It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States [Hardcover]

Gary Marks (Author), Seymour Martin Lipset (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2000

Socialist parties have been major forces in every democratic country in the world, yet they have played a surprisingly insignificant role in American politics. Why the United States should constitute an exception has been a critical question of American history and political development. The authors shed light on why it has not been possible to establish a durable socialist party in the US and provide important insights into American society and politics. Comparing America with other English-speaking countries, the authors eschew conventional explanations of socialism's failure to present a fuller understanding of how multiple factors combined to seal socialism's fate. Further chapters examine the distinctive character of American trade unions, immigration, the fragmentation of the American working class, socialist strategies and repression, concluding with an analysis of American political exceptionalism up to the present day.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Marx decreed in Capital that the most industrially advanced nation would usher the world into the bright dawn of socialism. But it didn't happen in America, the pinnacle of capitalist achievement. This broad but unambitious survey addresses one of the classic questions of American historiography: What accounts for the weakness of working-class radicalism in the U.S.? Preferring to restate the highlights of an admittedly worked-over literature on the subject rather than make significant new arguments of their own, Lipset (professor of public policy at George Mason University) and Marks (political science at UNC-Chapel Hill) present a "political sociology" of socialism's American flop. Lacking the feudal history that spurred Europe's early labor movements, the authors explain, American workers were "born conservatives," already enjoying social mobility and a relative prosperity. Moreover, strong constitutional limits on government power thwarted collectivists from the get-go and led homegrown radicals toward libertarian or anarchist camps. America's invincible two-party system made it all but impossible for a socialist candidate to succeed; since the Civil War, the authors point out, just nine non-major party candidates have won more than 5% of the national vote in any presidential election. What surprises there are in this book pop up in little-known annals of U.S. radicalism, such as the North Dakota Nonpartisan League, a strikingly successful contingent that in 1919 proposed a system of state ownership, only to be bitterly attacked by America's socialist party as an opportunistic rival. Green parties, the authors say, are the latest venue for utopian reform desires; again, the U.S. remains exceptional, as they point out, with no influential environmental party. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This history marks a great leap forward in scholarship about socialism in America, particularly on the American Socialist Party. Lipsett (public policy, George Mason Univ.) and Marks (political science, Univ. of North Carolina) contrast the brief rise and long decline of the American Socialist Party with the steady progress of social democratic and labor parties in other Western industrialized nations. The diversity of the American working class, American individualism, and the determination of Socialists not to ally with the labor movement or other political parties head the long list of reasons why "it didn't happen here." The broad scope of this work (it covers both the Socialist Party and its offshoot, the Communist Party), its historical detail, and its unsentimental analysis complement recent works on specific aspects of American socialism, e.g., Jim Bissett's Agrarian Socialism in America (Univ. of Oklahoma, 1999). Highly recommended for all academic and larger public libraries.
Duncan Stewart, State Historical Society of Iowa Lib., Iowa City
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (July 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393040984
• ISBN-13: 978-0393040982
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #562,066 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Socialism in the American Political System, November 27, 2000

By 

Steven S. Berizzi - See all my reviews

This review is from: It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (Hardcover)

This ambitious and generally excellent book by two veteran political sociologists seeks to explain why the United States, alone among industrial societies, lacks a significant socialist movement or labor party. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, who currently teaches at George Mason University of Virginia, and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, they are addressing " a classic question of American historiography." That is an accurate assessment, and the authors tackle it with intelligence, imagination, and useful comparative analysis. In an era of global capitalism triumphant, I suspect that most readers will not be interested in a long, albeit erudite, discussion of why the working-class challenge to industrial capitalism failed in the United States. Nevertheless, I recommend this book because it offers deep insights into American society which go far beyond answering the narrow question presented in the title.

Lipset and Marks present three principal reasons for the failure of socialism in the United States. First, that it is "but one instance of the ineffectiveness of third parties in the United States over the last century." Second, socialists and labor unionists "never succeeded in bringing the major union movement, the American Federation of Labor and later the AFL-CIO, to support and independent working-class political party." Third, "immigration created an extremely diverse labor force in which class coherence was undermined by ethnic, racial, and religious identity." Lipset and Marks devote a long, detailed chapter to each reason, and they are the heart of the book, along with the authors' fascinating discussion of the socialists' tendency to battle among themselves over issues of "ideological purity." Rarely has the history of the American labor movement and its political failures been surveyed so effectively.

Even general readers will instantly grasp why, as Lipset and Marks put it, the Great Depression "presented the Socialists with their final opportunity to build a viable political party." Especially in the early 1930s, in the authors view, "[r]ampant poverty, mass unemployment, widespread bankruptcies, and the public's general uncertainty about the future gave the Socialists grounds for believing that they could finally create a durable mass movement." That failed to happen and, in 1932, the Socialist candidate for president received only 2.5% of the total popular vote. The authors write: "Socialists were bitterly disappointed by the vote for [Norman] Thomas in 1932." Even in this time of obvious economic crisis, most American voters refused to turn to a third party. One reason certainly was the Socialists' extreme positions. According to Lipset and Marks, "the majority of Socialists stood far to the left in the first years of the Roosevelt administration, sharply attacking the New Deal as state capitalism." President Roosevelt shrewdly adopted "leftist rhetoric," offered "progressive policies in exchange for support from radical and economically depressed constituencies," and recruited "actual leaders of protest groups by convincing them that they were part of his coalition." At the end of their chapter on the 1930s, Lipset and Marks conclude that the "Great Depression politicized American labor," but the political party which labor embraced was the Democrats, not the Socialists. After World War II, socialism never had a chance. Communists and their fellow travelers were demonized, and leftists of all other shades were marginalized. In contrast with the conventional wisdom, Lipset and Marks make the important observation that "the Communists had lost most of their influence and membership before (Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist) crusade." They assert correctly, therefore, that "the long history of repression of American socialists cannot explain their failure to establish a viable political party." I take that remark to mean that repression, alone, does not account for the failure of socialism in the United States, but it certainly was a factor.

Lipset and Marks wisely concede early in the book that the question they pose - Why did socialism fail in the United States? - "may never be ultimately resolved." But, at the beginning of their final chapter, the authors come close to an authoritative answer when they incisively observe that the "United States is the only Western democracy to have a party system dominated by two parties, both of which are sympathetic to liberal capitalism and neither of which has inherited a socialist or social democratic vision of society." Lipset and Marks explain: "Distinctive elements of American culture - antistatism and individualism - negated the appeal of socialism for the mass of American workers for much of the twentieth century. Socialism, with its emphasis on statism, socialization of the means of production, and equality through taxation, are at odds with the dominant values of American culture." More than anything else, therefore, socialism may have conflicted with the American political tradition and its long-standing social and economic ideals.

Lipset and Marks are correct that socialism promises "to eliminate poverty, racism, sexism, pollution, and war," and its program clearly has its attractions, especially, as the authors observe, "to the idealism inherent in the position of young people and intellectuals." However, some of the most attractive features of the socialist platform have been coopted by the mainstream political parties. This may explain why moderate middle-class reform in the 200h century (progressivism, the New Deal, and the Great Society) has succeeded, while its working-class variant (socialism) failed. This book is not merely about of why socialism did not take root in the United States. It is about the essential characteristics of the political and socio-economic order in American society.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A complex and convincing story, July 26, 2000

By 

Jussi Bjorling - See all my reviews

This review is from: It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (Hardcover)

Gary Marks and Seymour Lipset may seem to be taking on an easy mark in their book explaining why socialism never made much headway in the United States. However, they are doing something much broader and more interesting than simply explaining a single failure; instead, they have constructed a theory of American political life that shows (according to them) that socialism NEVER COULD HAVE been successful in the United States. In some ways, it is a pity that this book's title will probably limit its appeal to students of socialism, because it addresses far more.

Their thesis has many, many supporting arguments, but the two most important to me seemed to be first, that American political culture is naturally predisposed against collectivism and class warfare. The authors trace this tendency back to 19th-century economic and social conditions, and discuss how it interacted with incoming groups of immigrants. Second, the authors discuss the inability of socialism to offer the most attractive vision of the future to the working class (unlike in Europe, where the unions are all socialist). This failure meant that socialism could never attract a mass base, and as a result was confined to the vocal but numerically insignificant leftist intelligentsia.

I did not agree with everything in this book, but I found it extremely thought-provoking and recommend it wholeheartedly.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thorough analysis of complex subject, tho rather laborious, August 1, 2000

By 

Richard E. Hegner (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (Hardcover)

The authors take on the perennial question of why a strong socialist movement never developed in the United States from virtually every imaginable angle--including American "exceptionalism," our electoral system, American federalism, the nature of unionism in the U.S., persection of leftists, etc. The emphasis here is on thorough--they have obviously reviewed all the major social science thought and research on this issue and added some original thinking of their own. (The footnotes are extensive, if not somewhat overwhelming.) They seem at their best when they approach the issues from the perspectives of political science and history, less so when they attempt sociological or economic explanations or attempt to draw lessons from international comparisons or multivariate analysis. (They frequently make comparisons with the experiences of such nations as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which seem to verge on irrelevance in places.) The style of the book is that of a social science textbook--at once both its strength and its weakness, in that the book's theses are well developed but hammered home rather repetitively. The summaries at the end of each chapter are especially useful. The book is something of an effort to read, given the amount of detail offered, but it is a worthwhile and thought-provoking investment of time.