The Intercollegiate Socialist Society—prototype of the modern American student movement and the ancestor of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—was the first nationally organized student group that had a distinct political and ideological orientation. Its social and economic concerns, among them the labor and women’s suffrage movements, encompassed most of the issues agitating a rapidly changing society during the first two decades of this century. The ISS started a tradition of student political awareness and protest that has persisted to our day. For more than 15 years, it provided a forum for a group of gifted young men and women who, then and later, exercised influence far out of proportion to their numbers. This first full-scale study of the ISS follows the society from its birth in 1905 to its decline during World War I and the postwar period. Relying largely on original sources, Horn examines the structure, ideology, program, and tactics of the ISS and assesses its impact on students, faculty, and college administrators.

Economist and historian Lawrence W. Reed has been hearing people say “Jesus was a socialist” for fifty years. And it has always bothered him. Now he is doing something about it. Reed demolishes the claim that Jesus was a socialist. Jesus called on earthly governments to redistribute wealth? Or centrally plan the economy? Or even impose a welfare state? Hardly. Point by point, Reed answers the claims of socialists and progressives who try to enlist Jesus in their causes. As he reveals, nothing in the New Testament supports their contentions. Was Jesus a Socialist? could not be more timely. Socialism has made a shocking comeback in America. Poll after poll shows that young Americans have a positive image of socialism. In fact, more than half say they would rather live in a socialist country than in a capitalist one. And as socialism has come back into vogue, more and more of its advocates have tried to convince us that Jesus was a socialist. This rhetoric has had an impact. According to a 2016 poll by the Barna Group, Americans think socialism aligns better with Jesus’s teachings than capitalism does. When respondents were asked which of that year’s presidential candidates aligned closest to Jesus’s teachings, a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” came out on top. Sure enough, the same candidate earned more primary votes from under-thirty voters than did the eventual Democratic and Republican nominees combined. And in a 2019 survey, more than seventy percent of millennials said they were likely to vote for a socialist. Was Jesus a Socialist? expands on the immensely popular video of the same name that Reed recorded for Prager University in July 2019. That video has attracted more than four million views online. Ultimately, Reed shows the foolishness of trying to enlist Jesus in any political cause today. He writes: “While I don’t believe it is valid to claim that Jesus was a socialist, I also don’t think it is valid to argue that he was a capitalist. Neither was he a Republican or a Democrat. These are modern-day terms, and to apply any of them to Jesus is to limit him to but a fraction of who he was and what he taught.”