1. Applebaum, Leon. “A Lock-Out: The Hosiery Workers in Kenosha, 1928-1929”. IN: Holter, Darryl. Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology. Madison, Wis.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin; 1999; pp. 82-87. Notes: Excerpted from his article, “Turmoil in Kenosha: The Allen-A Hosiery Dispute of 1928-1929,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (v. 70, no. 4), Summer 1987, p. 281-303.
  1. —. “Turmoil in Kenosha: The Allen-A Hosiery Dispute of 1928-1929”. Wisconsin Magazine of History. 1987; 70(4):281-303. Notes: Discusses a bitter and tumultuous strike by the American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers Branch 6 against the Allen-A Hosiery Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Only about half of the firm’s employees worked in the full-fashioned department which was involved in the strike; this department made silk stockings and had two categories of employees: the knitters (primarily men), who knit the foot of the stocking and the toppers (primarily young women), who attached each foot to the leg of the stocking, which the knitters then seamed together. Dissension had been growing between the employees and the company prior to the strike due to management’s announced intention to adopt an emerging industry trend to require each skilled knitter to supervise two knitting machines, rather than the previous practice of only one machine. On February 15, 1928 management precipated the strike by firing all their knitters and announcing that only those knitters who were not in a union would be re-hired the next day; the approximately 250 knitters and their supporters among the approximately 450 toppers went on strike in the morning.With the 1,300 Allen-A employees making up almost ten percent of the total factory workers in Kenosha, the effects of the strike were felt throughout the community, including political repercussions in city government. The police chief and the city manager, both of whom had tried to remain neutral regarding the labor dispute, were removed from office by the businessmen on the city council. In March 1928, when the strikers held a mass picket in defiance of a federal injunction which prohibited any activity in furtherance of the strike, many strikers were arrested and brought to trial, but a jury found them innocent; the company responded with additional legal challenges.
  1. Daniels, Newell. “Report of I.G.S. at the First Grand Lodge Meeting, held at Rochester, New York, in 1868”. K.O.S.C. Monthly Journal: Devoted to the Interests of the Knights of St. Crispin. 1873 Jan; 1(4):[97]-105. Notes: Daniels, the driving force behind the creation of the Knights of St. Crispin, a national union of shoemakers which was founded in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, provides details here on the founding of the union; based on this account by Daniels’, Frederick Merk (in his “The Labor Movement in Wisconsin During the Civil War”) explains that at the time of the union’s founding, the Milwaukee factory shoemaking system predominantly employed shoemakers of Irish extraction, while custom shoemaking in the city was mostly done by shoemakers of German heritage, resulting in Lodge No. 1 of the new union being formed by Daniels and his fellow Irish factory shopmates, and that then “Daniels induced the German Custom Shoemakers’ Union of Milwaukee to … join the order as Lodge No. 2” (p. 180); Merk also identifies the eleven additional Wisconsin lodges as having been organized at: Racine, Waukesha, Janesville, Kenosha, Watertown, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Sheboygan, LaCrosse, Portage, and Oshkosh.This issue of the K.O.S.C. Monthly Journal also appears as item L 822 in the microfilm set, Pamphlets in American History: Labor.
  1. Karsh, Bernard. “Anatomy of a Strike in Marinette”. IN: Holter, Darryl. Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology. Madison, Wis.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin; 1999; pp. 206-218. Notes: An excerpt from Karsh’s book, Diary of a Strike (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1958); in the second edition of his book (published in 1982), Karsh had revealed the real names of those involved in the strike he is discussing in Diary of a Strike–it was a strike by International Ladies Garment Workers Union Local 480 against the Marinette Knitting Mills in Marinette, Wisconsin.
  1. Karsh, Bernard. Diary of a Strike. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press; 1958. 180 p.Notes: In a town identified only as “Saylor,” a former lumber town and port city on the upper Great Lakes, the entire process of a strike for union recognition and a first contract is explored from beginning to end. Karsh, a social scientist, examines the question of how the will was created and sustained among the workers at a local mill, which produced “an expensive line of soft goods” (p. 17), to form a union and to go on strike to win that union. The actual names of the town, the company, the union, and the strike’s key participants were not revealed until the second edition of this book came out in 1981, but everything else in this compelling story is real; see the abstract provided for the second edition of the book for the actual names.“Some of the material included in this book first appeared in an article in the American Journal of Sociology and in The Worker Views His Union, published by the University of Chicago Press.”–preface, p. xiii.
  1. Karsh, Bernard. Diary of a Strike. 2nd ed. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press; 1982. 177 p.Notes: A sociologist’s look at the process of a strike against the Marinette Knitting Mills by International Ladies Garment Workers Union Local 480 from July 12, 1951 through October 25, 1951 in Marinette, Wisconsin. This second edition for the first time supplies the actual names of the town, the company, the union, and the strike’s key participants; the author explains in his preface here that, “in accord with standard practice in social science research, many of the identifying names were changed” in the original edition, but that the “need to disguise informants has diminished” since then (p. viii).This is a compellingly-told story and in his foreword to this edition, Sol C. Chaikin, the president of the I.L.G.W.U., explains why:

    “This is an unusual book, and still more unusual among works of non-fiction. Its subject matter–the daily events surrounding a strike of garment workers in Wisconsin–is the stuff of novels or motion pictures. Rarely is this story told by academics or journalists–and rarely so well as in this study. This work is not fiction, not propaganda, but reality: history as it actually was, and actually is.

    “Normally, when strikes are described, much is left out. Scholars most often take a perspective that is overly broad or coolly statistical. They lose the human drama, the sacrifice, the courage, the disappointment, the joys, even the humor. But who, after reading this book, will forget the moment when the company tried to have its winter heating coal sent through the mail?

    “Reporters for newspapers and television are better at relating the dramatic events of a strike, yet they too miss much of what a labor dispute is all about–the ebbs and flows, the subtle nuances of tactics, the improvisations, the countless decisions and countless details, the accumulation of small incidents that add up to a major confrontation. I think one has to live day by day with a strike to understand fully what is involved. Short of that, one can read Bernard Karsh’s book.” (p. [v])

    “Some of the material included in this book first appeared in an article in The American Journal of Sociology and in The Worker Views His Union, a book published by the University of Chicago Press.”–preface to the 1981 edition, p. xv.

    Reviewed: Goldman, Paul (reviewer). Work and Occupations, v. 11, no. 2 (May 1984), p. 227-228.

  1. Lescohier, Don D. “The Knights of St. Crispin, 1867-1874: A Study in the Industrial Causes of Trade Unionism”. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin: Economics and Political Science Series. 1910; 7(no. 1 (also published separately in May 1910 as no. 355)):1-102. Notes: Founded in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, through the enterprising efforts of Newell Daniels (a recent transplant to Wisconsin from Massachusetts), this union for shoemakers went on to become a national union, growing by 1870 to eleven Wisconsin “lodges” in addition to the Milwaukee lodge, as well as many outside of the state and with an overall national membership of 50,000. The organization became powerful enough to win several strikes around the country, but collapsed over the short period from 1872 to 1874, due to a number of factors, including changes in the markets and in mechanical methods used in the trade. Lescohier concentrates in his work on telling the national story of the union. Frederick Merk, in his “The Labor Movement in Wisconsin During the Civil War,” identifies the eleven additional Wisconsin lodges as having been organized at: Racine, Waukesha, Janesville, Kenosha, Watertown, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Sheboygan, LaCrosse, Portage, and Oshkosh.
  1. Miller, Eugene. “Leo Krzycki–Polish American Labor Leader”. Polish American Studies. 1976 Autumn; 33(2):[52]-64. Notes: Leo Krzycki was born in 1881 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and made his home there his entire life, while rising to national prominence as a talented, effective union organizer in the garment industry and serving as a vice-president with Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (A.C.W.A.). This article discusses Krzycki’s entire life and career from his early recollections of the 1886 Bay View Massacre (part of the national struggle in the movement to win an eight-hour work day) through his death on January 22, 1966.Krzycki’s first union involvement began, when at age fifteen “he led a group of young press tenders out on an unsuccessful strike at a local lithography plant” (p. 53). After a period of having been blacklisted as a result of that strike, he eventually returned to lithography work in Milwaukee and from 1904 until 1908 was general vice-president of the Lithographic Press Feeders Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. His work with the A.C.W.A. began in 1910 and lasted until his retirement in 1948. His formidable oratorical skills were frequently used in the organizing campaigns of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, especially in their steel, automobile, rubber, and packing house drives. In addition, Krzycki several times served as a representative of American labor at international labor conferences.
  1. Pesotta, Rose. Bread Upon the Waters. Edited by, John Nicholas Beffel. New York: Dodd, Mead; 1944. 435Notes: See p. 183-190 for Pesotta’s autobiographical account of organizing female cotton dress workers with International Ladies Garment Workers Union (I.L.G.W.U.) Local 188 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1935. Pesotta, a well-known U.S. woman labor organizer, also comments upon an I.L.G.W.U. strike in Racine, Wisconsin by female rainwear workers against the Chicago Rubber Company.Another edition: Pesotta, Rose; edited by John Nicholas Beffel. Bread Upon the Waters. Ithaca, N.Y.: I.L.R. Press, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 1987. This reprint added a section of photographs and an introduction by Ann Schofield.
  1. —. “Organizing Garment Workers”. IN: Holter, Darryl. Workers and Unions in Wisconsion: A Labor History Anthology. Madison, Wis.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin; 1999; pp. 147-150. Notes: Reproduces from her autobiography, Bread Upon the Waters, the portions about her organizing experience in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, on behalf of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
  1. Petran, Tabitha. “Leo Krzycki: Fifty Years a Servant of the People”. Slavic American. 1947 Fall; ???