< http://www.ou.edu/oupress/ > Agrarian Socialism in America Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920
Why was Oklahoma, of all places, more hospitable to socialism than any other state in America? In this provocative book, Jim Bissett chronicles the rise and fall of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma during the first two decades of the twentieth century, when socialism in the United States enjoyed its golden age.
To explain socialism's popularity in Oklahoma, Bissett looks back to the state's strong tradition of agrarian reform. Drawing most of its support from working farmers, the Socialist Party of Oklahoma was rooted in such well-established organizations as the Farmers Alliance and the Indiahoma Farmers' Union. And to broaden its appeal, the Party borrowed from the ideology both of the American Revolution and of Christianity. By making Marxism speak in American terms, the author argues, Party activists counteracted the prevailing notion that socialism was illegitimate or un-American.
The Oklahoma Socialist Party was disabled by the hysteria and repression of the war years, but not before its members forced all Oklahoma politicians--Democrats, Republicans, and socialists--to take seriously their fundamental demands: the right to own the plot of land they worked and the right to a just portion of the fruits of their labor.
ISBN: 0-8061-3148-9 Binding: Cloth
Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930, The
The Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, a radical labor union, played an important role in Oklahoma between the founding of the union in 1905 and its demise in 1930. In Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies, Nigel Anthony Sellars describes IWW efforts to organize migratory harvest hands and oil-field workers in the state and relationships between the union and other radical and labor groups such as the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor.
Focusing on the emergence of migratory labor and the nature of the work itself in industrializing the region, Sellars provides a social history of labor in the Oklahoma wheat belt and the mid-continent oil fields. Using court cases and legislation, he examines the role of state and federal government in suppressing the union during World War I.
Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies concludes with a description of the IWW revival and subsequent decline after the war, suggesting that the decline is attributable more to the union's failure to adapt to postwar technological change, its rigid attachment to outmoded tactics, and its internal policy disputes, than to political repression. In Sellar's view, the failure of the IWW in Oklahoma largely explains the failure of both the IWW and the labor movement in the United States during the twenties.
"Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies breaks new ground and adds a new dimension to what we know about the IWW and Oklahoma's state history." - George G. Suggs, Jr., author of Union Busting in the Tri-State District: The Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri Metal Workers' Strike of 1935
ISBN: 0-8061-3005-9 Binding: Cloth Price: $34.95
< http://www.uga.edu/ugapress/books/ > Free to Work
Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815-1880
James D. Schmidt
In this intriguing and innovative work, James D. Schmidt examines federal efforts to establish "free labor" in the South during and after the Civil War by exploring labor law in the antebellum North and South and its role in the development of a capitalist labor market. Identifying the emergence of conservative, moderate, and liberal stances on state intervention in the labor market, Schmidt develops three important case studies--wartime Reconstruction in Louisiana, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Freedmen's Bureau--to conclude that the reconstruction of free labor in the South failed in large part because of the underdeveloped and contradictory state of labor law. The same legal principles, Schmidt argues, triumphed in the postwar North to produce a capitalist market in labor.
James D. Schmidt is an assistant professor of history at Northern Illinois University.
Political Science . History, U.S. . Law
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 . 352 pp.
Hardcover ISBN 0-8203-2034-X (cl.) . $53
Labor in the Modern South
Glenn T. Eskew, ed. Women, African Americans, and work in the modern South
Embracing but moving beyond the traditional concerns of labor history, these nine original essays give a voice to workers underrepresented in the scholarship on labor in the twentieth-century South. Covering locales as diverse as Atlanta, Richmond, Tampa, and Houston, the essays encompass issues related to the specialized jobs of building ships and airplanes in the defense industries of World War II and to the unskilled work of oyster shuckers and cigar tobacco "stemmers." Heeding issues of race gender, and class in labor history, Labor in the Modern South includes an analysis of how young female workers spent their wages and an account of how purported underground unions of domestic workers fed white anxieties about the loosening hold of Jim Crow. Additional materials include an interview with, and an afterword by, Gary Fink, one of the foremost senior scholars in American labor history. Filled with new insights into southerners' concerns about workplace safety, access to training, job mobility, and worker solidarity, these essays offer a sophisticated and inclusive interpretation of twentieth-century labor.
Glenn T. Eskew is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. He is the author of But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle.
History, U.S. . Business & Economics . Family & Relationships
6 x 9 . 240 pp.
Published: June 2001
Hardcover ISBN 0-8203-2260-1 (cl.) . $45