The roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947: A reply to Hardiman

This constitutes a reply to David Hardiman's recent criticism of my article on the middle peasant thesis and its applicability to late colonial India. It challenges Hardiman's notion of the middle peasantry as too narrow and not the indisputable Leninist definition. Further, it emphasizes the emergence of a more flexible agrarian economy and society which, whilst not necessarily ‘capitalist’, renders redundant the concept of a traditional middle peasantry. Finally, Hardiman's interpretation of the Bardoli campaign of 1928 and its implications for understanding rural agitations in British India are critically examined.     

Organizing the neglected worker: the Women's Trade Union League in New York and Boston, 1930–1950

From 1930 to 1950, the New York and Boston Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) chapters focused on organizing poorly paid female service employees, many of them African American or Hispanic, whom the AFL and CIO largely neglected. Scholars who studied the WTUL generally confined their work to the period before 1920. Drawing on new primary sources, this article challenges previous characterizations of the WTUL as moribund after 1920, revealing the WTUL's vitality and innovative organizing methods. The WTUL maintained that New Deal protective legislation would prove largely unenforceable if workers remained unorganized. The article examines how the WTUL combined energetic organizing and legislative lobbying on behalf of laundry workers, domestic servants, cafeteria workers, hotel chambermaids, textile workers, and teachers, considered among the most difficult workers to organize.     

The ‘middle peasant thesis’ and the roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947

Peasant agitations during the last decades of British rule in India are now receiving increasing attention. Despite a diversity of arguments concerning their origins within the peasantry, one popular model is that developed by Wolf and Alavi of the potential radicalism of a landowning subsistence middle peasantry. The thesis is here examined both in terms of its general analytical value for India and by studying one particular movement, the campaign in Bardoli, Gujarat in 1928. From this, some conclusions are suggested about the nature of successful peasant political action in India and other parts of Asia.     

Teacher Unions conflict in New York City, 1935–1960

Abstract

While studies of the New York City Teachers Union (TU) generally attribute its eventual demise to the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s, this article situates the TU in the history of New York City teachers’ associations more generally. It argues that the Union’s fate was a consequence not simply of anticommunism, but of competition between the Union and other city teachers’ associations. In particular, the Teachers Guild fought with the Union for the mantle of teacher radicalism. While the two organizations fought for some of the same issues, the liberal Guild was accommodating to the government, while the radical Union was confrontational. When it came to the Union’s ideology, however, the Guild consistently sacrificed its commitment to academic freedom by collaborating with public authorities to reveal the extent of the Union’s Communist commitments. Using archival data – private correspondence of teacher unionists, minutes of Union meetings, and articles from the teachers’ unions’ official periodicals – this article documents the Guild’s efforts at subverting the Union, particularly at moments when the Union’s political commitments became salient in public affairs.     

‘The streets have been watched regularly’: the York Penitentiary Society,young working-class women,and the regulation of behaviour in the public spaces of York,c. 1845–1919

The York Penitentiary Society, a charitable female reformatory in York, aimed to transform ‘fallen’ women in the city into useful citizens through institutionalisation, domestic training, and moral and religious instruction. The Penitentiary focused on isolating its ‘inmates’ from wider society, but its moral reach extended far beyond the high walls of the Refuge, and the young women confined within. This article examines the York Penitentiary Society, and considers how it acted to police the streets and public spaces of York, and the behaviour of young women who populated them. In addition to adding detail to our understanding of the operation of female reform institutions, this study also adds to our knowledge on the unofficial policing of women’s behaviour in public space, and has significant implications for histories of urban life.     

The manifesto of the North American anti‐fascist alliance,New York,august 26, 1926

Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, By Ira Berlin. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. xxi, 423 pp. $15.00.

Rights of Union Members and the Government. By Philip Taft. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975. xv, 348 pp. $14.95.

The Hundred Million Dollar Pay Off. By Douglas Caddy. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974. $8.75.

Mother Jones—The Miners’ Angel: A Portrait. By Dale Fetherling. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. 263 pp. $11.85

A Guide to the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Compiled and edited by Warner W. Pflug. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974. 195 pp. $8.95.

MAN!: An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries. Edited by Marcus Graham. London: Genfuegos Press, 1974. 638 pp. £7.00 ($17.00), paperback £ 3.25p ($8.00).

Confrontation at Winnipeg: Labour, Industrial Relations, and the General Strike. By David Jay Bercuson. Montreal and London: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1974. pp. x, 227.

English Hunger &; Industrial Disorders: A Study of Social Conflict During the First Decade of George III's Reign. By Walter James Shelton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. ix, 226 pp. $15.00.

Edwardian Radicalism, 1900–1914: Some Aspects of British Radicalism. Edited by A.J.A. Morris. Boston: Routledge &; Kegan Paul, 1974. x, 277 pp. $18.00.

Les Ouvriers en grève. By Michelle Perrot. Paris: Mouton, 1974. 2 volumes. 900 pp.

The Import of Labor: The case of the Netherlands. By Adriana Marshall. Rotterdam: Rotterdam University Press, 1973. 177 pp.

The Chinese Worker. By Charles Hoffmann. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1974. xi, 252 pp. $15.00.     

Workers,parties and a “New Deal:” A comparative analysis of corporatist alliances in Mexico,and the United States, 1910–1940

Mexico experienced the twentieth century’s first social revolution, a decade of struggle from which emerged a new political regime – a post-revolutionary authoritarian or single-party state one – with President Lázaro Cárdenas as leader by 1934. This post-revolutionary creation included organized labor and peasants, a strong interventionist state and a hegemonic party. Cárdenas’ U.S. counterpart, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, too, was leading dramatic ‘New Deal’ institutional and political revolution in the 1930s and 1940s that spawned a new order of expanded federal government, a renovated Democratic Party, and new movements and interest groups, notably, labor. Both nations featured the same major actors: the state, political parties, and organized labor. Both presidents calculated that preserving labor alliances was crucial for formation and legitimization of a new political order, for maintaining conditions conducive to private-sector investment and economic growth, and for political and economic crisis management. Labor’s growing role reshuffled corporatist alliances within and between international neighbors. This study places Mexico and the United States in comparative context in the early twentieth century and analyzes elite control and inclusion of organized labor in transformation of political landscapes in two different political regimes – a democratic one couched in an established constitution and a post-revolutionary authoritarian one born of a bloody upheaval.