by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
The Sombartian argument in its blunt form is not defensible. But to say this isn’t to deny that the varying degrees of material comfort among segments of the American working class have probably constituted (to borrow a phrase from Daniel Bell) a limiting condition on the growth of American socialism. This relative or partial material comfort may help explain why American socialism was never likely to become a mass movement encompassing major segments of the working class; but it doesn’t suffice for explaining something more interesting: why American socialism has had so uneven a history, with modest peaks and virtual collapse at several points.
What seems crucial is that social mobility in this country has been perceived differently from the way it has been perceived in Europe. The myth of opportunity for energetic individuals rests on a measure of historical actuality but also has taken on a power independent of, even when in conflict with, the social actuality. This myth has held the imagination of Americans across the decades, including immigrants dreadfully exploited when they came here but who apparently felt that almost anything in the New World, being new, was better than what they had known in the old. Here we enter the realm of national psychology and cultural values, which is indeed what we will increasingly have to do as we approach another of the “objective factors” commonly cited among the reasons for the failure of American socialism.
The Lure of Free Land
As it turns out, escape from onerous work conditions in the East to free land in the West was largely a myth. “In the 1860s, it took $1,000 [then a lot of money] to make a go of a farm, and the cost increased later in the century. So for every industrial worker who became a farmer, twenty farmers became city dwellers. And for every free farm acquired by a farmer [under the Homestead Act of 1862], nine were purchased by railroads, speculators, or by the government itself.” There follows, however, a crucial proviso: if free land did not actually fulfill its mythic function, many people did not give up the dream that it would.20* And perhaps, I’d add, not so much the dream of actually moving to a farm in the West as a shared feeling that the frontier and the wilderness remained powerful symbolic forces enabling Americans to find solace in the thought of escape even when they were not able to act upon it.
But is there not a contradiction between the last two of the Sombartian “objective factors”? If the American worker felt so contented with his life as the roast-beef-and-apple-pie argument suggests, why should he have wanted to escape from it to the rigors of pioneering on the American prairie? This question—the force of which is hardly diminished by the fact that not many workers actually did set out for the West—was asked by the German Social Democratic paper Vorwärts when it came to review Sombart’s book: “. . . Why under such circumstances [does] the American worker ‘escape into freedom’ . . . that is, withdraw from the hubbub of capitalism, by settling on hitherto uncultivated land [?] If capitalism is so good to him, he could not help but feel extraordinarily well-off under its sceptre. . . . There is clearly a glaring contradiction here.”21†
The lure of the frontier, the myth of the West surely held a strong grip on the imaginations of many Americans during the late nineteenth century—and later too. But it soon became an independent power quite apart from any role the West may actually have played as a “safety valve” for urban discontent.
You have surely noticed the direction my argument is taking: away from a stress upon material conditions (even while acknowledging that in the last analysis they may well have constituted a large barrier to socialist growth) and toward a focusing on the immediate problems of American socialists that were or are in part open to solution through an exertion of human intelligence and will. Let me mention two: large-scale immigration, which created ethnic divisions within the working class, and the distinctive political structure of the United States.
The Immigrant Problem
The rise of American socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincides with the greatest wave of immigration this country has ever experienced, an immigration drawn largely from Eastern and Southern Europe, with large numbers of Italians, Slavs, Jews, and Poles. When a nonspecialist looks into the historical literature, the main conclusion to be drawn is that it would be foolhardy to draw any large conclusions. Or, if pressed, I would say that the waves of the “new immigrants”—the more poorly educated, largely peasant stock from premodern countries—presented more of a problem to the American unions than to the socialists.
Many immigrants in this “second wave” came with a strong desire to work hard, save money, and go back home; they thought of themselves as what we’d call “guest workers,” and that is one reason many came without their wives. The rate of return among East Europeans and Italians was very high. Between 1908 and 1910, for South and East Europeans, forty-four out of a hundred who came went back; between 1907 and 1911, for Italians, seventy-three out of a hundred who came went back. Such people were not likely to be attracted to political movements, especially those that might get them in trouble with the authorities or might interfere with their projects for self-exploitation as workers; nor, for the same reasons, were these immigrants often good material for unionization, though a study by Victor Greene has shown that the Slavs in western Pennsylvania, if conditions grew desperate enough, could be recruited as strong supporters of strike actions. As Jerome Karabel has shrewdly remarked: “If . . . a ‘safety valve’ did indeed exist for the discontented American worker, it was apparently to be found less on the frontier than in tired old Europe.”22*
Upon arrival, South and East European immigrants often took the worst jobs. Usually without industrial skills, these people were shunted to brute labor, on the railroads and in the steel mills. Their presence enabled the “first wave” of immigrants, from Northern Europe, to rise on the social scale and, above these, the native-born to enter new supervisory posts created by a rapid industrial expansion. The American working class was thereby split into competing ethnic segments—and the contempt native-born and earlier immigrants often showed the newer immigrants did nothing to heal this split. No matter what the Marxist schema might propose, these ethnic divisions were often felt more strongly than any hypothetical class consciousness, except perhaps during strikes, in which a momentary solidarity could be achieved.
Partly in reaction to the ethnic and racial antagonisms they met from other workers, but partly from a natural desire to live with those who spoke the same language, ate the same foods, and shared the same customs, many immigrant workers huddled into ethnic neighborhoods, miniature strongholds in which to beat off the contempt of their “betters.” These neighborhoods could often be controlled by shrewd politicians offering practical advice and social help; among the Italians, for instance, by padroni doubling as labor contractors in the construction industry. This heavy concentration in ethnic neighborhoods usually made for political conservatism and obviously served to thwart class or political consciousness. Later students would see such neighborhoods as enclaves of parochial narrowness or as communities enabling their members to accumulate strength for a move into the larger American world—obviously they could be both. Recently a more sophisticated analysis, by Ira Katznelson and others, has made much of the split between the immigrant as worker in the plant and as resident in the ethnic community, sometimes able to achieve an intense militancy in bitter economic struggles against employers, yet docile in relation to the conservative leadership of the ethnic neighborhood.
Harsh as the exploitation of immigrant workers often was, many of them retained a stubborn conviction that if they accepted deprivation in the short run, their lot would ultimately be bettered—or at least that of their children would be. Certain immigrant groups, especially the Jews, staked almost everything on the educational opportunities offered by America. Often accompanied by desperate homesickness for the old country and harsh curses for the crudity of life in America, the promise of the New World nevertheless gripped the imagination of the immigrants. American radicals mig
ht point to real injustices, but to newcomers who had left behind autocratic and caste-ridden nations, our easy manners and common acceptance of democratic norms could seem wonderfully attractive. And there is a psychological point to be added: it was hard enough to be a Slav in Pittsburgh or a Pole in Chicago without the additional burden of that “anti-Americanism” with which the socialists were often charged.
Much of the “new immigration” consisted of Catholics, people still close to the faith, in whom a suspicion of socialism had been implanted by a strongly conservative clergy. The labor historian Selig Perlman believed that the immigrant character of American labor was a major reason for the difficulties of the socialists: “American labor remains one of the most heterogeneous laboring classes in existence. . . . With a working class of such composition, to make socialism . . . the official ‘ism’ of the movement, would mean . . . deliberately driving the Catholics . . . out of the labor movement. . . .”23*
Now Perlman’s point seems beyond dispute if taken simply as an explanation of why socialism could not, or should not, have become the dominant outlook of the American labor movement. But it does not explain very much about socialist fortunes in general—unless, of course, you assume that domination of the American Federation of Labor was the crucial requirement for socialist success in America. That such domination would have helped the socialists is obvious; but it’s not at all obvious that, lacking it, they were doomed to extinction or mere sect existence. In truth, the socialists had plenty of possibilities for recruitment within the country at large before they could so much as reach the new immigrants.
Nor should it be supposed that the immigrants formed a solid conservative mass. In the Debsian era, socialist strength was centered in a number of immigrant communities: the Germans, the Jews, and the Finns, all of whom clustered in ethnic neighborhoods that some recent analysts have seen as bulwarks of conservatism. As if to illustrate how the same data can be used for sharply opposing claims, one historian, John H. M. Laslett, has argued that it was the “process of ethnic assimilation” rather than ethnic isolation that hindered the socialists:
This is perhaps clearest in the case of the Brewery Workers Union, whose socialism may in large part be ascribed to the influences of socialists who came to this country after the abortive German revolution of 1848, and in greater numbers after Bismarck’s antisocialist legislation of 1878. The radicalism of the union noticeably declined as these older groups either died off, moved upward into the entrepreneurial or professional middle class, or were replaced by ethnic groups whose commitment to socialism was less intense.24†
The immigrants, to be sure, presented practical and moral-political problems for the socialists. Many immigrants, even if friendly to the movement, could not vote, nor did they rush to acquire citizenship. There were segments of the party that harbored disgraceful antiforeign sentiments, and this led to internecine disputes. The plethora of immigrant communities made for difficulties: Morris Hillquit once noted ruefully that the party had to put out propaganda in twenty different languages. For a union trying to organize, say, a steel plant in Pittsburgh, where the work force was split ethnically and linguistically, this could be a devastating problem. For the socialists, however, it would have been crucial only if they had had much of a chance of reaching many of these “new immigrants,” or if they had already scored such successes among the indigenous American population that all that remained in their way was the recalcitrance of immigrant workers. Such, obviously, was not the case. No; the argument from the divisive consequences of immigration does not take us very far in explaining the difficulties of American socialism.
It is when we reach the last of our “objective factors,” that we come closer to the actual difficulties socialists encountered in America. It was . . .
The American Political System
If the authors of the Constitution had in mind to establish a political system favoring a moderately conservative two-party structure—a kind of “centrism” allowing some flexibility within a stable consensus politics but also putting strong barriers in the way of its principled critics—then they succeeded brilliantly. Our shrewdly designed system combines a great deal of rigidity in its governing structure with a great deal of flexibility in its major parties. Our method of electing presidents requires that the parties be inclusive enough to cement political coalitions before Election Day, and that means bargaining and compromise, which blur political and ideological lines. Our method of governing, however, makes for a continuity of elites, tends to give the political center an overwhelming preponderance, and makes it tremendously difficult for insurgent constituencies to achieve political strength unless they submit to the limits of one of the major parties. In recent years, this peculiar mixture of rigidity and flexibility has, if anything, become more prevalent. The tremendous costliness of running for political office, now that television has largely replaced the public meeting and advertising slogans the political oration, makes it all but impossible for minority parties to compete. It also enables rich men—noble, eccentric, or wicked—to take on an excessive role in political life. Yet the growth of the primary system and the fact that most voters pay even less attention to primaries than to elections means that coherent minorities can often achieve their ends through cleverness and concentration.
There are theorists by the dozen who regard all this as a master stroke in behalf of maintaining democracy. Perhaps they are right. At least, they may be right if the society does not have to confront major crises, as during the immediate pre–Civil War years and the Depression era, when the political system comes under severe strain. But if the system helps maintain democracy, it also seriously disables democratic critics of capitalism.
For the most part, all of this constitutes the common coin of American political science. Let me therefore try to sharpen the focus by discussing the problem from the point of view of the socialist movement as it kept trying to establish itself in the country’s political life.
One of my most wearying memories, when I think back to years in various socialist groups, is that of efforts we would make to get on the ballot. Most states had rigid requirements, sometimes mere rigged handicaps, for minor parties. In New York State we had to obtain a certain number of qualified signatures from all the counties, and this would mean sending volunteers to upstate rural communities where signatories ready to help socialists were pretty rare. In Ohio during the 1930s the number of required signatures, as I recall, was outrageously high. Well, we would throw ourselves into the effort of collecting signatures, and then have to face a court challenge from a major party, usually the more liberal one, since it had more to lose from our presence on the ballot than the conservatives. (It’s amusing how often Republicans turned out to be staunch “defenders” of minority rights.) If, finally, we did get on the ballot, we were often so exhausted that there was little or no energy, to say nothing of money, left for the actual campaign.
Over and over again the socialists would face this problem: friendly people would come up to our candidates—especially Norman Thomas—and say they agreed with our views but would nevertheless vote for “the lesser evil” because they didn’t “want to throw away their vote.” We tried to scorn such sentiments, but, given the American political system, especially the zero-sum game for presidential elections, there really was a core of sense in what these people said.
One of the few occasions when the socialist vote was relatively large—in 1912, when the party drew six percent of the vote—is partly explained by the fact that, as Thomas put it, “voters that year were pretty sure that the winner would be either Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt, not William H. Taft, and they didn’t believe that the difference between these two fairly progressive men was important enough to prevent their voting for their real preference,” the socialist Eugene Debs. I’d guess Thomas was right when he added that if America had had “a parliamentary rather than a presidential government, we should have had, under some name or
other, a moderately strong socialist party.”
The idea of a long-range political movement slowly accumulating strength for some ultimate purpose has simply not appealed to the American imagination. Movements outside the political process, yes—from abolitionism to feminism, from municipal reform to civil rights. But let the supporters of these movements enter electoral politics, and the expectation becomes one of quick victory. S. M. Lipset has described this phenomenon:
. . . Extra-party “movements” arise for moralistic causes, which are initially not electorally palatable. Such movements are not doomed to isolation and inefficacy. If mainstream political leaders recognize that a significant segment of the electorate feels alienated . . . they will readapt one of the major party coalitions. But in so doing, they temper much of the extremist moralistic fervor. . . . The protestors are absorbed into a major party coalition, but, like the abolitionists who joined the Republicans, the Populists who merged with the Democrats, or the radicals who backed the New Deal, they contribute to the policy orientation of the newly formed coalition.25*
To which I need only add a clever observation Sombart made in 1906, which is still, I suspect, largely true: “It is an unbearable feeling for an American to belong to a party that always and forever comes out of the election with small figures. . . . A member of a minority party finds himself on election day . . . compelled to stand at one side with martyr-like resignation—something which in no way accords with the American temperament.”26†
At least a significant number of Americans have never hesitated to “stand at one side with martyr-like resignation” or even with rage in behalf of moral causes. But, curiously, this has not seemed to extend to the electoral system: there, they have to strike it rich. That may be one reason they sometimes strike it so poor.