So begins Edwin Markham’s lionized poem “The Man with the Hoe.” At the tail end of the Gilded Age and the dawn of the Progressive Era, Markham’s incisive critique of the gaping wealth inequality that came to define this period in American history was lauded as “the battle-cry of the next thousand years” and “the supreme poem of the century.” The poem contributed to a vigorous national dialogue — immortalized in the opinion and letter sections of newspapers across the country — on labor’s role in society and the potential for a socialist future.

Much like debates across social media today, however, not all the commentary was celebratory. Tensions between classes had reached such a zenith that they also provoked responses like this: “As a tiller of the soil, I resent personally every word of the ungrateful writer who smites in the face of the man who feeds him.”