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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

Thesis Eleven, Number 68, February 2002: 110–121

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd
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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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112 Thesis Eleven (Number 68 2002)

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.

EXOGENOUS AND ENDOGENOUS FACTORS

Lipset and Marks argue that four factors were decisive. One was the
inherent disadvantages posed by the American political system for third
parties. Another was the peculiar mores of American culture, especially anti-
statism and individualism. A third was the heterogeneous working class,
stratified by ethnicity and language. The final factor was the enduring schism
between the trade unions and the political parties that claimed to represent
the working class. The authors are reluctant to isolate any one factor: the
result, they say, was ‘overdetermined’. Nevertheless, they imply that the
schism between party and unions, while obviously influenced by the other
factors, was especially important. In addition, they do not shrink from point-
ing out the dogmatic blunders perpetuated by generations of American social-
ists. Lipset and Marks are to be congratulated for resisting the temptation to
attribute defeat entirely to exogenous causes – the situation within which
working-class activists were placed, and the materials with which they had
to work. Endogenous causes emerge as equally significant. Aside from pro-
viding their own explanation, the authors make an equally valuable contri-
bution by rejecting some of the more common hypotheses.
The peculiar American political system has been the most popular
candidate for explaining exceptionalism, ever since the state was brought
back into social science. Scholars including Ira Katznelson (1985), Richard
Oestreicher (1988), William Forbath (1991), and Victoria Hattam (1993) have
focused on the ‘gift’ of (white) male suffrage, the federal polity, the first-past-
the-post electoral system, and the separation of powers – especially the domi-
nance of courts. Lipset and Marks clear away this profusion of political
impediments with sharp international comparison. Working-class men gained
the vote without a struggle in Australasia too. Germany, Switzerland, and
Australia also have federal polities. The Westminster electoral system also
discriminates against third parties, which gain proportionally far fewer seats
in parliament than their share of the vote. Judicial hegemony is uniquely
American, as Tocqueville recognized, but by itself it cannot explain why the
American Federation of Labor decided to influence the legal system by
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Biggs: A Century of American Exceptionalism 113

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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114 Thesis Eleven (Number 68 2002)

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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Biggs: A Century of American Exceptionalism 115

countries, however, the movement rebounded in numbers and commitment.

During the First World War, when repression in America was at its most
virulent, support for the Socialist Party remained undiminished in com-
munities like Minneapolis and Milwaukee. It was destroyed, however, in com-
munities where opposition to the war was viewed as treason. The lesson is
that the effect of repression in a democracy depends on the legitimacy of the
victims: those who can claim the mantle of legitimacy (like non-violent black
protesters in the 1960s) may even perversely benefit from repression, while
those who court illegitimacy by threatening the fundamental political system
(like the Black Panthers) are easily isolated and eradicated.
This brings us to the strategies of working-class activists, and of the
organizations that they created. These endogenous factors are often over-
looked, because sympathizers of a social movement are naturally reluctant
to identify its failings, and because social scientists are wary of any expla-
nation that is not entirely exogenous. It Didn’t Happen Here is a refreshing
change in this respect.
The authors place considerable emphasis on the schism between
unions and party. The American Federation of Labor was exceptional for
opposing independent political activity, and for its hostility to socialism. This
antipolitical orientation becomes explicable by distinguishing exclusive from
inclusive unionism. The Federation was dominated by craft unions who
pursued an exclusive strategy, concerned above all to protect their narrow
domain of the labor market from competition. These unions did not need
political leverage to regulate working conditions, nor did they wield large
concentrations of votes. Inclusive unions, by contrast, organized workers in
large numbers and could not restrict the supply of labor. Such unions – like
the United Mine Workers of America, the Australian Workers’ Union (for
shearers and other rural workers), and the National Union of Gasworkers and
General Labourers in Great Britain – were in the vanguard of political activity,
wherever they were. In America, however, inclusive organizations rep-
resented only a minority of the labor movement from the 1890s to the 1930s.
They never garnered enough votes in the American Federation of Labor to
reorient its policy. As a result, any labor or socialist party was deprived of a
solid base in the trade unions. Given its extreme radicalism, the Socialist Party
won an impressive share of the vote in the 1910s – but its membership
remained miniscule. The labor movement in the United States never had the
mutual reinforcement of masses voting for a working-class party as well as
belonging to a union.
The other side of the schism was the dogmatic radicalism of socialists
who were engaged in independent politics. Indeed, the schism became self-
reinforcing. As the Socialist Party became more doctrinaire, it further antagon-
ized trade unionists. Without the need to maintain the support of union
members, socialists were free to adopt more radical stances. Even in the
1880s, Engels noted – and deplored – the self-defeating dogmatism of
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116 Thesis Eleven (Number 68 2002)

German socialism in America; socialists apparently learned nothing in the

succeeding half-century. Lipset and Marks identify two stances that most con-
tributed to their marginalization. One was militant atheism, which effectively
alienated the sizeable proportion of workers who were Catholic (in religion
or culture). This explains why the Irish were uniformly hostile to socialism
in America, while so many supported labor in Australasia and Britain. Of still
greater consequence was the Socialist Party’s opposition to the war. Unlike
almost all other socialist or labor parties – but like the Russian Bolsheviks! –
it did not succumb to wartime nationalism. This principled stance is admir-
able, but it destroyed the party’s support among English-speaking Americans.
It also ensured that the American labor movement reaped no political advan-
tage from wartime state socialism (in which organized labor occupied a vital
role) or postwar class conflict.
Where socialists compromised in order to attract voters and where they
allied with trade unions, they proved that a ‘labor party’ could win office in
America, just as it did elsewhere. Milwaukee was run by a socialist mayor
from 1910 to 1940, and it elected a socialist to Congress. Other significant
examples included Minneapolis and Reading, Pennsylvania. Municipal social-
ism – along with agrarian radicalism in the west – had demonstrated con-
siderable success by the First World War. At the national level, however, this
kind of right deviationism was repudiated by the Socialist Party, and many
effective local leaders (like Townley) were expelled to maintain sectarian
purity. In Britain or Australasia these same men would have risen to promi-
nence in labor politics. Ironically, it may have been the exceptional strength
of socialism in America that ensured the absence of an independent labor
party.

TURNING POINTS AND COMPARISONS

It Didn’t Happen Here, in sum, is an impressive answer to the question
of exceptionalism. Because the book is arranged thematically rather than
chronologically, the periodization of exceptionalism remains implicit. Indeed,
most scholars who have studied exceptionalism either treat it as a timeless
characteristic or assume that it was determined in one single episode. By
focusing on comparison with other Anglophone societies, we can identify
three moments of particular significance – turning points which did not turn.
In the early 1890s, fledgling labor parties were formed in Britain and
Australia. Lipset and Marks describe what failed to happen in the United
States. The American Federation of Labor came close to supporting inde-
pendent political action on the British model in 1894 – when Gompers was
temporarily ejected from the office of President – but the moment passed.
Lipset and Marks are surely correct in attributing this to the dominance of
exclusive craft unions. In the previous decade, however, those unions had
been eclipsed by an inclusive labor organization: the Knights of Labor. This
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Biggs: A Century of American Exceptionalism 117

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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118 Thesis Eleven (Number 68 2002)

years later. In 1936 the President of the International Brotherhood of

Carpenters and Joiners opposed the Committee for Industrial Organization
because it would ‘take the labor movement back to the days of the K of L’.
Trade unionists retained another lesson from this period. At the beginning of
the 1880s, many were optimistic about political action. They founded the
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (modeled on the British
Trades Union Congress) in 1881 in order to promote national legislation. They
were soon disappointed. Efforts to enforce the eight-hour day for federal
employees, as provided by law, came to naught. There were many frustra-
tions at the state level too. Measures to restrict tenement cigar production
and to protect strikers from criminal prosecution, for example, ultimately
failed. These experiences were at least as important as the antistatism of
American culture in explaining the ‘syndicalism’ of American trade unionists.
That attitude was clearly announced when the Federation called on workers
to enforce shorter hours themselves on 1 May 1886.
All this provides an explanation for the failure of the early 1890s. As
the Knights of Labor disintegrated and the American Federation of Labor
turned away from politics, agrarian radicalism emerged in the west and the
south. The powerful current of populism remained isolated from the labor
movement. It reached its crescendo in 1896, when Bryan ran for president
as a fusion Democrat-Populist candidate. The campaign lacked any appeal
to the urban working class, and it was defeated in the cities. Thus ended the
first turning point that failed to turn.
Failure in the late 19th century did not, however, make the United States
unique. New Zealand and Canada also entered the 20th century without a
coherent labor party. The latter years of the First World War and its immedi-
ate aftermath were the next turning point. Almost everywhere the labor
movement made spectacular gains. A New Zealand Labour Party was
founded after several abortive attempts; a Canadian Labour Party entered
national politics, though it was not to endure. It Didn’t Happen Here revolves
around this second moment. The authors comprehensively explain why such
intense class conflict in the United States – far more workers struck in 1919
than in any other year before or since – did not give rise to any enduring
political organization. This failure still did not condemn the American labor
movement to exceptionalism. The difference between Canada and America
remained slight. Canada’s Trades and Labour Congress did not support any
independent party, and only a few members represented labor in the national
parliament. The Great Depression was the third turning point. In Canada, the
Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (ancestral to today’s New Demo-
cratic Party) was founded, and within a few years it had become the second
party in some provinces.
In this third moment, as Lipset and Marks recount, the American
working class was mobilized as never before. Inclusive unionism swept
through the mass-production industries from the mid 1930s. By then,
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Biggs: A Century of American Exceptionalism 119

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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120 Thesis Eleven (Number 68 2002)

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.

Michael Biggs has just completed a PhD at Harvard University. He is preparing

a book on the American strike wave of 1886, which will explain the rapid rise and
sudden collapse of working-class mobilization. Another interest is cartography:
‘Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation’
appears in Comparative Studies in Society and History (1999). He now teaches
sociology at the University of Oxford. [email: [email protected]].

References
Fink, Leon (1988) ‘The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism:
Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of Labor’, Journal of
American History 75: 1.
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