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The Historical Literature Relating to the Background, Development, and Implications of Title II of the Social Security Act of 1935

Robert H. Zieger
University of Florida
October 5, 2008

The citations below are confined to secondary literature. Citations to the copious writing and extensive oral histories of the men and women who shaped Social Security legislation and who administered the programs it established can be found in the books and articles mentioned below and in the fuller bibliography appended at the end of this essay. Particularly rich in this respect are the books by Achenbaum, Graebner, Lubov, and Poole.

There is a substantial and contested historical and sociological literature on the origins and development of Social Security’s programs for the elderly. The standard work is Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). W. Andrew Achenbaum, Social Security: Visions and Revisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) is particularly good on post-1939 developments while Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform (2d ed.; rev. and expanded; New York, Westport, London: Praeger, 1988) place the subject in the broader context of federal social welfare policies and programs. Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1979) focuses on the political and institutional forces shaping Social Security legislation and administration. Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America: The Bland-Lee Lectures Delivered at Clark University (NY: Oxford, 1977) contain important material on attitudes toward the elderly and the social and historical context of age-related initiatives. Also useful is Carole Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

On Civil War veterans’ pensions, I have relied largely on two books by Theda Skocpol: Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), and Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). William Graebner, A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, 1885-1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) contains a wealth of information on pre-Social Security Act pension and retirement plans and programs. For the Townsend Plan, see Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

The gender aspects of social welfare programs and policies are well-treated in Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), and Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York : Oxford University Press, 2001). Kessler-Harris’s essay “Designing Women and Old Fools: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939,” U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Karhryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 87-106, is particularly illuminating. See also Linda Gordon, "Social Insurance and Public Assistance: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought in the United States, 1890-1935," American Historical Review 97:1 (Feb. 1992): 19-54.

Personal statement re labor and the presidential election of 2008, for Labor and Working-Class History Newsletter, spring, 2008

For years now it has been my hope that the men and women who, in various permutations, dominate the Democratic party's jerry-built organization, will at last realize the political and electoral necessity for a strong and vigorous labor movement. But, alas, every year the story is pretty much the same. As Robert Kuttner observed during the 2000 presidential contest, "Once again, the labor movement will do the heavy lifting for the Democratic party" and "once again, it will be the caboose at the end of the train." Recent Democratic presidencies give little grounds for believing that things will soon change. Labor support for Jimmy Carter in 1976 was an important factor in his gaining the nomination but Carter did little while in office to further labor's agenda, at the head of which were national health insurance and meaningful labor law reform. With Bill Clinton labor did get a rare progressive majority on the NLRB and family leave legislation but instead of labor law reform it got the Dunlop Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations report and NAFTA.

LAWCHA members hardly need reminding that, however luke warm Democratic aspirants may have been, the alternative was invariably worse. The administration of George W. Bush may be particularly egregious in its anti-labor initiatives-stripping thousands of federal employees of collective bargaining rights; a union-wrecking NLRB; grotesquely skewed tax and fiscal policies-but Republican ascendancy from Nixon through the current administration has been bad news for working men and women, who have watched their living standards erode and their unions become marginalized.

Moreover, as Taylor Dark reminds us, it could have been worse. Even during the dismal Reagan-George H. W. Bush years, Democratic Congressional majorities, achieved in part through labor's large-scale financial and organizational efforts, produced some surprising pro-worker legislation. To be sure, as PATCO strikers would be the first to attest, the Eighties were not good years for unionists. But Dark points to trade legislation, plant closing legislation, and civil rights and fair housing laws, along with the rejection of Reagan's Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, as evidences of the fruitfulness of the labor-Democratic nexus. These were small victories, to be sure, hardly in the same league as the Wagner Act, John Kennedy's Executive Order 10988, or LBJ's Great Society. Still, we need only observe the absence of any sort of liberal advance during the 2000's to appreciate the importance of having a Democratic presence in Washington.

Even so, "It Could Be Worse" is hardly an inspiring battle cry. The early departure of the most openly pro-union aspirant, John Edwards, does not bode well. Yes, the AFT has endorsed Hillary and SEIU Barack. But is either candidate foregrounding the issues most relevant to the embattled labor movement? True, both voted in the Senate for the Employee Free Choice Act but neither has made a robust commitment to use public policy to rebuild the labor movement, and thus to revitalize the "labor" part of the liberal-labor coalition. Indeed, American Prospect editor Kuttner reminds us, "The last Democratic president to openly celebrate the labor movement was Franklin Roosevelt." The conventional wisdom, I guess, is that the political negatives associated with forthright advocacy outweigh the positives, thus precluding open and energetic identification with labor's cause. Still, even the most centrist Democratic candidate should heed Kuttner's call to "identify a new administration with the resurgence of unionism" because "The trade union movement is not only the instrument of worker voice and of better wages and working conditions, but it remains the most potent civic counterweight to the political power of organized business."

Alas, it is doubtful that anyone near the levers of power is actually listening. Yet if labor supporters lose hope, they concede the game before it starts. Not expecting a miracle, I venture only to recommend that the two aspirants-or more likely, their policy and program advisors- crack open Paul Krugman's recently published The Conscience of a Liberal and to heed the words of this born-again critic of recent Republican ascendancy. As Krugman observes, from the 1930s into the 1960s, a strong labor movement counteracted powerful corporate interests in both the economic and political arenas. A "middle-class" society, characterized by expanded home ownership, mass access to higher education, and a relatively egalitarian income-distribution structure emerged. Clearly, "Unions were . . .an important factor limiting income inequality. . . ."

But labor power meant more than fairer income distribution and moderation of disparities of income. It had a critical political dimension as well, one that the Democratic aspirants, their handlers, and the men and women who inhabit the party's shadowy decision-making apparatus would do well to contemplate. Thus, in the 1950s, Krugman notes, "The strength of the union movement . . . greatly benefitted the Democrats . . ., [since] a powerful union movement had the effect of mobilizing lower-income voters."

Will 2008's Democrats recognize at long last the critical importance of a vibrant labor movement to their electoral and programatic fortunes? Even if they did, would a crippled and all-too-often-sclerotic labor movement have the vision and energy to rebuild and regroup? Don't bet on it.

But another question merits a more positive response, to wit: Will Democratic majorities and Democratic occupation of the White House be good for wage-earners? And what about this one: Can labor's friends harbor even a long-shot hope that a new Democratic administration's agenda might include union-building initiatives? To be sure, the odds are long but, in the words of Judy Tenuta, "It could happen." Meanwhile, since Mickey isn't running this year, I'm for Hillary or Barack.

In the Grosvenor Resort case, for example, the Board went against 40 years of precedent to make it more difficult now for union supporters victimized by illegal discrimination to file back-pay claims. In another back-pay case, St. George Warehouse, the Board reversed a 45-year precedent. This new decision relieves employers of the burden of proving that employees they fired did not adequately search for work. Instead, the Board has now placed the obligation to prove that fired workers actively sought interim employment on the workers. If the workers cannot prove they took reasonable steps to find work after they were illegally fired, the employer is not obligated to make restitution. In this case, dissenting Board members wrote that the result of the decision is to "place a stumbling block before discriminatees and, ultimately, to frustrate enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act." Since the requirement to make back-pay restitution is the only penalty that employers who violate the National Labor Relation Act's prohibition of discrimination against union supporters face, these decisions go far in compromising workers' exercise of democratic rights in the workplace.

Recent detrimental Board actions have not been confined to these back-pay judgments. The Board's ruling in the Dana Corporation case overturned 40 years of precedent by giving a minority of anti-union employees the right to a decertification election immediately after their employer voluntarily grants union representation upon a showing of majority support. This decision undermines majority rule, protracts the transition from union recognition to contract negotiation, and invites disdain and contempt for orderly processes. Other precedent-reversing decisions issued by the Board have stripped protections from workers exercising their rights to collectively bargain and strike.

These rulings, along with earlier decisions that threaten to deny as many as eight million American workers to labor law protection, bolster the need for Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. This legislation, which has passed the House and commands a majority in the Senate, would put teeth back into labor law by increasing back-pay awards and expanding the power of the NLRB legal staff to reinstate workers immediately after they are illegally fired. These and other provisions of the bill would reverse much of the damage done the recent anti-worker rulings of the NLRB.

The legislation creating the NLRB in 1935 declared that "encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and . . . protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing" was to be the public policy of the United States. Although the 1935 enactment has been amended several times, this declaration remains the law of the land. What has changed is the highly partisan behavior of the NLRB, as evidenced by these egregious recent decisions, decisions that impede and punish self-organization and discourage collective bargaining, in clear violation of the basic intentions of US labor law.

When I talk about my book For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865, published last year by the University Press of Kentucky, someone in the audience invariably asks this question: "How long did it take you to write the book?" The answer, it turns out, is not so simple as might initially seem. Indeed, I find myself giving three answers, to wit: a) three years, seven months, sixteen days, nine hours, and twenty-seven minutes; b) nine years; c) my adult life (I'm 69).

The first answer, of course, refers to the time elapsing between when I first put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and when I sent off the Acknowledgments, Introduction, and Bibliographical Essay. It bypasses all the preliminary stuff-the prospectus, the false starts, the deluded outlines, the mental jettisoning of the project on the grounds that I wasn't worthy of such an important subject. It brings me back to my little cubicle in the documents section of the old library where for several months in the summer of 2003 I alternated between reading through the pile of books I had amassed in an effort to bring me up to speed on the post-Reconstruction political economy of the South and writing out draft paragraphs in which I sought to capture the drama and poignancy of three million newly freed Americans attempting to find their place amid bewildering economic, political, and social developments.

Actually, though, when I think about it, the specific writing time embraced in the aforementioned three years, seven months, etc., figures out to only about, say, an hour-and-a-half a page. Since the book is about 300 pages long (I'm counting the index and the photos), actual writing time was 450 hours, or 11.25 forty-hour weeks spread over the three years, seven months, etc. period. Of course, as fellow historians will readily attest, writing can't be neatly separated from reading and research. Writing exposes gaps of ignorance, which entail trips to the library, frantic google searches, and hectic rummaging through one's notes. In turn, this research suggests topics or perspectives not originally considered when the writing began, which in turn sends one back to the library, internet, and note files. And so on. Let's say that the additional reading, rummaging, and searching adds an additional half-hour to each page, bringing the total to 600 hours or fifteen forty-hour weeks. So maybe the right response is to say that "The writing and associated activities consumed fifteen weeks over a three year, seven month, etc. span."

But this answer seems sort of unimpressive. "If it takes only a semester's worth of work to produce a book, what is it you guys at the university do with all your time?," I sense students and laypersons wondering. Sure, you teach classes and you're always complaining about committee work. But with the ample free time, long summer vacations, and-let's face it-light teaching duties, it shouldn't take you almost four years to write a book. Clearly, I have come to realize, I need to devise an answer that gives the project greater gravitas and suggests that the writing of this book was indeed a substantial enterprise.

Hence my second answer: About nine years. Surely nine years-almost 12 percent of an early 21^st Century American male lifetime-bespeaks Significance and Weightiness. And it is true that if I reflect back on what started me on this project, it did begin about nine years ago when I was drafted by the president of the local labor council to serve on a labor-community committee formed to bring an award-winning exhibit on the life and times of Florida native A. Philip Randolph to our town. Since Randolph, along with Mike Harrington, George Orwell, and Thurman Munson, has long been one of my heroes, I entered into the project gladly. And it did turn out to be, literally, an inspiring undertaking. Here we were, black folks and whites, haughty professors and hard-working union members, coming together to celebrate the life and achievements of this distinguished Floridian. The "Southern History" with which I had been familiar as a younger man, with its hoop skirts, magnolia blossoms, Negro spirituals, and battered battle flags was little in evidence at the local Matheson Historical Center in our town, where the exhibit was on display in the spring and summer of 1998.

We held a series of programs and films in connection with the exhibit. In addition, the Florida State AFL-CIO held its annual legislative conference in Gainesville, where I appeared on a panel that included then-State Representative Anthony Hill, to whom I gave a copy of an earlier book I had written, American Workers, American Unions.⁽¹⁾ Several months later, the Representative called me, floating the idea that I come up to the Meany Labor Studies Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, to conduct a seminar on race and labor for the organizers and political action staff members who gathered there for labor education courses. Nothing came of this notion but it was then that I began to review in my own mind what I knew and what I thought students, labor activists, and other citizens needed to know about the history of race and labor. I more explicitly addressed the subject in the labor history class I taught annually at the University of Florida and, in the spring of 2002, at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. I gave some talks before student groups and before general public audiences. I wrote up a short article for publication in Labor's Heritage, a well-produced magazine issued by the Meany Center in behalf of the AFL-CIO.

Indeed, it was probably the bizarre fate of this article that sealed the deal for me. In the spring of 2002, after accepting the article, which was to bear the title "Black and White, Unite and Fight?," echoing the slogan of militant meatpacking unionists in the 1930s, and after scheduling it for publication, the magazine unceremoniously and without substantial explanation un-accepted it. The implication in the terse and rather dismissive letter that informed me of this reversal was that the paper had conveyed too frank a discussion of some of the less edifying episodes in organized labor's historic dealings with black workers. I was shocked, infuriated, and frustrated, especially since I had crafted and circulated the paper as a contribution to the labor-civil rights coalition that had just recently helped to engineer a stunning liberal electoral victory in the only southern state to go Democratic in the 2000 presidential election.⁽²⁾ Chastened and irate, I vowed revenge: If they wouldn't publish my article, I'd write a book, so help me Samuel Gompers. The rest, as indicated above, is History.

So, nine years. But on reflection, even that answer began to seem unsatisfactory. After all, it's not as if race and labor was a subject I had ignored before 1998. From the first edition of the labor history course I annually taught, first at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in the early 1970s, African American workers and their relationship to the labor movement had been a focal point.

In my writing as well. True, my first two books, published in 1969 and 1977,⁽³⁾ respectively, had dealt hardly at all with race. But subsequent books, especially The CIO, 1935-1955⁽⁴⁾ had sought to engage race and labor in substantial ways. Moreover, as I began developing a prospectus for my new book, it occurred to me that over the previous two decades it had been my privilege to deal extensively, either through direct personal collaboration or by virtue of the manuscript reading, journal article-vetting, and book reviewing that occupies so much of the attention of ageing professors of history, with many of the leading scholars whose work on race and labor would form the basis for the sort of synthesis I was contemplating. Indeed, it was gratifying to reflect back on the direct contact of this sort I had had with the work of such scholars as Eric Arnesen, Kevin Boyle, Michelle Brattain, Mary Frederickson, Rick Halpern, Michael Honey, Daniel Letwin, Alex Lichtenstein, Nelson Lichtenstein, Joseph McCartin, August Meier, Timothy Minchin, Bruce Nelson, Judith Stein, Joe Trotter, and other historians whose contributions were reshaping our understanding of the subject. Initial doubts that assailed me as a white guy who hadn't done an honest day's work in over forty years in now presuming to write a history of race and labor began, if not to dissipate at least to confine themselves to moments of discouragement. Indeed, a more defiant attitude began to emerge: If not me, who? And if not now, when?

Shortly after I had begun active work on the project, historian John Bracey visited our campus and gave a fascinating talk to students about the state of black history at the time he began graduate school at Northwestern in the early 1960s. It soon became apparent that Bracey and I were of a similar age. He recounted that in the initial syllabus for his 19^th century US history seminar, there were no works by black scholars or, apart from works that dealt with slavery as a political problem, about the black experience in ante-bellum America. Bracey and a colleague, with the complete support of an abashed seminar director, soon rectified the omission. Bracey told this story as a way of indicating to his undergraduate student audience how far black history and race history had traveled in the four decades since.

Bracey's experience resonated with mine, though in a different key. My advisor, Horace Samuel Merrill, and his wife Marion Galbraith Merrill were in those days civil rights activists in the suburban Washington, D.C., area where the University of Maryland is located. Even so, however, we read little if any black history or race history in our Twentieth Century seminar. To be sure, some of Sam's students, notably Thomas Cripps, were beginning to explore themes in black history. And it was certainly true that as the civil rights movement hit its highwater mark in those years, I joined my graduate student colleagues in supporting, and sometimes even in participating in, it. Still, more obtuse than Bracey, I took me far too long to understand the centrality of race to the American historical experience and to begin to incorporate the theme of race and labor into my own work.

I like to think, though, that in some subterranean precincts of my young historian's mind the seeds of the book I would write in my late sixties were beginning to germinate. At any rate, that's the way it appeared to me when it came time to write the Introduction to For Jobs and Freedom:

I still have a hard time confessing that I didn't stay for Dr. King's speech. As far as I was concerned, civil rights was a matter of politics and morality, not one of religion. Anyway, I had parked a long way off, it was getting late, and I had to pick up my wife at the Prince Georges County bank where she worked. So I threaded my way back through the throng lining the reflecting pool, across the Washington Monument grounds, up along Pennsylvania Avenue, the speakers' voices growing fainter. Since I had parked on one of the side streets off East Capitol St. behind the Library of Congress (my normal haunts in those dissertation-writing days), I made my way through the Capitol grounds.

It did occur to me that I should find some souvenir of the March. Something to prove to my progeny and to the students to whom I planned one day to teach US History that I Was There. The discarded bright orange-and-black placard lying behind a low hedge would do the trick, even if it did have a slight tear. "The UAW Says Jobs and Freedom for Every American," it read. Since my ambition was to be a labor historian, it seemed to fill the bill perfectly.

But I will confess that I hadn't really thought much about the "Jobs" part. Civil rights was about public accommodations, voting rights, and schools. Yes, certainly, demonstrators in southern towns and cities had demanded employment in the stores and shops. But it was the classrooms, the voting booths, and the hotels and restaurants that made the biggest headlines. Of course, an instant's reflection affirmed, the placard was dead right: without jobs, freedom was a coin of limited value. Jobs were the modern equivalent of the Reconstruction Era's forty acres and a mule-and we all know what happened when the freedmen were denied title to the land they and their forebears had worked for generations. Yes, it was true: all this was indeed about jobs and freedom.

1. I gave Rep. Hill a copy of the book's second edition, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1994. Since then a third edition, retitled American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century, and co-authored by Gilbert J. Gall, has appeared, also published by Johns Hopkins (2002).

3. Robert H. Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 1919-1929 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969); Robert H. Zieger, Madison's Battery Workers: A History of Federal Labor Union 19587 (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1977).

In 1948 when Harry Truman was asked to what he attributed his stunning upset victory over Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, he replied “Labor did it.” He was referring to the unprecedented commitment of financial and manpower support to his candidacy contributed by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial organizations (CIO), at that time separate national labor bodies. Truman’s terse remark was not entirely accurate, however. It is true that both labor federations as well as many affiliated unions and state and local labor organizations campaigned hard for the doughty Missourian. Their efforts were indeed critical in electing a candidate who had to fight not only a well-financed Republican campaign but also third- and fourth-party rivals Strom Thurmond and Henry A. Wallace. But political analysts were quick to point out that other factors–a strong urban Negro vote; discontent in the usually Republican farm and prairie states; Dewey’s lackluster and complacent campaign–contributed heavily to Truman’s unexpected success. Still, even if it wasn’t quite true that “Labor did it,” it was true that blue collar workers and an aroused and energetic labor movement played a critical role.
The endless t.v., newspaper, and internet discussions in the aftermath of Barak Obama’s remarkable victory in Tuesday’s presidential elections brought Truman’s quip to mind. Pundits have highlighted a number of factors to account for Obama’s showing. African Americans turned out in massive numbers, awarding the Democratic candidate a remarkable 97% of their votes. Obama, it appears, won the battle for the “hearts and minds” of Latino and Hispanic voters, seemingly by a two-to-one majority. Fifty-five percent of women supported him, as apparently did a majority of voters earning over $200,000 in family income. Virtually every expert has highlighted the vote of young people, noting both the massive turnout among those in the 18-to-29 year-old bracket and the 70% support they awarded Obama.

    Neglected in most of these postmortems, however, is the role that organized labor played in the campaign. Indeed, in this election the AFL-CIO and its affiliated organizations conducted labor’s largest political mobilization ever. Consider these facts:

    **Union members and their families comprised about 21% of the voting public.
    **Union voters backed the Obama-Biden ticket overwhelmingly. Sixty-nine percent supported the Democratic candidate. In key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Florida Obama-Biden outpolled McCain-Palin by 41 points among union voters.
    **More than 250,000 union volunteers walked the neighborhoods and distributed flyers. They made 70 million phone calls.
    **The AFL-CIO’s My Vote, My Right program protected voters from harassment and petty challenges by placing 2,700 union volunteer poll monitors at key locations. Meanwhile, 1,400 union attorneys stood ready to ensure that citizens were not denied the right to vote.
    **Among pro-McCain demographic sectors, the union difference was particularly notable. While the Republican candidate captured a majority among those over 65 years old, retired union members supported Obama by a 46 point margin. McCain won among veterans but union veterans went for Obama by a 25-point margin.

The new administration, of course, faces daunting problems, both at home and abroad. Labor activist veterans of political campaigns and legislative battles are well aware that President Obama and the Democratic congressional majority will face difficult issues and will understandably have to be responsive to a wide diversity of viewpoints. At the same time, however, working people and their unions do expect that their efforts in the campaign entitle them to sympathetic consideration of their legislative and political goals. They are determined to promote health care reform, more equitable taxation, and changes in economic policy that will benefit low-wage and middle income families. They seek pro-worker appointments to regulatory bodies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Labor Relations Board. High on their legislative agenda is passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would facilitate the efforts of workers to gain union representation and to achieve the benefits of collective bargaining. Despite organized labor’s role in Truman’s 1948 victory, few of its legislative goals were subsequently realized. Recognition of the unions’ efforts in the recent election may help to prevent history from repeating itself.

Robert H. Zieger
Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus
University of Florida

In commenting on various historical episodes, t..v. pundits and other public commentators are fond of telling us that “you won’t find this story in the history books.” Thus, declares columnist Cynthia Tucker, “Black Americans have been shortchanged by history.” “Textbook writers and history teachers,” she charges, “gloss over Reconstruction and Jim Crow” and generally slight the African American experience. But despite Tucker’s complaint, at least in college-level US history courses, the black experience is in fact a central component in both teaching and scholarship. The theme of black workers, their role in the broader working class, and their relationship to the labor movement has been a particularly lively one among scholars over the past several decades. My own book, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) is an effort to bring the fruits of this scholarly activity to the attention of a wider public.

Below is an annotated bibliography consisting of the 25 or so books on the history of race and labor in the post-Civil War US that I consider particularly important and relevant to teachers. While there are some venerable older titles, the emphasis is on relatively recent publications, books that teachers at all levels will find useful in bringing this critical subject to the attention of their colleagues and students. It is drawn from the bibliographical essay in For Jobs and Freedom (pp. 255-66). Reviews of a number of recent books on the subject can be found at http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rzieger/reviews.htm (Feb. 1, 2009).

Eric Arnesen, ed., The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007). A collection of essays reflecting recent scholarship in a wide range of occupational sectors. Deals largely with the period before 1950.

David E. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). A “free market” approach to the relationship between black workers and the labor movement from a prominent legal scholar. Very critical of organized labor’s historic stance vis-a-vis black workers.

Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1974). A fact-filled compendium, written from an old-fashioned–and still challenging–Marxist perspective.

Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (NY: Basic Books, 1985). A powerful and poignant overview of the distinctive problems and achievements of African American women workers.

Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931; Atheneum reprint, 1972). An older book that provides vivid accounts of black workers’ experiences in the early twentieth-century industrial economy. Traditional social investigation at its best.

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (NY: Harper & Row, 1988; Perennial Classics edition, 2002). The best one-volume history of Reconstruction. Foner stresses the role of economic factors and labor relations in reshaping to political economy of the post-bellum South. Supplement with Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).

David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973). An engaging account of African American life and labor; excellent for its discussion of black women’s experiences as domestic servants.

Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-21 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). These two books
depict a startling world of inter-racial labor activism in a key economic sector in the segregating South of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London, NY: Verso, 1996). A brilliant analysis of the role that de facto re-enslavement of African Americans played in the development of the “New South.”

Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). A fascinating account of a mythical–but perhaps not entirely mythical–black working-class folk hero and the music that celebrated him.

Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). An outstanding study that examines black workers’ employment and their struggle against discrimination in this key industry.

Beth Tomkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998). These books analyze the key role played by A. Philip Randolph and the men and women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in linking labor rights and civil rights.

Horace Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1939). One of the best books on the relationship of African American workers to the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in organizing mass production industries. Contains vivid material drawn from the authors’ interviews with both rank-and-file workers and union activists in autos, steel, meatpacking, and other key sectors. Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2003) and August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York: Oxford, 1979) are other insightful accounts of the key roles played by African American workers in the labor upheaval of the New Deal-World War II era.

Greta de Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). One of the few major studies of agricultural and other rural workers struggling to achieve civil rights and economic justice.

James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). A pioneering work that emphasizes the working-class character of the mass movement of blacks into the industrial North in the 1910s and 1920s. William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (NY: Atheneum, 1970) is an outstanding account of one of the most violent episodes in the often-turbulent course of the early Migration.

Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-54 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997) and Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997) chronicle the critical role played by black workers in building the Packinghouse Workers union and in the union’s efforts to encourage civil rights generally.

Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (Norton, 2005) focuses on the neglected racial implications and repercussions of innovative federal programs during the 1930s and 1940s, with special emphasis on their impact among black workers.

Merl E. Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941-1946 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1991). Stresses grass roots black activism in the workplace and in the community in the effort to secure this limited, but significant, breakthrough in federal policy.

John Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002) and Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), These two books examine the complex relationship among the steel industry, the United Steelworkers of America, and African American workers. Needleman’s book is particularly valuable for its inclusion of first-hand testimony from black workers and activists as they attempted to cope with the decline of this once-mighty industry.

Michael K. Honey, Going Gown Jericho Road : The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (New York: Norton, 2007). A reminder that when he was murdered, Dr. King was in Memphis to support the city’s sanitation workers’ struggle for union recognition. Honey makes a convincing case that in King’s radical vision, labor rights were a central component of the human rights for which he so eloquently spoke.

Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Timothy J. Minchin, The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Grass-roots studies of the struggles of black workers to use Title VII (workplace discrimination) of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to integrate two key southern industrial sectors.

Jerald E. Podair, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Traces out the long-term political effects of the conflicts that erupted in 1968-69 when black activists and the New York City teachers’ union clashed over school governance.

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Explores relationships among black militancy, union politics, and urban crisis in the Detroit of the 1960s and 1970s.

By Robert H. Zieger
Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus
University of Florida

Last week the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) was introduced in Congress. This is the most important labor legislation introduce in the past sixty years. In 2007, the House of Representatives passed this measure only to have it filibustered to death in the Senate. President Obama has urged passage of the Act and has affirmed repeatedly that he will sign it with enthusiasm.

The intent of this law is to restore workers’ rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining without fear of dismissal or other reprisal. In 1935, National Labor Relations, or Wagner, Act was adopted, predicated on the idea that workers were entitled to democratic participation in the decisions that governed their working lives. A National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was established for enforcement of the law and for the purpose of encouraging collective bargaining. Over the past several decades, however, Board has rendered a series of rulings that have impeded, rather than promoted, workers’ ability to choose union representation. During the George W. Bush administration in particular, Board rulings repeatedly undermined workers’ rights to chooses and encouraging of employers to resist workers’ right to choose.

The Employee Free Choice Act would restore democracy to the union recognition process. It would give workers themselves the right to decide whether to indicate their preference via a majority sign-up procedure or through the holding of an NLRB-administered election. As things stand now, this choice is exclusively in the hands of employers who often use the lengthy pre-election period to intimidate and penalize union supporters. Under current rules, employers are free to force workers to attend one-sided meetings which are used to present only one side of the issue. Union representatives are barred from these “captive audience” meetings. Brave indeed is the worker who would rise in such a meeting to advocate union representation. In addition, intense one-on-one pressure applied during working hours by supervisors and managers make a mockery of the democratic process as it is commonly understood. Instead of free and open discussion, with voters having access to and the ability to question all sides, the typical NLRB election has become a one-sided exercise in propaganda and coercion.

The Employee Free Choice Act will restore real democracy to the union recognition process. By requiring recognition if a majority of the workers sign an authorization card–while leaving open the right of workers to require a subsequent election–the Act will help to balance the current monopoly of access and power enjoyed by employers. Other provisions of the Act will increase penalties for violation of labor law and facilitate the process by which first contracts are arrived at. Employers who in the past have shown little concern for democratic participation in the workplace are understandably hostile to this legislation, which would provide workers with greater voice in the determination of wages, hours, working conditions, and rules governing discipline, promotion, and benefits.

The current crisis in the financial sector has focused attention on the economy. Americans are rightly concerned about their jobs, their incomes, affordable health care, and access to quality education. The era from 1945 to 1975 was the greatest period of prosperity in our history because the largest number of people shared in that prosperity. This was also the period of the highest unionization rates. Indeed, the growth of the American middle class was a direct result of worker-friendly policies that had been instituted during the depression of the 1930s.

The legislation creating the NLRB in 1935 declared that “encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and . . . protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing” was to be the public policy of the United States. This remains the law of the land. The Employee Free Choice Act will help to restore equity to the currently prevailing in the union recognition process and to provide a mechanism through which this still-vital policy can be revitalized.