This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters on Patreon and by Verso Books,

which has loads of great left-wing titles perfect for dig listeners like you.

One that you might like is The Great Cowboy Strike, Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Laos.

In the pantheon of American icons, the cowboy embodies the traits of rugged individualism,

independent, solitary, and stoical. In reality, cowboys were grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal workers, who responded to the abuses of their employers in a series of militant strikes.

Their resistance arose from the rise and demise of a beef bonanza that attracted international capital.

Business interests approached the market with the expectation that it would

have the same freedom to brutally impose its will as it had exercised on native peoples and

recently emancipated African Americans. These assumptions contributed to a series of bitter

and violent range wars, which broke out from Texas to Montana and framed the appearance of labor

conflicts in the region. These social tensions stirred a series of political insurgencies that

became virtually endemic to the American West of the Gilded Age. Marque Laos explores the

relationship between these neglected labor conflicts, the range wars,

and the third-party movements. The Great Cowboy Strike subverts American mythology

to reveal the class abuses and inequalities that have blinded a nation to its true history and

nature. The Great Cowboy Strike, bullets, ballots, and class conflicts

in the American West by Mark A. Laos. Out now from Verso Books.

Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

No one has provided a more clear-eyed and exacting study of why movements win then Francis Fox Piven, and her late husband and

collaborator Richard Cloward. Today, Piven is my guest. Four decades after poor people's movements,

why they succeed, how they fail, was published. Their insights into unemployed people's and labor movements of the 1930s and the later

...