10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11638
This essay provides a historiographical contextualization to the research that the author will publish in his forthcoming monograph, provisionally titled The Origins of Colorblind Socialism: Race and Class in the American Left, 1876-1899. Through a research in the multilingual socialist press, party archives and personal papers of socialist leaders, the book offers the first investigation of ideas of race in the American socialist movement at the end of the nineteenth century.
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11638                                                             ISSN 2611-2752




For a Racial and Transnational History of the Origins of American
                                                   Socialism

                                                Lorenzo Costaguta

                                              Published: November 10, 2020



                                                       Abstract

       This essay provides a historiographical contextualization to the research that the author will publish
       in his forthcoming monograph, provisionally titled The Origins of Colorblind Socialism: Race and
       Class in the American Left, 1876–1899. Through a research in the multilingual socialist press, party
       archives and personal papers of socialist leaders, the book offers the first investigation of ideas of
       race in the American socialist movement at the end of the nineteenth century.
       Keywords: Socialism; Race; Ethnicity; Class; Gilded Age.




Lorenzo Costaguta: University of Bristol (UK)
 lorenzo.costaguta@bristol.ac.uk;  https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/history/costaguta-lorenzo.
aspx
Lorenzo Costaguta is a Lecturer in US History at the University of Bristol. He is a historian of race and class with
a specialism in U.S. and European socialism. His forthcoming monograph on U.S. socialist racial thought will
be published by the University of Illinois Press. In 2018 he edited the collection Working Class Nationalism and
Internationalism before 1945: Essays in Global Labour History (Cambridge Scholars Press).



Copyright © 2020 Lorenzo Costaguta, Lorenzo Costaguta                                                                   5
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
American Socialism                                                                                USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




1 Beyond Exceptionalism
Published more than a hundred years ago, Werner Sombart’s essay Why Is There No Socialism in the
United States has retained an enduring influence in the historiography of American socialism. Som-
bart voiced the heartfelt concern of European socialists: how was it possible that a structured socialist
movement, by definition the by-product of capitalist economic development, was not taking root
in the country that more than any other in the Western world was subsuming a capitalist economic
structure? Although Sombart’s argument was rapidly abandoned in favor of more informed and de-
tailed points of views, the question he put forward continued to haunt scholars of the American left
for generations.
    This paper offers an historiographical contextualization of the research that I will be publishing
in my forthcoming monograph, provisionally titled The Origins of Colorblind Socialism: Race and Class
in the American Left, 1876–1899. The book, under contract with the University of Illinois Press, offers
the first investigation of ideas of race in the American socialist movement at the end of the nineteenth
century.1 While a full analysis of the significance of Sombart’s pamphlet is beyond the goals of this
paper, a description of how it has shaped the historiographical landscape on socialism in the U.S. helps
introducing the key themes my monograph seeks to investigate.
    Since the publication of Sombart’s essay in 1906, scholars have been animated by one of two goals.
Either they explain the ultimate reason why socialism failed to thrive in the U.S, or they make the case
that, in one form or another, socialism actually did shape the history of the country in some significant
way. Works in the first group begin with Sombart’s essay and include undertakings by Selig Perlman,
Seymour Lipset, Gary Marks, Mike Davis, Robin Archer and Kim Moody, among others. This branch
of historiography has produced more and more sophisticated versions of American exceptionalism.
Initially, Sombart suggested that American workers did not join socialist parties because the booming
American economy made them better off than their European counterparts. Perlman later compli-
cated the matter by suggesting that American workers were job-conscious rather than class-conscious.
Scholars including Lipset, Marks, and Archer, introduced other elements, such as the exceptional
narrow-mindedness and sectarianism of American socialist movements and the impact of ethnic and
racial divisions on the organization of the American working class. For all these scholars, the bottom-
line argument remained the same: given the exceptional social, economic, and political features of
the country, socialism simply could not develop in the U.S.2
    Scholars in the second group have followed two paths. The first has been to loosen the definition of
“socialism” and include the many ways left-minded radicals, activists, and intellectuals, often working
outside socialist parties, contributed to making change in the country.3 Alternatively, scholars have
made the point that, despite first impressions to the contrary, America did have a genuine socialist
tradition of its own, whose history has been neglected. This group includes scholars as diverse as the
socialist leader Morris Hillquit and the American historian Timothy Messer-Kruse. Nevertheless, their
work is united by reclaiming the existence and impact of an indigenous and distinctively American
socialist movement.4



1.   An article from this project has already been published. Cf. Lorenzo Costaguta, “ ‘Geographies of Peoples’: Scientific
     Racialism and Labor Internationalism in Gilded Age American Socialism,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,
     18 (2019): 199-220.

2.   Selig Perlman, A History of Trade Unionism in the United States. 1922; repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley 1950; Selig Perlman,
     A Theory of the Labor Movement. 1928; repr., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949; Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of
     American Socialism, eds. John H. M. Laslett and Seymour M. Lipsett. Berkeley: University of California, 1984; Mike Davis,
     Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. London: Verso, 1986; Seymour M.
     Lipsett and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the U.S.. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000; Robin Archer,
     Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007; Kim Moody, Tramps and
     Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900. Chicago: Haymarket Books,
     2019.

3.   The best example of this approach is Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. New York: Alfred A.
     Knopf, 2011.

4.   Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States. 1903; repr., New York: Russel & Russel, 1965; Timothy Messer-Kruse,
     The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1998.



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American Socialism                                                                              USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




    The Origins of Colorblind Socialism leaves aside the obsession with explaining the reasons for the
failure of socialism in the U.S. and avoids the search for a “genuinely American” socialist movement
which have ensnared previous generations of historians. Sombart’s question has been a productive
and useful framework of analysis. However, as suggested by Eric Foner and Leon Fink, with its Marxist
premise — that it was inevitable that the capitalist United States developed a class-conscious working
class — it has invited a wealth of ahistorical answers that fail to understand the significance of the
American radical world, including the socialist, in its own terms and with its own features.5
    One such feature is the multi-ethnic and multiracial composition of the American working class.
During the Gilded Age, the United States witnessed continuous conflicts along lines of class, race and
ethnicity. While the failure of Reconstruction had left African Americans without adequate defenses
for their recently acquired social and political rights, the economic expansion of the country had accel-
erated the annihilation of Native Americans on the frontier. At the same time, the growing immigra-
tion from Asia and Europe had created foreign enclaves whose rights were constantly threatened on
racial and ethnic grounds. Racism and white supremacism abounded in working class communities,
turning American industrial and economic relations into a powder keg ready to explode.6
    The Origins of Colorblind Socialism focuses on the early Socialist Labor Party of America as a unique
example of how the American left attempted to resolve tensions between race, class and ethnicity dur-
ing the Gilded Age. Labor historian David Montgomery suggests that socialists utilized an alternative
approach to the “mainstream of the post-Civil War labor movement:” whereas the leaders of labor or-
ganizations like the Knights of Labor advocated anti-monopolism and individualist self-emancipation,
or craft unity in the case of the American Federation of Labor, U.S. socialists focused on class struggle.7
The Origins of Colorblind Socialism explores how the members of the SLP, first and foremost support-
ers of class equality, responded to the unique circumstances created by racial and ethnic diversity in
post-Reconstruction United States.
    The Origins of Colorblind Socialism rewrites the existing narratives of Gilded Age American socialism
by focusing on the group of German immigrants that animated the SLP from its foundation in 1876
to the crucial split of the party in 1899 (after which the organization became essentially irrelevant). In
this period, American socialism was thought, spoken and written almost entirely in German. For this
reason, my investigation of American socialist racial thought is based on a wealth of German-language
socialist local papers produced in the vast German American communities of the North-East and Mid-
west. The book consequently places the American socialist movement in a transnational context and
reconstructs how the specific features of the German diaspora in the United States — phases of im-
migration, geographical origins, social stratification — played a role in shaping SLP members’ ideas
of race. By adopting an approach that combines intellectual and institutional history, it reconstructs
a neglected period of the history of American socialism while at the same time exploring the con-
tribution that this highly internationalized American socialist movement had on the construction of
modern theories of race and ethnicity in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.




5.   Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop, 17 (1984): 73; Leon Fink, The Long Gilded
     Age; American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, 6.

6.   The literature on the Gilded Age informing my project includes: Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism,
     1865–1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002; Rosanne Currarino, The Labor Question in America: Eco-
     nomic Democracy in the Gilded Age. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 2011; Leon Fink, The Long Gilded Age; Rebecca
     Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; The Gilded
     Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.,
     2007; Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. New York:
     Oxford University Press, 2019.

7.   David Montgomery, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America: 1860-1920,” Le Mouvement Social, 111 (1980): 201-215.
     Cf. also David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market
     During the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 130-137.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11638                                                                                   7
American Socialism                                                                                 USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




2 Whiteness Studies and Ethnic Studies in the Study of American
       Socialism
In The Origins of Colorblind Socialism, race and ethnicity are simultaneously the subject and the method-
ology of analysis. The subject, because socialist responses to the problems arising from the multiracial
and multi-ethnic composition of the American working class are the focus of my investigation; and
the methodology, because the book adopts the most recent approaches introduced by studies of race
and ethnicity in the U.S. as a means through which understand the socialist contribution to the “labor
question” in the country.
    In studies of leftist movements, the multicultural turn in the writing of American history has fa-
vored two interconnected tendencies.8 The first is found in the numerous histories of specific eth-
nic groups dealing with their social, economic and political contributions to the development of the
country. In The Spirit of 1848, a political history of the antebellum German American community,
historian Bruce Levine has written that his work “rejects the ‘either/or’ approach to studying ethnicity
and class.”9 By adopting an analytical framework that accommodates the fluid relationship between
these two concepts, Levine sheds light on the ways in which German Americans contributed to build-
ing the Republican Party and shaping the abolitionist movement in the 1850s. In this way, Levine
opens a path for the many scholars who have come after him.10 The second tendency, growing out
of the multicultural turn in history writing, is characterized by historians that pay special attention
to the combined effects of political development and ethnically-based dynamics. A case in point is
Paul Buhle’s History of Marxism in the United States, a history of left-wing movements that focuses on
the multi-ethnic nature of American radicalism.11
    In a parallel development, the studies of “whiteness” that proliferated in the early 1990s, have
both complicated and refined existing views on the relationship between race, ethnicity and radi-
calism. Kathleen Cleaver has written that David R. Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness starts with a vital
premise, “that the race problem is a white problem.” Her assessment can easily be extended to many
foundational works on the question of whiteness.12 This pathbreaking innovation — studying white
ideologies of race — undertaken by scholars of whiteness, “racialized” extensive areas of inquiry, ways
of conceptualizing, and methods of analysis that had previously been untouched.13 In labor history,



8.    Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Presidential Address to the
      American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly, 1 (2005): 20.

9.    Bruce C. Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War. Urbana: University of
      Illinois Press, 1992, 10.

10. Standing on the shoulder of Levine and other historians of the New Labor History school, a younger generation of scholars
    has produced fine analyses of ethnically confined radical groups. In particular, this book has been inspired by the following
    works: Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005;
    Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: the German Anarchist Movement in New York City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
    2007; Alison Clark Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era. Washington DC: German Historical
    Institute; Cambridge University Press, 2013.

11.   Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left. London: Verso, [1987] 2013.

12. Kathleen Cleaver, “Introduction,” in David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
    Class. London, Verso: [1991] 2007, xxiv.

13. Besides Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness, these are the works that have come to be identified as “canonical:” Alexander Saxton,
    The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso, 1990;
    Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race. London: Verso, 1994-1997; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. New
    York: Routledge, 1995; Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis:
    University of Minnesota Press, 1993; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
    Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Roediger has offered an analysis of the origins of the
    approach and of the relationships between its most important proponents in his Class, Race and Marxism. London: Verso,
    2017, 47-72. Not everyone agrees on the utility of whiteness studies for the investigation of working-class racial ideologies.
    The most direct attack to the discipline remains: Eric Arnesen. “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International
    Labor and Working Class History, 60 (2001): 3-32, with replies from James R. Barrett, David Brody, Barbara Fields, Eric
    Foner, Victoria Hattam and Adolph Reed Jr. Analyses that attempt to formulate a balanced assessment of whiteness studies
    include: Andrew Hartman, “The Rise and Fall of Whiteness Studies,” Race and Class, 46 (2004): 22-38; John Munro, “Roots
    of Whiteness,” Labour/Le Travail, 54 (2004): 175-92.



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American Socialism                                                                                 USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




one concept that has undergone renovation thanks to whiteness studies, is labor republicanism. In the
words of James R. Barrett, “labor republicanism, long an organizing principle for so much nineteenth-
century labor history, will never quite be the same.”14 To effect this change, historians have focused
on language and the development of labor ideologies, explaining the racist implications of labor re-
publicanism as a concept created by white workers in opposition to enslaved black labor.
     In ethnic and immigration studies, whiteness studies have had a key role in what Anna Pegler-
Gordon has called the “racial turn” in the discipline.15 In 1999, George Sánchez lamented the inability
of immigration historians to acknowledge “the centrality of race in the United States,” especially in
regard to the experience of Asian Americans and Latinos.16 In the past two decades, as noted by
John J. Bukowczyk, ethnic and immigration studies have moved in the direction signaled by Sánchez.
“Academic openings in European immigration and ethnic history have become scarce, while Asian
American and Latino research has flourished.”17 Whiteness scholars, studying European immigrants
as racialized subjects, started a trend that in turn, has caused barriers between racial and ethnic studies
to fall.
     This book sits at the intersection where scholarship on socialism in the U.S. meets ethnic and
racial studies. By following the path opened by scholars of whiteness, race and ethnicity, this book
aims to explore the political significance of race and ethnicity in the history of the American socialist
movement. Just as scholars have rearticulated ethnicity and labor republicanism in racial terms, now
it is time to explain the origins of American socialism through the lens of race. The Origins of Colorblind
Socialism not only uses the malleable concept of ethnicity adopted by whiteness and ethnic studies, it
also puts the debates on race center stage and reconstructs the history of socialism in the U.S. from
that perspective.



3 Between Scientific Racialism and Class Reductionism
The book links these developments in the study of racial and ethnic identities in the U.S. with a care-
ful consideration of the intellectual context of the time, especially for what concerns pseudo-scientific
ideas of race and contemporary racializations of immigrant and non-white workers in American la-
bor circles. Existing studies of American socialism in the context of late-nineteenth century and early
twentieth century racial ideologies adopt too simplistic notions of “social evolutionism” as a frame-
work of analysis.18 Instead, understanding socialist racial ideologies requires an adequate consider-
ation of the pervasive and complicated nature of the pseudo-scientific racialist language used at the
time. As detailed by Robert C. Bannister, Mike Hawkins, and Thomas C. Leonard, Richard Hofstadter’s
concept of “social Darwinism” is way too imprecise to describe a cultural milieu in which geographical


14. James R. Barrett, “Anything Here for Historians of the Working Class?,” International Labor and Working Class, 60 (2001): 38.
    Fink provides an updated historical survey of the concept of labor republicanism in The Long Gilded Age, 12-33. Alex
    Gourevitch offers an investigation of the concept from the perspective of a political theorist in From Slavery to the Cooperative
    Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. For
    an analysis of the concept in the context of the historiography on American socialism, cf. Michael Kazin, “Introduction:
    Daniel Bell and the Agony and Romance of the American Left,” in Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States. Ithaca:
    Cornell University Press, 1995, xxiv-xxv.

15. Anna Pegler-Gordon, “Debating the Racial Turn in U.S. Ethnic and Immigration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History,
    2 (2017): 40.

16. George Sánchez, “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 4 (1999): 69.

17.   John J. Bukowczyk, “The Racial Turn,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 2 (2017): 5. On the 1999 debate between George
      Sánchez and Rudi Vecoli and its historical relevance, cf. also Erika Lee, “A Part and Apart: Asian American and Immigration
      History,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 4 (2015): 28-42.

18. The only work on socialism and social evolutionism covering both the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era is Mark Pittenger,
    American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Progressive Era
    socialism is more thoroughly discussed, but in no occasion with a specific focus on social evolutionism. Cf. Sally M. Miller,
    Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century Socialism. London: Garland, 1996; Sally M. Miller, “For White Men
    Only: The Socialist Party of America on Issues of Gender, Ethnicity and Race,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive
    Era, 3 (2003): 283-302; Paul Heideman, “Introduction,” in Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race
    Question, 1900–1930, ed. Paul Heideman, New York: Haymarket Books, 2018.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11638                                                                                       9
American Socialism                                                                                 USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




determinism, biological evolutionism, anthropology and eugenics were but a few of the many compet-
ing approaches to explain human differences and its relations with social and economic hierarchies.19
As suggested by Daniel E. Bender, the entire American society understood the industrialization of the
country through the intertwined concepts of “savagery” and “civilization,” in the context of an evo-
lutionist framework in which the spread of modern industries was linked with the achievement of a
superior evolutionary phase.20
    The Origins of Colorblind Socialism uses this background on Gilded Age and Progressive Era racial
thought to reconstruct the origins and development of socialist racial thinking. Contextualizing the
development of historical materialism within this intellectual landscape, the book contends that in the
post-Reconstruction decades there were two main contrasting ways in which American socialists ap-
proached racial diversity, defined “scientific racialism” and “colorblind internationalism” respectively.
Scientific racialist socialists asserted that modern natural and human sciences provided enough evi-
dence to suggest that humankind was divided into different groups (“races” or “cultures”), that some
groups were inferior to others, and that socialism, in order to be considered as a truly modern in-
tellectual doctrine, needed to accommodate this evidence. In contrast, colorblind internationalists
rejected the idea that racial and ethnic division had anything to do with economic relations between
employers and employees, suggesting that class, instead of race, should be used to tackle the problems
of the American workers. The book chronicles the clash between these competing socialist ideologies
during the first phase of the SLP’s history, arguing that a major shift occurred. Between 1878 and 1890,
scientific racialists were the majority in the party, however, from 1890 it was “colorblind socialism”
that become the only approach defended by American socialists, mostly as a consequence of the in-
fluential leadership of Daniel De Leon. The Origins of the Colorblind Socialism concludes that American
socialists entered the twentieth century as firm supporters of a class-first approach, an approach that
remained as a key framework for subsequent American socialist organizations such as the Socialist
Party of America.
    Historians of American socialism condemn the class reductionism of Gilded Age and Progressive
Era socialists. Identifying it as a recurrent limit of socialists across the twentieth century and beyond,
they denounce it as the key reason why socialist movements have failed to gain a stable presence
among racial minority communities, especially the African American.21 My book contends that an
analysis of Gilded Age socialism helps better understanding the reasons that pushed socialists in the
direction of embracing a class-first (but not necessarily class-only) approach.22 It was precisely the
idea to disentangle socialism from potentially damaging forms of racial essentialism, which charac-
terized modern theories of race during the Gilded Age, that pushed socialists to embrace colorblind
socialism as the official doctrine of the party in the 1890s. The rejection of Spencerism and other racist
paradigms that underpinned the diffusion of eugenics and Jim Crow in the early twentieth century
nurtured socialist convictions of the importance of a colorblind point of view. Only outside that intrin-
sically racist conversation could socialists articulate a doctrine that was truly egalitarian in its approach
to workers’ relations. Yet, it is clear that this shift came with problematic consequences. By excluding
themselves from the conversation on race, socialists failed to develop an analysis that gave adequate


19. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought. 1944; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1992; George W. Stocking, Jr.,
    “The Persistence of Polygenist Thought in Post-Darwinian Anthropology,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution.
    Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: The Free Press, 1968; Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth
    in Anglo-American Social Thought. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979; Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European
    and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997;
    Thomas C. Leonard, “Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social
    Darwinism in American Thought,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 71, 2009: 37-51; Francisco Bethencourt,
    Racisms: from the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

20. Daniel E. Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

21. The most detailed reconstruction of the role of African Americans in the American socialist left remains Philip S. Foner,
    American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. For
    an updated analysis, cf. Michael C. Dawson, Blacks In and Out of the Left. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

22. William P. Jones has complicated the point of view on class-first approaches to race through a detailed analysis of Eugene
    V. Debs’s racial thought. Cf. William P. Jones, “Nothing Special to Offer the Negro’: Revisiting the ‘Debsian View’ of the
    Negro Question,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 74 (2008): 212-24.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11638                                                                                      10
American Socialism                                                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




importance to the specific role of racism in shaping dynamics of exploitation in the U.S. Only through
the help of non-white socialists and a decisive intervention from abroad did the American socialist
and communist left make progress on this issue.23



4     Conclusions: Towards a Global History of Socialist Racial Thought
The Origins of Colorblind Socialism documents the transatlantic nature of socialist opinions of race, in
turn reassessing the role of American socialism on an international scale. By investigating the wealth
of literature produced in the German American sections of the SLP scattered all around the country,
this study places American socialism at the center of a transatlantic conversation that extended well
beyond American borders. Exchanges between socialists in the German-speaking regions of Europe
and German Americans had been a constant feature since the early 1850s. Germans in the U.S. tried to
replicate the successes of German organizations, reading about them in the German press. This flow
of information reversed direction after the approval of Anti-Socialist Laws in 1878. With the socialist
press outlawed in Germany, German American papers became precious sources of information for
the persecuted German socialist movement. Not only that, but the United States turned into an ex-
tremely attractive option for many German editors who had suddenly lost their jobs. In the decades
under scrutiny, the German American movement was the fulcrum of a transatlantic flow of people
and information between Europe and the United States.24
    If positioned in this transatlantic dimension, the conversation on race that took place in the SLP in
the late-nineteenth century acquires a crucial importance. The SLP was the first socialist organization
that systematically discussed how to reconcile problems caused by racism with a theoretical system
that did not give much credit to divisions caused by race or ethnicity. This U.S.-centered conversation
needs to be reconciled with the opinions formulated by Karl Marx on the “Irish Question,” black labor
and revolution in non-Western societies, as well as with the discussion on colonialism and imperial-
ism started in the Second International in the late 1890s.25 From these points of view, the American
socialist movement was at the foreground of a debate on socialism and race that would deeply affect
radical movements of socialist inspiration on a global scale for the following century and beyond.
    After this project, my objective is to keep pursuing the study of socialist ideas of race beyond the
U.S. context. Expanding the investigation to conversations on colonialism and imperialism, my re-
search will focus on Second International socialism (1889–1914) and undertake an analysis on three
levels: a comparative one, in which the conversation on race, imperialism and colonialism in the U.S.
will be investigated in parallel with similar conversations happening in other European countries in-
volved in imperialist missions in the same period (the U.K., France, Belgium, the Netherlands and
Germany); a transatlantic one, where I will use the documents of the Second International as a means
to carry on the mapping of the links between members of the American and European socialist move-
ments that I started in this book, especially for what concerns conversations on race and empire; a
global one, the most ambitious and long-term goal, in which I will seek to expand the analysis of so-
cialist conversation on race in the American and European colonies.




23. My book will detail the role of Gilded Age black socialist Peter H. Clark (1829–1925) in developing a balanced historical
    materialist analysis of the relationship between racial and class exploitation in the U.S. On black socialism in the Progressive
    Era, cf. Heideman, Class Struggle and the Color Line. On the significance of the Third International in shaping the approach
    of U.S. communism to black labor, cf. Jacob A. Zumoff, The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919–1929. Leiden:
    Brill, 2014.

24. Hartmut Keil and Dirk Hoerder, “The American Case and German Social Democracy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,”
    in Why Is There No Socialism in the United States. Porquoi n’y a-t-il pas de socialism aux Etats-Unis?, eds. Jean Heffer and Jeanine
    Rovet, Paris: Editions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1988.

25. Diane Paul, “ ‘In the Interest of Civilization:’ Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the
    History of Ideas, 1 (1981): 115-138; Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies.
    Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010; Lucia Pradella, “Marx and the Global South: Connecting History and
    Value Theory,” Sociology, 51 (2017): 146-161; Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (eds.), Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy
    to World War I. Leiden: Brill, 2012.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11638                                                                                         11
American Socialism                                                             USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




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