The Death of a Myth: How Socialism and the Left Succeeded in America

Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? The German economist Werner Sombart asked the question in his book of that title in 1906. Since then, there has been a flood of speculation on the reasons. It has involved some of America's brightest scholars, including Selig Perlman, Daniel Bell, Louis Hartz, Martin Lipset, and Aileen Kraditor. It became almost a rite of passage for ambitious historians and social scientists to invent a new theory.

Contributing from different perspectives, a number of writers have begun in recent years to chip away at this historiographical megalith. There have been some striking claims. In their book Free to Choose (1980), the Chicago University scholars Milton and Rose Friedman observed that “almost every plank in the [Socialist Party of America's] 1928 presidential platform has by now been enacted into law” (p. 334). A few years later, the business philosopher Peter F. Drucker noted that, through the vehicle of pension funds, the American worker has at last achieved what Marx prescribed, the ownership of the great corporations.¹ The two books under review furnish some systematic evidence and thinking on the subject. Though different in approach, they mark a turning point in the historiography of the American Left.

In American Dreamers, historian Michael Kazin holds that the Left has influenced American culture. He uses the word “culture” in three senses. First, he discusses a great array of left-wing contributors, including such individuals as Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, and Howard Zinn. Second, he covers the Left's impact on behavioral culture as it affects phenomena ranging from sex to marijuana. Finally, he considers its impact on the cultural/ideological trends that influence politics.

In Kazin's estimate, this last impact was the weakest of the three types, certainly when measured by results. He says that the Left did occasionally succeed indirectly when the major political parties took up its proposals. However, this was an invisible success. On the “handful of occasions” when the Left won over the political and philanthropic elite, the victory “never occurred in its own name” (p. xv).

Kazin tells his story of cultural success with intelligence, erudition, and stylistic verve. He makes no secret of his own leftist sympathies and background. For example, he recalls his youthful experience in a Portland, Oregon, collective when he was a volunteer at The Stomach, a restaurant that served no meat or white-flour products. But so regularly does he interlace his narrative with insights into the failings of the Left that the reader can have no qualms about his objectivity.

An adherent of the “turning point” school of history, Kazin identifies 1829 as a seminal year for the American Left. The starting point of the narrative in his chronologically organized book, it was the time of a “three-part overture” (p. 7). The feminist Frances Wright published her Course of Popular Lectures, the redistributionist Thomas Skidmore issued his pamphlet The Rights of Man to Property, and David Walker authored Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Though not the first historian to identify the tripartite nature of 1830s radicalism, Kazin threads together the three strands in a credible definition of the early Left in the United States.

His vision of the ensuing years is dark. He sees 1848 as a turning point in European history that invites transatlantic comparison. Reactionaries crushed the European revolutions of that year, but socialist ambitions survived and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto rang out through the ages. However, America's 1848 was a disaster. With the acquisition of the Mexican territories, slavery won a new lease on life, and “the United States began its descent into the inferno of civil war” (p. 46).

Redistributionists were to have a dismal record in American politics. Abolitionists altered the course...