Description
Book SynopsisAs 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
Trade Review
"Costaguta’s findings torpedo the familiar notion that nineteenth-century socialists were indifferent toward race, and the interracial internationalism he recovers should be recognized as part of early socialism’s enduring legacy." --Jacobin
“Lorenzo Costaguta has produced an important book that reimagines the history of labor, racism and antiracism, socialism, and the post-Civil War United States. An extraordinary work.” --Angela Zimmerman, author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. A Racialized History of the Origins of American Socialism
Chapter One. “Freedom for All”: German American Socialism and Race before 1876
Chapter Two. “Geographies of Peoples”: Ethnicity and Racial Thinking in the Early SLP
Chapter Three. Must They Go? American Socialism and the Racialization of Chinese Immigrants, 1876-1890
Chapter Four. “Regardless of Color”: The SLP and African Americans, 1876-1890
Chapter Five. Savage Capitalists, Civilized Indians: The SLP and Native Americans, 1876-1890
Chapter Six. The SLP in the 1890s: Americanization and Socialist Evolutionism
Conclusion. The Past and the Future of Racial Socialism
Notes
Index
