Untitled Document

An independent women's movement in the mid-1800's developed out of the foundation of anti-slavery political
and social agitation in the decade before the Civil War. Women, growing increasingly aware of, and unsatisfied with,
their oppressed role in society, looked to the anti-slavery movement and found the potential for social and political
reform. As women's rights activists looked to abolitionists, Republicans, and Labor Unions for support, it became
clear that only through an independent movement could women bring the political focus to their rights as women.
Women's rights activities hoped to define a common bond of womanhood to unite all women under the fight for
suffrage. But what becomes clear through the movement is not a common experience of women, but a common
experience of oppression. The complex relationship of class, race and gender create many divisions in the movement,
but what ties the women together is the shared oppression that comes not only from men, but for some women also
from class, and race.

The first supporters of woman suffrage were middle class and their movement reflected their privileged position in
society. The bonds of womanhood were easy to establish within a single class and race of women. But when the
movement began to approach other races and classes for support the superficiality of any form of bond based on
sex became apparent, weakening the movement. By oversimplifying the commonalities and ignoring the differences
between races and class the women's movement alienated potential allies.

The hope for a unified movement was strong after the Civil War and leaders of the movement reached out to potential
allies like the abolitionists and the Republican Party. Most women had quieted their demands during the war and
turned their focus to the abolishment of slavery. By the end of the war all political focus was on the newly freedmen
and their economic and political rights. Abolitionists found themselves wielding new political influence. No longer
agitators after the victory of the North and the abolishment of slavery, they found themselves in a position to
implement real social and political change. Abolitionists did not want to push a platform as radical as that of woman
suffrage. The Republican Party adopted black rights as a part of their platform and, because women's rights had
faded to the background during the war, expected that they would stay in the background until the end of Reconstruction.
But suffragists felt quite the opposite; the women's suffrage movement believed that their only change for political change
was during the time of political upheaval after the War.

When it became clear to suffragists that the abolitionists were no longer giving their support and that the Republican
Party would not be adding woman suffrage to their platform the feminists looked to other allies. The suffragists looked
to the working class, drawing on so called bonds of womanhood to unite themselves with working women. The National
Labor Union emphasized unity and its work to racially desegregate men in the work place made an alliance between
them and the suffragists an appealing possibility. Feminists challenged the labor union to broaden its definition of worker
and of work. But although feminists allied themselves with the labor unions and with working women, the middle class
feminists never understood the complications of class, tending "to identify class antagonism, rather than class itself, as
the problem against which they fought" (119). The middle class feminists' inability to fully empathize with their working
class allies illustrates why an alliance with the labor class failed to lead to the vote and also why the bonds of womanhood
are too superficial to unite large groups in a radical movement.

The suffragists had, for a short period, a very successful alliance with working class women, but ultimately differences in
the priorities of each group drove them apart. When the suffragists looked to the working class for support they found an
abundance of oppression based on gender. Working class women were eager to join the feminist movement because working
women found themselves consistently oppressed not only by their male employers but also by their male co-workers. Women
were excluded from the unions because men saw women in the workplace as competition. Antagonism between men and
women in the workplace grew when employers used women workers to break strikes.

Antagonism between women workers and men typesetters was heightened by the practice of hiring and training women to
set type during union strikes. The newspapers disguised its acts as philanthropic stating that they wanted to help wage
earning women make a decent living. Unions as a result refused to organize women, viewing them as strike breakers.
Although the Civil War had seen an increase of women in the workplace causing unions to allow for locals to organize
women, the antagonism between the two sexes was enough to maintain segregation. On December 1867 women type
setters turned to the suffragists for help because they had been hired during a strike and then fired immediately after
the strike was resolved. Middle class feminists helped form the Working Women's Association. But typesetters and
suffragists "disagreed over the place of the suffrage demand in the working women's association" (134). Workers
tended to focus on equal wages and fair working hours while the feminists continued to focus on the vote. The feminist
agenda appealed to women typesetters because of the patriarchal oppression from both employers and unions, but
typesetters did not feel that the vote was a priority. The suffragists made a mistake in assuming that the bonds of
womanhood would be enough to unite them with the working class in the fight for woman suffrage. Bonds of womanhood
proved superficial in the face of the complex reality of class.

While the working Women's Association helped the typesetters join the union it could not find success with other
workers. The conflicts between priorities continued despite attempts to unite over a common sense of womanhood. Most
other working women were not skilled and did not compete with men for jobs. "The needlewomen at the working women's
home wanted higher wages and, as they explained to [leaders of the movement], the assurance of steady work" (144).
Feminist goals of independence and new trade opportunities did not seem realistic to these women. That the suffragists
and working class women could not align their respective priorities illustrates that these women did not share a common
bond of womanhood. That they were all oppressed is clear, but the complications of class and race proved far to complex
to be distilled into a commonality based on sex.

Further illustrating the complexity of an alliance between working women and middle class woman was the collapse of
the Working Women's Association after only one year. The middle class women felt they had little in common with
working class women. Working class women wanted to work to further equality in the work place while suffragists felt
that the only vehicle for women's independence was the vote. Middle class feminists also held the belief that true change
could only come from the top down. The condescending attitude held by the middle class members of the Working
Women's Association is best summed up in the Vaughn Case. It was the final victory for the association and the defining
moment of the association's collapse.

Hester Vaughn was a domestic worker who was seduced by her boss. When she became pregnant she was dismissed
from her job. She gave birth to her child alone and without aid. When the child died she was charged with infanticide.
The feminists of the Working Women's Association worked to free Vaughn and were able, in doing so, to address many
issues affecting working women. Feminists were incensed by the sexual vulnerability of women with very little agency
to find work, by bad working conditions, by sexual double standards, and by poverty. The association was able to get
a quiet pardon for Vaughn but its success in doing so was also a defining movement leading up to the collapse of the
Association. The Working Women's Association was supposed to be an organization that helped working women help
themselves and instead it became more and more an organization that created victims. By reinforcing a condescending
relationship between classes of women it was re-establishing the victim-hood of working women. Instead of being united
by the bonds of womanhood the movement was divided by issues of race and class.

The bonds of womanhood that feminists of the mid to late 1800's hoped would unite all women in the fight for suffrage is
better understood as the bonds of the oppressed. The white middle class women were united with black women and
working women by their common lack of voice, but beyond their shared oppression they had little in common. The
suffragists could not see beyond their own specific goals nor did they care to understand those who did not or, as was
more often the case, could not support woman suffrage. The suffragists' agenda was far too specific and inflexible to
include all women. The unique concerns of different groups of women from different classes and races made a unified
agenda impossible. Through all women shared a common oppression from a patriarchal society, they did not share
common agendas or goals. The bonds of womanhood are a superficial and over simplified means of uniting women
and failure to recognize this fact led to many failures in the early women's rights movement.

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Angela Lupton on Harriet Tubman by Jean Humez

Historian Jean Humez, author of Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (2003), argues that the creation and
dissemination of the Tubman legends, often by Tubman herself, are in many ways as important as the biographical facts
themselves. Most of Humez's book is devoted to representations of Tubman over the past 150 years. These stories,
collected from a variety of sources and often excerpted at length, provide even more vivid portrayals of Tubman's life
than Humez's biography itself, which seems to be what the author intended. Humez spends little more than 100 pages
writing her own biography of Tubman while the rest of the book allows Tubman's legend to unfold in letters and stories
by contemporaries who knew her or knew of her. The stories about Tubman are key, Humez argues, because Tubman
was illiterate herself and was known to dictate tales to those she knew and perform stories for those she did not. By
piecing together the written accounts of interactions and stories of Tubman, Humez creates a picture of her that is as
close to hearing Tubman's own voice as we can get (6).

The long tradition of slave narratives is represented here, as well as primary sources that mirror the racism of the times
in which they were written, especially in their condescending, and contradictory images of black Americans. Tubman
herself deliberately shaped many of these stories. Humez is at her best when she analyzes the oral storytelling traditions
in which Tubman was raised. "Tubman's motives for public performance of her life stories," she writes, "were a mixture
of the practical, the political, and the religious (133)."

Harriet Tubman, Araminta Ross at birth, was born on an Maryland Eastern Shore plantation sometime around 1820.
Araminta chose the name Harriet for herself as a young woman and took her first husband, John Tubman's, surname when
she married. Tubman grew up in a fractured but loving family and experienced all of the traumas associated with American
slavery--physical abuse, incredible hardship, deception, separation from loved ones, and deprivation of formal education.
As an adolescent, an overseer hurled a heavy metal weight that hit Harriet on the temple (177). Humez argues that this
accident caused Tubman to hear voices and music and receive inspirational visions. Throughout her life she periodically
fell into deep trances from which she could hardly be awakened. There seems little question that this condition was
inextricably intertwined with her deep religious beliefs. Thus Humez has, by necessity, written a spiritual biography of
Tubman. Perhaps Humez was predisposed to write such a narrative when the inspiration for the project came during a
course she was teaching at Harvard Divinity School on spiritual autobiographies.

The trauma of seeing two of her sisters sold, shackled, attached to slave chain gangs and taken south, and the probability
of falling victim to the same fate herself, devastated Harriet and convinced her of the pressing need to escape, which she
did in 1849 (16). She fled through nearby Maryland and Delaware to the North and became affiliated with black and white
leaders of the Underground Railroad, especially in Philadelphia. She returned to Maryland about a dozen times in the 1850s,
probably escorting out about 60 or 70 slaves. Most were relatives or close friends. The reports of Tubman emancipating
thousands throughout the South via the Underground Railroad have been vastly exaggerated.

Within a few years, Tubman had achieved legendary status in abolitionist circles in many northern venues. For reasons
of personal safety, she made her home in Canada, a short distance across Niagara Falls. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act
endangered runaways anyplace in the country by subjecting them to recapture and return to their owners if they remained
in the United States. She became a coveted and inspirational lecturer on the antislavery circuit and met with John Brown,
who solicited her assistance in plotting his raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry. She became widely known as both
"Moses" and "General Tubman" for her leadership.

Slaves could not actually enter into legal marital contracts, although they believed their unions to be valid. Humez devotes
a significant portion of her biography to the dissolution of Harriet's "marriage" to John Tubman, a freedman in Maryland.
Harriet and John married before her initial escape, but he declined to move north with his wife. On one return trip two
years later, when Harriet hoped John might finally have changed his mind, she learned that he had remarried during her
absence.

After the start of the Civil War, Harriet Tubman reluctantly took on menial assignments as a laundress and cook for Union
troops, mostly for black soldiers. Far more importantly, she soon negotiated the opportunity to put her skills to better use
as a spy and undercover scout for the Union, supplying crucial information through her affiliation and easy rapport with
the network of black men and women still enslaved in the South. Quantitatively, her leadership of a raid by Union troops
in 1863 was more significant than all of her antebellum journeys on behalf of the Underground Railroad combined. During
the Combahee River Raid in June of 1863, she procured the emancipation of nearly 800 slaves in South Carolina through
her work as a spy and scout(56).

For many years she tried to convince the government to acknowledge her wartime work. When her efforts were unsuccessful,
she solicited the help of influential friends. Most of her claims were rejected, and she received only a small pension based
on her work as a wartime nurse and cook, and ultimately as a widow. Her efforts as a military leader of men caused some
to call her "the black Joan of Arc"--while widely acknowledged during the war by a variety of Union officers and supported
by her New York congressman, she was never fully appreciated or rewarded by the government.

In 1869, she married again, presumably happily, though briefly, to Charles Nelson Davis, who died in 1888 from tuberculosis.
In another act of cultural defiance, Tubman's second husband was 25 at the time of their marriage while she was in her late
forties (56). She remained close to the African-American church, which provided her with both spiritual and social comfort,
and became committed to the cause of women's suffrage and spoke often on its behalf.

More important during her later years in Auburn, New York, were basic matters of survival and her own charitable campaigns
on behalf of her extended family and other African Americans in more need than herself. She turned to domestic work and
pig farming for sustenance. She fed, clothed, and housed dozens of her relatives and took special interest in and raised a
niece. Other biographers of Tubman, Catherine Clinton for example, have asserted that the niece was, in fact, Tubman's
own daughter and the product of rape by a white man in Tubman's youth. Humez argues intensely that there is no evidence
that this is true and further asserts that the likelihood of Tubman being sexually abused at all in her youth is unlikely due
to her protective family network (178).

Tubman's efforts to help those in need culminated in the creation of the Tubman Home, a residence for indigent black
people that was supported by local and national groups, especially those comprised of middle-class black women. Overall,
Tubman is portrayed as a truly dedicated, generous, and selfless woman, whose later years, while not nearly as publicly
praised, may have been her finest. Her celebrity and mythic status increased as her health declined in her early 90s and
she died, a long-time resident of the Tubman Home, in 1913.

Humez provides the facts of Tubman's life, as much as they can be known. And Humez also appropriately acknowledges
the inability to determine, for certain, biographical details like Tubman's exact date of birth or number of siblings. Humez
provides a painstaking countenance of Tubman's life, inasmuch as it can be told, but her analysis ends with questions of
historical veracity. There is no gender analysis of this woman who wore bloomers in wartime and was called "General"
or "Moses" far more often than "Aunt Harriet." With Humez's Harriet Tubman at nearly 400 pages, that analysis must
wait for another book.

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Sonia Varma Arora on To 'Joy My Freedom by Tera Hunter

          I remember a tall, powerful woman who worked in the mills pulling coke from a furnace-a man's job.
          It was Sue, and she loved men. When Sue arrived at my father's honky-tonk, people would yell:
          'Here comes Big Sue! Do the Funky Butt, Baby!' As soon as she got high and happy, that's what
          she'd do, pulling up her skirts and grinding her rear end like an alligator crawling up a bank (181).

Leola B. Wilson offered this reflection as she spoke about her aspirations to become an entertainer. A child in the South
at the turn of the century, Leola would sneak away for clandestine glimpses of adult entertainment through a peephole
she drilled in the wall of her father's honky-tonk dance hall. In 'Big Sue', young Leola saw a free black woman--a dancer--
reclaim her body from the physical toil of day-work, and redirect her energy toward personal gratification; she began to
imagine and exercise her freedom. Big Sue danced the 'Funky Butt' and even shook her "snake hips" and "buzzard lope"
with pride. She might have gotten cozy with men; maybe she even drank a beer or two, smoked a cigarette, or screamed
'C'mon Papa grab me!' (175) with unencumbered joy, and more importantly, a fierce sense irreverence towards upper-class
social etiquette and morality. No laws could stop her from dancing: dancing in halls, at picnics, house parties, and at church;
no laws could stop her from ultimately creating a community, an identity, and a vision for her life. Through this culture and
other community initiatives, women like Big Sue and Leola put down roots for themselves as they looked toward their
uncertain future as free black women in the ever-contested "New" South. Their socially devious behavior, however, was
not celebrated by everyone.

As Tera W. Hunter illustrates in her book, To 'Joy My Freedom: Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War,
freedom was an unstable condition. White society, and even upper class black society, frowned on freedpersons'
"unproductive" use of leisure time, on their illicit activity and flagrant vice. As decisively argued in 1903 by Henry Hugh
Proctor, an elite black, "in the name of Anglo-Saxon civilization, remove these things that are ruining the character of
our young men and stealing away the virtue of our young women!" (175) Replace them with schools-schools for cooking
and housework, a white newspaper motioned. Black working-class women who secured some modicum of agency for
themselves outside classist notions of femininity and respectability were surely a dangerous animal. Furthermore,
women domestic workers-as many of them were-who engaged in these activities and other community-based support
systems such as mutual benefit societies posed a similar threat. Though their labor was essential to the community,
their overt and covert resistance to master-slave attitudes and financial dependency was frightening to whites. Perhaps,
some doctors went so far as to suggest, black domestics who relate on such an intimate level with whites and white
children should surrender their independence and return to the safety of their employers homes-to slavery-for the
health and well-being of everyone involved.

As Hunter shows in her study of Atlanta, Georgia after the Civil War and through World War I, the black community
faced two central questions upon meeting with such unequivocal challenges: firstly, and most importantly, what would
allow them to overcome racism and the cultural and structural limitations of their independence? Secondly, what was
the most suitable way to ascend the ranks of society and "lift up" their race so-to-speak? How would they gain respect
and dignity, and prove themselves worthy of their new-found freedom? Elite blacks like Lugenia Burns Hope, founder
of the Neighborhood Union (NU), could not rest until there were "wholesome" alternatives available for blacks who were
attracted to "hurtful" amusements. Needless to say, the black working-class and upper-class had different solutions in
mind. (The white working-class and upper-class had their opinions, too.) In order to understand the debate over these
two questions, Hunter looks outside and inside the black community to show the unsteady nature of freedom and the
logic behind women's community-based and individual resistance.

Before the Civil War, Atlanta-coined as part of the "New South"-was a developing metropolis, rich with the potential
to grow on par with other merchant and manufacturing-based cities in the North. Squarely centered in this urban project
, slave labor, Hunter argues, "was only a source of labor and was merely incidental to the city's character" (8), not like
in the rural South where slavery ordered relations and plantation life. The demand was still there, however, and the
supply--the labor force-was not. Due to this scarcity, a hire-out system took hold which democratized white wage-earners
access to slaves. The work, too, was on the verge of democratization in many ways. The hire-out system helped slaves
as they began to rewrite the scripts of power that governed their lives; this kind of labor, performed on a short-term
basis in small workshops and hotel establishments (and for working-class families), did not warrant direct and constant
supervision as did gang labor in the fields.

The advantages of urban versus rural slavery were not invisible. Hired-out slaves who worked away from their masters
were able to test the limits of state slave regulation and spent more and more time in casual contact with free people,
black and white. However, because slave labor (without slave ownership) was available for a larger segment of white
society, more people had a stake in preserving the institution. Intermittent whiffs of freedom and social disarray in the
air during the Civil War fomented urban slaves to resist, to flee. By the time General Sherman and the Union army made
its way to Atlanta in September of 1864, it was clear that slaves themselves played an active role in the revolution and
demise of slavery. As Hunter argues, "they set the stage for the renegotiation of labor and social relations for many
years to come." (20) These negotiations, however, continued for centuries.

The Union victory at Appomattox in the spring of 1865 precipitated a sharp rise in Atlanta's population. Retaliations by
ex-Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan drove men and women into the city and into different conditions of servitude;
virtually all black women were compelled to find jobs as domestics-household workers, nannies, and elderly care workers.
Factory employment was against the proper mold of subservience and therefore "better-suited" for white women. (It
would be out of reach for most African American's until the eve of World War II.) Still, labor pains were not equivalent
to labor power during reconstruction. Even the Freedmen's Bureau which was established to distribute rations and relief
to ex-slaves, monitor the transition to a free labor system, and protect black rights, was grossly inadequate. Instead of
dividing black communities to prevent empowerment (a widely-used strategy in the antebellum South), segregation of
white and black society had taken root within two decades after the end of the War, but any hope of an equitable
distribution of resources and redistribution of land had waned. "Freedom," Hunter elaborates, "meant the reestablishment
of lost family connections, the achievement of literacy, the exercise of political rights, and the security of a decent livelihood
without the sacrifice of human dignity or self-determination." (43) Framed by an ever-narrowing web of structural and
governmental support, freedom had its limits for blacks in "unskilled" and service labor. However, creating other means
of structural support was not inconceivable.

Black women resisted being reduced to an army of laborers as they took control of their leisure hours and used recreation
and personal gratification to serve their own economic needs. The seamy and seemingly-debaucherous culture of dance,
entertainment, and blues music that flourished in honky-tonks and other halls on Decatur Street aided in this empowerment.
However, true strength, the ultimate weapon of resistance a domestic worker could wield, was the power to quit her job
and still have a support system upon which to fall back. Workers actively constructed these structural nets through their
participation in church societies and mutual aid and benevolent associations. African American churches were most notably
involved in social reform movements like temperance; they raised funds for black educational institutions, and allotted
missionary funds. Moreover, they promoted leadership and skill development for their organizers. Mutual aid associations
(also known as secret societies and benevolent societies) served a similar function through different means. Paying in
small, regularly assessed fees, women pooled their resources and reserved them for emergencies. Moreover, suggests
Hunter, such infrastructure enabled domestics to weave together individuals and extended families. The existence of
such societies, grumbled one employer "makes [women] perfectly independent and relieves them from all fear of being
discharged, because when they are discharged they go right to some of these 'sisters" (73). This truth resonated with
whites during the Progressive Era and through the turn of the century.

The greatest and saddest evidence of black empowerment is seen in the fear and counteraction it elicited from white society.
Domestics', especially laundresses', growing social mobility belied widely-held (somewhat feudal) views of domesticity and
servitude-more importantly, of blackness. Laundresses, or washerwomen as they were often called, were a special depository
for this insecurity because laundry work, Hunter argues, was the optimal choice for a black woman who wanted to create
a life of her own. Most worked in their own homes and neighborhoods, which allowed them to "intermingle washing with
the fulfillment of other responsibilities and incorporate help from other family members." (57) Furthermore, the intimacy
of laundry work inspired a certain degree of unity; it encouraged them to work together in communal spaces within their
neighborhoods, fostering, she argues, "informal networks of reciprocity that sustained them through health and sickness,
love and heartaches, birth and death" (62) Other markers of black laundress's independence stared whites in the face.

In July of 1881, the Washing Society members of Atlanta, christened the "Washing Amazons", called a strike in order
gain control of prices and obtain higher fees at a uniform level for all workers. (It should be noted that there were 1-2%
white women who partook.) With constructive outreach, their ranks swelled from twenty to three thousand strikers and
sympathizers within three weeks. Many whites were in disbelief of their organizational success; some even promulgated
a rumor that an unnamed white man really headed the organization (!) Moreover, employing families found it difficult to
break their hold by altogether eliminating the demand for manual workers; there was just too much work for laundry
firms to break the strike. (Steam laundries would not even begin to rival the manual trade in Atlanta until the 1910s.) The
strike, Hunter argues, is suggestive of changes in domination patterns in the emergent New South: "White employers
certainly had the power to confine black women to domestic work, but not the unilateral power to determine how and under
what conditions that labor would be organized and performed" (97). Furthermore, Hunter proves in To 'Joy My Freedom,
these networks of support and displays of independence were enough to stir up white anxiety and counteraction.

White Southerners' assaults on the autonomy of black women assumed a sadist form as they called for the physical
subjugation of black, working-class women's bodies. As Hunter posits, the tuberculosis endemic that swept the country
became a "medium for 'framing' tensions in labor and race relations, with the rhetoric cloaked in scientific and medical
legitimacy" (187). Urban blacks were singled out as being more susceptible to TB than rural blacks because their urban
lifestyle and debaucherous cultural community was not under proper surveillance. Slavery had ceased to "quarantine"
the disease so it became a "postbellum" black illness-and a threatening one at that. Diagnosed through imprecise and
inconsistent methods, TB metamorphosed to a "Negro disease" that was part of the "Negro problem" (193). The real
problem, however, was mapped onto female intermediaries, domestics who transversed the color line into white homes
and, not coincidentally, were also the least docile and most difficult group of workers to subjugate. City ordinances were
introduced to control the domestic TB problem, but none passed; the popular and political discourse of blacks as conduits
of disease would be enough to spread fear in the workforce and reaffirm the believed superiority of whiteness. (Some also
felt that ordinances unfairly targeted laundresses because the city had a vested interest in putting independent workers
out of business and feeding the ambitions of industrialists committed to building commercial laundries.) Alongside the
eventual reestablishment of racial hierarchies, the Ku Klux Klan and World War I intensified their political repression;
vagrancy and "work or fight" laws broke down the will of black laborers; lynchings, police brutality, rape, inferior
education, and political disenfranchisement all constrained their independence as well. Many were now "Looking for a
Free State to Live in," as suggested by the last chapter title of Hunter's book.

Between 1914 and 1920 at least a half million black Southerners migrated to Northern industrial cities. However, the
social organizations and support systems they had crafted over the years in their daily activities as neighbors, fraternal
members, churchgoers, and wage workers, Hunter argues, proved indispensable as they put their lives back together
and mobilized their communities once again.

Hunter's contribution to black women's labor history is perhaps most laudable for its close examination of women's lives
and livelihood as it was shaped within and outside of the work environment. In her scholarship, women, upper-class and
working-class, are re-centered in the narrative of African American's, women's, political, and labor history. The site of
true progressivism, strength and, we must admit, vulnerability was the female worker .

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Sara F. Moller-Christensen on The Union League Movement in the Deep South by Michael Fitzgerald

The Union League, also known as the Loyal League, is a Republican organization founded during the Civil War as a
patriotic club supporting the Lincoln administration. On the Union League web-site, it says that the club was, 'Founded
in 1863 by a group of concerned citizens to help preserve the Union.'<http://www.unionleagueclub.org (About the Club,
Our Role in History)>. The organization spread to the South after the war ended, and gave great hope to the newly
freed slaves. Michael Fitzgerald discusses the political influence of the 'first Radical Republican organization in the
southern states' (p. 2) in his book, The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change
during Reconstruction 1867-1872.

After the Civil War, on January 31, 1865 Congress passed Amendment XIII. The law said that, ' Neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist
within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.' The slaves were thereby emancipated, but now a
new yet similar struggle for freedom began. With emancipation, former slaves had gained freedom, but not equality.
Besides what had been written and passed as law, there were also socially determined obstacles that excluded
freedmen from opportunities that would make them equal to freemen. Unlike freemen, freedmen did not have access
to public schools, to jobs as skilled laborers, and it was difficult for them to gain access to land in order to support
themselves.

Former slaves had to build their own institutions, through which they would be better able to protect themselves and their
newly given rights. Thousands of freedmen joined the League in the summer of 1867, and according to Fitzgerald 'League
agitation inspired agrarian radicalism among the labor force, and this is central to understanding the nature of the
movement.' (p. 176).

Just as we read in Jubilee, cities quickly became centers of conflict after Emancipation. With a rapidly increasing
population of freedmen, and joblessness, the former slaves in Mobile soon became targets for rampant accusations and
prejudices. Cheap labor is a key term in discussing these issues. Before Emancipation America's economy had been
based upon the labor of slaves. With the Emancipation, the American economy was going through unprecedented
turbulence, and a lot of effort went into submitting former slaves to new forms of slave-like servitude. Since vagrancy
was against the law, the freedmen were 'consigned to long servitude on the chain gang, thereby discouraging new
migration and securing cheap labor for road work.'

Former slaves were punished for the fact that they had been freed, and in some cases things got worse for freedmen
after Emancipation. An example of this is that even though slaves had been allowed inside, freedmen were banned
from riding street cars in Mobile after the war (p. 181). Freedmen did not accept this development. They initiated a
fight against this overt racism, and after the first sit-in, the companies instituted segregated 'Star-Cars' for blacks.
The freedmen rejected the segregated streetcars, demanding equal rights, which 'marked the beginning of a
campaign of civil disobedience that continued for years.' (p. 182).

This example of civil disobedience may have been effective, but it did not sit well with the League, which, under pressure
from the Republican Party, took power away from Turner and Harrington, two white lawyers who had led the League,
passing on the torch to John Keffer. He was put in charge of, and successfully achieved, a reconstruction of the League's
leadership, to the satisfaction of the Republican Party. But much more importantly, the new leadership took away from
the freedmen's engagement with the League. (p. 189)

Freedmen wanted to farm under their own supervision, but since redistribution of land had not occurred freedmen had to
buy access to land. Planters, however, were not willing to rent their land out to freedmen, and because of disorganization
freedmen were forced back into the fields on the planters' terms. Membership of the League became a 'means of resisting
reconstruction of servitude.' (p. 113).

In the summer of 1867 thousands of freedmen joined the League, with high hopes for redistribution of land and 'a desire
to preserve and extend their freedom'. The League never promised or encouraged hopes for redistribution of land, but
gained strong responses from the Black community through 'rhetoric of citizenship and equality' (p. 127). And despite the
fact that the League as an organization never plotted to appropriate land by force, many landowners joined the secret club,
either to 'prove their loyalty or to find out about what was going on.' (p. 119).

Plantations owners saw Leaguers as a great threat to their positions in society, and went to great lengths to deter people
from joining the organization. In one case, a planter 'seized a man's entire cotton crop for a single absence at a League
gathering.' (p. 210). In another example, an elderly organizer, who had claimed that 'men like myself are in no danger',
was 'brutally beaten on an isolated road and subsequently died.' (p. 214).

When the Klan emerged it became even more dangerous to be associated with the Loyal League. As clearly shown in the
following quote, excerpted from a current Ku Klux web-site, members of the Klan saw their acts of terror as nothing more
than fair punishment:
          The victims of the Klan, who were White as well as Black, tended to be people proven to be guilty
          of serious crimes such as barn burnings, theft, rape, or murder. Corrupt politicians, Carpetbaggers
          and Scalawags were also Ku Kluxed. Usually the Klan left cryptic messages to warn minor offenders,
          but if these warnings were ignored, they too could be Ku Kluxed, which meant anything from a flogging
          to execution. These were barbaric times, but the Klan sought to restore law and order, not to destroy it.
          There was, in fact, no law and the Klan only used force when the forces of the Radical Republicans
          gave it no other choice. <http://www.kkklan.com/briefhist.htm A Brief History of the Original Ku Klux
          Klan: 1865 - 1869, par. 15>
The League began to deteriorate after the emergence of the KKK, and Radical Republicans lost an important link to
the freedmen.

Fitzgerald continuously insists on the significance of this forgotten organization. As he writes, 'The League's uneventful
later career does not detract from the importance of its initial radical impetus. Despite the complexity of factional
maneuvers, the social impact of politicizing the freedmen was clear. Blacks flocked to the League in the spring of 1867
because they believed that it would act upon diverse grievances.' (p. 189).

As Fitzgerald mentions in the introduction, W.E.B. Du Bois only wrote two paragraphs about the League in his book
Black Reconstruction in America, and only to assert that the League was not the Black 'version of the Klan.' (p. 4).

Beside from Fitzgerald's publication, there does not seem to be much information about this subject available anywhere.
However, presenting plenty of evidence, he manages to persuade the reader that this was one of the most important
political movements in the South during Reconstruction.

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Sophia Krasnoff on Beyond the Martyrs by Bruce Nelson

Bruce C. Nelson's social history of the anarchist movement in Chicago, Beyond the Martyrs, springs from his critique
of the scholarly and biographical renderings of the drama of the Haymarket Riot of 1886. According to Nelson, these
studies are limited by the disproportionate amount of attention paid to the specifics of the May 4 riot and the ensuing
trial, conviction and execution of four movement leaders. In contrast, Nelson's analysis examines the development of a
specific working people's culture in Chicago as it emerged from a diverse population of European immigrants and 'native
-born' Anglos and Irish-men. Nelson shows the class consciousness that solidified as part of this culture during the last
three decades of the 19th century, to be essential to the growth and impact of the socialist and anarchist constituency in
Chicago. Nelson's depiction of anarchist cultural development relies on three important factors. 1) The cultural differences
between workers as they shaped modes of organization and communication, 2) the evolution and fragmentation of the
socialist/anarchist political platform, and 3) the presence of a shared movement culture centered on specific anarchist
institutions, strategies, and means of communication.

Beyond the Martyrs is above all an examination of the diversity of the working population in Chicago and of the way that
social and cultural institutions were particularized within different communities. Divisions between Chicago's 'working
classes' were drawn along lines of nationality, language, religion, skill level, and prior political knowledge and/or experience.
Chicago at the end of the 19th century was an immigrant's city, with the level of foreign-born residents reaching a peak
of 75 percent in 1884 (Nelson, 16). Germans made up the largest portion of these immigrants, followed by the Irish, the
British, and the Scandinavians. During the last two decades of the 1800s, Poles, Russians and Bohemians (Czech, Slavic
and Moravian) also immigrated to Chicago in increasing numbers. Working class neighborhoods developed in industrial
areas, were largely segregated by ethnicity and had their own schools, churches and meeting places. However, the
relations between these enclaves were often antagonistic and tense as "different immigrant communities were strained
by language differences, competing economic interests, and social and cultural conflict." (21)

Religious clashes and differing skill levels created the basis for many of these conflicts. The Irish and the Polish were
Catholics, while the English and native born overwhelmingly protestant; and the Germans, Bohemians and Scandinavians
comprised a third group of "free-thinkers and atheists." (22) Workers were divided only slightly differently along lines
of skill, with non-Irish English-speakers dominating white-collar and skilled jobs, the skilled-sector made up of mostly
Germans and Scandinavians, and Irish, Bohemians and Poles doing mostly 'un'-skilled labor. Thus within the same line
of work there could be three different ethnicities as well as three different pay-scales based on the religious or language
preferences of the employer. For example, the resentment arising from wage-gaps between German and native-born
carpenters and cigar makers, indicates that the experiences of alienation and discrimination in the work place were
ethnically specific. (22) In light of Nelson's analysis of the distinct labor histories of Chicago's immigrants, it seems that
the importance of identity based organizing can not be underestimated.

Such organizing came naturally to many German immigrants, some of whom had been active in the socialist, workers
and peoples movements of their home country. The roots of the anarchist movement can be seen in early German artisans
clubs such as the Arbeiter Verein and the International Working Man's Association (IWA) formed in the pre-civil war
era. These groups were bred out of frustration with the republican leaning and temperance based artisan and working
man's societies, such as the predominantly Anglo Chicago Mechanists Institute, in which the cultural and political histories
of immigrants were not considered.

During the 1860s and 70s the IWA was reshaped and renamed several times, and "beneath those changing labels was a
process of radicalization that produced a socialist movement." (26) In 1877 the transition of the Chicago labor movement
from artisan republicanism to a more revolutionary political platform was expressed in the creation of the Socialist Labor
Party (SLP), which would run several senatorial, mayoral, and municipal candidates over the next five years. Throughout
the 1880s socialist politicians attempted to push policies that would establish the eight hour day, abolish prison, labor and
conspiracy laws, repeal vagrancy acts, prohibit child labor, mandate regular factory inspections and support women's
suffrage. (57-60)

However, the elected socialists proved politically impotent as their motions were voted down or tabled by majority party
members, and the SLP was in ruin by 1882. (66) The disintegration of the socialist party resulted in a split between the
leaders of the radical labor movement into two groups. The traditional, political socialists were led by T.J. Morgan and
George Sloan two English men; and a more radical faction was led by the German born Paul Grottkau and August Spies.
The second group of men would head a movement that supported complete dissociation from the current electoral system,
the destruction of the ruling class, and a cooperative organization of production. (117) They were the first in the American
labor movement to call themselves anarchists.

German, Czech, and English presses and newspapers played an essential role in the development of the political culture
and shared class consciousness of the anarchists over the next five years. As the SLP foundered the Germans remained
in control of the oldest and most popular papers, like Der Verbote which was established in 1874, and the retention of
their ethnically specific readers was essential to maintaining the anarchist base of support. (69) However, in the year of
the Haymarket riot there were eight such anarchist newspapers written in three different languages that served as multi-
cultural broadcasting systems that allowed for the organization and education of individuals who lived in different
neighborhoods, worked at different jobs and were born in different countries. These papers announced weddings, births,
deaths, gave directions to labor rallies and protests, offered editorials, local news and ran serialized novels. Advertisements
and illustrations were conspicuously missing from anarchist newspapers which "did not entrap readership," but demanded
conscious subscription (123). These papers expressed the "feverishly combative character" of the movement, (120)
running such slogans as "from agitation comes organization, from organization comes revolution!" (123) However, these
publications functioned politically in more ways than by simply proclaiming radical ideologies. "Papers were weapons that
could be turned on both those within and outside the movement. They recruited, educated, politicized, and mobilized the
movement's membership; they served as bulletin boards, both announcing and reporting the movement's club life." (125)

In 1885 one anarchist picnic set just outside the city limits and advertised in The Alarm and other publications drew around
3,000 people. The huge attendance rate of the movement's picnics, parades, dances and social gatherings during this time
period, gives us an idea of the increasing influence of the anarchist press. But more over, the dynamic social lives of the
anarchists of the late 19th century points to the establishment of a distinctive culture that was relatively inclusive, and
that was beginning to become self-sustaining.

Picnics, parades and dances were large, exciting events that whole families would regularly attend. Singing-societies and
theatre companies were featured at festivals and meetings and drew from a long tradition of German communal and
revolutionary folk singing, and political and satirical plays. (130) Anarchists events served as both entertainment and
education, and speeches were often conducted in three different languages at the same festival. Women "regularly
appeared in both socialist and anarchist demonstrations…on wagons, in plays, and carrying banners at the head of
processions." (93) German children were often educated in anarchist 'Sunday schools' and a few even received anarchist
christenings conducted by an "old trusted comrade" in a saloon in front of friends.

The culture that was developing was distinctly non-religious, and was oriented around the Czech notion of free-thought
and German atheism. Nelson claims that "most anarchists expected it would be a godless millennium." (165) In the
absence of a strong church presence, the movement was largely organized around the shared experiences of working
immigrants in the United States. This distinct enculturation can be seen as early as 1879, when 400 rifle and bayonet
carrying members of anarchist brigades such as the Bohemian Sharpshooters, Irish Labor Guard and German Jaeger-
Verein marched through the streets of Chicago to protest a law that banned armed gatherings. These groups were, "the
logical response to the situation where Chicago's ruling class, through the use of the police, brutally suppressed workers
demands" (151). Thus Nelson suggests that multi-cultural anarchist militias exemplify the development of "invented
traditions," (151) within a revolutionary socialist culture specific to the shared immigrant experience.

The anarchist's disavowal of religion, government and protestant morality alienated them from both the more conservative
trade unionists, as well as from the Knights of Labor and the police force, whose large Irish bases set them firmly within
the bounds of the Catholic Church. Nelson insists that the anarchists, "sought to subsume ethno-cultural conflicts with
(or into) a class culture," and that by the time of the Haymarket Riot, "they had gotten no further toward that goal than
a movement culture" (152).

However, "the forces of order prepared for the worst," (186) as the bourgeois press anticipated "trouble" and "violence"
for the impending eight hour day demonstrations. Nelson implies that the "context of suspicion and fear" (186) that
surrounded the event can be explained by the perception of a true 'communist' threat that challenged the very moral and
political order of Chicago's English speakers, Anglos and elites. In light of the brutality of the deadly riot and the ensuing
legal repression I am left wondering about the potential sphere of influence of the anarchists. Was the successful defusing
of their movement calculated or conspiratorial? Were the anarchists perceived as a national threat? Or does their violent
demise simply indicate that the movement was unable or unready to breach the larger gaps between Anglo-and non-Anglo
experience in the United States, in order to form a truly united working class consciousness? Lastly, if "Chicago's socialists
considered themselves part of an international socialist movement," and the "native-born, the Irish, and the English-
speaking would have non of it," (239) I wonder how the increasing migration of freed black men and women to Chicago
would have affected the anarchists position. Nelson mentions black and Asian people only once to sight an ambivalent
attitude toward racism on behalf of the anarchists. Thus I wonder how his utopian vision of an anarchist class consciousness
based on common experiences of oppression, would have interacted with the presence of an extremely disenfranchised
population who had their own methods and histories of organizing and surviving.

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Sarah Crossley on Red November, Black November by Salvatore Salerno

The Industrial Workers of the World, often referred to as the IWW or simply the "Wobblies," have been the object of
much scholarly debate since its inception at around the turn of the twentieth century. Yet despite the scholarly attention
devoted to this revolutionary, rough and tumble, rank-and-file industrial union, historians have yet to get its pre-World
War I history right according to IWW historian Salvatore Salerno in his work Red November, Black November: Culture
and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (1989). In fact, Salerno argues, they've got it all wrong. Claiming
that previous IWW historians have streamlined their focus on the institutional structures and indigenous influences of
the IWW, Salerno posits that an immigrant rank-and-file intellectual movement greatly influenced the IWW from its
inception as a "countermovement" in opposition to prior attempts at class solidarity, rather than a labor union. Salerno
posits: "Immigrants activists did play an instrumental role in the birth and development of the movement, and native
activists self-consciously drew on the experiences of European syndicalists in developing the principles and clarifying
the goals of the form of industrial unionism that the I.W.W. came to represent" (4) Thus, the IWW was not built solely
on the precedent of indigenous political thought or activism, but took as a model the French political ideology of
syndicalism, which holds that labor unions are the key to a working-class revolution.

Because Salerno's approach to understanding the IWW's elusive beginnings follows a route altogether different from
existing scholarship, he chooses to devote an inordinate amount of time to the historiography of the IWW. While scholars
of the IWW might view this recap as redundant, for those less familiar with the past scholarship, what amounts to
approximately half the book dedicated to historiography quickly brings the reader up to date on past scholarship and
offers a comprehensive trajectory with which to follow Salerno's argument. Yes, historians have written about the IWW,
but not, Salerno claims, in any way that radically departs from one of two schools of thought. The first being that of
historian Paul Brissenden who posited that the IWW did not emerge out of a bad economic downturn but rather came
about as part of "labor's struggles against capital." Such a theory is flawed, Salerno suggests, because it fails to consider
how immigrants' revolutionary syndicalism impacted the development of the IWW. The second, developed by historian
Melvyn Dubofsky insists that it is "the responses of miners to changes in economic conditions in the western United
States [that accounts] for the I.W.W.'s appearance on the labor scene." Problematically for Dubofsky, he elaborated
on Brissenden's theories regarding IWW development, adding to it historian Louis Levine's "myth of frontier origins"
that gave credit to native miners for the radical trajectory of the IWW (1-3).

Drawing on these two historians, Salerno begins to pinpoint ways in which subsequent scholars took for granted the
seminal wisdom of Brissenden and Dubofsky, neglecting wholesale the development of a distinct IWW culture, focusing
instead on the apparent instability of the organizational structure that seemed ready to topple even when seemingly at
its most stable. To insist on IWW instability based on organizational structure is to miss the point of this revolutionary
venture altogether, Salerno argues. Using the same statistical data as evidence used by previous historians, Salerno
suggests that lack of organizational ability and high turnover rates should not be understood in terms of failure for the
IWW, but rather that the evidence must be interpreted in a different fashion. Considering the fact that prior to World
War I, official organization records indicate that .02 percent of the IWW was made up of employed unionists and a mere
.4 percent of those were from trade unions, as well as repeated instances of non-dues paying members actively
participating in the union, one must consider the fact that the IWW was formed in opposition to existing political structures.
Therefore the data "demonstrate[s] that the I.W.W.'s membership was larger and less formal, its philosophy of industrial
solidarity broader and more complex than the concern with formal organizational criteria or available statistical information
indicates" (26). In short, the vast majority of IWW members-dues paying or not-existed off the official radar as they were
transients, migrant workers, or unemployed unskilled workers who left behind little or no evidence of their involvement
with the IWW.

Herein lies the problem for materialist scholars. Salerno's argument is primarily a work of intellectual history based on
an idea that there existed, prior to World War I a largely rank-and-file immigrant intellectual movement within the IWW
that left scant evidence of its existence except through primarily anonymous political writings and drawings. A rank-and-file
culture that remains largely anonymous is difficult to trace at best, yet the incorporation of several works of art produced
by the IWW rank-and-file illustrates the conclusions Salerno has drawn, although he often fails to contextualize the images
within the text.

Concerning himself with the "myth of frontier origins," Salerno continues on his historiographical voyage in order to
disprove Levine's pervasive theory that since "European Syndicalism and industrial unionism…both…appeared
simultaneously in America and Europe…the idea that French syndicalism directly influenced the I.W.W… was…an
exaggerated claim" (47). Instead, Salerno argues that an amalgam of influences contributed to the development of the
IWW, not the least of which was anarchism and European syndicalism. Salerno suggests that while there is insufficient
evidence to suggest that radicals from countries where syndicalism was becoming popular had contact with the IWW,
there was "as much a transoceanic phenomenon as it was an intra-European phenomenon. Point of departure did not
always guarantee point of origin"(48). Further, Salerno suggests that the dissemination of syndicalist ideas did not come
solely from immigrant syndicalists themselves, but from immigrant anarchists as well as leftist Socialist Party members
who developed their own brand of syndicalism. Thus, syndicalist influence came from various points and political affiliations
and infiltrated the IWW from its beginnings. It was therefore a meeting of native and immigrant groups combined that
informed the politics of the IWW, not simply indigenous influences alone.

As previously mentioned, Salerno posits that anarchists had a substantial role in the dissemination of syndicalist beliefs
in the IWW. Turning from the "myth of the indigenous frontier," Salerno continues to argue the significance of the role
of anarchists in the propagation of syndicalist ideas within the IWW. Brissenden, Salerno argues, failed to perceive the
magnitude of the impact anarchists had at the founding of the IWW, which has in turn contributed to a dearth of knowledge
on the impact of syndicalist ideas within the organization. Brissenden's work then led subsequent scholars to make
"assumptions regarding the influences of anarchism on the founding of the I.W.W. [that] not only ignored the impact of
anarchists on the revolutionary industrial union movement, but also distorted the way in which syndicalist ideas entered
the American labor movement" (72-73). Yet what about the relationship between the IWW and the syndicalist movement?

Salerno argues that the IWW had direct contact with and borrowed directly from the French syndicalist movement the
C.G.T. (Confederation Generale du Travail or the General Confederation of Labor). While arguing that there was
undoubtedly a direct influence of syndicalism on the formation of the IWW, it was not an ideology adopted wholesale. It
is here that Salerno gets to the heart of his argument:
          While the I.W.W. can not be considered an alien import but rather one that emerged from economic
          conditions and a particular cultural and political milieu indigenous to the United states [sic], the founders
          did draw on the experience of French syndicalists in clarifying their objectives and strategy, as they did
          other forms of labor radicalism that supported their developing conception of industrial unionism.
In short, the IWW was never intended to be a rigidly syndicalist movement just as it was never a wholly indigenous
movement. Instead, the IWW developed as a combination of cultural and political identities that melded together in an
effort to create a revolutionary industrial union that would speak to the needs of an American labor movement.

For Salerno, the IWW is really about a revolutionary working-class culture. Drawing on pamphlets and songs from pre-
World War I IWW history, Salerno documents correspondence with contemporary syndicalists and intersections of
principles of belief as well as divergent points. For instance, the intellectual aspects of French syndicalism found its way
into the dogma of the IWW, but organizationally, the syndicalists differed radically from Wobbly politics. European
syndicalists did not have the issue of dual unionism to confront and consequently organized together while the IWW
refused any association whatsoever with the American Federation of Labor. Thus, Salerno has come full circle as one
of his initial arguments was that the IWW was established as a cultural/intellectual movement rather than as an
organizational institution as suggested by previous IWW historians.

In the final chapter, Salerno examines the intellectual milieu of the IWW. Here Salerno argues that it was not official
policy that set the standard for the IWW. Rather, "I.W.W. graphics, poems, and songs indicate the incorporation of
anarcho-syndicalist tactics not as official policy but as expressions of the iconoclastic culture and militancy of the rank-
and-file Wobbly" (122). Such expressions included issues of industrial solidarity, anti-capitalism militancy, and calls for
direct action. While the majority of IWW sympathizers and members existed under the radar of official IWW organization,
they resurfaced in the cultural domain, speaking with revolutionary fervor through songs and drawings. According to
Salerno, "the I.W.W.'s art and cultural forms…challenged the definition of American life imposed and diffused by
government and business elites, while actively shaping a dynamic and revolutionary conception of workers' culture" (151).
Such a culture was built on class-consciousness and worker solidarity.

While Salerno's argument for a Wobbly culture is compelling, it is only useful to a point. As stated earlier this is a history
of an idea that is not always fully articulated. Essentially, Salerno directed his audience toward other IWW scholars. In
this sense, only the latter half of the book is particularly pertinent as it is to be assumed that if one studies the IWW, they
know the historiography. Often the evidence is thin or under analyzed with frequent use of block quotes and little
substantiation. However, it is necessary to consider the point that as most rank-and-filers remained under the radar here,
and understanding Wobbly culture is likely to be an exercise in speculation. Had Salerno, taken less time reviewing the
historiography and more time contextualizing the sources available its promise would have been greater. As it stands,
however, Red November, Black November does prove to be a wonderful introduction into the historiography of the
IWW that would allow students and scholars not in the know a chance to grapple with the idiosyncrasies of the history of
the IWW.

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Rachel Yanda on Harvest Wobblies by Greg Hall

In 1915, delegates of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) met in Kansas City to establish a union to address the
needs of the growing number of migrant agricultural workers. The Agricultural Workers' Organization (AWO also referred
to here as the AWIU) was founded in response to the large number of workers who traveled around the West and the
Great Plains laboring seasonally on farms. The AWO soon became a powerful branch of the IWW and "as of 1924 the
AWIU provided half of the IWW's treasury and perhaps as much as one-third of overall Wobbly membership" (208) In
order to appeal to agricultural workers the AWO introduced new styles of organizing and created an identity that
represented the workers they wished to unionize. In his book Harvest Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World
and Agricultural Laborers in the American West 1905-1930, Greg Hall discusses the role of these workers in shaping not
only the IWW, but the face of agricultural labor. Referring to members of the AWO as "Harvest Wobblies," Hall explains
the cultural characteristics of seasonal migrant workers and the importance this identity played in both their achievements
and their failures.

From 1915 to 1930, the AWO had a strong presence in the agricultural industry and through their work, conditions and
wages for farm workers improved. Their success however was short lived. Due to severe repression from the government
and the inability of delegates to organize new members, the AWO became nearly non-existent after 1930. Despite this,
the AWO is viewed by many as one of the most successful aspects of the IWW, and the legacy of the organization has
survived.

When the IWW was founded in 1905, the use of seasonal farm work was growing rapidly throughout the Great Plains and
the West Coast. American farms were experiencing an era of prosperity; by 1919 agricultural commodities were valued
at $24 billion dollars. This time was dubbed the "Golden Age" of farming. In order to cope with the demand for products,
farms of all sizes greatly augmented the number of temporary laborers to assist with the harvest. With the expansion of
the railroads the workforce became increasingly migratory. These workers, who were predominantly unmarried white
men in their twenties and thirties, became members of a growing community of harvesters.

The workers came from diverse backgrounds and had different goals. A study conducted by an economics scholar Donald
Lescohier, divided the laborers into three sections based on broad categories. One-third of the workers were farmers by
trade who had either lost their farms or were working to purchase a farm. The second third were contract workers who
did not possess a specific trade, but roamed around doing work in farm, mining, logging and other industries. The final
third were skilled or semi-skilled workers from urban areas. These workers often had a higher-level of education than
the other groups of laborers. Despite such varying backgrounds, Lescohier determined a shared culture existed between
migrant workers based on "their age, gender, race regional origin, trades motive, mobility, employment experiences, wages,
working conditions, and life on the road" (20). The IWW would use this cultural bond to create solidarity among workers
when they began to organize.

Agricultural workers faced many hardships in acquiring a job, and with workplace conditions. Transportation to a worksite
was expensive and potentially dangerous. There was a constant threat of robbery and it was considered unwise to carry
anything of value while traveling. Migrant workers established "jungles" where they could stay in route to a jobsite.
These jungles often provided a safe haven from the hazards of the road where migrants could find a company of other
workers. The availability of work was also unpredictable, and depended on the success of the crop. Due to the large number
of workers there was a constant excess labor supply. When employers posted an advertisement for 1500 workers, 3000
would answer. A worker could travel long distances to a job site, and be rejected once they arrived.

In addition to being inconsistent and competitive, harvest work was difficult. Living conditions, if provided, were unsanitary.
One hundred workers would often share one bathroom and were given only a pile of hay and ratty blankets for sleeping
arrangements. Harvesters often had to pay rent to be able to live on the boss's property. Though they worked for up to
sixteen hours a day, the wages were so low, that for many, "a hundred dollars, the clothes on one's back and a pouch of
tobacco were all a worker could claim at the end of the harvest"(25). Workers began to demand better conditions. In
Wheatland, California, a strike which ended in violence, made clear the need for agricultural workers to organize. While
the IWW had been organizing agricultural workers since the union was founded, it was not until after the Wheatland strike
that they emerged as the most prominent representative of harvesters.

In 1910, the IWW boasted strong membership in the northeast. Their membership was made up largely of factory workers
and miners. In the West, the IWW saw the need to incorporate seasonal and migrant workers. Their opinion of these
workers was dramatically different than those of the American Federation of Labor who "tended to view migrant farm
workers as a social problem rather than as true members of the working class in need of union representation" (57). For
the Wobblies, "these seasonal workers, but especially migrant laborers, represented a revolutionary class of workers who
lived and worked at the margins of the labor movement despite their indispensable role in the West's major industries" (55).
It was this distinction that drew many workers to the IWW.

The absorption of a new industry required the IWW to transform many of their organizing tactics. Originally, the IWW
was not accustomed to dealing with migrant and seasonal workers. The famous free-speech fights launched by the IWW
were not as effective in organizing agricultural workers as they usually took place in towns and cities. The IWW decided
"organizing on the jobsite was more useful than organizing…through the propaganda efforts of the free-speech fights" (54).
However despite a need to change tactics by 1914, migrant workers had become a primary focus of the IWW. Organizers
saw, in the harvesters, the potential of creating a truly revolutionary union. It was in this climate that the Agricultural Workers
Organization was founded.

Delegates from the IWW met in 1915 to lay the groundwork for the new union. To adapt to the unique nature of migratory
harvest workers the AWO initiated a job delegate system in which organizers would travel, acting as "floating locals."
Delegates moved from town to town working and signing up new members. The initiation fee was $2 and monthly dues
were 50 cents; this was significantly less than other IWW dues. If a Wobbly changed jobs on the off-season, they did not
have to pay a new initiation fee. The AWO urged members to charge $3 a day for their labor, and not to work more than
ten hours.

The tactics used by Harvest Wobblies varied from site to site, but strikes were common. Sabotage was also used to
threaten employers. To pressure the boss workers would "withdraw efficiency" to destroy the shipment of a crop.
Members of the AWO soon developed a reputation as troublemakers. The use of property damage was a fiercely debated
subject between Harvest Wobblies. For some it was the most efficient form of bargaining, others saw it as a useless tactic
that would only draw negative attention to their efforts. The rumors of sabotage were much more widespread than actual
acts of destruction, but this reputation plagued the AWO for years to come.

For the first season, the AWO sent out hundreds of Wobblies to work the harvest, and began to recruit members. The
union had conducted extensive research to familiarize themselves with the normal conditions of the area where they
planned to organize. They were very successful in organizing the Wheat Belt of the country, and within months had signed
up 2,000-3,000 members. The Great Plains would come to be the stronghold of the AWO. And it was in these areas that
the core culture was formed.

As the AWO grew, a community of workers was created. The union helped development social nets to provide safety
while traveling. Harvest Wobblies soon became a prevalent force on the trains. They developed relationships with
conductors and "ultimately, the little red union card became a ticket on area rail systems" (99). When AWO members
encountered non-union workers on the train, they were often given two options: they could become a Harvest Wobbly, or
be thrown off the car. This type of solidarity with other members created a strong sense of camaraderie and loyalty
among the Wobblies.

Another important element of Wobbly culture was the songs and entertainment that they created. Harvest Wobblies wrote
many songs that would later become anthems for the labor movement. Focusing on themes such as migrant lifestyle and
contempt for the boss helped unite workers. Workers formed bonds with each other based on a shared lifestyle that
"embodied the virtues of man, labor, work solidarity, masculinity, rebellion, tenacity, independence, mobility, camaraderie,
song and humor" (109).

The AWO had immediate success organizing, especially in the Wheat Belt. In 1916 alone nearly 20,000 harvesters became
members of the AWO. In some states they had such a strong reputation that farmers would bargain with just the threat of a
strike. By 1917, the Harvest Wobblies were receiving enough money in dues to be able to set up a seven room headquarters
in Minnesota. They established relationships with the Toilers of the World, an inclusive union for men and women canning
workers, and also with the Working Class Union, an organization of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Over these years
the AWO was creating a truly revolutionary movement. Their success, however, made them vulnerable to severe repression;
during the years of WWI the Wobblies were the recipients of intense persecution.

While the Wobblies had always been met by opposition, the War gave their enemies an excuse to target the organization.
The Wobblies never took an official stand on the War; they did not want anything to impede real labor issues. This did not
stop their adversaries from labeling the organization anti-patriotic and a threat to the country. Hostility came from farmers,
"patriotic extremists" (123) and the government. The assaults were widespread and employed incredibly dishonest
maneuvers. Newspapers made ties between the Wobblies and the Germans. The Department of War issued a warning in
Washington that Wobblies would try to destroy their food supply. Homeguard units were created to protect towns from the
"Wobbly threat." In an attempt to link the IWW with the Bolsheviks, an organizer was kidnapped and placed in a Russian
part of Las Angeles. Legislation like the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1918, and the passage of criminal syndicalism laws
were destructive to the IWW. Hundreds of members were arrested; and time which would have been spent on organizing
was taken up in an effort to protect those in jail. As well, the government was able to find a great amount of information
about the Wobblies by conducting raids of their locals. Anti-Wobbly forces successfully used the war to persecute and
undermine the organization. This and other factors led to a decline in membership and activity after 1919.

Another problem the AWO faced was their inability to recruit a diverse membership; the AWO remained a predominantly
white, male organization. From the beginning, the AWO had a hard time appealing to non-white workers. Many Asian and
Hispanic workers had formed their own associations and were hesitant to join in solidarity with the Harvest Wobblies.
There was a stigma surrounding Wobblies that was unattractive to many workers. Their hoboesque lifestyle was both a
blessing and a curse when it came to organizing. Throughout the War years the Harvest Wobblies developed such a
negative reputation that many workers did not wish to associate with them. While the wandering worker image initially
attracted harvesters, as the demographics of the industry changed many workers could not identify with the AWO.

Despite the challenges faced by the Harvest Wobblies, they continued to organize. Three individual branches of the AWO
were established to ensure direct representation in certain areas. This decision gave "job delegates the opportunity to
work on organizing strategies that would be more useful for their own region's distinctive needs and stimulate greater
participation of the membership" (168). This initiative gave strength to the struggling organization and played a part in
its survival through the remainder of WWI.

After the war, the AWO re-emerged as a powerful organization. It was during this time that the AWO created an ideology
that reenergized the movement. The organization separated their beliefs from communist principles. AWO intellectuals
"argued non-violence, workplace democracy, and individual liberty would work in the American context, but Marxist-
Leninist theories…had little hope of attracting workers in the United States" (178). In order to spread their message, the
AWO produced mass quantities of leaflets. These leaflets were translated into over twenty languages. Their purpose was
to unite workers around common causes and discuss important goals of the AWO. The organization also began to work
on a campaign to develop educational programs for their members. Organizers distributed educational materials in the
fields, and Harvest Wobblies were often given scholarships to attend The Work People's College (a school in Duluth,
Minnesota that educated students about capitalism and its negative effects on wage workers). These efforts were largely
successful in creating a strong rank-and-file membership.

The AWO continued to organize throughout the 1920's. The harvest seasons of 1921, 1922 and 1923 drew over 40,000
new members. These accomplishments, however, were shadowed by membership inconsistency. Workers were often
attracted by the immediate gains of becoming a Wobbly and would cease to participate when their demands were met.
After 1925, the AWO was unable to continue organizing on a large scale. The sharp decline was evidence of the AWO's
inability to organize a diverse group of workers. As more and more Hispanics and families began to work in the industry,
the culture of the AWO became less relevant. While the IWW had an inclusive agenda, in the case of the AWO it was
much more theory than practice. The conscious community of workers, which had been one of the most successful aspects
of the AWO, began to unravel. With the introduction of cheap cars, the train culture of the Harvest Wobblies was destroyed.
In 1929, only 639 workers were initiated into the AWO.

While Harvest Wobblies continued to organize into the 1930s, they were never as successful as they had been in earlier
years. The final cause of their downfall was the combination of forceful repression, new technology and their failure to
adapt to the changing workforce. Their legacy however has played a large role in many movements throughout the 20th
century and into the 21st. Workers' unions have often tried to emulate the tactics used by the AWO. Harvest Wobblies
built an organization of truly active members who had agency within their union. The creation of the job delegate system
and the extensive community of workers (albeit an exclusive one) are examples of true grassroots organizing. Their
tactics set a revolutionary ideal for the building of a true working people's movement.

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Annie Weinberg on Buried Unsung by Zeese Papanikolas

"Under the allegory of success there was a darker story, and somehow it had to do with those who failed, with those
who left no issue and no name, whose lives were holes in the webs of history."- Zeese Papanikolas

In his introductory paean to Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, western writer Wallace
Stegner calls the story "an Iliad from the loser's side." The phrase is a poignant and succinct summation of Zeese
Papanikolas's book, at once a cultural history of Greek immigrant coal miners in the American West, a biography of a
martyred union organizer, and a personal meditation on the nature of history itself. In its broad scope, its themes of honor,
redemption and struggle, and its elegiac lyricism, the book calls to mind the epic Greek poems from which the author took
his cue. Papanikolas describes late nights sifting through mislabeled archives and tattered photographs with the same
meticulous, loving detail he uses to describe union negotiations, coal extraction, and minefield shootouts. We the readers
experience the frustrations and joys of the historian as much as we come to understand the circumstances and meaning
of Louis Tikas's life and death. As such, a dual narrative unfolds, of the strike and the study. From the fragments of yellow
photographs and the half-remembered anecdotes of old men, the author attempts to recreate the events and personalities
of the 1914 strike against Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. In doing so, he is piecing together his own identity as a third
generation Greek-American- in essence, recreating himself.

At first glance, Louis Tikas may seem an unlikely candidate for a detailed biography. The miner and union organizer was
killed by Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt on April 20, 1914. He was twenty eight years old. He left no survivors, wife or children.
He was not the most famed or important organizer in the strike, nor was he the only one murdered that day. Few photographs
of him exist- one pulling barbed wire out of a town well, one standing next to fellow organizer John Lawson, one laid out,
dead, in the company store they'd turned into a makeshift morgue after the massacre. Most of the men he worked with
and knew have since died. He is barely mentioned in the other major histories of the time, George McGovern's The Great
Coalfield War and Barron Beshoar's Out of the Depths. Papanikolas's chosen subject, like a minor Greek king or warrior
mentioned in passing, could have been merely a sidenote in the Coal War history. However, it is perhaps his very
namelessness that the author found so compelling. " Let him stand for a whole generation of immigrant workers," he
argues, " who found themselves, in the years before the First World War, caught between the realities of industrial
America and their aspirations for a better life." (7)

Tikas was born in Retimo, Crete, 1886. In March of 1906, he landed in New York City, and by September, he had traveled
to Colorado. Little is known of his life in those first few years there, but by 1911, a fellow Cretan had left him the small
coffeeshop that would become the social hub of Denver's Greek life. Simple coffeeshops such as these served as gathering
places and support networks for the many immigrants who flooded the American Southwest in the first decade of the 20th
century. In 1897, there had been fewer than fifteen thousand Greeks throughout the whole U.S.A. However, with the
Greco-Turkish wars raging on their native lands, and the crash of the currant in 1898, young Greek men began immigrating
to the United States in record numbers. Between 1900 and 1910 alone it is estimated that over 170,000 Greeks moved to
the United States, from a nation with roughly 2.5 million people in total. Mining corporations like the Utah Copper Company
and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company were eager to hire these " greenhorns", because they were seen as more easily
exploited and less likely to organize than their nativeborn counterparts. (44) Like the Slavs, Italians, and Japanese, Greek
workers were often brought in as scabs and strikebreakers without clear knowledge of the conflict they were entering.
Papanikolas devotes much of the book to the uniquely Greco-American communities that arose out of this sense of cultural
displacement and volatile transition, as dreams of Old World Byzantine glory mingled with the harsh industrial realities of
laboring life.

Much of the exploitation of Greek laborers was facilitated by one of their own, an entrepreneurial padrone from Sparta
named Leonidas Skliris, who later came to be known as the Czar of Labor. Padrones such as Skliris were agents hired by
companies to gather cheap workers and scabs; these workers paid the padrone to find them jobs, gave them money for
transportation, and were often sent westward, penniless, to jobs that didn't exist. With his damning characterization of
Skliris as a conniving, ruthlessly ambitious traitor, Papanikolas provides the first of three great antagonists in the book,
later to be followed by John D. Rockefeller and Karl Linderfelt. Prompted in part by a desire to remove Skliris from power
as labor contractor for all the big Western conglomerates, the Cretan members of Bingham, Utah chapter of the Western
Federation of Miners struck in September of 1912. " When the Greeks at Bingham, Utah, rose up against Leon Skliris…
they were rising up against a whole ethos." (46) It was perhaps this collective action that paved the way for the later, larger
strike in Colorado. It was also in this year, 1912, that Tikas left his coffeeshop, with its card games and ouza and cigarette
smoke, and became a worker in the Frederick mines.

The next section of the book traces Tikas's development as an organizer, first in the Frederick strike on the Northern
fields, when he led the walkout of sixty three Greek men who refused to scab, incurring the wrath of the infamous Baldwin-
Felts Detective Agency. It was around this time that Tikas began working for the UMWA, as they gathered support for
direct action and infiltrated workers with their " active/passive" organizer teams. He traveled to Pike View in the Southern
fields, and found his fellow countrymen furious at the dropping prices, recalibrated weight systems, and bullying from
company guards. Papanikolas details the various wrongs perpetrated by Colorado Fuel and Iron against its workers
during this time- grueling, hazardous conditions and twelve hour days, an explosion at the Dawson site that killed over
300 men, the slave-like quarters and company scrip that belied glossy coal company magazines that were supposed to
epitomize Rockefeller's capitalist ideal of cheerful prosperity.

The strike officially began September 23, 1913. With seasoned Pennsylvania coal miner John Lawson as their guide, led
by fiery 83-year-old legend and activist Mother Jones, the miners framed their demands- an eight hour day, recognition
of the union, pay for dead work, ten percent advantage in the tonnage weight of wages, enforcement of the mining laws
and the abolition of the guard system. A month later, the Ludlow colony of striker was set up and the strikers, Slavs,
Poles, Russians, Bulgarians, Blacks, Italians and Greeks moved in en masse. Governor Ammons summoned the state
militia soon after, lead by General Chase and Leuitenant Linderfelt, fresh from imperialism's wars in the Philippines and
Mexico. Therein begins a meticulous account of the strike's various bloody incursions, conflicts and negotiations.

Tikas rose to prominence within the camp at Ludlow because of his proficiency in English and his inherent ability to calm
agitated strikers when company guards or militiamen strategically incited violence among them. He was eventually
arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown in a Trinidad, Colorado jail, along with Croat activist Mike Livoda, District
15 leader Ed Doyle, and Bob Uhlich. Internal jealousies within the resistance caused both an American organizer, Willy
Diamond, and a young Greek upstart, Pete Katsalis, to vye for Louis Tikas's union job. We see blurry photos of Tikas
standing next to Mother Jones at a Denver, Colorado protest. We see him distributing presents at Christmas. These
images are scattered, patched together snapshots from which Papanikolas and the reader must infer a larger whole.

The author reconstructs with great specificity the escalating tensions between militiamen, scabs, and strikers; though
many history books portray that fateful morning of April 20th, 1914, the day after Easter, as they day it all began,
shootouts and violence had in fact been exchanged for the past seventh months. Still, no party was prepared for the
bloodiness that ensued- militiamen set the encampment of over 1200 people ablaze. Two women and eleven children
burned to death, trapped in an underground cellar, and five miners were shot. While the precise circumstances of his
death will never be established, most agree the Leiutenant Linterfelt shot and killed Tikas during the melee, as he ran
back towards the fire. While the nation was distracted by Woodrow Wilson's fighting in Mexico, the killings outraged
many, and federal troops were brought in to restore order. In December, the union called off the strike, and the Greek
immigrants were once again left wandering the towns and outposts of the Southwest.

Papanikolas has chosen an obscure and undocumented character in history, and this is at once the book's greatest power
and weakness. His indisputably painstaking research is nevertheless filled with speculation and hypothesizing. Most of
the incidents recorded here draw primarily from the government documents, union records, and the oral histories of the
octogenarian miners whose recollections are sporadic and unreliable, if engaging and colorful. Due to the dearth of
documentation and writings from Tikas and his life, the reader learns little about the underlying sociological and political
ideals held by our protagonist. We are told he advocated pacifist resolutions whenever possible, and associated with
socialists at the camp, yet the ideals of Tikas and the Greek community he represented are presented as wholly
apolitical. While he begins to contextualize the strike in light of other world events, as he does for example with his
portrayal of John D. Rockefeller, a sad, aging, confused capitalist, shut away with his " acquitted conscience" ( 244) a
clearer discussion of ideology might have significantly enhanced his themes.

Papanikolas writes of his research: "It was Vietnam then. The country was collapsing in on itself. I talked of an obscure
Greek labor organizer killed sixty years before and a thousand miles away. My friend accused me of being interested
only in dead radicals. Maybe I was….Looked at from some star, or library, who knew if there was some order, some
pattern to these lurches and troughs and bloodlettings we called America? For us who lived it there was only the slap of
our own experience. Each new batch of immigrants wiped the slate clean. There was no American past; there was only
the moment of our own discovery." ( 56)

Papanikolas's account is a poetic and moving story of a community in flux, of men caught between the Old Greek world
of their childhood and the industrial brutality of the 20th century U.S. frontier. In the end, his book seeks a lyrical
reconciliation of cultural continuity and individuality-the search for this quiet, brave man becomes a search for the truest
parts of his identity, so that he too will not be relegated to nostalgia, " a last little buzz in the circuit of cause and effect".
In imagining and parsing together stories of the Ludlow Massacre, he is trying to fill in the holes in the web of history
that lie under the American allegory of success; he is trying to write it, before the old men die and the memory fades, so
their lost battles, for survival and for justice, will not pass quietly into the ephemera of the forgotten.

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Sonia Varma Arora on Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920, by Ronald Takaki

In 1835, William Hooper arrived in Hawaii, leased nine hundred and eighty acres of rich soil from King Kamehameha III,
and started a sugar plantation. Prosperity was inevitable: the climate was warm, water was abundant, and a sufficient
amount of "coolie" labor was readily available. As men with economic and moral motives, Hooper and other haole (white,
foreigner, outsider) entrepreneurs who followed in his footsteps hoped their mission into the Pacific would serve two purposes:
it would emancipate natives from the existing, "primitive" chief labor system and allow for the progress of industry-their idea
of national prosperity. In the end, argues Ronald Takaki in his book Pau Hana: Life and Labor in Hawaii, planters like Hooper
forever transformed both the land and native society in the islands. There was no turning back; as the editor of the Hawaiian
Gazette declared, "It is apparent that Sugar is destined most emphatically to be 'King.'" (17) And it was.

Throughout the 19th century, Hawaii's mountains of cane attracted nearly 300,000 immigrant laborers from all over the world.
However, if sugar was King, as the newspaper professed, haoles comfortably occupied the throne and easily held a monopoly
over the industry. Between 1848, the year of the Great Mahele (land division), and 1890, white foreigners acquired three fourths
of the islands' privately-allotted acres. Their political power even directly facilitated the U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1898.
Workers, however, skillfully resisted their employers' reign. As Takaki argues, without workers and their powerful displays of
solidarity and pride, the great progress and cultural diversity of modern Hawaii never would have been possible. It is to their
experience between the five A.M. cry of the plantation whistle, and once pau hana-finished working-that we now turn.

Plantation life was not for the faint of heart, and soon after they shipped out their first load of sugar to the American west,
planters were in desperate for a strong but docile labor force to fulfill their new production needs. Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
Portuguese, German, Norwegian, Puerto Rican, Russian and Filipino men, women, and children answered their call. The rumor
mill in their respective countries ensured them that Hawaii would be the land of eternal summer, a "paradise" where "clothing
grew on trees" and where "gold dollars were blossoming on every bush." (48) They courageously packed into disease-ridden
boats for three to six months, signed three- to five-year contracts (contracts that they could not even read), were given a bango,
a piece of metal with a four digit number-their new Hawaiian name,-and began their new lives. By 1883, immigrants made up a
startling 74.8 percent of the total population. However, whether they were a student, laborer, or Buddhist monk, or whether they
fled from turmoil, imperialist expansion, war, political and social chaos, or famine and flood, their fate was the same: they would
work. And despite everything, from their bare hands and backbreaking sweat, the Hawaiian sugar industry experienced meteoric
success.

Maintaining this level of productivity was now essential. There was no room for failure. As Takaki argues, planters found many
systems, schemes, and laws which would allow them to monitor their increasing army and extract labor. They paid workers in
company script, called for the enforcement of vagrancy laws, and systematically developed an ethnically diverse plantation working
class in order to create divisions among populations and therefore reinforce management control. Mainly, planters used Filipinos,
Chinese, and Koreans to keep their large Japanese labor force in check. With this core methodology, they achieved two great
feats: first, they created both a wage-earning labor force and a consumer class which was, in turn, dependent on the new plantation-
owned market-the company had to be successful in order for the local economy to be successful; second, they opened the way for
a corporate dominated sugar economy and a paternalistic racial and class hierarchy in the islands which, they hoped, would weaken
labor's power. Even so, planters could not buy loyalty. As Hooper griped in his diary, coolies wear an "obedient mask" and "do
but little when my back is turned." The fields were still contested terrain.

Frustrated with their work and the physical punishments they received at the hands of lunas (gang supervisors), disgruntled workers
loudly expressed their grievances. Violence and arson abounded in the twelve foot high fields of cane. In many cases, workers
used such action to show solidarity and ganged up against lunas if one member of their group was mistreated. Planters were
exasperated by this type of recalcitrance, but were utterly maddened by laborers' intentionally lazy and inefficient work habits.
As a writer for the Pacific Commercial Advertiser observed in 1880, plantation workers traveled to the cane fields like "snails"
but returned to their camps like "racehorses."(130) Within and outside their supervisor's radar, workers rebelled. Soon, they
also began to escape by doing opium or drinking alcohol: homemade swipe wine, one Filipino field hand explained, "was our coffee
in the mornings…our milk for lunch…and our evening juice." (134)* They even began to abandon their contracts and flee. Penalties
and fines, however elaborate they were, proved ineffective in preventing such behavior; employers had to be creative.

According to the island Marshall's calculations, approximately one fifth of the population had been arrested between the years
1890 and 1892; one third had broken their work contract! Planters started informal surveillance networks to capture these runaways
and offered rewards upwards of twenty dollars for their charges. They even went so far as to employ Asian government officials to
placate their nationals. Workers' new independence caused planters much distress. Furthermore, in 1900, after the U.S. terminated
the contract system, they had to find a new way of controlling the rising population of free men, those who had honorably completed
their service. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association (HSPA) quickly stepped in and instituted fixed wage agreements between
managers to maintain order. It would not work for long. Plantation communities, though divided, had grown strong.

Religion, gambling, fishing, dancing, and sport flourished on plantations and were sometimes instituted by companies themselves.
This type of social welfare made men more complacent workers, they thought; "[it] should be considered good business and not
philanthropy" their committees noted. (105) However, the strong community networks which grew out of this socialization proved
to be powerful. In 1909, the support of community organizations such as the Japanese Physicians Association, the Aiea Merchants
Association, and the Honolulu Retail Merchants Association-to name a few-enabled workers to take collective action. Japanese
field hands united, demanded equal pay for equal work, and protested the discriminatory, "un-American" (158) conditions of
plantation life. After they were evicted from their plantation homes for stirring up trouble, five thousand Japanese workers and
their families gathered in the streets of Honolulu. Sheltered in theatres and vacant buildings, women volunteers turned out in full
force to care for them. Workers on other islands continued to labor and support them financially.

In response, planters did what they had done for decades: they accelerated the importation of non-Japanese scabs. Because of this
divided workforce, the protracted struggle could not last. Five months later in a quiet Japanese elementary school, strikers met and
ended the ordeal. To be successful, Takaki argues, "the labor movement in Hawaii and its strike actions would have to be based on
interethnic working class unity." (164) In 1920, Japanese and Filipinos were able to do just that. Together they advanced the labor
struggle beyond "blood unionism," the organizing of workers into unions on the basis of ethnicity. It would not be easy.

The 1920 strike did not start out as a unified effort. After months of coaxing by labor leaders and community members, Japanese
and Filipinos finally joined forces. From camp to camp, leaders quickly spread their message: "pau hana, No go work. We on
strike." (166) Again, they shut down the plantations in all of Oahu. As long as they were dependent on planters' generosity for
bonuses or financial gifts, field hands knew that there would be no democracy in the islands; they needed higher wages. Planters
employed their usual divide-and-control strategy. This time, however, they also called all Japanese "anti-American foreigners"
and started a propaganda campaign to convince laborers that their union leaders were really just self-righteous misers. (172) Sugar
corporations would not give in and the strike ended. However, months later they quietly raised wages by fifty percent. Though
they needed to maintain a stable workforce, they would not let labor win.

Workers, however, immediately saw the rewards of their teamwork. Soon after, the Japanese Federation of Labor changed its
name to the Hawaii Laborers' Association, giving them a regional rather than an ethnic identity. Twenty five years later, workers
successfully struck for higher wages and the right to collective bargaining.

The sugar industry reigned in the archipelago, but Hawaii was built, as one worker said, "with my bear hands and calloused heart
and patience." (2) Through plantation laborers' collective struggle, a community formed and flourished. As Takaki notes, workers
were brought as itemized commodities but developed a working class culture and consciousness-"an identity of themselves in
relationship to the process of production." (179) They may have produced counterfeit script, fought with lunas, or took too many
breaks for swipe wine, but their spirit was indomitable. Sadly, as Takaki mentions at the end of his book, Hawaiians now face a
new obstacle: sugar is no longer King, tourism is.

Takaki's account of this pivotal moment in Hawaii's history is filled with many memorable stories, poems, diary entries, and
alarming census statistics-it might even be able to stand on its own as a primary source. However, it is somewhat thin in its
examination of plantation culture and gender relations, and could have delved a bit more into the economics of land ownership
during the Great Mahele.** His tireless commitment to piecing together this unwritten story from thousands and thousands of
carefully-selected primary sources is admirable nonetheless. In some ways, Pau Hana reads like talk story, a combination of
storytelling, history, and gossip-a favorite pastime of Hawaiian locals and other Asian communities. I cannot help but think that
plantation laborers at the turn of the century would have "talk storied" their history in the same way.

*Swipe is also said to be stronger than store bought gin!)

**At one point he slips in a list with plantation rules including the sentence "no two men shall be permitted to occupy the same
bed" with no follow-up analysis. Looking at the literature of R. Zamora Linmark, Elizabeth Buck, Lois Ann Yamanaka, and
Milton Murayama, scholars of Hawaiian culture know that the rule was there for a reason: gender stereotypes for each ethnicity
abounded.

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Molly Theobald on With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero, by Americo Paredes

Gregorio Cortez has been described as tall, short, dark-skinned, and light-skinned. His reputation for being a man with
god-like strength has scared away entire gangs of Texas rangers and allowed him to walk among his armed enemies
without fear. His horse is tireless and carried him thousands of miles through brush and over rivers. He is honest and
handsome. Women fall in love with him and Men, even the jailers who locked him up, are befriended by him. It is no
wonder then, that he is the hero in a corrido sung throughout Mexico and Texas by both Spanish and English speakers
alike.

A corrido is a Mexican narrative folk song usually depicting epic stories in a straightforward manner and without
embellishment. And Gregorio Cortez is the hero of one of these corridos for more than his charm and good looks. The
crimes he was wrongly accused of and his clash with the law represented more than the struggles of one unique individual;
his direct resistance of American law enforcement represented the frustration felt by Mexicans because of the years of
persecution and oppression they had suffered from invading Texans. Considered by Texans after the Texas Revolution
as inferior and naturally inclined towards dishonesty and theft, the lives of Mexican border residents through out the mid
to late 1800's and into the early 1900's were considered dispensable. Cortez's adventure and capture reflected the struggle
of a culture slowly being destroyed by border conflict and racism.

Gregorio Cortez and his border ballad is the subject of Americo Paredes' With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad
and its Hero. The book's extensive look at the hero, the legend, and the historical context, highlight the importance of
one story to a specific group of peoples living on the border between Mexico and Texas. But Paredes also makes clear
that Gregorio Cortez and his cultural significance are not unique. Instead Cortez is one example from a genre that extends
throughout history and that can be found in any culture threatened by the invasion of another. Paredes uses that example
of the British and the Scotts. He suggests that just as the Scotts, whose culture and livelihood was threatened by British
invasion, sang songs of heroes resisting assimilation and oppression; Mexicans living along the Rio Grande in the late
1800's and early 1900's sang of heroic individuals that defied stereotype and oppression to outsmart the Texan sheriffs
and rangers.

Before Texas invaded and divided the area surrounding the banks of the Rio Grande, the land that is now Mexico and
Texas belonged to the Spanish. When the Spanish settled in the north and south, the Lower Rio Grande, an area resting
from the mouth of the river to the two Laredos, was left unexplored and considered dangerous. A large gap of countryside
divided the well-established Mexico City and Texas. Jose de Escandon was sent with a group of soldiers to colonize the
area to create communication between the two Spanish areas to the north and south. By 1775, Nuevo Santander, had been
established with little conflict or difficulty. The area was fertile and Escondon who considered himself a settler more than
a soldier, preferred the peaceful assimilation into blood and culture of local Indians. Though settling in the area was meant
to connect Texas and Mexico, Nuevo Santander remained isolated. The deep valley in which it was located and the thick
brush that covered the area made it difficult to travel through or even reach the clustering of towns. Until the Texas
Revolution and the subsequent border strife that followed between 1836 and 1848, the valley surrounding the Rio Grande
was self-sufficient and left alone to develop a strong culture and identity of its own.

After the Texas invasion and the creation of a border that divided the area around the Rio Grande, those living in the
province of Nuevo Santander found themselves at the mercy of Texans with little protection from American law or their
own. While inhabitants of Nuevo Santander maintained few social hierarchies before the invasion, a low regarded laborer
being able to rise to the ranks of a horse-owning vaquero in the span of a life-time, the Texans brought with them the
violent hierarchy of racism. Texans considered themselves to be superior to the Mexicans. Spaniards were considered
second-rate Europeans because of their defeat in the Texas Revolution. Texans used the mixed backgrounds of Mexicans,
who usually had Spanish and Mexican ancestors, to justify the Texan belief that Mexicans were inherently dishonest, lazy,
and naturally inclined toward thievery. Texans blamed the predominantly peaceful border residents for the understood
lawlessness of the still largely unexplored land between Texas and Mexico City.

Sent to end "lawlessness and disorder along the Rio Grande" were the Texas Rangers, described as courageous and
honest. Each ranger was considered worth a whole gang of Mexicans. Idolized by Texans, Texas Rangers were feared
by Mexicans for their known tendency to shoot and kill for even the slightest suspicion. Many day laborers, travelers,
and farmers were killed by Texas Rangers only to have it later discovered that they had not even been armed. Rangers
defended themselves by arguing that the dead day laborers had been honestly mistaken for wanted criminals. The rangers
placed little value on the lives of Mexicans and were known to carry old pistols in their side bags to place on the bodies
of the Mexicans they shot in order to prove that the rangers had shot in self-defense. The once peaceful and isolated
residents of Nuevo Santander found themselves split by a new border and plagued with the violent racism of invading
Texans. From this chaotic threat to Mexican cultural identity grew the legend and ballad of Gregorio Cortez.

Although there are many versions of Cortez's story, all contain one major point. Gregorio Cortez was a good, honest man
who was minding his own business when he was wrongly accused of a crime. In one version of the story Cortez's brother,
Roman is involved in a horse trade with an American. Roman, known for his loud mouth and practical jokes, tricks the
American into trading for a lame horse. The American, infuriated by the joke, comes to Gregorio and his brother's house
with the Sheriff. Roman begins to talk back to the American and the Sheriff and so the Sheriff, in a fit of rage, shoots
Roman in the mouth and takes a shot at Gregorio who has come out of the house. Gregorio shoots and kills the sheriff
in self-defense and revenge. After the American flees, Gregorio loads Roman into his wagon, and with his family, rides
into town to get medical care for his brother. Cortez steals a sorrel mare and escapes into the brush. Using intelligence,
bravery, and speed Cortez manages to scare away or elude the large gangs of rangers that chase after him. He is aided
by Mexicans through out the country who always recognize him as a hero and give him food, drink and rest until he moves
on. According to the legend he is finally caught when he is betrayed by a trusted friend for reward money.

There are many versions of the legend, some more fantastical than others. While in every version Cortez is noble and
honest, his brother embodies many different characters ranging from the antihero to the trickster. Sometimes he is not
included in the story at all. He is often the model of everything a border Mexican should not be: lazy, loud, and always
getting into trouble. But in other versions of the story Roman embodies the folklore hero of the trickster. This crafty,
intelligent hero can be found in many Mexican and Indian folktales and always outwits the enemy instead of resorting
force or strength. But more important than what version of the story is told, is how the version of the legend reflects the
story teller. The legend of Gregorio Cortez is significant not for the hero, but for the defiance of cultural oppression that
the story represents.

As Paredes points out, border ballads of this type are not usually written by dominant cultures but by cultures threatened
by the invasion of another culture. Borders represent the clash of two different peoples and often this clash is devastating
to the less dominant culture. The ballad of Gregorio Cortez exists only because of the threat posed by the Texas invasion
and even more specifically, because of the threat of personal injury and loss of life posed by the presence of Texas Rangers.
Gregorio represents the plight of the Mexican border dwellers as they understand it themselves; he is a hero because he
is good and noble and does nothing to provoke the trouble that finds him. As Paredes writes, Cortez is "a projection of the
Border Mexican's reaction to border conflict and a pattern of behavior as well" (118). He not only represents the best of
the border Mexicans, he also represents a form of resistance, and an identity of intelligence and strength in the face of
racist oppression.

Gregorio's importance to the identity of the border Mexicans who idolized him is best illustrated in the manner in which
individuals tell his story. The borderers who sing the ballad or talk about Gregorio Cortez often describe him as looking
like themselves. Day laborers tell a version of the story in which Cortez is working in the fields when he is confronted by
the sheriff, while vaqueros describe him as getting into trouble with the Sheriff because of a horse trade. In contrast to
the border versions of the legend are the versions told in English. While Borderers always begin the story with the murder
and end it when Cortez is betrayed by his friend, the English versions of the story end with his trial where he is convicted
not of murder, but of horse theft. The English version emphasizes just how important maintaining the stereotype of
Mexicans as horse thieves was to the Texas rangers' way of life. While Gregorio Cortez is a hero, his significance lies
not in his deeds directly but in what his adventures represents for the culture and identity of the inhabitance of the Texas-
Mexican Border.

Gregorio Cortez is a product of border conflict. He is a product of cultural self-preservation and defiance in the face of
racist violence and oppression. His ballad is significant for the identity of the Mexicans living along the Rio Grande who
identify with his persecution and his triumph, but his position as a cultural icon is not unique. Border ballads can be found
throughout history and are always created by the losing side of two clashing cultures. He represents a last stand on the
part of a threatened people and though the once fertile and brush covered land at the border of Texas and Mexico is now
barren and dry, the memory of the hero who fought to preserve the life and culture of that area lives on in the Corrido of
Gregorio Cortez.

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Sophia Krasnoff on Civil Rights Unionism, by Robert Korstad

Robert Korstad's Civil Rights Unionism is an encompassing account of the resistance and struggle of the black working
class community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The book centers on the rise and fall of Local 22 of the FTA (Food,
Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers of America) and moves outward to illuminate the convoluted coming of age of
the R.J Reynolds tobacco empire. Context is essential to the tale that Korstad tells, and the author relentlessly scours
local court records, business and union files and the archives of the Winston-Salem Journal to create a realistic and useful
picture of the political, economic and social dynamics of the WWII era industrial south. In addition, Korstad cites from
over one hundred oral histories that the author conducted himself with union leaders, workers and foremen. The voices of
these individuals work within a larger politicized framework to illustrate the necessity, intensity and intelligence of a
community based, labor oriented civil rights movement that emerged in Winston-Salem in 1943.

Korstad focuses on the intricate development of race and class based relations in the company town, presenting the
bargaining power that local 22 gained through community organizing and democratic leadership, as unique, groundbreaking,
and unexpected within a climate of white supremacy and a culture of elite corporate control. Here the author's examination
of the socio-political history of Winston-Salem and the reign of R.J Reynolds serves to communicate one of the major
themes of his book: that there was nothing "spontaneous" about the burst of militant unified action on behalf of over 10,000
tobacco workers turned strikers, and nothing chaotic about the events that followed that first strike of 1943. Instead,
Korstead posits that the process of Southern industrialization, as it had relied on strict conditions of elite political control,
the exploitation of black labor, the segregation of poor people along color lines, and the total alienation and denigration
of women of color, had been underscored by a tradition of African-American resistance and organization that dated back
to slavery. In this way Korstad casts the tale of Local 22's worker led, class conscious civil rights campaign as an inevitable
and long overdue response to a cadre of racist, profit driven forces that had created conditions in Winston-Salem that were
intolerable for many and extravagantly luxurious for few.

The domination of the R.J Reynolds Company in North Carolina was not an ever-present entity, but rather a consciously
evolved construction of power and influence that came into being through a collusion of "smart" business tactics and political
duplicity. By 1900 Reynolds controlled ninety percent of the United States tobacco industry and went on to play a part in
defining the image of the decadent 1920s Jazz era with its cheap and cleverly marketed Camel cigarettes. The company
name became synonymous with the town of Winston-Salem, as R.J. Reynolds quickly developed a mutually dependent and
what the company considered to be a mutually beneficial relationship with the urban black and poor migrant white workers
who traveled each day to work in the tobacco factories. The company's "charitable" motivations could be evidenced in its
early years by such acts as the creation of a boarding house, a lunchroom, a gymnasium, and educational classes to be
subsidized for employees. Korstad writes that, "these top -down activities, which were mostly for whites only, helped to
institutionalize a system of what might be termed corporate maternalism, in which services to blacks and most poor whites
depended on self-help, charity, or a penurious relief system rather than becoming an entitlement of citizenship or an
employment contract" (68.)

The network of country clubs, golf courses, skyscrapers and hundred-acre estates that became characteristic of the
Reynolds's tobacco dynasty was particularly reliant on the repression and exploitation of Winston-Salem's black urban
population. Isolated by Jim Crow laws and social stigma, black workers were relegated to the most strenuous, lowest
paying positions in Reynolds' factories and were subject to the most blatant harassment and abuse from foremen.

Korstad explains that although the act of dividing workers along racial lines in order to maintain managerial control was
nothing peculiar to the South during this time period, the institutionalized nature of North Carolinian segregation created
ruptures between black and white workers that were nearly insurmountable. Ultimately however, "discrimination against
African-Americans…pulled all workers' wages down. It thus served as the linchpin in what became in effect a separate
southern political economy." (58) This economy was further reinforced through the concentration of Winston-Salem's
black community in the neglected and often dangerous and unsanitary area of East Winston. Forced stratification of living
conditions, and cultural and educational resources only served to support the notion of essential white supremacy on which
the corporate South was built. But the urban centralization and local investment of African-Americans also gave many
individuals living in such areas as Monkey Bottom or The Pond, a rooted and community oriented perspective with which
to approach future unionization and political involvement.

On June 17th 1943, the conditions in the stemmery plants of Reynolds' tobacco factory had changed very little from those
at the turn of the century. Workers had gained a few scattered protections after the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor
Standards Act including a forty hour week, overtime pay, and a minimum wage of 40 cents and hour. Few workers made
over 10 cents above minimum wage regardless of seniority, and on the sixteen to twenty dollars per week that they brought
home, no one's income fell above the amount specified by the government as the "minimum subsistence of living," for
North Carolina at this time. The work was hot, dusty and required intense concentration, and the smell of the factories
was overwhelming. In response to the war time labor shortage, management had recently stepped up quotas, striving to
speed up the process of production. The behavior of the foremen who roamed up and down the isles of the stemmery did
not echo the more light handed manipulation of higher officials at Reynolds, and the black women who manned the machines
in these plants found themselves at the mercy of the aggression and sexual harassment of predominantly uneducated white
men.

The preliminary confrontation broke out in plant number 65 when Theodosia Simpson, decided to stand up (or sit down as
the case may be) for a fellow worker who was sick and whose job had been threatened. Simpson, an aspiring teacher and
member of the Tobacco Workers Organizing Committee that had been started by a small number of workers who had
signed up with UCAPAWA (United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America) in 1942, quickly rallied
the 200 women of number 65 for an afternoon strike. The momentum of the work stoppage quickly spread throughout the
stemmeries and into the men's departments as well. The dramatic turning point came when James McCardell came forward
to inform management that the men in the casing rooms would stand by the female stemmers, and then promptly dropped
dead from a brain aneurism, sparking a unified front of anti-company sentiment.

After the death of McCardell the strike took on a life of its own, fueled by an interconnected and nearly endless list of
grievances, shared experiences, and newly found political excitement. Aided by UCAPAWA, the organizing committee
began signing up hundreds of black tobacco workers and preparing the community of East Winston for the walk out of
June 18th. As work came grinding to a halt in the following days, over 10,000 employees left work as a result of direct
union involvement or to the rupture in the chain of production that had kept the factory running smoothly for half a century.
During this time several key leaders of the movement and future union officers emerged, including the charismatic Robert
"Chick" Black. Respected among his fellow employees and described as a "good talker," and known by management for
his quick work and loyal service, Black proved to be a forerunning link between the company and the newly formed union.
It was with Black that the Vice President of Reynolds John Whitaker finally negotiated a signed agreement, promising a
meeting between the organizing committee and management to discuss grievances, issuing a statement that no worker
would be discriminated against or fired due to Union activity. In exchange workers returned to their jobs while planning
furiously for the future negotiations.

The resulting meeting with Whitaker, which occurred in the executive headquarters of the Reynolds building in the heart
of Winston-Salem, proved that management would make few concessions to the strikers until a Union was officially
recognized. However, the seed of direct resistance, political action and powerful communalism had been planted in the
minds of thousands of tobacco workers and the swell of grassroots organizing that occurred over the next few months
coincided with a racially inclusive, politicized campaign on behalf of UCAPAWA. The combination proved daunting for
both the company as well as the fence sitting AFL associated TWIU (Tobacco Workers International Union), whose
anti-communist rhetoric and tactic of pandering directly to the employer garnered them only 115 ballots out of almost
6,000 votes cast in the initial union election. Thus, it would be the leftist UCAPAWA turned FTA that accompanied the
tobacco workers organizing committee through a seven year process that included negotiating contracts, picketing and
striking, lobbying for local black candidates, supporting education and housing campaigns, and even presenting grievances
at City Hall when met by unresponsive management.

Korstad depicts the influential reign of Local 22 by focusing on a few central themes. First, we see the personal transform-
ations that occurred on behalf of union members and leaders of the organizing committee, as individuals were educated,
politicized and familiarized with their own power as activists and movement makers. This transition is placed in the context
of the larger political history of Winston-Salem as Korstad depicts the thieving tactics used by Conservative Democrats
and the tobacco companies at the turn of the century to dominate the state government and ensure white supremacy
through voter suppression, violent threats and economic repression of African-Americans. Velma Hopkins expresses the
way in which the union helped workers resist this history in her discussion of voter registration. "I didn't take registration
seriously until the union came in," she says. "The union taught us what each segment of government meant; what the
aldermen and county commissioners controlled. We'd never heard nothing about them because they were all white." (255)
Thus Korstad uses Velma's words to illustrate the expansion of the movement led by Reynolds tobacco workers from a
list of grievances to an essential Southern civil rights front.

The relevance of the legal-political climate of the 1930s and 40s to community based organizing campaigns is another issue
that Korstad presents as inseparable from the notion of Civil rights unionism. The patriotism of the WWII era augmented
by residual New Deal enthusiasm and the initial burgeoning of the NLRB, created a specific set of circumstances that
allowed for individuals and organizations to begin chipping away at the stronghold of corporate domination. The strength
of CIO unions lay in their willingness to strike while the iron of federal interventionism was hot, making full use of the
NLRB as a regulatory body, calling on them to recount the initial election results at Reynolds and to mediate grievances
and contract disputes. The effect of this limited but all-important government presence was to buffer the CIO's claims of
egalitarianism and inclusiveness with an air of legitimacy and effectiveness. However, as Korstad explains, many historians
have come to see "WWII as the fateful moment when the militant worker's movement of the 1930s tied its fortunes to the
Democratic Party and to a potentially enervating system of legalistic, top-down state regulation." Thus as leftist unions
became reliant on the strong arm of the NLRB, they also became "dangerously dependent on the party in power." (223)

Korstad's examination of the slow demise of Local 22 and the FTA in Winston-Salem expresses the danger of this
dependency. For the black men and women who had stood up of their own accord and challenged the company that seemed
to control every aspect of their lives, the union movement at Reynolds had been a process of self-education and democratic
organization that exemplified the integration of political and community life. However, as the anti-communist fervor of
the Cold War era began picking up during the late 1940s, African-American union leaders watched as the concrete civil
rights issues that were at the heart of their movement were pushed aside to make room for the red-baiting tactics of the
press, the company and the Truman administration. Under the glare of Taft-Hartley's stipulation that all union leaders
and organizers must sign an affidavit swearing that they were not affiliated with the communist party, the local and national
leadership of FTA, UCAPAWA and other CIO unions foundered. Union officials such as Robert "Chick" Black who had
guided the movement in Winston-Salem from its inception, while picking up a deep socialist consciousness along the way,
found themselves under fire from the House Committee for Un-American Activities.

This attack on pro-Civil rights labor leaders led to criticisms of the hypocrisy of the American "democratic" agenda, or,
as a black sorority leader wrote in defense of Local 22, of "the inconsistencies of those who speak vehemently on the one
hand against Communists, Fascists,… and other un-Americans' and yet propose a society within a society to keep each
race distinct" (345.) And it is these inconsistencies that Robert Korstad's book attests to in the end. As the author
chronicles the gains and political influence of a direct, needs based community insurgency that worked in conjunction with
a left led, socialist leaning union, we are left with an understanding of the significance of federal involvement in business-
labor relations. As the officers of the FTA refused to sign anti-communist affidavits in 1947, Local 22 was stripped of its
bargaining power. Thus, as Korstad illustrates, the dawning of the 1950s found tobacco workers of R.J. Reynold's in a
similar position to where they had been in the 1930s: with a legacy and a deep understanding of resistance and political
struggle, but without an enforced infrastructure that could help them to squeeze political and economic gains from the
stone of the corporate South.

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Jessie Wilkerson on Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, by Michael Honey

In Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, Michael K. Honey invokes questions as to how race relations both were
established and challenged in Memphis labor organizing and what affect they had on the Civil Rights Movement. He
considers how the labor struggles of black workers throughout the 30s and 40s concurrently laid a foundation as well as
proved the necessity of "an independent African-American agenda and community base" (288) for later Civil Rights
leaders in the 50s and 60s. As Honey conveys, the history of labor struggles in Memphis is wrought with ups and downs,
the victories followed by fervent backlashes. Yet the victories inspired working people to continue their campaigns for
rights while the losses surely reminded them, especially southern blacks, of what they were fighting to gain.

Following the Civil War, race relations in labor became more and more polarized. Black populations grew in Memphis as
migrants left the countryside in search of work, and whites reacted by scrambling to replace slavery with new forms of
control including the poll tax, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow laws. Having replaced the biracial Knights of Labor as a
labor force, the American Federation of Labor did little to aid black workers in worsening conditions. While some white
workers seemed to enjoy economic gain from the exclusion of black workers in unions, overall the rewards were lacking.
In fact, the racial divides more often provided employers with measures to pay whites low wages. As W.E.B. Dubois
termed it, white workers could rest on the knowledge of a "psychological wage." In other words, no matter their pay they
had the consolation of having a degree of power over blacks. Under this system, lighter, better paying work was granted
to whites while blacks were employed in heavier, dirtier work that paid lower wages. Honey aptly summarizes, "Such
advantages to whites could totally obscure the fact that both white and black workers made far less than enough to live
on" (36).

Both black and white workers' problems were exacerbated with the political and economic control of what became known
as "the Crump machine." Edward H. Crump, son of a former Mississippi slave-owner, was elected as Memphis's mayor
in 1909 and held a monopoly over the Memphis political scene until 1948. Crump's politics are best defined by his willing-
ness to favor big businesses, his manipulation of undemocratic practices such as poll taxes, and his paternalistic racism
that marginalized the majority of the black population. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Crump's vast control over the
town made it especially difficult for radical or anti-capitalist organizers to make any headway in the worsening conditions
of the Great Depression.

Along with white labor dominance and the Crump machine, conditions for black workers continued to decline with the onset
of the Great Depression. The most notable blow was the "Negro Removal" campaign of the 1930s in which white workers,
suffering from widespread unemployment, demanded that the designated black jobs be given to them. In the end, New Deal
programs did little for blacks as far as creating jobs or determining wages. And in Memphis, the Crump machine used police
authority and terrorization of black communities to assure that white workers had jobs before black workers. As the southern
caste system became more and more entrenched, both white and black workers' conditions failed to improve regardless of
New Deal programs.

For instance, the New Deal's National Recovery Act gave employees rights to organize and collectively bargain, placing
government in a more mediative role in labor struggles. However, southern employers effectively used power and political
clout to ignore the NRA and later the more stringent 1935 Wagner Act. Throughout 1935 and 1936 Memphis unions often
existed only as much as they followed the boundaries set by the Crump administration and its business alliances.

Despite the anti-labor environment, Memphian workers strove to better their conditions as some of the poorest paid
workers in the country. As the history shows, labor progress could only be as successful as the fight to end discrimination
against black workers. Thus, Honey wraps the history of Memphis labor battles around three crucial moments that spoke
both to class and race discrimination: 1)the first bi-racial victory of the CIO in Memphis; 2) the development of the
UCAPAWA in Memphis; 3) the organization of one of the most stringently segregated plants in Memphis, the Firestone
Company. While each of these organizing fronts proved successful in many ways, the successes were always met with
glaring racial discord.

In the spring of 1939, waterfront workers reacted to ever worsening conditions along the Mississippi River. Both black
and white workers were plagued with poor working conditions, including wages as low as eight cents an hour. Although
hiring practices enforced racial divisions among the waterfront workers according to skilled and un-skilled jobs, waterfront
workers usually worked for a common employer. Furthermore, the workers shared the same grievances regardless of race.

In one of the few instances that black workers successfully joined the AFL, black workers in the International Longshore-
men's Association (ILA) joined with the mostly white Inland Boatmen's Union (IBU) of the CIO to create one of the first
successful alliances between black and white workers. Under the leadership of Thomas Watkins, an African American in
the ILA who was unflinching towards white authority, the ILA local attracted black members who may not have joined
otherwise. Progress seemed to be in sight as Watkins was able to garner support from both white and black dockworkers
who came to understand the barge line's logic for keeping them divided. White leadership in the Memphis AFL soon took
issue with Watkins's militancy, a direct protest of southern white mores. Amidst internal racial conflicts, waterfront workers'
negotiations with the Federal Barge Line halted.

In response to the setbacks, the relationship between the ILA and the IBU strengthened as white workers realized the
necessity of black worker's support in the strike. Ultimately, the Federal Barge Line granted recognition of ILA and IBU
bargaining rights. The CIO claimed victory as the IBU "was the first CIO union in Memphis to strike and win, while the
ILA was the first black-led AFL union in Memphis to exercise independent leadership against white leadership" (110).

Though the CIO celebrated victory, such evident racial solidarity certainly led to ramifications felt by workers, especially
black workers. AFL leader Lev Loring, Federal Barge Line representatives, and Memphis police officers planned to murder
Thomas Watkins and to break up any evidence of Memphis's black leadership. Though unsuccessful at a murder attempt,
the white power structure did run Watkins out of town as well as squelch developing black union leadership. Following the
waterfront workers' attempts at interracial organizing, successive labor struggles along the Mississippi maintained racial
divides.

Another site that proved crucial to Memphis interracial organizing was the development of the United Cannery, Agricultural,
Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) by the leftist, racially liberal section of the CIO. The Memphis
UCAPAWA organized "from the ground up," focusing on black workers in the poorest of working conditions under the
harshest employers. The union eventually brought together leaders from various plantation states and formed the Southern
Cotton States Council in 1939. The council was especially revolutionary in that it addressed issues specific to black workers
such as voting rights and education for southern blacks. It also helped to organize black leaders under the philosophy that
workers had the ability to drive their own movement.

With the UCAPAWA foundation laid, black workers in low-paying jobs began to organize, often with the support of white
Communist party organizers. Perhaps because the organizing occurred mainly in smaller industries, the Memphis political
machine paid little attention. Regardless, the black workers proved efficient and energized organizers, providing as well a
"nucleus of white and black workers" (126) influential in later developments.

According to Honey, "the most important single target for CIO organizers" was the Firestone plant. A tire company brought
in by the Crump administration and given special allowances in favor of big business, Firestone offered a challenge to CIO
organizers in several respects: employers had enforced deeply entrenched racial divides in the factory, the American
rubber industry had proven difficult to organize nationally, and the Memphis Firestone plant was particularly hostile to
union organizing. As Honey notes, "The segregation system within the factory reinforced racist attitudes among white
workers, intimidated blacks, and established barriers to friendly interaction between the two groups" (151).

During 1940 efforts to organize, union leaders and members faced brutal terrorism sanctified by city and company authorities.
One of the most violent reactions towards the CIO organizing occurred when a group handing out leaflets was attacked by
a mob of seventy-five Firestone employees. Using "blackjacks, lead pipes, brass knuckles, sticks, knives, and at least one
pistol," the mob focused the brunt of the assault on union organizers. After several more attacks and the successful efforts
of the AFL at organizing white Firestone workers, the CIO folded. This CIO interracial effort, like others, proved too weak
for the southern segregation system.

The onset of World War II for the most part stymied labor efforts of the 30s and early 40s. Many factors played into labor
setbacks, including anti-strike agreements amongst unions and companies and some factories' manipulation of those
agreements. Furthermore, the South faced particular setbacks as whites became more and more uncomfortable with blacks'
unwillingness to accept the segregation system. The war raging against fascism bolstered blacks' dissatisfactions with their
own country. Rather than use to their benefit growing tensions, the CIO, moving further to the right, did not effectively
organize across race lines. Rather, the CIO implemented Operation Dixie, a drive to organize the South that excluded
blacks, white women, and "suspected communists." Honey notes, "The strategy of Memphis CIO leaders of placing
racial questions on the back burner did not fit the new situation, where racial change was so evidently on the front burner"
(213). Labor struggles, and subsequently racial conflict within them, continued to weaken with the passing of the Taft-Hartley
Act in 1947, the rise of red baiting, and the onset of the Cold War.

While 1930s and 40s labor organizing provided an outlet for southern blacks to begin to explore their rights, it proved
unsuccessful on its own in dismantling the southern segregation system. It did often succeed in showing whites how
necessary racial solidarity was for successful labor campaigns, but too often segregation and racism persisted even in
unions seemingly open to a bi-racial format. In the end, Honey offers a history that provides the roots for the Civil Rights
Movement. He shows that the strongest African American leaders were too militant for white dominated unions and not
until they established their own freedom movements, sadly void of the white working class, would they finally have the
space to explore fully transformative social change.

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Katie Goldstein on The New Left and Labor in the 1960s, by Peter Levy

In Peter Levy's book, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s, he explores the relationship between the New Left and the
labor movement during the 1960s. He explains the relationship as one of both animosity and collaboration. Although the
historic old left had risen from labor, he argues that left ideology, militarism, and cultural symbols created a wedge
between the labor movement and the New Left, which was majority white students. Levy argues that the disagreements
that occurred between labor and the New Left came from a liberal-left divide that led to the success in the rise of the New
Right during the 1970s and 1980s. But, Levy also disproves certain assumptions about the relationship between labor and
the New Left. For instance, Levy accentuates the importance of both the civil rights movement and the farmworkers
struggle led by Cesar Chavez as a part of the alliance, and not the differences. But politically and ideologically, organized
labor and the New Left ran into opposition over three issues that Levy clearly defines: the Vietnam War, Black Power,
and counterculture. However, besides these historically divisive events, there were also fundamental ideological differences
between the New Left and labor over the support of the political establishment, the role of the worker or the student as
an agent for revolutionary social change, and the question of bread and butter issues verse building a mass movement.
Levy writes "The New Left's relationship to labor should be viewed dialectically. Cooperation was the main theme of
the first half of the decade: confrontation the main theme of the second half of the 1960s: and a synthesis or reconciliation
of sorts appeared after 1970" (5). Organized labor and the New Left had a dynamic relationship that cannot be characterized
as only cooperation or only animosity, but instead as one that came together over certain issues and were divided over others.

The New Left was made up of a majority of university students and organizations that worked for civil rights, against the
Vietnam War, for student rights, and for a greater decentralization of power and organizational democracy. Levy defines
the New Left as an "uprising of students against the dominant cultural and political mores of society" (5). Levy explains
in the first chapter of the book that many members of the New Left came from families that were involved with organized
labor. But the New Left's fight against the mores, better known as the establishment, meant that there was already a
clear divide between organized labor and the students rising in the New Left. While organized labor wanted to maintain
a partnership with the establishment, both culturally and politically, to increase their bargaining power in a decade that
was politically pro-Labor, the New Left sought to criticize the establishment as part of a larger critique of America's
values. As written in the Port Huron statement, the self-defining document of the early New Left, written in 1962 by the
Students for a Democratic Society: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in
universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit."* They were mainly students concerned not with the bread
and butter issues of higher wages, the possibility of owning a refrigerator and a television set, but concerned with the
"poverty of spirit" and the suburban materialism they came from. They critiqued the world that they wanted to understand,
particularly in light of the hypocrisy that they felt surrounding them; with Great Society programs at home and an escalating
war in Vietnam, civil rights legislation but violent urban uprisings by African-Americans in major cities, and organized
labor's severe anti-communism and unquestioning support for the Democratic political machine.

The first wrench between organized labor and the New Left was the Vietnam War. But organized labor's support for
Vietnam signified a larger support of the Democrats, or the Establishment. The 1960s president of the AFL-CIO, George
Meany, was a hawkish anti-Communist who not only supported the war, but also red-baited dissent in organized labor
that opposed the war. But although there were exceptions of individual social activist locals that opposed the war, the
original sentiment towards the war was to support anti-Communist efforts and particularly, to support Lyndon B. Johnson.
As the country became more disillusioned by the way, so did organized labor. But labor leaders defined support and
dissent over the war as a question of Americanism. As organized labor attacked the New Left for its anti-American elitism,
the New Left responded with a greater attack on the role of organized labor. No longer did New Leftists view the worker
and unions as units of social change, but the "New Left increasingly saw labor as part of the establishment, or more
theoretically, as a partner of corporate liberalism"(54)

The second movement that caused a greater division between organized labor and the New Left, Levy argues, was the
Black Power movement. The theory of Black Power meant that Blacks held a particularly oppressed position in American
society that could not be addressed by the union movement or the existing political structures. Instead, "blacks had to
find their own mechanisms for addressing the need of the black worker" (70) and non traditional methods for the black
worker to be heard. However, although the Black Power movement helped to distinguish the difference between the
liberal policies of organized labor and the more radical politics of the New Left, organized labor did not backlash against
the Black Power movement. Instead

Contrary to popular belief, labor's response to the emergence of Black Power was not backlash. Rather, most labor
leaders reasserted their faith in liberal ideas and policies and in many cases actively fought backlash within their own
ranks. Yet, rather than appeasing the New Left, this development only aggravated tensions because many new leftists
had begun to see liberal programs and ideals as insufficient and outdated (65).

Also, the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles and the subsequent urban riots after Martin Luther King's assassination translated
to many New Leftists that the revolution was imminent, and that poor urban blacks were going to be at the center in the
fight for social change. Although this proved untrue, the New Left saw unions as not taking part in the revolution. As part
of the establishment, the unions' goal was more for everyone, while the New Leftists mostly espoused a more radical
doctrine of redistribution. Levy cited the case of Ocean-Hill-Brownsville, the fight between the Teachers Union and
community members over the community control of schools, and concludes in his chapter on Black Power "It [the struggle
between the union and the black community] also redirected labor's attention from its traditional foes, on the right, to
new ones on the left. This was readily apparent in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, as the two traded punches like boxers in a
championship fight. Before either movement stopped confronting each other, the new Right had emerged the victor" (83).

Another divisive element that Levy writes about was the role of counterculture in further dividing the labor movement
and the New Left, even though the counterculture movement was associated with the New Left but that was not always
accurate. Levy defines the counterculture movement as a way to "explicitly reject the American Dream as middle America
defined it" (90). Levy argues in this section about the power of cultural symbols, and the symbol of the sexually promiscuous
hippie, experimenting with drugs, listening to rock and roll, with long unkempt hair was a popular image associated with
New Leftist politics. While those that participated in the counterculture and New Leftists saw themselves as opponents
to the establishment, they were seen as apart of the elite by many working class union members.

Levy then writes about the role of politics and collaboration that occurred after the heightened times of confrontation in
the late 1960s. The whole country grew disillusioned with the war, and labor and the New Left found a new common cause
in the farmworkers struggle that brought together unionization, workers rights, anti-oppression work, and grassroots
activism. But as Levy argues in his conclusion, both movements, labor and the New Left, miscalculated their ability to
make change in the world. He argues against the backlash theory that the New Right rose to power because of a backlash
against the 1960s activism, but instead he argues that there were serious demographic and economic shifts that occurred
during the 1970s and the liberal-left underestimated the political power of the New Right. Levy writes "The New Left
and labor, crucial segments of the left-liberal coalition, were generally busier attacking each other than joining forces" (192).
Levy does not underestimate the power of this division, but he does not overstate it as the sole reason for the decline of
leftist activism and liberal politicians.

Levy's analysis of the relationship between the New Left and labor shows that there were divergent ideologies on who
should be the agent for social change that was not strictly Marxist that defined the proletariat as the sole revolutionary
force. Instead, the questions that arose among that New Left that created the largest tensions between their movement
and labor was the question of the relationship to the establishment and the status quo and labor unions represented the
maintenance the status quo in pro-labor and prosperous times, when labor activism used to be much more radical. Levy's
book is not just about the 1960s, but also about a definition of radicalism. The New Left and Labor in the 1960s brings up
essential questions concerning radical politics. For instance, does one work within the system? Does one stay outside the
system and maintain purist politics? Does one ally with the government even over violent and unjust foreign policy so
more people are likely to receive better wages and have better working conditions? Who is the agent of social change?
Is it students, poor urban blacks, or workers? Levy's book brings up these questions, with no clear answers.

*Students for a Democratic Society, "The Port Huron Statement," The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the
American Radical Tradition, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillan (New York: The New Press, 2003) 469.

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Rachel Yanda on Holding the Line, by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver is well-known for her numerous novels. The themes of these books largely revolve around women
who are independent, determined and righteous. Her characters struggle to assert themselves, challenging social norms
and their role in family or larger community. The subjects of Kingsolver's first book, Holding the Line: Women in the
Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, have the same inherent qualities. Working as journalist, Kingsolver recorded the
battle waged by the women of small Arizona mining towns throughout the eighteen-month strike against the Phelps Dodge
Corporation. Kingsolver explores the role these women played in maintaining the strike and how through their participation,
a feminist consciousness emerged. Her work documents an extraordinary convergence of the labor and women's movement
in a community fighting for its existence against a corporate aggression. While women have always been integral players
throughout labor history, in the case of the 1983 mine strike, they acted not simply as supporters, but leaders who in the
end defined the strike.

The strike against Phelps Dodge (PD) began on July 1st, 1983 after numerous failed bargaining attempts made by workers
and various unions. Though the workers had made concessions to PD, including a wage freeze for three years, the company
refused to negotiate with the union's demands. For workers, the most important aspect of the contract was the cost-of-living
allowances (COLA). In addition to wage cuts, and a decrease in vacation and sick days, PD wanted to end the COLA,
which the workers' had established in 1969. Unwilling to compromise this essential right, the workers walked off the job.
Immediately PD used legal means against the strikers, and when the company "won a court injunction barring the strikers
from assembling at the gates, women strike supporters began holding mass pickets of their own" (15). The men's absence
from the line initiated women's direct participation in the strike.

The women in Holding the Line would never have considered themselves political. They were mothers, wives, sisters,
daughters and occasionally miners themselves, but they were not activists. Their involvement however, was the reason
the miners were able to maintain the strike. As men were forced to find other work outside of the towns, strike responsi-
bilities fell onto women's shoulders. Growing up in a mining town, the women had seen the struggles their parents had
waged to gain union representation. Originally, the miners were excluded from the AFL who were unwilling to accept the
large number of Mexican workers as members. They organized under various unions, from the Industrial Workers of the
World to the CIO's International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. These unions fought against racism and
segregation at PD and made substantial gains for workers in terms of benefits and safety issues.

Female miners felt a special connection to the unions who made it possible for them to continue work after WWII and
fought against sexual discrimination on the job. The people of Clifton and Morenci "had grown up with the union, a tool
as familiar to them as a can opener or a stove. They knew exactly where they would be without it" (17). These women,
both miners and relatives of miners, were the first to join the picket line when the strike began. Women have always been
a part of working class movements, but they have often been invisible actors who provide continuous support behind the
scenes. Their work in labor struggles has been historically undervalued. The PD mine strikes were not exceptional for
the amount of female participation, but in the visibility with which the women organized.

The women's initial support of the strike was guaranteed, however their dedication intensified as their participation grew.
A member of the Women's Auxiliary explained, "It just came naturally. It's an animal instinct for a woman to protect her
young and defend her territory…it's all part of women's work" (133). Their commitment rose from the urgency of defending
their families and their homes. In this way, the events in Arizona mirrored other female movements in Latin America.
Similar activism can be seen in Argentina where the Madres de Plaza de Mayo formed groups to demand justice for their
disappeared children. In an unprecedented display of strength and solidarity these mothers challenged a violent dictatorship.
Likewise, the people's movement in Brazil that toppled the military dictatorship was started fifteen years earlier around
women-organized space community kitchens in the urban peripheries in Brazil. The actions resulted from necessity.
Through their struggles, women challenged and transformed traditional understandings of organizing. Oppressive regimes,
government or corporate, propelled the women into activism.

The women believed their determination came from the supportive nature of the small communities where they lived.
Living in a company town, they had personal stake in the successfulness of strike because "they had everything to lose"
(65). Kingsolver emphasizes the love that the women held for their communities was fundamental in their commitment to
the struggle. In remarkable contrast, the Duvall mine located close to Tucson launched a strike that failed after only four
days. The mine was not centrally locates and its workers commuted from various suburbs. Their lack of community was
detrimental in the success of the strike. In the company towns of Morenci and Clifton, the women's livelihood depended
on PD, not only for jobs, but for schooling and housing as well.

Besides community needs, the women also placed the strike in a national context. They recognized the role of the strike
in protecting unions. By 1983, unions were in a precarious position. Reagan's response to the air traffic controllers' strike
had established a strong anti-union sentiment and rights that had been won, such as collective bargaining, were in jeopardy.
One woman commented, "The labor movement is going to suffer considerably if this strike is lost. It will establish a precedent
for many companies in this state and in this country, to engage in this type of union-busting tactics" (47).

Most female participation came from the auxiliary, which became active after male workers were banned from the picket
line. The word auxiliary is somewhat misleading as these organizations came second to nothing, but spearheaded the strike.
Originally established as a social group where women would cook together or plan parties for their children, the auxiliary
was quickly transformed into a dynamic organization that sustained the strike for nearly two years. Undaunted by insults,
stereotypes and physical violence, the auxiliary was almost solely responsible for maintaining the picket line and rallying
support behind the workers. Their presence on the line was a reminder to PD that the workers would not be defeated without
a fight.

The auxiliary organized in a practical manner, making sure there were people on the line at all times, running food and
clothing drives and planning rallies. Kingsolver makes the argument that their jobs as housewives prepared them for the
basic challenges of the strike. She states, "A housewife is thoroughly acquainted with enormous, endless tasks" (108).
The nature of women's work prepared them for the hardships of the strike and aided their endurance. They were able to
adapt to the new situation and throughout the strike "every essential need was met" (104). Through the duration of the
struggle, women ran the town. At first, it was difficult for men to adjust to their wives' emerging confidence and indepen-
dence, but they soon acknowledged the importance of the women's work.

Their involvement in the auxiliary also served a more personal purpose, by giving the women the opportunity to assert
their independence. It provided a supportive environment where women could express themselves without the constraints
of their families. Kingsolver writes, "It had never been their habit to go anywhere but the grocery store without their
husbands-socializing spots like the bar were traditionally off limits to women alone or in groups-so the female camaraderie
on the line was a heady discovery" (50). The auxiliary meetings soon turned into social support groups where women were
encouraged to take on leadership roles and pursue educational opportunities. Through these interactions, women gained
a newfound confidence that they asserted not only in their personal lives, but in the context of the larger movement. In
order to rally national support for the strike, several auxiliary members went on speaking tours. Giving speeches to
audiences of thousands of people was a huge step for women who had rarely traveled outside of their small towns. The
auxiliary members were able to bring an all male room of Teamsters to their feet in support of their cause. The courage
this took was indicative of the radicalizing effect of the strike.

An important aspect of the women's transformation was the unconventional education they received during the struggle.
The clothing and food drives that were established seemed like obvious ways to avoid supporting the company stores.
One member reflected, "I'd probably still be charging at that stupid store…All this time all the money we were making
we were giving straight back to them…Its hard to believe we were so dumb. Now were doing everything for ourselves--
how'd we wise up so fast?" (107).

It also became apparent that the law was not on their side. Women were arrested on false accusations and held for hours
without formally being charged. Bond rates would be set exorbitantly high, forcing the unions to use important strike funds
to post bail. Women quickly learned their rights, and "they were surprised to realize how little they had though of such
things before" (42).

The harshest blow came when the National Guard took over the towns of Clifton and Morenci to help escort scabs into
the mines. Aided by the governor of Arizona, the towns were taken over by tanks, helicopters and soldiers. PD was able
to institute a ten o' clock curfew, and for two weeks the National Guard controlled the town. Facing armed soldiers in
opposition, the strikers were unable to stop PD from opening its gates to scab labor.

The obvious alliance between the government and PD caused the people of Clifton and Morenci to feel deeply betrayed;
one woman said that it was as if their town was raped. The description of the occupation depicts how violated the women
felt by the National Guard presence, personalizing a political act. These events came as a shock to many, who had valued
and felt pride in the country's legal system. They had believed that these were things that happened in South America or
Poland, but not in the United States. A member of the auxiliary expressed the effect of the National Guard presence in
her town: "I think this has been a learning process for us. We have always been proud of our country and believed in the
democratic system. Try to imagine the disappointment of having had such faith in a system that's turning against us now"
(39). This realization further radicalized the auxiliary, and any regard they had possessed for the government or the PD
Company was discarded and their resolve hardened.

The PD strike is unique in the way it was shaped by women, and in turn, shaped them. Kingsolver uses the example of
the Empire Zinc mining strike, depicted in the movie Salt of the Earth, to emphasize the PD strike's distinctive qualities.
In a similar struggle, women became the leaders of a strike for union recognition. While they went through similar trans-
formations, in the end "the women were still very much oppressed by the men" (20). The changes had not lasted, and
many women resumed subordinate positions in their households. Each strike shared many characteristics, such as demo-
graphics and location, but the social and political context of the PD strike enabled women to assert themselves and be
acknowledged. The Empire Zinc struggle took place in 1951, before the second wave women's movement of the sixties.
While still highly conservative, the 1980s were friendlier to women's activism.

The women in Clifton and Morenci believed that the strike permanently altered their lives. The process of radicalization
transformed the majority of woman who had been active in the strike. Some women became involved in organizing, finding
jobs both locally and nationally. Many "listed jobs or schooling on their agenda, some spoke of new arrangements for
household chores, and nearly all said that their women friends would continue to be very important in their lives"(178).
Women, who had previously lived in the spheres of their home and community, were members of a global organizing
movement.

After eighteen months of picketing and organizing the strike was called off and the union was decertified. While this struggle
is not a model of a conventional labor victory, the PD strike is an example of the powerful benefits of organizing. The role
women played in the strike highlights the transformative qualities of political and social movements. Through their partici-
pation, women unintentionally built a non-traditional feminist movement that enabled them to identify previously unrecognized
strengths. While the labor aspect was not successful, women won a battle they did not know they were fighting. The result
of the strike was a group of galvanized women whose lives were permanently changed.

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