This is our fourth entry for this week’s roundtable discussion on Michael Goldfield’s new book, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Goldfield examines the failure to organize the South in the period of the workers insurgency of the 1930s and 1940s.
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One of my favorite quotes from Mother Jones is “Sit Down and Read. Educate Yourself for the Coming Conflicts.” While she had a reputation as an agitator, much of her organizing stamina came from the soul-nourishing books she returned to again and again.
Read more →In 1918, the American labor organizer and socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for his anti-war activities opposing America’s involvement in World War One. In his closing defense, Debs said, “Your honor… I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
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One hundred years ago, revolutionary potential was exciting the sensibilities of radicals and counter-revolutionists across the country. In February 1919, the passions and potential of a workers movement was nowhere more powerfully demonstrated than in the Seattle General Strike. Anna Louise Strong was one of the prime chroniclers of the strike, and wrote one of the most memorable lines of the moment:
We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead
– NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!
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Ed: This is one of a series of conference notes from the recent LAWCHA conference. If you have reflections from one of the panels or plenaries, please send them along.
Talking for Justice! Maria Mareno and Restoring the Legacy of Migrant Women’s Activism-LAWCHA19
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Ed Sadlowski passed away yesterday. His life is a testament to the grit of the leftwing Midwestern union militants. His roots in unionism go back to the Southern Illinois coalfields and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations of the 1930s.
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Liz Faue’s new book, Rethinking the American Labor Movement, is our field’s newest attempt to reinterpret U.S. Labor History. I asked her a to tell us a little bit more about the arc of her interpretation.
Read more →Saturday’s session on the Documentary Ludlow: Greek Americans in the Colorado Coal War offered a new transnational perspective on a well-known topic. We had the filmmaker, Frosso Tsouka, who told of how the current economic austerity and struggles in Greece helped to prompt the film.
Read more →Friday’s session on Industrial Nostalgia and Heritage Preservation alerted us to the way that industrial decline has become the basis for historical interpretations. The role of professional heritage specialists was profiled as well.
Stephan Berger of Ruhr University, Bochum presented “Industrial Heritage Without Class?
Read more →I was very impressed with Friday’s fine cut screening of session B.7 “A strike and an uprising [in Texas]”: an experimental telling of the pecan shellers strike of 1938 led by Emma Tenayuca and the 1987 Jobs with Justice march of 3,000 in Nacogdoches.
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