Comments on: Student strikebreaking in early 20th-century America https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/06/23/student-strikebreaking-in-early-20th-century-america/ critical anthropology of academic culture Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:16:27 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.1 By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/06/23/student-strikebreaking-in-early-20th-century-america/#comment-1251 Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:16:27 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1410#comment-1251 Nate, hmm, I don’t know if I truly need any more confirmation of these people’s ludicrous class politics (and this isn’t my research topic), but if you happen to come across the quotes one day you should certainly post them here, if only for our collective dismay/amusement!

]]> By: Nate https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/06/23/student-strikebreaking-in-early-20th-century-america/#comment-1250 Sun, 27 Jun 2010 01:13:15 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1410#comment-1250 hi Eli,
Thanks for this, that article looks good and I look forward to reading it. I know I’ve seen reference in labor history books to ivy league students serving as strikebreaking thugs, I believe in one of the standard histories of the IWW (Dubofsky, I think, or maybe Foner, it’s been a while). I don’t recall if this was tied to the national guard or not but there were quotes from young elite men about how much they enjoyed beating picketing workers. I could probably find the reference eventually if you like.
take care,
Nate

]]> By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/06/23/student-strikebreaking-in-early-20th-century-america/#comment-1249 Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:40:09 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1410#comment-1249 I don’t think it’s that they took blue-collar jobs per se; it’s that they did the work long enough to break the strike. (A strike is of course not much good if the work is still being done.) And my sense is that the author thinks this was a rather widespread practice among (elite) college students of the era, but this is historical research, not sociology, and I don’t think we’re ever going to find the kind of survey you want. What was representative of the broader culture of the time, I suppose, was intense class antagonism and inequality, and not so much this particular practice… when Norwood does give figures, by the way, he typically says that between a couple hundred and a few thousand student strikers were involved in a given labor conflict. That would probably have been a large proportion of a given student body but a small fraction of the whole population.

Norwood talks a fair bit about why this didn’t happen at women’s colleges; I’d encourage you to take a look at the (fairly short) paper if you’re still curious about his analysis of some campuses vs. others.

]]> By: Michael Bishop https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/06/23/student-strikebreaking-in-early-20th-century-america/#comment-1248 Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:51:57 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1410#comment-1248 I find this quite interesting, and if taken at face value, quite surprising. The gist is that wealthy college students take blue collar jobs, primarily because they take joy in breaking strikes. I can’t imagine this happening today, unless you found a few truly unrepresentative individuals. How representative is this of the broader culture of the time? (not that your summary implies that it was) I’m sure there are many pieces of evidence that would be good to bring together. It would be nice to have repeated survey data with people’s attitudes towards organized labor, and strikers. Or if this was the culture at some colleges, and not others, some analysis of why that was.

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