Southern Labor Battles

The turn of the century brought with it a special kind of regimentation for the American worker. As labor historian David Brody has noted, after 1900 the wage earner stood “wholly within the modern industrial order.” There was less of a premium on skills that required independence of judgment and had once been handed down from generation to generation. It was the modern industrial order—mechanized, tightly managed—that now dominated the workplace. In the North the result was a...