Global Master Workman

This chapter analyzes the story of a transnational figure who hardly ever crossed a national border in his career as labor leader. Terence Powderly (1849-1924) was born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, in 1849, to Irish immigrants. He entered the labor force as a switchman for the Delaware and Hudson railroad at the age of 13, as the Civil War raged across the United States, and became a machinists’ apprentice at the age of 17. He was marked out very early as a rising star in the American labor movement, rising quickly in the Machinist and Blacksmith’s Union after joining it in 1871. In 1874, a year after the Panic of ’73 brought economic depression to the United States and forced Powderly west to find work, he joined a relatively new, secret union that he would be associated with for the rest of his life: The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor.

The Heroic Guerrilla

Daniel Bravo is a young boy in San Martin, a department in the Amazon. The son of a peasant labor leader, he experiences the effects of a police massacre of labor activists in Tabalosos. Victor Polay and Nestor Cerpa head up a guerrilla front in San Martin to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara. The state counterinsurgency, headed by Defense Minister Enrique Lopez Albujar, comes to San Martin

Epilogue

This chapter discusses Church’s waning influence and subsequent shift to more radical political activism in the 1930s and 1940s. Church resigned his position at the NAACP and argued with the newly appointed Walter White. While he remained respected as an African American leader, his relationship with the white community became increasingly adversarial. His fallout with Boss Crump in the 1930s led to Crump directly attacking him. At the same time, his relationship with socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph became closer. The chapter ends with a discussion of the erasure of Church’s legacy in Memphis immediately after his death, and his daughter’s mission to restore it.

We’ll Keep the Red Flag Flying Here: Syndicalism, Jim Larkin and Irish Masculinity at the Abbey Theatre, 1911–1919

This chapter examines the cultural impact of syndicalism, tracing its influence on representations of working-class masculinity in three strike plays staged at the Abbey Theatre during Ireland’s revolutionary period: St. John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage, Andrew Patrick Wilson’s The Slough, and Daniel Corkery’s The Labour Leader. All three plays were inspired by syndicalist labor actions in Irish cities organized by the labor leader James Larkin, whose agitational style incorporated aspects of queer socialism into a more normative masculinity founded on the capacity for violence. Larkin’s ability to inspire working-class men with his emotions alarmed Ervine, who focuses on the heterosexual ‘mixing’ named in his play’s title in order to suppress the disruptive potential of the homosocial ‘mixing’ of Catholic and Protestant men enabled by Larkin’s organizing. The counter-revolutionary family plot that Ervine constructs for Mixed Marriage includes an irresponsible working-class father and a strong but apolitical working-class mother, conventions which are replicated in A. Patrick Wilson’s Lockout play The Slough and amplified in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Daniel Corkery’s The Labour Leader, by contrast, embraces Larkin’s self-dramatization in order to explore the emotional landscape of working-class masculinity and the potential of a revolutionary theatre capable of harnessing syndicalism’s passions.

The Rise of Baking Powder Business

In Chicago and Terre Haute, Indiana, two new companies entered the baking powder war. Both used a new formula based on sodium aluminum sulfate, which Royal conflated with alum. Calumet was headed by salesman William Wright; Clabber was developed by the German Catholic immigrant Hulman family. Within fifty years, the Hulmans had grown from a small grocery to a distillery and department store, and wholesaler with branches throughout the Midwest, and earned the respect of labor leader and native son Eugene Debs. Baking powder also expanded into new foods such as Aunt Jemima pancake mix.

Combat in the Streets

This chapter discusses the great railroad strike of 1877. In the summer of 1877, the United States experienced its first national strike, an unorganized, spontaneous rebellion of working people in cities from Baltimore and Pittsburgh to St. Louis and Chicago. The Great Strike produced a fundamental change in public awareness. Beforehand, according to Socialist and labor leader George Schilling, “the labor question was of little or no importance to the average citizen.” After the strike, no one could deny that there was a “labor question” or a working class that did not feel on an “equal footing” with the rest of society. In the new climate of opinion, the Socialists prospered because they had answers to the new labor question, whereas others had denied its existence.