Yankee International - by Timothy Messer-Kruse (Paperback)

About the Book

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. 10 illustrations.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

[I]t may well lead scholars to reconfigure the history of the American Left.

Carl J. Guarneri, author of "The Utopian Alternative"

An absorbing, well-researched study.

"New England Quarterly"

"[I]t may well lead scholars to reconfigure the history of the American Left.

Carl J. Guarneri, author of "The Utopian Alternative""

"An absorbing, well-researched study.

"New England Quarterly""

Messer-Kruse does a superb job recapturing the radicalism of the American activists about whom he writes.

"Labour History Review"

Messer-Kruse's work is an entertaining examination.

"Choice"

About the Author

Timothy Messer-Kruse is assistant professor of labor history at the University of Toledo.