The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s

The golden key to understanding the last seventy-five years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought, and ranged across all of the major industries of the region.



In The Southern Key, Goldfield charts the rise of labor activism in eac...