Taylor, “Out of the Bowels of the Movement: The Trade Unions and the Origins of the Labour Party 1900–18,” in Brian Brivati and Richard Heffernan, eds., The Labour Party: A Centenary History (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 2000), 38–40; see also, J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 259–63.

145 “I.L.P. Amendment to the Labour Party Draft Constitution,” Francis Johnson, Secretary (N.D.), ILP Pamphlets and Reports, 1918, ILP Papers, LSE Archives.

146 G. D. H. Cole, A History of the Labour Party from 1914, 47. On Snowden’s critique of the membership change, see Laybourn, Philip Snowden: A Biography, 79–80.

147 Middleton to B. Williams, October 11, 1917, quoted in J. M. Winter, “Sidney Webb and the War Emergency Committee,” 220.

148 ILP, Pamphlet, “Dear Comrades …,” January 15, 1918; ILP, Pamphlet, “Carry on Comrades,” December 30, 1918, ILP Pamphlets and Reports, 1918, ILP Papers, LSE Archives.

149 See, for instance, the Minutes of the Bradford City Labour Group, beginning with “November 4 [1919] 1st Group Meeting after the Elections. 27 members present,” WYAS, Bradford.

10. Opposing Conscription and War on the Urban Periphery: The Antipodes and the United States

1 See Margaret Thorn memoir, Stick Out, Keep Left (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1997), 18–20, 24–7; on the 1913 strike, see Erik Olssen, The Red Feds (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1988), 180–97; also Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand, Melanie Nolan, ed. (Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury University Press, 2005). On James Thorn’s organizing in the UK, see James Thorn to J. T. Paul, 3 October 1910, J. T. Paul Papers, Hocken Library, Dunedin, and his weekly reports as a “Vanner” in Forward, May-September 1911–13. On Ross and his editorship of the Maoriland Worker, see Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 17, 151–3.

2 “Farewell Social to Vanner Thorn” and “Departure by James Th orn,” Forward, 13 September 1913, p. 7.

3 Margaret Th orn, Stick Out, Keep Left, 24.

4 Margaret Th orn, Stick Out, Keep Left, 26–31, P. J. O’Farrell, Harry Holland: Militant Socialist (Canberra: Australian National University, 1964), 70–74; Jim McAloon, “James Th orn, 1882–1956,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (www.dnzb.govt.nz); Barry Gustafson, From the Cradle to the Grave: A Biography of Michael Joseph Savage (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986), 95–8; “Conscription,” chronological notes by Herbert O. Roth on anti-conscription activities in New Zealand, from Maoriland Worker and New Zealand Herald, “Pacifism in New Zealand,” Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL.

5 See John Hirst, “Labor and the Great War,” in The Australian Century: Political Struggle in the Building of a Nation, Robert Manne, ed. (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 61–4. Also, Joan Beaumont, “The Politics of a Divided Society,” in Australia’s War, 1914–18, Joan Beaumont, ed. (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 48–52. Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900–1921 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979), 97–121; Conscription: The Australian Debate, 1901–1970, J. M. Main, ed. (Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1970), 1–7, 31–107.

6 Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157–8; D. J. Murphy, “Queensland,” in Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia, 1880–1920, D. J. Murphy, ed. (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 200–4.

7 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 193–6. Also, Burgmann and Jeffrey Johnson, “Workers against Warfare: The American and Australian Experiences before and during World War I,” in Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist, Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

8 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 198–201; Vere Gordon Childe, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers’ Representation in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1923), 145–6.

9 The literature on the vigorous and sometimes violent suppression of dissent in the United States during World War I is enormous. See, for example, H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1957), 43–60, 157–180; William Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870–1976 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 115–25; William H. Th omas, Jr., Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the US Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 89–109; Clemens P. Work, Darkest before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

10 For general trends of increasing Labor Party success in postwar municipalities, see Michael Hogan, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales,” 128–9, 132–4. Hogan notes that Holman’s Local Government Act in NSW in 1919 made only “minor changes” in the municipal franchise, to include ex-servicemen if they were “stable occupiers” in rateable property, but continued to exclude most other lodgers. In Queensland, for instance, see Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane, 1859–1959: A History of Local Government (Brisbane: Oswald Ziegler, 1959), 296–303. For a discussion of the comparative limits to municipal home rule, see below.

11 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 203–4. In Queensland, an atmosphere of intensifying labor conflict and working-class mobilization appears to have stirred into action private vigilantism to a greater degree than in other states, culminating in the “Red Flag Riots” in Brisbane, several months after the armistice. See Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–18, 65–86, idem, A History of Queensland, 161, and The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988).

12 Ernest Scott, Australia During the War (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 53–4, 64, 69–71, 354.

13 Ernest Scott, 108–14, 136–7.

14 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 184–5, 195; Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 122–38. On Gompers’s and the AFL’s hostility to war opponents and the IWW in particular, see Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 46–59.

15 Marnie Haig-Muir, “The Economy at War,” in Australia’s War, 1914–18 (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 100, 104–6.

16 David Meredith and Barrie Dyster, Australia in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 92–9. See also, Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1980), 3–4.

17 Ernest Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, “Book III: The Economic Aspects of the War,” (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 480–739. On nominal and real wages, 665.

18 Gordon Greenwood, “Australia at War, 1914–18,” in Australia: A Social and Political History, Gordon Greenwood, ed. (New York: Praeger, 1955), 276–85; also, D. B. Copland, “Australia in the World War: (iii) Economic,” The Cambridge History of the British Empire, J. Holland Rose, et al., eds. (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 587–604; Greenwood, 276–7 and Copland, 527–8 stress the “dependent” nature of Australia’s prewar economy.

19 Barry Gustafson, Labor’s Path to Political Independence, 96–7; see also, Muriel F. Lloyd Prichard, An Economic History of New Zealand to 1939 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1970), 262–5.

20 Gustafson, 97, 99. See also Harry Holland, “The Scandal of War Profits,” (Wellington, 1917), TL.

21 Maoriland Worker, 21 November 1917, quoted in Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 100.

22 New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, September 5, 1919, quoted in Gustafson, 100.

23 Stuart D. Brandes, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 129–40 (Norris quotation, 140). See also, Marc Allen Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000), 51–7; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 30–8. On the divisions among progressives, see Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “the People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 191–8.

24 Simon Litman, Prices and Price Control in Great Britain and the United States during the World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 181–2, 186–7, 196–9.

25 Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 115–16, 134, 232–9, quotation from Minutes of a Meeting of the Hide, Leather and Leather Goods Section of the War Industries Board, August 19, 1918 (Cuff, 234).

26 For a discussion of this “associationist” model, see Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and their Institutions, 1917–1933 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 22–7, 100–103. See also Robert D. Cuff, “Business, the State, and World War I: The American Experience,” in War and Society in North America, J. L. Granatstein and R. D. Cuff, eds. (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1971), 7, 16–19 on what he calls the “business synthesizers.”

27 See, for instance, Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 31, 50–63.

28 On wartime housing problems in the United States, see John Maurice Clark, The Costs of the World War to the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 145, 174, 274, and J. Maurice Clark, et al., eds., Readings in the Economics of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918), 510–12. For a discussion of working-class agitation around the problems of rent in wartime Britain, see chapter 9.

29 Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 107–23, for a survey of the adoption of conscription in the “Anglo-Saxon” democracies, plus France.

30 For an overview of the adoption of conscription and its opposition in New Zealand, see Paul Baker, King and Country Call: New Zealanders, Conscription, and the Great War (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1988). See also Herbert O. Roth Papers, Folder: “Pacifism in New Zealand,” including a four-page inventory of labor’s anti-conscription activity during the Great War, TL.

31 See Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–1918 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987); also D. J. Murphy, T.J. Ryan: a Political Biography (St. Lucia, Queensland: Queensland University Press, 1975), 310–12.

32 The fight against conscription in Australia is well-documented and widely discussed in the literature. See, for instance, F. B. Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, 1916–17 (Melbourne: Victorian Historical Association, 1965); for key documents, J. M. Main, Conscription: The Australian Debate, 1901–1970, 31–107, Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 114–16, surveyed the strength of opposition in each of the Australian states. Also, Joan Beaumont, “The Politics of a Divided Society,” 43–63; for a different regional perspective, see Bobbie Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia: The Social and Political Impact of the Great War, 1914–1926 (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), 90–131.

33 Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 41–53. Also, David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1980]) and William H. Th omas Jr., Unsafe for Democracy; H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918, 21–42, 230–34.

34 For a useful discussion of the interest shown in each other’s experience by anti-conscriptionists in Australia and the United States, see Robin Archer, “ ‘Quite like Ourselves’: Opposition to Military Compulsion during the Great War in the United States and Australia,” in Frontiers of Labor, 15–38.

35 Maoriland Worker, 8 December 1915, in “Pacifism in New Zealand—Conscription Chronology,” Herbert O. Roth Papers, TL.

36 “Majority Report of the St. Louis Convention,” reprinted in The American Socialists and the War, Alan Trachtenberg, ed. (New York: Garland, 1973 [1917]), 38–43 (quotation on 42).

37 Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891–1991 (1991), quoted in Joan Beaumont, “The Politics of a Divided Society,” in Australia’s War, 1914–18, 44.

38 For a discussion of crowd actions and food riots as arenas of urban women’s activism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see chapter 1.

39 Instances of women’s popular action and leadership around consumption issues in Britain, Germany, and the United States are discussed in chapters 9 and 11, as well as this chapter. For the 1917 food riots in the United States, see International Socialist Review, xvi, April 1917, 582–7. And for Berlin, Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 193–4, 199–204.

40 Judith Smart, “Feminists, Food and the Fair Price: The Cost of Living Demonstrations in Melbourne, August-September 1917,” in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 274–301. Also, see account in Janette M. Bomford, That Most Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1993), 178–80, and Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96–8.

41 From Crown Solicitor’s files, quoted in Judith Smart, 290–91. On the political activism of Adela Pankhurst, see Verna Coleman, Adela Pankhurst: The Wayward Suffragette, 1855–1961 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1996).

42 Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, Vida Goldstein, 149–54.

43 Joy Damousi, “Socialist Women and Gendered Space: Anti-conscription and Anti-war Campaigns 1914–18,” in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, eds., 254–73.

44 Joy Damousi, 263–9.

45 Footscray PLL, Minutes, February 9, 1915; Bendigo PLC Minutes, October 8, 1916. University of Melbourne Archives.

46 Creswick, PLC, Minutes, March 5, 1916, June 17, 1917. University of Melbourne Archives.

47 Janette Bomford, 149 (quoted in the Woman Voter, January 12, 1915). The Barrier Daily Truth also noted that Goldstein would not have been welcome a few years before because she was “outside the fold,” presumably because she had run as an independent women’s candidate for a parliamentary seat against the PLC’s candidate. See chapter 5.

48 On the Women’s Peace Army and its anti-conscription propaganda (leaflets, cartoons, posters) appealing to women, see Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War, 70–74, 83–92.

49 Diane Kirkby, “In Not a Few Respects, a Common History: Women, Wartime Lawmaking, and the Prosecution of Dissenters,” in Frontiers of Labor, 92, 94 (quotation on 94).

50 On the bitter split that pitted Emmeline and daughter Christabel, who supported the war, against Sylvia and Adela who adamantly opposed it, see Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 76–7; also, Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 286–91. On the splits in the US woman suffrage movement, see Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) and Anne Firor Scott and Andrew Mackay Scott, One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982).

51 Ernest Scott, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 338, 412. See discussion of Gallipoli in chapter 8.

52 Joan Beaumont, 43–6; Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 162–4; Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891–1991 (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991), 102–7.

53 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 198 (from interview with Dick Surplus).

54 Joan Beaumont, 48–9; quotation from Brisbane Courier, 18 January 1916, in Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty, 77.

55 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 207–28, quotation on 207.

56 “Manifesto of the National Executive of the Congress,” Report of the Australian Trade Union Congress, Melbourne, May 10 and 11, 1916, in Conscription: The Australian Debate 1901–1970, J. M. Main, ed. (North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1970), 37–9.

57 Australian Worker, 17 August 1917, in Conscription: The Australian Debate 1901–1970, J. M. Main, ed., 41–2.

58 Ernest Scott, Australia During the War, 363–9.

59 John Hirst, “Labor and the Great War,” The Australian Century, 61–2, 64–6.

60 For the UK, see chapter 9, for Germany, chapter 11, and for the United States, see below.

61 See Minutes, Anti-conscription League of New South Wales (with strong trade union representation), which document resolutions adopted for the mass meetings on the Domain in Sydney to protest conscription, rising unemployment, and the suppression of liberties, for example, 23/9/15, 30/8/16, 15/11/16, 7/2/17, ML, Sydney.

62 See, for instance, Minutes, Political Labor Council, Essendon, August 14, September 11, 24, for increasing debate and motions around conscription. VSL, Melbourne. Also, Minutes, Political Labor League—Bendigo District Council, October 8, 1916, resolution to hold twice-weekly public meetings and petitioning mayor for the use of the town hall and a motion of congratulations to PLC-NSW for expelling Prime Minister Hughes from the “movement.” This represented the first mention of conscription and the war in the PLL’s minutes. University of Melbourne Archives.

63 See, for instance, Henry Boote’s supplement, the Protest, quoted in Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–18 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 96. Also, Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914–1920 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989); Bobbie Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia, 67–76.

64 Minutes, Leichhardt PLL, August 24, 1915, ML.

65 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 89–90, 196–7 (quotations on 90, 197).

66 See unanimous motion of Essendon PLC supporting the refusal of British miners’ leader Robert Smillie to take a seat in the British war cabinet and endorsing the peace proposal of the Socialist Convention meeting in Leeds, Minutes, Essendon PLC, June 4, 1917, VSL.

67 Political Labor Council of Victoria, Annual Conference, Report of Proceedings, Trades Hall, Melbourne, April 1916 (Melbourne: Labor Call, 1916), 36, 35, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

68 ALP-NSW Conference Report, June 7, 1917, Australian Worker, clipping file, Voltaire Molesworth Papers, ML.

69 Minutes, Anti-Conscription League of New South Wales, September 23, 1915, ML, Sydney. Present at the inaugural meeting were delegates from the United Labourers Protective Society, Federated Ironworkers Association, Amalgamated Carpenters Union, the IWW, and the Australasian Socialist Party.

70 Minute book, August 24, September 28, December 14, 1915, July 11, September 20, October 10, 1916, Political Labour League, Leichhardt Branch, 1915–1964, ML.

71 Max Solling and Peter Reynolds, Leichhardt on the Margins of the City: A Social History of Leichhardt and the Former Municipalities of Annandale, Balmain and Glebe (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997), 173–5.

72 P. C. Evans, General Secretary, NSW ALP to Reginald Byrne, Hon. Sec., Darlinghurst, ALP, September 6, 1918, Correspondence, Reginald Byrne Papers, ML.

73 Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 106 (quotation from Sydney Morning Herald, October 16, 1916).

74 Creswick (Vic), PLC-ALP Minutes, 1915–1921, November 1, 1915, January 31, March 5, August 7, 1916, University of Melbourne Archives (hereafter UMA).

75 Creswick No Conscription Committee Minutes, October 3, 1916, UMA.

76 Ibid., October 12, November 6, 1916. Also, detailed reports of opposition mobilizing, Creswick Advertiser, October 3, 1916, and Powlett Express and Victorian State Coalfields Advertiser, October 13, 1916.

77 Creswick PLC-ALP Minutes, February 19, June 17, 26, 1916.

78 Ibid., July 29, November 18, 1918.

79 “Address by James Thorn at the Globe Theater in Auckland on Sunday, 10th December 1916,” transcript in Herbert O. Roth Papers, Folder: “Pacifism in New Zealand,” TL.

80 War and Class: The Diary of Jack McCullough, Melanie Nolan, ed., 339.

81 “Conscription,” chronological notes by Herbert O. Roth on anti-conscription activities in New Zealand, from Maoriland Worker and New Zealand Herald, “Pacifism in New Zealand,” Herbert O. Roth Papers. Thorn was released from prison a year later only to be served with induction papers; he refused service by going underground for the duration of the war. He engaged in an elaborate ruse that had the authorities believing him to be in Australia, even though he continued to live in New Zealand and write agitational pieces for the Maoriland Worker, Margaret Th orn, Stick Out, Keep Left, 26–9, 31, 33.

82 Paul John Baker, King and Country Call, 64–6 provides a useful summary of the political context of war opposition and support within the New Zealand labor movement and labor parties. The notable dissenting local trades federation that supported the war was in Dunedin, though its support eroded somewhat over the course of the war, Erik Olssen, Building the New World: Work, Gender and Society in Caversham, 1880s–1920s (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), 214–17.

83 Michael Savage to Peter Fraser, September 3, 1914, New Zealand Social-Democratic Party, Auckland Branch Letterbook, Roth Papers, TL; Maoriland Worker, 7 April 1915, p. 1, quoted in Baker, King and Country Call, 68.

84 Len Richardson, “Politics and War: Coal Miners and Conscription, 1914–1918,” in Miners and Militants: Politics in Westland, 1865–1918, 128–31; “Conscription” chronology, 1914–17, “Pacifism in New Zealand,” Herbert Roth Papers.

85 Roth, “Conscription” chronology, 1914–17; Greymouth Branch, NZLP, Minutes, April 23, 1917, TL.

86 Len Richardson, “Politics and War,” 133–4; Maoriland Worker, 8 December 1915.

87 See conscription chronology assembled by Herbert O. Roth, and typescripts of excerpts of anti-conscription speeches (taken from Maoriland Worker) by James Th orn (December 10, 1916), Robert Semple (November 26 and December 3, 1916), Tom Brindle (December 10, 1916), and Peter Fraser (January 3, 1917). “Pacifism in New Zealand,” Roth Papers, TL.

88 Roth chronology; Maoriland Worker, 2 February 1916. Paul Baker argues that larger and more militant unions were overrepresented at the conference and that smaller unions from more rural areas did not generally share their anti-conscription views; nonetheless, 18,449 union members and eighty-two organizations were represented, Baker, King and Country Call, 71–3.

89 “Labour and Conscription: The Conference Called by the United Federation of Labour and Held in Wellington, January 25–27, Unanimously Adopted the Following Manifesto for Publication,” pamphlet, Pacifism in New Zealand, Roth Papers.

90 James Thorn, “Conscription—with Discrimination,” Maoriland Worker, 5 January 1916, p. 3.

91 “Labour and Conscription: The Conference Called by the United Federation of Labour and Held in Wellington, January 25–27”; also, Lyttelton Times, 29 January 1916, “Conscription, the Labour Manifesto,” Early Labour and Anti-conscription documents, Roth Papers.

92 Paul Baker, King and Country Call, 75–81; on local government non-cooperation see 80–81.

93 See, for instance, letters to town clerk by secretary, Wellington SDP, with the clerk’s notation of response, typically “CC: reply as usual” with in one case, “Notify Police” added, November 5, 1914, February 25, 1915, March 24, 1915. The letter of rejection (addressed to the Anti-Conscription League, Wellington) received July 11, 1916. Social Democratic Party papers, Roth Papers.

94 Wellington City Council Minutes, August 5, 1915, June 6, 1916, February 21, 1918, May 2, 1918.

95 Wellington City Council Minutes, October 19, 1916, November 2, 1916, January 24, 1918. On the origins of the Labour Party’s advocacy of proportional representation in municipal elections, see LRC correspondence, August 10, September 28, November 2, 15, 1916, SDP papers, Roth Papers.

96 Paul Baker, King and Country Call, 89–90, 95.

97 On debates within the labor movement over conscription, see Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 112–15, Erik Olssen, Building the New World, 215–18, and Paul Baker, King and Country Call, 155–7.

98 Barry Gustafson’s paraphrase of New Zealand Gazette Extraordinary, 4 December 1916, 114.

99 Len Richardson, “Politics and War: Coal Miners and Conscription, 1914–18,” 137–9.

100 P. J. O’Farrell, Harry Holland: Militant Socialist (Canberra: Australian National University, 1964), 75; Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 114–15. For a list of the seventeen arrested and the terms for which they were sentenced, see Conscription Chronology, “Pacifism in New Zealand” collection, Herbert Roth Papers, TL.

101 “Mr. Semple’s Speech in Wellington on November 26th, 1916,” Transcript in Pacifism in New Zealand collection, Herbert Roth Papers.

102 Paul Baker, King and Country Call, 157–9; “Conference Secretary Seized,” Maoriland Worker, 3 January 1917, extract transcribed, Pacifism in New Zealand Collection, Herbert Roth Papers.

103 Minutes, Greymouth Branch of the New Zealand Labour Party, March 11, 22, April 8, 23, 1917, IPLL Collection, Roth Papers. Paul Baker, King and Country Call, 159–63; Len Richardson, “Politics and War,” 141–5; on the impact of Peter Fraser and his labor colleagues on the work of the Wellington City Council after their electoral success in May 1919, see for example, Wellington Municipal Council minutes, 27/5/19, 29/5/19, 12/6/19, 11/7/19.

104 John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 161–70; Th omas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 86–97; Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 60. Also, Daniel R. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort 1917–1919 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 30–4 and Frederick Palmer, Newton D. Baker: America at War, v. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1931), 184–219.

105 Jennifer D. Keene, The United States and the First World War (Essex, Engl: Longman, 2000), 29.

106 John W. Chambers II, To Raise an Army, 99–100.

107 Chambers, 108. Also, Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

108 Chambers, 164.

109 Basil M. Manly to Frank Walsh, August 24, 1915 (incorrectly dated 1914), Frank Walsh Papers, New York Public Library.

110 On Two Harbors, Minnesota, see the analysis of Jimmy Engren, Railroading and Labor Migration: Class and Ethnicity in Northern Minnesota, the 1880s to the Mid-1920s (Växjö, Sweden: Växjö University Press, 2007), 290–317; and on Dayton, see detailed discussion below and in chapter 6.

111 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 194–233, especially 268. The connection to local class dynamics is, for the most part, ignored by most historians of the US home front during the war.

112 John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 158 (quotation), 176–8. Higham and David Kennedy have both contributed to the image of a “frantic” and coercive nationalism unleashed by the war that mobilized “drillmasters of Americanization.” Higham, 245–7.

113 Quotation is from Vanderlip, The Need for a United Nation (1916), in John W. Chambers, To Raise an Army, 95, 92. On the reformers’ desire to transcend class divisions, see Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “the People.”

114 For the best account of the rise of socialist municipal politics and the open shop fight in Minneapolis, see David Paul Nord, “Hothouse Socialism: Minneapolis, 1910–1925,” in Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925, Donald T. Critchlow, ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 134–42 (quotations on 137, 141) and on the wartime and postwar challenges, 146–58. See also James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925, 41, 141–2.

115 David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–1922,” Journal of Social History, VII (1974), 509–29 and The Fall of the House of Labor, 317–27, 332–56; Cecilia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 23–9, 33–6; David A. Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); James Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015), 157–77; James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 188–202.

116 For the data on strikes during the prewar and wartime periods, see Historical Statistics of the United States, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 179 and International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia, Oceana (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 138. For the broad outlines of strike activity in Australia, 1910–20, see Malcolm Waters, Strikes in Australia: A Sociological Analysis of Industrial Conflict (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 50–55, and for less-than-helpful periodization, Michael P. Jackson, ”Strikes in Australia, USA and the United Kingdom,” in Michael P. Jackson, Strikes (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1987), 31–4, 38–9. Like most other statistical studies of strikes in Australia, the classic article by D. W. Oxnam, “Strikes in Australia,” The Economic Record, v. 29 May 1953, 73–89 gives very little specific attention to the strikes before and during the Great War. For the United States, the best statistical data for the war years are available in David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–1922,” 512–16. Less helpful is P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States: 1881–1974 (New York: St. Martins, 1981), 15–16.

117 On the prewar surge in strikes in New Zealand, see Melanie Nolan, “1913 in Retrospect: A Laboratory or a Battleground of Democracy?” in Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand, 23–4. The most comprehensive listing of wartime strikes is Herbert Roth’s files on the United Federation of Labour, “Strikes, 1914–1918,” Herbert Roth Papers, TL.

118 Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 34–40, and on the Victorian wage boards, Charles Fahey and John Lack, “The Great Strike of 1917 in Victoria: Looking Fore and Aft, and from Below,” Labour History, n. 106, May 2014, 81–8. Also, Malcolm Waters, Strikes in Australia, 109–10.

119 On the rate of unionization, see George Sayers Bain and Robert Price, Profiles of Union Growth: A Comparative Statistical Portrait of Eight Countries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 88, 123. Also Malcolm Waters, 101. On New Zealand, see James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin, 2001), 145–6; see also, New Zealand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics, G. T. Bloomfield, ed. (Boston: Hall, 1984).

120 On the immediate economic effects of the war for Australia, see Marnie Haig-Muir, “The Economy at War,” 97, 99, 106, 109; also Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 69–73. On the economic effects of the war in the United States, see David Kennedy, Over Here, 138–9, 258–62; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 332, 358–64, 370. “Strikes 1914–1918” NZ, Roth Papers, TL.

121 David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–22,” 512–14.

122 Dan Cloward, “Crime and Punishment: The Great Strike in New South Wales, August to October 1917,” in Strikes: Studies in Twentieth Century Australian Social History (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973), 51–80 (especially 56–7); Ian Turner, 83–96, 139–61; Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 174–7; Lucy Taksa, “Defence not Defiance: Social Protest and the NSW General Strike of 1917,” Labour History, n. 60, May 1991, 16–33. For the parallel strike in Queensland, see D. J. Murphy, “The North Queensland Railway Strike, 1917,” in The Big Strikes in Queensland, 1889–1965, D. J. Murphy, ed. (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 132–44.

123 Ian Turner, 162–6, 178–81. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 395–410; also, Colin J. Davis, Power at Odds: the 1922 National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922.

124 Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 182–202. Belich, Paradise Reforged, 145–6. See discussion below of postwar municipal gains.

125 John Hirst, “Labor and the Great War,” in The Australian Century, 61–4, 70–76.

126 See Erik Olssen, Building the New World on WWI, 214–23; Len Richardson, “Politics and War: Coal Miners and Conscription, 1914–1918,” 133–4, 140–45, quotation on p. 133.

127 Michael Hogan, one of the few historians to take a serious look at municipal labor politics in Australia, finds a checkered pattern of success in NSW coming out of the war, nevertheless, as he notes, “the period of the 1920s marks the entry of the Labor Party into local government in a serious way, with growing successes, especially in suburban Sydney.” Representation in city councils clearly advanced but the number of labor-controlled municipalities varied over time, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales,” 128–9, 130–33; F. A. Larcombe, A History of Local Government in New South Wales, v. 3 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1978), 33–5.

128 On divisions within the labor movement over the war and preparedness before US entry into the war, see Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 12–63 and Bruce I. Bustard, ”The Human Factor: Labor Administration and Industrial Manpower Mobilization during the First World War,” unpublished dissertation, University of Iowa, 1984, 27, 32–5, 55–90.

129 David M. Kennedy, Over Here, 30–36. On Gompers’s collaboration in the wartime crackdown on civil liberties of his left opponents, see Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anticommunism), 32–59.

130 Labour’s manifesto quoted in Nick Dyrenfurth, “ ‘Conscription Is Not Abhorrent to Laborites and Socialists’; Revisiting the Australian Labour Movement’s Attitude towards Military Conscription during World War I,” Labour History, n. 103, November 2012, 149–50. See also, Robin Archer, “Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective,” Labour History, N. 106, May 2014, 51–2, 64–7, and Douglas Newton, “At the Birth of Anzac: Labor, Andrew Fisher and Australia’s Offer of an Expeditionary Force in Britain in 1914,” in the same issue of Labour History, 19–41.

131 See Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland,158–9; also, idem, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–18 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 142.

132 On the general nativist currents in the United States during WWI and specific attacks on German immigrants, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum Press, 1963), 195–200, 204–209 (German American population figures for 1917, on 213). For the persecution of German Americans in the United States, see, for instance, Carl Wittke, German-Americans and the World War (Columbus, OH: Ohio State Historical Society, 1936), especially 163–96; Erik Kirschbaum, The Eradication of German Culture in the United States: 1917–1918 (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz Akademischer Verlag Stuttgart, 1986). On Irish Americans during WWI, see James R. Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin, 2012), 253–63. For Australia, Pam McLean, “War and Australian Society,” in Australia’s War, 1914–18, Jean Beaumont, 85–8 (population figures for 1911, on 86); Raymond Evans, “ ‘The Clutches of the Fiends’: Anti-Germanism, 1914–16,” in Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–18, 42–64. Ernest Scott, Australia during the War (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 105–67. Also, Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens. General population data for the United States and Australia, from chartsbin.com/view/gdn.

133 On the IWW and the Socialist Party strength in Australia see Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 39–40, 185–6, 193 and for Queensland, Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty, 15, 66–8, 131. For the United States, see Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973); David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–22,” and The Fall of the House of Labor, 330–410. On the opposition to the war by American socialists, see Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, 211–76, James Weinstein, The Decline of the Socialist Party in the US, 159–73; David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 108–25.

134 Martin Painter, “Local Government,” Politics in Australia, Rodney Smith and Lex Watson, eds. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 165–9 (quotations on 168–9). For a helpful summary of differences in the historical origins and development of local government in each of the Australian states, see M. A. Jones, Local Government and the People: Challenges for the Eighties (Melbourne: Hargreen Publishing Co., 1981), 34–41. Also, G. H. Knibbs, Local Government in Australia (Melbourne: Albert J. Mullett, 1919), especially 1–5. Andrew Parkin argues that, among other things, a long tradition of state-centralized administration dating from the colonial period constrained the political space of cities, Parkin, Governing the Cities: The Australian Experience in Perspective (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1982), 63–65.

135 The constitutional conventions of the 1890s in addressing the distribution of powers between federal and state authorities failed to even mention the place of local government, which continued by default to be given “the leftovers”, M. A. Jones, 42. Also, R. K. Chapman and Michael Wood, Australian Local Government: The Federal Dimension (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 30–33.

136 F. A. Larcombe, The Advancement of Local Government in New South Wales 1906 to the Present, v. III (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1978), 22–40 (quotation on p. 33).

137 Dale Krane, et al., Home Rule in America: A Fifty-State Handbook (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001), 8; Roscoe Martin, The Cities in the Federal System (New York: Atherton Press, 1965), 29 (quoted in Krane, 8).

138 Publius [James Madison], “No. 10,” The Federalist Papers (New York: Penguin, 1961 [1787–88]), 84.

139 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (quoted in Gerald E. Frug, 46).

140 For a less conflicted account of the legislative limitations on the power of cities, see Harold Lee McBain, The Law and the Practice of Municipal Home Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 3–6.

141 Gerald E. Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 43–4, 46.

142 “City of Clinton v. Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad Company” (1868), quoted in Dale Krane, 10.

143 See inter alia, Amasa Eaton, “The Right to Local Self-Government,” Harvard Law Review (1900), quoted in Frug, 48.

144 Gerald E. Frug, 47–51. See also Dale Krane, 10.

145 Graham Bush, Local Government and Politics in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), 8–29 (quotation on 29); Erik Olssen, The Red Feds, 154, 177, 182–3.

146 For an argument about the limits of class in shaping urban politics (as opposed to workplace conflict), see Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

147 See chapter 5 for more detailed discussion of these cases.

148 In Brisbane, the fight to municipalize the hated Brisbane Tramway Company and to raise the “municipal log” for city employees continued unabated, see “Report of the Mayor,” Brisbane City Council Minutes, February 10, 1916, xxiii-iv and February 1917, xvi-ii. John Oxley Library, Brisbane. See, also for Melbourne, Footscray Council Minutes, October 9, November 6, 1915, and Fitzroy Council Minutes, October 16, 30, 1916, January 21, February 18, March 18, 1918. Victoria State Archives. For a very helpful account of the contested wartime politics in Footscray, see John Lack, A History of Footscray (North Melbourne: Hargreen Publishing Co., 1991).

149 See Leichhardt PLL Branch Minutes, November 24, 1915, October 10, 1916, February 13, 1917, September 12, 1917, June 26, 1918, Mitchell State Library, NSW, and the Essendon PLC Minute Book, Victoria State Library. On the impact of the war in Leichhardt, see Max Solling and Peter Reynolds, Leichhardt: On the Margins of the City.

150 See Redfern City Council Minutes, October 22, 1914, June 17, August 12, 1915, October 5, 19, 1916, Sydney Municipal Archives. And Richmond City Council Minutes, April 27, May 10, 24, June 8, July 5, August 30, December 6, 1915, May 8, October 9, 23, 1916, November 19, December 3, 1917, Victoria State Archives. For a compelling account of the home front experience in Richmond, see Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Portrait of an Australian Working-Class Community (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988), 89–105.

151 See flyers: “Angus McDonell, North Ward, City of Northcote, August 24, 1916,” (Melbourne), “Fred W. Sear, South Yarra Ward, Prahran City Council, 18 July 1918,” (Melbourne) and “Labor’s Manifesto, Sydney Municipal Elections, December 2, 1918”, ALP Leaflets, Mitchell State Library, NSW.

152 Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane 1859–1959: A History of Local Government, 302; Michael Hogan, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales,” 125. See also F. A. Larcombe, The Advancement of Local Government in New South Wales 1906 to the Present, 26–40. On the continued success of the ALP in Richmond well into the 1920s, see Janet McCalman, Struggletown, 113–16.

153 Minutes, Brisbane City Council, September 27, 1915, 79; September 11, 1917, 87; March 8, 1920, 8. Greenwood and Laverty discuss the final resolution of the municipalization of Brisbane’s tramways, 1920–23, 280–83. On the political context of the T. J. Ryan Labor government, see D. J. Murphy, “Queensland,” in Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia, 1880–1920,), 127–228.

154 Minutes, Brisbane City Council, December 13, 1915, 108; Mayor’s Report, 1915, xxiii-xxiv; Mayor’s Report, 1916, xvi-xvii.

155 Report of the Mayor, Brisbane City Council Minutes, February 10, 1916, xxiii-iv; Report of the Mayor, February 1917, xvi-ii.

156 D. J. Murphy, T.J. Ryan: A Political Biography; “Ryan Defies Hughes,” The Australian Worker (Sydney), November 30, 1917, p. 6. P. H. Hickey, Solidarity or Sectionalism? A Plea for Unity (Brisbane: Worker Newspaper Proprietary Limited, 1918), 19; see also, Erik Olssen, “Patrick Hodgens Hickey, 1882–1930,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, dnzb.govt.nz. Peter Clayworth, “An Agitator Abroad: P.H. Hickey, Industrial Unionism, and Socialism in the United States, New Zealand and Australia, 1900–1930,” in Patmore and Stromquist, Frontiers of Labor (1918), 309–27.

157 Report of Mayor Hetherington, Brisbane City Council minutes, February 1917, xvii.

158 Minutes, Brisbane City Council, 8 November 1915; 25 September 1916, 85; 13 December 1920. See also Greenwood and Laverty, 297–99.

159 See previous discussion of Broken Hill in chapters 2, 5, and 7.

160 “Municipal Action in Broken Hill: All Eyes on the Barrier,” Barrier Daily Truth, May 14, 1915.

161 Brian E. Kennedy, Silver, Sin, and Sixpenny Ale: A Social History of Broken Hill, 1883–1921 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 128–9. See, for instance, Barrier Daily Truth, June 25, 1915, with long lists by name and state of origin the recent deaths, wounded, and high numbers of “Missing,” many from the ongoing, ill-fated campaign at Gallipoli. A number of men listed were from Broken Hill. The numbers of unemployed are drawn from “18th Series of Annual Reports by Factory Inspectors,” New South Wales, Legislative Assembly, 1915–16, quoted in Brian Kennedy, 129.

162 “A Practical Peace Policy: War and the Workers. Instructive Lecture by Bob Ross,” Barrier Daily Truth, May 24, 1915.

163 “The Unemployed: Yesterday’s Mass Meeting. Municipal Work Discussed. Argent Street Meeting Arranged,” Barrier Daily Truth, June 19, 1915; “Our Unemployed: Local Conditions Pressing Hard. A Meeting of Protest. The Export of Livestock,” Barrier Daily Truth, June 22, 1915; “Citizens Anti-Food Combine Committee. Last Night’s Meeting. Mr. Holman Interested. Ask for Comparative Prices,” Barrier Daily Truth, June 25, 1915.

164 Barrier Daily Truth, May 15, 1915, quoted in Brian Kennedy, 132.

165 On Bob Ross’s opposition to conscription, voiced through his new magazine, Ross’s Monthly, see Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross, 228–32.

166 For a tabulation of the results, see “Municipal Election Returns, 1914, 1915,” in “Pacifism in New Zealand” collection, Herbert Roth Papers, TL; for a review of the election in Wellington, see George Michael Betts, “Participation in Civic Politics: A Study of Wellington City Council,” 739–42.

167 “Canterbury Trades and Labour Council, Municipal Program (n.d. but probably 1915); “Auckland Labour Representation Committee … Municipal Platform, 1915” in “Pacifism in New Zealand,” Herbert Roth Papers.

168 LRC ad, Lyttleton Times, April 25, 1917, Local Body Election Scrapbook, E. J. Howard Papers, Hocken Library, Dunedin.

169 “Municipal Who’s Who,” April 17, 1917, Clipping File, E. J. Howard Papers.

170 A helpful account of the LRC’s energetic but somewhat conflicted campaign is in Libby Plumridge, “The Necessary but not Sufficient Condition: Christchurch Labour and Working-Class Culture,” New Zealand Journal of History, v. 19:2, 1985, 146–8; also Jim McAloon, “Radical Christchurch,” Southern Capital Christchurch: Towards a City Biography, 1850–2000, John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall, eds. (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 180–81.

171 Minutes, January 29, February 26, 1917, Christchurch City Council. Christchurch Municipal Archives.

172 Minutes, May 21, June 5, 17, 18, July 16, 1917, May 20, July 29, 1918, Christchurch City Council.

173 Plumridge, “The Necessary but not Sufficient Condition,” 149–50.

174 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 137–8; on the deep divisions in the Dunedin labor movement over conscription and the war, see Erik Olssen, Building the New World, 214–21.

175 Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870– 1976, 110–15.

176 H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918, 50–68 (New York Times quoted, p. 60), William H. Th omas, Unsafe for Democracy, describes the patterns of local action against war dissenters that federal agents either fomented or failed to restrain, 89–109, 146–71. Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870–1976, on the use of federal troops and agents to target striking workers deemed disloyal, 107–21, Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), on the massive roundups and detention of “slackers,” 41–53; William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters, 146–51 on federal suppression of publications and the mails.

177 Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 137–43, quotation on 153. Robert Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 119–21.

178 David Paul Nord, “Hothouse Socialism: Minneapolis, 1910–1925,” 142–3.

179 Ohio Socialist, June and July 1917, n. 6 and 7, carried numerous reports of arrests and indictments of party activists in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Tiffin, Marietta, Lorain, and Akron.

180 James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925, 140–44; Richard A. Folk, “Socialist Party of Ohio—War and Free Speech,” Ohio History, v. 78:2, Spring 1969, 108–9.

181 Paul H. Douglas, “The Socialist Vote in the Municipal Elections of 1917,” 131–9; James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925, 145–60; Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1934), 180–210, David Paul Nord, “Hothouse Socialism: Minneapolis, 1910–1925,” and Sally Miller, “Casting a Wide Net: The Milwaukee Movement to 1920,” in Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925, Donald T. Critchlow, ed., 133–66, 18–45.

182 Paul H. Douglas, “The Socialist vote in the Municipal Elections of 1917,” National Municipal Review, v. VII, n. 2, March 1918, 131–9 (quotation on 138), James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1967), 145–59 (quotation from the New York World, 152). Also, local studies in Donald Critchlow, Socialism in the Heartland and Richard Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grassroots of American Socialism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).

183 See discussion of Hamilton and Dayton, Ohio, in chapter 6.

184 James Lehman, “The Socialist Party in Hamilton, Ohio,” unpublished MA Thesis, Miami University, Ohio, 1964, 53–64, 104–10. Howard White, “City Manager Government in Hamilton,” City Manager Government in Seven Cities, Frederick C. Mosher, et al., eds. (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940), 183–5. For the pattern of prewar electoral success in Ohio and specifically in Hamilton, see Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, 69–94.

185 Miami Valley Socialist, March 5, 12, 1915; Howard White, “City Manager Government in Hamilton,” in City Manager Government in Seven Cities, 183–5 (quotation on p. 185).

186 Miami Valley Socialist, February 19, 1915. On the fight to amend the Dayton city charter, see local socialist activist Joseph W. Sharts, Biography of Dayton: An Economic Interpretation of Local History (Dayton, OH: Miami Valley Socialist, 1922), 115–19.

187 For a detailed discussion of the fight over a new city charter and commission form of government in Dayton, see chapter 6 above.

188 Joseph Sharts provides a narrative account of Socialists’ prewar and wartime electoral efforts in that city, see his Biography of Dayton, 111–22; also Miami Valley Socialist, v. 4, May 7, 14, August 13, October 15, 29, 1915 in Oscar Edelman Papers, Special Collections, Wright State University.

189 Minutes, Local Dayton Socialist Party, March 30, April 6, 26, 1917. Wright State University Archives.

190 “Majority Report of the St. Louis Convention, 7–14 April 1917,” in Antiwar and Peace Activism in World War I America, Scott H. Bennett and Charles F. Howlett, eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 78–81.

191 Minutes, Local Dayton Socialist Party, January 19, 25, June 8, 22, July 6, 27, August 3, 17, 1917.

192 Landrum R. Bolling, “Dayton, Ohio,” City Manager Government in Seven Cities, 265–73. Miami Valley Socialist, August 6, 17, 24, 31, September 28, October 19, 1917.

193 Chester E. Rightor, et al., City Manager in Dayton (New York: Macmillan Co., 1919), 218–24 (quotation on 221). Also, Landrum R. Bolling, “Dayton, Ohio,” 281–2. For an account by the Socialists’ leader in Dayton that emphasizes the renewal of fusion in 1917, not the anti-war posture of the party, see Joseph W. Sharts, Biography of Dayton, 118.

194 Chester E. Rightor, 221.

195 Miami Valley Socialist, November 16, 23, December 7, 1917. For the campaign in Dayton, Chester E. Rightor, et al., City Manager in Dayton, 218–24, Landrum R. Bolling, “Dayton, Ohio,” 281–2. Joseph W. Sharts’ Biography of Dayton, 116–18.

196 Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910– 1920, 206–13. James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925, 159–62, 172, 232–3 for the effects of the war and continuing persecution.

197 Ohio Socialist, n. 3 (March 1917), n. 4 (April 1917), n. 6 (June 1917).

198 Ibid., n. 2 (February 1917), n. 6 (June 1917), n. 7 (July 1917). Issues of the Ohio Socialist from August 1917 through early February 1918 are unavailable and may well have been confiscated by the authorities.

199 See detailed discussion of the Johnson administration in chapter 6.

200 Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities, 166–7; Richard A. Folk, “Socialist Party of Ohio—War and Free Speech,” 109; Paul H. Douglas, “The Socialist Vote in the Municipal Elections of 1917,” 136.

201 On the Hoan administration in Milwaukee, see Sally M. Miller, “Casting a Wide Net: The Milwaukee Movement to 1920,” in Critchlow, Socialism in the Heartland, 18–45, Robert C. Reinders, “Daniel W. Hoan and the Milwaukee Socialist Party during the First World War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 36 (Autumn 1952), 48–55, Edward S. Kerstein, Milwaukee’s All-American Mayor: Portrait of Daniel Webster Hoan (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 75–110.

202 Robert C. Reinders, “Daniel W. Hoan,” 50; Sally M. Miller, “Casting a Wide Net,” 36–7.

203 Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910– 1920, 175–7; Robert C. Reinders, 51; Edward S. Kerstein, Milwaukee’s All-American Mayor, 98–101.

204 Reinders, 54.

205 Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910– 1920, 206–13; James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925, 159–62, 172. David Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History, 109–17. Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 119–21.

206 Barry Gustafson provides an excellent overview of Labour’s electoral successes at the end of the war and in 1919, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 132–9, 147–52. See also Barry Gustafson, From the Cradle to the Grave: A Biography of Michael Joseph Savage, 93, 105–6, and P. J. O’Farrell, Harry Holland.

11. War and Revolution: The Home Front in Germany’s Wartime Cities

1 See discussion of Herz and his Altona city council comrades in chapter 4.

2 See, for instance, Hamburger Echo, 30 September, 7 October, 25 November 1911, News clipping file, Carl Herz Papers, IISG Amsterdam.

3 Christian Hanke, Selbstverwaltung und Sozialismus. Carl Herz ein Sozialdemokrat (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2006), 76. (All translations from the German, except those in quotations from English language sources, are by the author.)

4 Christian Hanke, 93.

5 Ibid. Hanke provides the most detailed chronology of Herz’s military service and immediate postwar political activity, 92–4, 99–122 (quotation 94).

6 Richard A. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 35–57. Also, David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 161–4.

7 Anthony McElligott, Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 12–23 (quotation on 23).

8 Jay Winter, et al., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For specific cities, see, for instance, Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 227–300; also Friedhelm Boll, Massenbewegungen in Niedersachsen 1906–1920 (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1981), Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany, Freiburg, 1914– 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and others; for Austria, see Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

9 See lengthy discussion of Lindemann in chapter 4. He has not been the subject of a significant biographical treatment. For brief sketches of his life, see Franz Osterroth, Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus: Band 1: Verstorbene Persönlichkeiten (Hannover: J.W.H. Dietz Verlag, 1960), 198–200, and additional biographical detail in Jürgen Mittag, Wilhelm Keil (1870–1968): sozialdemokratischer Partliamentarier zwischen Kaiserreich und Bundesrepublik: eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2001).

10 See discussion of the SPD Congress debates of 1902 and 1904 in chapter 4.

11 See full discussion of Lindemann’s 1911 campaign in chapter 4; also, chapter 7.

12 The Oberbürgermeister (mayoral) election in Stuttgart was debated extensively in the party press from around the country between early May and early June 1911; see large clipping file, “Das sozialdemokratische Bürgermeister problem,” Stuttgart Stadtarchiv (10 Depot A 1535); “Dr. Lindemanns Programm, 1911,” (campaign flyers, etc.), Stuttgart Stadtarchiv; also Siegfried Bassler, Mit uns für die Freiheit: 100 Jahre SPD in Stuttgart (Stuttgart: K Thienemann Verlag, 1987).

13 Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1984 [original German edition, 1973]), 42–4. For an assessment of the accomplishments of Gemeindesozialisten in the twenty-five years before the war, see Edmund Fischer, “Ein Vierteljahrhundert kommunale Entwicklung,” nr. 40, Kommunale Praxis, 2 Oktober 1915, 639–41. See also, Hugo Lindemann, “Probleme des Munizipalsozialismus,” Sozialistische Monatsheften (hereafter SM) 1910, 508–13 and his extensive writing on the wartime predicament faced by cities and municipal socialists, for example, “Die deutschen Gemeinden während des Krieges,” SM, 1914, 1073–78.

14 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 59–62 (quotation on 62).

15 Roger Chickering, “ ‘War Enthusiasm?’: Public Opinion and the Outbreak of War in 1914,” Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, An Improbable War: The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (New York: Bergbahn Books, 2007), 200–12. See also, Volker Ullrich, Kriegsalltag: Hamburg im Ersten Weltkrieg (Köln: Prometh, 1982).

16 Quotation from Vorwärts, July 30, 1914, in Wolfgang Kruse, “Die Kriegsbegeisterung im Deutschen Reich zu Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieg, Entstehungszusammenhänge, Grenzen und ideologische Strukturen,” Kriegsbegeisterung und mentale Kriegsvorbereitung: Interdisziplinäre Studien, Marcel van der Linden und Gottfried Mergner, hrsg. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), 73–5 (quotation on 74).

17 Philipp Scheidemann, The Making of New Germany: The Memoirs of Philipp Scheidemann, v. 1 (New York: Appleton, 1929 [orig. in German, 1928]), 201–2.

18 Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration: Eine Neuinterpretation des sozialdemokratischen Burgfriedensschlusses 1914/15 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1993), 31–7.

19 Roger Chickering, “War Enthusiasm?” 209.

20 Michael Stöcker, “Augusterlebnis 1914” in Darmstadt: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Darmstadt: Eduard Roether Verlag, 1994), 53.

21 Ibid.

22 Susanne Miller, Kriegstagebuch Eduard David, 15, quoted in Michael Stöcker, 53.

23 Chickering, “ ‘War Enthusiasm?’ ” 206–7, 209 (quotation). See also his more detailed account of events in Freiburg, Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 59–72.

24 Volkswacht (Freiburg), August 8, 1914, quoted in Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany, 78.

25 For a discussion of Kriegssozialismus, see Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration, 116–23, 164–77.

26 The SPD weekly, Kommunale Praxis, addressed all of these issues with increasing frequency, beginning as early as September and October 1914; see, for instance, Edmund Fischer, “Krieg und Gemeindesozialismus,” Kommunale Praxis, 31 Oktober 1914. (Hereafter KP.)

27 Tägliche Rundschau, August 5, 1914, quoted in Wolfgang Kruse, “Die Kriegsbegeisterung im Deutschen Reich zu Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges,” 83.

28 Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7–11.

29 For a judicious account that focuses on the drama of the SPD caucus in the Reichstag, see Edwyn Bevan, German Social Democracy during the War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918), 15–22. Also, Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War 1914–1918, 16–17, 177; and for durable national accounts, Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1955), 289–91; Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration, 53–63; Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD.: Entstehung und Entwicklung der Unabhängi gen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Darmstadt: Verlag Detlev Auvermann, 1970), 22–7.

30 Bevan, 24.

31 Bevan, 43–4.

32 Exceptions in the literature that give significant attention to the drama playing out in wartime municipal politics include Dieter Rebentisch, “Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die kommunale Selbstverwaltung. Ein Überblick über Programmdiskussion und Organisationsproblematik 1890–1975,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte xxv, 1985, 1–78 (especially 27–35), and Adelheid von Saldern, “Die Gemeinde in Theorie und Praxis der deutschen Arbeiterorganisationen 1863–1920,” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 3/1976 September, 295–352 (especially 329–31). See also a number of specific community studies, including Von Saldern, Vom Einwohner zum Bürger: Zur Emanzipation der Städtischen Unterschicht Göttingens 1890–1920, Eine sozial-und kommunalhistorische Untersuchung (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 1973), 366–419.

33 Dieter Rebentisch, 27.

34 Carl Severing speaking to a conference of Westfälischen city councillors, November 1916, in KP 17, 1917, 32, also quoted in Rebentisch, 28.

35 On the conflicting social reform agendas of liberals and social democrats in Wilhelmine Germany see Dennis Sweeney, “Reconsidering the Modernity Paradigm: Reform Movements, the Social and the State in Wilhelmine Germany,” Social History, v. 31:4 November 2006, 420–24; Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany: Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914 (New York: Oxford, 1999), Ralf Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main. Ein besonderer Weg von der ständischen zur modernen Bürgergesellschaft 1760–1914 (Munich: R. Oldenburg, 1996), Georg Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 188–214.

36 Hugo Lindemann, “Die deutschen Gemeinden während des Krieges,” SM, v. 20 (1914), 1073.

37 Ibid., 1074–8.

38 “Die Kriegsfürsorge der Gemeinden,” KP, nr. 36, 5 September 1914, 1088–91.

39 Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien: Geschichte der Frankfurter Stadtverordnetenversammlung, Bd.II 1901–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1995), 17, 22, 24–5 (quotation on 25).

40 Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany: Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126–7. See also, Ralf Roth, Gewerkschaftskartell und Sozialpolitik in Frankfurt am Main: Arbeiterbewegung vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg zwischen Restauration und liberaler Erneuerung (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1991), 74–9.

41 Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien, Anhang, 659–66.

42 Palmowski has a useful discussion of these shifting political and ideological dynamics among liberals in the decade and a half before the outbreak of WWI, 126–46.

43 John D. Rolling, “Liberals, Socialists, and City Government in Imperial Germany: The Case of Frankfurt am Main, 1900–1918,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979, 401–4 [quotations from Volksstimme, Oktober 26, 1914, August 7, 1914].

44 Rolling, 399–400; Maly, 231–4 (quotations on 231, 234); see also Palmowski, 128–9, 131. For a personal account of the war years in Frankfurt and the emergence of the opposition within the SPD, see Toni Sender, Autobiography of a German Rebel (New York: Vanguard Press, 1939), 60–90. For discussion of the prewar role of social democrats in the Frankfurt city council, see chapter 4 and on Frankfurt during the postwar “revolution,” see below.

45 See, for example, Ralf Roth, Gewerkschaftskartell und Sozialpolitik in Frankfurt am Main, 210–15 (quotation on p. 215 from Volksstimme). See also, Ralf Roth, “Bürger and Workers: Liberalism and the Labor Movement in Germany 1848 to 1914,” in Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840–1990, David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz, eds. (New York: Bergbahn Books, 1998), 133–5.

46 Rolling, 406–7.

47 Bericht über die Verhandlungen der Stadtverordneten-Versammlung der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, 1914, 28 Sitzung vom 3 August 1914, #762, 1024–5. Stadtarchiv Frankfurt am Main.

48 Rolling discusses the increasingly controversial role played by the Kriegskommission in all matters pertaining to the war and its impact on the city, 408–18.

49 Bericht … 29 Sitzung vom 1 September 1914, #776, 1042–3.

50 Ibid., 1058–65.

51 Bericht … 31 Sitzung, 20 Oktober 1914, #856, 1098–118; Bericht … 32 Sitzung 3 November, 1129–43.

52 Bericht … 33 Sitzung, 17 November 1914, #880, 1146.

53 Ibid., 1150–57.

54 Ibid., 1150.

55 Bericht … 34 Sitzung vom 1 Dezember 1914, 1183–91. For comparison with Berlin and the role of critics of early wartime social provision, see Frauke Bey-Heard, Hauptstadt und Staatsumwälzung Berlin 1919: Problematik und Scheitern der Rätebewegung in der Berliner Kommunalverwaltung (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1969), 45–9.

56 “Die Kriegsfürsorge der Gemeinden,” KP, nr. 37, 12 September 1914, 1105. Successive issues of KP provided a city-by-city survey, 5, 12 September, 3, 10 Oktober, 1914.

57 Gustav Hoch, “Die Kriegsfürsorge der Gemeinden. Schwierigkeiten bei der Fürsorge für die bedürftigen Familien der Kriegsteilnehmer und der Arbeitslosen,” I., KP, Nr. 40, 3 Oktober 1914, 2.

58 Edmund Fischer, “Krieg und Gemeindesozialismus,” KP, n. 44, 31 Oktober 1914, s. 1217–19.

59 Paul Hirsch was a stalwart municipal socialist who wrote extensively on both technical and agitational aspects of municipal issues. He served as a municipal councillor in Charlottenburg and Berlin from 1900–1921 and as an SPD member in the challenging environment of the Prussian state parliament. During the war he led the small SPD group in the Prussian body, vacillating between the minority independent SPD opponents’ and the majority party’s war position. After the November revolution he held a series of major offices, including president of the Prussian state Ministerium, and president of the Prussian constitutional convention. During the 1920s, after leaving state office, he served in various municipal positions, including Bürgermeister of Charlottenburg and later Dortmund, from which position he was removed by the Nazis in 1933. See biographical profile in Franz Osterroth, Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus (Hannover: J. H. W. Dietz, 1960), 134–5. Also, Edwyn Bevan, 43–4, 79, 142, 148.

60 [P.H.], “Deutschlands Lebensmittelversorgung im Kriege,” KP Nr. 5, 30 Januar 1915, s. 1–2; “Reichsmassnahmen zur Nahrungssicherung,” KP Nr. 6, 6 Februar 1915, s. 1. On the deepening problems of food supply in late 1914 and early 1915, see Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 24–5, 45, 48–50, 76–9.

61 “Lebensmittelversorgung. Lebensmittelwucher und Lebensmittleversorgung. Die Panik und der Wucher,” KP, nr. 47, 21 November 1914, s. 1–2; “Ernährungsfrage. Zur Frage der Brotmarken,” KP, nr. 15, 10 April 1915, s. 1.

62 Dr. Hugo Lindemann, “Zur Lebensmittelversorgung der Städte,” KP, nr. 35, 28 August 1915, s. 1–2.

63 “Die Pflicht der Gemeinden!” KP, nr. 13, 25 März 1916, s. 1.

64 Victor Noack, “Kriegsfürsorge der Gemeinden. Kriegsnotlinderung für Mieter und Hausbesitzer. Stand der Frage zu Anfang des Oktobers,” KP, nr. 42, 17 Oktober 1914, s. 1185–93.

65 P. Dupont, “Die Berliner städtische Kriegs-Arbeitslosenunterstützung,” KP, nr. 43, 24 Oktober 1914, s. 1206. “Die Arbeitslosenfürsorge zu Kaiserlautern im ersten Geschäftsjahr,” KP, nr. 9, 27 Februar 1915, 1.

66 H. Mattutat, “Die Bekämpfung der Arbeitslosigkeit in Württemberg,” KP, nr. 50, 12 Dezember 1914, 1332–3.

67 Hugo Lindemann, always the careful investigator, detailed the changing housing market with the onset and continuation of the war and anticipated what shortage of housing the war’s end might bring, Dr. Hugo Lindemann, “Die Entwicklung unserer Wohnungsverhältnisse, II” KP, nr. 42, 16 Oktober 1915, 671–4. Chickering found the volatile local housing market in Freiburg distorted by the overriding demands of the military and the war-induced population shifts, Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918, 249–54, 282–3.

68 A year later, Lindemann revisited the housing situation to report a significant decline in housing availability. Dr. H. Lindemann, “Die Entwicklung unserer Wohnungsverhältnisse,” KP, nr. 34, 19 August 1916, 529–34. And in August 1917, he offered a further assessment that revealed continuing deterioration, “Die Entwicklung unserer Wohnungsverhältnisse,” KP, nr. 33, 18 August 1917, 513–16.

69 P. H., “Kriegsfürsorge der Gemeinden,” KP, nr. 48, 28 November 1914, 1301–2.

70 “1915,” KP, nr. 1, 2 Januar 1915, p. 1.

71 ‘Die Kriegsfürsorge der Stadt Stuttgart,” KP, nr. 6, 6 Februar 1915, 103–6; Paul Hirsch, “Kriegsfürsorge der Gemeinden. Gross=Berlin,” KP, nr. 7, 13 Februar 1915, 113–16. Paul Hirsch, “Staatliche Förderung der kommunalen Kriegsfürsorge in Deutschland,” KP, nr. 26, 26 Juni 1915, 415–18; “Kriegsfürsorge der Gemeinden. Die Kriegsfürsorge in Frankfurt a.M.,” KP, nr. 48 27 November 1915, 767–70; “Kriegshinterbliebenen=Fürsorge,” KP, nr. 27, 1 Juli 1916, s. 1–2; “Kriegsfürsorge. Allgemeine Massnahmen,” KP, nr. 38, 16 September 1916, 599–603.

72 Fischer had a long history of SPD-associated journalism and became a leading voice and practitioner of municipal socialism during and after the war. He wrote extensively for Sozialistische Monatsheften and published Die Entwicklung der Gemeinwirtschaft in Sachsen, (1920) and Das sozialistische Werden (1918). He took his own life in 1925. Franz Osterroth, Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus: Band I: Verstorbene Persönlichkeiten (Hannover: J.W.H. Dietz, 1960), 82; also, Sächsische Biografie, accessed online, saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Edmund Fischer (1864–1925), July 19, 2016. See also Edwyn Bevan, German Social Democracy during the War, 72, 93, who mentioned Fischer’s role as a participant in the minority opposition of the SPD and who abstained from voting for war credits in December 1915 and March 1916.

73 Edmund Fischer, “Die Kriegsfürsorge für den Frieden,” KP, nr. 12, 20 März 1915, 193–5.

74 Paul Hirsch, Aufgaben der deutschen Gemeindepolitik nach dem Kriege (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 1917), 3.

75 Edmund Fischer, “Ein Vierteljahrhundert kommunale Entwicklung,” nr. 40, KP, 2 Oktober 1915, 639–41.

76 Ibid., 639.

77 O. May, z.Z. Soldat, “Neue Wirtschaftsprobleme,” KP, nr. 48, 25 November 1916, 753–6.

78 Dr. Hugo Lindemann, Die deutsche Stadtgemeinde im Kriege (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr Verlag, 1917), 1.

79 Ibid., 2–3.

80 Max Quarck, “Die Dringlichkeit der preussischen Gemeindeverfassungsreform. Nach einem Vortrag auf der Gemeindevertreterkonferenz für den Bezirk Frankfurt a.M.,” nr. 50, KP, 15 Dezember 1917, 785. On Quarck’s background, see Sozialdemokratische Reichstagsabgeordnete und Reichstagskandidaten, 1890–1918: Biographisch-Statistisches Handbuch, Wilhelm Heinz Schröder, bearb. (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1986), 180–81. Also, Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien: Geschichte der Frankfurter Stadtverordnetenversammlung, Bd. II, 1901–1933, 17, 25.

81 Max Quarck, “Die Dringlichkeit der preussischen Gemeindeverfassungsreform,” 785.

82 Ibid., 787. For a discussion of Baron vom Stein’s ideas about municipal reform and their impact, see chapter 1. Also, Gerhard Ritter, Freiherr vom Stein: Eine politische Biographie (Stuttgart: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983 [1931]), 212–303; and Erich Becker, Gemeindliche Selbstverwaltung: Grundzüge der gemeindlichen Verfassungsgeschichte (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 1941), 164–204.

83 Quarck, 788.

84 Ibid., 790–91.

85 Dr. H. Lindemann, “Selbstverwaltung und Politik,” KP, nr. 5, 2 Februar 1918, 65–8. The argument against partisan politics in local government was routinely deployed by city elites around the globe.

86 “Gemeindewahlen. Bayern und das Zentrum,” KP, nr. 45, 7 November 1914, 1233–5; “Aufschiebung der Gemeindewahlen in Sachsen,” KP, nr. 45, 7 November 1914, 1235–6.

87 H. Mattutat, “Die Bürgerausschusswahlen in Württemberg,” KP, 7 November 1914, 1237–9.

88 See chapter 9.

89 “Sozialdemokratisches Schuldeputationsmitglied bestätigt,” KP, nr 9, 27 Februar 1915, 155; Eduard Schmid, “Das bayerische Gemeindebeamtengesetz,” KP, nr. 50, 11 Dezember 1915, 797–800. Dieter K. Buse, “Breaking and Remaking a Party. The Division and Militancy of German Social Democracy Reconsidered, 1914–1918,” IWK. Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 40:1, März 2004, 14–15.

90 Max Quarck, “Die Dringlichkeit der preussischen Gemeindeverfassungsreform,” 790.

91 Paul Hirsch, Aufgaben der deutschen Gemeindepolitik nach dem Kriege, 6–7.

92 Ibid., 11–13.

93 Ibid., 15, quoting Hugo Lindemann, et al., Recht, Verwaltung und Politik im Neuen Deutschland (Stuttgart: Ferd. Enke, 1916).

94 Hirsch, Aufgaben der deutschen Gemeindepolitik nach dem Kriege, 13.

95 “Die Reform des preussischen Kommunalwesens,” KP, nr. 16, 21 April 1917, 1–2.

96 A. Joseph Berlau, The German Social Democratic Party 1914–1921 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 115–17; in his memoir, Scheidemann gave only cursory attention to the fight for democratic reforms, Philipp Scheidemann, The Making of Modern Germany: The Memoirs of Philipp Scheidemann, 337–39.

97 Paul Hirsch, “Neuordnung in Preussen,” KP, nr. 34, 25 August 1917, 529–32. The essay was ironically titled, given the author’s critique of the “new order” proclaimed by state authorities. On the broader context of the so-called July crisis, see Edwyn Bevan, German Social Democracy during the War, 182–202; also A. Joseph Berlau, The German Social Democratic Party, 1914–1921, 115–19.

98 Paul Hirsch, “Neuordnung in Preussen,” 532.

99 “Gemeindeverfassung. Die Aufhebung der Klassenwahl in Hamburg,” KP, nr. 51, 22 Dezember 1917, 809–10; “Rundschau: Die burgfriedlichen Stadtverordnetenwahlen in Köln,” KP, nr. 52, 29 Dezember 1917, 829–30.

100 “Gemeindeverfassung. Für die Reform der preussischen Gemeind ever fassungen,” KP, nr. 8, 23 Februar 1918, 119.

101 Paul Hirsch, “Die Reform des preussischen Wahlrechts,” KP, nr. 12, 23 März 1918, 177–80.

102 Among many others, see Edwyn Bevan, German Social Democracy during the War, 15–21 (quotation on 20–21).

103 Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1974), 72–4.

104 Siegfried Bassler, Mit uns für die Freiheit: 100 Jahre SPD in Stuttgart (Stuttgart: K. Thienemann Verlag, 1987), 67–9, 78–84; Jürgen Mittag, Wilhelm Keil (1870–1968), 131–45; Edwyn Bevan, 30–34.

105 “Die Aufgabe des Landtages,” and “Die 2. Kriegstagung des preussischen Abgeordnetenhauses,” Vorwärts, 10 Februar 1915, 1, 5. Interestingly, Vorwärts displaced the usual front-page coverage of the war with a prominent report of the Landtag deliberations and then a transcript of the speeches given. The speech by Hirsch was also transcribed in Karl Liebknecht, Klassenkampf gegen den Krieg. Betrachtungen und Errinerungen aus “grosser Zeit,” geschrieben von Karl Liebknecht in Berliner Untersuchungsgefängnis (Berlin: A. Hoffman Verlag, 1916), 60–3. See also, Bevan, 40–44; Susanne Miller, 101.

106 Bevan, 44–6. David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 41–2.

107 The classic account of the SPD’s prewar and wartime factionalism is Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism. For a useful review of developments and revisions since Schorske, see Dieter K. Buse, “Breaking and Remaking a Party: Division and Militancy of German Social Democracy Reconsidered, 1914–1918,” especially 1–5.

108 Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, 75–156.

109 Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD. Entstehung und Entwicklung der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Darmstadt: Verlag Detlev Auvermann, 1970 [1922]), 68. Prager includes the full text of the Manifesto, 69–71.

110 Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, 107–109, including a list of the thirty-one cities that registered five or more signatures. The episode is also discussed in Bevan, German Social Democracy during the War, 50–52; G. D. H. Cole, Communism and Social Democracy 1914–1931 (A History of Socialist Thought, v. IV, pt. I) (London: Macmillan, 1965 [1958]), 121; Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917, 304–5. On the participation of virtually the entire branch of the militant Düsseldorf SPD, see Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf 1890–1920, 256–7.

111 The only published list that purports to be complete can be found in Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Bd. 1, July 1914–Oktober 1917 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1958), 173–85. Among those attending was Carl Herz, city councillor from Altona/Hamburg, war opponent and future member of the USPD, participant in the revolution of 1918 and critic of party bureaucracy. On Herz’s wartime activity, see Christian Hanke, Selbstverwaltung und Sozialismus: Carl Herz, ein Sozialdemokrat, 75–94.

112 “An den Vorstand der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands! An den Vorstand der sozialdemoktratischen Reichstagsfraktion, Berlin!, 9 Juni 1915,” in Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD., 69–72 (quotations on 71–72).

113 Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, 109–113.

114 For the full text, see Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD, 72–5.

115 See Prager, 74–5, and Suzanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, 110–13, for a discussion of the fallout of Haase’s “pronunziamento,” as the party leadership called it.

116 David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 42.

117 For Kautsky’s term, Regierungssozialisten, for the majority leadership, see, for instance, a speech by Kautsky to the USPD founding convention in Gotha, April 1917, in Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD, 148.

118 The following chronology relies heavily on David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 44–52.

119 Quotation from Vorwärts, 3 Oktober 1915, in Edwyn Bevan, German Social Democracy during the War, 62–3.

120 See Carl Schorske, 306–7 (quotation on 307).

121 Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampt, 131–2 (quotation on 131).

122 The majority was no less internally divided. The Leipziger Volkszeitung in April 1916 somewhat fancifully identified nine distinct factions ranging from intensely nationalist to “left centre,” cited in Bevan, 86–7.

123 Schorske, 309. For a more detailed account of Liebknecht’s arrest and divisions among the minority over his defense, see Bevan, 103–6, 119–20.

124 Susanne Miller, 133–4 (quoting Ebert speaking before the party executive committee on July 21, 1916).

125 Bevan, 133.

126 See Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD, 107–14 for a detailed discussion of the maneuvering that led to the Reichskonferenz and the debates therein. (Quotation on p. 114.)

127 Bevan, 138–41. Susanne Miller has a detailed accounting of the jockeying to control Vorwärts as the military censors exercised ever-tightening control, 143–7.

128 Bevan, 142, 145–6.

129 Susanne Miller, 156.

130 Susanne Miller, 159–60.

131 Arthur Rosenberg, Geschichte der deutschen Republik (1935), quoted in Susanne Miller, 154.

132 Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration, 223–5 (quotation on 225).

133 A. Joseph Berlau, The German Social Democratic Party 1914–1921, 146.

134 Frauke Bey-Heard [author’s name at time of publication], Hauptstadt und Staatsumwälzung Berlin 1919: Problematik und Scheitern der Rätebewegung in der Berliner Kommunalverwaltung, 67–8. Heard-Bey noted “an astonishing trust in an inevitable upheaval that with the end of the war would open the possibility for an overriding and coordinated restructuring of all domains.” 67.

135 See discussion of these party congresses and the debates over municipalism in chapter 4.

136 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Gründungs-Parteitags der USPD. vom 6 bis 8 April 1917 in Gotha, Hrsg. Emil Eichhorn (Berlin: A. Seehof Verlag, 1921), 32–3.

137 Eugen Prager provides the fullest account of the debates at the founding conference and a rough accounting of delegates, Geschichte der USPD, 143–51. For the full listing see Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Gründungs-Parteitags der USPD., 38.

138 Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920, 262; Bevan, 155, 158.

139 Susanne Miller, 166–77; for the listing of party organizations that had been expelled from the party by the October 1917 SPD Parteitag, 166–7.

140 A variety of local studies illustrate these patterns of consumer mass action in cities across the country. A chronological assemblage of some incidents, together with other political developments, can be found in Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, “Wichtige Daten Juli 1914 bis Oktober 1917,” Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: Band 1 Juli 1914–Oktober 1917(Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1958), 691–706.

141 See, for instance, Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 193–94; for a more positive assessment, see Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 23–8 (quotation on 28); and on the impact of the food crisis on the politics of the war’s end and the revolutionary developments of 1918–19, see N. P. Howard, “The Social and Political Consequences of the Allied Food Blockade of Germany, 1918–19,” German History, v. 11:2, 1993, especially 162–9.

142 The most comprehensive account of the agitation around food supplies in Berlin is Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 76–92, 190–218. The listing in “Wichtige Daten” reads, “Shortages of potatoes in Berlin and other cities stimulated storms of protest in the marketplace over higher prices.” Dokumente und Materialien, 693.

143 Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 66–7. For a detailed account of the debate in the Berlin City Council, see, “Die Stadtverordnetenversammlung,” Vorwärts, 5 März 1915, p. 7.

144 Belinda J. Davis, 66–8.

145 Police Commissioner Jagow issued one of his periodic “mood reports” on May 15, 1915, quoted in Belinda J. Davis, 70.

146 Sean Dobson, Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 142. Dobson also notes that such overwhelming opposition did not appear in a number of other cities, Dresden, Chemnitz, and Zwickau, for instance.

147 Sean Dobson, 144–5. See other food protests, noted in “Wichtige Daten,” for October 1915, including “Bloody Clash between Demonstrators and the Police in Chemnitz: 150 People Arrested,” (15–18 Oktober 1917) and further “Unrest over Food Supplies in Berlin against Sharply Rising Prices,” 16 Oktober 1915), 696.

148 The most comprehensive listing I have found of food protests and demonstrations as well as strikes—many over food demands—is Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, “Wichtige Daten Juli 1914 bis Oktober 1917,” 691–706.

149 Dokumente und Materialien, Bd. 1, “Vorwort,” Dr. Walter Bartel, 40. Volume 3 in this collection picks up the documentary record on January 4, 1919, “Wichtige Daten, Januar 1919 bis Mai 1919.”

150 Rolling, 423–4, 428–9, 477. For the deliberations in the Stadtverordnetenversammlung (City Council), in which the Social Democrats played an increasingly prominent role, see Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien: Geschichte der Frankfurter Stadtverordnetenversammlung, Bd. II 1901–1933 (Frankfurt a. M.: Waldemar Kramer, 1995), 260–73.

151 Friedhelm Boll, Massenbewegungen in Niedersachsen 1906–1920: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung zu den unterschiedlichen Entwicklungstypen Braunschweig und Hanover (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1981) suggests the multiple causes, both structural and ideological, that underlay the declines in union and SPD memberships, see 153–8. For the Hanoverian city of Göttingen, von Saldern paints a picture of a wartime working class that remained fundamentally conservative and for whom open opposition, except with respect to problems of food supply, did not significantly surface before the upheaval at the war’s end, Adelheid von Saldern, Vom Einwohner zum Bürger, 366–75, especially 374–5.

152 Boll offers an illuminating description of these emerging differences between Hanover and Braunschweig in 1915–16, 158–86. Emblematic of the differences were the divergent editorial tacks taken by Hanover’s Volkswille and Braunschweig’s Volksfreund, the editorship of the latter taken up in November 1916 by August Th alheimer, from Göppingen/Württemberg and closely aligned with Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Mehring. On the Lebensmittelnunruhen (food protests) in Hanover, see 201–206.

153 Friedhelm Boll, 203–206 (quotation on 206).

154 Boll 207–208.

155 Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD, 107. In Bremen, as in some other cities, the June 1916 strikes—“the first political mass strikes in Germany during the war”—were a prelude to the political strikes of April 1917 and January 1918, but the “breeding ground” of the strikes had manifold causes; see Erhard Lucas, Die Sozialdemokratie in Bremen während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Bremen: Carl Schünemann Verlag, 1969), 95–6.

156 Geschichte der Stadt Dresden, Bd. 3, Von der Reichsgründung bis zur Gegenwart, hrsg. Holger Starke (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss Verlag, 2006), 251–2.

157 Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society, 263–4; quotation from Erhard Lucas, Zwei Formen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern, 1976), 50.

158 Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning, 193–5 (quotations on 193, 195).

159 Peter Brandt u. Reinhard Rürup, Volksbewegung und Demokratische Neuordnung in Baden 1918/19: Zur Vorgeschichte und Geschichte der Revolution (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1991), 65–6.

160 Klaus Tenfelde und Heinrich Volkmann, Hrsg., Streik: Zur Geschichte des Arbeitskampfes in Deutschland während der Industrialisierung (München: C.H. Beck, 1981); also Heinrich Volkmann, “Streikwellen 1910–13 und 1919–20: Kontinuität oder Diskontinuität der Arbeitskampfentwicklung,” in Arbeit, Mobilität, Partizipation, Protest. Gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, Jürgen Bermann, et al. Hrsg. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), 220–50. A helpful discussion of these general strike data and their patterns is found in Karl-Heinz Grotjahn, Stahl und Steckrüben: Beiträge und Quellen zur Geschichte Niedersachsens im Ersten Weltkrieg (1914–1918), Bd. 2 (Hameln: Verlag C.W. Niemeyer, 1993), 340–41.

161 Friedhelm Boll, Massenbewegungen in Niedersachsen 1906–1920, 207–14.

162 The strike was in response to a forced savings decree whereby younger workers were required to deposit part of their wages in a government savings program—in effect creating another means for the government to finance the war.

163 Boll, 215–17; Grotjahn, 341–4. Boll has a particularly detailed and insightful account of the Sparzwangstreik of May 1916 in Braunschweig, 217–23.

164 Grotjahn (quotations on 344–5). Also, for a detailed account of the 1917 strike, see Boll, 246–51.

165 On the unfolding of the revolution in Braunschweig in November 1918, see Boll, 258–92; also Grotjahn, 351–6.

166 Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning, 194, has made a cogent argument for viewing these strikes in the context of the consumption crisis.

167 For general accounts of the April strikes, see Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, 293–6; David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 82–4; Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 199–204; Sean Dobson, Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920, 167; Friedhelm Boll, Massenbewegungen in Niedersachsen 1906–1920, 243.

168 Belinda J. Davis, 201.

169 Quoted in Heinrich Scheel, “Der Aprilstreik 1917 in Berlin,” in Revolutionäre Ereignisse und Probleme in Deutschland während der Periode der Grossen Sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution 1917/1918, hrsg. Albert Schreiner (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957), 14. The author noted that in the original report the word Urheber (originator) had been underlined and in the margin the word “England” written, suggesting a desire to attribute the unrest to external forces.

170 This account is drawn largely from Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 201–3 and Dick Geary, “Revolutionary Berlin 1917–20,” in Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe 1917–1920, Chris Wrigley, ed. (London: Routledge, 1993), 31–3.

171 Davis, 202.

172 Sean Dobson, Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920, 168–9.

173 “Forderungen der streikenden Leipziger Arbeiter vom 16. April 1917,” Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Bd. 1, Juli 1914–Oktober 1917, 213. See also, Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, 293–4.

174 Sean Dobson, p. 370.

175 Friedhelm Boll, 244–5.

176 Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society, 263–5.

177 Susanne Miller, 295, f. 62.

178 For a general account of developments leading to the strike of January 1918, see David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 86–9; for developments in Bremen, Erhard Lucas, Die Sozialdemokratie in Bremen während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Bremen: Carl Schünemann Verlag, 1969), 94–7.

179 Hans Hautmann, “Vienna: A City in the Years of Radical Change 1917–20,” in Chris Wrigley, ed., Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe, 1917–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993), 92–4. For deliberations of the de facto wartime municipal governing authority, der Obmänner-Konferenz, during the strike in Vienna, see Stefan Leichtfried, “Politische Eliten in der östereichischen Monarchie am Beispiel der Wiener Obmänner-Konferenz 1914–1918,” Diplomarbeit, Universität Wien, 2009, 84–6.

180 David W. Morgan, 88–9; Philipp Scheidemann, The Making of New Germany: The Memoirs of Philipp Scheidemann, 343–7; also Philipp Scheidemann, Zusammenbruch (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 1921), 67–79 (quotation on 70). For a sharply contrasting view, see Walter Bartel, “Der Januarstreik 1918 in Berlin: K. II: Die Massen kämpfen—die sozialdemokratischen Führer verraten,” Revolutionäre Ereignisse und Probleme in Deutschland währen der Periode der Grossen Sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution 1917/18 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957), 157–74.

181 Sean Dobson, Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920, 166, 171. For a general account of the strike that also emphasizes the overriding power of conservative military authorities and Prussian politicians in containing the strike, see Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 446–58.

182 Dick Geary, “Revolutionary Berlin 1917–20,” in Chris Wrigley, ed., Challenges of Labour, 32–4.

183 David W. Morgan, 90.

184 Manfred Faust, “Krieg, Revolution, Spaltung: Die Kölner Sozialdemokfratie 1914 bis 1920,” in Sozialdemokratie in Köln: Ein Beitrag zur Stadt- und Parteiengeschichte (Köln: Emmons Verlag, 1986), 89.

185 Jürgen Reulecke, “Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Arbeiterbewegung im rheinisch-westfälischen Industriegebiet,” Arbeiterbewegung an Rhein und Ruhr: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Rheinland-Westfalen, hrsg. Jürgen Reulecke (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1974), 231–4 (quotation on 234).

186 Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 221–2, 225–8 (quotations on 227–8).

187 See detailed discussion below of Frankfurt, Bielefeld, and Munich; also, Altona in introduction to this chapter.

188 For useful overviews of the revolution, see Pierre Broué, The German Revolution 1917–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2005 [1971]); A. J. Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918: A Study of German Socialism in War and Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Die November revolution 1918/1919 in Deutschland, Hrsg. Ulla Plener (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2009); Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19, Hrsg. Alexander Gallus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); and for broader contexts, Germany 1916–23: A Revolution in Context, Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott, Kirsten Heinsohn, eds. (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015).

189 Lacking are significant numbers of local studies that explore the shifting currents of power at the municipal level, but see, for instance, Frauke Bey-Heard, Hauptstadt und Staatsumwälzung Berlin 1919: Problematik und Scheitern der Rätebewegung in der Berliner Kommunalverwaltung, Richard A. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic, Erhard Lucas, Frankfurt unter der Herrschaft des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrats 1918/19 (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1969), Carsten Schmidt, Zwischen Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf: Sozialpolitik und Kriegsgesellschaft in Dresden 1914–1918 (Dresden: Tectum Verlag, 2007), 70 Jahre Räterevolution 1918/1988: Diskussionsbeiträge und Dokumente zur Münchner Rätezeit 1918/19 (München: GNN Verlag, 1989), Adelheid von Saldern, Vom Einwohner zum Bürger, 374–413.

190 See Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005) 3–51, Germany 1916–23: A Revolution in Context, Klaus Weinhauer, et al., eds., (2015), 7–35; Andreas Wirsching, “Die paradoxe Revolution 1918/19” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 58 (2008) H. 50/51, 6–12; Alexander Gallus, “Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19—Erinnerung und Deutung im Wandel,” in Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19, Alexander Gallus, hrsg., 14–38. For a cautionary warning about presentist utopian renderings of the “Novembergeistes” see Adelheid von Saldern, “ ‘Nur ein Wetterleuchten’. Zu den historischen Komponenten des ‘Novembergeistes’ von 1918/19,” in Von der Arbeiterbewegung zum modernen Sozialstaat. Festschrift für Gerhard A. Ritter zum 65 Geburtstag, Jürgen Kocka, Hans-Jürgen Puhle und Klaus Tenfelde, hrsg. (München: K.G. Saur, 1994), 93–113.

191 Eberhard Kolb, 20.

192 Klaus Weinhauer, et al.,12–15.

193 Eberhard Kolb broadly distinguishes the somewhat more orderly election of Arbeiterräte (AR) or “Action Committees” in middle- and small-sized cities from those in larger cities where either the SPD or the unions took direct control over the formation of ARs or where ARs were formed spontaneously by factory representatives gathered in a general assembly. See Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–1919 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1962), 90–92.

194 In some cities, the transfer of power from existing local government bodies to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils was initially quite complete. For Düsseldorf, see Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society, 273–82, and in Köln, Bernard Neidiger, “Von Köln aus kann der Sozialismus nicht proklamiert werden!” der Kölner Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat im November/Dezember 1918 (Köln: DME-Verlag, 1985), 7–46. On the contested nature of local government in the early months of the revolution in Hamburg, see Richard A. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic, 35–57 and in Göttingen, von Saldern, Vom Einwohner zum Bürger, 374–419. And for the superbly detailed and insightful account of Berlin, Frauke Bey-Heard, Hauptstadt und Staatsumwälzung, Berlin 1919, 62–167.

195 On steps toward cooperation, however tentative, by the MSPD and USPD nationally and locally, see Broué, 152–3, 159–63. Heinrich A. Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1918 bis 1924 (Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz, 1984), 62–7, 97–113. Also, Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–1919, 157–82.

196 Broué, 165–7, 179–83.

197 Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic, 2nd edition (translated) (London: Routledge, 2005), 152.

198 Eberhard Kolb, 152–5 (quotations on 153, 154).

199 Ralf Hoffrogge, Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement (Leiden: Brill, 2015 [2008]), 92. Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–1919, 197–205. See also, David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 188–92.

200 Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung, 100–106 (quotations on 103).

201 Ibid., 104. See Severing’s account of these deliberations, Carl Severing, Mein Lebensweg: Bd. 1 Vom Schlosser zum Minister (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1950), 233–6, especially 236.

202 Ralf Hoffrogge, Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution, 91–6. The “Hamburger Punkte” are enumerated in A. J. Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918, 182.

203 For a careful delineation of the factions inside the USPD and their consequences in December 1918, see Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1978), 206–15. For a polemic contrasting the routes forward, see Rosa Luxemburg, “Nationalversammlung oder Räteregierung,” in Die Rote Fahne, n. 32, December 17, 1918, translation in All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Gabriel Kuhn, ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 113–15.

204 Karl Kautsky’s Mein Verhältnis zur USPD is quoted in A. J. Ryder, 183, and 200–217; see also Heinrich Potthoff and Susanne Miller, The Social Democratic Party of Germany, 1848–2005 (Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz, 2005 [2002]), 80–89. Dick Geary argues for the fundamentally moderate nature of the German revolution especially as manifested in the Congress of “Räte” and the vote for a national assembly in January 1919, “Revolutionary Berlin 1917–1920,” in Challenges of Labour, 41–45. Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–1919, 217–43; and idem, The Weimar Republic, 16–17; Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung, 114–44.

205 Dick Geary, “Revolutionary Berlin 1917–1920,” 43–7. Also, Eduard Bernstein, Die deutsche Revolution: Geschichte der Entstehung und ersten Arbeitsperiod der deutschen Republik (Berlin: Verlag Gesellschaft und Erziehung, 1921), 72–5; Klaus Tenfelde, Proletarische Provinz: Radikalisierung und Widerstand in Penzberg/Oberbayern 1900–1945 (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1982), 97–115. Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen November=Revolution 1918/1919 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1978), 321–70.

206 Dick Geary, “Revolutionary Berlin 1917–1920,” 37–8; see also, Ulrich Kluge, Soldatenräte und Revolution (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprech, 1975), 197–204, Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung, 191–205, and Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik, 262–81; Frauke Bey-Heard, Hauptstadt und Staatsumwälzung, Berlin 1919, 87–151; Klaus Tenfelde, Proletarische Provinz, 100–115.

207 Rolling, “Liberals, Socialists, and City Government in Imperial Germany,” 417–18, 420. The socialist gains in expanding the role of the public sector were especially evident in matters of food policy, 423–30.

208 Bericht über die Stadtverordneten=Versammlung der Stadt Frankfurt a. M., 12 November, s. 889–90.

209 Toni Sender gives a vivid firsthand account of these heady first days of the revolution in Frankfurt, The Autobiography of a German Girl (New York: Vanguard, 1939), 96–112; Rolling, 476–7, 479.

210 Erhard Lucas, Frankfurt unter der Herrschaft des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrats 1918/19 (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1969), 18–31 (quotation on 19); see also, Rolling, 481–3.

211 USPD Proclamation, November 8/9, 1918, published in Erhard Lucas, 26–7.

212 Rolling, 483–6 (quotations on 484–5). For an account of how the proclamation was drafted and distributed, see Toni Sender, The Autobiography of a German Girl, 105–8.

213 Sender, 116.

214 Bericht über die Stadtverordneten-Versammlung der Stadt Frankfurt a. M., 12 November, s. 891–9; Rolling, 486–7; Sender, 118–20.

215 Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien: Geschichte der Frankfurter Stadtverordnetenversammlung, Bd. II, 1901–1933, 277–80 (quotations on 278); Bericht über die Stadtverordneten-Versammlung der Stadt Frankfurt a. M., 12 November, s. 891–9; 10 Dezember 1918, s. 931–48.

216 Karl Maly, Das Regiment der Parteien, 282–4.

217 Ibid., 291 (quotation from an SPD campaign flyer).

218 Ibid., 291–4.

219 Sender, 134–8, 142–3, 147. A considerably less “rosy” picture of the political jousting between Majority and Independent Socialists in Frankfurt and the future of the Arbeiterräte is offered by Erhard Lucas, Frankfurt unter der Herrschaft des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrats 1918/19, 81–95. For some left-wingers, the issue in the national as well as city “parliaments” was “not having a socialist regime but only some social democrats in the regime.” (Quotation on 90.)

220 Karl Maly, 295–9. Also, David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922, 178–9.

221 Carl Severing, Mein Lebensweg: Bd. 1: Vom Schlosser zum Minister (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1950), 225–239. Also, Wolfgang Hofmann, Die Bielefelder Stadtverordneten, 114–15 and Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht, 136, 254–6, 403–5.

222 Volkswacht (Bielefeld), 9 November 1918, quoted in Reinhard Vogelsang, Geschichte der Stadt Bielefeld, Bd. II von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs (Bielefeld: Hans Gieselmann Verlag, 1988), 288.

223 Carl Severing, Mein Lebensweg, 227–8.

224 Ibid., 230.

225 Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–19, 171.

226 Carl Severing, Mein Lebensweg, 231–9 (quotation on 239).

227 David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 228, 316, 339.

228 See the thoughtful discussion of Eisner’s vision and tactical approach to winning and consolidating power through the workers’ councils in Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–1919, 67–9, 104–105, 192–3, 325–6, 360–64. Also, on Eisner’s personal evolution, Robert Michels’s remembrance, “Kurt Eisner,” Arkiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, XIV, Bd. 3, 1929, 364–91, and the recent biography, Albert Earle Gurganus, Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018).

229 Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte, 140–41; Kolb cites “handschriftliche Aktennotiz vom Gespräch Eisner-Liebknecht am 24 November 1918”; also, Albert Earle Gurganus, Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life, 410–12.

230 Gurganus, 332–3.

231 “Münchner ‘Selbstverwaltung,’ ” Neue Zeitung (München), 28 Januar 1919, 3. (IISG Archives.)

232 “Ein Märtyrer der Revolution,” Neue Zeitung, 22 Februar 1919, p. 1.

233 David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 156–61 (quotation on 159).

234 Bernard Grau, Kurt Eisner, 1867–1919, Eine Biographie (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2001), 422. Grau provides the most detailed and nuanced account of Eisner’s evolving Rätekonzeption, 421–39.

235 Speech by Kurt Eisner to the Bavarian Soldiers’ Council, November 30, 1918, quoted in Bernard Grau, Kurt Eisner, 423.

236 Bernard Grau, 429.

237 David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 237–9.

238 Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–1919, 85, 263.

239 See, for instance, Richard Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg, 35–70; Christian Hanke, Selbstverwaltung und Sozialismus: Carl Herz, ein Sozialdemokrat; Mary Nolan, Social democracy and society: Working-class radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920, 269–300, 69–111, 112–151; Frauke Bey-Heard, Hauptstadt und Staatsumwälzung, Berlin 1919, 69–111; Klaus Tenfelde, Proletarische Provinz, 103–115.

240 Eberhard Kolb, 262–70. Quotation and paraphrase of Paul Hirsch’s remarks are from 270. Also, Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen November-Revolution 1918/1919, 290.

241 Ibid., 325–7.

242 Dick Geary, “Revolutionary Berlin 1917–1920,” 45.

243 Edmund Fischer argued that socialism would free public servants from the subordination and mistreatment that came with the authoritarian state and grant them new status and fulfillment as functionaries of a socialist society. “The state is a peoples’ state, the ‘authority’ is the people themselves, from whom the officials then constitute just one important portion … So will the officials now be responsible for their fate. But it is also up to them to recognize that the socialist state is their state.” Edmund Fischer, Sozialismus und Beamtenschaft (Berlin: Selle & Co., 1919), 28.

244 Edmund Fischer, Demokratie (München-Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1919), 146. Fischer would take his own life in the early years of the Weimar Republic. See also, idem, Das Sozialistische Werden: die Tendenzen der wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Entwicklung (Leipzig, Veit Verlag, 1918).

12. A Democratic Moment: “Red Vienna” and the Promise of Social Democratic Cities in the Postwar Era

1 Edmund Fischer, Demokratie (München: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1919), 1.

2 Friedrich Keller, “Jakob Reumann,” Werk und Widerhall. Grosse Gestalten des österreichischen Sozialismus, Norbert Leser, hrsg. (Wien: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1964), 328. Also, “Die ersten Jahre der sozialdemokratischen Verwaltung unter Bürgermeister Jakob Reumann,” Felix Czeike, Wien und Seine Bürgermeister: Sieben Jahrhunderte Wiener Stadtgeschichte (München: Jugend und Volk Verlag, 1974), 378–84.

3 Stadtrat Hugo Breitner, “Jakob Reumann als Bürgermeister in den schwersten Tagen Wiens,” Arbeiter Zeitung, 30 Juli 1925; also available in the Jakob Reumann Nachlass, Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung Wien (hereafter VGA).

4 Arbeiter Zeitung, 2 Februar 1896, reprinted in Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien: Zu einigen Aspekten sozialdemokratischer Politik in der Vor- und Zwischenkriegszeit (Wien: Jugend und Volk Verlag, 1980), 24–8.

5 The longstanding system of three voting classes or Curias was based on taxable property and social status. The election of Reumann and Schuhmeier was a byproduct of mass demonstrations on behalf of franchise reform and a compromise measure put forward by the Christian Social Party that gave limited representation to workers in a fourth voting class that still imposed a strict residency requirement. See Maren Seliger and Karl Ucakar, Wahlrecht und Wählerverhalten in Wien 1848–1932: Privilegien, Partizipationsdruck und Sozialstruktur (Wien: Jugend und Volk, 1984), 52–5; also, John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 22–5. See chapter 7 for a discussion of the political activism of Vienna’s municipal socialists in the prewar years and on the assassination of Franz Schuhmeier, the introduction to part III.

6 Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien, 49–55; John Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918, 271–4, 282–4.

7 Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien, 52.

8 Protokolls for the Gemeinderat in 1909 reveal the wide range of SDAPÖ interventions: Nr. 2, 19 Januär 1909, Nr. 11, 30 April 1909, Nr. 12, 19 Mai 1909, Nr. 21, 8 Oktober 1909; also, for example, Amtsblatt entries for 9 Mai 1913, 1354–5. Vienna Municipal Archives. For an overview of their objectives, Councillor Leopold Winarsky, “Die Gemeinde Wien und die Sozialdemokratie: Sechs Vortragsdispositionen,” (n.d.) Partei Archiv vor 1934, Mappe 54, VGA.

9 SDAPÖ, Parteitag, 1909, s. 309, quoted in Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien, 53.

10 Hans Hautmann, “Vienna: A City in the Years of Radical Change, 1917–20,” in Chris Wrigley, ed., Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe 1917–1920, 91–5.

11 On the composition and functioning of the Obmänner Konferenz, see Stefan Leichtfried, “Politische Eliten in der österreichischen Monarchie am Beispiel der Wiener Obmänner-Konferenz 1914–1918,” Diplomarbeit, Universität Wien, 2009, including biographical sketches of the SDAPÖ representatives to the Obmänner Konferenz, that included successively Jakob Reumann, Ferdinand Skaret, Georg Emmerling, and Leopold Winarsky, 24–8. Vienna Municipal Archive.

12 Maren Seliger and Karl Ucakar, Wien: politische Geschichte, 1790–1934: Entwicklung und Bestimmungskraft grossstädischer Politik, Teil 2: 1896–1934 (Wien: Jugend und Volk, 1985), 982.

13 On the desperate conditions of wartime, see Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, especially 31–86, 291–313 (quotation on 305); John Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna, 421, 426–9; also Reinhard J. Sieder, “Behind the Lines: Working-Class Family Life in Wartime Vienna,” in Richard Wall and Jay Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 109–38.

14 Stefan Leichtfried, “Politische Eliten in der österreichischen Monarchie am Beispiel der Wiener Obmänner-Konferenz 1914–1918,” 25; Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien, 63; Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York: Oxford, 1991), 20–21.

15 Quoted in Franz Patzer, Streiflichter auf die Wiener Kommunalpolitik 1919–1934 (Wien: Jugund und Volk Verlag, 1978), 11–12.

16 Hans Hautmann, “Vienna,” 98–9.

17 Stadtrat Hugo Breitner, “Jakob Reumann als Bürgermeister in den schwersten Tagen Wiens,” Arbeiter Zeitung, 30 Juli 1925, VGA.

18 See Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien, 84–85; Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 26–7.

19 Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna, 45–9.

20 For a detailed account of the debates and conflict surrounding the constitutional changes that created Vienna as a separate province, see Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien, 63–82 (quotation on p. 81–82 is from Robert Danneberg, “Land Wien,” Arbeiter Zeitung, 17.12.1921).

21 Breitner, “Jakob Reumann als Bürgermeister,” 1925.

22 Felix Czeike, Wien und Seine Bürgermeister: Sieben Jahrhunderte Wiener Stadtgeschichte, 382–4.

23 Hans Hautmann, “Vienna: A City in the Years of Radical Change 1917–20,” in Challenges of Labour, Chris Wrigley, ed., 98–100.

24 For an older but still-useful survey of the historiography, see Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Kommunalpolitik im Roten Wien: Ein Literaturbericht,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, Bd. XXV, 1985, 239–50; the positive assessment of Red Vienna is closely associated with the work of Maren Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik in Wien: and Franz Patzer, Streiflichter auf die Wiener Kommunalpolitik 1919–1934. A leading voice skeptical of aspects of the Red Vienna experiment, especially in its cultural dimensions, has been Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); also Jill Lewis, Fascism and the Working Class in Austria, 1918–1934 (Oxford: Berg, 1991), 83–8, and Anson Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 24–31.

25 Josef Weidenholzer, “Red Vienna: A New Atlantis?” in The Austrian Experiment: Social Democracy and Austromarxism, 1918–1934, Anson Rabinbach, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 195–9 (quotation on 196). See also, Anton Pelinka, “Kommunalpolitik als Gegenmacht: Das ‘rote Wien’ als Beispiel gesellschaftsverändernder Reformpolitik,” in Kommunalpolitik und sozialdemokratie: Der Beitrag des demokratischen Sozialismus zur kommunalen Selbsverwaltung, Karl-Heinz Nassmacher, hrsg. (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1977), 63–77.

26 The literature on the origins and unfolding of Red Vienna is enormous. In addition to works already cited including Seliger, Patzer, Gruber, and Rabinbach, some other key studies include, Charles A. Gulick, Austria: From Habsburg to Hitler, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), especially vol. 1, 43–65, 134–71, 354–505; Norbert Leser, Zwischen Reformismus und Bolschewismus: Der Austromarxismus als Theorie und Praxis (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1968), 389–428, 373–98; for contemporary accounts, Otto Bauer, Die österreichische Revolution (Wien: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923) and Robert Danneberg, The New Vienna (London: Labour Party, 1931 [1924]).

27 Detailed party reports and analyses of electoral success by district are included in the party archives; see, for instance, “Wahlanalysen, 1907–1911” with data collected for each district including numbers of trade unionists, members of political and cultural organizations, and extensive analysis of voting participation and results, including such things as ”Flugblatt—Verteilungen”—numbers of leaflets distributed in the year, e.g. in Schuhmeier’s Ottakring 121,000 flyers in 1910, thereby helping to keep the sixteenth district “a firm and unassailable bulwark of the party” as reported in the “Jahresbericht der Auskunfts-und Rechtsschutzstelle Ottakring im Jahre 1910,” Partei Archiv vor 1934, VGA.

28 German social democrats took a very different path in the development of worker housing in the postwar period but viewed the Vienna experiment with a degree of ambivalent admiration. As Adelheid von Saldern has put it, “It almost appeared as if at the time it became mandatory for German Social Democrats to put forward Vienna as a non-mandatory model.” Adelheid von Saldern, “Sozialdemokratie und Kommunale Wohnungsbaupolitik in den 20er Jahren—am Beispiel von Hamburg und Wien,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, XXV, 1985, 183–237 (quotation on 237).

29 Helmut Gruber offers detailed data and criticism of the Vienna socialists’ housing program, see Red Vienna, chapter 3 “Municipal Socialism,” 45–80; also, Peter Marcuse, “The Housing Policy of Social Democracy: Determinants and Consequences,” in The Austrian Socialist Experiment, Anson Rabinbach, ed., 201–21. Also, importantly, Helmut Weihsmann, Das Rote Wien: Sozialdemokratische Architektur und Kommunalpolitik 1919–1934 (Wien: Promedia, 2002), especially 49–55.

30 Tom Bottomore, “Introduction,” in Austro-Marxism, eds. Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 26, 38–9.

31 On the limits the social democrats faced outside of Vienna, see Charlie Jeffrey, Social Democracy in the Austrian Provinces, 1918–1934: Beyond Red Vienna (London: Leicester University Press, 1995). The bitter fight with opponents on the right is treated in many works, but see especially Jill Lewis, Fascism and the Working Class in Austria, 1918–1934, Anson Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934, and Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).

32 See discussion of “Commemoration and socialist polarization” in the introduction, part I, of this work “Paris Is Burning: The Paris Commune and Historical Memory.” Also, Georges Haupt, “The Commune as Symbol and Example,” in idem, Aspects of International Socialism, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 23–47.

33 Janek Wasserman argues that the term “Red Vienna” was first used in 1927 and then typically by the socialists’ right-wing opponents, see his Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938, 1–3. Some evidence suggests an early usage transnationally. See below.

34 Maoriland Worker, 12 December 1923 reported the impressive results for the social democrats of the second postwar election in Vienna; also “Austria: Socialist Strength in Vienna,” The Australian Worker (Sydney), May 20, 1925.

35 “Austria’s Bright Spot: The Achievements of Vienna’s Socialist Municipality,” Australian Worker, August 19, 1925.

36 “A Socialist City,” Australian Worker (Sydney), September 16, 1925 (reprinted from Labour Magazine [London], July 1925).

37 “Municipal Socialism: What it has Accomplished for Vienna,” The Worker (Brisbane), December 7, 1927. Also, “A Socialist City: An Australian Visits Vienna,” idem, 5 December 1928. On the attention garnered in Europe and the United States by Vienna’s housing revolution, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 384–6; also, Louis H. Pink, “Vienna Excels,” in his The New Day in Housing (New York: John Day Co., 1928), 58–66.

38 “Municipal Socialism: Vienna’s Experience. Ten Years of Unexampled Progress. Object Lesson to World,” The Worker (Brisbane), February 1, 1928. The author noted that the riots of the previous July (1927), in which the police and right-wing militia had killed more than eighty workers and wounded hundreds, had been “admittedly an unfortunate setback, but none regard them as likely ever to be repeated,” a prediction not borne out in the violent overthrow of socialist Vienna by the Dollfuss regime in 1934.

39 Robert Danneberg, The New Vienna, p. 3.

40 “Under Socialist Rule: Thousands of the World’s Cities,” Worker (Brisbane), December 18, 1929, from data published in the New Leader (New York).

41 For the United States, see the cases of Ohio cities like Dayton, Hamilton, and Cleveland (chapters 6 and 10), and in Australia, Brisbane, and Melbourne (see chapter 5 and 10).

42 Anthony McElligott, Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 9–10.

43 See, for example, Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–1919; Frauke Bey-Heard, Hauptstadt und Staatsumwälzung, Berlin 1919; Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918–1920. Two periodicals continued to publish highlights of municipal socialist successes in the 1920s: Gemeindepolitik (Germany), a successor to Kommunale Praxis, which ceased publication in 1922, and Die Gemeinde (Vienna), published from 1913–1925.

44 Franz Osterroth, Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus, Bd. 1 (Hannover: J. H. W. Dietz Verlag, 1960), 198–200 (Lindemann), 134–5 (Hirsch), 82 (Fischer).

45 ILP, Pamphlet, “Carry on Comrades,” December 30, 1918, ILP Pamphlets and Reports, 1918, ILP Papers, LSE Archives. Minutes of the Bradford City Labour Group, beginning with “November 4 [1919] 1st Group Meeting after the Elections. 27 members present,” West Yorkshire Archives Service, Bradford. “Under Socialist Rule. Th ousands of the World’s Cities,” Worker (Brisbane), December 18, 1929.

46 Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence, 132–9. Michael Hogan, “Municipal Labor in New South Wales,” Labour History, n. 72, May 1997, 125, 131–3; Greg Patmore, “Localism and Labour: Lithgow 1869–1932,” Labour History, n. 78, May 2000, 64; Bradon Ellem and John Shields, “Making a ‘Union Town’: Class, Gender and Consumption in Inter-war Broken Hill,” Labour History, n. 78, May 2000, 116–17; Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane, 1859– 1959: A History of Local Government (Brisbane: Council of City of Brisbane, 1959), 302–3.

47 Socialdemokratiska Partistyrelsens redorelse (Social Democratic Party Congress, Executive Report), 1919, 12–13, ARAB, Stockholm.

48 Protokoll, Socialdemokratiska stadsfullmäktige-gruppen i Stockholm, 1908– 1919 (ARAB); Protokoll of Kommungruppe, Sverige Arbetare Parti (SAP), Växjö, April 3, 14, September 25, 1919, Kronoberg County Arkiv; Protokoll, Arbetarekommun, Malmo, v. 1917–1922, Labor Archives, Malmö.

49 See Peter Billing, Lars Olsson and Mikael Stigendal, “ ‘Malmö—Our Town’: Local Politics in Social Democracy,” in Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden, Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molin and Klas Åmark, eds. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1988, 283–4. Also, Kjell Östberg, Kommunerna och den svenska modellen Socialdemokratin och kommunalpolitiken fram till andra världskriget (Eslöv: B. Öslings 1996), 97. On the disparities in women’s suffrage, see Gunnela Björk, Att förhandla sitt medborgarskap: Kvinnor som kollektiva politiska aktörer i Örebro 1900–1950 (Negotiating Conditions of Citizenship: Women as Collective Political Actors in Örebro 1900–1950) (Lund: Arkiv, 1999), 326 (English summary).

50 Stadsfullmäktige i Malmö, Bihang (Appendix) N:r 38: Preparatory Committee. Feb. 2, 1921, April 22, July 8, September 16, 1921, for requests for supplementary relief funding; for the debate over the proper form of payment, September 29, October 12, 21, 1921.

51 Arbetet, 22 October 1921; fueling the response were positions put forward by the militant “Committee of the Unemployed” and the union of unskilled laborers, Protokoll, Arbetarekommun, Malmö, November 4, 14, 17, 1921, Malmö Labor Archive. My thanks to Jimmy Engren and Lennart Karlsson for assistance with translations of these passages.

52 Arbetet, 14, 18, 19 November 1921 (quotation from November 18).

53 Socialdemokratiska Partistyrelsens redorelse, 1928, 373–419. I am especially grateful to Ulla Eckström von Essen for her insights into the divisions among municipal socialists that surfaced most vividly at the 1928 party congress. On the incipient tension between local democracy and bureaucratization in the SAP, see Kjell Östberg, “Att institutionalisera demokratin: Socialdemokratin och kommunalpolitiken under mellankrigstiden,” Arkiv för studier i arbetarrörelsens historia, nr. 63–94 (1995), 1–32.

54 Carl Herz, “Das Kernproblem: Die innere Verwaltungsreform,” 29 Juni 1922 (466); “Die Selbstverwaltung im Heidelberger Parteiprogram,” Sächische Gemeindezeitung, Dresden, 1 April 1926 (467), Carl Herz Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

55 Hardly a mention is made of municipal socialist activity in US socialist publications like The Socialist World between 1920 and 1924 when it ceased publication. Great attention, on the other hand, was lavished on the fight for postwar amnesty and internecine party conflicts. James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975) is a helpful guide to schisms of the socialist left in the United States.

56 William H. Cumberland, “The Davenport Socialists of 1920,” Annals of Iowa, v. 47:5 (Summer 1984), 451–74; Edward S. Kerstein, Milwaukee’s All-American Mayor: Portrait of Daniel Webster Hoan (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 77–120; Kenneth Hendrickson, “The Socialist Administration in Reading, Pennsylvania, Part I, 1927–1931,” Pennsylvania History, October 1, 1972, v. 34:4, 417–42; James Maurer, It Can Be Done: The Autobiography of James Hudson Maurer (New York: Rand School Press, 1938), 296–312; Cecilia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 117–26, 135–63. For a recent, important analysis of the trajectory of the Socialist Party USA in the interwar period, see Jacob Altman, Socialism before Sanders: The 1930s Moment from Romance to Revisionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

57 “Under Socialist Rule: Thousands of the World’s Cities,” Worker (Brisbane), December 18, 1929.

Epilogue: Whither Social Democracy in Cities?

1 For a discussion of middle-class reform efforts in the Progressive Era and the transnational circulation of their ideas, see Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “the People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) and Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

2 On liberal reform alternatives to both elite rule and municipal socialism, see chapter 1. And on the centrality of an urban fiscal revolution to municipal socialist initiatives, see the discussion of “Red Vienna” in chapter 12.

3 On the shifting fortunes of socialist Milwaukee in the post–World War II political environment, see Eric Fure-Slocum, Contesting the Postwar City: Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Aims McGuiness, “The Revolution Begins Here: Milwaukee and the History of Socialism,” Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, Margo Anderson and Victor Greene, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

4 “Under Socialist Rule: Thousands of the World’s Cities,” Worker (Brisbane), December 18, 1929.

5 Patrizia Dogliani, “European Municipalism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Socialist Network,” Contemporary European History, November 2002, v. 11:4, 576, 584, 587–8, 595, 593.

6 Ad Knotter, “ ‘Little Moscows’ in Western Europe: The Ecology of Small-Place Communism,” International Review of Social History, 56 (2011), 475–510; Stuart MacIntyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Interwar Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Belden Paulson and Athos Ricci, “Revisiting Italy’s ‘Little Moscow,’ ” World Policy Journal, v. 18:3 (Fall 2001), 81–8. Also, a transnational communitarian experiment in the Soviet Union is examined in Seth Bernstein and Robert Cherny, “Searching for the Soviet Dream: Prosperity and Disillusionment on the Soviet Seattle Agricultural Commune, 1921–1927,” Agricultural History, v. 88:1 (2014), 22–44.

7 G. W. A. Bush, Decently and in Order: The Government of the City of Auckland 1840–1971 (Auckland: Collins, 1971), 42; idem, Graham Bush, Local Government and Politics in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995); F. A. Larcombe, A History of Local Government in New South Wales (Sydney: Local Government and Shire Association, 1955), 5–15, 19–23.

8 Ray Markey, “The Emergence of the Labour Party at the Municipal Level in NSW, 1891–1900,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, September 1985, v. 31:3, 408–17; also Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82–90; and Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 139–41, 176–82. Brian E. Kennedy, Silver, Sin, and Sixpenny Ale: A Social History of Broken Hill, 1883–1921 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978); George Dale, The Industrial History of Broken Hill (Melbourne: Fraser and Jenkinson, 1918).

9 John P. R. Maud, City Government: The Johannesburg Experiment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 22–3, 50–68.

10 The reforms included employment of trade union labor, minimum wages, the eight-hour day, the establishment of municipal enterprises like foundries and brick fields, and proposals for a municipal bank and coal mine, Maud, 80–85.

11 Ashish Bose, “Municipal Socialism,” Economic and Political Weekly, v. 6:12 (March 20, 1971), 681–2.

12 John P. R. Maud, City Government: The Johannesburg Experiment.

13 Ashish Bose, “Municipal Socialism,” 681–2. John R. Brennan and Andrew Burton, “Introduction,” and “The Emerging Metropolis: A History of Dar es Salaam, ca. 1862–2000,” Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, John Brennan and Yusuf Lawi, editors (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2007).

14 Emily Callaci, Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). Sophia Woodman, “Local Politics, Local Citizenship? Socialized Governance in Contemporary China,” The China Quarterly (London), v. 226 (June 2016), 342–62; Luis Suarez Salazar, Mariana Ortega Breña, Jean Hostetler Diaz, “Updating Cuban Socialism: A Utopian Critique,” Latin American Perspectives, v. 41:4 (July 2014), 13–27.

15 Benjamin Goldfrank and Andrew Schrank, “Municipal Neoliberalism and Municipal Socialism: Urban Political Economy in Latin America,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, v. 33:2 (June 2009), 448 (table of municipal socialist governed cities), 453.

16 Gerald Frug and David Barron, City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 53–140; Benjamin R. Barber, Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 21.

17 See, for example, “Johnson County Minimum Wage Hike Unlawful, Iowa Official Says,” Cedar Rapids Gazette, August 11, 2015.

18 For a helpful cataloguing of what he terms “Destructive and creative moments of neoliberal localization,” see Neil Brenner, “Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism,” in Brenner, Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2017), 60–62.

19 Michelle Goldberg, “Power to the City: The Progressive Case for Going Local,” The Nation, April 21, 2014, 11–18. For an argument with local and global implications, Benjamin R. Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

20 Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 37–41, 154–5; idem, “Brazilian Cities in the Nineties and Beyond: New Urban Dystopias and Utopias,” Socialism and Democracy, 15:2 (2001), 47–8; idem, “Porto Alegre: The Dynamism of the Unorganised,” in The Left in the City: Participatory Local Governments in Latin America, Daniel Chavez and Benjamin Goldfrank, eds. (London: Latin America Bureau, 2004), 40–44; idem. And Ernesto Ganuza, “Participatory Budgeting As If Emancipation Mattered,” Politics and Society, v. 42:1 (2014), 29–50.

21 Ginia Bellafante, “With Participatory Budgeting, Think Local and Vote Local,” New York Times, April 19, 2015.

22 Bertie Russell, “Making Power Emerge: Municipalism and the Right to the City,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, Issue 74, Spring 2020, 95–111 (quotation on 101); also, Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 147–59.

23 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, 135, 137, 129, 138. See also, Neil Brenner, et al., “Cities for People, Not for Profit,” in Brenner, Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays, 147–57; Mike Davis, “Who Will Build the Ark?” in Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (London: Verso, 2018), 201–22; and the classic by Murray Bookchin, From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a New Politics of Citizenship (London: Cassell, 1995).

24 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 131–3, 140–50 (quotations on 131, 133).

25 Chris Butler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2012), 150–59 (quotation on 150).

26 Mike Davis, “Who Will Build the Ark?” in Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (London: Verso, 2018), 201–22, (quotation on 219).

27 “Reforms Th at We Wanted,” The Worker (Sydney), January 13, 1911, 13.

Acknowledgments

1 The Formation of Labour Movements 1870–1914: An International Perspective, 2 v., Marcel van der Linden and Jürgen Rojahn, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Global Labour History: A State of the Art, Jan Lucassen, ed. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006).

Index

Adler, Victor, 519, 533–4

African Americans

and Socialist Party activism, 423–7. See Socialist Party of America

voting restrictions imposed on, 164–5

Altona (Hamburg), Germany, 316–18, 692–4, 806

American Federation of Labor

political program of, 1894, 145

American Protective League, 652, 679

American Railway Union (ARU), 112. See unions, general

Ameringer, Oscar, 523

anti-racist views of, 425,

anarcho-syndicalism, 630. See Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

and local control, 14, 122, 143

Annales de l’économie collective, 811. See Milhaud, Edgard

Anti-Conscription League, Australia, 637, 640

anti-conscription movement, 601–2, 604–7, 629–33, 635–43, 645–51

comparative repression of, 600–605, 634

racism in, 637–8. See White Australia

transnational comparison of, 627–9

anti-militarism, 653–4

anti-semitism

Vienna Christian Social Party, 503, 787

ANZACS

Gallipoli casualties of, 539–40

Arbetet, Malmö, Sweden, 113, 140–1, 481, 484, 502, 806

Archer, Ian, 54–5

Ashton, Margaret, 578

at-large voting

impact on municipal politics, 431–2, 432n58, 434, 444, 454, 682–3

ward system alternative, 344n38, 444n98

Auckland, New Zealand, 92, 95, 335, 338, 341, 350, 485, 488, 496, 643

Australia

conscription referenda in, 523n9, 620. See Australian Labor Party

defeat of conscription referenda, 633–41.

divisions over support of war, 537–9

early city-state relations in, 89–90, 664n67, 665n68

economic impact of war in, 622–3. See war collectivism

incorporation of municipalities, 86–9

influence of British Municipal Reform Act, 1835, 88

maritime strike and municipal politics, 124, 360

municipal franchise restrictions in, 90– 92, 159, 620n10. See municipal franchise

municipal socialists’ wartime accomplishments, 669–70

social conditions in early cities, 89

wartime economic effects, 538–9

wartime repression, 620–21, 661–2, 664

Australian Labor Party

municipal democracy, fight for 126–127

municipal victories, 1893–1915, 124–6, 496–7

Political Labor League, NSW, municipal platform, 125–6

program of Victoria Political Labor Council, 149–50

postwar municipal gains, 661n127, 670

wartime critique of parliamentarism, 638–9. See Hughes, W. M.

wartime divisions, 547–8, 619–20, 636, 638–9

women’s status, 421–2

Australian Socialist League, 124–5

Australian Trade Union Congress

opposition to conscription, 635

Australian Workers Union, 124–5, 638, 671

Austria. See Vienna

Austro-Marxism, 792, 796

Baiocchi, Gianpaolo

participatory budgeting in cities, 816

Baker, Newton D., 467, 475

Barcaldine, Queensland, 101–3

Barrier Truth

reports of labor’s global success, 498. See Ross, Bob

Bauer, Otto, 796

Bavaria, Germany, 262, 280, 289, 291, 725, 769

postwar revolution in, 779–81. See Eisner, Kurt

social democratic municipal program in, 292–7

Bebel, August, 260–61, 267, 281, 410, 415

Bellamy, Edward, 103

Bemis, Edward, 474

Berger, Stefan, 13–14

Berger, Victor, 432–4, 491. See Social Democratic Party, Milwaukee

constructivist views of, 418–19

delegate to Socialist International, 522–3

racial views of, 423

views on woman suffrage, 419–21

wartime prosecution of, 689

Berlin, Germany

1918 strikes in, 759–61

class differentiation within, 311

impact of municipal voter disfranchisement, 312

SPD electoral gains in 3rd class vote, 311–12

wartime unrest in, 752

Bernstein, Eduard, viii, 262–5, 481–2

advocacy of revisionism, 258n50, 268–70

defense of municipal socialists, 243, 266–7, 269

exile, influences on, 255–9

Independent Labour Party, views on, 256–7

influence on Erfurt Program, 254–5

Marx as revolutionary evolutionist, 258

mass strikes, views on, 117–119

observer at ILP founding, 173

Paris Commune, views on, 39–40

war views of, 735

Bethmann Hollweg, Theodore von, Chancellor

cultivation of socialists’ wartime loyalty, 534, 554–5, 728

Bielefeld, Germany

social democrats’ program in, 303–307. See Severing, Carl

SPD electoral success in 3rd class vote, 304–5

Volksrat and local governance, 777–9. See Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council

Birmingham, England, 68, 70

Björk, Gunnela

and male power in politics, 155. See women

Blatch, Harriot Stanton, 151

Blatchford, Robert, 1, 104, 136

support for WWI, 558

Boer war, 516, 592, 616

opposition to, 557–8, 572

Boggart Hole Clough, Manchester

uses of public space in, 221–6

Boll, Friedhelm, 749–51

Bongiorno, Frank, 361–2

Boote, Henry, 638

bourgeois social reform, 15, 99, 287, 310, 322–4

Bradford Labour Union, 135–36. See Manningham Mills strike

Bradford, England

governance by liberal manufacturers, 226–8. See elites

ILP municipal success in, 189–91, 228

ILP wartime initiatives, 571

local issues fueling ILP growth in, 136–7, 183–5

social conditions in 1890s, 183–84. See urban conditions

Brandenburg state, Germany

municipal socialists’ progress in, 271, 273–4

Branting, Hjalmar, 114

Braudel, Fernand, 46, 52

Braunschweig, Germany

wartime protest chronology in, 749–51. See Social Democratic Party, Germany

Breitner, Hugo, ix

tax reforms in Red Vienna, 793, 798

Brenner, Neil, 16–17

Brisbane, Australia

early economy of, 395–6

elite resistance to tax increases in, 398. See taxation

restrictive municipal franchise in, 395–7, 402–3. See municipal franchise

social conditions in, 398–9

tram strike and municipal politics, 128

weakness of labor in city politics, 400

Britain

conflicting views of the war, 543–4. See Independent Labour Party

local elections suspended in war, 565–8, 565n16, 570–71, 578, 580

municipal franchise restrictions, 159–60

strike patterns in, 111

wartime dissent in, 598, 606n128,129,131

wartime strikes in, 592, 594

Brocklehurst, Fred

free speech fights in Manchester, 221–6

Brockton, MA

socialist governance in, 456–7

Broken Hill, New South Wales

anti-conscription mobilization in, 642

labor’s governance, a global beacon, 497–8

labor’s municipal agenda, 132

miners’ strikes and birth of municipal socialist politics, 129–131

wartime grievances in, 673–5

Brousse, Paul, 37–38

Burgfrieden (social peace), 536n20

dissent over in Germany, 541–2

early benefits for SPD, 700–01

local electoral consequences of, 761–2

wartime pressures of, 535–7, 698–9

Burgmann, Verity, 103, 620, 638

Burns, John, 114

Bush, Graham, 93–4, 667

Butte, MT

municipal socialists victory and defeat in, 459–60

Castells, Manuel, 16, 33

Chamberlain, Joseph, 43, 70

Chambers, John, 653, 655

Chicago Federation of Labor, 464

Chickering, Roger, 697–8

Christchurch, New Zealand

class restructuring in, 351–2

labor politics in, 352–9

industrial transformation of, 351–2

labor’s power in city council, 358–9

local economy, 350

Social Democratic Party in, 338

wartime labor demands, 677–8

cities. See municipal socialism

incubators of wartime opposition, 551–5

global configurations of, 53

impact of Muslim trading routes on, 48

medieval reinvention of, 44–5

proletarian public spheres in, 19

public sector in, 7–9, 437–9

regulation of public space, 222–3, 232

roman ruins of, 44–5

and rural differentiation, 46–7

trade and municipal growth, 45–8

worker self-activity in, 17–18

wartime needs of, 702–4

wartime socialist politics in, 694–5, 708–11

city-state relations, 48–9, 52–4, 74–5

in colonial Australia, 365–66, 378–9, 396–7

urban elites conflicts with states, 50–53, 98–99. See self-government

Clarion, 1, 186–7

Clarion cycling clubs

and new culture of labourism, 186–7. See Blatchford, Robert

Clark, Anna, 55

Cleveland, OH

housing conditions, 4

municipal politics in, 470–75. See Johnson, Tom

populist tradition, 407–8, 470

tax reform, 407–8

wartime socialist gains in, 687

climate crisis

and socialist cities, 24, 818

Clyde Workers’ Committee

ILP leadership in, 596, 600

Clydeside, 585, 587–8, 594–8, 595n96

wartime housing agitation in, 586–8

Cole, G. D. H., 583n16, 611, 613

Colne Valley Labour Union, England, 135, 137

Cologne (Köln), Germany, 47, 302, 729

colonies

debates over local government in, 93–4

imported municipal governance in, 812–14

imprint of British municipal reform, 88. See Australia

traditions of urban governance in North America, 82–3

urban development in, 82

communism in small places, 811–12

Communist Party, Germany (KPD), 765

Connolly, James

internationalism of, 482

conscientious objectors

wartime support for, 572–4, 604–7

conscription. See anti-conscription movement

conscripting wealth, labor’s support for, 607–8, 628–9

development in Britain, 598–9

opposition in Britain, 572–3, 607–8. See Huddersfield

local labor opposition in Australia, 640–3

wartime threat of labor conscription, 636

constructivists

faction in SPA, 412–15, 417, 456–7, 485. See revisionism

Conway, Katharine St. John

ILP lecturer, 196–7. See women

Cooley, Th omas, 667. See home rule, municipal

Council of European Municipalities, 811

Cox, Jeffrey, 69–70

Creswick, Australia

local labor fight against conscription, 641–3

women’s leadership in PLC, 632

Cronin, James E., 109, 592–3

culture of local labourism

ILP branch activities, 195–200

Damousi, Joy, 632

Danielsson, Axel, 113–14, 138, 140–42, 142n98, 480

Danneberg, Robert, 792, 799

Davis, Belinda, 743, 752, 755

Davis, Mike, 24

climate crisis and urban empowerment, 818

Davitt, Michael, 482

Dayton, OH

business opposition to socialists, 449–51

business-led charter reform, 451–6

economic evolution of, 445

fusion politics in, 654, 683–5

open shop movement, 445–6, 454

socialist defeat, 1917, 684–6

socialist party growth in, 446–7

socialist program in, 447–50, 453

socialists’ wartime activity, 683–6

Debs, Eugene V., 412, 417. See American Railway Union

anti-racism of, 423, 426

meaning of Pullman strike, 116

Dietz, J. H. W., 286

Dillon, John, Judge

and states’ supremacy over cities, 467, 666–7. See home rule

direct democracy

socialist debate on, 418–19

Dissmann, Robert, 741, 771

Drew, W. H.

Bradford Labour Union president, 170–71

Drogmann, Joachim, 260

Du Bois, W. E. B.

frustration with socialists on race issues, 424. See racism

Dublin, Ireland

municipal socialist campaigns in, 482

Dunedin, NZ

wartime divisions in, 644n134, 646, 665n135, 678, 690

Düsseldorf, Germany, 319

Dwyer, John

and Active Service Brigades, NSW, 381–3

Ebert, Friedrich, 736, 738–9, 766, 768–9

economic depression, 1890s

global dimensions of, 6, 106, 108, 111

local effects in Melbourne, 368

Edgren, Lars, 80

Edwards, P. K., 108–9

Eisner, Kurt

assassination of, 1919, 783

postwar radical democratic vision of, 781–3

support for Workers’ councils, 779–83

elites

and municipal reform, 66–70, 72–3, 78n11

defense of urban property interests, 45, 380–81

governance of German cities, 77–9

governing rituals of in cities, 12n20, 55–56,56n43`

municipal governance of, 44, 54–5, 176–7

new manufacturers role in cities, 81–82, 96

and popular protest, 58n51

resistance to municipal franchise reform, 156–7, 158–9

urban governance of in Sweden, 80–81

Ely, Richard T., 38

Eley, Geoff, 516

Engels, Friedrich, 117–119, 254, 258, 268

city as crucible of revolutionary consciousness, 12–13

Erfurt Program, SPD

and democratization of local politics, 244

dualism of, 254–5, 260–61, 740

Essen, Ulla Eckström von, 806n53

Fabian socialism

Eduard Bernstein’s critique of, 256

limitations of, 71–3. See Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice

northern varieties, 176n18, 222

feminism

socialist debate on, 420–23. See women

Fischer, Edmund, 703, 712–13, 718n72

promise of postwar era, 785n243, 786

suicide of, 1925, 803

on unfinished postwar democratization, 785. See revolution, German

wartime municipalization as model, 718–20

Fisher, Andrew, 547–8

Fitzgerald, Shirley, 379

Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 152, 421

food, protests

and wartime strikes, 750–2. See Germany

Footscray (Melbourne), Australia

reputation as stinkopolis, 367–8

France

popular support for war aims of, 542–3, 543n40

wartime sacred union in, 534

Franco-Prussian War, 1870

encirclement of Paris, 28–9

impact of armistice, 28–9

Frankel, Léo, 36

Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 21, 74–5

party strengths in city council, 705

revolution of 1918 in, 770–77

socialist and liberals contention, 319–24

socialists’ gains in, 320–24

SPD factions, 771–2, 777

war needs, debate over, 709–11

wartime mass protests in, 749

Fraser, Derek, 65–69,

Fraser, Peter

conscription opponent, 644, 650–51

free speech

city councils’ protection of, 374

wartime curtailment of, 553–5, 579, 601–5, 648

Frug, Gerald, 96–7, 666

Fürth, Germany, 294

fusion

electoral strategy of labor’s opponents, 214, 218, 228, 349, 434, 454, 460, 475–6, 654, 684–5

Gallacher, William, 600. See Clydeside

Geary, Dick, 784–5

Geisler, Charles

socialist councillor, Dayton, 447, 450, 453–4

Gemeinde, Die, 506. See Kommunale Praxis

gender, 22, 55, 280, 818

socialist divisions on, 152, 239–41, 330–34, 419–23. See women

meanings in popular protest, 55n39

George, Henry, 20, 103

Germany

anti-socialist law in, 247, 250–51. See Social Democratic Party (SPD)

city-state relations in eighteenth century, 74–75

divisions over municipal franchise restrictions, 163–4

early municipal socialist programs in, 276–8

early opposition to war, 732–6

French Revolution influence on municipal reform in, 75–6

impact of industrialization in cities, 77

north-south electoral differences, SPD, 290–91, 293.

postwar democratization of cities, 802–3

polarized class divisions, Prussia, 302

three-class voting, origins of, 77–9. See municipal franchise

war enthusiasm in, 696–8, 730–31

wartime food crisis, 713–15, 743–5, 750–1

wartime housing crisis, 717n67, 68

wartime mass protest, inventory of, 742–3, 745–9

wartime strikes, 752–3. See strikes

Glasier, J. Bruce, 223

Glorious Revolution, England, 56

Goldstein, Vida, 150, 331–4, 632n47. See suffrage, woman

Gompers, Samuel, 621n14

resistance to 1894 general strike, 143. See American Federation of Labor

Gordon, David, 107

Göttingen, Germany, 310

Gould, Roger, 33

Grant, John

advocacy for local politics in Australia, 123–5

Grau, Bernard, 782

Grayson, Victor, 216, 216n102

Great Falls, MT

socialists’ program in, 461

Guesde, Jules, 516

Haase, Hugo, 700, 731

Halifax, England

emergence of ILP, 178–9

Halifax Labour Union, 178–9

Halifax Workers Municipal Election Committee

electoral work of, 201. See Independent Labour Party

Hamburg, Germany, 74–5

condition of working class in, 313–15

municipal franchise restrictions, 315–17

socialist vision for city, 315

SPD municipal success, 315–16

Hamilton, OH

anti-socialist politics in, 439–40, 444. See fusion

economic base of, 435–6

impact of 1913 flood, 438–9, 442–3

socialist councillors initiatives in, 437–9, 439n80, 442–3

socialist party growth, 436–7

wartime socialist defense of public sector, 681–2

Hardie, Keir, 189, 205, 223, 491, 519, 560

as chair, Independent Labour Party, 171–2, 174. See Independent Labour Party, UK

Harriman, Job, 414, 463–4

Hartley, E. R., 1–3, 21, 136–37, 335, 346, 558

international experience of, 480

role in Bradford City Council 167–69, 230–236. See municipal socialism

Harvey, David, 16

Haussmanization of Paris, 33

socialist alternatives for cities, 817

Haupt, Georges, 38, 517

Haussman, Baron Georges Eugene, 32–33

Haverhill, MA

socialist governance in, 417–18, 456

Hayes, Max, 413

Healy, Maureen, 790

Heard-Bey, Frauke, 740–41

Hearst, William Randolph

and campaigns for municipal ownership, 465–6

Henderson, Arthur, 609–12

Henderson, Stella May, vii, 152–4

Herod, Andrew, 17

Herron, George D., 414

Herz, Carl, 317–19. See Altona (Hamburg), Germanyl

opposition to SPD centrists, 692–3, 703

postwar role in Hamburg, 693–4. See Independent Socialists (USPD)

Hickey, Pat, 334, 336–7, 478, 672

Higham, John

US wartime racism and nativism, 654–5

Hillquit, Morris, 413, 416, 425, 523, 681

Hindmarsh, Alfred, 337, 347–8, 348n80

Hinkel, Fred, 440–44. See Hamilton, OH

Hirsch, Paul, 273, 275, 278, 701, 703, 713–14

envisioning postwar cities, 726–30, 784. See municipal socialism

municipal activism of, 273n83

postwar career of, 713n59, 803

war views of, 731–2

Hoan, Daniel, 688. See Milwaukee

Hobsbawm, E. J., 11–12, 107

on strike patterns, 109, 111

Holland, H. E., 41

Holman, William, 634

home rule, municipal. See self-government

early struggles over, 53.

fight for, 16, 23, 97, 211, 265–7, 664–7, 800–01, 815. See Selbstverwaltung

limitations on in US, 97n167, 467, 475–6

states pre-emption of, 815

transnational comparison of, 664–7

housing reform. See WEWNC

conditions in Bradford, England, 227–9

ILP proposals, 202, 204, 232–33, 579

municipal socialist proposals, 291n114, 295–7, 579

wartime demand for public housing, 584, 589

Howe, Frederic, 432, 467

Howell, David, 170, 185, 194

Hoxie, Robert, 522

Huddersfield, England

rise of the ILP, 180–81. See Independent Labour Party, UK

wartime opposition in, 554, 571–3, 605

Hughes, W. M., 547–8, 620, 633–4, 638–9

Humphris, Adrian, 342

Hurd, Madeleine, 81

impossibilists, 412–13, 415–17. See Socialist Party of America

Independent Labour Party, UK

branch electoral strategies of, 195–200

break with liberalism, 175–76

critique of conscription, 601–605

debate over federation or amalgamation, 171–2

effectiveness of municipal work, 230–36

foundation of labour’s local strength, 611–14

founding of, 169–70, 185n33

in Bradford, England, 1–2, 133, 136

initial program of, 174

Irish Catholic opposition to, 215–16

local branch autonomy, 206

local electoral victories, 190–94

local representation in wartime, 562–9. See WEWNC

local strengths and weaknesses,195–200, 212–218

local-national tensions in, 194–5, 201–203, 205–206, 209–210, 210n91

municipal victories of, 1901–1913, 495

North-South tensions in, 169–172, 174

opposition to WWI, 543, 546, 559–61

postwar vision of, 612–14, 611n142

wartime activity of, 596–7

Independent Political Labour League, New Zealand, 335, 337, 346–9

Independent Socialists (USPD), 693. See Social Democratic Party, Germany

formation of, 739–42

postwar factions within, 739–41, 765–6, 768–9. See revolution, German, 1918

radical decentralism of, 741–2

reaffirmation of Erfurt Program, 740

strike leadership of, 1917, 1918, 756–9

India, 813

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), US, 112–113

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Australia

anti-racism of, 638

war opposition of, 620–21

wartime repression of, 634–6

International Socialist Bureau

search for peace, 514–16, 518–19, 523, 533–4

International Union of Local Authorities, 811

internationalism

effects of global economy on, 6

from below, 478–483, 509

impact of communication innovations on, 6. See translocal

intercolonial labor conference, 1890, 114

wartime contradictions of, 521–2, 639–40

Italy

early city states, 47–48

municipal socialism in, 18–19

Jaurés, Jean

assassination of, 514–15, 520, 534

leadership of, 514–16, 518

Jefferson, Thomas

fear of mob rule in cities, 97

Johnson, Tom

election as Cleveland mayor, 407–8, 687

political ascension of in Cleveland, 473–4

urban reform initiatives, 466–7, 474

Jones, Samuel “Golden Rule”

class vote for governor, 472–3. See

Cleveland urban reform vision of, 466–68

Jowett, F. W., 135–6, 185–6, 206, 228

Bradford origins of, 183–4

elected Bradford city council, 1892, 136, 190, 230–36

views on war, 569–70

wartime internationalism of, 570

wartime opposition of, 557–61, 598–9

Judd, Richard, 500, 687

Kautsky, Karl, 118, 261–2, 297, 410, 739–40, 769

critique of revisionism, 268–9, 281

on Paris Commune, 39

shifting views on municipal socialism, 243, 274–5, 283

war views of, 735

Kautsky, Luise, 491

Keighley, England

labour’s break with Liberals, 181–83. See Liberal Party, UK

Keil, Wilhelm

and Schwäbische Tagwacht, 297–99

Keith-Lucas, Bryan, 71

Kirk, Neville, 361

Kirkby, Diane, 633

Kirkwood, Davy, 597, 600. See Clydeside

Knights of Labor, 99, 112–113, 143, 411, 470

Kohn, Margaret, 18–20

Kolb, Eberhard, 763, 766, 781, 783, 784

Kommunale Praxis, 241, 245, 702

establishment of, 273, 275, 278, 283–4, 300

Kotkin, Joel, 47

Kriegsozialismus. See war collectivism

labor churches, 187–9

labor migration, 313–15

social impact of, 106

labor history

importance of locality in, 18

labor press

global reach of, 112–14, 484

Labour Leader

wartime suppression of, 601–04

Labour Party, Britain

1918 programme of, 577n48, 609–10. See public ownership

clause 4, 1918 constitution of, 610

parliamentary orientation of, 211–13

postwar centralization of, 611–12. See Independent Labour Party

postwar strength in Bradford, 236–37

Labour Representation Committee (LRC)

electoral collaboration with Liberals, 207

labourism

appeal of municipal politics, 190–94, 204

new culture of, 1890s, 185–7, 188n41. See Independent Labour Party

Lane, William, 103, 399. See socialism, utopian

Langewiesche, Dieter, 79

Lassalle, Ferdinand, 247

Latin America

neoliberal municipal governance in, 814

Laybourn, Keith, 136, 184

Leeds, England

ILP break with liberals, 176–77. See Independent Labour Party, UK

Lefebvre, Henri, 12, 16, 33n13, 818

Leicester, England, 72

Leitch, John

labor mayor, Redfern (Sydney), 391–5

Lemlich, Clara, 152

Lenin, V. I.

on the Paris Commune, 35–36

Liberal Party, UK

and Irish home rule, 177, 181

workers’ alienation from, 176–85, 319n191. See Independent Labour Party, UK

liberalism

governance in German cities, 78–9. See elites

liberal-labor contention. See Liberal Party, UK

in New Zealand, 335, 337, 353. See Seddon, Richard

in Victoria, Australia, 368–9

Liebknecht, Karl, 36, 312, 415, 491

postwar conflict with Kurt Eisner, 780

war credits votes, 731–2

leadership of war opposition, 536, 542

Lindemann, Hugo, viii, 241–3, 481–2, 694–5, 703

advocate for municipal socialism, 271–3, 276–7, 278–80, 284–7

critique of party centralization, 263, 271–2

influence of British municipal socialism on, 263–64

mayoral candidacy in Stuttgart, 241–3, 299–301

municipal socialism in wartime, 720–21, 724, 727

postwar career of, 803

regulating wartime food supply, 714–15

relations with Bernstein and Kautsky, 264–5

Lissagaray, Prosper, 30, 31, 34

Lister, John

and Halifax ILP, 178–79, 193, 257

Little, Frank

lynching of, Butte, MT, 1917, 679

Locke, John, 43, 97, 97n167

Locke, Lilian, 150

fight for working women’s rights, 330–334

London County Council, 71–73, 255–56, 390

Lowry, E. Y. (Ned)

militant labor councillor, Townsville, Queensland, 400–401

Lueger, Karl, 503, 787

Luxemburg, Rosa, 152

assassination of, 769. See Spartacus faction

judgment on Paris Commune, 39

polemics on revisionism, 238–41. See revisionism

views on mass strikes, 119–120

wartime opposition of, 738

MacDonald, Ramsey, 137, 208, 486, 491, 604

criticism of the Webbs, 73

survey of local election results, 1908, 212–219. See Independent Labour Party

wartime opposition of, 558–60, 606

Madison, James, 666

fear of local threats to property, 97

Magnusson, Warren, 7–8, 16, 96n164

Maguire, Tom, 177

Majority socialists (MSPD), 693, 738n122. See Social Democratic Party, Germany

postwar alignment of, 767–9

Malmö, Sweden, 80

elite dominance in, 140–41

industrial character of, 139–40

postwar conflict in SAP, 805–6

Manchester, England economy of, 574

ILP activism in, 200, 221–6, 574–8

wartime employment issues, 580–82

wartime housing concerns, 579–80

wartime Workman’s Special Committee, 578–83

Manley, Basil, 653–4

Mann, Tom, 114, 135, 170, 195, 332, 335, 479

anti-racist internationalism of, 361

skepticism of parliamentary work, 137

Manningham Mills strike, Bradford

and local politics, 135, 184–5

and free speech, 133–5

Maoriland Worker, 487, 645–6

Jim Thorn’s writings in, 615, 617

Markey, Ray, 102

Martyn, Caroline

and labor revivalism, 189. See women

Marx, Karl

Civil War in France, 35–6

views on Paris Commune, 35n19, 38–9, 39n28, 40n32

Marxism. See Engels, Friedrich

and the city, 12, 16

revisionist challenge, 252–255. See Bernstein, Eduard

masculinity

and leadership of SPD, Germany, 239–41

opposition to women’s anti-conscription activism, 732. See gender

May Day, 117, 201

Mayne, Alan, 379

McAloon, Jim, 358n80

McBriar, Alan, 73

McCullough, Jack. See Christchurch, New Zealand

political trajectory of, 352, 488–9.

socialist values of, 350–51

wartime dilemmas of, 527–8, 537, 643–4

McGill, Pearl, 152

McGowen, J. S. T.

NSW Parliamentary Labor Party, 125

political roots in Redfern, NSW, 388–9, 393

McKee, Samuel, 84

McLaren, David, 337–39, 346–8, 348–49

elected labor mayor, Wellington, NZ, 349

housing reform initiatives of, 344–5, 348–9

Wellington, NZ municipal politics, 128

McLean, John, 599–600, 605. See Clydeside

Melbourne, Australia

early government corruption in, 364–5

municipal labor successes, 127–28

origins of urban problems in, 364

reputation as Smelbourne, 366. See urban conditions

wartime food protest in, 630–31. See women

working-class suburbs of, 363–4

Melling, Joseph, 596–7

metropolitan government

debate over, 366n103

steps toward in Melbourne, 366–7, 375

Michels, Robert

and critique of SPD leadership, 246, 246n23,24, 534

Milhaud, Edgard

municipal socialist views of, 811

Milan, Italy, 18

Miller, Sally, 421–2, 425

Miller, Susanne, 733, 737–8, 742

Millerand case, France

German socialists debate over, 274–5

Mills, Walter Thomas, 335, 339, 477, 509

advocacy of municipal socialism, 487–8

as Milwaukee emissary, 484–8

reception in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, 485–90

role in New Zealand socialist factionalism, 488–90. See Red Feds

translocal activism of, 484–90

Milwaukee, WI. See Social Democratic Party, Milwaukee

appeal of Milwaukee model, 460, 478, 487–493

constructivist socialists role in, 428–30. See constructivists

socialists’ international recognition of, 490–93

urban elites’ fears of, 446–7

wartime socialist administration of, 688–9

Minneapolis, MN

municipal socialism in wartime, 655–6

Mittag, Jürgen, 298

Montgomery, David

strike patterns in US, 110, 659

Morgan, David, 781

Morgan, Tommy, 414

Morris, William, 73, 103

Mühlhausen, Germany, 324, 326

Müller, Richard, 767–8

municipal autonomy

German city-states, 74–5

merchants promotion of, 49–51, 53–4. See cities

royal interference in, 48–9, 52–4

states’ challenge to, 378–9. See city–state relations

municipal charter reform

class struggle over, 451–5. See Dayton, OH

commission and city–manager government, 444, 452, 454

municipal franchise

broadening of in Red Vienna, 793, 795–6

compared to parliamentary franchise, 156n17, 158

early restrictions in Sweden, 80–81

global shifts in, 159–66

limited reform in Sweden, 1909, 501–3

origins of in US, 85–6

plural and cumulative voting, 90–92, 91n149, 150, 385–6, 395–6

postwar reform of, 165–6, 672–3, 775, 801–4

reform in Vienna, 1900, 1907, 504–5

restriction of women, 151–5

restriction of, 21–23, 21n40, 44, 140–41, 150–51, 289–90

rural/urban differences, 95n164

three-class voting in Germany, 77–9, 289

wartime struggles over, 726–30. See Germany

municipal labor politics

early limits faced, 192n49, 376–77. See municipal franchise

national versus local narratives of, 3–4, 9–10, 14

new opportunities for in Melbourne, 369–71

new opportunities for in Sydney, 382–3

opposition to conscription in NZ, 651

as training ground, 9n12

municipal politics

class polarization in, 218, 220–21, 223–4, 230–237

democratizing of, 305–7

parliamentary versus local interests, 11n15, 121–7, 235–6, 382–5, 399–401, 638–9

municipal reform. See bourgeois social reform

and critique of parish government, 60–61

and propertied interests, 96

parallels to municipal socialists’ program in US, 408–10, 467–8, 474–5

Municipal Reform Act, 1835, UK

and new manufacturers, 65–70. See elites

major provisions of, 65–6, 225n126. See Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice

municipal franchise and, 68–69. See municipal franchise

Royal Commission of Inquiry, 64–5

Whig-Tory conflict over, 66–70

municipal socialism

accomplishments in power, 218–21, 324–28, 392–4, 433–4. 437–44, 460–1

bourgeois reform and, 809–10

challenge to party orthodoxy, 270–72, 278–80, 353n64. See Social Democratic Party (SPD), Germany

contract versus day labor, 373, 403–4

democratic reform and, 277–9. See self–government

elite fears of, 390

everyday politics of, 127–8, 146

German revolution and, 775

global inventory, 1929, 799–800, 802–5

global victories, 1910–14, 493–5

home rule and, 666–7, 815

national political narratives and, 9–10

postwar comparisons, 689–91, 802n43

postwar gains, 532n10, 727–30, 781–2, 802–8

postwar parliamentarism as barrier, 806–7, 810

postwar taxation and, 793. See Red Vienna

program of, 7–9, 140–41, 190–91, 201–2, 224–6, 288, 276–7, 292–3, 294–5, 353–8

public health record of, 460, 474. See Butte, MT

socialist councillors, effectiveness of, 317–19, 375, 406

SPD debates over, 248–250, 258–59, 260–62

trade union standards and, 20, 295, 305

tradition of, 16, 809–10

varied forms of, 10n13

as vehicle for party building, 191–94

wartime advocacy of, 561–2. See Wartime Emergency Workers National Committee

wartime agenda for, 555–6, 701–4, 711–13, 720–3

wartime dilemmas, 520–21, 523–6, 694–5

wartime record of, 660–61, 681–9, 703–4

municipal socialists, US

cities governed by socialists, 1898–1922, 457

Hamilton and Dayton, OH compared, 445–6, 454

internationalist perspective of, 461

other party labels for, 463–4

prewar success, 462–3

socialist debate over, 414–16

wartime attacks on, 655–7. See United States

municipal trenches

wartime struggles in, 712, 714

municipalization

campaign for, Dayton, OH, 448–50, 453

history in Hamilton, OH, 436, 438–9, 442–3

public ownership and municipal socialism, 203–204

socialist campaigns for, 431, 448–50, 453, 461–8, 610–11, 671, 776. See public sector

tramways, 404, 671. See Brisbane

National Administrative Committee. See Independent Labour Party

challenges to leadership of, 194–6

oligarchical tendencies, 201–202, 206–7, 211–212

parliamentary agenda, 208–9

Napolean Bonaparte, 75

National Labor Party, Australia, 639. See Australian Labor Party

nationalism

appeal to social democrats, 11–13, 13n23, 22

unifying narratives of, 12n18, 15n27

nativism, 662–3

Nearing, Scott, 684

Nelson, Lancashire, England

labour’s governance in, 218–21. See municipal socialism

neoliberal urbanization, 16–17, 817–18

Nettl, Peter, 238–41, 245

New Zealand

anti-conscription activity in, 643–7, 646n88, 650. See New Zealand Labour Party

early colonial status, 92

early municipal franchise, 94–6

early opposition to war, 537

economic impact of war, 539, 623–4

influence of British Municipal Reform Act, 1835, 92

Labour Arbitration Court, 335–7, 350–1

labour’s prewar municipal politics, 339–40, 341, 345–9, 352–9, 496

women’s enfranchisement, limits on, 153–4

war opposition, Grey district miners, 549, 645–6, 649

wartime labor gains in cities, 676–8

waterfront strike, 1913, 339, 615. See Red Feds

New Zealand Federation of Labour, 337

New Zealand Labour Party, 335, 337, 339–40, 488–90

municipal victories of, 1911–15, 496

wartime divisions in, 548–9. See conscription

New Zealand Socialist Party, 335–7, 345–6, 349

municipal politics in Auckland, 338–9

Niehuss, Merith, 324

Nolan, Mary, 319

Nolan, Melanie, 350–51

non-partisanism

appeal of in wartime, 723–6. See Burgfrieden

elite advocacy of, 306, 316, 344, 358–9, 430, 451

Norris, George, 625

O’Hare, Kate Richards, 152, 422

racism of, 423–4

Offenbach am Main, Germany, 409, 758, 802, 812

municipal socialist strength in, 325–8

Offer, Avner, 743

open shop, 23, 461, 462, 618, 685, 807

employers’ campaigns for, 445–6, 454, 654–7. See Dayton, OH

Orleck, Annelise, 420

Ottakring, Vienna, 504, 507, 513. See Schuhmeier, Franz

Owen, Chandler

socialist views of, 425–7. See African Americans

Queensland Labor Party, 621n10

formation of, 399–400

Pankhurst, Adela, 482

wartime protest of, 630–33. See Australia

Pankhurst, Emmeline, 193, 223, 225, 482, 574–5

Pankhurst, Sylvia, 482

Pannekoek, Anton, 524

Paris Commune, 14, 99

Australian elite fears of, 100, 124

debate over dictatorship of proletariat, 42n37

final massacre, 37

international commemoration of, 38, 40–42

model for municipal socialists, 34–5, 37–42, 797

national guard in, 28–29

program of, 30–32, 33–34, 36–37. See municipal socialism

radical democracy of, 42

reconstruction of local government, 27–8

stonemasons in, 32–33

socialist debates over, 35–6, 38–41

as urban revolution, 29, 31–2

women’s activism in, 36–7. See women

Parkes, Joseph, 67–8

parliamentarism

and social democracy, 13–15, 14n24, 23, 206, 494n39, 638–9

Parliamentary Labour Party, Britain, 546, 559, 597, 604, 611–12

war support of, 606–7

participatory budgeting

urban workers’ empowerment, 816–17. See Porto Alegre, Brazil

partisanism, 306n151, 309n158,419, 429–32, 436–8, 444, 455–6, 469–70, 472–4. See non-partisanism

socialists support of, 724–6

Paul, J. T., 353, 489

Pearce, Cyril, 572

Peek, George N., 626

Pelling, Henry, 195

Peters, Arthur, 212–18

Pingree, Hazen

and urban reform in Detroit, 466–7, 468

Pirenne, Henri, 45, 47–8, 50

Place, Francis, 63–64, 67

Plumridge, Libby, 351

Plunkitt, George Washington, 408–9

Pohl, Karl Heinrich, 294

policing cities

local vs. state control, 667–8

socialist initiatives for police reform, 437–443, 474. See Hamilton, OH

Populists (Peoples’ Party), US, 144–6, 429n50, 470, 474n173

and government intervention, 411, 429

Porto Alegre, Brazil, 816–17

post-colonial cities, 44, 813–14, 816

Prager, Eugen, 733

proportional representation, 294. See municipal franchise

proto-industrialization, 58, 77

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 29, 36–7

Przeworski, Adam, 244

public sector, 7–9, 437–9. See municipalization

municipal socialist expansion of, 20, 295, 393–4, 567

wartime expansion of, 576–7, 577–8, 609–10, 714–15. See WEWNC

Pullman strike, 1894. See strikes

Quarck, Max, 21, 283, 321–2, 704, 706

on wartime municipal self-government, 721–4

Queensland Labor Party, 402,

wartime accomplishments of, 671–3. See Ryan, T. J.

racism, 261, 360–2, 412, 423–6, 637–8, 807

in anti-conscription movement, 637–8. See White Australia

in colonial municipal reform, 812–13

socialists in US, 423–5, 427n47

Randolph, A. Philip, 425–7. See African Americans

constructivist socialist views of, 427

Rebentisch, Dieter, 265, 702

Red Feds, New Zealand, 335–7, 488–89, 549, 644–6, 649–51

Red Vienna, 786–7, 794n24, 798n33

accomplishments of, 798–801

fascist overthrow of 1934, 797, 799n38

housing initiatives of, 796

international reception of, 798–9

and muncipal taxation, 20, 792–3. See taxation

prewar roots, 795–6

self-government of, 800–01. See home rule

as socialist model, 23, 796–801

transnational meaning of, 796–97

Redfern (Sydney), Australia

early social environment of, 387–9. See urban conditions

Eveleigh railway shops in, 388–9

labor’s tax reform initiatives, 392. See taxation

municipal revolution in, 389–95. See municipal labor politics

polluted conditions in, 379–81

Reform Bill, 1832, Britain, 63–4, 68

Rent Act, 1915, Britain, 589

Reumann, Jakob, 504–5, 797

early political activism, 786–9

Vienna mayor, 1919, 790–93

revisionism. See Bernstein, Eduard

debate at Stuttgart SPD congress, 267–70

and municipal socialism, 255–6, 258–9, 264–7

Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of, 239–40, 242–3, 267–8

socialist leadership critique of, 252–53.

US socialists’ debate over, 412–18. See Berger, Victor

revolution, German, 1918, 761–6. See Majority Socialists, Independent Socialists

city elites’ grip broken by, 762

mixed local outcomes of, 776n219, 783–5

democratizing influence of, 767–8

realignment of local governance, 769–85. See Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils

Reynolds, Susan, 49–50

Richmond (Melbourne), Australia

labor councillors’ agenda, 373–5

new labor politics in, 371–7, 371n112

right to the city, 12–13, 16–17

meaning for today, 817–18. See Lefebvre, Henri

Ritter, Gerhard A.

north-south differences in SPD, 291, 293, 323–4

revisionism and municipal socialism, 252–3, 271

SPD as state within a state, 251

Rochdale, England

ILP municipal program, 204

Rolling, John D., 321, 323, 772

Ross, Bob, 487–8, 675

racism of, 261

Roth, Ralf, 320–21, 323–4

Russell, Phillips, 41

Russian revolution

and Paris Commune, 41–2, 748–9

Ryan, T. J., 402, 547–8, 671

anti-conscription views of, 627–8, 662

Saldern, Adelheid von, 252, 310, 328, 749n151, 796n28

San Francisco

Union Labor Party governance in, 463–4

Sassen, Saskia, 16–17

Savage, Michael, 338–9, 644

Saxony, Germany, 307–10

origins of three-tier voting in, 309–310

Scates, Bruce, 360–61

Scheidemann, Philipp, 697, 728, 736, 759, 728n96, 769

Schorske, Carl, 263

Schuhmeier, Franz, viii, 504–5, 507

advocacy of municipal socialism, 513–14, 787–8

assassination of, 513–14

Schult, Johannes, 316

Scott, Joan, 18

Seddon, Richard

and New Zealand Liberal Party, 5, 95, 335, 343

Seidel, Emil

socialist mayor, Milwaukee, 433–4, 492, 523 Selbstverwaltung. See home rule

self-determination (Selbstbestimmung)

and municipal franchise, 288–9

self-government. See home rule

early cities, 48–9

Red Vienna, 792–3, 800–01

wartime municipalities, 713–14, 721–6

intra-elite competition, 57–8

Seliger, Maren, 788, 790

Semple, Bob, 549, 624, 643, 649–50

Sender, Toni, 773

and German revolution, 771–4, 776–7. See Frankfurt am Main

Severing, Carl, 758, 768

and Bielefeld municipal politics, 303–6, 702

postwar moderation of, 777–9

Sharts, Joseph

socialist leader, Dayton, OH, 446, 448, 683

Sheehan, James J., 74–5

Simons, Algie, 414, 416

Singer, Paul

ambiguous views on municipal socialism, 262, 269–71, 273–4, 280

Berlin municipal politics, 248–50, 273–4

internationalism of, 483

single tax, 20, 225, 284, 361, 392, 466. See George, Henry

and new politics in Australia, 123–4

and SPD municipal program, 284–5, 284n103. See taxation

and urban reform, 473–4

Sinzheimer, Hugo, 772–3

Smart, H. Russell, vii, 201–203

Smart, Judith, 630

Smillie, Bob, 530n6, 546, 638n66

conscripting land and capital, 607

Smith, Joan, 598–601

Snowden, Philip, 189, 193, 573–4, 597, 606

Social Democratic Federation, UK, 216–17, 491

Social Democratic Party (SPD), Germany

agrarian reform and, 262

anti-socialist ban, 5, 105

divisions within, 244–5, 250–51, 265, 274–6, 288–9, 542n37, 736–9. See Majority Socialists, Independent Socialists

inward orientation of, 245–6, 250–51, 260–61. See Kautsky, Karl

as model socialist party, 244

municipal socialism debate, 8–9, 278–287. See Lindemann, Hugo

male leadership of, 239–41

municipal victories of, 1909–1914, 500–01

parliamentary strategy of, 281–3

postwar divisions in, 765–9. See revolution, German, 1918

war credits votes, 700–01, 730–32, 737

war opposition in, 535–7, 732–6, 732n105, 736–9, 750n152. See Luxemburg, Rosa

wartime gains of, 706–7

Social Democratic Party, Austria, 786–7

municipal victories of, 505, 507, 795n27

postwar agenda, 791–2. See Red Vienna

Vienna councillors effectiveness, 505–6, 788–90

wartime balancing act, 789–90

Social Democratic Party, Christchurch, NZ, 357–9

Social Democratic Party, Milwaukee. See Berger, Victor

growing strength, 429–434

international reputation, 490–93

municipal defeat, 491–2

new immigrants support for, 432

socialist city councillors initiatives, 431

victory of, 1910, 432–4

wartime governance by, 688–9

Social Democratic Party, Sweden

founding of, 5

marginalization of municipal politics in, 138–39, 139n91, 141–42

municipal gains by, 1910–1914, 501–2

socialism, utopian

and municipal reform, 7n6, 73, 103, 321, 399

Socialist International, First, 30, 35

Socialist International, Second, 104–105, 483, 521n22

May Day, 117

translocal activism, 6, 22

anti-war debates in congresses, 516–18, 520, 523–4,

support for municipal socialism, 276

wartime divisions in, 516–17, 532–5

Socialist Labor Party, US, 410–12

Socialist Party of America

debates on race and class, 423–7. See racism

factions in, 412–13, 412n12. See revisionism

municipal governance by, 1898–1922, 457

municipal successes of, 1911–1920, 428–9, 455–6, 499–500

opposition to WWI, 523–5, 664, 678–81, 683–4

strength in Ohio cities, 435

target of wartime repression, 678–9, 685–6, 807n55

women’s representation in, 422–3

Socialist Party of Australia

opposition to WWI, 662

Solly, Bob

working-class anti-racism, 361–2

Sombart, Werner

and municipal socialism in the US, 409–10, 490

South Africa, 813, 813n10

Spartacus faction, SPD, Germany

centralizing tendencies in, 740

formation of 737–9. See Liebknecht, Karl

and German revolution, 763, 765, 768–9

St. Louis

streetcar strike and local politics in, 464–5

Stedman, Seymour, vii, 415

Steger, Manfred, 240, 254–55

Stein, Karl Freiherr vom

municipal reform program of, 75–7, 722–3, 726

Stephenson, Carl, 48

Stockholm, Sweden, 81

strikes

“Great Maritime Strike,” Australia, New Zealand, 5, 100–102, 112, 114, 123n56, 335

“Great Upheaval” in US, 5

1918 political demands in German strikes, 758–61

antiwar debate over general strike, 516–20

catalysts of political change, 5, 103, 115–117, 146

dockworkers as catalysts of new unionism, 122

eight-hour day, 117

general strikes, political impact of, 117, 316–17, 395

general unions, role of, 111–113, 181–83

global contagion in 1890s, 112–113

local and regional patterns of 110–111, 114

mass strike debate of socialists, 1890s, 115, 117–120

mass strikes, political objectives in, 143–5

New Zealand strikes, 1908–1913, 335–9

patterns of, 104–105, 106–8, 109–113

streetcar strikes, political impact of, 145, 464, 464n149

transnational impact, 105

wartime Hanover/Braunschweig compared, 753–4

wartime in Germany, 751–52, 754–5, 753n162

wartime industrial and consumption grievances, 593–7. See Clydeside

wartime politicization of, 590, 593, 595–7, 657, 660

wartime strikes compared, US, Australia, NZ, 657–60

strikes, specific

Belgian coal miners, 1891, 117–18

Belgian general strike for universal suffrage, 1893, 118–19

Bisbee copper miners, 1917, 679

Brisbane general strike, 1912, 395

Broken Hill, NSW, miners, 1889, 1890, 101

Broken Hill miners, 1892, 130–31

coal miners, globally, 1890s, 114–115

dockers in UK, 1889, 5, 109, 111

gas workers, Leeds and ILP, 176–7

German strike wave, April, 1917, 755–8. See women

Manningham Mills, defeat of, 135. See Manningham Mills strike

miners, 1908 Grey District, New Zealand, 336–37. See Red Feds

miners anti-conscription, NZ, 1917, 651

miners, Rocky Mountains, 458–61, 478

Pullman strike, 1894, 116, 143–5

railroads, US, 1877, 110, 142

railway strike, NSW, 1917, 659

sheepshearers, Australia, 1890, 101–103

streetcars, Cleveland, 1899, 470–72

tramways, Brisbane, 1912, 404–5

tramways, Wellington, NZ, 1912, 349

Sturgis Bourne Acts, 60–61

Stuttgart, Germany, 297–301

divisions among social democrats, 299–301. See Lindemann, Hugo

living conditions in, 296, 298

Südekum, Albert, 275, 281, 286, 300, 490–91, 703

suffrage, woman, 633n50

campaign in Australia, 331–34, 386. See Goldstein, Vida

demand in wartime Germany, 722, 726

international dimensions of, 482

limitations of, 151–55

postwar adoption of, 802

Sutch, Jim

labor councillor, Richmond (Melbourne), 149–50, 371–6

Sweden. See Malmö

early town development, 80–81

limits on women’s enfranchisement, 155. See suffrage, woman

municipal franchise restrictions, 161–3

postwar municipal franchise, 804–5

reform of commuity meeting, 80n120

Sweet, Rosemary, 66–7

Sydney. See Australia

early governance of, 377–8

industrial suburbs of, 379–81. See Redfern

Tanzania, 813

taxation. See single tax

and municipal socialism in Broken Hill, NSW, 132

municipal socialist proposals for, 277

urban elite fears of, 69, 82, 93–4, 315, 366, 391, 397, 792–3, 798, 800, 812

Taylor, T. E.

labor mayor, Christchurch, NZ, 355–7

Thane, Pat, 8

Theisz, Albert, 34. See Paris Commune

Thiers, Adolph, 29–30

Thompson, Claude, 334, 480

Thompson, E. P., 16, 64, 133, 136–7, 170n5

rationale for ILP municipal campaigns, 175–6

moral economy of crowds, 57–8

Thorn, James, 1–3, 21, 330, 480, 615–17, 644n82, 647

anti-conscription views of, 616–17, 643–4

labor politics in Christchurch, 353–4, 338n22

Tillett, Ben, 114, 134, 136–7, 170–72, 223

attack on continental socialists, 172–4, 174n14. See Bernstein, Eduard

in Australia, 127–9, 334, 479

support for workers’ direct action, 199–200

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 97 Tocsin, 129, 132

Toledo

reform initiatives in, 468–9

Tombs, Robert, 29

trade union density

comparisons of, 658

translocal

internationalism from below, 6, 10, 479, 484, 521–2, 525–6, 530–31

political activism in cities, 6, 9n11, 9–10, 17, 21

translocal, consciousness of, 335, 484

Transnationalism, 21, 329, 334–5, 477–84, 522, 591, 619, 622, 678, 800, 809

Tudor, Henry, 257

Turati, Filippo, 19. See Italy

Turner, Ben, 206, 214, 480

Two Harbors, MN

socialist governance of, 654

Ulrich, Carl, 325, 325n208

unemployment

impact on ILP, 218

in wartime cities, 674–5, 715–17

Union of Democratic Control, UK, 566, 569, 573, 579, 611. See conscription

unions, general

and rise of the ILP, 181–83

formation of, 112–13

United States

adoption of conscription in, 651–3

conscription and class warfare, 655–7

economic impact of war, 624–7

Espionage and Sedition Acts, 679, 687, 689

machine politics and urban reform, 85–6, 419, 432, 434

municipal franchise restrictions, 164–5

mass strikes in, 142–4. See strikes

municipal socialist politics in, 428–9, 455–7, 462–3, 463–4, 499–500

postwar political climate, 23, 807

preparedness campaign, 624–5, 651, 653–4

states’ control over cities, 85–6, 410n6

wartime repression of dissent, 618, 655n112, 686–7. See Socialist Party of America

urban citizenship

boundaries of, 150. See municipal franchise

rights and obligations of, 155–7

urban elites. See elites

and reform, 61–62, 64

defense of property, 20. See taxation

governance in German cities, 78–9

urban conditions

as political stimulus, 6, 93–4, 120–21, 146, 288, 313–15. See translocal

impact of industrialization, 4, 6, 56–7

popular protest of, 55, 57–8, 62–3, 104. See women

urban reform, US

and municipal socialism, 22, 466–7, 475–6, 499–500, 504–6

urban unrest, 57–8. See food, protests

USPD. See Independent Socialists, Germany

Utah

strength of municipal socialism in, 459

Van Lear, Thomas, 656, 680

Vienna, 787n5. See Red Vienna

Christian Social Party in, 503–5, 508, 787, 792–3

early municipal socialist agenda for, 787–9

postwar revolution in taxation, 791–3

social democratic victory, 1919, 790–92. See Reumann, Jakob

wartime hardships, 790–91

Vollmar, George von, 262, 281

Walling, William English, 414, 417, 419, 428

Walsh, Frank, 653–4, 657

war collectivism (Kriegsozialismus)

advent in Germany, 699

associationism as US alternative, 626–7

contested meaning of, 762

government economic intervention, 622–4

War Emergency Workers’ National Committee (WEWNC). See Britain

defending labor in wartime cities, 561–9

local program of, 547n48, 562n10, 576–7

managing labor’s wartime interests, 544–7

pragmatism of, 534

Webb, Sidney

and Labour Party reconstruction, 611–13

leadership of WEWNC, 545

proposal for conscripting wealth, 608

public housing initiatives, 584, 589. See WEWNC

Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice

critique of local government, 61–62, 70–71

cult of expertise, 72–3. See Fabian socialism

elitism of, 70–73

origins of local government studies, 58–60

transnational observations, 478

Weimar Republic, 777, 779, 802–03, 807

Weinhauer, Klaus, 763–4

Wellington, New Zealand, 93, 95

housing conditions, 341–45. See housing reform

municipal politics, 341–9

Wells, Ada, 677–8. See Christchurch

Western Federation of Miners, US

and municipal socialism, 458–9, 478

WEWNC. See War Emergency Workers’ National Committee

White Australia

historiography of, 360n85

opposition to, 360–61

and working-class racism, 360–62

white supremacy

realignment of the 1890s, 412. See racism

Whitlock, Brand, 467–8

Wilhelm II, Kaiser

war proclamation of, 699–700

Wills, Jane, 17

Wilson, Thomas

labor alderman, Brisbane, 402–404, 672–3

Wilson, Woodrow

wartime policies of, 651–3

Winarsky, Leopold, 507–8, 789

Winkler, Heinrich, 767

Winter, Jay, 529–30, 550

Witt, Peter, 407–8, 467, 472–3

women. See suffrage, woman

anti-conscription leadership, 630–33. See Australia

as early modern political actors, 55

gender-class divisions among, 330–334, 419–23. See Locke, Lilian

in labor and political bodies, 152, 151–55

municipal activism of, 7, 317

municipal franchise limitations, 91, 95–6

municipal office-holding by, 193–4

in Paris Commune, 41

protest actions of, 131, 629–30

strike activism of, 471, 756

violence against, 632. See anti–conscription

wartime employment, 563–4

wartime food protests, 597, 744–5, 751–2

wartime housing activism, 587, 595

women’s organizing, Victoria PLC, 330–34, 333n8

Women’s Federal Political Association, Australia, 331, 334

Women’s Franchise League, Australia, 331

Women’s Peace Army, 633

Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, Germany, 23, 693, 761, 764–5, 769n204. See revolution, German, 1918

Berlin congress of, 766–8

local contexts, 764–6, 764n193

role in local governance, 765n194, 771–77. See Frankfurt am Main

workers’ centers

new forms of political action, 814, 818

Workers’ Electoral Association, Berlin

and municipal politics, 247–48

World War One

alternative chronologies of, 530–32

anti-conscription, 627–43, 643–51

casualties in, 541n33

cities and food crisis, 550–52, 583–90, 713–15. See Germany

colonial labor gains, 617–19

conscripting wealth, 529, 549, 553, 561, 636, 646

conscripting labor, fear of, 576, 596, 601, 605, 607–8. See conscription

hardships in cities, 549–53, 712–19

free speech, 598–605,

housing-employment crisis in cities, 552–3, 552n59, 583–90, 589n78, 715–17

labor activism in cities, 668

local grievances, 529–31, 744–5

local opposition, 521–2, 531–2

municipal socialism during, 22–23, 668–70, 673–5, 676, 681–6, 688–9, 701–4

nationalizing effects of, 529–30

outbreak of, 519. See Socialist International, Second

repression of war opponents during, 553–5, 651–57, 660–64, 666–7, 678–80, 686–7

strikes, 590–94, 657–60, 750–61. See strikes

temporary truce in class war, 705–6, 710. See Burgfrieden

total war, debate over, 528–9

trench warfare in, 540–41

Wright, Jabez

first labor mayor of Broken Hill, 130–32, 673, 675

Wünderich, Volker, 247, 252

York, England, 46

Labour Party wartime initiatives in, 573

Zetkin, Clara, 152, 239, 267, 280

Zibordi, Giuseppe, 19

Zielowski, Otto, 708–9, 770, 774. See Frankfurt am Main

Zimmerwald Conference, 1915, 736–7