Dissertation Information for Troy Matthew Rondinone NAME: - Troy Matthew Rondinone
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2003)
ADVISORS: - John Lasett
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Joyce Oldham Appleby - Naomi Lamoreaux - Alessandro Duranti
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: The other 'irrepressible conflict': Industrial war in the public imagination, 1865--1950
Abstract: This dissertation examines the ways in which Americans popularly understood clashes between organized labor and capital between 1865 and 1950, focusing specifically on the impact of the Civil War experience on shaping social perceptions. Understanding unions and employers as representing opposing armies in an ongoing battle, Americans unintentionally transferred a set of metaphors and images gleaned from four years of bloody combat to the increasingly unsettling environment of industrial relations. Examining the public discourse surrounding a set of national strikes, I chart the rise and fall of an antagonistic class model.
Prior to the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, Americans understood strikes to be community affairs, belonging more to the world of street festival than to factory life. Using a republican idiom suffused with rights talk, Protestant imagery, and racial and nativist sentiment, observers understood strikes to be benign, moral affairs. Everything changed after the Civil War, as strikes quickly became viewed as battles in an ongoing 'industrial war.' While earlier themes in strike analysis persisted, they were increasingly shot through with a powerful metaphor of organized combat, reflecting the power of the Civil War experience on popular memory and language.
During the turbulent years that followed, the industrial war metaphor came to be fleshed out with organizational specifics, as heightened labor violence came to be understood in terms of armies, commanders, soldiers, and grand strategies. Departments of labor studies quickly organized themselves around meliorating the conflict. By the turn of the twentieth century, efforts to affect a treaty between the two combatants took central importance.
At the same time, the 'public,' an entity created by the media and politicians to provide a buffer between the two industrial armies, came to the center of the discussion. The public existed as an interested third party, separate from the two sides and with a vested interest in a resolution of hostilities. Once it became associated with an interventionary federal government, it would pull both capital and labor groups into its ranks. By 1950, a new, pluralistic idiom had marginalized the frightening notion of imminent social collapse. Although strikes persisted, the idea of class war did not resonate as it once had.The end of this idea meant, inevitably, the end to an era of American history.
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MPACT Scores for Troy Matthew Rondinone A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-13 10:49:33
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