“Radical” Progressives: The Wave of the Future 559“Radical” Progressives: The Wave of the Future
Some people espoused more radical views. The hard
times of the 1890s and the callous reactions of con-
servatives to the victims of that depression pushed
many toward Marxian socialism. In 1900 the labor
leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president on the
Socialist ticket. He polled fewer than 100,000 votes.
When he ran again in 1904 he got more than
400,000, and in later elections still more. Labor
leaders hoping to organize unskilled workers in
heavy industry were increasingly frustrated by the
craft orientation of the American Federation of
Labor, and some saw in socialism a way to win rank-
and-file backing.
In 1905 Debs, William “Big Bill” Haywood of
the Western Federation of Miners, Mary Harris
“Mother” Jones (a former organizer for the United
Mine Workers), Daniel De Leon of the Socialist
Labor party, and a few others organized a new union:
theIndustrial Workers of the World (IWW). The
IWW was openly anticapitalist. The preamble to its
constitution began: “The working class and the
employing class have nothing in common.”
But the IWW never attracted many ordinary
workers. Haywood, its most prominent leader, was
usually a general in search of an army. His forte was
attracting attention to spontaneous strikes by unor-
ganized workers, not the patient recruiting of work-
ers and the pursuit of practical goals. Shortly after
the founding of the IWW, he was charged with com-
plicity in the murder of an antiunion governor of
Idaho after an earlier strike but was acquitted. In
1912 he was closely involved in a bitter and, at
times, bloody strike of textile workers in Lawrence,
Massachusetts, which was settled with some benefit
to the strikers; he was also involved in a failed strike
the following winter and spring by silk workers in
Paterson, New Jersey.
Other “advanced” European ideas affected the
thinking and behavior of some important progressive
intellectuals. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theo-
ries attracted numbers of Americans, especially after
G. Stanley Hall invited Freud and some of his disci-
ples to lecture at Clark University in 1909. Not many
progressives actually read The Interpretation of
Dreamsor any of Freud’s other works, none of which
were translated into English before 1909, but many
picked up enough of the vocabulary of psychoanalysisIn 1900, Ashcan artist George Luks portrayed corporate monopolies and franchises as a monster preying on New York City.