In the fall of 1909, Max Hayes — typographical worker, editor of the Cleveland Citizen, and leader of the socialist opposition inside the American Federation of Labor — told Cleveland’s labor delegates that the union movement itself was at stake: “The American Federation of Labor will stand or fall as events issue.” Philipp Corfman’s Jacobin essay reconstructs the fight that followed, in which Cleveland’s socialists came closer to capturing the AFL than anyone before or since.

The Cleveland council they led was a genuinely radical body:

  • Its 1887 Declaration of Principles demanded the “emancipation of the working classes” and told workers not to vote for “the political parties of the capitalists”
  • It invited Emma Goldman to speak in 1897 and grew from about six unions in 1887 to more than a hundred locals by 1902
  • Hayes led an 1905 typographers’ strike that won the eight-hour day; the Citizen exposed a corporate spying ring and the union-busters running McKinley’s 1896 campaign
  • Hayes and Harry Thomas drafted Ohio’s workman’s compensation law in the Citizen office

Against them stood Samuel Gompers, AFL president since 1886, the apostle of “pure and simple unionism” — extract concessions through economic pressure, reward friends and punish enemies, and leave capitalism itself alone. His federation grew to roughly two million members by 1905, but mostly as craft unions for skilled workers, shutting out the unskilled majority and often immigrants and workers of color. For the socialists that was the failure: a labor movement that had written off millions of workers and could not defend them against automation or the business cycle.

The rupture came in 1909 over an electrical workers’ leadership dispute. The AFL backed the conservative incumbents; Cleveland’s council backed the rank and file. Gompers revoked the charters of defiant local bodies and chartered a rival Cleveland Federation of Labor run by local conservatives. At the Toronto convention that year, a socialist faction planned to turn the backlash into a leadership challenge — and Hayes was weighing a run against Gompers when news arrived that Gompers faced prison for defying a labor injunction. Labor closed ranks around its besieged president; the socialists held off. By April 1910 Cleveland’s council folded into the rival body and lost every major vote. Two of the three socialist leaders were dead within three years.

What makes the essay worth reading is the counterfactual it refuses to let go of: absent that prison sentence, a socialist could plausibly have taken the AFL. Gompers-style business unionism instead set the mold for a century, and Corfman’s closing argument connects the defeat forward — through the purges of the First Red Scare to a labor movement now weaker than it has been since Hayes’s time. The Cleveland socialists are a reminder that American workers were never naturally docile, and that the shape of the labor movement was a choice made and contested, not a fact of nature.