The attempt to account for America’s anti-socialist exception has sustained a thriving academic cottage industry among historians, sociologists and political scientists over many decades. As long ago as 1906, the German economist and sociologist Werner Sombart was asking: “Why is there no socialism in the US?”
The answer, he thought, lay in the success of capitalism and the extent to which American workers identified as a result with the prevailing social and economic settlement. “On the reefs of roast beef and apple pie,” Sombart wrote, “socialistic utopias of every sort are sent to their doom.”
There were other factors at work too, Sombart argued. America had no feudal past, which meant that workers there felt the political system was largely responsive to their needs, in a way that their European counterparts, who’d had to fight to achieve the franchise, did not. Greater social mobility led most Americans to value self-improvement over collective action, while the open frontier to the west held out the promise of cheap land and property should things go awry at home. Finally, the two-party system squeezed the space available to any reform-minded third force.
Ironically, the period in which Sombart was writing was in fact a high-water mark of sorts for socialism in America. In 1912, for example, membership of the Socialist party, formed in 1901, peaked at 113,000. And in that year’s presidential election, the Socialist candidate Eugene Debs polled more than 900,000 votes, or 6 per cent of the electorate, on a platform that denounced the capitalist system and called for collective ownership of all major industries, land and the banks.
Socialist inroads at the polls were accompanied by the growth of the leftwing press. Estimates put its total circulation during this period at more than two million. Periodicals such as Appeal to Reason, published in Kansas, and the agrarian socialist National Ripsaw, had circulations in the hundreds of thousands. By 1912, the Jewish Daily Forward, a socialist newspaper published in New York, had a circulation of 120,000.
Electoral success was not restricted to presidential politics. In 1910, Wisconsin elected the first Socialist member of the US House of Representatives. And in the same year, Milwaukee, the largest city in the state, returned a socialist as mayor. Socialists would run Milwaukee for a total of 38 of the next 50 years, earning it the reputation as one of the best-governed cities in the country.
The press called the Milwaukee mayors “sewer socialists”, a label they adopted for themselves, as it drew attention to their preference for providing high-quality public goods and services over the pursuit of class struggle. The term made a comeback this year when Mamdani used it to describe his own vision for New York. “Sewer socialism,” he said, means “that we want to showcase our ideals, not by lecturing people about how correct we are, but rather by delivering and letting that delivery be the argument itself.”
As the historian Joshua Freeman pointed out, New York had a sewer socialist of its own in the first half of the 20th century: Fiorello La Guardia, who was mayor from 1934 to 1946. Although nominally a Republican, La Guardia governed “like a socialist”, Freeman argued. During his tenure, the city’s physical infrastructure was transformed out of all recognition. And as well as building highways, swimming pools and playgrounds across all five boroughs, he established the New York City Housing Authority, the first such public body in the country, introduced rent controls, brought competing private subway lines under unified public control and kept transport fares low — priorities all echoed in Mamdani’s promises to “freeze the rent” for stabilised tenants and provide “fast and free buses”. “Zohran has definitely seen La Guardia as one of the mayors to emulate,” said Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the New York DSA.
However, there is an important difference between the two men, warned Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University and a “non-active member of DSA”. Unlike Mamdani, La Guardia had history on his side. “He was mayor during the New Deal.”
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