American Working-Class History Research Articles

‘The mendacious Irish character:’ Molly Maguire, anti-Irish sentiment, and anti-labor propaganda in the American press, 1880–1920

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates the prevalence and impact of nativist and anti-labor narratives built on the claim that the ‘Molly Maguires’, a vague 1860s and 70s militant Irish labor phenomenon of the Pennsylvania anthracite region, was still active between the 1880s and the 1910s. It finds that such narratives were widespread until the late 1890s, and still regionally significant until the late 1900s, finally fading into obscurity in the 1910s. ‘Molly Maguirism’ as a media narrative was primarily directed at organized labor and the (Irish) working class; it is best understood as a form of ethnicized proto-Red Scare tactic, but could incorporate other elements, such as broader nativist ideology and sectarianism. Based on these findings, prevailing models of Irish acculturation, such as Painter’s ‘second enlargement of whiteness’, are obsolete; the paper recommends a thorough revision of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish American working-class history, accounting for the continued and hitherto massively underestimated presence of anti-Irish sentiment.

Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s

Book Review| March 01 2010 Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s Laura Hapke Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008 xi + 301 pp., $69.99 (cloth) Paul Husbands Paul Husbands Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2010) 7 (1): 117–119. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2009-062 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul Husbands; Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s. Labor 1 March 2010; 7 (1): 117–119. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2009-062 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Labor and Working-Class History Association2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Labor's Canvas: American Working‐Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s – By Laura Hapke

Labor's Canvas: American Working‐Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s – By Laura Hapke

Laura Hapke, "Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s" (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)

Laura Hapke, "Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s" (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)

Labor's canvas: American working-class history and the WPA art of the 1930s

At an unprecedented and probably unique American moment, laboring people were indivisible from the art of the 1930s. By far the most recognizable New Deal art employed an endless frieze of white or racially ambiguous machine proletarians, from solo drillers to identical assembly line toilers. Even today such paintings, particularly those with work themes, are almost instantly recognizable. Happening on a Depression-era picture, one can see from a distance the often simplified figures, the intense or bold colors, the frozen motion or flattened perspective, and the uniformity of laboring bodies within an often naive realism or naturalism of treatment. In a kind of Social Realist dance, the FAP's imagined drillers, haulers, construction workers, welders, miners, and steel mill workers make up a rugged industrial army. In an unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor's Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal's Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success. Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor's Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal's artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves.

Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xi + 336 pp. $18.95 paper.

Few episodes in North American working-class history have attracted as much attention as the rise and fall of the Molly Maguires. The term refers to a secret movement of Irish miners who employed threats and violence in confronting their adversaries in the anthracite coal fields in the decade after the US Civil War. Most interpretations have been ideologically charged and focused mainly on the violence itself, beginning with sensational newspaper accounts and Alan Pinkerton's own book based on information from his operative James McParland who infiltrated the movement. At least one study, J. Walter Coleman's The Molly Maguire Riots (Richmond, 1936), showed a healthy skepticism for McParland's biased sources—Pinkerton and others who were more interested in hanging the Molly Maguires than in understanding them. In The Molly Maguires (New York, 1983 [1964]), however, Wayne Broehl, Jr., developed the more typical view that the Mollies were terrorists and the Pinkertons heroes. Though he handled the evidence less critically than Coleman, it is Broehl's account that has been viewed as the standard, perhaps the definitive account for more than a generation. With all this work and much more, why do we need another study of the Molly Maguires and what is it that makes Kevin Kenny's by far the most valuable treatment of them?

The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War

Immigrants and their children became the chief component of the U.S. working class during the nineteenth century. Bruce Levine examines the early years of this social transformation, focusing on German-born craft workers and the key roles they played in the economic and political life of the wage-earning population of antebellum America. Interweaving themes often treated separately--immigration, industrialization, class formation, and the political polarization over slavery--Levine sheds new light on the development of the working class, the nature and appeals of partisan politics, and the conflicts that led to sectional war. This study begins by carefully delineating the European background of these emigrants, especially their involvement in the economic, political, and cultural developments that culminated in the revolution of 1848. It then follows them to the New World, where it locates them within the multi-class German-American population. The author subtly analyzes the deepening political divisions within German-America, differentiating conservative, liberal, radical-democratic, and Marxist currents. At the same time, Levine explores the distinctive role that German-American workers played in American society at large--notably, in the multi-ethnic antebellum labor movement and in popular responses to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the rise of the Republican party, and the outbreak of sectional war. Throughout, Levine stresses the way in which European memories, traditions, and values conditioned (and were reshaped by) the immigrants' encounter with industrial, political, and cultural realities in their new land. The volume concludes with a discussion of the legacy of the radicalcraftworker milieu in postbellum decades and an assessment of later attempts to ignore or minimize this aspect of German-American and American working-class history. The Spirit of 1848 offers much new information and insight concerning craftwork, the nature of the antebellum lab

Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History

Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History

Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History

Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History

The American Working Class History Project

The American Working Class History Project

American Working Class History: A Representative Bibliography. By Maurice F. Neufeld, Daniel J. Leab, and Dorothy Suxmson. (New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1983. xi + 356 pp. $29.95.)

American Working Class History: A Representative Bibliography. By Maurice F. Neufeld, Daniel J. Leab, and Dorothy Suxmson. (New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1983. xi + 356 pp. $29.95.)

Latin American Working Class History: The Case of the Mexican Revolution

Latin American Working Class History: The Case of the Mexican Revolution