Reviews
"While this text contributes to an important national story, it also highlights the importance of local and regional factors and variations. It adds to the growing, albeit piecemeal, literature on the pre–World War II southern labor movement by demonstrating not only its existence and modest successes but also its indigenous origin...Given current U.S. unemployment rates, the story of this book could speak to the growing number of organizers and policy makers looking to again harness the grassroots."
—American Historical Review
"Beset by racial divisions and official hostility, Georgia's workers nonetheless effectively mobilized in a range of organizations on behalf of radical politics to achieve far more than most would have expected. Richly detailed with examples from former Soviet archives and convincingly argued, The Unemployed People's Movement makes readers rethink their ideas about southern workers and the possibilities for social change."
"This is a book for everyone seriously interested in southern, labor, and radical history."
—Paul Buhle, coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left
“Lorence gives a rich and honest portrait of the complexity, contradictions, struggles, achievements, and limitations of the unemployed people’s movement . . . Lorence’s monograph is a remarkable feat of research, a model case study of a movement deserving careful historical attention.”
"Well-researched, well-written, and makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of reform movements and social change in the twentieth-century South."
—Georgia Historical Quarterly
Description
Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly accessible records of the Communist Party of the United States, Lorence details interactions between various institutional and grassroots players, including organized labor, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, liberal activists, and officials at every level of government. He shows, for example, how the Communist Party played a more central role than previously understood in the organization of the unemployed and the advancement of labor and working-class interests in Georgia. Communists gained respect among the jobless, especially African Americans, for their willingness to challenge officials, help negotiate the welfare bureaucracy, and gain access to New Deal social programs.
Lorence enhances our understanding of the struggles of the poor and unemployed in a Depression-era southern state. At the same time, we are reminded of their movement's lasting legacy: the shift in popular consciousness that took place as Georgians, "influenced by a new sense of entitlement fostered by the unemployed organizations," began to conceive of new, more-equal relations with the state.
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Cloth |
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Paper List price: $24.95 978-0-8203-3876-7 3/1/2011 |
James J. Lorence is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County. From 2001 to 2005 he served as Eminent Scholar of History at Gainesville State College. His books include A Hard Journey, Screening America, and The Suppression of "Salt of the Earth."
