The Class Struggle Chronicle Recommends Toni Gilpin's "The Long Deep Grudge"
The Editors of The Class Struggle Chronicle
5/1/2024
As organizers in a working class association, nothing excites us more than a good book on Labor History. Add, on top of that, a local tie, some interracial solidarity, and the Haymarket Affair and you have a real winner! These impressive ingredients combine to make Toni Gilpin’s book, The Long Deep Grudge, first published in 2020 by Haymarket Books.
International Harvester was once a monopoly in farming equipment manufacturing in the United States and was founded in Chicago under the family name, McCormick Works. After a brutal assault on striking workers in May 1886, a demonstration was organized at Haymarket Square, leading to the watershed moment in Labor History: the Haymarket “Riots.” Years later, in an effort to flee the labor-friendly North, the McCormick family opened a new factory here in Louisville, Kentucky. Things did not turn out the way the McCormick’s envisioned, though, for a small, but radical labor union called the United Farm Equipment Workers of America (FE) soon organized the Louisville plant and immediately began forging interracial solidarity among rural white and urban Black workers on the picket lines, constituting some of the earliest civil rights struggles in our city. Through short-term contracts, frequent walkouts, and other aggressive tactics aimed at strengthening the workers and the union, the FE provided a model for other labor organizations in how to unite, mobilize, and strengthen the working class.
Today, as many established unions and labor federations adopt the ridiculous idea that “when the company does well, the workers do well,” the story of the United Farm Equipment Workers of America is of vital importance to building strong rank-and-file power and to returning the Labor Movement to an understanding of the class struggle. Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge eloquently tells this story and offers workers and organizers a picture of what a militant union can accomplish.
Though union membership is now at an all-time low, working people are fed up with being exploited as their bosses consolidate more and more wealth and power. The “subterranean fire” that August Spies, a Haymarket union organizer, spoke of is raging beneath the surface and the time is ripe for a newly-invigorated, well-educated, and militant Labor Movement. The editors of The Class Struggle Chronicle highly recommend Toni Gilpin’s book for organizers and for any working person interested in this important chronicle of local Labor history.
Visit www.haymarketbooks.org to purchase a copy of Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge. If you cannot afford a copy, please reach out us at contact@louworkersbrigade.org and we will send you a free copy!
