Radical Leaders Research Articles

The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 by Anne H. Tripp

928 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The l.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. By Anne H. Tripp. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. xiv + 317; illus­ trations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95. The dramatic Paterson, New Jersey, strike—where craft and ethnic tensions flared among the rank and file, where hostile police and judges arrested and convicted strikers and sympathizers, where di­ visions among labor’s radical leaders surfaced in attacks in the press and at the podium, and where the strike itself was staged for public display at Madison Square Garden—has not escaped the attention of scholars. Indeed, in 1979 Eugene M. Tobin referred to it as “one of the most intensively studied episodes in recent labor history” (Labor History [Winter 1979], p. 73). But not until 1987, with the publication of Anne Huber Tripp’s volume, did the strike receive its own monograph. A narrative of painstaking detail, Tripp’s study traces the events of the strike methodically, and she admirably weaves into her account the historiographical significance of such occurrences as the pageant, pointing up the issues that have divided Wobblies and historians alike. In particular, she rejects the claims of historians calling police violence in Paterson excessive, and instead argues that local authorities, even while making mass arrests, followed a disciplined course designed to prevent the IWW from “exploiting” an incident of police brutality. A closer examination of the sources, Tripp asserts, allows such “errors” to “be exposed and corrected” (p. xiii). It is in her explanation of the IWW defeat at Paterson that Tripp adds to the ongoing historiographical debates. By systematically com­ paring the defeat at Paterson with the IWW’s earlier victory at Law­ rence, Massachusetts, she ably demonstrates the importance of studying the economic structure of industry, the response of local authorities, and the tactics of the IWW itself to understand those two very dif­ ferent outcomes. That the Paterson strike followed the victory in Law­ rence was of no small consequence to local employers and officials determined to prevent another triumph for the IWW. But the IWW’s decision to wage an unusually long strike and one against a declining industry, increasingly characterized by “cockroach” shops, largely ac­ counted for the failure in Paterson. Still, Tripp has not adequately addressed a number of issues sur­ rounding the strike. Her descriptions of the work process are incom­ plete, and her discussion of technological change in the silk industry is barely developed. Even while acknowledging the importance to the strike of workers’ resistance to tending the new multiple looms, she hardly explains the significance of this innovation. And although she mentions more than once silk workers’ fears of “technological un­ employment” (p. 64), she fails to place that issue substantively in her study. Indeed, Paterson workers do not intrude in Tripp’s story of the strike; she finds them mere “pathetic spectators” (p. 238) caught TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 929 between the IWW and their employers. Yet she also maintains that they early demonstrated a “willingness to protest their conditions” (p. 67), that the organization of the strike “reflected the emphasis on local and mass leadership” (p. 77), and that after the pageant per­ formance strikers “demanded” (p. 149) an accounting of the event’s finances. A fuller examination of the silk workers and their changing work environments would help resolve some of these problems. Constricted by conventional historiographical questions, Tripp faithfully follows the squabbles within the IWW and socialist leader­ ship but leaves other issues undeveloped. As a consequence, workers who walked off their jobs for five months make only shadowy ap­ pearances in the study, and the technological innovations they believed threatened their livelihoods receive but scant attention. Jo Ann E. Argersinger Dr. Argersinger, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is a Rockefeller Fellow at the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs. Her book, Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression, is published by the University of North Carolina Press. She is currently writing a book entitled At Horne and at Work...

Bureaucratic privilege as an issue in Chinese politics

Since December 1978, social policy in China has followed a more openly elitist direction than in any period since 1949. The conservative drift in many policies is unmistakable, but in one respect there is concern — Party opposition to the rapid growth of bureaucratic privilege and abuse of political position. Mao had struck harshly at non-Party intellectuals, urban entrepreneurs, scientists and politically inactive youth. These groups are part of the social base for the new top leadership. A set of demobilizing reforms and purges aimed to route the radical leaders have been ordered by the Deng faction to intimidate their followers, as well as to discredit the mass-campaign style of work in order to replace it with orthodox Party-state structures. Some resistance has followed, but the increasing privatization of the economy created an absolutely larger petty-bourgeoisie which formed a new social layer supporting Deng. Generous back-pay and compensation for those weeded out by the Cultural Revolution gave a material basis for new inequalities. Upper-class communists were once again able to organize privileged, elitist education for their progeny. Finally, economic policy, including the new tolerance of patriotic Hong Kong capitalists, gave a new lease of life to entrepreneurs, some with foreign ties. A coalition of Party bureaucrats, civil servants, academics and businessmen has little time for socialist egalitarianism and Mao's radicalism.

Agricultural Development: The Key Link in China's Four Modernizations Program

Mao Tse-tung, source of legitimacy for radical leaders of left-wing of Chinese Communist Party, died in September of 1976. The radical left-wing leaders were arrested and removed from their positions of power within month following Mao's death and a new, post-Mao leadership coalition under control of right wing slowly emerged during course of 1977. Thus, in early 1978, Chairman Hua Kuo-feng's Report on Work of The Government, delivered to National People's Congress, announced that solution of China's economic problems would now take precedence over ideological objectives of Mao's social and political revolution (Hua, 1978). To solve those problems, National People's Congress adopted Ten-Year Plan (1976-1985) for Development of National Economy, which Hua had summarized in his report. Utilizing themes originally put forth by Chou En-lai in early 1970s, this Ten-Year Plan was to be first stage in achieving of China's agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology-the four modernizations-by end of twentieth century. Ever since Hua's speech which announced plan for achieving Four Modernizations, Chinese leaders and press reports have emphasized continuously that is foundation of national economy, and that the development of agriculture at a high speed is most important guarantee of success in (FBIS, 25 Oct. 1979). Furthermore, in post-Mao spirit of respect for facts, it is admitted that China has difficulties in feeding urban population and in ensuring a rational development of industries using farm products as raw materials (FBIS, 6 Mar. 1979). According to a Renmin Ribao (6 Mar. 1979) editorial, modernization will quite simply be out of question if this state of affairs continues. Few Western

The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765-1776

The success of the American Revolution is less likely to be understood through an examination of its ideological origins than through a close analysis of the political processes by which principles, beliefs, and anxieties were translated into revolutionary action. This book offers the first detailed profile of the several hundred obscure committeemen and propagandists who took up the new revolutionary ideology and carried it that one last step: out of the realm of rhetoric and into the domain of concrete change. And participatory democracy as a principle of American government owes its realization largely to these second-rank politicians and ordinary citizens, who provided the basic muscle of Revolutionary politics. In the 1760s and early 1770s Pennsylvania lacked nearly every ingredient for revolution found elsewhere in the colonies: a strong dissenting tradition, widely felt economic grievances, or a legislature intimately acquainted with royal government. Only the painstaking enlistment of a strong leadership core, the construction of new political institutions, and the rapid mobilization of the majority of the community could overcome these deficiencies. In Pennsylvania British authority succumbed to the activity of a few hundred men who were drawn into public life by a handful of veteran politicians within just two years. To these men and to their committees Pennsylvania owes its revolution. In his book Richard Alan Ryerson focuses on the daily business of politics in the Revolutionary period--the art of motivation for radical political purposes--and its economic and social dimensions in the most prominent American city of the time. How were the colonists mobilized for resistance? What was the political process? Who were the disaffected people who became the radical leaders of the Philadelphia community? To answer these questions, Ryerson compares campaigning styles, nomination and election procedures, and local political organizations in the colonial era with their counterparts during the Revolution. He also examines the age, economic status, religious faith, and national origins of the men who formed the radical committees of Philadelphia between 1765 and 1776.

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement, by Edward Pessen

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement, <i>by Edward Pessen</i>

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement, by Edward Pessen

"Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement, by Edward Pessen." Canadian Journal of History, 4(2), pp. 108–109

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement

Book Reviews

AbstractHistorical and Critical Essays.The Emergence of the Eastern World.The Family in Classical Greece.The War at Troy.Contours of the Middle Ages.The Life of Francesco Guicciardini.The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change.A Manual of Siegcraft and Fortification.The French Enlightenment and the Jews.The History of Germany Since 1789.Raspail, Scientist and Reformer.The Tragic Week: A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875‐1912.Franco, The Man and His Nation.A History of Sweden.Essays in Swedish History.The Early Fasas. A History of Sweden, 1523‐1611.Russia and the Outbreak of the Seven Years' War.The Peasant in Nineteenth‐Century Russia.The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917‐1921.Stalin, Hitler, and Europe: The Origins of World War 11, 1933‐1939.English Cistercian Monasteries and Their Patrons in the Twelfth CenturyThe Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Later Middle Ages.Henry VIII.Charles II's Escape from Worcester. A Collection of Narratives Assembled by Samuel Pepys.The Later Correspondence of George III. Volume IV, 1802‐1807.William Stubbs on the English Constitution.Life of John William Strutt, Third Baron Rayleigh O.M., F.RS.Celts, Catholics and Copperheads; Ireland Views the American Civil War.Anti‐Catholicism in Victorian England.Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894‐1914.Ottoman Reform in Syria and Palestine, 1840‐1861: The Impact of the Tanzimat on Politics and Society.Travels in Ethiopia.Smuts: The Fields of Force, 1919‐1950.They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South‐West Pacific, 1830‐1865.James Truslow Adams, Historian of the American Dream.Reinterpretation in American Church History.The Americans and the French.The Antinomian Controversy, 1636‐1638: A Documentary History.A Rope of Sand, The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution.Attack on Quebec: The American Invasion of Canada, 1775.The Philosophy of the American Constitution.Origins of the Fifth Amendment.Mirror For Americans. Likeness of the Eastern Seaboard. 1810.Most Uncommon Jacksontans: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement.The Papers of Andrew Johnson.History of the Second Seminole War, 1835‐1842.William Montague Browne: Versatile Anglo‐Irish American, 1823‐1881.The Gettysburg Campaign, A Study in Command.Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi.The World of Andrew Carnegie: 1865‐1901.The Emergence of the New South, 1913‐1945.Progressive Politics and Conservation: The Ballinger‐Pinchot Affair.From Prague After Munich: Diplomatic Papers, 1938‐1940.The Faces of Power: Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Johnson.Drafted or Deferred: Practices Past and Present.The Supreme Court and Political Freedom.The Supreme Court and Administrative Agencies.The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru.Brazil: The Land and People.Why Perón Came to Power. The Background to Peranum in Argentina.

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement.

Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement.

Du neuf on the "Banquet of the People," June, 1848

Some years ago in the pages of this journal I published an article that tried to solve the problem of whether the June 1848 insurrection was organized or spontaneous by focusing on the campaign for a monster Banquet of the People, Fraternization of the Workers, which attracted widespread attention just prior to the outbreak.' My findings indicated a striking contrast between the attitudes of a militant rank and file, enthusiastically welcoming a mass gathering of the Paris workers, and those of a club leadership, anxious to avoid trouble in the belief that the working class would become the first victim of violence By implication, I construed the clubs' sabotage of the potentially insurrectionary banquet as circumstantial evidence that the June insurrection was indeed a spontaneous outburst in which the radical leaders played at best the part of reluctant followers. The justification for this somewhat roundabout approach to the motives and outlook of the insurgents was the seeming lack of direct evidence. My documentation was based on a perusal of much of the left-wing press, supplemented by some unpublished police reports and other documents from the archives of the parliamentary commission that investigated the causes of the June uprising.2 The aim of this note is to set the record straight on the basis of new evidence, while using this opportunity to draw the attention of

New York's Radicals and the Coming of Independence

HE British-American skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and the consequent siege of British forces in Boston were responsible for creating a Continental Army and the extralegal political machinery to direct a military defense of individual liberty and freedom. Lexington and Concord also placed new and heavy responsibilities upon Whigs everywhere: manpower had to be mobilized, supplies and money obtained, and time given to the myriad details of war. With the emergence in each colony of a quasi-revolutionary government by the spring of 1775, the older tactics of the Sons of Liberty became obsolete and the radical Whig leaders were put to a severe test. In most cases unprepared by training or experience for anything more than managing newspaper propaganda, mass meetings, and street brawling, their continued usefulness would depend upon their adaptation to the changing times which they had in part created. What happened to these radical leaders, whether they continued to shape the future as they had the past, varied in each colony. The response of New York's radical triumvirate of Isaac Sears, John Lamb, and Alexander McDougall was perhaps uniquely different from developments elsewhere. Identified since 1765 as leaders of New York's Sons of Liberty, Sears, Lamb, and McDougall, merchants of modest fortune and middle age, had an off again-on again personal relationship that was largely determined by their involvement in the rivalry of the Livingston and DeLancey factions for political power in the colony. Coming together under the Livingston banner in late 1769 during New York's political crisis over the Quartering Act, the popular trio was firmly joined in the American defense as the critical year of 1775 opened.1 They soon found themselves,

The Jackson Wage-Earner Thesis

IN recent years American historians have shown great interest in the labor and radical literature of the Jacksonian period. This literature is taken to manifest the beginnings of a substantial labor movement in the United States. In particular it is the thesis of those historians that a substantial movement of eastern wage earners, led and inspired by the radical anticapitalistic elements among Jackson's supporters, became a significant part of the great Jacksonian revolution. The evidence for this thesis, which might be called the Jackson wage-earner thesis, is, I think, worth further consideration. A number of figures and movements have been taken to represent an advanced radicalism, closely kindred to modern radicalism. The problem, however, is not only ideological; it is semantic and psychological. The evidence has frequently rested on generous and broad assertions in editorials, pamphlets, manifestos, petitions, and party programs. Are these so-called radical leaders truly radical, and in what sense? Are the many so-called working men's movements and parties of the period truly movements of wage earners and are they truly anticapitalistic? Can we take at face value not only the assertions but also the very terminology of the time? The Jackson wage-earner thesis has recently been presented in its most explicit and cogent form by Arthur Meier Schlesinger, jr., and it is convenient therefore to center the discussion on a few representative figures and movements which have been cited in his Age of Jackson. An early figure is Langton Byllesby. Byllesby has been described as an Owenite pamphleteer and his book Observations on the Sources and Efjects of Unequal Wealth (I826) as an attempt to restate Owenism without the anti-religious bias but public sentiment was not prepared for the book, coming as it did before the Jacksonians were conscious of their mission as champions of labor. Now, it is as a poet that we first hear of Byllesby; indeed he had a knack for rhyming. In I8I3, while in Philadelphia, Byllesby, who dabbled in inventions throughout his life, was commissioned to prepare a poetical defense of patent rights and turned out the anonymous satire Patent Right Oppres-

Mob Activities in Revolutionary Massachusetts

pT HE fires of opposition which Grenville's Stamp Act had kindled throughout Massachusetts, continued to smolder after the act was repealed and burst forth with increasing flame at the news of Townshend's Import Duties and Customs Commission. Radical leaders carefully fanned the blaze through newspapers, clubs, and town meetings. They organized non-consumption and non-importation agreements, and cultivated that most efficient of all agents of intimidation, the mob. The mob, of course, is not confined to any particular age or country, but is apt to be found wherever there is crowded humanity and social unrest. Its first appearance is often sudden and unexpected; its later activities may be sporadic, or continuous and highly organized. It feeds on discontent, and is fostered by political propaganda. It becomes a menace to society whenever governmental machinery is careless or inadequate. Such conditions existed in many parts of the AngloSaxon world during the last half of the eighteenth century. Hence, this was preeminently an era of mob activity. Unemployment, following a series of wars, had filled many of the towns and cities with poor, idle, and often reckless men. They had little happiness, less humanity, and a great hatred of the classes above them. They had no share in government, and considered it an