How Socialists Built America
John Nichols
The Nation
April 13, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/159929/how-socialists-built-america

This article is adapted from The "S" Word: A Short
History of an American Tradition. Socialism, published
in March by Verso.

If there's one constant in the elite national discourse
of the moment, it is the claim that America was founded
as a capitalist country and that socialism is a
dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarranted
faith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This
most conventional "wisdom"-increasingly accepted at
least until the recent grassroots mobilizations in
Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Maine-has held that
everything public is inferior to everything private,
that corporations are always good and unions always bad,
that progressive taxation is inherently evil and that
the best economic model is the one that allows the
wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic as they
choose before anything trickles down to the great mass
of Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that
proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose
of providing healthcare for kids and jobs for the
unemployed are "antithetical" to the nation's original
intent and that Barack Obama's reforms are "destroying
this country as it was founded."

When Obama offered tepid proposals to organize a private
healthcare system in a more humane manner, Sean Hannity
of Fox charged that "the Constitution was shredded,
thwarted, the rule of law was passed aside." Newt
Gingrich said the Obama administration was "prepared to
fundamentally violate the Constitution" and was playing
to the "30 percent of the country [that] really is [in
favor of] a left-wing secular socialist system."

In 2009 Sarah Palin raised similar constitutional
concerns, about Obama's proposal to develop a system of
"universal energy building codes" to promote energy
efficiency. "Our country could evolve into something
that we do not even recognize, certainly that is so far
from what the founders of our country had in mind for
us," a gravely concerned Palin informed Hannity, who
responded with a one-word question. "Socialism?"

"Well," she said, "that is where we are headed."

Actually, it's not. Palin is wrong about the perils of
energy efficiency, and she's wrong about Obama. The
president says he's not a socialist, and the country's
most outspoken socialists heartily agree. Indeed, the
only people who seem to think Obama displays even the
slightest social democratic tendency are those who
imagine that the very mention of the word "socialism"
should inspire a reaction like that of a vampire
confronted with the Host.

Unfortunately, Obama may be more frightened by the S-
word than Palin. When a New York Times reporter asked
the president in March 2009 whether his domestic
policies suggested he was a socialist, a relaxed Obama
replied, "The answer would be no." He said he was being
criticized simply because he was "making some very tough
choices" on the budget. But after he talked with his
hyper-cautious counselors, he began to worry. So he
called the reporter back and said, "It was hard for me
to believe that you were entirely serious about that
socialist question." Then, as if reading from talking
points, Obama declared, "It wasn't under me that we
started buying a bunch of shares of banks. And it wasn't
on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement,
the prescription drug plan, without a source of funding.

"We've actually been operating in a way that has been
entirely consistent with free-market principles," said
Obama, who concluded with the kicker, "Some of the same
folks who are throwing the word `socialist' around can't
say the same."

There's more than a kernel of truth to this statement.
Obama really is avoiding consideration of socialist, or
even mildly social democratic, responses to the problems
that confront him. He took the single-payer option off
the table at the start of the healthcare debate,
rejecting the approach that in other countries has
provided quality care to all citizens at lower cost. His
supposedly "socialist" response to the collapse of the
auto industry was to give tens of billions in bailout
funding to GM and Chrysler, which used the money to lay
off thousands of workers and then relocate several dozen
plants abroad-an approach about as far as a country can
get from the social democratic model of using public
investment and industrial policy to promote job creation
and community renewal. And when BP's Deepwater Horizon
oil well exploded, threatening the entire Gulf Coast,
instead of putting the Army Corps of Engineers and other
government agencies in charge of the crisis, Obama left
it to the corporation that had lied about the extent of
the spill, had made decisions based on its bottom line
rather than environmental and human needs, and had
failed at even the most basic tasks.

So we should take the president at his word when he says
he's acting on free-market principles. The problem, of
course, is that Obama's rigidity in this regard is
leading him to dismiss ideas that are often sounder than
private-sector fixes. Borrowing ideas and approaches
from socialists would not make Obama any more of a
socialist than Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt,
Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower. All these
presidential predecessors sampled ideas from Marxist
tracts or borrowed from Socialist Party platforms so
frequently that the New York Times noted in a 1954
profile the faith of an aging Norman Thomas that he "had
made a great contribution in pioneering ideas that have
now won the support of both major parties"-ideas like
"Social Security, public housing, public power
developments, legal protection for collective bargaining
and other attributes of the welfare state." The fact is
that many of the men who occupied the Oval Office before
Obama knew that implementation of sound socialist or
social democratic ideas did not put them at odds with
the American experiment or the Constitution.

The point here is not to defend socialism. What we
should be defending is history-American history, with
its rich and vibrant hues, some of them red. The past
should be consulted not merely for anecdotes or factoids
but for perspective on the present. Such a perspective
empowers Americans who seek a robust debate, one that
samples from a broad ideological spectrum-an appropriate
endeavor in a country where Tom Paine imagined citizens
who, "by casting their eye over a large field, take in
likewise a large intellectual circuit, and thus
approaching nearer to an acquaintance with the universe,
their atmosphere of thought is extended, and their
liberality fills a wider space."

America has always suffered fools who would have us
dwindle the debate down to a range of opinions narrow
enough to contain the edicts of a potentate, a priest or
a plantation boss. But the real history of America tells
us that the unique thing about our present situation is
that we have suffered the fools so thoroughly that a
good many Americans-not just Tea Partisans or Limbaugh
Dittoheads but citizens of the great middle-actually
take Sarah Palin seriously when she rants that
socialism, in the form of building codes, is
antithetical to Americanism.

* * *

Palin is not the first of her kind. There's nothing new
about the charge that a president who is guiding "big
government" toward projects other than the invasion of
distant lands is a socialist. In the spring of 2009,
just months after Obama and a new Democratic Congress
took office, twenty-three members of the opposition
renewed an old project when they proposed that "we the
members of the Republican National Committee call on the
Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the
American people by acknowledging that they have evolved
from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and
nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename
themselves the Democrat Socialist Party."

Cooler heads prevailed. Sort of. At an emergency meeting
of the committee-which traces its history to the first
Republican convention in 1856, where followers of French
socialist Charles Fourier, Karl Marx's editor, and their
abolitionist comrades initiated the most radical
restructuring of political parties in American history-
it was suggested that the proposal to impose a new name
on the Democrats might make "the Republican party appear
trite and overly partisan." The plan was dropped, but a
resolution decrying the "march towards socialism" was
passed. Thus, the RNC members now officially "recognize
that the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring
American society along socialist ideals" and that the
Democrats have as their "clear and obvious
purpose.proposing, passing and implementing socialist
programs through federal legislation."

The Republican Party is currently firmer in its
accusation that the Democrats are steering the nation
"towards socialism" than it was during Joe McCarthy's
Red Scare of the 1950s, when the senator from Wisconsin
was accusing Harry Truman of harboring Communist Party
cells in the government. Truman had stirred conservative
outrage by arguing that the government had the authority
to impose anti-lynching laws on the states and by
proposing a national healthcare plan. But what really
bugged the Republicans was that Truman, who had been
expected to lose in 1948, had not just won the election
but restored Democratic control of Congress. To counter
this ominous electoral trend, conservative Republicans,
led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, announced in 1950 that
their campaign slogan in that year's Congressional
elections would be "Liberty Against Socialism." They
then produced an addendum to their national platform,
much of which was devoted to a McCarthyite rant charging
that Truman's Fair Deal "is dictated by a small but
powerful group of persons who believe in socialism, who
have no concept of the true foundation of American
progress, and whose proposals are wholly out of accord
with the true interests and real wishes of the workers,
farmers and businessmen."

Truman fought back, reminding Republicans that his
policies were outlined in the 1948 Democratic platform,
which had proven to be wildly popular with the
electorate. "If our program was dictated, as the
Republicans say, it was dictated at the polls in
November 1948. It was dictated by a `small but powerful
group' of 24 million voters," said the president, who
added, "I think they knew more than the Republican
National Committee about the real wishes of the workers,
farmers and businessmen."

Truman did not cower at the mention of the word
"socialism," which in those days was distinguished in
the minds of most Americans from Soviet Stalinism, with
which the president-a mean cold warrior-was wrangling.
Nor did Truman, who counted among his essential allies
trade unionists like David Dubinsky, Jacob Potofsky and
Walter Reuther, all of whom had been connected with
socialist causes and in many cases the Socialist Party
of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, rave about the
evils of social democracy. Rather, he joked that "Out of
the great progress of this country, out of our great
advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our
rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have
learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this
country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all
they do is croak, `socialism.'"

Savvy Republicans moved to abandon the campaign. The
return to realism was led by Maine Senator Margaret
Chase Smith, who feared that her party was harming not
just its electoral prospects but the country. That
summer she would issue her "Declaration of Conscience"-
the first serious challenge to McCarthyism from within
the GOP-in which she rejected the anticommunist hysteria
of the moment:

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in
making character assassinations are all too frequently
those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the
basic principles of Americanism-

	The right to criticize;
	The right to hold unpopular beliefs; 
	The right to protest; 
	The right of independent thought.

Republicans might be determined to end Democratic
control of Congress, Smith suggested in her declaration:

	Yet to displace it with a Republican regime
	embracing a philosophy that lacks political
	integrity or intellectual honesty would prove
	equally disastrous to this nation. The nation
	sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don't
	want to see the Republican Party ride to
	political victory on the Four Horsemen of
	Calumny-Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear. I
	doubt if the Republican Party could-simply
	because I don't believe the American people will
	uphold any political party that puts political
	exploitation above national interest.

Most Republicans lacked the courage to confront McCarthy
so directly. But Smith's wisdom prevailed among leaders
of the RNC and the GOP chairs of Congressional
committees, who ditched the Liberty Against Socialism
slogan and reduced Taft's 1,950-word manifesto to a 99-
word digest that Washington reporters explained had been
cobbled together to "soft pedal" the whole "showdown on
`liberty against socialism'" thing. Representative James
Fulton, who like many other GOP moderates of the day
actually knew and worked with Socialist Party members
and radicals of various stripes, was blunter. The cheap
sloganeering, he argued, had steered the party away from
the fundamental question for the GOP in the postwar era:
"whether we go back to Methuselah or offer alternative
programs for social progress within the framework of a
balanced budget."

Imagine if today a prominent Republican were to make a
similar statement. The wrath of Limbaugh, Hannity, Palin
and the Tea Party movement would rain down upon him. The
Club for Growth would organize to defeat the "Republican
in Name Only," and the ideological cleansing of the
party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and
Margaret Chase Smith would accelerate. Some of my
Democratic friends are quite pleased at the prospect; as
today's Republicans steer off the cliffs of extremism
that they avoided even in the days of McCarthy, these
Democrats suggest, the high ground will be cleared for
candidates of their liking. But that neglects the damage
done to democracy when discourse degenerates, when the
only real fights are between a party on the fringe and
another that assumes that the way to win is to move to
the center-right and then hope that fears of a
totalitarian right will keep everyone to the left of it
voting the Democratic line.

* * *

If universal building codes and health protections for
children can be successfully depicted by our debased
media as assaults on American values and the rule of
law, then the right has already won, no matter what the
result is on election day. And a nation founded in
revolt against empire, a nation that nurtured the
radical Republican response to the sin of slavery, a
nation that confronted economic collapse and injustice
with a New Deal and a War on Poverty, a nation that
spawned a civil rights movement and that still recites a
Pledge of Allegiance (penned in 1892 by Christian
socialist Francis Bellamy) to the ideal of an America
"with liberty and justice for all" is bereft of what has
so often in our history been the essential element of
progress.

That element-a social democratic critique frequently
combined with an active Socialist Party and more
recently linked with independent socialist activism in
labor and equal rights campaigns for women, racial and
ethnic minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and
people with disabilities-has from the first years of the
nation been a part of our political life. This country
would not be what it is today-indeed it might not even
be-had it not been for the positive influence of
revolutionaries, radicals, socialists, social democrats
and their fellow travelers. The great political
scientist Terence Ball reminds us that "at the height of
the cold war a limited form of socialized medicine-
Medicare-got through the Congress over the objections of
the American Medical Association and the insurance
industry, and made it to President Johnson's desk."

That did not just happen by chance. A young writer who
had recognized that it was possible to reject Soviet
totalitarianism while still learning from Marx and
embracing democratic socialism left the fold of Dorothy
Day's Catholic Worker movement to join the Young
People's Socialist League. Michael Harrington wanted to
change the debate about poverty in America, and perhaps
remarkably or perhaps presciently, he presumed that
attaching himself to what was left of the once muscular
but at that point ailing Socialist Party was the way to
do so. In a 1959 article for the then-liberal Commentary
magazine, Harrington sought, in the words of his
biographer, Maurice Isserman, "to overturn the
conventional wisdom that the United States had become an
overwhelmingly middle-class society. Using the poverty-
line benchmark of a $3,000 annual income for a family of
four, he demonstrated that nearly a third of the
population lived `below those standards which we have
been taught to regard as the decent minimums for food,
housing, clothing and health.'"

Harrington succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The
article led to a book, The Other America: Poverty in the
United States, which became required reading for policy-
makers, selling 70,000 copies in its first year. "Among
the book's readers, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who
in the fall of 1963 began thinking about proposing
antipoverty legislation," recalls Isserman. "After
Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson took up the
issue, calling in his 1964 State of the Union address
for an `unconditional war on poverty.' Sargent Shriver
headed the task force charged with drawing up the
legislation and invited Harrington to Washington as a
consultant."

Harrington's proposals for renewal of New Deal public
works projects were never fully embraced. But his and
others' advocacy that government should intervene to
address the suffering of those who couldn't care for
themselves or their families underpinned what the author
described as "completing Social Security" by providing
healthcare for the aged. It urged on the Johnson
administration's Great Society, including the Social
Security Act of 1965-or Medicare. Johnson took his hits,
but Americans agreed with their president when he argued
that "the Social Security health insurance plan, which
President Kennedy worked so hard to enact, is the
American way; it is practical; it is sensible; it is
fair; it is just."

Could a plan decried as "socialized medicine" by the
American Medical Association because it was, in fact,
socialized medicine really be "the American way"? Of
course. During the Medicare debate in the early '60s,
Texas Senate candidate George H.W. Bush condemned the
proposal as "creeping socialism." Ronald Reagan, then
making the transition from TV pitchman for products to
TV pitchman for Barry Goldwater, warned that if it
passed citizens would find themselves "telling our
children and our children's children what it once was
like in America when men were free." But Bush and Reagan
managed the program during their presidencies, and Tea
Party activists now show up at town hall meetings to
threaten any legislator who would dare to tinker with
their beloved Medicare.

Americans would not have gotten Medicare if Harrington
and the socialists who came before him-from presidential
candidates like Debs and Thomas to organizers like Mary
Marcy and Margaret Sanger and the Communist Party's
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn-had not for decades been pushing
the limits of the healthcare debate. No less a player
than Senator Edward Kennedy would declare, "I see
Michael Harrington as delivering the Sermon on the Mount
to America." The same was true in abolitionist days,
when socialists-including friends of Marx who had
immigrated to the United States after the 1848
revolutions in Europe were crushed-energized the
movement against slavery and helped give it political
expression in the form of the Republican Party. The same
was true early in the twentieth century, when Socialist
Party editors like Victor Berger battled attempts to
destroy civil liberties and defined our modern
understanding of freedom of speech, freedom of the press
and the right to petition for redress of grievances. The
same was true when lifelong socialist A. Philip Randolph
called the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
and asked a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.,
who had many socialist counselors besides the venerable
Randolph, to deliver what would come to be known as the
"I Have a Dream" speech.

* * *

Again and again at critical junctures in our national
journey, socialist thinkers and organizers, as well as
candidates and officials, have prodded government in a
progressive direction. It may be true, as historian
Patrick Allitt suggests, that "millions of Americans,
including many of these critics [of the Obama
administration], are ardent supporters of socialism,
even if they don't realize it and even if they don't
actually use the word" to describe public services that
are "organized along socialist lines," like schools and
highways. In fact, contemporary socialists and Tea
Partiers might actually find common (if uncomfortable)
ground with Allitt's assertion that "socialism as an
organizational principle is alive and well here just as
it is throughout the industrialized world"-even as they
would disagree on whether that's a good thing. Programs
"organized along socialist lines" do not make a country
socialist. But America has always been and should
continue to be informed by socialist ideals and a
socialist critique of public policy.

We live in complex times, when profound economic, social
and environmental challenges demand a range of
responses. Socialists certainly don't have all the
answers, even if polling suggests that more Americans
find appeal in the word "socialist" today than they have
in decades. But without socialist ideas and advocacy, we
will not have sufficient counterbalance to an anti-
government impulse that has less to do with
libertarianism than with manipulation of the debate by
all-powerful corporations.

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt,
Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were not socialists.
But the nation benefited from their borrowing of
socialist and social democratic ideas. Barack Obama is
certainly not a socialist. But he, and the nation he
leads, would be well served by a similar borrowing from
the people who once imagined Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid and the War on Poverty.

___________________________________________

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