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The United States in an Era of Global Revolution

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Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

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Abstract

During the early decades of the twentieth century in the US, waves of ‘revolutionary enthusiasm’ crashed upon the institutional ‘breakwaters’ erected by corporate capitalists, their state enablers, and reformist allies to deter or divert potential revolutionary mobilization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For the broad sweep and conflicted character of this period of revolt, see David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and his ‘Labor and the Republic in Industrializing America’, Le Mouvement Social 111 (April–June 1980), pp. 201–215. See also Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: Norton, 1987).

  2. 2.

    One of the best treatments of this period of corporate reconstruction is James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal of the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon, 1968); also Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, Law and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On the peculiarities of US imperialism see Alfred W. McCoy, Francisco A. Scarano and Courtney Johnson, ‘On the Tropic of Cancer: Transitions and Transformation in the U.S. Imperial State’, in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (eds.), Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

  3. 3.

    See, for instance, Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and for the corporatist response to the irrationalities of the marketplace see Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). On the challenges faced by the left in the interwar period see James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975); and James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

  4. 4.

    Quoted in Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2012), p. 25.

  5. 5.

    Eric Foner suggests that Americans were the first to face the challenges of ‘mass politics, mass culture, and mass consumption’ and the challenge of defining ‘socialist politics in a capitalist democracy’. And he observes: ‘Only time will tell whether the United States has been behind Europe in the development of socialism, or ahead of it, in socialism’s decline’. Eric Foner, ‘Why is there no socialism in the United States?’, History Workshop Journal 17 (1984), pp. 57–80, here p. 76.

  6. 6.

    McCoy, Scarano and Johnson, Tropic of Cancer, p. 3, pp. 5–6. For a case study of US statist expansion and experimentation, see Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2009). And on the ways in which the US conquest and colonization of the Philippines constructed a “conversation” about racial hierarchies and assimilation in both the Philippines and the US, see Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

  7. 7.

    McCoy, Scarano and Johnson, ‘On the Tropic of Cancer’, p. 3, pp. 5–6; for a case study in colonial administration as a model for state expansion, see Howard Gillette, ‘The Military Occupation of Cuba: Workshop for American Progressivism’, American Quarterly 25 (1973), pp. 410–425. On state-building and its limitations in the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century US, Stephen Skowronek, Building the New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and on the state in the service of expanding market capitalism, David Montgomery, 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, 1993).

  8. 8.

    Jeffrey A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 59–64. On the globalization of American capitalism, Panitch and Gindin see, The Making of Global Capitalism, pp. 25–43.

  9. 9.

    On the technological revolution in steel see David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 9–22.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., pp. 62–68; also Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture and Steel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).

  11. 11.

    See Margaret Byington’s classic Homestead: Households of a Milltown (New York: Charities Publications Committee, 1910); Roy Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business and Environmental Change (New York: Wiley, 1969); Paul U. Kellogg, The Pittsburgh Survey: Findings in Six Volumes (New York: Charities Publications Committee, 1909–14); and Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 96–124.

  12. 12.

    On the Pressed Steel Car strike see Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Quadrangle, 1973); Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement of the United States: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965).

  13. 13.

    Brody provides the most detailed account of the strike, Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 214–262 and idem, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965); also James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

  14. 14.

    On the Industrial Arbitrarion Congress and the Chicago Civic Federation see Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), pp. 48–55; and Richard Schneirov, ‘Labor and the New Liberalism in the Wake of the Pullman Strike’, in Nick Salvatore, Richard Schneirov and Shelton Stromquist (eds.), The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 204–232; on the Erdman Act, Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 259–263; James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal of the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1981), pp. 3–39 remains the best treatment of the National Civic Federation but also Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, p. 275, pp. 278–281 on the clashing approaches of the NCF and NAM.

  15. 15.

    See Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 23–55. Also essays by Pearson and Klug in Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson (eds.), Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), pp. 51–77, pp. 78–103; Lawrence Richards, Union-Free America: Workers and Anti-Union Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

  16. 16.

    Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, pp. 7–8.

  17. 17.

    See Annelise Orleck, Commonsense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, ‘Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South’, Journal of American History 73 (1986), pp. 354–383; also Janet K. Weaver, ‘Pearl McGill and the Promise of Industrial Unionism: Button Workers, the Women’s Trade Union League and the AFL’ (University of Iowa: unpublished PhD Dissertation, 2019).

  18. 18.

    See especially Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) on the ways in which a new women’s popular culture infused the rebellions of working-class women; also Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

  19. 19.

    Accounts of the “uprising of the 20,000” are numerous. See, for instance, Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980); Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire; Daniel Katz, All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (New York: New York University Press, 1911), pp. 50–59.

  20. 20.

    On the Lawrence strike see in particular Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort; and on the Paterson silk workers’ strike see Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); and Anne Huber Tripp, The IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  21. 21.

    The best account of these West Virginia mine wars remains David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), especially pp. 87–105, pp. 146–175; James R. Green has added significantly to the story in The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015), pp. 99–156.

  22. 22.

    See the account of the strike and the context of CFI industrial relations in Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, pp. 343–347. Also, perhaps most completely, Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

  23. 23.

    James R. Barrett, ‘Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930’, Journal of American History 79/3 (1992), pp. 996–1021; also Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields, pp. 91–95, pp. 155–169; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort, Katz, All Together Different, pp. 36–45, pp. 50–57; Donna Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988).

  24. 24.

    Daniel Swinarski, ‘Statistical Characteristics of Violent Strikes, 1908–1914’ (University of Iowa: Unpublished essay, 1991), p. 5, in this author’s possession. These data are also discussed in Stromquist, ‘Reinventing “The People”’, pp. 168–169. Less persuasive is Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Violence and Reform in American History (New York: New Viewpoints Press, 1978).

  25. 25.

    On the competing accounts of anarcho-syndicalist influences on the IWW see Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 45–118. Transnational manifestations are discussed in Peter Cole, David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer (eds.), Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (London: Pluto Press, 2017), especially pp. 1–26; also, for a transnational contemporary account, André Tridon, The New Unionism (New York: Huebsch, 1913).

  26. 26.

    See forthcoming Shelton Stromquist, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism (Verso Press, 2023).

  27. 27.

    Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 19; James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 43–45, p. 93, pp. 103–118.

  28. 28.

    The best general accounts of the war’s impact on US workers and their unions are Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor and Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

  29. 29.

    John W. Chambers, To Raise an Army: the Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 108. Also, Montgomery, Citizen Worker.

  30. 30.

    On employers determination to use the war to undermine an expanding and militant labor movement, see Harriet C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War 1917–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1957); William H. Thomas, Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).

  31. 31.

    David Montgomery, ‘The “New Unionism” and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America 1909–22’, Journal of Social History 7/4 (1974), pp. 509–529, here pp. 512–514. On wartime conflicts in the Bridgeport munitions industry, see Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–1936 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 11–40; and especially, idem., ‘Dilution and Craft Tradition: Bridgeport, Connecticut, Munitions Workers in 1915–1919’, Social Science History 4 (1980), pp. 105–124.

  32. 32.

    Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, pp. 370–375, pp. 395–410; Brody, Labor in Crisis; also Colin J. Davis, Power at Odds: the 1922 National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

  33. 33.

    On divisions within the labor movement over the war and preparedness before U.S. entry into the war, see McCartin, Labor’s Great War, pp. 12–63.

  34. 34.

    David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 30–36. On Gompers’ collaboration in the wartime crackdown on civil liberties of his left opponents, see Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties Between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp. 32–59.

  35. 35.

    Chambers, To Raise an Army, pp. 99–100.

  36. 36.

    Australia represented another outlier. For comparisons of opposition to war and conscription in the US and Australia, see essays by Robin Archer, Verity Burgmann and Jeffrey Johnson, Shelton Stromquist, and Diane Kirkby in Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist (eds.), Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

  37. 37.

    On the general nativist currents inflamed in the U.S. during WWI and specific attacks on German immigrants see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 195–200, pp. 204–209, p. 213; see also Carl Wittke, German-Americans and the World War (Columbus: Ohio State Historical Society, 1936), pp. 163–196.

  38. 38.

    Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: from 1870–1976 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 110–115.

  39. 39.

    H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, pp. 50–68 (New York Times quoted, p. 60); William H. Thomas, Unsafe for Democracy, describes the patterns of local action against war dissenters that federal agents either fomented or failed to restrain, pp. 89–109, pp. 146–171; Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, on the use of federal troops and agents to target striking workers deemed disloyal, pp. 107–121; Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); on the massive roundups and detention of ‘slackers’, pp. 41–53; William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 146–151 on federal suppression of publications and the mails.

  40. 40.

    Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, pp. 137–143, quotation on p. 153. Robert Goldstein notes that the most aggressive and violent targeting of the Socialist Party came in the aftermath of its victories at the polls in municipalities in November 1917, Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, pp. 119–121.

  41. 41.

    Montgomery, ‘The “New Unionism” and the Transformation of Workers’; McCartin, Labor’s Great War, pp. 90–119.

  42. 42.

    McCartin, Labor’s Great War, pp. 136–146; also Cecelia Bucki, ‘Dilution and Craft Tradition: Bridgeport, Connecticut, Munitions Workers in 1915–1919’.

  43. 43.

    Davis, Power at Odds, pp. 36–56.

  44. 44.

    Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, pp. 389–391.

  45. 45.

    Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 25–39.

  46. 46.

    On the Great Steel Strike, Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 231–262; idem., Labor in Crisis. And Barrett, William Z. Foster.

  47. 47.

    Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1977), pp. 43–94.

  48. 48.

    Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, p. 389; Davis, Power at Odds, pp. 64–165.

  49. 49.

    David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

  50. 50.

    Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, 45–53 (quotation on 49).

  51. 51.

    Panitch and Gindin (quotations on 52, 53).

  52. 52.

    The most compelling account of the changing culture of immigrant working-class America and its effects on political mobilization in the 1930s is Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal; also Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: the Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). And for a collection of local cases of labor’s revolt, ‘We Are All Leaders’: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s, Staughton Lynd, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

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  1. Department of History, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Shelton Stromquist

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    Stefan Berger

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    Klaus Weinhauer

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Stromquist, S. (2023). The United States in an Era of Global Revolution. In: Berger, S., Weinhauer, K. (eds) Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04465-6_12

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