Dynamite : The Story of Class Violence in America

"Dynamite harkens back to an era of American capitalism a little less glossy, a little bloodier, and with striking parallels to today."--Feminist Review

Labor disputes have produced more violence over a longer period of time in the United States than in any other industrialized country in the world. From the 1890s to the 1930s, hardly a year passed without a serious—and often deadly—clash between workers and management. Written in the 1930s, and with a new introduction by Mike Davis, Dynamite recounts a fascinating and largely forgotten history of class and labor struggle in America’s industrial beginnings.

It is the story of brutal exploitation, massacres, and judicial murders of the workers. It is also the story of their response: when peaceful strikes yielded no results, workers fought back by any means necessary.

Louis Adamic has written the classic story of labor conflict in America, detailing many episodes of labor violence, including the Molly Maguires, the Homestead Strike, Pullman Strike, Colorado Labor Wars, the Los Angeles Times bombing, as well as the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Louis Adamic emigrated from Slovenia when he was fifteen years old and quickly joined the American labor force. The author of eleven books, he is now recognized as a great figure in early twentieth-century American literature. He was found shot to death in a burning farmhouse in 1954.

Introduction by Jon Bekken, co-author of The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years, 1905–2005 and co-editor of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review.

Louis Adamic (1898­1951) was one of the best-known ethnic American authors of the twentieth century. His politics, firmly on the left, were always controversial. In circumstances that remain a mystery, in 1951, Adamic was found shot dead in his burning farmhouse in Milford, New Jersey. A former meatcutter and long-distance truck driver, Mike Davis teaches urban theory and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He is the author Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb and City of Quartz. He lives in San Diego.