 This is Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which is where I got this shirt from. Today we're here to talk about American exceptionalism or why there is no socialism in the United States, why the American working class did not produce a large socialist party or communist party as is found in pretty much every other advanced capitalist economy, including Canada. What is special about America? Now the idea of America being special goes way back, back to the pilgrims who were going to build that city on the hill. But the idea of American exceptionalism is something that's particular to the American working class and its lack of socialist feeling, lack of leftism in the United States. That goes back to one particular person a little more than a century ago, Werner Sombat, a German sociologist, friend of Max Weber, came to the United States in 1902 and wrote a series of articles which were published in a German social democratic magazine on why no socialism in the United States. Now obviously he didn't mean literally no socialism, there were at the time two American socialist parties, there were many socialists, the socialist candidates for president, there were two of them in 1900 and 1904, gone at about 2% of the popular vote. In 1912 the socialist candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, received over 6% of the popular vote, making a credible fourth party challenge, there were three parties, three major parties in that election because the Republicans split. So there was socialism, but the question that Sombat was really asking is why there wasn't more. And Sombat's question is a simple model that is very much like the materialist models that we talked about way at the beginning of the class. Here's his model, things happen to workers, then workers form institutions. It's a linear model, goes in one direction, there are no feedbacks. Simple, you could say, if you want to be mean, simple, mind it. For Sombat, his concept of the things that happened to American workers was prosperity. And in this, Sombat was challenging the Marxism that he had to some extent absorbed. And the Marxism that dominated the social thought of the German Socialist Social Democratic Party, of which he was peripherally associated at this time. I say peripherally associated, because Sombat went on to be a Nazi in later life. It's a sad story, we don't want to get into that. But the German Social Democrats at the time had a simple-minded sense of Marxism, which was really the complete opposite, antithesis of what Marx really wrote and really believed, but I don't want to go there either. And this simple-minded materialism that they believed, that they associated with Marxism, what I call second international Marxism, had a straight, linear relationship between things, acting on people, and then people creating social institutions as a result. Sombat applied that to socialism in the United States and said, American workers were wealthy, relative to workers in other countries. He didn't do all the calculations, but he was basically right. He argued American workers were not socialists because they loved capitalism, workers loved capitalism, because capitalism gave them roast beef and apple pie. He had various formulations. My favorite is, you cannot get socialism in a land of strawberries and whipped cream. That was Sombat's analysis, and while it wasn't translated to English for 74 years, which is kind of remarkable, since it was cited by so many people, but it was only translated in 1976, kind of odd. But it was widely read because most American social scientists in the 20th century read German, and people more or less believed it. And it's still widely current in popular press. American workers like socialism, because America's prosperous. At the time of Sombat, American workers had wages about 20% higher than workers in England, about 40% higher than workers on the European continent in France and Germany. Americans were taller, as much as two inches taller on average than adults in Germany or France. Americans lived longer. There's good reason to say that Americans were prosperous and therefore were not socialists. When you get down to it, and there's a good recent book by Robin Archer, why there is no labor party in the United States, when you get down to it, however, all the things lead to workers' models, whether Sombat or various people have followed after him, break down. When you get down to the specifics of the case, the evidence is not there. Look at the United States in terms of wages. If socialism is inhibited by strawberries and whipped cream, then you would expect that the places that had the most strawberries and whipped cream would have the least socialism goes the other way. The most prosperous parts of the working class were the most strongly social. The most affluent areas, the western mountain states, the northeast, the upper Midwest, the most prosperous parts of the country were the strongest socialist areas. The poorest workers in the poorest areas, Mississippi, Louisiana, agricultural workers, domestic servants, workers in the textile industry. These were the workers who were the least socialist. Machinists, tool and dye makers in the Connecticut Valley, hard workers in the northwest. Urban workers in San Francisco and New York were the most socialist. Some of our model breaks down, so do all the other models. Some people advanced along this. Our simple linear progression. Seymour Morton-Lipset argues that it was individualism and inhibited socialism. This is more individualist than the hard rock miners and the agricultural workers in the west, and they were the most strongly socialist. They were the people behind the international workers of the world, the IWW, the revolutionary syndicalist trade union in the United States. Other models, immigration inhibited socialism. Well, the most strongly socialist workers in the United States were the Jews and the Italians in New York City. The most strongly socialist unions were recent immigrants. There is no good evidence that immigration inhibited socialism. There's no particularly good evidence that racism inhibited unionization and socialism. What you come down to is that all the explanations coming from this model are wrong because this model is wrong. This is not the way the world works. So next time we'll talk about a little more complicated model, which maybe will capture the dynamics of America's labor movement better. Till then, thank you very much and have a good day. Bye-bye.