Lorenzo Costaguta has produced a well-researched and important book about how Euro-American immigrant socialist in the late nineteenth century confronted the young nation's great racial and ethnic diversity. This ambitious study, drawing on an assortment of sources – including German language newspapers – examines the ways they related to Chinese, African Americans, and Native Americans. Focusing primarily on the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), Costaguta notes that “American socialists embarked on an unprecedented attempt to use socialist principles to understand, explain, and ultimately change the circumstances created by racial and ethnic divisions in post-Reconstruction United States” (p. 3). In making his case, Costaguta challenges earlier interpretations advanced by scholars like the late Philip Foner, who maintained in American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, CT, 1977) that socialists were only mildly interested in racial questions. Well before the word “intersectionality” became fashionable in liberal academic circles, nineteenth-century socialists grappled with this thorny question. Yet, socialists hardly spoke with one voice. Costaguta's study, organized thematically, shows that some prioritized class solidarity while others were more inclined to identify with their whiteness.
Costaguta starts with an analysis of German American socialists. Arriving in the US just before the Civil War's outbreak, German émigrés were forced to come to terms with the horrors of slavery. As he puts it, “[t]he struggle for the abolition of slavery defined German American socialist ideas of race in the antebellum period” (p. 20). Here he introduces us to some fascinating figures, including Joseph Weydemeyer, who, more than anyone else, according to Costaguta, “contributed to the development of American Marxism in antebellum America” (p. 24). Racism's victims acknowledged the progressiveness of the German community. Prominent abolitionist, Frederick Douglas, for example, explained that “a German has only to be German in order to be utterly opposed to slavery. In feeling, as well as in conviction and principle, they are antislavery” (pp. 24–25). Some demonstrated their commitment through practice. Weydemeyer, a veteran of the Prussian army, served in the Civil War as an aid to Union General John C. Fremont.
Socialists, according to Costaguta, participated in central race-related debates following the Union victory in the Civil War. Many SLP members, a majority of whom were German immigrant-intellectuals, naturally viewed racial and ethnic issues as outsiders. Costaguta makes the point, “that the interpretation of racial conflicts in the United States was conducted with approaches, ideas, and standards that derived from a German cultural context” (p. 52). They explored these questions through the lens of Darwinism, historical materialism, and scientific racialism. We learn about key movement-intellectuals, including Adolph Douai, Paul Grottkau, August Otto-Walster, Friedrich A. Sorge, and the Irish immigrant Joseph P. McDonnell.
One of Costaguta's most interesting chapters explores the socialist approach to Chinese communities. Historians have long underlined the characteristics of the deep racism expressed by numerous white workers and their organizations against Chinese laborers, whom they tarred as “cooly labor”. Costaguta offers a careful analysis of this issue, explaining that there were deep splits within the left. At first, SLP spokespersons, for instance, viewed Chinese laborers and jobseekers as victims of exploitation rather than as menacing job competitors. Yet, such support, found in very few circles, waned following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. “By the end of the 1880s”, Costaguta explains, “not a single article in the socialist press defended the rights of those Chinese immigrants who remained in the United States” (p. 75). Importantly, while socialists generally embraced the Marxist principle of building working class power internationally, their approach to the Chinese questions demonstrates that they were roughly as bigoted as non-revolutionary white workers. Costaguta, like earlier scholars, identifies the shortcomings of labor and socialist views of the Chinese question: “Socialist commentary on Chinese immigration conflated different levels of analysis, showing lack of empathy and understanding toward the difficult circumstances of Chinese workers” (p. 76).
Such failings were clear when white socialists approached the issue of African Americans. Long used by employers to break strikes, socialists understood the ruling-class's time-honored divide-and-conquer techniques. In 1879, SLP members adopted an explicit demand for unity across racial lines, calling on “working people of the South, regardless of color, to unite with their brothers of the North against the attempts of the ruling class to further impoverish and enslave them by depriving them of the possession and enjoyment of the fruits of their labor” (p. 97). But there was one meaningful problem with this high-minded goal: socialists had failed to establish much of a presence in most southern regions.
More significantly, the immigrant-led socialist movement's support for African Americans was mixed. Nevertheless, some African Americans joined the SLP. Peter H. Clark, a Black Cincinnati school teacher embraced socialism because, in Costaguta's words, it offered solutions “for economic inequalities and racial ones” (p. 108). Yet, Clark was mostly isolated; few others from Cincinnati's Black community joined him, which is one of the reasons why he ultimately left the organization. Outright racism directed against African American workers was an additional reason for the failure to build durable, long-lasting multiracial coalitions of Marxists. Consider events in 1877 in St. Louis, where workers staged a biracial, cross-industry combative strike. At first, it seemed that protesters were willing to unite across racial lines. When a Black steamboatman, W.H.M. Knight, asked an audience of protestors to stand with “us regardless of color”, the crowd shouted back: “We will, we will” (p. 114). But, as the crowd, consisting of both strikers and unemployed men, grew riotous, the strike leadership took on a tone of anti-solidarity, demanding that only striking workmen participate in public actions. Strike committee member Albert Currlin insultingly called the Black protestors “loafers and niggers” (p. 115).
Not all white radicals held racist ideas, yet most were unwilling to recognize racism's distinctive influences. Costaguta uses the cases of Albert and Lucy Parsons to help make his point. Albert, one of the Haymarket martyrs, had served in the Confederacy before editing a Waco, Texas-based newspaper and becoming active in Republican Party politics. He married a Black woman, Lucy, and the two moved to Chicago, where both became active in anarchist and socialist politics. While their personal lives demonstrated racial progressivism, they showed little concern for the unique difficulties faced by African Americans in their political activities. Writing in the radical paper the Alarm about the lynchings of thirteen African Americans in a Mississippi community, Lucy insisted that the lynchers killed these people because of their class position. The Black man was lynched, she wrote, “because he is poor. It is because he is dependent” (p. 126). Assessing the situation broadly, Costaguta maintains that, “only rarely did SLP members manage to go past their implicit tendency to prioritize economic citizenship for white workers over the respect of social and political rights for African Americans” (p. 128).
One of Costaguta's most original chapters concerns US socialists’ views of Native Americans. Rather than perceive members of indigenous communities as “savages”, socialists regarded the system of capitalism is the true example of savagery: “In the encounter between different cultural, political, and social systems on the frontier, American capitalism played the role of the savage against an indigenous population whose humanity was obliterated by white colonialism” (p. 130). Moreover, socialists sharply criticized the US government's reservation policies, which was practiced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and suffered from chronic corruption. Costaguta suggests that the socialist approach to the question of Native Americans was grounded in “anthropology and historical materialism” (p. 146).
Costaguta's final chapter investigates the context surrounding the birth and early growth of the American Socialist Party in 1901. Here, he focuses much attention on Daniel De Leon, a socialist who sought to “Americanize” the movement. This leader must take credit for, in Costaguta's words, destroying “the multiethnic coalition that had supported the socialist movement up to” the 1890s (p. 150). De Leon prioritized building the movement by recruiting workers from unions like the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. Yet, De Leon suffered from racial blind spots: He believed in racial equality in theory but, as Castaguta put it, “wavered on the idea that African Americans represented a ‘special’ section of the American working class” (p. 159). Costaguta suggests that De Leon missed opportunities to address racism head-on. His failure, coming at a time when states passed Jim Crow laws and racist propaganda proliferated in popular culture, weakened the socialist and labor movements. Castaguta details enduring challenges, highlighting anecdotes from on-the ground organizers. In the words of one, Alabamian white workers were “blinded by race prejudice” (p. 161).
Castaguta's outstanding intersectional study has a minor limitation: it does not tell us how nineteenth-century immigrant socialists approached the issue of class divisions within non-white communities. While most African Americans and Chinese immigrants worked and struggled in agricultural, domestic, and industrial settings, a small number ran small businesses and entered the professions. Chinese immigrants opened laundries and restaurants, and a handful of African Americans led higher educational institutions. Non-white business owners and Black anti-socialists like Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, obviously had different class interests than most of those who shared their racial background. Did Gilded Age socialists write about such divisions? If they did not, perhaps Costaguta could have speculated why.
Of course, the strengths of this study far outweigh any weaknesses. Students interested in the history of the left, labor historians, and scholars of immigration will learn much from Costaguta. He deserves our appreciation for writing it.
