Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960

By Gary Gerstle

In this classic interpretation of the 1930s rise of industrial unionism, Gary Gerstle challenges the popular historical notion that American workers' embrace of "Americanism" and other patriotic sentiments in the post-World War I years indicated their fundamental political conservatism. He argues that Americanism was a complex, even contradictory, language of nationalism that lent itself to a wide variety of ideological constructions in the years between World War I and the onset of the Cold War. Using the rich and textured material left behind by New England's most powerful textile union--the Independent Textile Union of Woonsocket, Rhode Island--Gerstle uncovers for the first time a more varied and more radical working-class discourse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691228235

Book preview

Introduction

This book explores the efforts of two groups of twentieth-century workers to build a union and to fashion a class identity for themselves. The first group consisted of secular and modernist radicals, mostly European-born, who brought dreams of social democratic transformation to American shores; the second consisted of devout and traditionalist ethnics, largely French Canadian and American-born, torn between responding to pressures they experienced as workers in an industrial society and reaffirming their fealty to their ancestral culture. In the 1930s these workers came together in the Independent Textile Union. In the process they made the city in which this union emerged, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, into what Fall River and then Lawrence had once been – the bastion of organized labor in New England. Their union movement was also an integral part of the CIO insurgency that erupted in most centers of industrial production in those years; it opposed the principle of industrial unionism to the worn AFL principle of craft unionism, and it viewed unionism not in the practical, bread-and-butter terms of AFL unionists, but in terms of a grand struggle for freedom and independence.

This book uses the story of this union’s swift, dramatic rise – and equally precipitous fall – to probe the characters of the modern labor movement and of modern, working-class political culture during their formative, twentieth-century years. The beginning of that formative period lies not, as is often assumed, in the economic collapse of 1929, but in the dramatic changes in American politics and culture World War I brought to a head. Prior to 1917, an ethnic group could choose, if its members desired, to remain separate from the American cultural mainstream and to cultivate its Old World traditions; the American landscape was dotted with insular ethnic communities, whose cultural life remained remarkably autonomous of the Protestant, republican, and commercial culture around them. Prior to the war, political radicals, too, enjoyed a period of unusual independence. The number, size, and influence of radical groups in the prewar period was probably greater than in any other period of American history, and the variety of political languages they spoke was similarly unprecedented: socialism, syndicalism, Bellamyite nationalism, anarchism, populism – most flourishing in multiple versions that reflected the diverse ethnocultural backgrounds of their particular groups of supporters.¹

By the mid-1920s this world of cultural and political diversity had narrowed significantly. Most ethnic groups then found it far more difficult to maintain their independence from the cultural mainstream; most radical groups found themselves weak in number and their political ideas excluded from mainstream political discourse. Part of this dramatic change reflected the maturation of long-term centralizing tendencies in economics, communications, and culture, all contributing to the nationalization and homogenization of the American experience. National corporations and their standardized management and marketing techniques increasingly shaped the work and consuming habits of the American people; national newspaper chains and the radio centralized information gathering and processing; movies and national magazines insured that most Americans, especially those in urban areas, would spend a substantial portion of their leisure time in a single transcontinental supermarket of mass cultural products.²

But the pressures for conformity in the 1920s came not only from such vast, impersonal forces. They resulted also from the deliberate efforts national and state governments (as well as private groups) made to generate a mass citizenry, essentially homogeneous in its cultural and political attitudes. These efforts crystallized in the war, as panicked government officials and private citizens, alarmed at the overwhelming numbers of immigrants with cultural ties to central Europe as well as by the loud, Socialist-led opposition to American war involvement, launched Americanization campaigns, unprecedented in scope and intensity, to strip the masses of their foreign ways and allegedly radical beliefs. These campaigns continued after the war, abating only after the radical problem was solved by the crushing of the 1919–22 strike wave and the immigrant problem was solved by closing off America to immigration in 1924.³ Even after fears of political and cultural subversion subsided, however, the American government, at both the national and state levels, did not fully relinquish its newly gained powers to define the appropriate cultural and political behavior of American citizens. Governmental prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcohol was a vivid and daily reminder in ethnic communities throughout the 1920s of the American state’s ability and new found willingness to intrude on the personal and cultural habits of individual citizens. Similarly, the citizenship training courses first set up to enforce political loyalty on the foreign-born became a permanent part of public school curricula in every state and thus an obligatory part of every public school student’s cultural and political education.⁴

Such state-sponsored campaigns to shape individual behavior by no means created the politically docile or culturally homogeneous citizenry that the Americanization movement’s more conservative architects had envisioned. Their effects were far more complex and contradictory; in communities like Woonsocket they would actually generate a greater sense of political opportunity and a higher level of political conflict than had prevailed in the prewar era. But they would do so by forcing ethnic and radical groups through a wrenching period of internal upheaval, forcing their members to struggle with the demands for political and cultural conformity that the external world of government, corporations, the Catholic Church hierarchy, and the mass media ever more insistently thrust upon them. The battles that erupted within ethnic communities and radical groups, and the manner of their resolution, profoundly shaped American working-class politics and culture, and prefigured, in important ways, working-class responses to the Great Depression.

Part I of this book analyzes the cultural and political transformations that Americanization campaigns and economic depression wrought in Woonsocket in the 1920s. In particular it shows how Americanization campaigns and a troubled economy freed the city’s two most important working-class groups, traditionalist French Canadians and progressive Franco-Belgians, from the insular ethnic worlds in which they had been confined, how they made political action based on a shared class experience a real possibility, and how they prompted workers to begin fashioning a capitalist critique from the American political traditions that conservative Americanizers had so insistently thrust upon them. These social and political developments form the essential backdrop to the city’s Depression experience, and are critical to understanding the 1930s rise of an industrial union with the power to alter fundamentally the working and living conditions of Woonsocket’s workers.

Part II, covering the years from 1929 to 1936, analyzes the process by which Woonsocket’s industrial union, the Independent Textile Union (ITU), came into being and secured a foothold in the city. Part III, spanning the years from 1936 to 1941, analyzes the union’s successful bid for economic and political power and its elaboration of a working-class Americanism that managed to accommodate both the Franco-Belgians’ modernist vision of socialist transformation and the French Canadians’ traditionalist vision of corporatist reconstruction. Part IV focuses largely on the years from 1941 to 1946, a period in which the union’s French Canadians, aided by a resurgent ethnic middle class, fought and triumphed over the union’s radicals, only to relinquish their corporatist vision under pressure from an ideologically powerful wartime state. During these war years the working-class Americanism that through the 1930s had focused so insistently on democratizing relations between capital and labor was transformed into a pluralist creed focused instead on eliminating racial and religious bigotry from American life. This ideological transformation, which was echoed throughout the country, displaced conflict between capital and labor from the central place it had long occupied in the nation’s political consciousness and, in the process, severely weakened the labor movement’s claim to speak for the down-trodden and oppressed. Ideologically marginalized, Woonsocket’s unionists suffered the indignity of presiding over their union’s dismantling, which proceeded in lockstep with the city’s deindustrialization in the 1950s.

Few words in the 1930s American labor movement resounded as broadly as Americanism. John L. Lewis, angrily defending his CIO unions against charges that they espoused communism, nazism, or some other philosophy, declared in 1940: I yield to no man the right to challenge my Americanism or the Americanism of the organizations which at this moment I represent. Lewis did not attempt to define his Americanism; he simply assumed that his audience – in this case a convention hall packed with trade union delegates – knew precisely what he meant.⁵ Earl Browder, the chairman of the American Communist Party in the 1930s, also frequently invoked Americanism, as in his well-known, bizarre slogan, Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism. In invoking Americanism Browder rarely summoned up the kind of thunderous indignation that was second nature to Lewis; from his perspective, it was important that Americanism imbue the Communist Party with as innocuous and unassailable an aura as mom and apple pie.⁶

Americanism was as popular in the ranks of ordinary American workers as in elite union and radical party circles. In Woonsocket a French-Canadian skilled worker and rank-and-file unionist was fond of yelling at union meetings – again without explication – Unionism is the spirit of Americanism. And another such rank and filer, speaking to a group of applicants for citizenship in 1938, stressed the absolute necessity of maintaining unionism as the key factor in Americanism. The radical leaders of this union movement, mostly skilled workers and socialists from northern France and Belgium, also indulged in Americanist talk as when they criticized the reactionary Supreme Court justices in 1937 for blocking the emergence of a new, progressive Americanism. And in 1940 they called on their members to insure that Americanism would continue to mean to the average man the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Although this last statement is unusual in its explication of the term’s referents, even here these remain vague, linked somehow to the Declaration of Independence.⁷

Many scholars have noted that Americanism enjoyed widespread currency in labor and radical circles in the 1930s. But, frustrated by the term’s apparent lack of specificity, most have dismissed it as a shallow, rather meaningless political term.⁸ The few historians who have seen Americanism as an important political phenomenon have followed the lead of Warren Susman, treating it as the carrier of profoundly conservative political impulses. Susman’s argument followed two lines. The first took up a critique of Popular Front culture that Trotskyists and other dissident communists first articulated in the 1940s and 1950s. In this vein, Susman argued that precious little political thought stood behind the symbols of national community that Americans so eagerly embraced in the thirties. Patriotic terms like Americanism, New Deal icons like the Blue Eagle, and mass cultural images like Frank Capra’s nostalgic cinematic rendition of the wholesome, virtuous character of small-town life offered individual Americans security and a sense of belonging to a greater whole in a time of deep distress. These symbols and terms thus encouraged adjustment rather than rebellion, conformity rather than dissent.

In his second line of argument Susman embraced an analysis of Americanism that originated with Gramsci and fellow 1920s European intellectuals of both the left and right. Insofar as Americanism contained any political ideology at all, Susman claimed, it was procapitalist, rooted in the genius of Henry Ford, not of Eugene Debs or of Karl Marx. The exponents of Fordism interpreted democracy in terms of American workers’ full participation in the marketplace of American capitalism. They envisioned equality in terms of the mass distribution of consumer goods – cars, clothing, radios – to American families. They promised only the semblance of social equality and participatory democracy, never challenging, in Susman’s words, the essential decision-making power in the shop, industry, the community or the nation. Even the American Communists and Socialists of the 1930s, who deliberately espoused Americanism as a way of introducing radical thought into mainstream political discourse, Susman argued, failed to move beyond this Fordist vision. Their arguments reinforced rather than challenged the fundamental structure of capitalist society.⁹

Susman’s analysis is not entirely wrong. Many Americans of the 1930s, especially those of the middle class, drew from Americanism a comforting sense of community and security that saw them through hard times. Likewise, a significant number of reformers, labor leaders, and radicals did construct an essentially procapitalist, consumerist vision out of Americanist materials. But for every individual looking to Americanism for comfort and security, we can counterpose another who found in Americanist rhetoric an inspiration for political revolt, and for every self-professed radical conflating his or her Americanism with Fordism, we can find another using Americanist rhetoric to focus attention directly on the unequal distribution of power between capital and labor that prevailed in the workplace, community, and nation.

The fact that such varied meanings became attached to the term Americanism renders impossible efforts to treat it as an ideology. But Americanism was not so amorphous as to resist definition. It can best be understood as a political language, a set of words, phrases, and concepts that individuals used – either by choice or necessity – to articulate their political beliefs and press their political demands. Americanism emerged as a political language in the second and third decades of the twentieth century as a result of a medley of factors noted earlier: first, the Americanization campaigns of World War I and after, through which the government sought to enforce an American identity – 100 percent Americanism – on the nation’s cultural dissenters and political radicals; second, the implementation in the nation’s largest firms of a new system of industrial relations – often called Fordism or the American Plan – based on high productivity, high wages, and enlightened schemes of scientific and personnel management; and third, the national diffusion by mass cultural media – movies, radio, and national magazines – of American cultural values and, in the process, of the English language. The combined result of these forces, by the twenties, was an unprecedented national emphasis on pledging loyalty to American institutions, on defining what it meant to be an American, and on elaborating an American way of life. Such a preoccupation with being American did not in itself procure political or cultural conformity, but it did force virtually every group seriously interested in political power – groups as diverse as capitalists, socialists, ghettoized ethnics, and small-town fundamentalists – to couch their programs in the language of Americanism.¹⁰

In any particular period of time from the 1920s through the 1940s, some groups were invariably more successful than others in appropriating the language and adapting it to their specific political agendas; but success was always tenuous, vulnerable to dramatic economic developments like depression and major political events like war. The substance of American politics, then, changed dramatically over time as different groups gained and then lost control of the language of Americanism. The language of Americanism, in turn, easily accommodated, even camouflaged, such dramatic shifts. This camouflaging, I will argue, has hidden a good part of twentieth-century politics from historiographic view. It has led some historians to see in twentieth-century politics too much mindless patriotism, others to see mostly crass opportunism, still others to see only an obsession with the private – no longer the public – good. Yet, the language of Americanism was a good deal richer, more varied, and more complex than any of these perspectives suggests.

Americanist language can best be understood in terms of four overlapping dimensions that I will call nationalist, democratic, progressive, and traditionalist. The nationalist dimension of Americanism demanded of its adherents fealty to a series of American heroes, foremost among them the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers, and Abraham Lincoln. Such hero worship entailed admiring the myths collectively woven around these individuals’ efforts to secure religious freedom (the Pilgrims), to establish a republic (the Founding Fathers), and to preserve the union and free the slaves at the country’s gravest hour (Lincoln). Dwelling on such deeds, of course, led naturally to an emphasis on America’s greatness, even uniqueness, among the world’s nations. It also, however, allowed political insurgents at home to legitimate their particular goals by linking themselves to the revered causes of the nation’s past. As John L. Lewis wrote in 1925, a return to first principles – a reassertion in practice of the rules laid down by the Fathers of the Republic . . . has been all that the most ardent champion of popular rights or proponent of public welfare need ask.¹¹ Such reassertions were often made in plainly opportunistic ways; 1930s labor leaders, for example, unabashedly declared that their pursuit of economic security was but a latter-day version of the Pilgrims’ quest for freedom and sustenance. Nationalist language,then, frequently imparted a fairly crass tone to political discussions.

The second, democratic dimension of Americanism – linked inextricably to the first – focused less on the identity of American heroes, more on the ideals for which they fought. Such commonly used words and phrases as democracy, liberty, rights, independence, and freedom evoked these ideals. This aspect of Americanism harbored an unacknowledged tension between such competing democratic notions as individual rights and equal rights; free enterprise and industrial democracy stood in similar opposition. The democratic dimension, then, lent itself to justification of goals as disparate as the untrammeled pursuit of individual wealth on the one hand and the democratization of capitalist institutions on the other. Many used it to articulate cultural (rather than economic) visions, such as the pluralist dream that called for the extension of equal rights and equal opportunities to all American citizens irrespective of creed, color, or national origin. The flexibility of this democratic dimension – its nurturing such a range of political and social visions – accounts in large part for the malleability of the language of Americanism as a whole and its appeal to groups as divergent as free enterprisers, political radicals, and cultural pluralists.

The third dimension of Americanism was progressive, entailing a belief in the fundamentally rational, abundant, and ever-improving character of the modern world in general and of American society in particular. This dimension stressed the ability of free and energetic man to transform, with the aid of machines, the natural world, to stock the marketplace with a dazzling array of colorful, useful, and pleasing consumer goods, and to put these within reach of virtually every American. An important corollary of this belief was that such consumption made life progressively easier, more satisfying, and more enriching. By eliminating scarcity, the modern world also eliminated sources of social conflict and made enduring social peace possible. The words evoking this progressive view included progress, science, technology, abundance, rationality, and efficiency; such phrases as scientific management and the American standard of living also reflected this progressive perspective. Historians recently have tended to associate this view with capitalists and their apologists who sought to divert the masses from seeking economic power, the true source of independence and happiness.¹² But it is well to remember that virtually all socialists, from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century, have shared the capitalist faith in the liberating potential of modern society and specifically in the latent ability of modern industry, with its marvelous efficiency and productivity, to deliver all people from the world of scarcity and conflict to the world of abundance and harmony. Lenin was one of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s greatest fans,¹³ and in 1930s’ Woonsocket, working-class radicals would make progressive language a critical component of their Americanist discourse.

The fourth dimension of Americanism was traditionalist, rooted in nostalgia for the mythic, simpler, and more virtuous past when the essence of America was to be found on the farm and in the small town; when family values were paramount; when individuals were hardy, virtuous, and God-fearing; and when all Americans were white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Family, God, virtue, discipline, manliness, self-reliance, prohibition, and Christianity all evoked this strain of Americanism, which infused movements of religious fundamentalism, anticommunism, racism, nativism, and imperialism with extraordinary patriotic passion. For those who lived in rural areas or small towns, or who belonged to the embattled urban, Protestant middle class, this aspect of Americanism was salient, expressed in national debates on prohibition, immigration restriction, and evolution.¹⁴ In working-class communities composed of new immigrant groups, this strain remained submerged, at least until the end of World War II. Catholics and Jews could not embrace a dimension of Americanism that, in the hands of Protestants, relegated them to a subordinate place in American social life; yet the traditional values associated with it nevertheless powerfully appealed to ethnic Americans, especially Catholics, whose worlds were defined by God, family, and community. It would sneak into the discourse of the 1930s labor movement in odd ways; unionists in Woonsocket sometimes ascribed traditionalist qualities to Abraham Lincoln (plain, simple, honest, courageous) and portrayed Thanksgiving as a time for family feasting.¹⁵ But not until World War II thoroughly undermined nativism did ethnic Americans feel able to embrace the traditionalist perspective of Americanism as their own.¹⁶

This traditionalist dimension of Americanism stood in sharp contradiction to Americanism’s progressive dimension. Many found it difficult if not impossible to embrace both. Some did, however; Henry Ford was perhaps the most prominent among them. Ford combined a faith in the wonders of mass production with a continuing adherence to a distinctly nineteenth-century set of moral values. This dualism was imbedded in his most celebrated concept, the five-dollar-a-day wage, predicated on a new theory of economics that stressed the economic abundance and profits that would result from putting more money into workers’ hands. Yet Ford insisted on making half of that daily wage contingent on his workers living a properly moral domestic life, and he sent sociological inspectors into his employees’ homes to assess their cleanliness, order, and decorum.¹⁷

The contrary progressive and traditionalist dimensions of Americanism proved complementary, however, when located in different constituencies of a single social movement. Both the 1930s labor movement and the New Deal brought radicals and reformers imbued with a progressive faith together with ethnically minded workers still committed to their community’s moral traditionalism. What cemented their alliance was their ability to share a common political language even as they emphasized different dimensions of that language and imparted to particular words significantly different meanings. Thus, to reformers and radicals the American standard of living often connoted a plan to use the state to create and distribute economic abundance to all Americans; to ethnic workers, by contrast, it sometimes meant the defense of the most essential component of their community – the patriarchal family. The very contradictoriness of Americanism, in such instances, served political movements well.

This discussion of Americanism’s four dimensions – nationalist, democratic, progressive, and traditionalist – suggests the multiplicity of political visions that this political language could and did sustain. This very multiplicity means that this language cannot be adequately understood from a study of words, symbols, or icons alone. The historian must examine as well the ways in which these ambiguous words and symbols were actually used, looking at how particular groups first selected words and concepts from the language of Americanism and then assembled them into a political world view. This task is particularly urgent in view of the way in which mass production and mass distribution transformed the very nature of political language in the early twentieth century. Mass production eviscerated political language in two ways: First, it encouraged the use of stock images and phrases that could be distributed to an extraordinarily large and diverse population, and, second, it tended to commodify words, replacing their intrinsic meanings with ill-defined but appealing congeries of associations. The actual meanings of words and concepts, as a consequence, became harder to discern and more susceptible to change.¹⁸ For this reason, a study of twentieth-century political language profits from being anchored in a local context where the relations between words and their users can be systematically examined.

The relevant groups in this local study are Woonsocket’s two working-class factions (radicals and ethnics) that built the ITU, the French-Canadian community’s ethnic elite (chiefly, Catholic clergy and Republican Party leaders), Woonsocket’s textile employers, and the national bureaucratic elites charged with implementing the government’s industrial relations policies. The importance of the working-class factions, whose cultural, class, and political experiences receive the most detailed treatment, lies not only in the critical role they played in building and sustaining Woonsocket’s labor movement but also in their representativeness: Virtually every industrial union that arose in the United States in the 1930s depended on the same alliance of radical and ethnic workers that propelled the ITU into being.¹⁹ I have ascertained the influence of elites – ethnic, industrial, and governmental – on local working-class culture and politics, and especially on working-class constructions of Americanism, by focusing. on politically tense historical moments that reveal with unusual clarity both the internal political character of elites and their external relationships to the Woonsocket masses. These moments include an internecine ethnic elite fight in the 1920s, the divided response of Woonsocket industrialists to New Deal legislation in the early 1930s, a bitterly contested municipal electoral campaign in the late 1930s, and the federal government’s attempt to secure working-class political loyalty and shopfloor peace in the 1940s.

My interest in political language springs ultimately from my interest in political power and especially its ebb and flow between elites and masses. Those who control a political language enjoy, in my view, an advantage in their bid for power. The centrality of the language of Americanism to political debate in the 1920s and 1930s may be seen as a victory for elites who saw it as a tool for containing the nation’s unruly masses of ethnic workers. Yet, even as that victory foreclosed certain political opportunities, it opened up others for radicals and ethnics who were willing and able to couch their socialist and ethnocommunal ideas in the language of Americanism. I have tried to demonstrate how easily the flexible language of Americanism could accommodate such ideological reformulations, often camouflaging them in ways that have hidden them from historical view. At the same time, I have tried to show how this language’s dominance in the interwar years rendered dissident movements of both the right and left vulnerable to containment and sometimes to dissolution.

That this language was both flexible and dominant, that it both accommodated ideas emerging from other political languages and forced them through difficult and risky processes of reformulation, is critical to understanding the relationship of language to power. Language is not all-powerful; it does not, by itself, determine social reality as Gareth Stedman Jones has claimed.²⁰ Words do not possess such intrinsic meanings that the mere act of speaking or thinking them automatically ties the speaker or thinker to a web of fixed associations, meanings, and values. Words can sometimes have this effect. Equally common, however, are instances where different individuals impart to the same words markedly different meanings and visions.²¹ In these latter instances what often determines the primacy of one meaning or vision over the other is the overall balance of power – economic, social, ideological – that prevails between contending individuals or groups. The conflict over language, at such moments, is only one of several contests that together comprise a struggle for political power. The battle for control of the language of Americanism, in Woonsocket and elsewhere, can only be understood, I hope to show, as part of a series of political struggles occurring simultaneously on different fronts: in factories, where workers and employers fought for control of the shopfloor; in ethnic communities, where priests, lay elites, and working-class masses vied for political and moral power; in the increasingly important administrative institutions of the American state, where contending social groups tangled with each other and with public servants for political and ideological authority. The history of a political language, in other words, can only be understood as part of a broader social and political history. In that spirit, we begin this story not with an examination of political language but with the post-World War I intraethnic struggles in Woonsocket’s French-Canadian and Franco-Belgian communities that undermined critically important sets of class relationships in this textile city.

¹ No single work satisfactorily captures the political and cultural diversity of the pre–World War I world, though the following are suggestive: Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1976); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism (Cambridge, U.K., 1987); John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, Ind., 1985); Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York, 1987); and Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967). John Higham, Integrating America: The Problem of Assimilation in the Nineteenth Century, Journal of American Ethnic History 1 (Fall 1981), 7–25, and William Taylor, The Launching of a Commercial Culture: New York City, 1860–1930 (unpublished paper), have also influenced my thinking on the subject. The cultural and political diversity of the period can best be grasped by sampling the voluminous literature that now exists on specific political movements, industrial cities, and ethnic groups for the period from 1880 to 1917. See, for example, Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, Ill., 1982); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York, 1976); Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, U.K., 1983); Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago, 1982); Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the World They Found and Made (New York, 1976).

² These various centralizing tendencies are discussed in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); William J. Leiserson, Adjusting Immigrant and Industry (New York, 1924); Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 171–256; Michael J. Piore and Charles F.Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984); David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977); Steve Fraser, The ‘Labor Question,’ in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 55–84; Stuart Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago, 1967); David Brody, The Rise and Decline of Welfare Capitalism, in his Workers in Industrial America (New York, 1980), 48–81; Wiebe, The Search for Order; Jerry Israel, ed., Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America (New York, 1972); Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York, 1929); Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will; Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of the Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York, 1980); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture (New York, 1976); Carl F. Kaestle, Pulling Together or Coming Apart? Standardization and Diversity in American Print Culture, 1880–1980, and Susan Watkins, The Rise of Demographic Nationalism in Western Europe, 1870–1960 (unpublished papers delivered at Shelby Cullom Davis Center Seminar, Princeton University, 1986–87); Taylor, The Launching of a Commercial Culture.

³ The best study of the war-inspired Americanization efforts is still John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York, 1975; originally published in 1955); see also Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (New York, 1948). On the collapse of labor and radical organizations see Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 370–464; David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (New York, 1965); Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany, N.Y., 1981); Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis, 1955).

⁴ Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, Ill., 1963); Robert A. Carlson, The Quest for Conformity: Americanization Through Education (New York, 1975); Bessie L. Pierce, Civic Attitudes in American School Textbooks (Chicago, 1930), 229–30.

⁵ Quoted in ITU News, October 1940, 6. See Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York, 1977), 288–90, for an attempt to define Lewis’s Americanism.

⁶ Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957) (Boston, 1957), 175–386. Earl Browder’s Americanism, of course, can only be understood as part of the Communist Party’s effort – as a result of decisions made by the Communist International in Moscow in 1935 – to present itself as patriotic, democratic, and respectable. Such a rhetorical face-lift was not accompanied by internal changes in the party that might have rendered its radicalism truly nationalist and democratic, and thus its Americanism should not be regarded as a genuine expression of deeply held beliefs. The fact, however, that Browder, in constructing a patriotic veneer for his party, should have chosen Americanism as his keyword amply testifies to its popularity in the ranks of American workers. Leon Samson, in his Toward a United Front (New York, 1935), produced the Communist Party’s most ambitious treatise on Americanism and its relationship to socialism.

⁷ ITU News, September 1939, 8; August 1939, 5; May 1937, 7; December 1940, 4.

⁸ See, for example, Howe and Coser, The American Communist Party, 363–6.

⁹ Warren Susman, Socialism and Americanism, The Culture of the 1930s, and Culture and Commitment, in Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984), 75–85, 150–210. The Trotskyist roots of Susman’s first line of argument can be found in Howe and Coser, The American Communist Party; the Gramscian roots can be found in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York, 1971), 277–318. For the European conservatives’ critique of Americanism see Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (New York, 1987), 22–53, and Victoria de Grazia, Americanism for Export, Wedge 7–8 (Winter–Spring 1985), 74–81. The influence of Trotskyist and Gramscian perspectives on the writing of twentieth-century American cultural history has spread far beyond Susman. See, for example, Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York, 1973), and T. J. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York, 1983).

¹⁰ Susman, Culture and Commitment, in Culture as History, 184–210; David O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years (New York, 1968), 212–27; Philip Gleason, American Identity and Americanization, in Stephan Thernstrom, ed., The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 31–58; R. W. Dunn, The Americanization of Labor: The Employers’ Offensive Against the Trade Unions (New York, 1927); Gary Gerstle, The Politics of Patriotism: Americanization and the Formation of the CIO, Dissent (Winter 1986), 84–92; John J. Bukowczyk, The Transformation of Working-Class Ethnicity: Corporate Control, Americanization, and the Polish Immigrant Middle Class in Bayonne, N.J., 1915–1925, Labor History 25 (Winter 1984), 53–82.

¹¹ John L. Lewis, The Miners’ Fight for American Standards (Indianapolis, Ind., 1925), 179–80.

¹² See, for example, Ewen, Captains of Consciousness.

¹³ On Lenin, see E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution (3 vols., London, 1950–53), vol. II, 109–15.

¹⁴ Traditionalist constructions of Americanism were most common in the early 1920s. For glimpses of how this language was used see Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade; David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism (Chicago, 1968); Norman Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918–1931 (New Haven, Conn., 1954); Ray Ginger, Six Days or Forever? Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes (New York, 1958); and Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith, William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915–1925 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

¹⁵ ITU News, February 1938, 5, and November 1939, cover.

¹⁶ On the place of such traditionalist language in the political consciousness of ethnics in post–World War II America, see Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

¹⁷ Meyer, The Five-Dollar Day; Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (Boston, 1986), 87–131. Gramsci mistakenly took Ford to be representative of America’s bourgeoisie and thus attempted to show how Ford’s peculiar blend of traditionalist and progressive views formed the essence of the nation’s new bourgeois (and hegemonic) ideology. His analysis, though often ingenious, is thus flawed in important ways. See Hoare and Smith, Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 277–318.

¹⁸ On the evisceration of twentieth-century political language see Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York, 1984), 23–59; Lears and Fox, eds., The Culture of Consumption. My interpretation of the consequences of such evisceration, however, differs in significant ways from the ones offered in these accounts.

¹⁹ The representativeness of Woonsocket’s radical and ethnic worker alliance will be discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.

²⁰ Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, U.K., 1983); see also the very interesting debate on language and politics sparked by Joan W. Scott’s essay, On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History, International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (Spring 1987), 1–36.

²¹ For a wide-ranging examination of such instances, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York, 1987).

Part I

Ethnictown, 1875–1929

1 The French Canadians

As late as 1930, few could have predicted that Woonsocket, Rhode Island, would soon become the center of textile unionism in New England. A heavily industrialized city of 50,000, Woonsocket’s social and cultural life had long been dominated by its 35,000 French-Canadian residents, and everyone knew that French-Canadian workers simply did not join unions in large numbers. The French-Canadian elite in Woonsocket and elsewhere thought of their ethnic workers as devout Catholics too preoccupied with their spirituality to concern themselves with such banal, materialist pursuits as unions addressed. Nativists in the labor movement believed that French-Canadian workers lacked the kind of rational intelligence, civic responsibility, and self-improving zeal that American trade unionists required. Syndicalists and socialists, who had cultivated a great deal of pro-union and radical sentiment in numerous ethnic, working-class enclaves elsewhere in New England, found French-Canadian workers forbiddingly difficult to reach.

This wide-ranging consensus on the unorganizability of French-Canadian workers slipped almost unnoticed and unquestioned into historical scholarship. Today it is difficult to find works that even raise the issue of French-Canadian labor quiescence as a question worthy of study. The relatively few explanations of such quiescence that historians have proposed tend to focus on the inherently conservative, backward-looking nature of French-Canadian culture. But such culturalist explanations cannot account for the rise, in 1930s Woonsocket, of a powerful labor movement with broad, enthusiastic French-Canadian support. French-Canadian working-class quiescence in pre-Depression Woonsocket cannot be ascribed, therefore, to an ethnic culture that inevitably made its adherents meek; it can only be understood in social structural terms – specifically, the subordinate place occupied by French-Canadian workers in an ethnic social order dominated by a clergy steeped in counter-Reformation, antimodernist values. During the years from 1875 to 1914, when that cleric-dominated social order shaped Woonsocket’s ethnic life, French-Canadian workers lived up to their quiescent reputation. But once national economic and political pressures plunged that social order into crisis in the years 1914 to 1929, French-Canadian workers began to discover, amidst the shattered state of their elite, the freedom to fashion a vigorous class identity for themselves. They turned increasingly to economic and political institutions like trade unions and the Democratic Party that their ethnic leadership had long frowned upon, and they began reformulating aspects of their conservative culture to express better their grievances as wage earners in a capitalist society. To those willing to listen, they had declared by 1930, albeit in halting and confused ways, their desire to fashion an independent life for themselves. Such working-class stirrings, though failing in the short term to alter significantly Woonsocket economic and social life, reveal a great deal about the gathering cultural and political forces that would transform Woonsocket society in the 1930s. To understand these stirrings, and the cultural and political forces underlying them, we must first explore how the ethnic social order that had profoundly shaped French-Canadian working life since the latter years of the nineteenth century first established itself on American soil.

La ville la plus française aux États Unis, 1875–1914

In the early nineteenth century Woonsocket was one of many rural areas in New England transformed by industrialization. Its access to the water power of the Blackstone River and its location only twenty miles upstream from the textile entrepreneurs of Pawtucket – Samuel Slater, Moses Brown, and David Wilkinson – made it a natural site for cotton manufacture. By 1810 local farmers with choice pieces of land along the Blackstone falls began either selling out to textile entrepreneurs or drawing on Providence capital and Pawtucket artisans to establish their own mills. The first three decades of textile manufacturing witnessed many more failures than successes but, by the 1840s, Woonsocket boasted twenty-one mills and about a thousand operatives. Although cotton textile manufacture predominated, one local entrepreneur, Edward Harris, had introduced woolen manufacture to the city. The success of his economic ventures would eventually make Woonsocket a center of woolen manufacture as well.¹

Woonsocket’s first textile workers came from the ranks of impoverished Yankee farmers and of Irish immigrants who came to northern Rhode Island in the 1820s to build a canal making the Blackstone River navigable from Worcester to Providence. By the early 1840s, 332 French Canadians had settled in Woonsocket – the first are thought to have arrived as horse dealers in 1815 – and some undoubtedly worked in the textile mills.² But the great wave of migration that would transform Woonsocket into a French-Canadian enclave did not begin until the late 1860s.

Agricultural crisis in Quebec and the explosion of textile manufacturing in New England together triggered the mass migration of French Canadians to New England. By the 1860s, the high birth rate of French-Canadian habitants (peasants) in conjunction with sharp limits on the amount of arable land created a severe land shortage in the triangular part of southern Quebec, between the northern border of the United States and the St. Lawrence River, where 90 percent of French Canadians lived. American textile manufacturers, meanwhile, were rapidly expanding their enterprises, as the Civil War’s end both released a pent-up demand for civilian clothing and made available to the North supplies of the South’s raw cotton. Desperate for labor, northern manufacturers sent recruiters to Quebec with promises of economic opportunity in New England’s textile mills. The impoverished French Canadian habitants did not take long to respond. Between 1861 and 1870, about 200,000 left Quebec for New England. As many as 500,000, representing about a fourth of the entire French-Canadian nation, settled in New England by 1901.³

A migration of such magnitude made French Canadians one of New England’s most important ethnic groups. French-Canadian immigrants and their children comprised 46 percent of the work force in New England’s largest industry, cotton textiles, in 1900.⁴ They established communities in every major mill town – Fall River, New Bedford, Lowell, Lawrence, Pawtucket, Manchester – and they turned many smaller mill towns like Biddeford and Lewiston, Maine, into virtual colonies of Quebec.⁵ The French-Canadian community in Woonsocket increased more than tenfold from 1847 to 1875, from 332 to 3,376, and then quadrupled between 1875 and 1900. In percentage terms, first- and second-generation French Canadians increased their share of the city’s population from 7 percent in 1847 to 49 percent in 1900, outstripping the Irish and forming the largest segment of the city’s burgeoning textile work