2025/03/01 by Kenyon Zimmer · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11552808
In this important and illuminating book, Lorenzo Costaguta examines nineteenth-century American socialism’s evolving understandings of race. The result is a nuanced and deeply researched work about the struggles of “class-first” socialists to grapple with the complex realities of American racism. Workers of All Colors Unite also reframes the early history of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and asserts its importance as a site where “the seeds were sown for the future of the Left to grow” (16).Costaguta uses a multilingual archive of German- and English-language sources, while avoiding the trap of dividing the history of the American left between “foreign” radicals and a “‘genuinely American’ (read: non-immigrant) socialist movement” (7). Although most of the chapters focus on German-speaking socialists, they are presented as telling the story not of German socialism in America but of American socialism. “In the period under consideration,” the author rightly notes, “American socialism was thought, spoken, and written almost entirely in German” (3).The book is primarily an intellectual history. Its core chapters scrutinize SLP members’ published discussions of Chinese immigrants, African American workers, and Native Americans, respectively. These sections detail the eclectic variety of early socialist views on each group, and the ways they evolved throughout the 1870s and 1880s—sometimes in opposite directions. As Costaguta argues, most socialists’ German background profoundly shaped their interpretations of the United States, and “their approaches were a mixture, a patchwork, a synthesis of ideas traveling across continents, applied to eminently American circumstances” (174). Different radicals melded Marxist internationalism with Social Darwinism, Lamarckism, scientific racialism (i.e., the belief that different biological races exist), or the anthropology of Lewis H. Morgan. Intriguingly, the author shows how some socialists who accepted “scientific” ideas of inherent racial differences, such as Adolph Douai, still argued in favor of racial egalitarianism, while others who rejected scientific racialism, such as Daniel De Leon, were nevertheless “fundamentally unable to understand race as an independent variable in shaping American working conditions” (167).In the case of the Chinese, the SLP’s position shifted from tepid support of “free” immigrants from China to support for Chinese exclusion, pressured by the success of the anti-Chinese Workingmen’s Party of California in the 1870s and justified through an implicitly racialized conception of all Chinese as inherently slavish “coolies.” In this case, “race remained a more important lens than class in approaching the issue of Chinese immigration to the United States” (89). As early as 1879, by contrast, the SLP officially endorsed cross-racial organizing among Black and white workers. However, as a party based almost entirely among ethnic communities in the North, the SLP’s commitment to Black-white unity rarely translated into meaningful action. Instead, socialists “kept insisting that African American workers joined [sic] their fight for improved working and living conditions through party politics and trade union activism. In doing this, they did not realize that African Americans had problems that confrontational opposition towards employers and local politicians could not solve” (99). Less convincingly (in my opinion), Costaguta suggests that the SLP’s unwillingness to form a coalition with the southern-based Greenback Labor Party in 1880 represented a missed opportunity to organize significant numbers of southern Black workers into the socialist movement—an argument that rests on several tenuous assumptions, chief among them that Black support for the nonsocialist Greenbacks would somehow translate into support for the SLP’s program. Finally, socialists had little direct contact with Native Americans but viewed them with great sympathy, and in SLP members’ discussions of the American frontier they inverted the categories of “savagery” and “civilization,” applying the former to the behavior of white settlers and authorities. Doing so, according to the author, “led to questioning their own positionality as a ‘superior’ race and culture in a way that was absent in the conversations on Chinese immigration and Black labor” (131).Only in the 1890s, with De Leon’s push for ideological conformity within the party, did the SLP purge itself of scientific racialism in favor of a view “that tied historical materialism to Morgan’s anthropology in a coherent if simplistic evolutionist theory that placed socialism as the inexorable future of world history” (150). Yet even so, the SLP failed to develop “a proactive racial policy that put the fight against racism at the center of its political action nor did it promote special measures to defend the equality of its members in the organization from racial prejudice” (175).The book ends with the 1899 party split, which led to the creation of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and “ended the period in which the SLP was a key incubator of ideas about race and ethnicity within the American socialist movement” (167). It makes a convincing case, however, that the SPA inherited from the SLP “an internationalist, class-focused, and racial-conscious socialism” that, in the 1930s, finally led both the SPA and the Communist Party to “put the fight against racism at the very center of their political action,” helping to lay the foundations of the civil rights movement (5, 172).Costaguta does leave some questions unanswered. For example, he never explains when and how (and, indeed, whether) the SLP’s support for Chinese exclusion changed after 1890. He also never mentions the early socialist movement’s analysis of “the Jewish Question,” which, in the Gilded Age, was very much viewed by most in racial terms. And although Jewish immigrants comprised the second-largest demographic within the SLP by the 1890s, the book includes no mention of the racial analyses contained in their Yiddish-language publications—a topic touched on in studies by Gil Ribak and David S. Koffman. Such quibbles aside, Workers of All Colors Unite is a superb and definitive work of scholarship, and it provides insight for contemporary struggles seeking to reconcile racial justice and class solidarity within the American left and labor movement.