The Bible Speaks to Labor

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf ◽  
Ken Fones-Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Community Relations ◽  
Textile Workers ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Social Message ◽  
Local Minister

This chapter focuses on religious resources that the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) utilized to offer an alternative to Christian free enterprise and bring collective bargaining to the South. In the summer of 1946, the citizens of Danville, Virginia rallied behind a local minister and the local of the Textile Workers Union of America to create a Citizens' Committee to fight for economic justice and defy charges that they were led by outsiders “with Communistic leanings.” There were also allies in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, at Highlander Folk School, and in the industrial department of the YWCA who sought to fuse Protestantism's social message to the organization of southern workers. These pointed to a reservoir of prophetic Christianity upon which the CIO could draw when it mobilized for its crusade to organize Dixie. Perhaps most important, the CIO had a cadre of men and women with ties to Protestant churches whom it could send to build favorable community relations.

Able and Militant Fighters for Workers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bussel
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Union Organizing ◽  
Textile Workers ◽  
Transport Service ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Service Employees ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
American Federation Of Teachers ◽  
Industrial Organizations

This chapter examines how their time in Chicago led Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway to the shared experience of industrial union organizing and reinforced their faith in the potential of working-class mobilization. It begins with an account of the Memorial Day Massacre in 1937 and how Chicago provided Calloway with his first opportunity to exercise leadership in a union setting. It then considers Gibbons's involvement in Chicago's labor community as member of American Federation of Teachers Local 346 as well as his role in helping Chicago workers organize under the banner of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It also discusses Gibbons's work as an organizer for the Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC) and looks at two men who played instrumental roles in shaping Calloway's career: Willard Townsend and John Yancey. Finally, it describes Calloway's involvement with the United Transport Service Employees of America (formerly International Brotherhood of Red Caps), during which he also began to articulate a concept of working-class citizenship.

Under Construction: Frames, Culture, and American Labor’s Postwar Embrace of “Free Enterprise”

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-387
Author(s):  
Kristina Fuentes
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
Defensive Strategy ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Social Movement Framing ◽  
Under Construction

The empirical literature on social movement framing has largely neglected the processes by which frames are made. This paper addresses this lacuna through a study of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) embrace of “free enterprise” in its postwar program in the 1940s. Conventional accounts present the CIO’s use of consensual language in this period as a reflection of the labor federation’s rightward ideological drift, but a close examination of the processes involved in the construction of the “free enterprise” frames reveals a more complicated story. Drawing from archival research, I show that free enterprise was viewed with suspicion and antipathy within the organization, which is reflected in early drafts of the program literature. I also demonstrate that the decision to ultimately embrace “free enterprise” was rooted in a defensive strategy, one that was shaped in part by the leadership’s perception of American political culture at the time.

The Bible in the Twentieth-Century Anglophone World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark P. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
Anglophone World

This chapter looks at the tensions between biblical interpretation and the political, social, and cultural context of dissenting Protestant churches in the twentieth century. It notes that even a fundamental category, such as the ‘inspiration’ of Scripture, shifted across time as the nature of public debates, social and economic structures, and Western definitions of public knowledge shifted. The chapter progresses by looking at a number of examples of key figures (R. J. Campbell, Harry Emerson Fosdick, H. G. Guinness, R. A. Torrey, and R. G. McIntyre among them) who interpreted the Bible for public comment, and their relative positions as the century progressed. Popularization of biblical interpretation along the lines of old, new, and contemporary dissent, is explored through the careers of three near contemporaries: Charles Bradley ‘Chuck’ Templeton (b. 1915, Toronto, Canada), William Franklin ‘Billy’ Graham, Jr (b. 1918, North Carolina), and Oral Roberts (b. 1918, Oklahoma).

The Evangelical Discovery of History

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 330-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bebbington
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Churches Of Christ ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Church

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Police Harassment ◽  
The Right ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This epilogue shows that Hague v. CIO had a legacy more complex than its reputation as a speech rights victory for workers and others over dictatorial city boss Frank Hague under the Bill of Rights. The American Civil Liberties Union and renamed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) immediately split over the decision’s ramifications. Moreover, while the ruling enlarged constitutional protection for the right of public assembly to the benefit of Jehovah’s Witnesses, civil rights demonstrators, and others, it did little to enhance picketing and other “labor speech,” or to shield union organizers from police harassment. And while the decision freed the CIO to organize in Jersey City, it did not destroy Mayor Hague, who accommodated CIO unions and was ousted later due to city politics.

A Labor-Liberal Constellation

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-196
Author(s):  
Emily J. Charnock
Keyword(s):  
Political Education ◽  
National Committee ◽  
American Federation Of Labor ◽  
Labor Organizations ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Liberal Democrats ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Democratic Action

This chapter traces the initial diffusion of the PAC concept from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to other labor organizations, including the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and liberal ideological groups. Though the AFL had previously opposed the CIO’s partisan electoral strategy and the formation of P.A.C., it came to emulate both following passage of the Taft-Hartley Act by a Republican Congress in 1947, forming Labor’s League for Political Education (LLPE) to engage in elections. That same year, two avowedly “liberal” groups were created to bolster the anti-Communist Left and champion liberal Democrats: the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC). The chapter traces the intertwined electoral efforts and tactical innovations of these liberal and labor organizations through the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, the subsequent creation of their joint PAC, the Committee on Political Education (COPE), and the latter’s activities in the 1956 elections.

Business Unionism and Rank-and-File Unionism at the Turn of the Millennium

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana L. Cloud
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Similar Transformation ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Union Leadership ◽  
Labor Institutions ◽  
American Union

This chapter introduces the arguments of the book in the context of a summary of the critique of traditional American union leadership as pro-business and dangerously invested in partnerships with management. First, it chronicles the two waves of the American union movement, telling the story of the rise of democratic unionism with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its subsequent decline in the postwar years. It then provides some examples from the 1990s and 2000s of instances in which conservative unions led workers to defeats, primarily because of the failure to prioritize rank-and-file action in favor of more administrative, legalistic, and consumer-oriented strategies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the changing situation of labor today. It argues that that the story of the rise of the CIO provides an inspiring model of the birth of a fighting labor movement out of a period of fragmentation, exclusivity, and weakness in existing labor institutions. It further suggests that present conditions of economic crisis and the stirrings of a new militancy are ripe for a similar transformation.

Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
American Federation Of Labor ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Sexual Division ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Job Segregation ◽  
Sexual Division Of Labor

This chapter examines the effects of union organization on women workers and sexual division of labor, focusing on the 1930s and 1940s along with earlier developments in U.S. women's labor history. It draws on feminist scholarship that argued that labor unions' efforts to exclude women from membership had helped to consolidate patterns of job segregation by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After reviewing theories of occupational segregation by sex, especially with regards to the role of unions in the formation of labor-market boundaries between “women's work” and “men's work,” the chapter discusses the ways that the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (initially called Committe for Industrial Organization) contributed to the sexual division of labor. It argues that industrial unions had the opportunity to challenge job segregation by sex during the 1930s and 1940s, but instead helped consolidate it. In both periods, the labor movement showed litte interest in recruiting women into its ranks.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document