Overview

Socialism in America is a thematic presentation of the various types of socialism, such as Communitarian, Christian, Marxist, and Anarcho-Communist, that have existed in the United States from the time of the Revolutionary War to 1919. The documents included demonstrate how socialism wsa an integral part of the American past: because its ideals were embedded in the birth of America, it authentically expressed the American egalitarian norm. The documents demonstrate that each type of socialism has a counterpart in a broadly based contemporary social movement: for example, religious communities were linked to revivalism and millenarianism. Ultimately, the collapse of socialism in America was tied to the country's conservative mood in the 1890s and World War I.

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Defining socialism as the natural progeny of Jeffersonian egalitarianism whose soul was maimed by the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath, the editor has stuffed religious and secular communitarian tracts together with early socialist, Socialist Party and IWW writings into an anthology covering the period 1808 - 1919. Four of nine chapters present visions of nineteenth-century agrarian micro-utopias, many of which were never implemented. The latter half offers categorically socialist writings. Among the most interesting are the debate between the American S.P.'s left wing and the Hillquit-Berger leadership. The speeches by Debs, Louis Fraina, Bill Haywood and Upton Sinclair make excellent period pieces and political testaments. The editor evinces a strong anti-radical bias, characterizing the S.P. as moderate and constructive and the militant I.W.W. as a miniscule ragtag bunch of bomb-throwers. As a pedagogical ancillary, the book insufficiently explains the historical context of each reading; Kipnis' The American Socialist Movement 1897 - 1912 (1952) is better for the material covered, and Tyler's Freedom's Ferment (1944) offers a greater understanding of communitarianism. As a documentary collection, it's only novel contribution is some out-of-print Christian Socialist selections. As a thematic anthology, its original juxtapositions are rather on the order of a peanut-butter-and-artichoke casserole, while its conception of socialism exceeds the bounds of permissible tendentiousness in such matters. Fried is co-editor of an anthology of European socialist writings. (Kirkus Reviews)

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"Albert Fried""s books include The Essential Lincoln, The Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian Traditions in American Politics, and The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. He divides his time between teaching American History at the State Universsity of New York at Purchase and writing."

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