Missing the Boat on Socialism

...anarchism has proven to be an unfulfillable dream...

...They provide no sustained evaluation of radical ideas, deemed more crucial than the Left's institutional legacy by the John polls...

...By slighting the background to the rise and fall of radical fortunes, the authors rob their subject of much of its significance...

...By the Johnpolls' method of reasoning, the conduct of Congressional business could somehow be understood in the light of the chaplain's prayers that precede legislative sessions...

...Like too many of their predecessors, the Johnpolls emphasize the frailties within the Left and miss the deeper roots of its unpopularity...

...After recording the rejection of radicals in general and union elections, most scholars have gone on to give them at least honorable mention...

...The John-polls ought to have examined and, if warranted, criticized American radicalism at what they themselves consider its strongest and most representative...

...And certainly the most powerful of this country's 20th-century Leftist groups, the Socialist Party of America, was essentially faithful to the democratic visions and methods of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas...

...Occasionally they do express gratitude for the introduction of alternative ideals to the buccaneer competitiveness once so predominant in American politics...

...The one clearly marked exit from the damaged structure of liberalism opened onto the supply side...

...At a time when unemployment is rising, the tax system benefits the most comfortable and the family of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volc-ker—the world's most important central banker—has to take in a boarder, the Left's inability to prosper politically should be absorbing the attention of academics and activists more than ever...

...Their book is nevertheless unusual among histories of radicalism in its almost total disenchantment...

...The Marxist parties could never decide whether to be reformist (hence superfluous) or revolutionary (hence doomed...

...In this manner, the book makes much of how some prominent radicals a century apart have despaired of significant social change, and become conservatives or sour nihilists...

...Equally unconvincing is the authors' assertion that syndicalism has resulted in "conservative business unionism...

...Also puzzling is the Johnpolls' emphatic claim that 19th-century dissenters established a pattern supposedly repeated by 20th-century radicals (who are otherwise scantily mentioned...

...and corruption...

...A mere three of the book's 20 chapters deal with the 20th century, when Communists perverted the humane ideals of the earlier Socialists, and the authors put forward little evidence to buttress their belief that socialism is or has been fundamentally despotic...

...Ever since the New Deal apparently outflanked the far Left for good, the absence of serious socialist alternatives has distinguished the United States from the rest of the Atlantic community...

...Yet the authors fail to marshal evidence that would elevate the connection between these radicals from chronology to causality...

...The unexplained omission smacks of tendentiousness and weakens the book's scholarly value without adding to its polemical force...

...They do not seem to have had a clearly defined audience in mind either...

...Moreover, the authors never specify with any consistency the principles behind their own disillusionment with the Left...

...The Johnpolls' energy as researchers has not brought us any closer to fully delving into Werner Sombart's question...

...The larger reasons are not easy to summarize, but I would think a tentative list should include: a higher standard of living than European economies could provide, an absence of class consciousness among workers, effective bread-and-butter trade unionism, voters' loyalty to the two-party system, a fear of the chaos and mayhem that radicalism reputedly engenders, the complexities of ethnic and racial antagonisms, and widespread allegiance to competitive individualism...

...Even Daniel Bell's excellent Marxian Socialism in the United States, for example, compares radical movements to religious millenar-ian groups that must weigh how to be in the world without being of it...

...The Johnpolls are correct to say that anarchism has lacked durability...

...Although the passionate idealism of many anarchists was often a surrogate for thought, that was not true for Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman—with whose "positions on most issues," the Johnpolls tell us, they "basically agree...

...Consequently, in the 1980s no American Francois Mitterrand stood waiting in the wings for a cue from the electorate...

...More"—would have dismayed his syndicalist contemporaries in France and Spain...

...Perhaps the least satisfactory chapter in this volume is on the New Left, a topic where the authors are captious and ungenerous in a manner that truly inhibits analysis...

...The nasty and squalid denouement of the most recent phase of radical history ought not to have impeded an effort to examine the New Left's origins in battles against legalized segregation in the South, the denial of suffrage, the persistence of poverty in a society hailed as affluent, and against a military intervention in Southeast Asia that eventually cost the lives of some 55,000 Americans...

...Impossible as the dream may be, though, Sombart's question remains pertinent today...

...Samuel Gompers' famous reply to the question of what American labor wants...

...Ever since, ideologues as well as historians have stayed up late trying to figure out an answer...

...The syndicalists' hostility toward capitalism and the state, and exaltation of the general strike, have barely affected the course of American labor history apart from the glory that the Wobblies briefly radiated...

...Their overstated case, to boot, is barely substantiated...

...The result, with minor exceptions, is a tale quite familiar to students of American socialism...

...Nor do they note that a major cause of the short half-life of the communitarian experiments dotting the landscape of 19th-century America was the leaders' not imposing discipline (the element that tended to give longer life to the religious communes...

...Although protest movements have abounded in eccentric characters as well as sublime ones, this is a colorless volume unlikely to fascinate the general reader...

...In this context, the work by Bernard K. Johnpoll (who teaches political science at SUNY-Albany) and his wife Lillian is a special disappointment, for The Impossible Dream only fuzzily maintains its focus on the full range of Sombart'squery...

...On the other hand, the deliberate avoidance of most secondary sources announced in the preface and the footnotes diminishes The Impossible Dream's contribution to academic discourse...

...and syndicalism has led to conservative business unionism and the corruption that power brings...

...Its believers were probably the most morally attractive of all radicals too, no doubt because of their remoteness from the responsibilities of power...

...To bolster this suggestion, the John-polls often grope toward some notion of causality—asserting, for instance, that the revolutionary violence Johann Most advocated at the turn of the century influenced the Weathermen of the SDS...

...Yet the lives and ideas of both figures are almost completely excluded from The Impossible Dream...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Associate Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University AT THE DAWN of the century, the German sociologist Werner Sombart wondered, "Why is there no socialism in the United States...

...Admirable though this sort of quest for regularities in the past is, The Impossible Dream suggests no more than that such parallels may exist...

...The Johnpolls, in contrast, argue that socialism "has, in practice, become a subterfuge for oppressive totalitarianism...

...Most historians of the American Left, however, have tended to concentrate on its internal weaknesses and organizational failures...

...More frequently the authors object to the autocratic and sectarian tendencies of the Socialists without noticing that stridency and di-visiveness alone hardly account for the Left's chronically poor showing at the polls...