Labor History Links

Few terms have been surrounded with as much myth and misunderstanding as “anarchism.” Part of the difficulty is that there are many kinds of anarchists. The high point of American anarchism surely came in the 1880s in the movement led by Chicago “Social Revolutionaries,” such as Lucy and Albert Parsons. Contrary to the stereotype, anarchists like the Parsons did not object to order itself but to the oppressive forms of order imposed by the capitalist state. Albert Parsons also frankly acknowledged the belief shared by other anarchists in his circle that social transformation would only come through revolution, “through bloodshed and violence.” What is perhaps less clear from the statement is Parsons’s simultaneous commitment to trade unionism as the primary agency of social change. In this 1887 essay, “What Is Anarchism?” social revolutionary Parsons explained how his strain of anarchist socialism derived its name and purpose from the Greek words for “no” and “government.”

Source: Albert R. Parsons, “What is Anarchism?” Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, as Defined by Some of its Apostles (Chicago, 1887). Reprinted in Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986), 27–28.

The Chicago radicals convicted of the infamous May 4, 1886 Haymarket Square bombing in which one policeman was killed remained openly defiant to the end. In his final letter to his wife, written August 20, 1886 from the Cook County “Bastille” (jail), convicted Haymarket bombing participant Albert R. Parsons, an Alabama-born printer, admitted that the verdict would cheer “the hearts of tyrants,” but still optimistically predicted that “our doom to death is the handwriting on the wall, foretelling the downfall of hate, malice, hypocrisy, judicial murder, oppression, and the domination of man over his fellow-man.”

This book reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These "labor republicans" derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating back to the classical republics. In this tradition, to be free is to be independent of anyone else's will - to be dependent is to be a slave. Borrowing these ideas, labor republicans argued that wage laborers were unfree because of their abject dependence on their employers. Workers in a cooperative, on the other hand, were considered free because they equally and collectively controlled their work. Although these labor republicans are relatively unknown, this book details their unique, contemporary, and valuable perspective on both American history and the organization of the economy The term “community organizer” was deployed repeatedly against Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign as a way to paint him as an inexperienced politician unfit for the presidency. The implication was that the job of a community organizer wasn’t a serious one, and that it certainly wasn’t on the list of credentials needed for a presidential résumé. In reality, community organizers have played key roles in the political lives of American cities for decades, perhaps never more so than during the 1970s in Chicago, where African Americans laid the groundwork for further empowerment as they organized against segregation, discrimination, and lack of equal access to schools, housing, and jobs.

Introduction : something of slavery still remains
The paradox of slavery and freedom
"Independent laborers by voluntary contract" : the laissez-faire republican turn
"The sword of want" : free labor against wage labor
Labor republicanism and the cooperative commonwealth
Solidarity and selfishness : the political theory of the dependent classes
Conclusion : the freedom yet to come

Author of From Slavery To the Cooperative Commonwealth. Discusses Who Were the Knihgts? The Peak of the Knights, Central Site of Unfreedom; Conflict, Repubicanization of Labor; The Origins of Republicanism; Conclusion; The Knights and Radical Labor; The Influence of the Knights, Karl Marx, Craft vs. Industrial Unionism, Race; wage slavery. Reconstruction Era.

Twice the Work of Free Labor is the first book-length study of the history of the Southern convict-lease system and its successor, the chain gang. For nearly a century after the abolition of slavery, convicts labored in the South’s mines, railroad camps, brickyards, turpentine farms and then road gangs, under abject conditions. The vast majority of these prisoners were African Americans. In this timely book, Alex Lichtenstein reveals the origins of this vicious penal slavery, explains its persistent and widespread popularity among whites, and charts its unhappy contribution to the rebirth of the South in the decades following the Civil War.

The book also offers an original analysis of the post-Civil War South’s political economy. Lichtenstein suggests that, after emancipation, forced black labor was exploited not by those who yearned for the social order of the slave South, but by the region’s most ardent advocates of progress. The convict-lease and chain gang allowed a New South to rise while preserving white supremacy.

Between 1908 and 1917, the American photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine (1874-1940) took some of the most memorable pictures of child workers ever made. Traveling around the United States while working for the National Child Labor Committee, he photographed children in textile mills, coal mines, and factories from Vermont and Massachusetts to Georgia, Tennessee, and Missouri. Using his camera as a tool of social activism, Hine had a major influence on the development of documentary photography. But many of his pictures transcend their original purpose. Concentrating on these photographs, Alexander Nemerov reveals the special eeriness of Hine's beautiful and disturbing work as never before. Richly illustrated, the book also includes arresting contemporary photographs by Jason Francisco of the places Hine documented. Soulmaker is a striking new meditation on Hine's photographs. It explores how Hine's children lived in time, even how they might continue to live for all time. Thinking about what the mill would be like after he was gone, after the children were gone, Hine intuited what lives and dies in the second a photograph is made. His photographs seek the beauty, fragility, and terror of moments on earth

In this acclaimed historical study, Alexander Saxton establishes the centrality of white racism to American politics and culture. Examining images of race at a popular level--from black-face minstrelsy to the construction of the Western hero, from grassroots political culture to dime novels--as well as the philosophical constructions of the political elite, it is a powerful and comprehensive account of the ideological forces at work in the formation of modern America

•The 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike: Part A
•"Proclamation of the Striking Textile Workers of Lawrence," Charles P. Neill, ed., Report on the Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Document 870 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office...
•Massachusetts militiamen with fixed bayonets surround a parade of peaceful strikers, 1912, George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, Maryland, #1425
•Textile Workers' Strike Committee, "Shall Wool and Cotton Kings Rule The Nation?" Charles P. Neill, ed., Report on the Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Document 870 (Washington, D.C.: Gove...
•"Letters Between William M. Wood and the Strike Committee," ed. Charles P. Neill, Report on the Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Document 870, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office...
•Mary K. O'sullivan, "The Labor War at Lawrence," Survey, 6 April 1912, pp. 72-74.
•Flyer distributed in Lawrence, September 1912, American Textile History Museum, Lowell, Mass.
•Walter M. Pratt, "The Lawrence Revolution," New England Magazine 46 (March 1912), pp. 6-16.
•The 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike: Part B

On January 12, 1912, ten thousand woolen textile workers went on strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The strike was precipitated by a paycut implemented by the American Woolen Company when a state law went into effect that reduced the weekly hours that women could legally work. Mill operatives believed that they deserved a living wage sufficient to support themselves, and resisted their employers' efforts to use the hours law as an excuse to reduce their wages. For weeks the strikers held out, mobilizing support through rallies and other events that publicized their plight. By February almost thirty thousand strikers had stopped virtually all production in Lawrence. Although most of the strikers were unskilled workers, and although they lived in a company town where the police and the media were controlled by the mill owners, within two months they gained a compromise settlement.

⬥ Objectives

To examine attitudes expressed in different publications toward the Lawrence Strike; to explore class differences in attitudes toward the strike; to discuss the gendered politics and rhetoric around the children of the Lawrence Strike; to think about the gendered viewpoints of three writers about the strike; to compare retrospective and contemporary accounts of the same event.

⬥ Teaching Strategies

1. Read "Lawrence Strike," in Mary Heaton Vorse, Footnote to Folly (1935). Describe the progress of the strike from this retrospective account. What is Vorse's point of view? Do you see how her account is influenced by her middle-class status? How else is Vorse different from the strikers? What is her attitude toward the strikers? Toward police? Toward mill-owners? Do you find this account credible, trustworthy?

2. Compare Vorse's description of the children's exodus from Lawrence with the description in the New York Times . Was the Times article sympathetic to the strikers? What was the author's political stance?

3. Have the students read "The Exiles from Lawrence to New York," as well as the introductory essay to Il Proletario . How did Il Proletario differ from mainstream newspapers? How did its treatment of the Children's Exodus differ from Vorse's account?

4. Help students synthesize all the pieces they read by asking them how the removal of children from Lawrence became a political act. If organizers conceived of the move as a way to help out striking parents, what did it symbolize? How were the children themselves portrayed in reports as politicized? How was the action "gendered" as feminine?

5. The brutality of police toward women and their children waiting to go to Philadelphia has been termed a "turning point" in public attitudes toward the strikers, and the public's support proved crucial to the workers' victories. What about this incident proved so pivotal, and why?

In the current boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism, one subject has been conspicuously absent: women, both enslaved and free. This project places women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor.

Alexandra J. Finley shows how women often performed the foundational labor necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets. She makes this argument through five case studies, each of which highlights a particular woman or group of women who labored in the slave market. Some of these women performed domestic labor for slave traders, sewing outfits for enslaved people about to be sold, cooking meals for traders traveling to slave markets in New Orleans, or operating boarding houses where traders lodged. Many also performed reproductive labor, raising slave traders' children, giving birth to the future enslaved workforce, or practicing midwifery. Or they were chosen as concubines, or "fancy girls."

Such women exemplify the importance of female labor to slave trading, performing domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor all at once for the man who enslaved them. In bringing a gendered perspective to the economic history of slavery, which is currently missing from the conversation, Finley demonstrates that women's labor was not "natural" or incidental to economic development, but a product of specific discourses about the biological roots of gender and race"-- Provided by publisher

In the 1930s, thousands of Finns emigrated from their communities in the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia, a region in the Soviet Union where Finnish Communist émigrés were building a society to implement their ideals of socialist Finland. To their new socialist home, these immigrants brought critically needed skills, tools, machines, and money. Educated and skilled, American and Canadian Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformations who would not only modernize the economy of Soviet Karelia, but also enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants of socialist colonization of what Bolshevik leaders perceived as dark, uneducated and backward Soviet ethnic periphery. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is the first comprehensive account in English of this fascinating story. Using a vast body of documentary sources from archives in Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russian- and Finnish-language press and literature from the 1930s, oral history interviews and secondary literature, Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala explore in depth the “Karelian fever” among Finnish Americans and Canadians, and the lives of immigrants in the Soviet Union, their contribution to Soviet economy and culture, and their fates in the Great Terror.
Contents Preface Introduction
Chapter 1. Finnish Immigrants in North America and Russia
Chapter 2. Two Perspectives on Soviet Immigration Policy: Moscow and Petrozavodsk
Chapter 3. To Karelia!
Chapter 4. The Failure of the Immigration Program
Chapter 5. American and Canadian Immigrants in the Soviet Economy
Chapter 6. North American Finns in Soviet Culture
Chapter 7. Challenges of Cross-Cultural Communication
Chapter 8. American and Canadian Finns in the Great Terror
Chapter 9. Wartime and After Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

This volume explores the Industrial Age (1860–1914), bringing together published and archival primary sources with introductory essays that contextualize a period of extraordinary social, cultural, and economic transformation.

The Industrial Age’s developments, which included electricity, internal-combustion engines, moving assembly lines, and clock time, posed as much risk and opportunity as do today’s innovations. Today artificial intelligence, terrorism, climate change, and the threat of pandemics like Covid-19 threaten our safety and sense of well-being, just as machine production, the labor movement, toxic chemicals and waste, and epidemics like tuberculosis and cholera posed significant challenges in the Industrial Age. This modern and innovative collection features tried and tested topics, such as immigration and labor, along with underexplored ones, such as electricity, abundance, and contaminants. Each chapter includes a historiographical essay exploring the rich historical and sociological scholarship on the period in the United States, while framing the documents and illustrations included in the chapter.

American Life During the Industrial Age is an ideal companion to undergraduate and graduate courses in United States history, American studies, the history of technology, and the history of culture and society.
Introduction
1. Wages
2. Scarcity and Abundance
3. Immigration
4. Race and Racism
5. Work
6. Unions and Strikes
7. Electricity
8. Clock Time, Speed, and Simultaneity
9. Contaminants 10. Diseases and Cures

The 2011 battle in Wisconsin over public sector employees' collective bargaining rights occasioned the largest protests in the state since the Vietnam War. Protestors occupied the state capitol building for days and staged massive rallies in downtown Madison, receiving international news coverage. Despite an unprecedented effort to oppose Governor Scott Walker's bill, Act 10 was signed into law on March 11, 2011, stripping public sector employees of many of their collective bargaining rights and hobbling government unions in Wisconsin. By situating the events of 2011 within the larger history of public sector unionism, Alexis N. Walker demonstrates how the passage of Act 10 in Wisconsin was not an exceptional moment, but rather the culmination of events that began over eighty years ago with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. Although explicitly about government unions, Walker's book argues that the fates of public and private sector unions are inextricably linked. She contends that the exclusion of public sector employees from the foundation of private sector labor law, the Wagner Act, firmly situated private sector law at the national level, while relegating public sector employees' efforts to gain collective bargaining rights to the state and local levels. She shows how private sector unions benefited tremendously from the national-level protections in the law while, in contrast, public sector employees' efforts progressed slowly, were limited to union-friendly states, and the collective bargaining rights that they finally did obtain were highly unequal and vulnerable to retrenchment. As a result, public and private sector unions peaked at different times, preventing a large, unified labor movement. The legacy of the Wagner Act, according to Walker, is that labor remains geographically concentrated, divided by sector, and hobbled in its efforts to represent working Americans politically in today's era of rising economic inequality

Drawing on family archives, Echols combines lucid exposition of the rickety economics of the building-and-loan industry with a rich social history of its decline from cooperative nonprofit institutions that financed working-class home buyers to laxly regulated, for-profit venues for predatory lending and Ponzi schemes. She styles Davis as a darker—in her telling, truer—version of building-and-loan icon George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life: not a populist hero, but a greedy social climber seeking wealth and status through reckless—then fraudulent—gambles with other people’s money, enabled by the anticollectivist ethos of his conservative community. Echols’s absorbing portrait makes Main Street the rival of Wall Street for callous corruption. hortfall opens with a surprise discovery in an attic-boxes filled with letters and documents hidden for more than seventy years-and launches into a fast-paced story that uncovers the dark secrets in Echols's family-an upside-down version of the building and loan story at the center of Frank Capra's 1946 movie, It's a Wonderful Life.
Prologue: captain nothing
Advertisements for himself
The loan man
Racketeers and suckers
Slipping through your fingers
Sowing grief
The port of missing men
Orphans in the storm
Epilogue

Professor Alice Kessler-Harris talks with scholars about the history of women’s work in this Massive Open Online Course from Columbia University in collaboration with New-York Historical.There are multiple sections and the sidebar at the link will alert you to other videos in this series.

Overview: First published in 1982, this pioneering work traces the transformation of "women's work" into wage labor in the United States, identifying the social, economic, and ideological forces that have shaped our expectations of what women do. Basing her observations upon the personal experience of individual American women set against the backdrop of American society, Alice Kessler-Harris examines the effects of class, ethnic and racial patterns, changing perceptions of wage work for women, and the relationship between wage-earning and family roles.
In the 20th Anniversary Edition of this landmark book, the author has updated the original and written a new afterword
Contents
Forming The Female Wage Labor Force: Colonial America To The Civil War:
Limits of independence in the Colonial economy
From household manufactures to wage work
Industrial wage earners and the domestic ideology
Idea Of Home And Mother At Work: The Civil War To World War I:
Why is it can a woman not be virtuous if she does mingle with the toilers?
Women's choices in an expanding labor market
Technology, efficiency, and resistance
Protective labor legislation
Transforming The Notion Of Work For Women: World War I To The Present:
Ambition and its antidote in a new generation of female workers
Some benefits of labor segregation in a decade of depression
Making history working for victory
Radical consequences of incremental change
Note of acknowledgment
Epilogue
Notes
Index

From the publisher. In this long-out-of-print oral history classic, Alice and Staughton Lynd chronicle the stories of more than two dozen working-class organizers who occupied factories, held sit-down strikes, walked out, picketed, and found other bold and innovative ways to fight for workers' rights. Rank and File brings the militancy of these firebrand organizers to life -- whether it was in founding unions, challenging sexism and racism, safety violations, and management intimidation, or working for broader social changes

John L. Lewis’ dramatic walkout from the October 1935 American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention and the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) that soon followed marked a new stage in labor’s drive to organize industrial unions in depression-era America. Here Alice Dodge Wolfson, who was working as a stenographer in 1935, recalled her own contribution to the Lewis walkout and the creation of the CIO. Attending the October 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City as a delegate from her stenographers local of the United Office and Professional Workers Union (a left-wing New York union aligned with the supporters of industrial unionism around Lewis), Wolfson played a small but decisive role in helping launch the CIO when she rose to challenge an AFL official from the convention floor.

Commanding a vast historiography of slavery and emancipation, Aline Helg argues that significant numbers of enslaved Africans and their descendants across the entire Western Hemisphere managed to free themselves hundreds of years before the formation of white-run abolitionist movements. Her analysis of resistance and struggle covers more than three centuries, from early colonization to the American and Haitian revolutions, Spanish American independence, and abolition in the British Caribbean. But Helg's purpose is not only to underscore the agency of those who managed to become 'free people of color' before abolitionism took hold but also to assess in detail the specific strategies they created and utilized"-- Provided by publisher
k summarizes slaves’ pursuit of freedom
in the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, and Danish colonies of the Americas from the early sixteenth century to 1838, when British abolition schemes began to dismantle the institution in law. At the heart of her project,Aline Helg analyzes four principle mechanisms by which Afro-descended slaves achieved freedom: marronage, manumission, military service, and revolt. --review

A film that uses a presentation by acclaimed historian Allan Berube to illustrate the union's positive contribution that prevented discrimination on political, sexual orientation in this red-led union

This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube (1946-2007), a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990),

Berube also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, who were close colleagues and friends of Berube, have selected sixteen of his most important essays..

Introduction. Allan Bérubé and the Power of Community History 1 John d’emilio and Estelle B. Freedman

part i. A Community Historian: Exploring Queer San Francisco
1. Lesbian Masquerade 41
2. Behind the Specter of San Francisco 54
3. Don’t Save Us from Our Sexuality 62
4. Resorts for Sex Perverts: A History of Gay Bathhouses 67
part ii. A National Historian: Reexamining World War II
5. Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay gi s in World War II 85
6. Coming Out Under Fire 100
7. Rediscovering Our Forgotten Past 113
8. The Military and Lesbians during the McCarthy Years 125
part iii. A Working-Class Intellectual: Personal Reflections on Identities
9. Caught in the Storm: aids and the Meaning of Natural Disaster 147
10. Intellectual Desire 161
11. Sunset Trailer Park (with Florence Bérubé) 182
12. How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays 202
part iv. A Labor Historian: Queering Work and Class
13. Class Dismissed 233
14. “Queer Work” and Labor History 259
15. Trying to Remember 270
16. No Race-Baiting, Red-Baiting, or Queer-Baiting! The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union from the Depression to the Cold War 294

May 1, 1900 turned into a day of horror at Scofield, Utah, where a mine explosion killed two hundred men. In the traumatic days that followed, the surviving miners began to understand that they, too, might be called to make this ultimate sacrifice for mine owners. The time for unionization in Utah was at hand. A sensitive and in-depth portrayal of the efforts to unionize Utah's coal miners, The Next Time We Strike explores the ethnic tensions and nativistic sentiments that hampered unionization efforts even in the face of mine explosions and economic exploitation. Powell utilizes oral interviews, coal company reports, newspapers, letters, and union records to tell the story from the miners' perspective.-publisher--

Utah's coal operators used ethnic tensions, nativistic sentiments, private detective agencies, state officials, and the Mormon church to divide workers and thwart their efforts to organize and sustain viable unions. Not until late in
1933 were Utah's coal operators ready to negotiate an agreement with the state's mine workers that recognized the mine workers' right to organize unions of their own choosing and to bargain collectively with their employers.role of foreign-born workers in the struggle for unionism, the significance of Utah in the UMWA's nationwide organizing strategy, the attitude of Mormon church leaders toward the labor movement,and the effect of the federal government's labor policies on efforts to unionize Utah's mine workers

The Knights of Labor, the Western Federation of Miners, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the National Miners Union had also tried to organize Utah's mine workers.
Deals with disasters in 1900 and 1924 claiming hundreds of lives.

He devotes separate chapters to three long, bitter strikes— the strikes of 1901, 1903-1904, and 1922—each of which ended disastrously for the UMWA and the miners involved in them, but which left a legacy of resistance to the abuses of the coal operators and instilled a burning passion in many mine workers to see Utah's coal fields unionized.

Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx might appear strange bedfellows, the president and the intellectual revolutionary. Yet they shared an abiding interest in labor, labor relations, and slavery. This volume puts the two of them in dialogue, using linked, short passages from their writings, and thereby uncovers their agreements and disagreements about this fundamental issue

The word “tramp” came into common usage in the 1870s as a disparaging description of homeless men thrown out of work by the economic depression and forced to take to the road in search of a job or food. Fears of the “tramp menace” were revived during the even more devastating depression that began in 1893. Many Americans viewed tramps with a combination of fear and disgust. The 1878 work Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives, written by the famous detective Allan Pinkerton, presented a somewhat more mixed portrait of the tramp. In this chapter on “Tramp Printers and Tramp Encampments,” Pinkerton expressed some sympathy for the plight of people thrown out of work by the depression, grudgingly admired the audacity of the tramping printers, and argued against treating all tramps as criminals. Still, like other middle-class observers before and since, Pinkerton wanted to separate those he saw as the “deserving” poor from poor people he viewed as undeserving and possibly dangerous.
Source: Alan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (New York: G.W. Carleton and Co., Publishers, 1878).

In the winter of 1876, testimony from a Pinkerton Detective Agency operative was used to destroy the Pennsylvania miners union, as 20 miners were accused of membership in a militant Irish organization called the Molly Maguires, convicted of murder, and hanged. The negative publicity from the trial effectively killed unionism in Pennsylvania mining for twenty years. This picture illustrated The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives, Allan Pinkerton’s self-serving account of his detective agency's infiltration of the secret society of miners. Pinkerton’s work in the service of the Reading Railroad typified the widespread use of private police and organized violence by railroads and other businesses to suppress unions.