Class War, USA: Dispatches from Workers’ Struggles in American History
Brandon Weber, Class War, USA: Dispatches from Workers’ Struggles in American History, Haymarket Books, 2018. 168 pages. $19.95.
As its subtitle indicates, Brandon Weber’s Class War, USA is a series of twenty-five brief “Dispatches from Workers’ Struggles in American History.” It begins with the fight of the Lowell, Massachusetts “mill girls” to organize against their “overseers” in the 1830s and ends with the ongoing national campaign by today’s low-wage workers and community activists for a $15 minimum wage.
A regular writer for The Progressive magazine, Weber has contributed historical pieces to its “Dispatches” feature, including articles on some of the same topics as in the book.1 The “Dispatches” section, whose goal is to cover “news from the front lines of progressive grassroots politics”, is focused (as is the magazine) on current events; however, as his journalism and this book show, Weber can report the historical past with the urgency of “news.” He uses a writing style that is conversational, but no less informative for its easy accessibility. The book is directly addressed to audiences actively engaged with the efforts of working people to collectively improve their own lives. The struggles of the class, not individuals or celebrities, take center stage in these chapters: only three of twenty-five are biographical and two of those are cultural bookends on protest music, “Joe Hill” and “Woody Guthrie.” The third is on Eugene V. Debs.
While it is not an academic survey of U.S. labor history, each episode is thoroughly, if unobtrusively, documented, in a concluding “References” section. Sources are a wide-ranging and well-balanced mix of scholarly books and more popular, often public, online materials: websites, magazines, general reference works, digitized period documents, and newspapers. The chapters on the horrific 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, “eruption” of anti-Black violence and the 1985-1987 Watsonville, California, Cannery Strike are particularly good examples of how Weber combines scholarly and journalistic sources.
Most strikingly, Class War, USA is a visually compelling work. Enriching the workers’ stories are both period photographs and pictures of archival items, such as flyers, movie stills or video screenshots, posters, illustrations, and some fascinating objects of material culture. Chapter Five includes, for example, from the same private collection, images of an original American Railway Union membership card issued in the year of the 1894 strike and a remarkable (and rare) commemorative coin minted by the city of Chicago which purported to have an actual fragment of the 1886 Haymarket “anarchist bomb” intentionally embedded in it, like some medieval reliquary—or a spectacle lynching souvenir (29). There are 108 graphics included in the 168-page book.
In addition to the visual images and giving further “eye-witness” immediacy to Weber’s historical narratives is his effective use of “telling” or unusual, eye-catching details. That the author is an interesting storyteller is especially crucial to the success of those chapters on topics that are regularly scheduled stops in American labor history. For example, even those readers who know about A. Phillip Randolph or The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters might be surprised to find that “at its peak in the 1920s, there were twenty thousand porters on the job—the most African Americans employed by a single company in U.S. history” (21) and that one of the top five demands of the union after it formed was “a name card in each car with the actual name of the porter”, since they were frequently addressed by racist passengers with a generic “George” (23).
Weber’s careful detailing of the demands and grievances of working people in each chapter is another strength of the book. This approach should appeal to his intended audience of movement activists, many of whom must endure mainstream news coverage of their struggles that often does not report exactly what they suffer, want, or win, but rather fixates instead on blocked traffic, lost money, or body counts of one kind or another.
Class War, USA also makes a strong case for the importance of lesser-known stories that deserve greater attention because of the lessons that they can teach today. Examples are the outstanding chapters on three strikes: the Atlanta washerwomen in 1881, the postal worker wildcat in 1970, and the Teamsters at UPS in 1993. However, pursuing details of surprising relevance for the modern reader leads the author astray at least once when he ascribes the origin of our word “redneck” to the wearing of bandannas of that color by striking West Virginia miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain (71). Use of the term “redneck” to refer to rural white laborers was documented in up-country Mississippi at least thirty years before the violent strike in West Virginia.2
In addition to History or American Studies courses, this book would be very well adapted for use in the study groups or meetings of any organization fighting racial, class, or gender oppression. The social struggles depicted in Class War, USA are much broader than the workplace or organized labor. The stories of the Christmas Truce, Stonewall Rebellion, Attica Prisoner Uprising, and the Bonus Army, among others, show this expansive understanding of class interests and consciousness. And the episodes involving trade unions explain how the rank and file can win without the support of, and sometimes despite, the people claiming to lead or represent them, either on the shop floor or at the ballot box. Weber is often explicit about which side he is on and what the “morals” or lessons of the stories are. The point of view implicitly shaping the whole book emphasizes the importance of working-class self-organization and class political independence, both of which demand a militant “them and us” attitude, even while counterbalanced by the necessity of democratic alliances “with nearly everyone” (153).3
Matthew Schultz
Illinois College
Jacksonville, IL
matthew.schultz@ic.edu
1 http://progressive.org/dispatches/ever-heard-black-wall-street/
2 Huber, Patrick, and Kathleen Drowne. 2001. "Redneck: A New Discovery." American Speech: A Quarterly Of Linguistic Usage 76, no. 4: 434-37. Interestingly, given the current attention to the “return of populism”, this earlier (1891) occurrence happened in the context of a Populist conflict between “the Bourbon Democrats, mostly wealthy Delta planters and business leaders . . . and the small planters and land-holding farmers [who] had joined the Southern Farmer’s Alliance” (435). Weber is right to the extent that the word has a politically relevant historical story to tell and an origin in class struggle.
3 “Them and Us”, in this sense, is also the title of a radical U.S. labor history classic whose relevance is worth rediscovery today: Matles, James J., and James Higgins. Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank-and-file Union. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.