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  • The Great Industrial War, a comprehensive assessment of how class has been interpreted by the media in American history, documents the rise and fall of a frightening concept: industrial war. Moving beyond the standard account of labor conflict as struggles between workers and management, Troy Rondinone asks why Americans viewed big strikes as "battles" in "irrepressible conflict" between the armies of capital and laborùa terrifying clash between workers, strikebreakers, police, and soldiers. Examining how the mainstream press along with the writings of a select group of influential reformers and politicians framed strike news, Rondinone argues that the Civil War, coming on the cusp of a revolution in industrial productivity, offered a gruesome, indelible model for national conflict. He follows the heated discourse on class war through the nineteenth century until its general dissipation in the mid-twentieth century. Incorporating labor history, cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociology, The Great Industrial War explores the influence of historical experience on popular perceptions of social order and class conflict and provides a reinterpretation of the origins and meaning of the Taft-Hartley Act and the industrial relations regime it supported.

  • The authors argue that there have been moments in American history when a class analysis entered into popular discourse. What has been "exceptional" about American history is the manner in which that class analysis emerged. When Americans speak the language of "class" and "class warfare," it is often clothed in the rhetoric of labor republicanism. That is, rather than offering a systemic analysis of capitalist processes, American labor republicanism offers a class analysis that sets a small set of bad acting "elites" and their dependents against the mass of American workers. The authors trace this discourse from Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 description of "economic royalists" to Lou Dobbs's nativist attack on "corporate elites" and undocumented workers. As the United States enters a new period of "class awareness" and economic crisis, this republicanism returns to haunt public discourse. © 2010 UALE.

Last update from database: 3/13/26, 4:15 PM (UTC)

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