The Story Behind a 1920 Communist’s Speech in Ann Arbor

April, 19, 1920. Ypsilanti Daily Press.

Marxism in Washtenaw County, just west of Detroit, was little more than a novelty before the First World War. Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party had some supporters, but very little organization. Unions, including the likes of the Knights of Labor, had a long history in the area, but their presence was sporadic. Many of the industrial mills that lined the Huron River were unionized, or at least unionization was attempted, in the 1880s and 1890s. Hundreds of women worked these mills and Ypsilanti’s “factory girls” certainly made their voices heard in those early years.

The Socialist Party was large and organized enough to field slates of candidates at all levels of government in many parts of the state, but not rooted in the working class enough to get many votes. Crucially, Debs was not on the Michigan ballot in a number of elections.

Dennis E. Batt

After the cataclysm of the World War and The Russian and other revolutions, many more workers looked to the possibilities of radical transformation as offered by the Bolshevik experience as a new possibility.

The article above, from April, 1920, details a talk given by then Proletarian Party leader, Dennis E. Batt at the Ann Arbor Labor Temple, once at 306 S Main, now a high-end art gallery. Batt was a pioneering American Communist and among the most important early Communists in Michigan.

He spoke on the topic of ‘Marxian Socialism’, which Batt vulgarly describes as essentially; the class struggle, materialist conception of history (which seems something quite different to me from Marx’s ‘historical materialism’) and law of value (labor theory of value). For another speech giving his views during this period see this talk given at Madison Square Garden.

Dennis E. Batt was born in 1886 in Tekonsha, Michigan, the son of a street car conductor and later moved to Detroit before joining the military while still in his teens. After returning from the service, Batt became a tool and die maker in a factory, a trade he would continue throughout his life, and joined the Socialist Party of Michigan where he became an acolyte of John Keracher and the ‘impossibilist’ wing of the Party.

The Michigan Socialist Party, a hotbed of radicals after the war, was expelled by the National SP, like many other Party locals, in 1919. Fights over ‘reform or revolution’ and organizational practices ignited by the Bolshevik Revolution would split the Socialist Party all across the country. A contemporary report of the meeting in which the left-wing under Keracher won the Michigan Party can be found here.

Batt, along with Kerarcher and the bulk of the Michigan SP, had taken strong anti-reform positions; positions which would be considered crazy, ultra-left stuff today.  But hey, the Hapsburgs, Romanovs and Hohenzollern dynasties had all fallen in the previous eighteen months and the red flag had been hoisted over a half-dozen European capitals, so they had reason to be optimistic about the course of revolution. And, of course, the War had finished them for reform.

October 3, 1919. NY Times.

September 1919 saw the Communist Party of America, supported by Batt and other radicals associated with the foreign language sections of the SP, and the Communist Labor Party of America, supported by John Reed with an orientation to the IWW.

Batt was named National Secretary of new Communist Party of America and edited The Communist, weekly organ of the Party. At the Chicago of the founding meeting of the CPA, federal officers arrested Batt for sedition on the floor of the meeting.

CPA organ, edited by Dennis Batt.

Batt and others in Michigan rejected going ‘underground’ in response to the Palmer Raids of the CPA and split to form the Proletarian Party of America, with Batt as National Secretary and editor of The Proletarian. He went to Moscow for the Red International of Labor Unions convention in 1921 and attended the 3^rd Congress of the Comintern in the failed hope of getting the new PP recognized as a section.

The Proletarian, edited by Dennis Batt.

Later, Batt would be elected to the Executive of the Detroit Federation of Labor and President of Lodge 82 of the Machinists. He also became editor of the DFL’s organ, Detroit Labor News.

Eventually Batt’s position in the unions brought him into conflict with his  comrades in the Proletarian Party and he was expelled in the late 20s, thereafter becoming an increasingly traditional union bureaucrat who, like so many who would gain similar positions, severed his ties to radical politics.

John Keracher (1880–1958)

The Proletarian Party would soldier on as a Detroit, and later Chicago, based radical party for decades, with areas and occasions of real importance.  Declining by the late 1940s and finally disbanding in 1971, John Kerarcher would serve as leader of the Proletarian Party from 1920 until ill-health forced him to step down in 1954.

During the 1990s Detroit newspaper strike, I had the good fortune and great pleasure of getting to know an old stalwart of the Party, Fred Valle, a barber by trade. We marched together, him in his late 80s or early 90s, with another aged veteran, the SWPs Frank Lovell, at the 1997 Action Mowtown demonstration.  What a pleasure it was to hear these two men reminisce and even engage in friendly redebates of  old contentions on the same streets they did so in the past. I asked questions and soaked it in as we walked in the last great Detroit labor struggle.

Batt was a forerunner, with many of the same strengths and weaknesses, of what became the post-Russian Russian Communist left; the official and the critical. That the offical labor body in Ann Arbor gave Batt their hall to talk to them about Marxism in the midst of the Red Scare says something about his standing in the movement at the time.

Batt’s radicalism was shaped by the great strikes of the 1870s, which would define the world of labor he was born into. Later, as a young man, the intense class war of the first two decades of the twentieth century would seem him actively participate. All of those experiences would be redefned by the events of the World War and the Russian Revolution.

Unions in the area would increase throughout the 1920s, though the campaigns were much more muted and the politics more conservative than those before the war. It was in this period that Batt “sold out”. The Communist Party would only really begin to have influence in Michigan through the rise of the CIO and the UAW in the 1930s, with its multiple crises. Batt would be a bitter rival and object of derision by these new unionists and his former comrades, so much like the Batt of twenty years before.

Communist Party rally in Detroit, 1937.

Even in Washtenaw County, the massive Willow Run Ford factory in Ypsilanti had several separate Communist or radical inspired caucuses in UAW Local 50, including many black auto workers. During World War Two and the era of the Popular Front, the city’s large and energetic Young Communist League was led by a black man, Thomas Dennis. Like Batt, Dennis was also be a union and political leader, but with deep family roots in the freedom struggles of the 19th century.

Also like Batt, he would be arrested for sedition, under the Smith Act, after another World War, but that is for another post.

Glory! Glory! Ypsilanti’s Black Freedom Fighters Assault Fort Wagner!

We continue covering the sesquicentennial of the Civil War Today marking the anniversary of a milestone this day in the history of the black liberation struggle in the United States; the battle of Fort Wagner, July 18th, 1863. Though black troops had seen action in the west earlier, notably when they fought at the battles if Island Mound in Missouri, Port Hudson, Louisiana and just the day before at the battle of Honey Springs in Indian Territory on July 17th, 1863, it wasn’t until this day 148 years that black troops were widely seen to have joined the war as combatants.

The 54th Massachusetts saw horrific combat on this day leading a doomed assault on a Confederate fort protecting Charleston, South Carolina, Fort Wagner. Dispelling the racist notion that blacks would not fight, they fought like people fighting for their lives and the lives of their families. They fought for their own future, the future of blacks in America and the future of freedom around the world. And they fought ferociously.

The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was a pioneering black regiment largely staffed by white abolitionists and composed of free blacks form the North as well as some escaped slaves from the south. It was the first black regiment raised in the north and one of the few to retain its state designation throughout the war. Some of those enlistees included noted black abolitionists and activists including the sons of Frederick Douglass. It was, if such a thing might be said, the ‘elite’ black unit of the Civil War.

Some 1,500 Union soldiers, black and white, were counted as casualties that day. Of the 54th, only 315 men remained after the battle. thirty were killed in action, fighting which saw the 54th reach the parapet of the fort and engage the enemy with their very hands. The dead included regimental leader and abolitionist Colonel Shaw as well as Captains Russel and Simpkins. These white officers were buried in a mass grave with the black enlisted men where they remained until a storm washed the burials out to sea. Twenty-four later died of wounds, fifteen were captured, and fifty-two were reported missing after the battle and never reported again.

Massachusetts was the citadel of the abolitionist movement and the raising of black troops enjoyed the active support of the state government, then held by the more radical, if not The radical, wing of the Republican Party and attracted people from all over the North; from my small town, Ypsilanti, Michigan as well. Around twelve men, impatient with the lack of progress in raising a regiment in Michigan, joined some of the first regiments in the country to be raised: the deservedly famous 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In several contingents, and organized by a network of black Masonic lodges, the men left from Ypsilanti for Camp Meigs in Readville, Massachusetts in the Spring of 1863. After the 54th was full the 55th Massachusetts was formed and also served with distinction throughout the war, including at the battles of James Island and Honey Hill. Three units with Ypsilanti men; the 54th, 55th and the Michigan raised 102nd USCT, which included over seventy Ypsilantians, would all serve together in the same operations from South Carolina to Florida and there is ample evidence that the men related across the regimental boundaries, including at memorials for fallen comrades from Ypsilanti.

Mostly young, mostly without families and mostly working as laborers and living as borders these men all had pasts, all of them were from somewhere else. Some lied about their pasts, some concealed them. Some were undoubtedly escaped slaves, others were exiles from racist communities. Many knew each other, others were recent arrivals. Only months after they enlisted their regiment would be decimated at Fort Wagner, their service a badge of honor for the rest of their lives, if they lived. What went through the minds of these men as they headed by steamers down the coast to slavery’s shores, guns in their hands and freedom on their lips?

They included Elias Rouse, an escaped slave from Kentucky who joined Company K of the 54th and was wounded in the arm in the assault on Fort Wagner.He would later marry the widow, Mary, of another volunteer, John Gay of the 102nd United States Colored Troops, who died of disease and is buried in South Carolina. Elias is buried in Ypsilanti’s Highland Cemetery.

John Bird a farmhand originally from Ohio, who joined the 55th and died of disease on Morris Island, South Carolina in January.

Nelson Wilson, a young hotel worker claiming to be from Canada though he was from Kentucky, also possibly an escaped slave, joined the 55th and was promoted to Full Corporal and later moved to Saint Louis.

James Wood originally from Indiana would join the 55th and serve through the war moving to Detroit afterward where he became a cook.

Napoleon Hamilton, originally from Alabama, joined the 54th and was promoted for his role at Fort Wagner later to have his rank reduced for ‘carelessness’.

William Casey, originally from Virginia, joined the 55th at the age of 48, though he lied and said he was 40. He injured his back doing fatigue-duty and was assigned to regimental duties after that, discharged for disability at the very end of the war.

Charles August, a black smith originally from Delaware was captured during the assault and died in the notorious Andersonville prison in September of 1864.

John Leatherman, a merchant marine, joined the 54th and was either killed in the assault on Fort Wagner or was captured and later died at Andersonville (the records say both). The thought of an experience of a captured black soldier is terrifying. Very few of the men captured at Wagner survived.

Charles Scott, a day laborer, joined the 54th and died of wounds received in one of the very last battles of the war, Boykins Mills, South Carolina in April, 1865.

Others from Michigan who fought with these storied regiments include Armistead Williams, a 36 year old laborer from Detroit, who joined the 54th and was captured two days before the assault on Fort Wagner, dying in July, 1864 of typhoid fever.

William Brown, a 19 year old merchant marine from Detroit died at Folly Island, South Carolina in December, 1864. He joined Company E and was in the thick of the fight at Wagner.

William Griffin, a twenty year old blacksmith from Detroit, had joined the 55th and was killed in action at the battle of Honey Hill on November 30th, 1864.

Richard Richie, a farmer from Greenville, Michigan joined the 55th as well. Originally from Mississippi, he was killed at the battle of Honey Hill as well.

Alfred Harris, a 28 year old sailor from Detroit, joined the 54th and was declared missing, never to be seen again, following the assault on Wagner.

Henry Steward, a 23 year old farmer from Adrian, joined the 54th and was promoted to Sergeant. He died of wounds received during the assault on Wagner in September of 1863 in a hospital in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

John Stevens, a farmer from Pontiac was 23 when he joined the 54th. He died this day, 148 years ago fighting for the liberation of his enslaved race on the walls of Fort Wagner.

These are the names of only some of the veterans of the 54th and 55th. There were many who answered freedom’s call from Ypsilanti and headed south in a war of liberation with other black units, mainly with the Michigan raised 102nd USCT. So many of their stories are lost forever, whatever we might do to rescue their legacy is not worthy of their sacrifice, yet we must do it. Remember their names comrades, they are heroes.

Below is a letter from Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis to his sweetheart Amelia, whom he would later marry, in the days following the battle that gives a sense of the assault and the men who made it.

Long live the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts! Freedom will be taken by the sword!

MORRIS ISLAND. S. C. July 20

MY DEAR AMELIA: I have been in two fights, and am unhurt. I am about to go in another I believe to-night. Our men fought well on both occasions. The last was desperate we charged that terrible battery on Morris Island known as Fort Wagoner, and were repulsed with a loss of 3 killed and wounded. I escaped unhurt from amidst that perfect hail of shot and shell. It was terrible. I need not particularize the papers will give a better than I have time to give. My thoughts are with you often, you are as dear as ever, be good enough to remember it as I no doubt you will. As I said before we are on the eve of another fight and I am very busy and have just snatched a moment to write you. I must necessarily be brief. Should I fall in the next fight killed or wounded I hope to fall with my face to the foe.

If I survive I shall write you a long letter. DeForrest of your city is wounded George Washington is missing, Jacob Carter is missing, Chas Reason wounded Chas Whiting, Chas Creamer all wounded. The above are in hospital.

This regiment has established its reputation as a fighting regiment not a man flinched, though it was a trying time. Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking. How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell, but I am here. My Dear girl I hope again to see you. I must bid you farewell should I be killed. Remember if I die I die in a good cause. I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this war. Good Bye to all Write soon Your own loving LEWIS

A Fall Walk Among Ypsilanti’s Soldiers of Black Liberation

These are my heroes.  A few years back I took a bike ride through Ypsilanti’s Highland Cemetery.  I had heard that there was a monument to Civil War soldiers, it was a nice day and I ended up there more as a destination for a ride rather than as a destination in of itself.  I got to the monument pictured above and read on its base “They Died To Make Our Country Free”.  What a remarkable thing I thought.  It didn’t say to restore the Union or to make or country freer, or to live up to its constitution (which itself helped to codify slavery), or anything like that. It said to make free, meaning it was unfree.  Not a popular thing to say, even today, when we would like to think that slavery was endorsed only by the Southern states rather than by the whole of the Federal Government.

I looked around at the graves and noticed some with the marking “102 USCT”.  I knew that meant “United States Colored Troops”, but more than that I did not know.  Also remarkable, they were buried among the white veterans on the Civil and other wars.   What was the 102 USCT?  Why were they buried here under this statue among other, white, soldiers.  Above all, who were these men?  So began an investigation, perhaps an obsession, into the black men of Ypsilanti who would join in, what they surely viewed as, a war of liberation to destroy slavery and free their people.

Since then I have spent untold hours in archives, deeds offices, newspaper stacks, libraries and searching the streets to see if any of their homes still stand.  Whatever tangible connection I could find to them.  Over 70 black men from Ypsilanti, or around 80% of the listed adult male black population (which was surely higher than recorded), would join after the army was opened up to blacks in the Spring of 1863 (Louisiana, Missouri and South Carolina had earlier, local, recruitments).  Almost all of them the First Michigan Colored Infantry, later 102nd United States Colored Troops.

Around twelve men, impatient with the lack of progress in raising a regiment in Michigan, joined the first regiments in the country to be raised: the deservedly famous 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Massachusetts, the seat of abolitionism with a Radical Governor, refused to add “colored” to the name of the regiment.  These men would see and endure the unimaginable.  Including two who would be sent to the dreadful Andersonville Prison, one of whom, Charles August, would die there.  The heroic, but doomed assault on Fort Wagner was the  defining public moment for black participation in the war.  Men who lived not three blocks from me would storm its parapets only to be driven back with huge losses.

There is so much more to say on who these men were, where they came from and what it says about how some blacks viewed the war. For me it has been a window onto world I had heard of, but could never really define.  Now I see it, if not clearly, than in more detail than I thought possible.  My curiosity has been peaked and I don’t know how to stop. Any one who knows me, often to their annoyance, knows it can be my favored topic of conversation.

I would like to rescue these men from the obscurity racism pushed them into, from the obscurity of time  and class as well.  They deserve to be known, to be understood.  They are a vital, vibrant link in the revolutionary tradition of the United States.   They are genuine heroes; soldiers of black, of human, liberation.

I went to Highland again last Thursday.  A perfect late fall day.  The leaves have peaked and everywhere among the trees a golden snow was falling.  A quiet day in the cemetery after the tumult of the election’s final week.  I found myself wishing I could have told them that on Tuesday the United States elected a black President.  I wonder what they would have said.

Jeremiah Snively joined the Regiment at the age of 19 in January, 1864.  He lived in Ypsilanti after, working as a day laborer.  His grave marker is one of several new markers bought by a kind individual to replace the deteriorated originals.

Elias Rouse most probably came from a slave family in Kentucky, listed as a mulatto, he may have been the child of his mother’s Master or one of his children.  What I know about his early life is sketchy.  He would end up in Chatham, Ontario which along with Buxton was a center for runaway slaves, free blacks who could no longer abide the racism in the “free states” and radical black abolitionists organizing to strike a blow against slavery.  It was in Chatham that John Brown met with people like Martin Delaney and John De Baptiste (who would go on to lead recruitment to the 102nd) hoping to win support in the colony of exiles for his armed foray into the South.

Elias would then end up in Ypsilanti where, with William Scott, he would leave for Massachusetts to join Company K of the 54th Massachusetts in May, 1863.  Meaning as soon as he was able to join a regiment he went.  He had, perhaps, been waiting for that day all of his life.  Elias was wounded in the assault on Fort Wagner but stayed with the “Glory” Regiment through its entire service.  William Scott would, like so many others, fall ill and was discharged within six months of joining.  Many more members of the 102 and other black regiments died of disease than of combat.

Elias returned  to Ypsilanti after the war where he would marry the widow of his comade John Gay of the 102 USCT, Mary Gay.  The Ypsilanti men who had gone to join the 54th and 55th would see their Ypsilanti friends of the 102 later in the war.  All these Regiments were stationed together in Florida and South Carolina at one time or another.  They would fight together at Deveaux Kneck, Boykon’s Landing and Honey Hill there.  Several raids would destroy hundreds of miles of Confederate rail and infrastructure.

John Gay died of disease in South Carolina in 1865.  He is buried there.  Elias would raise John’s children with Mary and they would have some of their own.

He died in 1899, and is listed in the records as a peddler and day laborer.  His house with Mary still stands, she may have bought it with her Widow’s Pension in the 1870’s.  I would love to know more about Elias and will continue to try to track down what I might about him.  To see a photograph of him, to see his face, would be a deeply satisfying thrill.

Comrades in life and in death.

Henry Thornton is mostly a mystery.  I know he joined the Regiment later, in October 1864, at the age of 38.  But other than that I don’t know much about him.  This is a Grand Army of the Republic marker from the time of his death.  He would probably have been a member.  There were two black GAR branches in Michigan, one of them named after John Brown.

Either this is David York’s grave with his brother George York’s death date or it is George’s grave with David’s name on it.  Both had come to Ypsilanti with their family from Kentucky in the 1850’s.  George enlisted at the age of 15 with his 18 year old brother David in October 1863.  George fell ill and died tragically without ever leaving Ypsilanti.  David would return to Ypsilanti where he married a women named Mary, have half a dozen children and lived a couple of blocks from where I live now.  A laborer he died after the turn of the century.

Benjamin Harper, originally from Indiana joined the Regiment in November, 1863 at the age of 20 and served the life of the unit.  He saw battle in Florida and participated in raids into the Carolina interior that destroyed plantations, skirmished with Confederates and liberated slaves.  His comrade of the same company was Jesse Oliver from Ypsilanti.  He would die of wounds received at the Battle of Honey Hill.   After the war Benjamin would live next to the Yorks and marry a woman named Martha from Canada.  He would die around the turn of the century.

Percival Murphy joined the Regiment at the age of 39 in February, 1864.  Originally from Ohio he is listed as “mulatto”.  Percival had come to Ypsilanti some years before the war.  The town had for many years, since the Second Great Revival, had a reputation as relatively tolerant.  Its proximity to Canada would mean that it would also be a way stop for black folks on their journey to that, more hospitable, country.  Many young black men show up on the records before the war as single farm laborers boarding on white farmsteads.  Percival also lived not far from me where he raised a family with his wife Catherine, originally from Delaware.

Thomas Davis joined at the ripe old age of 44 near the end of the war.  Originally from Virginia he had also come to Ypsilanti some years before the war where he worked on farms with his brother Daniel.  He would marry Margaret who would die young.  He would later marry Elizabeth and work as a peddler.  He died on April 13, 1895.

There are many more names and stories to share.  These are just a few of the men who would join the freedom struggle from Ypsilanti.  Others, like William Casey and Edmund Lowe, would become leaders of their community.  Many more came home from victory to the harsh reality of an unfinished revolution; continued racial discrimination and violence and the exploitation inherent to their class.  All of them deserve mention.  Surely, none were angels and just as surely very few of us will ever do more for freedom than they.

McKinney in Ypsi!

Here in my little town, sandwiched as it is between Ann Arbor and Detroit, people pass through they do not stop. We’re delighted to have Cynthia McKinney at Ypsi’s newest watering hole, the Corner Brewery. Cynthia joined the May Day march against the war (see photo above) led by ILWU in the Bay yesterday.

If you’re in Ypsi or the area come on down! A report on her visit will follow.

Meet Cynthia McKinney, candidate for President of the United States

May 5, 7-9 PM
The Corner Brewery
720 Norris St
Ypsilanti

(I-94 to exit 183, Huron St north past Michigan Ave and Cross St to Forest Ave, and Forest Ave east to Norris St)

A six-term former Member of Congress from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney is seeking, and will likely be, the Green Party nominee for President of the United States

Cynthia wants to:

• End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bring the troops home now.
• Implement universal, single-payer healthcare.
• Repeal NAFTA, fair trade, not corporate globalization.
• Spend money for education, not pay prisons for profit.

As a Congressperson, Cynthia:

• Opposed funding for bloated military and secret intelligence budgets.
• Introduced Articles of Impeachment for George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice.
• Introduced, championed, and passed in the U.S. House the Arms Trade Code of Conduct, prohibiting the sale of arms to known human rights abusers.
• Passed legislation to extend health benefits for Vietnam War veterans still suffering the health from exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange.

She currently serves on (a) International tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, (b) Brussels Tri-bunal on Iraq, (c) is participating in War Crimes prosecutions in Spain, and (d) is working with the Malaysian Peace organization to criminalize war.

Visit her website: www.runcynthiarun.org

Paid for by the Power to the People Committee Cynthia McKinney for President
Joan Christian, Treasurer, P.O. Box 311759 Atlanta, Georgia 31131-1759