page_1001 < previous page page_1001 next page > Page 1001 furniture, popularized communitarianism for generations. Utopian intellectuals Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, and John Humphrey Noyes, among others, participated in national debates over sexual egalitarianism and "free love." For all their inner strengths, however, the colonies lacked the capital and  especially if secular  the inner cohesion to establish themselves permanently. With the rise of heavy industry following the Civil War, they gave way to immigrant socialist movements and to utopianism of another type, more cultural or intellectual than practical. German-American immigrants, along with Jewish immigrants at the end of the century and a scattering of other groups, established a roughly Marxian socialist presence within labor organizations (which they frequently founded), ethnic newspapers, mutual benefit societies, and cultural associations in large cities and small industrial towns. At two points they had a major impact. During the national railroad strike of 1877, the few thousand organized socialists contributed speakers, leaflets, and in the case of St. Louis (governed briefly by a strike committee), insurrectionary political leaders. In the working-class drive of the middle 1880s for an eight-hour day and for local labor parties, socialists (and "revolutionary socialists," or anarchists) often took a leading regional or local role  and suffered the brunt of the murderous repression following the Haymarket Square incident in which a bomb thrown by persons unknown killed a number of Chicago policemen. A second wave of utopianism, following the publication of Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward (1888), briefly organized hundreds of study circles or clubs seeking a peaceful route to the classless society. This initiative, along with the waning populist movement, the catastrophic 1890s depression, and a widespread disillusionment with increasingly corporate control of nominally democratic institutions, prompted an education-minded political socialism among the native-born. Eugene V. Debs, erstwhile champion of the American Railway Union, had become by 1900 the personal symbol of this sentiment, linked to the varied immigrant socialist movements. The Socialist party, although it elected hundreds of candidates to local office and obtained nearly a million votes for Eugene Debs's 1912 presidential candidacy, failed nevertheless to bridge the gaps between skilled and unskilled workers, and native-born whites, blacks, and immigrants. Unlike their European counterparts who encompassed a more homogeneous mass and led the working class into modern political participation, American socialists offered only a philosophy of brotherhood and the resistance of particular groups at the rough edges of allpowerful American capitalism. For a while, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) seemed to pose another alternative. Organized in 1905, the IWW promulgated the vision of "one big union" for all workers. By the lights of socialist ideologue Daniel De Leon, the new union constituted nothing less than the basis of a new civilization, ready to substitute a purely functional economic cooperative coordination for state-dominated political rule. Although mounting great strikes among the unskilled, the IWW could not overcome the combined hostility of employers, the state, and craft labor movements. With U.S. entry into World War I and the collaboration of the American Federation of Labor's leader with government aims, socialists and IWW activists suffered beatings, jailings, deportations, and the suppression of their publications. One section of the socialist movement thereafter allied itself with newly founded communist factions, amid much destructive internecine warfare, government infiltration, and antiradical propaganda. Another section joined in emerging farmer-labor movements or became largely quiescent. The rollback of labor organizations in the 1920s sealed the Left's isolation, but enjoined socialists of all kinds (particularly Christians and communists) to address otherwise virtually unchallenged racism and imperialism. In a subtle but decided reorientation, radicals became the often lonely champions of a multiracial democratic American society. The depression years saw a revival of socialist movements not so much in a directly political sense as in activity within labor and reform causes. The struggles of the unemployed, the vic-  < previous page page_1001 next page >