In current American political discourse, socialism is a provocative word that can be read as condemnation or as an accolade. But, after more than a century of revolutions, the Red Scare, and the Cold War, whether socialist is used as a pejorative or to praise, the term is often used without precision. Stephen Barton’s J. Stitt Wilson: Socialist, Christian, Mayor of Berkeley makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of what socialism meant to its early practitioners in the United States, before the twentieth century weighed the term down with its political baggage.

J. Stitt Wilson was born in Ontario in 1868 and immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s. He adopted socialism while serving as a Methodist pastor in various working-class Chicago neighborhoods and toured the Midwest and West lecturing on Christian socialism. He moved to Berkeley in 1902, served as mayor, and played an active role in state and national politics until his death in 1942.

Wilson served as Berkeley’s mayor from 1911 to 1913. He also ran, unsuccessfully, for governor and state assembly. Throughout it all, Wilson traveled across California and the United States as an advocate for workers’ rights, woman suffrage, temperance, tax reform, Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign, and other leading socialist causes. Wilson also traveled to Great Britain and worked with British socialists. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, he delivered weekly sermons on Christian socialism. An effective speaker, Wilson spent his life working to develop socialism into a powerful political force.

Barton offers a solidly researched analysis of Wilson’s Christian socialism. Wilson’s thinking fused Protestant Christianity, individualistic democracy, and socialist doctrine. His teachings emphasized individual salvation, but he also believed that individuals must work to save society. Capitalism, a competitive system that exploited working people, Wilson argued, should be replaced with a socialist society based on cooperation and shared resources. Wilson viewed socialism as a practical means of implementing the teachings of Jesus, and he believed that change could be achieved peacefully through the ballot box.

Wilson’s gradual “evolutionary” socialism placed him at odds with “revolutionary” socialists and labor leaders who believed that change would come only when workers overthrew the existing system. Wilson necessarily found himself in conflict with more radical socialists. In many ways, Wilson’s agenda overlapped with that of more mainstream reformers and, at times, Wilson built bridges and worked cooperatively with progressives. But Wilson’s socialism was often a bridge too far for many of his more moderate allies. Barton’s analysis of these intersections and conflicts provides useful insight into the perils and promises of coalition-building in the early twentieth century.

Barton’s book also makes a valuable contribution to the history of woman suffrage and its role in American politics. Wilson’s ideas about class, equality, and justice were deeply influenced by activists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Caroline Severance. Barton campaigned vigorously for the successful 1911 California woman suffrage amendment and worked on similar campaigns in New York and Iowa. While many California women argued for the right to vote on the grounds of justice, some suffragists put forward a maternalistic vision of female voters cleaning up corrupt male politics. Although divided in their rhetorical arguments, by intersecting with the era’s other democratizing reform movements, and often sharing similar outlooks with socialists, labor activists, progressives, and temperance workers, suffragists brought men such as Wilson into the suffrage movement.

Wilson’s term as mayor of Berkeley coincided with the accomplishment of woman suffrage in California, and a woman served on the Berkeley school board during his term. Barton’s account of Wilson’s election and the subsequent infighting on the city council and school board provides examples of the opportunities and challenges faced by women as they sought to enter politics in the first years of voting in California.

Barton notes that Wilson was more concerned with gender than with race. While Wilson embraced a vision of equality of all humans in the abstract, he seems to have engaged in little activism against the racism so widespread in progressive California. It would be interesting to view Wilson’s Christian socialism from the perspectives of Asian, Black, and Latinx activists in California, as well as from the perspective of San Francisco’s Catholic working-class communities. What did activists from these communities think of white Protestant socialists such as Wilson?

Wilson’s work in municipal politics and Barton’s careful research provide insight into the histories of the ever-contentious issues of taxation, municipal governance, and public infrastructure. Public ownership of utilities was a core element of Wilson’s socialism, and he was also influenced by Henry George’s single tax arguments. During his time as mayor, he attempted to translate these abstract principles into practical policy. This proved no easy task, and results were mixed. Barton’s account of the challenges Wilson faced as he tried to build, maintain, and pay for infrastructure in early twentieth-century Berkeley will be informative—and familiar—for anyone who follows California politics.

Confronted with the challenges posed by rapid growth and industrialization, early twentieth-century reformers, including Christian socialists such as Wilson, proposed a range of solutions. In California as in much of the country, new political alliances formed, dissolved, and reconstituted themselves. Though riven by arcane debates and infighting, these reformers, and the voters they attracted, left a lasting imprint on the development of California and on American politics more broadly. Barton’s detailed account shows us the rich creative environment within American reform movements and reveals how activists such as Wilson developed and disseminated and attempted implementing new ideas. Confronted with the mixed results of Wilson’s administration, Barton also provides sobering lessons on the challenges of coalition-building to bring new ideas into the realm of practical policy.