Out Of The Jungle. Jimmy Hoffa And The Remaking Of The American Working Class

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: Very Good
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf
Publisher Place: New York
Publisher Year: 2001
Edition: First Edition

Description: 272 pages. Jacket is in Very good condition throughout, The only exception is some light wear at top of spine on jacket.. Book appears to have hardly been read and is in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: Jimmy Hoffa is one of the most storied figures in American history, a rough-and-tumble Indiana native who became the head of the largest and most powerful union in twentieth-century America. More than a quarter-century after his mysterious disappearance, Hoffas legend lives on. Yet much of his life, and the significance of his public career, has remained obscured by myth or entirely unknown.In Out of the Jungle, historian Thaddeus Russell gives us a detailed, crisply written, and fascinating account of Jimmy Hoffas life and times, much of it previously untold. Russell argues that Hoffa was compelled by a variety of social forces to place the economic interests of his union members over broad ideological concerns. The most important of those forces was the demonstrated desire of ordinary Teamsters to improve their material lives. “What do you hire us for, he famously asked a meeting of truck drivers, “if not to sell your labor at the highest buck we can get He responded to the rank-and-file members demands as did none of his contemporaries in the labor movement, seeking financial gain with the mercilessness that made him renowned and feared.Russell shows how Hoffas ruthless attitudes evolved over his career. Beginning in the small Indiana coal-mining towns where he was born and raised, continuing into Depression-era and wartime Detroit, and then across the country after the war when Hoffa gained national notoriety, Russell places his life and career in historical perspective. The author presents new interpretations of how the Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and Robert F. Kennedys crusade against organized crime affected not only Hoffa and the Teamsters but also the American labor movement as a whole.In this lively and thorough narrative, Thaddeus Russell illuminates the life of one of the most mysterious, compelling, and important figures in modern American history.

ISBN: 9780375411571