Reimagining Democracy: The Socialist Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in the United States

Abstract

The initiative and referendum are commonly characterized as quintessentially Populist or Progressive reforms, but transatlantic socialism deserves pride of place in the intellectual history of direct legislation in the United States. A decade and a half before the People’s Party famously commended the idea of direct legislation at its 1892 nominating convention in Omaha, Nebraska, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) made the demand for direct legislation a plank in its first party platform. That demand was shaped by the 1875 Gotha Program formulated by the Socialist Workers Party of Germany and informed by socialist debates during the First International and the pioneering work of Moritz Rittinghausen. The diffusion of these ideas among Gilded Age labor radicals is a crucial and underappreciated part of the story of the origins of the initiative and referendum in the United States. That socialists’ pioneering role in the origins of the initiative and referendum in the United States has largely been slighted is particularly ironic since the individual arguably most responsible for securing the direct legislation resolution at Omaha was among the nation’s most successful radical labor organizers and a committed socialist, Joseph R. Buchanan.

On the day after Christmas in 1877, the year of labor’s “Great Upheaval,” a new political party calling itself the Workingmen’s Party of the United States convened a national convention in Newark, New Jersey. ¹ One of the convention’s first acts was to rename the party the Socialistic Labor Party (SLP). ² Among its final acts was to adopt a platform that included sixteen demands, the first of which, as one might expect from a self-described Labor Party, was for an eight-hour working day. The party also called for government inspection of working conditions, a prohibition on child labor in factories, and lifting laws designed to restrict union organizing and strikes. However, not all the party’s demands focused on labor issues. Its final three demands targeted the political process: that the right of suffrage “shall in no wise be abridged,” that “Every public officer shall be at all time subject to prompt recall by the election of a successor,” and a call for “Direct popular legislation enabling the people to propose or reject any law at their will.” ³

The SLP platform of 1877 was the first organized call in American history for the adoption of the initiative and referendum. ⁴ Nor was this demand a one-off or an afterthought. Every SLP national convention for the next two decades included a call for direct legislation. ⁵ Indeed, at the party’s second national convention in 1879, the platform’s first demand was for an “Entire revision of the United States Constitution so as to institute direct popular legislation, and enable the people to propose or reject any law at their will, and thus secure self-government” (the demand for an amendment to the Constitution to secure an eight-hour work day was relegated to the seventh demand). ⁶ In 1885, the platform language changed but the demand remained the same: “The people to have the right to propose laws (initiative) and to vote upon all laws of importance (Referendum).” ⁷

No other national political party during the 1870s or 1880s issued a call for direct legislation. Not the Greenback Party. Not the Anti-Monopoly Party. Not the Prohibition Party. Not the Equal Rights Party. And certainly not the two major political parties, the Republican and Democratic parties. Nor did the Granger Movement or the Farmers’ Alliance, which was the progenitor of the People’s (aka Populist) Party. When the southern and northwestern farmers’ alliances convened in St. Louis at the close of 1889, the platform they adopted said nothing about direct legislation. In its December 1890 convention in Ocala, the Farmers’ Alliance platform expanded to include the direct election of U.S. senators and a progressive income tax, but there was still no room for direct legislation. The platform adopted at the convention that formally launched the People’s Party in May 1891 was similar to the Ocala platform and still sans the initiative and referendum. Not until July 1892, when the Populist Party held their national nominating convention in Omaha, did the party pass a resolution commending “to the favorable consideration of the people and the reform press the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum.” This resolution was not part of the official party platform but was instead identified as one of ten “Expressions of Sentiments” appended to the platform. ⁸

Even though the SLP’s demand for direct legislation predates the Populist Party’s commendation of that reform by fifteen years, it is commonplace to find the initiative and referendum described as a creation of the Populist movement. Political scientist Amy Bridges, for instances, writes that “Direct democracy was first advocated in the United States by the People’s Party.” ⁹ Historians of the initiative and referendum generally know better but they, too, have missed or downplayed SLP’s pioneering role. Thomas Cronin’s account of the origins of the initiative process is more nuanced, but even he introduces the late nineteenth-century origins of direct democracy in a section titled “The Populist Impulse,” which gives pride of place to the “populist-minded groups” that came together at the Populist Party’s Omaha convention to support the initiative and referendum. ¹⁰ The SLP receives only a fleeting mention in Cronin’s narrative, while the SLP is ignored entirely in Thomas Goebel’s otherwise superb history, A Government by the People: Direct Democracy in America: 1890-1940. ¹¹ Steven L. Piott’s comprehensive state-by-state history, Giving Voters a Voice: The Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in America, recognizes that the SLP was there first, but still misses the mark by more than a decade, noting that “prior to 1892 the only organized political agitation for direct legislation came from a plank in the platform of the SLP, which met in convention in Chicago on October 12, 1889.” ¹² David Schmidt’s oft-cited Citizen Lawmakers even more seriously misleads by suggesting that the initiative and referendum only appeared in the SLP and Populist Party platforms after a New Jersey advocacy group, the People’s Power League (which soon merged with the People’s Union before becoming the Direct Legislation League), “sent delegates to the 1892 conventions of several political parties, and won approval of I&R resolutions in the platforms of the Socialist Labor Party and the Populist Party.” ¹³ Although delegates from the New Jersey-based People’s Union were responsible for securing support for the initiative and referendum at the Omaha convention, the group obviously played no role in inducing the SLP to retain a plank that had been a central part of its platform for a decade and a half. ¹⁴

Why have scholars generally overlooked the SLP’s pioneering advocacy of the initiative and referendum? Part of the answer may be that the standard compilation of nineteenth-century national party platforms omitted all SLP platforms prior to 1892 because the party did not nominate a presidential candidate until 1892. ¹⁵ Perhaps part of it, too, is an assumption that the SLP was too small and insular to have had a meaningful effect on the spread of the initiative and referendum in the United States. ¹⁶ But maybe the largest part of the explanation is that scholars of the initiative and referendum have been overly reliant on a handful of accounts written by late nineteenth and early twentieth century direct legislation reformers, some of whom were happy to downplay or even efface the radical socialist origins of the direct democracy idea and others of whom were probably unaware of those origins. ¹⁷ Whatever the reasons for this relative neglect, it is time we gave socialists their due in the germination of the idea of the initiative and referendum in the United States. ¹⁸

Socialist Before Populist: Joseph R. Buchanan and the Omaha Direct Legislation Plank

Of course, no serious scholar of the initiative and referendum assumes that direct legislation emerged fully formed out of the Populist mind, let alone the Omaha convention of 1892. Schmidt’s own account of the Omaha convention highlights the crucial role the New Jersey–based advocacy group played in persuading the Populist Party to include a resolution commending the initiative and referendum for the people’s “favorable consideration.” And Piott rightly points out that the tepid language of the resolution reflected the Populist Party’s “lukewarm commitment” to direct legislation at the time, an observation that cries out for us to explore ideological currents and social movements beyond the People’s Party in tracing the origins of direct legislation in the United States. ¹⁹

A clue to the puzzle of why a party with a “lukewarm commitment” to direct legislation would endorse it was left by J.W. Arrowsmith, president of the People’s Union, who in 1894 recorded that the inclusion of the direct legislation resolution owed to the Herculean efforts of a member of the newly formed People’s Union, who was selected to attend the Omaha convention, Joseph R. Buchanan. According to Arrowsmith, Buchanan—who served on the Omaha convention platform committee—“held the floor and resolutely refused to yield it until some concession was made to the New Jersey industrialists who were demanding ‘direct legislation’ as the Alpha and Omega of reform.” ²⁰ Arrowsmith was right that without Buchanan there would have been no resolution, but he tells the reader nothing about Buchanan other than that he was from Newark, representing the “industrialists.” ²¹

What Arrowsmith, a well-to-do prohibitionist, left out of his history was that Joseph Ray Buchanan had been the most successful labor organizer in the Mountain West and its leading socialist. ²² Moreover, by Buchanan’s own reckoning in 1893, his awareness of the initiative and referendum “extend[ed] back about fifteen years”—that is, to the late 1870s, precisely the time that the SLP placed the demand for direct legislation into its party platform. Indeed, Buchanan made no effort to disguise the idea’s socialist origins, admitting that “the principle has been a part of the socialistic programme since the first declaration was given out by American socialists.” ²³

Born to a Whig newspaper family in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1851, Buchanan headed west to Denver at the age of twenty-six where he had little difficulty finding employ in a newspaper office. ²⁴ His upbringing in Missouri had taught him a lot about the printing trade, but little or “nothing of the ‘labor problem.’” In Denver he was introduced to socialism and trade unionism and joined the International Typographical Union (ITU). If Buchanan’s education in “the labor problem” began in Denver, his radicalization was precipitated by his move in 1880 to booming Leadville, Colorado, which at the time was among the nation’s richest silver camps, with a population of about 25,000 people, making it the second largest city in the state, behind only Denver. Although he went to Leadville to strike it rich, the prospecting proved “fruitless” and he quickly returned to the newspaper work he knew best. Ensconced at the unionized Daily Democrat, he took up the cause of striking Leadville miners—the leaders of whom were affiliated with the Knights of Labor—whose wages had been slashed, not because of declining profitability of the mines but because of an increase in the supply of labor that followed from the railway reaching Leadville in the summer of 1880. During the strike, Buchanan took to the streets, denouncing the mine operators for hours on end—“moving to a fresh rostrum every half hour or so”—and quickly made a name for himself as a charismatic “labor orator.” In the end, with the help of troops sent into Leadville by the state’s governor, the strike was broken, and Buchanan soon thereafter returned to Denver to work in the composing room of yet another newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News. ²⁵

In Denver, he became more deeply involved in union politics, and was elected as his local’s (Local 49) delegate to the annual meeting of the International Typographical Union in the summer of 1882. The zeal he displayed at the convention on behalf of the rights of lowly “subs” earned him a nickname that stuck: the “Riproarer of the Rockies.” That November, he became a charter member of a new assembly of the Knights of Labor, embracing with gusto its exhortation to “Agitate, Educate, Organize!” Ever since arriving back in Denver, Buchanan had been “reading everything dealing with social conditions that [he] could get hold of,” devouring “the writings of the leading political economists,” and in December 1882, he founded the Labor Enquirer, a new newspaper whose masthead declared: “He Who Would be Free, Himself Must Strike the Blow.” That this was a favorite adage of African American abolitionists in the run up to and during the Civil War was no coincidence as Buchanan was committed to leading a “war for the emancipation of the wage slave.” ²⁶

The Labor Enquirer (1882–1887), which was the mouthpiece for both the local assemblies of the Knights of Labor and of ITU Local 49, became the region’s most widely read labor paper, but Buchanan’s influence was not confined to the pages of his eight-page weekly. He also became one of the nation’s most sought-after labor speakers and the knights’ most successful union organizer. The high unionization rates in the Mountain West owed a great deal to Buchanan’s efforts as a polemicist and organizer. Between 1882 and 1888, unionization in Colorado was so rapid that by 1888 it counted more labor organizations per capita than any other state. Among Buchanan’s achievements was founding the spectacularly successful Union Pacific Knights (District Assembly 82), which organized all Union Pacific railroad workers from Omaha, Nebraska, to Portland, Oregon—and secured for these workers “the highest wages on any railroad line.” Buchanan played a key role not only in directing successful strikes against the Union Pacific railroad but also in coordinating strikes of coalminers and promoting boycotts of nonunion companies. ²⁷

As successful as Buchanan was in organizing the unorganized into trade unions and extending the influence of the Knights of Labor, he grew increasingly frustrated by the failure of labor-backed candidates at the national level. Particularly disappointing was the abject failure of the Greenback-Labor Party presidential ticket in 1884, which tallied only a bit over 1 percent of the vote nationwide; that the party’s nominee, Benjamin Butler, did a little better in Colorado, receiving 3 percent of the vote, was scant consolation. As Buchanan later conceded in his 1903 memoir, Story of a Labor Agitator, he “began to lose faith in the ballot,” fearing that the majority of workingmen “were not only too stupid to raise themselves, but too weak to stand if raised by others.” Feeling “sick at heart” at workers’ political apathy, he turned to Burnette Haskell’s recently formed International Workingmen’s Association (IWA)—named after but not affiliated with the defunct and more famous International Workingmen’s Association, commonly known as the First International—as “a means more likely to accomplish the emancipation of the wage slave.” ²⁸

Popularly known as the “Red International” on account of its red cards and its repudiation of the anarchism espoused by the “Black International”—aka the International Working People’s Association (IWPA)—Haskell’s IWA rejected both the ballot and violence as the means of emancipating the working class, favoring instead “a long campaign of socialist education and agitation.” ²⁹ While remaining on the National Executive Board of the Knights of Labor, Buchanan became head of the IWA’s new Rocky Mountain Division (Haskell headed up the original Pacific Coast branch)—and the Labor Enquirer became the IWA’s “national official organ.” He also organized and led the Rocky Mountain Social League, a society dedicated to spreading the “doctrines of modern socialism.” ³⁰ Buchanan’s aim was not only to disseminate socialist ideas in society but to “bore within” the Knights of Labor by recruiting IWA members and pushing the organization in a more revolutionary direction, an agenda that was vigorously resisted by the Knights’ more conservative leader Terence Powderly. ³¹

Buchanan’s conflict with Powderly intensified after the violence at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886. The demonstration at Haymarket Square had been called by labor organizers—most of them German born and many of them anarchists affiliated with the IWPA—to “protest against the brutality of the police” visited upon workers, many of them Knights of Labor, who had gathered in large numbers the previous day to show their support of the nationwide movement for the eight-hour workday. When the police ordered the remaining several hundred demonstrators to disperse, a bomb was thrown by someone in the crowd, killing a police captain and leading to a chaotic melee that killed and wounded many more officers and protesters. Thirty-one anarchists were indicted, eight put on trial, and seven convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Five of the seven were born in Germany, and many native-born labor leaders, Powderly among them, rushed to distance themselves from all foreign-born anarchists and socialists. But Powderly’s refusal to defend the anarchist leaders—most of whom spoke at the event but had left by time the bomb was thrown—also drew sharp condemnation from many labor leaders, including Buchanan, who felt the trial had been a sham, and that the anarchists were being executed for their ideas. ³²

Sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the Haymarket events, Haskell pressed Buchanan to go to Chicago to help consummate two long sought objectives. First, he hoped that Buchanan could capitalize on the weakened state of the IWPA to bring about an organizational union of the SLP, IWA, and IWPA, in a fusion of the “Reds” and “Blacks.” Second, he hoped Buchanan could exploit labor’s dissatisfaction with Powderly—and with Chicago employers’ year-long anti-union drive backed by the police and armed Pinkerton agents—to oust him as the order’s Grand Master Workman, a post Powderly had held since 1879. ³³

Buchanan moved to Chicago in January 1887, joined the SLP, and started up a new labor paper, the Chicago Labor Enquirer (Haskell took over the Denver Labor Enquirer), where he trained his sights on Powderly’s pusillanimous leadership and championed the cause of the “Haymarket Eight.” ³⁴ However, Buchanan met with little success. In November 1887, four of the condemned anarchists were executed, one killed himself, and two got their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Although the Red International did become amalgamated with the SLP in 1887, that was largely due to the rapid decline of Haskell’s IWA after the events at Haymarket rather than the building of a robust revolutionary socialism. ³⁵ Certainly, Buchanan had no success bringing about a union of the reds and the even more badly weakened blacks. And despite Powderly’s unpopularity among Chicago’s workers, Buchanan was outmaneuvered by Powderly, although the organization Powderly presided over was reduced to a shadow of its former self (whereas in 1886, about 800,000 workers were members of the Knights of Labor, by the end of the decade the number was reduced to no more than 100,000). By the summer of 1888, Buchanan had abandoned revolutionary Marxism, a recantation that led to condemnation by prominent organs of the SLP in New York, the withdrawal of support from Chicago’s socialists and anarchists, and the collapse of his newspaper (he sent the subscribers’ list to Henry George in New York). To cap it off, he was then kicked out of the party before he could resign. ³⁶

Buchanan left Chicago disillusioned with Marxist sectarianism but he “never relinquished the theory of socialism,” although he now adhered to an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary socialistic creed. ³⁷ Moving east, he went to work as a labor editor at Charles Dana’s the New York Sun, and then was hired to write about labor news at the New York office of the American Press Association. ³⁸ Working as a labor editor in New York City, Buchanan continued to advocate for the rights of labor, including the eight-hour work day, and became acquainted with AFL chief Samuel Gompers, ³⁹ as well as the Newark labor reformer and longtime member of the Knights of Labor, Henry Beckmeyer, ⁴⁰ who was among a small group of New Jersey men who in early 1892 organized the People’s Power League (Beckmeyer was the president).

It was while working as a labor editor in New York City and living in New Jersey that Buchanan attended the June 17, 1892, meeting in New Brunswick that gathered together representatives of around a dozen New Jersey labor and reform groups and out of which was organized the People’s Union as a nonpartisan body dedicated to electing only candidates who would pledge to support the proposition that “The people should have the power to propose law by mandatory petition, and to vote direct upon any act passed by legislative bodies for the purpose of accepting or rejecting, as by the people shall be deemed best.” ⁴¹ This was the body that selected Buchanan—who now identified with the Populist Party—to attend the Omaha convention two weeks later with the purpose of getting the Populist Party to insert this plank or something like it into the party’s platform.

The delegates in New Brunswick chose well, for few could command an audience better than Buchanan. It is fitting rather than ironic that the man selected to persuade the Populist Party to endorse the initiative and referendum was no agrarian populist or prairie farmer, but a legendary labor organizer and orator steeped in socialist doctrine, and whose awareness of the initiative and referendum almost certainly stemmed from the SLP platform.

Direct Legislation’s Transatlantic Origins: Rittinghausen, Bürkli, and the Gotha Program

Buchanan’s biography provides a glimpse into one of the ways that socialist ideas about direct legislation from the 1870s and 1880s became an integral part of the Populist movement and “the age of reform,” but that still leaves unanswered the question of how the demand for direct legislation become enshrined in the SLP platform fifteen years before it appeared in any other American party platform. ⁴² Most histories of the initiative process recognize the importance of the Swiss initiative and referendum system for direct democracy advocates in the 1890s, most notably in the pioneering works of William McCracken, Boyd Winchester, and especially James W. Sullivan, ⁴³ but these accounts rarely acknowledge the pivotal role that European socialism and German-speaking socialist emigres played in introducing the idea of direct legislation to the United States. ⁴⁴

The seminal figure in the intellectual history of direct legislation was a German socialist, Moritz Rittinghausen, who in the fall of 1850 published a series of articles on direct legislation in La Democratie Pacifique, edited by France’s leading Fourierite socialist Victor Considerant. Titled “Direct Legislation by the People or Genuine Democracy,” the articles were widely circulated in pamphlet form in four different languages (the English edition published in 1851 sold for a penny). ⁴⁵ An enthusiastic convert to the cause, Considerant used his own pen as well to spread the gospel of direct legislation, in a pamphlet that went through four editions in four months. It too was translated into English in 1851, under the title The Difficulty Solved; or, The Government of the People by Themselves. ⁴⁶

Both Rittinghausen and Considerant wrote as disappointed refugees who had left their countries after the failed revolutions of 1848–1849—Considerant fled to Brussels in the summer of 1849 after participating in a botched effort to overthrow Napoleon III, and Rittinghausen emigrated first to Paris and then to Brussels after Louis Napoleon’s coup in December 1851. Both, too, had first-hand experience with legislative bodies: Considerant as a member of the French Constituent Assembly and Rittinghausen as a member of the Frankfurt parliament. Both emerged from the revolutionary experience convinced that representative assemblies could not be counted on to represent the interests of the people, an argument that resonated with particular force in the wake of the French Assembly’s passage of a voter suppression law that disenfranchised nearly a third of the voters by making it more difficult to register to vote, stiffening residency requirements in a way that targeted nontaxpayers, and expanding “the number of offenses for which an elector could be disenfranchised to include proscribed political activities—such as distributing pamphlets—outrages against public morality or religion, questioning the principle of property or the family, vagabondage, or interference with army recruitment.” ⁴⁷

Considerant and Rittinghausen’s advocacy of direct legislation met with fierce resistance not only from the “Party of Order” in France but from socialists, radicals, and anarchists across Europe. Proudhon devoted a large chunk of his 1851 anarchist classic, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, to attacking Rittinghausen and Considerant on the grounds that a state built upon direct legislation was every bit as antithetical to individual liberty as a state built upon representative democracy. ⁴⁸ A lengthy review of Considerant and Rittinghausen’s pamphlets in the Westminister Review, organ of the English “Radicals” (among them, John Stuart Mill), assailed the impracticality of using the “the masses of the nation as a great voting machine for legislation,” although it commended the authors for their attention to “the vices of Parliament.” ⁴⁹ Writing to Frederick Engels in the summer of 1851, from his own post of exile in London, Marx dismissed the concept of “pure democracy” or “direct government” as “figments in the minds of Rittinghausen [and] Considerant,” leading nowhere but to “impossibility and absurdity.” ⁵⁰

Although Rittinghausen’s ideas did not make immediate headway in Europe, they captured the imagination of some German and Swiss socialists, most notably Zurich’s Karl Bürkli, who penned a short tract of his own, which was translated into English in 1870 as Direct Legislation by the People, versus Representative Government. Direct legislation, of course, had authentic roots in Swiss experience. Some cantons, generally the less populous ones, had a long history of adult males gathering once a year to vote directly on the laws. During the 1830s, many of the more populous cantons rewrote their constitutions and introduced a requirement that all constitutional amendments be approved by the people, a practice also common in many American states. Some cantons also allowed for legislative referenda, although many saw the plebiscite as a “co-opting device” that politicians used to ratify and legitimize measures. The new Swiss Constitution of 1848 instituted the mandatory constitutional referendum at the federal level and empowered citizens to petition for a new constitution. ⁵¹ But while direct legislation was part of the Swiss experience, Bürkli demanded something more radical than just the occasional vote of the people on constitutional changes. He strove instead to subvert if not entirely replace the rigged system of representative democracy.

In Bürkli’s view, like Rittinghuasen’s, representative democracy could never adequately represent the interests of working people. Bürkli maintained that every representative body was composed largely of “capitalists and their creatures, and members of the middle classes, hostile to social progress.” Just as “the slaveholder is, by his very nature, incapable of making laws in the interests of his slaves, so the representative being a capitalist, is incapable of ever framing laws in the interest of the workman.” Part of the problem with representative democracy was that people had been conditioned to vote for more highly educated people even though “in reality, interest is the determinative cause in matters of legislation.” Since working-class people would never be a majority in a legislature, their economic interests would always get shortchanged. Experience with representative democracy also taught that “people can be far more easily misled when there is a question of persons (such as elections for national or municipal councils) than where there is a question of things (for instance, voting on laws); and this for the simple reason that … it is far more easy to judge whether a certain law is made in the interest of the working classes, than whether a councilor will always speak and vote in the interest of the people.” The lesson for Bürkli was that “No saviour will ever redeem the people; they must redeem themselves”—and that salvation could only come through the initiative and referendum process. ⁵²

In 1868, Bürkli got his chance to institutionalize this more radical vision of direct legislation when he was selected as a delegate to the council tasked with writing a new constitution for Zurich. His work was guided by the principle that the people should be given the broadest possible powers and the legislature’s powers should be rendered as small as possible. ⁵³ The new constitution, which was approved by Zurich’s voters in the spring of 1869, gave citizens the power not only to initiate laws and constitutional amendments but required that laws passed by the legislature be voted on by the people (commonly called the obligatory referendum). The constitution did not abolish representative democracy in favor of “pure democracy,” as Rittinghausen had advocated, but it went further than anything that “had existed anywhere else before that time.” ⁵⁴ As Friedrich Albert Lange (a German socialist and philosopher who, together with Bürkli, played a key role in writing the Zurich Constitution) boasted, it was the “first attempt in history to install democracy on a more rational basis than by popular assemblies or parliaments.” ⁵⁵

Fresh off his success in institutionalizing direct democracy in Zurich, Bürkli journeyed to Basle in September 1869 for the Fourth General Congress of the First International, which included seventy-five socialist delegates from nine nations, including one American, Andrew Cameron of the National Labor Union. ⁵⁶ Bürkli was one of Switzerland’s twenty-two delegates and Rittinghausen, who only the month before had helped to found the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, was among the ten German delegates. Much as Joseph Buchanan did at the Omaha Convention, Bürkli, backed by the large Swiss delegation, as well as Rittinghausen and others in the German delegation, pressed the Basle Congress to consider direct legislation, even though it was not on the congress’s original agenda. The proposal incurred strenuous opposition from, among others, the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin, who insisted that “the International should not participate in any political movement aiming merely at the reform of the bourgeois state.” After a heated debate, the congress agreed to return to the matter after the scheduled agenda items had been dealt with, but because the convention never got past agenda item number three the discussion of the initiative and referendum was never resumed. ⁵⁷

Although failing to get the First International to endorse direct legislation, Bürkli and Rittinghausen nonetheless succeeded in pushing the initiative and referendum to the forefront of socialist agitation in Switzerland and Germany. Buoyed by Zurich’s example and urged on by Bürkli and Lange, Rittinghausen succeeded in making “the introduction of direct legislation (i.e., the right to make and reject proposals)” a core demand of the Eisenach Program adopted at the founding meeting of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party in August 1869. The party’s platform insisted, too, that “political freedom represents the most essential precondition for the economic liberation of the laboring classes” and that therefore “the social question is inseparable from the political one.” ⁵⁸ In 1875, when the party joined forces with Ferdinand Lassalle’s General German Workers Association to form the Socialist Workers Party of Germany, the resulting Gotha Program affirmed the foundational demand that the state must enact “Direct legislation by the people.” It also demanded that decisions “on war and peace” be made by the people, an idea that would be resurrected by socialists and others in the United States during and after World War I. ⁵⁹

Marx and those closest to him remained as skeptical of direct legislation as they had been when Rittinghausen first introduced the idea. Marx’s famous Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875 (though not published until 1891), included sharp criticism of the Gotha Program’s political demands, including direct legislation and universal suffrage, because they contained (in Marx’s words) “nothing beyond the old democratic litany familiar to all.” ⁶⁰ Engels was even harsher, telling August Bebel in 1875 that the Gotha Program’s demand for direct legislation was “fashionable nonsense” and that direct legislation had done more damage than good in Switzerland. ⁶¹

Transplanting a “Foreign Platform”

While Marx and his allies remained skeptical about the Swiss experience with direct legislation, believing it either irrelevant or insufficiently revolutionary, the ideas of Bürkli, Rittinghausen, and Considerant found more fertile soil in the United States, where, as in Switzerland, reformers were able to frame radical institutional change as modernizing or adapting past practices to meet evolving conditions. ⁶² As Hanspeter Kriesi and Dominique Wisler explain, the existence of New England town meetings and state constitutions requiring popular approval of constitutional amendments gave “the new paradigm of direct legislation … a high ‘narrative fidelity’” in the United States “because it resonated well with the stories, myths, and folk tales” that made up the nation’s “cultural heritage.” ⁶³

If “narrative fidelity” helps to explain how an idea that began on the radical fringes of American society during the 1870s and 1880s became institutionalized in the constitutions of nearly half the U.S. states in the opening two decades of the twentieth century, it may also help explain why we have not always fully appreciated the socialist roots of direct legislation. ⁶⁴ After all, how could an idea that seems so quintessentially populist (and American) owe much of anything to socialists—particularly European socialists—who were concerned principally with the oppression of the working class?

That these socialist roots have often been obscured may also have something to do with the way that some Progressive Era reformers told the history of the direct legislation movement. The public backlash after the events at Haymarket Square prompted many in the radical world, including Henry George’s single taxers and the labor movement, to distance themselves from socialism. ⁶⁵ Erasing the taint of an “alien” socialism likely facilitated bringing direct legislation into the mainstream of Progressive reform.

Among the earliest and most influential of these misleading Progressive histories was an 1896 essay on “The Direct Legislation Movement and Its Leaders,” by Eltweed Pomeroy, publisher of the Direct Legislation Record and soon to be the National Direct Legislation League’s first president. By Pomeroy’s reckoning, the first direct legislation resolutions introduced at a U.S. political convention occurred at a state convention of the Prohibition Party in New Jersey in April 1892 (the resolutions were tabled). ⁶⁶ He acknowledged that the SLP already had a direct legislation plank but insisted that didn’t count because the platform “cannot be said to have been adopted in this country, as it was taken in a mass with many other things from the foreign platform where it was put mainly through the work of Charles Burkly of Zurich” (the French spelling of Karl Bürkli’s name). In Pomeroy’s view, moreover, “The socialist organizations [had] done nothing to promote Direct Legislation in America, but, on the contrary, … deemed it inadvisable to help in its advancement lest attention might be diverted from the movement for the co-operative commonwealth.” ⁶⁷

There are a host of problems with Pomeroy’s history of the direct legislation movement. To begin with, although it is true that the SLP’s early embrace of direct legislation was influenced by a “foreign platform,” namely the German Gotha Program (which Bürkli did not have a direct hand in writing), it is misleading to suggest that the SLP plank therefore “cannot be said to have been adopted” in the United States. SLP members in the United States were not puppets of international socialism. For starters, by 1877, the First International no longer existed, a casualty of bitter factional and doctrinal feuds in the first half of the decade, and so there was no international socialist body dictating national party policy. ⁶⁸ And, in any event, at no point did the First International endorse direct legislation.

Second, and more important, the SLP’s 1877 platform, though obviously modeled on the Gotha Program, was hardly a carbon copy of it. Both began from the premise that labor is the source of all wealth, that “the directors of labor” (what the Gotha Program called “the capitalist class”) monopolized “the means of labor” and maintained “the masses … in poverty and dependence” (“misery and slavery,” in the Gotha Program), and that the emancipation of labor must be achieved by the working classes. Many of the demands were the same, such as a progressive income tax, the right to strike, free and compulsory education, sanitary inspections of working conditions, and a prohibition on child labor and the employment of women in occupations detrimental to “health or morality.” But many were different. Some of those differences were in emphasis: the SLP called for abolishing prison labor, whereas the Gotha Program only called for its regulation. But sometimes the differences were substantial: for instance, the Gotha Program called for mandatory voting and secret ballots as well as the right to bear arms, none of which were included in the SLP platform. By the same token, the SLP platform demanded the power to recall all elected officials and the establishment of a Bureau of Labor Statistics in every state and the federal government, with the leaders of these offices to be elected by the people. Neither of these demands were in the Gotha Program. Moreover, the language of the direct legislation planks in the two platforms were substantially different. Whereas the Gotha Program demanded “Direct legislation by the people. Decision as to peace or war by the people,” the SLP platform called for “Direct popular legislation enabling the people to propose or reject any law at their will, and introduction of minority representation [that is, proportional representation] in all legislative elections.” Clearly the SLP delegates who convened in Newark in December 1877 were doing more than copying and pasting from the Gotha Program. ⁶⁹

A further problem with Pomeroy’s claim is that the SLP platform’s call for direct legislation underwent changes that were unconnected to any “foreign platform.” Although the party placed the demand for direct legislation near the bottom of its list of demands in 1877, at its next convention two years later the party elevated direct legislation to its first political demand and changed the wording to clarify that it was calling for a federal constitutional amendment to institute direct legislation. At its third national convention in 1881, the direct legislation plank remained unchanged but only after a “lively discussion,” in which one delegate objected that “the referendum in America, where thousands upon thousands of laws are passed each year, [was] unfeasible, because one would never finish voting,” while a spokesman on the other side assured the convention that the referendum would apply “only to fundamental laws.” ⁷⁰ In 1885, at the SLP’s fifth national convention, the convention altered the wording of the direct legislation plank to call for “The people to have the right to propose laws (initiative) and to vote upon all laws of importance (Referendum).” ⁷¹

At bottom, Pomeroy’s suggestion that the SLP platform “cannot be said to have been adopted in this country” bespeaks a reflexive animus toward a Marxist ideology seen as alien to American traditions and toward the party’s German-born Americans, who native-born reformers, like Pomeroy, distrusted as carriers of dangerously revolutionary doctrines. German emigres formed the backbone of the SLP, and at times, particularly during the early 1880s, the membership was so overwhelmingly German-speaking that the party convention’s proceedings were published only in German. For much of this period, the party’s principal (and often sole) organs were German language papers, although in November 1886, the party reestablished an official English-language organ, the Workingmen’s Advocate. ⁷² But during the party’s first few years, ⁷³ and then again in the mid-1880s, the party attracted a broader ethnic constituency, including native-born Americans, and made common cause with other radical groups, including in Chicago local elections in 1878–1879 and in Henry George’s 1886 New York City mayoral campaign. Some local SLP sections unofficially backed Greenback candidates in local elections in 1878 and 1879, and in 1880, the national SLP voted to endorse the Greenback presidential candidate, James Weaver. ⁷⁴ In fact, in 1880, forty-four members of the SLP were admitted as delegates to the Greenback Party’s national nominating convention, seven of whom were seated on the platform committee. ⁷⁵ The antimonopoly ideology of the Greenback-Labor Party, as the party was officially designated after 1878, converged in many ways with that of the SLP, and the 1880 Greenback platform included many demands that could be found in the SLP platform, including an eight-hour workday and a progressive income tax. ⁷⁶ The SLP, in short, was neither a rubber stamp for the German Socialist movement nor a hermetically sealed sect.

This brings us to Pomeroy’s second contention that “socialist organizations [did] nothing to promote Direct Legislation in America.” It is true that the SLP, much like the Socialist Workers Party in Germany, never prioritized enactment of direct legislation. Some have even suggested that the direct legislation plank never “reflected any real concern [on the part of the SLP leadership] with the desirability of direct democracy, but had been put into the party platform to attract members who could then be converted to recognizing the necessity for a revolutionary change of the economic system.” ⁷⁷ But even if the direct legislation plank was more “decoration” or honeytrap than raison d’être, the party nonetheless strove to publicize it. In the spring of 1878, for instance, New York’s Henry Drury, “chief traveling organizer” for the SLP, conducted press interviews to advertise the party’s platform in which he explicitly listed the party’s demand for direct legislation. Drury helped to ensure that newspaper readers across the country encountered the SLP’s call for direct legislation. ⁷⁸ The direct legislation plank was sufficiently well advertised that spring—it appeared as part of the SLP platform in countless newspapers in every region of the country ⁷⁹—that those opposed to socialism took explicit aim at it, as when the Baltimore Evening Bulletin complained that the socialists want “to have wages leveled upward and work hours leveled downward by direct legislation.”

In recruitment meetings in its first years, SLP representatives often opened by reading the platform and then a speaker would elaborate on the rationale of the various planks. In July 1879, for instance, several SLP members from New York hosted a meeting in the courthouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with about 100 workingmen in attendance. The featured speaker was Cyrenus Osborne Ward (older brother of the soon-to-be-famous sociologist Lester Frank Ward), who worked as a machinist at the Brooklyn Naval Yard and had ties to the international socialist movement (he had even met Marx). A reporter from the Harrisburg Independent highlighted Osborne’s remarks about “demand 15,” the direct legislation plank, in which “the speaker said [that] until we take upon ourselves the right to vote upon the laws … we will have nothing but class rule and class legislation.” ⁸⁰ Even if the leadership of the SLP never made direct legislation a priority, the platform plank and the party’s members nonetheless played an important role in introducing discussion of the initiative and referendum into America’s workplaces, meeting halls, and newspapers and magazines.

The early influence of the SLP platform can be difficult to trace, concealed as it is within myriad social interactions and conversations that are lost to us. But sometimes the influence of the SLP platforms is so blatant that it would seem impossible to miss. For instance, when the Rhode Island Nationalists—a party inspired by the utopian socialism of Edward Bellamy—nominated a complete ticket for the state elections in the spring of 1891, they adopted the platform of the Socialist Labor Party virtually verbatim—and both Bellamy’s New Nation and the SLP organ the Workmen’s Advocate trumpeted the fact. The wording of the Nationalists’ demand—“The people have the right to propose laws according to the Initiative principal [sic], and to vote upon laws of importance according to the Referendum principle”—was lifted directly from the SLP’s most recent 1889 platform that declared that “The people to have the right to propose laws and to vote upon all measures, according to the Referendum principle,” essentially the same language the SLP had used since 1885. ⁸¹ The Maine Nationalists adopted this platform more than a year before both the Omaha convention’s commending of the initiative and referendum and the New Jersey Prohibition Party’s tabling of the resolutions supporting the initiative and referendum. The Socialists, not the People’s Party or the People’s Power League or the People’s Union, were the real pioneers of direct legislation.

There is abundant evidence that by the late 1880s SLP leaders were actively promoting the initiative and referendum in particular. In June 1889, for instance, a talk on “The Initiative and Referendum” was a featured part of the Sunday lecture program for the “agitation meetings” hosted by Chicago SLP’s “American section.” ⁸² The previous September, to take another example, the editor of the Workmen’s Advocate sparred with the New York Sun over government ownership. To the Sun’s question as to whether “Government Socialism, with the State owning everything” was preferable to “the present system, with its private property, private farming and manufacturers, the free initiative of the individual citizen, and the right of association,” the Workmen’s Advocate replied: “it depends upon what conception of government and State one has whether to answer unqualifiedly yes or no. The State of today is not entitled to the name” but “A State in which the people have the power of initiative and referendum, with the industries scientifically organized, in short, the Co-operative Commonwealth indicated in the Socialist Platform, would most assuredly be better” for the people than the present system “of which the people are not members but slaves.” ⁸³ Contrary to Pomeroy’s account, then, many in the Socialist Labor Party—just like Bürkli, Rittinghausen, and Considerant—viewed the initiative and referendum not in competition with but as an essential component of and means to the Co-operative Commonwealth.

Conclusion

The conventional way of thinking about direct legislation as a Populist and/or Progressive reform has left us with an incomplete, even impoverished understanding of the intellectual origins of the initiative and referendum in the United States. First, by starting the history of direct legislation around 1890, historians have largely written Gilded Age politics and ideas out of the story of the origins of direct legislation. Second, in focusing on the American political tradition—whether in the form of a Jeffersonian persuasion, a Populist impulse, antimonopoly tradition, or populist republicanism—scholars have tended to neglect the transatlantic origins of the initiative and referendum. ⁸⁴ Together, these emphases have led us to overlook or at least underestimate the crucial role that socialists, specifically the SLP, played in seeding and spreading the initiative and referendum in the United States.

To trace the intellectual origins of the U.S. initiative and referendum to European socialism, particularly the ideas of Rittinghausen, Bürkli, and the Gotha Program, is not to deny the ways that these socialist-inspired ideas were adapted and transformed in the American context. The transatlantic crossing of ideas is absolutely not a game of pass the parcel. But it is to insist that a fuller understanding of the origins of direct democracy requires historians to attend more closely to the ways these ideas were communicated, translated, reworked, and diffused during the Gilded Age. ⁸⁵ And only by putting Gilded Age socialists at the center of our narrative can we accurately delineate and then explain how the initiative and referendum went from the margins to the mainstream of American politics and society.