Abstract
Socialism in the United States grew at the turn of the twentieth century largely in response to alleged judicial despotism. Broad injunctions enjoining workers, deployment of state and federal troops during strikes, and extralegal extraditions and arrests of union leaders demonstrated to American workers that the law could and would be used to keep them in line. Socialists built their appeal by confronting this judicial overreach, insisting the only way to create a more equitable law to meet the novel conditions of industrial society was by voting for the Socialist Party. Yet the party’s approach to legality and the courts was more conciliatory than its rhetoric makes it seem. The party’s leadership was committed to a platform that conformed to the law. Socialists intended to cultivate a respectable image for themselves to attenuate the common association between socialists and bomb-throwing anarchists. In large part they attempted to accomplish this through the work of socialist lawyers who represented workers in court, transmuting radical discontent into a narrower, legal form, and defended Socialist-sponsored legislation, demonstrating the party’s constructive potential. To American socialists, their pursuit of respectability and legality did not entail a sacrifice of radical principals, but rather reflected their distinctly American character and genuine patriotism. They took pride in an American legal and democratic culture founded on egalitarian principles. Capitalism, they believed, had corrupted these pillars, and only through socialism could they be restored, revitalized, and perfected. The contradictions between their radical rhetoric and moderate conduct, between their Marxism and their Americanism, limited the Socialist Party’s potential, either as an electoral entity or a vehicle for working class dissent, and ultimately precipitated its unraveling during and after the First World War. All the same, the presence of socialists both in American politics and courts – their willingness to engage in “bourgeois” institutions – enabled them to participate in an expansive debate about the future of American law and democracy in an increasingly stratified society.