Working-Class Americanism (reissue)

The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960

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by Gary Gerstle

Princeton University Press

Due/Published June 2001, 300 pages, paper

ISBN 0691089116

Available again, now with a new preface by the author (S01).

In this classic interpretation of the 1930s rise of industrial unionism, Gerstle challenges the popular historical notion that American workers' embrace of "Americanism" and other patriotic sentiments in the post-World War I years indicated their fundamental political conservatism. He argues that Americanism was a complex, even contradictory, language of nationalism that lent itself to a wide variety of ideological constructions in the years between World War I and the onset of the Cold War. Using the rich material left behind by New England's most powerful textile union--the Independent Textile Union of Woonsocket, Rhode Island--Gerstle uncovers a more varied and more radical working-class discourse.