Author(s): | Lipset, Seymour Martin Marks, Gary |
---|---|
Reviewer(s): | Rauchway, Eric |
Published by EH.NET (April 2001)
Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism
Failed in the United States. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000. 379
pp. $26.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-393-04098-4.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Eric Rauchway, Modern History Faculty, Oxford
University.
Although Seymour Martin Lipset is now employed by George Mason University and
enjoys fellowships at the Hoover Institution and the Woodrow Wilson
International Center, his principal credential is as a New York Intellectual
(City College division) and this book reflects the preoccupations of that
vanishing circle. With Gary Marks, director of the Center for European Studies
at the University of North Carolina, Lipset provides useful comparative
international illustrations between the United States and other industrial
nations in Europe and the Antipodes, but the real comparison in this book is
the traditional one between the particulars of the American case and the
predictions of Marxist theory.
This interpretive tack gives the book the tenor of a last word in a long
conversation. The text refers explicitly to Daniel Bell, Louis Hartz, Richard
Hofstadter, and Irving Howe, and apart from its evidentiary basis, the
essential terms of the argument would have been familiar to them — and indeed
to Marx, Engels, Weber, and Kautsky. It is the best-supported and subtlest
version of the traditional thesis we are ever likely to get — but it looks
over the heads of the present generation to the titans of the past without
engaging current or recent scholarship to any great degree.
Lipset and Marks organize the book around assessments of the traditional
arguments for socialism’s failure in the US. They use separate chapters to
evaluate the respective influence of political structure, the American
Federation of Labor, immigration, Socialist Party purism, and political
repression on the fate of labor politics.
They find in favor of a mixed theory of causation: a “not elegant, but …
sensible” eclecticism, believing that “neither political, nor sociological,
nor cultural factors alone are sufficient to explain the weakness of socialism
in America” (p. 83). Despite its liberal tone, this very eclecticism rules out
some of the favorite explanations for socialism’s American shortfalls. Once
they find that the political system and culture tilted against socialist
success, that immigration from diverse sources spoiled class consciousness,
and that economic and political inclusion weakened the workers’ will to oppose
Americanism, then the strategic decisions of individual politicians within the
socialist movement, the labor movement, the Communist Party, and the two major
political parties seem insignificant: “The failure of socialism in America was
overdetermined” (p. 200).
Lipset and Marks’s attention to international comparison pays off most
handsomely in eliminating lesser causes. They establish that the early
enfranchisement of adult white males did not seduce them away from socialism
in other nations, and so cannot be cited as a cause of their disinclination to
vote Socialist in the US; that the Socialist Party of America hewed to a more
radical line than its contemporary counterparts in other countries, and
therefore cannot reasonably be impugned for being less Marxist than American
workers would have liked; that political repression of socialism in the US was
less thorough than in other nations, and so cannot reasonably be cited for
the movement’s downfall (indeed, Lipset and Marks imply that the US government
might have been insufficiently repressive for socialism to succeed — where
repression was greater, so was allegiance to socialism).
What remains is less surprising: the cultural and economic power of
Americanism (Hofstadter’s quip about the US not having an ideology but being
one reappears here) and the effects of immigration. Lipset and Marks remind us
that however miserably the other half lived in turn-of-the-century America,
they lived, in the main, better than they had in the old country, and had good
enough reason to hope for even better to come. Immigration to the US was
greater in both volume and diversity than to other receiving countries. With
an “extraordinarily heterogeneous” (p. 127) working class, the US was
unlikely to see class consciousness. And the political opportunities that
immigrants did create by forming voting blocs proved of greater use to
Democrats or Republicans, whose established patterns of ethno-religious
allegiance put them in a better position to curry or oppose the immigrant vote
than the dogmatically class-oriented Socialists.
Lipset and Marks make a good enough case on behalf of Americanism and
immigration, but they also miss taking what to a historian seem their biggest
tricks, precisely because they do not explicitly engage recent historical
scholarship. They remark tantalizingly that the “dominant strain in American
culture” — which was, they say, “egalitarian, antistatist, individualistic”
— stood in sharp contrast to “ascriptive” European cultures (p. 97), but they
do not discuss the recent work of Rogers Smith and Gary Gerstle, which
insists otherwise. They do not engage the farmer-labor thesis of Elizabeth
Sanders, nor the ‘corporate liberal’ thesis that continues to occupy Martin
Sklar, James Livingston and Richard Schneirov. And most importantly, in making
a book-length case for American exceptionalism — and, in the last chapter,
its recent demise or transformation — they do not engage the substantial
recent scholarship (including most notably Daniel Rodgers’s work) attempting
to refute it.
This is especially disappointing because the argument that remains implicit in
the book, if drawn out, would make a significant contribution to current
studies in the relation of American exceptionalism to international economic
and political development. Lipset and Marks conclude by pointing to the
partial diminishment of American exceptionalism as other nations’ socialist
parties have turned toward market capitalism. Almost in the same breath, they
point to exceptionalism redivivus, as European and Antipodean nations develop
significant Green Parties while the US does not. The future of this exception
depends on which of two recent events better prophesies the American political
future: Ralph Nader’s presidential candidacy, or George W. Bush’s junking of
the Kyoto emissions-control accord.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, Nader will prove no more successful than
Eugene Debs in building a third party on the ashes of electoral failure, we
are left with a United States more devoted to unfettered industrialism than
any of its peers. The US now is therefore in much the same situation as the US
of 1900, on the eve of socialism’s great failures. Despite its debts, despite
the moral and intellectual opprobrium in which its politics and politicians
are held, it is now as it was then a draw for immigrants and capital alike
owing to its tremendous productivity — and the lure of Americanism.
In the early 1900s, the US government proved less able than its peers to
manage the inflation that afflicted gold-standard economies of the period. But
so long as the private citizens of the world favored the US by sending their
work and their money to America, the US economy as able to cushion the effects
of inflation by increasing productivity. The US could avoid serious sustained
governmental management of the economy without much consequence because the
rest of the world paid for American excess.
Much the same appears to be happening now. The earlier phase of global
indulgence ended with a world catastrophe that the Socialists predicted, but
from which the US was largely exempt — the Great War. If the Greens are the
new Socialists, the next catastrophe will not make exceptions for America.
Eric Rauchway’s new book, The Refuge of Affections: Family and American
Reform Politics, 1900-1920 has recently been published by Columbia
University Press. He is currently working on Making the Dollar Almighty:
Inflation, Immigration, and American Political Culture, 1897-1937.
Subject(s): | Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender |
---|---|
Geographic Area(s): | North America |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |