Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

198 // PAUL BUHLE AND ROBIN D. G. KELIEY
Beginnings
The particular legacy of the Left within labor and vice versa has had a decisive
institutional impact upon interaction between Jews and African Americans, particularly
during the twentieth century. Tracing this legacy returns the story to the
birth of an organized Left in which socialist-oriented Jews and Blacks, each relatively
few in number, came to represent forces far larger than themselves.
The International Workingmen's Association (or "First International," as it
would later be called) brought Marxism and a modern Left onto American shores
during the later 1860s, through a telling confluence of two distinct traditions.
The first, usually considered the most important in the alliance, comprised the
mostly German-American bloc of immigrant workers and intellectuals. As heirs
to generations of political mobilization and cultural-educational association in the
Old World, even before the Civil War Germans had created a culture of radical
artisans whose eagerness to fight against Southern secession and slavery emboldened
the radical wing of the young Republican Party and actually decimated the
German-American radical ranks. 2
They had nevertheless blazed the trail for the younger German-Americans of
the 1870s—90s, who established a rich associational life, with newspapers, craft
unions, and fraternal associations. All left-of-center, such institutions were largely
restricted to their own linguistic and neighborhood culture, establishing an
important pattern in the various ethnic sections of the American Left for generations,
one with a crucial impact upon Black and Jewish interactions. Finding a
place for their socialist values within a seemingly capitalist culture, ethnic radicals
unintentionally walled themselves off from other communities, including
African Americans. At its best, however, their evolving notion of group survival
within a future socialism also evoked a conscious multiculturalism large enough
to accommodate African Americans' special presence even before the immigrant
radicals gained a sense of Blacks' central role in American history and culture. 3
Yankee reformers, rooted in the abolitionist and perfectionist movements of
the 1840s-60s, constituted the other wing of the International. Their political
associations often had bolder commitments to universality (such as support for
women's rights) than those of the immigrant socialists, but little comparable lasting
power. Like the anti-racist or anti-imperialist movements of later generations
on the Left, they represented sentiment more than fixed constituency and urgently
needed allies successfully rooted in ethnic life. Like the German-Americans,
they did possess one cause appealing to the scattering of Jewish middle class and
the young Jewish immigrants first finding their way to labor and radical movements
during the 1880s: the militant advocacy of Free Thought, a vision of life
emancipated from conservative evangelical Protestant or Catholic hierarchy, or
Jewish rabbinate. 4
A fratricidal conflict between these two groups and the sudden collapse of the
First International in 1.871—72 eclipsed the influence of the "American" reform-