Title: 100 Years of 100 Things: American Socialism

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. After congratulating the New York Community Trust on their centennial before the news, now we continue our WNYC Centennial Series, 100 years of 100 things. Taking the opportunity on this show to take deep historical dives into 100 different people and things over the course of our centennial year July to July. This week, things 34 and 35, 100 years of American capitalism and 100 years of American socialism.

Socialism first now with historian Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University, editor emeritus of Dissent magazine and the author of several books, including What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party and American Dreamers: How the Left Changed the Nation. Many of my questions and the conversation we're about to have will be drawn from an article on Lithub by Michael Kazin called A Brief History of American Socialism. Professor Kazin, thanks for coming on with us again. Welcome back to WNYC. You are there, right?

Professor Kazin: I'm here.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, just checking. I didn't hear you the first time. Well, I learned from your article who coined the word "socialism" back 200 years ago, around 1825. Would you tell our listeners a little of the story of a man named Robert Owen?

Professor Kazin: Sure. It's ironic because Robert Owen, who was born in Wales and made a lot of money in Scotland as a textile manufacturer but was very unhappy with the idea that there was a competitive society, that some people were doing very well, like himself, and many working people were doing very badly. When he was in Scotland, he set up schools for his workers. He gave them free food. He limited their working hours to only 12 hours a day because some of them working 14 hours a day. Then he came to the United States in the 1820s and he set up what he called socialisms. Utopian colonies where all the land was held in common.

Men and women had equality. Men did jobs that had been women's jobs before, women did men's jobs before. He coined the term socialism. Well, he made it popular anyway. We're not exactly sure who actually first used the term, but he made it popular and by which he meant socialism compared to individualism. People using their social connections to help one another instead of to compete with one another.

Brian Lehrer: You're right that unlike people who call themselves socialists today, he was treated with great respect by top leaders of the United States when he came to this country. We're still in the 1800s here. By whom and in what context?

Professor Kazin: Well, it's quite amazing, actually. He gave two addresses to joint sessions of Congress in 1824, early 1825, and every living president at the time actually heard him. He went to Monticello in Virginia to talk to Thomas Jefferson, who was too ill to hear him in Congress, but the outgoing president James Monroe in 1824 heard him, and the incoming president John Quincy Adams also heard him. John Adams, who lived until 1826, he went to visit him in Massachusetts. Ironically, the man who coined the term socialism was listened to respectfully. Not necessarily that they agreed with him but listened to respectfully by every living American president.

Brian Lehrer: How did they, if there's any historical record of this, square their respect, at least their respect for Owen's ideas about socialism, because of the way you just described what he meant. He was contrasting it with individualism. If there's been a country in the history of the world that's explicitly identified with individualism, it's been the United States from the beginning.

Professor Kazin: It's true, but remember, the United States was not yet an industrial society then. The only industrial society in the world was Owen's own Britain, United Kingdom. What William Blake famously called the dark satanic mills of industrializing Britain were something that Americans, both presidents and wealthy Americans, and also ordinary Americans who knew what was going on, wanted to avoid. They wanted a more egalitarian society.

Unfortunately, most of them only wanted egalitarian society among white people, but nevertheless a more egalitarian society. They hoped to avoid some of the class divisions that were growing up between workers and industrialists in Great Britain. That was one of the things, I think, which really led people to at least be interested in what Robert Owen had to say, whether they agreed with him or not. An alternative to the way Britain was developing.

Brian Lehrer: I guess it suggests some of the eternal paradoxes and tensions in American culture and American history, because on the one hand, being proud of being an individualistic society, but also considering ourself, even if inaccurately, a classless society compared to a place like Great Britain, and also individualism compared to what even de Tocqueville saw coming, and chronicling the United States from France, as he did, as a place where there was a lot of community, organization, power and presence, right?

Professor Kazin: Yes. Even now we value community. We like to help people when there are natural disasters. A lot of originally socialist ideas like social security, like government funded health insurance, are very popular, even though people don't identify those with socialism per se. I think you're quite right, Brian. There's an equilibrium sometimes or even sometimes a paradox between our strong belief in individualism and self-reliance and also our strong belief that people should help one another. That idea of people should help one another, should care for one another, that is a wellspring of a socialist commitment, I think, and has always been.

Brian Lehrer: Did Robert Owen, who coined or at least popularized the term socialism in the early to mid part of the 18th century, live to see the work of Karl Marx or comment on it in the context of what Owen believed socialism to be?

Professor Kazin: He did read Marx. He died in the 1840s and so he didn't live to see it. He didn't live to see a socialist movement of the kind which developed in Europe especially, and to some degree in this country as well, in the late 19th, early 20th century. For him, I think he didn't like the idea of class conflict. Of course, class conflict is so central to what it means to be a Marxist. He wanted people to join these communities, show a more egalitarian way to live together. He wanted to avoid the kind of industrial battles that took place in the United States in the late 19th century, which did so much actually to form labor unions, but also did so much to turn a lot of Americans off the idea of class conflict.

Brian Lehrer: Before we leave Robert Owen, would you compare those two 19th century socialists, Owen and Marx, by saying, if I'm understanding you correctly, that Owen thought more socialism would help avoid class conflict, and by the time Marx came to prominence, he had decided that was inevitable to get to any kind of economic equality?

Professor Kazin: The kernel of Marx's analysis is that there's always been class conflict. There's always been class divided societies. The only way for the majority of people in any society who we thought would be wage earners to have a good life was to overthrow the ruling class. Whereas Owen was a member of the ruling class, at least in Britain, very wealthy man, he wanted to avoid that kind of conflict, that kind of violence. Also, he was a moral socialist. He didn't have a long worked out many-volume analysis about capitalism worked. He just thought it was immoral for people to live to do better than other people. In that sense you might call him a Christian socialist before that was a term.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. Thing 34, 100 Years of American Socialism. Later in the week we'll do 100 years of American Capitalism. Our guest for this historian Michael Kazin. Now let's jump ahead to only 100 years ago in the 19-teens and '20s, America's best-known socialist at the time, Eugene Debs, ran several times as a third-party candidate for president. Here's a clip of arguably today's leading American socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, describing Debs as a big influence on him.

Senator Bernie Sanders: Another one of my heroes is Eugene Victor Debs. That ring a bell?

Lex Friedman: Yes.

Senator Bernie Sanders: Okay.

Lex Friedman: For many reasons, yes.

Senator Bernie Sanders: All right, many listeners may not know who Debs was. Debs was a union organizer in the early 1900s, helped form the American Railway Union, ran for president, I think five times. Ran the last time while he was in a jail cell because of his opposition to World War I and got a million votes doing that. Debs lost badly in every race that he ran. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for president. Much of what Roosevelt ended up doing was at least some of what Debs had talked about. Debs helped lay the groundwork for ideas. Sometimes you can lose and win if you're into transforming society.

Brian Lehrer: Bernie Sanders on the Lex Friedman Podcast. That was just three days ago that that was recorded on Eugene Debs. Professor Kazin, tell us more, who was Eugene Debs and what was the Socialist Party, the line that he ran on in those presidential elections 100 years or so ago?

Professor Kazin: Eugene Debs is an interesting guy. He was born in a little town in Indiana, Terre Haute, and he was a railroad worker. As Sanders said he was a union leader of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and then of a larger union of all railroad workers, American Railway Union. He was put in jail for leading a big strike, Nationwide Railroad Strike, 1894. When he was in jail in 1894, he came out of jail proclaiming himself a socialist. He said unions are good, they're important, but working people will never really have a good life unless they run the society. He became the main leader of the Socialist Party of America, which was formed in 1901. Sanders is right.

He ran five times for president under the banner of that party. He never won more than 6% of the popular vote for president in 1912, winning about a million votes. He was a very popular figure, even among people who didn't vote for him because he spoke about socialism in an American idiom. He talked about the Constitution, Declaration of Independence as very fine documents because of the ideals that they put forth of democracy and equality, which he believed could not be fulfilled under capitalism. He also talked about religion. He said Jesus Christ was the first true socialist. He was a carpenter and Empire crucified him and so forth.

He tried to yoke Christianity and democracy to the cause of socialism. This was the heyday of the Socialist party. They had 118,000 members in 1912, which translates to about 400,000 members today. They had a lot of people elected to office, local offices. Over 1,000 different socialists were elected to local office in different parts of the country. A lot of people in Ohio towns and Indiana towns and Pennsylvania towns, little one industry towns. A lot of coal miners, steel workers. There were two socialist congressmen, one from New York City, Meyer London, who was a lawyer for the Cloak Makers Union, and one from Milwaukee, Victor Berger, who was the leading socialist in that state, Wisconsin.

It was a major force at the time. There were famous Americans who identified with socialism like Helen Keller and Jack London and Charlie Chaplin, the most famous actor in the world at the time, all called themselves socialists. Even though politically, as Sanders said, it never became a major political party on the national basis, it had a real cultural influence, I think, and everyone in America in the early 20th century knew what socialism meant and knew who Eugene Debs was. It had a presence much greater than really it's had until Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016.

Brian Lehrer: Well, is there anything at the core of Debsian socialism that you would compare as similar to or different from what we think of as Bernie Sanders' main priorities today, as a point of reference, since Bernie Sanders does call himself an independent socialist?

Professor Kazin: Sure. Also, by the way, on YouTube, you can find Bernie reading speeches by Debs in his Brooklyn accent. It's unintentionally humorous because this is several years ago, I think, when he was still Congressman from Vermont. Maybe he was just mayor at the time.

Brian Lehrer: Well, there was also a New York radio station, WEVD, which my understanding is stood for Eugene v. Debs. Are you aware of that? Was that an explicitly socialist New York radio station?

Professor Kazin: Yes, it was sponsored, I believe, by the International AIDS Garment Workers Union and other unions, which had a lot of socialists who were in the leadership of those unions for a long time. I think began in the '30s when Norman Thomas was the leading socialist after Debs died. I didn't know it was still not around.

Brian Lehrer: No, it's not still around--

Professor Kazin: No, no, very much. It was named After Debs. Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: You were going to compare Bernie and Debs.

Professor Kazin: Well, Debs was a revolutionary. He didn't necessarily want a violent revolution, but he believed that the only way to bring about the socialism that he cared for and he was inspired by, was to overthrow the capital system entirely, to have no private enterprise. Whereas Bernie Sanders is what in Europe would be called a social democrat. That is, he doesn't want to do away with the big banks. He doesn't want to have public ownership of Starbucks or of Amazon, but he'd like them to be unionized. He'd like everybody in America to have health insurance paid for by the government.

He'd like it to be a much larger welfare state, a lot more power for workers in their workplaces. That, historically, is what we call social democracy, because it's a way in which working people and other people in society can be better off and the government can do a lot more for them at the same time that entrepreneurship, capitalism, even millionaires can still exist. That's the system that historically developed in Sweden and Denmark and some other parts of Iceland, other parts of Western and Northern Europe.

That really, when you hear his speeches, he's given speeches about what socialism means to me at my university Georgetown and other universities over the last few years. He always defines them as that's what Franklin D. Roosevelt was for. That's what Lyndon Johnson's great society was for. That's what Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about. None of those figures were obviously revolutionaries.

Brian Lehrer: Were you saying that Eugene v. Debs would have had the government own the coffee shops since you said Bernie Sanders wouldn't have the government owned Starbucks? Yes. You're saying. Yes, go ahead.

Professor Kazin: I think maybe the workers themselves owning them. The young man or woman who hands you your latte would probably be one of the owners of the Starbucks, and they'd get together and discuss who would have which part of the profits, and they'd all be in a union at the same time and so forth. I think that's the way it would probably run if Deb's had his way.

Brian Lehrer: Are there any good examples of that that have actually taken root in this country or anywhere? Because that sounds like such a good thing, workers owning the company and democratically deciding how to run the company and how the profits are divided up. I can imagine critics saying that is horribly inefficient having to make every decision about what to stock the shelves with and where the money is going to go by committee. Has it ever worked anywhere or is it prominent in any company that you would name in the United States or elsewhere?

Professor Kazin: There have been cooperative businesses at different times in the US. Planing mills, for example, that were run by carpenters, brick making factories that were run by the bricklayers themselves. I don't think there's any one right now that way. Of course, it takes a lot of work as you say. Oscar Wilde, who was often sympathetic to socialism, when he wasn't so sympathetic, he had a great line. He said he wouldn't want socialism because it would take too many evenings, that is too many meetings. Democracy at the workplace takes a lot of time. That's one thing. A lot of people, obviously working people, they want to do their job and get paid as well as possible for it and then forget about it for a while. Whereas if you help to run the company, you can never quite forget about it.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, we're in our centennial series 100 Years of 100 Things. This week, things 34 and 35, 100 Years of American Capitalism. Later in the week, 100 Years of American Socialism. Now with historian Michael Kazin from Georgetown. Listeners, anyone have family oral histories of socialists going back however many generations and what they believed in or what got handed down to you, as we always try to include a personal oral history aspect to these 100-year segments?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. I myself had some relatives from the past who, when I was young and they were old, they were telling me about being active in the '30s and told me when I was a kid that they used to argue about Lenin versus Trotsky and various things like that. Who has a story like that of socialists from the past in our 100-year series from your family or anyone else who you knew or yourself? 212-433-WNYC. We can take some phone calls from younger DSA members today, but this is mostly a history segment. We want to get old stories on the table as well as some contemporary thinking.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Staying with Debs and that era right around 100 years ago, you mentioned this briefly. Counterintuitive, probably to people grounded in today's politics might be the fact that you wrote about a strain of rural Christian socialism. Rural Christian socialism, such as in Oklahoma a century ago. Of course, people will think, well, wait, today the rural parts of the country are the most conservative and what we consider the Christian movement in this country. I realize there are different kinds of Christianity. There's the Black church, which is very different from the white Christian nationalists who are in the news a lot now. The idea of rural Christian socialism might make a lot of listeners in 2024 go, "What?"

Professor Kazin: Well, yes, one of the ironies is that Oklahoma today, which I think is one of the reddest states in the country, votes for Republicans by 30 or 40 percentage points. 1912, when Debs ran for president, he got the highest vote in any state in Oklahoma, 16.6% of the vote in Oklahoma. That was because Oklahoma at the time was very Christian Protestant almost entirely, but it was a state of tenant farmers, poor farmers who worked for other people, and sometimes farmers owned a little bit of their own land, and mine workers and very badly exploited oppressed people in both cases.

There was something called the social gospel back then, which some of your listeners probably heard of, the idea that the way to be a good Christian was to apply the teachings of Christ to society, to try to make society more moral and more equal, so the meek would really inherit the earth, as Sermon on the Mount put it. You had former populists who were mostly a rural group in the 1890s, who were quite popular in places like Oklahoma, who had big revival meetings on the prairies there. You had ministers who talked about Christ as a carpenter, humble man who would have wanted people to share everything equally.

You had Socialist Party, which argued that if you're a farmer, your property taxes under $1,000, you shouldn't have to pay any property tax at all. Only people have property over $1,000 you have to pay property tax. The socialists in Oklahoma and elsewhere, too, had a program, even within capitalism, reforms, to help wage earners, to help small farmers. That was one of the reasons why people were attracted in Oklahoma to the Socialist Party. They really felt that both major parties were made up of people who didn't really do much for them, didn't really help them, just talked rhetorically about helping them, but didn't really do anything specifically.

Whereas the Socialist Party, for some of these people, really had an idea of, you put us in power, we will cut your property taxes. We will make sure you have a minimum wage. We will make sure there'll be factory inspectors or coal mine inspectors who will go into your workplaces and make sure that you're not in danger of dying because of an industrial accident. All that was very attractive to people who voted socialist.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I see in that context in your article, A Brief History of American Socialism, which you wrote last year on lithub.com that the writer of the Pledge of Allegiance is somewhere in that context of Christian socialism. Want to say that part here?

Professor Kazin: Sure. His name is Francis Bellamy, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1890s as a way partly to try to get immigrants assimilated into American culture. He was inspired when he wrote that by the French Revolution as well as by the promise of the Declaration of Independence. He didn't advertise the fact that he was a Christian socialist because he wanted everybody to say the Pledge of Allegiance. He was very much inspired, I think, by the idea that Christian socialism would be the fulfillment of American ideals, and that's inspired him to write the Pledge in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to take a break and continue for the rest of the hour with Michael Kazin, historian From Georgetown, on 100 Years of American Socialism. Really, we've been talking about 200 years of American socialism, but our latest segment in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, 100 Years of American Capitalism, coming up later in the week. We've got a lot of time left as we move toward the present, a lot of years left to cover and probably won't surprise you, Professor Kazin, to learn that our lines are full, and we even have a recently declared mayor of New York candidate who's calling in. That's going to be one of the calls that we take as we continue on 100 Years of 100 Things on the Brian Lehrer Show. Stay tuned.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, 100 Years of 100 Things, number 34, 100 Years of American Socialism with Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown, editor emeritus of Dissent magazine and the author of several books, including What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party and American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. Since I teased before the break that we have a declared mayoral candidate calling in, let's take him and see what he has to say. It is Assembly Member Zoran Mamdani in Astoria, Queens. Assembly Member, thank you for calling in. Hello. You want to talk about the history of socialism?

Assembly Member: I'm always ready to talk about the history of socialism. Thank you so much, Brian, for having me on the call and for having this segment. I think when we're talking about this topic, one of the things that comes to mind for me is the concept of sewer socialism, which was a term that was coined by a delegate to the Milwaukee convention of the Socialist Party of America to describe the project of municipal government that transformed that city where you had socialist mayors who went on to build public health infrastructure, publicly owned power systems, improving workplace conditions, expanding education, truly putting the needs of the working class at the center of city government.

There was this quote that has always stuck with me that one observer said of those mayors and of that project, which was they were never approached by the lobbyists because lobbyists knew it was not possible to influence them. That ethos, that vision, it has been a real guiding force for so many of us legislators who are members and endorsed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Kazin, do you want to engage?

Professor Kazin: Yes, that's great. I'm glad you mentioned all this. Sewer socialism, they were called sewer socialist partly because there's a lot of disease coming out of the sewers back then. One of the things that socialists who got elected to run cities like Schenectady, Reading, Pennsylvania and Milwaukee especially, because they ran Milwaukee for many years wanted to do was have a better sanitation system so people wouldn't get so sick, especially in poor neighborhoods. That's one of the reasons they got elected locally. They weren't talking about revolution. That's not what got them elected to run these cities.

What got them elected was talking about better social services, fairer taxes, public ownership of utilities, playgrounds and parks. A big park in Milwaukee was built by a socialist mayor named Daniel Hone. It was really solving people's immediate problems in a way that was really helping the majority and as the Assembly Member was saying, was not going to be following corporate interests and often defying those corporate interests. Also, the socials were very pro-union, of course, and many socialists were actually heads of unions at the time, 100 years ago. It was all part of a reform oriented, worker-oriented package, I think.

Brian Lehrer: Assembly Member, let me ask you one follow up question, because I'm sure if you're out there as a declared Democratic socialist, if you and Eric Adams and I realize there are other candidates who are already declared, but let's just say for the moment, you and Eric Adams, when you get close to the primary next June are both in it. He's certainly not a self-described socialist. Conservatives today will tar socialists with the implication that they are totalitarian or that the socialism that they believe in could eventually wind up in totalitarianism. The Soviet Union, socialism that did metastasize into Stalinism, did happen in the mid 20th century. The critique sometimes is that this is ultimately going to take away people's freedoms. How would you respond to that if somebody threw that at you or if Eric Adams next year throws that at you?

Assembly Member: Well, I think in setting up the contrast between myself and Mayor Adams, we have a mayor who himself is an apologist for fascism and for a fascist movement in his recent commentary, or lack thereof with regards to President Trump. I think that many New Yorkers understand that, in fact, if there is a mayoral candidate who--

Brian Lehrer: Just so people know what you're talking about, the mayor said on Saturday that he does not believe Trump is a fascist, as Trump's former Defense Secretary and Homeland Security Secretary and Joint Chief of Staff Chairman are all saying. Adam said yes, sometimes people call me a fascist too. I think everybody needs to turn down the temperature just so people know what that reference is.

Assembly Member: I appreciate that, Brian. I think that for New Yorkers, what I've found time and again is that when I explain what socialism means and what a socialist politic really entails, and that it is focused on bringing dignity into working class people's lives, I found that people find that far more relevant to the concerns that they're facing. Because while so much of this race has been discussed with regards to corruption and competence, what I'm hearing from New Yorkers has been cost of living being the number one concern in their life, the fact that they cannot afford their rent, they cannot afford their childcare. As we're talking about saving democracy and urging people to go and vote, there is an understanding that that democracy needs to be extended from the ballot box to the rest of New Yorkers' lives.

Brian Lehrer: One more quick follow up. I didn't expect that we would be making news here in a history segment, but maybe you just did. If you're calling Eric Adams a fascist, which you just did, how do you back that up?

Assembly Member: No, I wasn't calling him a fascist. I was saying he's an apologist for fascism.

Brian Lehrer: Okay, I thought you said both. But you're not saying that.

Assembly Member: Oh, no, no, I'm not saying that. Though I know he'd love me to, but that's not what I'm saying. I think to the point that was also made earlier by the professor about socialists making a mark in their governance by being separate from corporate influence and lobbyist influence, I think also that's what we're seeing from New Yorkers, where we have a mayor who was elected on the premise of supporting the working class, and instead he has sold them out to big business. Almost 100 years after the term of sewer socialism was coined, there were five socialists that were sent to the state legislature.

This was at the time where aides of Governor Andrew Cuomo were actually saying very similar things about us because we were circulating a letter amongst our colleagues calling on the governor to resign due to his criminal mismanagement of the pandemic and claims from multiple women alleging predatory behavior. And when his aides were scrambling and months later, their private text messages were revealed by the attorney General's investigation, it was made clear to the public that Melissa DeRosa had texted her colleagues, "Zoran is DSA, so we don't have play there."

Brian Lehrer: I see. It's the same marginalization. Assembly Member, [clears throat] excuse me, Zoran Mamdani, also a declared mayoral candidate in next year's Democratic primary. Thank you for calling in. Very interesting. We'll talk to you next year, if not before, as we have all the candidates on, and the primary really heats up. Let's take another oral history call from another fairly prominent caller, filmmaker Danny Lyon calling from Albuquerque. Danny, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Danny: Hi, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You got a story for us, right? About some uncles?

Danny: I do, yes. My uncle Abram, who I knew till I was in my 20s, was a Menshevik, and he killed a policeman and was charged with it in the 1905 revolution. He made it to America, became a doctor.

Brian Lehrer: That was in Russia where that happened?

Danny: Oh, yes, Russian Jews. My uncle Lazar was a Menshevik and was in the revolution that succeeded, I think the February Revolution. He came to America and was the founder of the Lawyers' Guild, which was later put on the Attorney General's list. My mother talked about Kerensky in the '60s with a kind of broken heart, saying, they're working on my house, saying, "God damn it, Kerensky was overthrown." Turned out he ended up in America and died in New York.

Brian Lehrer: What did these older relatives of yours feel about how the Russian Revolution wound up eventually in Stalinism?

Danny: They didn't talk about that, but one of them, Meron Bistritsky, who married my aunt, he stayed really late, and he fled the Nazis, actually, so he lasted that long. They didn't talk about it that much. I've read a lot about what happened, and I've read rumors that Trotsky was in the East Village. Is that true? I don't think it's true.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know. Maybe Michael Kazin knows that.

Professor Kazin: Yes. He was in the East Village. He debated During World War I with American socialists, including Morris Hilquit, who got 22% of the vote running for mayor of New York City in 1917 during World War I. Trotsky and Hilquit debated in Russian and also in English about whether there should be a general strike and whether socialists should argue people should disobey the draft, not go in the draft. Hilquit said, "That's too radical. We'll get repressed if we do that." Trotsky said, "Well, you should do it anyway." Then the February Revolution happened, which Danny Lyon just mentioned. Then Trotsky, of course, took the first vote he could going back to Russia so he could be part what became the Bolshevik Revolution.

Brian Lehrer: Danny said Trotsky was maybe seen on the Lower East Side. Apparently, he was uptown too, as I think we're going to hear from our next caller. Happy in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Happy: Hello. Trotsky was a chess player, according to my grandfather, and I don't know how good of one he was, but my grandfather thought he was crazy wanting to go back to the old country. They had worked hard enough to escape the Tsar, and now you want to go back?

Brian Lehrer: What year did he go back, Michael?

Happy: 1917.

Brian Leher: At the beginning of the Russian Revolution. He went back to be part of it.

Happy: Yes, he wasn't here that long, and his English wasn't that good, actually. He spoke several languages, but English was not one of his better languages.

Brian Lehrer: Happy, thank you for that story. Kim in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kim.

Kim: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Kim: I would like the professor to touch upon the policies of socialism and how white America became very much antisocialist when many of the policies of socialism started to benefit Black minority people in this country started to fight for those rights and it aligned with giving them those rights. Believe it or not, white America started to align socialism with giving opportunities to people of color in this country and became very anti socialist and thinking that all of America's money is going to go towards people of color.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Kazin, is that how you understand history? Kim, thank you very much.

Professor Kazin: Well, it's a little more complex. Certainly, Debs was antiracist, but some socialists were not unfortunately antiracist. Earlier in the 20th century, the communist Party, which of course supported socialism but aligned itself with the Soviet Union, was actually a very important anti racist force in America, helped to lead the National Negro Congress. There were pro communists like Paul Robeson, WEB du Bois, very important leaders who were friendly with communists, though they were not themselves members of the Communist Party in the '30s and '40s. It's certainly true that racists in the south and in the north often said that civil rights was a communist cause.

Martin Luther King Jr, as some people probably know, was pilloried by the FBI by J. Edgar Hoover in the '60s because he had some aides and advisors who had been communists. One of them still was. Stan Levinson still was in the Communist Party. At the same time, I think that's not the only reason why socialism was unpopular in American history, because most people in America identify socialism with state ownership and often and by the '30s with Stalinism, as you mentioned, with an authoritarian system. They didn't want that. As long as socialism was seen as an antidemocratic, anticivil liberties--

Brian Lehrer: Also, and we're going to run out of time soon, you have in your article you quote I think a sympathetic critic of socialism maybe, but some reasons that they're marginal in the US is that they could not relate to the specific problems of the give and take political world. Another person said that they speak to working people as if they were the ignorant dupes of capitalism with no ideas or cultures of their own.

Professor Kazin: Yes, these are some of the criticisms. Not all by any means, but some socialists who are not good organizers would often tell working people, you got to wise up here. Capitalism is not good for you. How can you continue to want to be a small businessperson? How can you continue to vote for these capitalist parties, Democrats, Republicans? That's a problem that's the left have today as well. When they talk to people who don't support Democrats, they say, well, it's just dumb working people who don't know their own interests. That's never a good way to convince people.

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, how do you see today's socialist movement, the DSA, a lot of young people, fitting into the arc of history that we've been discussing? We have about 45 seconds.

Professor Kazin: Sure. Well, DSA is larger than it's ever been, but it's lost some people in the last year or so partly because of divisions over the Gaza war. I think it's very positive that people are thinking again about socialism in a way they really haven't in about 100 years. That began with Bernie Sanders' campaign in a serious way, I think, in 2016, and it continues today. My students are not hostile to socialism, even though they always call themselves socialists. The idea that socialism is something people could talk about, argue about debate and not minimalize is, I think, a very good thing.

Brian Lehrer: Michael Kazin, professor at Georgetown, professor of history, editor emeritus of Dissent magazine and the author of several books, including What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party and American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. Thank you very much for joining us for the second time in our 100 Year series. We really appreciate it.

Professor Kazin: Great. Enjoyed it, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: After thing number 4 in 100 years of 100 Things, 100 years of American Socialism, we'll do 100 years of American Capitalism later in the week. That's the Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Serna, Carl Borzmand and Esperanza Rosenbaum. We had Juliana Fonda and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. Stay tuned for All Of It.

 

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