Dubious Alliance

Dubious Alliance
Author: John Earl Haynes
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 1984
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816613249

Dubious Alliance was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The formation of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party of Minnesota took place in a context of intense factional struggle that lasted from the death of Governor Floyd B. Olson in 1936 to the election of Hubert Humphrey to the U.S. Senate in 1948. Dubious Alliance, the first full account of this critical chapter in the state's political history, has wider significance not only because many of the leading figures in the story have played a role in national politics, but also because it deals with issues—chief among them, the origins of Cold War liberalism— that matter far beyond the boundaries of a single state. John Haynes follows the struggle from its inception to the postwar battle within the new DFL between Popular Front adherents and anti-Communist liberals led by Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey. He makes clear that the struggle with the Popular Front was the formative political experience of Humphrey's generation; those who fought with him, and who became active in national politics—Orville Freeman, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Donald Fraser—did not seriously question Cold War foreign policy till well into the Vietnam era. Thorough and dispassionate, this book will help today's readers better understand the DFL's birth and the struggle that surrounded it—complex events long obscured by Cold War fears and political myth-making. John Earl Haynes is a historian by training—he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota—and also a specialist in tax policy. He was an adviser to Governor Wendell Anderson and later served as a congressional aide to Anderson and to Representative Martin Sabo. Haynes is now Director of Tax and Credit Analysis for the state of Minnesota.

Freedom Farmers

Freedom Farmers
Author: Monica M. White
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469643707

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Radicalism in the States

Radicalism in the States
Author: Richard M. Valelly
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1989-07-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226845357

Concentrated in states outside the Northeast and the South, state-level third-party radical politics has been more widespread than many realize. In the 1920s and 1930s, American political organizations strong enough to mount state-wide campaigns, and often capable of electing governors and members of Congress, emerged not only in Minnesota but in Wisconsin and Washington, in Oklahoma and Idaho, and in several other states. Richard M. Valelly treats in detail the political economy of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (1918-1944), the most successful radical, state-level party in American history. With the aid of numerous interviews of surviving organizers and participants in the party's existence, Valelly recreates the party's rise to power and subsequent decline, seeking answers to some broad, developmental questions. Why did this type of politics arise, and why did it collapse when it did? What does the party's history tell us about national political change? The answers lie, Valelly argues, in America's transition from the political economy of the 1920s to the New Deal. Combining case study and comparative state politics, he reexamines America's political economy prior to the New Deal and the scope and ironies of the New Deal's reorganization of American politics. The results compellingly support his argument that the federal government's increasing intervention in the economy profoundly transformed state politics. The interplay between national economy policy-making and federalism eventually reshaped the dynamics of interest-group politics and closed off the future of "state-level radicalism." The strength of this argument is highlighted by Valelly's cross-national comparison with Canadian politics. In vivid contrast to the fate of American movements, "province level radicalism" thrived in the Canadian political environment. In the course of analyzing one of the "supressed alternatives" of American politics, Valelly illuminates the influence of the national political economy on American political development. Radicalism in the States will interest students of economic protest, of national policy-making, of interest-group politics and party politics.

Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists

Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists
Author: Matthew Hild
Publisher:
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Hild shows that the Populist (or People's) Party, the most important third party of the 1890s, established itself most solidly in Texas, Alabama, and, under the guise of the earlier Union Labor Party, Arkansas, where farmer-labor political coalitions from the 1870s to mid-1880s had laid the groundwork for populism's expansion.

In Dubious Battle

In Dubious Battle
Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2006-05-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101118660

A riveting novel of labor strife and apocalyptic violence, now a major motion picture starring James Franco, Bryan Cranston, Selena Gomez, and Zach Braff A Penguin Classic At once a relentlessly fast-paced, admirably observed novel of social unrest and the story of a young man's struggle for identity, In Dubious Battle is set in the California apple country, where a strike by migrant workers against rapacious landowners spirals out of control, as a principled defiance metamorphoses into blind fanaticism. Caught in the upheaval is Jim Nolan, a once aimless man who find himself in the course of the strike, briefly becomes its leader, and is ultimately crushed in its service. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement

Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement
Author: William E. Forbath
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674037081

Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American “individualism.” In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe’s labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor’s outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.

Who Rules America Now?

Who Rules America Now?
Author: G. William Domhoff
Publisher: Touchstone
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN:

The author is convinced that there is a ruling class in America today. He examines the American power structure as it has developed in the 1980s. He presents systematic, empirical evidence that a fixed group of privileged people dominates the American economy and government. The book demonstrates that an upper class comprising only one-half of one percent of the population occupies key positions within the corporate community. It shows how leaders within this "power elite" reach government and dominate it through processes of special-interest lobbying, policy planning and candidate selection. It is written not to promote any political ideology, but to analyze our society with accuracy.

Cry from the Cotton

Cry from the Cotton
Author: Donald Grubbs
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2000-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1557285225

The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union was founded in eastern Arkansas in 1934 to protest the New Deal's enrichment of Southern cotton barons at the expense of suffering sharecroppers, both black and white. Their courageous struggle, in the face of determined and often violent resistance from their landlords, is the subject of this thorough study from Donald H. Grubbs, which was published to critical acclaim in 1971. Cry from the Cotton was the first full-scale look at the STFU and its leaders. It discloses that, although the union operated under noticeable socialist party sponsorship in its infancy, it drew much more upon the native Southern evangelical and populist traditions, much as the civil rights movement would do twenty-five years later. Grubbs convincingly demonstrates that while the STFU failed to gain immediate social justice for its members, it resulted in the formation of the Farm Security Administration, which even today continues to aid the rural poor, and it played a large part in forcing the formation of the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, whose spotlight on management terrorism helped the CIO toward success. The volume stands as a classic on labor issues and class struggle and still echoes with the haunting plea of the dispossessed for equity.

From Mission to Microchip

From Mission to Microchip
Author: Fred Glass
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 542
Release: 2016-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520288408

There is no better time than now to consider the labor history of the Golden State. While other states face declining union enrollment rates and the rollback of workersÕ rights, California unions are embracing working immigrants, and voters are protecting core worker rights. WhatÕs the difference? California has held an exceptional place in the imagination of Americans and immigrants since the Gold Rush, which saw the first of many waves of working people moving to the state to find work. From Mission to Microchip unearths the hidden stories of these people throughout CaliforniaÕs history. The difficult task of the stateÕs labor movement has been to overcome perceived barriers such as race, national origin, and language to unite newcomers and natives in their shared interest. As chronicled in this comprehensive history, workers have creatively used collective bargaining, politics, strikes, and varied organizing strategies to find common ground among CaliforniaÕs diverse communities and achieve a measure of economic fairness and social justice. This is an indispensible book for students and scholars of labor history and history of the West, as well as labor activists and organizers.Ê