Argentina plays France today in the 2022 World Cup final. The U.S. team bowed out on December 3 when they went down 3-1 to the Netherlands. But soccer, it turns out, has a long history in the United States, thanks to its popularity among immigrant workers from European countries.
From 1927 to 1935, the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) established the Labor Sport Union, a coalition of worker athletic clubs, primarily located in the urban Northeast and Midwest. The CPUSA’s 1925 sport manifesto emphasized that sports should be used as a medium for class struggle and even to create “proletarian fighting units against militarism and fascism.”
One of their successful sporting accomplishments was the Workers’ Soccer Association, or WSA, which organized leagues in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. This communist soccer league played two seasons per year and competed for city, regional, and national championships.
On today’s show, history professor Gabe Logan recounts the history of the Workers’ Soccer Association and explains an overlooked aspect of U.S. soccer that intersected political ideology, labor, and athletics.
On this week’s Labor History in Two: No Justice, No Bagels!
Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com
Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.
#LaborRadioPod #History #WorkingClass #ClassStruggle @GeorgetownKILWP #LaborHistory @UMDMLA @ILLaborHistory @AFLCIO @StrikeHistory #LaborHistory @wrkclasshistory @FIFAWorldCup @ussoccerplayers @gabe65330234
“It Didn’t Start with Amazon: A Conversation About the History of Organized Labor in the South”
The Battle of Virden
Sharecroppers’ struggles for rights and power
Feathers and Pennies - the 1888 Matchgirls and us
Trumka: “Art is why they remember our struggles”
Live from The Battle of Blair Mountain!
The Battle of Blair Mountain; Remembering Ed Asner
Marching on Washington: civil rights to voting rights
Sacco and Vanzetti; Midnight in Vehicle City
Trumka on the future of American labor (archive show)
Remembering Rich Trumka (1949-2021)
Keokuk before the strike
Indigenous Longshoremen & the I.W.W.
Houston, We Have a Labor Dispute
Dramatizing The Murals
2020/2021 Joe Hill award-winners
The Memphis Fire Fighter Strike of 1978
Marvel Cooke, a Journalist for Working People
LHT Archives: Why America’s most radical union shut down ports on Juneteenth
LHT Archives: Debs on capitalism; Dudzic on the Labor Party
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Irish Songs with Ken Murray
History Obscura
Historycal: Words that Shaped the World
The Rest Is History
Lore