A Century of American Exceptionalism
A Century of American Exceptionalism
REVIEW ESSAY
A CENTURY OF AMERICAN
EXCEPTIONALISM
A review of Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks,
It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the
United States (W. W. Norton, 2000)
Michael Biggs
Friedrich Engels followed the events of 1886 across the Atlantic with
jubilation. American workers had flooded into the Knights of Labor; they
struck en masse for the eight-hour working day on 1 May; in the November
elections they voted for labor candidates, most notably Henry George in New
York City. This could not, of course, compare to Germany, where the Social
Democratic Party captured 10 percent of the vote despite legal persecution.
The Anglo-Saxons – ‘those damned Schleswig-Holsteiners’, as Marx joked –
on both sides of the Atlantic had proved an embarrassment for Marx and
Engels. In theory, the most industrially developed societies represented the
future of the less developed. Yet socialism remained marginal in Britain and
the United States, the capitalist societies par excellence. That is why Engels
greeted the rapid growth of the American labor movement in 1886 with such
enthusiasm. ‘[I]f we in Europe do not hurry up’ he wrote, ‘the Americans will
soon outdistance us’. There was now hope for Britain, where the Trades
Union Congress was dominated by labor aristocrats devoted to retaining their
privileged position within the working class. Marx’s daughter Eleanor and
her husband Edward Aveling, returning from a visit to the United States, con-
cluded: ‘The example of the American working men will be followed before
long on the European side of the Atlantic. An English or, if you will, a British
Labour Party will be formed, foe alike to Liberal and Conservative’. The
example was not only political. Spanish anarchists and French syndicalists
were inspired by the general strike for eight hours. After the American Feder-
ation of Labor took up the eight-hour campaign again in 1889, the Second
International emulated the American example and adopted 1 May as the date
to demonstrate for shorter hours and celebrate working-class solidarity.
Over the 1890s, however, the American working-class movement lost
its place in the vanguard of the Anglophone world. In Britain, two labor
candidates won seats in parliament in 1892, and the following year the
Independent Labour Party was founded. Engels was less enthusiastic about
this than the American events of 1886, but he nonetheless recognized the
potential of the Party as a vehicle of working-class political aspirations. With
less international attention, but more immediate success, nascent labor parties
emerged in the Australian colonies. In New South Wales, the Labor Electoral
League won 35 seats – a quarter of the total! – at its first election in 1891. By
1893, labor gained representation in the parliaments of South Australia and
Queensland. In Australia and Britain, the subsequent years were ones of
frustration as well as hope; there was no inexorable progress towards power.
Nevertheless, the working class retained a distinctive voice in parliament and
eventually created a cohesive party organization, closely linked with the trade
unions. In America, by contrast, the independent labor parties of 1886 had
collapsed completely.
By the turn of the century, socialists could consider America as excep-
tional – in the negative sense. Werner Sombart posed the famous question
in 1906, though with a less appropriate frame of reference: continental
Europe. Throughout the 20th century, socialists and social scientists have
returned over and over to the puzzle. American exceptionalism became more
pronounced as working-class parties gained electoral strength and eventu-
ally acceded to government, in Australasia and Britain as well as in conti-
nental Europe. Yet there has never been a successful socialist, communist, or
labor party in the United States. This absence has made a decisive difference
to state and society: it helps explain the impoverished welfare state and the
remarkably high level of inequality.
It Didn’t Happen Here, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, is a
fitting finale to a century of argument about Why Socialism Failed in the
United States. Lipset has previously tackled the broader question of America’s
uniqueness on many dimensions besides class politics. Emphasizing cultural
values (akin to Tocqueville’s mores) such as individualism, he argues that
these deeply rooted principles continue to shape American society. One of
his most valuable contributions is systematic comparison with Canada – a
society also forged in the American revolution, though on the side of counter-
revolution. Marks has compared the political orientation of unions repre-
senting the same groups of workers in different countries. In collaboration,
they have now produced an impressive work of comparative and historical
social science. It provides a comprehensive and convincing account of the
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failures of socialist politics from the 1890s to the 1930s. For this period, one
suspects that future research will not add or subtract much of consequence
to their account. But the authors leave loose ends on either side of this period.
In the 1880s (as we have seen), Marxists held up the American labor move-
ment as an example for Britain and other Anglophone societies – it was
exceptional in the positive sense. Only in the 1890s, after the success of
independent labor parties in Australia and Britain, was the comparison
reversed. In the 1930s, half a century later, the New Deal coalition held out
the promise of social democracy within the Democratic Party. Yet again,
however, this promise evaporated in the following decade.
supporting one of the major parties (usually the Democrats) rather than a
third party. It is true, of course, that Democratic and Republican parties had
sunk deep roots into communities of urban workers by the late 19th century,
cultivating ethnoreligious identities and providing patronage. Because the
main parties were so porous, they easily absorbed occasional attempts to
mobilize around class, beginning with the workingmen’s parties of the 1830s.
Although America is exceptional for preserving its two-party duopoly
for well over a century, third parties have on occasion achieved considerable
success. What is remarkable, as Lipset and Marks point out, is that socialists
never attained even that success. Aside from the recent stunning success of
Ross Perot, there were two high points in presidential elections. In 1892, the
Populists won 8.5 percent of the vote; in 1924, La Follette – running as an
independent Republican – won 17 percent. The latter’s candidacy was
endorsed by trade unionists, but the American Federation of Labor made it
clear that this was a temporary expedient, intended to punish the two main
parties for nominating anti-labor candidates. The 1924 result may nonethe-
less reveal the reservoir of electoral strength that could have been tapped by
a viable labor party, even if it might never have gained the White House.
Alternatively, if America is a two-party state, then there was a real possi-
bility that one of them could have been captured for labor. While scholars
have fixated on the constraints imposed by the American political system,
Lipset and Marks draw attention to a unique opportunity: the popular nomi-
nation primary, which many states adopted in the early 20th century. As they
point out, ‘one of the key features of American politics that makes life so
difficult for minor parties, the primary system, made a strategy of “boring
from within,” that is, contesting primaries within the major parties, more
feasible’ (p. 265). This strategy was used to spectacular effect in North Dakota
by A. C. Townley, a socialist who understood the potential radicalism of small
farmers. In 1916, his Nonpartisan League won control of the Republican Party
at the primaries, and so elected its candidate as governor; two years later, it
won control of the state legislature. It enacted an impressive program of
agrarian state socialism, which is reminiscent of New Zealand’s first Labour
government in the 1930s. Primaries could be subverted outside Midwestern
farm states too. Upton Sinclair, for example, gained considerable success
(though not gubernatorial office) in his campaign to end poverty in Cali-
fornia, within the Democratic Party, in 1934.
Aside from political institutions, the peculiar mores of American culture
have been antithetical to the socialist project. ‘The antistatist, antiauthoritarian
component of American ideology, derived from Jefferson’s declaration of
Independence, remains an underlying source of the weakness of socialism
in the United States’ (p. 22). This part of the authors’ argument is least devel-
oped; they do not devote a separate chapter to it. It is a plausible general-
ization, though it may not always withstand detailed examination. After the
Civil War, for example, working-class activists conducted a lengthy campaign
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to legislate the eight-hour day, at the state and Federal level. In Britain, by
contrast, proponents of similar legislation in the 1890s faced determined
resistance by weavers and some coalminers. If the American Federation of
Labor from the 1890s ‘came close to syndicalism’ in rejecting state regulation
(p. 98), then that might have reflected unionists’ political frustration in
previous decades rather than enduring American values. As Lipset and Marks
themselves observe, the persistence of antistatist values was also a result of
the failure of socialism.
The United States differs from other ‘neo-European’ societies in the
diversity of its immigrants. As a result, the working class was exceptionally
stratified by ethnicity, religion, and language. According to the authors, ‘while
many Socialists were immigrants, relatively few immigrants were Socialists’
(p. 159). This paradox does not take us far, because even fewer native-born
Americans were socialists. More pertinent is their observation that socialism
was most successful in relatively homogenous communities: whether of
native-born Protestants, as in Oklahoma (a citadel of the Socialist Party before
the First World War), or of radical European immigrants, as in the Lower East
Side of New York City. In such communities, mobilization around class was
not impeded – or was even reinforced – by ethnocultural identity. Of course
some immigrant groups were more receptive to socialism than others. Lipset
and Marks analyze electoral support for the Socialist Party in several states
in 1912 – its peak, when Eugene Debs won 6 percent of the vote – and 1920.
The proportion of immigrants from Scandinavia and from Russia (largely
Jewish) is positively associated with the socialist vote. The proportion of
German immigrants has a positive effect only for the latter date, when the
Socialist Party had become identified with opposition to the war. Strong
support from radical immigrants was a mixed blessing, for it contributed to
the extremism of American socialism (to which we will return below).
The diversity of its immigrants, the peculiarity of its institutions and
values – these aspects of America were structural impediments for working-
class activists. A rather different kind of exogenous factor is repression, a
deliberate response to workers’ mobilization. Recently this has been a popular
explanation: Leon Fink (1988), Kim Voss (1993), and Gerald Friedman (1998)
single out repression as the most important cause of failure. The American
ruling class is surely distinctive, witnessed by its willingness to use lethal vio-
lence against workers until the late 1930s. To some extent this simply reflects
the general violence of American society. More than this, however, any articu-
lation of working-class demands was treated as fundamentally illegitimate by
the bourgeoisie, and this sets the United States apart from the other Anglo-
phone societies. The historical sociology of capitalist class consciousness
remains yet to be written. Nevertheless, repression cannot bear the explana-
tory burden that has been placed upon it, as Lipset and Marks argue persua-
sively. The United States was not uniquely repressive: socialists were also
vigorously persecuted, for example, in Germany and Argentina. In those
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was ‘the first national organization created by the American Working Class as
a whole’, as Engels recognized. It recruited all kinds of manual workers,
without distinction of occupation or industry; it was even open to other
‘producers’, like small farmers. It breached the boundaries of gender and
ethnicity, welcoming women, foreign immigrants, and blacks (though not
Chinese). Spreading beyond North America, it reached into western Europe
and Australasia. Why did the Knights of Labor not become the basis for a
labor party? The authors only hint at an answer.
The Knights of Labor was beset by two problems. First, the organiz-
ation was not intended for conflict with employers. Unlike the leading craft
unions, it lacked the means to control strikes and to fund striking members.
More importantly, it lacked any coherent industrial organization. The official
leadership disapproved of local assemblies organized by trade; anyway, local
assemblies were combined into district assemblies which were for the most
part defined by location. (These districts resembled municipal trades coun-
cils in Britain and Australasia.) The Knights of Labor was so ineffective
because the official leadership – and above all the General Master Workman,
Terence Powderly – believed in class harmony. For them, strikes were anath-
ema; to restore justice between capital and labor, public opinion had only to
be educated properly. Needless to say, such notions left the Knights without
any defense against capitalists, who were determined to crush any workplace
organization. Second, the Knights of Labor competed for members with exist-
ing trade unions. In this respect it was quite different from the New Union-
ism that emerged in Britain and Australasia in the late 1880s, which did not
attempt to recruit skilled craftsmen. They even attracted suspicion from craft
unions. In America, direct competition led eventually to all-out war.
There may have been an alternative path for the Knights of Labor, which
was a diverse and decentralized organization. Many local activists, especially
in industrial cities, were inspired by socialism, and understood the antagon-
istic relationship between labor and capital. While they chafed against
exclusive unionism, they were prepared to ally with craft unionists against
the common enemy. Essentially they wanted New Unionism, with the Knights
of Labor as its vehicle. Unfortunately, Powderly was able to maintain his
‘impotent despotism’ (as Engels aptly called it) and ultimately expelled all
those who wanted to steer the organization on this course. This also quashed
a remarkably successful foray into electoral politics. Although the organiz-
ation never formally endorsed the various labor parties that sprang up in
1886, the Knights of Labor provided most of the candidates and the bulk of
their votes. The leadership subsequently imposed its official apolitical stance.
Trade unionists created the American Federation of Labor in 1886, as a
defensive alliance against the Knights of Labor. The circumstances of its birth
left a lasting imprint. In the mind of unionists like Gompers, inclusive
unionism was forever associated with the failure of the Knights of Labor and
with the specter of dual unionism. This memory remained potent even 50
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however, the Socialist party had relegated itself to irrelevance. The Com-
munist party flourished only when Moscow ordered it to pursue a ‘Popular
Front’ strategy, from 1935 to 1939 and from 1941 to 1948. The impetus for
independent labor politics was skillfully diverted by Roosevelt, through a
combination of radical rhetoric and prudent patronage. The Progressive party
in Wisconsin, the Farmer-Labor party in Minnesota, and the American Labor
party in New York were kept inside the New Deal coalition; they were
ultimately absorbed by the Democratic party. Why, then, did that not simply
become the functional equivalent of a labor party? After all, the association
between voters’ social class and partisan preference was almost as strong in
the United States as in Britain by the early 1940s (according to recent analy-
sis by David Weakliem and Anthony Heath [1999]). And the association was
far stronger than in Canada. ‘Those on the left and center of the Democratic
party’ – observe Lipset and Marks – ‘resembled Europe’s social democrats’
(p. 290). What happened to prevent this convergence? They refer to ‘long-
term prosperity’ after the Second World War, but this is hardly sufficient.
The explanation, of course, lies south of the Mason-Dixon line. Unfor-
tunately, Lipset and Marks ignore the American South (it receives no entry
in the comprehensive index). This omission is significant, first because any
analysis of variation within the United States should consider not only posi-
tive cases (like Milwaukee) but also negative ones. The labor movement was
persistently weakest in the South. Second, and more importantly, the Demo-
cratic party was also the party of racial apartheid and elite hegemony in the
South. This was an insuperable barrier to social democracy, as Frances Fox
Piven (1991) and other political scientists have pointed out. Research by Ira
Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder (1993) shows how southern
Democrats supported the New Deal as long as legislation was crafted so as
to exclude agricultural and domestic labor (where blacks were concentrated)
and to ensure decentralized administration. During the 1940s, however, they
joined with Republicans to veto further labor legislation, and indeed to erode
what had been gained. This culminated in the Taft-Hartley Act in 1948. Within
a few years, the membership of trade unions began its long (relative) decline,
which has continued for almost half a century.
It Didn’t Happen Here needs to be supplemented by a fuller account
of the 1940s and the 1880s. This should not detract from the authors’ great
achievement. After their monumental work, not much is left for future
scholarship on Why Socialism Failed in the United States. Nevertheless, the
comparison with other Anglophone societies could be advanced further. We
need parallel treatment of developments in the United States (perhaps focus-
ing on a few states) and another society, which attends closely to periodiza-
tion. Robin Archer is now completing such a comparison with Australia. One
hopes for a similarly detailed comparison with Canada, the nearest society
to America: as we have seen, it too was ‘exceptional’ until the 1930s.
Another dimension of comparison has yet to be explored. The literature
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on exceptionalism treats the labor movement as sui generis, and assumes that
class is naturally the axis of modern politics. In reality, the labor movement
was only one of several social movements which shaped modern politics.
Temperance and the women’s movement were enormously significant in the
early 20th century. These other movements, to be sure, have not generally
created new parties that realign electoral politics. In America, there has been
one exception: the abolitionist movement. This emerged as a formidable
force in the 1830s, despite considerable repression. In the following decade
it challenged Democrats and Whigs by contesting elections in the North,
under the banner of the Liberty and then Free-Soil party. This so destabilized
the two-party system that the northern Whigs eventually united with the
opponents of slavery to form the Republican party in the mid 1850s. Within
three decades, abolitionism realigned politics around the issue of slavery –
just as the labor movement elsewhere was to realign politics around the axis
of class. Why did it succeed, while the American labor movement repeatedly
failed? This comparison would surely provide fresh insight.
At the beginning of the 21st century, socialism has failed everywhere.
Marx has finally been proved right, though not in the way he envisaged: ‘The
country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less devel-
oped, the image of its own future’. Tony Blair’s Labour Party is made over
in the image of Bill Clinton’s Democratic party. This convergence should not
be exaggerated. As Lipset and Marks point out, leftist parties in other coun-
tries had built a permanent monument: the welfare state. It has survived their
ideological demise. Path dependence ensures that America will remain
exceptional. In the future, will politics be aligned once more on the axis of
class? Or will another social movement realign politics on a new dimension?
Throughout western Europe, as Lipset and Marks point out, the environ-
mental movement is represented by Green parties in national parliaments
and the European parliament. The movement has not achieved such success
across the Atlantic. The 21st century may have its own variant of American
exceptionalism.
References
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Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of Labor’, Journal of
American History 75: 1.
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Friedman, Gerald (1998) State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United
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