''A true American system of finance'': Frame resonance in the US labor movement, 1866 to 1886

Collective action frames are ideological tools that organize experience, diagnose problems, and prescribe solutions for the constituents of social movements. What happens when a social movement ideology tells constituents one thing, but their experiences tell them something contradictory? I investigate greenbackism in the nineteenth-century labor movement, a striking example of ideology that blatantly contradicted constituents' experiences. I show that, although social movements can account for discrepancies between ideology and experience, such strategies are limited and some collective action frames are ultimately disconfirmed empirically. Collective action frames dealing with practical, everyday issues are similar to falsifiable scientific theories, although the means by which they are disconfirmed is different. Master frames, the larger ideological traditions upon which social movements are based, are comparable to scientific paradigms, which are resistant but not immune to disconfirming evidence.