A Practical Visionary

Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912
by Elliott Shore
University Press of Kansas, 1988, 280 pp., $25.00

Few problems have troubled U.S. historians more than the question Werner Sombart posed in 1900: “Why is there no socialism in America?” Of course he asked the question just as America’s only grass-roots socialist movement was aborning. One answer is that there was socialism in America, but that the movement suffered from the carrot of Wilsonian progressivism and the repressive stick wielded by the same administration during and after World War I.

Still, the decline...