The Rise of Labor: A Chinese-Australian Participates in Bendigo Local Politics at a Formative Moment, 1904–1905

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-271
Author(s):  
Amanda Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Labor Politics ◽  
Federal Level ◽  
Labor Party ◽  
Political Position ◽  
National Conversation ◽  
Municipal Election ◽  
Local Levels

Abstract Chinese-Australian and son of an entrepreneur, Edward Ni Gan, a successful lawyer and would-be politician, was, in 1904, the first candidate in a Bendigo municipal election to tie his campaign to the Labor Party platform. Labor had just achieved the significant victory of three months in power at a federal level, and, although Ni Gan did not win in 1904, his support for the movement was well-received in Bendigo. When he tried to stand the following year as the endorsed Labor candidate, however, he was quickly disillusioned by procedural rules and his inadequate trade union networks. His speeches as an independent candidate showed his political position recast as a radical liberal in the Deakinite mode. In both campaigns, Ni Gan’s colour was a difference which could be accommodated since he otherwise so happily embodied the young, white, “fair and square” sportsman who was an ideal progressive Bendigonian. His engagement with Labor politics in the first decade of the twentieth century shows that the drive for “White Australia” which often dominated the national conversation, could be less powerful at local levels.

Sustaining Labor Politics in Hard Times: Race, Labor, and Coalition Building in Racine, Wisconsin

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-63
Author(s):  
Naomi R Williams
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Local Elections ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Labor Politics ◽  
Working People ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract This article explores the shifting politics of the Racine, Wisconsin, working-class community from World War II to the 1980s. It looks at the ways Black workers’ activism influenced local politics and how their efforts played out in the 1970s and 1980s. Case studies show how an expansive view of the boundaries of the Racine labor community led to cross-sector labor solidarity and labor-community coalitions that expanded economic citizenship rights for more working people in the city. The broad-based working-class vision pursued by the Racine labor community influenced local elections, housing and education, increased the number of workers with the power of unions behind them, and improved Racine's economic and social conditions. By the 1980s, Racine's labor community included not only industrial workers but also members of welfare and immigrants’ rights groups, parents of inner-city students, social workers and other white-collar public employees, and local and state politicians willing to support a class-based agenda in the political arena. Worker activists’ ability to maintain and adapt their notion of a broad-based labor community into the late twentieth century shows how this community and others like it responded to the upheaval of the 1960s social movements by creating a broad and relatively successful concept of worker solidarity that also incorporated racial justice.

Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies: ‘Ethereal from the Waist Up and All Welsh Pony Down Below’

2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Grime
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Musical Drama ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Lesbian Identity ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Public Scrutiny ◽  
The University ◽  
Fragmented Identity

In this article Helen Grime examines the enduring epithet of ethereality and its persistent connection to the career of the actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies (1891–1992). Most closely associated with her portrayal of Etain in the much revived musical drama The Immortal Hour, ethereality is understood as a signifier of 1920s femininity. The offstage presentation of a domesticated femininity further evidences the apparent conventionality of this actress's self-presentation at a time of particular anxiety about the socio-political position of women. These notions of femininity hint at the prevailing social attitudes that confronted an actress whose on- and offstage appearances were subject to public scrutiny while her private lesbian identity remained obscured. It is suggested, however, that Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies's playful negotiation of her demonstrably fragmented identity evidences an agency and self-possession belied by her public conformity. Helen Grime completed her thesis, A Strange Omission: Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Twentieth-Century Shakespearean Actress, in 2008 and is currently a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Winchester.

Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle M. Nickerson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
The Family ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment ◽  
The Right ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
Warrior Women

This chapter examines how women developed forms of antistatist protest in the first half of the twentieth century that posed an oppositional relationship between the family and government. By the 1950s, anticommunism and antistatism became widespread mechanisms of political protest for women on the right much as peace activism and welfare work came to seem natural for women on the left. But unlike the later generation of Cold Warrior women who exerted themselves most forcefully through local politics, conservative women of the early twentieth century made their strongest impact by attacking that national progressive state. They also demonized “internationalism” as the handmaiden to communism, discovering another foe that women's position in the family obliged them to oppose. Consequently, the earliest generation of conservative organizations adopted the habit of calling themselves “patriotic” groups to contrast their own nationalist sentiment with the internationalism of progressives, which they equated with communism. This pattern continued into the post-World War II era.

Boom, Echo, and Splinter

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-168
Author(s):  
Mark Healey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
New World ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Population Expansion ◽  
Active Citizenship ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
Labor Politics ◽  
European Immigrants

Buenos Aires began the twentieth century as a prosperous port drawing European immigrants to serve a booming export economy. It expanded outward from its core of urban power and prosperity through suburbanization, early on segregating slaughterhouse zones from sites of recreation for the comfortable. Mid-century industrialization drew workers to the peripheries—which became zones of labor politics and bases for active citizenship and Peronist power. Peronist economic and political power sustained an unequally shared prosperity past World War I. Then de-industrialization in times of population expansion accompanied by military dictatorship (1976-1983) and a new suburbanization to protect the wealthy brought the polarizing mix wealth and marginality, formality and informality faced earlier in other New World cities. Re-democratization failed to bring more shared prosperity—or an escape from repeated cycles of promise and crisis.

A labour of Sisyphus: the quest for a great Labour Party

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Andrew Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
National Government ◽  
The Way

A central historical progressive dilemmas is explored, in chapter four, by Andrew Gamble through a re-visiting of Marquand’s 1977 biography of Ramsay MacDonald. An extensive historical work, which sought to rescue MacDonald from the simplistic cries from his own party of betrayal for his heading of the coalition National Government in 1931, the book was also intended to offer clear lessons for what Marquand viewed as a Labour Party in the 1970s undermining itself though its class warfare, trade union sectionalism and doctrinal narrowness. Gamble argues that the dilemmas observed and lived out by both MacDonald and by Marquand, as his biographer, endured throughout the twentieth century and indeed remain unresolved today. Nearly one hundred years on, MacDonald offers insights into the way in which, in times arguably even more challenging than our own he grappled for an extended period with these delicate political balancing acts.

scholarly journals Political mediation and participation in the Czech rural areas

2008 ◽  
Vol 54 (No. 12) ◽  
pp. 575-581
Author(s):  
J. Čmejrek
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Rural Community ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Fragmented Population ◽  
Rural Municipalities ◽  
Election Results ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Municipal Election

The objective of this paper is to show the mediation between citizens and political power by political parties in Czech rural areas. The position of political parties in rural municipalities is demonstrated in two perspectives. The top-down perspective is based on the distribution of several tens of thousands mandates in local municipal councils between political parties. The opposite perspective provides the bottom-up point of view – from the level of the individual municipalities, their party systems and party organisational structures. The analysis of the municipal election results reveals clearly that the role of political parties in local politics depends namely on the size of the given municipality. In this sense, the Czech Republic represents a very interesting example as it is characterised by a dense and heavily fragmented population settlement with a large number of small rural municipalities. In rural municipalities, we encounter incomplete party spectra and the absence of political parties in the smallest municipalities. Besides, the lists of candidates in rural municipalities reveal the weakness of the local party organisations that cannot avoid cooperating with the independent candidates. The small distance between the citizen and the elected body in a rural community significantly determines the forms of the local politics; the ideological and party mediation is superfluous, in fact, it is often seen as something harmful which divides the rural community.

scholarly journals Anti-Competition Regulation

2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 701-724
Author(s):  
Anne Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Competition Policy ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Legal Change ◽  
Federal Level ◽  
Public Demand

Looking across the long twentieth century, this article tracks the rise and fall of one form of anti-competition regulation: the certificate of public convenience. Designed to curb “destructive competition” in certain industries, such as transportation and banking, certificate laws prevented firms from entering those industries unless they could convince regulators that they would satisfy an unmet public demand for goods or services. This history highlights how lawmakers used similar techniques in governing infrastructure and finance—two fields that are not often studied together. It also shows that state regulation both prefigured legal change at the federal level and then lagged behind it, suggesting that different dynamics have been in play at each level of governance in devising competition policy over the last century.

The “Amnesty” Aftermath: Current Policy Issues Stemming from the Legalization Programs of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan González Baker
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Early Implementation ◽  
State And Local ◽  
And Control ◽  
Local Levels

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) created two one-time only legalization programs affecting nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants. Legalization has produced important changes among immigrants and in immigration policy. These changes include new patterns of immigrant social and economic adaptation to the United States and new immigrant flows through family ties to IRCA-legalized aliens. The heightened salience of immigration, produced in part by legalization, has also generated a wave of “backlash” policymaking at the state and local levels in high-immigration sites. This article combines data from a longitudinal survey of the IRCA-legalized population with qualitative field data on current immigration issues from key informants in eight high-immigration metropolitan areas. It reviews the political evolution and early implementation of legalization, the current socioeconomic position of legalized aliens, and changes in the immigration “policy space” resulting from legalization. Aldiough restrictive policies have again captured public attention, legalization has also sparked renewed efforts at immigration advocacy, particularly where immigrants who adjust to U.S. citizenship hold the potential for influencing local politics.

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