Preface to the 2016 Edition

It is a pleasure to see a new edition of this short history of the U.S. working class made available by Haymarket Books—particularly with a new cover that highlights the diversity of those whose lives and labor have always kept our country running. In the book’s introduction, I define what I mean by working class (a term I much prefer to the fuzziness of middle class)—it is consistent with the recent Occupy movement’s notion of “the 99%,” which means it refers to most of us, regardless of precise percentages. The richness in composition of today’s working-class majority is matched by the richness of our history, which this book seeks to convey.

At the present moment, a majority of the people in the United States seem to face—in some important ways—nastier realities than was the case when I was growing up. What has been made of our country and of our world, by those whose power and policies have been dominant, is shameful and outrageous and horrific. Growing numbers of people are becoming fearful, angry, and restive over this state of affairs, with a sense that things should be better than they are. This book helps to show how laboring people in the past faced similar hard times, and through solidarity and struggle they brought about many positive changes in their lives. Some of these changes are still of benefit to us today.

There is much that has happened since the first appearance of this book. Rather than attempting a fifteen-year update, we can put it quite simply: The situation of the broadly defined U.S. working class is worse in 2016 than it was in 1999. Yet there are also new strengths coming to the fore. Surveying the rich diversity of race and ethnicity that makes up our working-class majority, Martin Luther King Jr. commented back in the 1960s: “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” This elemental understanding is shared more widely today than was the case back then, and there has also been, in our society, the deepened awareness that “great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment” (as Karl Marx once noted). There are still, of course, powerful forces at work to set us against each other, but as the labor radicals of the old Industrial Workers of the World pointed out: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” The organized labor movement has “seen better days,” to put it mildly. But what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. History shows that hard times, sooner or later, generate hard-fought struggles through which we’re capable of winning victories and bringing better times.

It is my belief that we can learn from the past in order to shape a better future. In striving to make this so, we must draw from the inspiring vision, the great underlying spirit, that animated some of labor’s greatest spokespeople (some of whose names are unknown), who spoke and wrote and sang about a better world of freedom, truly creative labor, and genuine community that can and must be won for all of us. Elements from such speeches and writings and songs pepper these pages.

In the first edition of this book, I foolishly, absent-mindedly left out a song that has inspired many, and may inspire many more. It grew out of the great Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912, described in these pages. Women played a central role in that hard-fought but successful struggle, and for some this threw into bold relief the passion and strength of the half of humanity whose liberation from oppression is pivotal to the liberation of all. The radical poet James Oppenheim captured that revolutionary spirit in his poem “Bread and Roses.” My failure to include it earlier enables me to share it now as the conclusion of this new preface.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!