Socialism is as American as apple pie Mamdani has legendary predecessors

Predictable as the tides, self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s rise has brought out a range of bad to worse takes. Powerful Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have abandoned their “vote blue, no matter who” line, demurring on whether the youth-galvanizing Mamdani deserves their endorsement. Bill Maher frets that Gotham has never had a would-be mayor this “radical” and called Mamdani a “Marxist.” Meanwhile, many on the Right have characterized Mamdani almost as an invasive species, with the late Charlie Kirk going so far as to call him a “parasite.”

Implicit in this alarmism is that there is something abnormal, even un-American about a socialist having the audacity to wind up popular. This sensibility has deep roots, from the 20th-century Red Scares, which led to Socialist party leader Eugene Debs being jailed for protesting World War I, to the darker influence of McCarthyism. It also has more rarefied intellectual dimensions. Throughout the Cold War, Right-wing heavyweights from F.A Hayek to Barry Goldwater defined the conflict in Manichean terms: the open society over the closed; individualism over collectivism; freedom rather than forced equality; God against the anti-Christ. In these tellings, America was supposed to be the land where socialism went to die.

But this is ahistorical nonsense. In reality, socialism has deep roots in the United States going back to the early republic. Socialists have even governed in the country, leaving behind a successful legacy that today’s Leftists can justly be proud of. It’s a legacy Mamdani should more openly embrace. 

American socialism burgeoned in the 19th century, and was often deeply intertwined with abolitionism and feminism. An iconic figure of the time was the leading social reformer Frances “Fanny” Wright. Born into a wealthy Scottish family in 1795, Wright was rapidly orphaned but lucky enough to inherit a substantial fortune. She was deeply inspired by the revolutionary republicanism of the era, and also the humanitarian reformism of early socialists like the industrialist Robert Owen.

Wright traveled to America and was impressed by the country’s democratic institutions and comparative egalitarianism, praising the young republic in her 1821 book, Views of Society and Manners in America. Wright became the “first woman to edit an American journal of opinion and the first to regularly lecture before audiences of men and women,” writes the journalist John Nichols in his book The “S” Word. Over time, she became increasingly worried that the country wasn’t living up to its own ideals. In 1825, Wright published a fiery critique of slavery, becoming one of the country’s most acclaimed — or notorious, depending whom you asked — abolitionists.

Not all of Wright’s efforts succeeded. The same year that she published her tract against the Peculiar Institution, she poured much of her own fortune into establishing the proto-socialist commune of Nashoba in rural Tennessee. Plagued by infertile soil and malaria, it eventually folded. Wright lost a lot of money. But she carried on her activism with the new Working Men’s Party and delivered lectures across the country on women’s suffrage. 

The latter got Wright a lot of flack in the era’s conservative press, with many editors declaring her a “monster” for trying to upend the “natural” patriarchal order. But Wright was undeterred and won loyal admirers. This included America’s poet laureate, Walt Whitman (who himself held socialist sympathies). Whitman declared Wright “a woman of the noblest make up” and recalled that he often read The Free Inquirer, the radical newspaper she co-edited, and had been inspired by her lectures.    

Wright was part of a broader ferment of socialist thought and activism in mid-19th-century America. It swept up the most famous socialist of all time, Karl Marx, who was a longtime contributor to the New York Tribune. As the historian Ander Hartman notes, Marx’s articles for the Tribune constitute the single largest body of work he published in his lifetime. Even as he fiercely criticized America’s plantocracy and, especially, the slave-owning South, Marx saw America as a country at the forefront of progress. 

On behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, Marx even wrote a flattering letter to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, in turn, was an avid reader of the Tribune and shared many of the economic views the progressive paper espoused. In 1861 Lincoln proclaimed that labor is “prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” 

American socialism really kicked into high gear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as labor disputes and Gilded Age inequality intensified in tandem. American class struggle could get very militant; in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, hundreds lost their lives as the state sent in armed forces to crush striking coal workers in West Virginia. Indeed, violent class struggle was a fixture of national life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The Socialist Party of America found a receptive audience during this time under the leadership of the charismatic Eugene Debs. Running for president five times, Debs won 6% of the vote in 1912 and increased his vote tally during a final run in 1920. The latter contest was notable for Debs campaigning from a jail cell. 

The party continued to wield influence under new leader Norman Thomas. An honorable but somewhat melancholy figure, Thomas had been a Presbyterian minister by trade, and his pacifistic socialism was deeply stamped by his religious training. This also fed into Thomas’s militant anti-Stalinism. Initially enthusiastic about the October Revolution, Thomas joined many democratic socialists in the West in repudiating Bolshevik violence and authoritarianism as contrary to socialist principle. This earned Thomas the ire of authoritarian communists, including Leon Trotsky, who described Thomas as a typically hypocritical American who defended imperialism and indulged in religious mysticism contrary to the scientific atheism of orthodox Marxism.

From 1928 to 1948, Thomas ran six presidential campaigns as the Socialist Party’s nominee. He was never able to restore the party to Debs’s levels of electoral success. This was partly because FDR, responding to the misery and unrest of the Great Depression, implemented reforms that took the wind out of the movement’s sails. Nevertheless, Thomas was well respected by the Roosevelt administration, especially the president’s wife, Eleanor. Many core socialist ideas made their way into the New Deal, most notably the Wagner Act of 1935 that legalized labor organizing at the federal level and made it the policy of the federal government to encourage collective bargaining, after years in which organizers were met with bullets and truncheons.

The Socialist Party’s struggle to remain relevant in a two party system was all too real. But this doesn’t mean American socialism didn’t manage to govern elsewhere — including in some unexpected places.

Perhaps the most famous example is in Red Milwaukee, which was governed by socialist mayors for decades. In 1910, Emil Seidel, a patternmaker by trade, won a landslide victory advocating for “sewer” or “municipal socialism.” Seidel pitched his campaign as giving workers not only sewers, but living wages, recreation, clean air, and good homes. It was a message that resonated with the public, and Seidel went on to win the big office. He would establish the first public works department, close down brothels, and launch a city park system. When he ran for re-election in 1912, he won more votes than in his first run, though a surprising Democratic-Republican unity ticket brought him down.

In 1916, Milwaukeeans returned to socialism, electing Daniel Hoan mayor. He’d hold the position for almost a quarter of a century, until 1940. The city would then go on to elect a third iconic socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler, in 1948. Zeidler would emulate Hoan’s long-term popularity, and was re-elected two more times between 1948 and 1960. “Sewer socialists” were municipal planners at heart, building on their philosophy that cooperation, rather than strict competition, would benefit everyone in the city. Their popularity owed much to a combination of strong support for workers’ movements and unions, expansive public works projects like city parks, and a deep dedication to caring for the least well off, not least African Americans. Zeidler drew a lot of fire advocating for desegregation and putting up billboards across the south encouraging sharecroppers to head north for plush jobs in Milwaukee.  

The legacy of sewer socialism continues down through Bernie Sanders, who made a mark as an often pragmatic mayor of Burlington, Vt. By most accounts, these municipal American socialists governed well. This bodes well for the prospect of a Mamdani victory. If he governs New York as well as his socialist forebears ran Milwaukee and Burlington, working-class New Yorkers will get the affordable city they deserve.

Contra the Right’s “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theorists, then, American socialism isn’t some foreign disease spread by the “Franklin School of Critical Theory,” as the Fox News shouter Mark Levin amusingly called the Frankfurt School in one of his books (repeatedly, so you know it wasn’t a typo). Indeed, American socialism has been around for nearly two centuries. Its sympathizers and proponents have included Walt Whitman, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and more. American socialism has defenders because it addresses real and longstanding dissatisfaction with oligarchy, imperial aggression, racialized social conflict and oppression, and the tyranny of private government in the workplace. 

Not everyone in New York or the country at large is willing to sign up to Mamdani’s cause today. But for the naysayers, it might be worth it to fix the problems socialists expose — rather than constantly trying to banish the red specter.

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