In this project I examine the history of Socialism in the United States, from the first religious Utopian Communities to the birth of McCarthyism. In order to do this, I systematize the diverse expressions the movement has taken through the period emphasizing their doctrines, political actions, known activists, and the relation the movement had to the institutions of the US.
It is not a new finding that the socialist movement in the United States nowadays is weak. Compared to the rest of the developed countries, where at least a democratic socialist party has developed a major role in their political history, the country has never materialized a socialist association with the ability to take center stage. It may seem that individualism is a characteristic in the United States that is highly regarded, and therefore, because socialist ideas are not native, they will never have a fertile ground. However, this has not always been the case for an important portion of the society. The major task of this project is to show that socialist ideas have been present since the early beginnings of the US’s path as a sovereign nation. As Albert Fried says, “if we read deeply, Socialism was not an alien but an integral part of American past”.
For this task, I propose revisiting from the early stages of the socialist movement until the First Red Scare. This is because the left movement was almost anihilated between the Interwar period, and it changed radically after the 60’s when it reborn and started campaigning for a broad range of social issues such as feminism, gay rights, abortion rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms, changing the focus on social justice based on dialectical materialism and social class. The “New Left”, which emerged in the 1960s on the strength of the civil rights movement, the protests the Vietnam War and the increasingly experimental character in personal styles and habits, is too amorphous and syncretistic to define with any assurance. Its hallmark lies in its indefinability, its looseness and lack of boundaries. Analyzing this mutation exceeds broadly the purpose of this work and it will be understood, then, why I end the presentation here.
In this project, the term Socialism is understood as the political ideology that advocates for an egalitarian redistribution of wealth and power in society and stands as a reaction to the rise of capitalism and the economic inequality it induces. As socialists have disagreed over how this change should come about, no distinctions would be made from this answer: utopians, anarchism, socialism, unionism and communism therefore should be understood as variants of Socialism. What animated these Socialisms, what underlay their enormous differences and why it is proper to bring them under the same rubric was their conviction that each person’s obligation to society was a brotherhood, not a collection of strangers drawn together by interest, that the individual derived his highest fulfillment from his solidarity with others, not from the pursuit of advantage and power. Whatever their persuasion, all Socialist regarded the opposition of self and society as a false one, reflecting the prevailing ethic of greed and domination. All envisioned an end, really a return to the beginning, in the form of either the perfect community, or the Kingdom of Heaven on earth or the cooperative commonwealth.
As I intend to show that socialist organization has been recurrent since early stages of the nation development, the historical era I propose to analyze American Socialism takes place from the Early National Period to the beginnings of the 1960s. That said, I will start reviewing the Utopian Socialism,the Socialism Ties to Labor, Anarchism and the opposition to WWI & First Red Scare.
Paraphrasing the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, the task of historians is to “remember what the others have forgotten” and ” (not) simply to discover the past but to provide a link with the present”. As the US is becoming more and more unequal after the post-2008 economic crisis is essential to rethink the economical path taken. Furthermore, the past can provide us valid answers on what we should do.