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Bartee Haile
Obeying a direct order from Washington, the postmaster at Hallettsville confiscated the latest edition of The Rebel on June 17, 1917.
What prompted the suppression of Texas’ leading socialist newspaper by the Wilson Administration?
The official story was publisher Tom Hickey’s outspoken opposition to the president breaking his campaign promise to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe.
But some believed The Rebel had been living on borrowed time ever since “Red Tom” made public the Texas-born postmaster general’s replacement of tenant farmers on his plantation with convict labor.
In 1860 nearly all farmers in Texas held title to the land they tilled. A half century later, an estimated 53 percent were hired hands working the fields for absentee owners.
The landlord’s customary cut in the late 1800’s was a fourth of the cotton and a third of the other crops raised by his tenants. However, after the turn of the century, many began to require cash payments, a demand that drove sharecroppers deeper into debt and turned them into modern-day serfs.
Although some experts argued that hard working renters could eventually escape the tenant trap, the sharecropper knew better and so did the Dallas Morning News. “Nine out of ten of the tenants of today, probably 19 out of 20, are destined to remain tenants,” the big-city daily observed in 1910.
Hoping to steer maverick sharecroppers toward the Socialist Party, organizer Thomas Aloysius Hickey created the Renters Union and a weekly publication called The Rebel. Shunned by Democrats and Republicans alike, the outcasts eagerly embraced anybody that showed the slightest interest in their plight.
The Renters Union quickly blossomed into a mass movement with a radical rather than reformist outlook. The seething resentment previously reserved for landowners escalated into a scathing indictment of the entire capitalist system.
In record time The Rebel had 22,000 subscribers and Appeal to Reason, the national party organ, claimed a paid circulation of 40,000 in the Lone Star State. Inspired by Hickey’s success, 40 socialist papers popped up in places like Texarkana, Grand Saline, Palestine and Mount Pleasant.
At first Hickey came under criticism from his superiors for failing to advocate collectivized agriculture according to socialist dogma.
The nasty letters from the national headquarters suddenly ceased in 1912, when the Texas branch of the Socialist Party emerged as the fastest growing state organization in the country. In that year’s presidential election, Eugene V. Debs tripled his vote receiving nearly nine percent statewide and twice that in parts of East Texas. Impressed by “the true socialist spirit” of his supporters, Debs declared, “Many of them have scarcely a crop between themselves and destitution and yet they are the most generous, whole-hearted people on earth and for socialism would give the last of their scant possessions.”
The radical influence extended even to Dallas, where the socialist candidate for mayor took a surprising third of the turnout. Despite the fact that no left-winger had ever won a single ballot box in Big D, he carried seven of the city’s 33 precincts.
Intoxicated by these triumphs, Texas socialists expected an electoral breakthrough in 1912. But a shrewd banker from Temple with a down-home style stole their thunder and the bulk of their tenant-farmer base.
Jim Ferguson roared through the countryside like a springtime tornado and carried off the spellbound sharecroppers.
In the process he singlehandedly blew the bewildered socialists off the political map.
Hickey and associates tried to tell themselves that the truant tenants would return to the fold the moment the Democrat showed his true colors. But they misjudged the magnetic appeal of Farmer Jim, who would command the allegiance of poor Texans for the next 30 years.
Those that did come back were the most rambunctious and hardest to keep in line.
Ignoring a warning from the socialists that violence would only provoke repression, they went on a night-riding rampage in western Texas that landed many in jail.
The socialists counted on another presidential campaign by the popular Debs in 1916 to get their movement back on track. But the aging agitator refused to run and his replacement, a colorless candidate preoccupied with the war, only accelerated their decline.
The inevitable crackdown came in 1917 shortly after the United States entered Following his release from federal detention for anti-draft activities, Tom Hickey accused the government of using the war as an excuse “to crucify a political opponent they could not bribe or control.”
“Red Tom” expressed this opinion in hand-written letters because he no longer had a newspaper. The very first publication in the country banned from the U.S. mail as a threat to national security had been none other than The Rebel.
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