| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. By Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. (New York: Norton, 2000. 379 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-393-04098-4.)

This book purports to explain why socialism failed in the United States, but the ominous-sounding It in the title is not organized socialism at all. Rather, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks are after even bigger game. Their target is not just the Socialist party, once led by Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, but the whole idea of social solidarity and of politics as something that reflects more than a distinctly American "exceptional" set of cultural values: Protestant, individualistic, and bourgeois. 1

Lipset, who got his start debating politics in the depression-era alcoves of City College, has written book after book arguing that an ideologically rooted, culturally resonant exceptionalism has made the socialist idea a utopian fantasy in the United States. In this book, the political scientist Gary Marks helps him make that comparative argument and measure its contemporary economic and political cost with social data taken from the experience of Canada, Australia, and the most industrialized nations of Europe. . . .

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