He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times.
Hartman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Karl Marx in America, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Karl Marx in America at the University of Chicago Press website.… course, since the AFL had the most to lose to it. But even some within SLP ranks condemned the strategy.Page 99 of Karl Marx in America does indeed convey something central to the book, where I argue that Marx’s thought was more important in shaping American political discourse than most people realize. Page 99 is part of Chapter Two—“Working Class Hero”—about how the militant labor and socialist movements of the Gilded Age took up Marx as inspiration and as strategic guide to fighting against the emergent industrial and corporate capitalism that had taken shape in the United States and had made the lives of millions of workers pretty miserable.
A group of SLP dissidents led by Morris Hillquit revolted in 1899. These “kangaroos,” as DeLeon loyalists nicknamed them—a nineteenth-century political term of derision for a crook—opposed both dual unionism and DeLeon’s regime. At the annual SLP meeting, the kangaroos attempted to take physical possession of the party’s printing press. A brawl broke out, but the Hillquit group failed to dislodge the DeLeon stalwarts. The rebels then took the matter to court, where they sued for the name and property of the SLP, only to lose. DeLeon maintained control, but he and the party were damaged by this schism. DeLeon and the SLP fell from their perch atop the socialist movement, replaced by Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party of America that formed in 1901.
Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party
If anyone in history personifies American Marxism, it is Eugene Victor Debs. He rallied more Americans to the cause of class struggle than anyone else. Yet Debs was not always a fire-breathing class warrior. The Indiana-born revolutionary started his political career promoting the idea of a “grand cooperative scheme” that would allow people to “work together in harmony in every branch of industry.” Rather than a working-class struggle over the means of production, the young Debs called for the creation of utopian colonies modeled on a Christian vision of a city on a hill. The future of socialism, for him at the time, lay in the vision imagined by Robert Owen. Debs believed that a rapacious form of capitalism had betrayed the spirit of brotherhood—a spirit that had long animated Americans—and that the moral example set by the utopian community would help convince others to live up to their highest ideals.
Sinclair Lewis called Debs the John the Baptist of American socialism. Daniel Bell described him as “the man whose gentleness and…
Page 99 represents a transition in the chapter from discussing the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) led by the explicitly Marxist Daniel DeLeon, which ultimately failed to capture the hearts and minds of most radical workers, to discussing the Socialist Party of America led by the incomparable Eugene Debs. Although Debs, much more so than DeLeon, was immersed in longstanding American political traditions like Christianity, republicanism, and populism, his experience with the labor movement and even more so, capital’s repression of the labor movement, made him more amenable to Marx’s ideas. And when he read Marx while in prison in 1894, he was converted to Marxism and took American socialism down the Marxist road. The Gilded Age was thus one of what I call the "Marx booms," periods in US History when lots of Americans read the bearded communist philosopher favorably.
The book consists of nine chapters, chronologically ordered from the US Civil War to the present, which dig deep into how Marx interpreted the United States (the focus of Chapter One—“American Revolutionary”) and even more so, about how Marx’s ideas came into contact with people working out political problems in America. Out of what might be called “the Marx-America dialectic,” three distinct versions of Marx emerged: the Marx who famously centered labor as the driving force of value in a capitalist society; the Marx whose ideas mixed with other American political traditions to form hybrid political tendencies; and the Marx whose repulsive theories helped liberals and conservatives work out their own ideas about America.
The Page 99 Test: A War for the Soul of America.
--Marshal Zeringue