Ben Maby

It seems like the conversation on the labor left, and definitely on the left, is at a point where there's a lot of excitement, opportunity. Everybody recognizes that, but there's not a clear agreement on how to seize the opportunity.

Ben Maby

And so the history of the 1930s is a perfect example of a moment when little activist groups and existing institutions managed together to create an entirely new labor movement.

Speaker 2

Not in the Federation of Labor are the 30 million unskilled workers, the rank and file of labor in the nation's great mass production industries: oil, textiles, rubber, steel. Again and again, Miner Lewis has proposed their organization.

Speaker 3

The American Federation of Labor must undertake to so revise its policy that it can welcome the admission of these millions of workers into the industrial form of organization for which they clamor.

Speaker 2

But other AFOL executives fear that the organization of mass workers might lead to radicalism.

Speaker 3

And the great heart of the American Federation of Labor is sound, and as long as it remains sound, communism will never gain a hold in America.

Speaker 2

Unable to convert PAFFF unionists to his way of thinking, Miner Lewis at last resigned from the Vice Presidency of the Federation of Labor, marched up and down the US spreading the gospel of industrial unionism. To organize the half million workers of the mighty steel industry, long an impenetrable stronghold of the open shop,

Speaker 2

he formed the Committee for Industrial Organization, backed by 10 of the Federation of Labor's biggest unions. Into Pittsburgh, heart of steeldom, marched this tough, two-fisted coal miner to launch an organization drive that would cost $75,000 a month.

Speaker 3

Gentlemen, this meeting has been called to secure definite financial.

Ben Maby

Okay, well, here's a passage from the conclusion of The Many and the Few, Henry Kraus's story of the Flint sit-down strikes and the organization of the OAW. This is taking place after the conclusion of the first GM contract in a meeting hall during a celebration. Henry Kraus, the editor of the OAW newspaper.

Ben Maby

Leaving, I noticed two young fellows near the door. They had been drinking, and one of them was trying to explain something to his buddy. His words came garbled, and as though realizing that he was not making himself understood, he shook his head violently several times. Finally, almost tearful, he exclaimed as from the very depths of his being,

Ben Maby

"Emmett, you got to believe me. It ain't me that's talking. It's the CIO in me." This little expression delighted me, despite the unworthy circumstances in which it was spoken, for it seemed to give a flashing insight into the great depth of meaning that this magic entity, the CIO, had so swiftly attained for the workers.

Ben Maby

It was not yet the millennium, as this poor, sodden fellow reminded one. It was chiefly significant, rather, for its tremendous implications of an immense collective unity in power based on simple loyalty to group interest.

Speaker 4

Let me tell you of a sailor, Harry Bridges is his name, an honest union leader who the bosses tried to frame.

Ben Maby

Hey, listeners. Hey, everybody. My name is Ben Maby, and I'm an editor based in New York City and a member organizer with both the News Guild CWA and the Crown Heights Tenant Union. You're listening to our first episode, an inaugural episode, a preview episode for The Fragile Juggernaut, a limited-run podcast on the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO,

Ben Maby

and the world-shaking strikes and struggles amongst mass industry workers in the United States in the 1930s and '40s, the CIO sometimes catalyzed and created, and that sometimes it kind of channeled to its own ends.

Speaker 4

FBI is worried. The bosses, they are scared. They can't depart six million men, they know. And we're not gonna let them send Harry over the sea. We'll fight for Harry Bridges and build the CIO.

Ben Maby

But what was the CIO on a basic level? The answer is that during the Great Depression and World War II, millions and millions of American workers took part in new forms of labor struggle and union organizing. Most significantly, these efforts led to the unionization of the mass production industries, which dominated the American economy, industries like auto, steel, rubber, and electrical products.

Ben Maby

Today, we might think of this type of manufacturing worker as the paradigmatic union member. But until the 1930s, these big mass production industries had successfully resisted union organization. Many people thought they were inherently unorganizable. But in a short span of years, workers in these industries organized themselves into the industrial unions of the CIO. This acronym actually had two meanings.

Ben Maby

Initially, it stood for the Committee for Industrial Organization and later for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But the key word here in both cases is industrial. An industrial union is one which includes all the workers in an industry, regardless of their specific trade or skill. Industrial unionism was an old idea, but it had never succeeded in the US at scale until the CIO.

Ben Maby

And that scale really was immense. To take just one telling example, over the course of the year 1946, almost five million workers were directly involved in a work stoppage at one point or another. And at one moment that year, 1.6 million workers were out at the same time. But this juggernaut, if it was mighty, was also fragile. By 1955,

Ben Maby

just two decades after the formation of the CIO, the industrial unions merged with the older, more conservative unions in the American Federation of Labor, or AFL, creating the organization still known today as the AFL-CIO. In the merger, the CIO lost a lot of its distinct identity and forward momentum, but left a permanent impact on every aspect of American politics, society, and economy.

Speaker 3

The arrogant ultimatum of a brutal dictatorship. If they want a showdown, they may have it. Organized labor accepts the challenge of the omnipresent overlords of steel to fight for the prize of economic freedom and industrial democracy.

Ben Maby

We've assembled quite the organizing committee for this podcast. There's six hosts in total. And we'll all take a second to introduce ourselves in a moment. But I'd be remiss if I didn't first shout out our partner, Haymarket Books, the premier radical independent publisher in the United States who has generously sponsored this project alongside listeners like you.

Ben Maby

We're honored and really thankful to kind of work with A Voice in Publishing that's clear-eyed about its political and vocational commitments. And that includes understanding and championing the kind of emancipatory political traditions forged by the working class of this country. This podcast, which will run about 20 episodes, is the first of many future audio products launched by the Haymarket team.

Ben Maby

We're thrilled to be the first, Haymarket Original. We're not typically going to have so many of us on each episode of the show, but we did think it was important early on to kind of establish each of our voices, our perspectives. So all of us are going to kind of pop in for this first episode, especially the intro portion, to kind of get us started. Alex, would you like to start by introducing yourself?

Alex Press

Yeah, thanks, Ben. So that passage we opened with from the GM Flint sit-down strikes really encapsulates why I'm doing this project, why I think it's important. I'm Alex Press. And in my job as a labor reporter for Jackman Magazine, I covered this year's UAW strike in auto at the Big Three. And in that process,

Alex Press

one of the most exciting things that people probably know if you're listening to this show is that there was a new strategy pioneered in the strike. Sean Fain, the newly elected president, called it the stand-up strike. And he explicitly said, "This is this generation's answer to the 1936 Flint sit-down strikes that built this union." So history is always really present,

Alex Press

even as I do the most amnesiac job in the world, which is reporting on a regular basis. It's important in this job for me to have some historical grounding, right? I mean, all the time with labor reporting, you hear, "This is unprecedented." I'm often greeted when interviewed as, "We've never seen this before. Organizing has never looked like this," or,

Alex Press

"Workers have never dealt with this type of problem." And to me, I often think of the CIO era as one in which it was sort of an experimental laboratory of sorts, for both good reasons and bad reasons, as both constraints and freedom there. And so I just really want to go deep into some of this history so I can I often find myself pushing back and trying to bring a historical perspective.

Alex Press

But there's no group of people that I'd rather do that with than this font of encyclopedic historical knowledge represented in ROC, our organizing committee. So that's why I'm here.

Ben Maby

Thanks, Alex. Andrew, do you want to go next?

Andrew Elrod

Sure. Hi, my name is Andrew Elrod. I am a writer and historian, live in Los Angeles. I was delighted to have the opportunity to join this group. Earlier this year, in the spring and summer, I had been, I think,

Andrew Elrod

with a lot of people returning to the history of the CIO to try and answer a question that's kind of looming around the present, particularly during the how many years now of strike summer and strike October. It seems like we've had at least two strike Octobers in a row.

Andrew Elrod

As popular consciousness returns to the question of labor organization, it seemed appropriate to revisit the last major upsurge in organization during the Great Depression when, in the course of two and a half years,

Andrew Elrod

some two million workers suddenly became union members and won contracts that gave lasting institutional existence to a new force in American life.

Ben Maby

Thanks, Andrew. Gabe?

Gabe Wynan

Sure. Hi. My name's Gabe Wynan. I am a professor of labor history. I teach at the University of Chicago. And I have been involved in the labor movement, like I think everyone on this call, in various ways as an organizer. And there's a few different things that bring me here, I guess. I mean, one, echoing what others have said,

Gabe Wynan

is the way that the experience of the CIO has this kind of talismanic quality in the present talking about the lessons and resources from history available to us as people who want to rebuild workers' power. And that talismanic quality is complicated, I think, because on the one hand,

Gabe Wynan

it's something we can kind of look back at to see what was possible and what could be possible again. On the other hand, from the perspective of academic labor history, for example, it often feels like the 1930s and 1940s were the kind of culmination of everything that ever happened in the kind of history of social class and class struggle in this country.

Gabe Wynan

And then another century happened, and the thing that was built in the '30s and '40s fell apart over time. And so now it feels like we kind of we're stuck in this kind of strange denouement of this narrative that didn't actually end up the way that everyone thought it would.

Gabe Wynan

And I think that's connected to allowing too much mythology to kind of gather around the 1930s.

Gabe Wynan

So I'm interested in kind of trying to kind of get in the weeds of the period in a different way, get past, for myself, the kind of pat understandings that I have often of particular unions at events and whatever in the form that I would kind of give them to undergraduates or something like that,

Gabe Wynan

and to try to really approach it in terms of sort of historical contradictions and strategic dilemmas that workers' organizations always face in some form. And that's connected to a kind of larger project that I'm interested in, and maybe others are here too, that kind of gave rise to this idea, actually, which is a general sort of dissatisfaction with the way that,

Gabe Wynan

let's say, theory and practice are related to each other in the kind of discourse of the American left, in a sense that actually, to be better to be oriented strategically better to our historical moment should involve not less theorization in favor of kind of just focusing on the concrete,

Gabe Wynan

but rather actually trying to kind of bring some of the more rigorous traditions of Marxism more directly to bear on kind of concrete situations in which we find ourselves. And that's a project that I don't know how to do, certainly.

Gabe Wynan

But I've been talking with friends and comrades, including some here, about trying to create some collective space for things like this, right? And I think this podcast is an example, but only one example, of ways that we on the American left might be having those conversations in a deeper way.

Gabe Wynan

I think that there is appetite for that. And my hope is that this will be the first of many things like that.

Gabe Wynan

So just to kind of plug it, since it's sort of partly where this came from, like I say, with some friends and comrades, we've been talking about starting something, not quite a publication, more project, I guess, tentative name Parallelogram from a letter Engel sent. I won't get into the details of that now. But anyway, it's a kind of space for projects like this.

Gabe Wynan

Now, that's not going to guide the details of what we're doing here. What we're doing here is about the specific historical moment and the kind of questions that it raises. But I want to just sort of say it now so that people who are interested in that element of what we're doing here can hear this whole project as a kind of invitation. And I do hope that you will take it that way.

Gabe Wynan

And if you have ideas for things like this that you want to do and you want to be able to talk to people about how to engage in some kind of collective study in any form, I hope that you'll share it with us. My great-grandfather was in the ILGWU. He was a cutter in the garment industry in the Lower East Side. Or he lived in Lower East Side. He worked in the garment district.

Gabe Wynan

He'd immigrated from Russia around 1905. And he was a socialist and voted for Eugene Debs.

Gabe Wynan

And I think there's kind of distinct generational experience, I feel like, I've had and lots of us have had, of wanting to recover some of our own connections to that now increasingly lost feeling kind of phase of the American left and to figure out what it means for us, not what it means or I'll just say for me, what it means for me, not in terms of a kind of canonical history,

Gabe Wynan

but in terms of how we might appropriate it in our own lives and our own struggles.

Ben Maby

Emma?

Emma Tidleman

Hi. I'm Emma Tidleman. I am a history professor teaching US history in Canada in Montreal at McGill. Like Gabe and others on this call, I also have experience in the labor movement, in the academic labor movement. And part of my motivation for joining this project was just feeling frustrated sometimes,

Emma Tidleman

seeing old, unproductive ways of thinking being reproduced in organizing contexts, especially amongst academics. But more importantly, I think that as history professor, I have really wanted to think differently about how to teach this history,

Emma Tidleman

how to frame this history without falling back on tropes or reproducing old mythologies, and rather to kind of think about how to make this history a more usable one, which is not to say,

Emma Tidleman

"Let's reproduce what the CIO did," but rather studying how this group of radicals in the past made decisions in the moment under particular historical constraints and yet still managed to kind of break out from the dominant framework in which they were working, I think,

Emma Tidleman

is a really important history and has the potential to instill useful lessons and teach us how to develop ways of thinking strategically. So not to reenact history, but just to say that visiting this past has the potential to help us become more aware of our own limited perspective.

Emma Tidleman

Studying the past helps us become aware of the limits of our former outlook.

Andrew Elrod

And I'm Tim Barker. I'm another one of the historians in the group. And in graduate school, I played a small part in the emergence of a UAW local at Harvard, HGSU local 5118. As far as I know, no one in my family was ever part of a CIO union except possibly briefly during World War II. But I really, growing up,

Andrew Elrod

got a very clear sense from my grandparents of sort of what Andrew mentioned, of what it meant to be alive and to have your life shaped by this broader age of the CIO. And I felt like this was a history that somehow connected the particularities of my own weird family with something that actually touched millions of people once upon a time.

Andrew Elrod

And the reasons I'm doing this podcast are a few. One is that as a teacher, I've found that people, students, the public, people are really interested in this history and eager to learn about it. And they don't necessarily have a great place to turn. One thing a lot of us talked about as we were organizing this is that there's not really one great book on the CIO.

Andrew Elrod

There are a couple that we'll draw on. Our title, Fragile Duggernaut, actually comes from Robert Zeger's book about the CIO, which is a standard work, quite useful, but it doesn't tell the whole story of what's really a very contested history. And what we've said today is sort of a basic introduction.

Andrew Elrod

But part of what we'll be unfolding through the show is just how much people argue about basic questions about how to think about where the CIO came from. Was it from the bottom up? Was it from the top down? Were the compromises they made inevitable? Were they wise? Were they unwise? Were they disruptive? Could it have gone a different way?

Andrew Elrod

These are all things that people have argued passionately about since the 1930s right down to the present. And a couple points that interest me, particularly as a historian, that we'll be talking about in the series, one is the relationship between domestic class politics and labor organizing and political economy and militarization and warfare, right?

Andrew Elrod

Because as we'll see in the show, military orders end up playing a big role in this to the CIO, even before 1941. We see today there's some similar issues in play. And another point is just this question of class coalitions. And there are different ways of thinking about the '30s.

Andrew Elrod

Some people think of it as a kind of a happy story in which labor and capital found a compromise and a way to live together that was pretty good, and we should just go back to it and try it again. Other people take the perspective that conflict never ceased. There are different views about how workers relate to their own unions, whether the unions themselves at times were standing in the way of workers' struggle.

Andrew Elrod

And so those are questions that are, I think, couldn't be more relevant today and that we'll have a chance to reflect on most, if not all, of these episodes.

Ben Maby

Yeah. I also kind of have a kind of family history that's in relationship to this. I mean, I come from a trade union family, more the kind of craft worker side than the industrial worker side, which is what the primary focus of this podcast is. But the family history kind of was a bridge to a lot of my own involvement in the labor movement, which has been as a rank-and-file member,

Ben Maby

as a kind of auxiliary supporter of organizing drives and strike campaigns, and also as a kind of staff organizer for service workers, for engineers and journalists, for higher ed workers. And I'm really kind of excited to dive into this history with the kind of team that we have because I think that the era, as others have said, yields a lot of lessons, not necessarily always direct one-to-one lessons for us.

Ben Maby

But it kind of remains, consciously or unconsciously, the high watermark of the labor movement in this country. Many listeners are going to be familiar with the landmark events of the era, the heroic Flint sit-down strikes of 1936 or '37. But I think even as we're kind of faintly aware of these massive upsurge in working-class organizing as a sort of backdrop to the period,

Ben Maby

we normally kind of think about the period through the lens of the New Deal or the popular front of the Depression or World War II. This is a history that's really rarely told with the mass worker in the driver's seat.

Ben Maby

I think even for those of us on the left or the labor movement, when we have even an extinctive kind of understanding of the working class as a protagonist in this era, we may not always have a confident grasp on a lot of the details, the kind of zigzags, the kind of textured way, understanding of how people organized. Despite these strikes and struggles being so dynamic,

Ben Maby

they're only often a kind of faintly heard hum, I think, in the background of geopolitics or policymaking or political campaigns that normally kind of frame and define the way we narrate this period. So I'm really excited for this podcast to kind of flip that on its head a bit and kind of tell the story from the vantage point of these workers, the tactics they invented, the organizations that they built, the new space for politics that they forced open.

Ben Maby

These are innovations that are often poorly grasped by historians, many of us who receive this history from different vantage points. But Mike Davis, he's an activist and historian. He looms really large in this episode. He would remind us that they were often not even grasped self-consciously by the workers themselves, either in leadership or the rank-and-file.

Ben Maby

So uncovering and highlighting that implicit theory of working-class organizing and activity in this really important moment is something I'm excited to think about together with the career that we have, to understand these organizing drives not just something that's trickled down from great men or it was an automatic reflex of a certain moment in capitalist development, but it was also something forged by the kind of organizational practice of everyday people.

Speaker 9

Now, this is my dilemma, Red. We got a meeting of the council next Tuesday night, the Knoxville Industrial Union Council. And it's going to be a pretty important meeting. I sort of hate to miss it. We're going to have meetings.

Speaker 9

John Rife is calling a meeting of all of the CIO staffs, CIO organizing committee folks, from Alabama and Tennessee and Georgia. In other words, it's going to be a three-state staff meeting. And then that afternoon, that'll be in the morning of the 30th. And then that afternoon,

Speaker 9

we'll all break up, and each state will have its own separate staff meeting.

Ben Maby

I think we should probably signpost a little bit about the scope of the series to kind of say a few words about where we're going to be going with it over the course of the 20 or so episodes that we'll be recording. Does someone want to take a stab?

Speaker 10

Sure. We're going to race across quite a lot of history from the antebellum period, roughly 1830s, 1840s to the 1930s, where most of the action starts, and then slower and slower across the 1930s, 1940s. The show will end in 1955 after 20 or so episodes with the merger of the CIO back into the AFL.

Speaker 10

As we kind of advance in time, we also will be kind of pausing to look at certain kind of thematic or geographical things that will reward some closer attention, New York City, the West Coast, the South, the left-led unions,

Speaker 10

different topics like this that will kind of allow us to create a sort of a mosaic of the world of the CIO, even as we're kind of telling a narrative story.

Ben Maby

Cool. Thanks, Gabe. So what are we doing here in this first episode?

Speaker 11

Well, I think this first discussion is scene setting that has to take place about the history of the American labor movement, working-class history in the United States,

Speaker 11

the particular circumstances of the frontier and the slave society of the South and the industrial development of a country that was very much unlike that of continental Europe or Great Britain or these other

Speaker 11

national histories that the examples and even models of labor history often assume.

Ben Maby

And it's not just a question of sort of how the working class emerged. We're sort of trying to talk about why we think a history of the American working class should be a history of the CIO, right? And that might sound a little paradoxical. If we really think it's important about the CIO, why are we starting all the way at the beginning?

Ben Maby

And I think the way that we've thought about that is that what's really special about the CIO is how it's distinct in American history, right? The level of success it achieves, the level of working-class organization it brings into the political sphere, right, rather than just within the workshop, and also its inclusiveness in terms of at least aspirationally organizing workers, regardless of their level of skill,

Ben Maby

their gender, their racial or ethnic background, and all of these things. And so the question is sort of why wasn't there something like the CIO much earlier in American history? It's sort of one thing to keep in mind throughout this history that might seem like it has very little to do with the 1930s and 1940s.

Emma Tidleman

I think Mike Davis's essay, which we cover in the first episode/first two episodes, it covers a lot of ground, which is great. It's also kind of talking about the component parts of who will become the working class. So different groups of people are dispossessed and proletarianized through different historical processes.

Emma Tidleman

And this is really significant for possibilities of political organization. The process starts in the early 19th century, but it really accelerates with the Civil War and in the 1870s, 1880s.

Emma Tidleman

And you see early kind of experimentation with something that looks like industrial unionism at the same time as you see the emergence of a more exclusive form of labor organization in craft unionism. And this is something that Davis covers in a single essay, which is extremely useful.

Speaker 10

There's an essay that we don't talk about in the episode that I love by Adam Schavorsky, the Marxist political scientist, about what we're talking about when we talk about class formation.

Speaker 10

And Schavorsky has this famous line in the essay where he says, "Struggles about class always precede struggles between classes." And what he means by that is that the actual mode of production and the forces of production never dictate the organizational form of the working class.

Speaker 10

And there's always kind of work that has to get organizational work that has to get done, which is itself confronting questions of boundaries, right, questions of inclusion and exclusion, who's like us, who's not like us, which is a fundamentally political process that can't be read off of economics. And that's what he means by struggles about class. And I think in some way, struggles about class are what a lot of this episode is about,

Speaker 10

right, as people are trying to figure out who is all in the same boat here, right? Who's two different? Who's similar to each other? Those are questions about race. They're questions about immigration. They're questions about religion. They're questions about skill. And they're really fundamental to American working-class history.

Ben Maby

The way we approach that in this episode is by kind of beginning to discuss the kind of different streams of proletarianization, the different kind of points of origin for the people who make up the American proletariat and the American working class, people in chattel slavery, immigrants kind of coming over largely from Europe,

Ben Maby

farmers locked into a growing American kind of frontier.

Ben Maby

And we kind of start from these kind of broad strokes of kind of early 19th and mid-19th century American history and kind of work our way up to a kind of key moment in 1877, both when the period of Reconstruction ends and when we're kind of on the precipice

Ben Maby

of a new kind of era in American working-class history with the emergence of some of the great railway strikes and the kind of birth of nascent forms of industrial organization.

Speaker 12

Brought a trial to deport him over the sea. But the judge said, "He's an honest man. I got to set him free." Then they brought another trial to frame him if they can. But right by Harry Bridges stands every working man.

Speaker 13

Oh, the FBI is worried. The bosses, they are scared. They can't deport six million men, they know. And we're not gonna let them send Harry over the sea. We'll fight for Harry Bridges and build a CIO.

Speaker 10

So we thought we would begin the discussion first by moving pretty far back in US labor history with an overview of processes of class formation across the 19th century. And in this, we turned to the late, great, beloved historian and militant Mike Davis.

Speaker 10

Mike Davis distinguished himself in many different ways. Maybe we could take a second and just do a little tribute to him. But he also wrote Prisoners of the American Dream, which, in our view, is one of the most helpful and kind of efficient overviews in 19th-century working-class history. So we're going to go through that as part of the structure of the discussion today.

Speaker 10

But first, let's just talk about Mike for a moment, maybe, and who he was and what he meant to us.

Ben Maby

Yeah. I mean, one reason I think we all immediately agreed that this essay would be a great way to start off the entire series was not just its efficiency with moving through hundreds of years of history, but the way it grew out of Davis's commitments as a practical socialist and supporter of working-class politics.

Ben Maby

The essay is written in the 1980s and really reflects his attempts to come to terms with the total collapse of labor as an organized political force around the time of the 1980 election. The essay starts with this great vignette of workers in Philadelphia sitting around on election day in a bar talking about why they're not going to vote for anyone. And he says,

Ben Maby

"To answer this question, you have to start all the way at the beginning." And I think that spirit of connecting a long-duration history with contemporary political purpose is really typical and special about Davis's work.

Speaker 11

Yeah. It was one of the first essays that Mike started writing. His first book is published by the time he's 40. And he had kind of over two decades of serious political militancy and activism kind of behind him at the point at which he started to kind of tackle at a certain kind of nature of the American left in the early Reagan years, the kind of question about why there was no socialism,

Speaker 11

why working-class politics was so diminished, so weak, so often absent from the American kind of political scene. But before kind of Mike began that kind of research project, he was kind of wrestling with it in a much more practical way in Southern California as a member of CORE, early civil rights organization, also as a member of SDS,

Speaker 11

Students for Democratic Society. His activities there, combined with his decision to stay in his girlfriend's dorm, helped kick him out of Reed College early on. But Mike kind of was a kind of itinerant, serious working-class intellectual and organizer, spent time in the CP, spent time as a founding member of Team Search for a Democratic Union, which is now part of the coalition, kind of stewarding that organization.

Speaker 11

And yeah, so this essay kind of comes as a kind of culmination of a long career as a kind of militant and organizer dealing with questions of working-class disorganization that he observed, whether he was as a kind of communist activist in LA or as a truck driver, kind of going back and forth across California.

Speaker 10

And I feel like we should say the essay is called Why the American Working Class is Different. And this is a really kind of well-trod and even sort of clichéd issue for, I'm sure, all of us as people who have thought about, written about, or engaged with both the history of the left and the history of the United States,

Speaker 10

right, American exceptionalism as a kind of concept, right? It's such a powerful one that presidential candidates get asked about what they think about it, right? But it's really one that's forged in a kind of Cold War context, especially it predates that. But I guess reaches kind of apex in a Cold War context.

Speaker 10

And there's always been competing theories, I guess, going actually back to the 19th century and even in some ways to Tocqueville in the early 19th century about the sources of it. And I think Davis, in this essay, what's distinctive about it is that he doesn't do the move that many US labor historians did in the '70s and '80s,

Speaker 10

which is to resist the idea that the American working class is different and to say, "Actually, no. We have an equally distinguished tradition of working-class struggles in this country as in any other country." And in fact, maybe it's even sort of the same as what they have in England or France. There's an essay by Sean Willens, for example, called Against Exceptionalism that makes that argument.

Speaker 10

Instead, what he does is accept, right, from this vantage point that we were talking about in the 1980s that the US working class is different but insists on a kind of materialist and very historical sort of structural, I think,

Speaker 10

account of what the nature of that difference is and how the different factors to which it's often attributed kind of compound with each other.

Ben Maby

And just to say a word about not just why we chose this essay and why we love Mike Davis,

Ben Maby

but why we wanted to start a podcast on the history of the CIO by going all the way back to the beginning of the American working class is because the absence of something like the CIO in earlier periods of American history is a kind of index of the American difference or the American exceptionalism that Davis is talking about, right? The CIO was an organization of industrial unions,

Ben Maby

which at least aspirationally spoke in the name of all American workers, men and women, black and white, skilled and unskilled, immigrant and native. And just as importantly, the CIO had a voice in politics, right? It organized as a political action committee on behalf of labor's goals within electoral politics.

Ben Maby

And so when Davis is talking about the absence of socialism, social democracy, or a certain kind of class organization in US history, one way of thinking about that is he's asking, "Why didn't something like the CIO or like what the CIO wanted to be emerge before the 1930s?"

Speaker 11

That doesn't mean that I think that it wasn't an issue or wasn't an aspiration that many parts of the American left and the American labor movement didn't have. It is a watchword often after the defeat of almost every kind of major working-class upsurge by the second half of the 19th century, certainly after the kind of Civil War. So for generations, people are talking about industrial unionism.

Speaker 11

Big Bill Haywood, who's a founder and leader of the IWW, we'll be talking about him later, he talked about industrial unionism as socialism in its work clothes precisely because it signaled and it kind of symbolized the practice of proletarian equality and the fight both against shitty bosses, against the kind of dictates of private property and its managers, but also because it kind of symbolized a different kind of practice of politics,

Speaker 11

a different kind of way of being organized as a class.

Speaker 11

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Speaker 11

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Speaker 11

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Ben Maby

So should we get into it? Why is the American working class different?

Speaker 14

There are kind of almost ossified explanations that scholars developed over the course of the 20th century, whether it's racial divisions, the political system, the existence of undeveloped proletariat, the existence of small-scale property owners across the US.

Speaker 14

Land holding was very widespread in the US compared to other countries. And all of these things are kind of true. But one of the points in this chapter and this essay is that they don't predetermine failure. There are cycles of struggle. And one of the,

Speaker 14

I think, powerful concepts that he introduces here is that there's a kind of sedimented historical experience, which each failure kind of contributes to what happens next, contributes to changes in direction or strategy or outlooks. And so it's not that those failures can't be overcome, but they matter a lot.

Ben Maby

One reason that someone might reject the idea that the US is different is that there's been tons of class conflict in US history, right? The 19th century in the US sees as much industrial violence as any developing capitalist country. There's every.

Speaker 11

More, I think.

Ben Maby

More. Every business cycle, there's something that can uncontroversially be described as open warfare at some point between workers and their bosses. So if the working class is different, it's not because there's never been conflict, right?

Ben Maby

And understanding the way that the existence, even the exceptionality of the conflict has given way to this absence is, I think, something that Davis tries to wrestle with and we're trying to understand as well.

Speaker 10

Key to Davis's point, right, is that the US working class is forged differently, right, in various ways. It's differentiated.

Speaker 10

I always think about the kind of basic ingredients of the US working class emerging in the 19th century from slavery, right, and then the kind of crisis of and abolition of slavery and the question of free labor. The native-born, let's call it small property class, which I think encompasses maybe we could argue about this,

Speaker 10

but encompasses both kind of small farmers and also artisans, right? Artisans, at least in the early part of the century, have a kind of crossover sort of proletarian, semi-bourgeois, both in neither kind of position in some ways. A classic example would be a shoemaker in the early 19th century.

Speaker 10

That would be someone who I mean, there's different versions of it. So in the early 19th century, you could think about a shoemaker who makes whole shoes, right, or at least makes much of a shoe.

Speaker 14

And they own the means to do so, probably, right?

Speaker 10

Right. And that's a sense in which you can kind of see them almost as petite bourgeois, although that's also not quite right because they're working, right? So they own tools. They own a workshop or run a workshop, but maybe they rent it, right? And maybe they also employ a couple of apprentices and journeymen, right?

Speaker 10

And so it's a kind of class position that doesn't really exist in quite the same way now but was very important to the early phases of industrialization.

Speaker 10

By the late 19th century, we're going to be talking more about artisans and craftsmen having been sort of absorbed into factories but still as a distinctive kind of layer in industrial production.

Speaker 10

So now imagine that shoemaker in a shoe factory that is not mechanized enough to just get rid of him, but instead, he is more clearly a kind of employee of the owner of the factory. And he's still the one who kind of understands the process and in some ways supervises it but is increasingly subordinated to a kind of bigger owner.

Speaker 10

That's a kind of classic process of the 19th century. So to recap, slavery, small property, and then, of course, coming into the bottom of the free labor market, streams of immigrants.

Ben Maby

It's worth saying maybe that the working class is also forged politically on the basis of the kind of struggles that it gets involved in.

Ben Maby

And this is something Mike talks about at great length, that it's hard to understand the kind of formation and the forces which ended up shaping the working class in Europe and the European context, especially without understanding the struggle for the franchise, which is a kind of hallmark of some of the major kind of working-class struggles in the early parts of the 19th century, mid-parts of the 19th century,

Ben Maby

the revolutions that they kind of forge and participate in either as a leading or subordinate actor. The situation is different in the United States because the revolution kind of predates the emergence of the industrial worker in many respects. And the kind of question of the franchise is pretty different out here.

Speaker 11

Right. And just to make that concrete, in the 1830s or something, relatively few people in the US are factory workers, but relatively many people, especially white men, are allowed to vote. And the combination of those facts is really different than the way things will go somewhere like Western Europe, where the fight for universal male suffrage kind of goes hand in hand with the movement of a lot of people into the industrial workforce.

Ben Maby

It means that workers don't need their own organization as workers to fight for suffrage. And so instead, there's.

Speaker 11

There are already Democrats or Republicans before they're workers.

Ben Maby

That's right.

Speaker 14

And to the extent that class conflict exists, it's not necessarily between workers and property owners as capitalists.

Speaker 14

It's between producers and bankers and merchants and land speculators, people who were thought of as parasitic middlemen who didn't actually work themselves but who kind of extracted wealth from people who produced things.

Speaker 10

Yeah. I think it could be helpful here to draw a comparison more explicitly between what is a very kind of classic European-stylized understanding of the process of class formation over the 19th century and the kind of concrete events of the 19th century that we're going to talk more about.

Speaker 10

I mean, this is sort of a French this is sort of turning the French experience into the general example, but it works well enough, right? The idea that there's a kind of phase of bourgeois revolution that begins in the 18th century against feudalism, right? And that's complicated in how clearly we can actually understand that to be what happened.

Speaker 10

But nonetheless,

Speaker 10

the kind of frustrated bourgeoisie held down by aristocratic privilege turns on the aristocracy and the old regime but discovers in a cycle of revolutionary attempts between the late 18th century and the mid-19th that it's actually not able to overcome the bourgeoisie and supplant it

Speaker 10

with a liberal state without summoning to its cause kind of emerging proletariat, which is pretty underdeveloped still at this point. It has no political organization or not much of its own. And classically, then in 1848, right, this contradiction kind of becomes visible,

Speaker 10

right, that what the bourgeois revolutionists and the proletarian participants want out of revolution is actually not the same. It's out of that kind of contrast that the Communist Manifesto was written in 1848. And there are ways that the US experience fits that in ways that it doesn't and that the Civil War can kind of be slotted into a version of that sequence,

Speaker 10

sort of, right, sort of uncomfortably and sort of successfully.

Ben Maby

Before we get to the Civil War, maybe we should speak a little about that first wave of immigrants.

Speaker 11

Yeah. 1848 is a great year to bring up because of the German immigration.

Ben Maby

And the year before, 1847, is a kind of high point of the Irish inflow, right, of people fleeing the famine. So you've got a sort of first wave of people coming who are not English-speaking, in many cases, not Protestants.

Ben Maby

They come from a variety of class backgrounds, but the Irish especially are quite desperately poor and so find employment digging canals, building railways, being sort of the common labor, and being excluded to a large extent from that kind of small producer political economy that we had said was one of those major components of early American political economy.

Speaker 10

Also, that small producer political economy is itself not totally disintegrating, but is coming under quite severe pressure, right? Small farmers in New England are finding that their sons are not able to get their own farmsteads and are having to move to the city and seek jobs as apprentices or whatever, right?

Speaker 10

And then similarly, craftsmen in the cities are finding that larger and larger workshops are kind of succeeding more and more and pricing them out and outcompeting them, putting pressure on the kind of apprentice-to-master craftsman kind of trajectory and that older source of kind of petty producer livelihood.

Speaker 14

But there's still this kind of ideal or aspiration that that old economy could still exist if it could be reproduced in the West and small producers could continue to own land in the West.

Speaker 14

So maybe you're a wage worker today, but tomorrow, you could become a property owner and kind of work for yourself. And so, of course, this is a process rooted in colonialism and Western expansion. And that kind of vision of expansion, which is almost like a safety valve,

Speaker 14

is what's going to kind of bring that northern economy into conflict with the South, kind of lead up into the Civil War.

Speaker 10

Yeah. Maybe it's worth kind of going to Abraham Lincoln here for a moment, actually.

Speaker 10

I often find that people are kind of amazed at how much Lincoln talked about labor and the meaning of labor and how central questions of what it means to be a laborer and under what conditions one can kind of properly do that were really important in 19th-century politics. And going to what you were saying,

Speaker 10

Emma, the petty producer economy is still significant enough, right, in the kind of crisis of the union in the 1850s and 1860s that its defense is a really key part of the anti-slavery coalition, right,

Speaker 10

that white small farmers or people who would like to be small farmers or people who would like to kind of get on that apprentice-to-master ladder understand that there is pressure on those opportunities. They associate that pressure with the contest over the West, as you're saying. And they have to kind of think about, well, what does it mean to actually be a citizen who works?

Speaker 10

And what is the relationship between citizenship and work? And there's a speech that Lincoln gives in Wisconsin when he's, I think, shortly before he's campaigning for president. I'm just going to read a little bit of it. He says, "The world has agreed that labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied. There is no dispute upon this point. From this point, however, men immediately diverge.

Speaker 10

Much disputation is maintained as to the best way of applying and controlling the labor element. By some, it is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital, that nobody labors unless somebody else owning capital, somehow by the use of that capital, induces him to do it.

Speaker 10

Having assumed this, they proceed to consider whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers and thus induce them to work by their own consent or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, they naturally conclude that all laborers are necessarily either hired laborers or slaves.

Speaker 10

They further assume that whoever is once a hired laborer is fatally fixed in that condition for life and thence again that his condition is as bad as or worse than that of a slave.

Speaker 10

This is the mudsill theory, meaning there needs to be a kind of so-called mudsill class that's to say racially subordinate under the burden of all the difficult labor."

Ben Maby

A foundation for the whole social system.

Speaker 10

Right. But then he says, "But another class of reasoners hold the opinion that there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed and that there is no such thing as a free man being fatally fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. That both these assumptions are false and all inferences from them groundless. They hold that labor is prior to and independent of capital,

Speaker 10

that in fact, capital is the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. That labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence, they hold that labor is the superior, greatly the superior, of capital." And you sometimes see that quote circulate to say like, "Hey, Lincoln was a socialist." But that's actually not quite what it is, right? What he's saying is,

Speaker 10

I think, this thing that Emma is talking about of the kind of petty producer ideal.

Ben Maby

Right. There's no idea here of a natural or inevitable antagonism between labor and capital, just of having them sort of properly ordered so that if you're a hired man at one point in your life, it's not a fixed condition. You could go on to become a capitalist through the fruits of your own labor. Lincoln thinks it would be unfortunate to have a large permanent class of wage workers,

Ben Maby

but he doesn't want to abolish wages in general.

Speaker 11

Which becomes a kind of seed for the dissolution of the working-class movement that finds expression in the Civil War and in the victory of the union.

Speaker 14

Right. So I mean, this is one of the things that gets working people of various stripes on board with the union cause, not because they're necessarily abolitionists. Some were, but most weren't. Rather, there's a very real concern that if slavery and large,

Speaker 14

large plantations are going to expand into the West, then they're not going to leave any room for this kind of petty producer economy.

Speaker 14

And so there's really a coalition that forms in what becomes the Free Labor Party and then the Republican Party, where you have some capitalists, you have some farmers who are kind of organizing on their own and end up demanding the creation of the US Department of Agriculture, which is formed in the Civil War.

Speaker 14

And you have kind of workers who are committed to this vision of free labor, which I think the Lincoln quote kind of encapsulates. And so the Republican Party ends up being this very tenuous coalition between all of these different groups.

Speaker 14

And one kind of throwaway line that Mike Davis says is that it's kind of a shame that labor didn't forge its own wing within the party because it was very easily kind of subsumed. And that coalition, in the absence of slavery, is going to come under kind of increasing, increasing strain.

Ben Maby

We should say it explicitly that this producer's vision is also a vision of how gender works and the sort of the independent subject in this vision is a male head of household who may have under his authority family dependents, right, whether those are his wife, his children, various hired workers of different kinds.

Ben Maby

And so there's only certain kinds of people, even in theory, qualify for this kind of independence. And it's also one that's racialized and has ethnic overtones. So it's an open question whether Catholic Irish immigrants sort of have what it takes to achieve this kind of independence, even in theory. And so they have, in addition to any sort of concrete lack of economic opportunity,

Ben Maby

they also face a kind of theoretical objection or at least a question about their qualification for this kind of a political economy.

Speaker 10

Yeah. I feel like that's worth just spelling out in a little more detail because the kind of ideological core of this idea of independence is that you can only be a competent, virtuous citizen of the republic if you have the freedom to exercise your own judgment and conscience, right? That's kind of at the center of it. And that's why it's important that labor not be subordinate to capital,

Speaker 10

right, in the kind of Lincoln vision. Because if labor is subordinate to capital in a systemic way, then citizens kind of lose the quality that makes them able to be citizens. However, women are seen as legal nonpersons, right? And so they're sort of fundamentally, constitutively unable to be independent in that way, right?

Speaker 10

They don't have the right to own property independently after they're married. They can't bring suit, etc. And the Irish or Catholics in general, right, because of the connection to an important, durable, powerful institution in the form of the church, are seen as having dual loyalty, basically, and therefore, again, can't freely exercise conscience.

Speaker 14

It's true. So yeah, the household is kind of at the center of this economy, which means that there's a male head and he has dependents who may or may not do wage work. Women perform wage work, not just men.

Speaker 14

But the household with the kind of patriarchal head was at the center of this economy and this kind of language of producerism. But I would also say that producerism is very malleable and not fully coherent as an ideology. And so it's going to change over the course of the 19th century.

Speaker 14

And it becomes a language almost that the labor movement is going to inherit, for better or worse. You have Eugene Debs, who in the early 20th century is a socialist candidate for president.

Speaker 14

You have him saying something like, "We have to unite the producing classes against the money power." This is a language that is very ubiquitous across different labor organizations. And it's very slippery at the same time.

Speaker 14

It has the potential to eventually unite different people, but it also has the potential to paper over differences between different classes.

Ben Maby

So that brings us sort of all into the Civil War, where a bunch of this stuff comes together. What does it mean to think about the Civil War as a moment, not in military history or even high political history, but a moment in the history of class formation and the formation of the working class in particular?

Speaker 14

Well, I mean, I think it's a huge rupture in a lot of ways. I mean, the emancipation of 4 million working people in the South, which is also the largest confiscation of private property, I think, in US history. W.E.B. Du Bois calls the Civil War famously a general strike,

Speaker 14

meaning that enslaved people really did withdraw their labor from plantations across the South, slowed the southern economy, joined the Union Army in some cases. And so you see this huge number of formerly enslaved people just mobilizing in dramatic ways.

Ben Maby

And that in a way that combines the fight for economic interests as workers and the demand for political rights and voting rights.

Ben Maby

So it's a moment in American history when there's something more like what Gabe was calling the classic European example, where there's a sort of a revolutionary movement of working-class people that combines the economic and political in a way that it's very hard to separate them at this moment.

Ben Maby

It's hard to overemphasize just how important these currents of self-organization in the plantations south were to kind of tipping the cause of the war in the North's favor. I mean, the organizing didn't start in the context of the Civil War. You can kind of pick up a memoir from a formerly enslaved person like Osborn Perry Anderson has probably one of the best,

Ben Maby

most lucid memoirs of this kind of genre, where he describes pretty vividly how much meetings of enslaved people would kind of take place in the middle of the night, often between plantations, listening in on high politics, waiting to hear whether or not Fremont would win a national election prior to Abraham Lincoln in 1856, gauging their own kind of strategies and practices,

Ben Maby

whether it's flight or trying to slow things down on the plantation on the base of what was happening in high politics or later on the kind of march of the Union Army through the South. And his own itinerary is one which symbolizes sort of an era.

Ben Maby

He was someone who was moved around through different parts of the plantation south, participated in secret clandestine meetings during the kind of period of slavery prior to the war. When the war breaks out, he flees into kind of union lines, joins the US Union military, and later ends up kind of settling up north with a kind of other community of free blacks.

Ben Maby

But it's a signal of, I think, a lot of the ways that working-class proletarians, maybe not working-class, but proletarians, people who are dispossessed and in bondage, their own self-organization really did kind of course through the war, also transforming the meaning of the war as a result.

Speaker 11

And it has consequences for other groups too, right?

Speaker 10

Well, the centrality of the southern question to the emerging working-class movement of the mid-19th century in the United States means the kind of program that can be advanced is profoundly different in the United States. In Europe, you have the writing of the Communist Manifesto. That's something that doesn't have the same kind I mean,

Speaker 10

it can't have the same kind of resonance in the United States where there's this question of the growth of chattel slavery.

Speaker 10

And I think the fact that the program has to confront this is the beginning of one of the first defeats in the kind of litany of defeats that Davis uses to structure this introductory essay.

Speaker 14

But it's interesting for Davis and even for Eric Foner, suffrage and participation in electoral politics are really important. But the first demand that freed people made was not for suffrage. It was for land. It was for redistribution of southern property.

Speaker 14

And suffrage was in some way a consolation in the wake of the failure of the redistribution of land. And when suffrage comes, Black communities, both men and women, mobilize around it. Women can't vote, but they still kind of come out as a communal activity.

Speaker 14

But it's not actually the first and most important demand that they have, which I think is kind of important to note. And so it's one of those things where you start to see fissures in this Republican coalition that exists. And those fissures are kind of growing in the North as well.

Speaker 14

As northern workers are trying to kind of expand on the possibilities of this moment, they force their fellow party members to kind of reckon with what could potentially be a radical moment and then move away from it.

Speaker 10

Right. I mean, I think that kind of reinforces the way that the war seems like a belated and the most violent of the 1848 revolutions. In a way, you could say the I mean, if the war is a some level of confrontation between two regional ruling classes, right, the northern mercantile and industrial ruling classes,

Speaker 10

especially industrial, and the southern planter class, right, the northern coalition triumphs because it's able to reach much deeper into society, to mobilize many, many more layers of society under it toward its cause, right? The planters can kind of do that with some small white farmers a little bit.

Speaker 10

But even there, there's resistance, right? And that's sort of the limit of their ability to mobilize their society to their cause. Whereas because of the coalition dynamic that Emma was talking about, the union political leadership actually has something to offer in various ways, right, meaningfully, to the small farmer in the North,

Speaker 10

to the petty industrial producer, and ultimately to the slave.

Ben Maby

And even to the Irish immigrant who there's obviously a massive draft riot in New York in which mostly Irish people riot both against the Protestant ruling class and against free Black people in the city.

Ben Maby

But on the other hand, they're able to give tons of Irish people guns in the Union Army, and they don't shoot their officers, which is not what would have happened if the South had tried to arm their own enslaved people.

Speaker 11

But the fact of the riot then points to the fissure, the opening of this fissure, which becomes the kind of second period of class formation and defeat in the Reconstruction era and the political challenge of the Populist Party.

Ben Maby

I was going to say it's also worth just maybe mentioning that the union or rather the Civil War and the kind of belated kind of bourgeois revolution that it might represent was driven by its both maybe an intra-elite kind of competition, but also from the dynamic struggles of popular orders, working-class people, but they were not necessarily marching under the same banner or with the same political traditions.

Ben Maby

And if that kind of struggle represented a kind of temporary synthesis or unity between the traditions of free soil, free men, free labor of the kind of white artisans of North, and the kind of struggles and political traditions of the peasant dream, as some historians call it, of the former plantation south, it was a temporary and unlasting unity,

Ben Maby

one that tragically gave way to division, both partisan, one marked also by incredible violence throughout the South. And yeah, as Andrew says, this paves the way for the model or the shape that other working-class struggles take going forward through the 19th century. It's one that's shaped by this violent disunity.

Speaker 14

Yeah. And in the absence of that southern ruling class, the Republican Party, which for a period of time really controls the levers of economic decision-making, they just kind of go crazy with this very aggressive economic program focused especially on the West. So while fighting the Civil War,

Speaker 14

the union is creating a transcontinental railroad. It is accelerating colonial kind of campaigns against native people in the West. It's passing really monumental land legislation to encourage settlement. It is privatizing mineral lands in a kind of general way for the first time.

Speaker 14

And so it's really encouraging this developmental takeoff that's going to accelerate in the West, especially. And it's also then in the immediate aftermath of the war, looking to the South and trying to reorganize the southern economy.

Speaker 14

So there's just an enormous amount of new economic activity driven by the Republican Party and its vision.

Speaker 10

And it unifies the continent economically, right? Kind of the continent had been a kind of space of real economic heterogeneity, right, different sort of regional economies that work differently and we're not all linked to each other. And that really changes.

Ben Maby

What kind of workers does this new nationwide mode of capital accumulation what kind of workers does it produce?

Speaker 11

Factory workers.

Ben Maby

Yeah.

Speaker 10

Railroad workers.

Speaker 11

Miners.

Speaker 10

And traveling, I think the mobility, this is something that Davis says somewhere, workers in the States can vote with their feet.

Speaker 10

The origins of what would become by the 1880s and the 1890s, the internationals, the affiliates of the AFL, those national unions come into being because they have to deal with a carpenter who has had enough of living in Cincinnati and goes to St. Louis and then ends up in Salt Lake City.

Speaker 10

And the conditions of the trade in the new city and the regulation of that craft across these cities that are on different sides of the continent has to suddenly become something that the union has to deal with this, which is a new thing.

Ben Maby

That kind of mobility, it really does mark the biography of all of the leaders of the era. William Z. Foster, a leading Communist Party member, someone who organizes a great steel strike, is a hugely important figure for the whole series. His kind of life, someone who grew up in the kind of Irish slums of Philadelphia, checks all of these kind of regional boxes.

Ben Maby

He spends some time in the South. He is in the Pacific Northwest, where's where he first kind of cut his teeth and encountered syndicalism. He gets on a boat and ends up in both Australia and South Africa, I think, as well as East Asia. So he kind of really does represent not only this itinerant character of a lot of the American working class that we could talk about any number of labor leaders who had a similar kind of biography,

Ben Maby

but also this kind of working-class cosmopolitanism. Labor historians are divided about whether or not this is a strength or a weakness in terms of the durability of organizing campaigns or political traditions of American unionism, but it's undoubtedly a feature.

Speaker 10

Well, and Davis makes this point, right, whereas industrialization in Europe in the 19th century happens in cities that have, in many cases, been there for 1,000 years, right? In the United States, west of that, Appalachians, industrialization, the factory makes the city, right? Someone realizes that, "Oh,

Speaker 10

this would be a convenient place to mine minerals, obviously, which are location-specific, or to have a transportation entrepot of some kind between rail and rivers. It's close to mineral resources." Pittsburgh is the case I know really well, right? Pittsburgh is where it is because it's the easternmost major port on the Mississippi River system, right?

Speaker 10

The Ohio River originates there and flows into the Mississippi. And it's close to coal fields. And so they can bring the iron to the coal. They can use the river to do that. They can make steel, and they can ship it on the railroads off to the East Coast. But it's true of many of these cities, right, that they basically are born industrial in the West.

Ben Maby

Maybe people remember from a high school or college history class that that is often taken to be the end of political reconstruction, right, with the removal of federal troops in the South. But there's a lot of other stuff going on. So what's the American working class in 1877 look like?

Speaker 10

Well, maybe to start in the South, since Andrew appointed us that way, by the mid or late 1870s, as Emma said, right, the kind of demand for land for the freed people has been defeated, resoundingly rejected,

Speaker 10

by their own former coalition partners in the Republican Party who have used the power of the federal government to ultimately drive them back into a kind of economic subordination to a reborn masterclass, right, to whom they are now connected through relations of tenancy and sharecropping, varieties of debt peonage, basically.

Speaker 10

And there is an important political struggle that happens in the South, basically between planters and kind of merchant/banker figures. A sort of whole new system of exploitation of this kind of debt peon agricultural labor class is constructed, anew, right? And it captures small white farmers also,

Speaker 10

although there's kind of less of a system of racial terror to keep them in line. Meanwhile, though, the process of economic unification, right, it's causing the railroad to come through the South, dragging what remnants there were of kind of relatively economically autonomous peasant agriculture into the world economy through unrelenting pressure to produce cotton.

Speaker 14

Yeah. I mean, it's a really important point because once the general population of working people in the South is no longer enslaved, there's new pressure to enclose on the lands that had been able to kind of prop up this small-scale farming peasant population of white farmers.

Speaker 14

So actually, slavery had allowed many white farmers to escape proletarianization, to escape dispossession.

Speaker 14

And in the wake of emancipation during Reconstruction, there are these moves to put up fences or to reorganize land in such a way that farmers are no longer able to herd their livestock, which is a practice of consumption that many people had relied on.

Speaker 14

And so at the same time that you're getting this enfranchised Black proletariat, you're also seeing small-scale white producers kind of declining into the ranks of the proletariat as well. Are they going to kind of align with one another politically?

Speaker 14

That is the crucial question and an object of major struggle, right?

Speaker 10

And there are moments where they succeed in doing so briefly, right? But that's not the systematic pattern.

Speaker 14

It's very tense, obviously. But it's also complicated because the material conditions are not quite the same, right?

Speaker 14

You might be a farmer who's slowly declining from land ownership to tenancy, maybe to work, but you're not immediately thrust into wage relations in the way that so many Black workers were.

Ben Maby

And that looks like what? Maybe having a child or two, maybe slight work on someone else's land, or try to search in the town for work, or maybe spending some of your own day divided between work on your own kind of plot and work on the plot of another?

Speaker 14

Yeah. Or do you have livestock, even if you don't have land yourself? Do you have kind of agricultural tools that you can bring to the table?

Speaker 11

Emma, could you say a little bit more about how the existence of the slave system buffered white farmers?

Speaker 14

Yeah. So you have the Cotton Belt, right, where there are major plantations. The economy is organized around commodity production, cotton primarily, but others too. And the ruling class in the South had pretty much controlled state legislatures, and they decided where railroads went.

Speaker 14

But they weren't necessarily interested in building railroads in parts of the South where you weren't producing major commodities, where small-scale farmers were kind of subsisting in what some people call a safety-first economy, meaning you produce everything that you need to live for yourself,

Speaker 14

and maybe you produce a little extra stuff on the side, and you can sell for a market, but you're not primarily dependent on selling things in the market. So you can kind of live on your own, on your land. Now, that is often kind of contingent on access to an open range. So you might own a little bit of property yourself,

Speaker 14

your house, your household, and your farm, but you don't necessarily own enough property to maintain your livestock or to hunt. And so after the Civil War, two things happen.

Speaker 14

One, those hunting grounds and herding grounds get enclosed because landowners don't want freed people to have access to them in the ways that small farmers used to. So freed people don't have access to those commons, but also small farmers are losing their access to those commons. That's one. And then two,

Speaker 14

especially the Republican-controlled legislatures during Reconstruction are doing a railroad frenzy. They're building railroads everywhere. And not just Republicans. This continues under the Democrats as well. But suddenly, the South is crisscrossed by railroads in ways it never had been before.

Speaker 14

And part of that is like, okay, planters hadn't been interested in the forests of the South. Forests and timber were not the major commodity that the South produced. And so capitalists coming in looked at those southern timberlands and thought like, "Well, this is an undeveloped waste place," is what they called them,

Speaker 14

"and we need to get in there." So there were parts of the South that were not organized around commodity production like timber, where you see railroads getting built, capital pouring in, and kind of older forms of life becoming impossible.

Ben Maby

And the opportunity many saw in the construction of the railroad system actually comes to decide the critical election in 1876, which results in the withdrawal of the final union occupation force in the remaining states. I always like to emphasize this, but it doesn't get taught a lot.

Ben Maby

But there's a clear prefiguration of kinds of business conflict, corruption that we come to think about in the '20s, Teapot Dome, or even later, the George W. Bush administration's connections to the oil industry or something.

Ben Maby

But you can see a much longer heritage around the Electoral College vote in 1876, which is immediately followed then by the explosive year of 1877 when the kind of new working class steps onto the stage with a national railroad strike.

Speaker 10

Before we fully dive into 1877, I think we should say a word about deflation.

Ben Maby

Yes. The crisis, the business crisis that threatens all of these new railroad corporations is instigated with a financial panic in 1873 and declining prices. It threatens them, and it's also in some ways a consequence of the railroad investment cycle.

Speaker 10

Could you say more about that?

Ben Maby

The 1870s are often seen as some of the first instances of the classic capitalist patterns of crisis or the business cycle in which the economic system itself seems to generate these rhythms of over and under production, of rising and falling profitability, of rising and falling levels of investment. Of course,

Ben Maby

throughout history, there'd always been seasonal patterns, and there'd always been weather events. But this system of patterns seemed to come from within the economic system itself. And a huge amount of the investment that was going on, and especially the most volatile investment, was in the form of railroads, right? And so I think without too much violence to reality,

Ben Maby

you can think of the big downturns which happened in 1873 and again later in the decade as sort of the busts that follow periods of railroad boom, right? You build a railroad, then there's too many railroads. The cycle of expectations which drive railroad investment, which in turn drives a lot of macroeconomic activity, is just basically unstable and generates these waves throughout the decade.

Speaker 10

Well, and it has really important kind of social and immediate consequences for the phenomena we've been talking about in a couple of ways I think we could point to.

Speaker 10

One is, although I won't try to explain what causes what macroeconomically, right, there's an insistence by the elite elements of the Republican coalition on how the war debt be managed and on how the monetary supply is organized, in particular to return to a hard gold standard, right, in the aftermath of the war.

Speaker 10

And the question of currency, it becomes probably the single most important political question for the remainder of the 19th century. So going to a hard gold standard certainly contributes in important ways to the kind of brutal deflationary conditions.

Ben Maby

And the backdrop here is that the Civil War had been financed through a big expansion of the public debt and through the issuance of a paper currency, which was a new and, as it turned out, temporary thing in US history.

Speaker 10

Right. It's when the term greenback is invented for the dollar. Second, just to kind of make more concrete what deflation means for some of the kinds of people we've been talking about, to return to the agricultural South, right, deflation is persistent decline in prices. That's what it means.

Speaker 10

And my understanding is that basically, cotton, for example, sees really brutal, persistent price declines, which has the effect Emma, correct me if I'm wrong,

Speaker 10

has the effect of obliging small southern farmers to plant more and more and more cotton to try to keep up with their debts, which then, in a classic crisis of overproduction, causes the price to continue to fall.

Speaker 14

Yeah. I mean, and there's just literally no cash circulating, which is partly to do with the banking system that the Republican Party put in place during the Civil War, which contained some concessions to New York bankers.

Speaker 14

And so a lot of things were bought on credit in the peripheries in the South and parts of the West. Credit was really expensive. And one of the reasons that small-scale farmers started producing cotton, there was one year of a spike in prices when people kind of said,

Speaker 14

"Okay, let's grow some cotton." But also, cotton was what merchants would accept as collateral. So you have to pledge the future cotton crop in order to get access to credit, basically. And so it was in many ways a coerced choice to enter this cycle of cotton production, overproduction.

Speaker 11

Today, we talk about this in terms of the business cycle and monetary policy, but these weren't words that would mean anything to many people. But I think it is to answer a question Ben asked maybe earlier in this discussion about what kind of working classes produced after the Civil War.

Speaker 11

Well, it's one that is now conditioned by a cyclical rise and fall in prices and accompanying growth and contraction of business, which means unemployment.

Ben Maby

And wage cuts, right? So the railroad version of the cotton cycle we were talking about might be one in which there's a rise in competition among railroads because now there are too many of them or because demand is falling short because there's already deflation. When there's this kind of competition, railroads respond by trying to cut costs, which often means cutting wages, right?

Ben Maby

So it's large-scale unemployment, which emerges sort of as a concept around this time, but also the wage cuts, right? And I think a lot of these strikes are brought on by business attempts to cut costs by cutting wages at the bottom of one of these new business cycles.

Speaker 11

Yeah. It is the catalyst for the big railroad strike, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. I think it was a 10% wage cut that first hit workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia. I think it was on the back of two or three other wage cuts they had also kind of taken on the chin in the last prior months. And at this point, they just kind of refused to send out the trains.

Speaker 11

I think there was something close to gosh, does anyone remember how many? I think 600 trains were kind of stuck at the Baltimore and Ohio station in West Virginia at the kind of start of the strike.

Speaker 11

And even as the militias sent in, no one is able to kind of restart these trains, which kind of catches a prairie fire and sends almost a signal out to workers across the country that now is the time to kind of stand up to some of those attacks on their wages that was happening across the country. So it picks up in Maryland. It takes place in New York. It stretches all the way out to kind of San Francisco.

Speaker 11

And Mike Davis calls it the first nationwide class confrontation that takes place. Maybe we don't too or don't feel like that's true, given how you want to read maybe some of the Civil War history that we just talked about.

Speaker 11

But there's a kind of nationwide pattern of class conflict emerging here, anchored in particular by these railroad workers, which thread together the nation as even a meaningful political concept in the latter half of the 19th century.

Speaker 10

And I feel like as we're saying about the 1877 strike, a couple of things. One is that there's no organization there before it, right? It has a kind of what we might call spontaneous quality. And very rapidly, in cities all over the country, railroad workers find that they are able to kind of call whole populations out with them, right?

Speaker 10

So it takes on a quality of a kind of mob action, if you want to think of it that way, or a riot. And in Pittsburgh, for example, again, to return to my place, the kind of crowd confronts and basically overcomes the local militia, National Guard, scatters them.

Speaker 10

They try to take refuge in the arsenal in Pittsburgh, and the arsenal refuses to give them refuge because they understand that if they allow them in, the strikers will tear the place down brick by brick. And so instead, they kind of melt away, and the state has to bring reinforcements from the other side of the state, right? So the problem the state recognizes was that there's too much local sympathy,

Speaker 10

and they have to bring sort of outsiders. So I think those two dimensions of it also really kind of mark it as a kind of beginning in a certain way, right? Not a total beginning, as Ben is saying, but there's no preexisting organization. And it has this quality that kind of connects it to the kinds of kind of crowd actions that characterize things like the French Revolution, for example.

Ben Maby

Or the Paris Commune, which had happened less than a decade earlier and was on everyone's mind.

Speaker 10

Right. And which everyone in America immediately associated with this.

Speaker 11

The apex probably of the strike maybe is in St. Louis, of all places. In 1877, as the railroad strike is kind of raging on, railroad workers in that city it's an important kind of crossroads for a number of rail lines.

Speaker 11

They launch a strike, and they're joined by a number of other industries who are also kind of critically some of the industries we've been talking about as core to the developing proletariat and the kind of patterns of economic growth in the period. That's canal workers. That's miners, manufacturing industries, but also has the community riot-like character that Gabe was just describing.

Speaker 11

They don't just bring the city to a standstill. Quite literally, a group that's called in the press the internationalists, which is to say people associated with Marx's First International end up leading the strike in the place of deep formal organization and even assume some functions of the kind of municipal government for the course of a period.

Ben Maby

And you can tell the story of working-class struggle for the next half-century as a struggle to forge organization out of these basically national riot situations in which railroad engineers quit to drive the trains,

Ben Maby

and then they have to figure out how to prevent strike breakers from coming in. They have to physically defend a railroad station or a shophouse, and that becomes a losing proposition against the US military. And so they have to burn down the shophouse so that the company can't use it. And to pull out of these what we're calling spontaneous,

Ben Maby

I think spontaneous upsurges of militancy, and how to build durable organizations out of them becomes a central problem throughout the 1880s and the 1890s and into the Wilson administration and World War I.

Speaker 11

And to get back to something Ben said at the beginning, this is a place where the industrial union idea is emerging, at least as a horizon, right? By the end of the century, there will be something called the American Railway Union, which understands itself explicitly as an industrial union in the sense that it wants to represent the workers on the railroad period, not the firemen, not the brakemen, right?

Speaker 10

It's so different from how workers are organizing mostly in the period, which is mostly through secret societies. I mean, this is also there in the European kind of workers' experience. You'll probably be familiar with the League of Just that was the kind of group which had first became the Communist League, which had commissioned Marx and Engels to kind of write the manifesto. These clandestine, almost blankiest cells,

Speaker 10

they're a core part of the 19th century, even European workers' experience. They're also pretty active throughout the United States. It's a big way that Friedmen were organizing across the South. It's a core part of the kind of nucleus of action that takes place to kind of galvanize this strike too. And these secret societies, they're kind of funny. They are patterned off the Freemasons,

Speaker 10

and they are secret societies because they believe that these relatively clandestine kind of underground codes of organizing, because it's not public, can shield you from intense employer repression or just civic repression. Well, and it also kind of in that way replicates the classic image of the bourgeois republican revolution, right?

Speaker 10

I mean, you mentioned the Freemasons. Groups like the Freemasons were quite important in the overthrow of the old regime because they gave people a kind of way to organize themselves and sort of fraternize with each other outside of the rules of feudalism. And so that sort of being replicated and radicalized and extended downward in the social spectrum,

Speaker 10

immediately out of 1877, you see, although there have been efforts to form big national labor unions already going back to the Civil War, right, across the 1860s and early 1870s,

Speaker 10

coming out of 1877 and the activity on the rail lines in particular is the formation of what is probably the most credible real candidate for the first national labor movement that has something to it beyond just the name, right, which is the noble and holy order of the Knights of Labor,

Speaker 10

right, in keeping with your point about fraternal kind of society organization. They have actually just become the Knights of Labor, but they exactly have this kind of origin to them.

Ben Maby

Well, that seems like a good place as any to kind of stop for this episode and the kind of birth of a possibly new organizational form for the working class.

Speaker 12

Let me tell you of a sailor, Harry Bridges is his name, an honest union leader who the bosses tried to frame.

Ben Maby

Thank you for listening to the first episode of Fragile Juggernaut, a podcast on the history and meaning of the CIO. We will be releasing new episodes every other week through the duration of our series. Our next episode will take on the history of the American working class from 1877 up until the start of the First World War.

Ben Maby

Fragile Juggernaut is hosted by our organizing committee: Alex Press, Andrew L. Rod, Ben Mabey, Emma Titleman, Gabriel Wynant, and Tim Barker. We are produced by Alex Lewis and Jackson Roach at Row Home Productions, and we're brought to you by Haymarket Books. We are proud to be the first Haymarket Books Originals production.

Ben Maby

Make sure to follow and share the Haymarket Originals podcast feed so that you and your comrades are the first to know about other series-length nonfiction audio products that Haymarket rolls out. To learn more about Haymarket Originals, visit haymarketbooks.org, where you'll find thousands of indispensable radical books and other political education resources. You can also join the Haymarket Book Club,

Ben Maby

one of the best ways to support Haymarket and help fund projects like this. You can also find a link to our Patreon for Fragile Juggernaut in the show notes below. Subscribers to the podcast get access to our newsletter, which features reading lists, further analysis, and interviews with historians and labor radicals, both past and present.

Ben Maby

Every little bit you can contribute will help us be able to put this thing together. Solidarity forever.

Speaker 12

Oh, the FBI is worried. The bosses, they are scared. They can't depart six million men, they know. And we're not glad to let them send Harry over the sea. We'll fight for Harry Bridges and build the CIO.