Within the scope of this research, we will attempt to answer the question of whether socialism will help or hurt America, and what steps can be taken to improve American relations with the world. The migration of socialism from its European homeland to the United States produced, as we have seen, results sometimes exciting but also deeply troubling to the Marxists. To succeed, any revolutionary movement needed to come to grips with the pervasive religious and cultural values, to understand and appreciate as well as to attempt to transform them. Homegrown radicals and class-conscious workers, for all their weaknesses, potentially provided socialism access into the American mainstream. The process of discovery had to be mutual, a complex and protracted probing from both sides. The critical question was, what did each bring to the conversation?
Socialism supplied a definite class view and a strategic instrument, the union, which could serve as means of transition to a new order. Indigenous radicalism stood for the most part outside these traditions. (Perrier 1983) But its disciples held for that very reason a more sophisticated view of the multi-cultural, factory and non-factory, character of the American lower classes, Black and white, male and female. They also had a better subjective sense of the meaning, for Americans, of the old Republic’s decline and debauch at the hands of monopolistic capitalism. At their best they understood the traumatic awakening into history which alone could bring a serious acceptance of Socialist ideas, and the moral or spiritual vacuum which only an expanded faith in democracy could fill. (Perrier 1983)
The pre-industrial religion of a redemptive, benevolent deity watching over the republic fitted the needs of American radicals and reformers well into the late-nineteenth century. More than that, it placed the palpable deterioration of democracy in a great field of hope. America had failed the trust given its founders with the virgin continent. But that trust might yet be redeemed. The blasphemer, agent of Indian genocide, slaver, merchant aristocrat, could not rule on. The shadow of his antithesis, the redeemer-woman, hovered in the background ready to bring salvation to a society that recognized its own heart of darkness and willingly marched toward the light.
