Workers and Politics in the Immigrant City in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

A consideration of workers and politics in the early twentieth-century United States must take into account a variety of changes that confronted the working class in this era: the fashioning of a new national state role, the remaking of politics, and finally the remaking of the working class itself.Analysis of American politics in this particular era has been dominated by the paradigm of "The System of 1896" and the model of urban "machine politics."These two concepts represent a widely accepted framework of analysis that demonstrates the integration of the working class into the political system and the consequent muting of class concerns within that system.Our task is to investigate these concepts to measure their useful ness in explaining working-class consciousness and its impact on politics.Specifically, the investigation must examine the dynamics of local-level politics, where working-people's activities had their greatest strength and resonance.This essay will examine these ideas and suggest an alternative understanding of the politics of workers, and especially of immigrants, in this era.At the turn of the century, the United States had recovered from the economic and political turmoil of the 1890s depression and entered three decades of political stability known as the "System of 1896."This system

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