Mark Kruger's new book explores one of the most revolutionary yet overlooked moments in US history. What became known as the St. Louis “Commune” was a short-lived outgrowth of the Great Railroad Strike during the summer of 1877, a massive work stoppage that began along the rail lines of West Virginia and Baltimore and spread westward to dozens of cities. Directed by a revolutionary socialist party, the Commune was the first general strike of the industrial era labor movement, and it remains the only time in US history that workers took direct control of a major city.
Kruger's central argument is that the 1877 strikes, and the St. Louis Commune specifically, resulted from complex transatlantic developments. As such, he begins by examining the social and philosophical foundations in European radicalism and German immigration through the revolutions of 1848. His intriguing narrative recounts how Forty-Eighters from Germany—abolitionists, radical democrats, and socialists—imparted...