Elliott Shore's Talkin' Socialism

...The conditional explanations are full of holes...

...The Sombart question is based on the assumption that a class-conscious labor movement actually created socialism in Europe...

...He soon fell out with SLP chief Daniel DeLeon, who called Wayland "a Salvation Army Sentimentalist...

...Exceptions can be found in Nick Salvatore's influential biography of Eugene Debs, which is also a cultural history of the movement, and Paul Buhle's recent Marxism in America...

...Finally, while Wayland envisioned a Cooperative Commonwealth free of capitalist greed and competition, he acted like a shrewd businessman...

...At this point, J. A. Wayland had already become a successful newspaper publisher and entrepreneur...

...Blacks would "choose" to remain segregated and women could return to the home and hearth instead of being drafted into wage slavery...

...Surely, most immigrants were culturally conservative and often politically deferential, but the strongest pockets of socialism developed among Irish shoeworkers, British and Finnish miners, and Jewish clothing workers...

...The advent of second class postage (one cent per pound...

...In 1893 he began to publish his views in a newspaper, the Coming, Nation...

...Wayland saw socialism as a rational attempt to "control the forces that were threatening his America," in Shore's words...

...His life was a profound refutation of the belief that critical dissent is somehow un-American or unpatriotic," says Salvatore...

...The appeal of Debs's party lay in its leaders' ability to explain social reality in radical political terms using commonly understood language...

...There is no need to review these interpretations here...

...Shore offers a fascinating account of the rise of mass circulation newspapers, aided by the falling price of newsprint and wood pulp paper and the change from steam to electrically powered printing presses...

...This work challenges assumptions about American exceptionalism...

...Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912...

...For a time Daniel Bell's end-of-ideology interpretation dominated the discussion...

...Clearly, violent class conflict affected the United States...

...The publisher made significant profits through real estate sales and returned to his native Indiana on the eve of a great depression...

...After the collapse of the Populist movement, Wayland began publishing his "One-Hoss Philosophy" in the Appeal to Reason, which he moved to Girard, Kansas, in 1897...

...One busts occasionally but the farmers do not move into his palace—another gambler does that...

...This kind of language accounted for a good deal of the Appeal's popularity...

...The Appeal's growth is also explained in technological terms...

...Indeed, being a successful entrepreneur clearly allowed him to promote his socialist visions...

...Because it was so democratic, Goodwyn argues, Populism was more radical in challenging capitalism than European-style socialism...

...The political arguments about the Socialists' internal problems are often marred by wishful thinking...

...Here Shore departs from his exemplary attempt to describe the inner reality of Debsian socialism and enters the more familiar terrain of political criticism...

...Following the late Herbert Gutman, historians like Alan Dawley, Leon Fink, Paul Faler, and Sean Wilentz see in the nineteenth-century worker protest a class-conscious anticapitalism they call labor republicanism...

...and Rural Free Delivery made broader distribution possible...

...Like most modern historians, he faults the socialists for not extending their radical criticism of corporate capitalism to other spheres of social life and for not understanding the diversions of consumer culture...

...Few problems have troubled U.S...

...Neither variety of explanation has been satisfactory...

...His antiCatholicism was a throwback to colonial Protestant thought and the conspiratorial view of the Roman Papacy...

...They learned how to use new techniques of sensational journalism to reach a mass audience...

...Broadly, the answers to Sombart's question have fallen into two camps: political answers that focus on the problems of the left itself and conditional answers that focus on the problems posed by American society and polity...

...This concern with the language of politics and the meaning of cultural messages also characterizes Elliott Shore's fascinating book, Talkin' Socialism: J.A...

...The Coming Nation" would emerge and end the destructive effects of capitalism...

...They worked very effectively within the largest trade union in the region, the United Mine Workers of America...

...Of course he asked the question just as America's only grass-roots socialist movement was aborning...

...Like Salvatore, Shore uses the biographical mode to explain the socialist appeal through the life of an influential figure, Julius A. Wayland, editor and publisher of the Appeal to Reason, the most successful radical publication in U. S . history...

...But the popularity of the democratic land-use program actually strengthened the movement by giving its leaders and demands legitimacy...

...The Appeal sponsored many subscription contests (a farm in Arkansas was once a first prize) and mobilized a remarkable "army" of salesmensoldiers who fanned out and sold subs on horseback, bicycle, and along railroad lines...

...Certainly, the "Little 01' Appeal" —was something less than "The Temple of the Revolution...

...Socialists were defenders of Americanism But of course Americanism also included some uncritical, traditional values...

...In my study of southwestern Socialists, GrassRoots Socialism, I examined what the movement actually accomplished and paid less attention to the question of why it failed...

...Wayland had a gift for writing "in the language of country newspaper paragraphs—humorous, biting, sentimental and uncompromising...

...To blame the Debsian Socialists for being too sectarian, too moderate, too nativist and racist, too vulnerable to government repression during World War I or too reliant on electoral politics implies that the Socialists could and should have acted differently...

...Within ten years Wayland had made the Appeal into a mass circulation radical weekly that played a major role in promoting socialist thinking in every state of the nation, though most of the readers were concentrated in the West and Midwest...

...In recent years historians have shifted away from explaining the failure of socialism...

...Even if we accept the assumption of a strong socialist presence in Europe, and ignore its ultimate political impact, we can easily reject the view that we are a society without class...

...More important, Wayland knew how to exploit the resources at hand and put them into movement-building...

...Wheat gamblers live in palaces...

...Organized labor, whose leaders supported the war effort and opposed the Russian Revolution, was still repressed in the postwar era...

...By 1910 the paper had achieved a circulation of 471,000, larger than that of the Saturday Evening Post...

...Wayland and his Appeal to Reason comrades figured out how to acquire the capital and to exploit the latest technology and marketing innovations...

...They wanted to make a broad populist appeal to the middle and working classes but rejected the compromises the Populists made with the capitalist parties...

...Debs was in the political world and of it...

...Lawrence Goodwyn sees populism as a mass radical movement premised on an awareness of class exploitation by big business and banks...

...the problem was that it did not usually get politicized by the left...

...Like Debs, Wayland developed his political views 124 • DISSENT Books in the Midwest in the 1880s and 1890s and was influenced by populism, comunitarianism, and Marxism as well as Ruskin's eclectic romanticism...

...These counterfactual arguments are often the essence of Marxist historical controversy, but they do not deepen our understanding...

...For example: "Wheat is selling for 32 cents in Utah...

...He is more concerned with offering an interior view of the movement through his sketch of Wayland and his circle...

...David Montgomery has identified an American form of syndicalism among skilled workers who belonged to conservative AFL "pure and simple" unions...

...Socialists were sectarians living "in the world but not of it" and espousing class-conscious politics in a society without class conflict...

...Still, the identification of surrogate socialisms does not explain why the Socialist party of America failed to become a mass movement...

...Historians are now exploring the oppositional politics that actually existed in the United States...

...Without suggesting his life as a model for our own time, J. A. Wayland's story offers some food for thought to contemporary socialists and anticapitalists, who often fear becoming creatures of the media but also complain about being ignored by it...

...The publisher apparently thought he could separate his "personal economic life" from his political vision, says Shore...

...historians more than the question Werner Sombart posed in 1900: "Why is there no socialism in America...

...Shore believes there was a "stark contradiction" between socialism and the "get rich quick schemes" Wayland promoted...

...They also clung to economic determinism even though it narrowed the party's class appeal to small property WINTER • 1990 • 125 Books owners...

...they have been capably summarized by Irving Howe in the first chapter of Socialism and America...

...They wanted to reach out to women and attempted to do so through a "woman's column," but their thinking about women's domestic status under socialism envisioned a world of separate spheres for men and women...

...The United States is therefore "exceptional" in not spawning anything comparable...

...Circulation was the first priority, and "self-promotion to boost it was now the rule...

...But Wayland's story does show visionaries how radical ideas can be expressed in a familiar context and a commonplace language...

...The new nation would preserve the cultural values of small-town Protestant America...

...If class conflict indeed existed in the United States, then some kind of class consciousness was expressed in politics, though not necessarily in the form of European socialism...

...His ability to make money and invest it shrewdly in a "socialist making machine" showed that he could, contrary to Daniel Bell's view, live "in and of the world...

...Historians' preoccupation with how external conditions and internal problems inhibited the party's growth has discouraged other kinds of inquiry about what socialism actually meant to the American people...

...His first publishing venture began in Pueblo, Colorado, where he was radicalized by an English cobbler who hooked him with Laurence Gronlund's immensely influential attempt to Americanize Marxism, The Cooperative Commonwealth...

...Like all radical cadres, the Appeal group displayed a "kind of tunnel vision," exaggerating its own concerns and successes while ignoring the larger changes in the society...

...Most southwestern Socialists certainly made themselves vulnerable to repression by opposing World War I. But it is not clear that joining Wilson's prowar progressives would have allowed the movement to prosper and grow in the 1920s...

...Wayland was probably not aware that his foray into consumer culture contradicted his socialist goals...

...The inner view of Girard and the activities in the Appeal building is not a very flattering one...

...The southwestern Socialists were nativist and racist, but even the few, like Gene Debs and Oscar Ameringer, who rose above some prejudices and appealed to Native Americans, Chicanos, and African Americans, met with little response from oppressed nationalities...

...Indeed, Wayland "shared with many people the prejudices and ideas of mainstream American thinking...

...Unlike DeLeon, Wayland was not a disciple of Marx...

...One answer is that there was socialism in America, but that the movement suffered from the carrot of Wilsonian progressivism and the repressive stick wielded by the same administration during and after World War I. Still, the decline of socialism after 1920 and the failure of the left in the 1930s kept the question alive...

...Commonplace socialism is no longer very appealing to those who envision radical change...

...In 1907 it serialized Upton Sinclair's best-selling novel The Jungle, brought Eugene Debs on as an editorialist, and played a major role in heightening the class resentment that resulted from the sensational kidnapping of William Haywood and other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners to stand trial for murdering the governor of Idaho...

...Wayland drew other lessons from Hearst and the kings of the "yellow press...

...Wayland, like all midwestern Socialists, found a radical meaning in Protestant millennialism...

...They both focus on the cultural appeal of socialism...

...q 126 • DISSENT...

...No less than capitalist publishers, Wayland understood how to take advantage of these developments...

...The Debsian idea of a "Coming Nation" —based on preserving the best about the past—ignores the need for an international, multicultural vision...

...He is interested in how the Socialists spoke to people and how people understood what they said about the class nature of society and the promise of democracy...

...Shore does not say enough about the Appeal's role in movement building...

...Immigration would be restricted...

...After the election of 1896 Wayland reluctantly gave up on the People's party and joined the Socialist Labor party...

...The struggle for control on the shop floor yielded sharp antimanagement feelings and bonds of mutuality, but socialist politicians failed to see the radical potential of the craftsmen's ideology...

...Higher priced advertising (pioneered by Joseph Pulitzer and purchased by new department stores and mail order houses) allowed greater capital investment by publishers...

...Far from being sectarian, the Debsian Socialists in Oklahoma (the party's strongest state) included dissidents ranging from Pentecostals and Populists to Wobblies and Spiritualists...

...By looking at the language of radicalism and how it was printed, circulated, and read, Talkin' Socialism helps us understand what socialism really had to say...

...Shore also criticizes Wayland and Socialists in general for "dualistic thinking...

...And to Salvatore, the party's leader embodied that appeal: "Debs came to understand the complex character of the democratic tradition and publicly fought to define America's cultural symbols anew in the changed context wrought by industrial capitalism...

...The party's land program for tenant farmers was popular enough to risk cooptation by progressive Democrats...

...He showed how socialists could operate in the world they were trying to change...

...I am not so troubled about Wayland's shrewd business dealings or his marketing schemes...

...Like his idol, John Ruskin, Wayland became a social critic and self-styled "One-Hoss Philosopher...

...Instead he tried to Americanize Marxism so that it became "common sense" to ordinary people...

...they did so with homespun criticisms of capitalism—criticisms drawn very much from the common sense of rural and small-town people trying to save a threatened way of life...

...Mari Jo Buhle, Meredith Tax, and Susan Levine see in the Gilded-Age struggles of WINTER • 1990 • 123 Books working women the emergence of a class-conscious protofeminism...