Group items tagged

revolutions in American industry

Technological innovations

national investments

slashed the costs of production and distribution

National credit agencies

Taylorism

Frederick Taylor

Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production.

use of interchangeable parts in Civil War–era weapons manufacturing

sewing machines

packers’ “disassembly” lines

grain reapers

Duke cigarette rollers

Henry Ford made the assembly line famous

Cyrus McCormick

Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into the forefront of the world

massive economies of scale

New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating

A new class of managers—comprising what one prominent economic historian called the “visible hand”—operated between the worlds of workers and owners

between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy

Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity

But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions

new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them

One of Darwin’s greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin’s theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest.

H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. “All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak.”11

By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders

American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions

skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.

Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s

It welcomed all laborers,

In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day,

culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886.

The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism

Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights’ expansive vision of a “producerist” economy and advocated “pure and simple trade unionism,” a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes.

Homestead, Pennsylvania.

Henry Clay Frick

Pinkerton detectives,

1894, workers in George Pullman’s Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utilities in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country.

workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.

Total population: 62,941,714

Total population: 75,994,26

Total population: 91,972,266

Did You Know? Howard University, a historically all-black school in Washington, D.C., was established in 1867 and named for Oliver Howard, one of its founders and the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He served as the university's president from 1869 to 1874.

There was no tradition of government responsibility for a huge refugee population and no bureaucracy to administer a large welfare, employment and land reform program

4 million newly freed blacks

When Congress introduced a bill in February 1866 to extend the bureau’s tenure and give it new legal powers, Johnson vetoed the proposed legislation on the grounds that it interfered with states’ rights, gave preference to one group of citizens over another and would impose a huge financial burden on the federal government, among other issues.

as well as removing bureau employees he thought were too sympathetic to blacks

Johnson’s actions, which included pardoning many former Confederates and restoring their land,

there was disagreement over what type of assistance the government should provide and for how long.

covering the 11 former rebel states, the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and West Virginia and Washington, D.C. Each district was headed by an assistant commissioner.

achievements varied

the bureau was underfunded and understaffed,

Bureau agents, who acted essentially as social workers

were subjected to ridicule and violence

Ku Klux Klan) who viewed the agents as interfering in local affairs by trying to assist blacks

fed millions of people,

medical aid,

settled labor disputes.

locate lost relatives

building thousands of schools for blacks

found such colleges as Howard University in Washington, D.C

Fisk University in Nashville

Hampton University

most of the confiscated or abandoned Confederate land was eventually restored to the original owners

dismantled the Freedmen’s Bureau

summer of 1872,

the bureau’s efforts did signal the introduction of the federal government into issues of social welfare and labor relations

grasshoppers

juggling of freight rates

75-90 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels of corn (2-1/2 acres)

35-40 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels (2-1/2 acres) of corn with 2-bottom gang plow, disk and peg-tooth harrow, and 2-row planter

with walking plow, harrow, and hand planting

About

15-20 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels (2-1/2 acres) of corn with 2-bottom gang plow, 7-foot tandem disk, 4-section harrow, and 2-row planters, cultivators, and pickers

One response to the depression was military dictatorship

collapse in raw material and agricultural commodity prices led to social unrest,

fascism and militarism

Hitler outlawed labor unions

restructured German

industry into a series of cartels

massive program of military rearmament

totalitarian communism.

Stalin's

welfare capitalism

Canada

Great Britain

France

the economic decline brought on by the Depression was steeper and more protracted in the United States.

European countries significantly reduced unemployment by 1936. However, the American jobless rate still exceeded 17 percent as late as 1939, when World War II began in Europe. It did not drop below 14 percent until 1941.

It produced a major political realignment

committed, to varying degrees, to interventionist government.

Roosevelt won the governorship of New York in 1928--one of the few Democrats to survive the Republican landslide. Surrounding himself with able advisors, Roosevelt labored to convert New York into a laboratory for reform, involving conservation, old-age pensions, public works projects, and unemployment insurance.

a New Deal for the American people

policy of experimentation

assuring landlords a windfall of an extra $142 a month. Buildings that previously held 60 families now contained 300

Mexican Americans faced serious opposition from organized labor

repatriated

It would, however, be rash hence to infer, that immediate and unconditional emancipation works better than the gradual and conditioned abolition of slavery.

In studying these precedents it must be re- membered that the slaves in our Southern States are at least ten times as numerous as the slaves in either the British or the French colonies.

t is pretty well understood that President Lincoln agrees with Senator Doolittle in advo- cating colonization of the blacks

Those who have read “Sewell's Or- deal of Free Labor in the British West Indies,” will understand this prejudice. In Jamaica and Barbados the mulattoes are steadily gaining pow- er and influence, and the end can not be mis- taken. The white race must eventually go to the wall. To avoid this result, Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Doolittle, Mr. Blair, and those who agree with them, propose to colonize the negroes of our Southern States—to send them to Hayti, or Cen- tral America, or somewhere else.

To be effectual this remedy must be thorough. The entire four millions must be exported.

unsuccessfully invaded Mexico.

invasions of Nicaragua.

Knights of the Golden Circle, developed plans to create an independent slave empire stretching from Maryland and Texas to northern South America and the West Indies.

Stuart Hall,

Prudence Crandall

Anne Braden

For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.

But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women

had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda

So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?

“Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A.

and Columbia University.

that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them

Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed

Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system

)

It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?

I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally il

but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader

Fannie Lou Hamer

Huey P. Newton w

Mark Rudd

[Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted.

One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi

E.D. Nixon,

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress;

several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party.

Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools

she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,

From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union.

After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism

a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers

NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights,

Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent.

There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.

There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services.

We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.”

It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.

Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.

Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011

Black Lives Matter movement.

this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media.

there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”

She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy

As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism.

We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.