Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Making a New Deal
- Introduction
- 1 Living and Working in Chicago in 1919
- 2 Ethnicity in the New Era
- 3 Encountering Mass Culture
- 4 Contested Loyalty at the Workplace
- 5 Adrift in the Great Depression
- 6 Workers Make a New Deal
- 7 Becoming a Union Rank and File
- 8 Workers' Common Ground
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
1 - Living and Working in Chicago in 1919
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Making a New Deal
- Introduction
- 1 Living and Working in Chicago in 1919
- 2 Ethnicity in the New Era
- 3 Encountering Mass Culture
- 4 Contested Loyalty at the Workplace
- 5 Adrift in the Great Depression
- 6 Workers Make a New Deal
- 7 Becoming a Union Rank and File
- 8 Workers' Common Ground
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In 1919, four million workers launched the greatest strike wave in American history. Boston policemen, New England telephone operators, textile workers up and down the East Coast, most of the working-men and women in Seattle, 450,000 coal miners, and 365,000 steel-workers nationwide led an offensive in which more than one in five American workers eventually participated. Their goals were both material and ideological. Fearing retrenchment by management after World War I, workers fought to defend their wartime wages and hours but even more basically to protect their jobs. And inspired by America's war effort in Europe, they sought to bring the campaign for democracy back home, to their own shop floors and election wards.
Chicago, with its history of labor militance and its location at the crossroads of transportation and communication, became a center of the strike movement, with more strikes than any other city besides New York. Here, too, some of the most important strikes took place, particularly in the mass production industries – steel, meatpacking, ready-made clothing, and agricultural equipment – that had made Chicago the second largest industrial area in the nation. Every day through the tumultuous summer and fall of 1919, Chicago's newspapers reported another event: a strike at Argo's Corn Products Company, a work stoppage at the Crane Company, a day-long general strike of 100,000 workers to free labor hero Tom Mooney, a walkout at International Harvester, conflict at all the major packinghouses, idle steel mills in South Chicago.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making a New DealIndustrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, pp. 11 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008