In 1952, a year after I was born and a decade and a half before I became an active participant on the American left, Daniel Bell published a book called Marxian Socialism in America, the first serious scholarly examination of the subject. He considered, among other questions, why the traditional Marxist parties in the United States had by then descended into abject political isolation. The Socialist Party of America (SP), which four decades earlier had enrolled over a hundred thousand members and attracted nearly a million voters in the presidential election of 1912, was reduced to less than a thousand aging stalwarts by 1952; its youth affiliate, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), had fewer than a hundred. Further to the left (or to the east, given its affinity for the Soviet Union), the Communist Party, USA (CP) still counted roughly twenty thousand members, but many of its leaders were imprisoned or about to be imprisoned for violation of the Smith Act, a federal law making it a crime to conspire to teach or advocate the desirability of overthrowing the government. According to public opinion polls in the early 1950s, a clear majority of Americans believed that the Party should be outlawed entirely.
Egalitarian Idealists and Authoritarian Zealots: A Cautionary Memoir
