Download or read book The Ordeal of the Jungle written by David Bates and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the city’s meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt. By organizing workers into neighborhood locals, which connected workplace struggles to ethnic and religious identities, the CFL facilitated a surge in the organization’s membership, particularly among African American workers, and afforded the federation the opportunity to aggressively confront employers. The CFL’s innovative structure, however, was ultimately its demise. Linking union locals to neighborhoods proved to be a form of de facto segregation. Over time union structures, rank-and-file conflicts, and employer resistance combined to turn the union’s hopeful calls for solidarity into animosity and estrangement. Tensions were exacerbated by violent shop floor confrontations and exploded in the bloody 1919 Chicago Race Riot. By the early 1920s, the CFL had collapsed. The Ordeal of the Jungle explores the choices of a variety of people while showing a complex, overarching interplay of black and white workers and their employers. In addition to analyzing union structures and on-the-ground relations between workers, Bates synthesizes and challenges previous scholarship on interracial organizing to explain the failure of progressive unionism in Chicago.

Download or read book The Last Great Strike written by Ahmed White and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1937, seventy thousand workers walked off their jobs at four large steel companies known collectively as “Little Steel.” The strikers sought to make the companies retreat from decades of antiunion repression, abide by the newly enacted federal labor law, and recognize their union. For two months a grinding struggle unfolded, punctuated by bloody clashes in which police, company agents, and National Guardsmen ruthlessly beat and shot unionists. At least sixteen died and hundreds more were injured before the strike ended in failure. The violence and brutality of the Little Steel Strike became legendary. In many ways it was the last great strike in modern America. Traditionally the Little Steel Strike has been understood as a modest setback for steel workers, one that actually confirmed the potency of New Deal reforms and did little to impede the progress of the labor movement. However, The Last Great Strike tells a different story about the conflict and its significance for unions and labor rights. More than any other strike, it laid bare the contradictions of the industrial labor movement, the resilience of corporate power, and the limits of New Deal liberalism at a crucial time in American history.

Download or read book The Gospel of Church written by Janine Giordano Drake and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From the end of the Civil War until the early twentieth century, Anglo, immigrant, and African American settlers were moving north and west faster than ministers within the major denominations could follow them with churches. In 1890, Northern Methodists, the largest Protestant denomination, only claimed 3.5 percent of the American population. Roman Catholics claimed 9.9 percent, and African American Baptists, the largest Black denomination, claimed only 18 percent of the African American population. In total, under 30 percent of Americans went to church on a weekly basis. While African American churches served a relatively larger role within their communities, the major white denominations played a minor role in the lives of the working poor. Clergymen like Dwight Moody reflected, "The gulf between the churches and the mases is growing deeper, wider and darker every hour." Home missionaries like Josiah Strong warned, "Few appreciate how we have become a non-churchgoing-people." Strong was right. In large fractions of the country, especially mining and industrial centers in the West, a simple lack of church edifices and long-term ministers to fundraise for them gave way to a vacuum of Protestant, denominational authority. In part, this disconnect between the number of churches and the size of the population was a result of culturally dislocated migrants. In 1890, more than 9 million Americans were foreign-born, and only a small fraction of those Americans had any familiarity with Anglo-Protestant traditions. They were joined by another 1 million African Americans migrants from the South to northern industrial centers. But this was only one of many reasons the poor did not go to church with the wealthy. While middle-class families paid lip service to the importance of building capacious churches, their own policies and practices reinforced the class system. As one minister reflected in 1887, "The working men are largely estranged from the Protestant religion. Old churches standing in the midst of crowded districts are continually abandoned because they do not reach the workingmen." Meanwhile, he continued, "Go into an ordinary church on Sunday morning and you see lawyers, physicians, merchants and business men with their families [-]you see teachers, salesmen, and clerks, and a certain proportion of educated mechanics, but the workingman and his household are not there." As the working-classes swelled with the expansion of American factories, ordained Protestant ministers served an ever-dwindling proportion of the country"--

Download or read book Racial Conflicts and Violence in the Labor Market written by Cliff Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on community-level race relations during the 1919 Steel Strike, when intense job competition contributed to racial conflict among the nation's steel workers. As the Great Migration brought thousands of black workers to northern cities, their lower labor costs generated racially split labor markets in the industrial sector. Further, the discriminatory policies of labor unions forced many blacks to serve as strike breakers during periods of class conflict. As a result, the migration heightened racial conflict and undercut important union organizing initiatives. The 1919 Steel Strike illustrates how racial divisions crippled many American unions, a pattern that helps to explain the demise of organized labor during the 1920's. No previous studies of the 1919 Steel Strike have systematically compared community processes to determine how local events shaped the strike's outcome. Despite the failure of the 1919 Steel Strike, the varied experiences of workers in different communities reveal much about the causes of racial conflict and the possibilities of interracial solidarity. This study finds that patterns of black migration, local government repression of labor, the organizational strength of local unions, and employers' efforts to inflame racial tension all help to explain community-level variation in interracial solidarity and conflict. (Ph. D. dissertation, Emory University, 1996; revised with new preface)

Download or read book American Violence written by Richard Hofstadter and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 804 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With eyewitness accounts and contemporary reports—linked together by succinct analytical commentaries—Richard Hofstadter and his young collaborator, Michael Wallace, have created a superb documentary reader that is, in effect, a history of violence in America through four centuries. Here, as experienced by men and women who lived through them, are not only the familiar, chilling eruptions—Harper’s Ferry; the Civil War draft riot in New York; Homestead; Centralia; the Detroit ghetto; the assassinations of Lincoln, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy—but also less commonly remembered episodes, such as the New York slave riots of 1712, the doctors’ riot of 1788, vigilante terror in Montana, the anti-Chinese riot in Los Angeles in 1871, and the White League coup d’état of 1874 in New Orleans. In his extensive introduction, Richard Hofstadter shows how, in the face of the record, Americans have had an extraordinary ability to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and the best-regulated of peoples. With more than one hundred entries, the editors have documented and put into perspective the thread of violence in American history whose rediscovery—as Hofstadter suggests—will undoubtedly be one of the most important intellectual legacies of the 1960’s. The book clearly demonstrates, even as the reader comes to grips with long-eluded truths, that America’s consistent history of violence has not yet breached beyond hope of restoration our long record of basic political stability, that most social reforms in the United States have been brought about without violence.

Download or read book Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism written by James Douglas Rose and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not all workers' needs were served by the union. Focusing on the steel works at Duquesne, Pennsylvania, a linchpin of the old Carnegie Steel Company empire and then of U.S. Steel, James D. Rose demonstrates the pivotal role played by a nonunion form of employee representation usually dismissed as a flimsy front for management interests. The early New Deal set in motion two versions of workplace representation that battled for supremacy: company-sponsored employee representation plans (ERPs) and independent trade unionism. At Duquesne, the cause of the unskilled, hourly workers, mostly eastern and southern Europeans as well as blacks, was taken up by the union -- the Fort Dukane Lodge of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. For skilled tonnage workers and skilled tradesmen, mainly U.S.-born and of northern and western European extraction, ERPs offered a better solution. Initially little more than a crude antiunion device, ERPs matured from tools of the company into semi-independent, worker-led organizations. Isolated from the union movement through the mid-1930s, ERP representatives and management nonetheless created a sophisticated bargaining structure that represented the shop-floor interests of the mill's skilled workforce. Meanwhile, the Amalgamated gave way to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, a professionalized and tightly organized affiliate of John L. Lewis's CIO that expended huge resources trying to gain companywide unionization. Even when the SWOC secured a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel in 1937, however, the Union was still unable to sign up a majority of the workforce at Duquesne. A sophisticated study of the forces that shaped and responded to workers' interests, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism confirms that what people did on the shop floor was as critical to the course of steel unionism as were corporate decision making and shifts in government policy.

Download or read book Report written by United States. Congress Senate and published by . This book was released on with total page 1896 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor and published by . This book was released on 1938 with total page 2100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Steel City Gospel written by Keith A. Zahniser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrating the power religious language, ideas, and institutions had in shaping progressive reform in Pittsburgh, this cross-disciplinary study addresses significant debates in the fields of Progressive-Era political history and American religious history, while telling the story of an industrial city in a crucial era of change.

Download or read book Hearings written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 1522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Working Hard for the American Dream written by Randi Storch and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-06 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Hard for the American Dream examines the various economic, social, and political developments that shaped labor history in the United States from World War I until the present day. Presents an overview of labor history that also considers women workers, ethnic America, and post-World War II workers Incorporates the most recent scholarship in labor history Takes the story of labor up to the present day in a readable and accessible manner

Download or read book Wisconsin Library Bulletin written by and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago written by Dominic A. Pacyga and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-11 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the experiences of immigrants in two iconic South Side Polish neighborhoods in Chicago to demonstrate how Poles created new communities in an attempt to preserve the customs of their homeland.

Download or read book Communist Methods of Infiltration government labor written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 1186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York City Area written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hearings and Reports 83rd Congress 1st Session written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 1190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Communist Methods of Infiltration education written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 1566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: