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introduction

identity

money

success

conclusion

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Identity

Wealthy and socialist: contradiction or not?

Gerber did his law clerkship under Morris Hillquit. In talking about his early life, as Gerber described a need to find employment, he repeated a statement of his identity vis-à-vis his profession. He was “a young lawyer.” He had worked hard in order to achieve that designation, indeed he made a point of highlighting his achievement of completing law school and passing the bar by age 21.

The socialists of Gerber’s childhood and early career, individuals he would have been in contact with either through his father or through his mentor, Morris Hillquit, were working for a gradual transition to socialism from capitalism. They held to an evolutionary Marxist ideal, in which a slow transformation would occur as workers recognized their class interests and voted accordingly for the American Socialist Party. Looking back, we see that the party was not particularly successful in its mission to achieve the transition. As D. H. Leon noted, in his review of interpretations on American socialism, “prosperity or possibility of prosperity was likely a more important element in the political difficulties of American socialism than the racial, religious and ethnic divisions among Americans (including socialists), or even the anti-socialist policies of the Catholic Church in the AFL and elsewhere.”⁵

Prosperity was an issue for the intellectual leadership of the party beyond the effect it had on helping maintain the capitalistic status quo. Morris Hillquit, one of the individuals most responsible for the party doctrine, was a successful corporate lawyer. According to Richard Fox, his

intense, unfaltering commitment to an ideology of radical social change was mixed with a strong yearning for social prestige and cultural respectability. Hillquit’s Marxist doctrine, like that of the party as a whole, for which he more than anyone else was responsible, was ‘defused’ at almost every step by an accommodationist political style, not only that of the office-seeker in search of votes, but that of the immigrant in search of acceptance.⁶

This approach, according to Fox, effectively made the revolutionary ideas of the socialists seem closer to progressivism in their application than they were in their ideology. Because of his presentation style, people listening to Hillquit’s speeches may not have perceived the radical nature of Hillquit’s rhetoric.

The well-spoken, polished lawyer was more comfortable speaking to a well-meaning bourgeois audience than the workers he hoped would find advantage in the success of his ideology. “Although as Hillquit claimed one could be a revolutionary and still associate with the bourgeoisie and ‘live off’ the capitalist system, he nevertheless should have realized that his style of life tended to conflict with his propaganda. In less than two decades Hillquit had risen from the status of an indigent cuff-maker to that of a prosperous corporation lawyer.”⁷ Hillquit may have enabled Gerber to feel that he could hold to his father’s socialist beliefs and have the material comfort he yearned for as a young man who had experienced two different worlds growing up: one in which on a daily basis there was not any money and one in which on weekend visits to his sister in Westchester County he experienced the life of a millionaire’s child.

“The Hillquit paradox is that he aspired to notability in the radical, the bourgeois and the progressive spheres and apparently sensed no contradiction.”⁸ With such a paradox as a role model and mentor, it is much clearer why Gerber felt comfortable espousing views of democratic socialism that seem to us so contradictory to his evident desire for social and monetary success. His perception was that a philosophical identification with one did not necessarily preclude him from the achievement of the other. Gerber prompts us to wonder whether he may be representative of one of the reasons why socialism didn’t take root here in America.

 

prologue

introduction

identity

money

success

conclusion

manuscript

references

credits

home