The Party That Withered

...Essays in the History of American Socialism Edited by John H M Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset Doubleday 754 pp $12 95 (cloth), $5 95 (paper) Reviewed by Steven Kelman Author, "Behind the Beihn Wall," "Posh Comes to Shove" America is of course the one advanced industrial country m the world without an influential mass-based Socialist movement (May Day, for example, is an official holiday not only in East Germany but in West Germany as well ) Yet, m comparing the Democratic party of the United States with the Social Democratic parties of Europe, it is easy to conclude that we are not so exceptional after all On the one hand, organized labor has become increasingly involved in Democratic politics in a way that begins to approach the ties between the trade unions and Socialist parties in Europe, more than ever, Democrats are the "liberals,' Republicans the "conservatives " On the other hand, today's European Social Democrats are hardly socialist in the sense they were before World War I Thus a convergence has taken place m recent years Nonetheless, the separate heritages of the U S Democrats and the European Social Democrats continue to produce important distinctions At the most formal level, the Democrats and the Social Democratic parties are different types ot political collectivities The Leftist parties of Europe are membership organizations with functioning bureaucracies, working-class educational programs, symbols, and traditions The Democrats are incomparably weaker as a party This point may seem trivial, but survey-based comparative research being done by Sidney Verba and Norman Nie suggests that the nature of a party system has a significant influence on political outcomes Verba and Nie find that a strong political organization is the most effective means of counteracting the tendency of the disadvantaged to participate less in elections The class bias surrounding political participation helps to explain, in turn, the relative weakness ot liberal forces within the United States Put simply, the welfare state has ad-\anced further in Europe because of the presence of Social Democratic parties A second difference resulting from America's lack ot a mass Socialist movement is the relative absence in this country of any debate on change beyond the welfare state While no Social Democratic party has plans to nationalize the bulk of private industry, the Europeans are seriously discussing issues like worker participation, social wealth, and so forth Consequently, although the contrasts are less stark than in the past, the question of "American exceptionalism" remains an interesting one, and in this collection ot essays, some reprinted and some written especially tor the occasion, 31 authors, mostly academics, try to come to terms with it The contributions are divided into two broad categories—those focusing on internal factors (the policies and leadership ot the U S Socialist party) and those emphasizing external elements (the characteristics of American society) The Socialist movement that started to emerge m America in the 1890s was strongly factionahzed from the outset Just when Socialist strength in the American Federation ol Labor (AFL) was at its height, the followers of Daniel DeLeon withdrew to begin a lifetime of harping against "labor fakirs ' The party's ambivalent attitude toward the Wobbhes strained its relations with the AFL before World War I The formation of the Third International after the War produced another split—a rupture, James Wemstein argues m his essay, that dealt the decisive blow to American Socialism Bernard Johnpoll, in his article, maintains that the party was prevented from achieving a renaissance during the '30s because of internecine feuds A virtue of those offering "internal explanations" is their recognition that a functioning Socialist movement once existed m America In 1912 there were in fact over a thousand elected Socialist officials in the United States, as well as a solid party organization and press Still, these accounts fall short in two respects First, they tail to prove that the Socialists were more factionalized than their European counterparts, who succeeded Second, they fail to analyze the character ot Socialist strength in the pre-World War I period Even at its peak, the party was unable to make real breakthroughs among urban industrial workers (as opposed, say, to the support it developed among marginal and isolated groups of workers in Western mining camps) Here it would be valuable to have more research on the political role ot pro-Socialist unions, and the extent to which they influenced or failed to influence their members The "external explanations" ot Socialist weakness are many and oft-repeated They include America's lack ot a feudal past (meaning that class consciousness was lower here than in Europe), the capacity of the nation's ideals to act, m the expression of Leon Samson, as a "substitutive socialism", the presence of universal suffrage, making it impossible for Socialists to gain followers by piggybacking on the movement to enfranchise the working class, high social mobility, the open frontier, the economic rewards available to U S labor, the effects ot immigration and ethnic heterogeneity in preventing the formation ot a popularly based Socialist movement As a nonhistonan, my impulse while reading the various discussions was to want to throw up my hands It is true, of course, that a subject as complex as Socialism's inability to take root in America must have multiple causes Actually the issue can be defined m terms ot reaching a 'critical mass' In Political Man, Lipset wrote that ' once established, a democratic political system gathers momentum' and creates social supports to ensure its continued existence ' While the Socialist party's lack of success in generating a "critical mass" before 1914 must be due to several factors, one would at least like to be able to rank these according to their importance The question is, how...

...The historian is on relatively solid ground dealing with elite behavior, explaining why Lincoln did this or what the New York City press thought of that But when he tackles American values or class consciousness or the openness of workers to Socialist ideas, he is dealing with topics where evidence is neither readily available nor easily obtained Laslett objects to those who state that Socialism was impeded by the national value system, contending that the conflict between hopes and reality should have favored the development of Socialism In the final analysis, though, all arguments of this kind rest on speculation, not hard data Ideally, an investigator would remove one variable at a time and see what the result is—for instance, he would replay American history without social mobility and observe the changes Such a procedure can be followed in scientific experiments and, by means of opinion polls, in certain types of social science research as well One can use a similar technique m history, albeit in limited ways, through comparative studies, indeed, Laslett and Lipset, in their introduction, emphasize that such is the path historians will have to take in the future In another volume, Lipset has already made a suggestive attempt to discuss how differences m the American and Canadian value systems produced Socialist movements of differing strength Methodology aside, this book is marred by a structural defect Normally, the difficulty with any essay collection is its failure to cohere Laslett and Lipset have tried to ovoid this, and make the collection lively and polemical, by soliciting comments on each of the essays Yet their solution creates problems ot its own One is that the majority of contributors are not as interested in the book as the editors It is no coincidence that the most meaningful exchanges are between Laslett and Lipset, between Daniel Bell and Laslett, and between Stephan Thern-strom and Lipset The other replies tend to be of low quality, with the commentators frequently taking upon themselves the task of the entire book rather than dealing in a detailed way with the essay at hand Often, too, they descend to ideological polemics reminiscent of the scholarly guerrilla warfare of the '60s and inappropriate to a serious treatment of an historical phenomenon Problems also arise from inviting so large a number ot New Leftist academics to contribute A few of them seem to have agreed to participate only on the condition that they be allowed to insult the editors in print The more one considers the explanations offered for Socialism's weakness in the United States, the more one becomes convinced that the question cannot be separated from the larger subject of American social history particulaily that aspect concerned with mass attitudes These attitudes have never been determined, perhaps they never will be For this reason, the essays in Failure of a Dream'' say as much about what we don't know as what we do...