Working-Class New York
Working-Class New York

Author: Joshua B. Freeman

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1620977087

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A “lucid, detailed, and imaginative analysis” (The Nation) of the model city that working-class New Yorkers created after World War II—and its tragic demise More than any other city in America, New York in the years after the Second World War carved out an idealistic and equitable path to the future. Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all. Working-Class New York is an “engrossing” (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls “absorbing and beautifully detailed history,” historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city’s wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power. A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.

Sunbelt Rising
Sunbelt Rising

Author: Michelle Nickerson

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-04-14

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0812243099

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This volume examines patterns of growth, government organization, and cultural representation that created a new region across the nation's southern rim following World War II. Essays explain how ideology and political economy restructured space within the Sunbelt, making the landscape and lives of its inhabitants more uniformly metropolitan.

Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union
Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union

Author: David Scott Witwer

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780252028250

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Almost since its creation at the close of the nineteenth century, the Teamsters Union has had recurring problems with corruption. This book is the first in-depth historical study of the forces that have contributed to the Teamsters' troubled past, as well as the various mechanisms the union has employed -- from top-down directives to grass-roots measures -- to combat the spread of corruption. Arguing that the Teamsters Union was by its very nature especially vulnerable to certain forms of corruption, David Witwer charts the process by which organized crime came to play a significant role in sectors of the union, from low-level involvements of the 1930s to suspicions of mob ties among the union's upper echelons beginning in the 1950s. Witwer includes a detailed account of the links forged between the mafia and union head Jimmy Hoffa as well as the highly revealing McLellan Committee investigation that first brought these links to light.David Witwer is a former employee of the New York County District Attorney's Office and the U.S. Attorney's Office. Drawing on hundreds of hours of tapes of activities and conversations in the offices of corrupt union officials, he brings his experience and insight to bear on the union's history, considering the subject from a range of perspectives that include the rank and file, the Teamster leadership, and the criminal element. He also examines the persistent efforts of labor opponents to capitalize on the union's unsavory reputation, fanning the flames of "crises of corruption" in order to influence popular and legislative opinion.