The Barbara Wertheimer Prize
To recognize serious study in labor and work history among undergraduate students, the New York Labor History Association awards the Barbara Wertheimer Prize of $250.00 for the best research paper written during a given academic year. With permission, an abstract of the winning paper is posted on the NYLHA website. Please encourage your best undergraduate students to submit their work.
Papers on any aspect of labor or work
history will be considered. Entries will be evaluated on the basis of
scholarship and literary merit.
Entrants should send one copy of their paper to:
Brian Greenberg,
Department of History and Anthropology,
Monmouth University,
West Long Branch, NJ 07764
bgreenbe@monmouth.edu.
This thesis looks at the careers of two labor organizers and political radicals, Rose Pesotta and Powers Hapgood, and argues that their leftist politics played a central part in their success as national organizers for the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO). Pesotta was an anarchist, a Russian immigrant, and a garment worker who organized for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Hapgood was a Harvard graduate turned coal miner, an organizer for the United Mine Workers, and an active member and organizer for the Socialist Party. In 1935, both Pesotta and Hapgood began a two year period of intense organizing work as national organizers for the CIO and its member unions, during which they became close friends and companions.
The first two chapters look at Pesotta and Hapgood's careers in turn and show that their radicalism preserved their commitment to organizing over a 10 year period of demobilization in the 1920s. When the Great Depression came and labor unrest began to mount, they were some of the few experienced members of the labor movement with organizing experience capable of leading this drive. Most importantly, their shared analysis that a class struggle existed in the United States between workers and capitalists committed them to organizing industrial and participatory unions, which directly led to their decision to work for the CIO.
The final chapter looks at their participation in the Flint Sit Down Strike of 1937. In Flint, a cast of radicals coming out of a national leftist community, all with prior friendships and similar understandings of where the labor movement needed to go, came together to lead the strike. Pesotta and Hapgood fit comfortably into this developed leftist milieu in Detroit and Flint, and without it and the organizers involved the sit down strike would never have been successful, potentially depriving the labor movement of its most important catalyst. The conclusion of this thesis argues that successful movements of labor require a radical philosophy and national community to educate, inspire, and connect labor organizers.
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