The Yankee International

by Messer-Kruse, Timothy

• ISBN13: 9780807847053
• ISBN10: 0807847054
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Examining the social and intellectual collision of the American reform tradition with immigrant Marxism during the Reconstruction era, Timothy Messer-Kruse charts the rise and fall of the International Workingman's Association (IWA), the first international socialist organization. He analyzes what attracted American reformers--many of them veterans of antebellum crusades for abolition, women's rights, and other radical causes--to the IWA, how their presence affected the course of the American Left, and why they were ultimately purged from the IWA by their orthodox Marxist comrades. Messer-Kruse explores the ideology and activities of the Yankee Internationalists, tracing the evolution of antebellum American reformers' thinking on the question of wage labor and illuminating the beginnings of a broad labor reform coalition in the early years of Reconstruction. He shows how American reformers' priority of racial and sexual equality clashed with their Marxist partners' strategy of infiltrating trade unions. Ultimately, he argues, Marxist demands for party discipline and ideological unity proved incompatible with the Yankees' native republicanism. With the expulsion of Yankee reformers from the IWA in 1871, American Marxism was divorced from the American reform tradition.

Author Biography

Timothy Messer-Kruse is assistant professor of labor history at the University of Toledo.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
the American Reform Tradition	p. 6
Marx and the Republican Tradition of the First International	p. 45
the Now Domocracy	p. 71
the Rise of the Yankee International	p. 94
Marxism, Civil Rights, and the Sources of Division in the American International	p. 128
the Marxist Coup and the Splitting of the American International	p. 157
Race and Class in the Two Internationals	p. 187
the International, the Working Class, and the Trade Unions	p. 217
Epilogue Tho Legacy of the Yankee International	p. 247
Notes	p. 261
Bibliography	p. 291
Index	p. 309
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