Preface to the New Edition Preface Part I: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" 1. The Transit Industry 2. Transit Workers Part II: "Did you see the light?" 3. The Founding of the Transport Workers Union 4. Organizing the IRT, 1933-1936 5. Organizing: 1936-1937 Part III: "A revolution must come on the dues installments plan" 6. The Fruits of Victory 7. Catholics and Communists: Union Politics, 1937-1941 Part IV: "As ... decent citizens of New York" 8. Public Transit and Transit Politics 9. Unification Part V: "Events have abolished all debates" 10. Wartime 11. Breaking Out of New York Part VI: "Fortune's blows when most struck home ... " 12. From the Grand Alliance to the Cold War 13. Fratricide 14. The New Order Epilogue Notes Index
An award-winning history of the Transport Workers Union, and an example of radical organizing in action
Joshua B. Freeman is Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York. He is co-author of Who Built America? and author, most recently, of Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II.
"[Freeman] provides one of the best histories we have of an American union. He also further illustrates to what degree the union battles of the 1930s emerged out of a cultural...milieu, rather than simply from economic position or class identity, and how those battles transformed that milieu by seeming to open new possibilities to men and women who only a few years earlier were resigned to a life of powerlessness and economic hardship." --Alan Brinkley, The New York Review of Books "America's workers, in all their diversity, are finally finding their historians. None will be better served than are New York's transit workers by Joshua Freeman. On at least three counts Freeman's book is truly unexcelled--first, as a demonstration of how ethnicity--in this case, Irish ethnicity--has shaped the American unionizing process; second, as an incisive analysis of the role of communists within a CIO union; and, finally, as an account of the complex intermeshing of trade unionism and municipal politics. Mike Quill himself would have had to concede that his measure had been taken by this smart academic... Freeman has written a terrific book." --David Brody University of California, Davis "An extraordinary work whose impact will far transcend the circle of scholars interested in CIO unions of the Roosevelt era. Freeman's study of the TWU--a work firmly rooted in the new social history--successfully integrates organizational structures with a more traditional historiographical interest in politics and personality. He adds an extremely important dimension to our understanding of the social history of the New Deal era." --Nelson Lichtenstein "[Freeman] provides one of the best histories we have of an American union." --Alan Brinkley, The New York Review of Books "Joshua Freeman has done painstaking, exhausting research, producing a balanced book that is an exemplary model of labor-union history." --Anthropology of Work
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