INTRODUCTION

TOWARD A LITERARY HISTORY OF (SOCIAL) DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

This book focuses upon three prominent American socialists who also happen to be essential figures in the study of modern American literature. To be sure, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois aspired to careers in writing and intellectual work prior to their becoming socialists. Du Bois in fact wrote the work that made his name as an intellectual, The Souls of Black Folk, prior to expressing any overt interest in socialism, and he is nowadays regarded primarily as an advocate of African American civil rights. Gilman's socialism is also not widely recognized; today she is seen almost exclusively as an early feminist. Sinclair alone of my three featured writers is well known as a socialist—and that has not necessarily been an asset to his literary reputation. Yet for Du Bois and Gilman as well as Sinclair, a conscious commitment to socialism became central to the writers' intellectual, political, and literary identities early in their careers, and this commitment remained strong throughout the rest of their lives. My aims in this study are to examine how and why they made this commitment, to explore what their shared—and divergent—viewpoints say about socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to consider the relevance of their socialist literary work to the history of their times—and ours.

They are a somewhat miscellaneous trio: almost the only thing uniting them was a shared belief that the common wealth of the United States should be controlled democratically and shared equitably by all citizens, and that this could be achieved through the collective organization of society's less privileged members. But it is precisely their diversity that testifies to the versatility of socialist ideals and practices in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the wide influence of socialism in American culture of that era. Each, in fact, is representative of a distinct direction taken by socialism in the United States. Gilman reflects socialist elements in the protest politics of the 1890s—in the Edward Bellamy Nationalism, Populism, and Fabianism in which she was active at the very start of her literary career—even as she was becoming the foremost advocate of feminism in American socialism and of socialism in American feminism. Sinclair signifies not only the more assertively proletarian, Marxist brand of socialism that emerged at the turn of the century with the founding of the Socialist Party of America, reflected in his famous muckraking novel, The Jungle; his career overall also shows the progressive infiltration of socialist ideas into the mainstream of American politics, exemplified especially in his nearly successful 1934 run for the California governorship, which helped to strengthen the case for Roosevelt's New Deal. Du Bois joined the Socialist Party only briefly in the second decade of the twentieth century, the Communist Party only in the early 1960s during the final three years of his life, but from soon after the turn of the century onward, socialism infused Du Bois's writing and activism, providing a discourse by which he sought to cultivate political solidarity among blacks and to hold whites accountable on matters of racial justice. His work reflects the symbiotic relation between the socialist movement and black intellectuals and the tension between them as well.

On the one hand, American Socialist Triptych offers an in-depth study of each of these three major authors, challenging interpretations of them that have tended to downplay or sidestep the socialism of Gilman and of Du Bois, while seeking to renew interest in Sinclair's socialism as a topic of critical discourse. On the other hand, this book uses Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois as representative of the socialist movements of which they were a part. Viewed collectively, they provide a means of gauging the potentials, shortcomings, and accomplishments of American socialism over five decades, between 1890 and 1940. If, as many historians and critics have suggested, the 1930s and the Great Depression were the key moments when American political-economy turned leftward, resulting in the establishment of important elements of the welfare state that have persisted to this day, the groundwork for that turn was laid in the previous decades, during which, for the first time in American history, democratic government became an instrument rivaling the power of private business enterprise, and in which socialists of various kinds played no small role.

American Socialist Triptych also has something to say about American literary history, as literary history. In tracing the narrative of Gilman's, Sinclair's, and Du Bois's socialism, I often draw upon nonfiction prose, letters, diaries, speeches, and public documents as well as fiction, which does no more or less than follow the lead of the writers themselves, who in their political advocacy employed about equally both conventional genres of creative writing and other genres. Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois were hardly on the cutting edge of modernist experiments in narrative form. Yet their adaptations of realist fiction to their political aims, particularly their innovative combinations of realistic with utopian modes, meant that the kinds of writing employed by Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells in support of Populism and Nationalism continued to do important cultural work in the second and third decades of the twentieth century in support of socialism, hence bridging the methods of realism with those employed in documentary and proletarian fiction of the 1930s. In the hands of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois, not only did literary fiction record the social and political currents of modern American history; it also helped to write that history. These authors demonstrate continuity across the supposed break between premodern and modern literary periods, even as they illustrate a set of writing practices integrating political and literary aims at a time when many modernists were seeking separation between these aims.

 

By telling the interconnected stories of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois as socialists, I seek in this book to enter into several current conversations taking place in literary history, literary criticism and theory, and social theory. For each of these fields, I believe something may be gained by an examination of Gilman, Sinclair, Du Bois, and their socialist comrades—not least because a fuller recollection and understanding of the really existing socialist movement in the United States ought to be relevant to scholars and citizens interested in cultivating a more equal, just, and sustainable social order today.

Most proximately, there is the work done on U.S. radical writers of the twentieth century. Especially of late, scholars in this field have gravitated to the connections between American writers and the political party that was most implacable in its hostility toward American capitalism, the Communist Party. The first generation of literary historical scholars adopting these emphases, headed by Daniel Aaron, James Gilbert, and Walter Rideout, traced the roots of 1930s literary Communism back to the second decade of the century, finding parallels between the beginnings of American modernism and of American literary radicalism.1 More recently, the critical tendency has moved away from an examination of the evolution of American Communism, toward a narrower focus upon the one period when the Communist Party built something approaching a popular following, the Depression decade of the 1930s. That decade provides the historical rubric for a score of monographs and essay collections published over the past twenty-five years, including work by Paula Rabinowitz, Barbara Foley, Bill Mullen, James Smethurst, and Robert Shulman.2 Even when the radical literary project continues to be more broadly conceived historically, the Communist Party typically remains the fulcrum. A focus on Communism remains manifest, for example, in works as culturally and historically diverse as William Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (1999), Alan M. Wald's Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (2002), and Barbara Foley's Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (2003).³

Thanks to these and other scholars, we know a considerable amount about American Communist writers and about left literary activity in the 1930s. But far less is known about the involvement of American writers in other kinds of American socialism and during periods other than the 1930s. If from one standpoint the fact that so many literary and cultural critics have fastened upon American Communism and the Great Depression appears to represent a consensus about their importance, from another standpoint these emphases represent serious scholarly and political risks. If a central—very likely the central—aim of left scholarship is to retain a working historical and political knowledge of American socialist traditions, then the focus of this scholarship upon Communism and the Great Depression risks critical myopia. In Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left, Cary Nelson offers a warning about the state of our knowledge of radical traditions in poetry: “We are not, in short, even ready to produce a complete bibliography of American poetry of the Left, let alone a reasonably comprehensive account. . . . By far the largest gaps in our knowledge, however, are not from the Red decade of the 1930s, . . . for which good accounts can be given, but rather from the half-century that leads up to the 1930s.”⁴ Nelson's comments might be extended to refer to deficiencies in our knowledge not only of radical poetry but of left literature and culture generally. I would add that the critical emphasis on the 1930s that Nelson cites, though it need not lead to an exclusive focus on the Communists, has in practice been tantamount to this.⁵

To a significant extent, my study of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois is complementary to the large body of criticism on Communist-affiliated writers in the 1930s. Their work formed a precedent for the later Communist activity; Sinclair and Du Bois, especially, were on parallel tracks with the Communists during much of the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps most importantly, I concur with the majority of the scholars in the field in finding that the Great Depression provided the key opening for structural changes in the political economy of the United States—the profound crisis of capitalism that socialists had long been predicting, although not the final crisis that the most dogmatic Marxists had pronounced as inevitable. I allow, too, that the positions advanced by Communist Party members (sometimes at the urging of the Comintern authorities, sometimes in spite of them) were often highly progressive, especially on questions of gender and racial equality. The deep appeal of the Communist Party to African American intellectuals was the practical consequence of these positions.

This is not to say, however, that a recovery of the socialism of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois is merely a matter of filling in a few details in an intellectual and political map we already know from inquiries into the Communists and the 1930s. The socialist philosophies and social democratic strategies of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois, grounded in the pre—World War I analyses of the Second or Socialist Internationale, were distinctively different from those of the Third Internationale, or Comintern, inaugurated with the success of the Bolshevik revolution. Most fundamentally, the latter held that the only way to effect genuine social equality was by the revolutionary overthrow of the Western liberal democracies as well as the surviving monarchies—all seen as fatally intertwined with capitalism—and this position demanded acceptance of political violence as necessary and efficacious in the establishment of a workers' government. The Second Internationale, in contrast, held it possible that social equality could be achieved by gradual, parliamentary, and peaceful means. Such a position did not rule out the possibility of violent confrontation or the necessity of political compulsion, and indeed the relation between these, on one hand, and political liberty and harmony, on the other, is a central tension in the work of all three of my featured writers. Still, the philosophical and political difference between the internationales is as substantial as it is practically unexamined in literary critical studies of socialism in the United States.

American Socialist Triptych must, therefore, enter into some contention with the preponderance of scholarship upon the “Red decade” and literary Communism. Besides the question of extralegal political violence, which is either openly accepted or (more often) pointedly sidestepped in discussions of Communist writers, another key issue is that the supposed ideological advantages of Communism were manifested in practice (at best) with great inconsistency. Witness the widespread phenomenon of disillusionment among African American writers, most prominently Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, after a few years of passionate involvement in the party.6 In light of the demise within the past twenty years of the really existing socialist states promulgated under the Comintern, we must also call into question what had been the strongest argument in favor of the Communist tradition: its practical efficacy. And as the outrages of Stalinism and of Mao's Cultural Revolution have been revealed, we must ask, too, about the supposed ideological sophistication and progressivity of the whole movement that identified socialism with revolutionary Marxism and then with Communism. What, exactly, is the ethical appeal and political value of ideological positions that could be implemented in the United States only in partial and extremely localized fashion, and where they were implemented more fully, in the U.S.S.R. and China—we should not mince words here—resulted in some of the most homocidal and autocratic political regimes in human history?

I cannot, for example, endorse the critical procedure advanced by Kate Baldwin, who in her study of African American writers and Cold War—era Communism argues that W. E. B. Du Bois's idealizations of Stalinism may be warranted as a critical counterweight to the racism, economic exploitation, and intolerance of American society in the 1950s. Baldwin faces a delicate balancing act in reading Du Bois's late work, as she tries “to tread the fine line between over-identifying Du Bois with the ruin of the Soviet empire—and hence assigning to his idealism a necessarily ‘tragic' fate—and underidentifying or not fully appreciating the ways in which Du Bois allied himself with the Soviet Union through a consciousness of outsider status and thus a counter to what he insisted were the monolithic goals of a post—World War II Americanization.”⁷ I share Baldwin's goal of keeping alive social democratic ideals and of opposing U.S. imperialism. But neither Baldwin's account of “overidentifying” nor her conception of “underidentifying” seems aware of the risk of forging ties with an authoritarian and homicidal dictatorship just because such ties will show unequivocally one's contempt for American capitalism. Ultimately, the dilemma of untangling Du Bois's socialism from Stalinism is an unnecessary one, interesting and (even) feasible as it may be as an intellectual exercise, for Du Bois's socialism long predated his apologetics for Stalinism. Du Bois's dialogue with socialism was no less rich prior to the very existence of the Third Internationale, and in its pre-Stalinist manifestations it had immeasurably more to offer as a viable model for our present thinking about social democracy.

The same thing may be said in more general terms: American socialism, like international socialism, had a much longer and more viable history than the one associated with the Communist Party and focused upon the Red decade of the 1930s. As a corrective and an alternative to this typical focus, my attention in American Socialist Triptych will be centered upon the activity of American radicals and progressives in the period between 1890 and 1920, in which Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois are representative figures and were sometimes influential players. As my concluding analysis of Sinclair's “End Poverty In California” campaign will show, even in the 1930s the Communist Party was far from offering the one genuinely progressive alternative to the status quo. Moreover, the degree of leftist success in the 1930s was not an aberration, but depended upon the radical activism of other groups predating by decades the Communist Party and the Bolshevik revolution. Within this framework, it is the relative political quiescence of the 1920s that becomes something of an aberration: Not the defining moment in American letters that it appears to be with emphasis on the usual canonical authors—T. S. Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner—but rather a pause between much more extended periods of radical and progressive activity before as well as after the decade of the “lost generation.” Socialist ideas and ideals suffered during the world war and in American reaction to the Bolshevik revolution, but they were kept alive by radicals and progressives who had cut their teeth before the war as well as new arrivals on the left—and thereby kept culturally and politically viable when needed to face down the crisis of worldwide depression. Ultimately, then, New Deal successes in introducing social democratic and socialistic practices are indebted far less to political pressure exerted by the Communists than to a foundation of socialist ideas, and to a large cohort of political progressives shaped by those ideas, that originated a generation or half a generation earlier.

As with literary histories focused upon leftist writers, so with the wider range of literary and cultural critics and theorists who assert an interest in socially transformative progressive politics: the contemporary conversation may be enriched by opening a dialogue with Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois, and some of what the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialists have to say may be critical of the conversation's current direction. It is in fact remarkable how often the leading critics and theorists of literary studies over the past thirty or so years employ a single word that has long-standing ties to the leftist political tradition: radical, radicalism, radicalize. That word in its several variants operates as a kind of linguistic talisman, coming up repeatedly at climactic points in critics' arguments. Here is Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, hailing Nietzsche for “Radicalizing the concepts of interpretation, perspective, evaluation, difference, and all the ‘empiricist' or non-philosophical motifs that have constantly tormented philosophy throughout the history of the West.”8 New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt rejects “the O altitudo! of radical indeterminacy,” but argues for an interpretation of King Lear of which he claims, “The possibility of such a radical undermining of the orthodox position exists, and not merely in the cool light of our own historical distance.”⁹ Elaine Showalter declared in 1985 that the fullest expression of feminist criticism “demanded not just the recognition of women's writing but a radical rethinking of the conceptual grounds of literary study,” a movement accelerated by “radical critical thought from other countries.”¹⁰ A little later, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble declares: “One ought to consider the futility of a political program which seeks radically to transform the social situation of women without first determining whether the category of woman is socially constructed in such a way that to be a woman is, by definition, to be in an oppressed situation.”¹¹ Not to be outdone in invocations of “radicalism,” Fredric Jameson recently speaks not only of modernist writers as employing “radical artistic practices” and registering “radical change . . . in the social world outside” but also of a “radicalism” that goes right into the depths of human subjectivity, to “betray a radical depersonalization of the bourgeois subject” and a profound desire “for some new existence outside the self, in a world radically transformed and worthy of ecstasy.”¹²

The references to “radically transformed,” “radicalizing premises,” “radical critical thought,” and so on, are of obvious interest to this study seeking to describe the perspectives of American writers who aligned themselves with allegedly “radical” political groups and philosophies. But just what do these citations of radicalism signify in the work of theorists and critics of the last thirty years, all of them in the vanguard of our profession at the time the works cited above were published? All, to one extent or another, appeal to the word's Latin root, radix, which of course means nothing other than “root” itself. As for what the theorists are purporting to identify as the root of all significance, there are two principal tendencies, often used in combination. The first is the prevalence of the linguistic turn, greatly catalyzed by Derrida and poststructuralism generally, signaled in Showalter's hailing of “radical critical thought from other countries,” and exemplified in Butler's interrogation of the social construction of “the category of woman.” The second, also demonstrated by Butler and carried to its logical extreme by Slavoj iek, is the interiorization of radicalism and politics, wherein what would appear to be an arena of social change through traditional, identifiably political apparatuses becomes instead a struggle within the psyche of every individual, beginning with the critic him- or herself. Given Fredric Jameson's reputation as a diehard Marxist critic, it is particularly remarkable that his book Singular Modernity, quoted above, embodies both the linguistic turn and the tendency toward interiorization. While continuing to insist upon his Marxist credentials, Jameson feels compelled to point out that “the base/superstructure distinction . . . [is] only mentioned once by Marx, in a not very central place” and to declare the widespread “displacement onto language and terminology of political struggle today.”13 Nowadays for Jameson, the “radical artistic practices” of modernism are not to be identified with radical social change itself (a slippage all too common in other critics); they are instead held to be cultural indices of “radical change” in society and harbingers of the “radical depersonalization of the bourgeois subject.”¹⁴

Other critics and theorists have joined Jameson in suggesting their “radical” interpretations also have implications in the area of progressive politics—and politics as usually considered, having to do with how societies organize themselves, how they manifest relations of power, and how they produce and distribute material and other goods. Not only feminist, gender, and neo-Marxist critics lay claim to progressive political visions; so have deconstructionists and New Historicists, at least after their initial “O altitudo” phases.¹⁵ But what, exactly, is the kind of politics wrought by the linguistic and psychological emphases of recent literary criticism and theory?

The common denominators among these theorists and critics are an opposition to institutions as inherently coercive, and a corresponding championing of the freedom of human subjects from constraint. The sharp impact of Michel Foucault's thought and diminishing influence of Karl Marx's is key to understanding the difference, beginning with the fact that the Marxist-socialist emphasis upon material relations of production is displaced in Foucault by a focus upon discursive power-relations. The centrality of discursivity in Foucault, of course, reinforces perfectly the linguistic interest of English professors and their colleagues in cognate disciplines, whereas the shift from economic exploitation to “micro-physics of power,” cultivated through a variety of disciplinary and institutional practices,¹⁶ increases dramatically the forms of social relations that might be compassed within the struggle for justice. Marxism focuses upon the emancipation of a particular class with the clearest social grievance, the proletariat, from a particular form of economic exploitation, capitalism, with the end result of class equality. For Marx and virtually all socialists both preceding and succeeding him, equality is the foundation for true liberation. Foucault's project, in contrast, emphasizes that all members of society are constrained by social discipline, with the differences between social roles (proletarian vs. bourgeois, female vs. male) being less significant than the overall effects of social control. Although it is difficult to locate in Foucault a fully fledged emancipatory vision (only power), interpreters of Foucault have extrapolated such a vision in which social power might be challenged at more or less any point, with more or less equal effectiveness. Such an assertion of the equal political significance of most every cultural phenomenon has been a bonanza for literary scholars, who have proceeded to elaborate how social reality can be challenged and changed through a virtually limitless variety of forms of literary resistance and stylistic subversion. Meanwhile, lacking any means to distinguish between the subjects of social control (as all are equally controlled), practitioners of Foucauldian power-analysis render the egalitarian aim of Marxism and socialism virtually meaningless; in its place, because all subjects alike are subject to disciplinary practices, is the struggle to “free” them and particularly (adopting the model provided by psychoanalysis) to liberate the play of desire.

This notion, that political power might be subverted and transformed by whatever literary or cultural textualities happen to come to hand, is challenged directly by Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois. Canonical as their writing has become in recent decades, all three were passionately insistent upon the socially instrumental and political function of their own work, which to a large extent they generalized to all literary work. They believed that certain kinds of writing might foster social change, and it was critical for them to seek these out, for they also held, conversely, that many kinds of writing accomplished little at all in the way of social transformation; most writing did no more than reinforce existing social norms. Using the example of the Dutch painters, Gilman suggested in 1904 that the usual role of art was to accentuate the existing ideology, to make “Holland Hollander,” although she also allowed that literature, especially fiction, might foster the imagining of new social realities: “that power of seeing over and under and around and through, of foreseeing, of constructing hypotheses, by which science and invention profit as much as art.”17 More bluntly, Upton Sinclair declared in 1925: “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”¹⁸ W. E. B. Du Bois spoke in virtually the same terms, playing the curmudgeon just a year later at the height of the “New Negro” Renaissance: “All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”¹⁹ The instrumentalism of their writing asserts, moreover, the importance of a social and material world beyond textuality: a world important enough to sacrifice, quite willingly, the pleasures of the text and the stylistic performance, however adroit and culturally resistant such a performance might be. In short, these writers state the case for conceptions of politics and society reoriented to class struggle, in which the contest for material resources is fundamental, and social structures are typically assembled by and for the benefit of men ahead of women, whites over people of color, and owners above workers.

To find a body of recent critical work sympathetic with the frankly materialist and instrumentalist emphases of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois, we must examine the work of a distinct minority among literary and cultural critics—often also critics of minority literature and culture—or move altogether outside the orbit of literary studies into social and political theory. Perhaps the most in sync with the triptych writers, and perhaps the most implacable critic of the linguistic and psychological turns of recent “radical” theory, is the Marxist-feminist literary theorist Teresa Ebert. Ebert writes scathingly that most postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, by focusing upon linguistic and ideological struggles, have accomplished little more revolutionary than validating their own status as “privileged mental workers.” “Postal” theories, as Ebert calls them, practically erase basic distinctions between material needs and immaterial desires, such that “Lack and need become superfluous concepts and, as such, have to be erased: this is a world (class) for which the problem is no longer the problem of poverty (need) but of liberty (desire).”20 Ebert's perspective is instructive, and not least by the fact that her bluntly materialist position is very much a minority voice even among contemporary critics who profess some allegiance to Marxism.

Black studies has also provided a significant forum for scholars in disciplines other than English to dialogue critically with literary scholars who have defined radical political change in primarily discursive, psychological, or stylistic terms. Kenneth Warren's critique of “The End(s) of African-American Studies” analyzes the work of Robin Kelley and other literary scholars wherein “politics tends to get reduced to a matter of meaningful aesthetic expression and the correct exegesis of that expression rather than concerted action directed toward definable goals.”²¹ In W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought, Adolph Reed dresses down the cultural politics of Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in order to dispute the priority in literary studies of politics of indirection, subversion, and cultural diffusion, as opposed to more conventional understandings of politics as advocacy, hegemonic struggle, and collective organization. By showing that more recent traditions of black social justice activism are descended genealogically from Du Bois's work, Reed even offers implicit evidence showing the long-term relevancy of the socialist tradition in which Gilman and Sinclair as well as Du Bois participated.

Coming from several disciplinary spaces, sometimes responding to disciplinary discourses touting quantitative measurement of economic value, one recent trend in progressive social thought essentially seeks to split the difference between the materialism of Ebert and the psychological and linguistic emphases of the “radical” postmodernists. Chantal Mouffe's On the Political speaks of “liberty and equality for all” as the foundational aims around which political and ethical consensus might be gained—a reasonable and seemingly even obvious practical suggestion until one considers the ways that the two terms have been played against one another in the history of U.S. politics as well as in the theoretical debates described above.22 Along much the same lines, Lisa Duggan's The Twilight of Equality? concludes with a counterbalancing emphasis upon “Love and Money,” with a dual focus on “pleasure and collective caretaking, love and the egalitarian circulation of money.” Ultimately, Duggan envisions the necessity of fundamental challenge to prevailing cultural and economic categories, “radical transformation of cultural categories” and “a socialist transformation of the institutions of political economy.”²³ Mouffe and Duggan attempt to balance bottom-line definitions of economic inequality and classically Marxist conceptions of class politics with multiple definitions of the social good and the proliferation of recent justice struggles. Here they are joined by a handful of literary scholars such as Eric Lott, who in The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual issues a warning to liberals with a “general preference for agitating around class and economic inequality to the exclusion of other exploitations,” suggesting as alternatives “the history of African-American liberation movements, radical women's uprisings, and other insurrectionary energies.”²⁴

This is a critical balance I must seek in my own study. Implicit in the very choice of representative figures in my triptych is the aim of including “African-American liberation movements” and “radical women's uprisings” on equal terms with more mainstream, more visible versions of American socialism. Moreover, in spite of their passion for literary instrumentality, the writing of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois, like all literature whether of the most prosaic or experimental sort, operates inescapably on the level of cultural or ideological work. On other points, too, there are strong commonalities between Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois and the current group of social democratic theorists. In distinction from the Communists of their day and dogmatic Marxists such as Teresa Ebert in ours (as avid a supporter of militant revolutionism as any past devotee of the Comintern), they either emphasize or imply the importance of using the existing political and legal structures for bringing about economic transformation, however radical. Mouffe explicitly repudiates the necessity—or even the possibility—“of an act of radical refoundation that would institute a new social order from scratch.” She insists, instead, that “a number of very important socio-economic and political transformations, with radical implications, are possible within the context of liberal democratic institutions.”25

At the same time, Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois also offer a potentially salutary challenge for today's theorists who go to such extraordinary lengths to insist upon the equivalence of all justice struggles. The problematic, if productive, paradigm was articulated as early as Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which in 1985 asserted not only that there are multiple forms of social oppression under modern capitalism (a mainstay of Marxist analysis concerning gender oppression, suppressed nationalities, and so forth) but also that those forms are relatively distinct and autonomous from one another and that, therefore, the justice claims and freedom struggles of each oppressed group must remain relatively separate and independent. Yet Laclau and Mouffe further (and reasonably) insisted that the only way for oppressed, outsider groups to be empowered was through a dynamic coalition politics: “In our view,” they argued, “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.”²⁶ As with the literary critics surveyed earlier, it is possible to see here the influence of Foucauldian anxieties about social control and the dream of social freedom complicating the Marxian narrative—and not necessarily positively. Although these critics seem less vulnerable to Ebert's charge of replacing need with desire, it is not clear that the formulations balancing the Foucauldian drive for liberation with the Marxist goal of equality—Mouffe's “liberty and equality for all,” Duggan's “Love and Money”—actually result in a practicable and compelling socialist strategy.

Even as Gilman and Du Bois insisted upon the importance of women and racial minorities within social democratic coalitions, they joined Sinclair and other socialists in emphasizing economic determination and insisting upon economic equality as the basis for all other forms of social freedom. At those moments when today's social democrats stress the autonomy of the new political struggles as a way to demonstrate the inadequacy of economic analysis, they tend to reify economics into a limited conception of “class.” On some occasions, as when Mouffe speaks of “all the democratic struggles which have emerged in a variety of social relations and which, we argued, could not be apprehended through the category of ‘class,'” and when Lott warns against liberals' “general preference for agitating around class and economic inequality to the exclusion of other exploitations,” they appear to reduce the flexible category of economic relations to a static, narrow social category.27 Such a reification makes class just one among several subject identities, and of course to prioritize class interests above the interests of exploited minorities, women, or GLBT people would be to violate the core principle of equality. But economic analysis (whether in the Marxist or in other socialist traditions) cannot be equated to partisanship for a particular, clearly defined set of individuals. If, to be sure, Sinclair sometimes conceives of the proletariat in terms of the white, male, European stereotype, Gilman and Du Bois show us that prioritizing the mode of production and the problem of economic exploitation, as Marxism and socialism do, can and should mean attending first and foremost to the needs of women, blacks, and other disadvantaged groups that are more economically exploited than the white, male proletariat (or even largely excluded from economic life). Indeed, economic analysis can actually function as a mediating frame of analysis that allows for a more fundamental articulation of common interests between various exploited groups than simply an assertion of the necessity of a series of ad hoc political alliances against a common but ill-defined foe, variously identified as social repression, disciplinary power, or political oppression. Such an analysis of economic relations may also make possible a relative prioritization of immediate political goals: not an absolute privileging of economic over social issues, but a conditional emphasis upon material needs.

From the example of the triptych writers, we can see, too, that the different relationships of various disadvantaged groups to the means of social production may result not only in different relative priorities, but in rather different kinds of political action than if—as prompted by the formula of equivalency—they were pursuing their own goals mainly according to their own lights. The tension lies in whether “love” and “money” can, after all, be pursued by everyone simultaneously, or whether some group's pursuit of its desires might, in fact, interfere with not only the desires of another group or individuals but even their basic material needs. In response to the effort to balance goals of “love” and “money,” liberty and equality, for all individuals simultaneously, the triptych writers often offered a differential understanding of the relationships of various individuals and groups to social power—and hence an understanding that different groups will need to behave differently for there to be a coordinated and coherent, counterhegemonic socialist strategy. To take just one preliminary example: Charlotte Perkins Gilman saw that the difference between middle-class and working-class women was qualitative as well as quantitative, for the former could enjoy significant wealth even as they altogether lacked status as socially productive individuals, whereas the latter had some status as productive individuals (and were exploited by it) even as they had very little wealth. Consequently, the remedies for their situations were starkly different: middle-class women had to become traitors to their class, giving up their privileges as bourgeois consumers even as they sought recognition as producers by moving into the workforce; working-class women already had recognition as producers but needed to gain in their privileges as consumers, needing to obtain control over the full product of their labor.

All of this is not to suggest that Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois were paragons of egalitarian ethics and social democratic political judgment. Gilman, Sinclair, Du Bois, and their cohort of activists offer instead a series of case studies exemplifying both the possibilities of egalitarian activism within the United States and the challenges of such activism. Ultimately, the most fundamental difference between this study and recent theorizations of “liberty and equality,” “love and money,” is not about aims, or even social democratic strategy, but about their emphasis on general theory and a focus upon recent events and my focus on a historical methodology and a longer view. I seek in American Socialist Triptych to describe not so much how social democracy might be—the ideal conditions that might yet yield social democracy, “a ‘chain of equivalence' among the diversity of democratic struggles,” to quote Laclau and Mouffe—but rather how historical events actually did conspire to realize a degree of social democracy in the United States. It tells this narrative both by entering into dialogue with historians and biographers and by using primary texts extensively, not only literary texts but also unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and personal correspondence. In adopting these historiographic methods rather than the higher theory of Ebert, Laclau and Mouffe, Foucault, or Derrida, American Socialist Triptych is oriented toward the specificity of what has actually happened with, and to, socialism in the United States. This is not to discount the importance of the ideal; indeed, among the phenomena that have “actually happened” in the United States is the projection of a variety of socialist futures. The interaction between pragmatic and idealistic versions of socialism—often called “scientific” and “utopian” socialism—is central to the story I have to tell, beginning directly in the next chapter and more or less throughout. Yet the narrative will consider with at least equal attention those aspects of historical contingency—the resistance of institutions and practices to change, and the necessity of using institutions in order to effect change—that complicate the pure and direct pursuit of egalitarian ideals and also those historical aspects—moments of serendipity—that create opportunities in spite of the theoretical shortcomings of the activists involved.

 

I should like finally to offer a few words on the book's strategy and organization by way of the overarching metaphor I have adopted for this work: the triptych. In its original medieval usage, a triptych is a three-panel, dually hinged and usually movable, allegorical mural created for medieval Christian churches and chapels. The three parts of the mural were employed variously: they might represent a snapshot of a single scene with three focal points; they might describe a single narrative arc with beginning, middle, and end and typically moving from left to right; or they might present three separate, though interrelated saints' lives or biblical narratives.28 In all its variations, the heart of the triptych is the composite and dialogic effects gained by viewing the three panels together. So, too, with my triptych of American socialist writers. To begin with, there is a logical and chronological progression from Gilman and the pre-1900 socialists on the one side, to Sinclair and the Socialist Party in the middle, and on to Du Bois and Black Nationalism on the other. But in terms of socialist ideology, the progression is by no means absolute. As the triptych is meant to be viewed as a whole, with the ever-present possibility of comparisons back and forth between the panels, so too this socialist triptych demands reading the earlier story of Gilman in constant dialogue with the later two, virtually synchronous stories of Du Bois and Sinclair, for in her work we find a socialist-feminist interrogation of the latent patriarchy of the other two. It demands also that the work of W. E. B. Du Bois be brought into critical relation with the main line of the socialist tradition defined by the careers of Gilman and Sinclair, neither of whom ever entirely grasped the importance of antiracism to socialist strategy.

Here it is useful to recall the medieval penchant for the grotesque often reflected in the triptych, whereby the very holiness of the represented characters or narratives might be brought into question by the manner of their presentation (the Last Judgment, for instance, seems particularly arbitrary in its division of the damned and the saved, whose naked forms are indistinguishable from one another except for their radically differing eternal destinations).²⁹ The diversity of the triptych as a genre, often focusing upon events in the life of Jesus but also taking as subjects the Virgin Mary, the Last Judgment, Adam and Eve, various saints, and even the visages of patrons, also suggests that no single triptych pretends to tell the whole narrative that the church seeks to convey to spiritual seekers and believers. The central narrative thread may be held in common—whether social equality in this world or salvation in the next—but the ways of elaborating upon the story are multiple. So, too, I do not profess that Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois were in all ways exemplary of the best in American socialist traditions—only that their work is often prophetic and consistently instructive. I also do not assert that work done by other scholars upon other socialist traditions ought to be disregarded. I merely offer that, in addition to the chapel of progressivism and the shrine to Communism, we might consider the authenticity of another American social democratic narrative, this socialist triptych of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois.

Besides the triptych of representative socialist writers, fundamental to this project at its conception, another tripartite scheme has emerged through the process of research, writing, and rewriting, reflected in the three-part organization of the chapters into groups. The scheme emerges from the tension between Gilman's, Sinclair's, and Du Bois's work as political activists and their profession as writers. The political and literary functions were practically coterminous for these writers. Yet unquestionably, there were choices these writers could and did make about how precisely to manifest their political commitments in their writing, and they certainly made choices at various times about how closely they aligned themselves, and involved themselves, with specific political groups and campaigns. Moreover, even as the literary politics of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois must be understood within the context of the groups and movements of their times, their political literature must be understood within the framework of literary tradition, genre, and reception. Consequently, this book will sometimes focus more upon how the triptych writers used their literature toward immediate political ends, and sometimes more upon how politics is reflected in, and acts upon, literary form.

Part I will consider especially the interconnections between the political and the literary at those moments in the authors' careers when they initially identified themselves with socialism, a procedure that will also serve to introduce American socialism in the decades of the 1890s and the following two decades. In Part II, which has a slightly later focus concentrated on the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the argument is closely tied to the development of a literary critical genre that was the favored mode of all three of my featured socialist writers, a genre that I shall call realist-utopian fiction in deference to the two widely acknowledged literary genres that it merges. These genres, I shall argue, have been interdependent upon each other from the outset and have developed in relationship with the progressive-socialist movements of their era. In addition to this argument's implications for the standard literary histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an exploration of the literary production of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois allows an examination of the several different relationships of the literary profession and of intellectual work generally with political activism. Even as their careers reflect a constant desire and the possibility of literary production doing immediate political work, those careers also show the productivity and the necessity of longer-term cultural work. At various points in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the triptych authors paid relatively greater attention to their own literary endeavors and pulled back from direct political activism. But for them, certainly—and perhaps for other American writers—the shift in focus did not reflect a diminishment of political interest so much as a redirection of socialist strategy from immediate political action to less direct cultural work. The two chapters comprising Part III examine the interaction of the longer-term work with political action, showing how, at the key historical moment of the Great Depression, the cultural work combined with a renewal of direct action to bring about political and institutional change.

Although this progression reflects the compromises and the long-term commitment necessary to bring about just a degree of socialist change in the United States, it also inspires some degree of hope for a more egalitarian future by social democratic change. If the history of U.S. socialism in the later years of the nineteenth century and opening years of the twentieth century remains immanent in many of our contemporary institutions, practices, and ideological formations—and, after all, elements of the welfare state, key provisions of Social Security established in the 1930s, do remain with us—then that history may tell us of both the potentials for progressive transformation and the pitfalls of attempting such a transformation in the opening years of the twenty-first century. Although there is considerable difference between the way literary critics have come to imagine social liberation in the twenty-first century and the way these socialist literary figures imagined it in their times, and while there is appreciable though more subtle difference between the formulations of the new social democrats and these old ones schooled in the Second Internationale, the notion of a common American history of “radicalism” suggests also that the various concepts that today's academics offer under those terms have, at their root, a common aim of genuine social equality in material as well as psychological dimensions. This book is written with such a possibility in mind, coupled with an awareness that, for all our interest in justice and equality, contemporary scholars of American culture and literature are lacking in resources for learning the history of nonviolent, democratic, and radical politics within their fields. It is my hope that American Socialist Triptych will be such a resource.