Socialism, a political ideology, rejects the private ownership of land, factories, and other means of production as well as the wage‐labor system and the competitive market economy. Socialist beliefs and movements, though dizzyingly varied, have generally fallen into four groups: communitarian, revolutionary socialist, democratic socialist, and syndicalist. Communitarianism, which has the longest pedigree, can be traced to eighteenth‐century religious movements such as the Shakers, who reacted to a commercializing society by retreating into rural settlements, holding their property communally, and hoping to reform society by example. As antebellum Americans felt the first shocks of the emerging industrial order, some embraced European alternatives to capitalism, from the paternalistic industrialism of Robert Owen to Charles Fourier's utopian blueprints for communal cooperatives.
By the 1860s, having absorbed the work of Karl Marx, most socialists turned from debating how best to withdraw from capitalist society to arguing over how to revolutionize it. Two major streams of thought emerged, both initially espoused in America mainly by German immigrants, who founded a branch of Marx's Communist International in New York in 1872. Orthodox Marxists, committed to overthrowing capitalism through revolutionary class struggle, concentrated on infiltrating labor unions and mobilizing the masses. Democratic socialists, by contrast, sometimes called “Lassalleans,” for the German Ferdinand Lassalle, believed that socialism could be achieved peacefully through electoral politics.
Neither group proved notably successful. The revolutionary Marxists, squandering their energies in factional infighting, were rejected by the trade‐union movement they assiduously courted. On the electoral front, the Workingmen's party (1874), renamed the Socialist Labor party (SLP) in 1877 and led after 1890 by Daniel De Leon, fielded a presidential candidate in 1892, but he won only 21,000 votes. Foreign‐language socialist newspapers did little to broaden the movement's appeal. The
Socialist party of America (SPA), founded in 1901 by Eugene V.
Debs, Morris Hillquit (1869–1933), Victor Berger (1860–1929), and other defectors from the SLP, never overcame most Americans’ tendency to give their racial, ethnic, and religious identity a higher priority than their social class. Neither Debs, the SPA's five‐time presidential candidate between 1900 and 1920, nor Norman
Thomas, the party's perennial candidate from the 1920s to the 1960s, seriously challenged the major‐party nominees.
The final category of socialism, syndicalism, combined the immigrant Marxists’ critique of capitalism with the Abolitionists’ suspicion of government. Whereas Marxists sought to transform the labor movement into a revolutionary force to overthrow the government, syndicalists envisioned a new society emerging from workers’ control of the mills and factories. Syndicalism flourished in western mining, lumber, and railroad camps with the founding of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) in 1905. The Wobblies’ dramatic strikes; flamboyant leaders; and wealth of songs, lore, and poetry made them a romantic symbol of the syndicalist version of socialism.
Despite its overall failure, American socialism has influenced American thought and culture, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edward Bellamy's novel of evolutionary socialism,
Looking Backward (1888), which drew upon Laurence Gronlund's
Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), proved enormously popular. Some prominent
Social Gospel advocates espoused Christian Socialism, and influential reformist works by socialists, or reflecting socialist ideas, included Henry Demarest Lloyd's
Wealth against Commonwealth (1894); William Dean
Howells's
A Traveler from Alturia (1894), Upton
Sinclair's
The Jungle (1906); and Jack London's
The Iron Heel (1907). The socialist magazine the
Masses (founded 1911) enjoyed considerable
Progressive Era influence.
World War I, which brought repression of the antiwar left and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—a revolution celebrated by the American socialist John Reed in
Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)—redrew the contours of American socialism. The U.S. Communist party (CP), founded in 1919, ceded control of its affairs to Moscow and, like its Marxist forebears, generally favored doctrinal purity over coalition building. Both the CP and the SPA gained ground early in the Great Depression, but both were eclipsed by the popularity of the
New Deal and then by the antiradical climate of the
Cold War.
Socialism's fortunes rose with the emergence of the
New Left in the 1960s. The leading New Left organization,
Students for a Democratic Society, a hybrid of socialist traditions, rejected Marxist dogmatism while it embraced both the communitarian dream and the democratic‐socialists’ hope for radical social change through a revitalized politics. Socialism's indirect influence resurfaced in the 1960s as well. For example, the socialist Michael Harrington's
The Other America (1962) helped inspire President Lyndon B.
Johnson's War on Poverty. Although the New Left soon faded, its blend of communitarian hopes and democratic‐socialist goals remained alive in the late twentieth century. The Democratic Socialists of America, founded by Harrington in 1983 to pursue socialist goals within the
Democratic party, was the latest manifestation of socialism's continuing influence in American life.
See also
Capitalism;
Communist Party—USA;
Conservatism;
Labor Movements;
Liberalism;
Radicalism;
Shakerism;
Utopian and Communitarian Movements.
Bibliography
Donald Egbert and Stow Persons, eds., Socialism and American Life, 1952.
James Weinstein , The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925, 1967.
Paul Buhle , Marxism in the U.S.A.: From 1870 to the Present Day, 1987.
Maurice Isserman , If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, 1987.
John Patrick Diggins , The Rise and Fall of the American Left, 1992.
Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left, rev. ed., 1998.
Timothy Messer‐Kruse
