This story was originally published by High Country News . After Katie Wilson was elected mayor in Seattle and Zohran Mamdani triumphed in New York City, USA Today warned its readers that America’s new socialist mayors “have big plans to be generous with your money.”
Wilson was unapologetic. “I’ve been a socialist for a very long time,” she told Jacobin magazine, “since before it was cool to be a socialist.”
Whether you consider them cool or dangerous, radical or inept, socialist mayors are not a new phenomenon. During the early 20th century, the Socialist Party of America was a viable third party, especially in the West, part of a broader workers’ movement that ranged from traditional unions to the more radical “Wobblies” of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
I grew up in Utah and now live in southwest Montana. These stridently red states were once fertile ground for a brand of socialism centered around worker solidarity, public health and progressive attitudes toward equality and class. But the region’s prevailing narrative — Western individualism and conservatism — tends to obscure this rich labor history.
When I was a kid in Park City, Utah, in the 1990s, it was already a resort town, though less so than it is today. But underneath its ski slopes lay a pattern of mines, like a subterranean rune telling the story of a time, not too long ago, when Park City was very different. In public school, we learned the mining history of the Wasatch Mountains; the region’s labor history was ignored. During the early 20th century, the Socialist Party of America was a viable third party. In 1902, however, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) endorsed the Socialist Party platform, and the Park City chapter later invited Mary G. Harris Jones — Mother Jones, co-founder of the IWW — to speak at the 1907 Labor Day parade. Park City’s mines were deadly, but the closest hospital was in Salt Lake City. “Injured miners had to travel by train to Salt Lake City to get treatment,” writer Gerald McDonough, grandson of Bartley McDonough, the local WFM president, told me recently. “By the time they got there, they’d died.”
After an explosion at the Daly West Mine killed 34 miners and injured several others in 1902, the WFM fought for the establishment of Park City’s first hospital. What does it say about the companies that profited from some of the world’s deadliest workplaces that it required union agitation after a disaster to establish a city’s first hospital? And why had we never learned about this in school?
According to Utah historian John Sillito, the dissonance between the labor history of places like Park City and its present image as a rich person’s playground is no coincidence.
“The interests that controlled Park City then continue to control Park City and its history,” he told me over Zoom. “It’s in no one’s interest in Park City to advertise something other than snow.”
And yet Utah, the state that continues to reelect Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who groundlessly blamed the murder of a Minnesota lawmaker last year on “Marxists,” was once home to a successful Socialist Party.
Lee is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In “A History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary,” Sillito and his colleague John McCormick note that more than 40% of Utah’s socialist membership in the early 20th century was Mormon and that from 1900 to 1920 Utahns elected more than a hundred socialists in more than two dozen cities as mayors, county commissioners, city councilmen and justices of the peace. Part of the reason? Mormonism.
When the LDS church moved West, it established the United Order in many towns, a centrally planned economic system that asked business leaders to relinquish ownership to the collective, pool their resources and provide communal labor. A political cartoon titled “The Double-Headed Octopus” that was published in The Montana News on Oct. 5, 1904, depicts Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president, about to spear a two-headed octopus labeled “Capitalism” with the faces of Republican candidate Teddy Roosevelt and Democratic candidate Alton B. Parker. (C.W. Fryer via the Library of Congress) Most Utah socialists were classic “sewer” socialists, focused on local reforms in sanitation, sewage and public health. In Bingham, Utah, for example, socialist officials expanded the sewer system, established a city dump with regular garbage collection and required electrical utilities to insulate power lines.
In those days, socialism flourished throughout Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Montana, especially in places where mining created massive income divides. The socialist who was elected mayor of Butte, Montana, in 1911 and 1913 left behind a balanced budget, improved sanitation and provided safer streets. My grandfather, who became a Butte miner in the 1930s after high school, survived a cave-in when the mine he worked in collapsed. He loved talking about Butte but never mentioned its rich labor history. Then again, he wasn’t born until 1920, right at the end of the Socialist Party’s heyday. Perhaps no one had told him, either. In 2024, I became the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives’ Carrie Johnson Research Fellow, diving into old newspapers, meeting minutes and historical scholarship, becoming increasingly fascinated by the town’s dramatic worker legacy. Unlike Park City, the workers’ story remains a part of Butte’s identity.
Tim Harper’s father worked for the mines as a union electrician. “Dad always said, ‘The worst union in the world is better than no union at all,’” he told me over coffee recently.
“Our ancestors grew up in the mines,” Harper said. “They died in the mines. The company wouldn’t help them. Only the union would.”
The mine owners’ callousness and opposition to labor organizing, especially in the early 1900s, is hard to overstate. Chris Fisk, who taught history for 30 years, mostly at Butte High, always discussed the unsolved murder of IWW organizer Frank Little in 1917. Little was dragged out of a boardinghouse in the night and lynched from a train trestle, and his killers are widely believed to have been connected to the mining company. “Dad always said, ‘The worst union in the world is better than no union at all.’” “A person trying to [work and] better themselves is not a bad thing,” Fisk said. “Murdering someone is. My students tend to understand that.”
Many Western unions were divided between far-left socialists and moderates as well as along ethnic lines. Murray, Utah, one of the few Utah cities to elect a socialist mayor and majority socialist city council, built a publicly owned power plant that still operates today. Yet in 1912, Murray’s socialist officials refused to support a strike by mostly Greek smelter workers and passed a law preventing white women from working in Greek coffeehouses. “It was clearly a fear of Greek men interacting with non-Greek women,” Sillito said.
Internal divisions frayed the coalitions, but ultimately the federal government buried the Socialist Party of America and the IWW. During World War I, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used unsparingly to shutter the Socialist Party’s newspapers and even imprison its most prominent leaders.
Yet the movement’s reforms remain with us. Socialists dared to ask the question: What obligation does a corporation have to its workers, and what does it owe the community from which it reaps its profits? I thought of this recently as I drove past a billboard outside Butte opposing the development of a new data center near the city. “The tech companies get the boom,” the billboard warned, “we get the bust.”
It’s addressing big tech in 2026, not the mining companies of the early 1900s. Still, it raises the question: Who will stand up to powerful interests this time around? The post How Socialism Built the Reddist States in the West — Including Utah appeared first on Truthdig .