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economy, rather than offering an elec- toral alternative. Their strategy of “re- alignment” attracted younger figures who became the public faces of social- ism in the 1960s, most notably Michael Harrington and Bayard Rustin.
The key fact for Ross is that the Shachtmanites belied their socialist rhetoric and the SPA’s legacy of anti- militarism by offering political cover for the welfare-warfare policies of Democrats such as Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jack- son. By 1972, many of them support- ed Richard Nixon. Following the lead of former Communists who played prominent roles in the conservative movement of the 1950s, the strategic “right” of postwar socialism eventu- ally found a new home on the political right in the 1970s.
This is a fascinating story, which Ross may be the first to treat as a con- tinuation of the odyssey that begins with the Populists and the Knights of Labor. But it fits awkwardly with the fourorfivehundredpagesthatpre- cede it. By the time Ross turns to the post-history of the SPA—a sequence of almost totally insignificant paper organizations—the number of names, groups, and journals in play has be- come overwhelming. Early socialists dreamed of a broad-based party that could attract support from millions of ordinary Americans. By the end, there were more factions than members.
So why wasn’t that dream realized? Strategic choices clearly played some part in the failure to establish a viable socialist party. So did official repres- sion. Later on, socialists had to con- tend with the problem of co-optation, whether by Communists or Demo- crats. Ross documents all these factors. Yet an even more important consider- ation is almost entirely absent from his analysis: America’s ethnic and religious diversity. Socialism appeals to class as the defining fact of politics. It is most successful when people have few other major differences from each other.
This has never been the case in the SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
United States. Even before the wave of immigration from Eastern and South- ern Europe that began in the 1870s, many Americans saw themselves as old stock or German or Irish, Catholic or Protestant, rather than as workers. There were some examples of pan- ethnic cooperation. But they were gen- erally limited to specific industries or periods of economic depression.
Race was even more important. Blacks were America’s most exploited laborers, but they never embraced so- cialism to any significant extent. This was partly because their political ac- tivity was sharply restricted and partly because many early populists and so- cialists were white supremacists who limited black participation to racially segregated cells or discouraged it alto- gether. Due to the tragedy of America’s racial history, socialists lost a major source of potential support.
Finally, the leading representatives of American socialism may have been too American for their own good. The JeffersonianelementsRossprizeswere most appealing to middle-class Mid- western Protestants. As Lipset and Marks have pointed out, anti-statist themes were less exciting to a working class composed of new immigrants, particularly Catholics. They respond- ed to Father Coughlin, not Norman Thomas.
It is possible that better luck and more skillful tactics could have over- come these obstacles. But it is not clear how much that would have mattered in the end. Despite their antimilitarist beginnings, socialist parties in most of Europe supported both World Wars and then embraced much the same blend of social welfare, economic cor- poratism, and militarized internation- alism that has defined the Democratic Party at least since FDR.
Perhaps America is not exceptional after all.
Samuel Goldman is assistant professor of political science at The George Washington University.
A Missing History of Conservatism
by THOMAS E. WOODS JR.
Conservative Heroes: Fourteen Leaders Who Shaped America, From Jefferson to Reagan, Garland S. Tucker III, ISI Books, 224 pages
I
think was, been there, done that.
confess: when I received my re- view copy of Garland Tucker’s Conservative Heroes, all I could
Having endured my share of collec- tions that outwardly resemble Tuck- er’s book, I am drearily familiar with the genre: commonplace, convention- al, and generally inoffensive historical figures, of the sort all right-thinking people are expected to admire, are solemnly commended to the reader as model conservatives.
That’s why Tucker’s book came as such a pleasant surprise: here are plenty of figures—from Nathaniel Macon and John Randolph of Roa- noke to John C. Calhoun and Robert Taft—who play rather a minor role, or are actually cast as villains, in the neoconservative version of American history.
Tucker sidesteps a major dispute in intellectual history by frankly treating American conservatism as synony- mous with classical liberalism. Thus the political philosophy whose for- tunes are chronicled in Conservative Heroes “was originally called ‘classi- cal liberalism’ but now more often is termed ‘conservatism’.”
The ideas Tucker associates with conservatism are familiar ones: a disbelief in the perfectibility of man, a commitment to limited govern- ment, support for private property, and a conviction that private virtue is necessary for the maintenance of a free and just society. But as I say, the people he chooses to illustrate these principles are far less familiar, and that’s a good thing.
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 49