Historian Jack Ross says the Socialist Party was the most important third party of the 20th century

by Allison Jobe

Allison Jobe is PhD student at American University, focusing on American radical movements in the twentieth century.

“The Socialist Party was the most important minor political party in the twentieth century,” claims Jack Ross, whose book The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History came out this month. Unlike other popular minority parties, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) experienced “consistent levels of public support, a wide-ranging impact, and a more-or-less respected place in the national conversation for half a century.” The legacy of the American socialists continues to weigh on US politics. Yet, according to Ross, the SPA has never received adequate scholarly treatment. His newest book is the first attempt to set the record straight about the Socialist Party, its perspective and influence.

Recapturing the legacy of the Socialist Party was the theme of a panel discussion on “American Socialism Reconsidered” hosted by the National Press Club in Washington DC on April 9. The event brought together four top scholars and experts on American political movements to discuss the implications of Ross’s comprehensive history of America socialism.

For Ross, who has a long family history of socialist and labor activism, this book was a personal journey. During his own early political forays, he faced a contradiction which became a central question for this book; “how was the Socialist Party of . . . Eugene V. Debs and . . . Norman Thomas the same Socialist party whose legacy was claimed by so many at the right-most edge of Cold War liberalism, by many frankly elitist contemporary liberals, to say nothing of the sectarian left?” Therefore, this book is as much about the American historical memory of the Socialist Party as it is a history of the actual party.

The Socialist Party of America addresses another contradiction in the history of the Left— the dominance of the Popular Front-era Communist Party(USA) in the historical memory. George Washington University history professor Eric Arnesen expanded upon the historiographical reasons for the relative invisibility of the SPA. He traces this trend to New Left historians who were drawn to the romance of the Popular Front of the late 1930s, a period when the Communist Party eclipsed the SPA in membership, publicity, and influence. The SPA as an object of study has therefore been neglected. With this book, Ross aimed to deemphasize the narrative of the Communist Popular Front and restore the noncommunist Left to its rightful place in the history of radicalism.

The panel was sponsored by the Freda Utley Foundation, named for the late former-communist and political activist. Her son, Jon Basil Utley, opened the forum with a discussion of her personal and political journey into and out of the international communist movement. Her 1940 The Dream We Lost is a critique of Stalinist Russia and gained the attention of both the Left and Right in the US. Immigrating to the US with her young son in 1939, Utley continued to speak out against the threat of communism. Jon Basil is also a political activist and is the publisher of The American Conservative.

J. Arthur Bloom, managing editor for The Front Porch Republic, expanded upon the connections between the radical Left and the American Right. Bloom argued that during the Popular Front, the communists left the socialists to forge an alliance with liberals and progressives. Entrance to WWII became the glue which combined the Democrats and the no-longer radical communists. The anti-war Socialist Party then forged ties with the similarly isolationist Old Right within such groups as the American First Committee. These seemingly strange bedfellows shared the fear that war threatened the health of republican institutions. For this reason, many groups across the political spectrum can claim the legacy of the SPA.

Samuel Goldman, assistant professor of political science, concluded the panel discussion by praising Ross for his attention to the middle American socialists. In Goldman’s estimation, the ethnic and particularly Jewish presence in the American Left has been overstated and Ross’s book represents a step in the right direction to recapture the activism of middle America.