Stalin Over Wisconsin: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950

For union organizers, community activists, and labor scholars the republication of Stephen Meyer’s Stalin Over Wisconsin: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 is especially timely.

Meyer tells the story of fiercely militant, and Communist-influenced, UAW Local 248, which represented the huge Allis-Chalmers plant outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Founded during the heyday of industrial unionism in the 1930s, Local 248’s history demonstrates how, against all odds, a forceful rank-and-file union can be built—and how and why it can be undermined.