**Excerpts from Mike Macnair,The Seizure of state power by the American proletariat , (Glasgow, UK: Morning Star, 1997). **
The nature of the communist revolution, as explained by Marx and Engels, requires first that the workers form themselves into a party, distinct from and independent of all other classes and their parties, and that this class party wage an unceasing struggle to conquer political power for the working class. The working-class, of course, is both product and part of the development of the capitalist mode of production, and thus exists at the level of the world-market and world-history of capital first and foremost. The struggle of the world-proletariat against world-capital necessarily resolves in the dictatorship of the world-proletariat over and against world-capital, and the subsequent abolition of all classes. The beginning of the end of the class war was unleashed with the end of the First World War, the earliest sign of the death agony of capitalism. The first battles of the class war of manœuvre1 were inclusive, even Pyrrhic struggles. But with the insurrection of North America’s workers, the first decisive victories in the war of manœuvre were won, and the first beachheads secured.
This is a short overview of that process.
The workers’ class party in America was composed of revolutionary maximalist sections of the parliamentary Workers’ Communist Party of America, the so-called “direct unionist” wing of the International Workers’ Solidarity Union, and a number of ad hoc and subsidiary “spontaneist” movements, such as the factory council/shop-steward movement and the so-called “standing strike committees” and “ward committees of workers’ defense” which formed the prototype of the revolutionary soviets and community assemblies. Since the end of World War I, the formalist parliamentarian party-movements associated with the Second International and founded in pattern after the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands …
The division of the party by faction in the 1920s had nearly led to its splitting. The Reform-Coalitionists (known as Revisionist Right by the Left) nearly split the party in the election of 1928. Such a split might have been inevitable, that the only major country without a social democratic party would finally get one. But barely a year after the election, the already troubled state of the American proletariat turned precarious when stock market crash in 1930 heralded a new age of crisis. This all-but-repudiated short-term opportunism.
The greatest capitalizers on the new wave of discontent were the DeLeonist-Debsist or so-called Orthodox (called Centre by the Left) faction, who supported party unity and party heterogeneity over all, as well as an open parliamentary road. Nonetheless, the Bolshevik-Leninists (also called the Left) and the Ultra-Left, which confusingly organized as the Left Fraction, built informal but, it would turn out, extremely important factory-floor and neighborhood networks of revolutionary militants. The Ultra-Left maintained an ambiguous relationship with the party institutions – they often could and did participate in district and factory party cells and conferences, but opposed most of the apparatus and its parliamentary designs, but through this organic relationship with the working class were arguably in the nadir of 1931-32 of the crash the second most influential party faction.
In terms of international affinity, the Right sympathized most closely with the Vienna International and left social democratic parties, while the Centre, one sympathetic with the Bukharinist Right, held closely to the general line emanating from Stalin through the ECCI2. Internationally, the Left maintained a left-critical stance on the Soviet Union and Stalin in particular, but for practical reasons distanced itself from the Trotskyist International Left Opposition. The Ultra-Left held most closely with the council communists and Italian communist left expelled from the Comintern, though they justified their partial entryism in the WCPA with reference to the unique form of the American party and peculiar American conditions).
In spite of all odds and circumstances, the American parliamentary party remained true to the Debsian “united front party” constitution he had originally built between the Kautskyian/municipal socialist pan-left and DeLeon’s impossibilists, with the latter in programmatic, organizational, and agitational command, and the former tasked with party-building, filling out local elective office, and building a parliamentary faction.
The ultra-left period of 1931 saw factory occupations and the beginning of strike-committee movements. The ‘councilist’ wing of the Ultra-Left and ‘Luxemburgist’ wing of the Left began circulating agitation for forming a government of workers’ councils. Ultimately the strike waves subsided slightly; fearing repression, the Right and Centre formed a pact to organize for parliamentary victory as a tactic of first resort, and Rightists began secret negotiations with members of the ISLP Right and the reformists in the Democratic and Republican Parties, the fruit of which was the Non-Partisan League and Farmer-Labor fusionist and populist formations. The Right was determined to avoid an insurrection, which they regarded as putschist and disastrous for the movement, and feared the possibility of provoking a repression like that of the Two Red Years of 1917-1919 in light of their seeming resurrection in 1930-31.
In its negotiations, the Right sought military, juridical, and industry support for the possibility of a WCPA victory in the election of 1932. It promised that the Cabinet would seat reformist Democrats and Republicans (albeit with no promises in the key departments), that major legislation would have to have tri-partisan support, and that they would not support attempts to purge the senior state bureaucracy, officer corps or federal courts, or pack the Supreme Court. As a carrot, the Right revolted against the WCPA’s attempt to filibuster the confirmation of MacArthur as Secretary of War, demonstrating that in the event of a parliamentary victory they expected to be able to command at least simple majority support of the full-time cadre and bureaucrats in the IWSU and Party apparat, and were demonstrating in principle their respect for the division of power within the bourgeois republic.[3]
This led nearly to a revolt by the Left, but once more the Centre held. The line of battle was drawn, though, with the Left faction making it clear they would split the party, electoral victory or not, should the leadership betray the party charter that “the party shall not enter government unless it possesses decisive majority political support from the working-class and tacit support from a plurality of the population for implementing the minimum program”; this was a sticking point, given that the Right had in principle essentially promised to do exactly that, and the Centre seemed possibly prepared to put party-unity in the abstract over all other principles. 1932 was a period of suppressed conflict in the WCPA, as the party got into gear as a single force to win the election with a majority. The Ultra-Left at this point declared that the party was not a reliable instrument of working-class power, but its factional organization could not coalesce clearly around slogans of split, abstention, critical support for the WCPA electoral campaign, or otherwise. This political paralysis on programmatic grounds was juxtaposed with their deepening roots in the multiplicity of factory, ward, urban, and ad hoc workers’ organizations which had matured and developed organically since mid-1930.
The Left and Ultra-Left concentrated on a nascent movement of “Workers’ conferences,” uniting Solidarity “direct unionists,” the shop-steward and factory council movements in several industries, and the “ward committees of workers’ defense.” In contrast, the party apparat sought to bureaucratize and centralize the shells of the 1931 pan-urban general strike committees into “standing strike committees,” ostensibly pro-soviet but in essence conceived as a means to be a conveyer belt from shop-floor and street militancy to canalization in party institutions. However, these organizations would be fatefully transformed in the strike waves of late 1932 and early 1933.
As 1932 rolled on, the party appeared ever more hegemonic, but paradoxically at the expense of unity. More and more the party tendentially bifurcated into a formative left social democratic, Kautskyist formation, and on the other hand, something of a fusion between orthodox DeLeonist impossibilism and the Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands (KAPD) in Germany in the early 1920s.
The Ultra-Left used the early electoral signs as a signal to prepare for insurrection, and a number of factory occupations, marches, and strikes erupted in Dec-Jan 1932-3. The lame-duck government responded by criminalizing insurrectionary speech, which shored up the Right and Center while driving the Left and particularly Ultra-Left underground and into local organization. The Right forced through party elections in January right after the repression of insurrectionary speech, allowing it to take a commanding plurality over party offices.
“Political Realignment in the ‘Long 20s’”, from a generic high school American history textbook.
…Political realignment in Late Capitalism, brought on by parliamentary constitutional reform and the growth of workers’ power, resulted in an increasing inability of the liberal bourgeoisie to maintain control of the old Republicans and Democrats in the tug of war between conciliatory reformists and far-right reactionaries and radical populists. Party society fragmented dramatically in the Long 20s.
By 1930, the Democratic Party and Republican Party together accounted for only 50% of all votes counted. The highly regressive electoral system of the U.S. Constitution, though highly weakened by the increasing marginalization of the Senate upper-chamber and the introduction of bourgeois responsible executive government in the popular chamber, remained intense. The old gerrymandered single-member plurality congressional districts were highly disproportionate. Therefore, victory counts for the major parties and for choice fusionist tickets often belied the total votes casted for marginal parties and schismatic groups.
The WP and DFLP accounted for more than their votes suggested, even via united fronts and fusionism with local and small sect groups, though not to the hegemonic extent of the major bourgeois parties, due to rampant fraud and continuing repression and gerrymandering…
It is important to remember that before the revolution, one of the major controls of popular democracy was the redistricting system. The lower house of the Old Republic had seats apportioned to the states on the basis of population. But these seats were all single-member constituencies, which are a rarity post-revolution. Because of this, the boundaries of the districts greatly affect the outcome. Furthermore, there was no constitutional requirement that the districts contain the same number of residents. Districting was controlled by state legislatures. Consequently, in the Northern states, the Republican Party could ensure that it had an advantage in federal elections through its reliable control of state legislatures, which were also gerrymandered the same way as House of Representative seats. Southern states were essentially single-party states, dominated by the Democratic Party, and so could reliably produce a disproportionate number of seats for that party in the House.
This was done by two general ways. First, urban districts, which leaned more strongly towards the Workers Party in many states usually had considerably more residents, diluting their vote. Since there were more rural and suburban districts, the Republican Party had a disproportionate number of seats.
In South, there was the additional tools of voter disenfranchisement, which kept large numbers of blacks and poor whites from even being able to vote at all. But the system couldn’t last forever under the strain.
Additionally, after the fallout from the 1920 general election, states began changing how they selected electors to the Electoral College, who selected the president. Prior to 1924, nearly all states had their electors chosen in a slate. Whichever candidate won the state’s popular vote got all of the state’s electors. This had been criticized by Progressives as grossly disproportionate and unfair.
The compromise reached in the 1920s was to have each elector be tied to a congressional district, along with two electors tied to the states vote (the Electoral College consisted of one elector for each member of the House of Representatives in each state, and a number of electors equal to the number of Senators). This naturally had to the bonus of tying electoral votes to gerrymandered congressional districts, helping maintain the Republican Party’s grip on the presidency.
When coalitions between the revolutionary Workers’ Party and the reformist Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party took control of a number of crucial state legislatures in the 1930 election year, they gained a considerable amount of control over the redistricting process. In other states, governments were forced to bow to general strikes protesting the gerrymandering, and adopt fairer redistricting. This would be crucial in ensuring that the large swing towards the Workers’ Party and the DFLP wasn’t totally impotent in the 1932 general election.
…A proliferation of would-be centrist, nationalist-populist, reactionary, quasi-fascist and fascist, as well as religious revivalist, Christian and alternative socialist, labor nationalist, and reformist as well as ultra-left party-sects and groups and figures proliferated. So did the expansion of American class-strugglist anarchism, particularly fresh from its class-renown radicalism, courage, and defiance of the state in the Biennio Rosso. The Spartacist paramilitaries, formed from veterans of the elite formations in the First World War, grew in strength considerably with the restart of the class war following Black Friday. Its anarcho-syndicalist sections particularly proliferated in the relative party-independence of Solidarity
…In his seminal work, The Class Anatomy of Fascism , Robert Paxton identifies several qualities of fascism. While his work was based on his study of the French collaborationist regime, Mussolini’s Italian Fascism, and German “National Socialism,” several groups began to adopt these qualities, what Paxton identifies in supplementary works as “failed fascisms”.
Firstly, the various ethnic-fascist solidarity groups, the quasi-authoritarian-nationalist, semi-Nazi-sympathizing (especially by 1930) German-American Bund, and the Italian Fascisti Americani in close sympathy with the National Fascist Party of Mussolini’s Italy. For the most part, these groups were relatively weak compared with the other fascists on the American far-right, but they made up with their limited numbers with a strong level of fanaticism, tight organization, and a higher propensity to violence.
Their presence was very common in ethnic neighborhoods, and they were constantly engaged in a sort of gang-warfare with both the Spartacus League as was as the communist affiliated Jewish-American Labor Bund. They were often sustained by patronage from large conglomerates and wealthy sympathizers, who used them as hired muscle against labor groups.
There was Father Rev. Coughlin’s predominantly-Irish (though with some significant exceptions) Unity Party. Though often considered an ethnic fascism, the Coughlinites styled themselves as a more general fascism, as American as apple pie. The Unity Party developed a rhetoric and propaganda along the lines of the British Union of Fascists, presenting itself as a strong, nationalist antidote to the twin evils of capitalist excess and communist revolution.
Finally, there were the auxiliary fascisms, who were largely controlled by state groups and tended to provide muscle to whatever right-wing cause du jour was important. Chief among these was the American Legion, chartered by the Republican post-war Majority Government. Styling itself as a veteran’s association similar to the Slavers’ War’s Grand Army of the Republic, in practice they were a non-sectarian far-right muscle group, and derisively nicknamed “the American Stahlhelm,” by left-wing groups.
A Velvet Revolution: The Campaign of the Workers’ Communist Party
The last pre-revolution party congress began on 29 April 1932. On that rainy spring day, delegates from across the United States gathered in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. As one of the few venues large enough to host the convention, this brought the party’s organizers into very capitalist business negotiations with the Garden’s very conservative owners. Only after lengthy negotiations, and due to the fact that the Depression had gutted the Garden’s business, was the venue secured for a reasonable rate.
The exercise of mass party democracy had overwhelmed the efforts of the “Big Names” to really control the agenda. 1928’s party congress had been subdued, almost bourgeois. But in the intervening four years, where workers had endured Depression conditions even before the stock markets went tumbling down, no one was left with much desire to remain respectable.
Gone were the suits and ties. The centrists and rightists in the party locals had been sternly rebuked. The rank and file of the party now filled the delegate slate; ten thousand workers from all walks of life hopped trains, hitch-hiked or car-pooled their way to the Big Apple.
The slogan on the convention floor was quickly becoming “Strike while the iron is hot”. The mood was revolutionary, and many felt that the party’s victory in the November elections would only be one part of an all-out assault against capitalism. The party’s membership rolls had practically exploded in the past few years, and organizers had done an incredible job proselytizing. New locals from all across America, even in the Deep South, had been chartered and sent delegates to the convention.
Still, there were numerous issues to be settled. The slate of Congressional candidates had to be approved, the party platform adopted, and most importantly, the leadership candidates would have to be selected. The most important of which would be the man who would run for president; he may very well be the party’s first president, and if a peaceful, democratic changing of the guard was to occur, the right man for the job would need to be selected.
Numerous organizational fights filled the first days. The credentials committee was waylaid by a fierce row over delegates sent by the recently reabsorbed locals of the former Independent Socialist Labor Party. Haywood, the fiery national chairman of the party-affiliated Solidarity trade union federation, led a campaign to exclude key members from the “social fascist” grouping from taking part in the convention, though his own private letters reveal that this tactic was less earnest and more a bid to stall for time to ensure that all the members of his ultra-left faction would arrive for the convention. Nevertheless, there was a real anxiety about letting even left social democrats of the Vienna International into a revolutionary workers’ party.
The real business did not begin until the morning of 5 May. The various factions were well organized by this time, and the few unaffiliated delegates had been gobbled up into one camp or another. The first real debate was over the party’s stance going into the election. The ultra-left sought to immediately begin a transition to a government of workers’ councils, focusing all of the party’s efforts leading up to and after the election on imminent social revolution. They submitted a draft for the party programme that rejected any pretence to a minimal programme.
The maximalist programme would totally smash the existing state. Within this transitory state, the soviet councils would take direct control of production. Class property in all forms would be abolished and whatever was left of the state, if you could even call it that after they were done with it, would be the provision of an extensive cradle-to-the-grave welfare state.
A major bloc from the centre, to many’s surprise, had shifted into a maximalist left camp, and endorsed much of the revolutionary confrontation rhetoric coming out of Haywood, Mattick and Marcantonio’s camp. John Reed, whose own revolutionary credentials were impeccable, gave a two hour speech outlining a maximalist approach, though more “tempered” than the ultra position, and making more concessions to syndicalism. Though the electoral victory would primarily be a shield to the real revolutionary thrust in the streets, the maximalist vision ended by quoting Abraham Lincoln: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
In effect, the left chose a careful balance between revolutionary practice and reconciliation.They united around a set of proven leaders: Reed the charismatic leader, Upton Sinclair the elder statesmen, Haim Kantorovich the theoretician, and William Z. Foster the pragmatic enforcer.
The centre, Moscow’s favorite and reeling from the continued rebuke of total adherence to Comintern general doctrine, took a much more passive role in the convention. The group’s former leader, the retired General Secretary C.E. Ruthenberg, had recently been forced into resignation from the Politburo for being Stalin’s errand boy, and though the centre still in theory held the national leadership through Earl Browder, in practice they had been heavily compromised.
The centre adopted, with modifications, the left’s call for a “united front” of all working-class political groups in the upcoming political contests. With muted protest from the ultra-left, the party established an electoral grouping called “the Popular Front” in preparation for the November elections. Though European leftists would adopt the nomenclature later, in practice these later popular fronts had very different internal dynamics. The European fronts were largely defensive anti-fascist coalitions, composed of left-liberals, social democrats, and socialists/communists, and in practice the revolutionary parties held a junior role, and were often excluded from major decision-making.
The American Popular Front in 1932, however, placed the revolutionary workers’ party in a commanding role. The reformists of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party joined a junior role, as did the various Non-Partisan Leagues in some of the states. The Popular Front would run a single presidential ticket, and organize a slate of legislative and gubernatorial candidates to maximize the potential control of the US Congress and of the state governments.
With this in mind, the party would compromise. In the balloting for the Presidential nomination, the obvious candidates (Haywood, Sinclair, Browder) were pushed to the wayside by the party whips, and the dark-horse candidacy of Norman Thomas came out with a strong majority on the seventh ballot.
Norman Thomas was an atypical party member. As a Presbyterian minister, he stood out immensely in a mass party where even the rank and file were increasingly professing atheism (whatever their private thoughts on God were). Thomas was also an atypical Marxist (or not a Marxist at all, as his opponents accused), turning less to scientific socialism for inspiration than the potential revolutionary humanism of Marx’s early writings and the great promises of the early, heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution. He sought inclusivity, avoiding the bitterness of factional debates in favor of a common revolutionary program that could appeal even to social democrats and disaffected liberals.
In that sense, he was the perfect man to rally behind, a veritable second coming of the late Grandfather Debs, and someone who friend and foe alike could agree was absolutely earnest in professing a belief in universal Christian love of neighbor and foe alike.
A revolution with Thomas at the head would be the perfect campaign of American exceptionalism, a velvet revolution that succeeded through love and compassion, accomplished at the ballot box and negotiation table, not at the barricades and battlefields.
That moment of unity started to sour quite early after the triumphant end of the national convention. Everyone did some sobering up, and returned to advancing their factional agendas, though at a clearly reduced pace and visibility. The right and center quietly reached across the aisle to the Republicans and Democrats who were increasingly sure of an incredible shellacking at the polls that there would be a place for them in the brave new world of socialism. The left soured at their increasing loss of control over the party’s Congressional caucus, and sought to prepare an eventual revolt of the backbenchers should the new revolutionary government make too many compromises, and the ultra-left made preparations for direct action in the face of a reactionary counterattack they were sure would come.
The Centre Cannot Hold: The Republican Presidential Campaign
Journalist Edward R. Murrow described the 1932 Republican National Convention as “Rats fighting over the command of a sinking ship.” Murrow, who covered the event as a young intern, had the clear vision of hindsight. While the convention was undoubtedly fractious, venal, corrupt and fratricidal, it was also stubbornly out of touch.
The majority of Republican delegates at the convention were part of the faithful core of old America; older privileged whites more concerned with the appearance of decorum than justice, true believers in the virtue of free enterprise and the ill-defined “American way”. Many still expressed doubt and dumbfoundedness that the ongoing Great Depression was as bad as the reports claimed. They blamed immigrants, foreign agitators, communist fifth columnists. Anything but the system itself.
Dissident voices were ostracised as defeatists. The strongest challenge to the incumbent Herbert Hoover didn’t come from Republicans incensed by the mismanagement of the economy, but rather from the increasingly reactionary Business Republicans who believed that Hoover was too soft on communism.
Hoover failed to secure a majority on the first ballot. Many state delegations, particularly those that came from state conventions rather than primaries, had arrived unpledged and voted for a number of small spoiler candidates to force either of the two front-runners to court them. The challenger, Congressman Hamilton Fish III had become a national celebrity among the middle class for his attacks on perceived communist infiltration, which turned up genuine communists less often than collateral damage.
The debates were sour. Hoover took great umbrage at Fish’s courting of antisemitism and entryism by far right groups such as the Silver Legion, the American Legion, the Unity Party or the various ethnic fascist groups. Fish countered by critiquing the president for his failed legislative initiatives, such as his failed attempt to reduce federal outlays by privatising the U.S. Railway Administration. Even at giveaway prices the struggling rail corporations could not assume the cost of maintaining the physical rail infrastructure itself, and the resulting scandal was a major public relations blow for Hoover.
It was ultimately Fish’s intransigence on federal relief programmes as a moral hazard that did in his candidacy. Hoover and the majority of the Republican Party were coming around to countercyclical policy, if only too little and too late. Hoover had previously tried to maintain a working relationship with the House of Representatives by focusing on balanced budgets and “reducing waste”, and promoting state level relief efforts by. But by Summer 1932, most of the states were bankrupt, and the conventional wisdom about the sources of financial panics and the remedial strategies had been refuted.
Thus on the fourth ballot Hoover clinched the Republican nomination. This was made possible largely by a lack of strong challengers. Many would-be Republican prominents, such as the Progressive wing’s Theodore Roosevelt III4 or the ever mercurial Robert Taft, made no serious moves against Hoover, believing that win-or-lose the nomination would be a poisoned chalice.
The left-flank of Leonard Wood’s highly successful political coalition had become unmoored by the Great Depression. As the crisis deepened in 1931, the quasi-social democratic Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party broke off national cooperation with Republican Party, leaving Hoover with a minority government dependent on votes from the conservative Democratic Party in the South.
The conventional wisdom in the campaign was that the Republican Party would be unlikely to pick up seats. Many contented themselves with the thought of a silent majority in the country as perturbed by the chaos and revolution in the streets as they were, who’d diligently turn up the polls to shore up the centre.
The Republican Party had commissioned a nation-wide comprehensive poll of American voters, the first one of its kind, to identify likely trouble spots and to help guide the campaign. Run by Ivy League university staff and students, the poll sampled people in the states utilising motor vehicle registration to avoid the usual problem of self-reporting bias. Voters would then be contacted by phone if available, or in person.
The results were made available to Hoover’s campaign in late July. The polling predicted a reduced plurality in the House and Senate, but otherwise a good margin of favorability for Hoover over Thomas. Polling also suggested that voters cared most strongly about law and order issues, the protection of private property, and core American values. Based on this data, Hoover and his allies made an aggressive campaign centred on these issues. Radio addresses and newspaper propaganda touted the strength of the traditional American way of life and values. Hoover similarly defended the suppression of the Bonus Marchers based on law and order appeals.
But there was a fatal flaw built into this research. The predicted vote totals were compared to the actual vote totals of the last general election four years earlier, and not effective demographic data or other polls. Since it passed this basic sanity check, there was very little focus placed on methodology and sampling techniques, which were still in their infancy.
The core sampling strategy using motor vehicle registration biased the sample towards wealthier voters, who would naturally be more conservative. There were attempts to correct this, but they were intrinsically doomed to failure, and in practice further compromised by being based on pre-Depression data on motor vehicle ownership. Many working class people who had owned cars had stress sold them, or had them repossessed. This sample was further complicated by the overreliance on telephones to poll voters, which saved labor and expense, but further overselected wealthier voters.
The illusion of legitimacy offered by the polling led the the Republican Party leadership to charge headlong into an unpopular strategy, heedless of the dangers. Contrary voices were once again suppressed as defeatists. Even the protests of party workers and volunteers from the College Republicans campaigning in working class neighborhoods were ignored, some of whom were physically assaulted for their efforts.
The Republicans were always going to lose the election; the question to be asked, with the benefit of hindsight, was a matter of how badly they were going to be humiliated. But the certainty offered by polling and conventional wisdom was far more insidious. The stunning results on election day generated shock and despair. The business community and the political leadership had neither expected nor prepared for defeat.
The disbelief quickly turned to anger, as a narrative of a stolen election quickly spread.
Iconoclast: Huey Long’s Insurgency in the Democratic Party
Since being hunted to extinction outside the South, the Democratic Party had been embattled on its home turf. The left-splinter of the DFL had taken taken the party’s apparatus in the Midwest, and had cooperated with the party of Lincoln to crack the “Solid South”. Simultaneously, the masses of poor blacks and whites were being mobilised by communists against the systems of peonage that supported the planter aristocracy.
The 1920s had been tumultuous and bloody. The Great Depression brought no respite. In the state legislatures, the Democratic Party was holding on by a thread after the 1930 cycle of midterm elections. The civil rights movement had destroyed the terroristic elements of the regime, and after the Democratic Party had been forced to repudiate the KKK and turn the state police against them, the spectre of white robes had faded.
With the terrorist violence gone, the communist labor organizers had broken the back of the sharecropping system. The planter estates went bankrupt one by one as commodity prices continued to decline. The tenant farmers became squatters on what was supposed to be the bank’s land, and both parties were stuck at an impasse.
The party of Andrew Jackson was a pillar in the South. And going into the national convention, the Democratic Party became embroiled in a battle over the future of that party. Three forces jockied for position. The representatives of Herbert Hoover wished to forge a united front against the communists in national elections. The old guard of the party united around the candidacy of John Nance Garner, adopting a nationalistic conservative platform based on bedrock elements of American mythology: God, free enterprise, and hard work. And finally, the insurgency of Huey Long, who promised immediate relief from the economic malaise with public works, farm relief, and wealth redistribution.
Given the fact that the Democratic Party was only on the ballot in 13 states and was mathematically impossible for them to win, it is easy to dismiss this as delusions of grandeur. But the battle, like everything in the party in this era, was more about the direction that the Southern states would take. The presidential campaign was a mechanism to unite the party behind the sectional interests of the South, and both Long and Garner had the same game plan: to win enough electoral votes in the general to deny a majority to any other candidate, and thus force the election to the Congress, where they could play kingmaker and extract concessions.
As Governor of Louisiana, Long had been a virtual despot. Gaining legislative support from the DFL to crowbar the rest of the Louisiana Democratic Party in line, Long had vindictively purged the state government of political opponents, and had coerced state employees to contribute to his political war chest. He dispensed patronage to allies and parishes that had supported him, and denied them to enemies. All this and more came up in the convention battle.
But with the reds marching towards revolution, and Long having a proven track record in combating the growth of the Workers’ Party in Louisiana, Long managed to turn corruption into a positive trait. Long spoke forcefully about finding a third way between socialist upheaval and capitalist decadence. His campaign slogan of “Share Our Wealth” had appealed strongly to the embattled middle class in the South.
As the first vote began, Garner was confident in victory. But when the delegates votes were tallied, Long achieved a majority on the first ballot. Pandemonium erupted; shouting and fistfights broke out as accusations of fraud, ballot-box stuffing, and pays offs were made. Long deftly chose to make peace with his enemies afterwards, including concessions with his running mate as well as the Congressional leadership.
On the campaign trail, Long toured the South in person, speaking to large crowds. He whipped congressional candidates into playing ball, and event went as far as promising cabinet positions in an eventual coalition government. Entreaties from the Republicans to drop out of the race were rebuffed. In one interview, when pressed on the fears that the communists might take power in the election, Long stated if the American people voted for socialism, then he’d be happy to work with the Workers’ Party for the good of the American people, and cracked a joke about what cabinet position he’d take.
Blood and Soil: The Far Right
America’s homegrown reactionaries had been eradicated in the tumult of the Great War and the struggle to complete the liberal republic. A new breed of reactionary grew in this vacuum, one that lived vicariously through the example of European fascism.
The most prominent of these groups is the Silver Legion of William Dudley Pelley. Pelley espoused the mystical and the romantic. Seven Minutes in Eternity talked about out of body experiences, reincarnation and eternal recurrence in between sections about applying the lessons of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism to the United States.
Pelley adopted the notion of national-socialism enthusiastically. The nation was an organic community, united by shared culture and kinship. And unlike Europeans, who divided their race into tribes based on historic strife, in the melting pot of the United States the primordial Aryan race was reconstituting itself through interbreeding and cultural mixing.
Drawing upon a cursory reading of the new anthropological study of the Indo-European peoples, Pelley’s ideology espoused racialism cloaked in mysticism and pseudo-Darwinism. The Aryan peoples had made Europe their home, but had been contaminated by inferior stock in the process. An unconscious revulsion towards this had caused the cream of the European people to leave for greener pastures. Here in the New World, they’d purged their weakness through hybrid vigor, mixing the various tribes of the Aryans while minimising the contagion.
The Jews were the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and through the agent of Bolshevism they worked to undermine the Aryan race through miscegenation, sex perversion5, feminism and philosophy. At its most extreme, Pelley’s national-socialism held pleasure itself in disdain. Anything that distracted from the spiritual essence and caused man to revel in his animal nature in the material world was suspect, from food that was too delicious to cleanliness. Pelley’s manifesto exalted hatred towards racial and political enemies. And in the United States, this meant blacks and Native Americans first and foremost.
Pelley’s movement was small, but found a growing source among the ailing petit-bourgeoisie as the country sank further into the Depression. But his movement was far behind the European movements that inspired him. In 1932, that meant overtures of cooperation with the Republican right, including supporting Fish’s campaign for president.
When that turned out to be a bust, Pelley reassembled the America First coalition, hoping to use the election as a propaganda tool. In his nationwide campaign, he attracted a number of new far right groups into his coalition, as well as the usual cluster of defunct parties and unused ballot lines.
The Unity Party was a predominantly Irish-American party, loosely led by the unorthodox priest Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin’s group had been founded in 1928 initially to advocate for old-age pensions and Catholic distributist principles. As economic conditions worsened, and working class radicalism resumed the tempo of the Red Summer, Coughlin and the Unity Party quickly turned to the reactionary right. Modeling its programme increasingly off the Italian National Fascist Party, the Unity Party were the natural lieutenants in the America First coalition.
The Unity Party had a broader appeal than the more clearly “ethnic fascisms” that were growing during the Great Depression. This appeal crossed over into the Republican Party, attracting a number of sympathisers from the industrialists and professional political apparatus.
If Pelley considered Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith allies, if overly ambitious, he considered the third foundation of the KKK, styled as the “Revenant Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” as useful idiots.
The KKK had the largest roots of any of the American fascisms, growing out of the ashes of a defunct organisation. But it was also the one that was most unfocused and reactive. The KKK provided muscle and little else. They were a source of embarrassment during the America First campaign, first by getting involved in street scuffles and rural battles with the Spartacus League and the various Red Army Fractions in the South, and worse, by often losing.
More ancillary were the ethnic fascisms: the German-American Bund and the Fascisti Americani, both of whom were dubious allies. In particular, the German-American Bund became more restless following Hitler’s victory in the July 1932 elections, and began adventurist talk of establishing a “National Socialist German Workers Party in America”.
Notably, while the Silver Legion gained the support of auxiliary groups like the far-right veterans’ group the American Legion, Pelley lost the support of his largest ballot line in the 1932 election. The Prohibition Party declined to support Pelley, believing him to be insufficiently opposed to the devil drink, and instead nominated their own candidates.
The Sixteenth Charade: The Prohibition Party
Promoting an odd blend of progressivism with busy body moralising, the Prohibition Party was the eternal dark horse in American politics, never quite achieving major success in federal politics but always insisting on running anyway. To prevent a repeat of 1928, the party had instituted several new rules, including preventing candidates from running for the Prohibition platform and another simultaneously.
William Varney, who had attempted to run against Pelley in 1928 and later attempted his own run on a separate “Law and Order” ticket, was still blamed for allowing Pelley to emerge victorious, so he graciously bowed out, instead opting instead to run for the mayorship of Rockville Centre, New York. In his place was Don Keyhote*, an eccentric pharmacist from Terre Haute, Indiana, who had been a strong prohibitionist since almost dying from alcohol poisoning in 1919, as well as a critic of the Klan in his home state, making him a perfect antidote to Pelley.
The sun had been setting on the Prohibition cause in recent years. While a number of states in the South had adopted temperance tinged in racist overtones, the cause had faltered when the long desired Temperance Amendment failed in Congress.
Keyhote ran an aggressive campaign on a shoestring budget, blaming the country’s economic woes on intemperance, but also adopting a fairly progressive platform with a mixture of populist and social democratic reforms, as well as the ever popular lost causes of Henry George’s Land Value Tax and the National Dividend from the Social Credit movement.
1932 US General Election
Presidential
Full results
| Presidential Candidate | Party | Home State | Pop vote | pct | Electoral vote | VP Candidate | Home State |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Norman Thomas | Workers’ Party | Ohio | 19,765,101 | 42.92% | Upton Sinclair | New York | |
| Democratic-Farmer-Labor | 6,366,000 | 13.82% | |||||
| Total | Popular Front | 26,131,101 | 56.74% | 398 | |||
| Herbert Hoover | Republican | Massachusetts | 10,454,321 | 22.70% | 81 | Charles Curtis | Kansas |
| Huey Long | Democratic | Louisiana | 7,013,491 | 15.23% | 88 | Henry W. Jones Sr. | New Jersey |
| William Pelley | America First | Massachussets | 2,154,786 | 4.68% | |||
| Don Keyhotay | Prohibition | Indiana | 300,785 | 0.65% | Sam Chopanza | Connecticut | |
| Total | 46,054,484 | 100.00% | 567 | ||||
| Needed to Win | 284 |
US House of Representatives, 67th Congress
| Party | Leader | Home State | Seats | Last | Net | Pct. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republican | Nicholas Longworth | Ohio | 79 | 200 | -121 | 16.77% |
| Workers’ Party | Max Bedacht | Illinois | 237 | 125 | 112 | 50.32% |
| Democratic | John Nance Garner | Texas | 56 | 65 | -9 | 11.89% |
| Democratic-Farmer-Labor | Floyd Olson | Missouri | 99 | 41 | 58 | 21.02% |
| Independents | 4 | -4 | 0.00% | |||
| Total | 471 | 100.00% | ||||
| Needed to Win | 236 |
US Senate
| Party | Seats | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Republican | 28 | -9 |
| Democratic | 24 | -2 |
| Workers’ Party | 30 | 9 |
| DFL | 14 | 2 |
| Total | 96 |
[1] A schematic concept from Antonio Gramsci distinguishing the actual adjoining of active class war in the heat of a revolutionary situation with the long-term ‘party-building’ and ‘strategy of patience’ during relative class peace, the “war of position.”
[2] The Executive Committee of the Communist International, the permanent standing administrative body in between World Congresses, and the official mechanism through which the Soviet state directed the world communist movement in this period.
[3] This is an analogue to Salvador Allende, leader of the Unidad Popular and President in Chile, who actually ironically appointed Pinochet as Chief of Staff of the Army, and sought to avoid the arming of workers, prior to the putsch by his own appointee resulting in his death.
[4] He is more commonly known as Theodore Roosevelt Jr. IOTL, but because his father was never president ITTL, the normal suffix convention applies.
[5] Literally everything that isn’t sex for the purposes of procreation.
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