From Popular Front to Cold War
The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930ā1954
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
From Popular Front to Cold War
The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930ā1954
About this book
From Popular Front to Cold War tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization founded in 1930 to provide life, burial, and health insurance to its members. But as the essays gathered by Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker make clear, the IWO broadened its mission to promote interracial solidarity, support labor unions, combat racism and antisemitism, and champion progressive social programs from the Great Depression into the postwar era.
At its height, the IWO had almost two hundred thousand members drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the working classāJews, Blacks, Poles, Slovaks, Italians, Hispanics, and others. It operated summer camps, published foreign-language newspapers, and supported a wide range of cultural activities. An early advocate for the United States' entry into World War II, the IWO was also ahead of its time in championing the nascent civil rights movement. After the war, it was declared a subversive organization due to its ties to the Communist Party and disbanded in 1954, though its legacy as a model for working-class cooperation across racial and ethnic differences endures to this day.
Contributors: Felicia Bevel, Paul Buhle, Matthew Calihman, Annabel Gottfried Cohen, Dylan Kaufman-Obstler, Paul C. Mishler, Ben Ratskoff, Elissa Sampson, Henry Srebrnik, Lauren B. Strauss, Nerina Visacovsky, Jennifer Young, Robert M. Zecker
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Table of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction: Race and Ethnicity in the US Left
- Part I Beginnings: Yiddish-Speaking Immigrants and Class Solidarity
- Part II A Radical Urban Black Belt: Tackling Race, Colonialism, and Internationalism
- Part III A Left Diaspora: Internationalism and Radicalism
- Part IV Endings: Persecution and LegaciesāThe Shift from the Old to the New Left
- Coda: āThe Melting Pot Has a Scorched Baseā
- Appendix
- Contributors
- Index