Jun 8, 2006 2:03 PM
Five years ago, in these pages, former New York Teacher staff writer Jack Schierenbeck produced “Labor history old and new: a starter’s kit,” user-friendly capsules of 23 essential books on working-class history, unions and politics. What follows is not as extensive, but with summer coming, you may have some time to read a few of the better books on labor and social change published since 2001.
If you read one book this summer, make it James Green’s “Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America” (2006). A historian at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, Green chronicles the eight-hour-day movement and its collapse after a mysterious bomb exploded at a May 4, 1886, Chicago labor protest and killed seven police officers.
After what is today universally agreed was a sham trial, a judge imposed the death sentence on seven labor leaders for the bombing, which followed a police attack on an up-to-that-minute nonviolent demonstration. Though none of the men were even at the rally when the bomb was thrown, the court held that their “inflammatory speeches and publications” incited the bomb-thrower, who was never identified. From the standpoint of the city’s business elite, the police break-up of the demonstration saved Chicago from anarchist terror, but for the largely immigrant labor movement, it was a police riot and a beheading of their leadership.
In the end, four of the men were hanged, one committed suicide and the sentences of two others were commuted from death to life imprisonment. Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld — whose courage John F. Kennedy profiled — eviscerated his own political future when he pardoned the remaining jailed defendants in 1893.
In the 1951 classic “Chicago: City on the Make,” Nelson Algren describes the city of the broad shoulders as having “many deep-boned grudges to settle,” including the “big dark grudge cast by the four standing in white muslin robes, hands cuffed behind at the gallows head. For the hope of the eight-hour day.”
The quintessential labor strike of the 20th century was the 1912 Lawrence, Mass., textile workers campaign, and Boston Globe reporter Bruce Watson covers it masterfully in “Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream” (2005). Textile workers from dozens of nations speaking dozens of languages, none of them English, fought in the dead of a blisteringly cold winter against state militia in order to get their employers, including the then- giant American Woolen Company, to retract a wage cut.
(Incidentally, we came upon this book, fittingly enough, at an NYU labor protest, where among the 78 arrested was one graduate assistant clutching a copy of Watson’s just-released work. “It’s for reading while I’m being processed,” the striker said.)
The Lawrence strike was led by the Industrial Workers of the World, and if you don’t know who the Wobblies were, look no further than Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman’s “Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World” (2005).
Critics called them anarchists and trash and said IWW stood for “I Won’t Work,” but the Wobs set the gold standard for organizing the unorganized, including unskilled immigrants, blacks, Chicanos and Native Americans, long before the mainstream unions turned to organizing industrially and racially integrating locals. Many of the classic labor songs, including “Solidarity Forever,” were IWW hymns.
If Lawrence was the strike of the century, then New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist conflagration was the fire of the century, and Washington Post reporter David von Drehle brings it home in crackling detail. “Triangle: The Fire that Changed America” (2003) chronicles the death of 146 garment workers, mostly young women and mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, after their Greenwich Village factory floor caught on fire. They died because managers locked the doors as a punitive measure. While the Triangle manufacturers were never found guilty of committing a crime — a botched prosecution and a partisan judge saw to that — the tragedy forced significant reforms in fire protection and workplace safety. It also boosted the organizing efforts of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, now UNITE-HERE, which went on to successfully organize the then- sprawling women’s garment industry in lower Manhattan.
Nelson Lichtenstein, an historian at UC-Santa Barbara, published “State of the Union: A Century of American Labor” (2003) before the AFL-CIO fragmented last summer, but he doesn’t miss much else, making it possibly the best overview of labor issues and the rise, fall and hoped-for renaissance of unions in the new century. Part exhaustive labor history — especially of the period from the Great Depression to the present — and part astute political analysis, Lichtenstein brings the story up-to-date by examining the problematic Reagan and Clinton years as industrial America downsized and global capitalism outsourced jobs. Lichtenstein says a renewed labor movement is not only a good thing for working families and the only likely counterweight to corporate domination, but vital in preserving and extending democracy, too.
Schierenbeck’s excellent 2001 compilation is available below.