1867:  German immigrants in Minneapolis establish a Workingman's Society to find jobs for Society members, the first mutual benefit group of its kind formed in Minnesota.

The Workingmen's Party of the United States (WPUS), organized 19-22 July 1876, was the first nationwide socialist organization in the United States. Although it lasted less than two years before splitting into irreconcilable factions, it was an important seed-bed for future developments of the American labor movement in that it embraced trade unionism, labor journalism, worker education, struggle for social reform, socialism, and electoral activity.

The WPUS reflected the fact that the United States was a multicultural "nation of nations." The party had two official weekly German-language papers—the Chicago Verbote (Herald), edited by Conrad Conzett, and the New York Arbeiter-Stimme (Labor's Voice), edited by Otto Walster, to serve the organization's large number of German-American members. (Germans were the largest immigrant group in the U.S. at this time, followed by the Irish.) The party's official English-language weekly, the Labor Standard, was edited by J. P. McDonnell, a former Irish Fenian who later served for a time as secretary to Karl Marx in the First International. At least 21 other newspapers around the U.S. supported the WPUS, of which 12 were German, 7 English-language, 1 Bohemian, and 1 Swedish.