Was it a political April Fools’ trick?  That might have been the thinking of Kalamazoo’s political leaders when they awakened on the morning of April 2, 1912, the day after local elections were held. Election returns showed that Socialist candidates had been elected to two of five open seats on the city council, and the Socialist candidate for mayor had lost by only 195 votes out of 6,000 votes cast.

While the election results seem surprising, they were not a complete shock. In the mayoral election of 1911, the Socialist candidate for mayor, William T. Curry, a relative newcomer to the city, received twenty-five percent of the vote. The Kalamazoo Gazette described the vote as “a lack of confidence in both the old parties.”

That loss of confidence continued to grow, stirred perhaps by a bitter strike in the late winter of 1912 at the Kalamazoo Corset Company, involving nearly 1,000 workers. In the April elections, Guy Lockwood and Byron Van Blarcom were elected to the city council from the 1st and 5th wards respectively. William Curry finished second behind Democratic candidate Charles B. Hays and well ahead of Republican E. W. Vosburg.

Had Kalamazoo suddenly become a hotbed of socialism? What could explain the obvious dissatisfaction of many of Kalamazoo’s voters with the traditional political leadership? The newly-elected Socialist alderman represented Kalamazoo’s working class wards in the northeast and southeast quadrants of the city. Did their victory suggest labor activism among the city’s factory workers?

Socialist ideas had been part of the political debate in Kalamazoo for several decades, as they were nationally. The 1912 Presidential election was the high water mark for the Party, as its candidate, Eugene V. Debs, received the largest vote ever for a Socialist candidate. Debs had addressed a rally in Kalamazoo in 1910, speaking beyond the city limits at the pavilion in Oakwood Park after Kalamazoo’s city administration refused to grant a permit to use a theater for that purpose on a Sunday.

The three candidates who had fared so well in the 1912 election had interesting careers in the following years, although the local Socialist Party dwindled as a force in electoral politics.

Guy Lockwood was easily the most committed believer in the Socialist cause. He came to Kalamazoo in 1904 from Girard, Kansas where he had worked for the Socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason. He took a teaching position at the Acme School of Drawing before opening his own Lockwood Art School.

Lockwood used his artistic talents to promote the Socialist cause. He published a series of pamphlets originally entitled The Prophet and The Ass but later re-named The Billy Goat. These illustrated booklets promoted a distinctly Marxist perspective. He was active in the local Socialist Party, giving lectures and writing letters to the editor explaining and defending socialism.

Following his election in 1912, Lockwood served one two-year term on the City Council and ran for Mayor in 1914 but finished a distant third to then incumbent Alfred B. Connable. (Mayors served for one-year terms, but aldermen were elected to staggered two-year terms.) Nevertheless, he remained politically active, and his Art School continued into the 1940s. Byron Van Blarcom, by contrast, was ejected from the Socialist Party in 1912. The issue appears to have been the one that had kept Debs from speaking on a Sunday in Kalamazoo, namely local ordinances which prohibited theaters from opening on Sunday. The Socialists and the Democrats favored opening the theaters because it would make it easier for workers (whose normal workday was often 10-12 hours in those years) to attend. Republicans and Van Blarcom supported the Sunday closing.

In 1914, Van Blarcom sought re-election by trying to secure the Republican nomination. He then seems to have withdrawn from electoral politics and become a successful residential contractor.

W. T. Curry remained in Kalamazoo for several years, working for the Iron Moulders Union. By 1915, he had moved to New York, and in 1918, he had enlisted to work for the YMCA with the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I before disappearing from the historical record. The success of the Socialists in the 1911 and 1912 elections might have been a factor that led Kalamazoo leaders to adopt a new form of government in which the commissioners are elected at large. The elimination of wards made it difficult for either neighborhoods or groups of people in a neighborhood to elect a specific representative. A candidate had to have support across the city, not just in geographic or ethnic enclaves.