Episode three of Fragile Juggernaut explores the transformations within the working class brought about by World War I and its decade-long aftermath. A growing political alliance between the AF of L and Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Party profoundly altered the labor movement of the Progressive Era, growing its size and militancy amid the rising prices of the war boom, culminating in the combustive strike-year of 1919. But in the corporate reaction and federal repression that followed, labor unions shed a third of their combined membership and entered the assembly-line era divided and dwindling in power. This society the Great War bequeathed was, as its contemporaries argued, unbalanced. The 1920s “return to normalcy” intensified, rather than counteracted, this lack of balance—swinging toward the struggles within organized labor that would elicit the CIO. 

Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.

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Episode two of Fragile Juggernaut picks up with the labor movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. How did workers organize themselves amidst shifts in the structure of the economy, from the acceleration of proletarianization to the rise of corporate capitalism, and what opposition did they confront?

Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way. 

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts

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Welcome to episode one of Fragile Juggernaut, the first project from Haymarket Originals! In episode one, we introduce our “organizing committee” of six rotating hosts and our goals for this collective project of inquiry into the history of the U.S. workers’ movement. 

We then tackle a key historical question: what was the American working class? We begin the story of the CIO in the nineteenth century in order to identify the different groups—immigrants, farmers, artisans, enslaved workers—who comprised the “raw materials” of an inchoate working class. Following their varied paths into wage work, and their relationship to the politics that resulted in the Civil War, the episode ends with the rise of industrial corporations, most notably the railroads, and the political compromise that ended Reconstruction—with a national uprising of workers in 1877. That mass action anticipates what’s to come for the emerging labor movement.

Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.

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