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American Labor Struggles: 1877-1934
Engravings from news periodicals, notes, references, index.
434 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1936
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September 22, 2025
The New York 'Times' Book Review had a positive response to this book when it was first published, and so did the 'New Republic,' who wrote,
"Samuel Yellen’s broad panorama of ten great labor struggles is the best introductory volume to the
history of American labor that has yet appeared. It is detached, dispassionate, concise, and it carries
conviction at almost every point. It is the work of a thirty-year-old instructor in English at Indiana
University, who has tried, in his own words, 'to analyze the causes underlying the development, to
disclose the tactics and policies instrumental to the maturation, and to indicate the contribution left
to the total current of the labor movement at the expiration of [each] struggle.' The emphasis in his
book is on 'the weapons of industrial warfare devised and employed by labor and capital, the role of
government, the attitude of the local agencies,' and within the limits of his material he has 'tried to
show the growth of the various ideologies and practices, the difficulties of the industries involved and the general trend of the conflict of capital and labor in the United States.'”
1936 was just the beginnings of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), at that point a breakaway from the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL had refused to organize unskilled workers, and organized workers on a craft basis, rather than an industrial basis (all the workers in a factory of shop). The CIO was formed by some of the more far-seeing union bureaucrats in the AFL who could see, based on three important strikes in 1934 (the last one in the book is one of them--the Longshore workers on the West Coast) that if they didn't organize the unskilled workers that groupings to the left of them would do it. For the history of the CIO until it merged with the AFL in 1955, read Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55 by Art Preis.
At the time of the merger, the AFL-CIO had something like 20 million members, and today it's just a shell of its former self. One of the biggest problems has been that the labor movement in this country still keeps supporting the capitalist parties--almost always the Democrats--instead of forming a labor party to challenge the capitalists on the political field as well as the industrial field.
For this question, taken up briefly by Yellen, and at greater length by Preis, let me recommend Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unionsas well as the The Teamster Series (4 volumes): Lessons from the labor battles of the 1930s, by famous union organizer Farrell Dobbs, who like Eugene Debs went to jail for expressing his antiwar views.
One thing that's been gained is that today Black and Latino workers, as well as women are a major part of the work force. And despite the racism in the labor movement, Blacks were organized by the CIO, and their advances helped pave the way for the Civil Rights Movement. It's not a coincidence that the major initiator of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a local leader of the Pullman Porters, E.D. Nixon, and that Rosa Parks had been a secretary to him. Nixon helped win Dr. Martin Luther King to the cause.
"Samuel Yellen’s broad panorama of ten great labor struggles is the best introductory volume to the
history of American labor that has yet appeared. It is detached, dispassionate, concise, and it carries
conviction at almost every point. It is the work of a thirty-year-old instructor in English at Indiana
University, who has tried, in his own words, 'to analyze the causes underlying the development, to
disclose the tactics and policies instrumental to the maturation, and to indicate the contribution left
to the total current of the labor movement at the expiration of [each] struggle.' The emphasis in his
book is on 'the weapons of industrial warfare devised and employed by labor and capital, the role of
government, the attitude of the local agencies,' and within the limits of his material he has 'tried to
show the growth of the various ideologies and practices, the difficulties of the industries involved and the general trend of the conflict of capital and labor in the United States.'”
1936 was just the beginnings of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), at that point a breakaway from the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL had refused to organize unskilled workers, and organized workers on a craft basis, rather than an industrial basis (all the workers in a factory of shop). The CIO was formed by some of the more far-seeing union bureaucrats in the AFL who could see, based on three important strikes in 1934 (the last one in the book is one of them--the Longshore workers on the West Coast) that if they didn't organize the unskilled workers that groupings to the left of them would do it. For the history of the CIO until it merged with the AFL in 1955, read Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55 by Art Preis.
At the time of the merger, the AFL-CIO had something like 20 million members, and today it's just a shell of its former self. One of the biggest problems has been that the labor movement in this country still keeps supporting the capitalist parties--almost always the Democrats--instead of forming a labor party to challenge the capitalists on the political field as well as the industrial field.
For this question, taken up briefly by Yellen, and at greater length by Preis, let me recommend Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unionsas well as the The Teamster Series (4 volumes): Lessons from the labor battles of the 1930s, by famous union organizer Farrell Dobbs, who like Eugene Debs went to jail for expressing his antiwar views.
One thing that's been gained is that today Black and Latino workers, as well as women are a major part of the work force. And despite the racism in the labor movement, Blacks were organized by the CIO, and their advances helped pave the way for the Civil Rights Movement. It's not a coincidence that the major initiator of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a local leader of the Pullman Porters, E.D. Nixon, and that Rosa Parks had been a secretary to him. Nixon helped win Dr. Martin Luther King to the cause.
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