We've been talking about industrialization in my history class, and the horrible conditions for workers and drastic inequality. I'm just wondering what made it so there wasn't a stronger proletariat movement, or were unions supposed to be the effective equivalent?
If I could ask a clarifying question: are you more concerned with the social and economic pressures which may have contributed to the lack of a "proletariat movement" in the U.S. (a very complicated question with a broad and divisive historiography), or individual instances in which more radical or "proletariat" worker groups were combated or quashed in the U.S. ?