<p> This thesis examines the premodern and ethnically stratified labor and social structure maintained at Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach, California during the early-to-mid twentieth century as an expression and performance of an idealized regional identity with roots in a romanticized sense of past and place. Amid dramatic urbanization, industrialization, and corporatization, the rancho&rsquo;s owners, Fred and Florence Bixby, made significant efforts to maintain past views, technology, and paternalistic social relations with their Mexican employee tenants. To be sure, the desire to preserve an idealized western lifestyle as well as a particular class position motivated such efforts. Moreover, while this daily performance of an idealized regionalism signified a rejection of the modern progress hailed by most elite white southern Californians, it nevertheless constituted a conscious exercise in defining modernity.</p>

One hundred and forty-six women, most of them young immigrants, died in the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City's Lower East Side on March 25, 1911. One of the worst industrial disasters in the history of the United States, it confirmed the belief of progressives that unregulated industrialism had gone awry. This tragedy, however, have rise to a campaign for protective labor legislation in the Empire State and provided historians with an example of the reform impulse in the years prior to World War I. This dissertation makes the case, both implicitly and explicitly, that this disaster, if examined in both a social and a political context, can be used to increase our understanding of three broad aspects of the history and historiography of the progressive era. First, it can help us to evaluate the debate among historians over the true extent and effectiveness of the reform movement. Secondly, it will help us examine how coalitions of diverse and incompatible groups temporarily united to demand reform legislation, and finally it can allow us to interweave many histories of the era--the immigrant experience, American radicalism, trade unionism, the suffrage movement, and progressive reform--that formerly have been analyzed as separate stories. The idea of limitations is emphasized in each of the dissertation's predominate themes. The reform initiative, in terms of both its liberalism and the effectiveness of the legislation it produced were limited. Furthermore, the degree of cooperation generated by the reform coalition that responded to the Triangle Fire was temporary and produced few enduring associations. The ongoing historical debate regarding the meaning and the results of progressivism has produced extensive but incoherent opinions which call for further scholarly clarification. This dissertation not only provides a framework for further analyzing the events surrounding the Triangle Fire, it also produces additional information about progressivism--its membership, its goals, its achievements, and the political and social environment which produced the movement.

The present study examines organized labor's role in American political and economic life during the Nixon years. In the 1960s, most observers regarded American workers as economically secure and content. Events at the close of the decade, however, undermined the image of the affluent worker. Workers' support for conservative candidates George Wallace and Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign convinced many observers that blue-collar Americans had swung to the right. In the election's aftermath, analysts of various political persuasions tried to explain “the blue-collar blues.” According to the mainstream press, white workers had become more concerned with social issues—ghetto rioting, campus unrest, widespread anti-war protest, the breakdown of law and order—than about “traditional” economic issues. Richard Nixon hoped to capitalize on the Social Issue to woo white workers and fashion a new Republican majority. But the relationship between the Nixon Administration, a traditionally Democratic labor leadership, a radicalized student movement, and a volatile rank and file proved to be highly complex. Large-scale strikes against the General Electric and General Motors corporations in 1969 and 1970 showed that workers still considered economic issues to be of paramount concern. Workers and their unions did not uniformly support U.S. policy in Vietnam; indeed, during the Nixon years, unionists became more outspoken in their opposition to the war. Some unions even attempted a rapprochement with segments of the New Left. Organized labor denounced Nixon's attempts to combat the inflationary spiral the Vietnam War had triggered. Nixon nevertheless won substantial blue-collar support during his 1972 reelection campaign. He did so not by playing the social issues but by neutralizing the Vietnam War and economic concerns. Nixon's victory proved to be short lived, however. The economic recession of 1973 took its toll on the workers and their unions. The energy crisis launched a devastating round of de-industrialization. By 1974, Nixon's blue-collar support had collapsed. For all their discontent, white workers had not become members of the new Republican majority. They were displeased with their position in American society, however, and their votes were available for courting.

In 1945, the business community worried about its ability to shape the post-war political and economic reconstruction. Industrialists had lost enormous prestige in the depression, and during the New Deal faced sharp challenges from liberalism and organized labor. World War II provided business leaders with an opportunity to restore their reputation if not their dominance, but in the post-war decade there were a number of major national issues still open to debate. American society had yet to reach a consensus on the relationship of government to the economy, on the proper size of the welfare state, and on the scope of union power in the factory. The business community began mobilizing to regain the political and economic initiative in this debate. This study explores the business community's ideological attack against its primary opponent, organized labor, and against tile liberal, New Deal philosophy unions represented. It also examines the ways workers and their unions both resisted and reshaped employer actions. In the years after World War II, the business leaders engaged in an attempt to restructure the ideas and images that constituted America's political culture. They conducted a widespread and intensive campaign to sell Americans on the virtues of individualism as opposed to collectivism or unions, freedom as opposed to state control and centrality of the free enterprise system to the American way of life. The most obvious efforts to shape ideology and to create the more conservative, consensual political climate that historians associate with the fifties took place at the national level. National business organizations like the Advertising Council orchestrated massive public relations campaigns that relied on the mass media to sell business and capitalism. Employers also recognized the need for more direct connection with the public. Sensing that organized labor challenged their ability to shape worker attitudes and provide political leadership, moderate as well as conservative employers sought to undermine union power through a program that drew upon human relations and welfarism in order to build worker allegiance to the firm. Fearing for lost authority beyond their factory gates, employers also instituted sophisticated community relations programs promoting the free enterprise system.