In 1932, Professor George Barnett, one of the nations's leading students of the labor movement, painted a doleful picture of organized labor's prospects. Wracked by the depression and suffering under timid and unimaginative leadership, unions, he believed, were exercising "lessening importance . . . in American economic organization." Indeed, Barnett saw "no reason to believe that American trade unionism will so revolutionize itself . . . as to become in the next decade a more potent social influence than it has been in the past decade." The cumbersome phraseology carried a harsh judgment: The day of the unions had passed. Rarely has so expert an authority been so wrong.
 

The revival of the labor movement was as unexpected as it was dramatic. Between 1932 and 1939, membership soared from under 3 million to almost 9 million. Workers everywhere surged into unions. Whereas the AFL's strength normally lay in the construction, hand craft, and entertainment trades, by the end of the 1930s powerful new organizations in mass production industries embraced hundreds of thousands of recruits. The unparalleled expansion of the labor movement involved the revival of such venerable organizations as the United Mine Workers and such other long-established AFL affiliates as the Carpenters, Machinists, and Teamsters. But the rise of new organizations in steel, automobiles, rubber, electrical appliances, and other core industries and the emergence of a new national federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), truly transformed the labor movement.

In the past, organized labor had experienced several remarkable surges of growth. In Jacksonian America, workingmen's parties and unions had flourished for a season. Again, in the 1880s the Knights of Labor had reached hundreds of thousands with its gospel of mass organization and workers' power. And during World War I union membership had mushroomed as labor moved into previously unorganized industries and in 1919 made a bold bid to capture the steel industry.

The upsurge of the 1930s, however, was different. It swept up workers in every geographical area and in every trade and industry. It persevered through misfortunes, setbacks, and repression. Workers and union leaders exhibited an ability to match struggles on the shop floors and picket lines with effective political action. Unlike earlier episodes of union growth, this one generated permanent mass organizations, capable of asserting and defending workers' rights on both the political and economic fronts.

Underlying this remarkable achievement lay the determination of working people to resist the victimization and distress that the depression had brought. Throughout the 1930s, unionists, journalists, government observers, and academic experts puzzled over the mood of working people. Did the economic crisis breed resignation and self-blame? Would it spark resentment and radicalism? Would the broken promises of the golden twenties cause embittered workers to abandon the American system; would they embrace some authoritarian alternative, as the German and Italian people appeared to be doing?

In a nation of over 140 million people there could be no simple answer to these questions. Yet the pattern of workers' behavior in the 1930s did permit some conclusions. Throughout the decade workers were uncommonly militant. They resisted further erosion of their standards and struggled to create and sustain organizations to buttress their position and safeguard their working conditions and pay packets. They made clear political choices, voting in heavy numbers and casting their ballots for Franklin D. Roosevelt and politicians closely identified with his policies. They showed little interest in radical parties or unions, and they overwhelmingly avoided extremism.

This particular brand of working-class militancy was complex, and it was far from universal. Many workers continued to regard unions as foreign and distasteful. Ethnic and sexual rivalries often weakened activism. Workers calculated an investment in union dues as carefully in terms of benefits anticipated as they did any other family purchase. Close observers detected a strong strain of cautious defensiveness behind even the most militant activism. Pennsylvania steelworkers, for example, saw the new union as an opportunity to create a system of security to support traditional family values, regarding the broader purposes of the labor movement as irrelevant. Workers wanted stability, protection from arbitrary personnel policies-freedom (in the words of a New York State paper worker) from "the petty tyrannies of our supts. and foremen during the depression."

The desire for the union contract lay at the heart of the militancy of the 1930s. Workers felt mystified at complex, ever-shifting systems of payment. They resented the favoritism, arbitrariness, and cruelty of hiring practices that forced workers to abase themselves for preference in employment and that discarded older workers in favor of presumably more vigorous younger ones. Workers in the 1930s resolved to limit managerial authority and to safeguard their standards and status with clear contractual safeguards. One union activist observed bitterly that his employer "refuses to sign a contract for labor when every piece of machinery or stick of wood is bought through a written contract. Certainly," he argued, "buying labor is just as important." Much of the activism of the I 930s aimed at changing this situation.

This seemingly humble goal, however, aroused bitter opposition. Its achievement required huge organizing campaigns, unprecedented political activism, massive strikes, and great sacrifices. Some critics believed that "mere" contractual relationships only solidified the basic capitalist system. Collective bargaining, argued some leftists, only led to cooptation of workers by employers. Only revolutionary struggle that refused to compromise with illegitimate capitalist authority merited working-class commitment.

But things looked different to American businessmen. Deployment of labor without restriction was central to the innovative heart of the American economy, they believed. Earlier in the century, aggressive employers under the banner of the open shop had broken the power of many established craft unions precisely so that engineers and managers could impose their version of efficient, unrestricted production. Union work rules, contractual grievance and seniority rights, and other union-imposed regulations and customs, they believed, stifled the creative genius of the American system.

Moreover, it was an article of faith among employers that few workers genuinely desired union representation. The craft unions, charged critics, benefitted only a small cadre of highly skilled workers. So America's largest and most powerful corporations, as well as her smaller shops and factories, fiercely resisted unionism. While some industrialists preferred accommodation to open conflict, most regarded industrial unionism with the same fear, suspicion, and determination to resist that their predecessors accorded to craft unionism.

Early in the Roosevelt administration, workers began to give evidence of their newfound activism. Enthusiastic reaction to passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act on June 16, 1933, revealed discontents and hopes seething beneath the surface of working-class life. Section 7(a) of the new law declared that workers had the right to bargain collectively with their employers through representatives of their own choosing. The law implied that it was illegitimate for employers to stifle unions, interfere with efforts to form unions, or refuse to enter into bargaining relationships. The primary purpose of the Recovery Act was to stimulate economic recovery through a National Recovery Administration (NRA). This body relied on business groups and trade associations to develop codes of fair competition that would be binding on all firms enjoying their protection. Despite the decidedly probusiness cast of the NRA, however, its establishment gave hope to thousands of workers and stimulated the formation of unions under the promised protection of Section 7(a).

The most dramatic growth spread through the nation's soft coal regions. John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), had watched his once-powerful miners union shrink from membership of a half million in 1919 to under 80,000 in the early 1930s. Lewis himself seemed to personify the combination of ruthlessness, cynicism, and ineptitude that caused observers such as Professor Barnett to despair of organized labor's future prospects. But Lewis had helped to draft the labor section of the Recovery Act. A series of strikes in the impoverished Appalachian coal fields in 1931 and 1932 had reaffirmed the coal miners' legendary militancy. He believed that Section 7(a) could provide the spark needed to revive his union and perhaps the entire labor movement. He committed the UMW's shaky finances to rebuilding the union. Scores of organizers invaded the coal towns, mining camps, and backwater hollows preaching the gospel of the UMW and the NRA.

"The President wants you to join the union," organizers told recruits, stretching the truth but effectively linking the campaign with the popularity of Franklin Roosevelt. Reports from Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and New Mexico poured in. By the end of June, Pennsylvania alone claimed 128,000 new members. Veteran organizer Van A. Bittner declared that Logan County, West Virginia, scene of a bloody civil war in the early 1920s, had become union territory. Nor did workers require much convincing, for, as Lewis's long-time critic John Brophy observed, coal miners "moved into the union en masse. . . . They organized themselves for all practical purposes."

Results in the needle trades, like coal mining traditionally a bastion of unionism, were almost as impressive. The two most vigorous organizations in the garment industry were the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILG) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union (ACW). Their leaders, David Dubinsky of the ILG and Sidney Hillman of the ACW, were Jewish immigrants with roots in the socialist organizations associated with Jewish working-class culture. Both rejected the AFL's disdainful attitudes toward female, immigrant, and unskilled workers, and both believed that trade unionism had to move beyond AFL voluntarism. But both organizations had had to struggle through the 1920s and had fought to maintain standards in an anti-union era. Meanwhile, Communist dissidents, eager to enlist garment workers in the crusade to bring to America the revolutionary transformation that in 1917 had swept Russia, waged sharp battles to control important locals. The depression devastated the garment trades and the unions, pushing both the ILG and the ACW toward disaster. In 1933, Hillman's union, which held almost 180,000 members in 1920, now claimed 60,000 but collected dues from only 7,000. Dubinsky's Ladies' Garment Workers declined from 120,000 to a paper strength of under 40,000, and key locals faced disintegration.

Both leaders grasped the opportunities that the new legislation offered. Through the summer of 1933, the Amalgamated fought successful organizing campaigns in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Rochester. It recruited thousands of new members in hitherto unorganized segments of the men's clothing trade, extending its influence into the shirt shops of rural Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In some of the small mining towns, garment factories provided low-wage employment for miners' wives and children, and in these places Amalgamated organizers linked up with Lewis's resurgent UMW locals to recruit whole families into the revitalized labor movement. By the end of 1933, Hillman's organization had doubled its membership.

The ILG expanded even more impressively. Taking on Philadelphia ladies garment manufacturers even before passage of the NIRA, in May 1933, the ILG won a major strike in that city. Another walkout in August rebuilt the union in the decisive women's dress industry in New York City. Strikes and organizing campaigns in New York and outlying areas extended the ILG's gains, and when the union s convention met in May 1934, Dubinsky pointed proudly to membership rolls topping 200,000.

These stunning gains reached far beyond the industries themselves. All three unions had traditions of mass industrial organization. All three featured bold, energetic leadership. Moreover, the three reborn organizations teemed with activist workers unusually loyal to their unions and to the cause of trade unionism in general. "The rebuilding of the UMW, the Amalgamated, and the ILG in 1933," observes Irving Bernstein, "was of the utmost significance . . . to the future of the American labor movement. These developments formed an axle upon which trade unionism was to turn for most of a decade."

But labor's gains went far beyond these areas of traditional strength. Indeed, the most remarkable development of the early New Deal years was the explosion of organizing throughout the nation and in industries and trades with little previous unionism or with long records of defeat and despair. Steel and iron workers signed up with the AFL affiliate with jurisdiction over the industry, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers (AA). Pulp and paper workers-some veterans of agonizing strike defeats in the 1920s, others new recruits-flocked into two established AFL unions in the industry. "I have so many calls for organizers," declared the Pulp Workers' president in July, "that I have neither the men nor the money to take care of all of them." By August, the union had depleted its stock of dues books and payment stamps. AFL unions in the construction trades, which normally recruited very selectively, found themselves besieged with applications from workers of every description.

Whole categories of workers with no previous record of activism sought unionism. From Filipino fruit pickers to newspaper editorial employees, and from Hollywood actors to dry cell battery workers, thousands signed up. Workers in auto plants, rubber factories, and electrical appliance shops joined despite their lack of previous laborite experience. In all, the AFL gained about 500,000 members in 1933 and added 400,000 in 1934.

This vast new recruitment created difficulties for the Federation's staid leadership. The flood of new members overwhelmed cautious union bureaucrats, comfortable in their tenure and now threatened by the sudden influx. The AA, for example, could not cope with the newly militant contingent of steelworkers, and the opportunity to bring mass organization to the furnaces, mills, and fabricating shops slipped through their fingers. Tens of thousands of new union enthusiasts worked in trades not easily classified under the AFL's antiquated system of jurisdiction. The unions that held the bulk of power in the AFL simply could not deal with recruits from the mass production industries, most of whom toiled in semiskilled or unskilled jobs. Machine operators and assemblers in the auto plants, for example, were not machinists in the usual sense of the term, for typically they served no apprenticeship, held no journeyman's card, and could not claim conditions of autonomous, independent craftsmanship. Were these semiskilled operatives eligible for membership in the International Association of Machinists? If so, their vast numbers would overwhelm the traditional membership, whose highly prized skills had enabled the union to gain impressive pension and wage benefits. If not, what AFL affiliate could properly claim these hopeful new recruits? Most large AFL affiliates faced this problem. For example, would the thousands of unskilled and semiskilled workers in the expanding electrical appliances industry he enrolled as full members in the venerable International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers? What of the large numbers of lumber and sawmill workers seeking organization and falling under the jurisdiction of the haughty United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners? The policies and structures of the most powerful AFL unions were geared to the needs of skilled workers and seemed unable to accommodate the newly organizing masses.

To what AFL organization, for example, would the thousands of rubber workers in Ohio, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Alabama belong? What of the groups of button makers, pen and pencil workers, casket makers, onion pickers, warehouse loaders, salt miners, and new activists in a hundred other trades and occupations from Florida to Washington State who sought union representation in the heady days of 1933 and 1934? The AFL, a sober, tradition-bound organization, had never before needed to respond to such an upheaval of union sentiment. Its leadership, delighted but perplexed at this sudden turn of fortunes, hastily issued charters to hundreds of groups, packing them into so-called "federal labor unions," organizations directly run by the AFL itself. In due time AFL officials would sort out these recruits and dole them out to the appropriate craft unions.

In accordance with AFL policies, a shop that had organized as one integrated body would find that AFL functionaries wanted to break up this unity. Established unions insisted that particular groups of workers, regardless of the auspices under which they were first organized, be turned over to the AFL affiliate that normally represented those with similar skills or functions. AFL traditionalists believed that if they retreated from this policy, they would undermine the strength of the established unions, many of which had gained success by tight control of the job market. For workers in mass production industries, however, this approach made no sense. If AFL policies prevailed, the comradeship and strength of union solidarity would give way to fragmentation, as workers in the same shop found themselves suddenly dispatched to the Teamsters, Carpenters, or Sheet Metal Workers.

In addition, Federation officials, wedded as they were to policies of restraint, caution, and legalistic notions of correct union behavior, soon found that these new recruits demanded action. For newly organized workers, the act of joining a labor union often required courage. They expected to remain together in the same local union, regardless of the diverse jobs workers performed. And they expected their bold step of joining a union to pay off, at least in the form of vigorous leadership on the part of AFL officials. When Federation functionaries responded-as they usually did to the demands of newly organized locals-with counsels of delay, restraint, and moderation, disaffection spread almost as quickly as enthusiasm had earlier.
 

Throughout 1934, this tension between an established bureaucratic labor movement and volatile new recruits underlay an extraordinary spasm of labor unrest and violence. Work stoppages in that year totaled over 1,800 and involved over 1.5 million strikers. These were the highest figures for work stoppages since the early 1920s. In part, the strike wave resulted from the mild economic upturn that the enthusiastic initial public reaction to the NRA had created. In part also, it reflected worker discontent with the limitations of labor policy under the new federal recovery program. Many of the walkouts were routine labor-management confrontations, but some of the strikes convulsed whole communities and industries. In the summer of 1934, several key strikes exhibited a lethal bitterness rarely matched in American history.

In May, for example, thousands of unionists and their allies confronted police and national guardsmen in Toledo, Ohio. Throughout the day of May 24, soldiers and strikers charged and countercharged on the streets outside the Auto-Lite factory, focal point of a strike of auto parts workers enrolled in a federal labor union. Guardsmen hurled tear gas into the crowd. They fixed bayonets and drove it back, only to yield as unionists and sympathizers retook their ground, attempting to force strikebreakers out of the plant. After hours of savage street fighting, the ill-trained troops leveled their rifles and fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding scores. Even so, fighting lasted into the night, and the next day Ohio governor George White dispatched more guardsmen while the Toledo Central Labor Union, representing eighty local unions, debated calling a general strike.

Later that summer, violence erupted in San Francisco and Minneapolis. In the Bay City, striking longshoremen linked up with rank-and-file Teamsters and cargo handlers to paralyze the waterfront. When police began to escort strikebreakers to the piers, a pitched battle erupted. Police bullets killed two strikers. A mass public funeral on July 9 brought the city to a standstill. Thousands upon thousands of strikers and supporters marched through the city, accompanying the hearse to the strains of the march from Beethoven's Eroica symphony. Historian Charles Larrowe describes the scene: "Tramp-tramp-tramp-grave and grim, on they came; there seemed no end to the procession. Long after the trucks bearing the coffins had passed . . . the phalanxes of the marchers escorting the bodies . . . continued."

Two weeks later, conflict shook Minneapolis. A newly expanded Teamsters' local, embracing hundreds of truckers, freight-handlers, and produce loaders, struck in protest over the cargo and freight companies' refusal to bargain. The strike brought commerce to a halt, with the highly disciplined strikers permitting only deliveries of essential medical and emergency food supplies. With the aid of local police, the cartage company resolved to crack the street barricades and resume deliveries. On Friday afternoon, July 20, one large yellow truck, escorted by fifty armed policemen, rolled into the central market area to unload a few token boxes. As it moved slowly off, a vehicle bearing club-wielding pickets cut it off. The police blasted away at the car with shotgun fire and then turned their weapons on the strikers filling the surrounding streets. As other pickets moved up to aid their fallen comrades, an eyewitness reported, "They flowed directly into the buckshot fire . . . . And the cops let them have it as they picked up their wounded. Lines of living, solid men fell, broke, wavering." He saw one man "stepping on his own intestines, bright and bursting in the street, and another holding his severed arm in his right hand." A troubled calm fell upon the city, as the strikers counted their losses--two dead and sixty-seven wounded.

The summer's agony ended in September with the massive strike of textile workers in New England and the South. The AFL's weakly organized United Textile Workers, unable to compel employers to recognize its unions but goaded by rank-and-file impatience, reluctantly called its people out of the mills. Over 400,000 cotton and fabric workers responded. Local police and national guardsmen clashed with angry pickets, as mill owners recruited strikebreakers to maintain production and crush the unions. At Trion, Georgia, on September 5, a union supporter and a sheriff's deputy died in an exchange of gunfire. In neighboring South Carolina the next day, bullets killed six pickets. A crowd of 10,000 gathered on the eighth in the small mill town of Honea Path to bury the dead. Two more textile workers died and twenty more fell wounded as riots and demonstrations swept through the dreary textile towns in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine.

The upheavals of 1934 held important lessons for working-class activists. The AEL too often provided only dilatory and unresponsive leadership. Lack of solid organization too frequently led to defeat. The NRA, seemingly so promising as an instrument of worker power, proved unable to enforce its vague mandate to encourage collective bargaining. Yet the San Francisco longshoremen, the Minneapolis truckers, and the Toledo strikers learned that strong local organizations, determined leaders, and mass support could bring gains. Despite the ineptitude of AFL officials, the antagonism of employers and local authorities, and the weakness of NRA functionaries, workers won at least partial victories in these strikes.
 

The limitations of the machinery established under the NRA to enforce Section 7(a) became starkly apparent during the 1934 turbulence. Though the legislation declared that workers had the right to create unions free of employer control, it provided no means of enforcement. In theory, a Labor Advisory Board (LAB) heard complaints and brought them to the attention of NRA code compliance authorities. These officials in turn could recommend that NRA director General Hugh Johnson strip offending companies of code protection. Presumably, this would put the offender at great competitive disadvantage, and hence the threat of removal of the NRA's emblem of compliance, the Blue Eagle symbol, would induce employers to honor the provisions of Section 7(a).

In reality, this mechanism almost never operated. The grossly understaffed LAB could not keep track of the widespread violations. Nor did its functionaries have high regard for labor unionists, considering them ignorant and self-serving, impediments to the board's work. Sneered one LAB official, unionists were so "green and lacking in insight" that their inclusion in NRA proceedings was mere "window dressing." Moreover, NRA officials in general regarded Section 7(a) as an unfortunate provision, an embarrassment rather than an integral part of the recovery program. Code-enforcement authorities believed that workers' interests were best protected in the codes themselves, which stipulated wage minimums, limitations on hours of work, and other labor provisions. Unions did not fit into the picture, whatever the apparent language of Section 7(a). When union growth brought with it strikes and confrontations, NRA officials reacted impatiently. Labor unrest merely delayed recovery. Where the union was strong, officials accommodated themselves reluctantly to its power. Where it was weak or ill-organized, they ignored or bypassed it. Despite the apparent promises of Section 7(a), the actual policy of NRA officials was, in the words of historian Clete Daniel, "antiunion in theory" and often "it proved anti-union in practice."

At least NRA administrator Johnson and most of his key advisors seemed to share this view. Unionists, however, had friends in the Roosevelt administration, especially in Congress. Astute Democrats saw a resurgent labor movement as an ally of their party and as a critical element in economic recovery. Senator Robert F. Wagner, for example, emerged as a leading critic of the NRA's uncertainty in regard to Section 7(a). The New York Democrat believed that only a revitalized labor movement could protect workers' rights. Moreover, he held that mass purchasing power provided the essential stimulus to economic recovery; strong unions, Wagner argued, would raise wages and thus provide a powerful engine of economic growth. So when employers violated workers' rights and when NRA officials responded ineffectually, Wagner threatened congressional action.

The president had no fixed views on these matters. If anything, he leaned toward the more paternalistic approach of Johnson and the NRA hierarchy. Certainly, he found the strike wave of 1934 distracting. He dispatched representatives to trouble spots, hoping to quell unrest by appeasing or cajoling the aggrieved parties and thus get workers back to their jobs so that the recovery program could proceed without further delay. But Wagner was a power in the Democratic party, and Roosevelt had no desire to alienate him or an expanding labor movement. On August 5, 1933, he created the National Labor Board (NLB), a seven-member panel charged with investigating and resolving labor disputes arising under the NRA. The board was empowered to conduct elections among workers to determine whether they wanted union representation. Presumably, once the NLB held an election, employers would abide by the results and would enter into a bargaining relationship if the union won. In a typically Rooseveltian stroke, the president named Wagner to the new agency, thus neatly sidetracking the senator's threatened legislative investigation.

But neither the NLB nor a successor agency, the National Labor Relations Board, which replaced it in June 1934, proved effective. While the personnel of these labor boards were more sympathetic to unionism than were NRA functionaries, they remained essentially powerless. They could bring disputing parties together. They could recommend settlements. They could conduct elections. But in the final analysis, they had only the power that the law itself, the original National Industrial Recovery Act, granted. NLB investigators and board members simply had no means of forcing employers to recognize unions or to engage in collective bargaining.

These limitations proved particularly damaging in cases involving the discharge or harassment of union activists. Employers found that the firing of a vocal rank and filer or the layoff of a local union officer invariably had a chilling effect on workers' enthusiasm for organization. If the union could not protect these militants by securing reinstatement, ordinary workers drew back from signing a union card or wearing a union button. Yet laborites turning to the labor board for relief found little satisfaction. However sympathetic, the agents of these bodies could only try to persuade employers to reconsider. Even when they did gain reinstatement, aggrieved activists rarely received back pay, nor did employers suffer any punishment.

A determined employer had many devices with which to thwart the apparent intent of Section 7(a). Even where a union won a representation election, neither the law nor any NRA regulation required that the employer deal only with the majority organization. He could, and many did, claim that those workers who voted against the union also deserved consideration, and many employers entered into talks with representatives of the "loyal" (i.e., anti-union) employees as well as with those of the pro-union faction. Playing one side off against the other, employers could reward the "loyal" employees with minor concessions while protracting negotiations with the bona fide (or trade union) group. One Wisconsin employer offered advice to a colleague threatened with the virus of unionism. String out negotiations, he counseled. "I cannot help but feel that if you follow such a stalling procedure . . . this thing will wash out." Since nonunion employees, who paid no dues and faced no management displeasure, received minor benefits from a benign employer, unionists would rapidly grow disillusioned. "The employees," he counseled, "are quick to lose interest because in joining the union their natural expectancy is that they are going to secure some immediate benefits." Soon, he predicted, "they rapidly [will] start dropping out of the union." The labor board had no remedy for these tactics.

In 1934, autoworkers grew particularly disillusioned with the NRA. Through the summer and fall of 1933, thousands of workers in auto and auto parts plants had joined dozens of new federal labor unions. AFL president William Green dispatched veteran organizers to advise and direct these raw recruits, who in turn often chafed under the unimaginative leadership of these old-timers. Throughout its brief history, the auto industry had fought all unions. Union sentiment had flared up in the wake of World War I, and small groups of left-wing activists and skilled tradesmen kept a union presence alive through the 1920s and early depression years. As the 1933 Briggs strike had revealed, lack of viable unions was not necessarily a result of worker satisfaction or docility. So the surge of autoworkers into the federal unions came as no surprise to veteran activists and observers.

Joining the union was one thing. Wrenching a signed contract or even merely protecting rank-and-file activists was quite another. Some employers, notably the huge Ford Motor Company, refused even to participate in the NRA and openly pursued blatantly anti-union policies. Even NRA participants-including such powerful corporations as General Motors, Chrysler, Bendix, Auto-Lite, Briggs, and scores of other parts and body manufacturers-fought the union menace without quarter. Throughout late 1933 and into 1934, these employers waged no-holds-barred warfare against the new locals, firing activists, imposing company-controlled organizations, and refusing to bargain.

In 1934, impatient autoworkers threatened to push the timid AFL leadership into an auto strike. The Roosevelt administration, cooperating closely with fearful AFL leaders and obliging industry officials, sought to resolve the conflict by creating a special body, the Automobile Labor Board, to deal with labor disputes in this critical industry. Without the vigorous support of the AFL-and perhaps realizing that a mass strike against the auto giants had little hope of success-autoworkers grudgingly acquiesced. But the board's limited power and ineffectual personnel did nothing. Employers continued their assaults on the disintegrating unions without penalty. By the summer of 1934, autoworkers by the thousands had abandoned the federal unions. Lamented one local leader in July: "Since March our membership has fallen away in appalling numbers. . . . Our treasuries have been drained. . . The few remaining loyal members are discouraged."

In all, the AFL lost some 600 of its new federal labor unions in 1934 and early 1935. Once a shining promise of a reborn labor movement, the NRA had become in the eyes of thousands of workers the "National Run Around." Since the NRA's recovery program seemed increasingly ineffectual in general, the muddled labor policies of the Roosevelt administration merely appeared to conform to the pattern of failure increasingly evident in this early phase of the New Deal.

In the spring of 1935, Senator Wagner resumed the initiative in the formulation of labor policy. Convinced of the fatal weaknesses of Section 7(a), he introduced a bill that would reinforce its encouragement of labor organization and collective bargaining. The proposed legislation would establish a powerful new federal agency to safeguard and enforce workers' rights. At the root of Wagner's initiative rested his conviction that labor organization would boost wages and that in the resultant rise of mass purchasing power lay the key to economic recovery.

The Wagner proposal envisaged broad changes in federal labor relations machinery. It would create a three-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This new agency, unlike the similarly named boards that functioned under the NRA, would wield broad powers of investigation and enforcement. The bill included a list of "unfair labor practices," prohibiting specific activities such as financing of company unions, employment of spies, arbitrary firing of activists, and refusal to bargain. Perhaps most important, it mandated representation elections upon workers' request, laid down ground rules for the conduct of those elections, and required that employers engage in collective bargaining exclusively with the party victorious in the election. In all, the Wagner bill reinforced the basic concept of Section 7(a) and lodged primary responsibility for federal activity in labor relations in an independent agency armed with substantial powers of investigation and enforcement.

Through the spring of 1935, the proposal's fate remained uncertain. Organized labor's representatives, of course, supported it in testimony before the Senate Committee on Labor and Education. Despite the law's clear endorsement of unionism and collective bargaining, however, some labor and liberal spokespeople remained wary. Veteran AFL leaders feared that the law would weaken the federation's traditional voluntarism. If labor now relied on a federal agency to gain membership, they worried, the unions might soon find that they were becoming mere appendages to the government. Some radical unionists opposed the legislation's provision for exclusive bargaining rights, believing that it would eliminate dissenting organizations and increase the already bureaucratic nature of mainstream union governance. Business and corporate groups lashed out at Wagner's proposal, arguing that it would violate individual rights, create a top-heavy bureaucracy, and interfere with traditional labor-management relationships. They resented the "unfair labor practices" provision, which, they claimed, singled out and prejudged businessmen as virtual criminals. The Roosevelt administration, still wedded to the top-down approach to recovery embodied in the NRA, gave Wagner no encouragement. Indeed, the president even sent Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to Capitol Hill to delay congressional action.

On May 27, 1935, however, the United States Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. This bombshell decision dismantled the entire NRA operation. For laborites, it meant that the provisions of Section 7(a), uncertain and disappointing as they were, no longer applied. The events of 1934 had clearly revealed that the potential for labor unrest and even for violent confrontation lay close to the surface; thus, the destruction of the Recovery Act and the sudden elimination of its dispute machinery strengthened Wagner's hand. Doubts about the new legislation faded as administration official and congressional leaders contemplated the specter of unregulated labor-management confrontation. President Roosevelt clambered aboard the labor law express, seeking to identify the administration with the suddenly popular and seemingly indispensable proposal. Mainstream labor leaders, increasingly aware of the gains they had made under 7(a), swallowed their reservations. Business representatives remained adamant, but on July 5, the National Labor Relations Act became law.

The National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act was one of the seminal enactments in American history. Building on a half century of experimentation on both state and federal levels, it established basic machinery in the realm of labor relations. It shifted the focus of labor conflict away from violent confrontation toward the hearing rooms and courts. Prior to the passage of the Wagner Act, literally hundreds of workers had been killed and thousands injured in a long history of disputes stretching back into the nineteenth century. After its enactment-and especially after the United States Supreme Court passed favorably on its constitutionality, as it did in March 1937-deaths and serious injuries in labor disputes became rare. In effect, the Wagner Act declared it public policy to encourage collective bargaining through independent unions. It promised that the government would guarantee a fair procedure for determining bargaining rights and for the disposition of charges of unfair practices. While strikes and picket lines remained important, workers could turn to the National Labor Relations Board, operating under clearly specified rules and procedures, to protect their rights. For their part, employers now had to contend with an agency armed with powers that made intimidation, delay, and union-breaking far more costly.

The law was not magic, however. Veteran unionists counseled against complacency. "American workers," declared one long-term union leader, "should not lean too much on the Wagner Labor Disputes Law or any other law." Indeed, until the Supreme Court passed on its constitutionality, the Wagner Act had only limited effect. Many employers, utterly convinced that the Court would strike the new legislation down, continued to fight the unions without restraint. When Court approval finally came, the NLRB did indeed prove a vigorous supporter of union goals, and it played an important role in sustaining union gains during the late 1930s. Still, recruitment of members, building local organizations, and demonstrating strength at the workplace remained the task of the unions. Despite the reassuring presence of the NLRB, the words of the old miners' song remained as true as they ever had been: "You've got to go down and join the union/ Join it for yourself/Ain't nobody there to join it for you! You've got to go down and join the union for yourself."

Nor was the new law without drawbacks for labor unionists. The voluntaristic stance of the old AFL had a point to it. However sympathetic, the NLRB remained outside union control. In an unfriendly administration, its appointees could well use its complex machinery to discourage union growth. The broad powers of the board, while safely enlisted on the unions' side as long as Wagner, Roosevelt, and the New Deal remained in place, could prove two-edged. Moreover, even a friendly board had to operate in a broadly political context. As the board exercised its powers and as difficult questions of interpretation and application of the law emerged, lawyers and bureaucrats stepped to the foreground, often rendering rulings and decisions that brought drastic changes to the collective bargaining process, to the patterns of organization and recruitment, and even to the basic nature of the unions themselves. Thus, for example, is fell to the board to determine appropriate bargaining units. Under what circumstances, rival union organizers, employers, and ordinary workers asked, should all workers in a given plant or shop-or group of establishments in a given region or company-be considered a distinct unit for the purposes of holding representation elections and for subsequent bargaining? When was it appropriate for a group of distinctive craftsmen, or specialized workers, to be considered as a separate unit? Such seemingly arcane and pedestrian questions really struck at the heart of the matter of union character, and board decisions caused labor organizations to make profound changes in their structures, policies, and organizing strategies to accommodate the rulings. As some of the AFL's old-line leaders had cautioned, organized labor soon found that basic decisions regarding the future and direction of the labor movement were being made by government bureaucrats and board lawyers, not by the workers' representatives themselves.
 

For John L. Lewis the debate over government labor policy remained secondary in 1935 to the crisis that he perceived in the labor movement itself. He believed that the AFL had frittered away the golden opportunity to organize the vast mass production industries. True, at its October 1934 convention, it had adopted a bold-sounding resolution calling for organization of steel, auto, rubber, and other core industries. But Lewis knew from his long experience as a member of the AFL's ruling Executive Council that traditionalist leaders would block any real program of mass organization. Fearful that new recruits would jeopardize power arrangements within their unions, yet unwilling to waive their theoretical jurisdictional claims, such crusty veterans as William Hutcheson of the Carpenters union, Arthur Wharton of the Machinists, Matthew Woll of the Photo Engravers, and Gustave Bugniazet of the Electricians insisted that newly recruited workers be divided up among the established unions after the initial organizing campaign. There they could receive wise counsel, cautious advice, and firm direction from tried and true veterans. New recruits from steel, auto, and rubber, AFL patriarchs believed, were headstrong and foolish. They had no deep attachment to the labor movement and wanted only immediate results. Their inexperience and impatience played into the hands of the corruptionists and radicals forever lurking on the fringes of the labor movement. Mass production workers had to be recruited very carefully and had to be kept under tight control. Otherwise this "rubbish" (as Teamsters president Daniel Tobin once referred to unskilled workers) might destroy the AFL.

But Lewis's Mine Workers had always recruited on an industrial basis, as had the needle trades unions as well as organizations in food processing, paper-making, and some other trades. For these organizations, the solidarity of workers regardless of skill levels or trade had brought great benefits. Moreover, the simple fact of the matter was that modern industry, in which the vast majority of workers toiled, had been making nonsense out of traditional definitions of skill. To John L. Lewis, the equation was starkly clear: as things stood in 1935, the AFL could not organize the central core of American industry. And this inability to organize the millions of workers in this central core doomed the labor movement to political and economic irrelevance. Thus, regardless of federal labor policy, organized labor had to change its course. Wagner Act or no Wagner Act, somebody had to challenge the AFL's backward officialdom.

Late in 1935, Lewis made his move. Fifty-five years old, Lewis had led the UMW since 1919. With his imposing bulk, his mane of thick, graying hair, and his bushy eyebrows, Lewis could be an awesome figure, especially in contrast with the bland men who held power in the AFL. Lewis's larger-than-life physical appearance combined with his stentorian voice to remind reporters of a Shakespearean actor. And Lewis, though he customarily read almost nothing other than newspapers and union documents, obliged by salting his oratory with carefully chosen and well-rehearsed snippets of biblical and classical rhetoric. Some veteran labor reporters and union leaders dismissed Lewis as a power-hungry fraud, pointing to his poor record in the 1920s, his persecution of honorable union rivals, and the monumental ego that made him a stranger to self-doubt. But Lewis's mixture of vainglory, vision, and vigor struck a chord in the mid-1930s. Armed with seemingly absolute self-assurance and buttressed by the financial and organizational power of his reborn UMW, Lewis stepped forth at the AFL's October 1935 convention to challenge the federation's officialdom and to assert the claims of industrial workers.

AFL conventions were tedious affairs. Guest speakers, pious clergymen, and stodgy union chiefs droned on from a dais lined with venerable labor leaders and honored public officials. Floor debate rarely disturbed the somnolent convention hall. Delegates from the affiliated unions and from the city and state federations, bedecked with gaudy convention badges, paid little attention to the proceedings, which largely rubber-stamped the resolutions emanating from the tradition-bound Executive Council. Normally lasting at least two weeks, AFL conventions did well by the barkeeps and restaurant owners, for trade unionists tended to be heavy drinkers and big tippers. Labor reporters paid little attention to the scheduled events and attempted to remain alert enough at the endless card-playing and drinking sessions to pick up the odd scrap of gossip that might contain the germs of a story.

Amid this dull routine, Lewis was always a welcome distraction. Striding confidently into a room, surrounded by a worshipful entourage of relatives, bodyguards, and yes-men, the Mine Workers' chief automatically drew journalists into his circle. He was always good for a pithy quote, dressed up with unexpected and high-sounding phrases from the Bard or the Book of Job. And in the 1930s, Lewis truly stood for something. He did have a vision of a powerful, activist labor movement, reinforced with millions of recruits from the steel mills, auto plants, warehouses, and rubber, glass, and cement factories. So when Lewis spoke, as he did frequently at Atlantic City, people paid attention. Though the industrial union forces lost vote after vote on the convention floor as Executive Council resolutions intoned the wisdom and propriety of AFL policies and reaffirmed traditional views of mass production workers, Lewis's sharp dissents became the focus of attention. As the convention drew to a close, an air of troubled expectancy pervaded the hall.

The climax came on October 18. Amid desultory debate relating to the precise jurisdictional rights of federal unions, the powerful traditionalist president of the Carpenters' union, William L. Hutcheson, sought to silence an industrial union advocate through raising a point of order. "This thing of raising points of order all the time on minor delegates," Lewis interjected, "is rather small potatoes." The sixty-one-year-old Hutcheson shot back with choice epithets, calling Lewis, among other things, a "bastard." Lewis's biographers, historians Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, describe what happened next: 'Lewis jumped to his feet. Quick as a cat, he leaped over a row of chairs toward Hutcheson, jabbed out his right fist, and sent the carpenters' president sprawling against a table." Hutcheson, his faced bloodied, soon left the convention floor. Meanwhile, reported a journalist, "Lewis casually adjusted his tie and collar, relit his cigar, and sauntered slowly through the crowded aisles," having, literally, dealt AFL traditionalism a staggering blow.

On November 9, Lewis convened a meeting of AFL leaders eager to pursue industrial unionism. Dubinsky, Hillman, and Charles Howard, president of the International Typographical Union (ITU), joined the UMW chief, as did the presidents of four smaller AFL affiliates. The group established a Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), whose publicly announced purpose was to operate through the AFL to encourage industrial unionism. Lewis and the United Mine Workers provided much of the financial and organizational support for the new body. Although ACW and ILG members contributed large sums and although Hillman and Dubinsky were influential within the CIO, everyone looked to Lewis as the heart and soul of this new initiative.

The AFL establishment immediately denounced this CIO. Green and his colleagues viewed it as a dual union, that is, a direct rival and threat to the established labor movement. Both Lewis and Hillman dismissed the AFL's complaints. Lewis ostentatiously resigned from the AFL Executive Council, and Hillman had little hut contempt for the corrupt and ineffective AFL unions in the clothing field. CIO leaders refrained, however, from severing ties with the AFL, even after the federation's leaders pushed through suspension proceedings in August and October 1936. Lewis publicly ridiculed Green, calling his manhood and intelligence into question in thunderous and orotund press releases. Still, the CIO leaders believed that they could continue to claim sympathetic support among second- and third-level AFL unionists, many of whom shared their disappointment with the Federation's leadership, if the dissidents remained at least nominally attached to the AFL. Also acting as a brake on the more impetuous CIO enthusiasts was Dubinsky. The diminutive head of the ILG, while generous in support of CLO activities, opposed plans to leave the federation. Indeed, when in November 1938 the CIO at last held a convention, adopted a constitution, and changed its name to Congress of Industrial Organizations, thereby institutionalizing its break with the AFL, Dubinsky refused to go along.

Well before this final break, however, the CIO had begun to function as a separate body. Throughout 1936 and 1937 it provided a dramatic contrast to the old federation. In February of 1936, for example, CIO director John Brophy dispatched representatives to Akron, Ohio, where the AFL United Rubber Workers (URW) confronted the powerful Goodyear Company in a mass strike. While cautious AFL representatives clucked with disapproval over the rubber workers' militancy, the CIO people joined the strikers on the frigid picket lines, addressed their meetings, and provided good copy for the newspaper reporters covering the strike. Although CIO representative Adolph Germer himself grumbled over the rubber workers' disdain for proper procedures, the CIO nonetheless projected an image of forceful commitment to mass organization in Akron, while the confused AFL representatives dropped out of the picture. Few were surprised when in June 1936 the URW defied its AFL advisors and cast its lot with the CIO.

Through 1936, the CIO made spectacular gains on both the organizing and political fronts. In June, Lewis and his associates created a new organization, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), to bring unionism to the nation's half-million steelworkers. With Lewis's lieutenant, Philip Murray, in charge, SWOC represented a bold innovation in organizing strategy. Bypassing established unions with jurisdictional claims among steel mill workers, SWOC organizers fanned out into the industrial heartland, encouraging local activists to take over AA locals, supporting CIO militants in company-sponsored unions, and gathering membership in the steel-making centers of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

Politically, 1936 was decisive as well. The early success of CIO initiatives could not always hide a certain sense of desperation, even on the part of Lewis and Hillman. Time was running out. Industrial workers, so often disappointed by both the AFL and previous government policies, might well give up on organized labor. The CIO group believed that reelection of Franklin Roosevelt and increased Democratic majorities in Congress were critical to its success. Armed with the new labor legislation and supported by a triumphant New Deal, the CIO could capture millions of members in the auto, steel, rubber, and textiles industries. But a Roosevelt defeat-a prospect that in the summer of 1936 seemed all too possible-would usher in a hostile Republican administration that could gut the Labor Relations Act and bolster anti-union employers. Thus, Lewis and his colleagues threw unprecedented labor support behind the president. The UMW alone contributed over $500,000 to the Democratic war chest, an amount that dwarfed any previous labor commitment to any political campaign. Perhaps more important, throughout the industrial areas union officials and rank-and-file workers threw themselves wholeheartedly into the campaign, regarding it as a critical showdown between the forces of the liberal, prolabor New Deal and the GOP and its candidate, Kansas governor Alfred M. Landon.

FDR's spectacular reelection on November 3 galvanized working-class communities. Powerful corporate interests, including the leading figures in the steel and auto industries, had contributed heavily to anti-Roosevelt organizations. The Democrats' stunning victory carried into office hundreds of state and federal legislators, dozens of liberally inclined mayors and other local officers, and governors in key industrial states. It seemed a labor triumph, so massive and enthusiastic was support for FDR in working-class precincts.

Years later, Katherine Pollak Ellickson, Brophy's assistant, recalled the mixture of jubilation and apprehension that prevailed at the CIO's post-election gathering. Lewis stressed that "we must capitalize on the election. The CIO," he declared, "was out fighting for Roosevelt and every steel town showed a smashing victory for him." Hiliman added that the CIO had to move quickly, for now "may be the last opportunity to organize" the industrial masses. The CIO leaders, Ellickson recalled, "had won at the ballot box. But could they win at the plants?"
 

The answer-a resounding yes-came soon after. Early in 1937, CIO unions won monumental victories in the two most obstinate open shop industries, auto and steel. In February, the UAW capped an epic six-week confrontation with the General Motors Corporation (GM) in Flint, Michigan, with the achievement of a union contract. Barely three weeks later, SWOC, without a strike, brought U.S. Steel to terms. Following as they did on the heels of organized labor's sweeping electoral triumphs of 1936, the victories over GM and U.S. Steel touched off a wave of mass organization of remarkable intensity. By the spring of 1937, the CIO seemed to be at full tide.

The first great victory came in Flint, a city of 150,000 people lying sixty miles north of Detroit and linchpin of GM's nationwide production empire. On December 29, 1936, UAW militants shut down the huge Fisher Body plant, one of five major GM facilities in the bleak Michigan city. Employing 7,300 workers, Fisher One supplied bodies for the profitable Buick division. The UAW's strength in Flint had ebbed and flowed with the vagaries of union fortunes and government policies during the early New Deal years. The union could claim only about 10 percent of GM's 47,000 Flint workers as members, but this work stoppage and those in other Flint plants soon brought in thousands of new recruits. For the auto giant, the strike erupted at a particularly inopportune moment, for a mildly resurgent economy had begun to buoy the car market, leaving GM vulnerable in a long work stoppage.

For six weeks, UAW members occupied critical GM plants in Flint. Supported by mass picketing outside the factories and by a complex network of UAW services, this sit-down strike technique both demonstrated the workers' power to paralyze the operations and discouraged the usual kinds of strikebreaking. Although GM badgered public authorities to remove the workers, skillful UAW and CIG legal maneuvering permitted Michigan governor Frank Murphy, committed to a peaceful settlement, to pursue negotiations. As usual, the company could rely on a compliant local police force to do its bidding, and early on, the police did launch an attack on one of the occupied buildings. The sit-downers so savagely repelled this foray, hurling heavy door hinges and other metal parts from commanding upper-floor windows, that the police soon abandoned frontal assaults.

The Flint sit-down strike was one of the epic confrontations in American labor history. Pictures of the sit-downers-sprawled on the car seats that provided their bedding; hauling supplies up through the plant windows from the union food wagons; kissing their children, lifted up from the sidewalks by visiting wives-appeared in newspapers everywhere. Some of the wives created a Women's Emergency Brigade, whose colorfully clad members provided visible moral support and on more than one occasion interposed themselves between vulnerable strikers and mayhem-bent Flint police. With able UAW operatives such as Victor Reuther, Robert Travis, and Henry Kraus mobilizing strike support and orchestrating publicity outside the plants, and with John L. Lewis himself in Detroit handling negotiations with frustrated GM executives and anxious government officials, in the second week of February the two parties eventually reached a settlement. The contract, a humble document of barely one page, contained few concrete concessions for GM workers. But it did have the critical stipulation: the company agreed to recognize the UAW as bargaining agent for its members in the struck facilities.

On February 11, the sit-downers, many sporting beards and all beaming with joy, trooped from the plants. Thousands of autoworkers filled the streets in a celebration that lasted through the freezing winter night. Despite the grudging and partial character of the contract wrung from GM, unionists regarded the very fact of bringing the world's most powerful corporation to the bargaining table as a breathtaking victory. "The GM sit-down strike of 1936-37," declares historian Sidney Fine, "was, all in all, the most significant American labor conflict in the twentieth century."

Victory in steel came in the spring. Through the latter half of 1936 and into 1937, SWOC built its organization in the plants of U.S. Steel and the so-called Little Steel companies. Corporations such as Jones and Laughlin, Republic Steel, and Inland Steel were "little" only in comparison with industry leader U.S. Steel, which in the mid-1930s held about 40 percent of the nation's steel-producing capacity and employed over 220,000 workers. The other corporations, industrial giants in their own right, had traditionally followed U.S. Steel's lead in most matters relating to pricing and labor policy. And the steel industry had a long record, from the notorious Homestead Strike of 1892 through the great 1919-20 strike, of violent opposition to organized labor. Thus, SWOC's success in recruiting about 125,000 steelworkers by the beginning of 1937 was an impressive start. At the same time, it did not guarantee success, for the figure represented only about 25 percent of the steelworkers, and if past practice continued, all the large corporations would fight this new union without quarter.

But the political and social climate in the New Deal years provided laborites with some new weapons. Roosevelt's victory stiffened the resolve of SWOC organizers in scores of mill towns whose voters had overwhelmingly cast their ballots for FDR. Democratic governors in key steel states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois would perhaps not be so ready as their predecessors to intervene in behalf of the corporations. In June 1936, the United States Senate had created a special committee to investigate employer violations of workers' rights. This body, dubbed the LaFollette Committee after its chairman, Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., of Wisconsin, sent investigators to probe into the use of espionage, the stockpiling of arms and munitions, and the domination of local authorities by antilabor corporations. The committee's activities attracted great public attention and provided a sense of governmental support for labor's organizing efforts rarely seen before.

The New Deal years had brought changes inside the mills as well. True, U.S. Steel and the others remained hostile to organized labor. Still, during the NRA period, the companies had created so-called Employee Representation Plans (ERPs) by which they hoped to fulfill their obligations under Section 7(a). These organizations, designed primarily to undercut true labor unions, operated under company auspices and usually under tight managerial control. By 1935, however, union sympathizers and other militant workers had gotten themselves elected to serve in dozens of these organizations, often called "company unions." With at least 90 percent of the workers in basic steel enrolled in these organizations, company unions, though disdained by trade unionists, had begun to attack management policies. Indeed, SWOC organizers often found the ERPs hotbeds of militancy. Throughout 1936 and 1937, local activists constantly pressed the steel companies for wage and other concessions, demands that put the employers in a double bind. If they granted concessions, SWOC members in the company unions escalated their demands and claimed that the companies were only trying to buy off union sentiment. If the companies turned a deaf ear, CIO supporters argued that only SWOC could force the steelmakers to come around.

By early 1937, the chairman of U.S. Steel's board, Myron Taylor, had grown weary of the incessant conflict in his mills. The company unions' purpose was to soothe labor unrest and to keep workers loyal and docile; instead, plant managers and foremen complained of escalating guerrilla warfare, fueled by SWOC's organizers and publicity. With the steel industry just approaching 1929 levels of production and with federal and state political authorities seemingly enlisted on the side of the union, Taylor began to believe that perhaps it was time to come to terms with organized labor.

Although most of the leaders of the Little Steel companies opposed concessions, in January and February of 1937 Taylor met frequently-and secretly-with John L. Lewis to discuss an agreement. Announced to the public on March 2, 1937, it broke with almost forty-five years of the steel corporation's anti-unionism and, in the words of historian Irving Bernstein, "converted the Steel Workers Organizing Committee from an aspiration to a trade union." Union gains were limited. Steelworkers won modest improvements in wages and hours of employment, along with sharply limited seniority rights. The contract created a grievance procedure, an important factor in giving SWOC locals a day-today presence in the mills. Most importantly, however, the contract conceded recognition of SWOC by the steel corporation. True, this recognition carried with it no guarantee that U.S. Steel and its subsidiaries would stop dealing with the ERPs. Nor did it provide for any form of union security, that is, any requirement that workers join or retain membership in the union for any specified period. It was, as with the GM-UAW agreement signed just two weeks earlier, important far beyond its specific provisions, however. In both cases a fledgling union had compelled an enormously powerful corporation to deal with its representatives and to acknowledge the right of its members to a contractual relationship with the company.

Initially, Philip Murray, SWOC head, believed that the agreement would quickly translate into agreements with the Little Steel companies. After all, they had traditionally followed the industry giant's lead in labor policies. But Murray's expectations remained unfulfilled. Most of the other large steel companies resisted the new union, often bitterly. Hardliners such as Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel, felt that Taylor and U.S. Steel had betrayed the industry. U.S. Steel had sold out to Lewis and the radical CIO; to follow the U.S. Steel-SWOC agreement, he believed, would be "a bad thing for our companies, for our employees; indeed for the United States of America." Rather than deal with SWOC, Girdler vowed, he would shut down and "raise apples and potatoes." When his peers chose Girdler as president of the powerful Iron and Steel Institute on May 27, weeks after SWOC had concluded its agreement with U.S. Steel subsidiaries, few believed that victory in Little Steel would be quick or painless.

For the moment, however, the CIO was triumphant. The months from the Roosevelt victory in 1936 through May of the following year was labor's time. The very term "CIO" carried a kind of magic. In the hulking steel mills and the vast auto factories of Flint and Detroit, workers asserted their power on the shop floor. Aggressive SWOC and UAW grievancemen, emboldened now by victory after victory, went after strawbosses and foremen. Whole communities seethed with fervor for the CIO. In May, when SWOC ended a strike by signing a preliminary contract with the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company covering 25,000 employees in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, SWOC district organizer Joe Timko could not persuade the pickets to disperse. Indeed, they remained around the mills, spitting at and beating up workers suspected of scabbing. Eventually, he rounded up a marching band, found an American flag to wave aloft, and stationed himself in front of the musicians. The pickets fell in behind, and Timko led a parade of 20,000 unionists and supporters away from the J & L Mill. "The procession," says Bernstein, "spun out for twelve miles along the Ohio River."

The victories in basic industry spurred workers everywhere to claim the mantle of the CIO. Reported director John Brophy, "Hundreds of groups of all types are clamoring for charters." Workers were "besieging" CIO organizers. "We have had to turn down hundreds of requests," he reported, on the grounds that the new organization had to concentrate on the basic industries. Still, UAW and SWOC representatives found themselves bringing into their local unions all sorts of workers-cclerks, waitresses, bank tellers, cigar makers, dairy employees. The UAW even signed up a group of corsetmakers.

A wave of sit-down strikes rippled through the stores, shops, restaurants, and hotels of downtown Detroit, normally the preserve of staid businessmen and sober financiers. In the wake of its victory over GM, the UAW added members by the thousands, climbing from barely 30,000 to over 200,000 by the end of 1937. SWOC mushroomed as well, adding as many as 30,000 new members a week in April and May and claiming over 300,000 by June 1. The CIO leadership, astonished by these developments, began to create a whole apparatus, remarkably parallel to that of the despised AFL, for enrolling thousands of workers who toiled in jobs outside the basic auto, steel, and rubber industries into permanent CIO organizations.
 

In addition to the CIO's impressive numerical growth, the new organization brought an exciting new dimension to the labor movement. Industrial unionism itself, while hardly unknown in the AFL, became a dynamic force, embodying the aspirations of hundreds of thousands of mass production workers. The distinctive CIO style of unionism quickly challenged employers' authority in the day-to-day operations in the plants and shops. Typically in AFL organizations, a paid business agent looked after workers' interests, often through quiet arrangements with the employer or contractor. Even where directly elected union officials handled workers' complaints, in AFL unions top-ranking officers, often remote from the actual workplace, settled up with the boss and then handed down the decision to a passive work force.

CIO grievance-handling, however, functioned as a direct extension of organizing. Work groups or departments elected their stewards and grievancemen. These men and women, many of them long-term union activists seething with resentment against anti-union employers and heavy-handed supervisors and foremen, prided themselves on their militancy. With the coming of the CIO, struggles for shop-floor power rippled through scores of industrial plants, as triumphant activists now tried to redefine basic relationships. Stewards sought to demonstrate the union's ability to compel changes both to their own constituents and to workers who had not yet joined the union. As foremen tried to step up production or impose discipline, these activists pulled the switches, led unionists off the job, and launched chronic mini-sit-downs, job actions which workers called "quickies." This "brass knuckles unionism" especially characterized such organizations as the Auto Workers and the Rubber Workers, in which local unions had grown directly from grassroots activism.

The CIO also exhibited distinctiveness in its approach to African-American workers. For decades, they had been the forgotten or despised stepchildren of the labor movement. Many AFL affiliates excluded or discriminated against black workers. Indeed, black Americans often regarded the labor movement as an enemy of their people while praising such employers as Henry Ford, who at least provided some industrial jobs to Detroit-area blacks. In the labor conflicts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers had often recruited black workers to break strikes, a role that the labor movement's disdain and the limited economic opportunities available to blacks encouraged. True, some unions, notably the United Mine Workers, had recruited membership on a multiethnic basis and had even boasted of some black officers. A tenuous thread of multiracial labor activity stretched back to before the Civil War in some sectors. Still, in general black workers understandably regarded the resurgence of the labor movement in the 1930s with suspicion and even hostility.

CIO leaders were well aware of this. They understood too that the employment of blacks in basic industry often had the result of placing them at critical junctures in production processes. They could not organize the great packinghouses of Chicago, for example, unless they organized the kill floors. It was here, amid the filthy conditions and backbreaking toil, that the whole production process began. And it was here, in these fatiguing, low-wage jobs, that black workers commonly toiled. Nor could they build stable unions in steel without recruiting the workers, many of them black, who labored among the coke ovens, where noxious fumes, foul conditions, and heavy physical demands exacted a harsh toll. In metalworking, the foundries hot, dirty, physically exhausting, and downright dangerous-were central to the production process and extensive employers of black labor. Throughout the industrial heartland, CIO organizers knew, black workers performed their tasks in key areas of the plant. Organizing them was critical to the success of the new unions.

Other factors highlighted the role of blacks as well. Even where blacks did not provide the key to the production process, their presence as potential strikebreakers dictated their recruitment. Younger and better educated than their counterparts in the AFL, CIO organizers and leaders were less provincial, less wedded to traditional racial attitudes. CIO activists often had experience with socialist and communist organizations, where racial egalitarianism was an article of faith. Of course, not all CIO organizers glowed with racial enlightenment, nor did black workers typically respond to CIO appeals uncritically. Indeed, Murray noted in the midst of the SWOC drive that "the organization of the negro steel workers will follow, rather than precede, the organization of white mill workers." In Ford's auto plants, where throughout the late 1930s the UAW fought bitter battles, many black workers in the foundries held back. But CIO organizations, often establishing ties with black civic organizations, civil rights leaders, and churches, continued to stress the recruitment of black workers, for, as Murray acknowledged, "the negroes have become an increasingly important factor" and were essential to CIO success.

Also distinguishing the new labor federation was its commitment to political action. In the AFL tradition of voluntarism, unions entered into the political process cautiously and reluctantly. Labor's appropriate strategy, believed AFL founder and perennial president Samuel Gompers, rewarded labor's legislative friends and punished its enemies. The labor movement could not become tied to any political party, nor should it look to the state to provide basic benefits for workers. Labor organizations did not actively campaign for or finance specific parties or politicians. While the modern age encouraged CIOser attention to the political and legislative area, most of the AFL's activities under the Gompers formula consisted of resistance to antilabor bills and practices.

True, in state and local politics particular unions and union leaders expanded on this narrow definition of labor's political purposes. And it is also true that with the depression and the New Deal, the AFL had moderated its position regarding national politics. Still, the basic components of AFL voluntarism-detachment from day-to-day political activities, a limited view of the state's proper role, and suspicion that government activity would, in the long run, work against union interests-remained strong in the 1930s.

CIO leaders had many reasons for rejecting this narrow approach. Hillman and Dubinsky, for example, were at least nominal socialists whose ideology stressed the connection between political and economic affairs. Even Lewis, who still retained much of the traditional AFL perspective, had grasped the central importance for the labor movement of a friendly administration in Washington and in the state capitals. Unionists in mass production industries could not afford to disdain politics. While AEL craft unions could enforce high wage demands and provide generous benefits for their skilled members, CIO unionists spoke for vast thousands of unskilled and semiskilled workers. If a CIO union struck, employers, especially in the slackened labor market of the 1930s, could readily find replacements. Clearly, for the CIO the political environment, from the behavior of local police all the way up to the attitude and policies of the Chief Executive, were of central importance.

Nor could CIO unions create the sort of private welfare system that AEL unions, operating in part as fraternal societies, had often achieved. Mass production workers were transient, moving from place to place, job to job, industry to industry. The vast majority of industrial workers looked to government for the creation and expansion of a social welfare system, rather than to elite craft unions. This being the case, labor organizations that presumed to speak for their membership had to attempt as forcefully as possible to shape the political environment. Thus, ardent CIO support and financial commitment to Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1936 was no fluke; it grew directly from the very concept of industrial unionism.

In still another area, the CIO stood out. Under Lewis's direction, the CIO eagerly welcomed anticapitalist radicals into its fold. Neither Lewis nor any other major CIO leader had as an active part of his agenda any sort of revolutionary plan. Still, veteran unionists such as Lewis, Hillman, Murray, and Brophy realized that Communists, Socialists, and other radicals were often among the most energetic, committed, and effective organizers. People who exhibited long-term Socialist or Communist activism amid the hostile environment of the United States had paid their dues. Because of the misfortunes of the labor movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, the established unions could provide relatively few experienced and energetic organizers. Thus, Lewis and his colleagues turned to men and women schooled in the hard classroom of radical politics, people at once skilled in the techniques of organizing and battle-tested in the struggles of the pre-New Deal era.

In the early UAW, Communists played key roles in Flint and other organizing and strike campaigns. In SWOC, one estimate held that as many as 30 percent of the original cadre of organizers were either Communists or very close to the Communist party. In the electrical appliance industry, James Matles, Julius Emspak, William Sentner, and other Communists took leading roles from the beginning. Communists and those deeply sympathetic to the goals of the Party were prominent in CIO unions in shipping, longshoring. mine and metal working, and other areas as well. In 1937, Lewis appointed men with strong affinities with the Communist party as CIO general counsel and publicity director.

No aspect of CIO innovation was more controversial. Employers saw in the CIO's use of Communists and Socialists proof of its subversiveness. The AFL, which had increasingly distanced itself from all but the most moderate Socialists, attacked Lewis and the CIO relentlessly for their association with Communists. In 1938, a leading labor journalist published a widely read series of articles that indicted the CIO for its penetration by Communists. Lewis, however, remained unfazed. Communists and other radicals knew how to organize. Even anti-Communist functionaries attested to that. In the mid- and late 1930s, moreover, the Communist party, for reasons of international Communist policy, seemed to be cooling its revolutionary ardor. Indeed, radicals of every stripe were so eager to seize the opportunity to build the CIO and to organize mass production workers that they set aside their controversial politics, at least temporarily. In any event, Lewis was convinced that radicals who had spent so many years wandering in the wilderness could not in any fundamental way challenge him or usurp the CIO. When asked if he weren't fearful that the Communists might attempt to dominate the young organization, Lewis replied with typical hauteur: "Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?"

Thus, in its aggressive activism in the shops, its openness to black workers and to radical influences, and in its enthusiasm for political action, the CIO did indeed command attention. In November 1937, SWOC head Philip Murray pointed with pride to the achievements of the new organization. Six thousand new local unions had been born, he reported. Workers had chosen some 36,000 local officers in democratic elections. Twenty-eight thousand CIO grievancemen asserted industrial workers' rights on the shop floor. From a modest plan to encourage organization of neglected workers, the CIO had emerged in less than two years as a mass movement of over 4 million members. Asserted Murray, "We are the dominant labor force in this nation."
 

And so it seemed in the hectic days of 1937. Before long, however, the tide began to turn. Developments within the labor movement, in the larger political and economic environment, and on the international scene began to drag against the CIO upsurge and to impose limits to the new organization's gains. The latter years of the 1930s, while on the whole a period of continued growth on the part of the labor movement, revealed sharp limitations in both the extent and character of the militant upsurge embodied in the early CIO.

As impressive as CIO victories were, the new organization failed to complete its conquest of basic industry. In auto, Ford remained unorganized. In steel, such important corporations as Bethlehem, Inland, Youngstown, and Republic fought SWOC as vigorously and, for the time being, as successfully as they had in the past. A CIO drive in textiles sputtered on inconclusively. CIO organizations created to recruit whitecollar workers, government employees, and professionals made little progress. Even in areas such as auto, rubber, steel, and electrical appliances, where the CIO won its greatest victories, incomplete organization encouraged employers to resist bargaining.

In May 1937, Henry Ford's private police mercilessly beat UAW organizers attempting to pass out leaflets near the Rouge plant. In Ford's factories around the country, his so-called servicemen thugs often recruited directly from prison regularly intimidated and assaulted unionists. Though the UAW brought ultimately successful unfair labor practices proceedings against Ford, the Ford workplaces remained a no-man's-land insofar as the UAW was concerned as these cases wound their halting way through the NLRB.

In steel, the aftermath of the great victory over U.S. Steel was one of the bloodiest episodes in American labor history. Unable to bring Little Steel to the bargaining table, in May 1937, SWOC struck. The companies recruited strikebreakers and sought to turn local opinion against the CIO. "Back-to-work" movements pitted strikebreakers against SWOC pickets throughout Pennsylvania and the Middle West. In ugly confrontations throughout the industrial heartland, eight steelworkers were killed on the picket lines. Dozens more were injured or arrested, as Little Steel slowly began to gain the upper hand, resuming production and forcing the weakened SWOC locals to call off the strikes.

On May 30, 1937, Memorial Day, the steel strike erupted in shocking carnage. As SWOC members and their families gathered outside a Republic Steel plant in south Chicago, scores of Chicago police confronted them. Housed and partially armed by Republic, the police tensed for action. For reasons never fully explained, the bluecoats began emptying their pistols into the crowd, which included women and children. Onlookers gaped in disbelief as scores of marchers fell to the ground, many shot in the back. Newsreel cameramen recorded the spectacle of frenzied policemen clubbing the wounded. Ten men died that day, contributing to the steel strike's ultimate total of eighteen. Fifty-eight suffered wounds, thirty of them from gunshot. Paramount News, whose cameraman had recorded the scene, suppressed the film, fearing that its showing in movie theaters might cause disturbances. L!fe magazine did run a picture spread, but the captions, in contradiction to virtually every eyewitness account, depicted the police as having acted only in self-defense.

Nor was all well within the CIO itself. As Lewis and Hillman drew farther away from the AFL and completed plans for the creation of a permanent, separate federation, Dubinsky held his 200,000 member ILG back. Some members of the CIO staff believed that the man whom Lewis had appointed as general counsel, a brilliant young lawyer named Lee Pressman, was controlling important aspects of CIO policy. Since Pressman, along with Len De Caux, the Lewis-appointed director of publicity, was close to the Communist party, critics began to fear that the new labor federation was becoming an adjunct to an alien radical sect. As for Lewis himself, although he remained the towering figure and the courageous lion of the labor movement, Brophy and others in contact with him began to feel that he had become distracted from the affairs of the CIO. Always imperious, often secretive about his plans, Lewis seemed increasingly to surround himself with a small coterie of old cronies and relatives. His daughter Kathryn, serving as his private secretary, administrative assistant, and general factorum, guarded access to the UMW chief.

Disarray afflicted key CIO affiliates. Both the UAW and the URW bubbled with factionalism, both in their national offices and among the local unions. So bitter did the feuding become in the Autoworkers' union that Lewis had to dispatch Murray and Hillman to attempt to resolve the personal, ideological, and tactical conflicts that divided the executive board and threatened to rip the new union to shreds. Eventually, in 1939, CIO functionaries helped to oust the union's controversial president, Homer Martin, and to install a successor acceptable to most UAW officials. Meanwhile, rank-and-file unionists-without steady leadership at the top and still struggling to force the auto companies to deal with the local unions on grievances, work practices, and disciplinary matters-staged innumerable strikes and sit-downs. In the recessionary economic climate of 1938 and 1939, these confrontations often pitted UAW men in one department of a plant against those in another, while employers such as GM gained renewed optimism that the UAW might be only a passing phenomenon.

Things were less turbulent in SWOC but no more encouraging. Without Little Steel, SWOC could not achieve breakthroughs in bargaining with U.S. Steel. Membership in locals began to fall off. Heavily in debt to the United Mine Workers, SWOC found steelworkers reluctant to pay dues to a union that seemed stymied. Though SWOC, which was under firm central direction by Murray, did not exhibit the kind of grass-roots factionalism and shop-level conflict characteristic of the UAW, SWOC organizers grew increasingly apprehensive about the state of their locals and increasingly high-handed in their efforts to collect dues from apathetic local unionists.

A resurgent AFL also provided the CIO with cause for concern. As traditionalist leaders grasped the extent of the CIO victories, they began to shed some of their lethargy. While no AFL union could challenge the UAW in the auto industry, the International Association of Machinists did compete effectively with the upstart in the important aircraft industry. The Carpenters, Electrical Workers, Teamsters, and Boilermakers extended recruitment efforts, often clashing with new CIO affiliates. In areas such as meatpacking, paper making, food processing, service trades, and retail work, AFL affiliates found that hastily created CIO organizations could not generate the momentum and enthusiasm that the UAW, URW, and SWOC had.

By 1938, membership in AFL unions had surpassed that in CIO organizations. Outside of the basic mass production sectors, with their huge plants and enormous concentrations of workers, the AFL had many advantages in competition with the CIO. The older federation had an elaborate and long-established institutional structure. Central bodies existed in virtually every city, and well-established state federations were available to AEL organizers for political, legal, and organizing support. The CIO sought to create similar structures, but by 1939 it had done so only in its areas of heaviest concentration. As competition for members extended to smaller towns and to less centralized industries, the AFL was more than competitive.

The expansion of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) illustrates the strengths that an awakened AFL could bring to competition with the CIO. For years, the IBT consisted of a loose federation of local unions, each seeking to control local hauling in the various cities. Milk wagon drivers, bakery wagon drivers, coal truck drivers, and other delivery men formed the heart of the local unions. The leadership of the international union, held since 1907 by Daniel Tobin, rarely interfered with these powerful local unions' internal affairs.

When the organizing fervor of the NRA swept through urban workers, Teamster locals often found themselves at the center of things. Since much economic activity depended on transport, truck and wagon drivers exerted great power in organizing campaigns and strikes. Moreover, in large cities warehouse, loading dock, and service workers, who came into daily contact with the truck drivers, often sought out IBT representation. While Tobin and other old-time leaders were reluctant to recruit these newcomers, militant young local leaders welcomed them. In Minneapolis, for example, the early surge of organization inspired by Section 7(a) brought an extraordinary group of young, bright radicals into effective control of Local 574. Activists such as Farrel Dobbs and Ray Dunn quickly realized that the conversion of their local union into a mass organization, consisting of all goods-handling workers, would add immeasurably to the power of the local. Moreover, such a program of mass organization coincided closely with their militantly socialist beliefs. By 1934, these able radicals had transformed Local 574 into a powerful working-class organization, one that effectively battled the employers and police in the great strike of that year and one whose radicalism and activism troubled the IBT's national leadership.

In other cities, even ideologically cautious unionists grasped the lesson of mass organization. In Detroit, for example, young James Hoffa led a spontaneous strike of grocery store loaders and helped to begin the expansion of Teamster recruitment in the warehouses, garages, and market areas of the Motor City. In effect, these militants were turning the once-limited IBT into an industrial union, one that recruited and bargained for workers in all areas relating to the loading, transportation, distribution, and disposition of goods. Moreover, by the end of the 1930s Hoffa, Pacific Northwest IBT leader David Beck, and others were using radical-inspired tactics to extend Teamster organization to over-the-road truckers, thus translating the public's increasing dependency on motor transport into the potential for enormous regional and even national power for the IBT and its fast-rising young leadership. What with its massive recruitment of "inside" workers-warehousemen, loaders, distributors-and of over-the-road truckers, by 1939 the IBT had grown to a powerful organization of some 440,000 members. These impressive numbers, the strategic positioning of the IBT in the nation's distribution system, and the organization's deep loyalties to the old Federation made it a potent instrument in the AFL's competition with the CIO.

By the end of 1937, however, any organizing had to take into account the deteriorating economic situation. The Roosevelt administration, alarmed by the mounting budgetary deficits that New Deal programs had accumulated, began cutting back sharply on public expenditures. The administration slashed relief rolls and curtailed public projects. Without the yeast of federal expenditures, the mild recovery of 1935-37 quickly collapsed. In the fall of 1937, unemployment surged upward. Through 1938, employers, faced with rising inventories and diminishing sales, stiffened their resolve to resist union demands and even pressed their workers for contract concessions. Recruitment grew difficult once again, especially for newer organizations which could not point to a long record of survival and resurgence.

The so-called Roosevelt Recession of 1937-38 was not labor's only grievance against its erstwhile friend. When asked by reporters about the bloody Little Steel strike, FDR, no doubt reflecting widespread public weariness over labor unrest, observed that if the employers and the unions did not soon resolve their differences, many people-himself among them, he implied-would be inclined to say, "A curse on both your houses." This remark seemed even to Roosevelt's strongest CIO supporters callous and insensitive. After all, it was not SWOC members who had murdered their adversaries. Lewis, increasingly convinced that FDR was an unusually devious and untrustworthy politician, found Roosevelt's remarks inexcusable. Recalling labor's massive support for the president in the 1936 election, the UMW chief denounced the Chief Executive's bland neutrality. "It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table . . . , "thundered the CIO leader, "to curse . . . with fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace." Lewis, a Republican in lifelong affiliation, began a steady drift away from FDR, thus adding another element of disarray to labor's tribulations.

For most labor leaders and for the masses of ordinary workers, however, Roosevelt remained the central ingredient in labor's revival and the country's hopes. Yet the reforming thrust of the New Deal, which had reached a peak with the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act of 1935, lost momentum in the later 1930s. Important legislative and political mistakes by Roosevelt and his Democratic advisors strengthened the hand of conservatives in Congress, even before the off-year 1938 elections reduced liberal strength in both houses. The La Follette Committee's investigations lost their novelty for a press and public increasingly focused on frightening international events. Conservatives in Congress, aided by bitter AFL leaders, began investigations of the allegedly pro-CIO and, some charged, pro-Communist bent of the National Labor Relations Board. While no adverse legislation resulted, the board, from its inception a bastion of industrial union sympathy, became increasingly concerned with appeasing AFL unionists, resentful employers, and congressional and press critics.

By the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, the labor movement was in a state of flux. True, its legions had grown enormously in the 1930s. Official AFL figures claimed over 4 million members, while CIO estimates-never as reliable as even the often-questionable AFL counts-stood at about 3.5 million. Organized labor had achieved footholds in auto, steel, rubber, and other mass production industries and had begun a remarkable new commitment to political activity. A seemingly moribund AFL had rebounded vigorously and was aggressively competing with the CIO. While problems, both those within the labor movement and in the larger society, remained to qualify labor's achievement, the New Deal years had indeed been victorious ones for organized labor.

Historian David Brody notes that by the time Hitler plunged the world into war, observant laborites remained troubled by the nature of their achievements. Despite the heroism and militancy of thousands of rank-and-file workers and despite the often brilliant and always dynamic leadership provided by Lewis and the other leaders of the industrial union movement, unionists were all too aware that circumstances outside the labor movement had been decisive in rebuilding their movement. The NRA, the Wagner Act, the La Follette Committee, and sympathetic administrations in Washington and the state capitals had been critical elements in labor's rebirth. Moreover, labor had made its greatest organizing gains at times when the economy seemed to be picking up, notably in 1933-34 and 1935-37. Whatever organized labor's sacrifices and achievements, Brody notes, the "trigger was in the larger environment."

In 1939, employment began to pick up. European nations placed large orders for war matériel and munitions. The steel mills shifted into high gear, and consumer-oriented industries followed right behind. The Roosevelt Recession was over. But at the same time, the fury and intensity of the European war, coupled with the increasingly ominous developments in Asia, threatened to draw the United States into the maelstrom. Congress beefed up military budgets and began debating peacetime conscription. No doubt, the impending war boom would strengthen the hand of the labor organizers. It might well provide the CIO with the boost necessary to complete the organization of basic industries. But it would no doubt also bring deep changes in the entire context in which labor relations occurred. If "outside" events had provided the key to resurgence in the 1930s, laborites wondered, how would their new and rebuilt unions fare in the deepening international crisis of the 1940s?