Work Out West history

In 1869, the first American Transcontinental Railroad was completed.

By 1880, nearly 56,000,000 acres had thus found their way into private hands.

The continental rail network grew steadily, and by 1884 four great lines joined the central Mississippi Valley area with the Pacific.

Moreover the book resurrected and romanticized the IWW, lavishing a good portion of its energy on stories of violence by and especially against Wobblies, many of whom in 1931 were still languishing in prison.

The explosion of strikes and organizing that attended the early New Deal found some of their most dramatic expression on the West Coast where the 1934 longshoreman's walkout led to a four-day-long general strike in San Francisco and sympathy strikes in ports up and down the coast.

The passage of the National Industrial Relations Act in 1935 set off the greatest era of labor activism in American history as two union federations (the older American Federation of Labor and the new Congress of Industrial organizations) competed to organize millions of workers into unions.

Spelled out in his 1949 book, California: The Great Exception, it formally argues the uniqueness of California's labor history but easily extends to most of the rest of the West.

E.P. Thompson's magisterial, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) became the touchstone for the "New Labor Historians" who followed its lead in using social history to probe beyond unions into work and social life, class formation, and the traditions of radical politics.

Dubofsky set this up in a widely read 1966 article, "The Origins of Western Working Class Radicalism" in which he drew attention to the Western Federation of Miners, the militant, socialist-linked union that helped launch the IWW. Dubofsky turned the WFM into the prototype for western radicalism.