Izlaganje sa skupa
Radnička Straža / Workingman’s Guard as a Source for Studying the Position of Our Emigrants in the Labor and Socialist Movement in the United States of America, 1907–1918
Nada Hranilović
; Institut za migracije i narodnosti, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
The labor movement in the United States became a modern and powerful one at the turn of the century. The workers and socialists' movement among Croatian emigrants there started to develop early in this century. The main precondition for our workers' inclusion in the American labor and socialist movements was the development of their class consciousness and of their awareness of the need for changing the existing social relations. This is why it was necessary to initiate a workers' paper in the Croatian language through which our workers in the United States could become instructed in socialism and the class struggle of both the American and the working class in general. Radnička straža, the first workers and socialists' paper of Croatian emigrants in the United States, was first published in Chicago in 1907. In 1911 as many as a dozen socialist papers were published in that city, of which three in the languages of Yugoslav emigration (Radnička straža, Proletarec – Proletarian, and Narodni glas – The voice of the people). Under the appellation of Radnička straža, the paper was published until 1918, greatly influencing the establishment of socialist clubs and Croatian emigrants' associations all over the United States, as well as their unification in the Yugoslav Socialist League. Radnička straža was the League's official paper. From its first publication to 1918 the paper was unwaveringly for the workers' cause, supporting an improvement of their living and working conditions, their right to association, their political rights (especially those of American female workers), and their right to striking, while also condemning children's work, etc. Although Radnička straža did not take an appropriate stand vis-à-vis the work-ing class' methods of destroying the capitalist social order, pleading, in the first place, for “a cultural battle, organization, and the book” as the fundamental means of the class struggle, its contribution to the development of the workers' and socialists' movement among Yugoslav emigration, to the American labor movement and the entire world labor movement is substantial. Because of such a conception, Radnička straža is, naturally, a valuable source for studying the place and role of Yugoslav emigrants in the U. S. labor and socialist movement.
Ključne riječi
emigrants; labour movement; socialist movement; Croats; United States of America; Radnička straža
Hrčak ID:
128161
URI
Datum izdavanja:
31.5.1988.
Posjeta: 1.242 *