[If there’s a lesson to be derived from Gary Dorrien’s account
of American socialism, it’s that the movement’s open participation
in and with the broad democratic left benefits the socialist cause.]
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AN AMERICAN HISTORY OF THE SOCIALIST IDEA  
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Harold Meyerson
June 15, 2022
Dissent
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_ If there’s a lesson to be derived from Gary Dorrien’s account
of American socialism, it’s that the movement’s open participation
in and with the broad democratic left benefits the socialist cause. _

Eugene Debs delivers a speech in 1912. , Library of Congress

 

_American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and
Theory_
by Gary Dorrien
Yale University Press, 2021, 752 pp.

Seven years ago, I reviewed in these pages the first major history of
the American Socialist Party to appear in several decades: Jack
Ross’s _The Socialist Party of America: A Complete
History _(2015)_, _an exhaustive and, for the reader, exhausting
tome whose text ran to roughly 600 pages before the election tables,
notes, and index, which ran for 200 more.

Now, Gary Dorrien, a professor of religion at Columbia and of social
ethics across the street at Union Theological Seminary, has produced
his account of this nation’s democratic socialist history, a text
that also runs to nearly 600 pages (before endnotes), though with
smaller type squeezing in many more words than Ross had managed.
Dorrien is a distinguished historian of socialist movements both here
and in Europe, with a particular specialty in the rather
under-documented field of religious socialism.

What’s striking about the two books is the extent to which they
don’t overlap. Other than their obligatory
Debs-to-Thomas-to-Harrington chronology, there are just three
particulars in which they resemble each other. First, neither is a
social history of the socialist movement; neither dives into the daily
lives and tasks of Lower East Side garment union organizers or
sewer-socialist Milwaukee block captains. Second, both authors see the
failure of socialists in the Debs era and for a few years thereafter
to help form an enduring farmer–labor party, of which they could be
the socialist wing—much as the Fabians did in Great Britain’s
Labour Party—as American socialism’s great missed opportunity. And
third, like most historians, each sees the savage repression of the
Socialist Party during the First World War, followed by the abrupt
rise of American communism after the Bolshevik Revolution, as body
blows from which American socialism never really recovered. (Ross’s
book predates by the narrowest of margins the Bernie boom of 2015–6,
while Dorrien’s gives it a full treatment. Dorrien’s account,
accordingly, has a happier ending than Ross’s.)

Once past the tomes’ three points of accord, the similarities end.
If you want to know the documented history of the Socialist Party
right up to Norman Thomas’s final presidential campaign in 1948,
Ross is your man. His account of party conventions, local elections,
and how rival factions voted; of the position papers and pamphlets
through which its internecine battles were waged, and of its myriad
fissiparous tendencies is altogether authoritative. His
characterizations of these events may at times be shaky—he never
quite understands that the battles of the 1930s between the party’s
old guard and its young militants were more generational than
ideological—but if you want to know which side a particular comrade
was on, say, in the vote to repudiate the Wobblies, Ross delivers the
goods.

Dorrien, by contrast, tells you what made that comrade tick. His is
not a history of the party but the history of the socialist idea, of
what brought particular people to embrace it, how exactly they did
embrace it and change it in the process, what part of it they carried
into their work in other movements, and, if they abandoned it, what
prompted them to do so and what stuck with them nonetheless. In a
sense, his is a work of collective biography, though, as the subtitle
warns us, it also consists of Dorrien’s analysis of and advocacy for
those portions of the socialist vision he finds most plausible and
compelling (hence his dive into the complexities of market socialism).
To these tasks, Dorrien has brought a lifetime of research into
largely neglected realms of socialist history and a keen aptitude for
telling the stories he’s uncovered.

Quite unlike Ross, Dorrien dedicates a good deal of his storytelling
to how socialists built progressive organizations and movements that
were not in themselves explicitly socialist, and how they navigated
the tensions inherent in those efforts. Mary White Ovington and
William English Walling, for instance, were prominent Debsian
socialists who disagreed with the party’s (and Debs’s) position
that racism would be eradicated by the nation’s move from capitalism
to socialism—a position they felt did nothing to alleviate the
dangers faced daily by African Americans. Indeed, that Debsian
argument was so pervasive within the party that it was not just shared
but consistently articulated by George Woodbey, the sole Black
delegate to the party’s conventions in 1904 and 1908 and a brilliant
street-corner orator whose story the author has pieced together.
Dorrien also documents the racism that ran through quadrants of the
party and found frequent expression in the speeches of Kate Richards
O’Hare, second only to Debs himself as the most popular socialist
orator of the early twentieth century.

The Debsian party was a far-flung hodgepodge of distinct subcultures,
and Ovington and Walling weren’t often compelled to listen to
O’Hare’s vicious racist asides. But the official stance of the
party struck them as so blind to racism that they ending up playing
major roles in founding the NAACP. They brought in W.E.B Du Bois to
edit its magazine and contributed to his advocacy of race-conscious
socialism and socialist-conscious anti-racism.

In a similar spirit, Dorrien argues that the chief success of Norman
Thomas–era democratic socialists was that of A. Philip Randolph,
Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Martin Luther King Jr. in building
the civil rights revolution. In telling this story, Dorrien also
writes about a woman who was the complete opposite of Kate Richards
O’Hare: Ella Baker, who, not yet an acclaimed public figure, worked
in obscurity to build and maintain the movement’s organizational
foundations. That Baker’s story is crucial to understanding the
civil rights movement’s achievements and its deeply sexist
shortcomings is readily apparent; that she is part of a chronicle of
American socialism, however, might not be all that obvious.

But the history of American socialism, as told by Dorrien, can’t be
extricated from those of the movements it helped spark and infuse,
just as the movements that brought people to socialism are part of his
narrative, too. The author makes a very convincing case, for instance,
that groups like the turn-of-the-century Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU) brought many of the leading women of the Debs
era to the party. Dorrien notes that women were more accepted in the
Socialist Party’s ranks than they were in the two major parties: by
1912, 10 percent of its convention delegates were female; at
Democratic and Republican conventions, that figure hovered at 1
percent. Notably, in a party dominated by working-class men, the women
“were middle-class, white, native-born, college-educated, and
Protestant,” Dorrien writes. “Nearly all came from middle-class
Christian churches” and organizations like the WCTU. “Only four of
the forty-one leading female socialists came from working-class
backgrounds.”

The porous boundary between Social Gospel Protestantism (and later,
just plain liberal Protestantism) and the democratic socialist
movement is one of Dorrien’s chief topics. While others have focused
on New York City Jews and Oklahoma sharecroppers, Dorrien makes the
case that a considerable share of socialists—from the Debs era to
the Religion and Socialism Working Group of today’s Democratic
Socialists of America—have come to socialism with the moral concerns
sparked by their religious convictions. That certainly describes
Thomas himself, though he abandoned his ministry soon after becoming a
leading spokesperson for (and later, the personification of) the
socialist cause. Dorrien recounts the results of a 1932 survey sent to
99,890 ministers and 609 rabbis (of whom 20,879 responded) that showed
51 percent favored “drastically reformed capitalism” and 28
percent socialism, “defined as the democratic socialism of the
Socialist Party or something like it,” as Dorrien puts it. (Of
course, in 1932, quite a number of laypersons were inclined toward
socialism, too.)

Dorrien tracks Thomas not only in tandem with Randolph, with whom he
was almost always quite close, but also with theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr, with whom Thomas was once close but later often bitterly at
odds. In the depths of the Great Depression, Niebuhr espoused a
militant, uncompromising socialism (over the long span of his life,
Niebuhr embraced even his compromises with uncompromising zeal). But
he parted company with Thomas, as did Randolph and many others, over
Thomas’s fervent pre–Pearl Harbor opposition to any U.S.
involvement in the Second World War. And just as Ella Baker’s
travails in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which may
not be part of the annals of socialism as such, are part of the tale
that Dorrien tells, so too is the post-socialist career of Niebuhr.
His role in creating Americans for Democratic Action, the leading
postwar liberal pressure group, is emblematic of the evolution of many
of the young socialist militants of the 1930s, who became stalwarts of
New Deal liberalism and (sometimes nuanced, sometimes not)
anticommunism. In another sense, Dorrien—who is the Reinhold Niebuhr
Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological—feels that the
socialist record isn’t complete without Niebuhr’s critique of what
he saw as American socialism’s refusal to recognize the imperfect
“real-world” options that, for example, the rise of fascism
presented it with (a critique that considerably overlaps that of
another midcentury former socialist, Daniel Bell).

This perspective also helps explain Dorrien’s favorable take on the
post-1972 Michael Harrington, whose stance that socialists should
participate openly in the Democratic Party informed the electoral
strategy of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), and
later DSA, which rejected the Socialist Party’s strategy of making
the perfect the enemy of the good. When Dorrien’s narrative reaches
the Harrington era, it’s infused with the author’s personal
experience; since 1974, he’s been a member of DSOC and then DSA,
which was formed by a merger of DSOC and the New American Movement in
1982. He’s also been active in its Religion and Socialism group,
which has enabled him to incorporate into his book a mini-biography of
John C. Cort, a key if idiosyncratic Christian socialist of the late
twentieth century. Dorrien includes accounts of his own discussions
with Harrington over what Harrington saw as the demise of religion—a
demise that Dorrien contested with data showing religious belief to be
more prevalent than socialist belief. (More recent data might not show
this so clearly, particularly among millennials and Gen Zers.)

Dorrien’s take on both Harrington and DSA isn’t uncritical, but
his affirmation of their orientation and strategy is of a piece with
his perspective on socialist history more generally: that the
socialist cause does best when it works with and in other democratic
progressive movements, including those that are only partially or
latently social democratic. That perspective is borne out by the huge
growth that DSA experienced in the wake of the presidential campaigns
of Bernie Sanders, which vindicated the Harringtonian strategy of
working within the Democratic Party. It’s also been borne out by the
considerable leftward movement of the Democrats—President Joe Biden
included—in response to the broad appeal that Sanders’s social
democratic platform won once it wasn’t confined to the sectarian
margins of American politics.

On this point, Dorrien’s perspective couldn’t be more different
from Ross’s. In his history, Ross largely dismisses the argument
that the party’s opposition to the New Deal was a chief cause of its
marginalization (Dorrien rightly views it as a near-fatal
self-inflicted wound) and considers involvement with the Democrats as
a defacement of socialist purity. Similarly, Ross pays little heed to
the limits that Debsian socialism placed on the causes of Black and
women’s rights, and on the struggles for recognition and power that
Black people and women experienced within not only the Debsian
movement but its successors as well. Dorrien, by contrast, tells the
stories of those struggles, right up through the ongoing debates over
the relative primacy of class, race, and gender—or the possible
fusions thereof—in today’s left.

And therein lies one of his book’s problems. Dorrien rightly
recognizes the period between Harrington’s death in 1989 and the
Sanders revival of 2016 as a largely fallow one for organized
socialism. The one socialist periphery that thrived during this time
was the academy, so his book’s penultimate chapter focuses on that,
with particular emphasis on the battles that socialist-feminist
philosopher Nancy Fraser had with her socialist and feminist critics
over her efforts to work through the conflicting claims of class and
gender, of distribution and recognition, in search of a workable
synthesis (efforts that Dorrien himself clearly supports). The problem
is that the class-race-gender debates that raged in academia were
largely conducted in insular, often neologistic academese, rather than
in, say, English. In giving a thoughtful and full account of them,
Dorrien plunges his readers—whose attention he’s riveted in the
preceding 500 pages with a taut, if sprawling, narration of leftist
history—into the miasmic gobbledygook of academic theory. There’s
an old rule in musical theater that as the audience nears the end of
the performance and may be wearying, it needs an “11 o’clock
number” designed to wake it up (like, for instance, the uproariously
upbeat title song of _Oklahoma_, which in an evening performance
doesn’t come before 11 o’clock). Positioning his dive into
academese at the 11 o’clock point in his narrative, Dorrien is
asking a lot of his readers.

Happily, he offers a rather upbeat ending that deals with the Sanders
campaigns and the rebirth, bigger than ever, of American social
democracy. Lacking the temporal distance required of historians,
Dorrien doesn’t really assess the current DSA, an organization of
people chiefly brought to socialism by the successes of socialist
campaigns and candidates within the Democratic Party, though also
inhabited, and in some places directed, by sectarian groups who seek
the comfort and control that comes with retreat to more confined,
disciplined political spaces. If there’s a lesson to be derived from
Dorrien’s account of American socialism’s occasional ups and
frequent downs, however, it’s that the movement’s open
participation in and with the broad democratic left benefits not just
the left but the socialist cause—and every now and then, the
American people as well.

_HAROLD MEYERSON is the editor-at-large of the American
Prospect and a longtime member of the Dissent editorial board._

_DISSENT is a quarterly magazine of politics and ideas. Founded by
Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it quickly established itself as
one of America’s leading intellectual journals and a mainstay of the
democratic left. Dissent has published articles by Hannah Arendt,
Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A. Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington,
Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin, Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz,
Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and many others. Subscribe to Dissent.
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