Jon Jeter’s full-throttle, full-hearted epic work, Class War in America, is as spellbinding a page-turner as it is a brilliant, scholarly, and intensely personal telling of stories of race relations in this class-ridden U.S.A. Even more surprising is that he tickles your funnybone along the way with a wry brand of humor.
This is anything but a dry re-telling of history. Spanning decades of solidarity and betrayal among working people—betrayal engineered by this country’s oligarchs—from the Civil War era to today, Jeter weaves together a people’s history of labor unions, political economy and grassroots movements and their intersection with every segment of American society.
In stories of ordinary people you will visit heroes as diverse as Ethel Rosenberg and Tupac Shakur, Tallulah Bankhead and Fred Hampton, Howard Zinn and Richard Pryor, and villains that span the gamut from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, and Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman to Jimmy Carter.
And with the exquisite story-telling of a true journalist, Jeter brings to life real people and transports you to the scene of historic events.
The scope of this book is too large to capture in a few words, but when you read Class War in America you will consider yourself fortunate, uplifted, and educated in ways you could not have foreseen. As Jeter himself writes, “It would be inaccurate to say that everything you thought you knew about American history is wrong, yet you almost certainly don’t know the half of it.”
PRAISE FOR CLASS WAR IN AMERICA
“Jeter’s narrative skill is remarkable; he writes with both passion and clarity about the ways “the white settler elite has historically deployed…false accusations to stir up murderous passions, creating a smokescreen for dispossession.” The picture he paints of America’s ruling capitalist oligarchy constantly pitting workers against each other along racial lines is vigorously convincing…” –KIRKUS REVIEWS
“With his CLASS WAR IN AMERICA, Jon Jeter has fired a broadside from the left that will, in this utterly divided society, spark its share of argument and counter-argument. But one central theme of this book is beyond debate: Jeter’s historical rendering of the American labor movement and capital’s incessant misuse of race as a means of dividing workers from each other is carefully and definitively chronicled. Race hate and racial fears have long been the most valuable weapon in keeping working people disorganized, alienated and, in the end, cheated.” –David Simon, creator of THE WIRE
“As learned as it is spirited, Jeter’s engaging book delivers on its promise to produce an arresting new history of labor in the US. Refusing to separate race and class and attending to the most exhilarating moments of solidarity alongside the most horrifying instances of white terror, CLASS WAR draws deftly on its author’s career as one of his generation’s leading journalists.” –David Roediger teaches American Studies at the University of Kansas. His recent books include THE SINKING MIDDLE CLASS and CLASS, RACE, AND MARXISM.
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