Ms Kegan's hearings start Monday june 28th
comments Lee Ross wrote this for Fox News Snap Shot

Elena Kagan’s Socialist Thesis

May 17, 2010 - 5:18 PM
by: Lee Ross A 134 page thesis detailing the rise and fall of the American socialist movement is hardly a light read, nor must it have been an easy paper for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to write as a Princeton undergrad in 1981. Yet Kagan produced "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933" as her senior thesis, in the hope, as she wrote, "of clarifying [her] own political ideals."



Unfortunately for politicos intent on discovering more about those ideals, whatever conclusions Kagan reached about her own ideology based on her study of the socialist movement are largely omitted from her final product. In what has become a common description of Kagan, she, even as an undergraduate, displays uncommon intellect but leaves the reader with little understanding of her own deeply-held views.



The research paper was a graduation requirement for Princeton students, who were able to select their own thesis topic. Kagan dedicated the work to her parents, now deceased, and expressed appreciation to her brother Marc, whose participation in radical causes, Kagan says, in part led her to pursue the topic.



The premise of her paper, dated April 15, 1981, is that previously written accounts of the American Socialist Party largely missed the main cause of the party's dissolution in the years following World War I. "Historians have looked everywhere but to the American