Networked Labor

Spatial Networks of Economic Power

Map of more than 3,900 union leaders in 1946.

What did peak union power look like on the ground in human terms? Decades of scholarship, still evolving, gives us a nuanced sense of local struggles linked to national and international issues. But it is sometimes harder to get a holistic sense of the movement, to see the linkages across organizations and campaigns. How were labor’s “strategic actors” distributed across the landscape of industrial society? Was the organizational terrain full of links between groups and people of different backgrounds, or barriers separating activists?

We can get some preliminary answers by mapping the 1946 Who’s Who in Labor. The directory contains nearly 4,000 entries, and like earlier directories has certain limitations. Labor union officials in 1946 were disproportionately male and predominately Euro-American. Unlike the directors of the mid-1920s that encompassed a “labor movement” of unions, political parties, and cooperatives, the postwar version sticks pretty close to the union movement itself. On the plus side, the labor movement of 1946 was yet to be ravaged by the Cold War anticommunist crusades. Still in the ranks were left-led unions that would be expelled in 1949. Leadership of unions like the UE, FE, FTA, Mine Mill, United Public Workers, and the Furriers.

Over the next few months I will be refining this data set, but for now I offer a spatial comparison between members of the AFL and the CIO. (If the embedded map doesn’t resolve, try this link: AFL and CIO Leaders, 1946 with AFL in Green and CIO in blue). A few initial thoughts on this map. First, while union leaders are pretty dense across the Midwest and Northeast, one can clearly see the clustering of CIO leaders in larger cities, and the spread of AFL leaders across the less densely populated areas. Manhattan, for instance, is densely packed with union officials–not surprising, but visually striking. Across the South, there are relatively more AFL leaders with the exception of Birmingham and Atlanta.

For now, you have to click on each marker to get information beyond the AFL/CIO distinction. The maps is likely most interesting at the city level where, especially if you know the city and/or its labor history, you can see which leaders lived nearby each other, trace the racial boundaries of neighborhoods, and get a sense of how much influence unions likely had on municipal politics. In the future we’ll add filtering and searching. More to come. Raw data on Github.

Process Notes

In the past, I’ve worked with GoogleMaps and Carto. My colleague Jim Gregory makes extensive use of Tableau to distribute maps and charts from his Mapping American Social Movements project. These commercial packages make it easy to display maps and data, but I am eager to make use of open source platforms. My goal is to keep the data as simple as possible (CSV files) to avoid having the data trapped in a proprietary platform. I am also curious to see whether a person with modest technical background can use these open source platforms and tools. This new batch of data gave me the opportunity to try my hand at Leaflet, an opensource java script library for making online maps.

I turned to the always-helpful site Programming Historian for a lesson on Mapping with Python and Leaflet. I was able to get about half way there on my own, and then got a crucial assist from the staff in our departmental computer support office. You need to learn a bit of Python code so you can run the geocoding program, and in the process you will learn a little about Leaflet. If you can follow instructions, have a modest capacity for troubleshooting, and know some computer science students, then you can do this. Whether you plan to go deeper into these programs or hand it off to an expert, I think it’s probably worth spending a little time understanding the basic concepts behind web mapping.

Labor’s New Men and Women of Power: What did they do in their spare time?

In his 1948 book, The New Men of Power, sociologist C. Wright Mills describe trade union leaders as “strategic actors” at the helm of “the only organizations capable of stopping the main drift toward war and slump.” That quote came to mind as I poured over the pages of the 1946 directory, Who’s Who in Labor, an echo of Solon DeLeon’s 1925 American Labor Who’s Who and Press Directory. From the Baltimore steelworker Edwin Abbott to Joseph Zych, the recording secretary of an AFL federal local in East Chicago, Indiana, the 390 pages cover a lot of human, organization, and geographic territory. There is also a separate section of labor professionals: “Men and Women Who Deal with Labor.”

Like its 1925 counterpart, the postwar labor directory is hard to work with. The text behind the scanned pages is a mess. But the entries are much more systematic than the 1925 directory, making it easier to extract targeted information. Best of all, most entries include sections on Interests, Clubs, and Sports, making it possible to get a sense of what these men and women new to power liked to do in their spare time. With the help of a detail-oriented UCLA undergraduate student, I was able to compile a relatively clean version of the directory–over 3,900 entries.

Using a simple grep command on the directory’s text, I was able to pull out much (although probably not all) of the words listed after the phrase “Interests:” and before the start of the next section (typically “Sports”). Replacing the commas in these lines with hard returns, I compiled a rough and ready list of just over 3,000 interests. The vocabulary is not entirely consistent, and there are a number of obvious OCR errors. That said, it is possible to get a rough picture of what labor leaders “Interests” were (keep in mind that sports and clubs had their own entries).

What was the top interest? Gardening and reading come in at about 200 mentions each, followed by fishing, music, photography, and hunting. Curiously, members of the AFL were more likely to list “gardening,” while members of the CIO were more likely to list “reading.”

Interests of CIO leaders, 1946

Rough assessment of “interests” of AFL leaders drawn from the 1946 “Who’s Who in Labor.”

Interests of AFL leaders, 1946

More Labor Press Data

Following up on the 1925 American Labor Press Directory data set, I’ve worked up a set from the 1940 volume of the same title. Unlike it’s predecessor, the 1940 volume reflects the mainstream status of the labor movement. It was compiled through a WPA project directed by labor economist John R. Commons at the University of Wisconsin.

Of the 680 newspapers listed, only a couple radical papers remain, and there are no (zero) non-English papers. The 1925 directory had about 60 non-English newspapers. Some drop off might be attributed to the passing of the immigrant generation, but more likely that Commons, et al. didn’t think it was important. Still, the 1940 volume reflects the geographic spread of unionism after 1935 with many more papers on the west coast. You can search the data set here. There is also a 1946 “Labor Who’s Who” that includes a much smaller Press Directory. Still waiting on a better quality scan to get the whole directory.

Thick Networks

In this next series of images I’ve shifted the emphasis from the relationship between people and organizations to the links that people share by virtue of belonging to the same organizations. In the former case, both people and organizations are nodes of the network connected by lines (edges). In the latter case, only people are nodes. Organizations are represented by lines connecting people. Each person is connected to every other person with whom they share an organization. The result is a much thicker field of relationships–or at least the appearance of it.

When I cycle through this set of images, I am reminded of brain scan imagery in which various types of stimuli ignite neurons in different parts of the brain. (In the gallery images, the colored dots are connected to the selected person while the white dots are not connected). There are four major clusters. None are completely homogeneous, but in the interest of description I’ll name them as if they are. From left to right, we begin with the immigrant trade union militants (e.g., Pauline Newman, and Rose Schneiderman who is slightly more connected to the WTUL group), move through the central group made up important of union and Socialist leaders (e.g., Debs, Berger, Maurer, Dubinsky) that also includes African American unionists Owen Chandler and Frank Crosswaithe. Moving further to the right we come to the mainstream, unremarkable AFL unionists on the bottom right, and finally at the top right corner we finish with railroad brotherhood leaders.

You can see the visual effect more strongly, although more slowly, in the interactive version of the chart One node network chart.

Mapping the Labor Press

I recently discovered the 1925 American Labor Press Directory, compiled by the same crew that put together the Labor Who’s Who. Luckily, the press directory (ALPD) is much easier to convert to data. There is less information in each entry, and the entries are more regular. Craig Messner at the Center for Digital Humanities did an initial run at it to show me how it could be done. Then I put in the hours with OpenRefine and Excel.

~~Here’s my first map. It shows about 250 of the 800 news sources in the directory, mainly labor, radical, and farmer-labor papers with a national audience.~~ I’ve updated the map with most of the local, Canadian, and Mexican newspapers listed in the directory. It’s notable that Chicago alone had 56 papers (not counting locally focused papers).

What I would like to do next is create links between the ALPD and the ALWW, and between both data sets and public sources like Wikidata. For instance, Vern Smith was the editor of Industrial Solidarity, published at 3333 Belmont in Chicago. His Wikidata entry is here, and links to his Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), which indicates that he is also the author of four books (at least one is wrong). A stronger example is Earl Browder, editor of the Worker’s Monthly (Wikidata, VIAF, LOC Name Authority) The point being there is already linkable data available, and there should be a way to use it to enrich these data sets and vice versa.

But for now, there is more cleaning to do. The local labor papers section is a mess.

Situations and Relations

Back in February, I gave a talk to the UCLA Digital Labor Working Group about my network analysis with the Labor Who’s Who data. You can see my slides here.

Patterns within a welter of information. Red dots represent people, light green dots represent organizations.

I opened with the idea that “the labor movement” is an abstraction–a place-holder phrase that means different things at different times. The American Labor Who’s Who was a particular version of that abstraction, created at a particularly contentious moment in labor history. It was compiled by a team led by Solon De Leon (son of a famous radical polemicist), and published by the Socialist Party aligned Rand School of Social Science. It describes a labor movement that encompasses not only trade unions, but also radical political movements, immigrant organizations, researchers, journalists, and what we would call “NGOs” today. My analysis, drawn from data extracted from the Who’s Who, is an abstraction of an abstraction.

It’s worth beginning with this caveat because computation and data visualization have an aura of legitimacy these days. These network charts (created in Gephi) are representations of reality, not reality itself. They are best used as models of plausible past realities, tools for thinking through problems of historical argument, rather than as illustrations per se.

I began with the broadest and busiest view of the data: all the people in the Who’s Who and organizations they belonged to (slide 1). The mathematical model that creates this chart draws more connected elements, or “nodes,” closer to the center and pushes less connected elements to the edges. A node’s size depends on how connected it is to other nodes, and lines connect people to the organizations they belong to. In these charts, the lines, or edges, have direction. People belong to organizations, so radiate from each person to their corresponding organizations.

In broad strokes, the first graph presents a ring of organizations roughly the same size, three organizations that are noticeably larger on the inside edge of the ring, and several groupings of people inside the ring. Without knowing the names of the people or the organizations, it appears that three or four organizations dominate the institutional field of the labor movement. There is also a lot of “noise.”

The right wing constellation of organizations included the AFL, fraternal societies, and the Democratic and Republican parties.

The left-wing constellation of organizations centered on the Socialist Party.

The next two slides try to filter out some of that noise by focusing on the “right” and “left” flanks of this social formation (think of it as “stage right”). The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Masons dominate the right side of the field (slide 2), surrounded by other fraternal organizations (Elks, Odd Fellows, Moose, etc.), mainstream political parties, and four trade unions–the Printers (ITU), Machinists (IAM), Miners (UMWA), and Carpenters (UBC). On the left (slide 3), the Socialist Party dominates, and is surrounded by independent unions (two garment worker unions and the IWW), left-wing parties and para-party organizations (Communist and Workers parties, the Trade Union Educational League, left-wing youth organizations, and the Workmen’s Circle. Worth noting: the spatial position of a node has no relationship to its place on the left/right political spectrum. The Women’s Trade Union League and the American Federation of Teachers, for instance, are farther away from the SP than the Workers’ Party, for instance. (In future I should probably reorient these vertically!)

Henry Ohl was a leading figure in the Wisconsin labor movement, and the Univ. of Wisconsin School for Workers.

Next come two slides that focus on two individuals who show up near the center of the graph, and represent mediating figures between the AFL and SP-oriented flanks of the movement. Henry Ohl, Jr. (slide 4) was a Milwaukee Socialist and a printer who championed the University of Wisconsin’s School for Workers.

Socialist editor Max Hayes was unusually well connected to the key organizations of the 1920s labor movement.

Max Hayes (slide 5) was a Cleveland Socialist–another printer–and the editor of the Cleveland Citizen. Both men started working in their early teens, apprenticed as printers, and were deeply involved in Socialist politics. Compare these two men with William Z. Foster (slide 6). He also linked the AFL and the SP, but by 1925 was publicly associated with the Workers’ Party and is placed farther on the periphery of the graph. Similarly, women union activists sit on the periphery of these network graphs, as do a number of labor intellectuals.

Whether Foster (or Pauline Newman or A. Philip Randolph) was less “central” to the labor movement of 1925 than Ohl or Hayes is not really what the graph explains. Centrality in this model is not the same as “importance.” Ohl and Hayes are more “central” because they were members of fraternal associations, and their membership creates a relationship in this model that draws them closer to the many non-Socialist men who were likewise part of the world of the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, and Moose.

Communist leader William Z. Foster’s network profile.

Unfortunately, we can’t see how this chart would change by 1940 when new leaders and organizations were in the field, and some of those on the periphery in 1925 moved to the center (e.g., Sidney Hillman). But the lack of chronology also helps us see the way careers in the labor movement spanned multiple institutions (e.g., Max Hayes in the Peoples Party and the SP).

Labor and radical history is often told one organization at a time, one city at a time, one campaign at a time. Of course we use the singular focus as a way to get at broader themes. When I researched my first book, I began with IWW harvest workers, and that opened out onto a whole constellation of social forces, places, and people. Network graphs, for all their complications and limitations, turn our eyes first to the relatedness that structures a social field. The “labor movement” of the 1920s was a particularly contentious place where splits between one wing or the other severed ties between erstwhile comrades. But groups and individuals in contentious relationships are still in relationships. A labor movement divided and fighting was still a movement to overturn the worst abuses of capitalism.

An insight I’ve gained from my research on workers’ education in between the world wars is that organizational schisms were not always the end of the story. Quite often they produced more talk, more action, and more learning. “There is no one road to freedom,” said the author of a popular workers’ education pamphlet, “There are roads to freedom.”

**************************

Note: I know the charts mix up colors and orientations. Extracting good charts from Gephi is one of the big challenges of this project, and I’m working on some other–also imperfect–ways to share the visualizations in more active form.

Networked Labor Movement: I reach an impasse, and go around

This is the fourth a series of posts I am writing to help me think through the use of network analysis and visualization.

alww-corrected — A simplified network chart based on the complete ALWW directory. The chart shows only individuals with 3 or more connections.

About seven months ago, I was merrily chugging along on this series using the index of the 1925 American Labor Who’s Who as a database for network analysis when I hit an impasse. I was using the list of names and organizations from the book’s index to build network charts. However, the simple structure of the index, so handy for the analog book, adds a layer of abstraction/interpretation that gets in the way of analysis.

The Labor Who’s Who index presents names according to two types of categories. The first might be called “varieties of organization” and includes American Federation of Labor Affiliated Bodies, Independent Unions, Political Parties, and Miscellaneous. Of these, only “AFL-affiliated” is an organic category. “Political Parties,” on the other hand, is a conceptual category, not an entity that the Socialist Party or the Republican Party affiliated with. At the next level down things get more complicated. Things get even messier in the Miscellaneous category, which includes Journalists and Writers, Negro Progress, Workers Education, and a few others. Unfortunately, the index doesn’t tell us the particular newspapers and organizations that make up these sub-groupings in Miscellaneous.

Neither does the index list all the organizational affiliations listed in individual entries, it is more of a snapshot of what the compilers thought were the most important memberships of each person. The result is a simplified, and perhaps, distorted image of the network of associations, and my research impasse. I was at the point of pulling out particular sections of the network chart (those individuals who sat between the two main groupings), but it seemed better to stop and develop the full database than continue with the index alone.

Easier said than done. The complete directory of over 1,000 names is much messier than the index (see the post “Old Book, New Data”). In addition to basic OCR scanning errors there are a few missing and torn pages in the scanned version. The enormity of the task of cleaning the data myself loomed. One solution was to “crowd source” the data cleaning, but that might take a long time and who would really be interested? Another potential solution was to deploy undergraduate students as a “curated crowd.” Because I was already scheduled to teach an upper division lecture course on American Working Class Movements in the fall of 2014, I developed a course project that included a small amount of data cleaning for students–and (as it turned out) a lot of help from two graduate students in the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities. I’ll write about what went right and wrong with that process in a later post, but the upshot is that now I have a working version of the complete directory.

And with that news, I will begin to post more regularly over the next month.

Networked Labor Movement: Edges and Mediators

This is the third in a series of posts I am writing to help me think through the use of network analysis and visualization.

A more attractive, but somewhat less informational, version of the chart showing the mediators grouped into their own node. Note that the node is green because it is made up of individuals.

My first post in this series off-handedly introduced the phrase “bipolar labor movement”–which I suppose is a nice way to avoid calling it schizophrenic. Then I took a sideways step to flesh out contents of the major categories in the American Labor Who’s Who index. Now we can move on to the look at the connections between all those dots that make the cool-looking network charts (right).

In network analysis lingo these links between people, organizations, and groups of organizations are called “edges.” In this post I’m going to look at a number of different layouts, some of which will be prettier than others. This is partly a function of Gephi, which has two ways of viewing the charts: Overview (not as pretty but more analytically functional) and Preview (less analysis and more graphic beauty).

A network chart based on the index of the American Labor Who's Who (1925). Blue dots represent major categories, red dots are organizations or subcategories, and green dots represent individuals. — A network chart based on the index of the American Labor Who’s Who (1925). Blue dots represent major categories, red dots are organizations or subcategories, and green dots represent individuals.

If you recall from the first post in the series, I came up with something that looks like a scatter plot (left). Green dots represent individuals, red dots represent subcategories of the index, and blue dots represent top-level categories. Below, I’ve used the same image, but made the edges visible.

One of the problems here is that there are so many nodes and links tightly packed that it gets very hard to make sense of them in the aggregate–the main reason I began with a simplified and abstracted version in the first post. In Gephi, you can filter out the less networked nodes (say, anyone who isn’t in at least two categories/groups). But for the moment it’s interesting just to ponder the whole messy lot and look for possible patterns.

Network chart showing edges (linkages) based on index of the American Labor Who’s Who (1925) with major groups labeled.

The clearest bits of new information are that there are a number links, and a group of individuals (green dots) in between the major (blue) nodes This seems potentially important. The individuals in the middle appear to be the bridge that links an otherwise polarized social formation. Did they really have such a function in historical context, or is their position on the chart an artifact of the program parameters that create the chart in the first place?

By selecting this group of nodes in Gephi we can see what they link to: mainly the AFL, Misc. Groups, Journalists and Writers, Political Parties, the Socialist Party, and Workers’ Education. So far so good. These are all likely places to find people who served as liaisons between unions and what today we would call NGOs. Let’s call these people “mediators” because they sit in the middle of, and link, the AFL and everyone else.

The group of roughly 50 individuals who appear between the major nodes have been selected. The bright green lines point to groups/categories they belong to, and the names of those groups are visible. Non-connected nodes are faded in background. Chart produced in Gephi.

Now, for the sake of simplifying the chart, we’ll group the “mediators” into their own node (Below: the green dot in between the two big blue circles. I’ve also rotated the chart to get a closer view). To do this in Gephi, you right-click on the highlighted group and choose “Group” from the menu. With the same mouse command you can tell Gephi to highlight the group in the “Data Laboratory” (i.e., the interface for looking at the underlying tables that make up the charts). In the image below, the “mediators” group and all the nodes it connects to are selected/highlighted. Everything else (non-linked nodes) is faded out. See all the white dots in the green field surrounding the AFL node? Those are non-selected individuals. So this chart represents a sub-network of the broader dataset: the mediators (a group of individuals–green circle) and all the organizations (red) and categories of organizations (blue) they belong to.

The "mediators" have been grouped into a single node and selected. Organizations or categories linked to this group of individuals are visible while non-connected orgs are faded in the background. Network chart created in Gephi. — The “mediators” have been grouped into a single node and selected. Organizations or categories linked to this group of individuals are visible while non-connected orgs are faded in the background. Network chart created in Gephi.

The next step is the figure out who these individuals are. Turns out I’ve selected 54 individuals in all. Among the more well-known are Fannia Cohn (IWGWU, workers’ education), Max Hayes (editor of the Cleveland Citizen and prominent Socialist), Arturo Giovanitti (ILGWU, formerly IWW), Mathew Woll and John Frey (AFL arch-conservatives), Alice Henry (WTUL), Fred Hewitt (editor of Machinists Monthly Journal), and a number of other labor union newspaper editors. I’ll have to spend a little time running through this list to make solid conclusions, but it makes sense that there are so many editors and writers.

But I’m running out of steam and will have to leave that for another day. I will leave you with this much nicer version of the same chart. I’m not sure what it means, but it really looks like a peacock!

Networked Labor Movement–one step backward

This is the second in a series of posts I expect to write to help me think through the use of network analysis and visualization. Read the first post, and a backgrounder.

As one of my correspondents said of my last post: interesting picture, but it’s meaningless without the background data. Well, maybe not meaningless, but abstracted in the extreme. So I’m going to back up a bit, partly for my own sake, to scope out the major categories, subcategories and organizations in the dataset (i.e., the blue and red dots in the chart to the right).

To review, this data is drawn from the index of the digitized version of the American Labor Who’s Who (1925), so it represents what the compilers thought were the relevant organizational contexts for the people listed in the directory at the time it was printed. The actual entries in the Who’s Who often include min-career histories, which makes them potentially more interesting, but also more complicated to work with as data.

Rather than run tables, I’ve made these “tree map” images with Raw, which is a great tool, but has limited ability to adjust labels, so some of these are a little messy. The major categories are AFL-affiliated Bodies, Independent Unions, Political Parties and Miscellaneous Groups (numbers represent individuals in the category, some people are in more than one category):

The AFL, Political Parties, and Independent Unions encompass organizations. “Miscellaneous Groups” includes specific organizations and functional subcategories (e.g., Journalists and Writers, Impartial Arbitrators, as well as League for Industrial Democracy.). The AFL-affiliated group is large and full of little organizations with one or two people listed. Here’s a chart of the AFL-affiliated organizations with 10 or more members in the Who’s Who. It’s interesting that the Women’s Trade Union League makes it into this list because women are otherwise underrepresented.

American Federation of Labor-affiliated organizations or groupings with 10 or more members in the ALWW index.

Below is a breakdown of the “Independent Unions” where I’ve combined all the railway unions for the sake of getting a better chart. There was one representative of African American rail unionism in that group, but Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (founded in 1925) didn’t make it into the Who’s Who. A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen and a few others appear under “Negro Progress” groups and in some AFL unions. So the Amalgamated Clothing Workers is really the largest non-AFL union in the Who’s Who. Also worth noting, by 1925 many militants had moved on from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). So in the index they have no connection, whereas their entries often list former membership.

Independent unions represented in the ALWW index (various railway unions combined for better visualization).

The next subcategory is Political Parties. In the actual directory quite a few people are listed as Democrats and Republicans, but not in the index. So this is really “left political parties” or “working-class political parties.”

Political parties represented in the ALWW index, apparently excluding the Democrats and Republicans which show up frequently in the full directory.

And finally, that large category “Miscellaneous Groups.” In later posts I’ll zero in on “Journalists and Writers” as well as a key group of individuals that link the AFL unions with the para-union organizations.

Chart of the subcategories and organizations listed under "Miscellaneous Groups" in the ALWW. — Chart of the subcategories and organizations listed under “Miscellaneous Groups” in the ALWW index.

The printed Who’s Who also has a geographic index, but I have yet to convert that into a spreadsheet. It would be interesting to see how the categories, subcategories and organizations look spatially. But that will have to wait for another day.

Next up, I return to Gephi and the network charts, add the links between groups and explore some individuals who seem to occupy key positions between the two poles of the 1920s labor movement.

The Networked Labor Movement

This is the first in a series of posts I expect to write to help me think through the use of network analysis and visualization.

When I started converting the printed American Labor Who’s Who to an electronic database, I knew the data would be a handy reference tool for students. But I also hoped to use the data for my own research, and that it might even be instructive for contemporary activists. In particular, I figured the directory of labor and radical leaders might help us see the interconnections between organizations and people that make up the thing we call “the labor movement,” and the fact that the movement was broader than “trade unionism” alone.

Why does that matter? Well, if we consider that union membership is currently below 10% of the private sector workforce, things seem pretty hopeless for Labor. How can a social group as defensive and marginal as that ever hope to assert real power again? But if we think of the unions as part of a broader political and social grouping that also includes journalists, educators, activists and lawyers–then we have something much larger and broader. That’s important not just for politics today, but for the way we think about historical change. As a number of labor scholars have noted, the labor movement tends to grow in sudden, massive upsurges rather than by slow steady accretion. The question is, what enables these upsurges?

For much of the 1920s and 1930s, union density was low and employers had the upper hand. Unions and radicals were divided against each other. A lot of energy went into expelling dissidents and poaching members from other organizations. Old forms of unionism held on to authority, while newer forms remained inchoate or marginalized. But unionism and progressive/radical political activism held on and, in the late 1930s and 1940s grew exponentially. Legal and macro-political changes had a lot to do with that upsurge–especially a new federal policy in favor of collective bargaining and the full employment context of World War II. But the massive and swift growth in union membership and power was also based on a network of local militants who carried out the organizing drives, produced labor newspapers and radio shows, and staffed the strike kitchens and community support networks that sustained activism.

So consider this chart, based on the index of the American Labor Who’s Who, which lists individuals by category (e.g., AFL affiliated, independent unions, miscellaneous), and by organization or subcategory (e.g., United Mine Workers or Journalists & Writers). Note: elsewhere, I’ve explained the limits of this source in terms of representativeness, and why it’s still worth using. This analysis is based on the roughly 1,300 U.S. entries.

I extracted the text of the index from the ePub version of the Who’s Who on the HathiTrust Digital Library, and converted it into a spreadsheet in Microsof Excel. Using the Table 2 Net website I converted a CSV formatted version of the spreadsheet it into a bipartite network table. Then I opened that table in Gephi–a free network analysis and visualization program and created a chart with the Force Atlas algorithm.

In a network you have “nodes” and “edges.” This is a “bipartite” network, meaning there are two kinds of nodes: people and categories of organization/activity. The edges are the connections between the two types of nodes. This is a “directed” network, which means that the lines of connection (the edges) only flow in one way: individuals are members of organizations, subcategories, and categories of organizations.

The chart orients around two poles of about equal size: American Federation of Labor (AFL)-affiliated bodies and everyone else (including journalists, independent unions, and political parties among others). Depending on your mood you could read this as affirming the AFL as the dominant player in this social field, or as suggesting the diversity of and balance of players. Or you might suggest there was some level of tension and conflict between the two poles. It’s useful to remember that this chart is an analytical tool, not necessarily a direct representation of reality–and there are layers of “bias” baked into the data from its origins.

This chart is designed to accentuate the separation of the groups for analytical purposes. It doesn’t show the edges (connections between and among people and organizations), only the relative groupings. I’ll get into the linkages between groups in subsequent posts. In particular, I’m interested in the group of green dots that sits between the AFL and Miscellaneous poles. This turns out to be made up of editors of major union and labor federation newspapers. They were a key group that linked unions to the broader working-class public sphere in large part because they formed bridges between unions and other social sectors–something that seems to be represented here in the chart.