ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the author's view on the story of mass upheavals that he was piecing together from American labor history. He went to work on a book that he originally called Mass Strike in America that Straight Arrow Books published under the provocative title Strike!. It was written out of pressing political concerns. In the struggle against the Vietnam War they had won the public debate, helped persuade the majority of Americans to oppose the war, mobilized millions of people to act, and engaged in massive confrontations with the forces of authority. In 1970 he left Washington, DC, and went back to his family home in Connecticut to write Strike! He was hardly well prepared for the task. He had taken only one brief American history course in college, and he had never even met a real live labor historian until after Strike! Was completed.
