Industrial Workers Of The World Research Articles

A Crusading Voice for the Mining West

The Rossland Evening World, a four-page daily dedicated to the mineworkers of British Columbia’s bustling West Kootenay mining town of Rossland, first appeared on May Day 1901 – just in time to do battle with local mine owners in the historic 1900–01 miners’ strike. The World may have owed its existence in part to William “Big Bill” Haywood, a founder of the militant Western Federation of Miners (wfm) and the Industrial Workers of the World. On visiting the town and the prospectors’ camp in the 1890s, Haywood saw that Rossland would soon grow into a thriving Pacific Northwest mountain community with a steady increase in wfm membership. He encouraged the miners to form wfm Local 38, possibly the first wfm local in Canada, and soon a dozen Kootenay locals formed wfm District Association 6. A wfm grant followed to help launch the local and the new daily. Amid growing frustration with bad working conditions and mine owners’ refusal to recognize the wfm, the World became a welcome sister to the wfm’s Miners’ Magazine, dedicating itself to “the Interests of Organized Labor.” By the fall of 1900, the strike of 1,400 miners was on, and the World published news and analysis throughout the region. Ultimately the strike was lost, but the World carried on until 1904. As its legacy, it showed how a daily newspaper could help build community support and provide a defence for the local unionized workforce.

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Amid a journalist killing spree in Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared 2022 as the Year of Ricardo Flores Magón. Among the best-known Mexican journalists of all time, Flores Magón, as well as a cadre of like-minded colleagues, unleashed a far-reaching revolution that threatened dictator Porfirio Díaz's rule as well as US investments in Mexico. While AMLO's administration has used Flores Magón's history to legitimize its vision of a government that works for all, it struggles to deal with the country's unrelenting violence. Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans could not have come at a better time, and while we can debate the effectiveness of AMLO's use of Flores Magón to gain popular support, Hernández's book on him and his colleagues is hard evidence of Flores Magón's far-reaching influence on Mexican and US history. It lays out clearly the reasons why Flores Magón remains a compelling historical figure.Engagingly written without sacrificing archival evidence, Hernández's book details the early twentieth-century Magonista revolutionary movement focused on ridding Mexico of Díaz to effect transformational change. She re-creates the vision and plotting, strategies, challenges, and real outcomes of Magonismo in both Mexico and the United States. Among the many lessons of Bad Mexicans is how social revolutions take constant perseverance and commitment, even when the bulk of the membership has lost faith. Visionaries such as Flores Magón, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Librado Rivera, and others who risked everything day in, day out were labeled “bad Mexicans” by Mexican and US government officials. Such labeling had bloody consequences and reveals the centrality of rhetoric and discourse in enacting so-called progress and development through violence. Bad Mexicans reminds of how labeling people remains a dangerous tool too often used to promote both fringe and mainstream political ideas that marginalize and justify keeping certain populations out of the country (in both Mexico and the United States).Díaz's regime had grown strong, affecting every single aspect of life. Magonismo's concerns with the Díaz government's abuse of power were legitimate. Local jefaturas led by unscrupulous jefes políticos often sexually abused women as they wielded regional control. On a more national scale, Mexican agents wooed foreign investors with endless natural resources, access to cheap, readily available labor, and guarantees of a safe environment for US capital investments. This alliance went a long way. As Hernández explains, besides aiding Díaz in his quest to make Mexico modern, the safeguarding of US interests in Mexico yielded high returns. US agents worked to keep unruly, “bad” Mexicans such as Flores Magón at bay. Flores Magón and others had no other option than to take their movement underground, even while serving prison sentences in some of the period's most notorious jails. The silencing of movements by discrediting their leaders through labeling involved extensive transnational state collaboration and constant surveillance. As Hernández aptly points out, the Mexican state grew stronger as it sought collaboration with the United States to track these individuals who threatened the stability of both countries. Such alliance was further solidified with cooperation from newly formed departments like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Hernández is quick to remind us, however, that while intricate transnational networks of state power could threaten democratic visions, grassroots networks rooted in alliances of workers, writers, and individuals seeking a dignified way of life—on both sides of the border—remained a constant threat to government officials. In the end, no strong transnational surveillance state could contain Magonismo's vision of a new and more equitable world. As the movement inspired many to demand land, women's, labor, and political rights, it also witnessed internal fissures, competing personal agendas, financial crises, and the continuation of a transnational crackdown on suspected rebeldes. As landed regional elites including Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza eventually served as president of Mexico, Magonismo meshed, clashed, or revived under new sociopolitical banners. As Flores Magón took his last breath and the revolution became institutionalized, Magonismo left an indelible mark on the growing Latino community in the United States. This legacy's importance sets this book apart from many others on Flores Magón. Bad Mexicans centers the way in which Magonista ideals shaped US residents and workers. Whether via labor collectives such as the Industrial Workers of the World or community-based efforts to end racially based lynching in Texas and other states, Hernández shows how Mexican and US history have always been entwined. Magonismo was a movement that countered a transnational vision of order and progress that favored industrial capitalist development over the lives of ordinary people; it not only sparked the beginning of one of the bloodiest revolutions of the twentieth century but uncovered the brutality with which US state and federal agents handled suspected revolutionaries, making clear its profound influence on contemporary ideas shaping immigration policy, law enforcement practices, and race relations.

For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900—1938 by Sonia Hernández

Reviewed by: For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900—1938 by Sonia Hernández Gabriela González For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900—1938. By Sonia Hernández. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 256. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Sonia Hernández's masterful study examines labor activism and explains the conditions that inspired workers to see anarcho-syndicalism as a path toward justice. By centering the stories and contributions of activist leaders such as Caritina Piña Montalvo, the book highlights the gendered nature of anarchism in the Mexican borderlands during the early twentieth century. Identifying Piña as "transnational labor broker" (2), Hernández takes the reader on a journey into the world that shaped the lives and ideologies of Mexicana anarchists such as organizing pioneers Luz Mendoza, Isaura Galvan, Reinalda González Parra, and later Piña. These women connected the dots of worker struggles in their own back yards with the challenges of workers around the world to claim and defend their human rights. Operating from the Gulf of Mexico region and invested in the local dynamics of the Tampico-Villa Cecilia area of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, Piña nevertheless formed an integral part of a global nexus that found her writing in defense of workers in faraway places, such as Mexicana textile workers on strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. She did this in her capacity as secretary of correspondence of the Comité Internacional Pro-Presos Sociales, an organization dedicated to helping political prisoners. Anarchist ideas found fertile ground in a Gulf of Mexico region whose export orientation tethered it to a global economy heavily invested in oil production. Thus, the region served as a magnet for a diverse array of migrants from Mexico and around the world who were attracted to economic opportunities but also to the principle of reciprocity associated [End Page 591] with mutual aid societies. Industrialization's success hinged on the working masses, and with them came ideas and prospects for labor organizing. But as the Gastonia intervention reveals, for Mexicana activists, "the anarchist ideal of a nationless world" (3) nurtured their sense of solidarity with all workers, whether in Tamaulipas, the United States, or elsewhere. Thus, from their home communities, Piña and other activists, through an impressive anarchist print culture and correspondence, felt resonance and connection with Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), Industrial Workers of the World, and Casa del Obrero Mundial labor organizers many miles away. One of the most compelling elements of this book is its focus on transnational feminism or femenismo transfronterizo, centering theorist Gloria Anzaldùa's intersectional framework engaging race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality and "promoting worker unity free from state control." Hernández adds geography to the mix, reminding us that while it is critical to understand how Mexicana activists took part in a transnational workers liberation project, they also shaped local histories. These local histories stretch into the Texas-Tamaulipas border area from where early Magonista ideas existed in tandem with a developing anarcho-feminist agenda that promoted equality of the sexes. Because the women of the PLM and other radical organizations did not exist in a sexist-free world, the rhetoric of gender equity in anarcho-syndicalist circles created opportunities for women activists to challenge the sexism that inhabited even progressive organizations. Part of the brilliance of this book is how it demonstrates Caritina Piña's anarcho-feminism even as it highlights her use of maternalism to advance an agenda for labor rights. In this context, motherhood, a concept used by the Mexican state in its national unity narrative, does double duty as the anarchist driver for a call to action focused on the need for women to participate in the labor struggle. Within the context of this revolutionary motherhood, women activists could claim equality with men as they who reproduce the fighters, the defenders of families and communities. Ultimately, Piña's political usage of motherhood is described by Hernández as anarcho-maternalism, for it "directly challenged the state as the primary guarantor of women's rights" centering instead women themselves as the...

Matthew E. Stanley. Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War.

Civil War memory continues to be a burgeoning field in United States history, and in Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans and the Meaning of the Civil War, Matthew E. Stanley approaches this topic from an original perspective. Spanning the Reconstruction era through the first decades of the twentieth century, the book traces the ways in which leaders of the U.S. labor movement recruited Civil War veterans by drawing on the language and imagery of enslavement, hoping to turn workers and farmers into warriors against industrial capitalism. Synthesizing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, this monograph offers a compendium of evidence that takes readers through the National Labor Union, the Colored National Labor Union, the Readjusters, Greenbackers, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers’ Alliance, various socialist parties, the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and more. Throughout, Stanley proves the resilience of “antislavery vernacular” (a phrase that appears regularly across chapters), a rhetoric that originated with discontented antebellum workers in the North. White men and Black men are the central actors, and while Stanley pays fairly consistent attention to the presence of white women, they fall away toward the end, when he draws conclusions about “workingmen” (226). The place of Civil War memory in Black women’s own labor activism awaits further scholarship.

Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left by William Marling

Reviewed by: Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left by William Marling Benjamin Peters Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left. By William Marling. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 319pp. $45.00. In The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day recalled the divisions that emerged within the Old Left in the 1920s and 1930s. There were those who were sympathetic to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and those who opposed it, favoring instead the Industrial Workers of the World or “Wobblies.” The Wobblies, with their call for “One Big Union,” regarded the skilled workers of the AFL as “the aristocrats of labor.” Impatient with the dialectic of “the orthodox Marxists,” they believed in direct action—even through violence. But Day also identified small anarchist groups. While anarchism in the United States was associated with secular figures such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Day pointed to Ammon Hennacy as a “Christian anarchist” in the mold of Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount. Borrowing this characterization, William Marling’s Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left offers the first critical biography of Hennacy, an important figure on the Left (Catholic or otherwise) and, in particular, for the Catholic Worker. Hennacy had been involved with the Wobblies, but rejected violent class-warfare and became a pacifist who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War I, where he met Berkman. Marling paints a vivid portrait of Hennacy starting with his childhood in Ohio raised by Quaker parents, his education at Hiram College, and his various attempts to live out his anarchist commitments, which Marling describes as “individualistic, anti-authoritarian, Christian pacifism.” Hennacy simply called it his “one-man revolution” (or as he supposedly once declared: “An anarchist is someone who doesn’t need a [End Page 81] cop to make him behave.”) The picture that clearly emerges is of a very disciplined and dedicated form of life and focus on personal responsibility. It was this pacifist anarchism that Hennacy brought to the Catholic Worker in the 1950s, though not without controversy. Indeed, Michael Baxter has even suggested that there are two poles within the Catholic Worker: the Father John Hugo-traditionalist pole and the Hennacy-anarchist pole, with most Workers falling somewhere in between. Marling also provides insights into Hennacy’s friendship with Scott Nearing, whose Living the Good Life became a classic in the back to the land movement in the 1960s, and the influence of the Hopi people, who Hennacy saw as providing a template for a more social form of pacifist anarchism. Marling does not limit his scope to an intellectual study of Hennacy’s life and thought. He spends considerable time on Hennacy’s personal life, recounting Hennacy’s first marriage to Selma Melms with whom he had two daughters. Melms eventually left Hennacy and took their daughters to join a religious cult in California. Marling gives a heartbreaking account of Hennacy’s often futile attempts to be part of his daughters’ lives. Marling also ventures into Hennacy’s relationship with Day, who influenced Hennacy’s decision to enter the Catholic Church in 1952. Marling strongly implies that this relationship was more than (as William Miller described it) “sophomoric.” Marling holds up correspondence that suggests they shared a real romantic intensity—which Day certainly exhibited when Hennacy began to pursue other (often younger) women in the Catholic Worker. If nothing else, this confirms the suspicion that Dorothy Day—in contrast to the more saintly manner she is often portrayed today—was attractive to many men and she did not always brush such attention away. Christian Anarchist is well-written and much needed—though more interviews with folks who knew Hennacy such as Karl Meyer or the late Tom Cornell could have given it a little more familiarity. That said, Marling has provided a great service to scholars or anyone else interested in the U.S. Left, Catholic radicalism, or the Catholic Worker. Accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, Christian Anarchist will certainly become the definitive biography of Ammon Hennacy for years to come. And as the current political and economic climate (eerily mirroring that of...

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870–1940

Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870–1940

The Limitations of a “Workingmen’s Democracy”: The Industrial Workers of the World and the Roots of “Solidarity” in the United States

The Limitations of a “Workingmen’s Democracy”: The Industrial Workers of the World and the Roots of “Solidarity” in the United States

Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity

Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Heavy Metal and Love Labor Journalism

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Heavy Metal and Love Labor Journalism

Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War by Matthew E. Stanley

Reviewed by: Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War by Matthew E. Stanley Jillian Marie Jacklin (bio) Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War. By Matthew E. Stanley. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 297. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $30.00.) More than twenty years have passed since the publication of David Blight's important monograph Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). Yet collective understandings of the sectional quarrel remain contested in the popular imagination, as heated debates over how the U.S. public should remember the war and its aftermath continue to fuel ongoing divisions between North and South, as well as heightened polarity in both the local and nationwide electorate. Meanwhile, Matthew E. Stanley's Grand Army of Labor sheds significant light on the working-class origins of the complicated disagreements over the "official" history of the military conflict and its outcomes. Through his deep and thorough investigation of a broad and diverse set of primary texts and artifacts, Stanley effectively convinces his readers that the story of laborers and their daily struggles provides essential context for comprehending the distinct but always overlapping layers of the post–Civil War political landscape. Indeed, he compellingly argues that "memory was … an enrollment tool" (7), which defined the parameters of freedom in the United States, and, as his analysis suggests, historical representations continue to influence the complex cultural atmosphere that exists within the contemporary nation-state. Stanley's sweeping and timely work provides a lesson on [End Page 401] the need to recognize how the practice of celebrating a collective military identity rooted in white patriarchy gained momentum during the postwar era, as well as how it endures in ways that continue to restrict access to American citizenship today. An ambitious endeavor, Stanley's project commences in the antebellum period, in which he begins his discussion of the antislavery movement and the emerging language of emancipation that coincided with efforts to promote Black liberation from chattel bondage. He then traces the role of these developments in shaping working-class cultural politics and labor organizing from the Civil War to the Progressive Era. Marching through an analysis of the platforms of the Free Soil Party, the Readjusters, the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the American Federation of Labor, among others, Stanley claims that, at times, each of these political parties and worker associations equated the status of wage workers to that of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South. Drawing on the speeches of partisan leaders and the literature that left-wing activists produced to promote worker solidarity and justice, Grand Army of Labor highlights the complex aspirations that these groups had—which existed along a cultural spectrum—and demonstrates the radical possibilities of electoral campaigning as well as the social ideologies that accompanied these organizing activities. Likewise, through this extensive exploration, Stanley references the conservative philosophies and discriminatory elements that undermined success during these opportune moments, when there were evident possibilities for destroying the untrammeled dominance of the two-party system in the United States. He also highlights the international aspects of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor movement, which ardent political repression had erased and continues to overshadow. Ultimately, as he persuasively indicates, an investment in white male supremacy and patriarchy, alongside the heightened nationalism rooted in military service, devastated more liberatory elements embedded in working-class activism. Thus Grand Army of Labor is a testament to the broad-based, though also exclusionary, terrain of struggle that participation in the Civil War created for veterans and their communities. Having a shared past in their physical efforts to eradicate slavery, former soldiers linked Black freedom and abolitionism to a language of emancipation for all people, regardless of faith, trade, gender, or race, which would support the needs and realities of everyday workers (though in most cases these were white male workers of western and northern Euro-American descent, especially those who had [End Page 402] direct links to Anglo-Saxonism). As Stanley's study highlights, antislavery did not equate to an erasure of racism, and...

Rebel Imaginaries: Labor, Culture, and Politics in Depression-Era California

Rebel Imaginaries: Labor, Culture, and Politics in Depression-Era California

Lee and Cox, When Sunflowers Bloomed Red: Kansas and the Rise of Socialism in America

Reviewed by: When Sunflowers Bloomed Red: Kansas and the Rise of Socialism in America by R. Alton Lee and Steven Cox Erik Loomis When Sunflowers Bloomed Red: Kansas and the Rise of Socialism in America By R. Alton Lee and Steven Cox (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. ix, 324. Notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) R. Alton Lee and Steven Cox, two veteran historians of social movements in the Midwest, have published a highly useful volume on the history of socialism in Kansas and the Midwest more broadly. While not a completely groundbreaking study, When Sunflowers Bloomed Red is a valuable addition to the literature. It is almost shocking for students to hear today that the rural Midwest was once a hotbed of American socialism. This book is a great reminder not only of that forgotten reality, but also of the amazing variety within the socialist movement. Lee and Cox’s primary contribution is teasing out these strains and exploring each in separate chapters. I particularly appreciate how they begin by discussing “capitalistic socialists”—not a type contemporary readers might expect, but one which describes the followers of both Populism and Eugene Debs. The empathetic socialists remind readers of the social feeling that went into so much of the movement. [End Page 232] The chapter on the miners of southeastern Kansas provides an example of the more urban-industrial socialism that became the hallmark of the movement in the United States. “Successful socialists” are not an ideological type, but it is easy to forget that socialists could and did win elections during the early twentieth century. One of the most successful campaign issues for socialist candidates, including those in Kansas, was public ownership of utilities. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized itinerant workers in oil and wheat, providing a direct challenge to capital in the state. The authors take corporate and newspaper reports on the IWW too literally, as the literature on the IWW nationwide demonstrates that the authorities exaggerated Wobbly violence for their own purposes. Finally, the authors close with a chapter on the decline of the socialists in the reaction of the 1920s, and the revival of the movement during the Great Depression. My reservation regarding Lee’s and Cox’s characterizations of midwestern socialists is their placement of all women in the chapter “The Female Socialists,” which dismisses this large group’s ideological variations. Socialist women would fit into the authors’ interpretive categories; Lee and Cox should have avoided placing all socialist women in one chapter and leaving the rest of the book to men. I also wish that the authors had provided a further explanation for socialism’s decline in the Midwest. They correctly point out that the movement was far from universally popular, but that was as true in 1915 as it was in the 1940s. Why did it thrive in the face of hostility and then decline at a time when socialism retained a significant following in the urban organized labor movement? Moreover, given the region’s contributions to the far right in the present, more theoretical discussion about the trajectory of both the politics of the region and socialism more broadly would have great value. Nevertheless, this is a strong book that will be of great interest to readers of this journal. [End Page 233] Erik Loomis University of Rhode Island Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Indiana University

Populism as Political Ontology: The Varieties of Populism in the United States

ABSTRACT Populism is a political ontology, in which political being is centered on the question of collective identity. It is also a political theology embedded within constitutional democracy. In the United States, three major varieties have attempted to resolve a question implicitly posed by the Constitution: who are ‘We the People’? These traditions are pluralistic, white supremacist, and Pan-African populism. For white supremacist populists, White people become the people. Pluralistic populism seeks to create a multi-ethnic and multi-racial collective identity around economic questions. Pan-African populism decenters Whiteness to build Black cultural, economic, and political power. Populist movements often emerge during times of crisis when collective identities are disrupted. I look back to three World War I era movements to gain insight into contemporary populisms. A study of the Ku Klux Klan, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Garveyism, suggests conflicts between the varieties of populism in the United States existed long before Donald Trump entered the national stage.

US Communists as Early Social Movement Unionists Circa 1930 to 1956?

Abstract Through the examination of three recently published volumes, in this review essay I argue that US Communists were “premature social movement unionists” in the quarter century circa 1930 to 1956. US Communists had adopted social movement unionism (smu), which did not officially emerge as an accepted type of trade unionism until the late 1980s/early 1990s, approximately a half century before becoming accepted throughout the world. This demonstrates that US Communists recognized the enormous potential of what trade unionism could achieve beyond the American Federation of Labor’s craft-oriented business unionism and the Industrial Workers of the World’s shopfloor based revolutionary syndicalism. Thus, the Communists’ smu can be interpreted as a precursor to the twenty-first century Bargaining for the Common Good.

The Road Not Taken: Pearl McGill and the Promise of Inclusive Unionism, 1894–1914

Abstract Pearl McGill's path from an officer in a union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) offers an alternative lens through which to view industrial unionism at the critical juncture of the legendary “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Her role in the strikes of button workers in Iowa and textile workers in New England between 1911 and 1913 shines a light on the ways in which grassroots activists invested hope that AFL “federal labor unions” (local unions directly affiliated with the national AFL) might serve as a vehicle for their inclusive union aspirations. Her contribution enhances our understanding of the strategies of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and the contested terrain of ethnicity and gender on which its leaders sought to organize women factory workers, constrained as they were by their loyalty to the AFL.

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War

Since the 1960s, historians of labor and the working class have diligently sought to expand our knowledge and understanding of their subject by employing perspectives that transcend an institutional or “top down” approach long associated with the Wisconsin School and its practitioners. To a remarkable degree, this “new” labor history has been successful and some credit must go to The Working Class in American History series published by the University of Illinois Press. Since the series began under the guidance of luminaries Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, and David Brody in the 1970s, nearly 150 monographs have been published, many of them noteworthy. To that list we may now add Matthew E. Stanley's book, Grand Army of Labor.Stanley's work surveys the profound impact that the Civil War and its memory held on American workers in the decades from the end of the war until World War II. In this deeply researched and wide-ranging study, he examines and analyzes the use of war memories and notable figures—John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass—in labor and left organizations and their struggles in these many decades. For veterans and their progeny, the war remained a vital intellectual force as they sought to make sense of the new order and recruit allies in their battle against those forces seeking to enslave all workers to industrial capitalism and the ruling class. A host of organizations and their leaders stepped into the fray to curtail “wage slavery,” ensure that all workers in the Grand Army of Labor remained “free labor,” that the agenda of “emancipation” and “liberation” that Lincoln, Brown, and others so loudly proclaimed would continue to move forward, and that “freedom” was not just another word for nothing left to lose!To demonstrate how the war memory was employed, articulated, defined, and redefined by labor groups and leaders after the war, Stanley offers readers overviews of various organizations. He begins in 1866 with the National Labor Union and moves chapter by chapter through the Greenback Labor Party, Farmers’ Alliance, Knights of Labor, Socialist Labor Party, Populism and the People's Party, American Federation of Labor, Industrial Workers of the World, Socialist Party of America, Communist Party, and Popular Front. For each, he presents an historical overview and a survey of the varied renderings that emerged in the fight for a more just workplace for all. Stanley is keenly aware of the shortcomings of most of these groups and their leaders on matters of race and gender and addresses these topics in his surveys. The Socialist Party of America and the Communist Party may have promulgated an anti-segregation and gender-inclusive message, but the Knights of Labor never enforced their integrationist policy, and the American Federation of Labor remained a bastion of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. As Stanley deftly explains, the Civil War memory could be reimagined and manipulated in the name of whiteness and masculinity as nationalism, patriotism, national unity, and the blue-gray reunion moved ahead. Both leadership and rank and file shared in this declension of the war's liberationist, democratic, egalitarian potential.Stanley provides readers a useful and rewarding examination and overview. The book merits a careful reading by any scholar interested in labor, the Gilded Age, radicalism, and social reform. Although some may already be aware of many points covered here, Stanley's survey approach will appeal to those with a broad historical palette who seek a longer and broader view. Perhaps the only major fault one might find with this work, and it is quite ironic, is that so few of the “grand army,” the rank and file, are allowed to speak. Unfortunately, Stanley relies on the leadership and their words and writings as he seeks to articulate how memory was used. Had he probed the work of the thousands of workers who contributed local labor reports, letters to the editors, poems, songs, and other writings to the labor papers throughout the country, the scope of the army and its memory might be considered more “grand.” Notwithstanding this criticism, Stanley's work is significant and valuable, marking another noteworthy contribution to the series in which it appears.

Margaret Sanger, “The Unrecorded Battle” (1912)

Margaret Sanger, “The Unrecorded Battle” (1912)

Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924

Book Review| May 01 2021 Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924 Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924. Mayer, Heather. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2018. xii + 216 pp., $22.95 (paper and ebook). Lara Vapnek Lara Vapnek St. John's University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2021) 18 (2): 128–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-8849412 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lara Vapnek; Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924. Labor 1 May 2021; 18 (2): 128–129. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-8849412 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.