The Failure of Organized Socialism in America

...It was largely a protest rather than Socialist vote...

...The explanation of the failure of any or all socialist groups in America lies in the American situation...

...Cabinet governments can be arranged through party coalitions...

...They were at least willing to attempt a coalition for a one-shot try in the Presidential race of 1924, with a progressive rather than a strict socialist and labor platform...

...Mass production, as Henry Ford was perhaps the first great industrialist dimly to understand, requires mass consumption, which in turn requires high wages...

...Weren't they a new party in 1856...

...These conditions were reflected in the organization in America of the labor movement, with which the fate of organized socialism was intertwined...

...It was only under the Roosevelt Administration that organized labor rose to anything like its present power, and then Socialists or former Socialists contributed a major share to the task of honest and effective organization, often in sharp competition with actual or incipient racketeers on one side and Communists on the other...

...Yes, but scarcely a third party...

...At one time I explained the significant difference between the United States and Britain regarding socialism in economic terms...

...It has adopted a great many of the measures which in the United States, as elsewhere, were definitely socialist in origin...

...As for myself, my hope as a Socialist campaigner was that we could serve a function both as educators of public opinion and as a kind of catalytic agent to precipitate a new and meaningful political realignment...

...In this time of growth the party's appeal was based more than its enthusiasts realized on immediate demands which were not widely copied at that time by the old parties...

...It is to the credit of democratic socialism that it increasingly recognizes that fact...

...In our imperfect democracy our political apparatus, constitutional and extra-constitutional, must pay some attention to economic and social development...

...But none of them grew like an oak from an acorn or ever won the Presidency...

...From the end of World War I we were plagued by the rise of communism and harassed and often divided by the problems it presented...

...Through no fault of its candidates, its campaigns of 1952 and 1956 were the efforts of a sect to hold fast the faith rather than a party to present a genuine political challenge...

...Some of you may challenge my statement on third parties by asking, "How about the Republicans...

...He, and Socialists generally, directly or indirectly, played a great role in advancing labor organization...

...So-called third parties temporarily commanding much popular interest in various issues have been a feature of American politics since early in the Nineteenth Century...

...But in balance it must also be pointed out that our United States has moved in the direction of a welfare state as far as any country in which democratic socialism is a first or second party in strength...

...To Morris Hillquit and other Socialists it was evident that the Socialist Party as such was not a likely vehicle for the democratic achievement of power...

...Until the American entry into the war, the Socialist Party, despite internal tumult, grew in membership, at one time reaching over 100,000, and in 1913 held 667 elective offices...

...This should not be interpreted to mean that I think American policy, domestic and perhaps even more particularly foreign, would not be far more adequate to the demands of our troubled times if one of our major parties were avowedly socialist...

...It is also true that our American parties are federations of state parties rather than truly centralized organizations and that this form of organization has enabled— or compelled-^them to function with few clear cut differences between them as parties, however sharp may be the differences between individual candidates...

...As we now know the race problem required more specific treat...

...Eisenhower, for campaign purposes, discovered the Democratic Party to be...

...As for the left wing of that party which Americans for Democratic Action is, in effect, it would find nothing horrendous in the programs of the British Labor Party and the once Marxist German Social Democratic Party...

...It is not because socialism was unknown or undiscussed in America...

...Gompers worked along the practical lines of rewarding political friends—from whom he asked little—and punishing enemies, within a framework of the interests of relatively small groups of organized workers...

...The whole amorphous situation has made it possible or, indeed, necessary for both major parties under pressure of events, public discontent, or strong leadership (for example, of the two Roosevelts) to pass legislation that nothing in their patchwork platforms suggested...

...It has not been faced with the basic problem of over-population...

...Moreover, the immigrants shared in common the hope, partially supported by experience, that America was a land in which their children, if not themselves, could rise out of their class rather than help their class to rise...

...It was a strength obviously based on immediate demands which in considerable degree he satisfied...

...The year 1928, when I first ran for President, was a year of rebuilding...

...We shall speak briefly of its present outlook after examining reasons for this decline in democratic socialist strength at a time when sister parties in many European countries, also beset by fascism, communism, and two world wars, were able to form progressive governments, if not to establish a socialist society as they once would have described it...

...More than one party—or, more accurately, sect—has regarded itself as the true exponent of the socialist way of life for the nation...

...In this country Gene Debs was a working class hero whose labor leadership preceded his conversion to socialism...

...I now stress as the single most important factor our political system, more especially the way in which we elect our President...

...The party was still willing to unite with other progressive elements in some sort of labor party but no opportunity ever came so nearly in sight as that of 1924...

...The formation of a party was to be determined later in the light of events...

...In my explanation I may, not unreasonably, be suspected of the bias of self-interest since I had a considerable share of responsibility for the Socialist Party's policies in the years 1924-48 during which it failed to build itself to strength...

...I watched these difficulties increase year by year in my own active campaigning...

...It is not merely the way in which we elect a President which presents difficulties to Americans in building a new party unknown in countries with a parliamentary system...

...What Professor John K. Galbraith brilliantly describes as The Affluent Society against the background of a still hungry world needs further analysis along the lines in which he has pioneered...

...By 1932, the party seemed again to be growing strong, but Franklin D. Roosevelt stole most of that strength by 1936...

...It was born free of inherited feudal restraints...

...And because it had been a party less rigidly sectarian than the old Socialist Labor Party, it made an even worse numerical showing...

...That will be harder to do in this century because of the far greater rigidity and complexity of the election laws of 49 separate states and the stupendous costs of campaigning across the nation...

...Nothing of the sort is in sight for 1960 unless an utterly reactionary Southern split on the race issue—not a true third party movement—should get things started by a genuine cleansing of the Democratic Party...

...The great Eugene V. Debs was its candidate for President, winning an increasing proportion of the popular vote from 1900 through 1912...

...The AFL did not endorse social insurance until well along in the first Roosevelt Administration...

...For one thing we would have a better theoretical understanding of basic facts and an approach to a solution of our problems...

...His election is the major political concern of the people...

...he temporarily abandoned his attempts at the Presidency in 1916 when he ran unsuccessfully for Congress...

...We made our mistakes...

...Until recently a tenuous union was preserved by tacitly ignoring the race issue, but as I write, except in the South, the Democrats are avowedly after the Negro vote even while they have left Southern racists in charge of the most important committees in Congress...

...But socialist organization, as a party rather than a sect, did not begin until 1900, when a coalition of midwestern Social Democrats led by Victor Berger and secessionists from Daniel DeLeon's quasi-syndicalist Socialist Labor Party, led by Morris Hillquit in New York, soon became a membership party...

...After that year the Socialist Party, plagued by communism, wrestled with years of boom and bust...

...The usual result in the experience of third parties is summed up in what I have been told so often: "Mr...

...I claim no infallibility for myself or the party...

...If the Marxist critique of Nineteenth Century capitalism had been or seemed to be as nearly right in application to America as to Western Europe, organized socialism would have made a better showing, despite all difficulties in the political framework...

...Our constitution makers, who hoped to bypass political parties in the important matter of the choice of President, practically forced a two-party system on us by requiring that the President must receive a majority of the electoral college, failing which the election must be thrown into the House of Representatives in which each state—New York as well as Nevada— would have one vote...

...some of the most progressive unions (e.g., in the needle trades) were definitely socialist in their beginnings...

...Roosevelt, with his successful New Deal, was the vital roadblock to Socialist Party progress after 1932...

...He checked the Socialists by adopting a program somewhat closer to the Socialist platform of 1932 than his own...

...American socialism has a long history...

...the effort of Socialists and a handful of others to establish a farmer-labor party after the election was decisively defeated at a convention in Chicago...

...The question I will try to answer is why American socialism has not produced a strong third, to say nothing of a second, political party...

...Parliamentary groups can grow like snowballs without compelling voters to face the either-or question: which of two chief contenders for the most important job in the nation do you like better or dislike less...

...They are the effects upon Americans of the vast immigration which lasted until it was checked in the middle 1920's, and the evil heritage of racism, the consequences of the monstrous institution of colored chattel slavery destroyed only by civil war...

...ended with World War I. Debs received his highest percentage of votes in 1912...

...It grew up with the machine age and developed mass production on a scale of which early economists, laissez-faire or collectivism could not have dreamed...

...But few were state legislators and only two were Congressmen, Meyer London of New York and Victor Berger of Milwaukee, and even they did not hold office simultaneously...

...But the American economy has had many advantages over the European...

...Then there arose the question of the proper socialist attitude toward the New Deal which, while not socialist, had appropriated and applied so many of the socialist proposals which the party had regarded as "immediate demands...

...Back in the Nineteenth Century, Karl Marx wrote for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, and the First Socialist International had its last headquarters in this country...

...the old Whigs disappeared from the scene...

...Thomas, I should have voted for you, but I couldn't take a chance lest that so-and-so [the voter's more disliked of major party candidates] would win...

...In the United States, thanks partly to free soil, to the relative weakness of class lines, and the many opportunities of technological expansion, it was usually easier for the sort of man who is effectively discontented to rise out of his class than to rise with it...

...In presenting to American socialism a situation different from that in Great Britain or Western Europe, two other sociological factors deserve mention...

...On the European continent it was for the most part socialism which brought the modern labor movement into being, although this was not true in Britain...

...The truth is that the historic debate between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism is in no small degree irrelevant to the facts of economic and political life as they have developed in the Western world...

...The same Constitution made the President no mere head of state but also of government...

...But as a whole, immigrants of many national origins tended to make the working class less homogeneous and harder to organize economically and politically than in Britain or the Scandinavian countries...

...I have long been of the opinion that no third party ever will come to power unless, like the Republican Party, it emerges rapidly all over the country and shows great strength at its first election...

...Gene Debs again ran for President in 1920—from a prison cell—and received a million votes, his largest numerical vote (though not proportionate) of his four campaigns...

...The Failure of Organized Socialism in America by NORMAN THOMAS ^Tn making a fair appraisal of the A impact of socialism on America in the past half century, it must be admitted, of necessity, that organized socialism has failed to become a political force in American life...

...Samuel Gom-pers saw greater hope for success for his craft unions in playing with the old parties...

...Revolutions, peaceful and political or violent, are, in the beginning, always the work of minorities...

...Socialism was often damned in the United States as a foreign importation and the party once had much of its membership in foreign language groups...

...He fought the raw capitalism of that period, but he fought it in an atmosphere of hope and with a somewhat unsophisticated faith in progress which was abruptly NORMAN THOMAS, long a leader of the Socialist Party in America, was six times its candidate for President...

...In their first Presidential race they became a second party...

...To admit this is not for a minute to clothe American capitalism in robes of light, to deny its outrageous exploitation of men and resources, or to justify our past or present divisions of the national income...

...It grew in membership because of its opposition to World War I, but later lost heavily, first through the persecutions of the Wilson Administration, and then— and far more seriously—by the Communist split...

...But up to the time of the New Deal the labor movement, predominantly a craft union movement, was led by the strong man, Samuel Gompers, a radical in his youth, who held a syndicalist attitude of suspicion of the state, even the welfare state...

...The whole experience left the Socialist Party weaker than before, partly because it had concentrated so much of its strength on the coalition national ticket, allowing its own local campaigns to suffer...

...But even before the election, in which a very creditable 5,000,000 votes were cast for LaFollette, some labor leaders were growing cold...

...It is my honest opinion that our fate as a party would have been about the same even had we avoided some of our internal crises...

...Thus we have the phenomenon of a Democratic Party predominantly Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, rural, and lily white in the South allied with a predominantly urban, non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant party in the North...

...It has operated in a continental free trade area, richly endowed with natural resources...

...Except for these hurdles and the political difficulties I have described, Socialists might have succeeded in becoming a strong party or in bringing into existence an American style labor or farmer-labor party...

...William McKinley or Calvin Coolidge would regard Eisenhower Republicanism at least as socialist as Mr...

...After 1936, the history of the Socialist Party is a history of decline, somewhat arrested at one time and place or another...

...A far greater handicap to socialism and the whole labor movement was the divisive anti-social racism which in some degree all over the country long cursed the mass workers...

...But they certainly were no more serious than those made by most of our European brethren in parties that went on to substantial victories...

...I know, because I ran for governor of New York that year...

...Most of these Socialist or former Socialist enthusiasts, whether of the right or left, rapidly became definitely anti-Socialist Party in their zeal to support Roosevelt and the New Deal for labor's sake...

...The Roman Catholic church was strong among the immigrants and this church was opposed to "Marxist materialism," which it usually attributed to all socialists...

...Gene Debs and most of the early socialist organizers thought that the problem could best be dealt with by general emphasis on the common rights and needs of all men as men and workers...

...For another, we Americans would understand and be understood far better in lands in which organized socialism is an international force...

...I doubt if a strong socialist British Labor Party would have emerged under a similar system in the United Kingdom...

...They help to account for the significant fact that since 1948 there has been no third party on the national scene with strength to capture popular attention to the degree that Socialist, Populist, and other third parties have in the past...

...Therefore in 1922 they sought to create a road to power, such as British workers had found, through the formation of a labor or farmer-labor party—an idea tentatively acceptable, from a self-interest point of view, to some labor and farm leaders, and to the LaFollette Progressives...

...Not only the unions, but the British Labor Party existed before the workers acknowledged themselves socialist—a result largely credited to the steady work of British socialists, Marxist and non-Marxist, among the mass of British workers who were class-conscious to a degree that Americans were not...