Socialism in America

Socialism : Noun -a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

Socialism has bad press in America. The majority of Americans have a negative opinion of socialism with a vague notion that it is somehow, ‘un-American.’ In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, fully three-quarters of political independents and moderates expressed discomfort with the idea of socialism, especially since it is believed to be connected with those on the left of the political divide.

I used to be one of those, since I had learned in my earliest school days that socialism was bad, that it didn’t work, and it was somehow, un-American. I vaguely remember that this information was given in a school government class. The lessons said this was proven by a Scotsman named Robert Owen.

Robert Owen and his sons began an experiment with a socialist community in New Harmony, Indiana in 1825. Owen was a wealthy industrialist and he established New Harmony on vacant land in Indiana with his own cash, purchasing property and promoting its establishment. He purchased advertisements in various newspapers to announce his experiment for a cooperative colony, bringing various people together in an attempt to achieve shortened working hours for an 8-hour work-day, a remarkable goal when working hours were commonly 12 or 10 hours per day. Under Owen’s leadership, the new town banned money and other commodities for trade, instead using "labor tickets" denominated in the number of hours worked as the substitute for cash. My lessons about New Harmony concluded with the note that the New Harmony experiment failed, proving that socialism was a failed economic system.

The New Harmony experiment did indeed fail. Owen’s theories about equal work and equal pay for everyone failed to produce enough economic value in the small community to satisfy all the consumers who moved there. Workers were unable to earn a living, and the town disbanded after a two-year effort and Owen’s decision to avoid spending good money after bad.

Although the community ceased to exist, Owen’s ideas achieved lasting prominence. Even with its short existence, New Harmony became known as a center for advances in education and scientific research. Town residents established the first free library, a civic drama club, and a public-school system open to both men and women, a novelty for the times when women were rarely given an education. Many prominent citizens of New Harmony achieved lasting notoriety including Owen's sons: Robert Dale Owen, became an Indiana congressman and social reformer who sponsored legislation to create the Smithsonian Institution; David Dale Owen, a noted state and federal geologist; William Owen, a New Harmony businessman; and Richard Owen, Indiana state geologist, Indiana University professor, and first president of Purdue University. The town also served as the second headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey. In a remarkably short time, the town hosted numerous scientists and educators who became part of a vibrant intellectual community. But the town still failed when Owens decided not to provide more funding. Although the problems were complex, failure of the town was laid to the economic system that Owens called socialism, and thus it received a lasting mark in the United States as a ‘failed system’.

Although the origins of socialism as a political movement and an economic system lie in the Industrial Revolution, its intellectual roots reach back almost as far as recorded thought—even as far as Moses, according to one history of the subject. Socialist ideas certainly played an important part in the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose Republic depicts an austere society in which men and women of the “guardian” class share with each other their few material goods. Early Christian communities also practiced the sharing of goods and labor, a simple form of socialism subsequently followed in early monasteries.

The more recent history of socialism has its origins in the 1789 French Revolution. After the French experimented with new forms of government and distribution of goods, others added their ideas. The Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels in 1848 just before the revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, expressing what they termed "scientific socialism". In Germany, socialism became increasingly associated with newly formed trade unions.

After the Scotsman Owens, socialism in America can be traced to the arrival of German immigrants in the 1850s when Marxian socialist unions began, such as the National Typographic Union in 1852, United Hatters of 1856, and Iron Moulders Union of North America in 1859. The famous U.S. author Theodore H. White helped define the movement when he wrote, "Socialism is the belief and the hope that by proper use of government power, men can be rescued from their helplessness in the wild cycling cruelty of depression and boom."

Notwithstanding the definition of socialism as an economic system, Theodore White’s idea that socialism could and should ‘provide proper use of government power’ for programs to support common people. An early example of this use of government power for the benefit of citizenry in America came with the development of government-sponsored public education for children. The schools were started shortly after immigrants from Europe came here in search of religious freedom. A school known as the Boston Latin School was founded in 1635 and is both the first public school and oldest existing school in the United States. All the New England colonies required towns to set up schools, clearly an idea that Socialists embraced. In 1642, the Massachusetts Bay Colony made "proper" education compulsory and other New England colonies followed this example. Similar statutes were adopted in other colonies in the 1640s and 1650s. The schools were all male and all white, with few facilities for girls, but they were organized and funded by the government, most often with citizen input and support by parents.

This socialistic idea put America on the move toward an educated working class that formed the basis of our middle class. Nations in the ‘old country’ did not follow our lead and the workers in these regions were mostly uneducated, unable to read or write and unequipped to help develop and use new technologies that became important for manufacturing goods that the rest of the world soon wanted. Although the result of early schooling for children helped in development of an educated middle class in America, the incentive for education in the beginning was not based on the idea of helping raise the wages and therefore, the standard of living for workers. Rather, the immigrants sought to have their children educated for the same reason that many had migrated here; the drive for education was related to teaching students to read Scripture.

One of the pervasive myths in the United States is that we have never had a socialist movement comparable to other industrialized nations. This is not true. In the early 20th century, a vibrant Socialist Party and socialist movement flourished in the United States. In 1877, the Socialist Labor Party of America was founded and in 1901, the Socialist Party of America was created. The party’s highly decentralized and democratic structure enabled it to adapt to the needs and cultures of diverse constituencies in different regions of the country. Among those attracted to the movement in its heyday were immigrant and native-born workers and their families, tenant farmers, middle-class intellectuals, socially conscious millionaires, urban reformers, and feminists. Party platforms regularly included the reform interests of these groups as well as the long-term goal of eradicating capitalism. By 1912, the Socialist Party boasted an impressive record of electoral successes at the local, state, and national levels. U.S. Socialists could also point with pride to over three hundred English and foreign-language Socialist periodicals.

The man generally credited for founding the Socialist political party in the U.S. was Eugene Debs, a labor leader and candidate for President. Debs grew up in Terre Haute Indiana and began work for the railroad, beginning at the lowest level, cleaning grease from freight engines for fifty cents a day. When a locomotive fireman came to work one day drunk, Debs was pressed into service. Soon he was working regularly for the Vandalia Railroad on the overnight run from Terre Haute to Indianapolis earning one dollar per night for his work as a fireman. After nearly four years on this job and then joining the union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs used his earnings to attend a business college, while retaining his status as an active member of the union.

Debs was elected associate editor of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF) and their monthly news organ, Firemen's Magazine, in 1878. Two years later, he was appointed Grand Secretary and Treasurer of the BLF and editor of the magazine. He worked as a BLF functionary until January 1893 and as the magazine's editor until September 1894. Debs also became a prominent figure in the community, serving two terms as Terre Haute's city clerk from September 1879 to September 1883. In the fall of 1884, he was elected to the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat, serving for one term.

Debs expanded his focus in union work by founding the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the nation's first industrial unions. In the summer of 1894, railroads operating across the country suddenly implemented pay cuts of 28% for many railroad workers. Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organized a wildcat strike in response. Suddenly, Debs’ ARU union became vitally important and membership in the ARU grew exponentially. In response to the pay cuts, Debs called for a strike and urged his union workers to boycott work on trains that had Pullman cars. The result was the nationwide Pullman Strike, affecting most lines west of Detroit and more than 250,000 workers in 27 states. The railroads were incensed at this and decided to turn to the government for help. They found a willing listener in President Grover Cleveland who used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was convicted of federal charges for defying a court injunction. He served six months in prison for his part in the work stoppage. Debs notoriety from the railroad strike ultimately led to his becoming a candidate for President of the United States as a leader of the Socialist Party.

The President of the US who never admitted to being a socialist was the man who implemented the most socialist-inspired programs for our country. Franklin D. Roosevelt helped lead our nation from the depths of the Great Depression by implementing a variety of programs that he called The New Deal. The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations to help the poor and working class. Major federal programs were the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). The programs provided support for farmers, unemployed, youth and the elderly and included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry. All these programs were based on ideas that socialists and other 3^rd party politicians developed and supported. The socialist ideas helped pull our country out of the Great Depression and helped jump start industries that managed the war effort. The grateful voters made FDR our most beloved President and voted for him at every chance, giving him four terms of office.

After Roosevelt’s premature death, his successor Harry Truman carried on the New Deal programs and became an ardent supporter of those ideas and programs. Harry was never one to back down from calling things as he saw them, nor was he afraid of the label ‘socialism’. In a speech on Oct 10, 1952, the plain-spoken Truman spoke about socialism.

Socialism is a scare word that they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last twenty years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.

Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

Harry S Truman

Harry was another of the many Presidents who called for America to implement a national policy of government sponsored health care for all citizens. This was not a new idea as Germany had implemented ‘sickness insurance’ many years earlier under the rule of Otto Von Bismarck beginning in 1883. The program was implemented over time with an initial start-up covering an estimated 5% to 10% of the population. The popularity of the program was irresistible; over time the program was extended to more and more Germans until the majority of Germans were covered early in the 20^th century as the program morphed from sickness insurance to national health care. Now, virtually all industrialized nations have a version of a national health care with only the US having a difficult time in giving birth to this overdue idea.

Conservative political activists prevented the implementation of a health care plan for US citizens despite the efforts of several US Presidents. The first to propose universal health care and national health insurance was Theodore Roosevelt. He encountered fierce opposition to his plan. Those who opposed the idea mostly came from the medical community. Doctors were afraid that if medical care were controlled by the government, a cap on doctor’s wages would be established, limiting their income. The American Medical Association (AMA) went into action, hiring a public relations firm in 1947, Whitaker and Baxter, who worked to disparage President Truman's proposal for a national health care system. The Whitaker and Baxter public relations firm used the term ‘socialized medicine’ to imply it represented socialism, and by extension, communism. They said the plans for socialized medicine would “undermine the [our] democratic form of government.”

The AMA conducted a nationwide campaign called Operation Coffee Cup during the late 1950s and early 1960s in opposition to extend Social Security to include health insurance for the elderly, later known as Medicare. As part of the plan, doctors' wives organized coffee meetings in an attempt to convince acquaintances to write letters to Congress opposing the program. In 1961, Ronald Reagan recorded a disc entitled Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine, warning its audience of the dangers that socialized medicine could bring. The recording was widely played at Operation Coffee Cup meetings. Other pressure groups began to extend the definition from state managed health care to any form of state finance in health care. The term ‘socialized medicine’ was an effective slogan as it continues to be used today although no one has ever bothered to provide a precise definition of the term, causing listeners to make up their own ideas that included outrageous fears about ‘death squads.’

Socialism in America continues to be a murky, ill defined concept which, in the minds of many, is somehow connected to communism, dooming it to a status of a bottom-feeder for those who have little knowledge of our capitalist economic system. It may be slowly shedding this bad press as Bernie Sanders continues to gain stature and openly calls himself a Democrat Socialist, something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. It is helpful to recognize that no one in the current political area is proposing to replace capitalism in America with socialism. What we are seeing, however; is a great number of politicians who are openly advocating more socialist ideas for national programs. Given the popularity of existing social programs like social security and national health care, it is difficult to imagine a future for our nation that doesn’t include more programs that offer a decided socialist flavor. That should be good news for all of us.

Bill