Socialist Party
From Turtledove
[edit] Socialist Party in the United States
The Socialist Party was a left-wing party that became a major political force in the United States after the Second Mexican War. Abraham Lincoln and a group of left-wing Republicans formed the Socialist Party in 1882 from a variety of leftist organizations. The Socialists were known for their mostly lenient foreign policy and their progressive views on labor. The Socialists had some success in regional elections the years following the Second Mexican War, but were never considered a threat to win a presedential election until after the Great War, when the widespread post-war labor strife catapulted them to victory, first as a senior partner in a governing coalition in the Republicans in the House of Representatives in 1918, and then to Powel House in 1920, when Upton Sinclair defeated Democratic incumbent Theodore Roosevelt.
The inauguration of Sinclair was attended by numerous party militants waving Red Flags. However, once in power the party did not institute any radical changes, and certainly did not abolish the Captalist economy.
The Socialists in power also made no change in the policy of open-ended military occupation of Canada which they inherited from the Roosevelt Administration. They offered the Canadians neither an option of renewed independence nor of incorporation in the United States and gaining of full Civil Rights, and President Sinclair authorized brutal repression of an uprising early in the 1920s.
Moreover, Socialist adminstrations like Democrat ones left the running of captured Confederate territories in the hands of ex-Confederate officials like Luther Bliss in Kentucky - willing to collaborate with US rule, but just as racist as most other Confederates - with the result that Blacks in these states remained disenfranchised, second-class citizens.
[edit] Socialist Party in the Confederate States
There was a small but not-negligible Socialist Party in the Confederate States in the days immediately after the Great War. The party as such was not involved in the Red Rebellion, but some of its members were, and the rebels' proclaimed Socialist ideology tended to reflect on a party professing the same. As a result, the party's popularity steeply declined (at least among whites). However, after the Great War, as the Whigs' fortunes reached their lowest ebb, the Confederate Socialist Party reached its zenith, winning four seats in the 1917 Congressional elections, from New Orleans, Louisiana, Cuba, and Chihuahua. (These were the only Confederate elections in which black veterans of the Great War were able to vote, a right of which they were deprived long before the Freedom Party came to power.) The CSP promoted a platform of racial equality, and as a result was despised by the Freedom Party. Once the Freedom Party dominated the Confederate government, its suppression of the Socialist Party verged on persecution, with many Socialists winding up in concentration camps.
