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introduction toward a literary history of (social) democracy in america This book focuses upon three prominent American socialists who also happen to be essential ‹gures in the study of modern American literature. To be sure, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois aspired to careers in writing and intellectual work prior to their becoming socialists. Du Bois in fact wrote the work that made his name as an intellectual, The Souls of Black Folk, prior to expressing any overt interest in socialism, and he is nowadays regarded primarily as an advocate of African American civil rights. Gilman’s socialism is also not widely recognized ; today she is seen almost exclusively as an early feminist. Sinclair alone of my three featured writers is well known as a socialist—and that has not necessarily been an asset to his literary reputation. Yet for Du Bois and Gilman as well as Sinclair, a conscious commitment to socialism became central to the writers’ intellectual, political, and literary identities early in their careers, and this commitment remained strong throughout the rest of their lives. My aims in this study are to examine how and why they made this commitment , to explore what their shared—and divergent—viewpoints say about socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to consider the relevance of their socialist literary work to the history of their times—and ours. They are a somewhat miscellaneous trio: almost the only thing uniting them was a shared belief that the common wealth of the United States should be controlled democratically and shared equitably by all citizens, and that this could be achieved through the collective organization of society’s less privileged members. But it is precisely their diversity that testi‹es to the versatility of socialist ideals and practices in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the wide in›uence of socialism in American culture of that era. Each, in fact, is representative of a distinct direction taken by socialism in the United States. Gilman re›ects socialist elements in the protest politics of the 1890s—in the Edward Bellamy Nationalism, Populism , and Fabianism in which she was active at the very start of her literary career—even as she was becoming the foremost advocate of feminism in American socialism and of socialism in American feminism. Sinclair signi‹es not only the more assertively proletarian, Marxist brand of socialism that emerged at the turn of the century with the founding of the Socialist Party of America, re›ected in his famous muckraking novel, The Jungle; his career overall also shows the progressive in‹ltration of socialist ideas into the mainstream of American politics, exempli‹ed especially in his nearly successful 1934 run for the California governorship, which helped to strengthen the case for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Du Bois joined the Socialist Party only brie›y in the second decade of the twentieth century, the Communist Party only in the early 1960s during the ‹nal three years of his life, but from soon after the turn of the century onward, socialism infused Du Bois’s writing and activism, providing a discourse by which he sought to cultivate political solidarity among blacks and to hold whites accountable on matters of racial justice. His work re›ects the symbiotic relation between the socialist movement and black intellectuals and the tension between them as well. On the one hand, American Socialist Triptych offers an in-depth study of each of these three major authors, challenging interpretations of them that have tended to downplay or sidestep the socialism of Gilman and of Du Bois, while seeking to renew interest in Sinclair’s socialism as a topic of critical discourse . On the other hand, this book uses Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois as representative of the socialist movements of which they were a part. Viewed collectively, they provide a means of gauging the potentials, shortcomings, and accomplishments of American socialism over ‹ve decades, between 1890 and 1940. If, as many historians and critics have suggested, the 1930s and the Great Depression were the key moments when American politicaleconomy turned leftward, resulting in the establishment of important elements of the welfare state that have persisted to this day, the groundwork for that turn was laid in the previous decades, during which, for the ‹rst time in American history, democratic government became an instrument rivaling the power of private business enterprise, and in which socialists of various...

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