The essays contained in this and the October 2003 special issues of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were originally delivered at a conference sponsored by Indiana State University, the repository of the Debs papers and site of his house, now a national landmark. Intended to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Debs' first run for the presidency, the conference themes of socialism and dissent attracted a diverse group of scholars, intellectuals, and activists. Their contributions help us gauge the state of the field. They also suggest new departures in the study of socialism.

Students of the life of Lillian D. Wald (1867–1940) know her best as a Progressive activist. A trained nurse and advocate for East European Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East Side, she founded Henry Street Settlement House there in 1893 and worked for state intervention in public health issues concerning women and children. Though she lived until 1940, historians have focused almost exclusively on her achievements before 1920: her founding of Henry Street, her key role in the formation of the Children's Bureau, her anti-militarism during World War I. This is not surprising, given that Wald' s rhetoric is that of a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive. She consistently cited her actions as in line with her universalist philosophy of human interdependence, which she referred to as “mutuality” and defined as a vision in which “no one class of people can be independent of the other”. Wald's mutuality echoes the Protestant social gospel movement's call for a “brotherhood of man” which inspired so many – including so many middle-class women – to work for various currents of Progressive reform.

The July 2003 special issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era revisited the history of the Socialist Party of America during the Progressive Era. This second issue on “New Perspectives on Socialism” examines socialism largely outside the party context, thereby challenging the tendency of scholars and non-scholars alike to identify socialism with a party-based political movement. To the degree that the essays collected here examine party-based socialism, they focus on the gradualist or revisionist wing of the party, whose socializing and democratic reforms, programs, and ideas helped establish a context for the Progressive Era and thereafter, when a “social democratic” type of politics became intrinsic to the mainstream American politics.

Socialism in the United States between 1901 and 1919 has usually been viewed in a national context replete with assumptions about American Exceptionalism. Taking their cue from Werner Sombart's classic 1906 essay “Why Is there No Socialism in the United States?,” historians of American socialism from Daniel Bell and David Shannon to Seymour Martin Lipset have pointed to distinctly American conditions inimical to the growth of Socialism. For Ira Kipnis and Philip Foner, the problem was that American socialism before World War One was too rooted in American political traditions, not pure or Marxist enough. For Daniel Bell, it was a “foreign virus,” and was unable to be domesticated. And in the work of Paul Buhle, the “foreign” nature of American socialism in its ethnic and immigrant members has found its rescuer. The distinction between the “American” and “foreign” character of American socialism dominated debate for far too long.

Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, statistician and insurance executive, was a formidable opponent of the emerging welfare state during the Progressive Era. As a vice president of the Prudential Insurance Company of Newark, New Jersey, Hoffman led a relentless campaign against proposals for government-ran compulsory health insurance between 1915 and 1920. While he acted in the interests of his insurance company employer, Hoffman's opposition also arose from his ardent beliefs about the nature of welfare states. Social insurance and other forms of state-organized assistance, Hoffman claimed, represented “alien governmental theories” based on “paternalism and coercion,” especially since they originated in autocratic Germany, where in 1885 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had created the world's first sickness insurance system. “In so far as our right to oppose compulsory health insurance is concerned,” explained Hoffman, “it [is] the duty of every American to oppose German ideas of government control and state socialism.” In the anti-German atmosphere engendered by the First World War, his arguments had particular resonance.

Progressivism has been notoriously hard to define, not least because progressives have been so diverse in their views and positions. They came in virtually all shapes, sizes, and opinions. One group, however, has seldom been included under the progressive umbrella, and that is American Catholics. But consider the credentials of Edward Osgood Brown, born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1847 to a long-established Yankee sea-faring family, who migrated to Chicago in 1872 and died there in 1923.

The conference at which a shorter version of this discussion was originally presented had as its theme, “Eugene V. Debs and the Politics of Dissent in Modern America.” Let me begin with a few words about “the Politics of Dissent,” because it was part of the overall framework of our discussions, and because it has a significant bearing on the way we think about capitalism and socialism.

Mention James Harvey Robinson and most students of American history will think two words: “New History.” Robinson tried to articulate what better-known historians of the period – Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington – were doing in their research and writing. As Richard Hofstadter explained, the leading historians of the Progressive Era tried “to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment.…They attempted to find a usable past related to the broadest needs of a nation fully launched upon its own industrialization, and to make history an active instrument of self-recognition and self-improvement.” Situated firmly in the “revolt against formalism” that marked Progressive Era intellectual work, historians made their research instrumental, teasing out what William James called the “cash value” of ideas. Historical writing could no longer, in Robinson's own words, “catalogue mere names of person and places which have not the least importance for the reader.” Rather, it had to “help us understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind.” In those words and his pioneering (though largely forgotten) work in European and intellectual history, Robinson codified the purpose of what has come to be known as Progressive history.

In 1913 Socialist Party (SP) leader Morris Hillquit contended that the United States had embarked on the path toward socialism. He argued that the “modern principle of control and regulation of industries by the government indicates the complete collapse of the purely capitalist ideal of non-interference, and signifies that the government may change from an instrument of class rule and exploitation into one of social regulation and protection.” He then asserted that like “the industries, the government is being socialized. The general tendency of both is distinctly towards a Socialist order.” This fit with his understanding of the stages a nation underwent as it progressed first from a society with little to no state involvement in the economy, to a social democracy with state regulation of corporations and protections for workers, to, finally, a socialist state where a government which the people elected managed the economy.

Henry James' The Bostonians is one of the most celebrated novels of Gilded Age America. As he wrote in his notebooks, it sprang from his desire to write an “American” tale, one dealing with what he took to be the most “characteristic” movement of the time, the “agitation” for woman's rights. Literary scholars have produced a vast literature dealing with the novel. Historians have largely ignored it. In this essay I seek to demonstrate two points. The first is that historians can, by grounding the novel in its historical context, provide insights into the work that have eluded literary scholars. The second is that The Bostonians proves a highly useful source for the historian into both the “agitation” for woman's rights and the largely unexplored role – the fascination with Victoria Woodhull and the Beecher-Tilton trial aside – Spiritualism played in that “agitation” and in the Gilded Age more generally.

This article examines the experience of distinct groups within the Socialist Party of America, considering the period from its founding in 1901 to the eve of World War One. The Socialist Party, befitting its membership in the international socialist movement of that era, was committed to representing the workers of the world in the Marxist struggle to achieve political and economic equality within a cooperative commonwealth. Accordingly, variables of gender, ethnicity and race were subsumed within the Social Question. Ideally, workers in every capacity and of all backgrounds would march together under the Red Flag and create a new egalitarian society. While, indeed, many lawyers, ministers and others of the middle-class belonged to the Socialist Party and often held office within it, thereby derisively being likened by critics to an assemblage of dentists, the party was very much working class in composition, as shown by James R. Green and others.

Have you ever wondered about the origin of the phrase: “If you want peace, work for justice?” I recently saw it on a bumper sticker that attributed the slogan to Pope Paul VI, and if you go to the Vatican sites for his annual peace messages between 1967 and 1969, you will find the general sentiment there. But the origin of the idea that peace requires social justice – not just the absence of warfare – is much older. In the twentieth century United States this idea originated in Jane Addams' book, Newer Ideals of Peace, published in 1907.

He had only seen Debs three times, met him twice, and really talked to him once, but when Debs died in 1926, John Haynes Holmes, pastor of New York City's Community Church (Unitarian), himself a distinguished civil libertarian and social reformer, announced that he loved Debs deeply and “honored him above all other men now alive in America.” Why did many people share that love of Debs, and others hate him, Holmes asked. In both cases the answer was Debs' own outflowing love, which common folks cherished but the rich and powerful saw as a threat to the established order. Exactly the same answer explained reactions to Jesus. Holmes spoke at a mass meeting in Debs' memory at the Madison Square Garden and converted a Sunday service at the Community Church into “a public memorial” to Debs: “I shall take his life as my text,” he wrote Theodore Debs, “use his writings for Scripture reading, and place in the pulpit a full-sized copy of Louis Mayer's bust, draped with the Red flag.” Waxing poetic, Holmes had Christ receive Debs into heaven with these words:

In the history of American socialism William English Walling occupies a special place. Born into a wealthy Midwestern family, Walling was educated at the University of Chicago and Harvard, but soon found a calling as a social reform activist when he learned first hand about the conditions of working people as an Illinois factory inspector and a habitué of turn-of-the-century social settlement houses and the Jewish ghetto scene. From that point forward Walling was a major influence wherever he directed his fertile mind and instinct for provoking controversy and precipitating new movements. In 1903, Walling helped found the National Women's Trade Union League and became president of its New York chapter. Six years later he cobbled together a group of anti-racist socialists to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – then invited W.E.B. DuBois to become editor of its journal, The Crisis.