A spectre is haunting the U.S.

This past six weeks or so in Clare Making Good Decisions, we have the following: Decide to do a DSA presentation on American history right when I get back from Vegas. Wait three weeks before putting in a request at the library for Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Pick it up from the library and panic that it's like 700 pages long. Remember that you picked up a shorter book on American socialist history from Verso at one of their ebook sales last year. Then, even though it is less than two weeks to the presentation and you only have it blocked out and not fully drafted, procrastinate on finishing the slides by reading all of John Nichols's The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition... Socialism first — much of it in the bath, with the Kindle in a plastic bag, in order to panic less.

 

Anyway. The "S" Word is pretty much the right book for the job here, although I should have started reading it at least a week earlier than I did instead of reading all kinds of Thomas Paine that wasn't Agrarian Justice. At about 300 pages, it's short enough to be readable but long enough to give a decent treatment to the figures it discusses and the stories it tells. 

 

This book is very definitely Of Its Time, and in this case, its time was the year 2010, given its January 2011 publication date. While the history it covers is presented more or less chronologically, the framework for the whole book is basically Glenn Beck Is Wrong About Obama Being A Socialist (and about Thomas Paine being a right-libertarian, and about... well, everything). It's a very strong reminder of the particular flavor of bananapants stupid the political discourse was at a particular political moment, and man, there is basically nothing I miss about 2010. I graduated college that year, and it sucked. (To be clear: I loved college. The 2010 job market, not so much.) 

 

The author himself is not quite a socialist; he identifies with the Midwestern progressive populist tradition, which has a strong history of socialist influence but is not always explicitly anti-capitalist. The book is also not necessarily pitched toward socialists; Nichols is very clear that his purpose in writing the book is, besides dunking on Glenn Beck, to give Americans of any political stripe a better appreciation for the actual history and influence of socialism in America so that we can broaden the political discourse and not be a bunch of idiots. The book is somewhat implicitly aimed at the liberal-left half of the political spectrum; it is full of values assumptions that would not necessarily speak to American conservatives, like that slavery was bad and helping people is good, not to mention the notion that it would be a positive development to broaden the political discourse and not be idiots. 

 

I was pleased to see that the chronology of this book kicks off with lots of appreciation for Thomas Paine, the most left-wing of the Founding Fathers, and contains much about both his politics in life and his influence on later generations of American, French, and British radicals. Paine, obviously, was not actually a socialist, since socialism wasn't a thing back then, but he was a definite intellectual precursor to it, and many of the 19th-century early socialists were referred to as "Paineites," which is a great term that we should start a caucus for. 

 

Moving on from Paine, Nichols discusses figures as diverse as the poet Walt Whitman, labor activist Fanny Wright, Tribune editor Horace Greeley, a radical young lawyer called Abraham Lincoln (who was in correspondence with Karl Marx during the Civil War), and Socialist Party heads Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. A big chunk of the book is dedicated to Victor Berger, the first Socialist elected to Congress, who was blocked from taking his seat by the rest of Congress, TWICE, because he was elected at the height of the First Red Scare, and then launched a bunch of high-profile lawsuits to "put teeth" into the First Amendment. Nichols also discusses the "sewer socialists" of the early 20th century and the few holdouts that continued electing Socialist leadership well into the 20th century, such as Milwaukee. 

 

Another chapter is dedicated to A. Philip Randolph, mentioned in many high school history books in passing as the founder of the first majority-black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It turns out that organizing that particular union was a massive 10-year endeavor, and somehow Randolph still had time to do like 50 other awesome things that nobody ever told me about. He stared down FDR into desegregating the defense industries and Truman into desegregating the armed forces. Later, he mentored a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was lead organizer of the March on Washington in '63. From this, Nichols segues into the role of socialists in the "new left," and the occasionally strained relationship between the "old left" and the "new left." 

 

Toward the end of the book there's some very interesting stuff about the career of Michael Harrington, which should be of especial interest to DSA members, particularly new ones who might not know anything about Harrington other than that he founded DSA (and that people occasionally try to use him as a club for or against their comrades in poorly defined sectarian infighting). I've never read any Harrington but everything I've read about Harrington makes him sound like a very interesting character, so I should maybe read some of his books one of these days (I have been saying this since I joined DSA, though, so what really needs to happen is for somebody else to run a Harrington reading group and I may or may not attend). 

 

In terms of actionable lessons that current-day socialists can take from the book, there are some, although they're probably a bit open to interpretation, since we're already a) not afraid of the word "socialism" and b) aware that Glenn Beck is a twit who doesn't know his arse from his elbow. Leaning on constitutional redemption rhetoric seems to be a good idea, one that's not always effective immediately but which can eventually make inroads in a way that straight anti-Americanism generally doesn't. Another lesson is that socialists can get quite a lot of stuff done when they can convince non-socialists to back them up on a specific issue or policy, but this often has the effect of eventually disempowering them as a unique voice — it is never really the socialists or socialism itself that goes entirely mainstream. Also, we really need to get louder about claiming the memory of activists who have been watered down into respectable single-issue reformers in the public memory. 

 

Anyway. I need to finish this presentation, don't I? Aaaaaaaahhhhh.