ORGANIZED LABOR AND THE BLACK WORKER DURING WORLD WAR I AND READJUSTMENT

World War I made the Tri-State district more productive and profitable than ever before. War industry demand for lead and zinc raised prices and wages, and led to the dramatic expansion of mines in the Oklahoma part of the district. Wartime nationalism also supercharged the risk-taking masculinity of the district’s miners who asserted their racist claims to the piece rate with new fervor that further undermined the appeals of union organizers and government health and safety reformers. But in the 1920s miners found their employers, who had grown bigger and stronger during the war, newly reluctant to pay them high wages. This stand-off created new opportunities for union organizers in the district, but Tri-State miners ultimately rejected solidarity in favor of the economic advantages they believed loyal, white American men deserved. By the 1920s, their working-class communities were organized around a faith in capitalism, violent masculinity, and white racism now transformed during the war into a staunch white nationalism. Having abandoned organized labor, Tri-State miners found themselves without allies as mining companies moved in the late 1920s to constrain their risk-taking behavior through new health controls aimed to eliminate silicosis and damaged men from the district.

Introduction: From Bourgeois to Corporatist Europe

Recasting Bourgeois Europe ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691169798.003.0001 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Charles S. Maier

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

World War I ◽

European Society ◽

Organized Labor ◽

World War ◽

Mass Politics ◽

Private And Public ◽

Economic Stabilization ◽

Elected Representatives

This introductory chapter explains that the book examines the process by which three European nations—France, Germany, and Italy—achieved political and economic stabilization in the decade after World War I. It shows how conservatives aimed at a stability and status associated with prewar Europe, employing the term “bourgeois” as a shorthand for all they felt threatened by war, mass politics, and economic difficulty. The book describes the emergence of a corporatist political economy that involved the displacement of power from elected representatives or a career bureaucracy to the major organized forces of European society and economy. This evolution toward corporatism meant the decline of sovereignty and of parliamentary influence. The book highlights two further significant developments that emerged only with the massive economic mobilization of World War I: the integration of organized labor into a bargaining system supervised by the state, and the wartime erosion of the distinction between private and public sectors.

Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community, 1920–1940

The Business History Review ◽

10.2307/3113735 ◽

1978 ◽

Vol 52 (3) ◽

pp. 342-368 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Kim McQuaid

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

World War I ◽

Business Leaders ◽

Business Community ◽

Organized Labor ◽

American Business ◽

Power Structures ◽

World War ◽

Big Business ◽

Corporate Business

Contrasting with the resentment of other power structures, especially corporate business, that democratic governments display is the obvious need of the powerful and the productive for each other in times of stress. Professor McQuaid follows the activities of a group of “corporate liberals” (i.e., big business leaders who believed that intelligent collaboration between business, government, and organized labor was an attainable goal) from World War I through the prosperous 1920s, the despondent 1930s, and the busy and prosperous years of World War II. He concludes that corporate liberal opinion grew more influential in both corporate and governmental circles during and after the period.

“We Must Deflate”: The Crime of 1920 Revisited

Enterprise & Society ◽

10.1017/eso.2015.90 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 17 (3) ◽

pp. 618-650

Author(s):

CHRISTOPHER W. SHAW

Keyword(s):

Monetary Policy ◽

World War I ◽

Federal Reserve ◽

Organized Labor ◽

World War ◽

Political Pressure ◽

Federal Reserve System ◽

The Great Depression ◽

La Follette ◽

Reserve System

Post-World War I Federal Reserve System policy focused on reducing price levels. Faith in liquidationist ideas led Federal Reserve officials to maintain tight-money policies during the depression of 1920–1921. Farmers suffering through this economic crisis objected to contemporary monetary policy. Organized labor and leading Progressive reformer Robert M. La Follette Sr. seconded their criticism. Postwar challenges to the nation’s financial leadership and its priorities bore tangible results by producing a number of notable reforms, including modifications of Federal Reserve policy and the Agricultural Credits Act of 1923. In the absence of similar political pressure during the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve System adhered to liquidationist ideas and did not pursue monetary expansion.

Measuring the Evolution of Strike Movements

International Review of Social History ◽

10.1017/s0020859000004478 ◽

1974 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 1-27 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Peter N. Stearns

Keyword(s):

World War I ◽

Organized Labor ◽

Ongoing Study ◽

Labor Movements ◽

World War ◽

Strike Activity ◽

Labor Strikes ◽

Means Of Measurement ◽

History Of

Strike activity is clearly the least studied aspect of the history of labor movements, yet it may be the most revealing index of the situation and outlook of actual workers. Moreover strike activity has an important history of its own, related to but not described by the history of organized labor. Strikes have evolved. Various groups of workers developed an ability to mount new kinds of strikes at different times. In order to grasp this evolution we need some clear means of measurement. What follows is an effort to suggest some criteria, many of them obvious enough. The essay results from an ongoing study of workers in France, Belgium, Germany and Britain in the two decades before World War I. But while examples are chosen primarily from this area and period, the effort is meant to be quite open-ended. There is no need to expect uniform patterns of strike activity in a given stage of industrialization; but there is every reason to hope that sufficiently general standards of measurement can be developed to measure key differences and to specify problems that require deeper study in terms of fundamental causation.

Transitioning labor to the ‘lean years’: the middle class and employer repression of organized labor in post-World War I Chicago

Labor History ◽

10.1080/0023656x.2013.807973 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 54 (3) ◽

pp. 321-342

Author(s):

Mark W. Robbins

Keyword(s):

World War I ◽

Middle Class ◽

Organized Labor ◽

World War

World War I and the American Constitution

10.1017/9781316148464 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

William G. Ross

Keyword(s):

World War I ◽

American Constitution ◽

World War

The Search for Our World War I Veterans

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e579372006-006 ◽

2006 ◽

Author(s):

Tom Thomas

Keyword(s):

World War I ◽

World War

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

Voprosy Ekonomiki ◽

10.32609/0042-8736-2017-1-142-155 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 142-155

Author(s):

I. Rozinskiy ◽

N. Rozinskaya

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

World War I ◽

Civil Wars ◽

Spanish Civil War ◽

Statistical Data ◽

Well Being ◽

Russian Civil War ◽

World War ◽

Common Features ◽

Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.