there were legitimate working class movements in the midwest at the time, and they tended to align with indigenous groups and freed slaves, rather than with bourgeois farmers. as such, they just ended up killed by these populist & progressive forces....just as anarchists ended up slaughtered in the bolshevik revolution. you can see all of the same reactionary & conservative forces at play in the populist & progressive movements as you saw in the rise of bolshevism, and there were some pretty dour consequences - we didn't really dodge this at all, we're still living with the legacy of it.

we need to stop whitewashing this, accept it for what it was, denounce it and move on.