For their feedback across the various stages of preparation of this article, the author thanks Alex Bryne, Tom Bishop, Ian Harvey, Christopher Phelps, Michael Strange, Robin Vandome, the audiences of the 2015 Spring Academy of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and the 2015 Radical Americas conference at the University College London, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal. The author also wishes to express his gratitude to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (Austin, Texas), the Tamiment Institute (New York), and the Central Library of St. Louis, who offered access to vital primary sources for the preparation of this article.

1 Leo, “The Chinese Question Again – Leo's Reply,” The Socialist, Mar. 8, 1879.

2 Cf. Bannister, Robert C., ed., On Liberty, Society and Politics: The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 Leo, “The Chinese Question Again – Leo's Reply,” The Socialist, Mar. 8, 1879.

4 Leo, “The Chinese Problem,” The Socialist, Feb. 15, 1879.

5 Pittenger's, Mark American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993)Google Scholar is somewhat of an exception. However, his analysis focuses on evolutionist theories to the detriment of race.

6 Cf. Foner, Philip S., American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 94–150Google Scholar; Miller, Sally M., Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century Socialism (London: Garland, 1996), 5–9Google Scholar.

7 Jones, William P., “‘Nothing Special to Offer the Negro’: Revisiting the “‘Debsian View’ of the Negro Question,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (Fall 2008): 212–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Recently, Paul M. Heideman has significantly contributed to give a richer and more comprehensive description of Progressive Era socialist opinions on race in the collection Class Struggle and the Color Line. This work attests to the intellectual vitality of the debates on race, socialism, and communism in the American Left in the 1900–1930 period. Cf. Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900–1930, ed. Heideman, Paul M. (London: Verso, 2018)Google Scholar.

8 Cf. the already mentioned Miller, Race, Ethnicity and Gender; but also, Perry, Jeffrey B., Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Dawson, Michael C., Blacks In and Out of the Left (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 26–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The first name of the party in 1876 was “Workingmen's Party of the United States.” The organization adopted a new denomination—Socialistic Labor Party—at the 1877 Congress in Newark. Progressively throughout the 1880s, “Socialistic” was abandoned in favor of the more widely used “Socialist.” Cf. Foner, Philip S., The Formation of the Workingmen's Party of the United States: Proceedings of the Union Congress Held at Philadelphia, July 19–22, 1876 (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1876)Google Scholar; Party, Socialistic Labor, Platform, Constitution, and Resolutions, Adopted at the National Congress of the Workingmen's Party of the United States, Held at Newark (N.J.), December 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 1877 (Cincinnati: Ohio Volks-Zeitung Print, 1878)Google Scholar.

10 Draper, Theodore, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking, 1963), 31Google Scholar.

11 Lipset, Seymour Martin, Marks, Gary, It Didn't Happen Here. Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 138Google Scholar.

12 The party did not keep regular lists of members. It is, therefore, difficult to reconstruct the precise dimension of the different ethnic groups with the party. However, scholars agree on placing the percentage of German Americans between the 80 and 90 percent. Cf. Hillquit, Morris, History of Socialism in the United States (1903; repr., New York: Russel & Russel, 1965), 213Google Scholar; Keil, Hartmut, “German Working-Class Immigration and the Social Democratic Tradition of Germany” in German Workers’ Culture in the United States 1850 to 1920, ed. Keil, Hartmut (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 7Google Scholar.

13 Department of the Interior, Office, Census, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 538–39Google Scholar.

14 Ibid.

15 A selection of literature on the impact of German immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century include Nadel, Stan, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion and Class in New York City, 1845–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Levine, Bruce C., The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Honeck, Mischa, We are Revolutionists: German-speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Efford, Alison Clark, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (Washington, DC; Cambridge: German Historical Institute; Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On German Americans in the American radical world, cf. Keil, “German Working-Class Immigration”; Nadel, Stan, “The German Immigrant Left in the United States” in The Immigrant Left in the United States, eds. Buhle, Paul and Georgakas, Dan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Michels, Tony, A Fire in Their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Goyens, Tom, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Buhle, Paul, Marxism in the United States. A History of the American Left (London: Verso, 2013), 19–57Google Scholar.

16 The SLP achieved its peak of influence in the 1890s under the leadership of Daniel De Leon. However, in the late 1870s the party gathered many prominent labor and radical leaders, from the future Haymarket martyr Albert R. Parsons to founders of the American Federation of Labor Peter J. McGuire and Adolph Strasser to the prominent leader of the labor movement of Detroit Jo Labadie. The influence of the early SLP faded in the early 1880s, when many abandoned the party and joined the anarchist movement or trade unions such as the AFL or the Knights of Labor. For references on the history of the SLP, the most accurate work remains: Perlman, Selig, “Upheaval and Reorganisation (from 1877)” in Commons, John et al. , History of Labour in the United States, (New York: MacMillan Company, 1935–36), 2:269–90Google Scholar. On De Leon and the SLP in the 1890s, cf. Seretan, Glen, Daniel De Leon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coleman, Stephen, Daniel De Leon (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

17 Historian Hartmut Keil has detailed how the relationship between German socialists in the United States and Germany evolved in the 1870s and 1880s. Cf. Keil, “German Working-Class Immigration,” 7–14.

18 Classic works on the “transatlantic space” and the left include Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar and Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. On transatlantic ties between the United States and Germany, cf. Schäfer, Axel R., American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000)Google Scholar; Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

19 On pre-Darwinian concepts of race, cf. Walls, Laura Dassow, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Figal, Sara Eigen and Larrimore, Mark, The German Invention of Race (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

20 The understanding of Darwinism of German American socialists was shaped by the ways in which Darwin's theories were received in Germany. Cf. Gasman, Daniel, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in the Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald, 1971)Google Scholar; Kelly, Alfred, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany,1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Weikart, Richard, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999)Google Scholar; Richards, Robert J., The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Foner, The Formation, 16–19.

22 Firsthand sources on Adolph Douai's life include Adolph Douai, Autobiography of Dr. Adolf Douai, Revolutionist of 1848, Texas Pioneer, Introducer of the Kindergarten, Educator, Author, Editor, 1819–1888, trans. and ed. Richard H. Douai Böker, 1959, folder 2, Adolph Douai Papers, Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin; “Our Loss,” Workmen's Advocate (New York), Jan. 28, 1888; “Adolph Douai: The gifted and tireless agitator dead,” Workmen's Advocate (New York), Jan. 28, 1888. For scholars’ treatments of his life, cf. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans, 15–29; Randers-Pehrson, Justine Davis, Adolf Douai, 1819–1888: The Turbulent Life of a German Forty-Eighter in the Homeland and in the United States (New York: Peter Lang, 2000)Google Scholar; Honeck, We Are Revolutionists, 38–70.

23 Foner, The Formation, 17.

24 Adolph Douai, “Die Geographie der Menschen,” San Antonio Zeitung, Apr. 4, 1854; Douai, Adolph, Land und Leute in der Union (Berlin: Otto Janke, 1864)Google Scholar.

25 Douai, Autobiography, 37.

26 Ibid., 144.

27 Adolph Douai, “Abstammung und Anpassung beim Menschengeschlecht,” Chicagoer Vorbote, Dec. 7, 1878. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German are my own.

28 The most common way in which intellectual historians have analyzed the impact of evolutionism in this period is through the contested concept of “social Darwinism.” Cf. Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Bannister, Robert C., Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

29 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 45.

30 de Montesquieu, Baron, The Spirit of Laws (1748; repr. New York: The Colonial Press, 1899), 224Google Scholar.

31 Bowler, Peter J., Evolution. The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 90–150Google Scholar.

32 Bowler, Evolution, 156–64.

33 Bowler, Evolution, 151–86.

34 Adolph Douai, “Abstammung und Anpassung beim Menschengeschlecht,” Chicagoer Vorbote, Dec. 7, 1878.

35 Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, 271.

36 “Abstammung und Anpassung beim Menschengeschlecht,” Chicagoer Vorbote, Dec. 28, 1878.

37 “Abstammung und Anpassung beim Menschengeschlecht,” Chicagoer Vorbote, Dec. 14, 1878.

38 “Abstammung und Anpassung beim Menschengeschlecht,” Chicagoer Vorbote, Dec. 28, 1878.

39 Rupke, Nicolaas A., Alexander von Humboldt: a Metabiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–27Google Scholar; Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 12–48.

40 Nichols, Sandra, “Why was Humboldt forgotten in the United States?,” Geographical Review 96:3 (July 2006), 399–415Google Scholar.

41 Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 120–29; Nichols, “Why was Humboldt,” 405.

42 Randers-Pehrson, Adolf Douai, 257–58. During the commemoration, Douai entered in a dispute with a protégé of the renowned naturalist Louis Agassiz, who had celebrated Humboldt for his religious faith. Douai, a fierce atheist, slandered his intervention on the stage, and was later attacked by Agassiz himself. Cf. Randers-Pehrson, Adolph Douai, 259–60.

43 Quoted in Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 175.

44 Ibid. Humboldt's theory of human differences, with its emphasis on diversity and the impossibility of classifying human differences, was an antecedent of Franz Boas's cultural pluralism. Cf. Bunzl, Matti, “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to the Anthropological Concept of Culture” in Volkszeit as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. Stocking, George W. Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

45 For Douai's opinions on African Americans, cf. Adolph Douai, “Something more about the farming population,” Labor Standard (New York), May 4, 1878; Adolph Douai, “Die Negerfrage”, Chicagoer Vorbote, Feb. 22, 1879; on Douai and Chinese immigration, Gyory, Andrew, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 131Google Scholar.

46 Cf. Adolph Douai, “The real number of foreign-born inhabitants of the U. St.,” San Antonio Zeitung, Nov. 25, 1854.

47 “Darwinism,” The Socialist (Chicago), Sept. 28, 1878. Emphasis in the original. The article was originally published in The Index, the journal of the Free Religious Association of Boston.

48 Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 3–35.

49 Ibid.

50 Hartmut Keil, “German Immigrant Working-Class,” 165; Jentz, John B. and Schneirov, Richard, Chicago in the Age of Capital. Class, Politics and Democracy During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 221–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Paul Grottkau, “Der Darwinismus in der ökonomischen und politischen Welt,” Chicagoer Vorbote, May 11, 1878.

52 Ibid.

53 Otto-Walster, August, Leben und Werk: eine Auswahl mit unveröffentlichen Briefen an Karl Marx (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966)Google Scholar; Keil, Hartmut, “A Profile of Editors of German-American Radical Press, 1850–1910” in The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, eds. Shore, Elliot, Fones-Wolf, Ken, and Danky, James P. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 21Google Scholar.

54 Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 58–61; the reaction of Ernst Haeckel to Virchow's comments has subsequently become central to a debate that still divides scholars on the connections between Haeckel and Nazism. Cf. Gasman, The Scientific Origins; Hawkins, Social Darwinism; Weikart, Richard, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 August Otto-Walster, “Darwinismus und Socialdemokratie” in Volksstimme des Westens (St. Louis), Oct. 13, 1878.

56 Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, Dec. 11, 1859. Quoted in Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism, 22.

57 Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, Jan. 16, 1861. Quoted in Weikart, Socialist Darwinism, 23.

58 Weikart, Socialist Darwinism, 22. On Marx, Engels and their ideas on Darwin and evolutionism, cf. also Pittenger, American Socialists, 15–25.

59 Foner, Philip S., “Friedrich Adolph Sorge: ‘Father of Modern Socialism in America’” in Sorge, Friedrich A., Friedrich A. Sorge's Labor Movement in the United States. A History of the American Working Class from Colonial Times to 1890, eds. Foner, Philip S. and Chamberlin, Brewster (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 3–41Google Scholar.

60 Gutman, Herbert G., “Joseph P. McDonnell and the Workers’ Struggle in Paterson, New Jersey” in Gutman, Herbert G., Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class (New York: The New Press, 1987), 95–98Google Scholar.

61 “The Necessity of International Organization,” Labor Standard (New York), Jan. 18, 1877.

62 Middleton, “The International Labor Congress and American Representation,” Labor Standard (New York), July 7, 1877.

63 Ibid.; emphasis in the original.

64 Ibid.; emphasis in the original.

65 Quoted in Foner, Philip S., The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Pathfinder, 1977), 119–23Google Scholar.

66 Critiques from a historical point of view include Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans, 57–150; Dawson, Blacks In and Out. For a theoretical and philosophical critique, cf. Mills, Charles W., From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 126–30; 148–55Google Scholar.

67 Selig Perlman, “Upheaval and Reorganisation (from 1877),” 2:269–90.

68 Labor Standard (New York), July 2, 16, and 23, 1877; National Socialist (Cincinnati), May 11, 1878.

69 Socialistic Labor Party, Platform, Constitution, and Resolutions, Adopted at the National Congress of the Workingmen's Party of the United States, Held at Newark (N.J.).

70 Not all the members were satisfied with this compromise. A group of SLP members abandoned the party after the approval of this clause. However, between 1880 and 1882 the SLP adopted a mild anti-Chinese point of view. Cf. “Protest der deutschsprechenden Sektion San Francisco,” Arbeiter Stimme (New York), Mar. 24, 1878; “California,” Labor Standard (New York), July 29, 1878; “Address to the Party”, National Socialist (Cincinnati), Sept. 7, 1878; “Party News,” Bulletin of the Social Labor Movement (New York), May 1882; Selig Perlman, “Upheaval and Reorganisation, 2:254.”

71 Socialistic Labor Party, Platform, Constitution, and Resolutions, Together With a Condensed Report of the Proceedings of the National Convention, Held at Allegheny, Pa., December 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31, 1879, and January 1, 1880 (Detroit: National Executive Committee, 1880), 3.

72 The SLP's record on African Americans is patchy and inconsistent. For reasons of space, it is not possible to go into details. A more extensive analysis can be found at: Lorenzo Costaguta, “Which Way to Emancipation? Race and Ethnicity in American Socialist Thought, 1876–1899,” (PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2017), 140–84. On St. Louis, cf. also “Die Negerwanderung,” Volksstimme des Westens (St. Louis), Mar. 17, 1879; “Über die Flucht der Farbigen aus dem Süden,” Volksstimme des Westens (St. Louis), Apr. 21, 1879; “Die Negereinwanderung,” Volksstimme des Westens (St. Louis), July 15, 1879; “Über Neger-Auswanderung,” Volksstimme des Westens (St. Louis), Sept. 22, 1879; Kanter, Eliott J., “Class, Ethnicity, and Socialist Politics: St. Louis, 1876–1881,” UCLA Historical Journal 3 (1982): 46–47Google Scholar. On Cincinnati, Taylor, Nikki M., America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 130–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Costaguta, “Which Way,” 101–84.

74 Foner, Workingmen's Party, 105–13.

75 Sorge, Friedrich A. Sorge's Labor Movement in the United States, 199.

76 On internationalism and the Knights of Labor, cf. Parfitt, Steven, “Brotherhood from a Distance: Americanization and the Internationalism in the Knights of Labor,” International Review of Social History 58:3 (Dec. 2013): 463–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Oestreicher, Richard Jules, “Socialism and the Knights of Labor,” Labor History 22:1 (1981): 5–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oestreicher, , Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 76–101Google Scholar.

78 Heideman, “Introduction” in Class Struggle and the Color Line, 2.