Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T21:22:22.728Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Language of Class in Twentieth-Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Margo Anderson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In June of 1948, during the peak period of strike activity in the United States in the past fifty years, Philip Murray, President of the CIO, the most successful militant labor organization of the twentieth century, published an article giving his views on labor organization, democracy, and “our American system.” He argued that “if we pull together . . . we shall surmount the present crisis.” He felt confident about his prediction because, he said, “We have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here. And in the final analysis the interests of farmers, factory hands, business and professional people, and white-collar toilers prove to be the same” (Murray, 1948; quoted in Lipsitz, 1981: 143).

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , Winter 1988 , pp. 349 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1988 

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.)

References

American Demographics (1982) 4 (July/August): 22.Google Scholar
Banfield, Edward C. (1974) The Unheavenly City Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Barfield, Owen (1967) History in English Words. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans.Google Scholar
Bell, Daniel (1960) The End of Ideology. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.Google Scholar
Bell, Daniel (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Berger, Bennett (1960) Working Class Suburb. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Blumberg, Paul (1980) Inequality in an Age of Decline. New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Boorstin, Daniel (1965) The Americans: The National Experience. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Boorstin, Daniel (1973) The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Briggs, Asa (1960) “The language of ‘Class’ in early nineteenth-century England,” in Saville, J. and Briggs, A. (eds.) Essays in Labour History. New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Brody, David (1980) Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle. New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Centers, Richard (1949) The Psychology of Social Classes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Colin (1940) Conditions of Economic Progress. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Conk, Margo Anderson (1980) The United States Census and Labor Force Change. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.Google Scholar
Dubofsky, Melvin and Theoharis, Athan (1983) Imperial Democracy: The United States since 1945. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Edwards, P. K. (1981) Strikes in the United States, 1881-1974. New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Freidel, Frank and Brinkley, Alan (1982) America in the Twentieth Century. 5th ed. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Gordon, David, Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael (1982) Segmented Work, Divided Workers. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Green, James (1980) The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth Century America. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Guthrie, Anna Lorraine [ed.] (1905) Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. I (1900-1904). New York: H. W. Wilson Co.Google Scholar
Harrington, Michael (1981) The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Harris, Howell (1982) The Right to Manage. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Hartz, Louis (1955) The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.Google Scholar
Higham, John (1979) “The matrix of specialization,” in Oleson, Alexandra and Voss, John, (eds.) The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Gareth Stedman (1983) Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kaelble, Hartmut (1981) Historical Research on Social Mobility: Western Europe and the USA in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Translated by Noakes, Ingrid. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Kahl, Joseph A. (1957) The American Class Structure. New York: Rinehart.Google Scholar
Laslett, John H. M. and Lipset, Seymour Martin [eds.] (1974) Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Levison, Andrew (1974) The Working Class Majority. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan.Google Scholar
Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bendix, Reinhard [eds.] (1953) Class, Status, and Power. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.Google Scholar
Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bendix, Reinhard (1959) Social Mobility in Industrial Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lipsitz, (1981) Class and Culture in Cold War America: A Rainbow at Midnight. S. Hadley, MA: J.F. Bergin.Google Scholar
Lynd, Robert and Lynd, Helen (1929) Middletown. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.Google Scholar
Lynd, Robert and Lynd, Helen (1937) Middletown in Transition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1959) Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Marwick, Arthur (1980) Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France, and the USA since 1930. New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Murray, Charles (1984) Losing Ground. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Murray, Philip (1948) “If we pull together.” Reader’s Digest 53 (August): 10–14.Google Scholar
Noble, David et al. (1980) Twentieth-Century Limited. New York: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Novick, Peter (1988) “Historians, ‘objectivity,’ and the defense of the west. Radical History Review 40 (Winter): 7–32.Google Scholar
Nugent, Walter (1981) Structures of American Social History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ostreicher, Richard (1988) “Urban working-class political behavior and theories of American elections, 1870-1940.” Journal of American History 74 (March): 1257–1286.Google Scholar
Perlman, Selig (1928) A Theory of the Labor Movement. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard (1982) The New Class War. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Polenberg, Richard (1980) One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States since 1938. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Potter, David (1954) People of Plenty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rainwater, Lee (1974) What Money Buys: Inequality and the Social Meaning of Income. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature (1906-1981). New York: H. W. Wilson Co.Google Scholar
Riis, Jacob (1957) How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (orig. 1890). New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Rosenman, Samuel I. [ed.] (1941) The Public Papers of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Vol. 6. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Shergold, Peter (1982) Working-Class Life: The “American Standard” in Comparative Perspective, 1899-1913. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Sklar, Robert (1975) Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Sombart, Werner (1976) Why There Is No Socialism in the United States (orig. 1906). London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Strasser, Susan (1982) Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Strieker, Frank (1983) “Affluence for whom?—Another look at prosperity and the working class in the 1920s.” Labor History 24 (Winter): 5–33.Google Scholar
Susman, Warren I. (1983) Culture as History. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Terkel, Studs (1973) “I got no use for intellectuals, but I want my kid to be an effete snob.” New York Times (2 November): 48.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles (1981) As Sociology Meets History. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles (1983) “Demographic origins of the European proletariat.” CRSO Working Paper No. 207. Ann Arbor.Google Scholar
Trachtenberg, Alan (1982) The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Turner, Frederick Jackson (1920) “The significance of the frontier in American history” (orig. 1893), in Turner, F. J. (ed.) The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt and Co.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1976) Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part I. Washington: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1980) Social Indicators III. Washington: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Census Office (1853) Seventh Census of the United States: 1850. Washington: Donelson and Armstrong.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (1976) The Measure of Poverty: A Report to Congress Mandated by the Educational Amendments of 1974 and Accompanying Technical Papers. Washington: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Wakes, Bernard (1976) “The language and imagery of ‘Class’ in early twentieth-century England (c. 1900-1925).” Literature and History 4 (Autumn): 33–55.Google Scholar
Warner, W. Lloyd (1941) The Social Life of a Modern Community. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Weber, Max (1958) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (trans, and eds.) New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond (1956) Culture and Society. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond (1973) “Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory.” New Left Review 82: 3–16.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Wilson, William Julius (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Erik Olin (1985) Classes. New York: Schocken.Google Scholar