This essay is the third contribution to our symposium on Tom Alter’s new book, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas, published recently by University of Illinois Press. We started with Kyle Wilkison’s analysis of the book’s contribution and survey of previous literature.
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Early in September, Polk County Iowa District Judge Jeffrey Farrell ruled that state officials had the right to overrule local school boards in decisions about when and how they might open for instruction during the current pandemic. He asserted, “Whether right or wrong, that is their decision to make.”
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Today we begin a 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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Duke University Press is allowing us to offer free access for three months to James Gregory’s provocative new essay “Remapping the American Left: A History Of Radical Discontinuity.”
The essay is based on his Labor and Working Class History Association Presidential Address and derives from his Mapping American Social Movements Project, which has mapped the major social movements of the twentieth century including a great variety of campaigns, political projects, and media outlets.
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The rewriting of radical history has occupied two generations of US historians, in one way or another, and among some especially fine efforts in race-linked struggles, Red, Black and White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 by Mary Stanton is a gem.
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Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues. In this edition, Stephanie Riley interviewed Jake Altman on his new book Socialism before Sanders: The 1930s Moment from Romance to Revisionism
Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz, Familiar Stranger: a Life Between Two Islands. Duke University Press, 2017. 271pp, $29.95 pbk
Stuart Hall, Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays. Duke University Press, 20917. 360pp, $27.95 pbk
1956: John Saville, E.P.
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On Sunday afternoon, March 9, 1930, the city of Philadelphia witnessed what the Public Ledger called “one of the most amazing demonstrations of all trade union history,” when 22-year-old Carl Mackley was eulogized as a martyr for labor’s cause. Mackley, a knitter in the full-fashioned hosiery industry, had been gunned down three days earlier by armed strikebreakers hired by the owners of the Aberle Hosiery Mill, where a strike was in progress.
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For years now I’ve been showing students and friends the polls that show an increasingly favorable view of socialism especially among low income, young African-American and Hispanic youth.
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Bernie Sanders has come close. And in doing so he has demonstrated that in 2016 the label democratic socialist is no longer a third-rail in American politics. This makes it a good time to talk about American political history and to contemplate the socialist movement of a century ago, when socialists won elections in more than 350 cities and towns, when more than 380 weekly and daily newspapers affiliated with the Socialist Party, when socialism was popular in states and counties that now vote solidly conservative.
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