Southern Palm, Northern Pine

This chapter examines how Civil War memories anchored farmer-labor radicalism during the 1870s and 1880s. The Greenback-Labor Party in particular used wartime tropes to submit that the popular commemoration of the war, as either a North-South or Black-white axis, was fatal to class and trade organization. Instead, party members advocated a “class reconciliation” of workingmen across both sections. Although such a reconciliation was thwarted by internal contradictions and external resistance, Greenback politics offered discrete opportunities for interracial remembrance after the decline of Reconstruction, with veterans bridging out of major parties and toward reformist and revolutionary politics.

No Danger among Them

This chapter examines how numerous companies sought the services of Asian immigrants. Efficiency, availability, and manageability, along with the fact that they would work for lower wages than white workers, made the Chinese an appealing source of labor to railroads and other businesses. Yet they remained desirable only so long as they met expectations of compliance and placidity. Employers would no more accept challenges to authority and prerogative from the Asians than they would from members of any other ethnic group. Although the Chinese escaped association with specific radical ideologies, such as anarchism or socialism, managers did not consider their assertions of agency to be any less subversive. Labor radicalism emanating from any source drew censure for being un-American. To some critics, Chinese immigrants lacked the wherewithal ever to become proper Americans. Their place of origin, sociocultural characteristics, and physical appearance engendered intense bigotry. Racially biased perceptions also came to justify animus on the part of other workers, who saw the Chinese as competitors whose low standards of living, greatly inferior to those of American laborers, enabled them to work for significantly lower wages. Enmity ultimately led to statutory discriminations.

Prologue

The book’s prologue briefly sketches the colonization of Indigenous land that led to Chicago’s founding and rapid urbanization, and then focuses on two important phenomena within that larger story: the origins of policing in the city and the Great Migration of Black Americans that produced the city’s famed “Black Metropolis.” It shows how the Chicago Police Department’s origins lay not in some vague interest in public safety, but rather in controlling labor radicalism and the behavior of European immigrants. It also documents how the promise of Chicago for migrating Black Southerners was often quite different than the reality that they found within the city.

From the Russian Pale to the Lower East Side: The Cultural Roots of Four Jewish Women’s Radicalism

This chapter traces the roots of East European Jewish women’s Socialism, feminism and labor radicalism in the Eastern European towns and cities where they were born during the late 19th century. It then follows Schendierman, Newman, Lemlich and Cohn as they moved to New York City and became involved in labor and women’s subsistence activism.