A Chapter of Texas Radicalism

IF ONE ONLY glanced at the title, one may be fooled into thinking that this was a book for history buffs with a specific interest in Texas radical history from 100+ years ago. However, a closer look tells us that this is indeed a project with very significant lessons for our political realities of today.

The author, Thomas Alter, has become a subject in a major campaign in the fight to preserve academic freedom and basic constitutional civil liberties in the Trump era.

Alter was fired in 2025 from his position as a tenured history professor at Texas State University, after speaking in his personal capacity at on online conference on revolutionary socialism. (The defense committee website https://defendtomalter.org/ provides updates on the campaign’s activities and his ongoing lawsuit for reinstatement.)

In this context, Alter’s historical research should be of renewed interest. While the author claims that this book “has been continuously informed by the present,” I would argue that the inverse is also true. One example would be the immense pressure on DSA-endorsed candidates running on Democratic Party tickets to conform to Democratic Party norms.

During the time that Alter is discussing, starting with the aftermath of the 1848 revolution in Europe, the party duopoly was already underway to establish its stranglehold on U.S. politics.

The independent third-party organizing described in Alter’s book — from the Knights of Labor, the Greenback Labor Party and The Grange to the Populist movement and the Socialist Party — may have faced even more vicious backlash than today’s efforts. Yet the two-pronged response of marginalization and cooptation by the two dominant parties remains by and large unchanged.

And like the socialists of today, these early agrarian and urban progressives and radicals were trying to organize independently yet were routinely pulled back into the two major parties’ orbit.

Radicalism in the Old Country

Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth centers on the multi-generational organizing efforts of the Meitzen family in Texas.

It starts with Otto Meitzen, part of an emerging middle class in Prussia, who left in the aftermath of the failed revolution of 1848. Although the extent of his involvement in the revolution is largely unknown, he was involved enough to flee with his family, including a newborn, once the counterrevolution started.

Alter shows us how the Meitzen family’s radical legacy in Texas was directly informed by radical organizing efforts in his home state of Silesia. Otto’s hometown of Breslau, the state capital, was an important urban center with significant industrial activity and an old and prestigious university, where a liberal nationalist fraternity (Die Breslauer Burschenschaft) arose and turned it into a hotbed of radical politics.

The nationalism of 19th century fraternities was born from a longing for an independent nation-state, yet to be formed; it would supersede individual fiefdoms and grant democratic rights.

Initially Burschenschaft members were discouraged from acting politically due to fear of harassment. A small group, led by Wilhelm Wolff and Robert Julius Bartsch, however, argued that one must engage in political issues.

Wolff later on became a prominent leader of working-class radicalism in Silesia and a very close friend of Marx and Engels.

Admitted to the university later in life, Wolff was the son of a hereditary serf, and as a child had to perform statute labor for the local lord. Wolff’s organic engagement in the struggles of both peasants and a burgeoning working-class in Silesia — and particularly his study of the Silesian Weaver’s Revolt of 1844 — had a profound impact on both Marx and Engels.

Unlike the liberal bourgeoisie, Wolff continuously highlighted the “soziale Frage” (social question) and advocated for a democratic republic against a constitutional monarchy. To Marx and Engels, this demonstrated revolutionary potential: peasants could be a key ally of the working class in the struggle.

Differing from other areas of Germany, forms of organizing in Silesia were not centered around a village or a trade but sprang up provincewide.

It was also the only region where peasants formed their own political organization. The most prominent was the Schlesische Rustikalverein, or Silesian rustic alliance, which attracted around 200,000 members.

These distinctive Silesian political features and experiences were to inform Otto Meitzen’s organizing approach in Texas.

New Beginnings in Texas

The counterrevolution drove nearly 79,000 Germans to the United States by 1850. Just four years later the German population stood at 215,000; by 1860 there were half a million. With its wide-open spaces, Texas seemed ideally suited for German ’48ers trying to realize their radical agrarian ideals.

In January 1850, Otto Meitzen and his family landed in Galveston. Initially they planned to settle in central Texas, near to German colonists associated with the Adelsverein (see “Toward a Socialist History: Utopian Communities in Texas.”)

Along the way, the Meitzens became aware of a cholera outbreak in New Braunfels that took 40 lives. Instead, they bought a parcel of land and settled in what would become Fayette County.

The frontier was extremely hard for Otto and his wife Jennie. Three of the children who migrated with them died between 1851 and 1857. Jennie gave birth to 13 more children, only five of which saw adulthood. The Meitzens, however, were at least able to survive off their land and by the late 1850s ventured into the mill business.

Together with his brother William, Otto built the county’s grist mill, cotton gin and sawmill. Jennie taught school, made cigars and candles, and sold whiskey off a still Otto built for her to operate.

Fayette County was changing from a primarily subsistence farming economy to a market economy based on corn, tobacco, wool and cotton. But much of the increased production was based on slave labor.

The dreams of the ’48ers were to settle in a land of abundance, where, governed by a democratic and egalitarian society, they could operate as enlightened farmers. Instead, they could see a brewing civil war over the institution of slavery.

Because of their revolutionary experiences back in Germany, by the mid-1850s they had started to form political organizations. The most important of these was the Freie Verein, founded in the autumn of 1853 “for the purpose of striving for and promoting the greatest possible freedom in mind in all directions.”

Nationally this organization was affiliated with the Bund Freier Männer (League of Free Men), which called for conventions to be held in states with large German populations. Members consisted mainly of socialists and freethinkers. But despite their overwhelmingly anti-slavery views, deeming slavery a “moral cancer,” the 1854 Convention of the League of Free Men in Louisville, KY took a gradual approach against slavery, deeming “its sudden abolition neither possible nor advisable.”

The main planks of the convention’s “Louisville platform” were:

• Free cession of public land to actual settlers

• Easy path to citizenship for immigrants

• Radical reform of the judicial system

• Direct elections, and

• An interventionist foreign policy against despotism.

Thes planks were similar to the demands of the Free Soil movement, which briefly existed around the same time as the League of Free Men, but was absorbed by the Republican Party in 1854.

What was unique about the Louisville platform, however, was its inclusion of equal rights for women. This was primarily due to the influence of the German freethinkers, while the socialists of the time argued that a campaign for women’s equal rights would distract from the class struggle.

Peak and Decline

Both the peak and the beginning of its decline for the League of Free Men was the San Antonio convention of May 1854.

The driving force behind this convention was Adolf Douai, who published a socialist newspaper called the San Antonio Zeitung. (Later he worked with fellow socialist Friedrich Sorge, who led the U.S. section of the International Workingmen’s Association. By 1870, both were involved in the creation of the Socialist Labor Party.)

With the platform translated into English and an attempt to reach beyond German-born immigrants and its strong anti-slavery stance, thinly disguised physical threats followed in newspapers such as the Texas State Gazette:

“We hope that the charges are unfounded…for let any portion of our population undertake a crusade…against slavery, our laws, religion and its ministers in Texas, and they will raise a storm of indignation from which they will be glad to escape by any means within their power.”

By the outbreak of the Civil War, with the loyalty of German Texans questioned, and support growing for the xenophobic nativist Know Nothing Party, the League had pretty much ceased to exist. This hostility culminated in the Battle of the Nueces, as pro-Union Germans fleeing Confederate territory were slaughtered.

Yet local Germans met on June 9, 1855 in La Grange to establish a Social Democratic Society, “which has in view to unite the German population as a body, encourage and assist the more ignorant and indifferent of their countrymen to become citizens of the United States, and use all means as a political body, to defend and uphold Democratic principles.”

Their organizing played an important role in the defeat of the Know Nothing Party in state elections in 1855 and the presidential election of 1856.

Post Civil War Populism

While German-Americans did not have a common view on which party more clearly represented them, Otto Meitzen became a life-long Republican. This meant breaking ranks with both his brother and brother-in-law. However, they were able to maintain several organizations that took up economic issues that were central to the lives of farmers.

The Grange, officially named The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry was founded in 1867 as an agricultural advocacy group. Although forbidden from taking political stances by their national leaders, many rank-and-file Grange members perceived it as a vehicle to organize politically. Their two main issues were to lower rates charged by railroads and to guarantee free mail delivery by the U.S. Post Office to rural areas.

The Farmers’ Alliance organized farmers along economic issues. They called for a (inflationary) relaxation of the nation’s money supply to ease the burden of loan repayments and sought for an end of the crop-lien system that kept sharecroppers and tenant farmers in perpetual debt.

The Greenback Party was a political party whose name was derived from paper money commonly known as “greenbacks.”

An act of Congress in 1875 required paper currency to be backed by specie. In Greenbacker ideology, the country’s economic woes were caused by a shortage of government-issued paper money. The shortage, they believed, deflated prices and raised interest rates. Greenbackers advocated the government produce more currency and the remonetization of silver to back up an expanded currency.

The People’s Party

Otto lived long enough to see the political radicalism of ’48 passed on to his son, E.O. Meitzen. Involved at one stage or another in all three of these organizations, E.O. Meitzen worked to merge the Farmers’ Alliance and Greenback Party into the People’s Party in the early 1890s.

At the party’s first national convention in Omaha in the summer of 1892, its platform called for a graduated income tax, nationalization of the telegraph and telephone industry, as well as free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold. Increasing the money supply, they reasoned, would result in higher prices for farmers.

The Populist Party fared well in the presidential election of the same year, winning 8.5% of the popular vote and carrying four Western states. In Texas, the People’s Party had 113,000 members and 2,800 clubs at the time. With the 1894 election, their candidate Thomas Nugent received 36% of the vote.

However, the gravitational pull from the two big parties grew and by the 1896 St. Louis convention, there were serious and open rifts within the People’s Party. Increasingly there were calls to reduce the party’s platform to support for free silver. That would be a basis for collaboration with the Democratic Party.

These fusionists, led by national chairman Herman Taubeneck, clashed with the mid-roaders, who wanted to continue to run the party and its candidates independently and adhere to the Omaha platform.

Ranks were closed between rural progressive farmers, like Meitzen’s Texas’ delegation and the urban Midwest laborers represented by Eugene Debs. While this alliance triggered the transformation from populist to socialist for plenty of Texas delegates, including Meitzen, it was unfortunately not strong enough to defeat fusionism.

But what did the Democratic Party stand for? They liked the idea of being a “people’s party” but for them that meant white supremacy. In fact, a vote against the Democratic Party was labeled a vote against the white race and in favor of “mongrelization.”

After the Democratic Party nominated William Jennings Bryan as their presidential candidate, the People’s Party did also, but nominated their own vice-presidential candidate, Tom Watson. Although the People’s Party survived into the next century, its existence as a national mass party all but ended.

Soon individual state parties fused with the Democratic Party. As Alter points out, however:
“The People’s Party fusion with Democrats did not transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle of progressive reform. Instead, the Democratic Party crushed the Populist movement and became the party of Jim Crow.

Third Generation: SP, NPL and decline

By the beginning of the 20th century the influence of the German element in Texas politics was less pronounced. This was mainly due to assimilation and a steep decline in immigration. But the struggle for independent organizing continued, and E.O. Meitzen was joined by the next generation.

Two of E.O.’s sons, E.R. and Arnold, were now helping him build a working-class party from the bottom up. Together they joined the fledgling Socialist Party shortly before the 1904 general election and helped organize a local in Halletsville. By the end of the year, they had recruited 17 dues-paying members and held weekly meetings.

However, despite Debs’ repeated appeals for socialists to stand against racial prejudice and welcome Black members into the SP on equal terms, the Texas SP failed to capitalize on winning over disenfranchised Black farmers and laborers. Instead, they caved into the Jim Crow norms of the time.

By 1908 a political conflict broke out in the Texas SP. It originated in Dallas, where the local leaders were slowly turning the party into a reform-oriented social democratic club. A left-wing faction rebelled and the struggle became statewide, ultimately resulting in two rival organizations with separate headquarters.

The SP’s National Executive Committee, controlled by right-wingers at the time, saw an opportunity to gain greater influence over state branches. They intervened in favor of the local right wing, while overall the SP was left leaning.

To counter the top-down approach of the right Socialists, E.R. Meitzen and Thomas Hickey, an Irish-born labor and party organizer, developed the “Texas Program.” It called for a decentralized, bottom-up party where party officers were answerable directly to the rank-and-file membership.

After a call for an election to choose a new state secretary, which Meitzen won, the Texas Program was overwhelmingly approved. Immediately stagnant members and locals tired of the previous infighting became active again, membership overall doubled and the number of county locals grew to 50.

Meitzen and Hickey founded a new weekly newspaper, The Rebel, which became the Texas SP’s official newspaper. In its heyday, when a quarter of a million Mexican immigrants lived in Texas — many fleeing the increasingly repressive regime of Porfirio Díaz — The Rebel reprinted articles from the Flores Magón brothers’ newspaper Regeneración and fully supported the Mexican Revolution.

Adding to the continuous harassment that came with World War I, the deteriorating health of Eugene Debs and the subsequent rightward shift of the SP altered the political situation at a national level. The Texas SP could not forge a separate path.

Adding to the demise of the SP was the brief success of the newly found Nonpartisan League (NPL), which swept into power in North Dakota in 1917. Indeed, many former SP organizers ended up working in the NPL, including E.R. Meitzen himself.

As a result of the NPL’s strategy to channel farmer-labor radicalism into the two-party structure, it was only a matter of time before the NPL would itself be absorbed by one of the two mainstream parties. Furthermore, it deprived farmer-labor radicals in Texas of a popular party of their own.

This was the beginning of a slow descent into FDR New Deal Liberalism and the end of independent organizing of farmer-labor radicals.

Conclusion

Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth is an important contribution to the documentation of radical history in Texas, but more in that Alter traces the lineage between radical peasant organizing in Central Europe and the new world.

This history of Silesia is not well known. Much of its lessons were lost when Poland gained control of much of Silesia after World War II and the imposition of Stalinist control followed. Massive migration ensued, and most of the original German population fled, were displaced or interned. Poland becoming a Warsaw Pact (Russia-dominated alliance) country further isolated this region from modern day (Western) Germany.

As a result, this radical regional German history is largely forgotten. Alter’s book is an interesting contribution to regional Central European radical history as well as regional Texas history. Yet it also offers lessons for contemporary activists and organizers.

One element that remains cloudy is what enabled German Americans to stand with Black farmers, and when they decided to conform to racist laws and cultural norms. On the other hand, Eugene Debs was consistent in his appeals for inclusion, writing:

“As a socialist party we receive the negro and all other races upon absolutely equal terms…We are the party of the working class, the whole working class, and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any special appeal to race prejudice.”

When the radicals in Texas decided to abide to the racial laws of the time, was it out of fear of government reprisals, appealing to less enlightened German American progressives, or yielding to the terror unleashed by armed vigilante groups such as the KKK?

Alter himself mentions that this accommodating behavior hurt the movement, offering an example of E.R. Meitzen’s close defeat in the 1906 election, where a socialist Black vote may have made a difference.

The two main takeaways of Alter’s book remain abundantly clear:

• Any efforts of independent radical farmer-labor organizing were at their best when they were based on cross-racial alliances, whether with radical Mexican peasant refugees or Black sharecroppers.

• Any effort of either running candidates on a Democratic Party ticket or dissolving/merging the previously independent organization outright came with severe consequences.

In the current authoritarian “white is right” political environment it is still as important as a century ago to neither give in to racist tropes nor fall into the trap of lesser evilism.

November-December 2026, ATC 245