White working class Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves in a social order that was fundamentally reorganizing itself. The railroads stitched the nation together at the same time as they began to wrench people and communities out of their rural or agrarian ways of life. The abolishment of slavery meant that agriculture needed to be altered within the south, and it drove many Americans to seek out new ways to reassert the racial hierarchies that had so long been the heart of America's social order. Some working class whites looked to new political movements to answer the emerging questions and difficulties of the changing times. Many acted to strengthen the labor movement, but found fierce and violent resistance from businessmen and corporations. Ultimately, it was a difficult and perilous time for the white working class, fraught with numerous failures and some successes. Essentially, the emergence...
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