Turn-of-the-century California sustained an active Socialist minority whose disgust with the excesses and corruptions of the corporate hold on California politics fed directly into the Progressive reforms. "The moral and intellectual leverage," writes Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform, "exerted by the Socialist Party and Socialist ideas in the Progressive era has never been sufficiently recognized." Nowhere is this more true than in California, where a strong tradition of respectable middle-class Socialism, Fabian and Bellamyite, as opposed to the more proletarian and revolutionary varieties in vogue in Eastern industrial centers, helped make nonthreatening, even respectable, such notions as the public ownership of utilities, prison and hospital reform, social welfare, public housing, workmen's compensation, and other social programs eventually enacted by the Progressives. Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Massachusetts newsman Edward Bellamy's novel of a future American cooperative utopia, first published in 1888, spurted the growth of the Nationalist movement throughout the United States. Composed mainly of middle-class intellectuals, Nationalist Clubs would meet in earnest sessions to discuss such Bellamyite ideas as state ownership of industry and utilities, social security, social welfare, women's suffrage, ballot reform, and free public education (Brown, E. Richard., 1979).
The California Nationalist Club organized itself in Los Angeles in May 1889. By 1890 sixty-two Bellamy Nationalist Clubs flourished in California, thirty- three of them in Los Angeles alone. Led by such colorful and articulate figures as Henry Gaylord Wilshire and William C. Owen, the India-born son of a brigadier of Bengal Lancers, the Nationalist movement, so the Overland Monthly reported in June 1890, "put a silk hat on socialism" by making socialist ideas acceptable to "people connected with literature and the professions." (Bullough, Vern L., 1964)
While Nationalism never became a potent political force in California, it did help to shape the California Populist party, which advanced the case against the SP through the 1890s..............
