I.1. Politics and Race

In what follows I shall attempt to explain the fact that there is “no socialism in the United States” — in the sense in which I developed it in the previous chapter — from the peculiar conditions under which the American proletariat lives, and that first (because it is in fact the “most obvious” to every observer) from the character of political life.

Before that, however, I must still mention a line of thought that one meets now and then when the matters under discussion here are spoken of. One hears, namely, the opinion that the absence of socialism in America is not grounded in the character of American life at all, but rather finds its explanation in the particular disposition of the Anglo-Saxon race, of which the American proletariat essentially consists. This race, it is said, is “by nature” unreceptive to everything that looks like socialism. This reasoning is false on two counts: first, the “Anglo-Saxon” race is not at all inaccessible “by nature” to socialist ideas: proof, the strongly socialist-coloured Chartist movement in England in the 1830s and 1840s, the development of the Australian colonies, and even of the mother country, in recent years; secondly, the North American proletariat does not consist exclusively, or even predominantly, of members of the “Anglo-Saxon” race. If it is permissible (as will surely be the case on the whole) to infer the composition of the proletariat from the general figures of the statistics of immigration and foreign birth (special inquiries into the conditions of origin do not exist, so far as I know, for this), the following picture results: of the immigrant population in the United States at the census of 1900, only 8.1 per cent came from England and 2.3 per cent from Scotland, but 25.8 per cent from Germany, 15.6 per cent from Ireland, 7.8 per cent from Russia and Poland, and so on. The proportion of persons descended from foreign-born parents is similar. Their share in the total gainfully occupied population was 38.4 per cent (1900); in these 38.4 per cent England and Wales participated with only 3.6 per cent and Scotland with 1.0 per cent, but Germany again with 11.3 per cent and Ireland with 8.4 per cent. For the industrial occupations in particular, the share of persons descended from foreign-born parents was 56.2 per cent, of which England and Wales accounted for 5.8 per cent and Scotland for 1.6 per cent, but Germany for 16.1 per cent and Ireland for 11.7 per cent. But even if one considers the total immigration in the nineteenth century, the share of the Anglo-Saxon race is smaller than one is inclined to suppose; it amounts (even including the Irish, who certainly make up more than half of it) to only 33.58 per cent, against 24.16 per cent of German immigration.

There are thus millions of people in America who have immigrated, still during the last generation, from countries in which socialism is in flower: the gainfully occupied Americans who are German, or descended from German parents, alone number 3,295,350 (1900), of whom 1,142,131 were active in industry — and so certainly for the most part as wage-labourers. Why are these millions (even if one wanted to assume that the “Anglo-Saxons” were immune to the bacillus of socialism) not socialists in America too?

The argument of race must therefore be left out of the explanation of the facts that interest us. Rather, it is precisely the motley jumble of the American population, which nevertheless shows quite uniform features of development, that suggests seeking the determining factors in the peculiarity of American life. I have already said that I wanted to pursue these peculiarities first in the shaping of political life.