Answering “the Riddle”: Polish and Jewish “National Questions” in the Socialist Party of America, 1900–19

In the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, as more than fifteen million immigrants arrived in the United States, many from the border regions of the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian Empires that once made up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they built a new path for information, politics, and ideas to travel back and forth between Eastern Europe and the United States. For the socialists of the Second International, this new route became an important part of a growing global network of socialist thought and organization. This new connection also meant that socialists in the United States began to talk and think seriously about the increasingly tangled nationalist politics of Eastern Europe, and particularly the questions of national sovereignty for Poles and Jews.

In this paper, I trace discussions on Polish and Yiddish territorialism and nationalism throughout the information network of the Socialist Party of America. These discussions, recorded in socialist newspapers, correspondence, and conference proceedings, form an integral and understudied part of the global history of nationalism and its relation to capitalism. By studying the relationship between American socialists and far-flung nationalist conflicts brought close by the development of global capitalism, I interrogate the development both of national structures, and of capitalist structures at the beginning of the twentieth century.