In this interpretation of the 1930s rise of industrial unionism, the author challenges the popular historical notion that American workers' embrace of "Americanism" and other patriotic sentiments in the post-World War I years indicated their fundamental political conservatism. He argues that Americanism was a complex, even contradictory, language of nationalism that lent itself to a wide variety of ideological constructions in the years between World War I and the onset of the Cold War. While the origins and spread of this language reflected the efforts of elites and the increasingly powerful American state to strip workers of their foreign ways and radical beliefs, the language itself proved flexible enough to express both the social, democratic and ethnic communalist visions that inspired political activism among the nation's workers during the Great Depression. This book should be of interest to historians of America, political scientists, sociologists and economic historians.