Culture of Misfortune

Clete Daniel is Professor of American Labor History in the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. He is the author of Chicano Workers and the Politics of Fairness, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941, and The ACLU and the Wagner Act.

The major thrust of the text and its contribution to theory is in reminding us that the frailties of union leadership in changing contexts can provide a rich understanding of an organisation.... It is, however, the focus on the character of union leadership and their actions within a particular social context that ensures the contribution of this text.- Martin Birt, University of Cape Town (The Journal of Industrial Relations) Daniel is masterful in interpreting efforts to unionize textile workers in the 20th century.... The book is strongest in delineating the divisions within national efforts.... Recommended for upper-division undergraduate through faculty collections.(Choice) Daniel relates this story with insight and sensitivity. He demonstrates his grasp of the historic dynamics of the American textile industry and the formidable obstacles that workers faced (and continue to face) in attempting to gain a collective voice.... Culture of Misfortune provides an interesting and controversial contribution to an important chapter in North America's labour history.- Jonathan Eaton (Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations) Daniel's book is both a pleasure to read and fills in an important gap in the historiography of textile workers. It provides the first comprehensive history of the TWUA. While not a substitute for community studies, anyone undertaking a study of textile workers in the future will need to refer to this volume in order to gain an appreciation of how the union's internal politics effected its external relations.- Lawrence Richards, University of Virginia (EH.Net) This superbly researched and brilliantly written monograph tells a profoundly depressing tale, as its title indicates.... This is easily the best study of the TWUA to date. Culture of Misfortune is based on solid research in the union archives and wide knowledge of the secondary literature. It is also beautifully written, and in its connecting of the TWUA's problems with those of industrial unionism in general in the concluding years of the twentieth century, the book has a wide significance.- John Salmond, La Trobe University (The North Carolina Historical Review) Was industrial unionism the panacea that the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and those historians who praise it claim? Maybe not, suggests Clete Daniel.... His 'interpretive history' is short on glory and long on failure. Daniel persuasively argues that textile unionism was moribund from its inception.... He probably got it right in the book's early pages. Once the culture of misfortune became entrenched, all that was left to fight over was a pile of loose threads.- Robert E. Weir, Bay Path College (American Historical Review)