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To: Fedora
Pretty interesting find.

Yes it is. The labor movement had many interesting beginnings. What I find the most intriguing is that it had different outcomes in the US as it did in Europe. European socialists saw the union movement as a class struggle. In the US, however, it was actually an effort by workers to acquire fair wages and working conditions and not a "class struggle". The great filter of American opportunity affords every man the dream that he to, may become rich. In Europe, the "dream" was to destroy the rich. America may have been founded by Northern Europeans, but there the similarity ends. America is a unique culture and society distinct from its European ancestry. The election cry of "Red Staters", that we don't care what Europe thinks, is a demonstration of that essential difference.

15 posted on 12/04/2004 11:48:58 AM PST by elbucko (Feral Republican)
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To: elbucko

Yes, it's interesting that although the early AFL did start off Marxist, under Gompers it tried to divorce its advocacy of better working conditions, a shorter work day, and higher wages from the overall socialist agenda that characterized the European labor movement and the earliest stages of the US labor movement.

Regarding your other post on the possibility of Douai's group influencing LBJ's socialism, I was wondering about that as well. I forget where but I read something within the past year about the early socialist movement in Texas, I think while crossreferencing Robert Caro's LBJ biography. I'm looking at Caro's first volume now and I see he has an early chapter linking LBJ's father Samuel Johnson to a Texas populist movement called "The People's Party" from the 1890s, which apparently got upstaged by William Jennings Bryan's broader movement but continued to influence the branch of the Texas Democratic Party the Johnsons belonged to.


21 posted on 12/04/2004 12:21:27 PM PST by Fedora
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