The International Workingmen's Association (IWA) in the United States of America took the form of a loose network of about 35 frequently discordant local "sections," each professing allegiance to the London-based IWA, commonly known as the "First International." These sections were divided geographically and by the language spoken by their members, frequently new immigrants to America, including those who spoke German, French, Czech, as well as Irish and "American" English-language groups.

The peak membership of the various sections of the International Workingmen's Association in the United States has been variously estimated in the vicinity of 4,000 to 5,000.

Organizational history

Background

The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International, was established in London in 1864. The organization was initially strictly European in composition, including prominently English, French, German, Polish, and Italian labor leaders and political activists.

The International made its way to American soil in 1866 when Italian socialist Cesare Orsini, brother of an attempted assassin of Napoleon III, arrived in the United States in 1866 and attempted to organize an American section.Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998; pg. 6. Orsini managed to win the support of a number of a handful of émigré socialists in New York City, in addition to gaining a sympathetic hearing from several prominent political figures, including newspaper editor Horace Greeley, abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, and radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner.

At the time of its establishment, the International was far from a revolutionary organization, seeking rather to advance the cause of labor through international cooperation of organized workers around a general program based upon the notions of liberty and justice.Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 48. This somewhat tender trade unionist perspective was not universal among its members, however, as from the outset it gained the participation of German émigrés Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and many of their co-thinkers, for whom the purpose of the IWA were not the modest goals of raising wages, lowering working hours, and liberalizing election law through international cooperation, but rather the construction of an international organization as a tool for the winning of state power from the bourgeoisie.Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 49.

In this era of imperfect transatlantic communications the message of the IWA was spread through personal communication, with parallel networks emerging between Karl Marx and his associates on the one hand and the official "American Corresponding Secretary" of the General Council of the IWA in London.Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 58. In effect these parallel channels of communication replicated the factional divisions of the European organization. The tension between labor-reformist and revolutionary visions of the IWA would find reflection in the factional warfare within the organization in America. Andrew Cameron was a delegate of the National Labor Union who attended the Basle Congress (1869).

Early New York movement

In December 1867 a first step towards formal organization on behalf of the International took place in New York City when a call was issued for a meeting to be held the next month at the Germania Assembly Rooms, located in the city's Bowery district.Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1903; pg. 177. Those calling the meeting were activists in the German-American labor movement. This event was held successfully and served as the foundation convention for an independent political party known as the Social Party of New York and Vicinity.

The Social Party adopted a platform which incorporated elements both of the program of the International as well as that of the fledgling National Labor Union (NLU) established less than two years earlier by William H. Sylvis. The group elected parallel Executive Boards, one each for its German-speaking and English-speaking membership. These two executive bodies cooperated in naming and running a ticket for city political office in the election of 1868. This effort was met with voter apathy, however, and the first campaign of the Social Party of New York also proved to be its last.

Following the 1868 electoral failure, the Social Party of New York dissolved and its leading German-speaking members established a new organization called the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (General German Workers' Association). This group had an unabashed international socialist orientation and was later recalled by Friedrich Sorge to have consisted "almost exclusively" of "plain wage-workers of every possible trade."F.A. Sorge, "Die Arbeiterbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1867-1877" (The Labor Movement in the United States, 1867-1877), Neue Zeit, No. 13 (1891-92), cited in Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, pg. 178.

In February 1869, shortly after its formation, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein was admitted to the National Labor Union as "Labor Union No. 5 of New York."Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, pg. 178. The group sent delegates to the 1869 and 1870 national conventions of the NLU, but withdrew from the organization immediately after the 1870 conclave.

Section 1

In the fall of 1869, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, also known as Labor Union No. 5 of New York, affiliated as a group with the International Workingmen's Association, becoming "Section No. 1 of New York." The group would not only become the bulwark of the International in America, but it would ultimately outlive the International itself, terminating only in 1874, two years after the death of the International.

Section 1 maintained contacts with various trade unions in New York City and around the country and was instrumental in helping to establish new sections of the International. Early in 1870 a French-speaking section was established in New York City, with a Czech-speaking section following the fall of that same year.

Communication between the executive of the International in London and the American movement was fragmented, with American sections speaking one or another language communicating directly with corresponding secretaries in that language in London — a situation which was deemed as contributing to factional rivalry and personal animosity.Samuel Bernstein, The First International in America. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1962; pg. 53. It was deemed desirable that a single Central Committee should be established in the United States to smooth the transmission of official communications to and from London. On October 2, 1870, a joint meeting of the German and French sections of New York City voted to accept the London Council's plan.Bernstein, The First International in America, pp. 53-54.

This was followed in December 1870 by the formal launch of the "Central Committee of the International Workingmen's Association for North America" by the German, French, and Czech sections.Bernstein, The First International in America, pg. 54. Within six months this body would include representatives of 10 sections of the International, including 8 from New York City and 2 from Chicago.Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 1: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor. New York: International Publishers, 1947; pg. 417. This would be the formal governing body of the IWA in America.

Growth of the IWA in America

The IWA was not geographically limited to New York City and its environs. In fact the first formal section of the International was established in the West Coast city of San Francisco in March 1869.Bernstein, The First International in America, pg. 61. Within a year supporters of the International were playing a role in the movement for the 8-hour day in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York.

Growth of the IWA in America was spurred enormously by the launch of the Paris Commune on March 26, 1871. Vilified by the conservative press, iconoclasts and radicals of all stripes in America rallied to the revolutionary city government of Paris, which was closely linked with the International Workingmen's Association in the public mind, if not in actual practice.Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 100. Although the Parisian barricades were overrun by defenders of the old regime in May amidst a bloody reaction that claimed as many as 20,000 lives, the French events nevertheless occupied the thinking of a generation in much in the same way that the Russian Revolution of 1917 would have a polarizing and far reaching impact nearly half a century later.

While most of the American press denounced the revolutionaries of Paris, radical reformers took up the revolutionary vision in the pages of their own journals.Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 101. The National Anti-Slavery Standard carried regular dispatches from Paris and kept its readers informed of the legal and political retribution levied against Commune leaders in the aftermath of the failed uprising. The Boston magazine Commonwealth, established by a Southern abolitionist minister, likewise defended the Commune in its pages.Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 102. So, too, did radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who declared, "There is no hope for France but in the Reds."Quoted in Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 103.

In addition to the abolitionist movement, an additional source of broad support for the goals and methods of the Paris Commune came via various newspapers associated with the Spiritualist movement.Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 103. The largest Spiritualist weekly, Banner of Light, attempted to explain for its readers the motivations and actions of the Communards, declaring they were "weary of the servitude that practically accompanies the wages condition, when all exercise of political power is denied it."Banner of Light, July 15, 1871, quoted in Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pp. 103-104.

By September 1871 there were 19 sections of the International in the US, of which 3 were "American" and 16 were non-English speaking. Eight more sections were added the next month and another 7 in November. By the end of 1871 the IWA in America included a total of about 35 sections, including groups in Philadelphia, Washington, DC, St. Louis, New Orleans, Newark, New Jersey, and Springfield, Massachusetts, among other places.

While no hard membership data is extant, scholarly estimates of the total number of American participants have generally clustered in the vicinity of 5,000,See for example: Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, pg. 179; Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 1, pg. 413; Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 1. Samuel Bernstein, perhaps the most careful scholar of the subject, indicates that total membership "very likely did not go beyond 4,000, after the increase in the first part of 1872."

Section 12

The French events also seem to have helped radicalize Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, editors in 1870 of the eclectic Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly.Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, pg. 106. Woodhull and Claflin were daughters of a religious revivalist mother and a father reckoned by his contemporaries as a grifter; Victoria had attempted to escape through marriage at age 15, while Tennessee had been exploited as a purported psychic healer and namesake of a homebrewed quack remedy concocted by her parents, "Miss Tennessee's Magnetio Life Elixir for Beautifying the Complexion and Cleansing the Blood."