by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
The Sombartian “factors” are too encompassing and thereby virtually ahistorical: they explain too much and thereby too little. They can hardly tell us why the American working class in the 1880s and 1890s engaged in very militant and even violent strikes yet did not “move ahead” to any large-scale socialist beliefs, nor can they tell us why the American socialist movement thrived, more or less, at one moment and collapsed at another. Such large historical “factors” as Sombart invokes may be overdetermining. Insofar as they apply, they leave little room for human agency, diversity, and surprise; they fall too readily into a “vulgar Marxist” assumption that human beings act exclusively or even mainly out of direct economic interest. And as a result, the problem for historians becomes to explain how any significant socialist movement ever did appear in this country. Between the Sombartian “factors” and the fate of a particular political movement there is, so to say, too much space; what is missing is the whole range of national culture—how people think, the myths by which they live, the impulsions that move them to action, and, not least of all, the circumstances and approaches of particular socialist movements.9*
In any case, let us now glance at some of the Sombartian causes for the failure of American socialism.
Absence of a Feudal Past
This argument has been most skillfully restated by the political theorist Louis Hartz. He isolates
three factors stemming from the European feudal inheritance, the absence of which in the United States precluded the possibility of a major socialist experience. One is a sense of class which an aristocratic culture communicates to the bourgeoisie and which both communicate to the proletariat. Another is the experience of social revolution implemented by the middle class which the proletariat also inherits. . . . Finally . . . the memory of the medieval corporate spirit which, after liberal assault, the socialist movement seeks to recreate in the form of modern collectivism.10*
Behind Hartz’s analysis there is a historical truth: that European socialist movements gained part of their following through alliances with bourgeois democratic movements in a common struggle against traditional or “feudal” institutions; and that the socialist movements kept their following by making demands that the plebs be granted political rights, promised but not fully delivered. Hartz makes much of the absence of this enabling condition in America, and, before him, Lenin had noted that America has one of “the most firmly established democratic systems, which confronts the proletariat with purely socialist tasks.”11†
In part at least, both Hartz and Lenin are wrong. For just as French socialists in the nineteenth century worked, as the Marxist phrase goes, to “fulfill the bourgeois revolution” by creating social space for the working class, and just as Chartism strove to gain for the English workers political rights within the bourgeois system, so there were in America major “democratic [as distinct from so-called purely socialist] tasks” to be undertaken by socialists and liberals. These concerned large segments of the population: for instance, the struggle for woman suffrage, in which the socialists played an important part, and the struggle for black rights, in which the socialists could have played an important part had it not been for the sectarian Debsian claim that black freedom could be achieved “only” through socialism and consequently required no separate movement or demands. The struggle in Europe to do away with “feudal” or aristocratic hangovers has an equivalent, mutatis mutandis, in America as a struggle to live up to the promise of the early republic.
It’s interesting that Marx and Engels could not decide whether the distinctiveness of American society was a boon or a burden for American socialism. At one point Engels, quite as if he had just read Hartz, wrote that Americans are “born conservatives—just because America is so purely bourgeois, so entirely without a feudal past and therefore proud of its purely bourgeois organization.”12‡ At another point, quite as if he had just read Hartz’s critics, Engels cited “the more favorable soil of America, where no medieval ruins bar the way. . . .”13§
The argument, then, can cut both ways. Absence of a feudal past has made for greater “civic integration,” a feeling among all (except the blacks) that they “belonged.” The American working class seems never quite to have regarded itself as the kind of “outsider” or pariah that the working classes of Europe once did. Whatever discontents might develop—numerous and grave in nineteenth-century America, from abolitionism to major strikes—were likely to be acted out within the flexible consensus of American myth, or as a complaint that our values had been betrayed by the plutocrats. Only the Marxists were feckless enough to attempt a head-on collision with the national myth, and what it mostly brought them was a bad headache.
But if America, in S. M. Lipset’s phrase, was “a new nation” that gave its citizens a strong sense of independence and worth, then precisely this enabled them to fight staunchly for their rights. American labor strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often more bloody than those in Europe. And it was, I think, two utterly divergent variants of the American myth, two simplified crystallizations at the right and left extremes, that made the class struggle so fierce in America. The capitalists, persuaded that Americans should be able to do as they wished with their property and pay whatever wages they proposed to pay, and the workers, persuaded that Americans (or Americans-in-the-making) should stand up as free men and resist exploitation, appealed to the same deeply embedded myth of the native citizen blessed with freedom by God.
There was a sharp class struggle in America during the decades after the Civil War, even without the questionable benefits of feudal hangovers, and in stressing its presence, as against those who kept talking about “classlessness,” the Marxists were right. There was even a kind of class consciousness in the American working class, though this was hard to specify and the Marxists rarely succeeded in doing so, if only because it was a class consciousness that took the form, mostly, of an invocation of early republican values and a moralistic evangelicism. Werner Sombart put the matter well: “There is expressed in the worker, as in all Americans, a boundless optimism, which comes out of a belief in the mission and greatness of his country, a belief that often has a religious tinge.”14* This belief, with its “religious tinge,” could be turned toward Social Darwinism or toward unionism, populism, and early socialism.
As for Hartz’s third factor—the lack of a remembered “medieval corporate spirit” which might help re-create “modern collectivism”—one may suppose that such a memory did have some influence on European workers in the mid-nineteenth century. (I suspect it has more influence on historians of romanticist inclination.) But it’s hard to believe that by the 1920s or 1930s this “memory” played much of a role in the collective expression of, say, the French workers. And if Americans had no such tradition to draw upon, it would be a crude exaggeration to conclude that the only other tradition remaining to us has been an unmodulated “possessive individualism.” Herbert Gutman, a historian of the American working class, has nicely distinguished between individualist and independent traditions. There are traditions of independent Americans cooperating for common ends, in everything from frontier communities to utopian colonies, from abolitionist movements to the early unions; and Gutman has further noted that the agitational literature of American unionism in the late nineteenth century echoed these very themes of the unionism of the 1830s.
It would be wrong simply to dismiss Hartz’s analysis, for it speaks to commonly perceived realities and, even with all reasonable qualifications, it has an evident power. But it has to be put forward in more nuanced terms than Hartz has proposed, and this means that his now famous “factors,” even if they rendered the rise of socialism in America difficult, do not suffice to explain its unhappy fate.
On the Reefs of Roast Beef
America, wrote Sombart, was “the promised land of capitalism,” where “on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie socialistic Utopias . . . are sent to their doom.”15* This pithy se
ntence appears to carry a self-evident validity, but recent historical and sociological investigations create enough doubts so that, at the very least, we must qualify Sombart’s conclusion.
It is an exaggeration to suggest that the American workers, or members of the lower classes, have enjoyed a steady material abundance. Large segments of the population, gasping for breath, have never reached those famous “reefs of roast beef.” There is a profound truth in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s remark that “in this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.”
From the 1870s until the present we have had sharply varying times of wellbeing and distress, largely in accord with the cyclical character of capitalist boom and crisis; times when the standard of living rose visibly for many workers, as during World War I and the decades between 1940 and 1970; and times when, as in the last third of the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries, certain American workers, like the building mechanics, did improve their lot while those working in mills, packing plants, and clothing factories did not. Differentiations of income and material condition among American workers have often been sharper than those in class-ridden Europe. They continue to our present moment, between skilled and/or unionized workers and that segment of the “secondary” work force consisting of ill-paid and largely unorganized blacks, Hispanics, and illegal immigrants in fugitive light industries.
Still other shadows fall across Sombart’s bright picture—for example, the extent to which American workers have been subject to industrial accidents because this country, until recently, refused to pass the kind of social legislation that had long been enacted in Europe. For a good many historians it has nevertheless been the supposed objective advantages of American society when compared with European societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a higher standard of living, a greater degree of social mobility—that largely explain the failures of American socialism. But, as far as I have been able to gather from various historical studies, the evidence regarding standards of living and social mobility remains inconclusive. For one thing, the technical problems in making comparisons on such matters are very severe. It is hard to know exactly how to “measure” standards of living and social mobility, since so many elements of experience, some by no means readily quantifiable, enter into them.
Seymour Martin Lipset, a close observer in this area, writes that “a number of students of social mobility in comparative perspective (Sorokin, Glass, Lipset and Bendix, Miller, Blau and Duncan, and Bourdon) have concluded from an examination of mobility data collected in various countries that the American rate of mass social mobility is not uniquely high, that a number of European countries have had comparable rates. . . .”16*
By contrast, Stephan Thernstrom, who has assembled valuable data about working-class mobility in Boston and Newburyport during the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries, concludes that mobility was significantly higher in a big city like Boston than in a town like Newburyport, and, indeed, that in Boston “the dream of individual mobility was [not] illusory [during the nineteenth century] and that collective advance was [not] the only realistic hope for the American worker.”17†
A more recent and notably meticulous study by Peter R. Shergold comparing real wage rates and real family income in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and two English cities, Birmingham and Sheffield, for the years 1899–1913, demonstrates, however, the enormous difficulties of such comparisons. Shergold concludes
that assertions of relative American affluence must be severely qualified. Unskilled workers experienced similar levels of material welfare in Britain and the United States in the 1900s, and it is quite possible that English laborers actually enjoyed a higher standard of living during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The dominant characteristic of the American labor force was not comparative income superiority, but the much greater inequality of wage distribution. The most highly-paid manual employees, primarily skilled workers, earned substantially larger incomes than those in equivalent English occupations, whereas low-paid workers received incomes similar to those in England. In short, the fruits of economic growth, the benefits of emergent corporate capitalism, were far more unevenly distributed among wage earners in the United States than in England.
And again:
It is the comparative inequality of wage rewards in the United States, an income gulf widened by ethnic heterogeneity and racial prejudice, that must provide the socioeconomic context within which to analyze the American labor movement. American workers found it profoundly difficult to perceive their very diverse lifestyles as the product of a common exploitation. It was not a high average standard of living that dictated how they behaved. Rather, in a supreme historical paradox, it was the combination of a uniquely egalitarian ideology—“Americanism”—with extravagant inequality of material circumstances.18*
Helpful as Shergold’s material is in undermining older assertions about the “objective” reasons for the difficulties of American socialism (and, for that matter, of the American labor movement), the exact pertinence of his work remains debatable. Had he chosen to compare an American industrial city with cities in Eastern or Southern Europe, areas from which so many industrial workers in America emigrated, the economic disparities would probably have been more dramatic—and the statistical difficulties still greater—than in the work he did. In any case, his evidence that skilled workers in an American industrial city were better off than those in a similar English one may help explain the varying fates of socialism in America and England, since skilled workers played an important part in the early socialist movements.
Though the scholarly material on standards of living and social mobility is valuable—indeed, one wishes there were a good deal more—it doesn’t by itself sustain Sombartian generalizations about American material conditions as the central cause of the difficulties and failures of American socialism. Even if one believes that Stephan Thernstrom’s conclusions about the possibilities of individual improvement in late-nineteenth-century America probably hold for the country as a whole, the evidence is not sufficiently stark or unambiguous to form, or contribute heavily to, a sufficient explanation for the sharply different fates of socialism in the United States and Europe.
3
Nor is there any reason to believe, either from experience or research, that affluence necessarily makes for docility among workers. To argue that it does is to succumb to a crude sort of reductive economism, according to which the outlook of the worker is determined by nothing more than his personal circumstances. There has, to the contrary, been a strand of social thought that has seen extreme poverty as a demoralizing condition, likely to inhibit rather than stimulate political activism. S. M. Lipset cites the fact that “strong socialist movements exist in countries with high rates of social mobility,” such as Australia and New Zealand, and Michael Harrington that German social democracy’s greatest growth occurred at a time of relative prosperity, between the 1870s and World War I. A paper by Philip Dawson and Gilbert Shapiro, following Tocqueville’s lead, shows that just before the French Revolution of 1789 those segments of the French bourgeoisie which had significantly improved their position were more vigorous in expressing opposition to the ancien régime than those which had not.
Studies comparing in close detail the conditions of American and European workers tend to be cautious regarding the Sombartian conclusion about “roast beef.” A brilliant essay by James Holt comparing trade unions in the British and U.S. steel industries from 1880 to 1914 finds that the main factors thwarting class solidarity among the Americans were the rapidity of technological advance, which reduced the need for skilled workers, who were often the most militant unionists; and the ferocity of American employers, who often used brutal methods to break the unions. “The most striking difference between the two situations [American and British steel industries] concerns the behavior of employers rather than employ
ees. In both countries, the impulse to organize was present among steelworkers but in one [Britain] most employers offered little resistance to union growth while in the other [the United States] they generally fought back vigorously.” Holt concludes suggestively:
The weakness and political conservatism of the American labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries have often been seen primarily as the product of a lack of class consciousness among American workingmen. In the United States, it is suggested, class lines were more fluid and opportunities for advancement more rapid than in European countries. . . . Perhaps so, yet . . . in some ways the American workingman was more rather than less oppressed than his British counterpart. The retreat of so many American union leaders from a youthful socialism to a cautious and conservative “business unionism” may have reflected less a growing enthusiasm for the . . . status quo than a resigned acknowledgment that in a land where the propertied middle classes dominated politically and the big corporations ruled supreme in industry, accommodation was more appropriate than confrontation.19*
Insofar as the roast-beef argument finds most American workers refusing socialism because they were relatively satisfied with their lot, it would seem to follow that, for the same reason, they would also reject militant class action. But many did turn to militant class or labor action. The history of American workers suggests not at all that a surfeit of good things led to passivity and acquiescence; it suggests only—and this is something very different—that the intermittent outbursts of labor militancy did not often end in socialist politics.