It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States.

• Author: Ainslie, Kimble Fletcher

By Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Pp. 379. $26.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

For conservatives and libertarians, reading a work that makes serious claims about the absence of socialism in the United States is a bit jarring. Yet political sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks have offered another installment on this theme in their book It Didn't Happen Here. Lipset, a former president of the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Association, has dealt with this issue for much of his long professional career, beginning with Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950). Marks is a Europeanist who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The authors ask us to accept that there is no socialism in the United States and, by inference, that the United States has remained "exceptional" in its politics and governance, compared to other Western industrial democracies, because nominally socialist parties, specifically the Socialist Party of America (SPA), did not effectively survive past the 1930s (though the official dissolution of the SPA did not occur until 1963). But this request is too much to ask of scholars of American politics, American political thought, and comparative public policy--not only because the analysis is so narrowly focused on parties, ignoring policy, but also because Lipset and Marks tell just half the story of the socialist experience in the United States.

From the present book, we learn a great deal about socialist party activity from 1870 to 1930, but almost nothing about socialist party organization and movements after 1945. Moreover, the authors devote little attention to the influence of socialist public policy both before and after this sixty-year period. The question might be put: What difference does it make that socialist parties in the United States failed by the middle of the twentieth century if socialist policy, state regulation, and state enterprise flourished in the United States both before 1870 and after 1930?

Let us review the basics of the book. The authors canvass the standard socialism-in-decline themes and the themes that have been linked to this thesis--such as the role of the two-party political system, the (dis)affiliation with labor unions, the role of immigrants and immigration, the place of ideology and party stratagems, the...