A fine reconstruction of events now too little remembered.
A vivid work of labor history, recounting a famed textile workers’ strike of 1912.
Lawrence, Mass., was a major center of textile manufacture in the early 1900s, and most of the work was done by immigrants—Italians, Portuguese, Greeks and others whom a nativist magazine called “the off-scourings of Southern Europe . . . [who] will not be assimilated [and] have no sympathy with our institutions.” Apparently, journalist Watson records, one of those institutions was poor pay. The textile makers, organizing under the banner of radical labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (which, Watson writes, “seemed to show up whenever labor unrest began to smolder”), complained about wages and working conditions, eliciting the response of another institution: when the workers went on strike in the winter of 1912, the mill owners prevailed upon the state to send in the militia, as if to lend credence to Jay Gould’s observation, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Violence ensued, and workers died, including one Italian woman whom Watson nominates for residence in a Tomb of the Unknown Immigrant. Naturally, the violence was blamed on the workers. The strikers won wide sympathy, however, when they sent their hungry children down to New York City to stay with relatives; when the kids returned six or seven weeks later, well covered by the press, “they were plump—some had gained a dozen pounds or more—and well clothed.” That was evidence enough to suggest to at least some contemporaries that the immigrants were indeed being misused, and in the wake of what has come to be known as the Bread and Roses strike, the textile workers actually came out ahead: the leading plant agreed to raise wages, to pay extra for overtime work and to rehire even the most vocal of the homegrown activists. And so it was—at least for a time, when bosses across the land returned with a vengeance.
A fine reconstruction of events now too little remembered.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03397-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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