This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines.
International Harvester - and the McCormick family that largely controlled it - garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the 20th century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II.
This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket "riot," the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America's late 20th-century industrial decline.
Both Harvester and the FE are now gone, but this largely forgotten clash helps explain the crisis of yawning inequality now facing US workers, and provides alternative models from the past that can instruct and inspire those engaged in radical, working class struggles today.
Reviews:
"The Long Deep Grudge is the gripping tale of another Heartland--a Midwest filled with militant workers who took on one of the world's largest corporations and, for a time, won dignity, high wages, and power on the job. It is the story of the kind of radicalism that comes from fighting a corporate giant like International Harvester. Union stalwarts like Gilpin's father fought not to improve the company's productivity, but "to claw back as much corporate wealth as possible." Told with vigor and wry humor, The Long Deep Grudge has lesson's for trade unionists, radicals, and anyone struggling for a better world in the here and now."--Tobias Higbie, faculty chair Labor Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
"In this highly resonant study of the farm equipment workers, Toni Gilpin reminds 21st century labor partisans of how a militant, democratic and multicultural union won power and improved the lives of thousands--and why corporate and political elites came to fear the example it set for the rest of the working-class. We need a revival of industrial unionism in the Midwest and elsewhere. Her book helps tell us how to do it."--Nelson Lichtenstein, director, Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy