We have been too long deluded by those who live in ease and grow rich by our productions, and have been blindly led to support men for office whose interest in the present state of society is directly opposed to our own. All our legislators and rulers are nominated by the accumulating class and controlled by their opinions. We have too long been deceived by designing men of both political parties … How long, my fellow workingmen, will we allow ourselves to be deceived? So spoke William Heighton in an address to workers at a Universalist Church in Philadelphia in 1827. Heighton, a labor journalist and organizer, was one of the founders of the Workingman’s Party of Philadelphia in 1829, when Karl Marx was 10 years old and the United States was fast becoming the first nation in modern history to call itself a democracy. Four years earlier, Robert Owen, the English capitalist who championed the building of industrial cooperatives to end unemployment and poverty (what Marx and Engels would later call utopian socialism) had addressed a joint session of Congress at which he discussed his ideas, which were generally praised in the United States.

But here the contradictions begin to mount. While the slaveholder and Indian-killer president, Andrew Jackson, associated himself with the concept of democracy and founded the modern Democratic Party, the first labor parties in history were established in New York, Newark, New Jersey and Philadelphia. Also, various cooperative communities, from Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana to Brook Farm in Massachusetts and the North American Phalanx (modeled after the theories of the great French utopian socialist, Charles Fourier) in Red Bank, New Jersey, came into existence.

The early labor parties faltered as the Whigs and Democrats stole some of their issues and literally bought out many of their leaders and the cooperative communities failed to sustain themselves in a hostile capitalist environment. Still, the United States was a nation where socialist ideas and organizations often merged with radical social movements advocating redistribution of public lands, the abolition of slavery, and equal rights for women. By the 1850s, conservatives in Congress, particularly Southern slave holders, often denounced “free schools, abolitionism, socialism, and agrarianism” (public land redistribution) in the same breath as radical imports from Europe and England that would undermine “American freedom.”

1848, the year of failed European liberal revolutions and the slaveholder-inspired US conquest of Mexico, was also the year that Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Many working-class activists, particularly Germans, fleeing the defeats of the revolutions, brought proletarian or scientific socialism (the socialism of the Communist Manifesto that Marx and Engels were in the process of developing) to the United States, along with labor anarchism, the labor-based Chartist movement of the British isles and other revolutionary currents. Friedrich Sorge, a supporter and correspondent of Marx and Engels, helped introduce Marxism to the US. Joseph Weydemeyer, another supporter of proletarian socialism, became a champion of anti-slavery and rose to the rank of general during the Civil War. These immigrants were overwhelmingly anti-slavery and challenged racism in the working class, where demagogues often portrayed abolitionists as wealthy dilettantes and slaves as better cared for than white workers (and potential competitors after freedom).

The Civil War saw the victory of the industrial capitalist class and the rapid development of an industrial capitalist system, which meant a large class of urban wage laborers struggling for existence in the face of a constantly shifting “labor market” highlighted by periodic depressions.

But working-class movements responded to the rise of industrial capitalism. Formed initially as a semi-secret society because of the blacklisting and employer violence, the Knights of Labor organized inclusive unions of workers, Black and white, male and female, and experimented with producer cooperatives and other alternatives to capitalism rooted in the utopian socialist tradition in the 1870s and 1880s. Meanwhile, immigrant workers conversant with both Marxism and the European socialist labor movement founded the Federated Order of Trade and Labor Unions, which came to be known by 1885 as the American Federation of Labor (AFL). At the same time German immigrants led in establishing the Socialist Labor Party, the first Marxist political party in US history.

After the Civil War, the contradictions within society could be seen most dramatically in the life of Albert Parsons. Born in Alabama in 1848 into a slaveholder family, Parsons was orphaned, raised by a slave woman and served in the Confederate Army. Captured by union troops, Parsons was influenced by abolitionists and became a radical Republican and the editor of a radical journal, The Spectator, advocating racial equality in Texas. In 1873, Parsons, now a socialist, escaped KKK terror in Texas and moved with his wife Lucy (a non-white woman of African American, Native American and Mexican American background) to Chicago. There he became a printer, a labor organizer and an ardent socialist speaker and writer, belonging at various times to the Socialist Labor Party and the International Working Peoples Association (IWPA) a labor anarchist group demonized by the capitalist press in the 1880s.

The Knights of Labor, the IWPA and the AFL organized campaigns and strikes in support of the eight-hour day. After police killed four workers at a solidarity rally for striking workers at the McCormick Harvester Works on May 3, Parsons joined with other labor leaders to organize a protest at Haymarket Square, at which more than 3,000 workers attended. As the rally was ending, the police marched on the protesters demanding they disperse. A bomb was thrown and eight people were killed and dozens injured in the ensuing riot.

Although a number of workers identified an agent provocateur as the bomb thrower, the police quickly released him and arrested eight leaders of the demonstration (most of whom had left the area at the time that the bomb was thrown). While he initially went into hiding, Parsons turned himself in voluntarily to stand with his comrades.

In a crudely fixed trial that drew international protests from labor and socialist organizations and many liberals, all eight were convicted. Parsons and three others were hanged in 1887. Subsequently, members of the socialist and labor movements met in Paris in 1889 to reconstitute the international movement. They chose May 1, 1890 as a day of protest and struggle for the eight-hour day and workers rights, in honor of the 1886 strikes and the Haymarket Martyrs. Out of these demonstrations emerged the Second International and May Day as the international holiday of the workers’ movement.

Lucy Parsons, after failing to save her husband in 1887, became a crusader against lynching in the 1890s, and a partisan of many labor and working-class struggles. In her later years, she lived in Los Angeles and was active in CPUSA campaigns. When she died in 1941, 54 years after her husband, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, in the tradition of the Chicago police, raided her home to seize documents.

In the aftermath of Haymarket, people were drawn to various strands of the socialist movement. A Christian socialist movement dedicated to principles of pacifism, support for workers’ rights and the development of socialism through education and reason developed. (In Europe, “Christian Socialism” was associated with anti-Marxism, and racist anti-Semitism, what Marxists called “the socialism of fools,” but this was never true in the US.) Lawrence Gronlund, who had been active in the great railroad strike of 1877, disseminated socialist ideas in his widely read book, The Cooperative Commonwealth.

The prominent novelist William Dean Howells wrote a powerful Christian Socialist novel, Hazard of New Fortunes. Edward Bellamy, a non-Marxist socialist, published a utopian-socialist novel, Looking Backward, which contrasted a peaceful, productive and happy socialist society in Boston at the end of the 20th century with conditions of life at the end of the 19th century. Bellamy’s work became the center of a movement called “nationalism” (even though Bellamy used the term “industrial army”), and nationalist clubs discussing socialist ideas developed in middle-class circles in the early 1890s.

Bellamy’s brother, Francis, a minister and prominent socialist, wrote a school pledge, the pledge of allegiance in 1892, on the 400th anniversary of the Columbus expedition. In the Bellamy version, there was no mention of “under God,” and the pledge was much more of a personal statement: I pledge allegiance to my flag, and the Republic for which it stands, with liberty and justice for all.” In an early version, Bellamy, true to his socialist principles, had the pledge read, “with liberty, equality, and justice for all,” but removed equality as a compromise to keep school officials, who associated equality negatively with the rights of Blacks and women from eliminating the pledge entirely.

As the socialist movement took the form of mass parties in Europe in the 1890s, many European socialists, Friedrich Engels included, began to wonder why the United States, with its republican heritage, was lagging behind.

The answers were quite complex, but some could be highlighted in the experience of an American friend of Engels, Florence Kelley. An early “red diaper” baby, Kelley was the daughter of a very progressive capitalist, iron manufacturer, abolitionist and radical Republican Congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley. Studying in Switzerland in the 1880s, Florence Kelley became a Marxist and a personal friend of Friedrich Engels. Returning to New York, Kelley married a socialist immigrant doctor, had three children and became active in the Socialist Labor Party. In that party, she experienced outrageous sexist attitudes from the male leadership, including a contemptuous attitude toward her knowledge of Marxist theory. She was lectured on her understanding of Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in Manchester, a work that she had translated into English.

Kelley, who had come from a privileged bourgeois background and had achieved education that few women could have dreamed of, moved to Chicago and became active in social reform. She joined Jane Addams in the pioneering settlement house, Hull House. When John Peter Altgeld, a pro-labor reformer was elected governor of Illinois on the Democratic ticket in 1892, he appointed Kelley, whom he knew in progressive circles, as the state’s first factory commissioner. (Altgeld also enraged capitalists and won worker support by pardoning the three Haymarket prisoners who remained in jail). Subsequently, Altgeld and Kelley successfully enacted pioneering regulatory legislation that provided eight-hour day protections for women and child laborers (the abolition of child labor, which Kelley championed, was still half a century away).

Kelley remained active in a wide variety of groups, from the National Consumers League which she helped to found in 1899 to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which opposed World War I. She was also prominent in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society with such prominent cultural figures as Upton Sinclair and Jack London. She recruited Frances Perkins, later Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, to the socialist movement.

In her remarkable career and life, Kelley is remembered as an initiator of progressive reforms used to stabilize and humanize the existing capitalist system. Her friend, Frances Perkins, and others active in and/or influenced by the socialist movement, later hid that background as they became national figures – a pattern repeated subsequently by many prominent trade unionists and intellectuals. This produced a situation where many Americans became, in the phrase of historian William Appleman Williams, “socialists of the heart,” agreeing with and supporting many policies advanced by socialists and Communists. But, the fact that socialists and Communists operated largely through broad reformist organizations meant that relatively few Americans became, like their European counterparts, “socialists of the head,” developing the political and class consciousness that was necessary to establish mass socialist labor parties and trade-union movements.

In the 1890s, a variety of trade union activists, recent immigrants with socialist experiences in Europe, supporters of Bellamy’s nationalist clubs, former populists and Christian Socialists came together at the end of the 19th century to form a Socialist Party in line with the European mass socialist parties. Eugene Victor Debs, the most important figure associated with this transformation, was a trade-union activist who came to see that a mass socialist party rather than bread and butter trade unionism and/or reform coalitions and societies was necessary for the working class to advance.

Born of Alsatian French parents in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1855, Debs became a member and official of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman in Indiana. Initially a conservative business unionist, Debs regarded the workers in the National Railroad Strike of 1877 as anarchists and revolutionaries and did not participate in the campaign to save the Haymarket martyrs. However, he came to see by the end of the 1880s that large industrial unions were the only answers to the trusts. In this regard, he led the organization of the American Railway Union (ARU) and won a major strike against robber baron James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad in 1894. That year, Debs accepted the petition of factory workers in Pullman, Illinois for membership in the ARU. These workers were making Pullman sleeping cars, and were facing major wage cuts with no cuts in rents or prices in the company town in which they were compelled to live.

When Attorney General Richard Olney, a former chief attorney for the railroad owners General Managers Association, placed federal mails on trains with Pullman cars as a pretext to intervene with federal troops, the strike was broken and Debs was arrested. To add insult to injury he was tried and convicted of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which most people believed had been passed to fight “combinations in restraint of trade” (monopolies).

In the Woodstock jail, Debs read the Communist Manifesto and other socialist works and was visited by dissident Socialist Labor Party members seeking to build a more inclusive socialist party. By the turn of the century, these groups had formed the Socialist Party of America, which Debs would represent in presidential elections through the early 20th century, garnering six percent of the vote in 1912, as he toured the country, whistle-stopping on a train called the “Red Special.”

In the years before World War I, it appeared to many that the Socialist Party was well on its way to becoming a mass party. Those hopes were dashed by the sort of factionalism and theoretical weaknesses on key questions – in the US, the labor question and the “Negro question” – that beset larger European socialist parties. The massive red scare after World War I adversely affected the party’s growth.

World War I also produced the Russian socialist revolution and the establishment of a new kind of revolutionary party, the Communist Party. This party would take the struggle for socialism to higher levels by connecting that struggle to coordinated national and international campaigns against racism, militarism and imperialism.