The Politics of Protest

Abstract

On November 4, 1919, six weeks into the Great Steel Strike, the citizens of Lackawanna, New York, elected John H. Gibbons as their Mayor. Gibbons' victory was a major upset. He defeated John Toomey, the incumbent who had the support of the steel firm after which this quintessential company town was named, by forging a loosely knit coalition of native and Eastern European immigrant workers during the height of the xenophobia of the ongoing Red Scare. Gibbons' election came at a time when the Socialist Party was in decline and the various levels of American government enthusiastically used their repressive mechanisms to crush the country's “un-American” Left.