How did the interplay between class and ethnicity play out within the working class during the Gilded Age? Richard Jules Oestreicher illuminates the immigrant communities, radical politics, worker-employer relationships, and the multiple meanings of workers' affiliations in Detroit at the end of the nineteenth century.| Cover Title Copyright Contents List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Living and Working in Detroit Varying Industrial Experiences Table 2. Firm Size and Distribution of Factory Employees in Detroit, 1896 Table 3. Class Composition of Detroit Work Force, 1890 Table 4. Detroit Women Wage Workers, 1892: Age at which They Began Work Table 5. Age of Women Workers in Detroit, 1892 Table 6. Daily Wages of Detroit Workers, 1884 What Did Workers Have in Common? 2. Class Solidarity and Competing Cultural Systems Detroit's Workers: Who Were They? Table 7. Occupational Composition of Detroit Ethnic Groups, 1880-1900 Competing Cultural Systems The Working Class Subculture of Opposition Craft Unions in the Late 1870's Labadie, Grenell, and American Socialism Socialist Activities Beyond the SLP: The Knights of Labor Unions Knights of Labor Political Action Table 8. Independent Labor Vote, State Representative Candidates, 1882-1886 The Subculture of Opposition 5. A Summer of Possibilities: May Day of Labor Day, 1886 Factional Divisions within the Labor Movement The Collapse of the Independent Labor Party Widening the Breach: The Knights, The Cigarmakers, and the Trade Unions Powderly, Haymarket, and the Destruction of the Knights of Labor "Will the butter come?" Class Solidarity and Working-Class Culture Political Alliances Detroit's Labor Movement in the 1890's: The Triumph of Pure and Simple Unionism Figure 1: Union Membership in Detroit, 1800-1906 Figure 2. Union Membership as Percentage of Work Force, Detroit, 1880-1906 Conclusion Figure 3. Percentage of Unionization of Nonagricultural Employees, 1886-1929 Note on Source Index Back cover |"Radical history at its best, speaking directly to the descendants of radicals and social visionaries about the lessons of their past."—Monthly Review
"This is a first-rate study of the interplay between class and ethnicity in a late nineteenth-century industrial city. . . . an important book that should be read not only by students of labor and immigration history but by all those interested in the evolution of American culture and values."—American Studies
|Richard Jules Oestreicher is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Pittsburgh.