The International Workingmen’s Association and the Social Question in 19th-Century America

This paper offers an interpretation of competing ideological factions within the American section of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) (f. 1864), and the split between democratic reformers and socialists in the United States. My focus is on the escalating tensions over the place of middle-class reform initiatives within an explicitly working-class organization, and whether movements such as Free Love, spiritualism and women’s suffrage derailed the mission of the organization: the abolition of class society. I discuss the ideological differences within Sections in relation to the mission of the IWMA and argue that the dynamic transformation of political traditions in the United States was a key feature of American reform after the Civil War. The IWMA was founded with the aim to supersede the defeats of 1848 and to build on the “Revolution of 1861,” the American Civil War, in order to “complete” it. My interpretation of the American split differs from histories of the International in the United States which stress that the Jeffersonian commitments of its American-born members put them at odds with the “dogmatic,” or “orthodox” socialist ideas of foreigners. I show that neither foreign socialists nor American democratic reformers were ideologically unified. American Sections represented a variety of interpretations within the Jeffersonian tradition, including labor republicanism and Warrenite anarchist tendencies (after the American, Josiah Warren); German socialists were split on the question of the labor party and the mobilization of unions. Both American democratic reformers and German socialists showed overlapping concerns, as well as points of fracture, over the practice of the International. The interaction and moments of convergence between these traditions within the cosmopolitan context of the IWMA remains central to the story of the American Sections.