Haymarket Originals is a new home for audio deep dives, by and for the left—brought to you by Haymarket Books.
The first Haymarket Originals project is FRAGIL...
Episode 17 of Fragile Juggernaut concerns the momentous arrival of long-dreaded events abroad that broke US politics out of its political and economic impasse during Roosevelt’s second term: Europe’s descent into fascist war. Foreign policy dislodged the American elite from their indecision over the nature of domestic reform; dislodged President Roosevelt from his indecision over whether to run for a third term; and dislodged the leadership of the CIO from its political cul-de-sac of battling employers at the bargaining table and their own government at the ballot boxes. With Roosevelt’s third term, CIO founder John L. Lewis surrendered his presidency of the industrial union center. In the process, the drift into war dramatically transformed the relationship of the industrial union movement to electoral politics and the Democratic Party—and of union leaders to the Depression society now energized and organized around war production. Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.Buy The Tragedy of American Science, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1888-the-tragedy-of-american-scienceSupport us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
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16. The West Coast
Episode 16 is the last in our three-episode regional series, offering a view of the CIO from the West Coast. Andrew, Ben, Emma, and Tim discuss what was distinct about the economy of the West: in this underdeveloped imperial context, working-class activity followed the supply chain, from coastal ports to inland warehouses and processing centers to the fertile valleys of California. This distribution-transportation nexus became a key battleground of jurisdictional disputes with the AFL, only to be scrambled again by an influx of wartime defense spending. Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/postsBuy Revolution in Seattle, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/872-revolution-in-seattle
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15. The South
Episode 15 of Fragile Juggernaut is the second of our trio of regional episodes, landing this time in the South. Ben, Emma, and Tim are joined by the celebrated historian Robin D.G. Kelley to discuss the patterns of Southern development, the rich organizational ecology of the region, the strategic misfires of the CIO, and the political and social bases of fascism in America. Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.Buy Class Struggle and the Color Line, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/946-class-struggle-and-the-color-lineSupport us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
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Bonus Episode: What the CIO Reveals About the Movement Today
This week our crew at Fragile Juggernaut is delivering our third special bonus episode. Alex, Ben, Emma, Gabe, and Tim converged at Chicago’s Socialism conference to discuss what the CIO can make us alive to in the contemporary labor movement and our conjuncture more broadly. Our series has probed the history of the labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s–detailing its heroism, anatomizing its tragedies, confronting its limits, and rethinking the whole turbulent era of the Great Depression, World War, fascism and antifascism from the vantage point of the mass worker. But the labor movement isn’t something to be memorialized: it’s something we’re building again anew. What can we learn and better understand about the present when we come to terms with the labor movement's past? Read Andrew Elrod’s “What Was Bidenomics” in Phenomenal World Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way. Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
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14. Working-Class New York
Episode 14 of Fragile Juggernaut is the first of our trio of regional episodes. It dials into New York City, the seat of the country’s largest manufacturing base, but one composed of a vast constellation of small and diverse shops; and also host to the nation’s largest port, transport system, white collar and cultural complex, and more. With the eminent historian Joshua Freeman, Gabe and Ben talk about worker organizing outside the CIO cast–public transit workers, teachers, laundry workers and domestics–as well as what made New York City, a non-fordist city in the age of Ford, so exemplary compared to other parts of the country. The episode features James Baldwin and Truman Capote; Irish dance halls and cruising on the piers; burial societies, Tammany Hall, and clandestine organizations; the origins of bodegas and how the mob got rackets into organized labor; the trade union origins of “Strange Fruit”; Ella Baker and Esther Cooper Jackson; the IRA and Broadway musicals; how transit workers built their union campaigning against big squeegees; the hybrid combinations of craft and industrial unionism; and the limits to workplace organization in a city defined by tremendous ethnic, religious, and neighborhood segmentation. Featured music: “I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Count Basie; “It's Better With A Union Man” by Pins and Needles Orchestra; “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday; “The Boys of the Lough” by Michael Coleman; “Talking Sailor” by Woody Guthrie; “One Big Union for Two” by the Pins and Needles Orchestra; “New York Town” by Woody Guthrie.Archival audio credits: Esther Cooper Jackson discusses domestic work research; Mike Quill debates Rep. Fred Hartley on ABC news; longshoreman and sailor Stan Weir describes conservatizing effects of the racket on the docks. Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way. Buy Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/991-organized-labor-and-the-black-worker-1619-1981
Haymarket Originals is a new home for audio deep dives, by and for the left—brought to you by Haymarket Books.
The first Haymarket Originals project is FRAGILE JUGGERNAUT: WHAT WAS THE CIO?
Through a limited run of twenty episodes, a group of labor historians and organizers will revisit the near-mythical history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—and the high water mark of US labor activity in the 1930s and 1940s—in the context of today’s critical juncture in the labor movement.
Join Tim Barker, Andrew Elrod, Ben Mabie, Alex Press, Emma Teitelman, Gabriel Winant, and special guests as they explore the trajectory of the American working class through a period of its greatest drama and political possibility.
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