Review of Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, University of Nebraska Press, 2015
Jack Ross would like us to reconsider the old Socialist Party of America (1901 – 1972, with remnants lingering on to the present day). Like the Socialist Party, he supports unions and the interests of the working class. Like the Socialist Party, he opposes war and the imperial American State that sends its military into endless wars around the world in the interests of multinational corporations. He sees the Socialist Party leaders; Eugene Victor Debs, Victor Berger, Morris Hilquit, Norman Thomas and many others; as “prophets, who warned of the folly in which the country and its leaders were setting out and who offered the alternative path of peace and justice.” He believes that if the Socialist Party had made somewhat different strategic decisions, they could have created an enduring and successful Labor Party with working-class oriented domestic policies and isolationist foreign policies that, if implemented, would have kept the United States “a republic and not an empire”. This is an interesting and thought-provoking perspective, but there are many flaws to the argument and important issues are left out, despite 600 pages of text and an additional 150 pages of notes, bibliography, index and a listing socialist leaders and elected officials.
Ross is at his best in the first and longest section of the book, covering the period from just before the founding of the Socialist Party in 1901 on through World War I and its immediate aftermath. Here he has the Party at maximum strength, with over 100,000 members in 1912, significant influence in the union movement, gaining votes and sometimes winning local elections, and arguing about strategy at a time when it really seems to matter.
Ross criticizes previous historians for romanticizing the left wing of the Socialist Party and the IWW and failing to give appropriate credit to the leaders of its electoral and union work, who had major successes. Ross gives well-deserved credit to Victor Berger and Morris Hilquit, who are overshadowed in historical memory by Eugene Victor Debs, the Party’s perennial and near-legendary Presidential candidate. Berger was the leader of the Socialist Party in Milwaukee, where Socialists won the majority of Mayoral elections between 1910 and 1960, and was himself elected to Congress six times between 1910 and 1928. He pioneered “constructive socialism”, a practical approach to gradual change at the local level that delivered real improvements in services to the working class. “Sewer socialism” was far from a joke when the infant mortality rate in American cities was sky-high due to inadequate sanitation. Hilquit was a garment worker and union activist who put himself through law school, became the leader of New York City’s Socialists and wrote several books on the history and theory of socialism. His firmly democratic views drew such hostility from the Communist Party (CP) that his name was memorialized in a song satirizing the CP and its attacks on the socialists. He and Berger were founding leaders of the Socialist Party along with Debs, and they served together on the Party’s National Executive Committee for most of the years from 1907 – 1926.
Ross argues that, contrary to those who romanticize the Party’s most radical factions, the Party would have been more successful if it had shown a greater willingness to participate in creation of a labor party, even if that party was not explicitly socialist. He explains that the Party’s insistence on separation had its roots in the experience of its founders. Many had participated in the People’s Party and were horrified by its self-destruction from fusion with the Democratic Party in support of William Jennings Bryan’s campaign for President in 1896. A substantial part, and possibly a majority, of the People’s Party convention that year would have preferred to support union leader Eugene V. Debs, then a member of the People’s Party and not yet a Socialist. Ross argues that if Debs had been willing to accept the nomination of the People’s Party, as he later did for the Socialist Party, then the People’s Party might not only have survived but gone on to become a successful American Farmer-Labor Party.
Throughout the rest of the book, Ross describes the Socialist Party’s missed opportunities and failed efforts to create that broader Labor or Farmer-Labor Party. In the 1920s, with a membership of only just over 10,000 remaining after repression during and after World War I and the loss of members to the Communists, the Socialist Party leadership ended its insistence that it was the only real party of labor and began various unsuccessful efforts to create Labor or Farmer-Labor parties. Ross argues that the onset of the Great Depression in 1930 created major opportunities, but the crisis also intensified factional conflicts that paralyzed the Party until too late. Membership doubled to over 20,000 but began to fall after 1935 when the New Deal moved in a more progressive direction and passed Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and other worker-friendly measures.
Ross dismisses the possibility that the Socialist Party might have made greater inroads by drawing on the example of Upton Sinclair and working within and in some places capturing the Democratic Party. Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for Governor of California in 1934 on a platform of “production for use”, a way of describing socialism. He lost the general election, but received 879,500 votes, almost as many as the 885,000 votes Thomas received nationwide in his 1932 campaign for President and far more than Thomas’ 188,000 votes in 1936. This approach has recently been revived by Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent socialist, with his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President in 2016.
Ross draws support for his thesis on a Labor Party from Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (2000). On the basis of a thorough comparative historical analysis they found that the primary reason for the failure to create an effective social democratic party was the failure to gain the support of the union movement, or at least a major fraction of it, and that sectarianism was a significant factor in this failure. Unfortunately, Ross ignores their finding that ethnic, racial and religious divisions in the American working class were a significant factor in the difficulties the Socialist Party had in developing this alliance and does not closely examine the Socialist Party’s work in these areas.
There is a major internal contradiction in Ross’ analysis between his desire for a Labor Party that might have become a major political party and his celebration of the consistent anti-war positions of the Socialist Party.
“The Socialist Party of America was the principle movement, in the half-century from the closing of the continental frontier to the triumph of the American colossus during and after the Second World War, that strove in vain for the United States to remain a republic and not an empire. That at the critical turning point within this period the Socialist Party was the most prominent opponent of U.S. participation in the First World War and was made to mercilessly suffer for it, alone gives it major significance in American and world history.”
Perhaps. But in America as in Europe, organized labor swung firmly behind the war effort as soon as the national government committed itself to war. The Socialist Party of America was able to take a position of principled opposition precisely because it was not closely tied to the unions, which otherwise would have controlled or been the largest single influence on the direction of the Party. There is little evidence to support the idea that the anti-war tradition would have continued to be dominant in a genuine Labor Party.
Ross wishes that the United States could have “remain(ed) a republic and not an empire”, but it was always both and until recently it was what Alexander Saxton aptly called a “white republic”. There was never a time before the founding of the Socialist Party when the United States was not an empire in the process of expansion; wiping out native peoples and herding them onto reservations, importing slaves from Africa to America and then from the upper South to the lower and trans-Mississippi South, invading and incorporating upper Mexico and taking up “the white man’s burden” in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.
The major exception to this pattern of racist empire-building was the Civil War, in which the Northern states defeated an effort by the Southern states to create a slave-based nation with its own imperial aspirations to incorporate Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean and Central America. If there was ever a “republic” in the Southern states, it existed mostly for the period after the Union victory in which multi-racial democracy was protected by Federal troops. After the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South in 1877 Confederate veterans organized in terrorist groups, took over local and state governments, deprived freed Blacks of the right to vote or serve on juries and subjected them to a fascist regime where share-croppers were held in debt-peonage, living at the mercy of the local sheriff and violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Ross has a brief discussion of the Civil War early in his book and it sets the tone for the book, as he systematically evades dealing with racism and also evades confronting the actual justifications for the war. He endorses the revisionist view that the Civil War was nothing more than a conflict among different factions of capitalism over tariffs and railroad subsidies. Most of the Northern working class, native born and immigrant, came to the defense of the Union because they believed that in fighting to preserve what was then the world’s only democracy, for all its limitations, they were also fighting to preserve the future of democracy in the world. Certainly workers were divided on the war and thousands of other workers joined in the anti-draft riots of 1863. Ross makes the wildly exaggerated claim that “the emerging industrial working class put up massive resistance to taking up arms”. He states that “if one accepts that conscription is slavery, ever a cardinal principle of the Socialist Party of America, it cannot be denied that the Draft Riots were a greater insurrection against slavery than any that took place in the South during the war.” This is disgraceful. Well over a hundred thousand Black slaves from the South joined the Union army and fought for their freedom at the risk of massacre if captured by the Confederate forces. Nor does Ross mention that the anti-draft riots he celebrates were also a classic pogrom against the Blacks who lived in neighborhoods where the rioting took place.
Ross gives the Socialist Party full credit for the anti-racist work done by its members, such as those who helped found the NAACP in 1909 and A. Phillip Randolph, whose threat of a march on Washington pressured Franklin D. Roosevelt to open up employment in war industries to Blacks, but he fails to present the full complexity of the Party’s role. While Eugene Debs was exemplary in his personal views on race, Victor Berger and many other leading white Socialists, admirable though they were in many respects, accepted the racist beliefs of the larger American society. Some Socialists argued that it was necessary in the short run to sacrifice the interests of non-whites in order to maintain good relations with the union movement. In California the unions had a long history of efforts to prevent Asians from coming to America and from competing with white workers once they were here. In 1913 the California Socialist Party’s newly elected state legislator, C. J. Kingsley, took a principled position opposing bills that would have segregated Blacks in the state’s school systems but supported union-backed bills to prevent Japanese (“aliens ineligible for citizenship”) from owning farm land.
Probably the most important Socialist Party contribution to overcoming racism was their strong support for industrial unionism, which was essential to the incorporation of non-whites into the union movement but gets little attention from Ross. The bargaining power of craft unions came from their control over workforce with a necessary set of skills, and they tried to exclude potential competitors from learning those skills or competing for jobs, often on an ethnic basis. Industrial unions learned that they had to take a much broader and inclusive approach to their membership, reflecting the broader potential industrial workforce, and took a more active interest in politics as a way of increasing their power. Issues of race and class are intertwined and any effort to focus solely on one or the other misses the essence of the process of social change.
The main focus of the second part of the book, covering 1921 to 1948, is the Socialist Party effort to keep America out of World War II, under the leadership of Norman Thomas, a former Presbyterian minister and near-pacifist. On joining the Socialist Party in 1918, motivated in large part by its opposition to American entry into World War I, Thomas wrote, “I have a profound fear of the undue exaltation of the state and a profound faith that the new world we desire must depend upon freedom and fellowship rather than any form of coercion whatsoever”. Thomas believed, based on his observation of the repression that accompanied World War I, that if America went to war again it would result in the replacement of democracy with fascism.
A reasonable person can believe both that engaging in war is harmful to democracy and that sometimes war is necessary. Ross, however, supports Thomas’ view that Roosevelt not only could have but should have kept America out of the war. He approvingly describes Norman Thomas’ concern that war with Japan would provide Roosevelt with a “back door to war” with Germany, and informs us that documents released in 1941 showed “the deliberate provocation of Japan by an oil embargo”, implying that America should have continued to sell oil to Japan and that, in return, Japan would not have attacked the U.S. Ross makes no mention of the fact that Imperial Japan was then in the fourth year of a brutal war of conquest against the Republic of China and needed the oil to continue the war. Nor does he mention that there was a nationwide campaign calling for the U.S. to boycott trade with Japan in an effort to force its government to stop and make peace with China. In describing this as a provocation, Ross contradicts his own stated principles. Surely an anti-imperialist isolationist would favor non-cooperation with the imperialism of other nations, even if that brought a risk that they would attack?
Ross is the reverse image of the “hawks” who believed the lessons of the Munich treaty of 1938 meant America should fight in Vietnam in 1964, reading the lessons of Vietnam and Iraq back into World War II instead. Roosevelt feared that if America stayed out of the war Hitler would conquer Europe, Japan would conquer Asia, and North America would become an island of democracy under siege from totalitarian regimes. He believed that the U.S. needed to provide military aid to protect democratic Great Britain from invasion by Nazi Germany and worked to persuade the American public that democracy in America was threatened by the Nazi German and Imperial Japanese regimes. Ross does not even mention this, asserting that “the real purpose of Lend-Lease was a power-grab by the Roosevelt administration, the beginning of the decade-long march toward virtually unchallenged presidential war-making powers in the postwar era”.
Norman Thomas and anyone else who read a newspaper at the time knew that the Nazis had destroyed every continental democracy in Europe with the exception of neutral Sweden and Switzerland, knew that they had imprisoned, tortured and killed most socialist and union leaders who had not made it into exile, and knew about their vicious treatment of the Jews, which at the time was only just short of the mass extermination that was soon to come. A large part of the support for the weakened Socialist Party of the 1920s and 1930s came from working class Jews and their leaders in the garment workers unions, fraternal organizations and ethnic newspapers. They were acutely aware of what was happening to the relatives and communities they had left behind in Europe. Most agreed with Roosevelt and could not accept Thomas’ opposition to U.S. involvement. When they left the Socialist Party, it lost its last significant base in the working class it purported to fight for. Ross gives scarcely a nod towards those Socialists who had a more realistic understanding of the situation and supports Thomas to the end.
Thomas’ isolationism reduced the Socialist Party to little more than 1,000 members by 1941 and it would never again be a serious political force in America. The final third of the book is a detailed history of the Socialist Party during its period of complete irrelevance from 1942 until its final disintegration in 1972, followed by a history of its fragments up to 2005.
This is a complete history only in the chronological sense. The book focuses on two main points, a question of political strategy – the formation of a labor or farmer-labor party, and the peace issue – the Party’s efforts to keep America out of the World Wars. Ross gives little attention to the Socialist Party’s domestic political program, theoretical ideas or issues of race and sex. His focus on the national organization gives the reader little idea of how the Socialist Party interacted with the working class on a day to day level and gained the enduring support of a large part of the voting population in a number of cities, most notably Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Reading, Pennsylvania and some areas of New York City, but failed to win over the workers in so many other cities.
The history of the United States is full of both systematic injustices and expansion of democracy; heroic yet flawed struggles that sometimes lead to progress; and backsliding and new forms of injustice. Over the course of its life, the Socialist Party of America carried the hopes of millions of Americans for a more just, democratic and peaceful society. I regret to say that Ross has not given us the history that American socialism deserves.
Alternative reading suggestions:
A readable overview of the history of socialism in America is John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism (2011).
The best work on the Socialist Party at its peak is Nick Salvatore, Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982)
The best study of the difficulties the Party failed to overcome is Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (2000).