Department of History & Cultures

Examination of the WWII "Cadre System", whereby pre-war officers and NCOs were utilized to form the core around which new units of the rapidly-expanding U.S. Army were formed. Example unit is the 501st Quartermaster Railhead Company formed in August 1942 from a cadre of men from the pre-war Company F, 120th Quartermaster Regiment, Oklahoma National Guard.

(if you are interested in this paper, please send me an email and I will be happy to send you a copy of it!)

My paper provides a reinterpretation of the life and thought of Daniel De Leon (Marxist leader of the American Socialist Labor Party from 1890 to 1914) through transatlantic lenses. It investigates the connections between American ad European socialist movements, both from a cultural and a political point of view. It demonstrates that the transnational methodology provides historians with new means to rediscuss transatlantic connections between working class movements, deepening the comprehension of them and reassessing their failures and successes. I introduce three points to discuss my argument.
1. De Leon’s biographical background: De Leon was born in 1852 in the Jewish community of Curacao, a Dutch owned island in the Caribbean. Between 1866 and 1874 he was educated in Amsterdam and Hildesheim, where he experienced in person the unification of Germany. He finally moved to the United States in the mid-1870s. Being exposed to several religious, cultural and national communities, he maturated a dislocated and conflictual personal identity, before lately joining with enthusiasm the American nation and the socialist cause.
2. This complexity can be acknowledged into his writings: his speeches and articles are embedded with American nationalist rhetoric, even if they defend a Marxist analysis of the so-called Labor question (the situation of extreme poverty experienced by the American working class between 1890 and 1910). They put forward a non-coherently developed synthesis between Marxist thought and American political culture.
3. De Leon’s party, the SLP, grew outside the American borders. Sections of it were organized in England, Ireland, Scotland and Australia. As suggested by Marcel Van den Linden, therefore, De Leonism can be defined as a “classical” example of transnationalism (Van den Linden 2003).

All these elements, in conclusion, prove that De Leon can be convincingly seen as an ante-litteram transatlantic figure, even if this does not lead to re-evaluate his political achievements, which remain essentially limited.

(if you are interested in this paper, please send me an email and I will be happy to send you a copy of it!)

When the Anti-Chinese Bill was signed by President Arthur in 1882, more than a hundred thousand Chinese workers lived in the United States (mostly in California). Seen as an unbearable threat by white workers and employers, they were forbidden the access to the U.S. with the almost unanimous consensus of the American public opinion.
My paper discusses the American socialist movement reactions to the supposed “Chinese question”. Analysing newspaper articles published between 1878 and 1890 by the socialist press, my paper investigates the interlinking and complicate relation between race and class during the American Gilded Age. Were white workers influenced by class solidarity? Did they see the problem of Chinese immigration merely as a race-based issue? Were they claiming their “whiteness” as a distinctive element to reject Chinese immigration?
My contention is that from 1878 to 1882 it is possible to map a debate in the socialist movement between an overall moderate “possibilist” answer to Chinese immigration, opposed to racist and prejudicial positions expressed by militants to describe chronicles of facts. The situation changed after the approval of the Anti-Chinese Bill, when the moderate pro-Chinese positions disappeared and left room for biased and racist stands, which strengthened and gained ground during the 1880s. My paper expounds the disputes raging in the socialist movement over the “Chinese question” in details and provide a critical new insight into the evolving debates over class, race, socialism and immigration that dominated the American Gilded Age.

[FULL TEXT AVAILABLE IN THE LINK BELOW]
This paper sets out to analyse a group of liberal theories that take a 'social practice-based' approach, namely those contained in The Concept of law by Herbert Hart; Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness by John Rawls; The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty by Friedrich Hayek. This essay focuses on the sources of Law and its role in a modern society. By ‘social-based approach’ I mean an approach that explicates the normative character of Law in terms of reasons internal to the normal workings of social practices. It has two antitheses: the ‘natural law approach’, which sees the source of the normativity of Law in natural rights and the ‘sovereignty model’, which holds that there is a specific source of the authority of Law (a sovereign body, a king, the Will of the people). The premise on which this essay is based is that Hart, Rawls and Hayek share the same methological approach (the social-based one).
The aim will be to compare these theories in order to identify their negative and positive aspects. It will be argued that, while Rawls’s project is a fruitful evolution of Hart’s insights into legal jurisprudence, Hayek’s theory contradicts his own liberal stance and ends up embracing a conservative point of view.

L’obiettivo di questo saggio è fornire una lettura della vicenda biografica di Daniel De Leon (1852-1914) che coniughi l'analisi della sua produzione teorica con una profonda revisione della sua storia intellettuale. Da una parte, si cercherà di suggerire un'interpretazione in chiave identitaria della parabola storica di De Leon, collegando il periodo precedente all'ingresso nel partito con quello successivo. Dall'altra, si darà conto dell'evoluzione delle sue teorie, evidenziandone sì le ascendenze “biografiche”, ma rintracciandone anche uno sviluppo unitario tramite l'analisi delle trascrizioni dei suoi discorsi e della sua vasta produzione giornalistica.

Book review of:

Alison Clark Efford. German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era. Washington D.C.; Cambridge: German Historical Institute; Cambridge University Press, 2013. x + 267 pp.

published on 49th Parallel, Issue 35 (2015).

Review of:

Denis Brennan. The Making of an Abolitionist: William Lloyd Garrison’s Path to Publishing _The Liberator_. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. 224 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7864-7425-7.

Published on H-Net - Socialisms, August 2015.

Pseudo-scientific theories of race were firstly advocated at the end of the eighteenth century. Initially, they prominently featured in the treaties of European naturalists such as George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon; later on, they were systematically employed, especially in the US, to provide justification to the practice of chattel slavery. The advent of Darwinism, finally, gave a decisive boost to the international diffusion of scientific racialism.
In my paper, I reconstructed how scientific racialism influenced the construction of socialist ideas of race and ethnicity in the US in the late nineteenth century. I argued that it is necessary to use a transatlantic perspective that focuses on the German origin of the American socialist movement. The different waves of German immigrants in the US were affected by different conceptions of race: whereas early immigrants like the Forty-Eighter Adolph Douai used pre-Darwinian approaches, grounded in holistic conceptions of nature like those presented by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, 1880s immigrants like Paul Grottkau and August Otto-Walster used purely Darwinian ideas, apprehended in Germany through the theories of Alexander Lange. My paper suggested that both these approaches did not automatically turned into racist stances, however they did pave the way to the disenchanted acceptance of the unmodifiable conditions of inferiority of certain minorities, a condition that could only be modified in the future socialist Commonwealth.
I also discussed the ideas of those socialists who did not use science-based conceptions of race. A group of internationalists and supporters of trade unions, led by the former leader of the International Workingmen’s Association Friedrich A. Sorge, remained firm in its egalitarian position. The contrasts between Sorge and the leadership of the American Socialist Labor Party led the former out of the party in 1878. Nonetheless, the ideas of this group emerged again in the 1880s with the Knights of Labor.





Bibliography

Primary sources
Labor Standard (New York, 1876-1878);
Chicagoer Vorbote (Chicago, 1878-1880);
San Antonio Zeitung (San Antonio, 1854-1856);
Socialist (Chicago, 1878-1879);
Volksstimme des Westens (St. Louis, 1878-1880).


Selected secondary literature
Peter J. Bowler, Evolution. The history of an idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States. A history of the American Left (London; New York: Verso, [1987] 2013).
Adrian Desmond, James Moore, Darwin’s sacred cause. Race, slavery and the quest for human origins (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
Sara Eigen, Mark Larrimore, The German invention of race (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006).
Daniel Gasman, The scientific origins of National Socialism: social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald, 1971).
Reginald Horsman, Race and manifest destiny. The origins of American racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Stan Nadel, Little Germany: ethnicity, religion, and class in New York City, 1845-1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
Mark Pittenger, American socialists and evolutionary thought, 1870-1920 (Madison; London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).
Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: evolution in German socialist thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999).

This article reviews the workshop "The Historical 'Dispute of the New World'. European Historians of the U.S. and European History, Culture and Public Life", held in Turin (Italy) in September 10-11 2015. Organized by Professor Maurizio Vaudagna and CISPEA, the event featured interventions of historians from all over Europe and aimed to discuss the importance of location in writing U.S. History.

The article was published on U.S. Studies Online. Click on the link to read it.