Before 2015, few in the mainstream of American political thought could have imagined that a socialist revival would reinvigorate the social-democratic left in the United States, threaten the dominant faction within a Democratic Party skeptical of the ameliorative effects of the New Deal and the Great Society, and put a national health insurance program on the political agenda for the American people in a way that had been almost unimaginable just a few years earlier and had not been seriously considered since the days of Harry S. Truman and Walter Reuther.1 The ruling economic and political orthodoxy is now besieged on all sides. The person at the center of this latest socialist revival is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist of longstanding, Bernie Sanders.
Sanders drew his inspiration, at least in part, from Eugene V. Debs, one of several founders of the Socialist Party of America (SP), and the subject of Sandersâs 1979 documentary and subsequent Folkways album. On the album, Sanders applies his mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn accent to the words of a late-nineteenth-century labor leader from Terre Haute, Indiana.2 This combination of Terre Haute, Indiana, and Brooklyn, New York, may seem a cultural oddity to the early-twenty-first-century observer. The Terre Haute-Brooklyn connection reflects the vitality and diversity of early-twentieth-century socialism in the United States, and its ability to cut across divides that may seem unbridgeable today. It brought together the small town railroad worker from the Midwest and the needle trade worker from the Northeast with a common dream of a better, more equitable world. Sandersâs vision of a new social-democratic movement in America relies on an idea that the waitress from New York City and the firefighter from Terre Haute can be connected by a common set of concerns and the social-democratic politics of the New Deal made real again.
Socialism was no isolated movement. Its appeal cut across the country, attracting hundreds of thousands of voters. Beginning in the 1900s and reaching a pinnacle in the early 1910s, this Socialist Party of rural hamlets, small towns, and urban enclaves was the core of socialismâs first major period of success in the United States. Of the two congressmen that socialists sent to Washington during this heyday, one hailed from Wisconsin and the other from New Yorkâs Lower East Side.3 There were socialist state legislators scattered across the country in states that included Nevada, Utah, Oklahoma, California, Washington, Montana, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Kansas, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Socialists elected local officials in the industrial towns of the Northeast right across the prairie and out to the Pacific Northwest, including mayors in Schenectady, New York; Cedar City, Utah; Butte, Montana; Boone, Iowa; Winslow, Arkansas; Grand Junction, Colorado; Brainerd, Minnesota; Broken Bow, Nebraska; Berkeley, California; Fairhope, Alabama; Coeur dâAlene, Idaho; Antlers, Oklahoma; Lima, Ohio; New Castle, Pennsylvania; Bicknell, Indiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Traverse City, Michigan; and many, many other cities and towns.4 Eugene Debs polled six percent of the vote in his 1912 run for president. In 1920, he ran from a prison cell after being convicted of anti-war speech under the Espionage Act and won more than 900,000 votes.5
Although socialism was an intellectually diverse movement in the Debs era, socialists shared a belief that capitalism would be replaced by a better, more cooperative system. Some were reformers insistent that they could build an alternative to capitalism, and others were Marxists who debated the preconditions of capitalismâs downfall and imagined a fundamental rupture. There were romantic revolutionaries and hard-headed strategists who took a longer view. They were all committed anti-capitalists. United by a belief that capitalismâs days were numbered, they disagreed on the how, the why, and the when of capitalismâs collapse.6
Socialismâs first period of success in American life lasted roughly twenty years.7 Its failure to mature into a durable, independent political party has been attributed to many forces: repression, social mobility, political alliances between Democrats and Republicans, the ability of preexisting political movements to absorb elements of the socialist appeal, and internecine conflict within the socialist movement.8 But this was all retrospective. It appeared at specific moments in history that socialism was on the upswing or soon would be again; itâs upward boundaries not yet demarcated.9 Although socialism never returned to the independent electoral strength of the Debs era, it has never gone completely and has remained a persistent and influential thread. The 1930s offered new opportunities, challenges, and a new and persistent relevance for socialists.
The socialist revival of the 1930s demonstrates that socialismâs contribution to American political life lived well beyond the Socialist Party of Americaâs heyday in the 1910s.10 During the socialist revival, socialists built institutions, organized the unemployed, extended aid to the labor movement, developed local political movements, and built networks that would remain active in the struggle against injustice throughout the twentieth century.11 The 1930s revival also served as a space in which women claimed leadership roles, though divergent gender ideologies and expectations provoked tensions within the socialist movement.12 Reincorporating socialists into the history of the American left and the history of the labor movement adds an important dimension to our understanding of the struggles for power in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the development and interplay of diverse anti-communisms.13 It brings this history out from under the shadow of Cold War historiography and moves scholarly debate toward a more honest appraisal of the histories of the socialist and labor movements. This work, while not a definitive history of American socialism in these years, is a piece of that larger project to bring complexity to histories shaped by the Cold War and suggests the vibrancy and diversity of the labor movement in the United States during the 1930s. Highlander Folk Schoolâs socialist roots, the attraction of revolutionary ideas, womenâs important role in the SP, and the shift from revolutionary rhetoric to gradualism demonstrates the complexity and importance of this history.
Histories of socialism in the 1930s have focused on the SP and its institutional life and internecine struggles.14 The SP began to evaporate from 1936 onward. As members left to join the New Deal coalition, the SP became largely irrelevant. Yet, the socialist movement had life and relevance beyond the SP. 15 Socialists migrated into the New Deal coalition and the Democratic Party, where they retained some coherence as a force for social democracy and a thoughtful variant of anti-communism.16 This redefinition of socialism complicates assertions that socialists were too idealistic and inflexible to be relevant in the United States. They, and socialism itself, underwent political and ideological transformations. No longer would most socialists continue to vote or soapbox for the SPâs candidates. President Roosevelt and the success of the New Deal coalition reshaped their political allegiances.
Taken together, the chapters that follow establish the significance and scope of the socialist revival in the 1930s, the importance of its most radical elements, the limitations and successes of the revival at the local level, and the ways in which its participants evolved through the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond. The prologue and âRadical Incubatorsâ set the scene, explaining the economic and social moment in New York City at Union Theological Seminary where socialism attracted important young people, including the founders of Highlander Folk School. âThe Revolutionary Policy Committeeâ looks at one particularly radical manifestation of socialism. The RPC was a product of the 1930s. It was an effort to find a conduit for militancy and radicalism that remained compatible with democratic socialism. âFruits of the Socialist Revivalâ focuses on two key institutions, Highlander Folk School and Soviet House. This chapter raises the profile of Soviet House and emphasizes the importance of socialism in shaping Highlander Folk School during its formative years. âTheir Party, Their Powerâ explores the revival in the context of womenâs participation in the SP and underscores the importance of their efforts. âWhile the Men Played Revolutionâ builds on the previous chapter by examining the life of Elizabeth âZillaâ Hawes and the conflicts that developed around gender in the SP and at Highlander Folk School. ââA Mighty Riverââ examines the change among socialists from a chiliastic socialism to a more pragmatic embrace of social democracy.
Just as the Terre Haute of the 2010s is no longer the Terre Haute of the 1910s, the socialism of Bernie Sanders is not the socialism of Eugene Debs. The experiences of socialists in the 1930s provided an important waypoint between the era of Debs and the resurgence of socialism in the United States after 2015. The 1930s moment helped shape a Sanders coalition built on concrete social-democratic demands. Socialists came to see capitalism as a force that could be contained, channeled, and blunted. They also lost the certainty that it could be completely replaced. While utopian strains remain within the socialist movement, they are no longer dominant. Instead, owing to the experience of the 1930s and the decades that followed, socialists have come to accept social democracy as a pragmatic ameliorative to capitalismâs destructive rapaciousness.
Footnotes
1
Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945â1968 (Cornell University Press, 1995), 53â54, 68â69; Jill Quadagno, One Nation, Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance (Oxf...