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Author: Philip J. Mellinger
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816547726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
This is the story of immigrant copper workers and their attempts to organize at the turn of the century in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and El Paso, Texas. These Mexican and European laborers of widely varying backgrounds and languages had little social, economic, or political power. Yet they achieved some surprising successes in their struggles—all in the face of a racist society and the unbridled power of the mine owners. Mellinger's book is the first regional history of these ordinary working people—miners, muckers, millhands, and smelter workers—who labored in the thousands of mountain and desert mining camps across the western heartland early in this century. These men, largely uneducated, frequently moving from camp to camp, subjected to harsh and dangerous conditions, often poorly paid, nevertheless came together for a common purpose. They came from Mexico, from the U.S. Hispanic Southwest, and from several European countries, especially from Greece, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and Spain. They were far from a homogeneous group. Yet, in part because they set aside ethnic differences to pursue cooperative labor action, they were able to make demands, plan strikes, carry them out, and sometimes actually win. They also won the aid of the Western Federation of Miners and the more radical Industrial Workers of the World. After initial rejection, they were eventually accepted by mainstream unionists. Mellinger discusses towns, mines, camps, companies, and labor unions, but this book is largely about people. In order to reconstruct their mining-community lives, he has used little-known union and company records, personal interviews with old-time workers and their families, and a variety of regional sources that together have enabled him to reveal a complex and significant pattern of social, economic, and political change in the American West.
Author: Philip J. Mellinger
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816547726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Get Book Here
Book Description
This is the story of immigrant copper workers and their attempts to organize at the turn of the century in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and El Paso, Texas. These Mexican and European laborers of widely varying backgrounds and languages had little social, economic, or political power. Yet they achieved some surprising successes in their struggles—all in the face of a racist society and the unbridled power of the mine owners. Mellinger's book is the first regional history of these ordinary working people—miners, muckers, millhands, and smelter workers—who labored in the thousands of mountain and desert mining camps across the western heartland early in this century. These men, largely uneducated, frequently moving from camp to camp, subjected to harsh and dangerous conditions, often poorly paid, nevertheless came together for a common purpose. They came from Mexico, from the U.S. Hispanic Southwest, and from several European countries, especially from Greece, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and Spain. They were far from a homogeneous group. Yet, in part because they set aside ethnic differences to pursue cooperative labor action, they were able to make demands, plan strikes, carry them out, and sometimes actually win. They also won the aid of the Western Federation of Miners and the more radical Industrial Workers of the World. After initial rejection, they were eventually accepted by mainstream unionists. Mellinger discusses towns, mines, camps, companies, and labor unions, but this book is largely about people. In order to reconstruct their mining-community lives, he has used little-known union and company records, personal interviews with old-time workers and their families, and a variety of regional sources that together have enabled him to reveal a complex and significant pattern of social, economic, and political change in the American West.
Author: David R. Berman
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607321823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
Politics, Labor, and the War on Big Business details the rise, fall, and impact of the anticorporate reform effort in Arizona during the Progressive reform era, roughly 1890-1920. Drawing on previously unexamined archival files and building on research presented in his previous books, author David R. Berman offers a fresh look at Progressive heritage and the history of industrial relations during Arizona's formative period. In the 1890s, once-heavily courted corporations had become, in the eyes of many, outside "money interests" or "beasts" that exploited the wealth of the sparsely settled area. Arizona's anticorporate reformers condemned the giant corporations for mistreating workers, farmers, ranchers, and small-business people and for corrupting the political system. During a thirty-year struggle, Arizona reformers called for changes to ward off corporate control of the political system, increase corporate taxation and regulation, and protect and promote the interests of working people. Led by George W.P. Hunt and progressive Democrats, Arizona's brand of Progressivism was heavily influenced by organized labor, third parties, and Socialist activists. As highly powerful railroad and mining corporations retaliated, conflict took place on both political levels and industrial backgrounds, sometimes in violent form. Politics, Labor and the War on Big Business places Arizona's experience in the larger historical discussion of reform activity of the period, considering issues involving the role of government in the economy and the possibility of reform, topics highly relevant to current debates.
Author: Jane Little Botkin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806157917
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 535
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Book Description
Franklin Henry Little (1878–1917), an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), fought in some of the early twentieth century’s most contentious labor and free-speech struggles. Following his lynching in Butte, Montana, his life and legacy became shrouded in tragedy and family secrets. In Frank Little and the IWW, author Jane Little Botkin chronicles her great-granduncle’s fascinating life and reveals its connections to the history of American labor and the first Red Scare. Beginning with Little’s childhood in Missouri and territorial Oklahoma, Botkin recounts his evolution as a renowned organizer and agitator on behalf of workers in corporate agriculture, oil, logging, and mining. Frank Little traveled the West and Midwest to gather workers beneath the banner of the Wobblies (as IWW members were known), making soapbox speeches on city street corners, organizing strikes, and writing polemics against unfair labor practices. His brother and sister-in-law also joined the fight for labor, but it was Frank who led the charge—and who was regularly threatened, incarcerated, and assaulted for his efforts. In his final battles in Arizona and Montana, Botkin shows, Little and the IWW leadership faced their strongest opponent yet as powerful copper magnates countered union efforts with deep-laid networks of spies and gunmen, an antilabor press, and local vigilantes. For a time, Frank Little’s murder became a rallying cry for the IWW. But after the United States entered the Great War and Congress passed the Sedition Act (1918) to ensure support for the war effort, many politicians and corporations used the act to target labor “radicals,” squelch dissent, and inspire vigilantism. Like other wage-working families smeared with the traitor label, the Little family endured raids, arrests, and indictments in IWW trials. Having scoured the West for firsthand sources in family, library, and museum collections, Botkin melds the personal narrative of an American family with the story of the labor movements that once shook the nation to its core. In doing so, she throws into sharp relief the lingering consequences of political repression.
Author: Walter Nugent
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546
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Book Description
Acclaimed historian Walter Nugent brings us what is perhaps the most comprehensive and fascinating account to date of the peopling of the American West. In this epic social-demographic history, Nugent explores the populations of the West as they grow, change and intersect from the Paleo-Indians, the Spanish Conquistadors, to displaced Okies, wartime African American immigrants, and all the disparate groups that have made California the most ethnically diverse state in the union. Their tale, in all its complexity, is a tale that surprises, that subverts traditional stereotypes and that illuminates the multifaceted character of one of the world’s most unique and dynamic territories.
Author: Matthew L. Basso
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226038866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.
Author: Eric V. Meeks
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477319670
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
In Border Citizens, historian Eric V. Meeks explores how the racial classification and identities of the diverse indigenous, mestizo, and Euro-American residents of Arizona’s borderlands evolved as the region was politically and economically incorporated into the United States. First published in 2007, the book examines the complex relationship between racial subordination and resistance over the course of a century. On the one hand, Meeks links the construction of multiple racial categories to the process of nation-state building and capitalist integration. On the other, he explores how the region’s diverse communities altered the blueprint drawn up by government officials and members of the Anglo majority for their assimilation or exclusion while redefining citizenship and national belonging. The revised edition of this highly praised and influential study features dozens of new images, an introductory essay by historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, and a chapter-length afterword by the author. In his afterword, Meeks details and contextualizes Arizona’s aggressive response to undocumented immigration and ethnic studies in the decade after Border Citizens was first published, demonstrating that the broad-based movement against these measures had ramifications well beyond Arizona. He also revisits the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham nations on both sides of the Sonora-Arizona border, focusing on their efforts to retain, extend, and enrich their connections to one another in the face of increasingly stringent border enforcement.
Author: Immanuel Ness
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317471881
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 2832
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Book Description
This four-volume set examines every social movement in American history - from the great struggles for abolition, civil rights, and women's equality to the more specific quests for prohibition, consumer safety, unemployment insurance, and global justice.
Author: Rodolfo F. Acuña
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816543291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title In the San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike of 1933, frenzied cotton farmers murdered three strikers, intentionally starved at least nine infants, wounded dozens of people, and arrested more. While the story of this incident has been recounted from the perspective of both the farmers and, more recently, the Mexican workers, this is the first book to trace the origins of the Mexican workers’ activism through their common experience of migrating to the United States. Rodolfo F. Acuña documents the history of Mexican workers and their families from seventeenth-century Chihuahua to twentieth-century California, following their patterns of migration and describing the establishment of communities in mining and agricultural regions. He shows the combined influences of racism, transborder dynamics, and events such as the industrialization of the Southwest, the Mexican Revolution, and World War I in shaping the collective experience of these people as they helped to form the economic, political, and social landscapes of the American Southwest in their interactions with agribusiness and absentee copper barons. Acuña follows the steps of one of the murdered strikers, Pedro Subia, reconstructing the times and places in which his wave of migrants lived. By balancing the social and geographic trends in the Mexican population with the story of individual protest participants, Acuña shows how the strikes were in fact driven by choices beyond the Mexican workers’ control. Their struggle to form communities graphically retells how these workers were continuously uprooted and their organizations destroyed by capital. Corridors of Migration thus documents twentieth-century Mexican American labor activism from its earliest roots through the mines of Arizona and the Great San Joaquin Valley cotton strike. From a founding scholar of Chicano studies and the author of fifteen books comes the culmination of three decades of dedicated research into the causes and effects of migration and labor activism. The narrative documents how Mexican workers formed communities against all odds.
Author: Linda Gordon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674061713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town's Anglos, furious at this "interracial" transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction tells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation of racial boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a "wild West" boomtown, where the mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became big business and whiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced passions that erupted in the "orphan incident." To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue. Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their church and asserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to "save" the orphans, and they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda Gordon brilliantly recreates and dissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story that resonates with today's conflicts over the "best interests of the child."
Author: David R. Berman
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816531471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
George W. P. Hunt was a highly colorful Arizona politician. A territorial representative and seven-time Arizona state governor, Hunt joined Woodrow Wilson in making the Democratic Party the party of Progressive reform. This political biography follows Hunt through his years in the territorial legislature, and then as governor. Author David R. Berman’s well-researched and detailed work features Hunt’s battles to stem the powers of large corporations, democratize the political system, defend labor rights, reform the prison system, abolish the death penalty, and protect Arizona’s interests in the Colorado River. He had a special concern for the down and out. He found the "forgotten man" long before Franklin Roosevelt. Hunt was proof that style and physical appearance neither guarantee nor preclude political success, for the three-hundred-pound man of odd dress and bumbling speech had a political career that spanned the state’s Populism of the 1890s to the 1930s New Deal. Driven by causes, he was very active in public office but took little pleasure in doing the job. Called names by opponents and embarrassed by his lack of formal education, Hunt sometimes showed rage, self-pity, and bitterness at what he saw as betrayals and conspiracies against him. The author assesses Hunt’s successes and failings as a political leader and take-charge governor struggling to produce results in a political system hostile to executive authority. Berman offers a nuanced look at Arizona’s first governor, providing an important new understanding of Arizona’s complex political history.
