Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century (review)

Each of the case histories featured in Three Strikes offers a compelling and highly readable perspective on working class history in the 20th century, and that is ample reason to recommend this slender volume to students and non-specialist readers. Historians will also find the case studies of interest, though the sum of these well-crafted parts falls short of the book's stated goals.

Zinn's opening chapter focuses on the Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914 and the accompanying violence that killed 66 men, women, and children. The signature event in this bloody tale—the infamous "Ludlow Massacre" in which National Guardsmen machine-gunned and burned the strikers' tent city—has since faded from public consciousness, as have the depression-era struggles documented by Frank and Kelley: respectively, the sitdown strike by women workers at Detroit's Woolworth's stores, and the musicians union's campaign to win job security for theater musicians displaced by "talking pictures."

In recovering this history, all three authors make their narratives dramatic and accessible. Zinn's terse rendering of the Colorado strike's escalating violence reads like a crime-scene report, punctuated by journalistic profiles of key players. Sitdowns and theater bombings also provide a dramatic backdrop to the strike stories of Frank and Kelley, combined with an equally engaging review of the cultural context. Frank explores the contradictions of the "beauty culture" that Woolworth's salesgirls shared with—but interpreted differently from—Woolworth's heiress Barbara Hutton, and Kelley examines the popular music and movie cultures of the 1930s that had such different meanings for black and white musicians. Frank uses newspaper headlines and Kelley uses musical references to invoke these pop culture idioms in their sub-headings; in lieu of footnotes, there is a thirteen-page bibliography.

In their brief introduction, the authors present Three Strikes as a book that "looks backward to look forward," seeking lessons for a labor movement whose "recent resurrection . . . has taken root in America's latest service-based economy." Toward this end, Frank effectively draws the link between Woolworth's and Wal-Mart, and Kelley evokes the problematic role of a musician (or any artist) in "an age of mechanical reproduction." Zinn's study conveys the salience of class conflict in our history, but has less overall relevance to the authors' stated goal, not only because coal mining pre-dates our service economy by several centuries, but primarily because the machine-gunning of strikers and their families is not a current employer tactic in the United States. Zinn focuses less attention on other issues—the post-strike "welfare" policies of Rockefeller's Colorado Coal Company, or the opportunities and obstacles the union faced in unifying a diverse workforce for collective action—that could also convey valuable lessons.

More sobering is the fact that all three of the strikes featured in this book were, to varying degrees, defeats. Only the Woolworth strikers won improved working conditions and union recognition, and their union was broken within months. The lack of a unifying perspective that might address these and other commonalties leaves the reader and the classroom teacher to draw their own conclusions.