The Early U.S. Socialist Movement

Lyle Fulks

Workers of All Colors Unite:
Race and the Origins of American Socialism
By Lorenzo Costaguta
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2023, 230 pages, $28 paperback.

Black Socialist Frank J. Ferrell introducing Terence Powderly at Knight of Labor convention, Richmond, Virginia, 1886. Library of Congress

IN THE GILDED Age following the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, Socialists in the United States immediately faced unique issues of race, ethnicity, national oppression and liberation. Lorenzo Costaguta has taken a close look at the ensuing debate in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Socialists were soon divided into two general approaches that largely coincided with the division between Marxists: those who favored concentrating on organizing the trade union movement and the non-Marxist Socialists who favored a focus on electoral politics.

Pro-electoral Socialists often tended to support so-called “scientific” racialism, while those who advocated a trade union strategy tended to argue for working-class unity across racial lines.

The appeal of scientific racialism was common in American society. Its supporters saw a hierarchy of “races.” Unsurprisingly, these white theorists placed the “white race” at the top. Nineteenth century labor radicals who already considered themselves scientific Socialists could all too easily find accommodation with white-supremacist ideology presented as science.

Socialists who concentrated on the early trade union movement tended to support racial unity and encouraged class solidarity without regard to race. These Socialists advocated racial equality.

The early Socialists were organized in the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and sponsored a thick network of newspapers, magazines and journals across the country. These, like the Party members, were almost entirely in German.

Lorenzo Costaguta has taken a deep look at the debate that ensued amongst these Socialists as reflected in these papers. He describes the writers and the contest amongst their ideas in instructive detail. Through the lens of the competing approaches of scientific racialism and class solidarity, Costaguta examines how the Socialists approached the issues raised by Chinese workers, Black workers and Native Americans in the struggle for socialism.

At first scientific racialism gained the upper hand. Despite supporting the rights of Chinese immigrant workers, for example, Socialists backed away from that position and anti-Chinese articles increasingly appeared in the Party press. This would not change until trade-unionist class-solidarity advocates took over the Party in 1889.

Attempting Black Outreach

The Socialists tried and failed to reach out to Black workers. Costaguta looks at the experience of Socialists in three cities, New Orleans, Cincinnati and St. Louis.

In New Orleans a promising early start was cut short by rivalry from the much larger Greenback Labor Party and yellow fever, but not before the SLP press reporting that the Black workers were the backbone of the labor movement in that city.

In Cincinnati, where the Party moved its national offices in 1877, shortly after the Party’s founding, the Socialists were joined by Peter H. Clark, named by his biographer as the nation’s first Black socialist. This helped to contribute to greater electoral support for the Socialist Labor Party, however briefly.

Clark had a long career in Cincinnati and national reform politics. Between 1877 and 1879 Clark was active with the SLP and a candidate on the Socialist Labor ticket for public office at least twice. By the 1880s Clark began to move further to the right and ended supporting the Jim Crow Democrats and segregation.

St. Louis had been a center of the Great Rail Strike of 1877. The national commercial press blamed the strike on communists inspired by the Paris Commune who intended to foment a violent revolution. This was nothing but a fever dream, but in a number of areas Socialists led the struggle.

In St. Louis, where the Socialists thrived — over 1,000 strong — a Socialist-led general strike controlled the town for a week without violence. Black workers had participated from the beginning, but as their numbers swelled so did white hostility, and the leaders called off the strike. (114)

The experience of the Socialist Labor Party in these three cities illustrates the paradox of its position. While the Party’s official resolutions identified the exceptional importance of Black Americans and insisted on interracial organizing, the SLP routinely failed at it. St. Louis and Cincinnati were lost opportunities. The SLP in New Orleans never had the strength to affect events.

The Socialist Labor Party of the 1870s and ’80s tried to address the problems Black workers faced but were unsuccessful. Costaguta says

“Socialists kept insisting that African American workers joined their fight for improved working and living conditions through party politics and trade union activism. In doing so they did not realize that African Americans had problems that confrontational opposition towards employers and local politicians could not solve.

“In this period African American protests took various forms from ‘traditional’ labor up[risings to physical and spontaneous acts of resistance against racist violence, such as the ‘Kansas Exodus,’ a mass migration of the Black workforce from several areas of the Mississippi valley towards Kansas. The limit of socialists was to expect African Americans to conform to socialist strategy rather than supporting African American dissent in whatever form it came.” (99)

In part this was due to the weakness of the Party in areas where there were Black workers, especially the South. Also, there were still few Black workers in many areas in the urban North and Midwest where the Socialists were stronger. This would not change until the Great Migration of the 1910s and ’20s.

Most importantly, the Socialists usually failed to realize the need to oppose oppression as well as exploitation. Black resistance to the introduction of Jim Crow laws and to white supremacy went largely unnoticed or unsupported in the socialist press in the 1880s and into the ’90s.

Socialists and Knights of Labor

While the pro-electoral Socialists had not achieved very much in the electoral arena to advance interracial solidarity, trade union Socialists in the Knights of Labor managed a symbolic victory when Black Socialist Frank J. Ferrel publicly spoke for racial equality at a large interracial meeting at which he shared the speakers’ platform with the segregationist Governor of Virginia.

Socialists played a minority but significant role in the Knights of Labor, especially in the large and powerful District Assembly 49 in New York City. The Knights were a labor organization combining the elements of a trade union, a mutual benefit society, and something along the lines of secret society like freemasonry. The Knights reached a membership of three-quarters of a million workers in the mid-1880s.

At their height the Knights gathered in segregated Richmond, Virginia for a convention in 1886, where as Costaguta tells us:

“(T)he Black delegate of New York’s District Assembly 49 (DA49) and SLP member Frank J. Ferrel tested the limits of Southern racial infrastructure. When Ferrel was denied entry to the hotel that was supposed to host the NYC delegation, the entire group walked out in solidarity. They attended collectively a theater representation, to the scandal of Richmond’s white only audience. Ferrel spoke in front of Virginia’s governor Fitzhugh Lee, introducing Knights of Labor’s Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly with a speech celebrating racial equality.” (126)

Costaguta notes that the first decade and a half of the SLP was book-ended by the battle at Little Bighorn and infamous massacre at Wounded Knee. These events framed the Socialists’ response to the U.S. academic Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis.”

Turner’s thesis shaped the discussion in the wider U.S. society, including the notion that the American frontier was the meeting place of savagery and civilization — assigning Native Americans to the savage category and reserving civilization for the white settlers.

Costaguta says that Socialists responded by using this same language of savagery and civilization, but would reverse the polarities; the settlers were the savages. “Essentialist racial and cultural hierarchies were turned upside down.” (138)

Still, the Socialists never considered seeking common ground with the struggles of Native People. Nonetheless, this discussion had the important effect of moving the Socialists away from scientific racialism.

Socialists discovered American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, and the socialist discussion moved from a focus on racial hierarchy to a focus on social and economic development. Socialist writings increasingly replaced concepts of racial hierarchies and geographical origin with social evolution and class struggle.

The 1890s brought a new Marxist leadership to the Socialist Labor Party. The Party turned to new member Daniel De Leon for leadership when this former academic luminary became editor of the Party organ The People. De Leon had been an award-winning legal scholar whose journey from public support for the 1886 independent labor candidate for mayor of New York, Henry George, through Edward Bellamy’s Nationalists to the SLP was too much for Columbia. When they failed to make him a full professor, as promised, he resigned. He would dominate the SLP until his death in 1914.

De Leon’s reputation is that of a dogmatic sectarian who zealously defended Marxist orthodoxy. Although indeed a dogmatic sectarian, he developed a unique Marxism. It was a heterodox blend of syndicalism and ultra- leftism — along with Second International era Marxism. De Leon is best admired for his fierce anti-opportunism.

De Leon rejected scientific racialism, geographic determinism, social Darwinism and Spencer’s “survival of the fittest.” He was enthusiastic about anthropology, especially the work of Lewis Henry Morgan. In fact it was from reading Morgan, not Marx, that made De Leon a convinced socialist. (157)

De Leon relied on the idea of social evolution as seen in the writings of Morgan and Marx. He always stood forthrightly for racial equality, but sometimes denied that race was a bottom-line issue. At other times De Leon recognized Black workers were in a special category based on their oppression as well as their exploitation.

De Leon was committed to a scientific outlook that rejected scientific racialism by turning to the emerging study of anthropology. Costaguta identifies De Leon, in the 1890s, as the first Socialist leader to insist “there is no race question, nor color question. What there is the Humanity Question — the Social Question.” (164) Yet in the end, De Leon led socialists to misunderstand the role of racism in the United States.

This outlook would also dominate in the left wing of the Debs-era Socialist Party as well. A decade later, Eugene Debs himself said much the same thing.

Another Century

Costaguta’s focus is almost entirely on the 19th century. The experience of Socialist engagement with the Black community in the Debs era is only foreshadowed as beyond the book’s scope.

It wouldn’t be until after World War I, the Great Migration and the Russian Revolution that Socialists began to move toward a race-conscious class solidarity position and to address the special oppression suffered by the Black community, to advocate Black liberation and engage with Black workers and their families.

Many of the same issues of human and social evolution were raised by the “Woman Question,” as issues of women’s liberation were called at the time. A comparison and contrast of the ways the Socialist Labor Party in the 19th century approached these struggles, both in theory and in the field, would be interesting.

However 19th century feminism is outside the scope of the book — although Mari Jo Buhle’s Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 covers the same period. She outlines the struggle for women’s suffrage as well as the demands for economic and sexual emancipation.

The struggle of the pioneer socialists to address issues of race and oppression for the first time resonates today as a revived socialist movement continues to grapple with them. Workers of All Colors: Race and the Origins of American Socialism is a first-rate and detailed guide to these early discussions, and helps create a framework for understanding the history of socialism and the struggle against national oppression. If socialism began exploring the relationship of exploitation and oppression, the work of anti-colonial scholars and Black socialist-feminists have deepened that understanding.

July-August 2025, ATC 237