Working-class Leaders Research Articles

“Hands across the sea”: Strikes, solidarity and diverging outcomes in port cities in Britain and Australia in the late nineteenth century

This article advances the historiography of port cities, waterfront trade unionism and imperial solidarity by comparing two distant places that, despite their colonial connections, are rarely juxtaposed: Britain and Australia. It investigates the relationship between the metropole and the periphery via the Great Dock Strike of 1889 in London (a 5-week dispute that ended in victory for the dockers) and the Australian Maritime Strike of 1890 (a 12-week strike that ended in defeat for the workers). This research shows how the responses to the strikes from the other side of the world reflected the characteristics of port cities and their waterfront workers. They were also largely determined by three neglected themes - the extent of colonial ties, the uses of the new telegraph network, and the impact of trade cycles - and how these themes influenced each other. The first theme develops and complicates Bernard Porter’s argument that Britons were indifferent towards imperial affairs. On the one hand, this article confirms his position by showing the asymmetry of imperial relations between the outward-looking Australians and the mainly inward-looking Britons. On the other, it demonstrates how imperial connections led to solidarity, and how Britain’s working-class leaders embodied an elitist imperial mindset. In doing so, this article draws new parallels between Britain’s working-class leaders and colonial administrators. Despite their different roles and educational backgrounds, both groups - imbued with a sense of imperial superiority - demonstrated a similarly paternalistic approach in their work overseas. Therefore, imperial solidarity in port cities is a prism through which the prevalence and impact of the British imperial ethos - a far wider subject - can be illuminated and assessed.

A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939

A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939

Working-Class Leaders and Their Political Work Between Civil-Societal Engagement and Class Conflicts: The Case of August Bebel – A Comment to John D. French

AbstractJohn D. French's stimulating article, which explores the scope for comparing working-class leaders across time and space, is considered in this contribution by reference to my biography of August Bebel and with a particular focus on the following topics: a) historical actors as shaped by their own particular time and place; b) the importance of personal relationships and networks in making people who they are; c) the importance of psychological elements and the risk in interpreting them in retrospect – recovering them depends upon the sources available; d) how charisma reflects an interdependence between attribution and individual qualities; e) the importance of political milieux for the flourishing of individual working-class leaders; and f) the relationship between political work to both civil society and existing class relations. Using these approaches allows us to write cross-border and cross-temporal “embodied social biographies”, as suggested by French.

Biographies of Labor Activists: Trajectories, Daringness, and Challenges

AbstractThis comment discusses three topics. First, John French's biography of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is located in the broader trajectory of the production of biographical narratives of activists under the auspices of the historiography of the labour movement. Second, French's daring gesture of comparing the trajectories of Lula and August Bebel, who lived in such different contexts, and the impact of this in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of labour history in Brazil is discussed. Finally, we look at some of the challenges faced by writers of biographies of working-class leaders, notably in relation to the intersectionality between class, race, and gender.

The Politics of the Social Biographical Approach to Working-Class Leaders

AbstractIn this paper, I consider John French's biography, Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil (2020). French discusses his methodology, which he characterizes as “a social biographical approach”. I argue that this methodology is already in historians’ toolkit. Historians writing biography seem to start with first premises rather than building on what went before. I thus contextualize the methodology, situating French's biography of Lula within more general shifts in approaches to biography.

Catholic realities and pastoral strategies: another look at the historiography of Scottish Catholicism, 1878–1920

Catholics in Scotland and their historians have recounted their past in several ways. We have many celebrations of the faithful Irish immigrant steadfastness while their Scottish-born brethren have had at best negligible recognition.2 At the other extreme the Banffshire-born conservative priest Rev. Aeneas Dawson airbrushed the Irish from his massive nineteenth-century history: even Daniel O'Connell did not merit a mention. On the other side, the pioneering lay activist James Walsh virtually ignored native-born Scots in his monumental study.3 In more recent times several historians have begun to capture something of the complexity of the Catholic experience.4 The independent-minded Catholic laity, restless Irish-born clergy and working class leaders have received consideration. Highlanders, Italians, Lithuanians, Belgians, Poles, English, converts and religious orders of men and women have received some long overdue attention.5 Some leading clerical and lay figures who tried to create and sustain a sense of community now have their biographers.6

Catholic realities and pastoral strategies: another look at the historiography of Scottish Catholicism, 1878–1920

Catholic realities and pastoral strategies:another look at the historiography of Scottish Catholicism, 1878–1920 Bernard Aspinwall (bio) Keywords Irish, poverty, marriage, children, temperance, revivals 'What can you see with your Second Sight?''The past and the future. Only the present is dark''But that's where we live'1 Catholics in Scotland and their historians have recounted their past in several ways. We have many celebrations of the faithful Irish immigrant steadfastness while their Scottish-born brethren have had at best negligible recognition.2 At the other extreme the Banffshire-born conservative priest Rev. Aeneas Dawson airbrushed the Irish from his massive nineteenth-century history: even Daniel O'Connell did not merit a mention. On the other side, the pioneering lay activist James Walsh virtually ignored native-born Scots in his monumental study.3 In more recent times several historians have begun to capture something of the complexity of the Catholic experience.4 The independent-minded Catholic laity, restless Irish-born clergy and working class leaders have received consideration. Highlanders, Italians, Lithuanians, Belgians, Poles, English, converts and religious orders of men and women have received some long overdue attention.5 Some leading clerical and lay [End Page 77] figures who tried to create and sustain a sense of community now have their biographers.6 Our roseate view of the past has been further jolted in recent times. The past was as chequered as the present. Family relationships of earlier generations, for example, were not always perfect. Evidence of the continuity of mixed marriages before, during and in the wake of Ne temere (1908) has further challenged older notions.7 The late Cardinal Winning was deeply distressed by his father's illegitimacy, his grandfather's abandonment of his family.8 Even the great hero of the Celtic faithful, Jock Stein was a nominal Presbyterian with Orange links and married to a lapsed Catholic.9 Mixed marriages throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were far more common than imagined. Evidence of a loose floating group of affiliated Catholic laity in the last century is becoming more apparent.10 Relations between clergy and laity were not infrequently strained: clashes in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh or mid-nineteenth-century Glasgow, late nineteenth-century labour movements or early twentieth-century socialists or Sixties radical laity are rarely seen as a common thread.11 Even in earlier days some clergy abandoned their calling through drink, women or a spiritual crisis: abandonment of a priestly vocation, whatever a selective [End Page 78] Catholic memory would like to believe, is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon.12 But like the old 'invincible ignorance' of pre-Vatican II days, the entrenched stereotypes still persist, particularly in any debate about sectarianism.13 We should be mature and honest enough to follow Pope John Paul II, accept our failings of the past and apologise profoundly for any offence given. Poor law records allow us to re-examine many stereotypes. A largely neglected area, they provide detailed personal histories. They allow us to see how and why individuals fell through social and religious safety nets and give an indication of successful pastoral care. Displaced, aged, ailing or unemployed poor were a permanent feature of the fluctuating Victorian economy. The records of their desperate plight help to explain why the Church adopted a particular pastoral strategy and to what extent it succeeded. The Scottish Poor Law (1845) sought to regulate the poor, to inculcate the 'right' ethos and contain challenges to the existing order: a righteous alliance of evangelical religion and political economy would, according to Rev. Thomas Chalmers, prevent irresponsible benevolence.14 In the wake of that legislation Glasgow had set up four poor law administrative units; Glasgow City parish poorhouse, established on Parliamentary Road, and the Barony with its poorhouse at Barnhill, while Govan and Gorbals administered the areas south of the Clyde. In the later nineteenth century these units consolidated: in 1873 Govan and Gorbals merged and in 1898 Glasgow and the Barony also merged. [End Page 79] The Barony parish covered a considerable area beyond the then existing Glasgow City municipal boundaries. It covered between two and five or six miles of the city except south of the...

Congress Ministry and the Labour Policy, 1937–1939: Madras Presidency

The article, while critically examining the ideas of M.K. Gandhi on the industrial strikes, seeks to locate the implication of his ideas, which had largely fashioned the policy and perspective of the Congress ministry toward the industrial conflicts in the Madras Presidency, that is, the first Congress government under the British Colonial State during 1937-1939. It also endeavours to analyse Gandhi's ideas on the issues of ‘Class’ and ‘Class Struggle’ and demonstrates how the Congress ministry under C. Rajagopalachary had attempted to put them into practice during 1937-1939. And in the process, it presents a critical analysis of the labour policy of the Congress government under C. Rajagopalachary as Prime Minister and V.V. Giri as Labour Minister While the moderate working class leaders sought to guide the industrial workers with emphasis on the approach of class collaboration forsaking the line of confrontation as its main plank and conduct the strikes through non-violent method, the Left radical working class leadership on the contrary strove to educate the workers in socialism and communism and lead them to adopt an uncompromising and unyielding attitude in their struggle against the capitalist class. Class struggle and class confrontation were explained to the workers to be the only methods suitable to achieve their demands. This approach of the Left working class leadership inevitably led to the conflict with the Congress ministry and its labour policy. Therefore, the article, while unmasking the uneasy and intricate relationship underlying the Congress ministry and the working class leadership also traces the perception of the working class and its leadership in the Congress ministry and its historic role in the advancement of the working class movement in India. It also seeks to present the appraisal of the capitalist class and colonial bureaucracy on the performance of the Congress ministry vis-à-vis the problem of the rising militancy of the working class.

Valkoisen hämärän maa? Suojeluskuntalaiset, virkavalta ja kansa 1918-1921 by Marko Tikka (review)

360 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 Reich Ministryfor the Occupied EasternTerritories,was eclipsed as a policy maker on racial issues (he was representedat Wannsee by Alfred Mayer). In short, Nazism was not driven primarilyor even secondarilyby the will to implement emigres' fantasies of destroying the Russian Revolution and eradicatingJewish Bolshevism. These goals had multiple origins and were only one aspect of an overridinggoal of national rebirth,cultural,racial and imperial,that assumeddifferentpermutationsin every sphere of society. Even within the Nazi hierarchy there were major differencesof policy within the broad consensus on the need for Germany to be reborn and its Volkskdrper to be purged, a vision rooted in the quest for a new modernity to resolve the pluraldysfunctionsof Weimar Germany and not in the persuasivenessof any one pressuregroup. Nazism was a hydra, whose different heads incarnated fantasies of rural regeneration,of blood and soil, of the awakeningof occult Aryan energies, of the emergence of a 'New Religion' of German Christianity,of technocratic mastery of Eastern Europe, of a healthy mass society fully coordinated in work and leisurewith the immortalityof the Volk, of the eugenic creation of a masterrace, of culturalrenaissance,of an urban civilizationemulatingRome but celebratingNordic supremacynot Romanita. Though Kellogg distances himself from Ernst Nolte's perverse portrait of the Second World War as a 'EuropeanCivil War' his exclusivefocus on the Aufbauand overestimationof its impact comes close to duplicatingNolte's distortedperspective.Fortunately Kellogg cannot be of apologetic, revisionist intentions, and his scholarship has bequeathed considerable data about a neglected aspect of Nazism's convoluted history, even if its neglect is not as unwarranted as he likes to think. School ofArtsandHumanities ROGER GRIFFIN Oxford Brookes University Tikka, Marko. Valkoisen hamdrdn maa? Suojeluskuntalaiset, virkavalta ja kansa I9I8-I92I. Historiallisia Tutkimuksia, 230. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuudlen Seura, Helsinki, 2006. 260 pp. Illustrations.Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. E32.oo. THEperiod I9I8-21 in Finland, which is considered in Marko Tikka'sbook, was a time of instability. The Whites, who had won the Civil War of early I9I8, feared a new Red insurrection,and there was a strong sense of alienation from the state on the part of the defeated working class. Political intrigue and lawlessnessflourished in a country awash with firearmsduring the years when a new constitution and democratic government were established and an effective police force and army were formed. Tikka considers the relationship between the Civil Guards, the authorities and the people during these troubled formativeyears of post-revolutionaryFinland. Originallyset up to maintainorderin the chaos which followedthe Russian Revolution and Finland's declaration of independence, the Civil Guards became government troops during the Finnish Civil War and played a key REVIEWS 36I role in the victory of the Whites. Tikka reasonably places them among the various defence forces which emerged in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Estonia in the uncertainyears afterWorld War I. The Civil Guards, as an armed force, were called upon to help the civilian authoritiesin a number of ways from mid I9I8 onwards.Tikka found that in I9l9-20 they assistedthe police on 2344 occasions. They helped in tracking down and arrestingReds who had either avoided surrenderor escaped from detention camps. They also helped to conduct surveillanceof working class leaders, trade unions and other workers' associations, including their social activities. Such surveillance was pervasive, sometimes heavy-handed, and stronglyresented. The pursuit of fugitives and surveillanceare characterized by the author as politically-relatedactivitiesbut other assistanceto the police was non political. Prohibition had been introduced in Finland in I919 and during its early years the Civil Guards became much involved in the destruction of illicit stills, a process which strengthened their ties with the police. Along the Soviet Russian frontier, where there was an immense amount of smuggling,the Civil Guardshelped the armyto patrolthe borders, often resultingin conflictswith local people who were engaged in the 'trade', includingat times some of theirown members.The Civil Guardswere used to captureand returnconscriptswho had desertedfrom the army.Unfavourable press coverage of their activities attracted the attention of the Civil Guards headquarters,which demanded explanationsof incidents involvingmembers. This kind of investigationwas unpopularwith members of the Civil Guards although they directed their resentmentagainst those who complained about them ratherthan againsttheir own commanders.A number of memberswere expelled for disciplinaryoffences, involving...

BOOK REVIEW: Morris B. Kaplan.SODOM ON THE THAMES: SEX, LOVE, AND SCANDAL IN WILDE TIMES. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times Charles Upchurch (bio) Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times, by Morris B. Kaplan; pp. 314. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005, $35.00, £19.95. Morris Kaplan opens Sodom on the Thames with a first-person account of his decision to embark on this study of late-nineteenth-century homosexuality, interspersed with a discussion of the sources that he has brought together in order to make it possible. Many of the individuals, events, and themes touched on in these first pages will be familiar to scholars of the period and topic, but it is in their arrangement and interpretation that Kaplan stakes his best and ultimately successful claims for the originality and importance of his work. In the introduction Kaplan informs the reader that what follows will be a narrative history, and he expresses his hope that this "return to storytelling" will be welcomed by some readers "impatient with the obscurity of 'postmodern' theory" (7). The emphasis on narrative is evident in part one, which details the lives of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, two young middle-class cross-dressers arrested in 1870 and tried for conspiracy to commit sodomy. Kaplan's account brings together almost all of the major themes and events described in the surviving trial documentation, making it the most comprehensive overview of this well-known case in the secondary literature. In the narrative, the reader is introduced to the extravagant behaviors of these young men and their friends, the dresses they wore on and off the stage, and their flirtations with other men. The central ambiguity that drove the court case is also explored: whether, without direct evidence of sexual acts, their behavior proved "unnatural" intent. In part two, Kaplan follows a similar narrative strategy, but with less well-known subjects. Primarily through the use of personal letters, Kaplan constructs a detailed look [End Page 769] into the lives of a group of public school men associated with William Johnson Cory, a master at Eton dismissed in 1872 under a cloud of suspicion. As with Boulton and Park, the question of whether sexual contact between men occurred cannot be definitively answered by the sources, and Kaplan refrains from reading into his evidence explicitly sexual relationships, as at least one earlier author has done. Instead Kaplan follows several of these men from the time they were at Eton through their careers, marriages, and involvement with younger men. While most interested in exploring the complex desires that link them long after their school days, Kaplan is also willing to introduce evidence that complicates any simple reading of their actions, such as the passion with which Cory also embraced the education of women later in life (152–53). Yet for all the engaging and valuable detail provided, this first half of the work has its limitations. Aside from a few pages at the start of part two, we learn little here about the public schools themselves, or about just how far from the norms of accepted masculinity were the behaviors of the men Kaplan describes. Greater attention to these and other areas of context would have helped to alleviate the occasional narrowness of the first half of the book, where the focus is dominated by primary sources and unwavering from details of either one trial or one circle of friends. No such criticism can be made of the remaining chapters, though. Part three, on the "West End Scandals," is not limited solely to the 1889–90 Cleveland Street affair, in which telegraph messenger boys were recruited for a male brothel patronized by well-connected upper-class men. Here Kaplan also includes scandals centering on heterosexual desire, including W. T. Stead's "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" (1885) and several politically charged divorce cases from the following years. Citing the Cleveland Street affair within this larger frame allows Kaplan to bring into his analysis the feminists, working-class leaders, and radical journalists who campaigned against elite male privilege, "linking hostility toward the aristocracy to suspicion of deviant desires and practices" (179). Through Kaplan's analysis we learn how public reaction...

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St. Clair

830 Reviews ('Luddein') remembers its rioting apprentices; its Smithfield martyrs; the summary execution it dealt the corrupt ministers of the all-too-visible Richard II. Northern ers recall Luddenden, a pocket of cultivation on the fringe of merciless moor; north Midlanders Lud Church, the rocky crevice associated with amassacre of Lollards, though (like the caves of Delphi) of farmore ancient mystery than they. One would not guess from Binfield's account how deeply Ludd pervaded and (see innumerable websites) still pervades the national consciousness. Binfield comments convincingly that 'Ludd seeks less to overthrow a government than to effect the repentance of the old one' (p. 3 I). A conclusion might have ventured the opinion that, given the pro foundly radical-conservative nature of English discourse, always both retrospective and prospective, the Luddites exemplify a long struggle, not to abolish or transcend human limitations, but to put them effectively towork for the common benefit. Hence the threatening, yet ethically rooted, nature of many of these documents. In the Romantic context, retrospective and prospective issues weave their own tragedy in Luddite writings: on the one hand they survive as record of the rich otherness of languages formed by class and locality; on the other they initiate the task set before working-class leaders: of out-arguing the governing class in its own language. To have conserved somany of them in one volume is a noble work. UNIVERSITYOF LANCASTER MALCOLMHARDMAN The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. By WILLIAM ST CLAIR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. xxix+765 pp. ?90. ISBN 0-52i-8ioo6-x. This is an astonishing book, or rather it is several books in one. First, William St Clair challenges the conventional notion that conceives literary history as a history of writing and of writers by recasting the history of the Romantic period as a history of reading and of readers. Instead of asking what books were written in the period, he asks what books were read, and the results are dramatic. Romanticism, it emerges, did not become an entrenched literary movement until the second half of the nineteenth century, because only then were the poets who came to be identified as Romantic published in editions cheap enough to be available to ordinary readers. Second, he offers a literary history inwhich the great engine of change is not individual genius but the laws governing intellectual property. The I774 decision by theHouse of Lords that declared illegal the perpetual copyright that publishers had previously claimed is presented as the single most important event in literary history, the decision that brought about the steep reduction in the price of books out of copyright that propelled the dramatic increase in the reading nation that marked the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Third, St Clair writes a polemical history inwhich the villains, assisted by successive governments which understood the political utility of keeping the mass of the population in ignorance, are the cartel of London publishers who sought tomaintain the price of new books at a level unrelated to the cost of their production. The heroes are the pirates, offshore like the Galignani brothers in Paris, or inland likeWilliam Benbow, who made modern literature available to those who could never have afforded the two guineas for which Longman sold Wordsworth's Excursion. By 1832 Queen Mab could be had for ninepence and a complete Don Juan for five shillings. By Igoo the power of the cartel had been so successfully challenged that an out-of-copyright nineteenth-century novel printed in double columns in one volume might be bought for sixpence. But for many St Clair's book will be most valued for the appendices inwhich he summarizes amass of data that has, until now, been available only piecemeal or not at all-information about the cost of production, the size of print runs, book prices, and sales figures, without which, as has become increasingly evident, an adequate literary history cannot be written. MLR, IOI.3, 2oo6 831 This is a quirky book. St Clair retains some of the mannerisms of the formidable scholars of the nineteenth century. A footnote indicates that the author can no longer recall in which of Scott's...

“Democracy's Third Estate:” New Deal Politics and the Construction of a “Consuming Public”

In the 1930s, the “consumer problem” captured the attention of American working-class leaders, consumer activists, and liberal economists. As sociologist and New Dealer Robert Lynd warned, “There is a ‘consumer problem' of national proportions and it is here to stay as a big white elephant on the doorsteps of business.” He continued: “The only way that democracy can survive, if indeed it is not now too late for it to survive at all, is through the quality of living it can help its rank and file of its citizens to achieve.” Progressive reformers feared that the modern consumer was powerless in the face of corporate market manipulation, mass technology, and the maldistribution of income. Without well-informed, independent, and financially secure consumers, their argument ran, the nation risked economic and political decline. Indeed, to many Americans, the Great Depression made clear that consumers did not possess enough purchasing power to sustain the economy. Moreover, the rise of fascist regimes in Europe suggested that poverty could in fact threaten liberal capitalism. According to this conception of economic citizenship, only powerful consumers with both economic and political clout could prevent economic ruin and civic decay. Robert Lynd, “Introduction,” in Persia Campbell, Consumer Representation in the New Deal (New York, 1940), 9–10, 23.

The Art of Being Indirect: Talking about Politics in Brazil

The mid-'70s in Brazil and in many other Latin American countries were marked by the emergence of many urban social movements. As soon as freedom of political organization and expression began to be assured, many associations disconnected from political parties appeared and started pressing state agencies for public services, improvements in the urban infrastructure, and the acknowledgment of civil rights. Both social scientists and politicians have considered this process extremely important in countries used to authoritarian political relationships even under civilian rule. Thus, many have described the social movements as generating a way of doing one more democratic in its procedures and more popular in its basis; and one that would inaugurate a new way of relating to state apparatuses and political institutions, especially political parties. In this article I analyze a debate among five leaders of one type of popular association that became important in the 1970s in Brazil, and which both observers and members considered to represent a way of doing politics. This type of association is called Sociedades de Amigos de Bairro (SAB), literally Neighborhood-Friends Associations, based in the poor working-class areas of Brazil's big cities. I do not focus my analysis on the content of the opinions expressed during the debate. Nor do I analyze the participants' conceptions of politics, their roles as working-class leaders, or their methods of organizing political participation-subjects about which they express considerable disagreement.' Rather, I focus on how their opinions and disagreements were voiced; that is, on the discourse strategies they employed to express opinions and disagreements, and to deal with conflicts. As a starting point for the analysis, I use Gumperz's (1982) understanding of a communicative event in which interpretation will be negotiated and interactions established. In the case of the debate I study, the analysis of discourse strategies suggests how the possibility of expressing political opinions and disagreements in a political discussion, in an interclass context, was negotiated among the participants. As a consequence, the analysis reveals how political and interclass relationships are shaped in Brazilian society. It indicates not only the complexities and difficulties involved in attempts to change political practices, but also the limitations that people face in the construction of a way of doing politics in

The Misuses of Gramsci

Professor Leon Fink has written a provocative paper. As far as I am aware, it is the most thoughtful defense of the labor historiography produced by his generation of historians, who came of age in the sixties and maintain the perspective they learned from that era's movements. But his paper would have been more telling had it confronted directly my critiques of the new labor history. Thus of my skepticism about the work of Sean Wilentz and the late Herbert Gutman, Fink writes: For explanations of real group motives and attitudes, it is not exactly clear what kinds of sources unless one awaits some sort of 'spectral' illumination are to be admitted as evidence. In that earlier essay I tried to make it clear that I regard as trustworthy evidence, not the objects of working-class leaders' protests and complaints, but what they demand and what they do to realize their demands.

Scientific Management and the 44-Hour Week

In the four years 1918-1922 standard working times within virtually all the major industrialised nations fell by approximately 20% either as a result of collective bargaining or as a consequence of state intervention in the labour market.1 This global phenomenon was a consequence of two primary factors. First, the radicalisation of the working class that had been engendered by the First World War. Second, a widespread awareness that the war had radically advanced research into the relationship between work and time and that those undertaking this research had come to the conclusion that labouring more than forty-eight hours per week, on a constant basis, was counterproductive. Because of the onset of fatigue, it had been concluded, any longer schedule would generally tend to reduce total output. The evidence supporting this conclusion had been gathered by American and European scholars associated with the seen tifie management movement. Collectively these individuals undertook a vast quantity of practical worktime research which enabled them to accumulate many examples of how industrial efficiency could be improved if working times were rationalised.2 In the post-war period the result of this research was used by European and American working class leaders and by intellectuals committed to social reform and/or industrial efficiency to galvanise workers and politicians into taking action to reduce standard working times. The evidence provided by the scientific managers was particularly important in undermining the argument that work times could not be reduced because this would undermine the

Chicago Haymarket Centennial

As six hundred dignitaries watched the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty one hundred years ago, eight Chicago working-class leaders sat in the Cook Coun ty Jail. They had been convicted of conspiring to throw a bomb that killed a policeman at a May 4, 1886 labor rally in Haymarket Square. Four of them, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fisher, would be hung on November 11, 1887. Except for Parsons, they were all immigrants. Just as the juxtaposition of the epigrams underscores the inconsistency be tween the image of justice and freedom promised by the Statue of Liberty and the reality as nineteenth-century workers experienced America, the conviction one hundred years later of church workers for providing sanctuary to refugees fleeing Central America stands in stark contrast to the glitz and glitter sur rounding the statue's rededication. The statue's promise has proven chimerical while the words of George Engel have proven prophetic. In 1886 the Haymarket affair was vastly more important than the dedica tion of the Statue of Liberty. Yet today advertisers and conservative ideologues have been able to rivet national attention to the patriotic symbolism surrounding the statue while Haymarket is all but forgotten. This underscores just how seri

Sources on Working Class History in Venezuela, 1850–1964

In Venezuela, the working-class movement has been studied remarkably little. In part, of course, this is due to its relatively late development compared even with that of other Latin American countries. Nevertheless, there are other fac tors that must be taken into account if the scarcity of serious investigations is to be understood. Above all, it must be recognized that the potential investiga tor has not been able to count on that initial basis of readily available and well organized sources so important at the outset of an investigation. Neither the National Library nor the more important university libraries have an adequate coverage of even the basic secondary materials. In a field in which leaflets, pamphlets, and mimeographed materials are so important, no collection of such sources can be found in official institutes. As for press and periodical sources, the National Library and the National History Academy have good general collections that cover the more important national dailies and periodicals together with a fair coverage of the provincial press, but they have collected very little of the trade union or working-class press. Unfortu nately, the unions themselves and the political parties with an important working-class base have been equally remiss. In general, they have not pre served even their own press. Most unions are not accustomed to saving their documents and show little interest in the preservation of their history. Perhaps the most striking example of this general tendency is that the Confederaci?n de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), the national trade union organization that has dominated the Venezuelan working-class movement since its early days, does not even possess a collection of the materials produced for its own con gresses. In the face of such obstacles, it is hardly surprising that many potential in vestigators have been discouraged from exploring the theme. Among working class leaders themselves, few have shown much interest in recovering their own history. But among these few, we find the pioneers in the field of Venezuelan working-class history such as Pedro Bernardo P?rez Salinas of the Acci?n Democr?tica (AD). Among the Communist working-class leaders, Rodolfo Quintero was the first to begin publishing reflections based on his experiences, above all in the petroleum industry. The first attempt to write a general ac count of the development of the working-class movement in Venezuela was

The politics of discontent: the grievances of the Uitlander refugees, 1899–1902

In most literature concerning the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, the Uitlanders' infamous grievances are cited as either the cause of or the excuse for the war. In actual fact, the so-called grievances were in most cases little more than issues which had gained their enhanced status of 'grievances' as a result of the publicity given them by the South African League and the Uitlander Council. While Milner ensured that these topics received public notice, many of the more basic concerns of the Uitlanders received little attention from the outside world. The purpose here is to elucidate the content and the form of some of these other grievances, particularly those expressed by a part of the Uitlander population during the war. In doing so, the extent of the distrust held by one section of the Uitlanders for the other becomes apparent, thus giving social meaning to the term class division. Milner's actions, when faced with Uitlander discontent during the war, illustrate his pragmatic political sense and give us an insight into his feeling for the very people he had supposedly gone to war to protect. His attempts to co-opt working class leaders and to suppress working class discontent arose from considerations of practical politics, but also from his natural tendency to rely upon commercial and mining leaders for advice and support. Hence, a study of his conduct in this instance presents a clear view of the more personal nature of the state-capital alliance which was to formulate much of South African policy in the early 20th century. In the two and a half years prior to the outbreak of war, many of the white residents of the Rand suffered from the effect of a business depression. Unemployment, particularly amongst building trade artisans and shop assistants, characterised the period as did an increase in the number of

Mission Neighborhood Health Center: A Case Study of the Department of Health Education and Welfare as a Counterinsurgency Agency

In the 1960's, working class communities all over the country, particularly minority inner city neighborhoods, exploded in violent anger. The federal government responded with a pacification or cooling-out program: the War on Poverty. The War on Poverty provided federal funds to bring a few programs into the community, to create a few jobs, and to buy off working class leaders who were a threat to those in power. In the course of this program of counterinsurgency, the War on Poverty took over a slogan of the 1960's, "community control," and turned it into its opposite; rather than control by the community, "community control" came to mean control over the working class majority of the community. One of the War on Poverty's important programs was the neighborhood health center program to provide ambulatory health care to low income people. This program, initially slated to reach 25 million people through 1,000 health centers, was scaled down to 125 centers serving only 1.5 million people. The standard view of the neighborhood health center program holds that its aims were 1) to bring high quality health care to people previously denied such care, 2) to provide employment opportunities and training to neighborhood residents, and 3) to allow community members to participate in the governance of the health centers (Davis and Schoen, 1978). A more realistic view sees the neighborhood health center program as a means to control, rather than to assist, minority working class populations. This paper takes the example of one neighborhood health center, Mission Neighborhood Health Center in San Francisco, to show how federal counterinsurgency works in the 1970's and to expose the class character of "community control."

James Larkin: Irish Labour Leader, 1876-1947

A long out of print biography of James Larkin who ranks alongside James Connolly as one of Ireland's great working class leaders. Larkin, a committed socialist militant, united and led Belfast's Catholic and protestant dock workers in a bitter dispute with the Unionist bosses in 1907. In the ensuing conflict thousands of Orangemen declared solidarity with Larkin and the police mutinied in support of the strikers. This book helps increase understanding of the man who some considered the greatest revolutionary syndicalist of his time.