All in the Same Boat: Fighting for Capital in Gadsden, Alabama, 1900-Present
| dc.contributor.advisor | Deutsch, Sarah | |
| dc.contributor.author | Wood, Brad | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-06-09T17:59:07Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-05-27T08:17:20Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020 | |
| dc.department | History | |
| dc.description.abstract | Following World War II, in the estimate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), one out of every six people in the city of Gadsden, Alabama belonged to the union, making it the “best organized CIO city in the US.” At midcentury, as most southern communities were growing more antiunion and more conservative, workers in this city of 60,000 in northeastern Alabama insisted that they had the same interests as union workers elsewhere and looked to a liberal Democratic Party and robust federal government to bolster them. In the late 2010s, little evidence remains that Gadsden and Etowah County were once so different from the rest of the South. White people here often vote for Republicans. Unions have all but vanished. Development officials openly brag that 94 percent of industry in the county operates unorganized. A visitor to Gadsden today might find it hard to believe that the community was once perhaps the most pro-CIO city the world has ever known. Yet those who came to study Gadsden in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to see it as a union town, like the famous American author John Dos Passos, had to reckon with a transformation even more difficult to conceive: just a few years before their arrival, the city was perhaps the most anti-CIO town in the country. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was dangerous to give even tacit support to the federation. On more than one occasion, workers joined with police and civic leaders to literally run organizers out of Alabama. But this antiunionism represented even yet another sea change: in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gadsden had also been something like a union town. The purpose of this dissertation is to use Gadsden as a case study to come to terms with the historical forces that have turned its feeling about unions upside down and inside out. When the residents of Gadsden changed their minds about unionism, for the most part, they did so as a community. This consensus was not the result of shared values; neither was it compelled by the dominance of local elites. It was, to the contrary, an outcome of Gadsden’s relationship to the out-of-town capitalists who sustained it. For all but a few exceptional years in the twentieth century (when Gadsden could be a union town), residents here have had to fight for capital against people from communities like their own. In both of the cases in which this working class city has forsaken unionism, it was because, and only because, that was what American capitalism demanded of it. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | ||
| dc.subject | History | |
| dc.subject | Alabama | |
| dc.subject | Capitalism | |
| dc.subject | Deindustrialization | |
| dc.subject | Development | |
| dc.subject | Labor | |
| dc.subject | South | |
| dc.title | All in the Same Boat: Fighting for Capital in Gadsden, Alabama, 1900-Present | |
| dc.type | Dissertation | |
| duke.embargo.months | 23.572602739726026 |