Book Reviews : Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States. By Sharon Smith. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2006. 377 pp. $16 paper
Abstract
Book ReviewsSubterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States. By Sharon Smith. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2006. 377 pp. $16 paper SAGE Publications, Inc.2007DOI: 10.1177/0160449X0703100418 Bill Shields In Subterranean Fire, Sharon Smith gives us a greatest-hits recounting of upsurges in U.S. working class and labor struggles. She takes us through several periods of labor movement growth, the reasons for them and the role of the organized left in each. For readers dealing with the political realities of 2006, this is bracing, even inspiring stuff. We need to be reminded that it has not always been so much about neocons and WalMart. For that reason, I recommend the book. However, like other such attempts to remember and thus help revive worker militance, it reveals too little about the long slow periods in between upsurges and needs to be complemented by studies that paint a fuller portrait of historical context and the whole array of class forces, such as Who Built America, a two-volume U.S. history written from a "bottom up" perspective. Smith starts by addressing the issue of America Exceptionalism. She argues that, while frontier land availability and working-class complexity blunted class-consciousness, these factors had faded