Three contributions here place important developments in US- centered labor history within a larger geopolitical framework. “Sinn Féinism,” argues Elizabeth McKillen about the men and women who joined the cause of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rebellion and merged the Irish nationalist struggle with the larger antiwar movement, “needs to be considered alongside Bolshevism, Socialism, and anarchism in any assessments of American radicalism in the early twentieth century.” Centered on anti-British boycott leaders like New York’s Leonora O’Reilly of the Irish Women’s Purchasing League and Chicago Federation of Labor leader John Fitzpatrick, McKillen tracks a story that extends from Dublin’s General Post Office in 1916 through Farmer-Labor politics as well as syndicalist actions in the 1920s. Only slowly did the maneuvering of a Gompers- dominated AFL together with the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 quiet the “threat” of this chapter of transnational radicalism.
In a second article, Jeff Schuhrke...
