This fine book centres on the familiar experience of company asset stripping and closure. But it also shows how the workers at Wisconsin Steel made two companies pay!

After 75 years of making profit out of the 3,500 workers of Wisconsin Steel in Chicago, its owners, the directors of International Harvester, decided to dump the plant in a phoney sale. They kept the mortgage on the mill, transferred ownership to Envirodyne, a consulting company with 20 employees and no steel making experience, and even lent it the money to buy the plant! They did this to try to cheat the workers out of the $45 million in benefits promised in their union contract. Two years later, they called in the mortgage and closed the mill without notice and without paying the workers' severance pay or health benefits.

The workers there, led by Frank Lumpkin and the Save Our Jobs Committee, fought for 18 years to get the money they were owed, and to stop any company ever again dumping their workers. And they won - in 1988 they got Harvester to pay out $14.8 million, and in 1995 they forced Envirodyne to pay $4 million.

They also fought the wider struggle to rebuild the city's industry and fabric, to get workers back into work on public works projects, where the steel they produced was indispensable. They realised that services depend on industry: like most US cities, Chicago's bridges, streets, sewers, schools, hospitals and houses need structural repairs that would use all the steel its mills could produce.

This book is also the story of Frank himself. He was one of the best workers, never late and never absent; his skills won him promotion to the tool room. He was always willing to pass on his skills to the younger generation, saying, 'If you have knowledge, you have responsibility to share that knowledge. You can't take it easy.' 'In order to learn you have to be able to teach and learn at the same time. That means we must listen and speak. We have to know each other. We have a similar cause. Together we can solve the problem. We need jobs that will feed, clothe and house our families. Nothing else is sufficient.'

In reading "Bring a Crowd," I was struck at how much this book goes beyond biography. It spans most of the 20th century and covers things that are almost never taught in most high school and college American history curricula. Mrs. Lumpkin touches on all of the core issues that continue to haunt modern-day America: capitalism, racism and opportunity. If this book doesn't present an honest depiction of these issues through the eyes of one man, then few books do. Frank Lumpkin has done everything from boxing to sharecropping. Everything he does has been won with a lot of courage, hard work and sheer pluck. He is a role model for most aspiring Americans, who having come from some other place-- probably not as accomodating as the U.S.--simply want something better. From racist rural Florida to the labor battles of South Chicago, Frank Lumpkin has been an active part of history that continues to be a mystery to most working Americans. How did we get a 40-hour week? How did we get paid vacations? How can we protect ourselves from dangerous workplaces? How are we protected if our employers abuse our labor and loyalty? In Frank Lumpkin, we can see how these issues evolved and how one man's struggle benefited us all. This book should be taught in every course on American history and made into a movie. Morgan Freeman should play the part of Frank Lumpkin. I can't remember the last book I read where I felt this was an essential reading into my own identity as an American. Read and rejoice that people like Frank Lumpkin have fought so bravely and for so long despite horrendous odds.

This is the story of an extraordinary "common man." Sounds like a logical impossibility, doesn't it? But in Always Bring a Crowd, the story of steelworker Frank Lumpkin, you will meet such a man, a hero for our times. You will read a life story that emerges from the blast furnace of American history-the part of American history that is generally shielded from our eyes. (And speaking of shielding, if the AFL-CIO doesn't promote and mass-produce this book, it's not serious about gaining strength in American politics.) In these days of wealth and luxury for a few, we all see the decline of our cities, farms, industrial base, schools, health care system and pensions. Our mass media, our public intellectuals, our politicians wring their hands and say, Too bad, but there is no way to counter the "global" and "high-tech" forces sending the majority of us on this pell-mell descent in a handbasket bound for economic hell. Or they say, Just be patient and await the "trickle down." Or they ignore the growing numbers of poorly paid and insecure salary and wage workers and say, That's just the way things are. Yet here stands the example of Frank Lumpkin. His life story shows us how to get out of the handbasket and start building up a better society. It will take union power. No other social force has its potential influence. Lumpkin demonstrated this in the campaign he's best known for in the Chicago area-the 17-year fight that prevented a giant steel firm and its holding companies from cheating 2,700 workers in a corrupt plant shutdown scheme. That's just his longest fight, however. The book recounts the effective role he has played in every other kind of social justice struggle our country has seen, including police brutality, oppression of women, fair housing, fair employment and tenants rights, among others. The insight, charisma, patience, and motivation needed to "bring a crowd" takes creativity and genius possessed by very few. As union man Ed Sadlowski says of Lumpkin in the foreword, "Maybe, if you're lucky enough, you'll cross paths with someone like him within your own lifetime." What path is Lumpkin on? As this book shows, people like Frank Lumpkin don't just happen. Born in 1916, Lumpkin comes from a family whose upward mobility began on plantations and sharecropping land in Georgia and then in the orange groves of Florida at a time when Afro-Americans did most of the picking. Big, powerful and smart-and fortified by a family that prized work, study and standing up against racism-Frank worked in fields, chauffeured, boxed as "K.O." Lumpkin and moved to Buffalo and became a steelworker in the early 1940s. Author Bew Lumpkin uses a unique structure to tell the story. The ordinary chronology of biography is there. But also, assembled like a collage, are the voices of workers and neighbors and friends joining those of the family. Those who know of the American Communist movement only through the "Russian spies" and "dupes of aliens" and "fellow travelers" stereotypes of the J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy/Nixon/Reagan line, or from the more liberal strains of anti-communism, will get an entirely different and more complex view of that history in this book. Bea Lumpkin captures the excitement of the challenges that brought the best out in Frank and his fellow workers, spouses and neighbors as they fought in word and deed to make a steel company obey the law and the union contract. The company kept shifting corporate skins like a snake, but Frank and the young labor attorney Tom Geoghegan (GAY-gen) finally cornered it. The workers won $4 million, thanks to bankruptcy laws designed to help corporations skip out workers and their communities, but that was only about a sixth of what they were owed. (Also see Geoghegan's Which Side Are You On?) Lumpkin shows that the worker's point of view is a far broader and wiser perspective than the caricatures like Archie Bunker, Ralph Kramden and the wolf-whistling, racist and profane construction workers of our commercials and movies. A reader will enjoy imagining what achievements could be won on a national scale if the confused, disheartened and insecure working people of this country had a leader, a movement, an organization with this political effectiveness.

John Woodford