Radicalism and the American Ethos

Milton Cantor. The Divided Left: American Radicalism, 1900-1975. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. 248 pp. Paul Avrich. An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 266 + xxii pp. Of all the modern industrial nations in the West, only the United States lacks a socialist-labor political party or movement. In Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Scandinavia, social-democratic and/or communist parties have exerted a formative influence on their societies. Canada's New Democratic Party as well has in some ways tried to approximate the European model. Milton Cantor's The Divided Left, which surveys the course of twentieth-century American socialism, communism and New Leftism, seeks to explain why labor never developed class consciousness and never sup- ported political movements alien to capitalism. In his biography of the almost forgotten anarchist leader, Voltairine de Cleyre, Paul Avrich sheds light on why her particular brand of radicalism failed as well

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