Covington Hall, Labor Struggles in the Deep South and Other Writings. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1999. 262 pp. $34.00 cloth; $14.00 paper.

Abstract

Covington Hall was a lifelong labor activist and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Hall edited labor newspapers and was a contributor to socialist and labor movement publications including the Industrial Worker, the One Big Union Monthly, and the original International Socialist Review. For years, his unpublished manuscript on Southern labor, a work that is both history and memoir, has been a resource for historians of labor in and near Louisiana. Now it is widely available, with an introduction by David Roediger. Hall tells a lively story about key movements in Louisiana labor history from the 1880s to 1914, but he is not always able to capture or explain the broad sweep of events. And the introduction by David Roediger does less than it should, offering little analysis of the unions Hall will describe or of the social settings in which they operated. Oddly, Roediger does not take the opportunity to apply his theories on “the wages of whiteness” to Hall's text; perhaps this is because New Orleans white workers don't seem to be receiving them. Hall himself deals with issues of race and unionism as they arise in particular situations, but not as themes in southern or American labor history.