Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2007
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 144-45.
Abstract
In Farmers vs. Wage Earners, R. Alton Lee seeks to uncover the hidden history of organized labor in his native state of Kansas. Historians of the sunflower state have long valorized the agricultural roots of Kansas while largely overlooking the contributions of working men and women to the region's history. In this thorough and well-researched study, Lee attempts to redress this gap in historical knowledge and trace the development of the political, cultural, and economic boundaries that came to divide farmers from wage earners. The volume admirably documents the development of this antagonistic relationship while also providing a detailed outline of labor history in Kansas.
Farmers vs. Wage Earners is organized chronologically, beginning with the 1877 railroad workers strike and proceeding through the growth of the Knights of Labor, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, World War II, and the "right to work" movement. In what is a large undertaking, Lee successfully explores workers' struggles in the railroad industry, mining, itinerant farm labor, aeronautics, defense, oil, and meatpacking. He skillfully uses a variety of sources to document everything from political negotiation at the highest levels of government to the personal experiences of women working in airplane factories during World War II. Pieced together, these sources provide both a wide-ranging and intimate look at the story of organized labor in Kansas and probe the question of why farmers and laborers came to see their interests as diametrically opposed, despite the fact that in many instances their goals, objectives, and material interests were nearly identical.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relations between farmers and wage earners in Kansas were fairly amicable. Lee argues that in both small rural communities and the emerging cities, residents tended to support one another in opposition to the outside influences of big business from the East. While solidarity among local people clearly benefited organized labor in Kansas, the failure of workers to apply this principle to nationwide struggles was to be a fatal flaw in their ability to articulate with the broader labor movement in the country.
Comments
Copyright 2005 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln