An American History of the Socialist Idea

Seven years ago, I reviewed in these pages the first major history of the American Socialist Party to appear in several decades: Jack Ross’s The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (2015), an exhaustive and, for the reader, exhausting tome whose text ran to roughly 600 pages before the election tables, notes, and index, which ran for 200 more.

Now, Gary Dorrien, a professor of religion at Columbia and of social ethics across the street at Union Theological Seminary, has produced his account of this nation’s democratic socialist history, a text that also runs to nearly 600 pages (before endnotes), though with smaller type squeezing in many more words than Ross had managed. Dorrien is a distinguished historian of socialist movements both here and in Europe, with a particular specialty in the rather under-documented field of religious socialism.

What’s striking about the two books is the extent to which they don’t overlap. Other than their obligatory Debs-to-Thomas-to-Harrington chronology, there are just three particulars in which they resemble each other. First, neither is a social history of the socialist movement; neither dives into the daily lives and tasks of Lower East Side garment union organizers or sewer-socialist Milwaukee block captains. Second, both authors see the failure of socialists in the Debs era and for a few years thereafter to help form an enduring farmer–labor party, of which they could be the socialist wing—much as the Fabians did in Great Britain’s Labour Party—as American socialism’s great missed opportunity. And third, like most historians, each sees the savage repression of the Socialist Party during the First World War, followed by the abrupt rise of American communism after the Bolshevik Revolution, as body blows from which American socialism never really recovered. (Ross’s book predates by the narrowest of margins the Bernie boom of 2015–6, while Dorrien’s gives it a full treatment. Dorrien’s account, accordingly, has a happier ending than Ross’s.)

Once past the tomes’ three points of accord, the similarities end. If you want to know the documented history of the Socialist Party right up to Norman Thomas’s final presidential campaign in 1948, Ross is your man. His account of party conventions, local elections, and how rival factions voted; of the position papers and pamphlets through which its internecine battles were waged, and of its myriad fissiparous tendencies is altogether authoritative. His characterizations of these events may at times be shaky—he never quite understands that the battles of the 1930s between the party’s old guard and its young militants were more generational than ideological—but if you want to know which side a particular comrade was on, say, in the vote to repudiate the Wobblies, Ross delivers the goods.

Dorrien, by contrast, tells you what made that comrade tick. His is not a history of the party but the history of the socialist idea, of what brought particular people to embrace it, how exactly they did embrace it and change it in the process, what part of it they carried into their work in other movements, and, if they abandoned it, what prompted them to do so and what stuck with them nonetheless. In a sense, his is a work of collective biography, though, as the subtitle warns us, it also consists of Dorrien’s analysis of and advocacy for those portions of the socialist vision he finds most plausible and compelling (hence his dive into the complexities of market socialism). To these tasks, Dorrien has brought a lifetime of research into largely neglected realms of socialist history and a keen aptitude for telling the stories he’s uncovered.

Quite unlike Ross, Dorrien dedicates a good deal of his storytelling to how socialists built progressive organizations and movements that were not in themselves explicitly socialist, and how they navigated the tensions inherent in those efforts. Mary White Ovington and William English Walling, for instance, were prominent Deb-sian socialists who...