Aaron Goings, Brian Barnes, and Roger Snider
Oregon State University Press, 2019.
The historian Paul Buhle notes in a recent essay that deepening social crises with strains of social and economic class running through them may be stirring new interests in American labor history.
The Red Coast provides evidence that he might be on to something.
The authors’ interest in the struggle of workers to form unions at the turn of the twentieth century—and the resistance of employers to those efforts—harkens to an old-school approach to labor studies in which scholars portrayed unions and companies, organizations, as the central actors in the stories they told. Goings, Barnes and Snider, however, blend that method, also known as “institutionalism,” with the “history from the bottom up” paradigm made popular by the “new” labor history movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Their sourcing of printed materials deposited in local and regional archives, biographies and interviews with participants in strikes and community mobilizations, and studies of immigrant groups that populated the coastal towns in which class conflicts erupted, all evince a kind of holism more common to sociology and anthropology than orthodox historiography. Politically, too, the authors are boldly inclusive: Communist Party members, prominent as union organizers and strike leaders across the country in the nineteen twenties and thirties—disparaged as alien outsiders by mainstream academics and sidelined by the historians trained in the new-school method—get their full due here as the