Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments It wasn’t quite nostalgia for nineteenth-century “boomer” railroaders or old-time locomotive engines that drew me to the subject of the “Great Southwest Strike,” although the monograph that first concentrated my mind on the pursuit of historical research and writing was Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, –, a social and cultural history of an earlier era’s peripatetic, daring, purportedly happy-go-lucky waged laborers. Nor did personal experience with unions or industrial work send me into the archives, even if a dozen or so years waiting tables taught me something about occupational identity. Instead, it probably began with a small puzzle, one that I could not solve as a young person and that for complicated reasons I came to care about: How was it that my grandfather, a self-reliant and decent man, actively participated in his postal workers’ union in El Paso, even though nothing in my upbringing in a Texas suburb in the s otherwise associated unions with anything self-reliant or decent—that is, when unions received mention at all? I cannot conceive of this book’s fruition without the aid of Kevin Kenny and James Sidbury, who shepherded me through the academic world, both at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. Their integrity as teachers and historians and the moments that I had with them in which I accepted the confidence that they had in me made all the difference in the world. The generous and perceptive feedback from Jim and Kevin at numerous points in this project, and also from Eric Arnesen, Melvyn Dubofsky, George Green, and especially Alan Lessoff, crystallized my understanding of crucial issues and events, emboldened me to take controversial positions, and provoked fresh questions for me. It almost goes without saying that I am wholly responsible for the outcome.  Acknowledgments I am indebted to my professors at the University of Texas at Austin— Howard Miller, George Forgie, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Harry Cleaver, and Milton Jamail—for the vital intellectual energy that they brought to the classroom, and to my companions in graduate school: Patricia Martinez, Ramona Houston, Adriana Ayala, and Lilia Rosas. I still remember warmly our dinners together. I am similarly fortunate to have known over the years David Ryden, Jo Bailey, Jane Creighton, Robin Davidson, Melinda Kanner, and Kris Anderson, my colleagues at the University of Houston–Downtown, each of whom, in his or her own way, has helped me to juggle less clumsily, and more efficiently and enjoyably, service to the university, teaching, scholarship , and parenthood. Special thanks go to David Ryden, who always gives me terrific advice and is never cross when I stubbornly refuse to take it. The University of Houston–Downtown has afforded this project critical aid in the form of research grants and a semester-long sabbatical. I have benefited greatly as well from the skill, persistence, attention, and good cheer of the university’s inter-library loan librarians, Anita Garza and Alice Lewis, and from the assistance of the staff at the Missouri Historical Society and the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. Two editorial internships at the Texas State Historical Association thrust me out of graduate school and into the wider world of academic publishing, training me to approach my own writing with a more judicious eye. I am particularly obliged to George Ward for his willingness to entrust me with challenging work. For the map of strike towns, a word of gratitude to Richard Jensen for permission to use his digitized version of the historical Missouri Pacific map, and to my partner in life, Christopher Pharis, who expertly transformed this for me into an illustration of the strike’s scope and intensity. My mother and father, Francine and William Case, and my sisters Shannon and Angie, by their own example, have imbued in me a keen urge to do all I can to get it right, especially the gray areas. I cannot think of how to thank them enough. Mary and David Pharis, my parents-in-law, permitted me long breaks to write during family visits and reassured me often that I would finish. My final thoughts on the completion of this book turn to my three-year old, Josephine, my six-year old, Elijah, and to Chris. I marvel at their embrace of our rather jumbled existence over the past...