Where Are the Workers?: Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites and Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Trasciatti applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution, and reported the following:
Page 99 explores post-World War I militancy among Black working-class Americans and the violence such militancy engendered from whites. During the war, more than 350,000 Black soldiers served in the military, many with distinction. Their hopes that service would win them social acceptance from white Americans were largely unrealized as the system of racial segregation that defined and structured American civil society reproduced itself in the military. Black soldiers served in segregated units in which commanding officers were typically white, and the implicit and explicit racism they endured undermined morale. Those who opposed the war were unmoved by appeals to save democracy in Europe when it had yet to be realized at home for Black Americans.Learn more about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the Rutgers University Press website.
The war and the migration of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans from the South to the North “inspired a level of activism unequaled until the modern civil rights period.” Frustrated by their wartime experience, in and outside the military, Blacks fought against physical violence and other forms of mistreatment at the hands of whites in several cities and towns during what has come to be known as the “Red Summer” of 1919. The longest and bloodiest riot was in Chicago, which lasted for thirteen days and left almost forty people dead, over half of whom were Black, over five hundred injured, and destroyed hundreds of Black homes and businesses. In rural Elaine, Arkansas, somewhere between one hundred and two hundred Blacks and five whites were killed during a riot that erupted when Black sharecroppers tried to organize a union. There were 26 different riots in 1919. Rather than address the true underlying causes of the violence (high unemployment and low wages, especially for Black workers, job discrimination, racism, etc.), law enforcement typically blamed “Black Communists” for fomenting discontent.
Page 99 does not give readers a clear sense of what my book is about. It addresses topics that are central to the book - working class organizing, social and economic inequality, political repression, anti-radicalism – but it does so within a very specific historical/political context (i.e. post-World War I labor activism and militancy among working-class Black Americans). The scope of the book is broader. Most important, the subject of the book – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – is not once mentioned! From reading page 99 alone, no one would know that the book is a biography of an Irish American labor organizer and free speech activist.
Although page 99 does not give a clear sense of the book, I believe it reveals what Ford Madox Ford called “the quality of the whole” [emphasis mine]. Although my book is a biography, it centers on Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s political activism. Flynn spent most of her adult life fighting for and alongside workers, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality. religion, etc., as they struggled for better wages, safer working conditions, respect, and the right to organize. She deplored red baiting and often spoke out against racial discrimination and in favor of solidarity between Black and white workers when few other white labor organizers did. (In fact, she helped raise money for the Black victims of the Elaine Massacre, which is mentioned on page 99.) Thus, although page 99 is not about Flynn, it presents events and people of the kind that mattered greatly to her, it shows how red baiting was used to explain away workers’ real grievances, and it places Black workers and their issues squarely within working-class history where Flynn believed they belong.
--Marshal Zeringue
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