The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895-1920.

Publication: Business History Review

Publication Date: 22-SEP-91

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COPYRIGHT 1991 Business History Review

The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895-1920. By Jerry W. Calvert * Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1988. viii + 189 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $21.95.

Jerry Calvert has written an important local study demonstrating that many working people in the United States in the early twentieth century. "did not accept large-scale corporate enterprise as part of the natural order of things" (p. 146). By tracing the rise and decline of worker insurgency in Butte, Montana, from the Populist era of the 1890s until the Republican electoral landslide in 1920, he has shown that class conflict was no mere Marxist abstraction or "foreign" import but an ongoing reality. endemic to the American environment and conditions. In Butte, the world's leading center of copper mining and the base of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company's operations, many workers envisioned an alternative to industrial capitalism--a future that they...

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