Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in

the United States (review)

Bill Shields

Labor Studies Journal, Volume 31, Number 4, Winter 2007, pp. 97-98 (Review)

Published by West Virginia University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lab.2006.0059

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/208035

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BOOK REVIEWS 97

Bananeras embodies the sense of humor, passion, and fierce commitment

to workers’ rights that has characterized Frank’s previous work. The accessibil-
ity of its prose, the timeliness of its subject matter, and its compelling narrative
style make it well-suited to undergraduate teaching and labor studies credit
courses on women and work, globalization and labor history. Bananeras is a
“must-read” for scholars, labor educators, and union members alike.
Daisy Rooks
University of California, Los Angeles

Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States.

By Sharon Smith. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2006. 377 pp. $16
paper.

In Subterranean Fire, Sharon Smith gives us a greatest-hits recounting

of upsurges in U.S. working class and labor struggles. She takes us through
several periods of labor movement growth, the reasons for them and the role
of the organized left in each. For readers dealing with the political realities
of 2006, this is bracing, even inspiring stuff. We need to be reminded that it
has not always been so much about neocons and WalMart. For that reason,
I recommend the book. However, like other such attempts to remember and
thus help revive worker militance, it reveals too little about the long slow
periods in between upsurges and needs to be complemented by studies that
paint a fuller portrait of historical context and the whole array of class forces,
such as Who Built America, a two-volume U.S. history written from a “bottom
up” perspective.
Smith starts by addressing the issue of America Exceptionalism. She
argues that, while frontier land availability and working-class complexity
blunted class-consciousness, these factors had faded in importance by the
1920s. Smith makes good points here, although recent struggles over immi-
gration and racism show how working-class divisions continue to be relevant
today. Over the course of the book, Smith argues that the U.S. working class
was as militant as any and that it was primarily conservative mis-leaders and
misguided radicals (read the Communist Party) that prevented workers from
achieving greater political power. Basically the book is a meditation on why
no enduring Labor Party was ever established in the United States and an
argument for why one is needed now.
A series of short sections walks the reader through familiar high points
of history—the Knights of Labor, the Eight Hour Movement, the Populists,
Pullman, the Socialist Party, and the Wobblies. She takes a careful look at
the 1930s and lingers here long enough to lightly praise and mainly bury the
98 LABOR STUDIES JOURNAL: WINTER 2007

Communist Party, in favor of what might have been if only partisans of the
Fourth International had been dominant on the left. She begs the question,
though, of why they did not prevail, which may be attributed to whose program
made more sense to active workers, particularly African-Americans.
Smith’s treatment of the post-war period describes betrayals and sell-
outs by labor leaders, including collaboration with the CIA abroad and a
self-destructive reliance on the Democrats at home. Most importantly, she
asserts that McCarthyism was responsible for destroying the long-standing
presence of an organized left in labor, which continues to cripple us even
today. This ignores the large number of Civil Rights/Black Power and New
Left veterans who went into the movement, but, perhaps, the fact that labor
progressives are not rolled up into one hegemonic cadre group is what she
is talking about.
There is not enough room here to thoroughly praise and criticize her
main points. I will conclude with an observation on her main concern. The
lack of a labor party has at least as much to do with the passage of anti-fusion
laws and the consolidation of Jim Crow segregation as with a lack of left-la-
bor vision. Once the new regressive voting regime was in place by the 1920s,
workers were left in most states with getting something from the Democrats
or nothing at all. This is an important political fact, and we’re still dealing
with this conundrum today.
Which do you think is more likely, for instance—a progressive takeover
of the Democrats or changes in the political system that allow minor parties
to compete successfully for power? There is no easy answer, although inter-
esting experiments are in progress, like the Working Families Party in New
York and the Instant Runoff Voting in San Francisco. Of course, we do have
a Labor Party; it has just taken them ten years to actually run candidates for
office! It is instructive that they are doing so in South Carolina, where fu-
sion, or cross endorsing, is allowed. That might be a good battle cry to carry
on with the militant spirit that Smith calls on us to emulate. Workers of the
world, fuse!
Bill Shields
City College of San Francisco