Ira Kipnis (–2002)

While this was not the book I was expecting it was a compelling read.

Based on the title, I imagined this would be a bottom-up social history of a broadly-defined socialist movement.

Instead, it was specifically focused on the Socialist Party elite, using official party documents and affiliated newspapers almost exclusively as its sources.

You will learn a lot about Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit and various other leaders of the SP. You will learn very little about socialist organizing or the party's the rank-and-file.

But still, many of the elite battles that make up virtually all of the book's narrative are eerily similar to the issues that leftists still face today. Should we be reforming society or trying to remake it? Should we be focusing on getting the government's boot off our neck, even if that requires major compromise at the ballot box, or should we be more selective in our electoral work?

Moreover, it paints a much different picture of the socialist movement than I was expecting. I imagined turn-of-the-century leftism to be orthodox Marxism, agrarian populism and the IWW. While these were all present to one degree or another, the book argues that middle-class reformism, anti-populism, and craft unionism were what dominated the SP during this time.

Kipnis does not hide the fact that he dislikes this. He openly sides with what he calls the SP's left wing. In his conclusion, which can almost be read on its own if the reader wants a quick summary of the high points, he accuses both the left and right wings of undermining the movement but he saves his harshest words for the right -- led by Victor Berger -- for essentially being no different than the era's progressives.

In all, an eye-opening book that undermines a lot of today's leftist celebration of some of the Socialist Party's successes during this time. In Kipnis' telling, many of the most successful Socialists were hardly socialists at all as we might think of the term today, but were rather bourgeois good government types who shied away from radically altering society.… (meer)