History Commons^™

The Federal Government And The Industrial Workers Of The World, 1917-1918: An Attempt To Crush A Labor Union, Michael Torrance Prahl

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in 1905 as an industrial union: an organization of working people based on where they worked rather than the type of work they performed. From the beginning, the IWW was militant in its rhetoric. The preamble to its constitution declared: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common." The IWW also advocated direct action (e.g., strikes and sabotage) as the means by which to accomplish their goal of a complete take-over of the means of production by the working class. Both its rhetoric and its actions created a …

Class Culture And Generational Change: Immigrant Families In Two Connecticut Industrial Cities During The 1930s, Ivan Greenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent social history stresses the autonomy of workers, especially the ways that immigrant families made "lives of their own." However, little attention is focused on the particular experiences of the second generation and the ways they forged their own group identity. This study, by locating the emergence of this generation, highlights an important demographic change within the working class.

Familiar developments of the 1930s take on new meaning. For example, the pivotal role of the second generation in the rise of the CIO helps to recast the early history of industrial unionism. The resurgence of the labor movement parallels the …