Readings:
- Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Chicago, 2010): Chapter 1 up to section 5 (pages 47-66) and all of Chapter 2. [if you’re pressed on time please just focus on Chapter 2).
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- Why did labor unions struggle or fail in the 1920s?
- What was Samuel Gompers’s theory of the place of unions and workers in capitalism? What, in his view, was the proper role of the state in labor-capital relations? Who was left out of Gompers’s political vision?
- What was the AFL’s attitude towards employers under Hugh Green’s direction?
- Why was it important for workers like carpenters to own their own tools? How did that make their relation with employers unique?
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- Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, 2010), pp. 8-15, 95-122.
- A couple of the pages appear to be a little blurry or cut off, but they really shouldn’t be a huge problem. That said, please let me know if you can’t see all the pages clearly and I can try re-scanning the book.
- This is a more narrative piece that gives a good sense of the lived experience of the great migration. For this reading, I just want you to get the big picture, asking yourself: what is “the great migration” and how did Black people experience it?
- Neil Fligstein, “The Transformation of Southern Agriculture and the Migration of Blacks and Whites, 1930-1940,” The International Migration Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 1983), 268-290.
- What is the economic theory of the great migration?
- What is Fligstein’s critique of this theory and alternative explanation?
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Robert M. La Follete, “The Danger Threatening Representative Government” (1897)
Herbert Hoover, Campaign Speech, Madison Square Garden, New York (October 22, 1928)
In Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns,” we read a narrative retelling of the lived experience of those who were part of the Great Migration. She begins by explaining that this event is greatly underreported and that the six million Black Southerners who migrated over 60 odd years did so largely without the press at the time considering it at all. Wilkerson argues that in order to understand the makeup of the United States today, we must understand the Great Migration. But because of the pace, and the race of those who migrated, it is resigned to the background, instead of being considered one of the great social and political movements in the history of this country. She goes on to explain that while the motivations for migration were varied and depended greatly on the individual, it was an opportunity for Black Americans to leave an oppressive caste system and become true citizens of a country they were brought to in bondage. It was both an expression of optimism about their futures and a political statement expressing their discontent with the violent Jim Crow South. As Wilkerson says it was a “reluctant yet hopeful search for something better.”
The telling of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney’s story narrates the continued violence Black farm laborers faced in the south after the abolition of slavery. Though she and her husband are sharecroppers who rent their own land, they are still subject to backbreaking days of labor, and to payment (or lack thereof) from the owner of the farm. As Ida Mae has children, and the Depression sets in for Southern farmers she watches as her husband’s ability to make income from their land evaporates. Ida Mae’s story in this excerpt ends there, but the path is laid for her family’s migration as the demand for cotton plummets.
Fligstein’s article “The Transformation of Southern Agriculture and the Migration of Blacks and Whites,” attempts to discredit an overly simplified version of the factors for Black Southern farm laborers migration, but ends up with his own easy explanation of this phenomena. He begins by explaining the economic theory that says that the mechanization of southern farming led to the mass exodus of Black farm laborers, and stating his critique that without evaluating larger political and social factors going on on cotton plantations and in the rest of the country, there is no way to understand why the Great Migration occurred. He goes on to explain that mechanization actually came later and that new regulations passed by Congress and supported by the Farm Bureau allowed owners to farm less land and continue to make a profit and that is what forced tenants out of the south.
However, as we learned from Ida Mae’s story, the lives of tenant farm laborers were much more complicated than that. Fligstein either intentionally omits or neglects to consider the social factors affecting Black farm laborers at this time. The mathematical models he uses are based during the height of the Jim Crow South. And Ida Mae shows us that even outside of the overt racism of Jim Crow, farm laborers are doing backbreaking physical work with little to no reward.
Fliegstein’s article argues that calling the rise of mechanized farming the reason for mass migration overly simple. But in his conclusion, he states, “generally, individuals act rationally given their information and constraints. When confronted with an agricultural system that is clearly being developed in ways that undermine their abilities to remain on the land, individuals will move.” Which is itself an oversimplification of human desires and neglects to address Wilkerson’s primary point, that Black people left the south not because they were running from the loss of their farming ability, but because they believed in the opportunity and freedom they could find elsewhere.
Echoing Hollis’s sentiments on the Great Migration being one of the most overlooked movements of American history, with huge ripple effects culturally and politically. Wilkerson writes, “The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such.” I was thinking about this passage because there seems to be no shortage of American mythos and romanticism of European immigration at the turn of the century; many families have stories their relatives having their names changed at Ellis Island or descriptions of ethnic enclaves in the Lower East Side. I think Isabel Wilkerson’s piece helps fill in the gaps of a romantic vision of the Great Migration, but also confronts you with the sheer amount of American figures that would not have left a mark had it not been for the Great Migration. Names such as James Baldwin, Michelle Obama, and Miles Davis are just a few among thousands. What I liked about Ida’s personification was that she wasn’t really written as a victim, but as a living, breathing person in a tough circumstance. When she describes ant colonies like, “The ant see a crumb, he can’t carry it himself. Don’t you know another ant will come and help him? They better than people,” it was such a rich description of a person who has probably seen more solidarity in animals than people. I guess what I liked about this piece is that it accurately pinpointed the origins of what became black life in Northern urban cities, but also didn’t shy away from making an appeal to one’s heart in the reading, showing that Southern blacks had desires for a better and fairer life, just like everyone else who has immigrated to the United States.
1. What is an example of another movement of people that does not get discussed enough but should?
2. Were there any businesses or enterprises that sprung up in response to the Great Migration, in the same vein as “coyotes” today who are paid to transport immigrants from Mexico over the border into the US?
I agree with Hollis’s critique of the Fligstein article, which purports to challenge and oversimplified and abstracted narrative of the causes of the Great Migration, but falls into that very trap. I agree with his call to examine the larger political and economic forces that shaped the landscape of opportunity tenant farmers were facing in the South and was compelled by his thesis that the political and economic factors in the South were a more decisive cause for mass migration from that region than vague notions and imperfect information about potential opportunity in the North. However, while the farm subsidies no doubt were a major driving force of agricultural mechanization in the South, which in turn were a major driving force of the sharp decrease in demand for tenant farm labor and thereby a mass exodus of disproportionately black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, I agreed with Hollis’s point here that it was a curiously narrow interpretation for Fligstein’s stated goal of his sociological analysis. I would have no problem with this focused analysis, which is certainly worthy of deep consideration, if not for Fligstein’s stated larger aspiration of finding a cause of the Great Migration even in the narrowed time frame of 1930-1940, which Hollis rightly pointed out, was the height of the Jim Crow order in the South.
Questions:
1. In *The Lean Years,* Bernstein portrays the AFL-driven experiment in labor-management cooperation as a failure that only reflected the weakness of American labor and the lack of its ability to build working class power through militant actions like strikes and pickets. Do you think that U.S. labor relations today reflect a lower or higher degree of this labor-management cooperation than in organized labor’s stagnation of the 1920’s? What has been the long-lasting resonance of this experiment?
2. What alternative/complementary hypotheses did Fligstein leave out in terms of underlying causes for the Great Migration?
Wilkerson, Bernstein and Fligstein were a very complimentary set of readings. As Hollis wrote, Wilkerson put together an incredible series of narratives that demonstrated the lives of Black farmworkers in the Jim Crow South. The decision to migrate from the South in search of something better, be it freedom from violence or the ability to earn more money helped to make up one of the greatest shifts in social and economic fabric of both the North and South. As Bernstein makes clear, the life of the American worker in the North was already undergoing an immense period of change due to mechanization, stagnant wages and the diminishing power of labor unions. The Great Migration was one the most significant forms that the changes in American capitalism took.
I disagree slightly with Hollis’ critique that Fligstein’s conclusion was as overly simplistic as the one he sought to counter. While it was definitely dry and emotionless, the transformation of southern agriculture from labor intensive, tenant-based system to a mechanized system was as severe as industrialization was in the North and had drastic implications for the social and political realities of those living in the South. I do agree that it is a mistake for Fligstein to over rationalize people’s choices, particularly in a society marked by racial violence. Still, freedom has to be considered in relation to one’s economic reality.
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1) Bernstein was quite critical of the choices made by labor in the 1920s.To what extent could the unions have countered against the external factors that weakened them, or were the changes in the industrial economy too great to overcome?
2) Do you agree that the lack of social protest in the 1920s was due to the relatively high standard of living for US workers? Could that have been overcome?
3) Thinking back to Dubois, could the Great Migration have been an opportunity for cross-race worker solidarity? If so, what would have been needed to make it happen?
I liked both readings, and agree with Hollis that they offer two distinct approaches to The Great Migration. As for the economic changes due to farm subsidies, Fliegstein’s argument is very convincing. That black sharecropper and tenant farmers, already financially strained, bore the brunt of the collapse of Southern cotton is consistent with the way blacks in general were treated with the rise of Jim Crow. It should not be surprising to learn that black farmers were cheated when it came to proportioning subsides or that there were fewer alternative income streams available to them than white tenant farmers. It is also important to note that white migration to the North was also prevalent. Fliegstein offers that the failure to migrate after the Civil War serves as proof for his alternate theory, and it may be partially correct, but the absence of large scale investment in machinery and rise in corporate farming took a while to take hold, so it may be a little problematic to discount it as a cause. Most likely, a combination of both subsides and rise in mechanization were at play. Although I like Fliegstein’s argument, the truth most likely involves both theories.
Another factor is the human desires that Wilkerson shows us. Although we read only a small sample of her book, I’d guess that we’d find a myriad of reasons for migration. If we think of the blacks leaving the South as we might see foreign-born immigrants, we see a familiar pattern. After the initial arrivals write home of their new lives and the wonders of their new home, friends and relatives follow. As communities of immigrants become settled, new arrivals have a base of support, however tenuous, as more come. I agree with Hollis that individual motivations are very important, and perhaps tantamount, but disagree with her assessment of the Fliegstein argument. There are many factors that influence socio-economic movements, and we are offered but two here.
I just realized that I forgot to put in my questions.
1: What do the histories of the AFL, IWW, Knignts of Labor, and UTW (among others) show us about what it takes to launch a successful job action? What works? How can a strike work? What dooms a strike?
2: Did tenant farmers attempt to diversify their crops after the collapse cotton prices? If not, why?
One of the readings that I enjoyed and the one that I could say that I could relate to was “The Warmth of Other Suns “ by Isabel Wilkerson. “The Warmth of Other Suns” is about the Great Migration which delves into why black southerners decided to leave the south and travel north for better opportunities. The author also shares the personal stories of the people that lived during this period. My grandparents on both sides were from the south (Georgia and North Carolina) and came to New York when they were young. My grandmother was 13 when she came up here in the 1920’s with her brothers and sisters to meet their father in Brooklyn who had remarried. The dream of the southern black was the same as the immigrant who comes to America, to go somewhere and live a better prosperous life and in order to do that, they had to leave the south.
In the south, black workers were caught in a caste system that seemed impossible to escape. You could fall into two categories; you were either a sharecropper or a laborer. Wilkerson takes a look at this this by sharing the stories of Ida and George. Ida and her husband were sharecroppers which was, “…an entire system based on credit. The sharecroppers owed the planters, the planters owed the merchants, the merchants owed the banks and the banks were beholden to businesses in the North”. One didn’t go into sharecropping to make money…they went into it to survive. The likelihood of a sharecropper actually making a profit was slim to none because of the endless debts. There was no end in sight for the sharecropping life.
Then you had the story of George who had high aspirations of getting a higher education, but because of pressure from his family, he put those dreams on hold and ended up picking fruit at citrus groves, while risking his life and getting cheated out of his wages. This was cheap labor at its finest. If you were sharecropping you as a worker could get hurt or pass out after being in the hot sun for ten hours at a time or if you’re picking fruit, you could fall out of a tree, break a leg, get paralyzed or worse. Besides domestic work, there weren’t many options in terms of labor and the employers knew this. They could give workers the cheapest of wages, cheat them of their wages and set whatever hours they had to work, with no workplace safety protocols put in place . And if they didn’t want to do it, there were ten people waiting in the wings to take your job. Could anyone blame them from saying the hell with this I’ll take my chances going up north?
But actually the same thing was up here too. I remember when my grandmother used to tell me how she used to clean houses and scrub floors and how she used to hang out of the windows cleaning them. Instead of scrubbing floors down in Georgia she ended up scrubbing floors up here, but the difference was that she didn’t have to come home from work and pass someone who was lynched or turn the lights out in her house whenever the Klan drove by. Besides the economic conditions that made my grandmother’s family leave, it was also the fear of living in the south. If you spoke up about getting cheated out of wages or anything of that nature, there wasn’t much you could do back then, and most people accepted it because the alternative was worse.
What’s ironic is for the last several years the migration has reversed. The families that came here years ago from the south are now returning and most of them are retirees. And they are returning to the south for a better quality of life. A few people from my own family left New York and retired to Delaware, South Carolina and Georgia. There is an interesting (and old) article from USA today about it (below) It makes for a pretty interesting read. With this whole covid-19 crisis, it will be interesting to see who the new migrants will be.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/census-great-migration-reversal/21818127/
I think two major factors described by Irving Bernstein point to the overall failures of the labor movement during the 1920s. As Bernstein points out, the “social climate” worked against labor with businesses gaining significant influence during this time (Bernstein 88). During the postwar economic boom, businessmen were seen as “hero[es] of the age” (Bernstein 88). Conservative leadership under presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover painted labor unionism as being “un-American” and antithetical to the spirit of individualism (Bernstein 88). Meanwhile, major industrial expansion in utilities, chemicals, and rubber led to concentrations of business power and mass opposition to the collective bargaining process represented by labor unions. All of these factors (and many more) contributed to the failures of the labor movement during this time.
I think one factor that Bernstein skips over, however, is the influence of the First Red Scare. The First Red Scare during the early 1920s had a stultifying effect on the labor movement and I struggled to find any mention of this in Irving Bernstein’s account of the labor movement in the 1920s. In her introduction, Frances Fox Piven points toward why Bernstein may have shied away from details regarding the First Red Scare. Piven mentions that Bernstein held a “general disapproval of […] radicals, especially […] Communists” (Bernstein xvi). It seems like this negative disposition toward radicals and Communists factored into Bernstein’s overall analysis and led him to certain conclusions regarding state efforts against labor organizers.
Herbert Hoover’s campaign speech also highlights the mood of the time and the overall social and economic ideology of the Republican Party at this time. I thought it was particularly fascinating how Hoover defined liberalism in his speech. His definition is one that is traditionally classical liberal and is unlike the definition of liberalism delineated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal era.
Questions:
1. What influence (if any) did the First Red Scare have on the labor movement’s failures during the 1920s?
2. In Herbert Hoover’s speech he describes socialism as being distinctly European and un-American. How do we see this narrative perpetuated today?
3. How did liberalism shift from the rugged individualism of Hoover to the New Deal liberalism of FDR? Is liberalism even a good label for the labor movement to attach itself to given its baggage and contested history?
I found the readings about “The Great Migration” very interesting, this was the first time I read about this. As an organizer and an immigrant, I really appreciated Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns.” As my classmates mentioned the lived experiences in her reading was something I totally related to as well. I agree with Wilkerson that Jim Crow laws and the Great Depression looming, the South didn’t offer much for the Black communities, therefore, motivating them to migrate to better opportunities to the North, however, I also agree with my classmate David that Fliegstein provides good arguments that the subsidies provided by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration program helped the transform the labor-intensive system into a mechanized capitalist system. Both of these theories can be true at the same time and have caused ‘The Great Migration.”
Irving Bernstein’s Chapter 2 mainly looks at the decline of the labor movement in the 1920s and the rise of the corporations and anti-union sentiments that helped in the decline. In a small section, Bernstein also talks about the tensions between unions and black workers who were considered scabs. Black workers had no option as they were discriminated against within the union or not even allowed in the union. We similar tensions today as well between unions and undocumented and new immigrant workers so have no choice but to work for less to survive. Therefore, a question I have is if the unions had openly welcomed and organized black workers back in the 1920s would it have helped stop the decline of the Labor movement. My second question is around the New Deal, it seemed like the labor movement was struggling and the political climate wasn’t very supportive of the labor movements so how did this suddenly lead to the most progressive and pro-labor policy like the New deal?
In the article by Historian Isabel Wilkerson, the author takes the reader into the world of the Black experience in America. Through the narratives of Southern Black individuals blissful hopes of living a better life, many fled the South seeking the promise of a Utopian urban cities in the Northern parts of America. “The great migration”, a historical
event in American history that occurred when 90% of the African – American Southern population uprooted and migrated to Northern cities seeking relief from Southern Jim Crow laws, higher work wages, and the promise of better living conditions.Unlike Southern living, their economic growth was limited to basic farming or other diminishing work in order to survive and feed their families. Their experiences in the journey prove to be just as challenging moving from part of the Country to another. According to the article , they faced extreme discrimination and prejudice along each road taken, but kept their focus to get the promise land, However, upon reaching the Northern cities they soon found out that life was not as promising and as glorious as it was believed to be. Northern cities proved to be just as racist towards the Black community. These stories are not new to me, only told from the perspectives and experience from different individual, but all similar. The one thing that struck me in this article is listed on page 9, here the author states that event is ” greatly underreported” and i couldn’t help but think that she meant that some influential social movements derived from this migration and it’s impact on American society. The other thing is , many of these migrant families produced some of the greatest influential literary and musical giants of Black history. The title of the piece speaks volumes ” Sons ? Suns
. they were
In the article by Historian Isabel Wilkerson, the author takes the reader into the world of the Black experience in America. Through the narratives of Southern Black individuals blissful hopes of living a better life, many fled the South seeking the promise of a Utopian urban cities in the Northern parts of America. “The great migration”, a historical
event in American history that occurred when 90% of the African – American Southern population uprooted and migrated to Northern cities seeking relief from Southern Jim Crow laws, higher work wages, and the promise of better living conditions.Unlike Southern living, their economic growth was limited to basic farming or other diminishing work in order to survive and feed their families. Their experiences in the journey prove to be just as challenging moving from part of the Country to another. According to the article , they faced extreme discrimination and prejudice along each road taken, but kept their focus to get the promise land, However, upon reaching the Northern cities they soon found out that life was not
as promising and as glorious as it was believed to be. Northern cities proved to be just as racist towards the Black community. These stories are not new to me, only told from the perspectives and experience from different individual, but all similar. The one thing that struck me in this article is listed on page 9, here the author states that event is ” greatly underreported” and i couldn’t help but think that she meant that some influential social movements derived from this migration and it’s impact on American society. The other thing is , many of these migrant families produced some of the greatest influential literary and musical giants of Black history. The title of the piece speaks volumes ” Sons ? Suns
. they were
Fligstein opens his essay by recognizing the importance of context when studying history. People are products of their environments, and political and social conditions constrain actions. The author shows us the structure of the Southern agricultural economy, and contends that when an economy based largely on credit is met with an infusion of capital, it will drastically change. I appreciated the analysis of economic classes in the South, and the relationship between planters, tenants, merchants, and international markets. However, he limits himself by dismissing the racial context of the Jim Crow South, by focusing on Black Americans by their class association as primarily tenant farmers, rather than as complex actors in a larger polity. Luckily, Isabel Wilkerson could help fill in those gaps for us this week. The story of Ida Mae in many ways corroborated Fligstein’s analysis. She laments the feeling of hopelessness while picking cotton for someone else who actually gets the material benefits in a system that relies on credit relationships rather than cash. No matter how good the crop is or how good the economy is, it is not the worker who sees the benefit.
Fligstein did provide a useful analysis of the power of planters in the political South, in both National and local politics. The Farm Bureau was an organization that reminds me of the many Chamber of Commerce’s, which look out for the landowners and those owning the means of production, and leave the others to fend for themselves. I’m curious how these political organizations fought unions, or labor organizations, and how they battled in the political arena to control legislation/ relief. The expression of pure political power jumped out at me on page 277, which describes how the AAA, led by future VP and famously progressive Henry Wallace, buckled under the pressure of the conservative Farm Bureau to change the rule barring landlords from displacing their tenants.
1.What are some reasons that cooperative farming wasn’t/ isn’t more popular? Bernstein mentions some instances, but not on a large enough scale to compete with large producers.
2.Bernstein goes to great lengths to show that the economy of the 1920’s wasn’t as strong as it is typically perceived. How could have organized labor expanded it’s power then, and how well do those lessons translate to contemporary USA?
Wilkerson’s piece is very informative and interesting because she connects how The Great Migration was an important event that shifted the political, social, and economic characteristics of the United States for decades. In other words, it was a turning point in American history that shifted the fabric of every city it touched. Cities like New York, Illinois, and Oakland. Instead of just focusing on the conditions that compelled Blacks to migrate, I think she does a valuable service by focusing on individual case studies. In doing so she demonstrates that although migration is propelled through the individual, The Great Migration was a collective endeavor by Black Americans longing for a better quality of life. In many ways, it represents in motion the Black Radical Tradition. This is because this collective consciousness was informed by the historical struggles for liberation not only from slavery but from Jim and Jane Crow. It was further motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being.
The Great Migration represented a new level of agency for Blacks. As Wilkerson states “The Great Migration was the first act of independence by people who were in bondage in this country for longer than they have been free.” Although a new sense of optimism and freedom were being explored I believed that Wilkerson does a great job of demonstrating how in American society, during and after the great migration Blacks never held a genuine opportunity to get free of that which it wished to distinguish itself from, in other words, a past of oppression and marginalization, yet as Hollis allude it was an attempt to make a change in what is only a partially transformed world. The essay is very inspiring in that it represents a new type of hope for Black Americans. One which has not fully formed—but whose foundations are there to be built upon.
How does Wilkerson individual case studies give insight into the collective process of migration from the American South by Blacks to other places in the country?
Why do you believe The Great Migration doesn’t get as much attention as other turning points in American history?
I agree with Jay and Tsering on the Irving Bernstein chapter 2 on the decline of unions. While there were many factors that supported the decline of unions, one of their downfalls was their inability to adapt or to organize or as Berstein mentions “they were ideological prisoners of the past” (page 91). Through out chapter 2, many of the leaders of the time utilized the union to improve their economic standing and not much thinking on the worker, much less the immigrant or the black worker. Black workers were discriminated and shut out of becoming part of the union often used as “strikebreakers of the time”(page 108). Just like Tsering, I wonder if unions had accepted more black laborers to their union, how different would our time be. However, based on this reading, union leaders didn’t care much of the worker, they only cared how much they can pocket and political control.
Wilkerson starts his first chapter acknowledging, “…the twenties is gold” and that “little girls were given gold pieces as birthdays gifts.” In the same page, the author says, “The twenties were, indeed, golden, but only for a privileged segment of the American population” and that the history turned its blind eye for, “For the great mass of people … the appropriate metallic symbol may be … tin.” Wilkerson sets his tone from the onset to prepare his reader that they are about to read the history from point of view of the latter’s: the poor, the mass, and the working class. Wilkerson utilizes gold and tin to materialize the stark income and opportunity gap between the privileged and the mass. In addition, Wilkerson uses another set of dichotomy to illustrate the period, “illusion and reality.”
The author asserts that a historical shift of population from rural to urban areas, “19,436,000 people,” which engendered “a great pool of workmen.” The factory owners benefited from such a large pool of workforce while the trade unions suffered in short term. In the meantime, scale of influx to the cities overcame the diversity, “homogenizing” the population with an exception: Blacks.
The “Machine Age,” 1920-29 was a cornerstone in changes which unfolds its effects up to date:
1- Automation reduces the manual power, and shifts the jobs from manual to service sector.
2- Immigration policies and immigrants as labor powers were manipulated in favor of the elite to infiltrate the labor power, and exclude migration from undesirable groups: in 1917, the law required literacy in ‘the English language, or some other language or dialect’
3- The exclusionary hiring policies for Blacks was visible and openly conducted
The income gap was on the hike, “The combined incomes of 0.1 percent of the families at the top of the scale were as great as those of the 42 percent at the bottom.” (p.63) After nearly a century, the economic gap has been increasing to double the start differences, “Richest 0.1% take in 196 times as much as bottom 90%.” (https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/)
Wilkerson’s book is exposing the Western manipulation: the history is writing for and on behalf of the ruling class, and that the condition of the mass has been omitted.
In the second chapter, Wilkerson is derailing on the shortcomings of the labor movement: exclusionary policies, nepotism, and corruption. He –bitterly- points out the valid points of mainstream media criticism on AFL-O, “Though harsh, this criticism had merit. In 1929 the United States labor movement stood still as the mainstream of American society swept by.”