Opler: For All White-Collar Workers

For All White-Collar Workers

The Possibilities of Radicalism in New York City’s Department Store Unions, 1934–1953

Daniel J. Opler

In recent decades the American labor movement has fallen on hard times, in part due to its long reliance on blue-collar workers for its membership despite the growing importance of retail and service jobs. In For All White-Collar Workers: The Possibilities of Radicalism in New York City’s Department Store Unions, 1934–1953, Daniel Opler examines early efforts to unionize workers in department and retail stores. Beginning with the origins of the modern labor movement in the mid-1930s, Opler argues that Communist labor organizers created vibrant and powerful unions in New York City’s department stores, only to see those unions—and the CIO’s powerful retail workers’ union—destroyed during the McCarthy era.

In the process of examining these unions, Opler takes the reader far beyond union meetings and contract negotiations, exploring the ways in which consumption, urban life, and changing understandings of public space affected the unions in these eras. As a result, For All White-Collar Workers becomes an exploration of such diverse subjects as the conflicts over midtown Manhattan, the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, the link between consumption and patriotism during World War II, private housing developments in 1940s New York City, and suburbanization, all viewed through the lens of the rise and fall of New York City’s department store unions.

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Murphy: Toward a Working-Class Canon

Toward a Working-Class Canon

Literary Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals, 1816–1858

Paul Thomas Murphy

In the first comprehensive book covering working-class views of literature during the first half o the nineteenth century, Paul Thomas Murphy argues that the documented rise in working-class political consciousness was accompanied by an important and largely undocumented rise in working-class literary consciousness. Furthermore, Murphy contends that the journalists of working-class periodicals struggled to fashion literary standards for their class to form a working-class canon.

In this original and stimulating study, Murphy pays close attention to what writers and editors of these periodicals had to say about specific literary genres, the literary and stylistic values they adopted, and the figures they saw as their models as well as those they rejected. Murphy provides a sense of working-class literacy and a brief history of the working-class press from 1816 to 1858. He then focuses on the views of fiction, poetry, and drama that appeared in the journals.

Noting that working-class writers and editors actively sought to define for themselves the spiritual and political role literature played for an emerging working class, Murphy concludes that while there was no uniform working-class interpretation of literature, working-class journalists conducted a lively and continuing debate about literature, and that their agreements and disagreements show a thriving and evolving aesthetic. Toward a Working-Class Canon offers both serious appraisals of now-forgotten writers and fresh and important views of the most well-known writers. It is a major contribution to Victorian studies, canon studies, British labor history, and the history of journalism.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org