ABSTRACT
The older native American Communists were born, with few exceptions, in the decade 1881-91. They were still relatively close to the birth of the modern American labor movement; to the infancy of socialism, trade unionism, anarchism, and syndicalism; to the heyday of radical and reform movements now only dimly remembered. The first Marxian Socialists in the United States were German immigrants who came over after the ill-fated German revolution of 1848. These German immigrants brought with them a degree of trade-union and political consciousness then unknown in the United States. The next and larger wave of German immigrants in the seventies and eighties however, owed their socialism less to the exiled Marx than to the romantic founder of German social democracy, Ferdinand Lassalle. The struggle between immediate demands and the ultimate goal was closely related to another struggle—between "revisionism" and "orthodox Marxism."
