Walling, William English

WALLING, WILLIAM ENGLISH (1877–1936). One of the few serious and innovative theoretical minds American socialism has produced, William English Walling was born into a wealthy family. His grandfather had been the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1880. As a youth, Walling committed himself to working on behalf of people who were less privileged than he. He studied with the sociologist Thorstein Veblen while a student at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, he worked as a factory inspector, a settlement house resident on the Lower East Side of New York, and helped to found the Women’s Trade Union League in 1903, which was dedicated to organizing female factory workers into unions. In 1906 her married Anna Strunsy Walling, a writer of fiction and essays on social justice and women’s rights. After reporting on a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, he became one of the principal organizers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, along with W. E. B. Du Bois. Although he had by then become a socialist, he disagreed with some of his comrades by insisting that racial bigotry and discrimination needed to be fought right away instead of waiting for socialism to abolish all forms of discrimination, as they hoped it would. Walling was aware too of the racist attitudes of some American socialists themselves, such as Congressman Victor Berger.

Walling visited Russia during the 1905 revolution and was converted to socialism after meeting and talking with many radical activists. He published one of the few books in English on the thwarted revolution, becoming the first American to write about Lenin in a nationally circulated magazine. He soon gravitated to the left wing within the American Socialist Party, published articles in the Masses, the leading journal of the bohemian Left, and began to publish major works of socialist theory. After examining the latest trends in the international movement, he attempted to integrate the ideas of pragmatists like John Dewey. He came to the conclusion that the way toward real socialism was fraught with dangers, primarily coming from the likely development of an oppressive governmental structure. Although the coming social orders, which Walling referred to as state capitalism and state socialism, would carry out reforms, develop a welfare state, and eventually nationalize industry, they would only further the interests of the middle class and a relatively privileged portion of the working class. True socialism would come about only when the unprivileged were able to express their will and organize a democratic socialism from below, overturning organs of state control and finally abolishing all class distinctions whatsoever.

After leaving the Socialist Party because of its opposition to American participation in World War I, Walling eventually lost his own belief in a socialist future but became an advocate for what he then saw to be the democratic values of the American Federation of Labor and actively supported it as a publicist and consultant.

Boylan, Jame. Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

Craig, Berry. "William English Walling: Kentucky's Unknown Civil Rights Hero," The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 96, no. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 351–376.

Schneirov, Richard. "The Odyssey of William English Walling: Revisionism, Social Democracy, and Evolutionary Pragmatism," The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 2, no. 4 (October 2003), pp. 403–430.

Walling, William E. Progressivism and After. New York: Macmillan, 1914.

William English Walling: A Symposium. New York: Stackpole and Sons, 1938.

“William English Walling,” Spartacus Educational. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAwalling.htm