It is just the kind of story that the politically savvy president might have entirely fabricated, when Roosevelt met with Upton Sinclair a few days after he had won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination of California in a landslide. Yet Franklin Delano Roosevelt's improbable yarn about his mother reading from The Jungle at table and spoiling his breakfast may, in fact, be true. Although Roosevelt was twenty-four and in his first year of marriage to Eleanor when The Jungle appeared in 1906, Roosevelt's mother lived within a few blocks of the newly wedded couple and was infamously involved in their daily affairs. In an ambitious and publicly spirited household such as theirs, she might well have prescribed Sinclair's sensational exposé as breakfast reading, especially as it touched the fortunes of the Theodore Roosevelt administration with which both Franklin and Eleanor had family ties. At their wedding, “Uncle Ted” had walked Eleanor down the aisle.1 In any case, in September 1934 Roosevelt needed to encourage Sinclair's belief that he was entirely in accord with the Sinclair candidacy; he did not want trouble with someone who was very possibly going to be the next governor of California. But he also knew how uncertain the election of Sinclair remained—Sinclair had, after all, been a registered Socialist a year earlier and, as we have seen, his plan to End Poverty In California continued to bear the socialist stamp. To be associated too closely with Sinclair—especially if he lost, but even perhaps if he won—would be politically risky. Hence, a story in which Roosevelt connected himself to Sinclair's literary celebrity in 1906 as opposed to his candidacy in 1934 established just the right distance. When Sinclair repeated the story to the press, as he predictably did within a few hours of the meeting with Roosevelt,2 the press and the public learned only that the president had had just about the same squeamish response to The Jungle as practically every other reader in 1906. But such a story recounting the reading of a novel almost three decades earlier could hardly be construed as an endorsement of the present-day Democrat and candidate.
Whether true or invented, though, the story also suggests Roosevelt's conversance with socialism—his awareness of the movement, his acknowledgment of the place of the socialist critique in American culture. In short, it hints at the subterranean persistence and the gradual emergence of socialist ideals and programs in American politics. If Roosevelt could not directly associate with Sinclair's long-standing effort to overturn the profit system, the popularity of Sinclair's candidacy, along with the economic crisis within American capitalism, could help to provide the impetus necessary for Roosevelt's New Deal to challenge and change important elements of that system. Yet Sinclair, together with other American socialists, shaped the New Deal not only as outside political levers. They also helped to identify which elements of the system to change, and how. They had helped to define New Deal ideology and rhetoric from the inside and long before it had crystalized as the New Deal. Even as Sinclair was discarded as a person unsuitable for public office, the rhetoric and programs that he and other socialists had long been advocating were adopted and in part implemented by Roosevelt and his political associates. Roosevelt could say little more about his affinity with Sinclair than that The Jungle had once spoiled his breakfast. The New Deal's social democratic elements make apparent, however, that Roosevelt and his deputies understood and assimilated the social ends and means advocated by Sinclair and other socialists of the Second Internationale—whether or not Roosevelt could recall the particulars of The Jungle's polemical ending as well as the parts about rat feces and human flesh being processed as canned food.
To assess the degree of the cultural assimilation and implementation of social democratic ideals and practices in the era of the New Deal, I will begin with the immediate and demonstrable effects that the EPIC campaign had upon California politics and then proceed to the more equivocal and yet definite influence that socialism exerted upon the New Deal itself. Because, though, that influence was far from complete and the aims of the New Deal itself were but incompletely realized, I will also address some of those legacies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American socialism that had to be pursued outside the transformations taking place in the federal government. Finally, I will turn to legacies of the American socialist tradition that must especially be fought for in our own day, both because they have been neglected and because they may lie within hope of realization.
NEW DEAL FOR CALIFORNIA, EPIC FOR THE NATION
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
The influence of EPIC is easy enough to trace within California politics. While soon after the 1934 election the EPIC organization was caught up in internecine battles between social democrats and Communists, the EPIC legislators that had been elected went to Sacramento and went to work. Senator Culbert Olson, newly elected from the Los Angeles senatorial district that was the most populous of any in the state, took the lead in systematically introducing legislation corresponding to the planks of the EPIC platform, in versions roughly corresponding to the revised EPIC plan that Sinclair had described in the summer of 1934 in Immediate EPIC: reduction of the state sales tax; institution of a graduated state income tax, an estate tax, a state business tax, and a tax on large tracts of undeveloped land; creation of pension programs for the elderly, for the disabled and the blind, and for widows with dependent children; and, finally, state funding for self-help cooperatives. One by one these were reported out of committee, sometimes recommended, sometimes not, and all were either voted down or left to die on the Senate floor—except, that is, for the bill providing funding for the cooperatives, which was approved and signed by Governor Merriam. It was, of course, poignantly ironic that state support for co-ops, meant by Sinclair to be the entering wedge for socialism, was the one piece of EPIC legislation that was signed into law during the annus mirabilis projected in I, Governor—and by a formerly reactionary governor. What had meant the coming of Bolshevism if Sinclair had been elected was simply another pragmatic measure for dealing with the Depression in Merriam's administration. This was, however, of a piece with the New Deal conversion of Frank Merriam that the EPIC campaign had helped miraculously to effect. As historian James Gregory points out, Merriam infuriated conservatives in his own party by cooperating extensively on the introduction of New Deal programs in public relief and new taxes.3
EPIC also helped open the road for progressives throughout California politics. Former EPIC activists and voter registrants were at the forefront of Culbert Olson's successful quest to unseat Merriam in 1938—and staged public demonstrations, ultimately also successful, pressuring newly elected governor Olson to stick by his campaign pledge to pardon Tom Mooney, a direct holdover from Sinclair's EPIC campaign promises. Olson's successor, three-term Republican governor Earl Warren, had advised Merriam to reinvent himself in mid-1934 as a pro–New Deal progressive—and Warren, of course, subsequently led the most liberal, activist phase in U.S. Supreme Court history. Another future governor got his start in the 1934 campaign as well: future Democratic governor Edmund “Pat” Brown had been active in the Republican-Progressive campaign of third-place finisher Raymond Haight, whom Sinclair justly described as having split the liberal vote with him and denied Merriam a majority victory. Even losing candidates from the EPIC ranks went on to win public office, support liberal causes, and help in the implementation of the New Deal. Sinclair's running mate, Sheridan Downey, became a two-term U.S. senator from California. Jerry Voorhis, who in 1934 ran and lost as an EPIC candidate in a safe Republican house district, went on to become a U.S. representative from 1937 to 1951 and a lifelong champion of and expert on producer cooperatives.4
Gregory observes that both parties were deeply factionalized after 1934: Olson's governorship was in large measure thwarted by the combination of old-fashioned machine Democrats with conservative Republicans, and the party of Earl Warren also gave plenty of latitude for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.5 The red-baiting tactic used to devastating effect on Sinclair—and exposed relentlessly in I, Candidate—would continue to work, some of the time: it backfired in the Merriam campaign against Olson in 1938, but it succeeded when an upstart Republican named Richard Nixon used it to bring down Voorhis, like Sinclair a former socialist, in 1950. But the crucial point, also acknowledged by Gregory, is that Sinclair and EPIC, in combination with FDR and the New Deal, made possible these liberal factions as vigorous caucuses, even if it did not secure the means for them to hold power single-handedly or continuously. Within the Democratic Party, the liberal faction went from being small and ineffectual to being the largest and most powerful bloc, and indeed one of the largest and most powerful forces within the national Democratic Party to this day. This political reality, which today seems self-evident and inevitable, can be traced directly to the EPIC campaign, which, even as it transformed the state Democratic Party into a much more radical and activist organization, had the distinction of recruiting enough new members to bring the party into the majority in the state, a position that it then enjoyed for the first time and it has not yet relinquished.
The influence of EPIC nationally is somewhat more a matter of conjecture and debate. Writing in 1933 in I, Governor, Sinclair had announced an ideological kinship between his plans and the president's as well as his intention to exert a further radicalizing influence upon Roosevelt: “I have watched with satisfaction a new birth of the Democratic principle under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He has barely got started on his journey, but he is headed in the right direction, towards a government control of business and industry—and I am shoving!”6 Certainly a prima facie case for Sinclair's success in “shoving” may be built from his subsequent primary victory, his reception at Hyde Park and among the New Dealers, and even the liberalizing pull of the EPIC campaign upon the Merriam administration. And then there is the tantalizing fact that Sinclair's near-miss in the off-year elections came just as several of the more ambitious, socialistic provisions of the first New Deal were being ruled unconstitutional and Roosevelt was preparing a push for the passage of a second round of legislation, the “second New Deal” whose enactments proved to be just as radical and, because more durable, much more revolutionary. Was there some connection between EPIC and the second New Deal that went beyond historical contiguity?
Absolutely so—argues Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his monumental history of the New Deal. Schlesinger singles out EPIC as foremost among several protest movements that constituted a “Politics of Upheaval” early in the Roosevelt administration: specifically, “The EPIC campaign … left behind a ferment of local radicalism not unlike that stirred by Floyd Olson and the La Follettes—a new popular militancy, fairly loyal to Roosevelt and the Democratic party but constituting a leftward pressure on the New Deal…. committed to a thesis of American exceptionalism and sharply opposed to the Communists.”7 For Schlesinger, the sharp antinomy on the progressive-socialist spectrum lies not between socialism and liberalism, but between the Communists and everyone else on the left, for the more radical “popular militancy” largely complements New Deal progressivism, to the point of preserving American uniqueness.
Current historian David Kennedy reasserts the divide between the socialists and New Deal progressives—to the detriment of the former and credit of the latter. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize–winning Freedom from Fear groups EPIC with still more unconventional and unstable movements that Americans were wise to reject: the Townsend revolving pension plan, the Share Our Wealth platform of Huey Long, and the anti–Wall Street crusade of Father Charles Coughlin.8 Kennedy dismisses the insurgent movements as threatening “financial soundness and political prudence” and distances the New Deal from their political-economic schemes, arguing that Roosevelt was not “stealing their thunder” when he had “stocked his own legislative arsenal with thunder enough.”9 Yet even Kennedy's own account of the relation between the New Deal and more radical insurgent movements implies the dependence of the former upon the latter. In particular, Kennedy's conclusion about the second phase of the New Deal suggests that Roosevelt was taking precisely the classic position of the conservative reformer, and therefore his initiatives were by no means independent of more radical movements. “It was a mark of Roosevelt's reflexive political genius,” Kennedy concludes, “that instead of simply bending with the pressure from his left, he capitalized on it. He could now credibly argue to conservative stand-patters that his own program, radical enough by any objective standard, was a prudent bulwark against the irresponsible radicalism of the demagogues.”10 Roosevelt, being the president, could and would ultimately take credit for the landmark New Deal legislation; but in spite of Kennedy's own characterization, his account makes clear the president's political and ideological relation to a threat still further to the left of his agenda, which not only warranted his “reflexive” progressive response but actually made his “radical” remedies look safe and sane in comparison.
Painful as it was to acknowledge after the EPIC campaign that elements of social democracy might be advanced by the New Deal because of Roosevelt's repudiation of Sinclair and his movement, Sinclair could gain some satisfaction from having predicted, way back in 1907, this kind of politically constructive rejection. In The Industrial Republic, he had imagined the Socialist Party would play a vital role “as a party of the last resort, a club held over Society,” creating the conditions for a popular political groundswell bringing the Democratic Party into office and then demanding action.11 Practically speaking, this is precisely what Roosevelt was doing when he steered a course between Republicanism and “wild radicalism,” which in his first inaugural he had presented as having more in common with one another than either had with liberalism.12 Moreover, Roosevelt's political-economic via media was charting the path that Sinclair and other socialists had envisaged for their movement. Sinclair's EPIC campaign, with its “one definite, concrete job” and his refusal to be pinned down by radical labels (even socialist and socialism), had itself been a manifestation of the search for a middle way. American socialism particularly of the Second Internationale had likewise been about finding the middle course between sudden, violent revolution and status quo law and order.
But Sinclair and other socialists provided far more than a political catalyst for progressive reforms implemented by other parties. The ideas and programs for those reforms had been originated by them and then, after the fact, adopted by the other parties. This, too, they themselves saw and announced. Sinclair wrote in I, Governor, “Nearly thirty years ago I founded an organization, the League of Industrial Democracy, which has had wide influence in American colleges, and helped to train those minds which now constitute the so-called ‘brain trust’ in Washington. These men [and women], whether they know it or not, are the children of my thought.”13 One close observer of the 1934 election, screenwriter Rob Wagner, noted just this metaphor of intellectual parentage in the general formulation of Socialist Party leader Job Harriman: “Our job is to father socialistic ideas, leave then on the door-steps of the other fellows for adoption.” Writing in March 1934, Wagner wove the trope into his own piece asserting that the transmigration of socialist ideas into the Roosevelt administration was well under way before the EPIC campaign gained national notice: “this particular baby, ‘I, Governor of California,’ was so attractive to the Democratic door-step-takers-in that they began to yip louder and louder for his father. They felt that the baby would make a swell companion for the innumerable pink babies—some of 'em pretty red!—that had been taken into the White House.”14
The case I am building that socialist ideas were influential within the Roosevelt White House and among New Deal legislation must necessarily be a circumstantial one. After all, neither Roosevelt nor the other principal New Dealers left a bibliography of their sources. Yet—to extend further the investigative metaphor I am here adopting—we may observe that all of the key elements making a case for the socialist provenance of the New Deal are clear: motive, opportunity, means.
The Great Depression itself provided the strongest motive possible for seeking government intervention and hence a widened degree of governmental control in the productive activity of the nation. The impetus for making relatively more overt, socialistic, and socialist interventions into the economy may be found in Roosevelt's political credo of doing something, anything, to deal with the crisis—in counterpoint to his predecessor Hoover's wish to follow economic orthodoxy and let the economy heal itself. Here, Alan Brinkley suggests, was Roosevelt's core philosophy: “Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”15 Roosevelt himself was quite conscious that his openness to experimentation meant receptivity to any number of heterodox economic and political options, including the EPIC plans being floated in the California gubernatorial campaign. Explaining to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins why he did not repudiate Sinclair publicly, Roosevelt opined: “Perhaps they'll get EPIC in California…. The beauty of our state-federal system is that the people can experiment. If it has fatal consequences in one place, it has little effect upon the rest of the country. If a new, apparently fanatical program works well, it will be copied. If it doesn't, you won't hear of it again.”16
Still, the opportunity for socialist political-economic strategies to become known and preferred in the White House lies only secondarily in the EPIC campaign and other insurgent movements of the 1930s, by which time the ideas and even the specific plans of Roosevelt and his brains trust were already largely formed (and any socialistic influence from outside political sources might be plausibly denied). The greater opportunity for social democracy to become known and embraced by Roosevelt and his administration came earlier, in the mixed socialist and progressive milieu of the pre–World War I era and even stretching back into the nineteenth century. At least four individuals in Roosevelt's inner circle had been schooled in the Social Gospel movement, even according to David Kennedy, a somewhat hostile witness for the socialist case: Roosevelt speechwriter and original Brains Truster Adolf Berle; federal relief administrator Harry Hopkins; Treasury secretary Henry Morgenghau, Jr.; and Labor secretary Perkins.17 The settlement house work in which Eleanor Roosevelt was involved, and with which she famously acquainted her husband-to-be, was also an unmistakable expression of that milieu. Then there is the testimony of Roosevelt himself that he had had The Jungle read to him at breakfast, which regardless of whether the story has any factual basis, points to a historical moment when socialist ideas were widely available and regarded affirmatively in American culture.
We may also note the conspicuous lack of other suspects with the opportunity to effect the kind of intellectual stimulus upon the New Deal that we are describing. Certainly it is evident that the New Deal policies implemented by the Roosevelt administration had their sources outside the conventional wisdom of the Democratic Party. Any number of New Deal enactments ran directly counter to the platform pronouncements of the party, which even in 1932 had proclaimed itself the “advocate [of] an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five percent in the cost of the Federal Government.”18 Yet this is the party which under Roosevelt nevertheless wrought the largest expansion of the federal government in U.S. history, which for the first time created a government bureaucracy with sufficient means—if not always political will—to superintend industry and to minister to the basic wants of all citizens.
As for demonstrating that the means actually adopted by the Roosevelt administration were socialist, I submit the following partial list of ideas either integral or unique to American socialism, all of which were incorporated into Roosevelt's and the New Deal's philosophy. The first I shall call Exhibit A: the idea that economics was not governed by naturally ordained laws but consisted, rather, of socially constructed relationships that might be studied, challenged, and changed. The view was articulated clearly in Roosevelt's speech accepting the Democratic nomination: “Our Republican leaders tell us economic laws—sacred, inviolable, unchangeable—cause panics which no one could prevent. But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”19 This was in fact news to orthodox economists of the Democratic as well as the Republican Party, but it had been one of the cornerstones of socialism predating as well as including Karl Marx.
Exhibit B is the idea that the current crisis was a permanent one, from which the nation would not recover without a fundamental change in economic direction. This was likewise articulated in the nomination-acceptance speech, wherein Roosevelt explained that the “enormous corporate surpluses” of the 1920s had not been distributed to consumers, to workers, or even to small stockholders but were, rather, poured into “new and unnecessary plants which now stand stark and idle” and “the call-money market of Wall Street” where it had simply vanished.20 The notion of permanent crisis, too, was anathema to the prevailing dogma of the business cycle, but it was commonplace among socialists beginning with Marx, imported to the United States by Lawrence Gronlund, and continuing among the whole range of Second and Third Internationale socialists, including Upton Sinclair and W. E. B. Du Bois.21
Then there is Exhibit C, a less apocalyptic alternative to the “permanent crisis” postulate, which held merely that the U.S. economy had reached a state of “maturity,” historically speaking, with the epoch of building up the nation's wealth led by the capitalist trust-builders being supplanted by an epoch of distributing that wealth more equitably. Prominent among others in the American socialist tradition who held to this view was Edward Bellamy, who from the imagined standpoint of 2000 described the following shift in U.S. political economy as occurring in the years subsequent to the 1888 publication of Looking Backward: “The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were entrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit…. The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust.”22 As for Roosevelt, in a September 1932 campaign speech he announced that “the day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted everything if only he would build, or develop, is over. [Our task] is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to reestablish foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problems of underconsumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably.”23
Exhibit D suggests that Roosevelt's understanding of political-economic history from rudimentary market economies to modern industrial capitalism—and specifically his understanding of labor within that evolution—stands in tangible relation to a long tradition of socialist analysis. One point of departure in this tradition, indeed, would be the historical analysis of Marx and Engels, as for example their proclamation in the Communist Manifesto that “modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers…. [T]hey are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.”24 Within American socialist culture as in American culture generally, the historical moments of the manufactory workshop and the craft guild are more idealized, so that the essential distillation of the entrance into capitalistic modernity assumes a golden age of relative industrial freedom. Here is the definitive formulation in the Socialist Party platform of 1901, at the party's founding: “Formerly the tools of production were simple and owned by the individual worker. Today the machine, which is but an improved and more developed tool of production, is owned by the capitalists and not by the workers. This ownership enables the capitalists to control the product and keep the workers dependent upon them.”25 The spirit of this formulation infuses the third of the twelve principles that Upton Sinclair proclaimed as fundamental to the EPIC plan: “Private ownership of tools, a basis of freedom when tools are simple, becomes a basis of enslavement when tools are complex.”26 The socialist formulation, moreover, informs Roosevelt's characterization of modern industry in his pivotal 1936 convention speech. Since the eighteenth century and the successful political revolution beginning in 1776, Roosevelt explains, developments in technology and economies of scale had created “a new problem for those who sought to remain free.” Roosevelt's characterization of the present-day situation is careful to enumerate several classes of citizens who suffer from this problem of freedom, and yet the model for that problem is the situation of the exploited proletarian laborer:
The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessman, the investments set aside for old age—other people's money—these were the tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.27
If the sympathies of the patrician Roosevelt seem a little too widely cast for a proper inheritor of the socialist tradition, we might consider not only that a moderate pragmatist like Sinclair extolled the virtues of socialism, and EPIC, for almost all classes of Americans, but also that Marx and Engels prophesied the tendency of all workers to gravitate to one class or the other of the two great classes, with the great majority being proletarians.
Habeas corpus is of course one of the earliest and most fundamental principles of law, dating from thirteenth-century England. In the investigative analogy that I am here adopting, it is likewise necessary and vital that we “have the body” of socialism—necessary and vital to show that the New Deal not only proffered the intention of social democratic words but also delivered the actuality of social democratic deeds. That the New Deal produced a substantial body of specifically socialist work might be judged by comparing its enactments with the immediate demands spelled out in the inaugural platform of the Socialist Party, published over three decades earlier. The Socialist Party platform of 1901 consisted of seven planks, which demanded:
1. The collective ownership of all means of transportation and communication and all other public utilities as well as of all industries controlled by monopolies, trusts and combines. No part of the revenue of such industries to be applied to the reduction of taxes on the property of the capitalist class, but to be applied wholly to the increase of wages and shortening of hours of the employees, to the improvement of the service and diminishing of the rates to the consumers.
2. The progressive reduction of the hours of labor and the increase of wages in order to decrease the share of the capitalist and increase the share of the worker in the product of labor.
3. State or national insurance of working people in case of accidents, lack of employment, sickness and want in old age; the funds for this purpose to be furnished by the government and to be administered under the control of the working classes.
4. The Inauguration of a system of public industries, public credit to be used for that purpose in order that the workers be secured the full product of their labor.
5. Equal civil and political rights for men and women.
6. The education of all children up to the age of eighteen years, and State and municipal aid for books, clothing and food.
7. The initiative and referendum, proportional representation and the right of recall of representatives by constituents.28
Understanding that these planks reflect the pragmatic, parliamentary philosophy of the American party and others of the Second Internationale, most of the measures representing ancillary or halfway steps advancing the cause of socialism but falling short of the complete abolition of capitalism, we may nevertheless recognize that the New Deal accomplished much of what Socialists had hoped to accomplish, much on a national scale that Sinclair had sought but failed to do in a single state. In short, the New Deal succeeded in introducing and then institutionalizing elements of social democracy in the United States.
Beginning with the area of least achievement, we must confess that plank 7 was not significantly advanced by the New Deal, as Roosevelt was much more inclined to seek wider executive power in the name of the people—in classic populist style—than to seek an extension of direct democracy. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt threatened that he would seek special executive authority akin to war powers, if Congress did not act swiftly against the Depression. Of course, wider democratic participation was a principle with a mixed record among socialists as well. While “proportional representation and the right of recall” was hailed by Karl Marx as the righteous practice of the Paris Commune of 187129 and Sinclair sought to use electoral recall, the referendum, and popular initiative as mechanisms to implement EPIC, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward had hoped largely to insulate the administrators of the nationalized political economy from the popular will, and the authoritarian practices of various really existing socialist states are too well documented either to deny or to need elaboration here. Although, as noted above, Roosevelt welcomed popular initiatives at the state and local levels, he believed—probably rightly—that rapid and sophisticated measures to redirect the economy could only be effected via the initiative of a strong central government, not through popular, grassroots initiatives, as Sinclair proposed.
The other six objectives specified by the Socialist Party in 1901 were, however, substantially advanced or even achieved through the New Deal. Concerning the first plank of the Socialist platform demanding public ownership of utilities and of monopolies, we may note that the New Deal created laws and agencies providing public control of those industries deemed most vital to the common good. Initially, the New Deal of 1933 had sought direct government control of industry through the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Adverse rulings of the Supreme Court based upon the commerce clause of the Bill of Rights forced a shift in strategy, however. Public control over industry then had to be channeled less overtly, through government regulation and oversight bodies. These had been created from the start of the New Deal; they continued to proliferate through the 1930s. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Securities Exchange Commission were established in the historic first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, created in 1933, and the Federal Housing Administration, which followed in 1934, established national standards in the businesses of appraising and home-building.30 The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had been created way back in 1887 to rein in the railroad industry; it was strengthened during the New Deal. So was the Federal Power Commission, which oversaw the oil and gas production industries. The Federal Communications Commission (founded in 1934) supervised telephones and radio; the Motor Carrier Act (1935) extended the authority of the ICC to cover the trucking industry; the Civil Aeronautics Board (1938) anticipated correctly the need for regulation of commercial travel by air.31 All of these agencies are open to the charge that they helped to save capitalism by protecting the system from its own internal dynamic toward self-immolation; by no means did they represent the full nationalization of the industries they superintended, and therefore they fell short of the prescriptions of the Socialist Party and the Nationalists and even the more modest proposals of the People's Party. But while the profits of business remained in private hands, so did financial risk, and because of these partial steps, industry was held more accountable to the public will than ever before, and more liable than ever before to be circumscribed, redirected, or reformed by democratically responsive public policy.
Concerning the second plank of the Socialist platform that called for “reduction of the hours of labor and the increase of wages” for the working class, we may say that this, one of the more modest immediate demands of the platform, was substantially achieved through the New Deal. The Wagner Act, one of the cornerstones of the second New Deal of 1935, established the right of collective and independent labor bargaining. Largely because of the Wagner Act, American unions grew rapidly, enjoyed unprecedented success in winning increased wages and shorter hours, and finally—after many decades of struggle—came into something approaching parity in the struggle with capital. During the 1930s, the federal government also stepped in to establish national labor norms that had long been sought by Socialists: a nationwide minimum wage, the eight-hour day, and the abolition of child labor.32 Such measures had until recently been pursued by socialists only, treated as impossibly utopian by mainstream economists affiliated with both major parties. It had been a rally for the eight-hour day, called by the Knights of Labor, that had led to the violence at Haymarket Square and to the arrest and capital convictions of the anarchist leaders there. The cause associated in 1877 with anarchist lawlessness, and judged in 1886 by Laurence Gronlund to be impossible as long as capitalism lasted, was not only championed in the 1930s by one of the major parties but passed into law that has remained to this day.33
Almost the same can be said of the New Deal's progress toward those aims specified in the third plank of the Socialist Party's immediate demands: pensions in case of unemployment, debilitating injury, and old age. In his state of the union address for 1935, Roosevelt called for government to provide a social safety net for all citizens, “security of the men, women, and children of the nation against certain hazards and vicissitudes of life.”34 That summer he signed the Social Security Act, which provided unemployment insurance, pensions for the disabled, financial support for widows with dependent children, and monthly stipends for retirees. Although Roosevelt preferred to describe the program in negative terms, as “security” in the event of catastrophe, the “hazards” targeted by Social Security were as predictable as rain, as universal as aging. Social Security might just as reasonably be understood in positive and universal terms, which (as Roosevelt perhaps understood) would help to reveal its socialist provenance: it meant the provision of a certain minimum share of the common wealth for practically all citizens, and a fair, if not equal, opportunity for children to achieve success. To appreciate fully just how revolutionary the changes effected by Social Security were, we should note just how alien its provisions were to the philosophy of Roosevelt's own party coming into the election of 1932, to say nothing of the party of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Whereas the provisions for old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and support for children had been called for by the Socialist Party for over thirty years, they made their appearance in the platform of the Democratic Party only in 1932, and then only in desultory fashion. Shackled by the states' rights tradition of the party, the 1932 platform called merely for “unemployment and old-age insurance under state laws.” In the pre-Depression Democratic platform of 1928, the only items resembling Social Security in the least were accident compensation for employees of the government only—and for work-related injuries only—and a proposed study to develop a limited plan for putting the unemployed to work on “necessary public works,” this construction to be phased out when such periods of acute unemployment should abate. But of course Social Security was passed into law as a right of all working Americans, regardless of class; its provisions for the unemployed have been thoroughly institutionalized. Unemployment insurance and old-age pensions have since become part of the fabric of American political and social life.
Concerning the fourth plank of the Socialist platform, demanding “Inauguration of a system of public industries,” we may observe that the New Deal established a tremendous network of federally backed employment programs. Though they were deliberately pegged to paying workers less than the current labor market (to say nothing of their receiving “the full product of their labor”), these federally instituted programs did something that the marketplace could not do for millions of workers: provide steady, remunerative, and secure employment. A few days after his meeting with Upton Sinclair in September 1934, Franklin Roosevelt indicated his cool response toward Sinclair's hope that the factories and farms of EPIC might be funded by the federal government, telling reporters that the EPIC plan was “impossible, absolutely impossible, on [the] scale” proposed by Sinclair. “If Sinclair has any sense in him,” Roosevelt continued, “he will modify at least in practice this perfectly wild-eyed scheme of his and carry it on as a community experiment.”35 But Sinclair might be excused for his wild-eyed scheming given that Roosevelt's New Deal had by this time already initiated a massive federal program of reforestation, public parks construction, and manual labor through the Civilian Conservation Corps, and had initiated a wide-ranging scheme for rural electrification, hydroelectric power, and land conservation throughout the South under the aegis of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Then in 1935 Roosevelt instituted his own scheme for publicly funded industry that altogether dwarfed the scale proposed by Sinclair. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) both expanded federal jobs programs on the model of the CCC and increased funding to state and municipal governments for a whole variety of public works (which Roosevelt stipulated must be “useful—not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that creates future new wealth for the Nation”).36 The WPA put some three million people back to work in 1935, and approximately eight-and-a-half million before its disbandment in 1943.37 This was not, decidedly, a permanent program for social and economic equality, but it was demonstrably an instance of government doing what socialists had long been urging, and what antisocialists had always warned against as catastrophic to the future of capitalism: the federal government, through progressive tax policy, was extracting profits from the capitalist economy through corporate and personal taxes and redistributing them among workers who had been deemed expendable in the conventional labor market.
Regarding the aims specified in the fifth and sixth planks of the party's immediate demands—equal rights for women and a share in the commonwealth for children—we may find in the Social Security Act of 1935 and related programs several measures that went some way toward their fulfillment. Roosevelt's 1935 State of the Union Address announced his intention to seek benefits not only for the unemployed and aged but also “for children, for mothers, for the handicapped, for maternity care, and for other aspects of dependency and illness where a beginning can now be made.”38 The resulting legislation was not by any means fully egalitarian, tending to treat both women and children as dependents as opposed to fully fledged citizens with equal rights. To a degree, then, the New Deal reflected the same cultural and political shortcomings that bedeviled the theory and praxis of the socialist movement, as our account of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her associates has documented. But if the inegalitarian shortcomings of the Social Security Act of 1935 are apparent particularly in the area of gender rights, its provisions continuing to treat men as breadwinners and women as mothers,39 it did intervene within that traditional matrix to assist women in those situations where social and economic circumstances struck them the hardest: when women's male partners were unwilling or unable to provide for them and their children, and when women were faced with being the primary providers for themselves and their families in a persistently patriarchal society. That portion of the Social Security Act devoted to Aid to Families with Dependent Children, when coupled with New Deal legislation against child labor and compulsory education laws already on the books, brought into being as a matter of federal, nationwide policy virtually all that the Socialists had called for in 1901 in the sixth plank of their immediate demands. Thus it happened, too, that in the final year of her life, Charlotte Perkins Gilman had an opportunity to see the partial fulfillment of her vision of a society that cared for all children as if they were one's own offspring.
A final measure of the ideological and political kinship between Roosevelt's New Deal and the social democratic tradition is the ongoing interplay between ideals of social equality and real-world implementation aiming for, but constantly falling short of, those ideals. The Socialist pattern is evident in Sinclair's quite orthodox formulation of the party's praxis articulated in The Jungle: work with non-Socialists where possible to pass measures of immediate assistance to the working classes, but make “no compromise” on the final objective of social equality and the abolishment of the profit system. And that pattern finds its echo in the rhetoric and aims of the New Deal as Roosevelt articulated them at the high-water mark of the New Deal, in his speech to the 1936 Democratic national convention. The New Deal was already substantially in the books, and from a socialist standpoint, many compromises had had to be made. Although Roosevelt himself had been responsible for any number of the compromises, the president turned back instinctively to the rhetoric of no compromise. Having just argued that private ownership of the tools of mass production has led to the enslavement of modern labor, Roosevelt denounced “royalists of the economic order” who have “conceded that political freedom was the business of government, but … have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business,” who have “granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but … denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.”40 He was taking a page practically right out of the American socialist playbook. Bellamy's Looking Backward, for instance, had announced “the obvious fact [that] no business is so essentially the public business as the industry and commerce on which the people's livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly superior in magnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles to be conducted for their personal glorification.”41 Gilman had written,
We have our religious life.
We have our political life.
We have our industrial life.
In the first two we have made ourselves free, but because we are slaves in the last we are helpless in all.42
Roosevelt declared: “Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.”43
Much as socialists would and did, Roosevelt saw the measures of the New Deal not as ends in themselves but as stepping-off points in the pursuit of a wider distribution of the national wealth and a deeper commitment to equal opportunity. In his convention speech, Roosevelt spoke of extending as well as sustaining the enactments of the New Deal by defining an “economic bill of rights.” The proposal did not call for an equal distribution of the common wealth, but it did envisage the interest of the national community in maintaining a minimum level of economic support for all citizens and in making employment at a living wage available to all American households. It was “the challenge to our democracy,” the president said, that “tens of millions of citizens” were being “denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.” Further outlining the crisis through a series of observations melding visionary and muckraking modes, all linked by the memorable anaphora, “I see millions … ,” Roosevelt propelled his audience toward the conclusion of a common interest of all citizens in each others' economic welfare and, therefore, in the eradication of poverty and unemployment as central tasks of democratic government:
I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.
I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productivity to many other millions.
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful, law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.44
Roosevelt was not only seeking a more cooperative commonwealth by pushing all Americans regardless of means to take up a struggle against poverty—a cause that he might well have recognized as the rallying cry of the California EPIC campaign, little though he was willing or able to acknowledge it. Unknowingly, no doubt, Roosevelt was also proposing the same “test of the excluded class” that Du Bois had long ago proposed in William English Walling's New Review. Without suggesting Roosevelt's means or the ends to greater equality were exactly those sought—or demanded—by his predecessors and contemporaries who were socialists, we might further note the similarity of Roosevelt's ideal to that of yet another socialist, still more venerable than Gilman, Sinclair, or Du Bois. For Roosevelt's demands that Americans should “never regard any faithful, law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous,” and that they “provide enough for those who have too little,” are but more carefully guarded versions of Marx's famous aphorism: “The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
The New Deal was, in fact, the clearest embodiment and most durable legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialism: producing laws, programs, policies, and government apparatuses that changed in fundamental and lasting ways both the means by which citizens might seek by democratic government to direct their nation's economic life and the aims of such a government to promote equal opportunity for every citizen. The New Deal used the national government as an instrument to increase democratic control of industry, to establish workers' rights to a fuller share of the product of their labor, and to extend public support for the sustenance of the most vulnerable members of society. Yet because it increased but did not fully effect that democratic control, because it distributed the common wealth more equally but not equally, and because its assistance to the most vulnerable members was both limited and partial, the social democratic legacy of the New Deal must also be judged to be incomplete. It is to some of these areas where the New Deal itself was flawed as well as the areas where the promise of the New Deal has not yet been realized that I will now, and finally, turn.
“LET US BE DISSATISFIED”: THE ONGOING WORK OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
“If you are saving dying babies, whose babies are you going to let die? If you are feeding the hungry, what folk are you (regretfully, perhaps, but none less truly) going to let starve?”
While issues of women's equality were sidestepped by the New Deal, issues of racial equality were trodden upon. African Americans had been hit especially hard by the Great Depression. Black communities had not enjoyed the boom times of the 1920s as fully as had the rest of the nation; the Depression drove black unemployment up to catastrophic levels: 31 percent in Baltimore, 40 percent in Detroit, between 40 and 50 percent in Harlem, and as high as 56 percent in Philadelphia.45 It would stand to reason that blacks, suffering disproportionately from the effects of the business depression, would benefit disproportionately from federal programs for jobs and agricultural assistance—if such programs were merely race neutral. But they were not. The distribution of agricultural subsidies being left to the states, many in the South prioritized assistance for the largest white-owned farms, leaving relatively little for small-scale white farmers and practically nothing for black ones. When the Works Progress Administration began distributing its largesse, it too worked through the aegis of city political machines, which frequently brought benefits to American ethnics but, again, not proportionately to the U.S. minority group with the least well established political connections, African Americans. When a “Subsistence Homestead Colony” was opened in West Virginia as a New Deal Experiment, Upton Sinclair hailed the development as the transmigration of the EPIC plan to the federal level.46 The colony was, however, for whites only. After Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in to lobby on behalf of would-be black residents, the government solution was to support a parallel, blacks-only colony—a phenomenon that W. E. B. Du Bois took up as exemplary of the kind of separate, cooperative economic development he had long called for.47 But the fact that the white colony proved a failure before the black colony could even be built and given a trial testifies not only to the difficulty of making a socialistic economic scheme work within a hostile capitalist environment but also to the New Deal's primary orientation to the needs and predilections of white Americans. It should come as little wonder that black intellectuals were disproportionately attracted to the no-holds-barred philosophy of the Communist Party, or that the African American populace found enthusiasm for the New Deal mainly on account of the sincere but symbolic antiracism of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Although there were many reasons for the deficiencies of the New Deal on matters of racial justice—chief among them, Roosevelt's political dependency upon the Solid South—one important reason, highlighted by our analysis of the cross-pollination of socialist and New Deal ideas, was the incomplete commitment to racial as well as gender equality across the spectrum of left-wing activism. That failure of commitment did not stem, however, from a failing in socialist ideals. Even critics as attuned to the shortcomings of really existing social democracy as Gilman and Du Bois repeatedly distinguished between an insufficiently developed practice and the egalitarian imperatives of the philosophy. The logic of social democracy and a more consistently implemented socialist program still stood to advance the cause of African Americans, women, and other minorities. Largely because the New Deal established government apparatuses permitting a more democratic direction of industry but implemented that direction unevenly as well as incompletely, preferentially in favor of whites and men, progress toward economic and social equality for nonwhites and women came later and more fitfully, and was driven by activists still further out on the margins than the Second International socialists had been. Although Du Bois lived nearly thirty years longer than Gilman, he was not an active participant in these post–World War II movements for social justice in the United States, either. Yet the social democratic philosophies he and Gilman had articulated were predictive of the directions taken by subsequent activists, and they remain relevant to the possibility of social democracy in our day. These, too, constitute legacies of American socialism.
Beginning with the most immediate and demonstrable of Du Bois's influences, we might note his example of wariness of the Communists. Although in 1938 Du Bois made an appreciative second tour of the Soviet Union, Du Bois rejected Mary White Ovington's despairing suggestion that, after three decades of working for racial equality, “my only hope is in Communism.” The methods of the Comintern would not do, Du Bois insisted, in spite of his own inability to transform the NAACP or any other organization into anything like a fit vehicle for black social democracy: As he warned Ovington, “Communism is the hope of us all but not the dogmatic Marxian program with war and murder in the forefront. Economic communism by the path of peace is possible.”48 Soon Du Bois's oft-repeated criticisms of the Comintern agenda and Communist leadership in the United States were affirmed by the disillusion and critique of other black intellectuals who had affiliated themselves with the party, either officially or unofficially, in large numbers during the 1930s. Whether their change of heart came at the time of Stalin's purge of the old-guard Bolsheviks in 1938, his nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany made public in 1939, or—just as likely—a gradual realization that the color line was drawn within the ranks of the Communist Party just as elsewhere in American society, most black Marxists came to renounce their ties with the party or at least distance themselves from it, whether the break was spectacular and public, as with Richard Wright, or more gradual and quiet, as with Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes.49
Du Bois's own odyssey would eventually lead him to embrace several political dangers against which he had warned—and a few with which he had flirted—for practically his entire career. In the 1950s, Du Bois's opposition to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was entirely defensible on ethical as well as political grounds. It is of little credit that Upton Sinclair took the patriotic line, supporting the execution vocally as if to make up for those occasions when he stood by his far-left comrades and against the popular will.50 Less worthy was Du Bois's willingness to throw over his long-standing skepticism about the Comintern. Backed into a corner by Cold War–era surveillance and prosecution as an enemy agent, abandoned by all allies except for Communists who were themselves liable to persecution, Du Bois went so far as to write a defense of Stalin and Stalinism in the unpublished book manuscript, “Russia and America.”51 When Du Bois actually became a member of the Communist Party in 1961, he immediately emigrated to Ghana, where he hailed president Kwame Nkrumah as the incarnation of his black nationalist, socialist vision and Nkrumah, in turn, feted him as the intellectual godfather of Pan-Africanism.
The Ghanese independence movement in fact represented a relatively close fit with Du Bois's projection, via Dark Princess, of twenty years of preparation and five years of “intensive struggle,” until finally, “In 1952, the Dark World goes free,” the question of a violent or peaceable transfer of power being up to “the Pale Masters.”52 The period of “intensive struggle” had begun right on schedule in Ghana, with the creation of various leftist parties in 1947; the victory of Nkrumah's socialist and nationalist Convention People's Party had come in 1951, and official independence had followed almost ineluctably in 1957, in large part owing to the willingness of the British to relinquish their African colonies. But another projection made in Dark Princess was also, altogether too fully embodied in Nkrumah—Kautilya and Matthew's concession to realpolitik that there was nothing particularly wrong with “tyrants” so long as they are chosen from the masses and work for the benefit of the masses—“But choose well the Tyrants—there is Eternal Life!”53 Although it was not until 1964, the year after Du Bois's death, that Nkrumah converted his elected presidency to a dictatorship-for-life, Nkrumah's cult of personality, the persecution of opposition parties, and the centralization of state power were already well under way when Du Bois arrived in Ghana, and these were consistent enough with Du Bois's notion of beneficent, populist tyranny that it is not clear this crowning act would have dampened his enthusiasm for Nkrumah.
If, however, in the last fifteen years of his life Du Bois expended the better part of his energy and hopes chasing dubious materializations of his dreams, there were other portions of his vision that were more positively and durably realized right in the United States. Just as he foresaw the liberation of people of color in colonies throughout Asia and Africa, Du Bois had foreseen that the black church might be the vehicle for welding black communities together behind a common purpose and mobilizing them in a mass movement that went beyond the legal rights fought for—however valuably—by the NAACP as led by Walter White and Roy Wilkins. The black church had, indeed, been one of the final argumentative cudgels he had wielded in his losing struggle against the NAACP board. Replying to Francis Grimke's essay siding with the board, Du Bois had countered that the Reverend Grimke was running down the virtues of his own highly successful and entirely segregated Philadelphia church. In another article penned in the spring of 1934, Du Bois capped a list of successful, self-segregated African American institutions with reference to the spirituals, which as early as The Souls of Black Folk he had characterized as not only the highest artistic achievement of black culture but also its principal medium for the message of liberation: “Does [the board] believe in 200 Negro newspapers which spread N.A.A.C.P. news and propaganda? … Does it believe in Negro business enterprise of any sort? … Does it believe in the Negro spirituals?”54 The marginality of Du Bois's political position by this point, coupled with his long-standing intellectual and temperamental distance from the African American church, ensured that he would not be an active participant in the social-political work of this most venerable and powerful of black institutions. But the pivotal, social transformative role he had projected for the black church in works ranging from Souls to Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess (which had correlatives among white socialists in the implicit religiosity of Upton Sinclair and explicit religious theorizing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman) would be substantially realized in the South during the 1950s, even while Du Bois was battling with U.S. authorities over his sympathy with the Soviet state. In fairness to Walter White and the legal strategy he had preferred, the legal decisions won by NAACP lawyers in the 1940s and especially the 1950s were critical, but the grassroots pressure for social and political as well as legal change came from the black churches and associated civil rights organizations, especially the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Although the civil rights movement did not fully embrace an economic agenda, it used its power as a culturally autonomous force much as Du Bois had envisaged it when he had advocated strategic self-segregation, wielding independent strength as the foundation for interclass and interracial cooperation. Though many whites collaborated with the churches and many civil rights groups were interracial, the movement was also substantially black led—not just nominally, as when the Communists put up black candidates for vice president, but actually.
Eventually, too, social activism rooted in the black church has come to address issues of economics and globalism nearly as forthrightly as Du Bois demanded it should.55 In a 1968 rally commemorating the centenary of the birth of W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., faced up squarely to the social democratic legacy of Du Bois, framed in terms of his final association with the Communist Party. Just a few months before his own death, King declared to the audience, “It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius who chose to be a Communist.” King then went on to proclaim kinship between socialism and his own ideals:
Let us be dissatisfied until every man can have food and material necessities for his body, culture and education for his mind, freedom and human dignity for his spirit…. Let us be dissatisfied until brotherhood is no longer a meaningless word at the end of a prayer but the first order of business on every legislative agenda. Let us be dissatisfied until our brother of the Third World—Asia, Africa, Latin America—will no longer be the victim of imperialist exploitation, but will be lifted from the long night of poverty, illiteracy, and disease.56
This was indeed a vision befitting Du Bois, reprising his test of the excluded class, his social democratic values, and his comprehensive, international conception of equality. Like the vision of Du Bois—and of Gilman and Sinclair, too—by holding the members of the human community to the highest moral and material standards, it constitutes a political program out of reach of any immediately practicable social reality, giving reason again and again for the proclamation and the summons of its central rhetorical figure, “Let us be dissatisfied,” and therefore constituting also a vision, a challenge, and a choice for practically any foreseeable future—including our own.
There are two points emerging from the work of the triptych writers, especially when taken together, that in closing I would like to highlight as being of particular relevance to social democracy today. The first is the triptych writers' pragmatic balance between the autonomy of justice struggles and their coordination around a central rubric of economic equality. While Up-ton Sinclair never fully comprehended the importance of antiracism to a social democratic program, he certainly understood the importance of feminism to such a program—difficult as this was to implement in his own relationships—and his political theory and praxis both gave wide latitude for divergence in socialist philosophies. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, meanwhile, offered a fuller theorization of parallel but semiautonomous struggles for equality. In Women and Economics, we might recall, she spoke of “the twin struggle that convulses the world to-day,—in sex and economics,—the ‘woman's movement’ and the ‘labor movement.’” In With Her in Ourland, published almost two decades later, Gilman offered much the same account through Ellador's appreciation of the women's and labor movements, whose common interests were best articulated via socialism.57 Gilman's presentation of the movements as separate from one another is, moreover, a matter of prescription as well as description, given that she also shows that women's and workers' interests are often qualitatively as well as quantitatively different. We have seen the line of reasoning in Gilman's work dating from the 1890s and fully formulated in Women and Economics: Because most bourgeois women are not included in the class of individuals paid by wages, and because women of all classes have their labor—sexual, reproductive, and domestic—expropriated by male patriarchs and partners, a revolution within capitalist means of production will not necessarily liberate women whose labor is not organized within capitalism. The inferences to be drawn from this, then, are not only that distinctive interests bind the women's movement together, but also that the uniqueness of those interests demand a certain semiautonomous and self-defensive agenda, lest an insufficiently egalitarian praxis by the labor movement should compromise women's cause.
Although Gilman, with her blindness to racial prejudice at least equaling Sinclair's, hardly anticipated a wider application of her theorization of autonomous and nonequivalent emancipation struggles, just such an application was articulated in the social democratic theory of W. E. B. Du Bois. Like Sinclair, Du Bois integrated Gilman's thought into his own: Du Bois's chapter “The Damnation of Women” in Darkwater both cites Gilman and draws upon her emphasis on the economic factor as critical in gender relations throughout. Unlike Sinclair—or Gilman, for that matter—Du Bois saw that it would be entirely possible for capitalism to be replaced by socialism in the United States without removing fundamental practices of racially based social and political inequality, just as it would be possible to supplant capitalism without displacing patriarchy. Even while racial identity could be used as an instrument among people of color to establish common ground across class lines (a double-edged ideological sword if ever there was one, either catalyzing the ultimate dissolution of class or concealing class difference within national independence movements), Du Bois saw that racial difference could—and very often did—undermine supposedly natural alliances between working-class groups of differing nations, ethnicities, and colors. This is the analysis we have seen most fully articulated in Darkwater, where Du Bois asserted that the “laboring class of all colors,” even if theoretically in solidarity with one another, could practically be divided by the color line; especially in Europe and North America, lighter-skinned proletarians might receive economic rewards purchasing their loyalty to the “national middle classes” of their own color. Effectively, then, race can be used as a de facto index of class differentiation, much as Gilman saw gender could be used in this fashion, and just as could the distinction between owning property and owning only one's own labor power. In the 1930s, it was Du Bois's assertion that this class differentiation along color lines was, in fact, occurring in the party that was loudest in declaring its opposition to such differentiation, the Communists. Even when late in life Du Bois became convinced, after all, that Soviet Communism provided the better medium for the development of racial equality than did U.S. liberalism, it is notable that he expatriated himself not to the Soviet state but to black nationalist-socialist Ghana.
Neither Gilman nor Du Bois could claim ownership of the strategy here described, of autonomous and complementary movements for equality within a broad-based social democratic movement. As we have noted, August Bebel's Woman and Socialism postulated the complementarity of the women's and labor movement before Gilman did. For that matter, Second International socialism was so insistently polyglot that it might be said to have implied (even if it did not fully act out) the idea of multiple, semiautonomous causes within the one larger socialist movement. But Gilman, Du Bois, and like-minded socialists certainly can claim precedence over late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century critics who articulate the concept of parallel, complementary justice struggles at the confluence of Marxist and Foucauldian theory. Here is Chantal Mouffe's recent summation of her work with Ernesto Laclau, which I have had some occasion to discuss already at the outset of this study: “For us the radicalization of democracy requires the transformation of the existing power structures and the construction of a new hegemony. In our view, the building of a new hegemony implies the creation of a ‘chain of equivalence’ among the diversity of democratic struggles, old and new, in order to form a ‘collective will,’ a ‘we’ of the radical democratic forces.”58 While the critical vocabulary is new and postmodernist, Gilman's “twin struggle” of the women's movement and the labor movement, wherein each plays a coequal role in social transformation, might readily enough stand in for Laclau and Mouffe's “diversity” and the “chain of equivalence,” whereas their “collective will” and “‘we’ of the radical democratic forces” are unmistakably “the forward-looking system” of socialism. Certainly Laclau and Mouffe's theoretical apparatus is more clearly poised than Gilman's dual movements of women and labor to accommodate the full range of possible liberation movements; as they write in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: “For the defence of the interests of the workers not to be made at the expense of the rights of women, immigrants or consumers, it is necessary to establish an equivalence among these different struggles.”59 Yet the burden of this assertion—the nonidentity and necessary autonomy of the various movements—which marks a clear advantage over the main line of Marxist thought that Laclau and Mouffe interrogate—is a major contention also made by Gilman and Du Bois. Furthermore, while Gilman envisages primarily two movements leading the way toward social democracy, Du Bois's incorporation of the women's movement alongside the black struggle for equality and the labor struggle definitely opens a path for other movements to step forward and show their credentials.
What is more, Gilman and Du Bois make clear just what such credentials would be, in a way that Laclau and Mouffe and other contemporary theorists of social justice often do not. One problem lurking in Laclau and Mouffe's open-ended radical hegemonic coalition is precisely that there is no clear standard by which the justice claims of various groups might be recognized and their justice struggles prioritized. Laclau and Mouffe are active participants in the recent theoretical trend in which the Marxian demand to end exploitation has been balanced—and even in many quarters overwhelmed—by the Foucauldian imperative to subvert social control. The trend is exemplified when they write that “the demand for equality is not sufficient but needs to be balanced by the demand for liberty.”60 This ostensible refinement opens the door to any group becoming equal claimants to participation in Laclau and Mouffe's hegemony, if they are able to attest that their freedom is being infringed upon. The insistence upon “balance” between equality and liberty is reductive of what might reasonably appear to be extraordinarily different “democratic struggles”: for example, the challenge of women executives in corporate America to break the glass ceiling as compared with the struggle of many current residents of Sudan or Somalia to stay alive. To call these “equivalent” and thereby to advocate similar degrees of political energy in each case is a prescription for maintaining their inequality (the relative privilege of the former and victimization of the latter). While Gilman's and Du Bois's understanding of social democratic strategy certainly cannot banish factional struggles between various would-be elements of a radical social democratic hegemony, their retention of the key socialist concepts of the economic base and labor exploitation, and the priority they place upon equality over liberty, turn out to be crucial and productive. For thereby they maintain a basis for distinguishing between the relative importance of various social movements and, at the same time, for uniting those who are exploited, dispossessed, or underprivileged.
A fundamental focus upon economic equality, both as the basis for all other forms of equality and as a basic yardstick of social equality, was shared as well by Upton Sinclair. Indeed, consensus between Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois upon the importance of the economic base, and a related commitment to tackle the greatest economic injustice foremost, points to what may be the most durable and usable of socialist legacies: the elimination of poverty as the initial step toward genuine social equality. The strategy—and goal—is the second and final point I would offer as pertinent to our thinking about social democracy in our day.
It goes almost without saying that a focused emphasis upon ending poverty is anathema to revolutionary Marxists, for whom any such program would seem a mere palliative, who assert that poverty will be eliminated in any case when the system of private property is abolished, and who insist that this abolishment can only be achieved by concentrating on organization and agitation by the proletariat. Ameliorating the basic material needs of the poorest members of the commonwealth might possibly be accomplished within any number of configurations (or at least, reconfigurations) of capitalism, militant Marxists warn. Alternatively, however, reform-minded American socialists postulated first that social concern for the poor might better mobilize popular support across class lines than would more immediately self-interested alliances between the bourgeois and the militant working classes, and second that the changes necessary to eliminate poverty would presently demand public ownership of the essential industries of the nation—that is, socialism. Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign operated upon both premises. While believing Californians would find rampant unemployment to be the clearest danger to the social welfare and would, therefore, be willing to back any plausible scheme to put the unemployed to useful work, Sinclair believed that once the virtues of such a program were demonstrated, and when the faults of capitalism were still more fully exposed by its further implosion, then the full development of socialism would be as gradual and inevitable as a force of nature. He predicted in I, Governor that the progress of social democracy, through EPIC, “was like a swiftly flowing river eating into a sand bank.”61 Essentially, class competition and division would be undermined by showing the possibility of plenty for all, and this possibility might be realized most directly by a campaign to end poverty.
Other socialists more attuned to the exploitation of minorities, including both Gilman and Du Bois, worried that even the best-case scenario according to doctrinaire Marxists—a socialist regime led by the American working classes and resulting in their dictatorship over the means of production—could leave women or blacks, or both, with little improvement in social and economic status. For these feminist and race-conscious socialists, the best way to ensure a truly egalitarian society was to focus, from the outset, on the needs of those in the greatest material want and social disadvantage. Indeed, among socialists, feminists and race activists were the ones who first formulated the idea of attending to the basic needs of the least privileged members of society as the first rather than the final task of social revolution; it came to the more mainstream writers such as Sinclair only later. As early as his 1913 New Review article, Du Bois had suggested that no social democratic system would be worthy of the name until it could face down questions such as these: “If you are saving dying babies, whose babies are you going to let die? If you are feeding the hungry, what folk are you (regretfully, perhaps, but none less truly) going to let starve? If you are making a juster division of wealth, what people are you going to permit at present to remain in poverty?”62 Only in 1933, under the immediate pressure of the Great Depression, had Sinclair boiled socialism down to the “one definite, concrete job” of ending poverty. But Charlotte Perkins Gilman had insisted upon the elimination of poverty as the social democratic ideal already by 1911. In her novel published that year, Moving the Mountain, looking back at an imagined social transformation, she projects that “the real turning point” in social progress was “where the majority of the people recognized the folly and evil of poverty—and saw it to be a thing of our own making.”63 The theme continues in Herland, where a general prosperity of all citizens has been the norm for so long that the word for “poor” has passed out of the Herlanders' language, and is asserted again openly in With Her In Ourland, in which Ellador urges the eradication of poverty to be both the most immediate, practicable step and the necessary precursor to dealing with other social and physical ills.64
The moderation and even conservatism of Gilman's appeal, part of an effort to forge the producing majority sought by the 1890s Populists as well as to exploit conventional conceptions of motherhood, concealed the fact that—so far as Gilman was concerned—an all-out commitment to ending poverty and bringing comfort to all American people would demand the radical transformation of society. The elimination of poverty would be the ultimate opening wedge for social democratic transformation. Perhaps this was not what Roosevelt had in mind when he made the eradication of poverty central to his appeal for an economic bill of rights, when he painted an image of “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” and urged his fellow citizens to “paint it out.” No doubt it was not what Lyndon B. Johnson had in mind when a generation later he proclaimed his “War on Poverty,” a war superseded by the war in Vietnam much as Roosevelt's campaign for economic justice had been suspended by World War II. Certainly, it remains quite possible that poverty might effectively be dealt with but capitalism left in place. Yet for socialists such as Sinclair, Du Bois, and Gilman, socialism was not an all-or-nothing proposition but a steady process, defined not by the adherence or nonadherence of a particular political-economic system to this or that abstract formula, but rather by whether a real existing society places the good of all its citizens ahead of the interests of its most powerful individuals. And the goal of ending poverty in a global society, a society with clear political boundaries but no real economic boundaries, ends up being not only the most utopian of objectives but the most practical first step toward equality.
Taking a rhetorical cue from another of the legatees of social democracy, Dr. King: Let us be dissatisfied when our society does not prioritize the needs of our least privileged and powerful members above the desires of our most privileged and powerful; dissatisfied when our nation puts its interests ahead of those of other nations, especially when our power and their weakness leads to the exploitation of their labor and natural resources; and dissatisfied, for that matter, when inhabitants living today on earth place their welfare ahead of the welfare of future inhabitants of our planet. Simultaneously, in the pragmatic and idealistic tradition of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois, we must equally declare our dissatisfaction at any political system or ideological scheme that employs political coercion or in any way compromises the fundamental welfare of the present generation in the name of achieving perfect social equality in some other time and place. Dedicated as they were to socialism as ethical ideal and as political economy, the triptych writers recognized socialism not as an end but as a means to a better community; hence their carelessness at various points in their careers about the labels socialist and socialism. In our own search for a more perfect national and international union, however, we should recognize how socialism and socialists including Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois have already advanced this cause and, as well, how they might yet help us in achieving a national and world community where all members are regarded equally not just in abstract theory but in material fact.