ABSTRACT
On the other hand, there have been the historians who acknowledge that a viable culture of dissent existed in American history, but that it was a political counter-tradition that lost out to the apikorista of corporate liberalism in the late nineteenth century. ese historians locate an alternate ideology to liberalism in the form of labour republicanism, which rested on the belief that civic virtue and active citizenship would protect the nation against the ruthlessness of competitive capitalism. With its decline in the repressive wake of the Haymarket A air and the co-optation of the People’s Party by the Democrats in 1896, the socialist movement was dead on arrival. According to historian Leon Fink, labour republicanism began to decline at the same time as the Knights of Labor, a product of the backlash against the Haymarket bombing in 1886: ‘[U]nder the stress of defeat, fear, and the unknown, the edi ce of a workers’ movement and a labor alternative did crack, leaving the working class with little chance of forging
a viable movement in its wake.’3 Like Fink, Dorothy Ross also made 1886 the decisive year for the failure of a radical alternative to liberalism. In her article, ‘Socialism and American Liberalism: Academic Social ought in the 1880s’, in which she discussed the careers of such prominent late nineteenth-century economists as John Bates Clark, Henry Carter Adams and Richard T. Ely, she argued that a er the Haymarket A air these socialist-tending academics tempered their views and chose job security over radical politics, thus turning away from socialism and towards an ideological stance she called ‘Fabian Liberalism’.4 Lawrence Goodwyn, a historian of Populism, placed the decisive moment when an alternative movement lost out to corporate capitalism a decade later than Fink and Ross, when the People’s Party merged with the Democratic Party for that year’s presidential election.5 At best, organized socialism represented a ‘shadow movement’, Goodwyn concluded. Labour historian Richard Schneirov summed up the trajectory of this scholarship when he wrote that ‘the defeat of the Knights in speci c strikes in the mid-1880s and the political defeat of the Populists in the mid-1890s, foreclosed a more democratic and emancipatory set of historical possibilities in twentieth-century America’.6
