The US labor movement and international solidarity have not often gone together. For much of the twentieth century, American labor leaders showed scant interest in the world outside North America. When they did, they frequently served more faithfully as ambassadors for their governments than their own movements, as when officials of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) urged the workers of Russia and other Allied countries to keep fighting World War I or when their successors pursued the Cold War policies of the State Department and the CIA in Latin America.

But there have always been other traditions and organizations, sometimes only dimly remembered, that strove for international solidarity with workers elsewhere. One of them was the late-nineteenth-century Knights of Labor, the first truly national organization of the US working class. It later became a broad international movement, with branches on four continents, and with dreams of what its founder, Uriah Stephens, foresaw as “an organization that will cover the globe” that “will include men and women of every craft, creed, and color.”