Working to Save the Soul of American Democracy Anarchist Women in the Great Depression: Rose Pesotta and Dorothy Day

Abstract

Abstract This thesis explores how immigrant anarchist women helped shape the labor movement from the mid-1910s until the U.S. entered World War II in 1941. Using a short biography of Rose Pesotta, the highest ranking female labor leader from 1934-1944, this thesis argues that anarchism remained relevant to the labor movement during the interwar period by creatively adapting to harsh realities. A workers’ education movement, founded by anarchist women in 1914, de-emphasized the violent tactics of the IWW syndicalists, and adopted Pragmatic philosophy during the 1920s, which appealed widely across the Old Left. As the backlash against radicals came to a crescendo with the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, these pragmatic anarchists—contrary to traditional immigrant anarchists, who became more insular and insurrectionary—adapted their praxis to suit the conditions, and built alliances with radicals, such as left leaning socialists and communists. They Americanized their socialist message in order to reach what had become a primarily native born industrial workforce by the mid-1930s, in part, by describing themselves as revolutionaries, rather than as anarchists. This allowed them to help usher in the CIO and to see native born striking workers finally adopt their socialist ideals by uniting in solidarity with fellow workers to demand more democratic workplaces. But these mainly white, male workers did so by linking these ideas to America’s revolutionary past, rather than the immigrant ghettos where they had originated. During and after World War II, the CIO ingratiated itself to the state and to employers, becoming more and more centralized and bureaucratic, and less democratic. Later, creative forms of anarchism re-emerged among marginalized groups, but mainly outside the labor unions.