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The Odyssey of William English Walling:
Revisionism, Social Democracy, and Evolutionary Pragmatism
Richard Schneirov
Indiana State University
| When all is said, [William English] Walling
is perhaps the only American Socialist of standing who keeps inquiry
alive, the only one who doesn't rewrite the same book every year
or two. And if honest inquiry happens to produce results very
damaging to the existing pretensions of the Socialist movement,
that is nothing against the inquirer. |
| —Walter Lippmann1
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In the history of American socialism
William English Walling occupies a special place.2
Born into a wealthy Midwestern family, Walling was educated at
the University of Chicago and Harvard, but soon found a calling
as a social reform activist when he learned first hand about the
conditions of working people as an Illinois factory inspector
and a habitué of turn-of-the-century social settlement
houses and the Jewish ghetto scene. From that point forward Walling
was a major influence wherever he directed his fertile mind and
instinct for provoking controversy and precipitating new movements.
In 1903, Walling helped found the National Women's Trade
Union League and became president of its New York chapter. Six
years later he cobbled together a group of anti-racist socialists
to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People—then invited W.E.B. DuBois to become editor of
its journal, The Crisis.
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Always more than an activist, Walling
became an influential interpreter of social movements and social
trends after he visited Russia along with Anna Strunsky—a Jewish socialist soon to become his wife—during the
abortive 1905 revolution. Three years later, he burst onto the
national scene with his book Russia's Message to the
World, which depicted the Russian peasantry as the harbinger
of socialism and democracy. Meanwhile, in two thoroughly researched
articles in the Annals of the American Academy of the Political
and Social Science Walling identified hopeful and progressive
organizational trends among the craft unions of the American Federation
of Labor (AFL).3
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