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Local 21'S Quest For A Moral Economy: Peabody, Massachusetts And Its Leather Workers, 1933-1973, Lynne Nelson Manion

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The industrial working class began the middle decades of the twentieth century with unlimited hope and possibility but ended them fraught with disillusionment and dismay. This marked a disjointed experience as optimism for the future gave way to disenchantment. With the ratification of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 and the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, hundreds of thousands of workers across the United States became union members. The euphoria that this initial burst of unionization created, however, could not be sustained throughout the post-World War II years. The Cold War, McCarthyism and later the onset of de-industrialization …