Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas最新文献

{"title":"Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas","authors":"Jarod Roll","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581377","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Alter II uses a multigenerational biography to recover a long history of agrarian challenges to capitalism in Texas and beyond that makes bold arguments about the genealogy of working-class radicalism in the United States and offers critical lessons for the American left today. Alter sheds new light on familiar subjects in the history of US agrarian radicalism—the Farmers Alliance, People's Party, and Socialist Party of America—by situating them in the transnational context of revolution: Germany in 1848, Mexico in 1910, and Russia in 1917. Focusing on three generations of the German American Meitzen family, who first arrived in Texas from Silesia in 1849 and became leading radical activists, Alter “demonstrates the existence of a decades-long farmer-labor bloc” that ran from the Greenback Party in the 1870s to the Farm-Labor Union of America in the 1920s (2). This farmer-labor bloc, he argues, “moved the political spectrum of US political culture both substantively and ideologically to the left” (2). While Alter sees the reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal as weak derivatives of farmer-labor bloc demands, he argues that these measures would not have happened without the agrarian radicalism kept alive by activists like the Meitzens. The farmer-labor bloc they helped build was at its most influential, he contends, when organized for independent political action, not when working within the partisan mainstream. Here Alter sees a clear lesson for the US left today: “Working-class protest movements have more success achieving their demands when they politically organize themselves as a partisan party independent of the two-party system” (3).Alter's through line is a biographical study of three generations of the Meitzen family whose members played leading roles in the development of the farmer-labor bloc, particularly in Texas. He follows their story, with its long pattern of involvement in radical politics, back to Silesia in the early nineteenth century. Here Alter finds the “roots” of the idea for a political movement to serve the needs of farmers and laborers that would later animate the Populist and Socialist movements, and the German immigrants, including the Meitzens among many others, who would actively transplant that idea after violent suppression of the 1848 German revolution forced their immigration to the United States. Arriving in Texas, the Meitzens helped lead a succession of working-class organizations—cooperatives, unions, and political parties among them—that sought to build a political coalition of farmers and wage workers to challenge the growing power of industrial capitalism. Alter uses their multigenerational activism to demonstrate the continuous development of the farmer-labor bloc through myriad linked and generally successive groups, including the Texas People's Party (1873), Greenback Party, Greenback-Labor Party, Grange, Farmers Alliance, People's Party, Farmers’ Union, Socialist Party, Nonpartisan Lea","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contested and Dangerous Sea: North Atlantic Fishermen, Their Wives, Unions, and the Politics of Exclusion","authors":"James P. Kraft","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581405","url":null,"abstract":"In this concise, engaging study, Colin J. Davis explores the history of a neglected group of workers—transatlantic fishermen. The study compares the problems and political activities of New England and British fishermen after World War II, when foreign competition and technological innovations threatened the men's livelihoods as well as the health of Atlantic Ocean fisheries. Fishermen's trade unions and wives helped to confront these threats, with uneven levels of success. This working-class drama unfolds gradually, and it speaks to major themes in social and labor history.The drama begins with an overview of the North Atlantic fishing business. The book's opening chapter discusses the types of fish that men harvested and areas of the seas where the fish were found. It also describes daily routines and job hierarchies on modern fishing vessels, whose large trawls collected fish by the ton. At that point, the book brings the hazards of deep-sea fishing into sharp relief. Working on a constantly moving trawler for long periods of time presented enormous challenges. Injuries and fatalities were relatively high in this line of work, especially during stormy weather. Trawlers sometimes capsized at sea and entire crews perished.Fishermen's unions struggled valiantly to protect their members’ interests, but only those of the New Englanders had much success. The reason was partly structural. Ignoring old craft traditions, the Americans established unions that included skippers and engineers as well as deckhands and cooks. As a result, the men had more power vis-à-vis shipowners than their British counterparts did. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, getting fishermen to support union goals proved challenging. The men were often at sea and rarely wanted to spend their shore time involved in union activities. Trade union leaders were typically more militant than the rank and file, and union victories hinged largely on their own dedication and hard work.Unlike other labor studies, this book shows how workers’ wives helped to solve industry-wide problems. In chapter 4, for example, readers learn how a group of British women who had lost their husbands at sea protested the lack of safety standards in the fishing business. Speaking publicly about the problem, the women complained that British trawlers often headed out to sea without reliable communication equipment, or even basic medical supplies. The women's speeches drew nationwide attention and eventually shamed shipowners and lawmakers into improving safety conditions. In New England, fishermen's wives created local organizations that highlighted the importance of fishing to coastal economies and thus justified the exclusion of foreign fishing fleets from coastal waters. In 1976, the women garnered support for the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation Act, which significantly extended America's territorial fishing limits and thereby protected their husbands’ jobs.The politics of exclusion occasionally spark","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity","authors":"Celeste R. Menchaca","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581517","url":null,"abstract":"Located in California's southeastern corner, the city of El Centro sits in the mountainous desert of the Imperial Valley. It was home to the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, “one of the oldest continuously operating detention centers in the United States (until recently)” (3). Despite its long history, little was documented of the detention facility in local archives. For Jessica Ordaz, this forgetting was representative of a larger historical erasure that masked violence against migrants under Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) custody. Her book aims to unpack the history of an otherwise buried yet important federal facility. Across seven chapters, Ordaz looks within the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, from its origins in 1945 to its closing in 2014, to uncover state practices of migrant labor exploitation and punishment, and in turn she reveals migrant resistance as transnational radical solidarity.Ordaz's central claim is that the El Centro Immigration Detention Center was not simply an administrative site to hold and process unauthorized migrants but “a racialized and gendered administrative regime of punishment” (94). She documents how migrants in the facility faced physical and verbal abuse, experienced psychological intimidation, endured overcrowding, and suffered solitary confinement. They were denied lifesaving medical services, basic recreation, and adequate nutrition. Their confinement, she argues, was designed to be punitive, a claim that resonates with the work of Miroslava Chávez-García and Natalie Lira, both of whom analyze racialized punishment through the lens of juvenile detention and sterilization in California. Ordaz further situates her analysis of racialized punishment within the context of wartime mobilization. She reviews how World War II, the Cold War, and the civil wars in Latin America armed INS officials with the rhetoric to frame migrants as a threat to the nation and, consequently, legitimized migrant incarceration, which allowed the state to expand detention and deportation infrastructures.Most histories on twentieth-century US immigration enforcement generally center on law and policy, the Border Patrol, or immigrant inspection at ports of entry. While these works provide a brief discussion of migrant detention, few fully unpack its significance. Instead, Ordaz demonstrates that detention facilities were a key mechanism in a larger system of labor exploitation. It was no coincidence, she points out, that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp was built just three years after the 1942 creation of the Bracero Program, a binational program where the United States issued short-term labor contracts to Mexican workers. Ordaz argues that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp and the Bracero reception center were two sides of the same coin: both “agricultural growers and INS employees viewed Mexican migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, as a source of labor and profit” (37). According","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880–1948","authors":"Jim Phillips","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581391","url":null,"abstract":"Ten percent of male workers in the United Kingdom were employed in the coal industry in 1914. Coal's economic and employment prevalence came at immense human cost. No industry was more dangerous or injurious to the health of its workers. Major pit disasters arising from explosions and fires drew public attention, but more damaging were the everyday attrition effects of roof falls and the dust-ridden environment underground. Coalfield women shared the industry's physical toll. While barred from work underground in Britain after the 1840s, their experience of childbirth and domestic labor in extremely arduous conditions was debilitating. Their daily shift, called the darg in Scotland, involved cleaning and drying their menfolk's pit clothes, heating water for baths, and preparing meals. Where mining sons lived in the parental home and worked different shifts from their fathers, mothers’ dargs could last from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m.The authors of Disability in Britain examine the impact of such exhausting life and labor. Their first key insight, from disability studies, is profound. Impairment and disability are not synonymous: impairment is physical; disability is social. Miners acquired impairments through workplace accidents and diseases. They were then disabled by obstacles erected by employers and medical professionals along with welfare policy makers and administrators. The authors’ second key insight is that miners were a highly organized “patient” group that exerted agency on two broad fronts: campaigning for a safer working environment to minimize impairment; and resisting disability on the terms defined by employers and policy makers. Miners across the United Kingdom won two major legislative victories in 1946–47. Clement Attlee's reforming Labour government passed the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, which provided statutory and comprehensive compensation for workers denied employment owing to impairment, and nationalized coal, which led to safer employment through stronger union voice.Disability in Industrial Britain is a major outcome of the Leverhulme Trust–funded Disability and Industrial Society project, where twelve researchers from seven UK universities engaged in comparative cultural histories of the coalfields from 1780 to 1914. Kirsti Bohata is a professor of English at Swansea University, where Alexandra Jones undertook a PhD thesis and Mike Mantin worked as a research fellow. Steve Thompson is a senior lecturer in history and Welsh history at Aberystwyth University. The interdisciplinary strengths of this research team shaped the broad range of sources they analyzed in this book, focusing on the coalfield territories of South Wales, Durham, and Scotland. The team drew empirical evidence from records of welfare policy makers and administrators, employers, the courts where compensation claims were contested, and trade unions. These documents, alongside newspaper reports, are integrated with extensive readings from creativ","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On","authors":"Eileen Boris","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329862","url":null,"abstract":"As historian John Wood Sweet recounts, on October 14, 1793, hundreds of men from New York City's “middling and lower ranks” violently dismantled the bawdy house of Mother Carey. Her perjured testimony had offered evidence for gentleman jurors to acquit a rake charged with raping the stepdaughter of a master harbor pilot, a skilled artisan who believed with the other rioters “that street protests were a legitimate, necessary way to maintain a free government.”1 This plebian protest against justice denied not only responded to the exclusion from formal power of working men during the transitional period of the Early Republic, when the old Dutch families retained influence, but also demonstrated a moral economy of the crowd that enacted its own norms of respectability. A patriarchal order saw rape as a crime between men, damaging a man's property and assaulting his reputation, though the actual victim was a daughter or wife. And according to the crowd's reasoning, working men had every right to avenge a wrong against one of their own by taking matters into their own hands. Moreover, as historians Christine Stansell and Judith Walkowitz found about prostitutes who lived among their neighbors and families, a seduced woman was not necessarily an outcast in these working-class communities—though mores were beginning to change as New York expanded from a village to a metropolis.2Sweet's example of collective action might also illuminate “the relationship between the premodern American political system and the coming of the factory,” the reexamination of which Herbert Gutman called for in his classic 1973 essay, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919.”3 For our purposes, this incident underscores an artisan cultural complexity absent from Gutman's account, focused as he was on those Blue Mondays, ethnic festivals, and leisurely work routines that rejected factory time for more rural rhythms, a way of being that he conflated as premodern and preindustrial. Rereading “Work, Culture, and Society” a half century later and from the standpoint of feminist labor history, I ask, What difference does gender make?It isn't that Gutman ignored women—we read the phrase “working men and women” more than once in his essay. He refers to “the frequent tension between different groups of men and women new to the machine and a changing American society,” “native and immigrant men and women fresh to the factory and the demands imposed upon them by the regularities and disciplines of factory labor,” and “men and women who sell their labor to an employer.”4 But his prototypical hirelings and immigrant laborers were men. Gender, as the language of power and a shaper of identities, was not a category of historical analysis when Gutman wrote his essay,5 so it might be understandable that he missed the gendered dimensions of his own story.Gutman does provide examples whose gendered meanings a sharper analytic can now unlock. He was too good a social hist","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"33 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Union</i> Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Television and Labor in the Age of Streaming","authors":"Kathy M. Newman","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329918","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article considers the problem of social class in contemporary television, focusing on the last five years. The author considers the ways in which streaming platforms are increasing the range and diversity of stories that television can offer; in addition, she shifts the conversation from class, consumption, and representation to work, labor, and production, arguing that this view highlights the extent to which television is engaging with questions of labor more often than we realize.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Paying Tribute for the Dead: Religion and Spectral Labor in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Epidemics","authors":"Jennifer Scheper Hughes","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329792","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study approaches the history of epidemics in Mexico under Spanish invasion through the lens of religion and labor. In the aftermath of a particularly devastating epidemic from 1576 to 1581, colonial administrators in Mexico tried to exact previous levels of encomienda tribute from a greatly diminished population. Across the colony, Indigenous survivors protested having to pay “tribute for the dead” for those that they lost in the outbreak, and they demanded official recounts and new censuses of their communities. Underlying their protest were longstanding Mesoamerican practices and principles for the structure of collective labor, or tequitl in Nahuatl, including social norms dictating the proper relationship between religion, work, and the afterlife. The language of protest suggests that among the most serious violations of the “tribute for the dead” was that those who died in the epidemic were being compelled to work as spectral laborers for Spanish purposes. The resilient power of these practices and beliefs motivated and galvanized a groundswell of struggle against the encomienda system of labor extraction toward the end of the sixteenth century, bringing that system to its knees.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Why the New Deal Matters","authors":"Nelson Lichtenstein","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330075","url":null,"abstract":"Eric Rauchway calls the New Deal a peaceable form of patriotism, a moment of common purpose exemplified by a built environment transformed through the exercise of government power. At the most basic level the New Deal still matters because Americans can scarcely get through a day without coming into contact with some part of it. Rauchway's book is therefore a tour of selected venues that exemplify what he sees as the New Deal's most significant and visible accomplishments. The book is rooted in physicality: an account of some of the dams, libraries, school buildings, housing projects, and roads whose construction put paychecks and a more tangible sense of their shared citizenship in the hands of millions.Rauchway starts at Arlington National Cemetery, where we visit the tombs of two World War I veterans, both killed when police shot them in the summer of 1932 during an altercation with the Bonus Army, which was encamped at the nation's capital in a vain effort to secure a desperately needed monetary bonus from Congress. Rauchway offers a fascinating account of President Herbert Hoover's ill-conceived determination to rid the District of Columbia of a group he thought mainly composed of radicals and layabouts. Hoover knew that General Douglas MacArthur's insubordinate decision to send in the troops and burn the Bonus Army encampment was a political disaster that would cost him dearly in the presidential election that fall. Yet Hoover could never bring himself to criticize MacArthur, because that might seem to legitimize the protest and cast a dark shadow over his own intransigence.With Hoover out of the way, Rauchway takes us to the Clinch River in Tennessee, where he offers a stirring account of how the New Deal built the great Norris Dam, a Tennessee Valley Authority project named after a stalwart Progressive, Senator George Norris, who along with Harold Ickes at Interior was among the cohort of Bull Moose Republicans who joined forces with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Despite its conformity to the Jim Crow racial order and its latter-day appetite for coal-fired electrical generation, Rauchway sees the TVA as a quintessential New Deal impulse: a vast experiment in social and economic planning that raised living standards in a benighted region, a project that TVA director David Lilienthal called “democracy on the march.” Within a decade it would prove a bulwark of American global power, when all that cheap electricity proved essential to the massive Oak Ridge enterprise that employed tens of thousands of rural folk to refine just a few hundred highly potent kilograms of uranium-235.Rauchway next takes us to Window Rock, Arizona, to observe the impact of the New Deal on the Navajo Nation, and then on to Hunter's Point in San Francisco, which offers him the opportunity to assess how and why the African American community came to support the New Deal despite FDR's manifest timidity on virtually all issues related to the American racial order. Led ","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Granite Sill, Fourth Floor","authors":"Samn Stockwell","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329750","url":null,"abstract":"In an attic workshop I assembled Tiffany lamps badly,holding my uneven seams up to the windowthen staring at the street below: a man spilling mustardon his dress pants, a bus wheezingin front of Caldor's, and pigeons carted by air.Lead trickled over my knucklesas I soldered plaques of colored glass.I thought I would never be alive,the most I could hope for would be the walkinto the morning-glazed building,following the trail of someone's perfume in the stairwell.My great-grandfather and great-unclelived in an outbuilding.At one end, two iron cots.At the other, a woodstove,an oilcloth-covered table,a bowl of molasses kisseswrapped in twistsof yellowed waxed paper.My great-uncle never strayed beyond the woodshed,but my great-grandfather had been a carpenter in town.My grandmother made their dinner and supperand pulled identical work clothes in enormous sheetsfrom the wringer washer—","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"128 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse: Ethnic and Class Dynamics during the Era of American Industrialization","authors":"Rosemary Feurer","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330103","url":null,"abstract":"This book's catchy title expresses the ruthlessness and extremes of the economic divide established during the Gilded Age. “Wretched refuse” suggests the way capitalists sought to deploy the world's poor as exploitable labor for profit, with an ironic nod to Emma Lazarus's poem. Zeidel chronicles capitalists’ constant search for workers who would take the lowest-paid and most dangerous work in the age of industrialization. They both needed and often reviled the immigrants they hired. When these recruits participated in strikes or were rebellious, the elite labeled them tools of foreign ideas and un-American radicals. Capitalists’ overt efforts to undermine labor campaigns and deny labor rights through a divide-and-conquer strategy in key industries contributed to a dynamic that led to political repression and immigration restriction, Zeidel argues. The media and influential commentators of the era might criticize the rich, but they strategically targeted the labor radicals and immigrants in ways that distracted from the reality of class power.Zeidel brings together the study of immigration restriction with the study of labor repression from 1865 to 1925. These are usually disconnected fields of study. Historians have long debated whether antiradicalism was a grassroots irrational hysteria, an elite-driven phenomenon, or a product of episodic wartime hysteria. Most treatments center on World War I as the pivot. Michael Rogin gave a theoretical interpretive lift by suggesting that political demonology had a psychological basis traceable to settler colonialism. Rogin examined the intersection of public and private forces in the enterprise, and connected it to the liberal impulse to create order. Zeidel's book seems to join that interpretation, implicating Progressives who yearned to restore class harmony. Others have contributed specific books about episodes from the Molly Maguires onward where employers and Pinkertons have been strategic, but they usually then leave out the way these affected immigration debates. Michael Kazin, on the other hand, has dismissed the role of repression in the fortunes of the US labor radicalism. While Zeidel is obviously arguing against Kazin's conclusion, he misses an opportunity to position the book in this dialogue. But the narrative he offers is full of insights regarding the connections between anti-radicalism and the immigration debate.Zeidel is more direct about placing this study in the historiography of immigration restriction, clearly stating that he is arguing against a genre of literature that reaches back to John Higham's Strangers in the Land, an approach that stressed nativism as a cultural construct and agent, and nationalism and nation-building around exclusion. This scholarship has often been untethered from employers and labor market conflicts even when there are mentions, for example, of incidents like Haymarket, and usually is centered on discourse, whiteness, social psychology, panics, and worker","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}