Workers of All Colors Unite

Race and the Origins of American Socialism

Lorenzo Costaguta

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780252087073, 9780252044922
• eBook ISBN: 9780252054082
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the clash between two major points of view. On one side, white supremacists believed labor should accept and apply the ascendant tenets of scientific theories of race. But others stood with International Workingmen's Association leaders J. P. McDonnell and F. A. Sorge in rejecting the idea that racial and ethnic division influenced worker-employer relations, arguing instead that class played the preeminent role.

Costaguta charts the socialist movement's journey through the conflict and down a path that ultimately abandoned scientific racism in favor of an internationalist class-focused and racial-conscious American socialism. As he shows, the shift relied on a strong immigrant influence personified by the cosmopolitan Marxist thinker and future IWW cofounder Daniel De Leon. The class-focused movement that emerged became American socialism's most common approach to race in the twentieth century and beyond.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. A Racialized History of the Origins of American Socialism
• 1 “Freedom for All”: German American Socialism and Race before 1876
• 2 “Geographies of Peoples”: Ethnicity and Racial Thinking in the Early SLP
• 3 Must They Go? American Socialism and the Racialization of Chinese Immigrants, 1876–1890
• 4 “Regardless of Color”: The SLP and African Americans, 1876–1890
• 5 Savage Capitalists, Civilized Indians: The SLP and Native Americans, 1876–1890
• 6 The SLP in the 1890s: Americanization and Socialist Evolutionism
• Conclusion. The Past and the Future of Racial Socialism
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover