Bibliographical Essay

The first edition of this book had a bibliographical essay of more than twenty pages. Here, I offer something updated but also more succinct. Additional sources can be found in the first edition and also in bibliographies of works listed here.

Companion Volumes

A close companion volume to this one has now come out in its own second edition, by my friend Michael Yates, titled Why Unions Matter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). This is a handy, well-written resource that combines history, sociology, economics, and political science. The two books, read together, reinforce each other—just as the friendship of the two authors gave strength and insight to each.

Given that this book offers a short history of the U.S. working class, some readers may want to turn their attention to additional books that offer more detail. Different facets of labor’s story are drawn together in a variety of accounts.

Jeremy Brecher focuses on labor insurgencies from the bottom up in his classic Strike!, Revised, Expanded, and Updated Edition (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), while Paul Buhle focuses on top-down bureaucratic labor conservatism in Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).

Patricia Cayo Sexton chronicles the repressive anti-labor efforts of the powerful in The War on Labor and the Left: Understanding America’s Unique Conservatism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), while Sharon Smith gives a sense of unquenchable struggle in Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006).

Bill Fletcher Jr. provides a set of capable refutations to anti-labor arguments in “They’re Bankrupting Us!” and 20 Other Myths about Unions (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), while Stanley Aronowitz weaves personal and scholarly reflections into a rumination on how future labor victories might be won in The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement (London: Verso, 2014).

Broader Contexts

It makes sense to consult general histories of the United States to contextualize the experience and development of the U.S. working class. One of the most succinct, but quite good, is Paul Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). A longer, very readable account can be found in Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, Fourth Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). A now classic left-wing synthesis is Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). A richly multi-cultural tapestry highlighting the intersection of class and ethnicity is Ronald Takaki’s beautifully written A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown, 2008).

It also makes sense to consider the historical dynamics of the economic system and labor process. Louis M. Hacker’s The Triumph of American Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), while certainly dated, has never quite been surpassed. Much is added, in various ways, by such studies as Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War, Revised Edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998); and David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

The centrality of the political left to the history of U.S. labor has been veiled all too often, but this does a disservice to those who seek to understand what actually happened in history. A useful resource on the history of the U.S. left is Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Classics

Several older classic works on the U.S. labor movement are worth exploring. The first is a two-volume study by the experienced and insightful German-American associate of Karl Marx, Friedrich Sorge: Labor Movement in the United States: A History of the American Working Class from Colonial Times to 1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977) and Labor Movement in the United States: A History of the American Working Class from 1890 to 1896 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987).

The work of ex-socialist Selig Perlman is an especially valuable component of John R. Commons and his coeditors (David J. Saposs, Helen L. Sumner, E. B. Mittelman, H.E. Hoagland, John B. Andres, Selig Perlman, Philip Taft) in History of Labor in the United States, 4 volumes (New York: Macmillan, 1918–1935).

An attempt to compose a Marxist version of the work of Commons et al. can be found in Philip S. Foner, A History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 10 volumes (New York: International Publishers, 1947–1994).

Louis Adamic’s Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008) surveys certain dynamics that add important dimensions to the story.

It may be reasonable, here, to draw attention to the work of U.S. labor historians who provided especially important examples to me as I engaged with the history of the working class.

One such scholar was my teacher, David Montgomery, whose works included: Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Some of Herbert Gutman’s most marvelous work is gathered in two volumes of essays: Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) and Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, edited by Ira Berlin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

David Brody’s books focused on the early twentieth century— Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) and Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987)—but his more wide-ranging essays are gathered in three volumes: Workers in Industrial America, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); In Labor’s Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

Also worthy of mention is Melvyn Dubofsky, whose We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), Industrialism and the American Worker 1865–1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing, 1975), and essays in Hard Work: The Making of Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000) have exerted strong influence.

From the 1930s to 2000

For the triumph of industrial unionism in the 1930s, readers can consult Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO, 1936–1955 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), and Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

The accounts of Preis and Zieger go through the 1940s and conclude in the 1950s with the AFL-CIO merger. An outstanding study of the 1940s by George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), marks the first phase of that era, and the story is taken into the 1950s and 1960s with Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003). The interplay of Communism and anti-Communism in all of this is discussed in different ways in two intelligent and informative works—Len De Caux, Labor Radical: From the Wobblies to the CIO, A Personal History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) and Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)—and in Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Studies on developments of the late twentieth century include two fine works by Michael K. Honey—Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) and Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008)—as well as Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Calvin Winslow, eds., Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s (London: Verso, 2010); and Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (London: Verso, 1988).

Focal Points

Focusing on laboring women are works by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977) and Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Also important is Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, eds., America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present, Revised Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). A rich collection of oral histories can be found in Brigit O’Farrell and Joyce L. Kornbluh, eds., Rocking the Boat: Union Women’s Voices, 1915–1975 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). A valuable assortment of scholarly essays is provided by Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Studies of the African-American working-class experience include William Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981 (New York: International Publishers, 1982), Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), and Robert H. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007). For a documentary collection, see Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., Black Workers: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Collections of scholarly essays are available in Joe Trotter, Earl Lewis, Tera Hunter, eds., The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Eric Arnesen, ed., The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). A scholarly-activist blend of past and hoped-for future is presented in Manning Marable, Immanuel Ness, and Joseph Wilson, eds., Race and Labor Matters in the New U.S. Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2006).

In the fascinating Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers: How Insurgents Transformed the Labor Movement (self-published, 2004), ninety-year-old labor militant Herman Benson draws on decades of experience to focus on how efforts to reform the labor movement can transform it into a vibrantly democratic, inclusive, and effective force. A similar focus, with many practical tips, can be found in Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle, Democracy Is Power: Rebuilding Unions from the Bottom Up (Detroit: Labor Notes, 1999).

A massive and rich focus on strikes—analyzing reasons for past defeats and victories—can be found in the informative Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, eds., The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History (New York: Routledge, 2009).

The Past Flows into the Future

Those of us with a life in two centuries—born in the twentieth, but coping with realities of the twenty-first—may have a keener sense than others of how the past flows into the future. If we have lived long enough, we have seen amazing changes.

Two capable histories of U.S. labor in the century in which we were born—Robert H. Zieger and Gilbert J. Gall, American Workers, American Unions (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002) and Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)—may help to ground us in what went on before today.

But scholars must have a sense of the present in order to make sense of the past, just as activists need to comprehend new realities if there is any hope of making use of such understanding of the past. In this, we may be helped by the spate of new works, such as Immanuel Ness, Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and the New Path toward Social Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), and Kim Moody, In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization and Strategy in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

Spirit and Creativity

As scholars seek to comprehend the past, they can be helped by listening to the voices of those who engaged in making the history that is now being studied. As activists cope with the present and struggle for a better future, they can find empowerment through interaction with those who were engaged in past efforts to make their way in life, and to struggle for dignity and justice.

The spirit of those who labored and struggled in times long passed can be found in the words they left behind. There are different works that enable us to hear those voices. Studs Terkel, in his book Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (New York: The New Press, 1997), helps us listen to a rich variety of women and men, with diverse work and life experience, while Staughton and Alice Lynd, eds., Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers, Second Edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012) set down the reminiscences and reflections of experienced labor activists who made history in the 1930s and later. In Paul Le Blanc, Work and Struggle: Voices from U.S. Labor Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 2010), we can learn from speeches and writings of freedom fighters associated with the working class—Tom Paine, Frederick Douglass, “Mother” Mary Jones, Eugene V. Debs, Fannia Cohn, A. Philip Randolph, Genora Dollinger, Cesar Chavez, and others.

Such voices can also be heard in innumerable creative works—poems and songs, short stories, novels, reminiscences—such as those represented in the more than 900 pages of Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy, ed., American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

The men and women and children from the past come to life for us through images as well—photographs and creative artwork—in books such as those that can be found in William Cahn, ed., A Pictorial History of American Labor (New York: Crown Publishers, 1972), Richard B. Morris, ed., The U.S. Department of Labor Bicentennial History of the American Worker (Washington, DC: 1976), and Joyce Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011). Only the third title is in print—perhaps some day the living past will be returned to us with new editions of the first two (for which it is still worth searching libraries and rare book dealers).

There are also motion pictures—documentaries and fictional presentations—which convey some of labor’s rich and multi-faceted story, and 350 of these are identified in Tom Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films about Labor (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 2003).