Labor Movement

Eight Topical Galleries

   1928 General Election
   Political Parties
   Farmers’ Movements
   Labor Movement
   Labor Disputes
   May Day
   Leftwing Publications / Marxism
   Leftwing Theater & Art

Images: Ohara Institute for Social
Research, Hosei University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
© 2013 Visualizing Cultures

[e084_1925_PA1562]

[e013_1927_PA1493]

[b214_1927_PA1085]

[e009_1927_PA0793]

[e022_1929_PA0800]

[e152_193-_PA0822]

[e225_1932_PA0837]

[e163_1932_PA0825]

[e047_1934_PA1519]

[b379_1935_PA0997]

Women workers in light industry led by textiles dominated the labor force in the first stage of industrialization that began in the late-19th century. By the 1920s—as these posters covering 1925 to 1935 reveal—organized labor had appeared on the scene, focusing on urban male workers employed in heavy industry. The labor movement reflected strong influences from the West, including such familiar features of leftwing artwork as clenched fists, mass rallies, gearwheels and smokestacks, flag-waving and hammer-brandishing workers, the broken chains of proletarian servitude, and a general saturation in the red coloring of revolutionary protest.