Scientific Racialism and Darwinism in the German American Socialist Movement: The Case of Adolph Douai

At the foundation of the SLP in Philadelphia 1876, divisions over political strategy were reflected in the ways in which the party press was organized. Supporters of trade unionism came together around the English-language Labor Standard and the German-language Chicagoer Vorbote, whereas supporters of political action took control of the German-language Arbeiter Stimme, based in New York.Footnote ²¹ One of the few individuals who could go beyond factional disputes and speak to the whole party was the German American leader Adolph Douai. A native of Thuringia, Douai had arrived in the United States in the early 1850s, where he spent some years in Texas working as an editor of the abolitionist paper San Antonio Zeitung, before being forced by the reactions to his political activism to relocate North.Footnote ²² In the late 1870s, Douai was one of the most popular leaders of the American socialist movement, and for this reason he was appointed assistant editor for all the three SLP newspapers during the founding Congress in Philadelphia.Footnote ²³ From this influential position, the German American leader had the chance to address the entire SLP on a topic that was of primary interest to him: scientific theories of race.

Douai had a profound fascination with scientific racialism, dating back to his time in Europe. He called his area of enquiry the “geography of peoples.” Douai published several articles under this title throughout his career, the first one already in the San Antonio Zeitung in 1854. He also wrote a book on the topic, called Land und Leute in der Union (“Land and People in the Union”), which was published by a German press in 1864 and discussed the history of the United States through the prism of Douai's theories of human development.Footnote ²⁴ Douai's articles, discussed in this section, reached a vast readership among German American socialists. They open a privileged window on the ways in which this first generation of German American socialists conceptualized the relationship between socialism and race.

In his 1884 autobiography, Douai claimed that in 1848 he had already begun describing himself as “a professor of the theory of evolution in natural science.”Footnote ²⁵ He went even further, writing that in the late 1850s he would have included himself among the Germans that were “Darwinians before Darwin.” He claimed that without any training in natural history, he could trace the humankind's origin from animals and reconstruct the link between geographical conditions and evolution. And he could do this well before the English scientist published On the Origin of Species.Footnote ²⁶ These few remarks demonstrate his full endorsement of Darwin's research. They also provoke questions regarding the way in which the socialist Douai interpreted and understood Darwin's revolutionary theory. In 1878, Douai opened an article in the Chicagoer Vorbote by arguing that “the great theory of Darwin brilliantly discovered that in nature there were two ways in which the great wealth of different types of creatures comes off, descent and adaptation.” But in his next sentence he developed an opinion with which Darwin would not readily agree with:

At first sight, Douai embraced Darwin's point of view. Yet his explanation of human evolution proved that pre-Darwinian elements continued characterizing his approach to race. According to Douai, every single change in geography caused a parallel change in the physical structure of human beings. If people remained in the same place, no modification intervened. But once, for whatever reasons, they moved, their bodies progressively adapted to the new environment. According to Douai, this process created a vast variety of different living beings, out of which, through a Darwinian process of selection, only the best survived.

Douai's fraught rearticulation of Darwin's point of view attests to the complicated process whereby the scientific debate on evolution unfolded between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Discussions on evolutionism, while conducted in intellectual circles far from the public eye, had a profound impact on social, economic, and political interactions in society at large. The morality of slavery, the approaches toward foreign nations in international relations, the adoption of policies for social support: in all these areas, intellectuals considered the then-modern theories of human evolution.Footnote ²⁸ In view of the predominance of these ideas, any analysis of socialist opinions during the Gilded Age must consider this intellectual scenario. The details of Douai's own scientific theories provide information on how he conceptualized the possibility of interracial and interethnic cooperation on the workplace between American workers. For this reason, it is necessary to trace back the development of Douai's point of view by examining the development of scientific theories of race in Europe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In his writings, Douai referred extensively to environmental circumstances, and his fixation with geography was far from original. In the eighteenth century, as geographical discoveries prompted stories of exotic populations from different areas of the world, intellectuals started to theorize reasons for human physical and cultural differences.Footnote ²⁹ For example, in his magnum opus The Spirit of Laws (1748), the French intellectual Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu elaborated a model according to which environmental circumstances decided not only human attitudes but also political and social features of the different human groups. For Montesquieu, climate and geography explained why despotism and slavery were common in Asia, whereas monarchies, republics, and more liberal regimes proliferated in temperate areas like Europe.Footnote ³⁰

In the nineteenth century, naturalists and geographers started to ground their theses in firsthand data acquired from explorations and fieldwork. Geological observation led to the widely held belief that the earth was constantly evolving. Many extended this idea to the organic world, suggesting that both animals and humans were the product of centuries-long processes of evolution. But then the question became: How was evolution possible? In what way had living beings changed over time?Footnote ³¹ One of the most influential replies came from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who wrote a more sophisticated and scientifically grounded version of the geographic determinism theorized by Montesquieu. Lamarckism presented a theory that suggested that living beings developed physical features according to their surrounding geographical environment. Lamarckism postulated that humans and animals could pass characteristics developed during their lifetime to their offspring. For example, the necks of giraffes had stretched because of the animals’ repeated attempts to reach the furthest leaves on trees.Footnote ³² In The Origins of the Species, Darwin corrected the ideas of the geographic determinists in a significant way, adding the fundamental point: random selection. To keep the example of the giraffe, whereas Lamarck had argued that the animals managed to stretch their necks, Darwin maintained that out of a group of animals whose different features had developed in a completely random way, only giraffes had survived because of their special ability to reach sources of food inaccessible to animals with shorter necks.Footnote ³³

These details give hints on Douai's shortcomings. Douai's point of view remained grounded in geographical determinism rather than the developed version of transmutation put forward by Darwin. His belief that living beings evolved according to the geographical surroundings resembled an expanded version of Lamarckism. Douai was incredibly imaginative in describing the effects of geographic circumstances on human bodies. To give one example, he argued that people living in the Tropics had dark skin because the heat prevented their lungs from breathing out all the carbon dioxide in the blood. As a result, some dioxide ended up under the skin and darkened its color. Douai provided a further detail to prove his theory, writing that “the negro children are fairly white because they only begin to breathe at birth, and only later progressively darken.”Footnote ³⁴ This and many other descriptions in Douai's writings indicate that he understood human evolution as a constant and regular process, which could modify human features in the span of a few generations, whereas Darwin maintained that evolution happened through millennia.

Douai's understanding of Darwin's theory was reflected in the ways in which the two conceived of racial equality. Despite his monogenist and evolutionist theory, Darwin was not against the idea of a hierarchy of human groups. As historian Robert J. Richards stresses, Darwin “aligned the human groups on a developmental path, from ‘savage’ races to the ‘civilized.’” In actual fact, Darwin refrained from using the term “race,” which he considered indistinguishable from that of species.Footnote ³⁵ But the most important points to stress here are, firstly, that Darwin circumscribed the level of development to non-biological fields: from a biological point of view, men and women were all equal. Differences occurred in the realm of political, cultural, social advancement, but not in the realm of biology. Secondly, Darwin believed that the differences in levels of human social development were modifiable through time. Darwin's classification was not cast in stone, but was flexible and modifiable.

Douai was a supporter of monogenism, but the way in which he conceived of and explained human differences was different from Darwin's. Douai stressed that human beings had far more similarities than differences, and for him this was enough to conclude that humans were all part of the same species, as demonstrated by Charles Darwin.Footnote ³⁶ However, Douai also believed that “species” and “races’ were two different concepts, and he took on the task of explaining human diversity with special enthusiasm. His analytical methodology was revealing of further influences that shaped Douai's theory of race. Douai combined historical information with considerations of nutrition, the availability of food and domesticated animals, geographic circumstances, technological developments, and linguistics. Therefore, even though he apparently based his theory of transmutation only on geography, in reality he formulated an analysis that was holistic in its methodology and scope. Douai placed African Americans, “negritos,” Malaysians, native Americans, and “half-breeds of the white, yellow and white race” on the lowest scale of human development, whereas “in the temperate climates,” he maintained, ” we find both the largest variety of bodily and mental development and the only progressed culture.”Footnote ³⁷ As these few remarks show, Douai connected biological human development to the technological, cultural, and social status of sophistication of the respective cultures and societies: tribes living in the Tropics, Malaysia, or Africa were the least developed, whereas Europe and the United States were at the top of the scale. In Douai's analysis the biological and the cultural continuously intertwined. As a result, the “white race” not only had a higher level of technological development, but it was also “mentally and physically superior.”Footnote ³⁸

In constructing his theories, Douai drew on the work of various German scholars that he had encountered during his formative academic years. Alexander von Humboldt, the founder of historic and human geography, was surely among them. Humboldt grew up reading Immanuel Kant's books and discussing his theories with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and his brother Wilhelm von Humboldt, later a leading linguist and founder of the Humboldt University in Berlin.Footnote ³⁹ His travels in South America between 1799 and 1804, and his published accounts of them, inaugurated a new method of study encompassing the interaction of mankind and the geographical environment.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was in Humboldt's methods that Douai found a key inspiration for his theories. Historian Laura Dassow Walls argues that Humboldt's scientific method was based on four mandates: explore, collect, measure, and connect. These phases implied scientific procedures but also aesthetical and sensorial practices, in which the scientist was expected to personally “experience” the place. Crucially, Humboldt believed that the set of disparate data the scientist gathered during his explorations could be brought together into a holistic view of nature. His main work, Cosmos, was a five-volume attempt to synthesize his grand theory of nature into a unified system, one which drew on everything, from emotional responses to natural landscapes to the explanation of theories connected to geographical phenomena. Cosmos was a powerful and influential expression of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. In its commingling of different disciplines, Humboldt's work became enormously influential not only for scientists like Charles Darwin, but also for American artists like the Transcendentalists and the painters of the American Hudson River school.Footnote ⁴¹

Humboldt died in 1859. In that period, Douai was a schoolteacher in Boston. His love for Humboldt was so renowned that the local German association asked him to organize an event of commemoration for the deceased Prussian naturalist.Footnote ⁴² On reading Douai's work, it is not difficult to see how much Douai had relied on Humboldt's theories: the German American socialist was imitating the same all-embracing analytical style of his intellectual role model, using a broad-ranging multidisciplinary approach that tried to reconstruct the development of the different human races by putting together different elements in a logically consistent structure. Unfortunately, Douai was not an explorer, nor could he collect primary material or measure the geographical features of the places he analyzed. What is more, he lacked Humboldt's scientific rigor and refined education. His results, therefore, were much more modest. While Humboldt produced works that revolutionized contemporary conceptions of the relationship between the humans and their environment, Douai created an incoherent patchwork which attested to the erudition of its author but was hardly a successful discussion of the complex issues at stake.

The differences between the two can be explored by investigating Humboldt's opinions on the idea of race. In Cosmos, Humboldt argued that mankind was distributed in varieties, “designed by the somewhat indefinite term races.” However, the differences between human groups were so many that to give a sharp, clear, scientific definition of the idea of race was essentially impossible. On the idea of creating a table of human races, Humboldt was crystal clear:

As this passage clearly demonstrates, Humboldt believed that while the humankind was divided into different groups with different attitudes, divisions based on inherent racial features simply did not exist. All men and women were “in like degree designed for freedom; a freedom which, in the ruder conditions of society, belongs only to the individual, but which, in social states enjoying political institutions, appertains as a right to the whole body of the community.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In his articles, Douai rearticulated Humboldt's egalitarian position in light of his different scientific approach. Douai adopted a holistic Humboldtian approach, but he believed that whereas the Prussian naturalist had limited himself to the analysis of the natural world, modern methodologies such as Darwinism now enabled modern scientists to expand Humboldt's enquiry to include human beings. The problem was that Douai got Darwin's theory wrong. As we have seen, the German socialist did not understand exactly how the process of random selection worked, and he conflated Darwinism with Lamarckism. As a result, he formulated a theory that was a curious mixture of Humboldtian methodology, Darwinism, and Lamarckism, in which geographical, socioeconomic, and cultural elements continually reshaped the physical structure of human beings.

Nonetheless, Douai came to political conclusions that were not far away from those of his intellectual mentors. Douai believed in the physical diversity of human races, but he was also a “progressive” Lamarckian and therefore believed that the biological features of human races were in constant flux. Even the groups at the lower levels of the human scale of development could improve for the better and rapidly ascend to the top of the scale by exposing themselves to the correct geographical circumstances. Douai's case attests to the fact that the adoption of scientific racialism was not necessarily tied to the defense of white supremacism. While arguing that at present white superiority was a reality, Douai also contended that it was desirable for other races to improve their racial stock and join the white group at the top of the scale of human evolution. Moreover, there were other elements of his theory that brought him to progressive political positions: for example, given the comprehensiveness of his theory, Douai paid special attention to the impact of social and economic conditions on the development of human groups, an aspect of his work that increased the acuteness of his political commentaries. Douai was one of the few socialists in this period who openly called for the organization of African Americans in the South; and in 1879 he voiced his opposition to the closure of the Western border in the debate on Chinese immigration.Footnote ⁴⁵ Finally, he was a staunch supporter of immigration, because he believed that the continuous intermingling of people improved the biological stock of the American population.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Inevitability of Darwinism: Paul Grottkau and August Otto-Walster

Douai was arguably the only socialist intellectual to employ such detailed theories of race in his work, but many others also used Darwinism as an interpretative lens to discuss the contrasts between different racial and ethnic groups. For the generation that followed Douai's—born in pre-unification Germany in the 1830s and 1840s—it was no longer a question of needing a holistic explanation of the differences between human groups. They had grown up in an intellectual milieu where the presence of a “theory of evolution,” expressed in scientific terms, had ceased to be a novelty. For them, on the contrary, the problem was to determine to what extent the theory of evolution could be used to interpret human facts. The Socialist reported an opinion on Darwinism that perfectly contextualized this issue:

The article shed light on a historical development that went beyond the debate on race diversity then being conducted in the socialist movement. The contrast mentioned by the correspondent, between the “traditional superstition,” and the “theory of evolution,” juxtaposed the scientific paradigms developed after 1850 to centuries-old religious philosophies imbedded in society.

Historian Alfred Kelly has an in-depth analysis of how Darwin's theories were received in pre-unified Germany, a place of origin, time frame, and system of education shared by all the German American socialists discussed in this article. In the nineteenth century, the German states were at the forefront of academic research in biology and the natural sciences, and they pioneered the modern university system of education.Footnote ⁴⁸ Darwin's Origin was translated into German in 1860 and his theories enjoyed a vast and immediate circulation. Kelly emphasizes that this diffusion of ideas not only affected the academic elite but was also a genuine popular process, with a great variety of writers publishing widely circulating rather amateurish versions of Darwin's theories. According to Kelly, the success of Darwinism needs to be contextualized within wider political and intellectual trends. Germans welcomed Darwin's evolutionism because it attacked the centuries-old ideologies defended by authoritarian institutions such as the Catholic Church. They saw it as an aspect of the human progress that would eventually overthrow illiberal institutions such as the Prussian autocracy and bring them political freedom. Darwin's theory was liberating because it rid the German intellectual world of the dualism between humans and animals (and in turn that between the spiritual and the physical) that had characterized German philosophy for the previous two centuries. It was not by chance, contends Kelly, that by the end of the century many German socialists were strong advocates of Darwinism.Footnote ⁴⁹

The material published by the German-language socialist press in the United States confirms what Alfred Kelly has suggests. German American socialists of the 1870s not only embraced Darwinism, they saw it as fully compatible with their socialist doctrine and applicable to the American context. In May 1878, the Chicagoer Vorbote published an article by Paul Grottkau titled “Darwinism in the Economic and Political World.” Born in Berlin in 1846, Grottkau had been a member of the Lassallean Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein (General German Workers’ Association) and editor of the Berliner Freie Presse. He was warmly welcomed by the German American socialist community in Chicago when he first arrived there at the beginning of 1878. His fame in Germany certainly facilitated his career in the local socialist movement, and within six months of his arrival, he was nominated editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung and the Chicagoer Vorbote, the daily and weekly papers of the Chicago chapter of the SLP.Footnote ⁵⁰

In his article, Grottkau explained why Darwinism was so popular among employers and the ruling class:

Grottkau did not contest the interpretation of Darwinism furnished by the capitalists. In his opinion, the fact that the “struggle for existence” ruled political and economic relations was based on scientific evidence. But he did show the way in which Darwinism and socialism could coexist just as easily. Grottkau argued that in this phase of history, according to the Darwinian process, it was legitimate for bigger businesses to destroy and incorporate smaller businesses, just as in the future, it would be legitimate for the socialist Cooperative Commonwealth (the largest possible form of economic production), to destroy and incorporate capitalist businesses.Footnote ⁵²

Grottkau was not the only one to hold this position within the SLP. August Otto-Walster expressed similar opinions in his writings. Otto-Walster was born in Dresden in 1834. In 1869 he worked in the Dresdner Volkszeitung and cooperated with August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht to found the Marxist Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei (Social-Democratic Labour Party). In 1876, Otto-Walster relocated to New York after accepting the offer of the SLP to work as editor of the official paper Arbeiter Stimme. In 1878, he moved to St. Louis to become the editor of the Volksstimme des Westens, a step forward in his career, considering that St. Louis had one of the largest chapters of the party and the Volksstimme was one of the few socialist dailies in America.Footnote ⁵³

In October 1878, Otto-Walster commented in the press on a talk given by Oscar Schmidt, an early supporter of Darwinism. In this talk, Schmidt had rejected the idea that Darwin's theory and socialism were compatible. A debate on the topic had exploded in 1877 in Germany after Rudolf Virchow, a renowned physician, argued that Darwinism should not be taught in schools because it was dangerous, a view confirmed by the fact that even socialists embraced it. Virchow's stance provoked a hostile reaction from Darwinian scientists. Zoologist Ernst Haeckel, by far the most celebrated and popular advocate of Darwinism in Germany, vehemently attacked Virchow. Haeckel argued that Darwinism had scientifically proved the inequality of men and therefore was at odds with the egalitarianism of socialism. The Virchow-Haeckel debate had a long echo in Germany, not only because the two men involved were so renewed, but also because the debate had mixed scientific controversies and politics, and had done so at a moment when socialism in Germany was far from popular.Footnote ⁵⁴

Otto-Walster was keenly aware of the German reverberations from this debate, and he took the occasion of Schmidt's talk to examine the issue:

Otto-Walster sought a way to make Darwinism and socialism harmonious. He argued that socialism did not contest the Darwinian principle that men and women were unequal and that the struggle for existence regulated social intercourse. But he insisted that socialism did demand fair and equal rules of engagement, so that everyone could have the chance to use their qualities and succeed in the struggle. Otto-Walster, for his part, aimed to attack pro-bourgeois biases, but was ultimately at ease with a social model that implied structural inequality.

The opinions of Adolph Douai, on the one hand, and those of Paul Grottkau and August Otto-Walster, on the other, exemplify the way in which German American socialists approached differences of race in the 1870s and early 1880s. In this period the SLP became a site where scientific theories of evolutionism were regularly deployed to conceptualize and explain racial differences. Still, American socialists did not produce a single and coherent position on the topic. By taking into account the intellectual debate in pre-unified Germany and by describing the generational differences within the German American socialist community, one can, nevertheless, identify two general approaches to the issue. The first is characterized by the early nineteenth-century eclectic mix of Darwinism and pre-Darwinian geographical determinism represented by Douai, and the second is Grottkau's and Otto-Walster's attempts to amalgamate Darwinism and socialism. While not being anti-egalitarian or racist in themselves, these approaches conceded the possibility that structural inequality, based on biological, social, and economic conditions, was a reality inscribed in the natural, rather than man-made, laws that governed human interaction. This concession severely weakened the emancipatory power of the political message socialist activists were trying to spread.

Anti-Darwinist Approaches: The Strengths and Limits of Color-Blind Internationalism

Marx and Engels welcomed the publication of Darwin's On the Origins of Species with enthusiasm. In 1859, Engels wrote to his friend:

As the quotation aptly shows, the aspect of the theory that both Marx and Engels enjoyed most was its capacity to explain evolution without religion. Marx confirmed this idea two years later. In presenting Darwin's book to Ferdinand Lassalle, he wrote:

Marx's and Engels's enthusiasm was an expression of the anti-spiritualist sentiment generated in Germany by the liberating theories of Darwin. The two socialist philosophers were looking for confirmation of their materialism. Darwin's theory provided a powerful argument against Hegelian idealism, the model in contrast to which Marx and Engels had framed dialectical materialism. As stressed by historian Richard Weikart, however, the German philosophers did not incorporate any other aspects of Darwin's theory into their theoretical plan. By the time Marx read Darwin's work, contends Weikart, the key tenets of his materialistic methodology were already in place. Marx's understanding of the world was based on the distinction between human and animal. His theory was devoted to explaining the dynamics that regulated human interaction. Biology and natural sciences were peripheral areas in Marx's system of thought. Therefore, continues Weikart, “Marx's evolutionary view of society did not in any way derive from or depend on biological evolution.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Given Marx's lack of focus on the natural sciences, it is not surprising that the German American socialists who most closely followed Marx and Engels were less proactive when it came to embracing Darwinist approaches. This difference is evident in the opinions expressed in the Labor Standard, the newspaper controlled by the SLP group that considered trade unionism to be the primary work of the party. This group was composed of former members of the North American section of the International Workingmen's Association (IWMA) and recent immigrants to the United States, mostly English-speaking and located in New England and New York. Among its more prominent leaders were Friedrich A. Sorge and Joseph P. McDonnell, the editor of the Labor Standard from 1876.

Sorge was a veteran supporter of Marxism in the United States. He arrived in the country after the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and lived in the New York City area. He served as Secretary of the North American Federation of the IWMA from 1867 to 1872, and as General Secretary from 1872 to 1874. From the late 1860s, he kept up a regular correspondence with Marx and Engels, which continued through his activity within the SLP.Footnote ⁵⁹ McDonnell was born in Dublin in 1847. During his youth, which was spent between Dublin and London, McDonnell had been a vocal advocate of Irish nationalism, a supporter of the Paris Commune, and a member of the IWMA, serving as the organization's Ireland secretary in the early 1870s. McDonnell had been jailed several times for his political activities, and Herbert G. Gutman notes that on his arrival in New York in 1872 “few other immigrants carried to industrializing America so full and so complete a set of radical credentials.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Leaders like McDonnell and Sorge brought to the SLP the internationalist inspiration that had animated the IWMA, as clearly explained in the Labor Standard in 1877:

In the Labor Standard the problem of national and racial differences was rarely analyzed in itself. The issue was more often mentioned in connection with the dynamics of the job market and immigration. In this context, the interests of the American workers were never given first place. Instead, McDonnell focused on what workers shared, their class circumstances, and downplayed the importance of what divided them, their national differences.

On July 7 1877, the Labor Standard published an article written by its correspondent “Middleton” (a pseudonym). McDonnell so warmly embraced the content of this piece that he decided to forgo his own weekly column to make space for Middleton's. Middleton started by explaining why American wages were decreasing so rapidly: as a consequence of global interconnection, high American wages had fallen to the level of low European wages. At this point, “having exhausted the civilized world in the hunt for cheap labor,” capitalists had turned to China.Footnote ⁶² But Middleton did not indulge any protectionist temptation, arguing: “it is useless to prevent the importation of the products of cheap labor, so long as we import the cheap laborer.” Middleton adamantly made his case by declaring that “the best protection for labor at home, is the improvement of the Laborer abroad.”Footnote ⁶³ He refused to place any blame on the workers immigrating to the United States:

Whereas Douai, Grottkau, and Otto-Walster accepted the idea that inequality and competition between human groups were unavoidable aspects of human interaction, Middleton chose to stress the similarities between the situations of workers around the world. He identified economic circumstances as the real problem that forced people to leave their countries of origin. In this way, he suggested a change of perspective that suddenly made anti-immigration appeals seem totally incompatible with the most basic values of human decency.

The trade unionists of the SLP did not focus only on immigration and national differences, they also concentrated on racial inequality. In a speech McDonnell gave to a crowd in New York during the Great Strike of 1877, the Labor Standard editor celebrated the interracial unity of workers by declaring that “it was a grand sight to see in West Virginia, white and colored men standing together, men of all nationalities on one supreme contest for the common rights of the workingmen. The barriers of ignorance and prejudice were fast falling before the growing intelligence of the masses. Hereafter there shall be no north, no south, no east, no west, only one land of labor and the workingmen must own and possess it.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Class solidarity, according to McDonnell, should make no exceptions. He thought that the worsening of the workers’ situation opened new spaces for them to unite despite their proclivity to balk at ethnic and racial differences.

Throughout the twentieth century, historians and philosophers on the left have repeatedly stressed the limits of color-blind and race-blind approaches. With their fixation on class inequality, they have argued, these points of view have systematically failed to recognize, understand, and engage with the specific social and economic circumstances created by racial discrimination in the United States.Footnote ⁶⁶ These criticisms can equally be applied to the color-blind internationalist position expounded by SLP members in the 1870s. However, placing socialist opinions within the historical context of the time may help to better understanding the strengths and limits of their point of view. In a social and intellectual situation in which theories of race, Darwinism and exclusivist nationalisms nurtured and reinforced tensions and divisions along lines of race, ethnicity, and class, these socialists found themselves swimming against the tide. As the opinions of Douai, Grottkau, and Otto-Walster made clear, in this period theories of race had deeply penetrated all social classes, becoming modern frameworks that required articulated intellectual responses. However, socialists supporting color-blind points of view decided to remain faithful to their approach. They rejected the idea suggested by scientific racialism that some human beings were inferior because of their race or ethnicity, and they did not concede the point that humans could be different according to the place where they were born. Color-blind socialists maintained that, despite physical differences, humans were essentially all the same. They were all disinclined to abandon their homes, families, and friends, and they were all animated by the same needs, such as the urgency to improve their economic situation. In this way, color-blind socialists articulated a significantly advanced position for their time that, despite its flaws, put them at the very forefront of the progressive spectrum of labor movements of the time.

The SLP from Color-Blind Internationalism to Scientific Racialism

At the foundation of the party, the scientific racialism of Douai, Grottkau, and Otto-Walster and the color-blind internationalism of Sorge and McDonnell were equally represented in the SLP. However, the coexistence of these two contradictory points of view did not last long. The precarious compromise that held together the different socialist organizations scattered around the country started to crumble almost immediately after the founding event of 1876. Even though neat lines of separation are difficult to draw, it is possible to suggest that color-blind internationalists were mostly located in the New York area, in Detroit, and in Chicago, while supporters of scientific racialism were more regularly spread in all the areas where the SLP had chapters, namely the Northeast and the Midwest. This division was replicated almost faithfully in the split that divided the SLP in 1877–1878. During the founding meeting, Sorge had made clear that he and his faction would stay in the SLP only as long as the new unified party avoided any sort of electoral activity. However, this condition was broken almost immediately. A couple of months after the end of the meeting, the Newark section of the SLP, led by Peter J. McGuire, ran candidates in some local elections. This episode opened a year-long quarrel between the Sorge and McDonnell-led group based in the New York area and the rest of the organization, with socialists exchanging heated accusations in all three of the party's papers.Footnote ⁶⁷ Paradoxically, the matter was settled in favor of supporters of political action by a series of trade union-led protests, namely the Great Strike of 1877. This upsurge in activism caused a sudden increase in the socialist vote, especially in some cities like Cincinnati and Chicago, and allowed the supporters of the ballot box to overtake and exclude their rivals. Apolitical Sorgeans formally remained in the SLP until the end of 1877, but they did not even take part in the second Congress of the party in December 1877, and by 1878 had founded their own organization, the International Labor Union (ILU), with the Labor Standard acting as its official paper.Footnote ⁶⁸ With the departure of the Sorgean group, color-blind internationalism became a minority position defended only by small groups in Chicago and Detroit, with scientific racialism being the most common sensibility among the remaining supporters of the party.

The outcome of this factional fight over the political strategies of the party, won by supporters of political action, had a significant impact on the SLP's racial politics. As seen above, the color-blind position supported by the Labor Standard group was based on clear guidelines. Internationalists offered piecemeal improvements, obtained through industrial action and small-scale organization. Not running at political elections meant not being forced to back political policies antithetical to socialist ideals (the closure of the Pacific borders, for example) solely for electoral reasons. In turn, this gave them the chance to campaign across the color line, an activity that rarely met with widespread support at the ballot box. On the other hand, the scientific racialism of Douai, Grottkau, and Otto-Walster left more room for flexibility and interpretation. Scientific racialists took political stances that were more malleable, and could be bent to follow the will of the electorate and be adapted to the changing intellectual context of the time. On Chinese immigration, after 1877 the SLP did not defend the same racist position as the Workingmen's Party of California, opting for a request to stop the importation of “coolies under contract” rather than a halt to all Chinese immigration.Footnote ⁶⁹ This position was clearly a compromise between conflicting points of view, and it allowed the permanence in the party of a California section that was opposed to Chinese immigration.Footnote ⁷⁰ On race in the South, in 1880 the SLP approved a resolution that urged “workers in the South, regardless of color, to unite with their brothers of the North” to fight against capitalists for the fruits of their labor.Footnote ⁷¹ However, the party struggled to translate this invitation to interracial cooperation into practical action. In the period I examine, the number of African American members in the SLP was negligible, and the few sections of the party located in parts of the country with significant African American communities, such as St. Louis and Cincinnati, did not include significant numbers of black workers.Footnote ⁷² Had the color-blind faction controlled the SLP after 1877, the behavior of the biggest socialist organization in the United States on Chinese immigration and the “Negro Question” would have likely been significantly different. Analyzing the history of the party through the lens of racial politics helps to reconstruct the circumstances in which socialists of the time made their decisions, and the way in which American workers assessed them.

Racial politics also helps to interpret the historical legacies of the contraposition animating the SLP in this period. Color-blind internationalism and scientific racialism had different impacts on U.S. labor history. Those who remained in the party after 1878 continued to support an unclear and unsuccessful approach to race. The record of the SLP in the 1880s is characterized by evident cases of white supremacism (the party was fervently anti-Chinese after 1882) and a general silence on other issues such as the situation of African Americans in the South and the annihilation of Native Americans on the Western frontier.Footnote ⁷³ Conversely, supporters of color-blind internationalism remained active in their attempts to organize American workers beyond racial division. The history of the International Labor Union was not particularly successful. The ILU enlisted among its members some old activists of the eight-hour movement, such as Ira Steward and George E. McNeill, even though these former NLU members no longer held prominent positions of leadership among American workers.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to Sorge himself, the ILU managed to organize some successful events in New England, but after a couple of years the organization was dismantled. In his 1890s series of articles in the Neue Zeit, Sorge blamed the repressive anti-trade union regulations for the early failure of his organization. Even if the meeting called by the ILU attracted large turnouts, he argued, the organizers could not find workers who agreed to be president or secretary of their assemblies, let alone enroll in the organization, because having their names published in the Labor Standard would have guaranteed a swift dismissal from their workplace. Despite decent results, then, the union was forced to close in 1880.Footnote ⁷⁵

However, the color-blind internationalism of the ILU did not disappear from the world of organized American labor. The promotion of piecemeal measures to improve the lot of workingmen and women without distinction of race and ethnicity returned as a key aspect of the action of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. Not only that, but the Knights put into practice the intuition of Middleton. Animated by the conviction that organizing workers in loco was the best strategy against cheap labor, they actually opened sections of the trade union federation in Europe and attempted to tackle the problem of immigration by improving the conditions of potential immigrants at home, similarly to earlier attempts by the IWMA in the 1860s and what the ILU wanted to do in the 1870s.Footnote ⁷⁶

Former members of the ILU and of the SLP contributed to the success of the Knights. Labor historian Richard Oestreicher has documented the fluid process that brought the Detroit section of the SLP to become the organizing infrastructure of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s.Footnote ⁷⁷ The reasons of this evolution were rather straightforward. The political successes of the SLP in the late 1870s proved to be rather short lived, and by the beginning of the 1880s socialists were looking for new ways to attract workers to their ranks. Those groups who still supported trade unionism in the Detroit and Chicago sections of the party were quick to resume their political action and affiliate with the Knights in their recruiting job. If pursuing their ideals meant abandoning the SLP, these activists were ready to do that. The ideals of ethnic and racial equality sketched by ILU members were translated into deeds by the Knights of Labor. Sorge and his group indicated a possible alternative that many socialists were ready to embrace in the 1880s.