A 134 page document–manifesto if you must–on the American socialist movement of the early 20th Century is hardly a light read nor must it have been an easy paper for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to write in 1981 as an undergraduate at Princeton University.
Yet she produced “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933,” as her senior thesis in the hope as she wrote “of clarifying my own political ideals.” Unfortunately, whatever conclusions Kagan reached about her own ideology based on her study of the socialist movement is largely omitted from her final product.
In what has become a rote description of Kagan, she, even as an undergraduate, displays an uncommon brilliance and intellect but leaves the reader with little understanding of her own deeply-held views.
The paper is a graduation requirement for Princeton students who are able to select the topic of their research. Kagan dedicated the work to her parents who are now deceased. She also expressed appreciation to her brother Marc “whose involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideals.”
The premise of her paper, dated April 15, 1981, is that previously written accounts of the American Socialist Party largely missed the main reason why the party crumbled in the wake of World War I as a viable political institution. “Historians have looked everywhere but to the American socialist movement itself for explanations of U.S. socialism’s failure,” Kagan wrote.
Internal dissention, Kagan argued, was the main cause of the party’s failure to become a significant political force. Her paper examined the dynamics of the Socialist Party’s New York chapter which was the largest in the country.
“It would be absurd to over-estimate the strength of the early twentieth century socialist movement,” Kagan wrote acknowledging the minimal impact the Socialist Party had on electoral politics a century ago. The party’s most frequent standard-bearer for president, Eugene Debs, never won an electoral vote in his five bids for the presidency and never garnered more than a million popular votes.
Nonetheless, Kagan contends “the specter of socialism haunted Americans to a far greater extent than the SP’s numerical strength might indicate.”
Because Kagan’s paper focuses on the role of New Yorkers in the evolution of the Socialist Party she spends a great deal of time discussing the importance of the participation of Jewish immigrants. Of them Kagan writes, “like many other foreigners, Jews arrived at Ellis Island expecting to find ‘the promised land.’ They found instead the Lower East Side, the most filthy, congested, and unhealthy section of New York.”
Kagan is herself Jewish and born and raised in New York City. It isn’t immediately clear if there is a direct familial connection to this time that might have made the topic of unique interest to her.
In her introduction, Kagan credits the assistance of Sean Wilentz for “painstakingly read[ing] each page of this thesis.” Wilentz is still a professor at Princeton and told Fox News via email that Kagan’s work is still memorable nearly 30 years later. He calls it “a very successful study of futility. In short, I remember thinking it was a mature piece of scholarship coming from a college senior.” Wilentz says the history of early 20th century socialism has long been a subject of interest to scholars and Kagan wanted to take a fresh look at the subject. “It was something of a classic topic in the field,” Wilentz says “and Elena had the intellectual fortitude to take it on.”
Absent from the paper is any overarching sense of personal attachment to the Socialist Party, its views, or the movement itself. There is scant evidence to suggest that Kagan wrote her senior thesis as an opportunity to promote the Socialist Party as a proxy for her political views.
Perhaps the closest she comes in expressing admiration for the Socialist Party, and the spirit of liberalism from someone just a couple of weeks shy of her 21st birthday, is in her conclusion. She called it a sad story “but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.”
Kagan finishes her paper by writing that “radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one’s fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe.” Thus for Kagan the lesson to be learned was that “American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.”