The Strike in the Temple of Consumption: Consumer Activism and Twentieth-Century American Political Culture
Author(s)
Glickman, Lawrence B.
Abstract
In September 1935 forty-one employees of a small firm in rural New Jersey walked off the job to establish a picket line. In a year of more than two thousand strikes involving well over one million workers, neither the size of the strike nor its proximate cause- management’s refusal to recognize a duly elected union- stood out. Yet it was “one of the strangest strikes in American history,” as a participant declared many years later. In its six month duration, during a year of notable labor upheavals, this small strike became of one of the most talked about. Reinhold Niebuhr chaired a committee of luminaries that investigated the strike, one of the first adjudicated by the newly created National Labor Relations Board.
