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Jason D Martinek, Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 367–368, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae139
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Extract
A disjuncture exists between this book's title and its subject. The extent of racial solidarity in the origins of American socialism (as Lorenzo Costaguta's evidence attests) was all too rare. While moments of possibility exist, when leading socialists put forward alternatives to the dominant racist tropes of late nineteenth-century America, deep divisions over how to address race remained a consistent theme in the early history of organized socialism in the United States. That said, the author offers a far more nuanced interpretation of how late nineteenth-century socialists dealt with race. And what emerges are idiosyncratic takes as immigrant socialists confronted race in the United States and sought to explain it using a range of theoretical concepts. How popular these views became within the socialist movement is not always clear.
Costaguta has taken up the historian Paul Buhle's long-standing challenge to dig deeper into the histories of the specific ethnic groups composing the socialist movement to help us understand the contours of socialism in the United States and reveal new insights. Costaguta focuses on German American members of the Socialist Labor party in the late nineteenth century. He is most interested in how they dealt with questions of race and ethnicity prior to the rise of Daniel DeLeon's orthodox party-line approach in the 1890s.
