The essays contained in this and the October 2003 special issues of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were originally delivered at a conference sponsored by Indiana State University, the repository of the Debs papers and site of his house, now a national landmark. Intended to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Debs' first run for the presidency, the conference themes of socialism and dissent attracted a diverse group of scholars, intellectuals, and activists. Their contributions help us gauge the state of the field. They also suggest new departures in the study of socialism.

Socialism in the United States between 1901 and 1919 has usually been viewed in a national context replete with assumptions about American Exceptionalism. Taking their cue from Werner Sombart's classic 1906 essay “Why Is there No Socialism in the United States?,” historians of American socialism from Daniel Bell and David Shannon to Seymour Martin Lipset have pointed to distinctly American conditions inimical to the growth of Socialism. For Ira Kipnis and Philip Foner, the problem was that American socialism before World War One was too rooted in American political traditions, not pure or Marxist enough. For Daniel Bell, it was a “foreign virus,” and was unable to be domesticated. And in the work of Paul Buhle, the “foreign” nature of American socialism in its ethnic and immigrant members has found its rescuer. The distinction between the “American” and “foreign” character of American socialism dominated debate for far too long.

This article examines the experience of distinct groups within the Socialist Party of America, considering the period from its founding in 1901 to the eve of World War One. The Socialist Party, befitting its membership in the international socialist movement of that era, was committed to representing the workers of the world in the Marxist struggle to achieve political and economic equality within a cooperative commonwealth. Accordingly, variables of gender, ethnicity and race were subsumed within the Social Question. Ideally, workers in every capacity and of all backgrounds would march together under the Red Flag and create a new egalitarian society. While, indeed, many lawyers, ministers and others of the middle-class belonged to the Socialist Party and often held office within it, thereby derisively being likened by critics to an assemblage of dentists, the party was very much working class in composition, as shown by James R. Green and others.

He had only seen Debs three times, met him twice, and really talked to him once, but when Debs died in 1926, John Haynes Holmes, pastor of New York City's Community Church (Unitarian), himself a distinguished civil libertarian and social reformer, announced that he loved Debs deeply and “honored him above all other men now alive in America.” Why did many people share that love of Debs, and others hate him, Holmes asked. In both cases the answer was Debs' own outflowing love, which common folks cherished but the rich and powerful saw as a threat to the established order. Exactly the same answer explained reactions to Jesus. Holmes spoke at a mass meeting in Debs' memory at the Madison Square Garden and converted a Sunday service at the Community Church into “a public memorial” to Debs: “I shall take his life as my text,” he wrote Theodore Debs, “use his writings for Scripture reading, and place in the pulpit a full-sized copy of Louis Mayer's bust, draped with the Red flag.” Waxing poetic, Holmes had Christ receive Debs into heaven with these words:

Turn-of-the-century socialists radicalized literacy. Unlike middle-class reformers, whose desire for mass literacy arose from the need for a hardworking, compliant workforce, socialists used it to undermine capitalism. Through their printed culture of dissent, they not only sought to transform individual lives, but an entire social system. They took up the task of using literacy to convert workers with a missionary zeal. Moral indignation fueled their crusade. In a nation of such wealth, they asked, why was it that so many industrious people did not have enough to provide themselves and their families with adequate food, clothing, and shelter? Their answer was that America's political and economic institutions had been corrupted by the nation's monied power. In their minds, only an enlightened, educated working-class could challenge the prerogatives of capital and make these institutions fully socially accountable to the people.