German immigrants brought with them the ideas of Karl Marx, and formed socialist unions. Because the only people talking about socialism were immigrants, their ideas were more or less dismissed. However, when Laurence Gronlund wrote The Cooperative Commonwealth, the seeds of socialism in America were planted. One could say Grondlund's book prepared the people for Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy's Utopian novel. It told a story of a man waking up in the year 2000 to find that cooperation had replaced the evils of capitalism.
The Socialist Party in America started growing rapidly between 1900 and 1912. By 1912, membership had reached 125,000 people. 300 individual Socialist newspapers spread their ideas throughout the U.S., and the party was responsible for a congressman and 56 mayors. The leader of the party, Eugene V. Debs, got six percent of the national vote in the presidential race of 1912. It's important to note that his policies were less about the class struggle, and more about poverty and injustice. The party became lumped in with the Progressive movement, which believed in people being able to change their economic status based on work, not previous advantages/disadvantages.
The party began to decline after the 1912 election, and had slipped to a meager 80,000 members by 1917. The government was beginning to try to take all power away from the party, and passed multiple laws making acting upon their ideals a crime. The Espionage Act of 1917 jailed anyone who discouraged enlisting. The Sedition Act of 1918 punished those "obstructing the sale of U.S. war bonds, discouraging recruitment, uttering “disloyal or abusive language" about the government, the Constitution, the American flag, or even the U.S. military uniform." Many were arrested under these acts, including Eagene Debs. The party died down, and by the 1950s the party was essentially gone.
The party started it's slow return in 1968 at a Socialist Party convention. It nominated it's own canditate again, for the first time in 20 years, in 1976. They ran their own canditates again in 1988, 1992, and 1996.
Sources:
- The textbook
I thought the information you presented in this post was very straight and to the point. The Socialist Party in the United States towards the beginning of the Soviet Union was extremely frowned upon, just like communism, even though they are different systems. While socialism is the passing along of ideas and resources within a larger community, communism is the actual government owning and being responsible for all forms of trade. This makes every single person equal at least in principle, and everyone is paid based on their skills, and nothing else. Socialism exists to some extent in Germany, where although the economy is capitalist, the government has a social welfare
ReplyDeleteSource:
Merriam Webster Dictionary