Culture of Misfortune

by Daniel, Clete

• ISBN13: 9780801438530
• ISBN10: 0801438535
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: Ilr Pr

Summary

The failure of the Textile Workers Union of America to organize its jurisdiction has often been considered the CIO's most critical setback in establishing industrial unionism in the United States. The textile industry had more than 1,250,000 workers, and the massive organizing campaign the CIO launched in 1937 resulted in perhaps the longest, most bitter, and most significant labor-capital clash of the century.

In Culture of Misfortune, Clete Daniel integrates many primary sources, including extensive archival records and numerous oral interviews, into his examination of this conflict. He pays close attention to the internal political culture of the TWUA and how it was affected by the dislocation and transformation of the textile industry the postwar assault on workers' rights, and the risks of activism in the face of the rampant anti-unionism of the South.

Daniel explains the inability of the TWUA to match the achievements of CIO unions in other mass-production industries through an analysis of the internal dynamics of the organization and of the external

Author Biography

Clete Daniel is Professor of American Labor History in the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(12)
A Common Interest	13	(26)
The Promise of Things to Come	39	(18)
In Praise of the New Unionism	57	(14)
Trusting in the Strength of Others	71	(26)
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back	97	(28)
The Spoils of War	125	(29)
``On Our Own Again''	154	(30)
Enemies Within	184	(21)
Self-Inflicted Wounds	205	(24)
Surviving the Future	229	(25)
Where There's Will	254	(29)
Notes	283	(34)
Index	317