Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [786]
Their very success at rooting themselves in Kleindeutschland concerned the ever practical Marx, who sent word from London that the nascent American socialist movement had better expand beyond “foreigners residing in the U.S.” Sorge protested this characterization, calling his members “adopted citizens,” but others admitted that “we Germans do not mingle with Americans in public.” In July 1871, accordingly, two “American sections” were admitted to the International.
The leaders of Sections 9 and 12 were indigenous (and mostly elderly) New York land reformers and labor activists. Some had been engaged in radical politics since the era of the Loco Focos. They included John Commerford, the chairmaker who had presided over the National Trades Union in 1835, Lewis Masquerier, who had helped George Henry Evans found the National Reform Association in 1844, and Stephen Pearl Andrews, the now sixty-year-old abolitionist, anarchist, mystic, Free Lover, and leader of a circle that included Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.
These survivors of the successful crusade against slavery were determined to create a fully egalitarian society. Andrews and his comrades were radical democrats, convinced that extending citizenship rights to blacks and women was the best way to right society’s wrongs. They also supported a vast range of other reforms—universal religion, universal language, universal world government—some with distinctly crankish aspects. They ardently opposed monopolies, landlords, politicians, and clerics but were also, as Marxists noted with alarm, hostile to class-based movements and sought the “Scientific Reconciliation of Labor and Capital.” Yet it was clear to the Germans that, all in all, the American sections’ democratic egalitarianism and experience with direct action made them a potentially potent addition. For the moment, the IWA flourished—by the end of 1871 there were thirty-three sections, with five thousand members—and it received the endorsement of the English-speaking New York Workingmen’s Assembly led by the sympathetic William J. Jessup.
Working women, on the other hand, though they would have liked to join the resurgent labor movement, continued to be unwelcome. So some responded positively when, as before the war, they received offers of help from middle-class women—this time not religious reformers but suffrage leaders. Stanton and Anthony turned to workers in their search for allies. The Revolution embraced the eight-hour day and greenbackism, agreed that the working class was the source of all wealth, accepted that the rich had stolen their wealth from those who created it, and declared that strikes were legitimate tools of working people.
As part of their new concern for the condition of working women in New York City, feminists investigated the situation of seamstresses at A. T. Stewart’s department store, and in 1868, Anthony and Stanton established the Workingwoman’s Association, initially composed chiefly of female typographers who worked in The Revolution’s shop. Publishers confronting strikes by the all-male National Typographical Union had made a practice of training women as compositors, employing them as scabs, then firing (or demoting) them once the men were brought to terms. This had created a pool of semiskilled, semitrained women floating around the industry, whom Anthony through the typographers offered to help organize. The female printers decided to take her up on it, though nervous about being tagged “strong-minded