“Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham

Abstract

Reviewed by: “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham Michael Phillips “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism. By Peter Buckingham. Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 403. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-755-2.) Thomas Aloysius Hickey, the fiery leftist journalist who cofounded the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and inspired the formation of the Renters’ Union, which fought for the redistribution of land in Texas, died of throat cancer in 1925. He subsequently sank into obscurity. As noted by author Peter Buckingham, pioneering Texas labor history scholars Ruth Alice Allen and James R. Green began researching the life of the Irish immigrant who became a dynamic force in the Socialist Labor Party and the Knights of Labor before he settled in Texas. Neither was able to produce a comprehensive Hickey biography due to a lack of adequate archival sources. Buckingham, however, discovered a rich trove of papers collected by Hickey’s widow, Clara Boeer Hickey, donated to the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, where two of the radical’s nieces were professors. This find has allowed Buckingham to produce a vivid portrait of a volatile, pugnacious man who, through his newspaper The Rebel and his tireless public speaking, helped bring socialism to its high point in the Lone Star State in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Hickey had long rejected the Catholicism of his youth, seeing the church as a cowardly collaborator in the British oppression of his homeland. Once in Texas, Hickey appreciated the impact of emotional, evangelical Protestant revivals and brought that style to his political proselytizing. Though Buckingham may overstate Hickey’s role, Hickey’s activism was a major reason that the Socialist Party gubernatorial nominees in 1912 and 1914 surpassed the Republican standard-bearers and that the Socialists became the second most popular party in the state, behind the [End Page 141] dominant Democrats. Finding an explicitly revolutionary message in scriptural passages describing the land as a bounty provided by God to be shared equally by all, Hickey became a star in socialist encampments in which he freely quoted from the bible. He powerfully tapped into the religious sensibility already characteristic of the Texas Left. An outsider, Hickey quickly grasped he could mobilize farmers to battle the rapidly escalating levels of land tenancy in Texas by evoking Christ more than Marx. Unfortunately, Hickey also advanced another central tenet of the Texas catechism, white supremacy. In New York City after his arrival in the United States, Hickey absorbed the anti-Black racism of the Irish immigrant community, which stemmed from fierce job competition. Hickey portrayed African Americans as intellectually deficient, and as sexual predators and enemies of white labor. Buckingham argues that the racism in Hickey’s writings was sporadic and that as he got older, perhaps influenced by the growing racial consciousness of his friend Eugene V. Debs, he moderated his views. One of the few weaknesses of this book is that Buckingham strains too much to absolve Hickey of his bigotry. Nevertheless, Hickey condemned the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco and, rejecting the virulent anti-Mexican racism in Texas, welcomed Latinx tenant farmers into the Renters’ Union and hailed Mexican revolutionaries as role models for the Texas rural underclass. A key strength of “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism is Buckingham’s detailed and nuanced understanding of revolutionary politics in Ireland that influenced the Texas radical, the interminable internecine struggles within the socialist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the role of Texans who were involved in Woodrow Wilson’s administration in crushing socialism in their home state. This solidly researched book should be of great interest to scholars of labor history, American radicalism, and Texas history. Michael Phillips Collin College Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association