Workers of the Sunshine State unite! : the Florida Socialist Party during the Progressive Era, 1900 to 1920
ABSTRACT: The Socialist Party of Florida was a more significant political movement than many historians have previously suggested. The Party was comprised of a coalition that included foreign born workers in Florida's growing cities such as Tampa, Jacksonville, and Pensacola, farmers who had voted Populist in the 1890s and had not reconciled themselves to the Democratic Party, an obscure religious sect in Lee County, and others. Despite the many obstacles it encountered, the Socialist Party of Florida earned greater electoral success than any other socialist party in the southeast. The party in Manatee County elected a state representative, Andrew Jackson Pettigrew, to a single term in 1906, and in Hillsborough County elected and re-elected the mayor and majority of the city council of Gulfport (since 1911 a part of Pinellas County) Despite its successes, the decline of the party began in reaction to its strong opposition to American participation in the First World War, and it faced significant state repression beginning by 1917. The success of the Russian Revolution, and the Red Scare in the United States thereafter, hammered the final nails into the party's coffin, and after 1916 it did not mount any serious political campaigns
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2006
University of Florida, [Gainesville, Fla.], 2006