The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns

This little book packs a punch. Small enough to fit into the backpocket of your jeans, Lens manages to cram 100 years of working class history into a tiny space and does an amazing job bringing the rebellions, uprisings, and violent battles fought by the American working class to life. Lens starts by looking at the Molly Maguires, a supposedly secret organization of working-class Irish immigrants accused of plotting to kill their strike-breaking managers after a hard-fought strike went down to defeat after the Civil War. He makes it clear that this was a frame-up orchestrated by big business to destroy working-class resistance in the mines to unsafe conditions, speed-ups, and poverty wages. The lesson here and throughout the book: big business in America was absolutely ruthless in its pursuit of profits, breaking strike after strike by force, framing leader after leader on bogus charges, and bribing politician after politician to get their way. Lens' history goes on to cover the tremendous railroad strikes in 1877 led by future revolutionary socialist Eugene Debs, the Homestead Strike, the founding of the American Federation of Labor, the rise and fall of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies as they were known, and the tremendous sit-down strikes that began the wave of mass unionization in the 1930s and the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organization. He pays particular attention to the role of organized working-class radicals - socialists, anarchists, communists, revolutionaries - who formed the backbone of the militancy that played a central role in winning what generations took for granted, the so-called American Dream. Lens' final chapters deal with the betrayal of the American Communist Party of the working class during WWII (supporting Roosevelt, the imperialist war, the no-strike pledge, and breaking all strikes during the war), the strike wave that swept the country right after the war's end, the economic prosperity of the 50s and 60s, and the castration of the labor movement that took place during the McCarthy era as tens of thousands of labor radicals were fired and blacklisted for their political beliefs. An unholy alliance of big business, Democratic and Republican politicians, and conservative union officials joined forces to get rid of, smother, and destroy rank-and-file organization and the influence of organized radicals within the labor movement in the 1950s. As a result, no one has been able to organize against the downsizing, restructuring, layoffs, pay cuts, attacks on benefits, and outrageous corporate greed over the last 30 years that have destroyed once powerful unions like the United Auto Workers among many others. Labor Wars is an eye-opening account for all of us who were taught in school that America has always been a middle-class society whose class mobility made "European-style" class struggle and mass socialist parties impossible here in the U.S. It's a history that's essential if we're