Too often Social Democrats are consumed by their grudges. Getting through the biographies they write about their heroes can be a tedious chore. Worse, the subjects of these biographies are poorly served by books that devote more attention to attacking enemies than defending their subjects’ virtues. Arch Puddington’s biography of Lane Kirkland is an egregious offender.

Kirkland, President of the AFL-CIO following George Meany’s retirement in 1979 until he was pushed out of office in the mid-1990′s, presided over an enormously difficult period for American labor. The decline in union density was accelerated by open hostility from the Reagan-Bush administration and a cottage industry of aggressive union-busting consultants, while corporate globalization shipped millions of unionized American jobs overseas. Kirkland’s reputation is as something of a Nero-type character who fiddled with anti-Communist foreign policy while Rome burned.

That is certainly an unfair over-generalization, but “Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor” does its subject no favors by devoting several large chapters – almost half the book – to championing Kirkland’s Cold War diplomacy, while tacking on a few dozen pages at the end to document Kirkland’s trade union achievements. Otherwise, Puddington’s book is about settling scores, but even here there is little useful scholarship. Names are invoked as a short-hand. Bella Abzug, without explanation is singled out as an example of hated “New Left” style politics, while Henry “Scoop” Jackson is similarly name-checked as the Great White Hope of the New Deal coalition.

Kirkland is deserving of a critical re-evaluation from a serious biographer, particularly in light of the fracture of the AFL-CIO during the Sweeney-era. It is literally true, as Puddington briefly notes, that the AFL-CIO was never more united, or could claim a larger number of members, than on the tenth anniversary of Lane Kirkland’s tenure as AFL-CIO President, thanks to his assiduous courtship of the unions that left the fold during the Meany years. It is ironic that the large unions that Kirkland wooed back into the House of Labor – the Teamsters, Auto Workers and Miners – played pivotal roles in the effort to oust Kirkland from office a few short years later. Unfortunately for the reader, Puddington shares no insight into the breakdown of support that Kirkland suffered amongst these unions.

To his credit, Kirkland was an early and insightful critic of NAFTA trade policies, and could voice an opposition that was internationalist in orientation. And, contrary to the popular image of him, Kirkland did take modest steps to tun the tide of labor’s declining fortunes. Readers (including myself) may be startled by the reminder than Kirkland started the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute which has trained a generation of organizers.

Future labor scholars would be better served by a new Kirkland biography that pays more attention to these chapters of his life, as well as conducting a more critical evaluation his aggressive involvement in foreign policy. A key question to be explored is the influence of Kirkland’s career path on his executive decision-making. Kirkland was the first president of a labor federation to not only not rise from the rank-and-file or elected office, but to have never been employed as an organizer or Business Agent. Having never cut his teeth on the core functions of a labor union, could that have influenced Kirkland to focus energy and resources on foreign policy work that most union leaders would skip? Could it have deprived him of the political calculus to know when you’re losing the support of your board?

In Michael Harrington’s remarkable deathbed autobiography, “The Long-Distance Runner,” he describes attempting to pick up the pieces of the shattered Socialist Party and a movement split between “Old” and “New” Lefts. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that he formed from his old wing of the party and the diaspora of unaffiliated socialists in the labor and feminist movements was structurally a “mass” organization (albeit, one with few illusions of attracting the masses to it) with a soft cadre at its center.

This terminology, Harrington notes, would be foreign to all but the .0001% of Americans who have spent any time in the organized sects of the left. A cadre are the people who give some internal coherence to an organization. The people who write and photocopy fliers, raise funds, sweep floors, attend meetings and caucus for votes, and so on and so forth. In a Leninist model, this cadre operates with a fairly tight discipline and a democratic centralist decision-making process. Translated to what my 14-year-old cousin would call “normal talk,” that means that the group has an internal debate, following which all members “toe the party line” and carry out the decision of the majority. It also means that no one can join the organization who is not vouched for by a member of the cadre. (Although we don’t use these terms in the context, political campaigns and union organizing campaigns follow similar principles.)

Harrington graduated from an arcane milieu of “anti-Communist, Leninist democratic sects.” Although DSOC (later, Democratic Socialists of America) took all comers, there was a soft cadre at its center – prominent intellectuals and labor leaders, as well as more anonymous volunteers – who nudged the broader organization towards its ecumenical bridge-building envisioned at its founding. One primary challenge, Harrington noted, is that each successive generation has less of a tradition of the movement and less ability to form a coherent cadre. The problem has obviously worsened in the two decades since Harrington published “The Long-Distance Runner.”

Harrington has the decency to note that the old Socialist Party died in a three-way split. Most scholars only deal with the two most prominent factions: Harrington’s and the majority Social Democrats who drifted towards the neoconservatism of Reagan and Bush. The third faction, which kept the name of the old party, provides little of scholarly interest. It is there that I cut my teeth politically. There is probably a paper to be written about the failed experiment of the new Socialist Party in attempting to recreate the mass-based party of yore without the benefit of an intellectual cadre, and, lately, without the benefit of a culture or tradition of the movement. Instead, each successive generation (a generation here being two or three years) joins the party cold after reading some inspiring speech of the long-dead Eugene Debs, and proceeds to engage in pointless faction fights over bureaucratic details (what is to be the name of the magazine, whom shall appoint the members of the International Commission) that are divorced from the actual politics of society.

We do need a socialist party, but first we need to rebuild the cadre for democratic socialism. The first step must be some kind of think tank, which can limit its membership to only the most serious and comradely of comrades, and pt out useful material (studies, statements, blogs, etc) that could find an audience in the greater number of Americans who consider themselves socialists but do not belong to any explicitly socialist organization. With a cohesive cadre and a modest audience, then, and only then, can we consider forming a new socialist formation that is open to any who would join it.