Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898–1920 by Frederick A. Barkey (review)

It is a rare event when an academic press publishes an unrevised doctoral dissertation in history, and even more extraordinary when that dissertation is more than four decades old. Yet this is exactly what the University of West Virginia Press has done with Frederick A. Barkey’s influential work, completed under the late David Montgomery at the University of Pittsburgh in 1971. Barkey’s chronicle of the rise and fall of West Virginia socialism is well known among some specialists of labor and radicalism and, together with James R. Green’s Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (1978), helped pioneer statewide and regional studies of the Socialist Party of America. Only now, however, is it available to a wider readership. The publication of Working Class Radicals is therefore a welcome and important addition to the corpus of books on American labor and radicalism but one that is also very much marked as a product of the era in which it was written.

One unique contribution of the manuscript is its utilization of now-unreproducible oral histories conducted by Barkey in the late 1960s, when he interviewed more than one hundred veterans of West Virginia’s socialist movement and members of their families. The inclusion of this research alone is of inestimable value. Bolstered by a thorough reading of the regional and national English-language Socialist Party press, it provides a solid foundation for Barkey’s narrative of the genesis and growth of West Virginia socialism and socialists’ strength within the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) and the State Federation of Labor (which in 1914 elected a socialist president) during an era of intense industrial conflict.

As Barkey sums up in a 2011 interview included at the close of the book, “For most of the period I studied, it was acceptable to be a Socialist, at least in labor circles” (175). Enjoying success among small farmers, skilled craftspeople, and miners, by the Socialist Party’s heyday in 1912–15 it counted more than fifty branches and six newspapers statewide (60, 122). Some West Virginia counties gave more than ten percent of their votes to Socialist Party candidates in the congressional elections of 1912 and 1914, and in some precincts the Socialist vote accounted for 40 or even 50 percent of the total. Socialist Party candidates were also triumphant in no fewer than twelve mayoral races between 1910 and 1915 and constituted major—and at times controlling—blocs within UMW locals and Trades and Labor Assemblies. These and other useful statistical breakdowns are presented in the book’s second major contribution: the collection of tables in its appendixes, culled from Barkey’s careful collation of data from interviews, voter returns, and union records (177–205). Researchers will especially appreciate the manner in which these have been reformatted for publication in an easily readable and attractive layout.

For Barkey, the most important of these tables is his compilation of a “Socialist Leader Sample” of eighty Socialist Party members who “had demonstrated leadership by being either candidates for important political offices or by holding positions in state Socialist organizations” and for whom biographical details were available (61, 177–82). A prosographical analysis of these men (and they are all men; aside from Mother Jones, female activists are mentioned exactly once in the entire book) provides a somewhat surprising portrait: “They were more native and more rural in origin than their non-radical contemporaries . . . [and] were better educated” (76–77). They were also overwhelmingly skilled craftspeople and, intriguingly, 70 percent belonged to Christian churches and most belonged to fraternal orders, including an extraordinary 45 percent who were members of the Order of the Redmen—a phenomenon that begs for further research (72–76). Based on these findings, Working Class Radicals presents West Virginia socialism as a thoroughly “American” doctrine, even going so far as to represent Abraham Lincoln as...