I sometimes wonder if had the American civil war been delayed for 30 or so years (to around the time Brazil abolished slavery), and had also had some more of the rounds of European proletarian immigration happen before the war if we’d have seen the first socialist revolution having been within the US instead of Europe.
There was a lot of socialist energy in the US by 1880, but there wasn’t a flashpoint comparable to the civil war to trigger such a revolution like there was with WW1 in Russia.
Interesting hypothetical, but the socialist energy you refer to is an outcome of the US’s massive industrialization as a result of the war, and the growing numbers of proletariat due to the winding down of Western settler expansion. I think it would be unlikely that the US could hold together as one nation for another few decades given the contradictions around free and slave labor in the Western territories.
I like to speculate what would have happened if the UK/France tried to intervene–might have been a US/Russia alliance ~80 years ahead of schedule :o
So I’m still thinking of a world where Lincoln became president but just never challenged slavery. Lincoln did a ton of stuff around railroads and deeply pro industrialisation stuff outside of the broader civil war effort.
Like if land reform had still happened out into the western states which represented a big part of why capitalism was so successful in the US when compared to other countries over the long term, but I don’t think it was nearly as meaningful in a short term sense against socialism.
