Socialism: an American tale
Bernie Sanders’ early successes in the Democratic primaries signalled the American left’s re-emergence as an electoral force. But, writes IWAN MORGAN, socialism’s influence on US culture has long outweighed its impact at the ballot box
During the early stages of this year’s Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders emerged as a serious contender for victory – and in the process gave democratic socialism a visibility it has not enjoyed for years.
The Vermont senator’s proposals include healthcare that’s free at the point of delivery, free tuition at public colleges and a ‘Green New Deal’ to convert electricity and transportation to renewable energy within 10 years. And – as his emergence as one of the leading contenders to win the nomination has proved – it is a manifesto with considerable appeal. Sanders has built his success on the backing of millennials, whose political consciousness was shaped by the failure of capitalism in the 2007–09 financial crisis, and on the Democratic left’s growing conviction that only radical measures can ensure a fairer economy. He was assisted in his bid by the splintering of the moderate vote behind a number of centrist candidates – until centre-left former vice-president Joe Biden emerged as his chief rival.
Whether Sanders’ campaign propels him to the presidency or not, its success demands a reassessment of socialism’s place in modern US history – which is far more significant than the media, the Democratic establishment and the American right are prepared to acknowledge.
In electoral terms, socialism has had less impact on the United States than any other western industrial nation. But socialist candidates haven’t always flopped at the polls. In 1912, Eugene Debs won 900,000 votes (6 per cent of the total ballots) as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America (SPA), attracting support from trade unionists, German Americans and populist western farmers. The next five years represented something of a golden age for the SPA – it elected two congressmen, dozens of state legislators, and more than a hundred mayors (Milwaukee, Wisconsin was its greatest urban stronghold). However, the party’s unpopular opposition to US involvement in the First World War, and factional splits over the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, sent it into decline. In the 1920 presidential election, Debs again won 900,000 votes, but this represented just 3.4 per cent of ballots. SPA hopes for a revival in the Depression fell foul of Franklin
D Roosevelt’s popularity. Its candidate won a minuscule 0.4 per cent of votes cast in the 1936 presidential election – a share that fell to 0.2 percent in 1940.
A laboratory for ideas
Away from the ballot box, however, socialism’s political influence has been profound. The SPA was a laboratory for policy ideas that found their way into both Democratic and Republican agendas. In 1980, celebrated conservatives Milton and Rose Friedman observed that “almost every plank” in its 1928 presidential platform, ranging from public administration of natural resources to elimination of child labour, became law in the ensuing half-century. Most significantly, the social security programme, created by Roosevelt and expanded by Democratic and Republican successors, traced its intellectual pedigree to socialists William Leiserson, Edwin Witte and in particular Selig Perlman, during their service on the United States Commission on Industrial Relations research division from 1912 to 1915. Witte went on to become the principal drafter of the Social Security Act of 1935, the cornerstone of the American welfare state.
The influence of socialists was also evident beyond the
As the Cold War loomed, a Red Scare targeted supposed Soviet subversives in government, the labour movement, universities and entertainment
corridors of power. In the early 20th century, Emma Goldman, Rose Pastor Stokes and Margaret Sanger promoted birth control to improve women’s welfare. Socialists responded to their repression in the First World War by helping establish the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. In 1909, WEB Du Bois and other socialists were instrumental in establishing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the US’s foremost civil rights organisation. Half a century on, Martin Luther King shrouded his Christian socialism during his early campaigning but grew more critical of America’s racism and imperialism in his final years.
Socialists were also deeply embedded in the nation’s cultural life, exemplified by bestselling early 20th-century novelists Theodore Dreiser, Jack London and Upton Sinclair; later writers who underwent socialist phases like Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and Walter Mosley; and musical talents such as Aaron Copland, Woody Guthrie and The Wizard of Oz lyricist Yip Harburg.
So why, given its cultural impact, has US socialism failed to gain the mainstream acceptance it has achieved in western Europe? Writing in the mid-20th century, so-called ‘consensus historians’ attributed its failure to the appeal of the American Dream. To them, this matched everything Marxism could offer, and bettered it: a classless society, opportunities for the talented, and a more comfortable material life (in the present, rather than just the future). But such rosy assumptions did not survive the racial, gender and class discords of the 1960s and beyond. They also underestimated the significance of government repression of the American left.
Unwarranted fears that the Soviet Bolsheviks were fomenting revolution in America precipitated the Red Scare of 1919–20, which led to the imprisonment of many socialists and the deportation of those who lacked citizenship. Eugene Debs, sentenced in 1918 to 10 years for inciting resistance to the draft, fought the 1920 presidential election as a federal penitentiary inmate.
A quarter of a century later, as the Cold War loomed, a second Red Scare targeted supposed subversives accused of working for the Soviet Union or of harbouring communist sympathies. This prompted purges in government, universities, the labour movement and the entertainment world.
Terrified that the stigma of being branded a communist sympathiser would destroy their professional careers, some socialist victims of the first Red Scare (such as the prominent economist Selig Perlman) recanted their faith.
This pattern was repeated in the second scare: the author
Betty Friedan removed all mention of her socialist past from The Feminine Mystique, her bestselling tract that helped launch second-wave feminism.
Republicans have routinely sought to discredit leftleaning Democrats by accusing them of socialistic impulses. This began in the 1930s when Herbert Hoover led the charge against Roosevelt’s New Deal, and has continued into the modern age. Conservatives pilloried Barack
Obama for seeking to ‘promote socialism’ in the wake of the 2007–09 financial crisis, especially when he passed the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’) in 2010.
Anticipating a Sanders presidential candidacy, the Conservative Political Action Conference, under whose banner hundreds of American conservative groups meet annually, invoked a third Red Scare by naming its 2020 convention ‘America v Socialism’. This will likely be a major line of attack in Donald Trump’s election campaign – even if, as looks likely, the Democrat facing him is Sanders’ rival for the nomination, Joe Biden. But will voters look beyond the propaganda and see that socialism is not the political virus of conservative imagination but a full-fledged part of America’s political tradition? That remains to be seen.