The International Workingmen's Association, or “First International” (1864–1876) was founded in the long shadow of 1848, amidst Polish and Italian national liberation movements and the upheaval of the American Civil War. As an organization it pushed against the limitations of radical republican politics, in both its European and American iterations. It was the first to present the need for an organized body of an international working class to develop the political forces capable of challenging industrial capitalism. As members of the First and Second International (1889–1916), American socialists were part of an effervescent cosmopolitical culture of social reform. These men and women were driven by the belief that the abolition of class was desirable, possible, and necessary. Across cosmopolitan networks, they built on eighteenth-century radical ideas and forged a new language of “workers’ democracy” based on their understanding that workingmen had inherent rights as producers. Arguments over the nature of the state, its executive authority, and the role of working-class leadership, were an integral part of these transatlantic debates.

This panel takes up the history of the First and Second Internationals in the United States, their primary concerns, intellectual frameworks, and political proposals. We begin with the founding of the International in America and its competing ideological factions (Nogales): the split between democratic reformers and socialists who stood divided on the role of middle-class reform initiatives (e.g., Free Love, and spiritualism) within an explicitly working-class organization. Whether through their communal experiments, trade-union organizing, or labor-party building, the U.S. Sections of the International exemplified the competing cosmopolitan tendencies at the heart of the American reform tradition, further explored by the second presentation (Gourevitch). After the Civil War, we find overlapping concerns between members of the Knights of Labor and various figures in the First International and Socialist parties. This paper brings together—what has been often characterized as—“foreign” and “domestic” traditions of labor radicalism, which sought to replace the industrial system with a “Cooperative Commonwealth.” The third presentation (Behrends) highlights the vast growth of social and political networks during the mass immigration of the first decade-and-a-half of the twentieth century. Leaving behind the border regions of the old the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, immigrants built a new path for information, politics, and ideas to travel back and forth between Eastern Europe and the United States. This paper focuses on discussions on Polish and Yiddish territorialism and nationalism in the Socialist Party of America and shows how the development of global capitalism forced party debates over far-flung nationalist conflicts and their implications building a class politics. We end our panel with a presentation on the socialist contribution to the fight against state policing in Reading, Pennsylvania. It shows how a multiethnic movement linked local socialist anti-police work to global developments in anti-imperial resistance. And it considers how socialists at the heart of industrial capitalism in the United States built durable political formations that would later prove decisive in the rise of worker education and the industrial unionism of the CIO era.