Picket Line Research Articles

Ruminations on the Global Reach of the Tahoe Crayfish

Abstract: In the spring of 1993 the opening of Pure Pleasure Book Store in Mesquite, Nevada, met with protests from many of the citizens of Virgin Valley in southeast Nevada. The conservative and church-going community rallied around members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) who objected to what they saw as an affront to the moral standards of the community and the dangers that pornography presented to children and families. The Mesquite Chamber of Commerce formed an organization with the acronym HOME, Help Our Moral Environment, to fight for the closure of the bookstore. HOME attracted support from the citizens of the valley and neighboring communities in Utah who volunteered to serve on picket lines near the store with signs denouncing pornography. Store owners asserted their right to free speech and kept the doors open while challenging a zoning ordinance in the courts that was passed by the City of Mesquite which prohibited such businesses. As the courts deliberated, picketing continued for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for two and a half years. On March 27, 1996, in Las Vegas Federal District Court, Judge Phillip Pro ruled in favor of the City of Mesquite to close the offending business under the authority of its zoning ordinance.

Picketing Against Porn in Mesquite: Community Values vs. “Satan’s Library”

Abstract: In the spring of 1993 the opening of Pure Pleasure Book Store in Mesquite, Nevada, met with protests from many of the citizens of Virgin Valley in southeast Nevada. The conservative and church-going community rallied around members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) who objected to what they saw as an affront to the moral standards of the community and the dangers that pornography presented to children and families. The Mesquite Chamber of Commerce formed an organization with the acronym HOME, Help Our Moral Environment, to fight for the closure of the bookstore. HOME attracted support from the citizens of the valley and neighboring communities in Utah who volunteered to serve on picket lines near the store with signs denouncing pornography. Store owners asserted their right to free speech and kept the doors open while challenging a zoning ordinance in the courts that was passed by the City of Mesquite which prohibited such businesses. As the courts deliberated, picketing continued for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for two and a half years. On March 27, 1996, in Las Vegas Federal District Court, Judge Phillip Pro ruled in favor of the City of Mesquite to close the offending business under the authority of its zoning ordinance.

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

Digital Picket Lines: Strategic Employee Disclosure

Digital Picket Lines: Strategic Employee Disclosure

Overdetermined: Psychoanalysis and Solidarity

With common unhappiness as its curative horizon, psychoanalysis deserves—indeed, it requires—the hysteric’s famous challenge to Freud: what, and whom, is analysis for? Motivated by the hysteric’s desire for a better life and Freud’s commitment to the social dimension of the psyche, this special issue considers psychoanalysis—theory and clinic—as the grounds for solidarity and political community, from the consulting room to the picket line. This extended introduction elaborates on the curative limitations and social dimensions of psychoanalysis by digging into a term—overdetermination—that has structured the psychoanalytic social bond from the origins of the talking cure. In putting the subject to grips with the disorienting effects of intersubjectivity, psychoanalysis constructs an ethical relation grounded in the illocutionary enactment of the subject’s negativity, sustaining a bond of care between divided subjects and between their overdetermined desires. This essay considers what the psychoanalytic commitment to our unhappiness in common might generate or foreclose for political bonds of solidarity beyond the consulting room.

Strike action could be a defining moment – but will it work?

Precedent must make nurses hopeful they can win their pay and patient care disputes on the picket line, without losing public support

‘Our strike is for patient safety as well as better pay’

Tens of thousands of nurses across the UK are set to take to the picket line in the biggest nursing strike in NHS history.

Full of Power

Knowledge and politics can be produced in a wide variety of places: a car, football terraces, picket lines, council estates. Doreen Massey was dedicated to popular education. In this introductory episode, we discuss the importance of intellectual spaces beyond the university.

Sparky and Rhonda Rucker at Govans Music Mondays

Sparky and Rhonda Rucker at Govans Music Mondays

Editor's Note

TOUCHING THE GREAT LAKES and plunging into the South, the State of Illinois offers tremendous diversity. What it lacks in geographical variation is more than compensated through a rich blend of people, places, customs, and of course, a past that reveals the conflicts, clashes, and compromises marking our life as a nation. As Americans of the early twenty-first century redefine themselves in a changing world, Illinois's shared past opens insights.This combined Summer/Fall issue of the Journal illustrates a state's history from the battles between local breweries in Rock Island to Black workers’ response to bitter discrimination, exclusion, and violence to the competing visions of Czech Americans and Czech nationalists at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. These pages reveal the struggles of a headstrong, courageous to the point of foolhardiness veteran of the Philippines war and the improbable rise of an unassuming immigrant to leadership in the Capone mob and its successors.Michael W. Dean explains the hopes of both Czech Americans and Czech nationalists at home in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire as they focused on Bohemian Day at Chicago's 1893 exhibition. Chicago, he notes, had the largest population of Czech immigrants in the United States. Here we find the roots of future political involvement by Bohemians producing leaders and, eventually, a governor. Native Illinoisan and US Army officer F. S. Wild, was, as J. T. Murphy demonstrates, a complicated individual—resenting perceived slights, taking great personal risks in combat, and unable to successfully adapt to peacetime conditions after his service in the Philippines. We find a man most at home in combat and frustrated when not under fire.The complicated, sometimes violent, history of race relations in Illinois, particularly in the workplace and on picket lines emerges in Alonzo Ward's “‘A Revolution in Labor’: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era.” Contrary to the once-prevalent portrayal of Black workers acting as scabs during mining and other labor disputes, Ward offers a complicated picture, including Black unionism and hopes—unrealized until later—of successful biracial labor organizing. Braden Neihart, in his work on Rock Island's “beer wars” between 1896 and 1907, unveils an often overlooked area of study—the brewing and marketing of beer. It is, he writes, an “important avenue to explore American history and the negotiations disparate groups undertook to navigate power relations.” Contests such as the ones he examines in Rock Island demonstrate the “messiness” of monopolies and capitalism.Finally, James S. Pula explores the unlikely rise of a man who bragged that he never carried a gun to a leadership position in the Al Capone gangster enterprise. Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik not only outlasted his benefactor but played a key role in expanding Mob enterprises after the end of Prohibition. This issue's Special Projects contribution comes from Timothy Dean Draper, who interviews Jon Lauck, a leader in the revival of midwestern studies.These pages provide evidence of Illinois's diverse, complex story—stories requiring multiple perspectives. We hope you will find such multivariegated slices of history interesting. As always, let us know what you think.

Whither the Working-Class Journalist over Thirty?

Whither the Working-Class Journalist over Thirty?

Recensione a A. Forsyth, The Future of Unions and Worker Representation. The Digital Picket Line, Hart, 2022

Recensione a A. Forsyth, The Future of Unions and Worker Representation. The Digital Picket Line, Hart, 2022

Against the hierarchy of knowledge: Georges Sorel, education and revolution

Abstract Georges Sorel’s ideas about education are key to making sense of his critique of the Third Republic. Cutting across the heated debates over classical as opposed to modern curricula, Sorel drew on a complex account of the nature of scientific knowledge to offer a sustained defense of education within the factory and on the picket line as a source of individual autonomy. Sorel’s refusal of the practices and modes of institutionalization of liberal education in his own time is a standing challenge for those who would defend liberal education today.

Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Doubt and Desire

Doubt and Desire

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

La Pastorela

La Pastorela

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

Appalachian Queer Film Festival (AQFF)

Appalachian Queer Film Festival (AQFF)

White Skin and the Black Mask™

White Skin and the Black Mask™