A History of America in Ten Strikes
A History of America in Ten Strikes
by Eric Loomis (New York: New Press, 2018)
Book review by Marc Kagan, a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation will examine Transport Workers Union Local 100 since the mid-1970s NYC fiscal crisis.
Certainly, the title is intriguing, an interesting premise. Can you tell a history of America – or at least from the Civil War to the present day, the period from which nine of these ten strikes are drawn – through a short list of carefully selected strikes (and in just a little more than 200 pages)? If so, which ones would you pick?
Some of Eric Loomis’s choices would likely be in anyone’s top ten: the 1886 nationwide 8-hour strike wave, Flint, PATCO. Another is obvious once stated: what Du Bois called the “general strike” of slaves during the Civil War. The rest are, to Loomis, usefully illustrative of a particular time and place in American history: women at the Lowell mills, responding to early industrialization and the dual class and gender forms of patriarchal control; Federal mediation of the 1902 Anthracite coal strike; Wobblies organizing immigrants in Lawrence; the extent and limits of union power in the post-WWII Oakland general strike; ‘60s-era worker revolt against both GM and UAW at Lordstown; Justice for Janitors immigrant organizing. Loomis’s methodology is relatively straightforward: set the historical context, recount the events of the strike and its outcome, and elaborate its significance for that time period and after. His thesis is that although class solidarity is necessary, it’s not sufficient: without government support, or at least neutrality, worker struggles generally cannot succeed.
Reading the introduction, which opens with this spring’s West Virginia teacher strikes, I was excited: might I have a single source for the sections of my American History survey course in which I teach “class?” A single voice to replace my current hodgepodge of selections from Jeremy Brecher, Eric Foner, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Howard Zinn? Unfortunately, Ten Strikes’ execution doesn’t match its promise. For one thing, the book is not really about ten strikes. Almost a hundred different strikes get a mention of as much as a page or two or as little as a few sentences. (That’s not counting the 150 “Major Events” in a 20-page appendix, or descriptions of dozens of coercive legal or policing actions by states or corporations meant to head off pro-worker efforts, or just to wring more sweat from workers’ brows.) The result is that Loomis, who notes that the book originated from his posts on “This Day in Labor History,” often sacrifices depth and analysis in his pursuit of just one more story that seems important. Because “The Eight Hour Day Strikes” chapter also reports on New York in 1873, the Molly Maguires, the 1877 rail strike, Homestead, Idaho silver mines, and sex workers, Ten Strikes resembles a condensed version of Phillip Foner’s “and then, and then, and then…” history of labor far more than an account of America’s course. As a whole, Loomis’s effort is a noble quest, but flawed; too often, students and other readers will lose the main drift to a flurry of minutia.
A few chapters partially fulfill the book’s charge. “Slaves on Strike” is a useful shortened version of Du Bois’s great polemic on their crucial role in winning the war. “The Anthracite Strike” nicely frames “middle class” Progressive attitudes toward the working class and social change. Flint is, of course, the most exciting chapter – workers win! – and handily demonstrates Loomis’s formula that victory is based on a combination of cross-class unity and government aid; a useful counterpoint is discussion of the notorious Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) exclusions, denying that aid to Southern black, agricultural, and domestic workers. “Lordstown” sets “Workers in a Rebellious Age” and watches as they are crushed by the start of deindustrialization, confusion in their own ranks, and complacency by union leaders.
Sometimes fact-checking seems careless. The Lawrence chapter is properly entitled, “The Bread and Roses Strike,” but the phrase is never explained to readers. The NLRA does not, “force an employer to bargain a contract,” but only to bargain, not reach agreement. Since wartime maintenance of membership procedures provided windows in which to leave the union, it’s incorrect to describe them as guaranteeing that all workers would pay dues. Loomis far overstates labor’s influence in WWII Washington, when he asserts that Roosevelt, “gave unions remarkable privileges in economic planning.” Abandoning the standard reading (but without explaining why), the 1945-46 GM strike is characterized as a victory, in forcing GM to accede to national wage increase standards. Class divisions and distinctions are sometimes blurred. Seemingly conflating capitalism with a free labor market economy, Loomis claims that, “many” 19th century workers believed, “capitalism was a just system…. that could work for them,” if only monopoly could be swept away. While 1877 strikers, “wanted a return to a society that respected the nobility of toil,” Loomis didn’t convince me that railroad workers sought “a nation of smallholders and entrepreneurs,” or that mighty 1950s unions transformed, “the working class into the middle class…. living lives of luxury.”
Certainly, the 2016 election has put more wind in the sails of whiteness studies and Ten Strikes often embraces a blunt and grim version: Lincoln’s opposition to slavery, he asserts, “was based upon the opportunities it denied to white men.” Well, in part. In the 1870s, the white working class worked to exclude the Chinese because they thought it would fix the problems that monopoly was causing. One hundred years later, they “saw their status as elite workers as under attack.” Walter Reuther “fought against racism in his union” – there is no mention of how he also fought the black-led Revolutionary Union Movement in auto shops – “but UAW members often resisted integration of their workplaces.” Given the drumbeat of white racial animosity, it behooves Loomis to better explain what ever holds the working class together.
What strike best tells us about contemporary America? The America where Republicans continue with their foot-to-the-floor union-busting, while the Democratic Party, Loomis’s suggested vehicle for government assistance to the working class, mostly represents, as Steve Earle once sang, “four more years of things not getting worse”? I agree with Loomis that there is a “deep connection between who controls the government and the success of the labor movement.” He gets it exactly right that a key factor at Flint was the pointed refusal of the newly elected governor to put the Michigan National Guard at GM’s disposal. That’s why it’s confusing, if not unexpected, that Ten Strikes ends with the hopeful recounting of the Justice for Janitors campaign, built on craft-based volunteerism and painstaking avoidance of NLRB elections. Meanwhile, here in “union friendly” New York and New Jersey, IBEW Local 3 members are nearing the two-year mark in their strike against cable monolith Spectrum. Apparently, our solid “blue” state governments, whose goodwill is crucial to the very existence of this monopoly franchise, see no political necessity to support striking workers, no cost for failing to act in their behalf. It’s only when we change this, Loomis argues, when fighting workers unite across race (and gender) and across the 99 percent, and make “corporate dominated government” politically inconceivable that we can hope to “demand the fruits of our labor… [and] a better life for all Americans.”