Workers of All Colors, Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism by Lorenzo Costaguta (review)

Reviewed by: Workers of All Colors, Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism by Lorenzo Costaguta Janine Giordano Drake Workers of All Colors, Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism By Lorenzo Costaguta (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. 254. Illustrations, notes, index. Clothbound 110. 00; paperbound 28. 00; e-book 19. 95. ) It is not hard to acknowledge that the Republican Party, which emerged in the 1850s as the party of "free soil, free labor, free men, " was deeply enmeshed in the system of white supremacy. Republicans theoretically supported Black voting rights, but they condoned Black exclusion laws and supported the rights of big business to play one race against the other in pursuit of affordable labor. It is much harder to acknowledge that the International Workingmen's Party in the United States, which grew alongside the Republican Party in the 1850s and took greatest expression in the Socialist Labor Party of the 1870s-1890s, was just as deeply enmeshed in the same systems of white supremacy. We often want to imagine that the left was always anti-racist and anti-sexist, or at least recognized the white power and empire-building at the heart of white capitalism. But American socialism was not born fully formed. In his important new book, Workers of All Colors Unite, Lorenzo Costaguta, an Italian scholar working in the United Kingdom, offers a definitive study of racial thought in the history of German-speaking American socialists End Page 82 between the 1850s and the 1890s. Costaguta finds that these socialists, who comprised the bulk of socialist party members before 1900, opposed slavery but cooperated at every turn with white Americans' efforts to sustain the antebellum order of white supremacy. In California, German-speaking socialists offered meaningful critiques of the Chinese peonage system, but failed to forge any solidarity with Chinese laborers. They joined the populist chorus of "The Chinese Must Go!" in hopes of building solidarity with struggling white European workers. In the Southeast, German-speaking socialists paid lip service to Black exploitation and opened socialist chapters to African American members. While they were glad to collect dues from Black members, they offered no remediation to victims of white-on-Black vigilante violence, systemic disenfranchisement, or inequitable access to education. They paid scant attention to patterns of Black resistance. In Oklahoma and the West, German-speaking socialists praised Native Americans for their "primitive" forms of communism, critiqued the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and spoke eloquently of the predatory nature of capitalism on Indigenous communities. Again, however, they offered no solidarity in protecting Native Americans' ancestral rights to their homelands. In fact, socialists encouraged Native Americans to participate in the destruction of their communities through allotment. As Costaguta clarifies throughout the book, German-speaking American socialists were captive to the white supremacist vision of empire-building that knit together Europe and the Americas. They were advocates of what Costaguta calls "racialist" evolutionary thought, the belief that socialist revolution came only through civilization and industrialization. Ironically or not, the Europeans and Americans who subscribed to these ideas thought of themselves as more "scientific" and "internationalist" than those who subscribed to nationalist ideologies of race and nation. Even after Daniel DeLeon set out to "Americanize" the Socialist Labor Party, an effort that mandated the use of English in periodicals and deliberations for the sake of openness, the organization's commitment to building a coalition of ethnic federations displaced and precluded discussions of the unique treatment of African Americans in American democracy. Precisely because these scientific socialists believed that ethnic and racial groups were distinct and situated on a spectrum of civilization, they did not acknowledge the systems of Black oppression from which they benefited and within which they participated. Costaguta wants readers to recognize American Socialism before 1900, and perhaps even up to the years before World War I, as a German American ethnic tradition. The roots of twentieth-century American socialism, which we sometimes begin with Eugene V. Debs and his vision of a Cooperative Commonwealth, actually lie in these German-speaking socialist communities of the late nineteenth century and End Page 83 their own participation in European socialist politics. The Socialist Labor. . .