There have been few occasions in American history when the labor movement has not been spat upon by either established authority (the "man," as he is known) or big business ("Your Holiness," as he is known). This is due in large part to the perceived danger to order that organization represents. A skull is much easier to crack if there isn't another skull in the way to obstruct the swing.

You didn't learn this in high school, but America has an über-violent history of class conflict, that is, the battle of the haves against the have-nots. And a brilliant chronicle of this is Louis Adamic's Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, which covers a span from the early 1800s to the time of its first publication in 1931.

That may seem like a long time ago, but like the super-wealthy of today, the generally termed "capitalists" of that former era had a penchant not only for providing "monkeys seated between guests" at dinner parties, but also for some cathartic union busting. And like the treasons bastards who long ago insisted on an 8-hour workday (still six days a week) and forced their bosses to take home less profit, the lazy rubes of the UAW (robots do all the work anyway) have brought down the auto industry. If you think that executives at the auto companies are responsible, with their approvals of horrible cars and their total lack of foresight, or that the credit crisis prevented Americans from buying new cars, then you, good sir, are a slave to the liberal media.

Though this brand of unfounded criticism is bad, an unfounded billy club to the face is even worse. Adamic's writing shows just how far labor has come in this nation, from the brutal Molly Maguires to the Haymarket bombing to the wobblies, and Dynamite holds strong as a brick in the pantheon of underground literature. And while it doesn't dwell deeply on many events, it serves as a fantastic general history of the early American labor movement.

From year to year and incident to incident, Adamic details just how successful business is at perpetually shitting on labor's treadmill. It's biased in favor of unions, yes, but also biased in favor of "hey, maybe we should stop shooting these people in the face and give them good pay." It would be hard even for Glenn Beck to argue against that. Strike that. He could do it.

And that's why today we should worry about anti-union hullabaloo. I, for one, am thankful for the union that put the food on my plate when I was a kid, though many Americans who are not affected directly by organized labor are simply unaware of the centuries-old movement. In this country we usually (usually) get rights and good pay, but we don't know why that is. Reading Adamic's Dynamite, like nearly falling off a seacliff, is an exercise in gratitude.