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AbstractBeginning with Leonora Barry of the Knights of Labor, women in the labor movement have envisioned class action as a means of overcoming sexual harassment. Drawing upon Brooke Meredith Beloso's emphasis on the "class constitution of gender and sexuality" and "gendered and sexual constitution of class," this essay considers four historical phases—the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Great Depression and Second World War, and the present era since the 1970s—to maintain the value of class as an analytic category in understanding sexual harassment and resistance to it in the history of American capitalism. Attentive to gender and race, it contests perspectives that erase or subordinate class while in turn seeking to situate class within a full-spectrum intersectionality. Bringing class back in reveals sexual harassment to be one form of the enactment of class, not merely gender. Although sexual harassment can in no way be reduced to class, class shapes sexual harassment and sexual harassment shapes class.

This is the first detailed narrative history of the genesis of New York City teacher unionism between 1912 and 1916, a crucial contributor to the formation of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). In charting the process leading from the founding of The American Teacher in 1912 through the creation of the Teachers' League in 1913 to the Teachers Union in 1916, historians have assumed that male Jewish radical high school teachers were prime movers, but primary school and women teachers were often a majority. Maternity leave, freedom of speech, and pensions proved galvanizing, not bread-and-butter issues alone. Above all, teachers sought to supplant managerial autocracy in school administration with democratic self-management. At the movement's core were socialists and feminists, but their democratic aspirations did not make them isolated radical outliers. Rather they were acting on dreams of workers' control evident in much of the labor movement in the Progressive Era.

Fictional literature portraying the descent of the United States into dictatorship is assessed critically and divided into three cultural-historical phases, each specific in class modality. Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890) and Jack London's The Iron Heel (1907) project a plutocracy violently imposed to forestall working-class revolution. Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935) and other mid-century novels envision a demagogic American authoritarianism, with working-class and lower-middle-class grievances exploited to amass personal power. In the Cold War and neoliberal eras, class recedes from salience in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004). Despite Atwood's brilliant evocation of totalitarian patriarchy and the extraordinary interiority of Sherwood Anderson's Marching Men (1917), the novels of American authoritarianism are on the whole characterized by aesthetic implausibility, one-sided apprehension of authoritarianism's class dynamics, and failure to treat white supremacy as central.

In the Great Depression, numerous American writers and intellectuals were attracted to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). This chapter provides an institutional analysis of that political-literary experience, arguing that it is best understood through a prism of structure.

Between the First and Second World Wars, Heywood Broun (1888-1939) and Benjamin Stolberg (1891-1951) were labor journalists when the newspaper industry was consolidating into chains and industrial unionism was gaining in American society. A comparison of their lives and writings in the 1920s and 1930s illuminates the politics behind news coverage of labor. Suspicious of the Communist Party, Stolberg ultimately clashed with Broun, the quintessential Popular Front left-liberal, over the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The two were similar, however, in framing labor positively, unlike much of the rest of the press, while eschewing any journalistic ethos of "impartiality."

During the 1960s, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were highly active in the movement against the Vietnam War and other social movements in the United States. Between 1962 and 1970, their leaderships sought to exclude homosexuality from their ranks. Using all available documentation, oral history, and correspondence, this article reconstructs for the first time how SWP and YSA members attracted to others of the same sex were either pushed out of the movement or compelled to circumvent the policy by building closets. By drawing on recent scholarship on the "straight state" in the United States, it explains that these socialist groups moved to bar same-sex sexuality because the state had incited both security concerns (fears that the government would pressure arrested homosexuals to become federal informants) and cultural anxiety (fears that "bohemian" styles would alienate American working-class recruits from socialism). It compares YSA and SWP policy to those of other leftist and working-class parties and organizations, including the Communist Party and Maoist and New Left organizations. After coming under strong external criticism by the gay and women's liberation movements, the YSA and SWP abandoned their antigay membership restriction in 1970. They therefore exemplify both the institutional suppression of homosexuality at midcentury and the transformations in civic and political culture generated by the gay liberation movement.

Now so familiar as to risk seeming clichéd, "We Shall Overcome" was the paramount song of the civil rights movement. "Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome some day": the song spoke to a generation's idealism, solidarity, and optimism in the transcendence of injustice. It is now practically lost to memory that the song enjoyed an equal vitality within the early New Left. We Shall Overcome was the official songbook title of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group more important than the better-known Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in generating sixties New Left radicalism. When Tom Hayden, at age eighteen, traveled south from Michigan in 1961 to observe SNCC's efforts to register black voters in Mississippi, he returned to write the SDS pamphlet Revolution in Mississippi, which, issued in the same year as The Port Huron Statement, reproduced all the words to "We Shall Overcome" on its title page.

Now so familiar as to risk seeming cliched, "We Shall Overcome" was the paramount song of the civil rights movement. "Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome some day": the song spoke to a generation's idealism, solidarity, and optimism in the transcendence of injustice. It is now practically lost to memory that the song enjoyed an equal vitality within the early New Left. We Shall Overcome was the official songbook title of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group more important than the better-known Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in generating sixties New Left radicalism. When Tom Hayden, at age eighteen, traveled south from Michigan in 1961 to observe SNCC's efforts to register black voters in Mississippi, he returned to write the SDS pamphlet Revolution in Mississippi, which, issued in the same year as The Port Huron Statement, reproduced all the words to "We Shall Overcome" on its title page. Joan Baez, twenty-two, sang "We Shall Overcome" at the 1963 March on Washington, and Pete Seeger sang "We Shall Overcome" together with SNCC staff in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. So popular was the song that President Lyndon Baines Johnson mouthed the words "We Shall Overcome" in a nationally televised address in 1965 to advocate the Voting Rights Act, a striking instance of that curious alchemy by which the radical becomes mainstream. Yet when SNCC's Bob Moses, historian Staughton Lynd, and radical pacifist David Dellinger led a march on the White House later in 1965 to signal the transformation of the civil rights movement into a movement against Johnson's own war in Vietnam, they still sang "We Shall Overcome." If "We Shall Overcome" seems the quint-essential song of the sixties, that is only through the erasure of its origins in a much earlier left. The song first appeared as sheet music in 1947 in People's Songs, a periodical Pete Seeger founded after the demise of the Almanac Singers that he and Woody Guthrie had created to arouse anti-fascist spirits on the eve of the Second World War. One of Seeger's associates, Zilphia Horton, had set down the words and music as "We Will Overcome" in 1947 after she heard it sung by black women in the Food and Tobacco Workers, a Communist-led union out on strike against the American Tobacco Company. Those women, in turn, had adapted it from the old gospel hymn "I'll Overcome Someday.". Adapted from the source document.

Examination of relationship of Old Left to New Left in U.S. political history and validity of Old Left and New Left as concepts.