Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-qs9v7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-09T10:06:06.088Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport's Socialist New Deal, 1915–36. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 300 pp. $35.00 cloth; Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 271 pp. $45.00 cloth; $16.95 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2004

Jason Scott Smith
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Graduate School of Business Administration

Extract

What impact did the New Deal have at the local level? In these two volumes from the University of Illinois Press series, “The Working Class in American History,” historians Janet Irons and Cecelia Bucki use the vehicle of the case study to present detailed answers to this question. In so doing, each scholar makes a valuable contribution to our understandings of social and political change in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). Looking at parts of the South (textile mill towns in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee), Irons explores how white textile workers responded to changes in labor relations under the New Deal, a response that culminated in the failed 1934 general textile strike. In her study of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Bucki provides a sophisticated urban history, situating workers, ethnicity, class, and the economy firmly within a larger narrative of organized labor's quest for political power.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2003 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)