Elena Kagan’s Not-So-Final Conflict
By: Hendrik Hertzberg
“To The Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933” would be an impressive enough piece of work if its author had been, say, a thirtyish assistant professor publishing in an academic history journal. Coming from a twenty-year-old college kid, it’s a truly remarkable accomplishment, quite out of the ordinary. Either that, or the college thesis-writing standards of the early nineteen-eighties were dramatically higher than I had assumed.
“To The Final Conflict” is a doorstopper of a college paper—a hundred and thirty double-spaced typewritten pages, exclusive of footnotes (unfortunately not included in the pdf facsimile). That’s around twenty thousand well-chosen words, written in a straightforward, deceptively simple style, with scarcely an infelicitous sentence or a detour into academic jargon from beginning to end. As best as can be inferred in the absence of the footnotes, the author draws much of her material from primary sources, especially the collections of the Tamiment Institute, the leading repository of documents relating to the history of New York’s trade unions and left-wing political organizations. Her synthesis of her discoveries shows a startlingly high level of narrative and analytic skill. I might quibble with some of her emphases, but her judgments are morally and politically sophisticated—in a word, judicious.
The title is a nice dash of vinegar. The allusion is to the soaring crescendo of “The Internationale,” but the conflict she’s writing about is not between anything so grand as capitalism and socialism. It’s between arm-waving socialists and other arm-waving socialists. It’s a rumble on the mean streets of the Lower East Side, pitting the militant or “revolutionary” wing of the New York Socialist Party against the moderate or “constructivist” wing—a conflict that proved decisive in dashing the Party’s hopes of becoming a serious contender for political power. Or so she argues: that’s her thesis.
With a bit of endearingly (to my eye) blithe undergraduate arrogance, she begins by proclaiming that that the elders who came to the subject before she did got it all wrong. Daniel Bell—the Daniel Bell—got it wrong. (“Bell’s thesis simply will not stand up under close scrutiny.”) Ira Kipness got it wrong. (“Ira Kipness escapes Bell’s pitfall only to blunder into one of his own making.”) James Weinstein got it wrong. (“Weinstein’s explanation is a superficial one.”)
Elena Kagan, naturally, gets it right. In her view, the Socialist Party failed for internal organizational reasons. It failed because it split apart instead of remaining united. It failed because it failed. As arguments go, this is on the circular side. The fate of the SP was, shall we say, overdetermined. There’s room for everybody to be right and everybody to be wrong. But even if the thesis of the thesis is thin, the thesis—the hundred-plus pages of narrative—is a fine piece of writing. The story she has to tell is a dramatic one and she tells it very well.
Admittedly, I’m probably the ideal reader for “To The Final Conflict.” The needle-trades unions play a big role in the story, and my grandfather was a lifelong member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, beginning around 1910. (Grandpa was a tailor at Bergdorf Goodman, which I guess made him an aristocrat of labor. According to family lore, one of his customers was Mrs. Charles Evans Hughes.) In 1924, when my future dad, Sidney Hertzberg, was thirteen, he made his first street-corner speech for the Socialist Party—the moral equivalent of the bar mitzvah which, militant little atheist that he was, he had refused to submit to. In 1939, my future mom, Hazel Whitman, a social-gospel Christian like Norman Thomas, was elected national chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League, the SP’s youth affiliate. The two of them kept on voting Socialist until 1952, when Thomas declined to make a seventh run for President and everyone with a claim to being any kind of “intellectual” fell in love with Adlai Stevenson. I grew up steeped in this stuff. I even joined the “Yipsels” myself when I was in high school. Yet much of the detail Kagan provides was new to me.
The biggest weakness of “To The Final Conflict” as storytelling is the absence of vivid, fleshed-out individual characters. Morris Hillquit, Meyer London, Louis Fraina, and others aren’t much more than names. But Kagan tells us a lot about their affiliations. The organizations and social forces and movements these people represented were just as interesting and arguably more important than their individual stories. Anyway, give her a break. She was only twenty. She couldn’t do everything—she had a lot of material to cover. If she had decided to turn her thesis into a book—which would have been a sound idea editorially if not commercially—her editor would have had her fill in the backgrounds and personalities.
Ever since Kagan’s thesis surfaced, of course, the big question around the conservative blogosphere has been: was (and is) the lady herself a (cover the children’s ears) socialist? In those quarters, the answer, unsurprisingly, tends to be yes. But is/was she really?
Well, that depends.
If you believe that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are socialists, then obviously, according to you, Elena Kagan is a socialist. So are Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and the other two hundred and seventy-nine members of the Senate and House of Representatives who voted for health-care reform. (For that matter, so is every mainstream conservative or center-right politician in Europe, all of whom, without exception as far as I know, support “socialized medicine.”) Logically, you must believe that the United States, the Greatest Country on Earth, is a socialist country. For you as a patriot, this should be food for thought.
If you believe the above and also believe or profess to believe that socialism (à la Sweden, say) and Communism (à la the Soviet Union, say, or Cuba) are peas in a pod, the only difference being that the former is a little sweeter and mushier than the latter, then you have put yourself in a an even stranger cognitive place. You are like someone who claims that there is no essential difference between Edmund Burke and Augusto Pinochet. When you say “Elena Kagan is a socialist” (or “Barack Obama is a socialist”), you are not simply saying “Elena Kagan (or Barack Obama) is a Democrat.” You are saying, “This person is a Communist. This person wishes to replace our system of representative democracy with a murderous dictatorship that crushes every kind of civil liberty.” By saying this, you reveal that you are either a liar or an ignoramus. There are many questions on which you can have nothing useful or true to say, only one of which is the question of who is or is not a socialist.
During the early part of the period Kagan writes about in her thesis, being a socialist, i.e., being a member of the Socialist Party or of one of its schismatic offshoots, always meant that you believed in the probability or even inevitability of a hazy utopian future, a cooperative commonwealth where no one would be filthy rich or dirt poor, where crime and war and exploitation would be unknown, and where honest workers would live in secure, modest comfort, toiling (but not too hard) by day in an atmosphere of respect and wholesomeness and, in the evenings and on weekends, enjoying family life and cultural enrichment. Someday.
Beyond and below that common dream, though, there was a fundamental split. Moderate or “constructivist” socialists like Hillquit believed in using the tools of American democracy to push for concrete ameliorative reforms. (Kagan’s list includes wages and hours legislation, women’s suffrage, and workingmen’s insurance.) The constructivists valued these things—the democracy and the reforms—for their own sake, not just as means toward some (highly uncertain) utopian end. Militant or “revolutionary” socialists, on the other hand, tended to view “reformism” as a snare and a delusion. Agitating for shorter hours and higher pay might sometimes be a useful tactic, but the paramount goal was always to hasten the Revolution, which might not necessarily be violent but would certainly be convulsive.
After the Bolshevik coup in Russia, this cleavage was no longer just a difference of opinion among comrades. Too much blood was being spilled. As Lenin’s regime grew more repressive and morphed into Stalin’s, the Socialist Party splintered. Most of the “revolutionary” wing broke off to join one of the new Communist parties. Most of the “constructivist” types agreed with Hillquit, the longtime leader of the party’s New York branch, who, Kagan writes, “constantly reiterated the theme that ‘the Soviet regime has been the greatest disaster and calamity that has occurred to the Socialist movement.’ ” The bulk of this group ended up as Democrats, as members of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition.
What remained of the Socialist Party by the nineteen-thirties still had its right and left wings, which differed from each other in the flavor of their shared hostility to the Soviet regime. But the SP was more like a ginger group or an activist think tank or a citizens’ pressure group than a real political party. By the time Kagan wrote her thesis, American socialism hardly existed, organizationally. It was a vehicle for certain politically engaged intellectuals—people like Michael Harrington and Irving Howe—who, for temperamental, historical, and sentimental reasons, wished to identify themselves with European social democracy while taking a critical and independent (but sympathetic) stance vis-à-vis the Democratic Party.
As you can imagine, Wingnut World smelled blood the minute they saw the title of Kagan’s paper. But the text has failed to produce the anticipated gusher of toxic quotes. Still, the show must go on. Here’s a passage right-wing bloggers profess to be shocked by. It’s from a paragraph of acknowledgments preceding the text:
I would like to thank my brother Marc, whose involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.
Not exactly the Communist Manifesto, is it?
Jumping to the very end, the final paragraph, in which the author states her conclusion, we find this:
Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered. The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America. Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one’s fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.
According to Erick Erickson of Redstate.com, “This proves Elena Kagan is an open and avowed socialist. The woman declares that socialists must stick together instead of fracture in order to advance a socialist agenda, which Kagan advocates.”
Uh, no. What this does suggest, however, is that when the woman was twenty she had some sympathy for the main impulses that motivated most of the American socialists of a century ago: they wanted factory workers and other humble folk to earn a decent wage, have a little leisure and a little dignity, have some protection from the hazards of fortune and the whims of their employers, and be equal citizens of a democratic political order. Is it too foolish to hope that she might still feel some of that thirty years later?