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THREE STRIKES

THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF LABOR’S LAST CENTURY

Important material out of the shadows to which so much labor history is exiled.

Top-drawer narrative histories of two important strikes, and a more amorphous consideration of musicians’ rights to their work, from three progressive historians.

Zinn (The Future of History, 1999, etc.) tackles the Colorado coal strike of 1913–14, during which 11 children and 2 women were found burned to death under tents set ablaze by National Guardsmen in a notorious incident known as the Ludlow Massacre. Zinn is a fine storyteller, keeping the tone low but passionate as he makes plain as day the many evils of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s coal operation, a veritable fiefdom unto itself, keeping workers in its harness from cradle to grave. He also does a good job highlighting how the New York Times acted in collusion with the coal operators as part of a larger cultural air-brushing of dramatic and violent labor events into oblivion. Frank (American Studies/UC Santa Cruz; Buy American, 1999) displays a jazzier style as he recreates the Woolworth’s sit-down strike of 1937 in Detroit. (“Woolworth’s was a palace built for working-class people. The big fluted columns were made of concrete, not marble, then painted shiny bright colors.”) He too stands foursquare behind the strikers: young white women, poorly paid in dead-end jobs, caught in the revolving door of unskilled work. The radical Waiters’ and Waitresses’ Union of Detroit capitalized on the canny tactic of the sit-down strike, which kept owners from locking out workers and hiring scabs, and the women managed to subvert journalists’ preoccupation with their sex. Kelley (History/NYU; Race Rebels, 1994) tries to get a sense of musicians’ rights through the unsuccessful American Federation of Musicians strike against theater owners in 1936. The topic is unwieldy, as can be seen when looking at today’s controversies Napster and MP3, and Kelley’s broader question—voiced, not answered—is “what happens when working-class consumption of popular culture overrides the interests or concerns of popular culture workers?”

Important material out of the shadows to which so much labor history is exiled.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2001

ISBN: 0-8070-5012-1

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001

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THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

THE CRISIS OF CLASSICAL MODERNITY

Peukert, who died in 1990 at age 39, also wrote Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. This new book is not quite everyday life under the Weimar Republic, but it does shift the emphasis from the doings of a few old men—the military elite who handed the country over to Hitler—to the prevailing anguish among all classes of Germans during the 12 years the Republic survived. Peukert sums up this anguish as ``the crisis of classical modernity.'' He notes that, since 1870, Germany had already been subjected to an accelerated process of modernization: industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, rationalization of daily life. Dislocations that were mild and bearable under the prosperous empire became killers in the Weimar years, after military defeat and with two horrendous economic crises in ten years. Weimar, in short, was not something completely new in German history. It was more of the same under impossible conditions. Peukert offers new angles on the period, all designed to show that it wasn't some fatal flaw in the German character that produced Hitler, but a series of complex problems all striking at once. Demographics, for example: A baby boom in 1900-10 flooded the job market just at the start of the Depression, and the Nazis recruited heavily among these young unemployed. Peukert also points out surprising continuities between Weimar and what followed. Laws against abortion and homosexuality never came off the books in those supposedly freewheeling years. Women who were married weren't supposed to work, were even fired from civil-service jobs. Nazi race madness was anticipated by a concern for eugenics by both the right and the left, going back decades. Writing to amplify and correct other historians, Peukert is dense, allusive, and sometimes crabbed. This is definitely not Weimar for beginners, and perhaps is best read as part of Germany's process of VergangenheitsbewÑltigung—coming to terms with the past. Or as a warning of how long stretches of hard times can bring out the worst in people.

Pub Date: May 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-8090-9674-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992

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PEA RIDGE

CIVIL WAR CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST

Two history professors (Shea: Univ. of Arkansas at Monticello; Hess: Lincoln Memorial Univ.) offer an absorbing analysis of an important early conflict in the Civil War. Though often regarded as having only peripheral strategic importance, the battle of Pea Ridge (Arkansas), the authors explain, led to Union control of Missouri and dominance of the entire trans-Mississippi region. In early 1962, a large Confederate army, assisted by a pro-Confederate governor and a secessionist state guard, posed a serious threat to Missouri's membership in the Union. As the pro-Confederate state-guard commander began an apparent retreat to obtain supplies and support from the regular Confederate army, Union forces under Samuel Curtis (who in turn was commanded by Henry W. Halleck) launched an aggressive offensive drive. Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed Earl Van Dorn, a dashing but untalented general, as overall Confederate commander—but though Van Dorn attempted to gain the initiative, what should have been a major Confederate threat to Missouri turned instead into a Federal invasion of Arkansas when Curtis's men- -marching lightly and far from Union supply lines—attacked rather than fall back into Missouri. During the fighting at Pea Ridge (March 6-8, 1862)—which was really more a strategically unified series of separate battles than a single engagement—Curtis kept the Confederate forces separated and ultimately drove them from the field. And by the authors' account, Halleck—who is not often treated kindly by historians—emerges as the unlikely hero who conceived the vigorous Federal strategy. After the battle, Van Dorn transferred his army to the eastern side of the Mississippi, allowing the Union to contain Confederate forces there. Shea and Hess rightly contend that this early Union victory, won ``in the springtime of northern hopes,'' secured Federal domination of the Mississippi region. A thoroughly researched and well-told account of an important but often neglected Civil War encounter. (Eighteen maps.)

Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1992

ISBN: 0-8078-2042-3

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992

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