Examining the social and intellectual collision of the American<br/>reform tradition with immigrant Marxism during the Reconstruction<br/>era, Timothy Messer-Kruse charts the rise and fall of the<br/>International Workingman's Association (IWA), the first<br/>international socialist organization. He analyzes what attracted<br/>American reformers--many of them veterans of antebellum crusades for abolition, women's rights, and other radical causes--to the IWA, how their presence affected the course of the American Left, and why they were ultimately purged from the IWA by their orthodox Marxist comrades. <br/> Messer-Kruse explores the ideology and activities of the<br/>Yankee Internationalists, tracing the evolution of antebellum<br/>American reformers' thinking on the question of wage labor and<br/>illuminating the beginnings of a broad labor reform coalition in<br/>the early years of Reconstruction. He shows how American<br/>reformers' priority of racial and sexual equality clashed with<br/>their Marxist partners' strategy of infiltrating trade unions.<br/>Ultimately, he argues, Marxist demands for party discipline and<br/>ideological unity proved incompatible with the Yankees' native<br/>republicanism. With the expulsion of Yankee reformers from the<br/>IWA in 1871, American Marxism was divorced from the American<br/>reform tradition.