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. Sombart 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 detailed 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 complicated 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

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 accelerated the annihilation of Native Americans on the frontier. At the same time, the growing immigration 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 during 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 organizations 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 supporters 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 Midwest. 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 immigration, 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 contribution 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.

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 methodology 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 favored two interconnected tendencies.⁸ The first is found in the numerous histories of specific ethnic 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 building 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 radicalism. 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, 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 republicanism 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 careful 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 labor 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 framework of analysis.¹⁸ Instead, understanding socialist racial ideologies requires an adequate consideration 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 determinism, biological evolutionism, anthropology and eugenics were but a few of the many competing 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 evolutionist 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 approached racial diversity, defined “scientific racialism” and “colorblind internationalism” respectively. Scientific racialist socialists asserted that modern natural and human sciences provided enough evidence 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 intellectual 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 influential 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 characterized 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 intrinsically 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 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 extremely 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 imperialism 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 research 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 involved 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 movements 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 socialist conversation on race in the American and European colonies.