This Day in Labor History: March 22, 1879

On March 22, 1879, the Socialist Labor Party held a giant celebration in Chicago to honor the Paris Commune. This moment is a good way to get into the history of early socialism in the United States and its transnational nature.

The Paris Commune was a pretty intense moment in working class history, no question. Paris workers took over the city in 1871 and held it for two months until the French military overwhelmed it was maximum violence. Probably 10,000 workers died in this violence. It was a coming of age moment for European radical socialism. It may have failed in the end, but if you wanted to show the working class both what could be done and just how over the top the forces of order would be in crushing it, the Paris Commune was it.

Now, in the United States especially, the Commune was seen with horror. Let’s be clear–there was nothing in the U.S. like the kind of worker organization that existed in France. Socialism was a concept was just being introduced to the nation’s workers. Moreover, Americans’ belief in individualism and the popularity of free labor ideology even among much of the working class–the idea that capitalism would work for those who worked hard–was really strong. Most of the early American working class movements were not radical at all by any standard. They just wanted to reset the playing field so this glorious system of capitalism would work as intended instead of concentration capital with a few rich people. So yeah, they were a little naive.

But this didn’t mean that for the forces of order–capital, newspaper editors, politicians, the military–the Paris Commune didn’t scare them. It terrified them. It wasn’t just that significant strikes would be compared to the Paris Commune with the intense desire to kill workers–like the Great Railroad Strike in 1877 that the government sent in the military to crush. It was that movement as unthreatening as the 1874 gathering of unemployed workers in New York who decided to march on City Hall to demand employment until they could work again needed to be crushed based on the Paris Commune. So the Tompkins Square Riot, which was really a riot of violent cops, not workers, was justified because if you allowed workers to gather, march, and demand jobs, well you might as well just usher the Paris Commune into the United States.

But, there were some radical socialist workers and even in this atmosphere of repression, they celebrated the Paris Commune and what they saw as its achievements. It was the same in England. French exiles were often part of this–a lot of communards naturally got out and pushing those ideas and what was and what could have been became both a way to spread socialism and to remain connected to French radicalism. In 1876, a group of socialists founded the Socialist Labor Party, the first really organized socialist workers organization in American history. The details of this are arcane to say the least–if you like leftist infighting and splitterism, you will love 19th century socialism. But the SLP managed to become a real organization over the next few years and by the 1890s, would play an important role in American working class history.

Chicago became the center of American socialism in the late 19th century, in part because so many of them were Germans and that was a town where Germans liked to settle. Moreover, there were a lot of German political refugees escaping the repeated periods of activism and repression after 1848. Later this would manifest itself in the largely German language anarchist movement that led to the Haymarket bombing in 1886. At this point, quite a few of these German migrants were interested in the Socialist Labor Party. In 1879, the SLP, committed to electoral political activism at this time to promote its interests, ran a candidate for mayor of Chicago named Ernest Schmidt, speaking of Germans. So it decided to hold a giant rally of remembrance for the Paris Commune as a way to get support Schmidt. That happened on March 22, 1879 and was the largest of the Paris Commune memory events of this era.

It was a pretty impressive showing. Titled “Grand Anniversary in commemoration of the Dawn of Liberty in 1848 and 1871,” it combined remembering the Commune with the 1848 revolutions. It was a fairly militant event as well. There was a march by a working-class militia, whatever that really meant, but I assume consisted of veterans of some of these revolutions marching in line. This was considered necessary in order to show the forces of order that violence against this movement would be strongly resisted. There were orchestra and band performances. There were lots of speeches of course. Estimates vary on how many people attended that first day. Even the Chicago Tribune stated there were 30,000 people there, with socialist papers claiming up to 100,000. The next day, there were more speeches and such and only about 5,000 people showed up for a less fun event, but still, that’s not a bad event at all. Schmidt ended up a solid third in that mayoral election, no real threat to the dominant parties, but a respectable performance in an era that loved it some third parties across the political spectrum.

Central to the SLP appeal–and this was true among British memorial events for the Commune as well–was the connection between voting and revolution. These were people who strongly believed in voting as the central action of liberty. Voting and revolution were deeply connected here–if working people could win through voting and that was ideal and if they could not, then revolution was on the horizon but that voting would likely bring on the capitulation of the powerful to the working class movement. By the 1890s, this got harder to argue and people turned increasingly against voting, which given the consisting killing of workers and the indifference of the forces of order to working class power started to make sense to a lot of people. But by placing voting in the context of the American Revolution, it proved a powerful way connect the present revolution to past revolutions in the United States.

There’s no great lesson here, but this moment in time is an interesting to way get at historical memory among left-worker movements in a time that few understand today.

I borrowed from Aloysius Landrigan, “Remembering the Commune: Celebrations in Britain and the United States,” published in Labor History in May 2024 to write this post.

This is the 594th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.