by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
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The search for answers often leads to nothing more than a redefining of questions. To discount but not dismiss the customary “objective factors” cited as explanations for the failure of American socialism is by no means to reject the idea of “American exceptionalism,” namely, that conditions in the United States have differed crucially from the Marxist model for the development of capitalism and/or the way capitalism actually developed in Europe. It is, rather, to transfer our explanatory stress from material conditions to the character of American culture. Exceptionalism among us took primarily an ideological or a mythic form, a devotion to the idea that this country could be exempt from the historical burdens that had overwhelmed Europe. It seems obvious that so distinctive a culture, defining itself through an opposition to, even a rejection of, Europe, cannot finally be understood apart from the shaping context of special historical circumstances: it did not arise merely as an idea in someone’s head, or an Idea in a Collective Head. Yet I want to stress the independent power, the all-but-autonomous life, of the American myth and its remarkable persistence, despite enormous changes in social conditions. The ideology or myth—call it what you will, as long as you keep your eye fixed on Gatsby’s “green light”—seems almost impervious to the modifying pressures of circumstance. It isn’t, of course; but what strikes one is the extent to which it continues, in good circumstances and bad, to shape our imagination.
What is this myth? It consists in a shared persuasion, often penetrating deeper into our consciousness than mere language can express, that America is the home of a people shaped by or at least sharing in Providence. America is the land of the settler’s paradisial wilderness, the setting of the Puritan’s New Israel. America is humanity’s second chance. Such sentiments rest on a belief that we have already had our revolution and it was led by George Washington, so that appeals for another one are superfluous and malicious, or that, for the millions who came here from Europe in the last one hundred fifty years, the very act of coming constituted a kind of revolution.
That many Americans have found it entirely possible to yield to this myth while simultaneously attacking our socioeconomic institutions, or complaining bitterly that the slaveocracy disgraced us, the plutocrats stole our inheritance, Wall Street fleeced us, the capitalists exploited us, and the military-industrial complex sent our sons to death—all this seems clear. To a simple rationalist or vulgar Marxist, the ability to hold at once to the animating myth behind the founding of America and the most bitter criticism of its violation or abandonment or betrayal may seem a contradiction; but if so, it is precisely from such contradictions that our collective existence has been formed.
The distinctive American ideology takes on a decidedly nonideological mask. I call it, very roughly, Emersonianism, though I know it had its sources in American and indeed European thought long before Emerson. By now, of course, “Emersonianism” has become as elusive and protean a category as Marxism or Freudianism. What I mean to suggest is that Emerson, in a restatement of an old Christian heresy, raised the I to semidivine status, thereby providing a religious sanction for the American cult of individualism. Traditional Christianity had seen man as a being like God, but now he was to be seen as one sharing, through osmosis with the oversoul, directly in the substance of divinity. This provided a new vision of man for a culture proposing to define itself as his new home—provided that vision by insisting that man be regarded as a self-creating and self-sufficient being fulfilled through his unmediated relation to nature and God. The traditional European view that human beings are in good measure defined or described through social characteristics and conditions was, at least theoretically, discounted; the new American, singing songs of himself, would create himself through spontaneous assertions, which might at best graze sublimity and at worst drop to egoism. The American, generically considered, could make his fate through will and intuition, a self-induced grace.
Now this vision can be employed in behalf of a wide range of purposes—myth is always promiscuous. It can show forth the Emerson who, in behalf of “a perfect unfolding of individual nature,” brilliantly analyzed human alienation in a commercial society, attacking the invasion of “Nature by Trade . . . [as it threatened] to upset the balance of man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than Babylon or Rome.” And it can emerge in the Emerson who told his countrymen that “money . . . is in its effects and laws as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral.”
This American vision can be turned toward the authoritarian monomania of Captain Ahab or to the easy fraternity of Ishmael and Queequeg. It can coexist with Daniel Webster and inspire Wendell Phillips. It can be exploited by Social Darwinism and sustain the abolitionists. It can harden into a nasty individualism and yield to the mass conformity Tocqueville dreaded. Arising from the deepest recesses of the American imagination, it resembles Freud’s description of dreams as showing “a special tendency to reduce two opposites to a unity or to represent them as one thing.” No one has to like this vision, but anyone trying to cope with American experience had better acknowledge its power.
This complex of myth and ideology, sentiment and prejudice, for which I use “Emersonianism” as a convenient label, forms the ground of “American exceptionalism.” Politically it has often taken the guise of a querulous antistatism, at times regarded as a native absolute—though that seldom kept many people from aligning it with the demands of big business for government subsidies. It can veer toward an American version of anarchism, suspicious of all laws, forms, and regulations, asserting a fraternity of two, sometimes even one, against all communal structures. Tilt toward the right and you have the worship of “the free market”; tilt toward the left and you have the moralism of American reformers, even the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World. Snakelike, this “Emersonianism” can also subside into or next to the Lockean moderation of the American Constitution and political arrangement. (“The American Whig leaders” of the postrevolutionary period, Sacvan Bercovitch shrewdly remarks, “brought the violence of revolution under control by making revolution a controlling metaphor of national identity.”)
It is notable that most nineteenth-century critics of American society appealed to the standards—violated, they said—of the early republic. They did this not as a tactical device but out of sincere conviction. “We will take up the ball of the Revolution where our fathers dropped it,” declared the agrarian radicals of the New York anti-rent movement, “and roll it to the final consummation of freedom and independence of the Masses.” The social historian Herbert Gutman finds the same rhetoric in the propaganda of the late-nineteenth-century trade unions. And Sacvan Bercovitch finds it in the declarations of a large number of American radicals throughout that century:
William Lloyd Garrison organized the American Anti-Slavery Society as “a renewal of the nation’s founding principles” and of “the national ideal.” Frederick Douglass based his demands for black liberation on America’s “destiny” . . . and “the genius of American institutions. . . .” As a leading historian of the period has remarked: “. . . the typical reformer, for all his uncompromising spirit, was no more alienated—no more truly rebellious—than the typical democrat. . . . He might sound radical while nevertheless associating himself with the fundamental principles and underlying tendencies of America.”27*
It’s a pity that our indigenous nineteenth-century radicalism had largely exhausted itself by the time small socialist groups, mostly immigrant in composition, began to be organized in the 1880s—or at least could not find a point of significant relation with them. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips began with a pure Emersonian invocation: “. . . We are bullied by institutions. . . . Stand on the pedestal of your own individual independence, summon these institutions about you, and judge them.” Once the fight against slavery was won, Phillips moved ahead to other causes, warning against “the incoming flood of the power of incorporated
wealth” and calling—in a political style Richard Hofstadter has described as “Yankee homespun” socialism—for an “equalization of property.”28† He became—almost—a bridge between nineteenth-century radicalism and the new American socialism. And like other American dissenters, he held fast to the tradition of invoking the principles of the republic—principles, he said, that had been violated and betrayed.
Recognizing the power of this traditional response is by no means to acquiesce in the delusions that have often been justified in its name. It isn’t, for example, to acquiesce in the delusion that America has been or is a “classless” society. Or that there has been any lack among us of bloody battles between capital and labor. Or that there are not today, as in the past, glaring injustices that call for remedy. To recognize the power of the American myth of a covenant blessing the new land is simply to recognize a crucial fact in our history—and one that seems to me at least as decisive for the fate of socialism in this country as the material conditions that are usually cited.
If you go through the writings of American socialists you can find glimmerings and half-recognitions that they have had to function in a culture ill-attuned to their fundamental outlook. The keenest statements on this matter come from an odd pair; an Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who had no direct contact with America, and an American radical of the 1930s, Leon Samson, remembered only by historians who make the left their specialty. In his Notebooks Gramsci writes: “The Anglo-Saxon immigrants are themselves an intellectual, but more especially a moral, elite. . . . They import into America . . . apart from moral energy and energy of will, a certain level of civilization, a certain stage of European historical evolution, which, when transplanted by such men into the virgin soil of America, continues to develop the forces implicit in its nature. . . .”29*
In isolation, this passage could almost be taken for a rhapsody celebrating American culture; but Gramsci was a Marxist, and he proceeded to argue that the elements of uniqueness he found in the American past had reached their fulfillment in an apogee of pure capitalism, what he calls “Fordism,” an unprecedented rationalization of production setting America apart from the kinds of capitalism known in Europe.
Leon Samson, a maverick socialist of the 1930s, developed a linked notion, that “Americanism” can be seen as a “substitute socialism”:
Like socialism, Americanism is looked upon . . . as a . . . platonic, impersonal attraction toward a system of ideas, a solemn assent to a handful of final notions—democracy, liberty, opportunity, to all of which the American adheres rationalistically much as a socialist adheres to his socialism—because it does him good, because it gives him work, because, so he thinks, it guarantees his happiness. . . . Every concept in socialism has its substitutive counter-concept in Americanism, and that is why the socialist argument falls so fruitlessly on the American ear. . . .30*
Both Gramsci and Samson were shrewd enough to locate their “exceptionalism” in the mythic depths of our collective imagination, among the inner vibrations of our culture. What one may conclude from their perceptions, as perhaps from my own discussion, is that if socialism is ever to become a major force in America it must either enter deadly combat with and destroy the covenant myth or must look for some way of making its vision of the good society seem a fulfillment of that myth. Both are difficult propositions, but I need hardly say which is the less so.
Many socialists have grasped for intuitions along these lines, but have feared perhaps to articulate them, since they seemed to suggest that so impalpable a thing as a culture can have a greater power of influence than industrial structures, levels of production, and standards of living. And that may explain why many American socialists, including the intelligent ones, found it safer to retreat into the comforts of the Marxist system, with its claims to universal applicability and certain fulfillment.
Would a developed recognition of the problem as I have sketched it here have brought any large or immediate success to American socialism over the past five or six decades? Probably not. All that such a recognition might have done—all!—is to endow the American socialists with a certain independence of mind and a freedom from ideological rigidity.
So, again, we restate our central question. Not “Why is there no socialism in America?” There never was a chance for major socialist victory in this society, this culture. The really interesting question is “Why could we not build a significant socialist movement that would have a sustained influence?” One answer, of course, is that the kind of culture I’ve sketched here makes it almost impossible for a significant minority party to survive for very long. In America, politics, like everything else, tends to be all or nothing. But whether it might yet be possible for a significant minority movement to survive—one that would be political in a broad, educative sense without entangling itself in hopeless electoral efforts—is another question.
Some Inconclusive Conclusions
The analyses and speculations in this article apply mainly to the earlier decades of the century, into the years just before World War II. But the troubles of American—and not only American—socialism in the decades since the thirties must be located in a more terrible—indeed, an apocalyptic—setting. The triumph of Hitlerism called into question a good many traditional assumptions of progress and schemes for human self-determination—called into question the very enterprise of mankind. The rise of Stalinism, a kind of grotesque “double” of the socialist hope, led to the destruction of entire generations, the disillusionment of hundreds of thousands of committed people, the besmirching of the socialist idea itself. As a consequence of the problems thrown up by Hitlerism and Stalinism, there has occurred an inner crisis of belief, a coming-apart of socialist thought. If we consider the crisis of socialism on an international scale within the last fifty years, then clearly these developments count at least as much as, and probably more than, the indigenous American factors discussed here.
There is a school of opinion that holds that American socialism did not fail, but succeeded insofar as it prepared the way, advanced ideas, and trained leaders for mainstream movements of labor, liberalism, and others. This view has an obvious element of truth, perhaps even consolation. Still, no one could be expected to endure the grueling effort to build a socialist movement simply so that it might serve as a “prep school” for other movements. Our final judgment must be more stringent, harder on ourselves: insofar as American socialism proposed ends distinctively its own, it did not succeed.
There is a more sophisticated argument about the fate of American socialism: that finally it did not matter. Europe, with its strong socialist and social-democratic movements, did not achieve democratic socialism; it could reach only the welfare state. The United States, without a major socialist movement, has also reached a welfare state, if at the moment one that is somewhat broken-down. Hence, this argument goes, what does it matter whether or not we have a socialist movement here? I would respond that, largely because of the strength of European socialism, the welfare state in Western Europe has advanced significantly beyond that of the United States, and that there are groups within European socialism, especially in Sweden and France, that now see a need to move “beyond” the welfare state. The presence of these groups has been made possible by the continuing strength of the socialist movement in those countries.
The usual “objective” socioeconomic factors cited as explanations for the difficulties of American socialism are genuine constraints. But I believe that the distinctiveness of American culture has played the more decisive part in thwarting socialist fortunes. And even after both kinds of reasons—the socioeconomic and the cultural—are taken into account, there remains an important margin with regard to intelligence or obtuseness, correct or mistaken strategies, which helped to determine whether American socialism was to be a measurable force or an isolated sect. That the American socialist movement must take upon itself a considerable portion of the responsibility for its failures, I have tried to show el
sewhere.
In the United States, socialist movements have usually thrived during times of liberal upswing. They have hastened their own destruction whenever they have pitted themselves head-on against liberalism. If there is any future for socialism in America, it is through declaring itself to be the partial ally of a liberalism with which it shares fundamental democratic values and agrees upon certain immediate objectives; after that, it can be said that socialists propose to extend and thereby fulfill traditional liberal goals by moving toward a democratization of economic and social life. If some liberals express agreement with that perspective, then all the better.
American socialism has suffered from a deep-grained sectarianism, in part a result of the natural inclination of small groups to huddle self-protectively in their loneliness, and in part, especially during the two or three decades after 1917, a result of the baneful influence of Bolshevism. At least as important have been the fundamentalist, evangelical, and deeply antipolitical impulses rooted in our religious and cultural past, impulses that helped to shape the socialist movements in the times of Debs and Thomas far more than their participants recognized. A damaging aspect of this sectarianism was a tendency to settle into postures of righteous moral witness, to the disadvantage of mundane politics.
During its peak moments American socialism tried to combine two roles—that of moral protest and that of political reform—which in America had traditionally been largely separate, and which our political arrangements make it very difficult to unite. In principle, a socialist movement ought to fulfill both of these roles: moral protest largely beyond the political process, and social reform largely within it. A strong argument could be made that the two roles are, or should be, mutually reinforcing, with the one providing moral luster and the other practical effectiveness. But it would take an extraordinary set of circumstances (say, the moment when abolitionism flourished or the moment when the protest against the Vietnam War reached its peak) for a movement in this country to combine the two roles successfully. And what’s more, it would take a movement with a degree of sophistication and flexibility that has rarely been available on the left, or anywhere else along the political spectrum.
