The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a conversation

CAPITAL’S TERRORISTS: KLANSMEN, LAWMEN, AND EMPLOYERS IN THE LONG 19TH CENTURY

Tuesday, February 21, 2023, 7 pm

Register here to join this event on Zoom.

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers and powerful individuals deployed a variety of tactics to control ordinary people as they sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. This book draws together the groups engaged in this kind of violence, reimagining the original Ku Klux Klan, various Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers’ organizations, and Citizens’ Alliances as employers’ associations driven by unambiguous economic and managerial interests.  Ultimately, this book suggests that the birth of law and order politics as we know it can be found in nineteenth-century campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters.

Chad Pearson is a lecturer in the History Department at the University of North Texas.  He is a labor historian primarily interested in ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Chad is also the author of Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and the co-editor of Against Labor: How US Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (with Rosemary Feurer; University of Illinois Press, 2017).

Ahmed White is the Nicholas Rosenbaum Professor of Law at the University of Colorado.  His early work focused on the rule of law concept in capitalist society, and on the role of criminal law and punishment as mechanisms of social control of the working class. His more recent scholarship has turned the history of law and labor relations from the early Twentieth Century through the New Deal period, as well as the viability of a functional system of labor rights in liberal society. He is one of the country’s leading experts on the history of labor repression, which is a major subject of his two acclaimed books, THE LAST GREAT STRIKE: LITTLE STEEL, THE CIO AND THE STRUGGLE FOR LABOR RIGHTS IN NEW DEAL AMERICA (2016) and UNDER THE IRON HEEL: THE WOBBLIES AND THE CAPITALIST WAR ON RADICAL WORKERS (2022).

Rosemary Feurer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Northern Illinois.  She focuses her research and teaching on understanding the political economy of social conflict.  She has been particularly interested in miners’ struggles in Illinois, and the role played by Mother Jones in the labor movement.  This has led her to work in public history and public education with major contributions to the Labor and Working Class History Association and the Mother Jones Heritage Project. Rosemary has authored many articles, the book RADICAL UNIONISM IN THE MIDWEST, 1900-1950 (2006), and, with Chad Pearson, co-edited AGAINST LABOR: HOW U.S. EMPLOYERS ORGANIZED TO DEFEAT UNION ACTIVISM (2017).University of Illinois Press 2006.

In preparation for your participation in this conversation, we invite you to read Chad’s essay in JACOBIN: https://jacobin.com/2022/11/bosses-terrorists-kkk-klansmen-capital  

[email protected]  and  651-207-4926

free and open to all