The Yankee International

By: Timothy Messer-Kruse

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Synopsis: Examining the social and intellectual collision of the Americanreform tradition with immigrant Marxism during the Reconstructionera, Timothy Messer-Kruse charts the rise and fall of theInternational Workingman's Association (IWA), the firstinternational socialist organization. He analyzes what attractedAmerican 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 theYankee Internationalists, tracing the evolution of antebellumAmerican reformers' thinking on the question of wage labor andilluminating the beginnings of a broad labor reform coalition inthe early years of Reconstruction. He shows how Americanreformers' priority of racial and sexual equality clashed withtheir Marxist partners' strategy of infiltrating trade unions.Ultimately, he argues, Marxist demands for party discipline andideological unity proved incompatible with the Yankees' nativerepublicanism. With the expulsion of Yankee reformers from theIWA in 1871, American Marxism was divorced from the Americanreform tradition.