Labor History Links

Founded in 1936 by workers from General Electric, Westinghouse, Philco, RCA and other companies that made electrical appliances and machinery, UE soon became one of the largest and most controversial unions in the CIO, claiming a peak membership of 686,000 in 1944. UE was known as a left-wing union, many of its top leaders closely associated with the Communist Party, a heritage that would complicate its internal and external politics. The union took strong positions on racial and gender equality. Women were an important part of the work force and by the end of the war comprised about 40% of the membership. At the same time, the leftwing reputation left the union vulnerable to red-baiting, which nearly destroyed the union in the early 1950s. Here are five interactive maps and charts showing the year by year geography of the UE.

"Explore the history and geography of the CIO unions from 1935 through the end of the 1940s with maps and membership data showing the growth and in some cases decline of key CIO unions: United Auto Workers (UAW), United Electrical Workers (UE), International Ladies Garment Workers (ILGWU), Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACWA), International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), International Typographical Union (ITU), and the International Woodworkers of America(IWA). . . .Educators may want to consult Teaching CIO Maps: Observation and Discussion Questions"

Site explores growth of CIO using graphs and maps of membership data of the industrial union movement of the 1930s.
"Detailed explorations of the geographic history of each of them. Here we combine membership numbers to show CIO density and the spread of locals across hundreds of cities. This is incomplete. We do not yet have geographic data for all affiliates. But shown in detail are some of the most important: United Auto Workers (UAW), United Electrical Workers (UE),Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACWA), International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), and International Woodworkers of America (IWA). Also two that helped launch the CIO but later rejoined the AFL: International Ladies Garment Workers (ILGWU) which left the CIO in 1939, and International Typographical Union (ITU) which left in 1944. There is much more information on the separate map pages for each of the seven unions."

All unions in the AFL-CIO call themselves "Internationals," acknowledging locals in Canada. No union more deserved the label than the International Woodworkers of America (IWA). Through most of its history (1937-1994), the Canadian districts balanced the US districts in membership and influence. The union's history began in the Pacific Northwest timber strike of 1935. The failure of the AFL-affiliated United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners to respond to its members’ demands led to lumber and sawmill unionists splintering from the craft union to form the Federation of Woodworkers. A year later, the new union affiliated with John L. Lewis’s CIO through a vote ratified at their 1937 convention in Tacoma, Washington. They renamed themselves the International Woodworkers of America.

Canadian Harold Pritchett was elected president of the new IWA. He was the former president of the Lumber Workers’ Industrial Union of Canada and a supporter of the Communist Party. The union’s initial locals were heavily concentrated in the Pacific Northwest (from British Columbia to the California border) and until 1942 the IWA made little headway in the other forest regions of North America. Due as much to the union’s affiliation with the CIO as to the Communist leanings of their leadership, the first years of the IWA’s existence were characterized by violence and hostility, as AFL-affiliated unions announced a boycott of all goods handled by IWA members. The late 1930s and early 1940s also saw sustained conflict within the IWA itself, with the anti-communist “White Bloc”, concentrated in the Columbia River District Council, waging a protracted struggle to wrest the leadership of the union away from Pritchett and the “Red Bloc” communist organizers. Pritchett was forced out of the presidency in 1940 when the U.S. government banned him from traveling into the United States. Political tensions within the union reached the breaking point in 1948 after the U.S. Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act requiring unions to ban Communists from leadership positions. Pritchett and other British Columbia District Council 1 officers vowed to separate and launched the Woodworkers’ Industrial Union of Canada (WIUC). However, rank and file majorities rejected the move and almost all Canadian locals subsequently reaffiliated with the IWA. Despite these struggles, the 1940s were a time of explosive growth for the IWA. Between 1941 and 1948, the forestry union doubled in size from 35,000 members to 85,000. Much of this growth occured in British Columbia, where Chinese-Canadian organizer Roy Mah and South Asian organizer Darshan Singh Sangha led efforts to organize non-white workforces around the Canadian province. The IWA in British Columbia expanded from five locals and 1,151 members in 1941, to thirteen locals and 24,453 members in 1948. Although still heavily concentrated in the transnational Pacific Northwest, the union also broadened its geography and by 1948 claimed locals in 31 states and provinces. Growth continued in the early 1950s with international membership surpassing 94,000 in most years, roughly one third of it in the British Columbia locals. These maps show the geography of the IWA from 1937 to 1955 when the CIO reunited with the AFL.

More than 1,000 Socialist candidates were elected to public office in the first two decades of the 20th century. They included two members of Congress, dozens of state legislators, and more than 130 mayors. These interactive maps identify 353 cities and towns that elected Socialist Party candidates, showing the offices held and identifying important office holders. Most of the information comes from The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History by Jack Ross supplement with contributions by Errol Wayne Stevens based on his dissertation: "Heartland Socialism: The Socialist Party of America in Four Midwestern Communities, 1898-1920," Indiana University, 1978.

It was not until the mid 1930s that Democratic and Republican Parties became so dominant that radicals began to abandon third party strategies. The Populist Party had briefly broken the monopoly in the 1890s. Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party soon developed an ambitious electoral strategy, winning more than 900,000 votes in 1912 and 1920 while electing hundreds of candidates to local offices. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Progressive Party made the presidential election a four-way race. Beginning in the 1920s, the Communist Party often fielded slates of candidates. Meanwhile, other disaffected Socialists launched Farmer-Labor parties in several states. In 1924, Robert LaFollette won 4.8 million votes running as a candidate of the Socialist, Farmer-Labor, and Progressive Parties. In 1932, at the depths of the Great Depression, both the SP and CP expected to do well. Neither did. That defeat marked a turn in leftwing political strategies as many radicals began working within the Democratic Party. Henry Wallace's Progressive Party campaign in 1948, the Peace and Freedom Party campaign in 1968, and Green Party campaigns since 1996 retested third party strategies -- with little success. These maps and charts show the rise and fall of independent leftwing parties from 1904 to 1948.

A disciplined organization that demanded strenuous commitments and frequently expelled members, the CP was not an open mass organization in the manner of the Socialist Party or the NAACP. Membership levels remained below 20,000 until 1933 and then surged upward in the late 1930s, reaching 66,000 in 1939, falling off during the Nazi-Soviet detente, then rebuilding after 1941 as the US and the Soviet Union joined in a World War II alliance. Party membership surpassed 75,000 at the start of 1947 before starting its Cold War decline. The CP developed a unique geography, centered in big cities of the North and Pacific West. New York (District 2) at some points accounted for 40-50% of party members.

The Communist Party devoted energy and resources to electoral campaigns starting in 1922. Party leaders did not expect to win, but they expected members and followers to support the ticket. Election tallies thus provide an indication of how many voting age citizens were loyal Party supporters in any year and place. Communist candidates were able to win about 100,000 votes in several elections during the 1930s and in Senate races in 1940 topped 115,000. These figures may serve as best estimates of the numbers of CP loyalists during party's heyday. The maps and charts show the geography of party strength, detailing the number of votes for Communist Party candidates for each county and every electoral contest from 1922 to 1946. Sources are explained below along with brief notes about CP electoral strategies and challenges.

As the Great Depression took hold and unemployment surged in the early 1930s, protests followed. The Communist Party took the lead in organizing actions, launching a subsidiary organization called the Unemployed Councils in 1930. The Socialist Party also organized unemployed protests in New York, Chicago, and a few other cities. Unaffiliated movements emerged in other locations, some like the Unemployed Citizens League of Seattle and movements in Los Angeles and Oakland attracting thousands of members while establishing self-help cooperatives and lobbying for relief funds to help those facing homelessness and hunger. The Communists chose direct action, concentrated on protests of several kinds, including noisy confrontrations with relief agency officials, massive hunger marches, and eviction protests aimed at forestalling the loss of housing. Police closely monitored Unemployed Council demonstrations and arrests and beatings were common.

Here there is a map, two lists, and a database describing more than 700 protests that took place in the years 1930, 1931, and 1932, nearly all of them involving the Communist Party. The descriptions are based on articles that appeared in the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper, and have not been verified. Be skeptical of claimed crowd sizes and other descriptions. And the database is by no means complete. The Daily Worker typically ignored or disparaged actions led by other groups.

The Socialist Party grew dramatically in the early 20th century, reaching a peak dues-paying membership of 113,000 in 1912. Based on party records, this map and accompanying charts show the reported membership numbers for each state for most years from 1904 to 1940. Notice that membership as a percent of population was strongest in the West until 1917 when the US entered World War I. At that point, party membership increased in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and some other states. After 1919, membership declined precipitously as many left the SP to join the Communist Party and others drifted away as the Red Scare undercut all radical movements.

These maps and charts show the number and percentage of votes for Socialist candidates for each state and county. They include presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional elections. The SP secured over 900,000 votes in 1912 and large totals in other races as late as 1938. These maps show the shifting geography of support.

These introductory maps provide a glimpse of what is available in more detail in the map sets for the Socialist Party. These seven visualizations show the vote for Socialist candidates by county and year, SP membership by state and year, the locations of 380 party linked newspapers, and the 353 towns and cities that elected Socialists to public office.

These maps and charts locate nearly 12,000 Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor. They are based on data gathered by Jonathan Garlock and published in Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Greenwood Press, 1982). The Knights of Labor was the largest and most extensive association of workers in 19th century America. Organized in 1869, the movement grew slowly in the 1870s, then surged in the 1880s, reaching a peak membership approaching one million in 1886-1887 with Local Assemblies spread across the country in more than 5,600 cities and towns. Its spectacular growth owed much to a bold agenda and flexible organizational plan. The Knights operated as both a trade union federation and a political movement. Envisioning a "Cooperative Commonwealth" in which producer cooperatives and nationalized railroads would replace monopolistic capitalism, the Knights launched dozens of local and state labor parties and hundreds of worker-owned cooperatives. Meanwhile, thousands of Local Assemblies represented members in their work places, bargaining with employers, threatening and conducting strikes. Inclusivity was the other hallmark of the KOL (especially in comparison to the American Federation of Labor unions that followed). The Knights included African American workers and counted 246 local assemblies organized by women workers. There are seven total maps, each one highlighting specific spatial realities of the Knights, including: New Knights assemblies by year (map); race, gender, and founding period (map); Number by state and year (charts); number by occupation and population (charts); state by state closeup maps; Local Assemblies outside of the United States (map); and list of assemblies by state/country.

In the barrios of Los Angeles, Chicano youth founded the Brown Berets in 1967, modeled after the Black Panther Party. The organization concentrated on combatting police brutality and fighting racism but some chapters also demanded education, job, and housing equality. By 1969, there were 29 chapters mostly in California but units also formed in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington. When the Brown Berets were disbanded by Prime Minister David Sanchez in 1972, a total of 36 chapters had been established primarily near college and university campuses.

For those inside and outside academic institutions, the Chicano press served as a medium to learn Chicano history, literature, and be informed of current news.

We have located and mapped more than 300 publications. Many were tiny, printing only a few issues and folding in a year or less. Others were much more influential, like El Macriado, the monthly published by the United Farm Workers union or El Grito del Norte from Denver and Caracol from San Antonio. Notice how many communities, large and small, hosted Chicano periodicals (155). Notice that 1970-1972 were peak years and that over half were published in California.

Most social movement organizations last only a few years and that is especially true for student run organizations. But MEChA has been active on some campuses for nearly fifty years and the organization continues to grow, with more than 500 chapters as of 2012. MEChA was founded at a conference in Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 when students from a dozen campuses adopted “El Plan de Santa Barbara.” The manifesto called for the unification of all student organizations into one umbrella organization, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan which would become known by the acronym MEChA. By consolidating student’s political power, MEChA became and has continued to be a significant on-campus political force for change. From 1969 to 1971, MEChA grew rapidly in California with major centers of activism on campuses in southern California, and a few chapters opened along the East coast at Ivy League schools. By the 1980s, MEChA’s growth occurred predominately in California where community college chapters joined those that had previously started on university campuses. During the 1990s, MEChA experienced a decade of slow growth yet in the 2000s the organization saw an incredible upsurge of new chapters particularly at the high school level.

When the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) organized the so-called “Chicano takeover” of Crystal City’s school board and city council in 1970, Tejano activists launched Raza Unida Party to compete in elections in Texas. The party soon spread to Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, helped by an alliance with Crusade for Justice, Corky Gonzalez's Denver-based organiztion. Over the next four years, RUP ran campaigns in 40 different communities involving 176 candidates for local and state offices. Some were successful, especially in south Texas. But RUP’s electoral accomplishments outside of Texas were few. In California, the RUP organized 93 chapters between 1971 and 1973 but elected only one city council person and two school board members. Only in Texas did RUP secure official party status for statewide races. In 1972, Ramsey Muniz won 219,127 running for Texas governor on the Raza Unida Party ticket, not enough to win but an impressive showing for a third party.

In 1925, researchers at the Rand School of Social Science compiled and published The American Labor Press Directory, listing 629 newspapers and periodicals. Mostly weeklies and monthlies, the majority were affiliated with local labor councils or were owned by publishers who proclaimed their commitment to the labor movement. Next in number were national publications owned by AFL international unions like the International Moulders Union. The once massive Socialist press had been decimated in the Red Scare and by 1925 claimed only 31 periodicals, while the IWW had 15, nearly all published out of the Chicago headquarters. The Directory also counted periodicals published by religious groups and other organizations deemed friendly to the cause of labor. The UCLA based Networked Labor Project has been working with these data to explore personal connections between labor activists in the 1920s and presents more detail than is available here.

"When ethnic Mexican farm workers led by Cesar Chavez joined with Filipino American workers led by Larry Itliong in 1965 to strike grape growers in Delano, California, the modern farm workers movement was born. Operating initially as the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and later as the UFW, the union spread beyond California as it launched a national grape boycott and inspired farm worker organizing in other states. Researched by Katie Anastas, these maps show the geography of UFW activism, locating more than 1,000 farm worker strikes, boycotts, and other actions.

When ethnic Mexican farm workers led by Cesar Chavez joined with Filipino American workers led by Larry Itliong in 1965 to strike grape growers in Delano, California, the modern farm workers movement was born. Operating initially as the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and later as the UFW, the union spread beyond California as it launched a national grape boycott and inspired farm worker organizing in other states. Here is a timeline of more than 1000 UFW actions as reported in El Macriado, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Seattle Times.

In 1965, Filipino farm workers in the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Itliong, began a series of strikes in Delano, California, demanding a minimum hourly wage of $1.40. Mexican-American farm workers in the National Farm Workers Association, led by Cesar Chavez, also joined the strike. By March 1965, Chavez was meeting with leaders of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in Chicago, discussing plans to organize agricultural workers across the country. The NFWA and the AWOC merged into one union, the United Farm Workers Association (UFW), in 1966, beginning a movement that would garner support from politicians, civil rights groups, students, and religious leaders worldwide.

These maps and tables locate 274 periodicals affiliated with anarchist groups or ideas from 1872 to 1940. (Single-issue publications, and those that lasted fewer than four issues, are not included.) The press played a particularly important role in disseminating information, coordinating action, and providing cohesion within the anarchist movement, which rejected the hierarchical structure of political parties and generally avoided formal organizations at the local, national, and global levels. Anarchists published periodicals in 18 different languages, reflecting the immigrant majority and transnational nature of the American movement. They were based in 20 states and 63 different cities, but New York, Chicago, and San Francisco were the main centers of anarchist publishing. New York hosted 95 newspapers, Chicago 37, and 19 were based in San Francisco. The vast majority were weeklies and monthlies; only two daily anarchist newspapers appeared, the German Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung (Chicago) and the Yiddish Abend Tsaytung (New York). Most titles were short lived--only 35 lasted longer than four years--and claimed modest circulations, typically around one or two thousand copies. However, the Yiddish Fraye Arbayter Shtime (New York) appeared from 1890 to 1977 and claimed a peak circulation of 30,000, and the German Die Fackel (Chicago) and Spanish language Regeneración (Los Angeles) both exceeded 20,000 copies.

This article presents maps and data that could not be displayed in the book Red Chicago. Maps show party offices and places used in demonstrations and mass meetings. Accompanying this is a timeline of more than 300 demonstrations, mass meetings, organizing campaigns, recreational events, and other actions staged by the Party and its auxilliaries from 1929-1934.

We Charge Genocide, which was produced by William Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress, charged that under the legal rubric laid out by the United Nations, the United States, which failed to enforce its own Constitution, must be punished under international law for its genocidal acts against African Americans. In his Introduction to the petition, Patterson emphasized the relationship between Hitler’s crimes against the Jews and America’s crimes against African Americans. “Out of the inhuman Black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease. It is a record that calls aloud for condemnation, for an end to these terrible injustices that constitute a daily and ever-increasing violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

Social movements need ways to educate and communicate. Until recently that meant newspapers and other periodicals. Denied access to major media, labor and radical movements have published thousands of periodicals, constituting an alternative press that is vital to these movements and important to the history of American journalism. The decades from the 1880s through the 1940s were the golden age for labor journalism while radical journalism enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance with the underground press movement of the 1960s and 1970s.