Books like Labor's New Millions — picked by fans

I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.

But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.

The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.

As a reader of history, I’m often drawn to novels, and when it comes to historical nonfiction, I favor books that combine epic tales with personal drama.

The Long Deep Grudge hits that nail on the head. It recounts the long-running conflict between the Farm Equipment Workers (FE)—a small communist-led labor union—and the corporate behemoth International Harvester. It also features a host of memorable individuals: radical and anticommunist labor leaders, captains of industry, public officials dedicated to preserving private wealth, and rank-and-file workers fighting for power on the job out of love for one another as well as anger at the boss.

Although the FE ultimately fell victim to the Red Scare, this is a fundamentally inspiring book about how much a militant democratic union can accomplish. 

When workers organize, it’s not only for themselves and for generations to come, but also a response to suffering by generations past.

Thomas Bell (born Adalbert Belacyk) brings this to light in his saga of Slovak-American life in steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in a family much like the one at the novel’s center. The story stretches from the 1880s into the mid-1930s, culminating with the unionization of U.S. Steel, a megacorporation that had previously crushed all efforts at labor organizing.

No book offers a more intimate view of what it took to bring this company to the bargaining table, and the unforgettable chapters on family members who didn’t live to see that victory make clear that the fight for a contract manifested a longer, more fundamental struggle for justice and human dignity.   

Time and again, I’ve given this book to folks in need of inspiration or opened it on a bad day to remind myself of the astonishing inventiveness, generosity, and stamina working people possess.

Recounting the life of a Mexican-American farm worker who became a community activist and union organizer, the book emerged from hundreds of hours of conversation in which Maria Elena Lucas told her story to Fran Leeper Buss and from hundreds of pages of creative writing Lucas had earlier produced. The result is riveting, because of the breadth of Lucas’s experience and the depth of what she shares about her inner life.

Especially stirring to me are the passages that lay out a personal theology that sees the divine in ordinary people and identifies God as a woman of color seeking the best for her children.    

Ribuffo could have portrayed his subjects—three mid-century Christian fundamentalists—as social or cultural misfits. Instead, he made a powerful case that these men—and others like them— were a product of the American mainstream. First published in the 1980s, when the so-called new Christian right was in its ascendancy, the book encouraged readers to check any temptation they might have felt to dismiss Protestant fundamentalists as political outliers who would disappear of their own accord. Generous almost to a fault, Ribuffo gave me plenty of advice during my own research to avoid any suggestion that there was anything un-American about fascist sympathies in the interwar years. 

This is a little-known gem by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder (best known for his play Our Town). Published in the 1935, it’s a contemporaneous account of Depression-era America, following the misadventures of traveling salesman and religious zealot, George Brush. 

Coming off as preachy and self-righteous, George sparks ire and outrage wherever he goes. Yet, he’s a sincere and decent person. At the end of his misadventures, George is humbled and begins to broaden his views, making him a complex, sympathetic character.

Though renowned during his lifetime, Wilder has been largely forgotten in favor of flashier contemporaries. All of his works are worth rediscovering, but Heaven’s My Destination is closest to my heart as it was a major inspiration for my own book.  

I was fascinated by this story of how a courageous young girl abandoned by her parents managed to survive during the Great Depression in rural Michigan. I felt a motherly concern for the heroine who not only confronts people’s reluctance to help a girl from a “trashy” family but also popular prejudices underestimating the potential of young women and consigning them to limited roles in society.

As if this were not enough, she must evade child-trafficking schemes! I loved the dramatic twists in the plot as well as the personal growth the heroine demonstrates as she struggles against formidable odds.

Every Father’s Day, someone or the other on my social media feed will post Robert Hayden’s wonderful poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The poem takes me back not only to the many acts of kindness and unheralded small sacrifices that my father made but also to the ambition and the anxiety of Seepersad Naipaul on behalf of his son away at Oxford and starting in life as a writer, a writer who later in life will win the Nobel Prize.

The poignant part of this drama is the father’s own ambition and anxiety about making it as a writer. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the son receives a telegram with some terrible news. He sends his family a telegram in return: “= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO”

I love this poetic chronicle of three generations of an Iowa farm family, making a go of it for 125 years on the same farm, dating from the great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, arriving for the first time on a newly-purchased farm. 

The lives of these folks and their neighbors were shaped by two world wars and the Great Depression, thriving through faith, love, self-reliance, and community.

I love it because it describes exactly how Wall Street used to work in the bad old days of the early 1900s, before the Great Crash and the Great Depression, before sweeping reforms turned it into what is today. I learned so much from this story about the characters who dominated the Street and set it up for failure.

I see all sorts of parallels with the growth of cryptocurrencies and the scams that surround that industry. I love the way Sinclair describes the Wild West, the ferociously greedy mentality of the players back then, and how he details the machinations of Ponzi schemers and fraudsters before there were any laws barring such scoundrels from doing whatever they pleased with gullible investors’ money.