First Chapter: 'It Didn't Happen Here'
By DAVID GLENN
|  
IT DIDN'T HAPPEN HERE
Why Socialism Failed in the United States.
By Seymour Martin Lipset
and Gary Marks.
379 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
 |
nless you're a patient soul, you probably don't want to find yourself on a Friday evening on a barstool next to someone like me -- someone obsessed with American radicalism's defeats, misdeeds and lost opportunities. Just as card-carrying Libertarian Party members have been known to give strangers unprovoked 90-minute lectures on the gold standard, leftists of a certain temperament are happy to share at length their theories about what exactly went wrong in 1919, or 1936, or 1970. With a few beers and a few counterfactual thought experiments, our evening is complete. If only America's electoral system were proportional rather than winner-take-all; if only the Labor-Populist alliance of the 1890's hadn't collapsed; if only American Socialists had more unanimously and passionately rejected racism, Leninism and the Vietnam War -- these are just a few of the scenarios commonly trotted out by wistful American radicals.
Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks's new book provides a systematic overview of the plausible explanations for the American left's weakness, some of which have been posited for well over a century by sociologists, political scientists and radical activists. ''It Didn't Happen Here'' will, of course, be devoured by my fellow barroom natterers, but it deserves a far wider audience than that. Even if the word socialism arouses no particular yearning or hostility in your soul, be aware that this debate offers paths toward new and rich understandings of American history. The German scholar Werner Sombart's famous 1906 treatise ''Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?'' is regarded today as one of the major descendants of Tocqueville's ''Democracy in America.''
''The inability of American Socialists to create a durable Labor or Socialist Party is not a historical quirk of a bygone era,'' Lipset and Marks write. ''On the contrary, it is a powerful influence on the present.'' Had they managed to forge such a party -- or to capture the Democratic Party as successfully as the Goldwater and Reagan movements captured the Republican -- the United States would almost certainly not be the only advanced democracy with no system of universal health insurance and no system of universal child support. We might not have levels of income inequality and relative poverty that are almost triple those of other rich nations. (Admittedly, we might be dealing instead with Western Europe's problems: relatively stagnant growth and high unemployment.)
Why did we go down one path and not the other? The best-known explanations involve claims about the broad features of American culture. Following Tocqueville's lead, Sombart emphasized the country's egalitarian ethos: whereas European laborers still chafed against vestigial feudal attitudes, the American worker ''carries his head high, walks with a lissome stride and is as open and cheerful in his expression as any member of the middle class.'' For white workers at least, much of the visceral class-consciousness that fueled European movements was absent.
Alongside this republican ethic, the country's founders bequeathed to almost all of us, leftists included, a robust antistatism. Unlike its European counterparts, the early American labor movement (in both its conservative and its radical incarnations) was highly skeptical about turning to the state for wage protection or social insurance. (The A.F.L. president Samuel Gompers described himself in 1920 as ''three-quarters anarchist.'') Finally, Lipset and Marks argue, America's Protestant heritage is reflected in the propensity our socialist parties have shown for dogma, fissures and often absurd arguments about doctrinal purity. At the height of the Great Depression, probably the greatest climate for radical organizing in American history, the Socialist Party actually managed to lose almost all its California members. The party's leaders, enforcing a taboo against working within the Democratic Party, forbade the membership to take part in Upton Sinclair's radical End Poverty in California movement -- and over 90 percent of them defected.
Beyond these broad cultural arguments are factors that can be studied more rigorously. One is the effect of immigration, something not easy to summarize. To oversimplify: even though American socialist movements have been disproportionately immigrant-led, immigration has not, on the whole, been helpful to the cause. America's ethnic, neighborhood and religious enclaves (''mutually isolated by their various starting-points,'' as Friedrich Engels lamented in 1887) have rarely come together in effective class-based political action. Our few successful municipal socialist movements arose in cities with an overwhelmingly dominant ethnic group: Pennsylvania Dutch in Reading, Germans in Milwaukee, Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The problem was not simply ethnic insularity but sometimes outright bigotry. Milwaukee's best-known Socialist leader, Victor Berger (himself an Austrian Jewish immigrant), delivered a racist harangue on the floor of Congress in 1911 against the immigration of ''modern white coolies . . . Slavians, Italians, Greeks, Russians and Armenians.''
An interesting comparative snapshot underscores the basic point. In the 1910's, Italian immigrants numerically dominated the working class of Buenos Aires, where they developed militant labor, socialist and anarchist movements. During the same decade in New York City, however, Italians were only one of several streams of immigration; there the Italian working class was much less mobilized, and it never became integrated into the largely Jewish Socialist Party of New York.
This sort of concrete, illuminating comparison is what this book is best at. Lipset and Marks similarly use comparative data to explore whether government repression weakened socialism here (not very much), whether America's political structure played a role (yes; the two-party system and the federalist diffusion of authority were both serious hurdles) and the role played by sheer prosperity. This last is not easy to pinpoint -- the correlation between poverty and militancy is not a simple one -- but, well, Trotsky himself wrote fondly of the $18-a-month apartment in the East Bronx where he and his family lived briefly in 1917. It was, he recalled in his 1929 autobiography, ''equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking range, bath, telephone. . . . These things completely won the boys over to New York.''
''It Didn't Happen Here'' might be seen as the culmination of a certain strand of Lipset's half-century career in political science. His first book, ''Agrarian Socialism'' (1950), was a study of radical movements on the prairies of Canada and the United States. And in 1974 he co-edited ''Failure of a Dream?,'' a huge anthology of essays on the American left's travails. His collaborator here, Gary Marks, is a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina; his book ''Unions in Politics'' is a comparative study of labor politics in Britain, Germany and the United States. This new book is purely businesslike, stepping into each question and its permutations with almost zero fanfare; one sometimes pictures a high school debate team with index cards at hand. But the index cards are good ones -- the authors are clearly on top of the literature -- and the debate team treats its opponents civilly.
About those opponents: one frequent complaint against Lipset's approach to ''American exceptionalism'' is that it's too closely akin to the consensus school that dominated the study of history and political science during the 1950's. That era of scholarship tended to neglect and obscure America's deep racial, regional and class conflicts. Throughout this book Lipset and Marks are scrupulous about avoiding such errors -- among other things, they frequently acknowledge that America has seen more labor militancy and industrial violence than European countries with more successful labor movements.
There's another familiar area of criticism, however, where this book does fall short. Lipset and Marks's comparative method focuses entirely on what they think are enduring features of American life (cultural traits, electoral structures and so on) and almost never pauses to acknowledge the importance of particular historical events. They cite the Depression -- when most elements of labor and the left were kept firmly within the Democratic coalition -- as ''an excellent example of the way the American presidential system has worked to frustrate third-party efforts.'' But doesn't it seem in hindsight highly contingent -- mighty improbable, in fact -- that a Democrat with F.D.R.'s supreme political skills happened to occupy the White House then? It's hard to imagine that Al Smith, though similarly sympathetic to labor, would have been able to enact the New Deal so aggressively or to shepherd the left into the party's tent so successfully. And in that scenario it's not outrageous to conjecture that a true Labor Party might have emerged (perhaps built of the same elements as the La Follette Progressive coalition of 1924, which managed 16.6 percent of the vote in that prosperous year). The Democratic Party might then even have gone into eclipse, just as Britain's Liberal Party did two decades earlier. Now, all of this might have been disastrous -- a Labor Party born in the 1930's might well have wound up controlled by Stalinists -- but my point is that during the Depression crisis our two-party configuration may have hung on the slim thread of Roosevelt's charisma. Here and elsewhere, Lipset and Marks make historical events seem more inevitable, more determined by structural constraints, than I believe they in fact were.
This problem is most acute in the book's extremely thin treatment of events since 1945. It's only during the last 60 years, after all, that modern welfare states have been constructed in the social democracies of Europe. This is the period in which the material consequences of this entire debate actually emerge. And yet here we read nothing about how the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 curtailed American unions' power; nothing about how race may have affected the nature of America's small-scale welfare state; nothing about how the Vietnam War divided the American labor-left during the one decade when there was an opportunity to expand its reach. Was the die really cast so firmly way back before World War II?
Still, this is an impressive work. Lipset and Marks present a huge range of material with great clarity, and they make plausible arguments about each of the structural constraints and cultural factors that they weigh. And the book has of course given me new fuel for my agonized bar conversations. One consolation: perhaps in a few decades I'll be joined by an aging Gingrichite, muttering into his whiskey about the botched opportunities of the mid-1990's.
David Glenn is writing a book on the city of Milwaukee and the American social contract.
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