In Springfield, Ohio, writes Gabriel Winant in the NYR Online this week, “local activists have attempted to hold the community together while Donald Trump and [J.D.] Vance summon a racist panic to rip it apart.” The work of these activists—labor organizing, community rallies, mutual aid, employment agencies—harkens back to decades of struggle and solidarity among working people, around the country and in Springfield specifically.

For generations, Winant argues, industrialists and politicians have tried to pit working-class people against one another across lines of race and ethnicity:

With each new wave [of immigrants], the same howl rose from an American throat: this group is too different, too unprepared, too ill-bred: these Irish, these Chinese, these Italians, these Jews, these “colored people,” these hillbillies, these Mexicans, these Salvadorans, these Venezuelans, these Haitians….

A primary task of the American left, then, has been to mediate between one generation of working people and the next, to find the openings between their diverse traditions and connect them.

Below, alongside Winant’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the Review’s archives about the American labor movement.

Gabriel Winant
The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

Alice Driver
Their Lives on the Line

The meatpacking industry lobbied Trump to declare its workers “essential,” to keep up production in the pandemic. Unless they got sick—then they were expendable.

—April 27, 2021

Russell Baker
How They Blew Up the L.A. Times

“The destruction of the Los Angeles Times building…occurred shortly after one o’clock on an October morning in 1910. Its interior was leveled by a series of explosions that set off a devastating fire. Twenty-one people were killed and many others injured. This was mass murder, not so commonplace as it became later in the new century, but shocking and monstrous for 1910, and it was sensational news nationwide. Given Otis’s campaign to break the unions, labor inevitably became the prime suspect.”

—November 20, 2008

Darryl Pinckney
Keeping the Faith

“A. Philip Randolph took over the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 and made it into an organization of historical importance far beyond its numbers. Randolph turned a labor union into a freedom movement, and during its twelve-year battle with the Pullman Company to become the first black union recognized by a major US corporation, he helped to transform attitudes among blacks toward unions, toward themselves as workers, and to end organized labor’s antagonism toward black workers.”

—November 22, 1990

Elinor Langer
The Hospital Workers: “The Best Contract Anywhere”?

Collective bargaining is a grueling, insane, time-consuming experience, full of truth and full of lies. It can also be exhilarating. As an instrument of achieving real progress, this proud invention of the American class struggle seemed to me absurd. But it is the world in which unions live, and in which they must prove themselves or fail.

—June 3, 1971

Clancy Sigal
Workers of the World

“The IWW soon attracted some of the most rugged and independent personalities in America. The famous preamble to the constitution—‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common’—was coined by a renegade Catholic priest, and the three best-known IWW martyrs were a Swedish drifter named Joel Ammanuel Haaglund, otherwise known as Joe Hill, the war veteran Wesley Everest, who was castrated in Centralia, Washington, by American legionnaires, and the half-Indian one-eyed organizer Frank Little, lynched with his leg in a cast outside Butte.”

—February 11, 1965

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