Of all the questions that have bemused observers of political life in America, perhaps none has been as perplexing as that of why the United States, alone among the advanced industrial countries, never developed a truly mass-based socialist movement. Foreigners, in particular, have long been struck by the almost universal antipathy of Americans toward socialist ideas. Writing of the America of the 1830s, Tocqueville astutely observed that in no other country of the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned'. This attitude, Tocqueville argued, was uniquely suited to a society in which most of its members possessed property. Yet more than half a century later-and long after the formation of a massive wage-earning class-Engels, in a letter to Sorge, observed that the pervasive attachment to private property witnessed by Tocqueville persisted among American workers:'It is remarkable,'he wrote,'how firmly rooted are bourgeois prejudices even in the working class in such a young country.'Perhaps, suggested an exasperated Engels, the dogged resistance to socialist ideas among American proletarians reflected a pronounced theoretical backwardness:'The Anglo-Saxon race-these damned Schleswig-Holsteiners, as Marx always called them-is slow-witted anyhow.'