Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nearly a century ago, Werner Sombart asked, "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" Sombart and historians following his lead have rightly pointed to the effects of racial, ethnic, and religious divisiveness, waves of immigration, high living standards, the two-party system, the ideal of social mobility, liberal democracy, and outright repression of organized labor. Without dismissing their significance, Timothy Messer-Kruse interestingly turns from these broader issues to the internecine wrangling among American radicals. His case study focuses on the International Workingman's Party, whose troubled existence from 1864–1874 foreshadowed much of the ideological discord that continues to bedevil the American left.

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With a solid grounding in primary sources, Messer-Kruse argues that the American reform tradition and European Marxism were ultimately antagonistic despite common concerns. The diverse cultural agenda of the former was often at odds with the single-minded theoretical imperative of the latter. Antebellum reform in the United States by 1850 embraced a diffused egalitarianism, which contemporaries called a sisterhood of reforms. Often configured together were abolitionism, temperance, feminism, spiritualism, vegetarianism, hydrotherapy, educational innovation, land reform, anticlericalism, and various utopian inclinations. Many paths, it was thought, led to the same destination. A core value was the sovereignty of the individual, an inheritance with republican, liberal, and antinomian roots. The failure of moral suasion alone, however, to eradicate social evils by midcentury led many reformers to turn to government to correct abuses, whether in personal liberty laws, temperance legislation, divorce reform, debtor relief, regulation of life insurance, or creation of asylums.

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