Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960.

Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 During the 1930s in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, conservative, deeply religious French Canadians joined with Franco-Belgian immigrants steeped in Marxian socialism to build "the most powerful of New England's textile unions" (p. xi). One group was "premodern," communalist, Catholic, and wedded to a culture defined by la survivance--"the perpetuation of French Canadian faith, language, and manners" (p. 25). The other was scular, anticlerical, rationalist, and confident of "the liberating possibilities of modern, industrial society" (p. 70). A core of French-Canadian skilled mulespinners provided the link, but where was the common ground? One might look first to language--all spoke French in Anglophone New England--but the French-speaking mill management and ethnic elite commanded loyalty as well. Not until outside forces weakened the ties of French Canadian workers to their ethnic leadership was class unity possible; until then each group lived in an "ethnic bubble," isolated from one another and to a considerable extent from the outside world. Franco-Belgians struck "recklessly," a tactic more appropriate to northern France than to New England. French Canadians never struck until 1927, deferred to priests who "chose" to reject the modern world and to ignore Rerun Novarum, and constructed a virtually hermetic Quebecois community life. The two groups did not speak the same language at all. Indeed, they inhabited two different …