Labor History Commons^™

Liquid Border, Yingfan Jia

Masters Theses

A River is a mighty and constantly-evolving force, leaving behind an intricately designed and constantly changing system. Not just a river, the Rio Grande stretches all the way from Colorado before intersecting with the US-Mexico Border in southern Texas - a point where the powerful forces of nature now merge with a clearly-defined political boundary. The outcome of this is a unique ecological niche, which may often go unnoticed despite its distinctiveness.

Texas is famous for its farms and ranches, and the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas was once an agricultural hub. However, urbanization and the depletion of water …

An Alternate Route: How Ronald Reagan Defied Expectations With His Approach To The Crosswinds Of The Patco Strike, Brock Bellinger

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

One challenge which reveals an executive’s leadership ability involves making the decision to fire an employee. President Ronald Reagan did not enjoy firing employees, due in part to his own father struggling to maintain employment. When the 1981 PATCO strike occurred, several obstacles arose which tested Reagan’s ability to act. The Professional Air Traffic Controller’s Organization (PATCO) had publicly supported Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign when other unions did not. Additionally, Reagan was sympathetic to unions, even serving as President of the Screen Actor’s Guild. These potential obstacles proved challenging from a political and personal perspective. However, when the …

Smashing Solidarity: Two New York Strikes At The Start Of The Postwar Wave, Joseph D. Parziale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two strikes in New York at the beginning of the massive 1945-46 strike wave—one by elevator operators in commercial buildings and another by dock workers throughout the Port of New York—can help us better understand a moment when workers exhibited a profound sense of themselves as a class, while their rivals in the shop, the corporate boardroom, and the halls of power fought vigorously to dispel the notion that workers divided by geography, industry, race, nationality, and gender were right to see their fates as intertwined. Historians’ focus on the economic issues at stake in the major strikes of the …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Hello Girls On Strike: Telephone Operators, The Fort Smith General Strike And The Struggle For Democracy In Great War Arkansas, Kyra Schmidt

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In September 1917, Fort Smith telephone operators formed a local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Soon after, company leaders dismissed two of the women who were instrumental in the formation of the union. After many attempts to meet and negotiate with the company leaders, the remaining operators walked out and began striking on September 19. This strike lasted almost four months and brought chaos into the city including the indictments, trials, and convictions of the mayor, J. H. Wright, and chief of police, Jim Fernandez. The election after Wright’s conviction saw the first female votes in Arkansas history. …

Factionalism In The Democratic Party 1936-1964, Seth Manning

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The period of 1936-1964 in the Democratic Party was one of intense factional conflict between the rising Northern liberals, buoyed by FDR’s presidency, and the Southern conservatives who had dominated the party for a half-century. Intertwined prominently with the struggle for civil rights, this period illustrates the complex battles that held the fate of other issues such as labor, foreign policy, and economic ideology in the balance. This thesis aims to explain how and why the Northern liberal faction came to defeat the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party through a multi-faceted approach examining organizations, strategy, arenas of competition, and …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

Capitalism And Unfreedom: Louis D. Brandeis And A Liberty Of The Left, Eric L. Apar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The American Right features a well-developed—and well-heeled—infrastructure for promoting a conception of freedom as inextricable from capitalism. The American Left, by contrast, has seemed content to cede the territory, abandoning the ground of freedom for the terrain of “equality,” “justice,” “fairness,” and “prosperity.” This paper is an effort to address this asymmetry in the public discourse over the meaning of freedom. Its principal objective is to capture the vision of freedom embodied in the political and economic thought of Louis D. Brandeis, one of the American Left’s ablest expositors of freedom.

In addition, the paper has three subsidiary objectives. The …

How The City Of Indianapolis Came To Have African American Policemen And Firemen 80 Years Before The Modern Civil Rights Movement., Leon E. Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Book Review (Paul Frymer's Black And Blue: African Americans, The Labor Movement, And The Decline Of The Democratic Party)., Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Oral History Interview: James A. Harmon, James A. Harmon

0064: Marshall University Oral History Collection

James A. Harmon was born in 1890 on his grandfather’s farm outside of Red House, WV. Mr. Harmon reminiscences about his childhood growing up on a 350-acre farm. He earned a sixth grade education at a two-room schoolhouse. When he was 14 years old, Mr. Harmon started his career on the river on the Steamer Calvert. During his interview, Mr. Harmon focuses on his varied jobs on many steamboats. Although he performed well in all of his duties, his greatest passion was engineering. He received his engineer’s license when he was 21 years old. In the audio clip provided, …