British Americans

BRITISH AMERICANS. British socialism and British immigrants affected the U.S. Left for the most part in the early period, with a special influence on the artisanal-oriented, gradualistic vision of socialism. Before the establishment of a regular English-language socialist book-publisher, British volumes and pamphlets served an American audience of the 1880s–1890s. William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England enjoyed wide circulation, as did a number of newspapers from the earliest British Marxist organizations, such as William Morris’s Commonwealth. A few survivors of Chartism or later British laborism took important roles in the small English-language wing of the Socialist Labor Party. The most prominent, Thomas J. Morgan of Chicago, conducted the “regular” wing of the local socialist movement against the social revolutionaries and sought to direct socialist trade union work into the mainstream union groups rather than competing socialist trades-bodies. Elsewhere, British (along with “Lancashire Irish,” i.e., Irish who had come to America by way of Lancashire) labor activists sought the establishment of strong craft unions and (if socialists) an educational effort aimed at the community.

British influences also had a special importance, in some areas, for the growth of libertarian or anarchist ideas. Several of the leading social revolutionaries (including Samuel Fielding, son of a Chartist and himself a former Lancashire prelate) in Chicago were known to have been politically active earlier in England. British-born anarchists, many of them veterans of William Morris’s movement, were active in propaganda groups of the 1880s–1890s. They had the most concerted influence in Boston, where they outnumbered other contributors to Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty magazine and where, through influence on the local printers’ and tailors’ unions, they exerted significant influence upon the Central Labor Union.

By the 1890s, the rise of Fabianism and the inability of American ethnic socialists to reach the native-born with an acceptable doctrine brought many American intellectuals in contact with the English socialists. The most prominent American by far, Woman’s Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard, converted to Fabian Socialism while on an extended visit. Fabian ideas, meanwhile, penetrated the Nationalist Clubs inspired by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, prompting the formation of the American Fabian in 1896. A humorous contemporary account probably captures (and caricatures) the intellectual atmosphere:

The former president, Mr. Crosby, sued to say emphatically, thinking probably of the “class struggle,” the “social revolution,” and the tactics and tone of the SLP: “No, I am not a socialist”; and then, fixing his eyes on the ceiling, he would reflect upon “the Brotherhood of Man,” and “Equality Before God” … and would murmur dreamily: “Why, yes I am a socialist; really, of course, we all are.”

While the American Fabian did not survive the reorganization of the socialist movement in the last years of the century, Fabian and Guild ideas flowed into the new Socialist Party. Gaylord Wilshire, John Spargo, William English Walling, A. M. Simons, Harry Laidler, and other important intellectuals were devout Anglophiles; the journals they edited (or to which they contributed) also featured articles by George Bernard Shaw, H. M. Hyndman, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, E. Belfort Bax, Tom Mann, and even Oscar Wilde, and were frequently illustrated by Walter Crane’s drawings in the style of William Morris. The Comrade, edited by Spargo, was the most beautiful U.S. Left magazine until the Masses, and was also the most British-influenced.

After 1900, British-American anarchist intellectuals concentrated their efforts upon establishing “Modern Schools” and anarchist colonies in Stelton, New Jersey, and Moghegan, New York, among other places. (One of the prominent figures, William Bridge, was the grandfather of Joan Baez.) Especially in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, these institutions became the major points of survival for English-language anarchism, and the publications from them (such as the Road to Freedom, published partly from Stelton in the 1920s–1930s) the chief evidence of intellectual vitality.

The American movement at large outgrew its early dependence upon British writers, and also drew increasingly away on tactical lines. With World War I, most of the Anglophile writers, whatever their factional orientation, defected to pro-war positions. The major exception and new source of British influence was the pacifist current and the collegiate socialism around the Intercollegiate Socialist and its 1920s successor, Labor Age. Harry Laidler, editor of the Intercollegiate Socialist, would for decades pursue the themes of nationalization as a road to American socialism, and the Independent Labour Party’s strategy (through the mainstream labor movement’s own political institutions rather than outside) as suitable. Labor education, such as that fostered at the Brookwood Labor College in partial imitation of British workers’ education, was the other strand of this program. As late as the 1950s, the League for Industrial Democracy (of which Laidler remained secretary) urged nationalization of the steel industry as the key transition to a more cooperative order.

It could be said that another British phase (or mini-phase) ensued with the later 1960s–1970s, when U.S. radical scholars in a number of fields looked to English theoretical explorations. English historian and peace leader E. P. Thompson, very likely the most influential Anglo-American historian after Charles Beard, erected new scholarly paradigms with his Making of the English Working Class (1963), a book of particular importance to a New Left generation deeply drawn to social history. The New Left Review, sometimes correctly viewed as Thompson’s nemesis, became for a time a principal fount for Althusserian, structuralist theorizing on both sides of the Atlantic. Other areas of postmodern radical scholarship, from literature to psychology, also looked to specific British intellectuals. The field of cultural studies traced its lineage to the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham and drew intellectual sustenance from the center’s former leading figure, Stuart Hall. Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn occupied, during the 1980s, positions of influence as the columnists of the Left in the Nation and elsewhere.

The waning of the postmodern phase in the middle 1990s found the New Left Review a more traditionally Marxist and increasingly well-read publication within the United States (without regaining its peak influence of the 1970s), more advertised and seen than any American-based Left theoretical journal. Verso, the New Left Review’s publishing arm, became a leading press of the American Left. On the political front, one particularly lively if sectarian group, the International Socialist Organization, looked continually to its “home” organization and journals of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, until the ISO’s demise in 2019.

The stunning British election of 2017, with the Labour Party, headed by Jeremy Corbin, becoming a very radical opposition to the Tories, brought wide new interest among American radicals. Many observers compared Corbin, an experienced left-winger (and Back Bencher) to Bernie Sanders. This vastly hopeful moment ended at the close of 2019 with a British election hinged on “Brexit,” and a massive, indeed unprecedented defeat for Labour. Would the Labour Party, with new leadership, bend much toward the Center? Or would the rapid expansion of membership, including tens of thousands of young activists in the years before 2019, mean a continuation of course well to the Left of the established social democratic parties of Europe? The parallels with Sanders, his allies and youthful supporters, continued to stir interest of the American side of the Atlantic. British films and (thanks to Streaming) British television reached the US with new appeals to radicals and the curious. The films of Ken Loach, like the songs of Billy Bragg, had a particularly wide and lasting appeal to issues of class, the chief political virtue of better British novels and films going back generations. The television productions of Sally Wainwright, including “Happy Valley,” and “Scott and Bailey,” impressed American audiences with their sharp view of class. Others of the same stripe, going back at least to the 1980s, found new viewers thanks to streaming.

Anderson, Perry. Western Marxism. London: Verso, 1981.

Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Portraits. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Rowbotham, Sheila. Rebel. Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States. New York: Verso, 2016.