American's Labour History

[Broletariat]

Need some help here. I'm doing a presentation with this OWS stuff and I want to take a look to the past at how violent and radical our labour movement has been, let me see if I have some key points.

1877 Great Rail Road Strike
Pullman Strike
Battle for Blair Mountain
Haymarket Martyrs
60's anti-war protests

Can anyone help me, or give me a nice summary of American Labour History? A summary would be best. I'm also going back over A People's History for this.

[the Left™]

Saul Alinsky and the Back of the Yards

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Militancy? Violence? Don't forget:

1909 McKees Rocks Strike
Homestead Strike
St. Louis Commune (part of 1877)
The Coal Wars
Coal Creek War
Colorado Labor Wars
Harlan County War
Hartford Arkansas Mine Riot

Also, it's "Battle of Blair Mountain."

[Franz Fanonipants]

Sarah Deutsch's No Separate Refuge chronicles the creation of a Chicano labor stream up and down the eastern slope of the Rockies from the mountain villages of New Mexico.

It's a good read, and covers an aspect of labor history in the US often ignored.

[The Douche]

Whats the book the IWW promotes, "Dynamite"?

[Os Cangaceiros]

The Homestead Strike was a really important one. It represented kind of the final nail in the coffin for amalgated steel's union power, which for a brief time was just as strong as the steel unions in the United Kingdom.

Also: 1934 Minneapolis general strike (which, IIRC, ended in victory for labor)

[socialistjustin]

Harlan County USA is a good documentary on the Brookside Strike.


Also look for The Wobblies. That was pretty good from what I could remember. I believe it's on Google Videos.

[Rocky Rococo]

Whats the book the IWW promotes, "Dynamite"?

That would be the book by Louis Adamic, excellent summation of the times.

[Olentzero]

I don't know how much time you have to prepare all this, but as Explosive Situation above mentioned, the 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis is a very good example; if you can get hold of a copy of Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs (who was a leader of that strike) you can get loads of information. Another book that might be worth it is Irving Bernstein's The Turbulent Years, the second of a two-volume history of the American working class in the 1920s and 1930s. I have it, but haven't read it yet so I can't really say whether you should read it or not, but its scope is more general and might give you more to work with than just the Minneapolis strike.

[Broletariat]

I have lots of time to work with to research, but my total speaking time is roughly 1-2 hours~ and the labour bit is only piece-meal compared to the other things I want to cover.

There's actually a Marxist history professor on campus who was tortured under Pinochet's Chile whom I might outsource this section to.

[Rocky Rococo]

Some other books:
Jeremy Brecher, Strike
Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars
Philip Foner, May Day (or really anything by Foner, great historian of US labor and minority struggles)
Like with Foner, another you can't go wrong reading is anything by Staughton Lynd

You can also use the archives at marxists.org (the Marxist Internet Archive) as a source as well. I would particularly recommend in this regard among the people whose writings they have there:

Eugene Debs
Daniel DeLeon
Emma Goldman
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Helen Keller

[Olentzero]

There's actually a Marxist history professor on campus who was tortured under Pinochet's Chile whom I might outsource this section to.Wait, what?

[Broletariat]

Wait, what?

Yea, since he's an academic, I'm going to screen him before officially outsourcing him, but one of my Marxist friends is vouching for him.

[Olentzero]

Why are you outsourcing the work? It's been a while since I was in academic circles but that sounds a little unethical.

[RED DAVE]

(1) Labor's Untold Story by Richard O. Boyer (actually published by the UE).

(2) Be careful of Foner. While he is generally reliable, and extremely important, he is sloppy to the point of foolishness on details. (I know this from experience; I have caught him in some very rudimentary errors).

RED DAVE