In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE TEXAS SOCIALIST PARTY Peter H. Buckingham Thousands of Texans turned to the Socialist Party during the first two decades of the twentieth century in the hope of attaining a brighter future. Under the leadership of former Populists, the Socialist movement grew slowly at first. The party sponsored political rallies and educational campaigns, and further broadened its appeal through Socialist encampments. Irish-born “Red Tom” Hickey reorganized the Lone Star Socialists, publishing a highly effective weekly newspaper, The Rebel. Farmers and workers, united under the banner of the Texas Socialist Party, challenged the Republicans as the second party in the state. Brave opposition to the U.S. entry into World War I, the failure to break the Texan fealty to the Democratic Party, and internal schisms combined to wreck the movement in short order after it had barely begun the process of setting down political grass roots. While the great economic crisis of the middle 1890s passed eventually , life did not improve for ever-increasing numbers of landless farmers, trapped in a nightmare of debt and poverty. Some of the former Populists, including William E. Farmer, Jake and Lee Rhodes, and G. B. Harris, became interested in the single tax idea of Henry George and the Americanized socialism of J. A. Wayland, who argued in the pages of his newspaper Appeal to Reason that public operation and control of the trusts (including corporate agriculture) and continued private holdings by small farmers would bring prosperity to the countryside . William Farmer broke with the Populists in 1898 to found an independent Socialist Party in Texas and a party newspaper, Social The Texas Socialist Party 75 Economist. The next year, the executive board of the fledgling Social Democratic Party (sdp), led by labor leader Eugene V. Debs (another recent convert to socialism) met with Farmer to merge their organizations .1 The Social Democracy Red Book exclaimed in 1900, “No man living will have a better right to rejoice at the overthrow of capitalism which is sure to come, than comrade W. E. Farmer, and we hope he may be one of the elect who will be permitted to live to see this grand transformation. His address is Bonham, Texas.”2 The Social Democratic Party competed for a short time with Texas affiliates of the Socialist Labor Party (slp), dominated from New York by the doctrinaire Marxist, Daniel DeLeon. The slp state platform of 1900 denounced their rivals as “the residuary legatee of moribund Populism” and pledged to overthrow capitalism in favor of a cooperative commonwealth.3 The document had nothing to offer to farmers except that the revolution would abolish privately held land. The sdp endorsed the national candidacy of Eugene Debs for president and the basic doctrine of international socialism: “ownership of the means of production and distribution.” Immediate demands included abolition of child labor where it interfered with education, a ban on women and children in unhealthy occupations, government health-and-safety inspections of workplaces, an eight-hour day for work, and measures to allow the people to initiate laws. There was to be no fusion with capitalist or middle-class political parties, a strategy that had doomed the Populists in 1896. Every support would be given to any and all labor unions.4 The sdp proved to be an intermediate step for the many former Populists in their shift to a more permanent and broad-based organization , the Socialist Party of America (sp), a national organization founded in 1901 out of the sdp and the “kangaroos” (critics of DeLeon) of the slp. “Battling Bill” Farmer chaired the state executive committee and wrote the founding platform in 1902, which reaffirmed the most basic problem to be faced as “the triune curse—interest, profit, and rent.” The Socialists asserted that two-thirds of the people were tenants in a vast area where wealthy corporations controlled much of the land. The working class was more poorly protected than any other state in the union and simply had to be freed from economic slavery. Progressive trust busting had no relevance for the new party. It also welcomed the endorsement of the American Labor Union, an arm of the militant Western Federation of Miners.5 In the early days of the sp, the national office could not spare enough authorized organizers to blanket Texas and the neighboring Twin Territories (Indian and Oklahoma Territories), so former Populists , sympathetic preachers, and even traveling salesmen carried the [18.217.203.172] Project MUSE (2024...

Share