Volume 11, Number 4 · September 12, 1968
Whatever Happened to Socialism?
By Christopher Lasch
The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925
by James Weinstein
Monthly Review Press, 350 pp., $10.00
Critics of Society: Radical Thought in North America
by T.B. Bottomore
Pantheon, 145 pp., $4.95
Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America
by James Burkhart Gilbert
Wiley, 291 pp., $6.95
In the years immediately preceding the First World War, the socialist movement laid down deep roots in the United States, in spite of many obstacles. James Weinstein, in a brilliant study of the Socialist party that will alter many of the prevailing assumptions about American radicalism, shows that at its numerical peak in 1912, the party had 118,000 members well distributed throughout the country. It claimed 323 English and foreign-language publications with a total circulation probably in excess of two million. The largest of the socialist newspapers, The Appeal to Reason of Girard, Kansas, had a weekly circulation of 761,747. In 1912, the year Eugene V. Debs polled 6 percent of the Presidential vote, Socialists held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, including 79 mayors in 24 states. As late as 1918, they elected 32 state legislators. In 1916, they elected Meyer London to Congress and made important gains in the municipal elections of several large cities.
Review, 6179 words
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