“Socialism is something that nice people do together in America”
Posted by zunguzungu on December 12, 2007
Or so says Marcus Klein, recounting a little vignette from Floyd Dell’s autobiographical novel 1920 Moon-Calf, in which our young protagonist learns what it means to celebrate Robert Ingersoll’s birthday:
Her look was of mischievous pride in the sharing of a pleasant secret, while his was a burning flash of wonder and gratitude… “Why,” she said, “I was brought up on Bob Ingersoll. My father’s a Socialist and a freethinker.”
“And you never told me!” he said.
“Why should I tell you? You never asked me. But I always knew you were a Socialist too.”
“Am I?” he said.
“Of course!”
It came out that he didn’t know there was such a thing as the Socialist party. She clapped her hands. “It will be fun to take you to the Socialist local,” she said.
…
Ah, the good old days when young people went about a-maying and frolicking like good, wholesome little proletarians. I’ve become interested in this period, because along with the now hard to imagine fact of Socialist mayors in Berkeley, Milwaukee, Schenectady, and Flint and the grand campaigns of Eugene Debs, there’s something really interesting about the way the idea of socialism and leftist radicalism more generally went under the flag of American pluralism. To be “American” was then the province of the left, while Anglo-philic elites found the immigrants pouring into the cities distasteful and looked to Europe for redemption and high culture. Or maybe I just find stuff like this hilarious; in Marcus Klein’s Foreigners, he recounts how Max Eastman discovered he was a socialist:
“A girl friend, as he was to record the matter later, had told him about the Marxist class struggle and the eventual victory of the Proletariat, and he had been delighted. ‘Ida,’ he said “that’s a perfectly wonderful idea!’”
Maybe the banal prosaicness of it, or the way these writers represent their conversions in such wholesome lovey-dovey ways makes me laugh. Or maybe the only appropriate response is a nervous chuckle, when reading about a time in this country when respected intellectuals were pacifists as a matter of principle, when people voted a little less out of idealism than out of fear and hate, and when the idea of “America” hadn’t become the private property of a militaristic clique of authoritarian xenophobes.
