History of the socialist movement in the United States

[9] Writing for The Economist, Samuel Jackson argued that socialism has been used as a pejorative term, without any clear definition, by conservatives and right-libertarians to taint liberal and progressive policies, proposals and public figures.

Many utopian experiments occurred in the 19th century as part of this movement, including Brook Farm, the New Harmony, the Shakers, the Amana Colonies, the Oneida Community, The Icarians, Bishop Hill Commune, Aurora, Oregon and Bethel, Missouri.

[21] Likewise, Upton Sinclair's masterpiece The Jungle was first published in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, criticizing capitalism as being oppressive and exploitative to meatpacking workers in the industrial food system.

United States Attorney General Olney and President Grover Cleveland took the matter to court and were granted several injunctions preventing railroad workers from "interfering with interstate commerce and the mails.

After workers went on strike in September 1913 with grievances ranging from requests for an eight-hour day to allegations of subjugation, Colorado governor Elias Ammons called in the National Guard in October 1913.

[59] Socialists met harsh political opposition when they opposed American entry into World War I (1914–1918) and tried to interfere with the conscription laws that required all younger men to register for the draft.

"[69] Soon, "the halls of Congress rang with denunciations of the IWW" and the government sided with industry as "federal attorneys viewed strikes not as the behavior of discontented workers but as the outcome of subversive and even German influences.

The sections of the Communist Party's International Workers Order meanwhile organized for communism along linguistic and ethnic lines, providing mutual aid and tailored cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height.

[93] Historian Eric Foner described the fundamental problem of those years in a 1984 article for the History Workshop Journal: Where was the Socialist party at McKee's Rocks, Lawrence or the great steel strike of 1919?

In specific parts of the United States, such as Ybor City, Tampa, immigrant populations played significant roles in helping translate national socialist efforts into local action.

[98][99] The ideological rigidity of the Third Period (from c. 1928) began to crack with two events: the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States in 1932 and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Nazi Germany in 1933.

[100] Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff argues that socialist and communist parties, along with organized labor, played a collective role in pushing through New-Deal legislation, and that conservative opponents of the New Deal coordinated an effort to single out and destroy them as a result.

[102][need quotation to verify] Browder uncritically supported Stalin, likening Trotskyism to "cholera germs" and calling the purge "a signal service to the cause of progressive humanity.

"[103] He compared the show-trial defendants to domestic traitors (Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, disloyal War of 1812 Federalists and Confederate secessionists) while likening persons who "smeared" Stalin's name to those who had slandered Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D.

It played a prominent role in the United States labor-movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in mobilizing the unemployed during the worst of the Great Depression[104][105] in the early 1930s and founding most[quantify] of the country's first industrial unions (which would later use the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act to expel their Communist members) while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of racial segregation.

Historian Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship[106] offer "a more nuanced portrayal of the party as both a Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s.

Others like Benjamin J. Davis, William L. Patterson, Harry Haywood, James Jackson, Henry Winston, Claude Lightfoot, Alphaeus Hunton, Doxey Wilkerson, Claudia Jones and John Pittman also contributed in important ways to the party's approaches to major issues from human and civil rights, peace, women's equality, the national question, working-class unity, socialist thought, cultural struggle and more.

Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Lloyd Brown, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Robeson, Gwendolyn Brooks and many more were one-time members or supporters of the party and the Communists also had a close alliance with Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.[108] A rivalry emerged in 1931 between the NAACP and the CPUSA, when the CPUSA responded quickly and effectively to support the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American youth arrested in 1931 in Alabama for rape.

[122] Editors Huberman and Sweezy argued as early as 1952 that massive and expanding military spending was an integral part of the process of capitalist stabilization, driving corporate profits, bolstering levels of employment and absorbing surplus production.

The illusion of an external military threat was required to sustain this system of priorities in government spending, they argued; consequently, the editors published material challenging the dominant Cold War paradigm of "Democracy versus Communism".

Anarchism continued to influence important American literary and intellectual personalities of the time, such as Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald, Allen Ginsberg, Leopold Kohr,[124][125] Julian Beck and John Cage.

Disillusioned, Bayard Rustin began working with members of the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA) of Norman Thomas, particularly A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Du Bois was affected by these policies and he became incensed in 1961 when the Supreme Court upheld the 1950 McCarran Act, a key piece of McCarthyism legislation which required communists to register with the government.

[2] Shachtman, Harrington, Kahn and Rustin argued advocated a political strategy called "realignment" that prioritized strengthening labor unions and other progressive organizations that were already active in the Democratic Party.

[219][220][221] SDUSA members helped form a bipartisan coalition of the Democratic and Republican parties to support the founding of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose first president was Carl Gershman.

"[249] An April 2009 Rasmussen Reports poll conducted during the Great Recession (which many believe resulted due to lack of regulation in the financial markets) suggested that there had been a growth of support for socialism in the United States.

All of these spaces have provided a place for people to gather and partake in a sustained dialogue through which to share stories, generate knowledge, and develop resources for dissent against the forces of neoliberal capitalism.

"[269] These organizations like the DSA are leading a movement that is giving voice to left-wing positions, emphasizing issues such as affordable housing, universal health care, opposing public subsidies for corporations, seeking the creation of government-owned banks, environmental justice, and free college for all.

Sponsored by the Committee for the Free World and the League for Industrial Democracy, with introduction by Midge Decter and moderation by Carl Gershman, and held at the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences, New York City in March 1981: 230–261.

Tracing forward in lineage through me and a few other ex-YPSL's [members of the Young Peoples Socialist League] turned neoconservatives, this happenstance has fueled the accusation that neoconservatism itself, and through it the foreign policy of the Bush administration, are somehow rooted in 'Trotskyism.'