From Red to Black

This chapter looks back to how, over the course of a decade, Chicago's “communists” had gone from counseling their followers to avoid violent confrontations to planning them. This evolution of tactics rested on an even more fundamental shift in outlook and social theory. In 1877 when leaders of the Workingmen's Party acted to restrain mob violence, they did so in the belief that industrial change would come about through the steady growth of trade unions and the gradual raising of the working class's consciousness. But in 1886 the men in Greif's basement were skeptical that trade unions could ever deliver more than a few extra crumbs to the workingman's table and had come to believe that workers were ready for violent class struggle. Between the one outlook and the other was a wholesale shift in the socialist movement that began in Europe and swept into America.