Reviews for Nanosols and Textiles

The average rating for Nanosols and Textiles based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-27 00:00:00 Kwon Woong Gerstle's interesting monograph documents the ways in the ways in which organized labor and the ideologies surrounding it developed from the First World War onwards in the textile-dominated city of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The City, whose primary cultural character was shaped by waves of rural French Canadian immigrants migrating to work in the mills of Woonsocket (as they did to other New England cities such as Lewiston, Maine, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Lowell, Mass) had historically been resistant to any form of radical action or labor organization. The French Canadian demographic, making up 60-70% of the City's population, was highly parochial and lived in a society in which Catholic clergy sought to recreate the parish life of rural Quebec which stressed living a life of piety over seeking to gain to much control over one's material conditions in this life. A small contingent of French (from France) and Franco-Belgian radicals/Marxists who had followed a wave of French capital/industrialists setting up shop in Woonsocket attempted to organize the Franco-American masses slightly before the First World War to no avail. This situation began to change by the 1920s, and rifts within the community were exposed by the Sentinelle affair sparked by plans to open a mixed-language Catholic school (Mt St. Charles Academy) in 1924 which pitted traditionalists seeking to preserve the city's identity as a parochial Francophone stronghold and those who sought a more Modernizing vision for the City. By the late 1920s, the cadre of radicals had achieved success in organizing Franco-American workers in Woonsocket along with the members of other groups in the city (Poles, Irish, Italians) using the language of Americanism which framed the aims of the working-class struggle within the terms of American democracy. This trend accelerated during the Great Depression, as rising unemployment made the Franco-American community increasingly open to new ways of self-expression outside of parochial Catholicism, and thus led to unprecedent unionization (which was aided by the allowances for collective bargaining provided by the 1934 Wagner Act). However, rifts soon developed between the radical faction of Woonsocket's primary union, the ITU, which sought a secularist, non-ethnic character and escalated confrontation with capital, and the Corporatists, who sought to create within the Union, a distinct ethnic character informed by Catholicism and the goals of greater rights of workers through mutual cooperation between labor and management. The corporatists eventually gained domination by the time of the Second World War, appropriating the language of Americanism for themselves as they realized that this was possible to fuse with the ideals of their own traditionalist culture. However, despite a brief period of postwar prosperity, the rapid decline and flight of the Textile industry in the 1950s from Woonsocket and the rapid Americanization of its population spelled the end of a cohesive, ethnically-based union movement in the City. This was a very informative and interesting read. I rate it 4 stars and not 5, because I find Gerstle's assessment that Woonsocket's union movement and industry could have persevered longer had radicals prevailed naïve, as such a state of affairs probably would have lead to a flight of capital from the City even sooner than it did already.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-04 00:00:00 Rafael G Somarriba "The language of Americanism remains supple and malleable, capable of introducing a variety of experiences and ideas into the nation's political discourse. To the extent to which liberals and radicals want to attain political power, they must learn, or relearn, how to speak this language. Those who set themselves such a task might begin their education with a consideration of how an earlier generation of political insurgents -- those active in Woonsocket and elsewhere in the 1930s -- constructed a "new, progressive Americanism" and made it an instrument of their empowerment." - pg. 336 Written in the Reagan era, this closing paragraph makes the reference to the specter of Reagan in a different review all the more clear. Yet, it has a timely factor for the post-2016 era as well. Gary Gerstle's Working-Class Americanism challenges the prevalent idea that Americanism is a conservative ideology by traveling to Woonsocket, Rhode Island during the post-World War I era, when two groups in the city -- the ethnic traditionalist French-Canadians and the secular modernist radicalist Franco-Belgians -- came together in the Independent Textile Union (ITU) and created a labor movement that turned New England into a bastion of labor organizing. Tracking the rise and fall of the ITU from 1914 to 1960, Gerstle shows how the social democratic leaders, like Joseph Schmetz, reformulated his (and his union's) socialist ideas and goals through an Americanist language that stressed socialism's connection to the American political heritage, revered the Founding Fathers, American Revolution, and Lincoln, and promoted unity through an identification with American society. Far from incompatible, he helped engineer labor successes and support for a radical, socialist vision of industrial democracy. However, this progressive Americanism alienated the traditional French-Canadians who preferred a communal, ethnic vision. In the late 1930s, they began coalescing around a distinctive ethnic unionism that pushed a parochial, communal, and patriarchal style. With the centrality of religion (Catholicism) and anti-communism, they won union control away from the ITU radicals. By the 1940s, Americanism underwent another transformation, this time through the levers of the federal government, towards cultural pluralism and anti-communism, ultimately undermining the traditionalist segment of the ITU. In the end, both the radical and traditional conceptions of Americanism lost their hold on Woonsocket. The most enduring lesson, and theme, that Gerstle argues is the variability of Americanism as a political language. Rather than a conservative ideology, Americanism can -- and has -- encompassed disparate political traditions, on opposite sides of the spectrum separate from each other, or, like his case study shows, within the same organization. More than a labor history and a community study, Gerstle refashions political ideology through a new lens.