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The 'S' Word: A Short History of an American Tradition: SOCIALISM


Review
The 'S' Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism, by John Nichols – review
This patchy history confuses socialism with libertarianism, and blurs
various – often contradictory – shades of red
Michael Lind
Sun 26 Jun 2011 00.05 BST

3

In recent years the American right has deployed the word "socialism" to
smear the policies of Barack Obama's Democratic party, including
moderately conservative policies like the recent healthcare law. The
right's revival of cold war rhetoric provides an opportunity for
journalists and historians to reconsider the actual history of socialism
in the US as a tradition and a movement, as distinct from an insult. This
is what John Nichols attempts in The "S" Word.

Nichols is right to argue that the Socialist party of Eugene Debs and
Norman Thomas, and the early 20th-century "sewer socialism" that fought
for municipal control of utilities were just as "American" as other
political movements. As he notes, many civil rights leaders, including
Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr, were influenced by American socialists who rejected racism at a time when many liberals were bigoted
or timid.

Yet Nichols distorts history by dragooning reformist liberals into his socialist tradition. For example, Tom Paine is posthumously drafted as a socialist hero because he favoured a version of a welfare state and
progressive taxation, even though these are compatible with an economy
based primarily on private property. Nichols does not mention Paine's
belief in minimal government or his support of an armed citizenry, which
are cited today by American libertarians and opponents of gun control.

Nichols writes of the New Deal: "FDR's borrowing of ideas about social security, unemployment compensation, jobs programmes and agricultural assistance from the Socialists was sufficient to pull voters who had
rejected the Democrats in 1932" into the enlarged Democratic party of
1936. This assertion is doubly inaccurate: not only did former socialist
and communist voters play a negligible role in the Democratic realignment,
but all of the policies listed by Nichols came from non-socialist
progressive and populist traditions, even if members of America's small, sectarian socialist movement endorsed them.

In discussing the perennial failed candidates of the Socialist party,
Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, Nichols edits aspects of their thought
which are incompatible with modern leftism. Readers will not learn from
Nichols that his hero Debs used racist arguments to support immigration restriction: "The Dago works for small pay, and lives far more like a
savage or a wild beast than the Chinese." Nor will they learn that as
Franklin Roosevelt sought to prepare the US for war with Hitler, Norman
Thomas campaigned at rallies around the country alongside Charles
Lindbergh, his ally in the America First movement, to promote
isolationism.

In a chapter entitled "Reading Marx with Abraham Lincoln: Utopian
Socialists, German Communists and Other Republicans", Nichols misleads
readers from the beginning, with an epigraph from a speech that Lincoln
made as an Illinois legislator in 1837: "These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people…". This startling quote, while genuine, is taken out of context from a speech in which Lincoln,
then a member of the pro-business, pro-banking Whig party, defended an
Illinois state bank from populist Democrats and particular investors ("the capitalists") who opposed that particular bank.

The chapter as a whole is similarly misleading. "Lincoln was not a
Marxist," Nichols concedes, "but the first Republican president belonged
to a time when men such as he were familiar with the writings of Marx and
the deeds of the revolutionary circle that spread from Europe to the
United States in the aftermath of the 1848 rebellions." Nichols
approvingly quotes Martin Luther King, Jr, who declared: "It is worth
noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx
during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely." But this "correspondence" consisted merely of a pro forma reply to a letter of
praise from Marx's First International, on behalf of the White House by a
US diplomat, as Nichols admits.

Any credible journalistic or historical account of American socialism must
deal accurately with the deep divisions between and within the communist
left and the non-communist left. Nichols ignores the principled anti-
communism of much of the democratic socialist left. Portraying the Moscow- controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA) as an ordinary minor party, Nichols finds no room in his book to discuss, or even to name, Earl Browder or any other CPUSA leaders, servile apparatchiks who followed every twist and
turn in Soviet foreign policy from the 1920s until the 1980s.

A good book about the various strands of non-Marxist and Marxist socialism
in the United States, and their relationship to populism, progressivism
and other movements on the centre left, would be worth writing. In The
"S" Word, John Nichols has not written it.

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