This week our crew at Fragile Juggernaut is delivering our first special bonus episode. Tim and Ben talk with Sam-Adler Bell—an excellent writer and one-half of the brilliant Know Your Enemy podcast—about our series.
Appearing on Know Your Enemy gave us a chance to explore a new dimension of our project: to think about the CIO not only as a moment when new social forces on the left converge or spring into action, but also as a cauldron for conservatives and reactionaries—a pre-history of the modern conservative movement—some of which would continue to dominate the American political scene for generations. The episode also was an occasion to return to some core themes: an account of the American working class as internally stratified, riven with internal struggles, and shot through with competing strategies and interests. In particular, we talk plenty about the political right within the labor movement, and the vaciliations of what some might call the “middle class,” whose zigzags so often stamp the outcomes of open political contests.
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
Episode seven of Fragile Juggernaut dramatizes the Sit Down strikes that built the UAW: why they proved to be powerful, what effect they had on the labor movement, and the truly global spread of the strike tactic. The fight in Flint and Cleveland, Kansas City and Atlanta, provides an occasion to talk both about the global organization of production and highly contingent efforts to root out spies, covering both the architectonics of capital and street battles barely won against advancing cops. These stories are where structural analysis meets the heist movie.
We want to flag two small factual mistakes on this episode: at one point Gabe refers to the federal CIO locals where he means federal AFL locals; elsewhere, Ben says Fisher Body a few times when he means the Chevy plant.
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
Buy Unite and Win: The Workplace Organizer’s Handbook:
Episode 8 of Fragile Juggernaut places us back in the critical juncture of 1936: the final year of Roosevelt’s first term in office. What were FDR’s re-election prospects as workers’ insurgencies erupted from below and as capital waited in vain for the courts to demolish the Wagner Act? What did this juncture mean for the CIO and its relationship to electoral politics? Episode 8 dives into these questions and surveys the evolving links between the CIO, leftwing intellectuals in the Roosevelt administration, and the Democratic Party. Featuring special guest Samir Sonti, an assistant professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.
Featured music: Franklin D. Roosevelt's Back Again (The New Lost City Ramblers); Old Age Pension Check (The New Lost City Ramblers); Farmer-Labor Train (Woody Guthrie); Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt (McKinley Peebles)
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
Buy The Long Deep Grudge, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1383-the-long-deep-grudge
Episode 9 of Fragile Juggernaut is the first of a series of thematic episodes, in which we pause our chronological narrative to survey key issues shaping the world of the CIO. In this episode, we turn our view on the escalating confrontation between fascism and anti-fascism. Was there an American fascism? Where did it come from and what did it look like? How did it relate to the labor movement? And what was the meaning of the Popular Front, the broad left coalition against fascism?
Featured music: “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” (Billy Bragg, originally Woody Guthrie); “La Crisis Actual” (Los Cancioneros Alegres); “Ballad for Americans” (Paul Robeson); “Ballad of October 16” (The Almanac Singers); “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” (The Almanac Singers)
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
Buy The Black Antifascist Tradition, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2223-the-black-antifascist-tradition
Episode 10 of Fragile Juggernaut surveys the wide range of workers who united–and sometimes fought each other–under the banner of the CIO. We begin in the slaughterhouse, with special guest Rick Halpern explaining how the United Packinghouse Workers of America (PWOC/UPWA) brought together black and white workers despite segregation inside and outside the workplace. Then, the hosts discuss two of the largest CIO unions: the United Steel Workers (USWA/SWOC) and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE). These two unions are often thought of, respectively, as emblematic of the “right” and “left” wings of the CIO. But what does that mean? And why did these two unions develop the way they did?
Featured music: “The Cloakmaker’s Union” (Joe Glazer); “Killing Floor” (Howlin’ Wolf); “Hard Times Killing Floor” (Skip James); “Odpocivam v Americkej pode/I Lie in the American Land” (written by Andrew Kovaly, performed by Vivien Richman); “Spirit of Phil Murray” (Sterling Jubilee Singers).
Archival audio credits: UPWA oral histories recorded and generously provided by Rick Halpern; Deadline for Action (UE, 1946); James Matles Retirement Speech via UE History; oral histories of James Downey, Tom Girdler, Jr., and Harold Ruttenberg via AAPB.
Buy Rick Halpern's Down on the Killing Floor Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p066337
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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This week our crew at Fragile Juggernaut is delivering our first special bonus episode. Tim and Ben talk with Sam-Adler Bell—an excellent writer and one-half of the brilliant Know Your Enemy podcast—about our series.
Appearing on Know Your Enemy gave us a chance to explore a new dimension of our project: to think about the CIO not only as a moment when new social forces on the left converge or spring into action, but also as a cauldron for conservatives and reactionaries—a pre-history of the modern conservative movement—some of which would continue to dominate the American political scene for generations. The episode also was an occasion to return to some core themes: an account of the American working class as internally stratified, riven with internal struggles, and shot through with competing strategies and interests. In particular, we talk plenty about the political right within the labor movement, and the vaciliations of what some might call the “middle class,” whose zigzags so often stamp the outcomes of open political contests.
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
This week our crew at Fragile Juggernaut is delivering our second special bonus-episode: while we are on a brief summer hiatus, Andrew and Ben sum up the first half of our mini-series, drawing together the core themes of our show so far and discussing where we’ll go in the second half.
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