American Labor And American Democracy

Author : William Walling
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2017-11-30
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781351298742

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American Labor and American Democracy by William Walling Pdf

In American Labor and American Democracy, William English Walling drew on his close association with Samuel Gompers and other leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to write the authoritative history of the labor movement in the first quarter of the twentieth century.Walling's position was that twentieth-century American democracy was not stagnant. It was a living, developing trend in society, with the AFL as its most progressive force. There could be no passive acceptance of American institutions as they stood: government in the twentieth century would need to develop into a medium for attaining social ideals and needs beyond individual realization. The aim of American labor was a pluralistic economic democracy in which government and industry would be guided by economic organizations representing not only labor, but every essential social group. Richard Schneirov, in his introduction to this new edition of a classic book, paints a rich and detailed picture of Walling's political and intellectual journey, and of his many contributions to the synthesis of democratic and socialist principles. American Labor and American Democracy is an important work that will help reevaluate our understanding of labor and working-class history, establish a new perspective on today's labor movement, and shed light on the relationship of labor to socialism, capitalism, democracy, and social movements; the nature of the large business corporation; and the relationship of special interest groups to democracy.William English Walling (1877-1936) was a social reform activist who helped found the National Women's Trade Union League in 1903 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. He authored several influential works, including Socialism as it Is: A Survey of the World-Wide Revolutionary Movement, The Larger Aspects of Socialism, Progessivism and After, and The Socialists and the War. Richard Schneirov is professor of history at Indiana State University, and has also taught at The Ohio State University and the Institut f(3)r England und Amerikastudien at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. He is the author of Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97, which was awarded the Urban History Association's prize for best urban history in North America for 1998 and co-edited The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s.

Author : Clayton Sinyai
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2018-07-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781501729911

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Schools of Democracy by Clayton Sinyai Pdf

In this new political history of the labor movement, Clayton Sinyai examines the relationship between labor activism and the American democratic tradition. Sinyai shows how America's working people and union leaders debated the first questions of democratic theory—and in the process educated themselves about the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship. In tracing the course of the American labor movement from the founding of the Knights of Labor in the 1870s to the 1968 presidential election and its aftermath, Sinyai explores the political dimensions of collective bargaining, the structures of unions and businesses, and labor's relationships with political parties and other social movements. Schools of Democracy analyzes how labor activists wrestled with fundamental aspects of political philosophy and the development of American democracy, including majority rule versus individual liberty, the rule of law, and the qualifications required of citizens of a democracy. Offering a balanced assessment of mainstream leaders of American labor, from Samuel Gompers to George Meany, and their radical critics, including the Socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World, Sinyai provides an unusual and refreshing perspective on American labor history.

Author : William English Walling,Richard Schneirov
Publisher : Transaction Pub
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1926
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1412804728

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American Labor and American Democracy by William English Walling,Richard Schneirov Pdf

In Liberalism, Puritanism and the Colonial Mind, Parrington gives a brilliant account of the beginning and development in American letters, the early ideas that have come to be reckoned as traditionally American--how they came into being, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our ideals and institutions. In doing so, the author follows the path of political, economic, and social development. This first of a three-volume work carries the account from early beginnings in Puritan New England to the triumph of Jefferson and back-country agrarianism. This first part of Main Currents in American Thought deals with intellectual backgrounds, especially with those diverse systems of European thought that have domesticated themselves in America. Parrington examines the legacies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to the colonial settlements and, in particular, the transplanting to America of old-world liberalisms. The liberalisms discussed in this book derive from two primary sources, English Independency and French Romantic theory, supplemented by English Whiggery. From the first came the revolutionary doctrine of natural rights, clarified by thinkers ranging from Roger Williams to John Locke. A doctrine that destroyed the philosophical sanction of divine right and substituted it for the traditional absolutism was formed. This struggle largely determined the course of development in early New England. A new introduction by Bruce Brown highlights the life of Vernon Louis Parrington and explains the importance of this Pulitzer-Prize winning study.

Author : Charles Bergquist
Publisher : Verso
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 1996-11-17
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : UOM:39076001761175

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Labor and the Course of American Democracy by Charles Bergquist Pdf

The American hemisphere is now more tightly interconnected than ever before, with the trend toward greater economic, social and cultural integration apparently certain to continue. In this landmark text, Charles Bergquist offers a fresh interpretation of the historical background to this integration from the unusual perspective of labor. Focusing on slices of US history, and built around critiques of a handful of classic and influential texts, his five essays form not a conventional narrative history but rather a study in the construction of historical meaning, and an invitation to make use of history in the forging of a new, more democratic understanding of politics in the Americas. The book opens with an illustration of how the different labor systems of colonial America best explain the great disparity in development and power between the US and Latin America today. It goes on to link the origins of US imperialism to labor’s democratic studies at home, and to explore labor’s role in the Latin American social revolutions, before presenting an analysis of popular culture in the Americas in which Donald Duck is revealed as the representative of all workers. Will Donald rewrite the history books and, in our post-Cold War era, realize his democratic potential? Or will he bungle the job and succumb to the postmodern confusions of the capitalists’ “New World Order?”

Author : Rosanne Currarino
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2010-10-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780252090103

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The Labor Question in America by Rosanne Currarino Pdf

In The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age, Rosanne Currarino traces the struggle to define the nature of democratic life in an era of industrial strife. As Americans confronted the glaring disparity between democracy's promises of independence and prosperity and the grim realities of economic want and wage labor, they asked, "What should constitute full participation in American society? What standard of living should citizens expect and demand?" Currarino traces the diverse efforts to answer to these questions, from the fledgling trade union movement to contests over immigration, from economic theory to popular literature, from legal debates to social reform. The contradictory answers that emerged--one stressing economic participation in a consumer society, the other emphasizing property ownership and self-reliance--remain pressing today as contemporary scholars, journalists, and social critics grapple with the meaning of democracy in post-industrial America.

Author : Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2012-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781400838523

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State of the Union by Nelson Lichtenstein Pdf

In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.

Author : Leon Fink
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2022-10-17
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780252054464

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Workingmen's Democracy by Leon Fink Pdf

Focusing on the operation and influence of the Knights of Labor—the leading labor organization of the nineteenth century—Workingmen's Democracy explores the dreams, achievements, and failures of a movement that sought to renew the democratic potential of American institutions. Runner-up in both the John H. Dunning Prize and Albert J. Beveridge Award competitions

Author : Charles Bergquist
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 1996-11-17
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781859841266

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Labor and the Course of American Democracy by Charles Bergquist Pdf

The American hemisphere is now more tightly interconnected than ever before, with the trend toward greater economic, social and cultural integration apparently certain to continue. In this landmark text, Charles Bergquist offers a fresh interpretation of the historical background to this integration from the unusual perspective of labor. Focusing on slices of US history, and built around critiques of a handful of classic and influential texts, his five essays form not a conventional narrative history but rather a study in the construction of historical meaning, and an invitation to make use of history in the forging of a new, more democratic understanding of politics in the Americas. The book opens with an illustration of how the different labor systems of colonial America best explain the great disparity in development and power between the US and Latin America today. It goes on to link the origins of US imperialism to labor’s democratic studies at home, and to explore labor’s role in the Latin American social revolutions, before presenting an analysis of popular culture in the Americas in which Donald Duck is revealed as the representative of all workers. Will Donald rewrite the history books and, in our post-Cold War era, realize his democratic potential? Or will he bungle the job and succumb to the postmodern confusions of the capitalists’ “New World Order?”

Author : Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2013-08-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691160276

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State of the Union by Nelson Lichtenstein Pdf

In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations. This edition includes a new preface in which Lichtenstein engages with many of those who have offered commentary on State of the Union and evaluates the historical literature that has emerged in the decade since the book's initial publication. He also brings his narrative into the current moment with a final chapter, "Obama's America: Liberalism without Unions.?

Author : Joseph A. McCartin
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2017-11-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781469617039

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Labor’s Great War by Joseph A. McCartin Pdf

Since World War I, says Joseph McCartin, the central problem of American labor relations has been the struggle among workers, managers, and state officials to reconcile democracy and authority in the workplace. In his comprehensive look at labor issues during the decade of the Great War, McCartin explores the political, economic, and social forces that gave rise to this conflict and shows how rising labor militancy and the sudden erosion of managerial control in wartime workplaces combined to create an industrial crisis. The search for a resolution to this crisis led to the formation of an influential coalition of labor Democrats, AFL unionists, and Progressive activists on the eve of U.S. entry into the war. Though the coalition's efforts in pursuit of industrial democracy were eventually frustrated by powerful forces in business and government and by internal rifts within the movement itself, McCartin shows how the shared quest helped cement the ties between unionists and the Democratic Party that would subsequently shape much New Deal legislation and would continue to influence the course of American political and labor history to the present day.

Author : Nelson Lichtenstein,Howell John Harris
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 1996-07-13
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0521566223

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Industrial Democracy in America by Nelson Lichtenstein,Howell John Harris Pdf

A close examination of what came to be known among collars of any colour as 'the labour problem' with the railroad strikes of the 1870s.

Author : Paul Buhle,Alan Dawley
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1985
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0252012216

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Working for Democracy by Paul Buhle,Alan Dawley Pdf

Written by some of our nation's top historians, Working for Democracy is the first book to examine the politics of American workers from the revolution to the present in terms of broad struggles for power in society at large. In more than a dozen chapters, the topics range from the committees of artisan "republicans" at the time of the American Revolution to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Whether the subject is the anti-slavery movement, the New Deal coalition, the Wobblies, or women workers, Working For Democracy is a testament to the struggles of workers everywhere in America.

Author : Foster Rhea Dulles
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1960
Category : Labor
ISBN : UCAL:B4273697

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Labor in America by Foster Rhea Dulles Pdf

Author : Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN : 0691057680

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State of the Union by Nelson Lichtenstein Pdf

One hundred years of labor history is explored in this detailed status report on the state of unions in America and the continuing evolution of the relationship between management and labor.

Author : Paul W. Posner,Viviana Patroni,Jean François Mayer
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2018-08-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9781683400561

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Labor Politics in Latin America by Paul W. Posner,Viviana Patroni,Jean François Mayer Pdf

In recent decades, Latin American countries have sought to modernize their labor market institutions to remain competitive in the face of increasing globalization. This book evaluates the impact of such neoliberal reforms on labor movements and workers’ rights in the region through comparative analyses of labor politics in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Using these five key cases, the authors assess the capacity of workers and working-class organizations to advance their demands and bring about a more just distribution of economic gains in an era in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. In particular, their findings challenge the purported benefits of labor market flexibility—the freedom of employers to adjust their workforces as needed—which has been touted as a way to reduce income inequality and unemployment. In-depth case studies show how flexibilization as well as privatization, trade liberalization, and economic deregulation have undermined organized labor in all of these countries, leading to the current internal fragmentation of unions and their inability to promote counterreforms or increase collective bargaining. This assessment concludes that even with substantial variation among countries in how reforms have been implemented, most workers in the region have experienced increasing precarity, informal employment, and weaker labor movements. This book provides vital insights into whether these movements have the potential to regain influence and represent working people’s interests effectively in the future.