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A rising up "from the depths" threatens to disturb a gilded party in the above cartoon published in 1906 byThe Appeal to Reason, the most popular revolutionary socialist newspaper in US history. The tuxedoed and bejeweled rich, enjoying a grand ball in what looks like the Metropolitan Museum, recoil in horror as a clenched fist smashes up through the dance floor. Below, in an allegorical view offered by scientific socialism, we see the suffering and resistance of the working class. In squalid darkness, women and children strain to hold up the roof - or is it the floor - while their kind are crushed by exhaustion, age and injustice. One among them however has put his burden down and leads the fight upward. This is what Socialism in America looked like in the Age of Monopoly.

The Age of Monopoly begins with the end of Reconstruction and the Great Uprising of 1877. Subject to waves of violent conflict, a second Civil War seemed ready to break out, whether on the frontier or in urban America as with the Haymarket bombing of 1886 or Homestead strike of 1892. In 1901 the US Steel became the biggest corporation in history, the Socialist Party is founded in Chicago, and a anarchist assassinated President McKinley, the man who three years earlier invaded the Philippines. The struggles of the Age of Monopoly reach a kind of peak with World War I (1916-1918) and the Red Scare (1919-1922) that followed. Victorious in the class struggle, monopoly capitalism and Wall Street reign uncontested until the age comes to a cataclysmic end with the Great Crash of 1929.

Throughout the era, in all parts of country, the American people rose to challenge the power of capitalism under the banner of building the "cooperative commonwealth." Denouncing the unaccountable power of Robber Barons and Plutocrats, a generation of industrial workers, midwestern farmers, urban immigrants, civil rights activist and feminists, as well as a progressive middle class, built Socialism into a mass movement. Rising and falling between the 1880s and 1920s, American Socialism was many things to many different groups, but through the lens of radical cartoonists we can see that at its root, Socialism encouraged people to challenge the sanctity of the free market, to demand the expansion of democratic rights and civil liberties, and to consider the real possibility of progressive, even revolutionary, change.

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Cartoons for Socialism Cartooning Capitalism