Volume 26, Number 1 · February 8, 1979
The Reasons Why
By Jerome Karabel
Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?
by Werner Sombart, translated by Patricia M. Hocking, by C.T. Husbands
M.E. Sharpe, 187 pp., $20.00
The American working class has never produced a genuinely mass-based political party of its own. In this it is different from the working class in every other advanced capitalist country. Yet there was a time when bitter struggles between American labor and capital—more acute than those in many European countries—seemed likely to bring such a party into being. The Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901 with 10,000 members, had, by 1912, grown to 118,000. More impressive still, it had elected some 1,200 public officials throughout the US, including the mayors of such cities as Milwaukee, Schenectady, Berkeley, and Flint. Some 300 socialist periodicals appeared. The Appeal to Reason, a weekly journal published in Kansas, reached a circulation of 761,747 in 1913.
Review, 4008 words
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