(Photo from The Toiler, Newspaper of the Communist Labor Party in Ohio)
Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, one can't shake a sense of latent conservatism. Support for Kerry, Obama, or Bush, placed you firmly on the Left in a community where Trump signs glared menacingly from the well-maintained lawns of well-maintained suburbanites only a few months back. And I swear to you, if there's not a McDonald's a block down, there's a church on the corner instead.
Radicalizing in this context, it's difficult not to feel alone. Being radical meant checking The Communist Manifesto out from the library, being a contrarian in high-school classes, and appearing (and being) disgruntled.
Years later, I've begun to realize that Ohio is not a hopelessly traditional place. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and a variety of social movements have taken root and radicalized significant sections of people. And that's also meant the rebirth of a socialist movement, with organizations growing and popping up across the state.
But this isn't the first time: the periods of radicalization during the 1910s, the 1930s, and the 1960s which swept the United States didn't leave Ohio untouched.
In the late 1910s, industrial workers in Ohio flocked to the Socialist Party, creating a significant challenge to the entrenched two-parties in the cities. The party had a significant foreign-born population, often with direct links to the Marxist and radical movements sweeping Europe during the time. And after the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Ohio Socialist Party began identifying openly with the nascent world communist movement. This support led them to be expelled as a bloc by the right-wing leadership of the Socialist Party. Thereafter, many former members joined the Communist Labor Party and later the Communist Party.
In the 1930s, the wave of radicalization during the height of the Great Depression created a hearing for the Communist Party message in the industrial cities throughout Ohio. And during the ensuing Red Scare of the 1950s, members of the Communist Party were intimated, harassed, and sometimes arrested, in Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland.
And finally, during the late 1960s, the movement for Black Liberation, Women's Liberation, and the movement to stop the Vietnam war flourished throughout the state. After the Kent State massacre, where the National Guard opened fire on an anti-war demonstration, killing 4 and injuring 9, mass demonstrations led universities like The Ohio State University to shut down for weeks. And simultaneously, the Black Panther Party and other communist organizations began taking root once again in Ohio. In the late 1970s, even the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party and the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization had bases in Cleveland.
In the coming weeks and months, I'm hoping to gather together some of these resources on the radical legacy of Ohio.
The recovering of such history is in one sense an entertaining endeavor; a novelty of sorts. However, doing such work is also of crucial importance for the growth of the revolutionary socialist movement. One of the real historical cruelties is how the neoliberal turn of the last 40 years has forcibly broken the links between the radicals of the past and the present. Without the knowledge of their successes and failures, we must start from scratch again.
So here's to rebuilding those links, and to reclaiming our past!
