Steve Fraser

In the Rearview Mirror: History's Mad Hatters: The Strange Career of Tea Party Populism

One of the oddest features of the Boston Tea Party, from which our current crop of Tea Party populists draw their inspiration, is that a number of those long-ago guerilla activists dressed up as Mohawk Indians, venting their anger by emitting Indian war cries, and carrying tomahawks to slice open the bags of tea. This masquerade captured a fundamental ambivalence that has characterized populist risings ever since. After all, if in late-eighteenthcentury America the Indian already functioned as a symbol of an oppressed people and so On a winter’s day in Boston in 1773, a rally of thousands at Faneuil Hall to protest a new British colonial tax levied on tea turned into an iconic moment in the pre-history of the American Revolution. Some of the demonstrators—Sons of Liberty, they called themselves—left the hall and boarded the Dartmouth, a ship carrying tea, and dumped it overboard.

In the Rearview Mirror: A Brief History of Opposition to Public Sector Unionism

independent association. But when they affiliated their group with the AFL, in effect claiming the same rights and status as private sector workers, he suspended nineteen officers, precipitating a walkout. Governor Calvin Coolidge, in the name of defending “the sovereignty of Massachusetts,” fired all the strikers, brought in state troops to patrol the city, and recruited a new police force from demobilized soldiers. He rode his strike-breaking into the 1920 Republican vice-presidential nomination and ultimately to the White House.

In the Rearview Mirror: Trading Places: Protecting American Industry Is So Yesterday

This was not always the case. From the earliest days of the United States, promoting and protecting manufacturing jobs was a rallying cry for workers and a hotly debated electoral subject. With little exaggeration, one might say that industrializing America constituted the core of public policy for more than a century. in the rearvieW mirror Trading Places: Protecting American Industry Is So Yesterday

Industrial Giantism and the Mythos of Progress: From Dark Satanic Mills to Foxconn

The 2012 controversy over the working conditions in the Foxconn Technology complex in Zhengzhou, China, where Apple electronic devices were made, brought worldwide attention to the gigantic factories built in East Asia over the past two decades. The scale of these industrial colossuses staggers the mind. The Foxconn factory in Chengdu, which poured out iPads to meet a seemingly insatiable consumer appetite, employed one hundred twenty thousand workers. A total of seventy thousand workers lived in company dormitories. Foxconn’s two complexes in Shenzhen together had a workforce exceeding four hundred thousand. Yue Yuen/Pou Chen 6 Industrial Holdings, the world’s leading producer of athletic and casual footwear, has a chain of factory behemoths in Southern China, including one, in Dongguan, with one hundred ten thousand workers. While typically not as large, shoe and sneaker factories in Vietnam employ tens of thousands of workers. Newspaper, radio, television, and theatrical depictions of these industrial complexes have focused on their low pay, dangerous conditions, and autocratic management, but their sheer size has sparked wonder, too, like the three tons of pork and thirteen tons of rice used every day to feed workers at one Foxconn facility. The outsized factory has been a feature of industrial life for two centuries, an incandescent symbol of human ambition, achievement, and suffering. Journalists, novelists, social scientists, labor activists, political radicals, industrial engineers, investors, management theoreticians, photographers, filmmakers, and artists all have been drawn to these new things under the sun, grappling to understand their meaning and consequences. Often the giant factory has been associated with modernity, with rejecting old ways to create a new, rational, and more bountiful world. But notions of modernity have changed as the large factory migrated across time and space from England in the eighteenth century to the United States in the nineteenth, to the Soviet Union and its satellites in the twentieth, and to China and Southeast Asia in the twenty-first.

In the Rearview Mirror: Uncle Sam Does(n't) Want You

The co-existence of idling workplaces and cast-off workers always has been the most severe indictment of capitalism as a system for the reproduction of human society. The coming into existence of a new social category—the “ninety-niners”—punctuates that grim observation. As recently as the 1930s, the numbing, demoralizing experience of year after year after year without work caused people to wonder if capitalism had outlived its usefulness. Nowadays, however, the “ninety-niners” notwithstanding, unemployment has been normalized; not a good thing, of course, but not something that all by itself causes us to question the way the economy is organized. in the rearvieW mirror Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You

In the Rearview Mirror: Barbarism and Progress: The Story of Convict Labor

Penal servitude may strike us as a barbaric throwback to pre-modern medievalism. But on the contrary, from its first appearance in this country, and still today, it has been associated with modern capitalist industry and large-scale agriculture. And that is only one of several misconceptions about this peculiar institution. Infamous for the brutality with which prison laborers were once treated, indelibly inscribed in popular memory with images of the black chain gang in the South, most assume it was a Southern inspiration. But penal servitude—the leasing out of prisoners, in effect the sale of their labor power by government to private in the rearvieW Mirror Barbarism and Progress: The Story of Convict Labor

In the Rearview Mirror: The Weight of Dead Generations

In the South, that distinctive recall of the past at the same time worked to replenish the soil of social subservience, leaving the Southern oligarchy of landlords, merchants, and their political facilitators in charge. Still, for legions of true believers, the “Lost Cause” was empowering, firing resistance to both Reconstruction and subsequent attempts to end American apartheid. For a long century, most white Southerners reveled in their peculiar version of the past, used it to define their moral imagination, and mobilized politically In the ReaRvIew mIRRoR The Weight of Dead Generations

In the Rearview Mirror: Going to War

the reason the president went out of his way to deny them). Both wars occur in an era during which the once-momentous process of going to war has been transformed, with the bar for unleashing the military lowered and lowered again. As a result, it is now pos sible for a president to take the country to war, or dramatically escalate a war, with the support of neither the public nor Congress, which is just what Obama did.