Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581377
Jarod Roll
Thomas Alter II uses a multigenerational biography to recover a long history of agrarian challenges to capitalism in Texas and beyond that makes bold arguments about the genealogy of working-class radicalism in the United States and offers critical lessons for the American left today. Alter sheds new light on familiar subjects in the history of US agrarian radicalism—the Farmers Alliance, People's Party, and Socialist Party of America—by situating them in the transnational context of revolution: Germany in 1848, Mexico in 1910, and Russia in 1917. Focusing on three generations of the German American Meitzen family, who first arrived in Texas from Silesia in 1849 and became leading radical activists, Alter “demonstrates the existence of a decades-long farmer-labor bloc” that ran from the Greenback Party in the 1870s to the Farm-Labor Union of America in the 1920s (2). This farmer-labor bloc, he argues, “moved the political spectrum of US political culture both substantively and ideologically to the left” (2). While Alter sees the reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal as weak derivatives of farmer-labor bloc demands, he argues that these measures would not have happened without the agrarian radicalism kept alive by activists like the Meitzens. The farmer-labor bloc they helped build was at its most influential, he contends, when organized for independent political action, not when working within the partisan mainstream. Here Alter sees a clear lesson for the US left today: “Working-class protest movements have more success achieving their demands when they politically organize themselves as a partisan party independent of the two-party system” (3).Alter's through line is a biographical study of three generations of the Meitzen family whose members played leading roles in the development of the farmer-labor bloc, particularly in Texas. He follows their story, with its long pattern of involvement in radical politics, back to Silesia in the early nineteenth century. Here Alter finds the “roots” of the idea for a political movement to serve the needs of farmers and laborers that would later animate the Populist and Socialist movements, and the German immigrants, including the Meitzens among many others, who would actively transplant that idea after violent suppression of the 1848 German revolution forced their immigration to the United States. Arriving in Texas, the Meitzens helped lead a succession of working-class organizations—cooperatives, unions, and political parties among them—that sought to build a political coalition of farmers and wage workers to challenge the growing power of industrial capitalism. Alter uses their multigenerational activism to demonstrate the continuous development of the farmer-labor bloc through myriad linked and generally successive groups, including the Texas People's Party (1873), Greenback Party, Greenback-Labor Party, Grange, Farmers Alliance, People's Party, Farmers’ Union, Socialist Party, Nonpartisan Lea
托马斯·奥尔特二世通过多代人的传记，重现了德克萨斯州及其他地区农业对资本主义的挑战的悠久历史，对美国工人阶级激进主义的谱系提出了大胆的论点，并为今天的美国左派提供了重要的教训。奥尔特将美国农业激进主义历史上熟悉的主题——农民联盟、人民党和美国社会党——置于革命的跨国背景下:1848年的德国、1910年的墨西哥和1917年的俄罗斯，从而对它们进行了新的阐释。1849年，德裔美国人麦岑(Meitzen)家族第一次从西里西亚(Silesia)来到德克萨斯州，并成为了激进激进分子的领袖。奥尔特着重研究了他们的三代人。他“证明了一个长达数十年的农工集团的存在”，从19世纪70年代的绿绿党(绿绿党)到20世纪20年代的美国农工联盟(Farm-Labor Union of America)(2)。“使美国政治文化的政治光谱在实质上和意识形态上都向左移动”(2)。虽然Alter认为进步时代的改革和新政是农民-劳工集团要求的弱衍生品，但他认为，如果没有像Meitzens这样的活动家保持活跃的土地激进主义，这些措施就不会发生。他认为，他们帮助建立的农工集团在为独立的政治行动而组织起来的时候最有影响力，而不是在党派主流中工作的时候。在这里，Alter为今天的美国左派看到了一个清晰的教训:“当工人阶级的抗议运动在政治上组织成一个独立于两党制的党派时，他们会更成功地实现自己的要求”(3)。Alter的贯穿线是对Meitzen家族三代人的传记研究，他们的成员在农民-劳工集团的发展中发挥了主导作用，特别是在德克萨斯州。他跟随他们的故事，以及他们长期参与激进政治的模式，追溯至19世纪早期的西里西亚。在这里，Alter找到了为农民和工人的需要服务的政治运动理念的“根源”，这一理念后来激发了民粹主义和社会主义运动，以及德国移民，包括meitzen夫妇在内的许多人，在1848年德国革命遭到暴力镇压后，他们被迫移民到美国，积极地移植了这一理念。到达德克萨斯州后，梅岑夫妇帮助领导了一系列工人阶级组织——合作社、工会和政党——试图建立一个农民和雇佣工人的政治联盟，以挑战日益强大的工业资本主义。Alter用他们几代人的行动主义来展示农民-劳工集团的持续发展，通过无数相互联系和通常连续的团体，包括德克萨斯人民党(1873)、绿背党、绿背工党、格兰奇、农民联盟、人民党、农民联盟、社会党、无党派联盟、美国党、工人党、德克萨斯工党、农民工党等等。在每一个案例中，阿尔特都通过梅岑夫妇的视角分析了这场运动，他们毕生致力于行动，为美国激进主义开辟了广泛的思想史和政治史。阿尔特的跨国分析不仅按时间顺序扩展了他的论点，而且加深了它，特别是关于墨西哥对美国农民-劳工集团的影响。他展示了20世纪10年代墨西哥革命的影响如何推动德克萨斯社会主义者采取更激进的土地政策，强调佃农的困境，这反过来迫使他们面对之前对白人至上主义政治的安逸。到1915年，德州社会主义者是该党左翼的先锋，他们对资本主义提出了激进的批评，并强烈反对美国对墨西哥和欧洲的军事干预。1917年布尔什维克革命的例子只是加速了这一政治轨迹。Alter认为，这些跨国来源使德克萨斯州的农民-劳工激进分子成为“资本主义民族国家的严重威胁”(171)。Alter的广泛方法使得《走向合作的联邦》成为美国农业激进主义文献的重要补充。虽然许多读者会从詹姆斯·格林、马克·劳斯、劳伦斯·古德温和凯尔·威尔金森等人的作品中认出他的部分故事，但奥尔特令人信服地证明，农民-劳工集团是一个连贯的、长达数十年的政治谱系，包含了学者们通常认为是离散的运动，如民粹主义和社会主义。他还表明，在工业资本主义存在期间，农民-劳工集团追求一种前瞻性的激进替代方案，从而为那些将农业政治描述为无可救药的落后或农业综合企业的温床的学者提供了有力的反驳。
{"title":"Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas","authors":"Jarod Roll","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581377","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Alter II uses a multigenerational biography to recover a long history of agrarian challenges to capitalism in Texas and beyond that makes bold arguments about the genealogy of working-class radicalism in the United States and offers critical lessons for the American left today. Alter sheds new light on familiar subjects in the history of US agrarian radicalism—the Farmers Alliance, People's Party, and Socialist Party of America—by situating them in the transnational context of revolution: Germany in 1848, Mexico in 1910, and Russia in 1917. Focusing on three generations of the German American Meitzen family, who first arrived in Texas from Silesia in 1849 and became leading radical activists, Alter “demonstrates the existence of a decades-long farmer-labor bloc” that ran from the Greenback Party in the 1870s to the Farm-Labor Union of America in the 1920s (2). This farmer-labor bloc, he argues, “moved the political spectrum of US political culture both substantively and ideologically to the left” (2). While Alter sees the reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal as weak derivatives of farmer-labor bloc demands, he argues that these measures would not have happened without the agrarian radicalism kept alive by activists like the Meitzens. The farmer-labor bloc they helped build was at its most influential, he contends, when organized for independent political action, not when working within the partisan mainstream. Here Alter sees a clear lesson for the US left today: “Working-class protest movements have more success achieving their demands when they politically organize themselves as a partisan party independent of the two-party system” (3).Alter's through line is a biographical study of three generations of the Meitzen family whose members played leading roles in the development of the farmer-labor bloc, particularly in Texas. He follows their story, with its long pattern of involvement in radical politics, back to Silesia in the early nineteenth century. Here Alter finds the “roots” of the idea for a political movement to serve the needs of farmers and laborers that would later animate the Populist and Socialist movements, and the German immigrants, including the Meitzens among many others, who would actively transplant that idea after violent suppression of the 1848 German revolution forced their immigration to the United States. Arriving in Texas, the Meitzens helped lead a succession of working-class organizations—cooperatives, unions, and political parties among them—that sought to build a political coalition of farmers and wage workers to challenge the growing power of industrial capitalism. Alter uses their multigenerational activism to demonstrate the continuous development of the farmer-labor bloc through myriad linked and generally successive groups, including the Texas People's Party (1873), Greenback Party, Greenback-Labor Party, Grange, Farmers Alliance, People's Party, Farmers’ Union, Socialist Party, Nonpartisan Lea","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581405
James P. Kraft
In this concise, engaging study, Colin J. Davis explores the history of a neglected group of workers—transatlantic fishermen. The study compares the problems and political activities of New England and British fishermen after World War II, when foreign competition and technological innovations threatened the men's livelihoods as well as the health of Atlantic Ocean fisheries. Fishermen's trade unions and wives helped to confront these threats, with uneven levels of success. This working-class drama unfolds gradually, and it speaks to major themes in social and labor history.The drama begins with an overview of the North Atlantic fishing business. The book's opening chapter discusses the types of fish that men harvested and areas of the seas where the fish were found. It also describes daily routines and job hierarchies on modern fishing vessels, whose large trawls collected fish by the ton. At that point, the book brings the hazards of deep-sea fishing into sharp relief. Working on a constantly moving trawler for long periods of time presented enormous challenges. Injuries and fatalities were relatively high in this line of work, especially during stormy weather. Trawlers sometimes capsized at sea and entire crews perished.Fishermen's unions struggled valiantly to protect their members’ interests, but only those of the New Englanders had much success. The reason was partly structural. Ignoring old craft traditions, the Americans established unions that included skippers and engineers as well as deckhands and cooks. As a result, the men had more power vis-à-vis shipowners than their British counterparts did. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, getting fishermen to support union goals proved challenging. The men were often at sea and rarely wanted to spend their shore time involved in union activities. Trade union leaders were typically more militant than the rank and file, and union victories hinged largely on their own dedication and hard work.Unlike other labor studies, this book shows how workers’ wives helped to solve industry-wide problems. In chapter 4, for example, readers learn how a group of British women who had lost their husbands at sea protested the lack of safety standards in the fishing business. Speaking publicly about the problem, the women complained that British trawlers often headed out to sea without reliable communication equipment, or even basic medical supplies. The women's speeches drew nationwide attention and eventually shamed shipowners and lawmakers into improving safety conditions. In New England, fishermen's wives created local organizations that highlighted the importance of fishing to coastal economies and thus justified the exclusion of foreign fishing fleets from coastal waters. In 1976, the women garnered support for the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation Act, which significantly extended America's territorial fishing limits and thereby protected their husbands’ jobs.The politics of exclusion occasionally spark
{"title":"Contested and Dangerous Sea: North Atlantic Fishermen, Their Wives, Unions, and the Politics of Exclusion","authors":"James P. Kraft","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581405","url":null,"abstract":"In this concise, engaging study, Colin J. Davis explores the history of a neglected group of workers—transatlantic fishermen. The study compares the problems and political activities of New England and British fishermen after World War II, when foreign competition and technological innovations threatened the men's livelihoods as well as the health of Atlantic Ocean fisheries. Fishermen's trade unions and wives helped to confront these threats, with uneven levels of success. This working-class drama unfolds gradually, and it speaks to major themes in social and labor history.The drama begins with an overview of the North Atlantic fishing business. The book's opening chapter discusses the types of fish that men harvested and areas of the seas where the fish were found. It also describes daily routines and job hierarchies on modern fishing vessels, whose large trawls collected fish by the ton. At that point, the book brings the hazards of deep-sea fishing into sharp relief. Working on a constantly moving trawler for long periods of time presented enormous challenges. Injuries and fatalities were relatively high in this line of work, especially during stormy weather. Trawlers sometimes capsized at sea and entire crews perished.Fishermen's unions struggled valiantly to protect their members’ interests, but only those of the New Englanders had much success. The reason was partly structural. Ignoring old craft traditions, the Americans established unions that included skippers and engineers as well as deckhands and cooks. As a result, the men had more power vis-à-vis shipowners than their British counterparts did. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, getting fishermen to support union goals proved challenging. The men were often at sea and rarely wanted to spend their shore time involved in union activities. Trade union leaders were typically more militant than the rank and file, and union victories hinged largely on their own dedication and hard work.Unlike other labor studies, this book shows how workers’ wives helped to solve industry-wide problems. In chapter 4, for example, readers learn how a group of British women who had lost their husbands at sea protested the lack of safety standards in the fishing business. Speaking publicly about the problem, the women complained that British trawlers often headed out to sea without reliable communication equipment, or even basic medical supplies. The women's speeches drew nationwide attention and eventually shamed shipowners and lawmakers into improving safety conditions. In New England, fishermen's wives created local organizations that highlighted the importance of fishing to coastal economies and thus justified the exclusion of foreign fishing fleets from coastal waters. In 1976, the women garnered support for the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation Act, which significantly extended America's territorial fishing limits and thereby protected their husbands’ jobs.The politics of exclusion occasionally spark","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581517
Celeste R. Menchaca
Located in California's southeastern corner, the city of El Centro sits in the mountainous desert of the Imperial Valley. It was home to the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, “one of the oldest continuously operating detention centers in the United States (until recently)” (3). Despite its long history, little was documented of the detention facility in local archives. For Jessica Ordaz, this forgetting was representative of a larger historical erasure that masked violence against migrants under Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) custody. Her book aims to unpack the history of an otherwise buried yet important federal facility. Across seven chapters, Ordaz looks within the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, from its origins in 1945 to its closing in 2014, to uncover state practices of migrant labor exploitation and punishment, and in turn she reveals migrant resistance as transnational radical solidarity.Ordaz's central claim is that the El Centro Immigration Detention Center was not simply an administrative site to hold and process unauthorized migrants but “a racialized and gendered administrative regime of punishment” (94). She documents how migrants in the facility faced physical and verbal abuse, experienced psychological intimidation, endured overcrowding, and suffered solitary confinement. They were denied lifesaving medical services, basic recreation, and adequate nutrition. Their confinement, she argues, was designed to be punitive, a claim that resonates with the work of Miroslava Chávez-García and Natalie Lira, both of whom analyze racialized punishment through the lens of juvenile detention and sterilization in California. Ordaz further situates her analysis of racialized punishment within the context of wartime mobilization. She reviews how World War II, the Cold War, and the civil wars in Latin America armed INS officials with the rhetoric to frame migrants as a threat to the nation and, consequently, legitimized migrant incarceration, which allowed the state to expand detention and deportation infrastructures.Most histories on twentieth-century US immigration enforcement generally center on law and policy, the Border Patrol, or immigrant inspection at ports of entry. While these works provide a brief discussion of migrant detention, few fully unpack its significance. Instead, Ordaz demonstrates that detention facilities were a key mechanism in a larger system of labor exploitation. It was no coincidence, she points out, that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp was built just three years after the 1942 creation of the Bracero Program, a binational program where the United States issued short-term labor contracts to Mexican workers. Ordaz argues that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp and the Bracero reception center were two sides of the same coin: both “agricultural growers and INS employees viewed Mexican migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, as a source of labor and profit” (37). According
{"title":"The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity","authors":"Celeste R. Menchaca","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581517","url":null,"abstract":"Located in California's southeastern corner, the city of El Centro sits in the mountainous desert of the Imperial Valley. It was home to the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, “one of the oldest continuously operating detention centers in the United States (until recently)” (3). Despite its long history, little was documented of the detention facility in local archives. For Jessica Ordaz, this forgetting was representative of a larger historical erasure that masked violence against migrants under Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) custody. Her book aims to unpack the history of an otherwise buried yet important federal facility. Across seven chapters, Ordaz looks within the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, from its origins in 1945 to its closing in 2014, to uncover state practices of migrant labor exploitation and punishment, and in turn she reveals migrant resistance as transnational radical solidarity.Ordaz's central claim is that the El Centro Immigration Detention Center was not simply an administrative site to hold and process unauthorized migrants but “a racialized and gendered administrative regime of punishment” (94). She documents how migrants in the facility faced physical and verbal abuse, experienced psychological intimidation, endured overcrowding, and suffered solitary confinement. They were denied lifesaving medical services, basic recreation, and adequate nutrition. Their confinement, she argues, was designed to be punitive, a claim that resonates with the work of Miroslava Chávez-García and Natalie Lira, both of whom analyze racialized punishment through the lens of juvenile detention and sterilization in California. Ordaz further situates her analysis of racialized punishment within the context of wartime mobilization. She reviews how World War II, the Cold War, and the civil wars in Latin America armed INS officials with the rhetoric to frame migrants as a threat to the nation and, consequently, legitimized migrant incarceration, which allowed the state to expand detention and deportation infrastructures.Most histories on twentieth-century US immigration enforcement generally center on law and policy, the Border Patrol, or immigrant inspection at ports of entry. While these works provide a brief discussion of migrant detention, few fully unpack its significance. Instead, Ordaz demonstrates that detention facilities were a key mechanism in a larger system of labor exploitation. It was no coincidence, she points out, that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp was built just three years after the 1942 creation of the Bracero Program, a binational program where the United States issued short-term labor contracts to Mexican workers. Ordaz argues that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp and the Bracero reception center were two sides of the same coin: both “agricultural growers and INS employees viewed Mexican migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, as a source of labor and profit” (37). According","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10581391
Jim Phillips
Ten percent of male workers in the United Kingdom were employed in the coal industry in 1914. Coal's economic and employment prevalence came at immense human cost. No industry was more dangerous or injurious to the health of its workers. Major pit disasters arising from explosions and fires drew public attention, but more damaging were the everyday attrition effects of roof falls and the dust-ridden environment underground. Coalfield women shared the industry's physical toll. While barred from work underground in Britain after the 1840s, their experience of childbirth and domestic labor in extremely arduous conditions was debilitating. Their daily shift, called the darg in Scotland, involved cleaning and drying their menfolk's pit clothes, heating water for baths, and preparing meals. Where mining sons lived in the parental home and worked different shifts from their fathers, mothers’ dargs could last from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m.The authors of Disability in Britain examine the impact of such exhausting life and labor. Their first key insight, from disability studies, is profound. Impairment and disability are not synonymous: impairment is physical; disability is social. Miners acquired impairments through workplace accidents and diseases. They were then disabled by obstacles erected by employers and medical professionals along with welfare policy makers and administrators. The authors’ second key insight is that miners were a highly organized “patient” group that exerted agency on two broad fronts: campaigning for a safer working environment to minimize impairment; and resisting disability on the terms defined by employers and policy makers. Miners across the United Kingdom won two major legislative victories in 1946–47. Clement Attlee's reforming Labour government passed the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, which provided statutory and comprehensive compensation for workers denied employment owing to impairment, and nationalized coal, which led to safer employment through stronger union voice.Disability in Industrial Britain is a major outcome of the Leverhulme Trust–funded Disability and Industrial Society project, where twelve researchers from seven UK universities engaged in comparative cultural histories of the coalfields from 1780 to 1914. Kirsti Bohata is a professor of English at Swansea University, where Alexandra Jones undertook a PhD thesis and Mike Mantin worked as a research fellow. Steve Thompson is a senior lecturer in history and Welsh history at Aberystwyth University. The interdisciplinary strengths of this research team shaped the broad range of sources they analyzed in this book, focusing on the coalfield territories of South Wales, Durham, and Scotland. The team drew empirical evidence from records of welfare policy makers and administrators, employers, the courts where compensation claims were contested, and trade unions. These documents, alongside newspaper reports, are integrated with extensive readings from creativ
{"title":"Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880–1948","authors":"Jim Phillips","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581391","url":null,"abstract":"Ten percent of male workers in the United Kingdom were employed in the coal industry in 1914. Coal's economic and employment prevalence came at immense human cost. No industry was more dangerous or injurious to the health of its workers. Major pit disasters arising from explosions and fires drew public attention, but more damaging were the everyday attrition effects of roof falls and the dust-ridden environment underground. Coalfield women shared the industry's physical toll. While barred from work underground in Britain after the 1840s, their experience of childbirth and domestic labor in extremely arduous conditions was debilitating. Their daily shift, called the darg in Scotland, involved cleaning and drying their menfolk's pit clothes, heating water for baths, and preparing meals. Where mining sons lived in the parental home and worked different shifts from their fathers, mothers’ dargs could last from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m.The authors of Disability in Britain examine the impact of such exhausting life and labor. Their first key insight, from disability studies, is profound. Impairment and disability are not synonymous: impairment is physical; disability is social. Miners acquired impairments through workplace accidents and diseases. They were then disabled by obstacles erected by employers and medical professionals along with welfare policy makers and administrators. The authors’ second key insight is that miners were a highly organized “patient” group that exerted agency on two broad fronts: campaigning for a safer working environment to minimize impairment; and resisting disability on the terms defined by employers and policy makers. Miners across the United Kingdom won two major legislative victories in 1946–47. Clement Attlee's reforming Labour government passed the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, which provided statutory and comprehensive compensation for workers denied employment owing to impairment, and nationalized coal, which led to safer employment through stronger union voice.Disability in Industrial Britain is a major outcome of the Leverhulme Trust–funded Disability and Industrial Society project, where twelve researchers from seven UK universities engaged in comparative cultural histories of the coalfields from 1780 to 1914. Kirsti Bohata is a professor of English at Swansea University, where Alexandra Jones undertook a PhD thesis and Mike Mantin worked as a research fellow. Steve Thompson is a senior lecturer in history and Welsh history at Aberystwyth University. The interdisciplinary strengths of this research team shaped the broad range of sources they analyzed in this book, focusing on the coalfield territories of South Wales, Durham, and Scotland. The team drew empirical evidence from records of welfare policy makers and administrators, employers, the courts where compensation claims were contested, and trade unions. These documents, alongside newspaper reports, are integrated with extensive readings from creativ","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329862
Eileen Boris
As historian John Wood Sweet recounts, on October 14, 1793, hundreds of men from New York City's “middling and lower ranks” violently dismantled the bawdy house of Mother Carey. Her perjured testimony had offered evidence for gentleman jurors to acquit a rake charged with raping the stepdaughter of a master harbor pilot, a skilled artisan who believed with the other rioters “that street protests were a legitimate, necessary way to maintain a free government.”1 This plebian protest against justice denied not only responded to the exclusion from formal power of working men during the transitional period of the Early Republic, when the old Dutch families retained influence, but also demonstrated a moral economy of the crowd that enacted its own norms of respectability. A patriarchal order saw rape as a crime between men, damaging a man's property and assaulting his reputation, though the actual victim was a daughter or wife. And according to the crowd's reasoning, working men had every right to avenge a wrong against one of their own by taking matters into their own hands. Moreover, as historians Christine Stansell and Judith Walkowitz found about prostitutes who lived among their neighbors and families, a seduced woman was not necessarily an outcast in these working-class communities—though mores were beginning to change as New York expanded from a village to a metropolis.2Sweet's example of collective action might also illuminate “the relationship between the premodern American political system and the coming of the factory,” the reexamination of which Herbert Gutman called for in his classic 1973 essay, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919.”3 For our purposes, this incident underscores an artisan cultural complexity absent from Gutman's account, focused as he was on those Blue Mondays, ethnic festivals, and leisurely work routines that rejected factory time for more rural rhythms, a way of being that he conflated as premodern and preindustrial. Rereading “Work, Culture, and Society” a half century later and from the standpoint of feminist labor history, I ask, What difference does gender make?It isn't that Gutman ignored women—we read the phrase “working men and women” more than once in his essay. He refers to “the frequent tension between different groups of men and women new to the machine and a changing American society,” “native and immigrant men and women fresh to the factory and the demands imposed upon them by the regularities and disciplines of factory labor,” and “men and women who sell their labor to an employer.”4 But his prototypical hirelings and immigrant laborers were men. Gender, as the language of power and a shaper of identities, was not a category of historical analysis when Gutman wrote his essay,5 so it might be understandable that he missed the gendered dimensions of his own story.Gutman does provide examples whose gendered meanings a sharper analytic can now unlock. He was too good a social hist
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329918
Kathy M. Newman
Abstract This article considers the problem of social class in contemporary television, focusing on the last five years. The author considers the ways in which streaming platforms are increasing the range and diversity of stories that television can offer; in addition, she shifts the conversation from class, consumption, and representation to work, labor, and production, arguing that this view highlights the extent to which television is engaging with questions of labor more often than we realize.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329792
Jennifer Scheper Hughes
Abstract This study approaches the history of epidemics in Mexico under Spanish invasion through the lens of religion and labor. In the aftermath of a particularly devastating epidemic from 1576 to 1581, colonial administrators in Mexico tried to exact previous levels of encomienda tribute from a greatly diminished population. Across the colony, Indigenous survivors protested having to pay “tribute for the dead” for those that they lost in the outbreak, and they demanded official recounts and new censuses of their communities. Underlying their protest were longstanding Mesoamerican practices and principles for the structure of collective labor, or tequitl in Nahuatl, including social norms dictating the proper relationship between religion, work, and the afterlife. The language of protest suggests that among the most serious violations of the “tribute for the dead” was that those who died in the epidemic were being compelled to work as spectral laborers for Spanish purposes. The resilient power of these practices and beliefs motivated and galvanized a groundswell of struggle against the encomienda system of labor extraction toward the end of the sixteenth century, bringing that system to its knees.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10330075
Nelson Lichtenstein
Eric Rauchway calls the New Deal a peaceable form of patriotism, a moment of common purpose exemplified by a built environment transformed through the exercise of government power. At the most basic level the New Deal still matters because Americans can scarcely get through a day without coming into contact with some part of it. Rauchway's book is therefore a tour of selected venues that exemplify what he sees as the New Deal's most significant and visible accomplishments. The book is rooted in physicality: an account of some of the dams, libraries, school buildings, housing projects, and roads whose construction put paychecks and a more tangible sense of their shared citizenship in the hands of millions.Rauchway starts at Arlington National Cemetery, where we visit the tombs of two World War I veterans, both killed when police shot them in the summer of 1932 during an altercation with the Bonus Army, which was encamped at the nation's capital in a vain effort to secure a desperately needed monetary bonus from Congress. Rauchway offers a fascinating account of President Herbert Hoover's ill-conceived determination to rid the District of Columbia of a group he thought mainly composed of radicals and layabouts. Hoover knew that General Douglas MacArthur's insubordinate decision to send in the troops and burn the Bonus Army encampment was a political disaster that would cost him dearly in the presidential election that fall. Yet Hoover could never bring himself to criticize MacArthur, because that might seem to legitimize the protest and cast a dark shadow over his own intransigence.With Hoover out of the way, Rauchway takes us to the Clinch River in Tennessee, where he offers a stirring account of how the New Deal built the great Norris Dam, a Tennessee Valley Authority project named after a stalwart Progressive, Senator George Norris, who along with Harold Ickes at Interior was among the cohort of Bull Moose Republicans who joined forces with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Despite its conformity to the Jim Crow racial order and its latter-day appetite for coal-fired electrical generation, Rauchway sees the TVA as a quintessential New Deal impulse: a vast experiment in social and economic planning that raised living standards in a benighted region, a project that TVA director David Lilienthal called “democracy on the march.” Within a decade it would prove a bulwark of American global power, when all that cheap electricity proved essential to the massive Oak Ridge enterprise that employed tens of thousands of rural folk to refine just a few hundred highly potent kilograms of uranium-235.Rauchway next takes us to Window Rock, Arizona, to observe the impact of the New Deal on the Navajo Nation, and then on to Hunter's Point in San Francisco, which offers him the opportunity to assess how and why the African American community came to support the New Deal despite FDR's manifest timidity on virtually all issues related to the American racial order. Led
埃里克·劳赫威称新政是一种和平形式的爱国主义，是一个共同目标的时刻，通过政府权力的行使改变了建筑环境。在最基本的层面上，新政仍然很重要，因为美国人几乎每天都要接触到它的某些部分。因此，罗威的书是一次精选场所之旅，这些场所体现了他所认为的新政最重要、最明显的成就。这本书根植于现实:它描述了一些水坝、图书馆、学校建筑、住房项目和道路，它们的建设使数百万人获得了薪水和更切实的共同公民意识。罗威从阿灵顿国家公墓(Arlington National Cemetery)开始，在那里我们参观了两位第一次世界大战老兵的坟墓，他们都是在1932年夏天与奖金军(Bonus Army)发生争执时被警察开枪打死的。奖金军驻扎在美国首都，试图从国会获得亟需的奖金，但却徒劳无益。赫伯特·胡佛(Herbert Hoover)总统考虑不周，决定将哥伦比亚特区清除掉，他认为这个组织主要由激进分子和懒汉组成。胡佛知道，道格拉斯·麦克阿瑟将军不服从命令，决定派兵烧毁奖金军营地，这是一场政治灾难，将使他在那年秋天的总统选举中付出沉重代价。然而，胡佛永远无法让自己批评麦克阿瑟，因为这似乎会使抗议合法化，并给他自己的不妥协投下阴影。胡佛离开后，劳赫威带我们来到田纳西州的克林奇河(Clinch River)，讲述了罗斯福新政是如何修建诺里斯大坝的。诺里斯大坝是田纳西河谷管理局(Tennessee Valley Authority)的一个项目，以坚定的进步党参议员乔治·诺里斯(George Norris)的名字命名。诺里斯与内政部的哈罗德·伊克斯(Harold Ickes)是牛鹿党(Bull Moose)共和党人之一，他们与富兰克林·罗斯福的新政联合起来。尽管TVA符合吉姆·克劳(Jim Crow)的种族秩序，而且在后来对燃煤发电也有兴趣，但劳夫威认为TVA是典型的新政冲动:一个在社会和经济规划方面的巨大实验，提高了一个愚昧地区的生活水平，TVA主任大卫·利林塔尔(David Lilienthal)称这个项目为“民主正在前进”。在十年之内，它成为了美国全球力量的堡垒，所有这些廉价的电力被证明对橡树岭的大型企业至关重要，该企业雇佣了成千上万的农村居民来提炼几百公斤高强度的铀-235。接下来，rachway带我们去了亚利桑那州的Window Rock，观察新政对纳瓦霍民族的影响，然后去了旧金山的Hunter's Point，在那里他有机会评估非裔美国人社区是如何以及为什么支持新政的，尽管罗斯福在几乎所有与美国种族秩序有关的问题上都表现得很怯懦。在约翰·科利尔(John Collier)的领导下，“印第安新政”(Indian New Deal)既是文化多元化的，也是经济变革的。科利尔曾在20世纪20年代捍卫美国原住民的权利和部落身份。科利尔拒绝了旧的“分配”制度，这种制度试图把印第安人变成自主的农民，相反，他提倡一种部落集体主义和自治的措施。成千上万的纳瓦霍男女在新政的基础设施项目中成为工薪阶层，这些项目极大地改善了保留区的生活，但在新政的农业政策方面，纳瓦霍人却固执地坚持个人主义。他们拒绝了科利尔通过宰杀山羊和绵羊来保护保留区草原和提高牲畜价格的努力，这一计划与1933年春天新成立的农业调整局臭名昭著的屠杀600万头小猪的计划没有什么不同。科利尔成了一个令人讨厌的人物，此后，一个支持分配制度的纳瓦霍派系赢得了部落会议的控制权。罗威对这一切都进行了乐观的解释，他认为，新政对基层民主的复兴意味着赋予社区权力，让他们抱怨新政的某些方面被证明是多么不充分。也许吧，但就像在南方白人和一些北方城市一样，当地精英也可以利用新政计划来巩固他们的权力。众所周知，罗斯福新政对非裔美国人社区的矛盾求爱。美国黑人确实把他们的政治忠诚转向了民主党，因为他们从任何面向底层劳动人口的项目——公共工程、工会组织、最低工资、失业保险——中获得了不成比例的好处。劳夫威还简要介绍了罗斯福的“黑人内阁”，1938年春天民主党初选期间总统“清洗”最反动的南方参议员的努力，以及在司法部设立“公民自由”部门。 但是，作者讨论了在新政住房项目中普遍存在的种族隔离和“红线”，将家庭工人和农业工人排除在新政的许多保护和福利之外，以及南方种族主义者对他们所在地区几乎所有联邦项目的实施实施的控制，这些都足以抵消所有这些。当我们读到最后一章时，很明显，劳夫威给他的书起错了名字。这应该是为什么在新政时期基础设施和公共就业很重要。劳夫威解释了建造所有这些水坝、学校和道路的字母机构实际上是如何运作的。哈里·霍普金斯在1933年秋天成立并运行土木工程管理局的速度确实令人震惊，雇佣人数超过400万，相当于今天的至少三倍。罗斯福和霍普金斯都讨厌失业救济金:他们希望人们为自己的收入而工作，以便在获得薪水的同时获得尊严和技能。他们拒绝接受经济状况调查，支付的工资通常高于当地劳动力市场的惯例。罗斯福认为，如果国家本身就是雇主，那么政府就不会显得那么陌生和遥远。“公共雇佣，”劳夫威写道，“将拯救的不仅仅是经济:它将拯救民主”(147页)。但是公共工程并不是新政的全部内容。它们很重要，但社会保障(Social Security)和瓦格纳法案(Wagner Act)也很重要，后者是在二战后才形成的。瓦格纳法案支撑了两代人的强大工会运动，不仅使数千万工人的实际工资翻了一番，而且奠定了新政(New Deal)的社会和政治秩序，主导了20世纪中叶的三分之一。在他最近对新政经济政策的杰出研究中，《造钱者:罗斯福和凯恩斯如何结束大萧条，击败法西斯主义，确保繁荣的和平》，劳夫威自己提供了另一组新政重要的原因。在经济危机时期，公共就业仍然是一个很好的逆周期政策工具，但它没有体现固有的进步意识形态。因此，近年来的经济刺激计划在很大程度上没有引起政治反响。为了实现更大的变革，我们需要动员起来的民众，首先是参加游行的工人阶级。新政产生了这样一种共生关系。我们再次需要它。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329750
Samn Stockwell
In an attic workshop I assembled Tiffany lamps badly,holding my uneven seams up to the windowthen staring at the street below: a man spilling mustardon his dress pants, a bus wheezingin front of Caldor's, and pigeons carted by air.Lead trickled over my knucklesas I soldered plaques of colored glass.I thought I would never be alive,the most I could hope for would be the walkinto the morning-glazed building,following the trail of someone's perfume in the stairwell.My great-grandfather and great-unclelived in an outbuilding.At one end, two iron cots.At the other, a woodstove,an oilcloth-covered table,a bowl of molasses kisseswrapped in twistsof yellowed waxed paper.My great-uncle never strayed beyond the woodshed,but my great-grandfather had been a carpenter in town.My grandmother made their dinner and supperand pulled identical work clothes in enormous sheetsfrom the wringer washer—
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10330103
Rosemary Feurer
This book's catchy title expresses the ruthlessness and extremes of the economic divide established during the Gilded Age. “Wretched refuse” suggests the way capitalists sought to deploy the world's poor as exploitable labor for profit, with an ironic nod to Emma Lazarus's poem. Zeidel chronicles capitalists’ constant search for workers who would take the lowest-paid and most dangerous work in the age of industrialization. They both needed and often reviled the immigrants they hired. When these recruits participated in strikes or were rebellious, the elite labeled them tools of foreign ideas and un-American radicals. Capitalists’ overt efforts to undermine labor campaigns and deny labor rights through a divide-and-conquer strategy in key industries contributed to a dynamic that led to political repression and immigration restriction, Zeidel argues. The media and influential commentators of the era might criticize the rich, but they strategically targeted the labor radicals and immigrants in ways that distracted from the reality of class power.Zeidel brings together the study of immigration restriction with the study of labor repression from 1865 to 1925. These are usually disconnected fields of study. Historians have long debated whether antiradicalism was a grassroots irrational hysteria, an elite-driven phenomenon, or a product of episodic wartime hysteria. Most treatments center on World War I as the pivot. Michael Rogin gave a theoretical interpretive lift by suggesting that political demonology had a psychological basis traceable to settler colonialism. Rogin examined the intersection of public and private forces in the enterprise, and connected it to the liberal impulse to create order. Zeidel's book seems to join that interpretation, implicating Progressives who yearned to restore class harmony. Others have contributed specific books about episodes from the Molly Maguires onward where employers and Pinkertons have been strategic, but they usually then leave out the way these affected immigration debates. Michael Kazin, on the other hand, has dismissed the role of repression in the fortunes of the US labor radicalism. While Zeidel is obviously arguing against Kazin's conclusion, he misses an opportunity to position the book in this dialogue. But the narrative he offers is full of insights regarding the connections between anti-radicalism and the immigration debate.Zeidel is more direct about placing this study in the historiography of immigration restriction, clearly stating that he is arguing against a genre of literature that reaches back to John Higham's Strangers in the Land, an approach that stressed nativism as a cultural construct and agent, and nationalism and nation-building around exclusion. This scholarship has often been untethered from employers and labor market conflicts even when there are mentions, for example, of incidents like Haymarket, and usually is centered on discourse, whiteness, social psychology, panics, and worker
这本书朗朗上口的标题表达了镀金时代形成的经济鸿沟的残酷和极端。“可怜的垃圾”暗示了资本家试图利用世界上的穷人作为可剥削的劳动力来获取利润的方式，这是对艾玛·拉撒路(Emma Lazarus)诗歌的讽刺。齐德尔记录了资本家在工业化时代不断寻找那些愿意从事最低工资和最危险工作的工人。他们既需要移民，也经常辱骂他们雇佣的移民。当这些新兵参加罢工或反叛时，精英们就给他们贴上外国思想和非美国激进分子的标签。泽德尔认为，资本家通过在关键行业采取分而治之的策略，公然破坏劳工运动，剥夺劳工权利，这导致了政治镇压和移民限制。那个时代的媒体和有影响力的评论员可能会批评富人，但他们在战略上把矛头对准了劳工激进分子和移民，而忽视了阶级权力的现实。齐德尔将1865年至1925年移民限制的研究与劳工镇压的研究结合在一起。这些通常是互不相关的研究领域。历史学家长期以来一直在争论，反激进主义是一种草根阶层的非理性歇斯底里，是一种精英驱动的现象，还是战时间歇性歇斯底里的产物。大多数治疗都以第一次世界大战为中心。迈克尔·罗金(Michael Rogin)提出，政治恶魔学有一个可追溯到定居者殖民主义的心理基础，这为理论解释提供了帮助。罗金考察了企业中公共和私人力量的交集，并将其与创造秩序的自由主义冲动联系起来。泽德尔的书似乎加入了这种解释，暗示了渴望恢复阶级和谐的进步主义者。还有一些人专门写了一些关于莫利·马奎尔夫妇之后的情节的书，在这些情节中，雇主和平克顿夫妇是有战略意义的，但他们通常会忽略这些对移民辩论的影响。另一方面，迈克尔·卡津(Michael Kazin)驳斥了镇压在美国劳工激进主义命运中的作用。虽然泽德尔显然是在反对卡津的结论，但他错过了将这本书置于这种对话中的机会。但他提供的叙述对反激进主义和移民辩论之间的联系充满了洞见。Zeidel更直接地将这项研究置于移民限制的史学中，明确指出他反对的是一种可以追溯到约翰·海厄姆(John Higham)的《土地上的陌生人》(Strangers in the Land)的文学类型，这种文学类型强调本土主义是一种文化建构和媒介，而民族主义和围绕排斥的国家建设。这种研究往往与雇主和劳动力市场的冲突无关，即使在提到Haymarket这样的事件时也是如此，而且通常集中在话语、白人、社会心理学、恐慌和工人在排斥努力中的作用上。泽德尔并没有忽视劳工的责任，但他把资本家作为塑造这种动态的关键代理人。从莫利·马奎尔斯(Molly Maguires)到海马基特(Haymarket)，再到勒德洛(Ludlow)和比斯比(Bisbee)，劳动史学家们对这本紧凑的调查中出现的一系列劳资冲突都很熟悉，但泽德尔也提到了一些鲜为人知的事件。据我所知，这是唯一一本将这些劳工冲突与长期以来的限制运动联系起来的书。Zeidel还提到了零和博弈中一些有趣但未被充分研究的因素，比如非洲裔美国人认为，由于来自移民的竞争，他们被拒之门外，而移民是管理者青睐的对象。然后他们坚决支持限制。那些招募移民的资本家为他们的努力辩护，他们高尚地呼吁自由劳动力市场的概念，并相信没有这些新鲜的劳动力供应，他们就无法繁荣。Zeidel展示了他们的私人和公共观点也包含了更严厉的观点。在宾夕法尼亚州的威斯特摩兰，煤矿经营者派遣移民来对抗他们认为激进的煽动者。在加州，铁路大亨查尔斯·克罗克(Charles Crocker)像订购面粉一样从中国订购工人，表达了中国工人柔顺而温顺的观点。雇主，尤其是经理们，在工作场所恶毒而持续地使用种族分类作为获得优势的手段。如果这增加了工人将移民视为雇主工具的倾向，管理者可以坐视不管，让这种情绪恶化，以使工人更难团结起来。雇主知道他们从这种看法中受益，泽德尔记录了一个显而易见的事实:他们对市场的建设导致了移民的非人化，这在一个完美的循环中回报了他们的利益。
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