Tom Mackaman

New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor 1914-1924

$35.00

By 1914, millions of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were doing the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in America’s mines, mills and factories. From 1916 through 1922, immigrants pushed forward the greatest wave of strikes in U.S. labor history and nurtured new forms of labor radicalism. In response, government and industry, supported by deputized nationalist organizations, launched a campaign of “100 percent Americanism,” developed new labor and immigration policies, and enacted the 1924 National Origins Act, which brought to an end mass European immigration.

New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor is centered on three specific sections of the working class in the US: coal miners in Illinois, steelworkers in the 1919 national steel strike, and miners in Northern Minnesota’s iron range. The three industries were constituent parts of the emerging national steel industry and were linked by the Great Lakes as an internal waterway.

The author has done what historians must strive to do: hold a lantern to those overlooked but decisive moments in history the lessons of which must be assimilated to combat political reaction today.

 

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Millions of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were by 1914 doing the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in America’s mines, mills and factories. From 1916 through 1922, immigrants pushed forward the greatest wave of strikes in U.S. labor history and nurtured new forms of labor radicalism. In response, government and industry, supported by deputized nationalist organizations, launched a campaign of “100 percent Americanism,” developed new labor and immigration policies, and enacted the 1924 National Origins Act, which brought to an end mass European immigration.

New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor is centered on three specific sections of the working class in the US: coal miners in Illinois, steelworkers in the 1919 national steel strike, and miners in Northern Minnesota’s iron range. The three industries were constituent parts of the emerging national steel industry and were linked by the Great Lakes as an internal waterway.

The author has done what historians must strive to do: hold a lantern to those overlooked but decisive moments in history the lessons of which must be assimilated to combat political reaction today.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: “Got a match?”
1. “Our lives, our thoughts and our allegiance”: New Immigrants in 1914
2. “A war of coal and iron”: 1914–1917
3. Securing “the industrial forts of America”: 1917–1918
4. “The Revolt of the ­Rank and File”: 1919
5. Reaction in New Country and Old: 1920–1924
Epilogue: The ­Nation-State, Immigration Restriction and Fordism

Weight 1.25 lbs
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Paperback

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