For the first time in nearly a century, echoes of socialism are once again reverberating in the United States. Despite waves of “red scares,” which reduced socialism to a political disease, current opinion polling suggests that substantial numbers of U.S. citizens, especially among younger cohorts, now consider socialism preferable to capitalism. What socialism means in the twenty-first century, however, appears inchoate – especially when its new American avatar, Bernie Sanders, most often praises Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and neglects the heyday of socialism in the United States from 1910 to 1918.

It’s a shame that Sanders, who once made a documentary on Eugene V. Debs, has not said much about earlier American socialist movements during his campaign – not only because such neglect buries a vibrant history of struggle, but because it’s precisely the experiences of the movements of the past that may help us navigate some of the major challenges in building an organized socialist movement today. Like us, earlier socialists struggled to unite a fragmented and heterogeneous working class, fuse extra-parliamentary struggle with electoral politics, counter the machinations of the Democratic and Republican Parties, and above all, make socialism a real part of people’s daily lives. And for a time, they succeeded. Let us therefore look back to this period, when socialism appeared as an actual political alternative in the United States, to see what it meant to its followers, how its proponents practiced politics, what socialists did when they obtained political power, and, most importantly, how they overcame some of the dilemmas they faced while crashing against others.

READ MORE