Maine A Narrative History Book

Flacks, present at the signing of the SDS's Port Huron Statement early in the Sixties, writes with some frustration that, despite upsurges in the American Left over the last 100 or so years, no sustained movement has appeared in America, and he tries to understand why this is so. The author concentrates his attention on the Socialist left of Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Joe Hill and forward to the period of anti-Vietnam War resistance in which he participated. However, he gives little or no attention to the rise of modern Liberalism as a challenge to strictly Socialist ideas and ideology, and perhaps here is where this well-conceived book fails to convince.

Flacks rightly puts the lie to the myth that Socialism immediately proceeds to autocracy or totalitarianism, and here the book is quite useful. As Flacks sees it, Socialism is every bit a part of the liberal democratic tradition in that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Socialism sought to democratize the American workplace. Doubtless this is why American commercial sector apologists have nothing but bitter resentment for anything Socialist, including even the success of social democracies that blend the best of representative democratic traditions with government intervention in the economy and social welfare programming, something so important to the New Deal's strategy to contain Communist expansion in this country.