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While the analysis of the overall racial situation of the era may be accurate, the extrapolation to Oppenheim's poem - and Oppenheim himself - as a white supremacist or racist makes little sense, and is in fact contradicted by other evidence. First, without even looking at any of Oppenheim's other work, it is problematic to assume that he meant the "white" race in his poem, for the simple reason that at the time, Oppenheimer himself would not have been considered a member of the white race. Oppenheim was Jewish, and at the time he was writing, Jews were considered their own race. Which means that either 1) Oppenheimer was cheering on the rise of a white race that he was not a member of (unlikely); 2) he was talking about Jews, not whites (which makes no sense in context, as the workers in the strike were mostly not Jewish) or 3) he was referring to the human race. The last explanation makes the most sense. Second, there is evidence that Oppenheim was anti-racism. He wrote a poem about Abraham Lincoln that includes the following lines, in reference to the President: "He knew what Shakespeare never knew / What Dante never dared to dream / That Men are one / Beneath the sun / And before God are equal souls / This truth was his..." Given this additional writing of Oppenheim, it is hard to reconcile why on earth he would have been promoting white supremacy (or Jewish supremacy) in the Bread & Roses poem, given his men-are-one/equal-souls paen to Lincoln. I'm sure Oppenheim had some latent prejudices of his time - everyone does. But he was no white supremist, and the most logical explanation for the use of the word "race" in the Bread & Roses poem is that it was referring to human race. (And an attempt to make things rhyme.) Research is your friend. It's really disapponting when JOURNALISTS can't be bothered to do some.