Nickolai

No history of the labor movement from unions. Actually from many sources.

"The Glory and The Dream, " a History of the US from 1932 to 1972 William Manchester (1973)
"The lies My Teacher Told Me " Every Thing Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. James W Loewen (1995)
" The Fight In The Fields" Ceasar Chavez Farm Labor Movement.
" Nothing Like It In The World" The Men Who Built The T***scotinental Railroad. A history of the planning and construction of the Railroad
" The Peoples History of The United States" From 1492 to the Present. Howard Zinn (1980) and updated
The Great Railroad Strike of 1886 You Tube
The Homestead Strike of Carnegie Steel in 1892 You Tube
The Pulman strike of 1894 You Tube
The Great Anthracite Strike of 1902 You Tube
Steel Strike of 1919 You Tube
The Battle of Blair Mountain, The coal Miners battle in west Virginia (1920-212) You Tube

oldroy Loc: Western Kansas (No longer in hiding)

Too much from You Tube for me. However, I did get a kick out of watching several of them and comparing what they told to the things I read back in the 1950s about the same subjects. Actually I wrote some fairly extensive research papers about most of those things. Probably the Homestead Strike was my favorite along with the Pullman Strike. Now there was a really bloody one and I ended up on the side of the bosses from reading some things about it.

I wrote a pretty extensive term paper about the building of the Union Pacific and the west end of the darned thing about 62 years ago. I found a BBC series of 5 on You Tube and just didn't like it as much as the books I read for my paper. I have always been pretty proud of that paper and do think I learned a lot about the building of that thing. The BBC forgot to mention that in addition to the land given for each mile of track also the government paid the builders in units of $16,000 for plains up to $48,000 in the mountains. Probably the best part of the book I read about the Union Pacific was a fairly long part about the Irishmen who laid what is still the record length of track for one day and they took nearly 1 1/2 hours off for lunch. Nobody ever came close to what those 8 men did that day. They worked 4 men to a gang, two gangs who carried one 30 ft rail at a time and just went from the end of track car with rails on it to the next place. They had a gang of Chinese mallet men who drove the spikes and they must have been something to keep up with those layers.

Darn it you got me started and now I will have to go back and read that paper and some of the others about the strikes of the 1880s and 1890s. I think you are just a bit too far left in thinking for me but we may have some fun using PMs someday just for kicks.

Nickolai

There were times where workers wrecked havoc on the owners with arson and such but time and again most of the violence was against the workers. Another I didn't mention was the Haymarket Square massacre in Chicago 1886. The Ludlow Massacre by the Colorado National Guard and the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow Colorado on April 20, 1914. Some two dozen people were k**led including women and children. The chief owner of the mine was John D. Rockefeller Jr. between 19 and 26 people met a violent death and probably the most violent struggle on US labor history between corporate power and laboring men. The entire strike cost between 69 and 199 lives. While national guardsmen fired into the tents four women and eleven children hid in a pit beneath a tent that was set on fire where they were trapped. Two of the women and al eleven children suffocated. Through out labor history government always came down on the side of capital and against labor with out exception. Local police. National guardsmen as well as two private companies that maintained a private standing army ready to board a train and show up any where in the US to beat and club anyone that caused trouble for the owners of capital and property.

In 1936 in Salinas California when some dust bowl migrant Okies working the lettuce packing sheds threatened a wildcat strike. The Lettuce Growers Association put in a call to the Pinkerton Agency in Chicago who sent a group of hired thugs who disembarked in Salinas tracked down five men and beat them to death in the streets of Salinas. No one was arrrested and no body cared because these men were landless peasants and had no rights. Until the New Dealers passed the national labor relegations in 1935 emancipating labor and ending for good child labor. Landless peasants had no rights in this country. If they wanted or needed any thing they had to fight for it so I don't look down on those Workers that initiated violence. What violence that was unleashed by the workers was usually in response to the exploitation of the weak by the powerful corportations.