Description:
In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri, Gregg Andrews examines the history of factory laborers in a celebrated Mississippi River town. In the late 1890s, shoe manufacturing transformed Mark Twain's boyhood home from a steamboat village to a factory town. By the mid-1920s, the St. Louis-based International Shoe Company, the world's largest shoe manufacturer at the time, controlled all shoe production in Hannibal and continued to do so until it shut down production lines in the 1960s. The company kept a tight grip on the town as it battled to keep out unions and maintain labor at a low cost and in a malleable state. When Hannibal's shoe workers claimed their right to organize under the New Deal during the Great Depression, the shoe corporation was defiant. The company's stance sparked mob violence against outside union organizers, nurtured a company union, pitted unionists against company loyalists, and badly divided Hannibal. At the same time, the town was engaged in yearlong festivities to celebrate the centennial of Mark Twain's birth and the opening of a museum named in his honor.
Andrews's study of shoe manufacturing and its production workers is thick in detail and rich with the human stories of those whose lives were shaped by the rise and fall of the shoe industry in Hannibal. Andrews captures the shoe workers--white and Black, men and women--in their own words as they describe their jobs, family struggles, and battles to unionize. Andrews examines the prevailing conditions that led the company to close its production facilities in Hannibal, leaving shoe workers and the town to confront the early shock waves of deindustrialization. His study of an industry that has virtually disappeared in the United States leaves a record for the families of thousands of American shoe workers and the citizens of Hannibal to better understand their history and the role shoe manufacturing played in it.Brief description: Gregg Andrews is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Texas State University and author, most recently, of Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853-1920.
Review Quotes: "Gregg Andrews, a gifted historian of labor and transnationalism, gives us a stirring and timely history that lays bare the strategies of management and the varied responses of shoe workers in the river city put on the map by Mark Twain. Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri shows how the largest shoe company in the early 1900s moved manufacturing outside the Midwest center of production in St. Louis for cheap labor, leaving governments and workers in the smaller cities to compete for investment and jobs. The strategy aimed to undermine the power of organized labor and community solidarity, but, as Andrews shows, it never extinguished the multiple forms of resistance by workers seeking better pay, safer conditions, and a thriving community."--David Roediger, author of An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education