Nineteen-Eighteen: A Year Draped in Red

Nineteen-Eighteen: A Year Draped in Red ​

Excerpt from Howard Zinn,Taking City Hall: The Growth of Workers’ Power in New York City , (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971)

The morning of January 1, 1918, was bitterly cold. The freezing rain, however, could not contain the boiling passion in the city’s populace that day. Today would be a day of two mayors, and all of the city would soon be up in arms.

The “official” mayor-elect, John Hylan, stood on the steps of City Hall that morning, ready to take the oath of office. The forces of the establishment had assembled throughout the city. The New York Police Department moved quickly, arresting well known figures in the local labor movement during the early hours of the morning. Business as usual would be enforced by the police truncheon, and the NYPD acted under strict orders to quash any open political dissent. They were not prepared for the storm that was to come.

A police strong-arm squad arrived at Hillquit’s residence in Manhattan’s lower east side, with a warrant for his arrest under New York’s “criminal syndicalism” laws. The squad instead met with an armed group of local Jewish workers. After a tense standoff, the police backed down. Word spread quickly of the crackdown and the reactionaries’ coup against Hillquit.

The local Socialist Labor Party organization was stunned; no one had ever imagined, even with the class war as tense as it had been, that the establishment would act so brazenly against democracy in its homeland. Hillquit had won 48 percent of the popular vote in New York City to Hylan’s mere 30 percent. Even among the most ardent of reactionaries, it would have been unthinkable mere months prior. But the events in Petrograd half a world away had shaken the world, and now here in America, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were reaching celebrity status among workers.

But while the party was paralyzed with indecision, the workers of New York began taking matters into their own hands. As word spread, largely by word of mouth due to the police raids on local labor press early that morning, large throngs of citizens walked out in protest, forming spontaneous marches and strike committees.
Even the most devoutly left-wing sections of the SLP found themselves playing catch up from day one. By 4 January, the barricades were up all across the city. The call for general strike had gone out, and had been quickly answered. Veterans of the Spanish-American War, as well as discharged soldiers of the current conflict, took up arms, raiding National Guard storehouses and forming disciplined workers’ militias to battle the police attempting to crackdown on the uprising.

The revolt brought spontaneous occupations in workplaces and factories all across the city. Emboldened by news of the revolution in Russia, they formed factory committees to manage occupied resources to sustain the general strike. In Manhattan and the industrial heart of Brooklyn, workers formed soviets, and manned the barricades in their wards.

The police did their duty to the class regime they had pledged to, but only barely. Their hearts were not in the conflict, and quite often the workers were simply better organized and armed than they were. They gave ground quickly, and clashes between the red militias and the police tended to have few casualties. On the 8th, the order went out to NYPD units to evacuate Manhattan island and abandon their redoubts on Wall Street and the Upper East Side. The order included the forcible evacuation of upper class residents and VIPs whenever possible even at the expense of their personal property.

It was carried out in a general panic, and as word spread among upper class residents in areas that remained unoccupied by workers’ militias, fears of bloody retribution by ‘the proles’ spread. Panicked bourgeois citizens crowded the streets and streamed to the bridges and ferries off the island. But they found, in most cases, that there was no escape. The dockworkers and sailors had taken up the red flag as well, and under the authority of the Manhattan Revolutionary Central Committee formed the previous day, they ordered those attempting to flee back to their homes or to the nearest refugee areas.

By the 10th, the NYPD’s withdrawal from Manhattan had been complete, though at considerable cost. Workers militias successfully encircled many police and auxiliary units during the withdrawal, using their control of the subway and rail systems to efficiently deliver militia units much faster than police units could move through streets blocked by abandoned vehicles, wagons and barricades.

From here, the crisis in New York quickly assumed a national character. Though Vice-President Charles E. Hughes had strongly protested in January 11th’s emergency cabinet meeting on the efficacy of suppressing the revolt, and urged President Marshall and First Secretary Wilson to open a dialog with Hillquit, now the president of the New York Commune, he was ultimately overruled. Marshall instead ordered a mobilization of the New York National Guard, countermanding the Governor, who had feared further political blowback. The National Guard would be placed under federal control, and the insurrection would be put down swiftly and brutally to ensure war materiel would continue to flow from New York’s ports to the front in France.

The resulting conflagration nearly destroyed the United States.

Excerpts from C. Wright Mills , “Reflections on the Biennio Rosso: Fifty Years Later” in The Daily Worker , 1 May 1968.

You’ve heard this before, probably more than once, in history classes or on PBS specials. Nevertheless, it is true. The Biennio Rosso (Italian, “two red years”) is the defining period of American revolutionary socialism, and it shaped the character of our national political consciousness ever since.

I am too young to remember the events myself, but I remember hearing about it constantly in my youth. Even in Texas, a relative sideshow to the struggles between 1918 and 1920, the revolutionary Wobbly spirit had been strong among local workers. Strong enough that civic life in Dallas for the working class was centered overwhelmingly around the union hall and the party. The grocer, the local plumber, the mechanic who fixed your heater; they were all reds, and they could all tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard about the mobilization of the National Guard to suppress the New York Commune.

Even my father, born the son of decently affluent middle class parents, found himself becoming a red that year. As he explained it to me when I was sixteen and first joining the YCL, he just couldn’t find any faith in government when it was mobilizing soldiers to kill people standing up for their basic right to elect their own leaders.

…Millions of people, who otherwise might never have become revolutionaries, ended up becoming precisely that because they watched their government and constitutional system essentially commit suicide. Many others became violent reactionaries while the political center slowly bled to death following the Biennio Rosso. Its death may not have been immediate, but it should be clear: The Revolution was simply the second act of a play that had begun fourteen years earlier. The soviets, workers’ militias, factory committees and other revolutionary institutions had been suppressed, but they had not been defeated. They revived, stronger than ever, during the next economic crisis, and the mortal wound that Thomas Marshall placed in the heart of American capitalism finally proved fatal.

Red flags, red flags everywhere

The National Executive of the Socialist Labor Party made its first official statement on the Hylan-Hillquit Affair on the 13th of January, shortly after the official announcements from the Cabinet on martial law in New York. They denounced the president’s mobilization of the National Guard as an abuse of power “more befitting a Prussian Junker than a leader of the American Republic,” and denounced the assumption of further emergency powers by the government to “wage war against the American proletariat.”

Though strong in its condemnation, the party wished to avoid offering any course of action, lest it be targeted for further official repression. The IWSU’s central executive council was not so reserved. The union, finally having got its ass in gear, announced a nationwide general strike. Abandoning its previous hostile anti-war rhetoric, the unions made clear that the general strike was against the tyrant Marshall and the dictatorial powers being used on the home front.

Tone didn’t matter, and the government’s counterattack treated all such behavior as treasonous. Following the previous days’ cabinet reshuffle, on the 15th, the new Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer announced arrest warrants for leaders of the SLP and IWSU.[2] The charges being leveled were a grave escalation of previous repressions. Participation in the general strike would be regarded by the Justice Department as treason.

The US Marshals and US Secret Service quickly made good on the Attorney-General’s promise. Socialist Labor members of Congress were arrested and detained without habeas corpus. While the proletarian organizations were already “underground,” a number of leaders of IWSU were arrested and formally charged with treason, including “Big Bill” Haywood, and Joe Hill.

If anything, the problems were only made worse. Rail workers stopped nearly all transcontinental rail traffic. Dockworkers refused to load ships, especially those bound for France or Great Britain. Factories making war materiel were occupied, and the arsenals they were producing were seized and distributed to workers’ militias.

The strikers were not battling with any clear revolutionary purpose in mind. Indeed, most felt, quite correctly, that a full revolution would only lead to disaster. Instead, they played a dangerous gamble, further threatening the war effort to bring the government to the negotiation table, and arouse the senses of cooler heads within the bourgeois government. But with everyday the whispers of revolutionary defeatism were growing louder, and such sentiments were reaching the troops at the front.

On February 1, they got their windfall. The United States Supreme Court issued an injunction on the federal government, requiring the immediate release of MCs being held in violation of their congressional immunity. Following the government’s reluctant compliance, the SLP’s delegation in the House of Representatives began negotiations, behind closed doors, with backbenchers from the Republican Party to begin a no-confidence motion on the Wilson government, and install a replacement that would negotiate an end to the general strike

Many Republicans and northern Democrats were alarmed, both at the government’s repressive policies and how they seemed to only spread revolutionary discontent, and understood the need to bring the situation back under control. The National Guard’s attempts to bring New York City back to heel had all failed by February 6, and the whole of the City, as well as Long Island, was more or less under the control of the New York Commune. Chicago’s revolutionary commune had taken over the city, as had the strike committees in Baltimore, Boston, Butte, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, and Toledo. The rot was spreading, with no end in sight.

At the opening of the emergency session on Monday, February 11, self-styled “independent Republican” Theodore Roosevelt (I-NY) presented a motion of no-confidence on the House floor as part of the morning’s procedural issues. The motion presented a new cabinet, negotiated hastily that weekend, and included official censure of the current government for its failure to resolve the matter of the nation being afflicted by a plague of red flags. While the floor-leadership tried to block the vote, the rules made this feat impossible, and after the lunch recess, the motion was presented again with the signatures of a full majority of MCs present. Wilson’s government fell in the resulting vote 255-100. As a stroke of genius, the Constitution’s requirement for motions of no-confidence to be constructive (i.e., propose a new cabinet) was subverted by naming placeholder candidates, many of whom would hold the office only on paper, being replaced by a permanent successor before the caretaker ministry’s term ended.[3]

Dutifully, the Cabinet presented their resignations, and President Marshall accepted the setback as best he could. By the end of the month, the new Cabinet was seated, and formal negotiations began to end the general strike. As part of the no-confidence deal, the SLP convinced the unions to suspend all activities that threatened the transfer of war materiel. The crisis in New York and other communes was settled with unilateral recognition, in exchange for an end to all strike activity and the disbanding of all workers’ militias.

The Department of Justice, in exchange, suspended its treason prosecution, and rescinded orders that had effectively made the IWSU and the SLP into outlaw institutions. However, the state of exception in itself did not end. And while the workers’ militias may have disbanded, they did not disarm.

Brest-Litovsk

On January 21, 1918, the governments of the Central Powers and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic agreed to terms for peace on the Eastern Front. The Central Powers, led in the negotiations by the German Reich’s foreign secretary Richard von Kühlmann, entered the negotiation tables a month prior, motivated by a pressing need to end hostilities in the East and shift those resources against the increasingly successful Western Entente.

Because of this, the Bolshevik delegation was able to bargain from a position of strength in spite of the fragility of its own position. The growing revolt of reactionaries and others discontented with the October Revolution at home gave the negotiations, led by Foreign Affairs Commissar Leon Trotsky, a certain urgency as well. The agreement hammered out over the month was not satisfactory to either party. The Bolsheviks were able to ensure a complete withdrawal of Central Powers forces from territory of the former Russian Empire, at the cost of self-determination and official neutrality for the territories that would become Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.

There was much fanfare and toasting, lauding that the stalwartly conservative Central Powers and the revolutionary Bolsheviks came to a “historic agreement” for “peace and self-determination.” Such rhetoric, however, was nothing but a facade, concealing both parties’ cynical goals. Neither the Bolsheviks nor Germany ever intended to maintain the treaty permanently. As Trotsky himself would put it, “I met with this sort of people for the first time. It is unnecessary to emphasize that I had no illusions about them. But I admit that I had expected the level to be higher. The impression of my first meeting could be summarized in the following statement: These people do not have a high estimation of their counterparts, but they also do not have a high estimation of themselves.”

These territories could be taken out of play, temporarily, while the Bolsheviks dealt with internal dissenters and the Germans fought the Entente to the peace table. Both still had clear designs on the ostensibly neutral buffer states carved from the Russian Empire. Ultimately, though, it was the Bolsheviks who gained the most in the end. In ten months, the German Reich would be forced to seek armistice and unfavorable peace terms with the Western Allies, resulting in the total dissolution of its imperial ambitions.

As German troops boarded trains for the Western Front, the Bolsheviks were already moving by proxy to fill the power vacuum. Native Bolsheviks made a strong presence in constituent assembly elections across the board. Friction between varying groups vying for control soon broke out into political violence and civil war.
Though Finland and the Baltic states were able to quickly counter native Reds and crush their insurrections, Byelorussia and Ukraine’s civil wars were trending in favor of the Bolsheviks. In Byelorussia, the Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies dissolved the National Assembly in late February, and declared the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The uneasy alliance between dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries and liberal reformers formed the Byelorussian National Republic in the western territories of the country, and set themselves to organizing a civil war against the Reds with whatever meager aid the Germans could spare.

The Russian SFSR “dutifully” supported self-determination of the Byelorussian people against the German puppet state squatting in the Pripyat Marshes and near the German border, and formed an alliance with the Byelorussian SSR, providing troops and aid.

Ukraine was in a more complicated situation. The Central Rada in Kiev had already been captured by a Bolshevik-Left SR alliance. But by the moment the Treaty was signed, Kiev and other Red controlled areas of the country found themselves under assault by a German-supported cadre of Ukrainian Cossacks styling themselves the “Ukrainian State” (Ukrayinska derzhava), under the self-appointed Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, himself a former general in the Tsarist army.

Though the Hetmanate was looked upon quite widely by the workers and peasantry as a pint-sized pretender to the Tsardom’s glory, their regime was competent in administration and militarily successful, and succeeded in taking Kiev in March of 1918. The leadership of the Ukrainian People’s Republic were forced to evacuate to Kharkiv, dependent on Russian aid for survival. The coup d’état sparked a spontaneous uprising among Ukrainian peasants in the south-east, overthrowing the local Cossacks and declaring a “Free Territory” under anarchist principles. Black Ukraine and Red Ukraine soon found themselves allied against the common enemy, though their relationship, even in the early honeymoon era, was far from rosy.

Still, the “father figure” of the insurrection, Nestor Makhno, was welcoming of a Red-Black alliance against reaction, even while being quite skeptical of the Bolsheviks’ intentions towards their allies once the Soviet Revolutionary War was through and the reactionaries crushed.

The Kaiserschlacht and the Road to Armistice

On 14 March 1918, the German Heer played it’s ace in the hole. Divisions surging from the Eastern Front supported a massive, simultaneous offensive thrust at the Allied lines from Cambrai to Aefthel. The Heer sunk all of its available resources, including considerable numbers of home-produced and captured tanks, into breaking the Allied lines and forcing a peace settlement on favorable terms.

By any account, the initial breakthrough was nothing short of spectacular. The Germans concentrated their assaults in the American sectors of the front-lines. Already less inclined to fight than their British and French compatriots, American soldiers were further disillusioned with the cause thanks to trouble back home and the utter bankruptcy of the justifications for their being in France. Coupled with the damaged logistical situation due to the mass strikes at the beginning of the Biennio Rosso, this made the American Expeditionary Force the weakest link in the chain. The Germans exploited this as ruthlessly as possible.

General Pershing, interrupted from staff meeting in Paris, hurriedly rode to the front to manage the damage in the Fourth Army personally. In spite of his acumen, Pershing on more than one occasion found himself far too close to the fighting, and nearly encircled with his troops by German spearheads.

Nevertheless, the Americans, supported by British reserves, managed to rally quite gallantly, spurred on by a tough, battle-seasoned core of junior officers and NCOs, who stemmed the flagging morale in what later French and British historians would consider a “uniquely American manner”, repeating the same slogan near universally: “Hold the line, comrades. Make it through this, and be sure to save a bullet for our own generals.”

This has euphemistically been referred to as a “constructive mutiny” by Revolutionary Army historians, with the thoroughly radicalized lower echelons of the army “finishing the job” that the brass and their robber baron masters started but were too incompetent to carry through. Though the normal chain of command would be restored by the end of the crisis, in those critical early moments the only thing keeping the AEF from erupting in total mutiny was the clear and present danger presented by the Germans, whose officers would quite gladly shoot any Red they found.

Still, the German “stormtrooper tactics” caught the whole front off-guard, with elite troops effectively infiltrating Allied positions and hitting supply depots while accurate, measured artillery bombardment suppressed the machine-guns and mortars of the defenders.

In all, the Germans advanced an average of 70 kilometers on the front in a little less than a month, before being halted and decisively reversed. By the time the lines returned to the pre-offensive positions in late May, the Germans and Allies both had suffered seven hundred thousand casualties, greatly exceeding the ability to replace the dead and wounded. The operation’s brilliant early tactical successes came at all too high a price, and in the end the Heer utterly failed to separate the Allied armies.

Bolstered by British reinforcements streaming from the closing of the Middle-Eastern Front, the Allies soon mounted their own riposte starting in June. With a core of hundreds of improved tanks, the British, French and American armies pushed forward. The massed tanks finally proved effective, punching effective holes in German lines, forcing the Heer into an orderly but demoralizing “advance in a rearward direction;” a fighting retreat that signaled the death knell of the dreams for a favorable peace settlement.

By August, the whole of the Western Front was collapsing under its own weight. General Erich von Ludendorff ordered a total retreat to beyond the Belgian-French Border, fearing an imminent total collapse of the army in the field. The Allies halted their offensives in late August, after taking the much-vaunted Hindenburg Line at the Belgian border. They were unable to sustain the logistics to even adequately feed frontline troops, let alone supply ammunition to machine-guns and artillery across the many kilometers of crisscrossing trenches, shell craters and mud in Northern France. For the first time since 1914, the guns fell silent.

The Kaiser formed a liberal government under Chancellor Max von Baden, and by early September sued for peace. Prompted by leaks of plans to send the High Seas Fleet to die in battle against the British lest they been taken in the peace, the rank and file of the Kaiserliche Marine mutinied at Kiel. Soon, mass mutinies began in the Army, and vast worker strikes broke out in Germany, prompting the Kaiser to abdicate to live out a life in exile, joining his cousin and former foe Nicholas II in Sweden. An armistice agreement was soon reached, and negotiations for a peace treaty began, with the German provisional government helmed by the SPD. The War to End All Wars ended.

[1] Marshall’s second cabinet:
Vice-President: Charles Evans Hughes (R-NY)
First Secretary: Woodrow Wilson (D-NJ)
Deputy First Secretary: James Mann (R-IL)
Secretary of State: Robert Lansing (D-NY)
Secretary of Treasury: Joseph Fordney (R-MI)
Secretary of War: Leonard Wood (R-MA)
Attorney General: A. Mitchell Palmer (D-PA)
Postmaster General: Albert S. Burleson (D-TX)
Secretary of the Navy: Edwin Denby (R-MI)
Secretary of the Interior: Knute Nelson (R-MN)
Secretary of Agriculture: Gilbert N. Haugen (R-IA)
Secretary of Commerce: Joshua W. Alexander (D-MO)
Secretary of Industrial Coordination: William S. Vare (R-PA)
Leader of the House of Representatives: Champ Clark (D-MO)
Senate Majority Leader : Jacob H. Gallagher (R-NH)

[2] Marshall’s third cabinet, once the dust settled
Vice-President: Charles Evans Hughes (R-NY)
First Secretary: James Mann (R-IL)
Deputy First Secretary: Champ Clark (D-MO)
Secretary of State: Theodore Roosevelt (I-NY)
Secretary of Treasury: David F. Houston (D-NC)
Secretary of War: Leonard Wood (R-MA)
Attorney General: A. Mitchell Palmer (D-PA)
Postmaster General: Albert S. Burleson (D-TX)
Secretary of the Navy: Edwin Denby (R-MI)
Secretary of the Interior: Knute Nelson (R-MN)
Secretary of Agriculture: Gilbert N. Haugen (R-IA)
Secretary of Commerce: Joshua W. Alexander (D-MO)
Secretary of Industrial Coordination: William S. Vare (R-PA)
Leader of the House of Representatives: Champ Clark (D-MO)
Senate Majority Leader : Jacob H. Gallagher (R-NH)