The Antique Drum

...One answer, it seems to me, is the doctrinaire ideology which imposed blinkers on the party theoreticians...

...Yet, what he has covered is documented meticulously...

...The left wing had no eyes for America...

...what are the other compass terms to distinguish among Debs, Haywood, T. J. Morgan, William English Walling, and Herman Titus, the wild-eyed dentist from the state of Washington...

...For them, Sinclair, technocracy, the Townsend movement and other shapeless movements of social discontent were tokens, like the flight of swallows before a storm, of the panic of the petty-bourgeoisie...

...Without it?¬the ideological differences would have led to expulsions and splits long before the tightening of the party constitution in 1912 and the subsequent expulsion of Haywood...

...Shannon's book, I feel, has only gone part of the way...

...Was it "conservative" of Hillquit in 1909 to edge toward a Labor party, or was it a realistic adaptation to the American scene...

...The reason for this, perhaps, is that Shannon's sources were mainly library, and for the later period few archives are available...

...Richard Hofstadter in his essay on "pseudo-conservatism" and his recent Age of Reform, have bridged the difference superbly...

...And so, while the labor movement surged to Roosevelt, the Militants and Clarity flowed "left," reversing their stand a half-decade later on the war issue, and leaving an odd combination of pacifists, new militant youth and old Reading antiquarians with the shell of the party...

...One could make the case that those individuals who had independent sources of status and prestige, like the literary intellectuals, could leave more freely than those individuals whose status depended largely on party position...

...Given the paucity of detailed specialized accounts, he has, as anyone who has labored in the field can attest, performed a herculean task, and later writers will give Shannon the tribute in footnotes he so well deserves...

...it is a requiem whose echoes can unlock the past: "This is the use of memory /For liberation-not less of love but expanding In recent years a spate of books have sought to expand our knowledge of why the Socialist movement failed in America...

...this is a pity, since the Kipnis book is marred by a subtle but distinct crypto-Stalinist bias...

...For Shannon, this shows that the pre-war Socialist party was "just like" the Democratic and Republican parties...

...Whatever we inherit from the fortunate We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us-a symbol: A symbol perfected in death...

...Shannon's training in the conventional historian's craft...

...The salient fact is that because of its ideology interminable factional fights constantly arose, and because its ideology proclaimed the ""inevitability" of socialism it could never achieve the necessary flexibility to adapt to the changing American scene...

...But what is the substantive or even contextual meaning of the term...

...Uneasy in this usage, Shannon shies away from its logical extension in the characterization of other tendencies in the party...

...What cut the ground out pretty completely from under us in a word was Roosevelt...

...Howard Quint's valuable study of the origins of the party...

...Yet,if Hillquit was a "conservative...

...A few talented individuals, viz...

...If one comes to the question why the "second" Socialist party, the party of 1930-1940 failed, one can point to the "objective" conditions of America, or, as Norman Thomas does in a view endorsed by Shannon, to the New Deal...

...Finally, in ten pages, he lists the major factors accounting for the failure of the Socialist party to become a major force in American life...

...One cannot, it seems to me, understand the fate of the Socialist party without understanding the nature of ideology, the role of social status, generational differences, expectations of social mobility, and other variables which recent sociological thinking has introduced...

...I would not want to detract from the painstaking and carefully researched contribution Shannon has made...

...My differences with him lie in the interpretations...

...Their attention was riveted on Europe because, as Marxist theory foretold, the rise of fascism there foreshadowed the fate of capitalism here...

...I would argue, tends to narrow his perspective...

...They reflect a growing division between historians and sociologists on the interpretation of the past...

...Political parties in the U.S.?¬he continues, "are famous for bunking strangers together, even incompatible strangers, and the Socialists until World War I were above all a political party...

...But if that invidious sociological reductionism departs too far from rational explanation, the other answer why Hillquit, Berger and Lee were anti-war lies in their rhetorical allegiance to the traditional ideology of socialism, divorced as they were from the intense national pressures to which the other socialist parties, closer to the battlefield, were subject...

...The fact that such a complex history is covered in only 255 pages of text often makes the narrative seem skimpy...

...One can, too, point to significant generational differences in the party leadership, to adduce additional hypotheses for the inability to adapt in the early years of the New Deal...

...But an epitaph is not a forgotting...

...Ira Kipnis's description of the 1900-1912 period...

...the wobbling recklessness of the Northwest miners and timber workers, etc...

...editor, "The New American Right" "We cannot revive old factions We cannot restore old policies Or follow an antique drum...

...In reaction to the high-handed centralism of the Socialist Labor party, the SP allowed for an extraordinary local autonomy...

...Starting briskly in 1900, he takes the story up to the sad debacle of 1952, when even the Prohibition parly outdistanced the 20,189 votes that went to Darlington Hoopes...

...In attempted scope, David Shannon's history is the most comprehensive volume to date...

...It is scholarship of this sort that permits secondary historical writing its more speculative excursions...

...These quarrels of interpretation are not parochial...

...And in using the word "conservative," how explain that the "conservative" leaders like Hillquit, Victor Berger and Algernon Lee opposed World War I while the entire intellectual leadership of the "Left"-William English Walling, Frank Bohn, Jack London, Upton Sinclair-decamped and supported the war...

...But surely this begs the question: If this was so, why didn't the Socialist party recognize the situation and act accordingly...

...It was not a political party but a social movement, held together by an ideology and a loose organizational structure...

...Some examples may make these differences more explicit...

...When Upton Sinclair left the SP in 1933 and within a year, as a Democrat, came within a hair's breadth of winning the Governorship of California, his action was contemptuously dismissed by the left wing...

...These are sins, if sins they be, of omission...

...But this is precisely what the SP was not...

...We have the Princeton volumes on Socialism and American Life...

...Shannon condensed his account of the early years-where his researches were most fruitful- because of the appearance of the Kipnis volume...

...These men, and those who opposed them And those whom they opposed Accept the constitution of silence And are folded in a single party...

...Yet the post-World War I history-which offers a major challenge for fresh interpretation-is covered in a hundred pages, touching only highlights along the way...

...It was, he writes, "a typically American party in the sense that it extended from coast to coast embracing a variety of social philosophies...

...Shannon calls Hillquit and Berger "conservatives...

...You don't need anything more...

...Shannon begins with the imaginative notion of picturing the pre-World War I party, a grab-bag if there ever was one, as a loose coalition of regional groups: the needle-trade immigrants of the East: the emotional, evangelical encampments of Oklahoma: the stolid burgher socialism of Milwaukee...

...If many sociologists have used shapeless generalizations and ignored the convoluted course of historical events, historians have failed to make adequate use of the sophistications (status, generational differences, character type) which sociologists have introduced...

...For this we owe him thanks...

...T. S. ELIOT'S elegy, from the Four Quartets, can serve as an epitaph for the Socialist party...

...From about 1931 to 1934, says Thomas, "it looked as if we were going to go places...

...Robert Iverson's unpublished doctoral dissertation on Morris Hill-quit...