Workingmen's Party of the United States

WORKINGMEN’S PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES. The first nationwide socialist organization in the United States, the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS) was formed in July 1876 through a merger of several groupings, including the North American remnants of Karl Marx’s First International. The organization included many immigrant and native-born labor radicals, including Adolf Douai, Samuel Gompers, Laurence Gronlund, J. P. McDonnell, P. J. McGuire, Thomas J. Morgan, Albert and Lucy Parsons, George Schilling, Friedrich Sorge, Adolph Strasser, Philip Van Patten, and Otto Weydemeyer, as well as the first known African American socialist, Peter H. Clark. It published the Chicago Vorbote (Herald), the New York Arbeiter-Stimme (Labor’s Voice), and the English-language weekly Labor Standard (edited by J. P. McDonnell, a former Irish Fenian and secretary to Karl Marx in the International Workingmen’s Association).

During its brief existence, the WPUS doubled its membership to seven thousand, largely but not exclusively German Americans, the bulk of whom appear to have been skilled craft workers. They were pioneers in trade unionism, socialist electoral work, agitation for the eight-hour workday, and the dissemination and popularization of Marxism and socialist ideas in the United States. When the spontaneous upsurge of mass strikes and working-class street actions swept the country in 1877, WPUS militants played a prominent role—particularly in Saint Louis, but also in Chicago and other cities.

The WPUS favored working-class unity transcending racial and ethnic divisions. Yet there is evidence of prejudice among some members in California toward imported Chinese laborers and in Missouri toward Black workers. Nor was there an appreciation in the organization of the catastrophe wrought by the Republican Party’s final betrayal of Reconstruction and Black rights in the South. There were also differences over whether women workers should be organized or instead driven back to their “rightful place” in the home, so as not to compete with male labor.

The most salient division, however, revolved around electoral activity. The party initially adopted a position favoring independent labor-socialist electoral campaigns only after a trade union movement was securely established. In the wake of the 1877 labor upsurge, however, many WPUS sections ran candidates—with some initial successes (e.g., Chicago, Cincinnati). This resulted in a split by October 1877, with a sizable minority (led by such people as Sorge, Strasser, McDonnell, Weydemeyer, and Gompers) leaving the organization to concentrate on trade union work; many of these were later centrally involved in establishing the American Federation of Labor. The majority of the WPUS transformed the organization into the Socialist Labor Party, which remained a vital force for socialism and labor action until it was split by new differences in the early 1880s.

Commons, John R., et al. History of Labor in the United States. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan, 1918.

Foner, Philip S. The Great Labor Uprising of 1877. New York: Monad Press, 1977.

Foner, Philip S. The Workingmen’s Party of the United States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the Americas. Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1984.

Kaufman, Stuart Bruce. Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973.

Sorge, Friedrich A. Labor Movement in the United States. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Workingmens Party of the United States, Proceedings of the Union Congress, held at Philadelphia on the 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd Day of July 1876. Declaration of Principles, Constitution, Resolutions, etc ... Internet Archive.