*From Popular Front to Cold War* (2026).

Ian Rocksborough-Smith interviewed Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker about their recent edited volume, From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1945, published by Cornell University Press earlier this year.

This 13 chapter book, with a coda by Paul Buhle, tells the history of the International Workers Order (IWO), founded during the Great Depression to provide life, burial and health insurance to its members (who numbered 200,000) at its height. As the chapters in this collection make clear, the organization had a very wide agenda that also directly combated racism and antisemitism, championed progressive causes (from labor movements to anti-colonialism, civil rights, and peace initiatives) as well as many forms of interracial and interethnic solidarity in cultural and social spheres that extended across national boundaries into the post-WWII era. The IWO and the sorts of mutual aid, organizational supports, and cultural programs it provided for its members tell us much about what happened to the interracial left through the mid-20th Century, but also contain lessons for the divided world we live in today. As noted in the introduction to this fascinating collection, “The Order’s framework of diversity within unity and its insistence on tying the fight against Jim Crow to the fight against antisemitism and anti-immigrant sentiment encouraged solidarity among racial and racialized groups, offering a vital ideological ancestor to today’s progressive movement” (p.4).

Video segments (viewable once you press play)

0:00: Introductions

4:13: How we came to study the International Workers Order (IWO)

10:50: The IWO and the Left

18:00: Functions of the IWO; how it attracted working class members during the Great Depression through mutual aid and needed safety net benefits

28:12: Cultural Work and Activism through WWII

51:10: Tensions and Impacts of the early Cold War

104:09: IWO as an Outlier

111:30: Future Studies

Here is a selection of sources from the IWO collection at the Kheel Center at Cornell University:

Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, Manuscript Collection No. 583, SERIES B. CULTURAL COMMITTEE, Sub-series 4. Plays and Entertainment, 16. Plays and related correspondence re: American Jewish Tercentenary; “Bread and Roses, Too”, 1955, American Jewish Archives.

1935 Harlem Meat Boycott Poster in English and Yiddish; 1935 Article from the Amsterdam News. The interracial boycott was modeled on the Great Meat Boycott of 1902, Lower East Side. Used with permission.

IWO Collection, International Workers Order (IWO) Records #5276, Box 48, Folder 7. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, Cornell University.

IWO Collection, International Workers Order (IWO) Records #5276, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, Cornell University. URL.

Web links to the IWO collection Cornell University and related virtual exhibits:

Document Archive: https://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/iwo-jpfo

Virtual Library Exhibit: https://exhibits.library.cornell.edu/fellow-travelers

Timeline: https://exhibits.library.cornell.edu/fellow-travelers/feature/timeline

Authors

Ian Rocksborough-Smith

Ian teaches primarily U.S. history at the University of the Fraser Valley in Stó:lō / S'ólh Téméxw / Abbotsford, B.C., Canada. His research interests include public and urban history, social movements, and histories of race, labor, religion, and empire in the Atlantic world. He has published academic articles and book reviews in a variety of journals like The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, Reviews in American History, and The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society and has a book entitled: Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism from World War II Into the Cold War (April/May 2018). He has written op-eds in Canadian Dimension and The Conversation (Canada) and is on the editorial team for Labor Online (LAWCHA). He has served as an international solidarity and human rights officer for his faculty union, local 7 of the Federation of Post-Secondary Employees of British Columbia (2021-2023).
Elissa Sampson

Dr. Elissa Sampson is an urban geographer who studies how the past is actively used to create new spaces of migration, memory, heritage, and activism. She has pursued a life-long interest in migration, diaspora, re-diasporization, and immigrant culture on New York’s Lower East Side, Brooklyn and Paris, making visible dynamic interactions among diasporas in shared spaces/places. As a Research Associate in Cornell University’s Jewish Studies Program, Dr. Sampson worked extensively with Cornell’s Kheel Center confiscated Cold War archives on the International Workers Order (IWO), including their partial digitization. She co-organized a public, online academic conference, “Di Linke” (the Left), based largely on its archival Jewish Section holdings. Dr. Sampson has taught labor and gender history, including the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, its memorialization, and relationship to current labor activism. She is the co-editor and contributor to a new book about the IWO.
Robert Zecker

Robert Zecker is a professor of history at Saint Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada, where he teaches courses in race, immigration, social movements, and U.S. history. His research includes immigration, radicalism, and the popular culture of immigrants on the left. He is the author of many articles in journals such as the Journal of American Ethnic History, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, and American Communist History. He is also author of five books, most recently “A Road to Peace and Freedom”: The International Workers Order and the Struggle for Economic Justice and Civil Rights, 1930-1954 (Temple University Press) and has a chapter, “'Spotlight on Jim Crow': Radical Immigrant Papers Cover Race and Civil Rights,” in Immigration and Exile: The Foreign-Language Press in the U.K. and U.S. (Bloomsbury). He is currently writing a history of the Communist Party’s Workers’ Schools, “Training for the Class Struggle.” Before entering the academic racket, Bob was an ink-stained wretch foisting journalism on an unsuspecting public in his native New Jersey.

Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker on their new book, From Popular Front to Cold War

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Ian Rocksborough-Smith, Elissa Sampson, Robert Zecker

Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker on their new book, From Popular Front to Cold War

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