The Flivver King stands among the finest of modern American historical novels. It is history as it ought to be written - from the bottom up and the top down, with monumental sensitivity to the compromise and conflict between the two extremes. Its two stories - those of Henry Ford and Ford-worker Abner Shutt, unfold side by side, indeed dialectically. They are, in the end, one story: the saga of class and culture in 'Ford-America'. Workers and bosses, flappers and Klansmen, war and depression, Prohibition outlaws and high-society parties, unions and anti-union gun thugs - few aspects of American life in the first four decades of the last century are missing from this small masterpiece. The Flivver King sustains the same sure grasp of working class life which characterized Sinclair's earlier classic, The Jungle, but much less sentimentally and with a steadier focus on how alienated work breeds not only degradation but also resistance and revolt. Originally written in 1937 to aid the United Automobile Workers' organizing drive, The Flivver King answers the question "Why do we need a union?" with quiet eloquence. Kerr have reissued it as a great American novel and an important historical document, but most of all because that question has never gone away and is now more vital than ever. With an introduction from Steve Meyer.

The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

Literature & Fiction

SINCLAIR, UPTON

Contemporary

Charles H. Kerr

The Flivver King: A Story Of Ford-America

Originally published in 1938, this is still the best biography of John Peter Altgeld - the German immigrant, and enemy of orthodoxy, who became governor of Illinois and pardoned the Haymarket Martyrs..

Eagle Forgotten

Biographies & Memoirs

Barnard, Harry

Historical

"The surrealists postulated that art should cease to be art, and they insisted that they were not artists and were not interested in art. According to their theory, the present phase of civilization (the phase of class societies) created the fundamental division between the human creator and the human user of art. Their great vision that “art will be made by all” was not (and is not) only a romantic illusion inherited from Hegel and the utopians. It is still a magnificent chal- lenge to the social conditions—both then and now—which led to the separation of art and life..." —Ivan Sviták, “Surrealism and Art” Philosopher and critic Ivan Sviták was among the leading Czech intellectuals during the lead-up to the “Prague Spring” of 1968, when tentative reforms by Communist Party leaders in Czechoslovakia sparked a mass movement for democratic socialism. By the time a Soviet-led invasion put an end to this movement and forced Sviták into exile, Sviták had influenced a generation of politicized youth with his works of Marxist humanist philosophy, social commentary, cultural critique, unconventional poetry, and satirical prose. This book‘s editor, Joseph Grim Feinberg, is a social theorist at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Republic‘s Academy of Sciences and—like Sviták—has collaborated closely with surrealist groups in Chicago and Prague. Taking up Sviták’s own, largely-unrealized proposals for publication, Grim Feinberg has collected Sviták’s most provocative writing on aesthetic theory, interspersing it with a selection of Sviták’s poetry and creative prose. In the resulting volume, Sviták explores the possibility of a world in which art will be “made by all,” and he defends humanity’s quixotic right to fight against old illusions so that new illusions might be born.

The Windmills of Humanity: On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World

Arts & Photography

Ivan Sviták

History & Criticism

His classic polemic, with a new Introduction by George Woodcock. "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison". [Henry David Thoreau

On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience

Politics & Social Sciences

Henry, David Thoreau

Social Sciences

Founded near Tyronza, Arkansas, in 1934 by 11 white and 7 black workers, within five years the STFU was organizing all across the South and counting its members in the tens of thousands. Reviving old IWW traditions of workers' solidarity and direct action as its members added many an innovation discovered in the course of new struggles, the STFU brought a luster all its own to the labor insurgency of the 1930s and 1940s. The first fully integrated multiracial union in the modern South, the STFU prefigured not only later farm-workers' unionization by also the civil rights agitation of the 1960s and the growing rank and file labor revolt of our own time. Here is the dramatic first-hand account of the origins, struggles, strikes, achievements, humor, songs and poems of the rural south, told through one of the founders of the union.

Roll The Union On: A Pictorial History Of The Southern Tenant Farmers Union

Business & Money

H. L. Mitchell

Economics

In this classic work of American nonfiction the greatest labor organizer in US history details her three quarter century fight for labor's liberation, and her unswerving belief in industrial unionism as the key to that struggle. I n steel, railroading, metal mining, textiles, and above all, the coal industry, Mother Jones fought alongside strikers. Here too is the exciting story of her crusade against child labor, her innovative efforts to organize working women, her experiences in court and in jail, and her daring involvement in the Mexican Revolution. Mother Jones' lively narrative - every page bristling with her characteristic humor, indignation and uncommon sense - is a masterpiece of American radicalism. This abundantly illustrated new edition includes a host of valuable additions. In a new Foreword Meridel LeSueur vividly recalls her 1914 meeting with Mother Jones. IWW historian Fred Thompson's Afterword provides useful background and fills in important gaps in Mother Jones' story. Also included are a Mother Jones article from 1901, a tribute by Eugene V Debs, an introduction by Clarence Darrow, helpful annotations to the text, a full bibliography and an index.

The Autobiography of Mother Jones

Mother Jones

Community & Culture

The Autobiography of Mother Jones (First Person Series)

Jones, Mother

Book by Fitz, Don and David Roediger

Within the Shell of the Old: Essays on Workers' Self Organization (A Salute to George Rawick)

During the late 1960s, when students all over American were practicing direct democracy on campus by waging massive student strikes and taking over their university buildings, the three essays collected here for the first time were among the most widely read pieces of student radical literature. Their author, Carl Davidson, was national vice-president and inter-organizational secretary of the SDS. Starting from the sociologists' conclusion that modern universities are “knowledge factories” designed to serve the Military Industrial Complex, Davidson, in these essays, explored various analogies and connections between students and the working class and outlined a theory of student syndicalism that characterized a critical phase in the development of SDS. Drawing not only on classical Marxism but also on IWW and anarcho-syndicalist ideas as well as on newer revolutionary currents such as the Dutch Provos and French Situationists, these writings were among the most original and influential documents of the American New Left in its dynamic first decade, and remain an unexcelled “how-to” manual for insurgent students seeking to gain some measure of control over their lives. In a new afterward, the author situates the rise of student syndicalism in its historic context, while reflecting on the meaning of these writings for today.

The New Radicals in The Multiversity and Other Sds Writings on Student Syndicalism (Sixties Series)

Davidson, Carl

Politics & Government

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Books by Charles H. Kerr