On the socialist origins of the Republican Party

[Meursault]

The reason I've returned is largely for this one thread. It's a subject I intend to publish on when I get around to it; I've not found a single peer-reviewed article on the subject. If I'm reliant on Wikipedia, it's because it's actually the best-sourced repository for this information.

It is taken as an article of faith today that, whatever the Republican Party's initial social liberalism in the Civil War era (as defined by its hostility to the institution of slavery and begrudging acceptance of blacks as, if not co-equals with whites, then at least deserving of their protection), it was always a pro-business organization, always fiscally 'conservative' even if the definition of fiscal conservatism has changed with time.

To an extent, this is true. Partisans of this viewpoint can point back to the populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan and his Democratic Party, and even further back to the granger movement of the 1870s, to show that there has always been a 'workerist' element within the Democratic Party. The assumption naturally follows that, if the Democrats were always economically populist, the Republicans must have been the antitheses of populists - to wit, conservatives.

But this is simply not so. From its very foundation, and for a long time thereafter, there was a socialist element in the GOP - not, as in the case of Bryan and the grangers, populists who would morph into liberals in the early 20th century, but outright socialists who imported their ideologies from their German-language homelands.

A brief look at the histories of some of the early Republicans will suffice to demonstrate this.


Carl Schurz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Joseph Weydemeyer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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August Willich - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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[Meursault]

Anti-Slavery coalition building, is probably the best way to describe the presence of Socialists in the GOP during that period. But it is hard to describe the party as being anything other then the handmaided of business, particularly those that wanted to sink their groper nasties into the Federal treasury, which is exactly what they did both during and after the Civil War.

The problem is that what makes for convenient historical shorthand, like the above, simply isn't accurate.

This isn't a case of a handful of socialists voting Republican in the era. This is a matter of Republicans like Carl Schurz, an open and active socialist and former confederate of Karl Marx's, being elected to the U.S. Senate from Missouri in 1868.

This is important: a socialist, who personally knew Karl Marx in Germany and shared much of the man's habits of thought and weltanschauung, actively campaigning for a Senatorial position - and winning - under the Republican banner.

[Meursault]

Anti-Slavery coalition building, is probably the best way to describe the presence of Socialists in the GOP during that period. But it is hard to describe the party as being anything other then the handmaided of business, particularly those that wanted to sink their groper nasties into the Federal treasury, which is exactly what they did both during and after the Civil War.

The problem is that what makes for convenient historical shorthand, like the above, simply isn't accurate.

This isn't a case of a handful of socialists voting Republican in the era. This is a matter of Republicans like Carl Schurz, an open and active socialist and former confederate of Karl Marx's, being elected to the U.S. Senate from Missouri in 1868.

This is important: a socialist, who personally knew Karl Marx in Germany and shared much of the man's habits of thought and weltanschauung, actively campaigning for a Senatorial position - and winning - under the Republican banner.

I honestly didn't investigate that much into the three people you presented as examples, assuming that you'd presented all that was relevant of them. From my memory, at least, I don't remember seeing a mention of Schurz as a Senator. Referring to the all-knowing Wikipedia, Schurz, during his time as a Senatorial candidate and in the Senate itself, stood for "fiscal responsibility" and "sound money", indicating that he may not have been as revolutionary a socialist as one might think. Further reading on his career seems to reveal him, at least in his post-Civil War political life, as a fiscal conservative opposed to imperialism. He supported civil service reform, which isn't a really ideological stance, and in doing so supported Grover Cleveland in 1884. He supported McKinley in the name of, again, "sound money"--something that was emphasized in his support of Hayes twenty years earlier, according to Wikipedia--and broke with the GOP in 1900 due to anti-imperialism. Thus, you spotlighting Schurz as an example of socialism in the early Republican party is still suspect.

This is simply a matter of 'sound money' not being incompatible with socialism as it was understood and practiced by German 'scientific socialists' (and one would expect these socialists to favor restrictions on the money supply more generally due to opposition to business subsidies). In fact, Friedrich Engels wrote favorably about the gold standard (Google 'Engels' 'bimetallism') even before Marx's death - among other stupidities and quirks of character that have long been forgotten that emerged in that time.

The idea of an economic redistributionist State more or less didn't exist in the 1880s, and what little experience the West had with State-driven monetary redistribution was largely the product of government subsidies of emerging capitalist industries like railroads. And if 'sound money' is 'scientific' in character, then of course positivist faddists with socialist ideas will support it.

To be fair, the thread title is probably too strong. I do not mean to claim that the Republican Party was a socialist party, and obviously capitalists were much more strongly represented. But at the same time it is also fair to say that socialists were represented in it, named and nominated candidates for election. They were a wing of the Party, though not dominant in it; one might compare their presence in the Republican Party of the Civil War era to the DLC Democrats of our own, though obviously serving very different functions.

(And of course Schurz wasn't particularly radical by the time he became Senator. But he was a socialist when he joined the GOP; my point is to trace socialist attraction to Republicanism to its very origins. One expects long years of association with the elite to wear out one's initial loyalties.)

[Meursault]

Basically what you seem to be saying is, in effect, numbing the socialist character of certain individuals who did attain high Republican office. What this results in, is, in fact, diluting your thesis. If you make irrelevant their socialist stances by claiming that such were irrelevant or happened to line up with more laissez-faire economic stances of the time, then does that not make the fact that they were socialist a moot point and thus not really worth focus on?

What it actually suggests is that there was continuity and congruity between the capitalist-liberal economics of the generic Republican leadership and the scientific socialist economics of the "Ohio Hegelians" and German emigrees who found themselves together in the same Party - and that perhaps this tradition can be revived at the expense of the duopoly we have today.

[Meursault]

From what I've found - and again there is practically no literature on the subject outside of the aforementioned neo-Confederate revisionist nonsense that makes hay out of the matter - socialist identification directly correlated with Republicanism anywhere there was a large German immigrant community, and, though I have no hard numbers, the impression I get is that most German-American Republicans in the first generation of immigrants during the Civil War period had socialist leanings.

Now, this holds good for Ohio and the upper Midwest. I've been curious about self-identified socialist immigrants to New York City, many of whom may have been Fenians and as such much more sympathetic to the Democratic Party. But the Fenians were not strict socialists, and what socialists were among them likely would not have been 'scientific'.

[Meursault]

http://www.worker-communist.org/2014/02/01/notes-on-the-early-history-of-american-communism/#more-75

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[Meursault]

Also, leading GOP officials like Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips were open members of Marx's own International Working Men's Association.

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[Meursault]

I love that the fact that the Republican Senator was a dues-paying member of Karl Marx's International Working Men's Association is so easily dismissed (i.e. not even discussed).