Historian publishes book on labor politics in the 1890s

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History assistant professor Michael Pierce’s latest tome is hot off the presses: Striking with the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party (Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). Historians have typically thought of Populism as a radical agrarian movement. In this much-needed corrective, Pierce argues that in Ohio Populism was an urban, not rural, movement, and that industrial workers and trade unionists formed the core of the state’s People’s (or Populist) party. Through case studies of Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Pierce examines the efforts of Ohio workers—especially the United Mine Workers—to protect the rights of workers, curb the abuses of corporations, and reform the state’s and nation’s government through an alliance with the People’s party.

Striking with the Ballot focuses on the Crisis of the 1890s, when the Panic of 1893, the Pullman strike, and boycott, the arrest of Debs, Coxey’s march, and the failure of the nationwide coal strike threw the country into disarray. Pierce demonstrates that trade unionists in Ohio responded by mobilizing politically under the banner of the People’s party. Rather than shrinking from broad-based reform, Ohio’s trade unionists embraced it and called for the expansion of state and national governments to protect workers from the abuses of corporations.

Pierce is the co-editor of Builders of Ohio: A Biographical History and co-author of In the Worker’s Interest: A History of the Ohio A.F.L.-C.I.O., 1958-1998 as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and review essays in venues ranging from Labor History to the Journal of American History. He teaches classes in American history, Arkansas history and labor history.