SOURCE: "The Lost Cause," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, January 30, 1986, pp. 26-8.

Woodward is an American educator and historian who is best known for Origins of the New South: 1877–1913 (1951). In the following review, he discusses Howe's explanation of the failure of socialism in the United States.

Lost causes, especially those that foster lingering loyalties and nostalgic memories, are among the most prolific breeders of historiography. If survivors deem the cause not wholly lost and perhaps in some measure retrievable, the search of the past becomes more frantic and the books about it more numerous. Blame must be fixed, villains found, heroes celebrated, old quarrels settled, old dreams restored, and motives vindicated. Amid the ruins controversy thrives and books proliferate.

Few would deny that at present the socialist cause in America has rarely looked more lost, its prospects more dismal, or its adherents more...