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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Chad E. Pearson, "Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century" (UNC Press, 2022)
Description: During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers, government officials, journalists, and powerful individuals deployed a variety of violent tactics to control ordinary people and workers who sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. Drawing together the various groups who engaged in this violence, Cha...