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Playing For The People: Labor Sport Union Athletic Clubs In The Lake Superior/Iron Range 1927-1936, Gabe Logan
Playing For The People: Labor Sport Union Athletic Clubs In The Lake Superior/Iron Range 1927-1936, Gabe Logan
Upper Country: A Journal of the Lake Superior Region
From 1927-1935 the United States Communist Party developed and implemented the Labor Sport Union (LSU). This athletic experiment encouraged workers to abandon paternalistic company teams, theologically inspired gyms such as the YMCA and YWCA, and withdraw their support from school sponsored athletics. Instead, workers would join the LSU, a worker controlled sporting fraternity. The LSU enjoyed support in the metropolitan centers of the Northeast and Midwest. However, it was also enthusiastically received in the rural mining and farming regions of Lake Superior. This work recounts the history of the LSU in general and its specific development in upper Michigan, northern …