Radical Past
Howe, Irving
BOOKS Radical Past SOCIALISM AND AMERICA by Irving Howe Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 225 pp. $17.95. Irving Howe, veteran democratic socialist, literary critic, editor of Dissent, and author of...
...Three of the four essays in Part One—"The Era of Debs," "Socialists in the Thirties," and "The Brilliant Masquerade: A Note on 'Browderism' "—were originally lectures delivered at the University of Michigan Law School in 1981...
...Vote for the lesser of two evils" was the thinking of many who, nevertheless, attended Thomas rallies in the 1930s...
...Irving Howe, veteran democratic socialist, literary critic, editor of Dissent, and author of the award-winning World oj Our Fathers, combines personal recollections and meticulous research in his insightful and analytical review of the U.S...
...Socialism and America includes a broad spectrum of Howe's thinking—from his evaluation of the Debs era, to the political past of the Left, to socialism today...
...Howe suggests that "the deceits of Stalinist manipulation" be avoided, but "the effort to engage with the social and political problems that occupy American society" should be emulated...
...They have been "extremely revised and enlarged," according to Howe...
...To Howe, as to many others, the "golden age" of American socialism was the Debs period...
...Howe writes that Eugene Victor Debs "made the slogans of radicalism vibrant with truth and beauty and hope: the very slogans that in the mouths of others could seem the merest rhetoric...
...Howe's essays on the socialists in the 1930s and on "Browderism" are autobiographical...
...Howe recalls the Presidential campaign of Norman Thomas in 1932...
...Of that I am absolutely certain...
...Democratic radicals can learn a good deal from the Popular Front—namely, what to avoid and what to emulate...
...Howe is blunt in his criticism of socialists...
...socialist movement in Socialism and America...
...He would like to see an alliance between mor-alism and activism similar to that of the British Labour Party during its best years...
...Howe credits Browder for whatever success the Popular Front formulated by the Communist Party may have had...
...Though there is a mood of pessimism throughout the book, Howe concludes on an upbeat note...
...The book is divided into two parts: "Socialism and America" and "The Socialist Idea...
...He recalls personalities and events: Norman Thomas and his Presidential campaigns, the Soviet Union, the communists, the quest for a united front "from below," and Earl Browder as the captain of the Communist Party and its Popular Front theology...
...He insists that if the socialist movement is to maintain its integrity it cannot forgo the voice of protest and it must act as an agency of reform...
...The two essays in Part Two have appeared in "slightly different form" in Dissent...
...People like me, veterans of the small phalanx of'premature' anti-Stalinism, were inclined to underestimate Browder," Howe confesses...
...was written for this book...
...Why Has Socialism Failed in America...
...Arthur Weinberg (Atthur Weinberg is coauthor, with his wife Lila, of "Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel" and "The Muckrakers...
...What the book misses, however, is an index...
...Yet he is confident that "whatever the fate of socialism, the yearning for a better mode of life which found expression in its thought and its struggle will reappear...
...Many people agreed with Thomas but voted for Franklin Roosevelt to make certain that Herbert Hoover was not reelected...
...he discusses the pitfalls of the movement, and why socialism has so far failed to capture the imagination of Americans...
...The moment had found its man—perhaps a small man, to be sure, but just right for the job...
...He acknowledges that he and his comrades missed an essential point during the Popular Front stage of the Communist Party: "that Browder was the right man...
...Socialism and America makes an important contribution to socialist literature...
...Whether some such alliance of forces or union of impulses might still be created in America is very much a question," he concludes...
Vol. 50 • March 1986 • No. 3
