The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876

Examining the social and intellectual collision of the American

reform tradition with immigrant Marxism during the Reconstruction

era, Timothy Messer-Kruse charts the rise and fall of the

International Workingman's Association (IWA), the first

international socialist organization. He analyzes what attracted

American reformers--many of them veterans of antebellum crusades for abolition, women's rights, and other radical causes--to the IWA, how their presence affected the course of the American Left, and why they were ultimately purged from the IWA by their orthodox Marxist comrades.

Messer-Kruse explores the ideology and activities of the

Yankee Internationalists, tracing the evolution of antebellum

American reformers' thinking on the question of wage labor and

illuminating the beginnings of a broad labor reform coalition in

the early years of Reconstruction. He shows how American

reformers' priority of racial and sexual equality clashed with

their Marxist partners' strategy of infiltrating trade unions.

Ultimately, he argues, Marxist demands for party discipline and

ideological unity proved incompatible with the Yankees' native

republicanism. With the expulsion of Yankee reformers from the

IWA in 1871, American Marxism was divorced from the American

reform tradition.