The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912

by Ira Kipnis

“This is the epic story of the struggle to build a mass socialist movement in ragtime America. Kipnis was a brilliant historian, and this is his enduring gift to activists." —Mike Davis A new edition of the out-of-print classic.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

A Chicago native, Ira Kipnis earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1950. He taught political science, American history and constitutional law at the University of Chicago until 1953, when he resigned from the faculty after invoking the Fifth Amendment during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on communist activity rather than testifying about his colleagues' political views. After his resignation Kipnis earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and became a specialist in real estate law.

Reviews

[Mikaellyng · Rating 2 out of 5]

Albeit an interesting read and great research, Kipnis arguments throughout this book are to be taken with a grain of salt. Written in the early 50s from a communist standpoint it is obvious that Kipnis was tackling the history of the socialist party and its failures in a dubious polemical fashion.
Firstly, Kipnis posits a view of the failure of the SPA in 1912 which takes for granted many internal and external factors which led up to presidential election and subsequent decline of the party.

Generalizations go further with Kipnis' analysis of a center-left-right divisions within the party, which did not become evident until the 1910s. In order to explain the failure of the party, Kipnis argues in favour of a largely incoherent "SPA left" which remained a minority (except during periods of alignments with Debs) against the reformist right faction. Avoiding properly analyzing the international context of 1912, the US political climate, and party activity, Kipnis argues that the primary factor here was the reformist right led by Berger, Hillquit and Spargo. SPA's gradual shift from largely proletarian to a party led by middle-class and petite-bourgeoise reformers is an interesting point of contention. Yet, Kipnis posits this not as a general trend of most of the contemporary socialist parties, but as an isolated instance. The general argument in this book seems to only put forward the idea of betrayal by the party right (subsequently support for the left which went on to form the communist party) through overemphasizing their role and avoiding other and in my opinion more important external and internal factors.

Source materials alone however makes this a necessary read for those interested in the history of the US left, if read alongside the works of Daniel Bell, James Weinstein, David A. Shannon and perhaps more recently with Jack Ross.

[Henry Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this was not the book I was expecting it was a compelling read.

Based on the title, I imagined this would be a bottom-up social history of a broadly-defined socialist movement.

Instead, it was specifically focused on the Socialist Party elite, using official party documents and affiliated newspapers almost exclusively as its sources.

You will learn a lot about Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit and various other leaders of the SP. You will learn very little about socialist organizing or the party's the rank-and-file.

But still, many of the elite battles that make up virtually all of the book's narrative are eerily similar to the issues that leftists still face today. Should we be reforming society or trying to remake it? Should we be focusing on getting the government's boot off our neck, even if that requires major compromise at the ballot box, or should we be more selective in our electoral work?

Moreover, it paints a much different picture of the socialist movement than I was expecting. I imagined turn-of-the-century leftism to be orthodox Marxism, agrarian populism and the IWW. While these were all present to one degree or another, the book argues that middle-class reformism, anti-populism, and craft unionism were what dominated the SP during this time.

Kipnis does not hide the fact that he dislikes this. He openly sides with what he calls the SP's left wing. In his conclusion, which can almost be read on its own if the reader wants a quick summary of the high points, he accuses both the left and right wings of undermining the movement but he saves his harshest words for the right -- led by Victor Berger -- for essentially being no different than the era's progressives.

In all, an eye-opening book that undermines a lot of today's leftist celebration of some of the Socialist Party's successes during this time. In Kipnis' telling, many of the most successful Socialists were hardly socialists at all as we might think of the term today, but were rather bourgeois good government types who shied away from radically altering society.

[Brian Napoletano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Iris Kipnis' "The American Socialist Movement: 1897-1912" provides a detailed account of the politics that dominated the Socialist Party in the United States during this timeframe. While the SP gained an impressive number of votes in the 1912 elections, it ultimately failed to fulfill its declared purpose, which was to change the United States from a capitalist to a socialist society. Well before 1912, the Socialist Party had divided itself into two factions: the Left faction and the Center-Right faction. According to Kipnis, the Left Faction devoted itself to building a labor movement and largely eschewed political struggles, both within the party and against the capitalist parties. The Center-Right faction, on the other hand, focused virtually all of its efforts on electoral politics, ignoring most of the labor movement and compromising on basic socialist principles to win support from middle class voters. While they did succeed in winning some local elections, including a seat in the US House of Representatives, Socialist Party candidates accomplished little while they were in office. The electoral orientation of the party persisted, however, in large part because of the control that the Right exercised over the party hierarchy. Even before 1912, the Center-Right faction controlled most of the party leadership and eliminated many of the democratic aspects of the Party, although they did not officially expel the Left until 1919.

Kipnis' account of this growth and evolution of the Socialist Party offers interesting insights into the people who lead the party, as well as the challenges facing the contemporary socialist movement. Issues that plague the movement today, such as factionalism and opportunism, were also faced by the early socialists in the US. Anyone who is interested in building a revolutionary workers' movement could gain a great deal from a reading of Kipnis' account of the Socialist Party.

[David Damiano · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book represents the first attempt to document the history of the Socialist Party of America. Perhaps because of that, I had fairly low expectations. The first stab at anything, much less something as complicated and all-encompassing as a mass movement such as socialism, is inevitably going to miss the mark in places. And while Kipnis’ book is by no means without its flaws, I was impressed by how fairly he treated the subject and its personalities.

I think it’s clear that Kipnis is sympathetic with the “Left Wing” (Debs, Haywood, Titus, etc.), but he ultimately argues that both camps – the revolutionists (aka impossibilists) and the constructivists – played a role in the party’s ultimate failure to bring socialism to America. The “Left Wing,” according to Kipnis, was too rigid ideologically. They were unwilling to engage with workers in the AFL and devoted themselves to the IWW, which they considered a properly revolutionary organization, even though it was clear that the Wobblies would never represent more than a small fraction of the working class. Moreover, they were unclear on the purpose of political action. Bill Haywood embodies the paradox. He was a key figure in both the IWW and the Socialist Party, yet he failed to synthesize syndicalism with political socialism. The best he could offer was that electing socialists was critical for the preservation of trade unionism because it would keep the “policeman’s club” in the hand of the workers.

Kipnis reserves the brunt of his criticism for the “Right Wing” of the party. He argues that when the party was founded, “Right Wing” socialists, headlined by Victor Berger and his Milwaukee movement, were in the minority and that a “Center-Left” coalition dominated the leadership. By 1906, however, the Center faction aligned itself with the Right and increasingly adopted an opportunistic mindset, downplaying the revolutionary agenda of socialism in order to gain middle-class votes. The constructivist version of socialism neutered the revolutionary message of Marx and Engels, and reduced the “co-operative commonwealth” to little more than public ownership of municipal services. By 1912, these conservative socialists had seized control over the party and managed to expel the radical elements which supported Haywood, the IWW, and industrial unionism. The party ceased to represent a radical agenda and instead had become nothing more than a left wing of the progressive movement. Consequently, the election of Woodrow Wilson and the leftward shift of the Democratic Party during his presidency essentially co-opted the Socialist Party’s platform and effectively siphoned off support for socialism.

I’m unconvinced by this general argument. James Weinstein in particular (in Decline of Socialism) presents practically the opposite argument, claiming that the exodus of the “Left Wing” had little effect on the party’s prospects and it was only the repression of the World War I years that hastened its demise. I think Weinstein’s assessment of the party is too rosy whereas Kipnis’ is too dour. But that debate is beyond the scope of this review. Ultimately, I think this book, for all the shortcomings in its thesis, represents a masterful piece of scholarship. It is abundantly clear that Kipnis was an incredible researcher and a brilliant historian. It truly is a shame that McCarthyism cut his career short.

My main criticism is that Kipnis takes the labels “Left,” “Center,” and “Right” far too literally while also largely ignoring the effect that geography and regional concerns played in determining the ideology of individual socialists or locals. I can understand that this generalization of the party into three (or really two) camps was necessary considering the scope of the subject at hand (and that Kipnis had virtually no pre-existing scholarship to build off). But it does serve to suggest that the party was literally divided into distinctive camps and that there was no significant overlap between the two. Eugene Debs provides an illustrative example of a character whose beliefs often straddled the divide. And especially when looking beyond the scope of this study (which ends in 1912), the actions of Hillquit and the supposed “centrists” during the war years demonstrates that a belief in constructive socialism did not obviate revolutionary principles, per se.

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a very good book, but it essentially ends with the expulsion of IWW leader Big Bill Haywood from the Socialist Party Executive. That was a loss, although Haywood's ultraleft rhetoric made it easy for the right-wing of the party to get rid of him. But the central leader of the left-wing at the time was Debs, not Haywood. And in 1918, when the Communist Party was being formed, most of the left-wing Socialist Party members joined it. There were also some former members of the IWW, like James P. Cannon, some former Socialist Labor Party members, and others. To see how this developed, one must turn to Cannon's First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant, and Revolutionary Continuity: Birth of the Communist Movement 1918-1922 by Farrell Dobbs.

Bill Haywood jumped bail and went to the Soviet Union. He met with Cannon, and together they came up with the idea of the International Labor Defense (ILD) to defend all the prisoners whether Wobblies, anarchists, or just labor frame-up victims. This committee, led by Cannon, was supported by Debs and many others, and helped the new Communist Party to break out of its isolation. The recruitment of labor activist William Z. Foster also gave a big boost.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers a very interesting period in American politics, when the 2nd Socialist International was ascendant, and the big divide among American Socialists was between political action and industrial action. This was the period of time when left-wing leaders of the Socialist Party, including Bill Haywood and others, founded the Industrial Workers of the World, that took a strictly syndicalist approach to regime change, but advocated political action for the purpose of controlling the police to prevent them from breaking strikes, which the IWW saw as the main weapon of the working class to bring about fundamental social and economic changes. In a few places, the minute descriptions of factional disputes (which abounded) is a bit tedious, but overall this book provides fascinating insights into the questions that consumed radical working class movements throughout the 20th century and down to the present day.

[Carsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

honestly would recommend, Kipnis goes into depth about the various contradictions and tensions in the Socialist movement of this period, like craft vs industrial unionism, pandering to the middle class vs working class, reform vs revolution, political vs union action, etc.