reviews

Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Pp. ix + 264. ISBN 0-252-06933-1

Brian Kelly argues that those primarily responsible for the promulgation and exploitation of racial antagonism in the labor relations of the Alabama coal fields during the first two decades of the twentieth century were the mine operators and other business interests, along with civic and political elites, both white and black. White miners and trade unionists, he readily acknowledges, embraced white supremacy and segregation. But when miners sought through the agency of the United Mine Workers (UMW) to improve their material conditions and free themselves from arbitrary social control in the coal camps, common class interests trumped racial antagonism. While neither the white rank and file nor the national UMW leadership abandoned white supremacy, Kelly believes that "nowhere in the early twentieth-century South were the traditions of racial protocol challenged more forcefully than in the Alabama coalfields." (188)

Based on resourceful and exhaustive research in corporate, governmental, and labor materials, Kelly's account of race and labor in the Alabama coalfields joins Daniel Letwin's The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (1998) in chronicling the struggle for union in the modern South. Letwin's book, however, concentrates on the period culminating in the UMW's 1908 strike defeat whereas Kelley focuses attention on the post-strike efforts of employers to create a stable, union-free environment. Race, Class, and Power provides rich detail on the efforts of leading Birmingham-area firms, notably Tennessee Coal and Iron, to create and maintain a labor force that was at once skilled, efficient, and docile. While black mine workers were considered inferior in intelligence and productivity, racial discrimination and the repression ubiquitous in the turn-of-the-century South enabled operators to keep wage rates low, a crucial consideration in a region whose coal veins required labor intensive exploitation. Even as they recruited black workers and exploited racial antagonisms to keep miners in line and their wages low, TCI and other leading operators attempted to stabilize the coal camps through programs of welfare capitalism, sponsoring churches, schools, and medical services designed to provide a better deal for black miners than was available in the cotton fields or in the urban trades. These programs, in which members of the Birmingham area's small black middle class were prominent, invariably encouraged dependence on the coal operators and discouraged dissent, union sentiment, or overly ambitious hopes of individual advance. Both the chronic repression and the welfare programs rested upon and sought to sustain the prevailing white supremacist racial order.

The culmination of Kelly's book is the revival of the UMW during World War I and the great 1921 Alabama coalfields strike, another brutal defeat for the union. Fully cognizant of the limitations in the union's conception of interracial organization, Kelly nonetheless stresses the uniqueness of the UMW's efforts. The very logic of race-based exploitation impelled at least a minority of white workers to attempt to revive the South's sporadic, but by no means insubstantial, traditions of class-based, interracial social protest. To him, it seems perverse to single out a beleaguered labor organization for reflecting attitudes and adopting policies that often short-changed black members. What other agency or institution in the progressive era South even contemplated interracial activism-the churches? The business community? The press? Academia? Moreover, in Kelly's rendering, white miners and UMW organizers were capable on occasion of transcending narrow calculations of self-interest in their recruitment of and collaboration with black miners.

Race, Class, and Power joins in the debate over the relationship between organized labor and African Americans in modern America. In his extensive notes in particular, Kelly takes issue with the "wage of whiteness" school of analysis, as well as with the related perspective of union critic Herbert Hill. For all the UMW's limitations, Kelly believes, the miners'union helped keep alive a sense of class-based interracial struggle that, despite the defeats in 1908 and 1921, bore fruit in the CIO upheaval of the 1930s. In his stress on employers' responsibility for promoting and sustaining a subordinative social order he also challenges those who see in "free market" capitalism a profit-seeking logic that benefitted black workers. Progressive-era unions, as Kelly's scathing account of the racial politics of Birmingham's craft unions unflinchingly demonstrates, all too often reflected and endorsed the era's racism. But in the end, at least in the Alabama coalfields, it was so-called "enlightened" employers who both defended and exploited the structures of racial subordination, and the UMW alone that provided an outlet for black activism and a glimpse, however fleeting, of genuine bi-racial progress.

Heather Cox Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001.

Heather Cox Richardson believes that historians have neglected the class-labor dimension of the retreat from Reconstruction. Leading Republicans initially saw the freedmen as exemplars of the free labor ideology that undergirded their notions of political economy, which rested on a belief in the harmony of interests of social classes. Released from the bonds of slavery, black men would readily adapt to the demands of a market economy by becoming diligent, provident, and ambitious workers, seeking the self-improvement that was possible only in a free labor regime. They would serve as examples to both indolent southerners and fractious northern white workers. Governmental intervention in their behalf would be brief, for the only protection that the sturdy republican worker, black or white, needed was the ballot.

Alas for these expectations, as the Reconstruction era unfolded Republicans grew increasingly disillusioned. Northern observers all too often validated southern whites' complaints that the freedmen were feckless, irresponsible, and vindictive. Even worse was the former slaves' demand that the federal government continue to intervene in southern political, economic, and social life to protect them and provide opportunities for the politically ambitious among them. For growing numbers of Republican editors, social observers, and politicians, the former slaves were proving in their own way as dangerous as were the obstreperous labor unionists and striking workers whose protests called class harmony into question. Republicans were disappointed in both restive laborites and ungrateful blacks, coming to regard both separately as dangerous challengers to the free labor world view that they believed had been vindicated in the Civil War.

An increasingly marginalized band of Stalwart Republicans continued to champion the rights of southern blacks, but the party's center of gravity shifted decisively toward sympathy with gentlemanly southern elites. One critical episode was the fight over public finance in South Carolina in the early 1870s, wherein white leaders persuaded many northerners that the Republican legislature was advancing confiscatory tax plans so as to exact revenge against former slaveholders and as a means of support for wild-eyed schemes of public provision designed to benefit black politicians and their work-shirking supporters. The fight over the 1875 Civil Rights bill was another milestone, as more and more Republican editors and politicians attacked federal legislative protection for blacks as special interest legislation. Southern blacks, these men believed, would gain access to the region's educational and economic opportunities, and would gain the personal respect they craved, when, and only when, they foreswore claims to special treatment, ignored demagogues who waved the bloody shirt, and buckled down to honest labor. By 1889-90 when Congress debated and defeated the Federal Elections Bill, proposed by a die-hard cadre of Stalwarts in the wake of wide-spread voting irregularities and terroristic attacks on black voters, most Republicans were content to let the white South conduct racial affairs in their own way, free of oppressive federal oversight. Alarmed by the labor unrest of the 1870s and 1880s, Republicans had come to see the South's black masses as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution.

Richardson's method is old-fashioned. She charts the shifting views of Republicans largely through intense examination of newspaper articles and editorials, as supplemented with politicians' speeches and debates. She makes a strong case that the vigorous partisan press of the late 19^th century constitutes a reliable register of shifting public ideology. The Death of Reconstruction also exhibits an impressive grasp of the diverse historiography of the post-bellum period and its notes provide a useful running commentary on key interpretive perspectives.

Although Richardson stresses that the economic changes and labor activism that punctuated the Gilded Age strongly influenced Republican views on the freedmen, these developments are off stage in The Death of Reconstruction. Nowhere does the author attempt to link black demands for racial justice, on the one hand, directly with the rising clamor of industrial workers for social justice, on the other. One of the tragedies of the Reconstruction and late nineteenth century period was the failure of white laborites to join hands with oppressed black workers and farmers, but discussion of this failure is not part of Richardson's agenda. She does briefly consider episodes of inter-racial agrarian activism but the book is mostly about the attitudes of Republican leaders toward blacks, not about the theme of joint worker-freedman dissent itself. Largely absent are the voices of the southern black workers and farmers about whom her public figures wrote and spoke so copiously.

The Death of Reconstruction is effective in charting the postbellum course of free labor ideology. It persuasively establishes the links that Republican leaders made between the turbulent politics of the Reconstruction-era south and the increasingly disputatious labor problem. On the other hand, Richardson is not persuasive in advancing the largely unstated notion that class concerns trumped racial considerations in shaping Republican ideology and policies. If it was true that editorialists and politicians turned against the freedmen because of their alleged deviation from free labor dicta, it seems clear even in these pages that deeply racist assumptions powerfully shaped the Republican elites' perceptions of events in the South and caused them to privilege the views of their erstwhile enemies over those of their putative allies in assessing developments in the former Confederacy.

One of The Death of Reconstruction's virtues is its able exposition of the views of those members of the black elite who largely agreed with critics of the mass politics of black Reconstruction. Richardson closes with a thoughtful examination of Booker T. Washington as a spokesman for black free labor views. Washington's speeches and writings, notably Up from Slavery, she holds, were aimed at northern white elites. They endorsed class harmony and aligned Washington and his cohorts as successful practitioners of free labor with those who were turning away from civil rights measures. In his own version of the "talented tenth," Washington looked to the small cadre of successful black entrepreneurs, professional men, and publicists for race leadership, thus in effect endorsing both the increasingly conservative views of Republican leaders and, by default, the southern white attack on black suffrage and political pretensions.

The Death of Reconstruction is a thoughtful and clearly written account of an important ideological shift that took place in the late nineteenth century. Interpreting Republican racial policies and politics through the lens of free labor ideology provides a valuable perspective on these familiar events. While it will not supplant David Montgomery's Beyond Equality (1965) as an examination of the class-labor nexus of the Reconstruction era, Richardson's book is a valuable addition to the literature.

Robert C. Cottrell. Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union. NY. Columbia University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv + 504.

Roger Nash Baldwin is a thoughtful biographical study of the long-term leader of the American Civil Liberties Union. It is based on extensive research in the Baldwin Papers, ACLU historical files, oral history interviews, and relevant secondary sources. While focusing on Baldwin's long and diverse public career, it also treats his intriguing personal and familial life. It is a good guide to civil liberties controversies during the period 1917-1981 while also providing a revealing look at the life styles of the almost-rich-and-famous among the legal liberal left during this period.

Robert C. Cottrell stresses the contradictory nature of Roger Baldwin's personality. A fierce defender of individual rights, he was a harsh and often arbitrary employer as ACLU executive director. A First Amendment champion, he often made public statements that put claims of social justice and redistribution of wealth over those of free speech. He was an ardent advocate of the downtrodden while at the same time reveling in the affluent style of life his family background, Harvard education, and marriage to Evelyn Preston, a woman of considerable means, provided. A sharp critic of assaults on civil liberties, he nonetheless cultivated close personal relations with the nation's top law enforcement authorities.

After beginning his public life as a social worker in St. Louis, Baldwin came to New York City in the spring of 1917 to assume the secretaryship of the American Union Against Militarism. I n July, he took on the directorship of the its Civil Liberties Bureau and subsequently of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which in turn became in 1920 the ACLU. From then until 1950, he served as ACLU executive director. After his retirement, he remained active in the Union's affairs, representing the ACLU in a variety of international human rights organizations and forums. He remained a vigorous outdoorsman and public figure almost until his death at age 97 in 1981.

Baldwin seems to have been little afflicted with self-doubt. His upbringing, education, and disposition led him to expect to be treated both seriously and generously, and so he usually was. Thus, although during World War I he spent seven months in county jails in New Jersey as a draft resister, jailors showed him remarkable kindness and leniency. Indeed, in contrast to the horrific experiences of fellow draft resisters incarcerated in military prisons, Baldwin's jail time was almost idyllic. He spent his days reading, corresponding, gardening, and organizing fellow inmates into dramatic troupes and discussion groups. Throughout his career, even though federal authorities kept regular files on his activities, he cultivated high-ranking officials and often carried on cordial relations with the very men who were in charge of harassing or investigating him.

Baldwin's political duality was particularly evident in the inter-war period. His public statements sometimes relegated freedom of speech, assembly, and the like to subordinate roles in what he sometimes saw as the central drama of the modern world, namely the supplanting of capitalism by some form of socialist or cooperative economic organization. At the same time, however, the ACLU actually functioned as an essentially civil libertarian body, defending Klansmen and other authoritarians as well as labor organizers, Communists, and other left-dissenters.

Baldwin's relationship to Communism in the interwar period was particularly perplexing. Like many on the World War I-era left, he hoped that the Russian Revolution would lead to social transformation throughout the West. Although well-informed by Emma Goldman, among others, of the new Soviet regime's repressive character, Baldwin continued to cut the Soviet Union a good deal of slack. He acknowledged the regime's violations of human rights but feared giving aid and comfort to critics on the right. At least until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August, 1939, Baldwin continued to believe that the Soviet regime's expressed commitment to egalitarianism and social control of economic activity entitled it to sympathetic treatment of its human rights record.

Cottrell does not explain why it was the Pact-and not, for example, the Stalin purges-that effectively disillusioned Baldwin. But he does make clear that once Baldwin had decided that the USSR was no longer potentially a positive force, he embraced anti-Communism with the same insouciant enthusiasm he had earlier displayed in exculpation of Soviet pathologies. To be sure, he continued to defend the rights of Communists and others caught in the toils of the Cold War era's legislative and administrative repressive apparatus. But he played a key role in the ACLU board's ouster in 1940 of Communist Party member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. He approved of the anti-Communist orientation of US foreign policy, serving for a time a critical, but sympathetic, observer of its nation-building efforts in South Vietnam in the late 1950s. As was the case early in his civil liberties career, Baldwin continued to rely on his social standing, Harvard background, and wide network of contacts to cultivate direct access to public authorities such as General Douglas MacArthur (in his capacity as Supreme Commander in post-war Japan) and FBI director Hoover, believing that knotty questions involving civil liberties could best be worked out through gentlemanly agreements.

Cottrell's civil libertarian values are clear and his criticism of some of Baldwin's compromises and illusions are sharp, but he is never less than fair in his judgments. While the prose is generally clear and accessible, at times (for example, in his discussion of Baldwin's involvement in the Sacco-Vanzetti and Scottsboro cases) Cottrell takes the reader through the details of lengthy exchanges of correspondence when a more focused discussion would better serve. There are factual slips that, individually minor, collectively cast doubt on the author's familiarity with the pre-World War II liberal-labor-left milieu. Thus, the IWW becomes the "International Workers of the World" (p. 66); socialist Juliet Poyntz is Juliet "Payntz" (p. 145); Amos R. E. Pinchot is confused with brother Gifford (p. 242); and Sidney Hillman becomes "a leading labor lawyer and top figure in the Socialist Party" (130). Despite these infelicities, however, Roger Nash Baldwin is a significant addition to the literature on civil liberties and on the American left in the twentieth century. Material on how the well-heeled left lived adds to the value of this worthy book.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 2002. x + 306 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. [I don't' know the price].

From the beginning of the republic, and even before, elite-generated ideas about race and gender decisively shaped definitions of American citizenship and labor. Through the 19^th century and into the 20^th, statesmen, legal experts, and cultural authorities influenced other whites to embrace these definitions and the institutions that embodied them, offering in exchange a share in the privileged status that whiteness and maleness brought. Even so, the actual practice of citizenship and the workings of labor market were far from uniform throughout the country. Thus, in the period 1870 to1930, ethnic Mexicans experienced civic marginalization and economic exploitation in different ways in the Southwest than did African Americans in the Confederate South. Meanwhile, in Hawaii still another regime of subordination and resistance emerged from the interaction of Anglos and Japanese migrants there. In each of these areas, local circumstances, differing applications of supposedly universal legal doctrines and cultural understandings, and the everyday behavior of ordinary people operated to create diverse, though always subordinative, race-gender-labor-citizenship regimes.

Unequal Freedom offers a fluent, thoughtful, and engaging account of the ways in which racialized and genderized labor markets and citizenship patterns functioned in these three areas. Readers will likely be most familiar with the story of racial subordination in the South during the era of Jim Crow and least with that of Japanese and other Asian migrants in Hawaii. All, however, will profit from Glenn's careful accounts of all three regions, based as they are on her extensive reading in the historical, anthropological, and sociological literature as well as in published documentary sources

Glenn emphasizes three themes common in all of these cases. She highlights the repressive and subordinative policies and practices that implemented racial and gender hierarchies; the distinctive local and regional character of the institutions and practices, in education, law enforcement, and the use of public space, that implemented racial and gender subordination; and the determination of victimized groups to resist dominant groups' claims of superiority and to create organs of protest and community advancement. Thus, Unequal Freedom is both an indictment of America's historic mistreatment of those defined as ineligible for citizenship and an edifying story of human agency and activism.

Glenn lays the groundwork for her three case studies in two broad chapters outlining American approaches to both citizenship and labor during the country's first century. Through the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, liberal doctrines of citizenship excluded women and, increasingly, blacks. Political and cultural leaders "constructed a fundamental opposition between independence and dependence," reserving only for those they deemed economically and morally independent the benefits of citizenship. (21) Thus they excluded women and blacks, the former because of their putatively dependent domestic circumstances, the latter of course because of their enslavement. Indeed, by the 1850s, legal doctrine and everyday practice were stripping even "free" blacks of citizenship claims, as new state constitutions narrowed eligibility for voting along racial lines. The relationship between citizenship, or lack thereof, and labor was reciprocal-since blacks and women were not worthy of citizenship, their work, no matter how necessary, could not be regarded as dignified or independent. And since by definition they performed no autonomous and independence-gaining labor, they were unworthy of citizenship.

The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the onset of large scale capitalist industrialism reshuffled the deck but did not change the rules. Indeed, at one point Glenn makes the seemingly startling claim that "blacks actually lost ground in the nineteenth century" (32), although it would appear that she means the first sixty-two years of the century, since later she acknowledges that "blacks probably had more genuine political influence during Reconstruction than at any time before or after" until the 1960s. (37) And she also notes that "Between 1865 and 1885 fourteen states passed civil rights laws that banned discrimination in public accommodations." (37)

Just as political and constitutional changes would appear to have provided the legal basis for improvement in the lot of African Americans, in theory expanding capitalism's demand for efficient allocation of resources should have freed labor markets of racial and gender barriers.⁽²⁾ But in fact industrial capitalists found much of benefit in the maintenance of divisions among the working class. Thus the ideology of free labor, in both its political and economic aspects, quickly came to buttress exploitative labor systems that flourished in the wake of the Civil War. Indeed, liberal jurists found ways in which to justify even openly coercive regimes of debt peonage, contract labor, and share cropping.

By the turn of the 20^th century, if anything racist doctrines were stronger than ever. The continued subordination of African Americans provided a template that employers, "white" workers, and the politicians, editorialists, lawyers, and jurists who spoke for them applied to other victims of subordination. This was so as it related to the status of ethnic Mexicans in the emerging political economy of the Southwest as well as to the growing use of Asian, and especially Japanese, migrant labor in Hawaii. Indeed, in a theme only touched on in Unequal Freedom, racialized doctrines of citizenship, with their collateral implications for labor usage, bore sharply as well on new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, even as they had a half-century before on their predecessors from Ireland.

A strength of Unequal Freedom is that Glenn is not content with outlining the formal rules, doctrines, and strictures that undergirded the race-and-gender based system of exploitation. Her examinations of the South, the Southwest, and Hawaii identify the various permutations on the common theme peculiar to each area and to various chronological phases of the story. Thus, for example, in the Southwest, Anglo elites had a difficult time defining precisely who was to be subordinated, since there were many different subcategories of Spanish-speaking residents, some with property and civil rights guaranteed under the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo. Moreover, long term nuevomexicanos identified themselves as the descendants of hardy pioneer stock, entitled to full rights of citizenship and public recognition. These Spanish-speaking elites joined Anglos in denigrating recent migrants from Mexico, people of mixed Spanish-Native American heritage, and the ranch hands, miners, and sugar beet workers who performed so much of the work necessary for the Southwest's entry into the modern capitalist economy.⁽³⁾

The story of racial subordination in Hawaii also had its distinctive features. Division within the Japanese community, between Okinawans and people from the Japanese home islands for example, created internal fissures even as Japanese laborers built an impressive infrastructure of Buddhist temples and Japanese language schools. Large scale strikes in 1909 and again in 1920 asserted economic and cultural claims as the Japanese forged an increasingly articulate and effective political presence in the Islands, simultaneously claiming full citizenship and labor rights on the one hand, and the right to sustain their Japanese cultural identity on the other.

Gender is central to her analysis in all three regions. The labor of black, Mexican, and Japanese women in the fields, residences, and workshops of white elites was critical in the exploitative political economy of the South, the Southwest, and Hawaii. Moreover, women in all three areas played key roles in building and sustaining community institutions, furthering job actions and protests, and resisting elite cultural authority. Meanwhile, women had to combat Anglo policies and attitudes that made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation while at the same time coping with the efforts of males within the ethnic community to drive them to the margins of public life in emulation of or conformity to Anglo gender roles.

Female activism facilitated the subordinated groups' rejection of the harsh individualism of mainstream American liberalism. Southern blacks, ethnic Mexicans, and Hawaiian Japanese found reliance on community and mutualistic activity a necessary antidote to exploitative white values and practices. Communal and solidaristic efforts to cope with the rigors of discrimination and exploitation in turn validated female activism and leadership. At the same time, however, within each subordinated group debates raged between those who saw advancement as most productively pursued through emulation of elite-generated rules and values and those who urged resistance and cultural autonomy. Glenn's tracing of these internal conflicts is both astute and suggestive.

The three core chapters on the South, Southwest, and Hawaii are succinct, thoughtful, and well-crafted. In other places, however, Glenn allows abstract formulations and their ally, the passive voice, to take over. This is especially evident in her chapter on citizenship and labor after the Civil War. Here the powerful men whose legendary ruthlessness built the foundations of modern industrialism disappear behind subjectless prose. Thus, women "were excluded from the category of free labor" (56-57) and "the capitalist labor market that emerged was fundamentally organized by race and gender." (72) Even the agents she does identify are abstractions rather than people or organizations. Thus: "The dominant culture calculated . . ." (75); "This model helped reconcile. . ." (74); "A new prescribed division of labor by gender arose. . . ." (74) Glenn's writing here, coupled with her celebration of the agency of subordinated groups, has the curious effect of making the powerful appear passive and, by implication, free of responsibility while endowing only their victims with agency.

Unequal Freedom exhibits a key intellectual and ethical ambiguity. In her sharp critique of America's liberal values and ideologies, Glenn at times seems to suggest that there is something inherent in America's public ideology that requires subordination of "others" along racial and gender lines. Thus, for example, she is sharply critical of Tocqueville (and by extension his recent celebrants), for failing to understand that "inequality [was]. . . central to the American political system." She also takes Gunnar Myrdal to task for believing that "widespread racial segregation and discrimination. . .[were] contradictory to Americans' professed beliefs" (48-49), seemingly endorsing the views of Marxist and feminist critics who see racial and gender subordination as intrinsic to American liberalism's justification and perpetuation of "material inequality" and who hold that "exclusion of women is inherent in liberal assumptions." (50)

Yet she also appears to agree with "many feminist critics [who] have acknowledged that classic liberal contract theory. . . has the potential for challenging all forms of hierarchical authority" and have concluded "that classic liberal contract theory. . . has the potential for challenging all forms of hierarchical authority. . . ." (50) The section in Unequal Freedom on the successful use by the Japanese in Hawaii of familiar liberal tropes and egalitarian rhetoric would seem to support the more optimistic reading of the evidence, as would Glenn's peroration near the end of the book where she invokes, seemingly unironically, notions of "fundamental American ideals. . . American concepts of justice and freedom. . . the American language of rights." (262) Here indeed she comes close to saying what practically all public commentators ritualistically say nowadays, namely that America's promise of freedom and equality is a vibrant, although unfortunately unfulfilled, aspiration.

That a book dealing with the "tough stuff" in American history might reflect a certain ambiguity on this point is not surprising. Many years ago Robert Frost captured this American dilemma in his poem "The Black Cottage":

2. Indeed, David Bernstein argues that freedom of contract doctrines associated with entrepreneurial capitalism did tend to have these effects when not compromised by liberal-labor interventions in labor markets. See David E. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (2001).

3. See Charles Montgomery, The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande (2002).

4. Robert Frost, "The Black Cottage," as quoted by Henry Wriston, "The Individual," Goals for Americans: The Report of the President's Commission on National Goals (1960), 38.

Robert H. Zieger is Distinguished Professor of History, University of Florida. His most recent publication is "The Paradox of Plenty: The Advertising Council and the Post-Sputnik Crisis," forthcoming in Advertising and Society Review, an on-line journal available at: http://www.aef.com/content/journal/

In Behind the Backlash, Kenneth Durr argues that racism is an insufficient explanation for the conservative political behavior of Baltimore's white blue collar workers in the 1960s and 1970s. He believes that the cautious values and aspirations that underlay white working-class political attitudes and behavior in Baltimore remained constant during the period 1940 to 1980. The steel workers, garment workers, chemical workers, auto workers, and other blue collarites who populated industrial sections of the city sought steady employment, a modest governmentally provided safety net, home ownership in ethnically and socially stable communities, and churches, schools, and public services rooted in their neighborhoods and responsive to local people. Whether they were long-term Baltimoreans, second or third-generation immigrants, or migrants from Appalachia, Baltimore's white workers were suspicious of economic and political elites and showed little interest in upward mobility. So long as the labor movement and the Democratic party appeared to further these modest ambitions, white working class Baltimoreans remained loyal to the New Deal coalition. But when it seemed, as it had come to by the mid-1960s, that liberals, labor leaders, and policy elites were privileging the claims of African Americans and rewarding even violent and destructive methods of protest, they proved dramatically responsive to the law-and-order appeals of Governor George Wallace and, later, Ronald Reagan.

To be sure, from the start of Durr's story during World War II, evidences of white working-class prejudice were not hard to find. On the job and in the neighborhoods, white workers and their families assumed the privileges of whiteness as a matter of course. They resented and resisted the egalitarianism of CIO activists and civil rights crusaders and protested, sometimes with brief flurries of localized violence, the incursion of blacks into formerly all-white neighborhoods. But Baltimore experienced no racial pogroms such as those that rocked Tulsa, Detroit, Chicago, Omaha, and other cities in the first half of the century. Race-baiting demagogues surfaced now and then, but by and large white Baltimoreans exhibited little of the virulent racism that afflicted other cities, South and North, in the post-World War II period.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, even conflict over school desegregation and housing did not trigger intransigent hostility. True, white Baltimoreans defended the concept of neighborhood schools but they accepted the entry of black students into previously all-white schools. Despite occasional violent episodes, they were more likely to blame predatory realtors for blockbusting than to attack incoming blacks. They voiced no particular ideology of racial superiority. They may have reaped the material wages of whiteness but did not require the putative psychological benefits of racial subordination; these were people who did not require a negative "other" for the propagation or maintenance of their identity.

In Durr's telling, blue collar electoral support for Wallace, first evidenced in the 1964 Maryland Democratic primary, grew more out of neighborhood struggles over highway construction, urban renewal, rising crime rates, and taxes than it did out of racial antagonism as such. Civic action groups emerged in the struggles against community-destroying freeways and redevelopment projects that threatened traditional neighborhoods. These grass-roots coalitions used the previous generation's union-organizing experience and employed traditional notions of democratic rights. To be sure, local activists sometimes expressed concerns over housing values and rising crime rates were in racial terms. Politicians such as George Mahoney (a Democrat whom the relatively liberal Spiro Agnew defeated in the 1966 gubernatorial election) and Wallace exploited on implicit racial appeals in their successful efforts to win blue collar votes. But Durr is critical of contemporary politicians and civic elites, and of historians, whose focus on the (illegitimate) racial dimension of white workers' civic activism has obscured their (legitimate) efforts to defend their neighborhoods and cultural identities. In his view, the working-class Reagan Democrat, who surfaced with a vengeance in 1980 and 1984, was no sudden phenomenon but rather the product of decades of the neglect of and skewed social priorities of white workers' erstwhile partners in the New Deal coalition.

Durr points to the career of Barbara Mikulski, currently one of Maryland's United States senators, as embodying the positive values of white working-class protest politics. Mikulski's rise began in the late 1960s in the Southeast Community Organization (SECO), one of a number of civic organizations that combined defense of neighborhoods against the city planners and road builders with prideful rediscovery of citizens' ethnic identities. Her sensitivity to the concerns of her white blue collar constituents has enabled her to retain working-class support for her broadly liberal public agenda. Mikulski, however, remains an exception, as Democrats remain unable to find a politically effective balance between the imperatives of race and class.

Behind the Backlash is more about communities and neighborhoods than it is about work places. Indeed, Durr's treatment of the aftermath of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in Baltimore's steel industry (184-86), while suggestive of the legitimate bases of white workers' anger and frustration, is truncated and confusing. He does a better job with his other brief example of the post-1964 job-site racial fallout, longshoring (186-90). The point that he does drive home in both examples is that in promoting programs of racial restitution through drastic changes in the seniority system and job access, "Liberal policymakers were . . . unwilling and unable to challenge wealthy and even middle-class Americans" but were all "too content to let working-class individuals discharge the debt." (191) Surprisingly, Judith Stein's outstanding examination of the steel industry's racial dilemmas, Running Steel, Running America (1997), which illuminates these issues in considerable detail and in broad macro-economic context, does not appear in Durr's otherwise-extensive bibliography.

Behind the Backlash is implicitly a critique of the "wages of whiteness" approach to white working-class history. If at times Durr seems to minimize or lose sight of the rage and frustration of Baltimore's black citizens, his book restores agency to white ethnics and helps to rescue them from the default obloquy to which race-conscious liberals and historians have too often consigned them. Stronger on neighborhood and political issues than on work-related themes, the book gives white workers and their families, suffering from the city's industrial decline and its social deterioration, a vigorous voice. Though Durr does not announce any overt political agenda himself-and indeed seems pessimistic about the possibilities of reforging a version of the black-labor coalition of yesterday-Behind the Backlash can encourage progressives to work harder to identify the common ground that class and race sometimes occupy in the political economy of post-industrial America.

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82
NAJIA AARIM-HERIOT, 2003
Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press
pp. xiv + 289, $39.95 (cloth)

Najia Aarim-Heriot argues that the roots of the discrimination and subordination inflicted Chinese immigrants in the 19th century lay not in fears of economic competition but rather in widely held, free-standing racist and racialist ideas among political and cultural elites, as well as among the voting public. She further contends that governmental policies and public discourse relating to the Chinese played a major role in undermining the egalitarian possibilities created by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Chinese Immigrants. . . bristles with excerpts from all sorts of racist diatribes appearing in the public prints, congressional debates and hearings, court decisions, and presidential speeches, the sources that the author uses most extensively. It provides a useful guide to the various municipal, state, and federal measures designed to curb or terminate Chinese immigration, although in the end the direct connection she posits between the rise of anti-Chinese legislation and the abortion of Reconstruction remains unconvincing.
Concerned as she primarily is with public discourse and legislative debate, Aarim-Heriot pays little attention to the lived experience of either Chinese or African Americans. Nor does she dwell on episodes of physical violence, such as the Rock Springs massacre of 1885. While duly noting the pernicious activities of California’s Workingman’s Party and alluding to rising anti-black violence in the post-Reconstruction South, she is mainly concerned with the politicians who turned their back on the egalitarian possibilities of the successful struggle against slavery and, in the end, re-racialized American citizenship. Repeatedly, she stresses that economic arguments against the importation of Chinese labor were hollow and usually insincere, serving as a convenient mask for the underlying racism that animated both local anti-Asian activists on the West Coast and policymakers and legislators in Sacramento and Washington.

Implicitly, the Reconstruction Amendments and related civil rights legislation offered an opportunity for Americans to abandon the racist foundations of citizenship and to usher in a new egalitarian civic order. For all their limitations, they posited the possibility of a non-racialized conception of citizenship. In debate over revision in the Nationalization Act in 1870, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner sought to advance this expansive and generous position, introducing amendments that would have eliminated the word white from the 1790 statute that formed the basis of US nationalization law. In Sumner’s view, such a move was a direct extension of the redefinition of American-ness that the Civil War and the abolition of slavery had brought and in Aarim-Heriot’s view, Sumner’s eloquent stand held out the possibility of national redemption from the flawed conception of citizenship she ably outlines in her first chapter.

Defeat of Sumner’s proposals, however, marked the beginning of the end, not only of a more expansive definition of citizenship generally but of meaningful Republican efforts to advance the rights of freedpeople. Votes over Sumner’s proposals exposed deep fissures in the ranks of the GOP, with many Republicans in effect repudiating the egalitarian implications of their anti-slavery and unionist commitments. This key debate not only showed the limits of Republicans’ commitment to equality; it paved the way for the reinscription of the Negro as being in effect, if not in legal theory, outside the circle of citizenship. Sumner, argues Aarim-Heriot, had tried repeatedly to “lay the blueprint for a real social revolution” but most fellow Republicans (to say nothing, of course of the frankly racist Democrats) voted “to keep the foundational whiteness of American identity,” as indicated not only by their failure to support Sumner’s pro-Chinese measures but also increasingly by “their vacillating policy toward black Americans. The intentional exclusion of the Chinese from the purview of the new naturalization statute,” she contends, “constituted a critical retreat.” As a handful of genuine radicals warned, “this measure would pave the way for a reconsideration of the status of African Americans. In that process, rather than the Negroization of the Chinese question, it would be the Negro question that would be ‘Asianized.’” (155)

Although the specific connection between the “Chinese question” and the “Negro question” is central to Aarim-Heriot, it remains elusive and even problematic at times. There is little doubt, of course, that racial prejudice North and South, East and West undergirded the simultaneous subordination of Chinese and African Americans in Gilded Age America. And Aarim-Heriot is persuasive in showing how anti-Chinese sentiment expressed in congressional debate served as a surrogate for anti-black feeling. The turn in Congress in the 1870s toward ever harsher treatment of the Chinese was often coupled, even in speeches by Republican legislators, with references to the “failure” of the experiment in granting degraded blacks the rights of citizenship. Still, at times critics of the Chinese were careful to distinguish their case from that of African Americans. The latter, after all, were long-term residents of the United States. They were Christians. They had fought in the country’s wars, most notably the Civil War itself. There was no necessary reason why measures to curtail Chinese entry into the country, even if based on explicitly racial grounds, would compromise the status or rights of African Americans.

Of course, in the end, victimization of the two groups proceeded apace, although largely along parallel lines. The national commitment to equality of the Civil War era–always tenuous and instrumental in any event–was woefully unequal to the task of civic empowerment of the freedpeople. Likewise, the occasional judicial decisions and congressional criticisms of mistreatment of Chinese immigrants were almost never couched in terms of abstract egalitarianism but rather centered on practical objections to discrimination and restriction. At times the two streams of racist sentiment overlapped and in the 1870s virtually universal sentiment against the Chinese did serve to further weaken increasingly feeble legislative efforts to defend southern blacks faced with “redemption.” But while Aarim-Heriot is successful in demonstrating the common roots of anti-black and anti-Asiatic racism in Gilded Age America, her claims for the central importance of the latter in shaping public attitudes and policies with respect to African Americans remain more suggestive than convincing.

Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South. By Robert Rodgers Korstad. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 556. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. ISBN 0-8078-2781-9 cloth. ISBN 0-8078-5454-9 paper.)

Based on a remarkable array of sources, including dozens of oral histories, Civil Rights Unionism is an important addition to the literature on the 20^th century black working class. Robert Korstad chronicles the rise and fall of organized labor in Winston-Salem's tobacco factories and points to the destruction of Food, Tobacco, and Agricultural Workers (FTA) Local 22 in the late 1940s as a turning point in the history of civil rights in the post-war South. Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, owners and managers of the R. J. Reynolds plants in the city relied on racial division, fierce anti-unionism, and episodic paternalism to retain control both of the work place and civic life. In the 1940s, however, a potent local union, born of militant activism on the part of low-wage African Americans, effective leadership on the part of the FTA, and the positive influence of the federal government through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), emerged to challenge the white power structure in the factories and in the community. Developments in Winston-Salem, Korstad believes, illustrate the operations of the "Southern Front," his term for the broad coalition of race and class liberals and radicals, who, with the aid of new instruments of federal power, sought decisive change in the New Deal-era South. Bi-racial and ardently democratic, Local 22 was a victim of reactionary local elites, who took full advantage of early Cold War hysteria to root out this effort to bring racial equality and class justice to the North Carolina city.

Korstad is particularly successful in the first third of the book in describing and analyzing both the contours of corporate, white supremicist power and the growth of autonomous black religious and civic institutions. His chapter on "Social Learning,"stresses the role of the black churches, whose congregations and, in many cases, clergy, were drawn from the ranks of tobacco workers, in providing the social experience that later fueled union development and civil rights advance. At the same time, the efforts of Winston-Salem's small professional and business elite to wrest concessions from white politicians and business leaders inadvertently legitimized the basic structures of racial subordination.

Successful unionization among low-wage African American workers in the Reynolds plants and in closely related leaf houses depended heavily on rank-and-file workers. The NLRB, whose election machinery facilitated the establishment of Local 22 and promoted eventual, if grudging, recognition from Reynolds, also played a key role. Less clearly explicated in Korstad's account is contribution of the FTA and its Communist leadership

Korstad finds Party influence in Winston-Salem to have been overwhelmingly beneficial. "Through precept and example," Korstad writes, "the Party . . . offered a reason to hope that workers could be the generative force in a broad-based radical movement and that . . . black and white together could some day overcome." (275) However, he calls attention as well to some of the Party's missteps, pointing to "the recklessness of some Party leaders and the undemocratic ways in which a Party dedicated to 'democratic centralism' sometimes behaved." (270) Party members' efforts to have the local endorse a wide range of pro-Soviet resolutions, he acknowledges, "lent substance to the charge that the union was slavishly following the Party line." (272)

Here Korstad misses an opportunity to lift Civil Rights Unionism above the by-now sterile debate over the role of Communists in the New Deal-era labor movement. If there was in fact "substance" to critics' views that "the union was slavishly following the Party line," Korsad's acknowledgment seems to clash with much of the rest of the narrative concerning the relationship between the local and the Party. Who exactly brought forth these resolutions? We know from other sources that New York-and Moscow-Party functionaries could be extremely insistent that local Party members press Party positions, regardless of local consequences. Korstad documents the efforts of Local 22 activists in behalf of the Party-supported Wallace campaign in 1948, a campaign that tended to isolate pro-Soviet elements from other progressives, but the actual dynamics of Party influence remain unexplored.

Korstad's reflexive antagonism toward the conduct of US foreign policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in the immediate post-World War II period colors the narrative. As Korstad well knows, questions of responsibility for the onset of the Cold War, the militarization of East-West tensions, and the implications of the pathologies of the Stalin regime for international relations generally remain highly contested matters. Yet Korstad repeatedly gives the CP a pass, endorsing with little critical analysis revisionist positions on these subjects. But in fact many liberals, civil rights advocates, and trade unionists were convinced that those who followed uncritically the pro-Soviet line could not be trustworthy partners in progressive politics.

Also questionable is Korstad's assessment of the "Southern Front." Nowhere does he provide convincing evidence for his belief that there existed a cohesive, "left"-led coalition, not least because the largest and most influential labor and civil rights organizations were, for better or worse, steadfastly anti-Communist. Confidence in the author's judgment on this point is further eroded when Korstad wildly overstates both overall southern union membership and African American union membership in the immediate wake of World War II. (276)

Despite these objections, Civil Rights Unionism is a considerable achievement. It contains one of the best detailed discussions of the lives of African American working people in the Jim Crow South extant. Its analysis of the tenacity of white elites is sobering and its discussion of the union-building process combines eloquent personal detail with a good grasp of the economic and governmental factors that enabled Winston-Salem's workers to create, however briefly, a strong and effective union. In a postscript Acknowledgments section, Robert Korstad pays homage to his activist parents and writes revealingly about personal experiences in the Jim Crow South that led him to this subject. A moving document in its own right, it constitutes an informative record of one historian's personal and professional journey.

Robert H. Zieger is Distinguished Professor of History, University of Florida. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Race and Labor in Modern America."

"The Great War generation," Jennifer D. Keene argues, "shaped the contours of the modern American military and was responsible for the most sweeping piece of social welfare legislation in American history, the GI Bill."(x) This is a large claim that the author only partially validates. Keene addresses three central themes: the ways in which conscripted citizen soldiers influenced army life and military practice during World War I; the ways in which veterans sought to influence public policies in the two decades after the Armistice; and the relationship of the doughboys' quest for veterans' benefits to the GI Bill. Keene brings fresh perspectives to the first two themes and presents a challenging, but problematic, treatment of the third.

Conscripts comprised seventy-two percent of the US Army's personnel in the Great War . These men quickly evinced a highly contractual understanding of what their service meant. Officers soon learned that concessions to the men's prejudices and preferences were more effective than was resort to draconian punishment. Keene's account of racial matters in the Great War army is particularly revealing. Subordination of black conscripts provided a rare example of the dovetailing of the prejudices and predilections of army authorities and new white conscripts. At the same time, the resistance of black soldiers to demeaning treatment reinforces her overall stress on soldiers' agency.

The army's hopes that four million doughboys would constitute a reliable source of support for enhanced military budgets quickly proved misplaced. Instead, veterans' organizations focused on gaining benefits for their members, eventually settling on "adjusted compensation" as the vehicle. When the Great Depression produced high levels of unemployment among veterans, the drive for immediate payment-the veterans' bonus-gathered strength. Was the 1936 bonus legislation that Congress eventually passed over Roosevelt's veto an example of pernicious special interest legislation, as FDR charged? Or was it, as Keene here suggests--though without amplifying the point--both an example of and a spur to the broader social provision that was the hallmark of the New Deal?

A brief concluding chapter on the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act (the GI Bill), carries a lot of interpretive freight. "It is," she says, "hard to exaggerate the importance of the GI Bill in twentieth-century American history." (212) By providing generous benefits, the GI Bill decisively shaped the postwar political economy. This law's origins as a response to the contentious inter-war struggles, Keene maintains, clear evidence of the doughboys' ongoing influence in modern American life.

Yet Keene also acknowledges that the GI Bill was as unique as it was significant. Vietnam War veterans did not fare so well, with the result that "military service once again became time lost for veterans rather than the path to increased occupational and educational opportunities." (213) Keene links the GI Bill to the New Deal (212) but in fact its generous provisions contrast sharply with the parsimony of other New Deal programs. This contrast encourages the view that the GI Bill really was a one-off sop to a particular constituency. Keene establishes that the doughboys' long struggle for adjusted compensation did have important long-rage repercussions. Their influence, however, did not extend to the reshaping of social provision in the US, which has not followed the GI Bill's precedent even with regard to subsequent veterans' benefits.

A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. By Steven Hahn. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003. viii + 610 pp.

A Nation under Our Feet is an important and inspiring book. Discussion of specifically labor issues is limited to scattered treatments of such well-known affairs as the relatively successful post-Reconstruction struggles of Carolina rice plantation workers and the bloody massacres of Louisiana sugar workers in the strikes of the mid-1880s. But Hahn's's powerful theme of the self-mobilization of ordinary people, tenaciously sustaining a commitment to democratic politics amid the most harrowing and discouraging of times, will resonate among labor historians. Moreover, A Nation under Our Feet, saturated as it is with the fascinating details of rural black social organization and political mobilization, serves as a poignant reminder that the American struggle for democracy has always been a people's struggle and that forces of repression and denial have always been powerful.

Between at least the mid-nineteenth century and until at least the post-World War II southern Civil Rights movement, rural blacks developed and sustained a powerful and effective political presence. Bondsmen and women created thick familial and associational networks. They held clandestine religious services, established subterranean communication networks, used the "weapons of the weak" to resist exploitation and abuse, and organized escapes. Indeed, rural slaves were often remarkably successful in asserting their human identities and limiting the demands of their owners. Shrewd and enterprising, slaves followed closely the escalating national divisions of the 1850s. When war broke out, their mutualistic organs of community and family life enabled them to participate directly in the struggle for freedom.

During the Civil War and Reconstruction, and indeed down to the 1890s, now-free rural blacks deepened and expanded these embryonic institutions and practices. Particularly impressive and even moving was the mass mobilization of ordinary, often illiterate rural blacks-male and female-and their insistence on exercising the political opportunities in the wake of war. Freedmen and women erected churches, built schools, published newspapers, and established a wide variety of civic and fraternal organizations. Whether recruiting soldiers for the Union army, fighting the Black Codes, forming Union League chapters, mobilizing voters, or struggling to sustain hard-won rights in the face of savage repression, rural southern blacks built on the experiences of slavery to maintain a continuous political presence in the South.

Nor did white southerners' efforts to strip African Americans of formal political rights, which culminated successfully in the 1890s, destroy the political structures that rural blacks had built in the South. The networks and institutions that had sustained electoral politics remained, now fostering clear understanding of the limits of a political process imbued with racism and dependent on uncertain alliances with whites. Although Booker T. Washington and other would-be race leaders called for an end to political agitation, the grassroots networks through which southern rural blacks had conducted electoral politics endured, encouraging dissent from the emerging Jim Crow consensus and keeping alive in the internal affairs of black congregations and sodalities habits of self-government.

Even before Jim Crow descended in full force, preachers, reformers, and social entrepreneurs were promoting various plans of migration, either to putatively more benign parts of the United States or to Africa. And, Hahn writes, "emigrationism . . . helped to widen and transform, as well as to sustain, political activism." (361) Promoters of migration such as Louisiana's Henry Adams and publications such as the American Colonization Society's African Repository helped to sharpen rural blacks' understanding of the threats to their political and personal aspirations in the post-Reconstruction South while simultaneously promoting the powerful idea that African Americans deserved a freer and more bountiful life. While in the end few American blacks actually joined these planned treks, on hundreds of plantations and scores of hamlets and villages, rural blacks, literate and unschooled alike, encountered emigrationist ideas and debated the movement's possibilities. It is no accident that in the waning years of the 19^th century, the trickle of southern blacks heading North began to swell, suggesting that the politics of migration was a significant force in southern life even before the Great Migration itself began. Patterns of southern rural self-mobilization and oppositional perspective recurred repeatedly in the 20^th century South, and were integral to the broad appeal of Garveyism and the mutualistic ethic of the post-World War II civil rights movement

A Nation under Our Feet is both a significant scholarly contribution and a book of remarkable contemporary relevance. It rests securely on impressive research in archival and other primary sources and command of the sprawling literature of black history, civil rights, and the Gilded Age-Populist era. Grassroots black resistance and political mobilization, which Hahn conveys through detailed accounts of innumerable local campaigns and debates, constitute the heart of the book. At the same time, Hahn's accounts of the obstacles to political expression that self-taught farmers and workers faced over a century ago seem startlingly contemporary in the light of the widespread disfranchisement, polling place intimidation, undercounting, and selective purges of voting rolls that characterized the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

Vincent J. Roscigmo and William F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). "Social Movements, Protest and Contention," vol. 19.

In The Voice of Southern Labor, Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher seek to make a contribution both to social movement theory and labor historiography. With respect to the former, they regard theoretical approaches to collective activism that stress only "issues of grievance, union influence, or strike success and failure" (p. xx) as of limited use in explaining the timing and character of social protest mobilization. Noting the highly dispersed character of the textile industry, they explore "the question of how processes relevant to social movement formation are manifested across space." They conclude that it was the confluence of indigenous culture, rapid technological development, and changes in national politics that help significantly to explain the militancy and solidarity that textile workers exhibited in the great 1934 strike. It was only in the brief period of the early 1930s that popular access to radio in the South meshed with decentralized ownership of broadcasting to provide opportunities for local musicians, many of whom had roots in the textile industry and whose songs often called attention to the plight of workers. At the same time, Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio-borne fireside chats conveyed a strong sense of entitlement to workers everywhere, nowhere more so than in the impoverished Piedmont villages.

The authors' examination of the relationship between radio and mill culture as primarily reflected in music constitutes their main contribution to labor historiography. Why was there such an explosion of broad-based worker-generated activism in 1934 and not before? Since mill workers' grievances long predated the great strike of that year, the explanation cannot lie in the simple facts of workplace mistreatment. To be sure, southern mill workers had earlier waged significant strikes, most notably in 1919-20 and at Gastonia and Marion, North Carolina, in 1929. But before the massive, Piedmont-wide 1934 uprising, strikes had been local affairs. Now, however, a quarter million or more southern mill workers walked out, exhibiting fierce militancy and region-wide solidarity in the face of harsh repression.

According to the authors, central to explaining the great textile strike are three overlapping themes that differentiate it from earlier job actions. The coincident expansion of radio broadcasting (and listening) throughout the upland South, the vigorous emergence of indigenous protest music, and the new presence in Washington of a president seen as a genuine friend of working people gave shape and cohesion to mill worker activism. To demonstrate this point, the authors carefully plot out the geography of rapid radio expansion in the late 1920s and early 1930s, showing a close correlation between the existence of outlets and the nodes of worker activism. Station owners and managers relied heavily on local talent, just as a gifted corps of mill-worker performers became available to fill air time. Since many of the most popular singers and musicians were mill workers or closely connected to family and friends who toiled in the mills, their music resonated immediately and powerfully in the textile towns and villages. Moreover, a high proportion of the most popular songs, such as David McCarn's "Cotton Mill Colic" and the Dixon Brothers' "Weave Room Blues," spoke of workers' grievances, singled out employers for criticism, and endorsed collective response. The sense that a new regime in Washington, as personified by the charismatic FDR, provided government support for mill worker empowerment complemented this techno-cultural thrust to create a powerful, cohesive mass movement that triggered the mass strike.

In a spirited conclusion, the authors argue persuasively for the importance of cultural resources in the shaping of workers' responses to working and living conditions. Fellow sociologists will be able to judge whether this somewhat fortuitous joining of cultural, political, and technological forces constitutes a significant contribution to the development of mass movement theory. Social movement theory, they sensibly argue, must include consideration of workers' cultural resources. And they are persuasive in holding that the combination of indigenous music and new technology helped to create a climate of cohesion and militancy in the early 1930s. This point, however, raises implicit questions as to how other configurations of popular culture and technological development might contribute, as seems to be the case today, to conservative patterns of political and social activism.

For historians, the authors' discussion of radio dispersion and its linkage with grass-roots musical expression constitutes their main contribution. The basic story of textile labor relations and especially of the 1934 strike is familiar, as are the limitations of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the National Industrial Recovery Act insofar as protecting workers' rights is concerned. Also well established in the historical literature is the rank-and-file character of the textile strikes, the ineptitude of the leadership of the United Textile Workers, and the harshness and efficacy of employer and state-conducted repression. Moreover, the authors do not inspire confidence when they confuse Section 7 (a) of the NIRA with the provisions of the NRA's Textile Industry Code (102, 133). But their careful examination of radio's role in unifying otherwise-parochial textile worker militancy adds an important element to the story of the great strike.

The University of Minnesota Press has not served these authors well. This book suffers from careless writing and copy editing. The authors' addiction to the passive voice sometimes threatens to rob mill workers of the agency that they otherwise herald. Lengthy block quotes drawn largely from mill workers' oral histories at the Southern Workers Project at the University of North Carolina do provide first-hand testimony but are not well integrated into the narrative. Misplaced modifiers and vague pronoun references abound. On two occasions, the authors remark that the importance of certain developments "cannot be underestimated," when in fact they mean the opposite (64, 103). Firm copy editing should have caught these errors, thus permitting readers to contemplate the authors' contributions free from distracting gaucheries.

Irene A. DeVault. United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism. Ithaca and London. Cornell University Press. 2004. xi + 244 pp. Appendices, index.

United Apart is an ambitious attempt to analyze the institutional dynamics of the American emerging labor movement at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a valuable complement to the work of historians of labor during this period such as Herbert Gutman, Patricia Cooper, and Gwendolyn Mink. Irene A. DeVault has selected forty "cross-gender" strikes in the tobacco, textile, shoe, and garment industries for detailed analysis. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of the "series" as a means of thinking "about the complexities of . . . workers' identities," DeVault examines the roles of race, ethnicity, geography, concepts of family, and gender in the conduct of these strikes. Her aim is to understand the relationship between each of these factors, as they played out in local strikes, to the emerging institutional and ideological character of the broader US labor movement, notably the American Federation of Labor. She concludes that race, ethnicity, industrial sector, and applications of moral economy were variable from situation to situation, encouraging mutuality and solidarity here, proving divisive and contributing to strike failure there. But two factors-gender and the physical location of the plant undergoing a strike-proved to be constant and thus were critical factors in shaping the character of the twentieth-century labor movement.

United Apart is not an easy read. The book is organized neither chronologically nor thematically. In the introduction DeVault observes that "The serial nature of the historical narrative-the fact that one event follows another-is. . . crucial in this book." She further explains that her "examination of the narrative seriality of the case studies provides a sort of standpoint epistemology version of historical narration: the point at which actors stand in the narrative determines both their reactions to events and the unfolding of these events."(8) The result is a presentation that combines comparative case-study analysis and direct expository narration featuring extensive quotations from newspapers and other contemporary sources.

Employing this format, DeVault guides the reader through the book's complex agenda. Thus, the first chapter provides introductions to the four industries through vignettes of strikes. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the Knights of Labor and the AFL, respectively, through detailed discussions of selected strikes. Chapter 4 investigates the roles that race and ethnicity played in various cross-gender strikes, while chapter 5 examines strikes occurring outside of the nation's central industrial core. Chapter 6 "explores the various roles family ties might play in different strikes," and chapter 7 returns to the AFL to explore its efforts to adapt its craft union orientation to the changing technological, organizational, and demographic character of work. The conclusion examines the origins and early development of the Women's Trade Union League as the AFL's main means of addressing the gender aspects of the changing work environment. Throughout, DeVault makes heavy demands on her readers, as they repeatedly are asked to review strikes discussed elsewhere in the book through the various lenses that she employs.

Despite the awkwardness of the book's structure and exposition, DeVault's conclusions are sensible and well-stated. An examination of forty cross-gender strikes clustered around the turn of the twentieth century in four industries in a variety of geographical locales indicates that established labor leaders failed to make effective us of the energy and skills that women workers brought to labor struggles. While they were capable of using craft, ethnic, and even racial categories to conduct successful strikes and build enduring craft unions, "skilled male workers. . . . could reach [i.e., usually reached] the end of strikes with the same levels of scorn for their female co-workers with which they had begun the strikes." Male leaders "learned" that women, whom they usually ignored, denigrated, or marginalized during strikes, could not be good union material. Meanwhile, women workers also "learned" that, in view of their treatment by the craft unionists who tended to dominate cross-gender strike situations, there might be "little reason. . . to continue or begin paying union dues." (220-21) Meanwhile, strikes on the industrial periphery, where local protests often created ad hoc labor organizations unrelated to national organizations, often exhibited real cross-gender solidarity. The struggles of textile workers in Colorado. Indiana, and Oregon, and tobacco workers in rural Wisconsin and Florida yielded examples of de facto industrial unionism built on this solidarity. In dismissing or ignoring these strikes in "marginal" places, AFL leaders lost an opportunity to learn lessons about the possibilities of industrial unionism even as their own half-hearted efforts to adapt the federation's archaic structure and dated ideology to the emerging twentieth-century economy fizzled .

United Apart brings to light dozens of otherwise-forgotten turn-of-the-century labor struggles. It gives historical voice to local women labor activists by their contemporaries and ignored by other historians. DeVault's appendices reflect her prodigious research into turn-of-the-century workers' lives, values, and protests. They also provide useful numerical material drawn from the Census of 1900 on the communities in which the strikes took place, as well as a valuable guide to the primary sources she has mined. Her findings about the role of gender in labor struggles and the distinctive nature of labor activism in smaller communities add significantly to our understanding of the emerging institutional character of the AFL.

Skilled Hands, Strong Sprits is an admirable book, although one with a slightly misleading title. It is actually a history of the AFL's and AFL-CIO's Building Trades Department (BTD) and Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD). As such, it provides rich documentation, conveyed in fluent and engaging prose, on a subject largely neglected by labor historians. The notes alone, occupying 33 pages of text, make the book a must for every student of labor history. Especially for those labor historians schooled in the once "new" labor history or attracted by the IWW, the CIO, or other examples of social unionism, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits serves as an essential primer on a number of subjects. Thus, Palladino underlines the importance of jurisdictional issues, the building trades' distinctive approach to recruitment and organizing, and the edgy relationships among the various construction unions and between them individually and their chronically disputatious locals. All of these subjects are as important to the character and dynamics of the building trades-and to the labor movement generally--today as they were a century ago.

The central theme in the history of the BCTD and its precursor organizations has been the tension between centralized direction and the highly localized character of the construction industry and the particularlistic-not to say parochial-perspectives of its international and local unions . From the time of the founding of the Structural Building Trades Alliance in 1903 and the BTD of the AFL five years later, leaders of the fifteen or so international unions claiming jurisdiction in the industry have sought ways to square orderly resolution of jurisdictional problems and advancing the general interests of building tradesmen, on the one hand, with the distinctive and often conflicting interests of individual unions and local workers, on the other. Efforts on the part rival unionists, such as the CIO's short-lived United Construction Workers Organizing Committee, to "industrialize" construction work by obliterating craft lines and promoting cross training and a multi-craft work culture went nowhere. Nor has the post-1970 employer onslaught against the construction unions solved the problem of how to insure the local supply of skilled and experienced workers that the unions' apprenticing programs provided during the post-World War II heyday of collective bargaining.

The main body of Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits chronicles the rocky course of the BTD and BTCD in its attempts to resolve these dilemmas. Much of Palladino's text is taken up with the making and breaking of inter-union jurisdictional dispute resolution agreements and with the efforts of BTD and BTCD leaders to forge and sustain positive relationships with the contractors associations and federal government officials whose endorsement of collective bargaining and whose large-scale construction projects were crucial to the health of unionism in the building trades. The narrative is particularly strong in chronicling the BTCD's success during World War II, when "prevailing union wage rates had set the standard for defense construction, and the basic rules of building trades unionism-the closed shop, the union hiring hall, and collectively bargained agreements-had been the keys to meeting wartime production demands." (139)

Palladino also traces the Department's initially successful efforts to blunt the effect of the Taft-Hartley Act and a 1951 Supreme Court's ruling, which together outlawed or seriously compromised these key elements in the unions' success. While the BTCD did not achieve repeal of or significant amendment to Taft-Hartley's damaging union security and secondary boycott provisions, labor lobbyists were successful in defending the prevailing wage provisions of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act and in gaining their application in the massive interstate highway construction launched in 1956.

Indeed, through the 1950s and 1960s, construction workers and their unions prospered, despite mounting contractor resistance and legislative and judicial setbacks. While non-union labor prevailed in residential and light commercial construction, union workers comprised over three-quarters of those employed in road building and heavy construction. Building tradesmen shared in the general blue collar prosperity and with the Bronx plumber, George Meany, presiding over the AFL and, after 1955, the AFL-CIO, the BCTD and its most powerful components, notably the Carpenters, Electrical Workers, Teamsters (even after their expulsion from the AFL-CIO in 1957), and Iron Workers exercised great influence within the House of Labor itself.

The story over the past thirty years, however, has not been nearly so positive. By the early 1970s, the theme of greedy and monopolistic building trades unions as central culprits in the period's mounting inflation had become an article of faith among business leaders and politicians. The creation in 1968 of the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable, which in turn spawned the Business Roundtable, quickly morphed from an effort to restrain union wage demands and force changes in work rules to an all-out open shop assault on BCTD's unions. Combined with declining federal construction activity and the emergence of aggressively anti-union construction giants such as Root and Brown, this broad front attack devastated the building trades unions, which by the middle of the 1980s were supplying less than 20% of all construction labor. The final substantive chapter of Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits traces the efforts of the BCTD and its member unions in the 1990s to fight back, detailing a variety of educational and organizing programs designed to regain the initiative through innovative recruitment efforts, corporate campaigns, and elaborate programs of inter-union cooperation in targeted locales such as Las Vegas. Promoted by long-term Department director Robert Georgine, these training and organizing projects absorbed substantial financial and manpower resources, achieving enough success to keep the hope of construction union resurgence alive but not substantially increasing the levels of union representation in the industry.

The concerted attack the construction unions was not their only problem. Closely intertwined with charges of irresponsible wage demands, featherbedding, and archaic work rules were criticisms of the building trades unions' discriminatory recruitment and training practices. Civil rights activists targeted especially publically funded inner-city construction projects, highlighting the gross under-representation of Blacks in the Carpenters, Electrical Workers, Iron Workers, and other high-wage unions. African Americans demanded that the building trades unions recruit and train more minority workers and enlisted the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) and other federal agencies in pressuring construction unions to increase drastically the presence of minority workers in the trades. During the Nixon administration especially, federal officials saw in the advocacy of increased minority representation a means of both splitting the Democrats' labor-civil rights coalition and, by increasing the number of building tradesmen, restraining the unions' wage demands.

Perhaps because, unlike other aspects of building trades unionism, this subject has drawn significant historical treatment,⁽¹⁾ Palladino devotes no sustained attention to the unions' race problem. Nor does she award more than passing notice to mismanagement of union funds and undemocratic governance, problems frequently associated with unions in the building trades. The story she tells is largely the story of hard-working and resourceful, but frequently frustrated, BTD and BCTD leaders attempting to balance the often competing interests of constituent unions, to find common ground with contractors' organizations, and to deal with Congress and a wide array of federal agencies.

Palladino's detailed discussions of a century of these efforts raises, but often only in passing, a number of distinctive features of the building trades. Thus, for example, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits touches lightly on such subjects as construction workers' work-site culture, the building trades' distinctive approach to organizing, and the role that BTD-BCTD unions have played in the broader labor movement. These and other features of the building trades define a distinctive brand of union experience, exploration of whose differences from other forms of union development in the United States can illuminate both their own historical role and the contrasting character and dynamics of industrial unions.

Take organizing, for example. For much of the past century, the goal has not been to recruit new members directly into the union or to organize the unorganized, since expansion union rolls would bring with it increased the pressure to find work for larger numbers of dues-paying members. Even when international unions, concerned about the decline in union presence among construction workers nationally, have developed programs to recruit non-union workers, local unions often balked, seeing enlarged local memberships as more of a threat to veteran tradesmen than as an opportunity to expand influence and power. High initiation fees and dues, along with the traditional building trades' suspicion of new entrants, especially those drawn from outside a local's historic geographic and/or ethnic catchment area, has impeded energetic recruitment of non-union workers. In short, the logic of union expansion that seems so obvious at international headquarters and among its sophisticated and often college-educated project directors has repeatedly clashed with the logic of local union notions of job protection.

Traditionally, the decentralized, multi-employer, and fractionated subcontracting character of the industry made the organization of contractors the obvious strategy. To the contractor, the union supplied trained workers. For its members, it provided jobs. For the union, strong union security arrangements provided stability and continuity. This is a very different world from that of the large industrial plant or the nursing home, where unions have no voice in hiring and no responsibility for securing work for terminated or laid-off members.

Differences in the culture of organizing and in the sharply different obligations that craft and industrial unions have, and have had, toward their members had marks one of the key fault lines in the American labor movement. Palladino's sharp focus on the BTD and BCTD does not permit her to explore these subjects. Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits is a significant contribution, however, in that her oblique treatment of them encourages wider-ranging reflections and comparisons. This important institutional history illuminates its specific subject matter while encouraging broader reflections on the broader character of the bifurcated US labor movement more generally.

Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in-Twentieth Century America. Princeton. Princeton University Press. 2005. 375 pp. Notes. Index.

Zaragosa Vargas makes two main contributions in Labor Rights Are Civil Rights. One is conceptual, the other is to the historical record. With reference to the latter, Vargas does much to chronicle the role of Mexican American workers in the turbulent decades of the 1930s and 1940s and to document their important role in the labor struggles and political controversies of those years. On the conceptual front, Vargas’s title clearly summarizes his thesis, namely that among an ethnic community with few organs of progressive civic activism available, it was through labor struggles that Mexican Americans fought most effectively during these years to assert their civic identity and to stake their claims to equality of treatment and opportunity.

Much of the actual narrative of the book is taken up with detailing the usually unsuccessful struggles of victimized Mexican American workers in the Southwest. Colorado sugar beet workers, Texas cotton pickers and smelter workers, New Mexican coal miners, California agricultural, garment, and domestic workers, and others protested abysmal wages, authoritarian work places, and chronic discrimination in a series of desperate job actions. Repeatedly, Vargas documents the daunting odds against the success of Mexican American workers’ efforts, especially in view of the blatant collusion of public officials, employers, the press, and the mainstream labor movement as embodied in an American Federation of Labor that sought only to protect its Anglo membership. Equally noteworthy, however, is Vargas’s celebration of the tenacity, solidarity, and courage of these vulnerable low-wage workers, who often faced threats of deportation or replacement by Mexican workers lured, legally or illegally, North to break strikes and to constitute an oversupply of labor designed to keep wages low and protest in check. In particular, Vargas highlights the role of Mexican American women, both as strikers and activists in their own right and as providing backbone of community support for male workers.

The role of government looms large in these accounts. State and local authorities invariably sided with employers. Law officers smashed picket lines and intimidated and brutalized would-be activists, while state legislators and other functionaries red-baited, race-baited, and demonized Mexican Americans. During the New Deal and World War II, it is true, some federal initiatives offered a certain degree of support and succor to those seeking social justice through labor activism. Some federal officials insisted on fair distribution of welfare and relief resources, while the National Labor Relations (NLRA) and Fair Labor Standards Acts (FLSA) provided mechanisms through which some Mexican American workers could achieve union recognition and wage improvements. During World War II, manpower needs, along with the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), also enabled minority workers to improve their situations, usually in association with activists in Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), especially those from its pro-Soviet affiliates.

But government was an uncertain ally at best. Both the NLRA and the FLSA excluded from coverage precisely those occupations–agricultural and domestic work–that employed large numbers of Mexican American workers. Moreover, throughout the New Deal era, despite some efforts to rein in its excesses, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) continued to harass, intimidate, and punish labor activists and to terrorize Mexican American communities with threats of deportation, often in close association with Anglo employers and public authorities. After World War II, FEPC ended and activists’ efforts to secure state-level fair employment practices in the Southwest went down to repeated defeat. War-generated federal programs that recruited cheap Mexican agricultural labor both played into the hands of agribusiness and encouraged division among the ranks of hard-pressed Hispanic workers on both sides of the border.

While Vargas’s accounts of strikers’ tribulations make for depressing reading, his theme of the connection between labor rights and civic rights is more heartening. Lacking the kinds of organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League that promoted civil rights energetically, Mexican Americans saw in such Communist-oriented CIO unions as the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, the Food and Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers, and the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers effective vehicles for promoting both work place demands and civil rights. Organizers and officers of these affiliates and their counterparts in the CIO’s Industrial Union Councils, notably the one in Los Angeles, aggressively recruited minority workers. Moreover, by training Mexican American activists and helping them to create community organizations and develop broad based coalitions to encourage voting and to counter police brutality and discrimination in housing and access to public resources, these CIO unionists promoted civic identity in arenas far removed from the fruit orchards, sweat shops, and mines and smelters where Mexican American men and women toiled.

Just as the federal government proved an uncertain ally at best, however, the CIO, and even the highly motivated cadres of the pro-Soviet affiliates, ultimately proved disappointing. Even in his discussion of the heyday of the Popular Front, Vargas alludes to problems of Communist Party dogmatism and abrupt shifts in its line that compromised the CIO commitment to racial and ethnic equality. After World War II, Vargas’s account (which is heavily dependent on Art Preis’s overtly partisan Labor’s Giant Step) highlights the CIO national leadership’s attacks on pro-Soviet affiliates and IUC’s, characterizing its efforts to rein in Stalinoid elements in the industrial union federation as “the growing despotism of the CIO.” (274) He celebrates those Mexican American activists (“progress-minded Mexican American workers”; 275) who backed Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential election, hailing Wallace’s genuine commitment to equality while ignoring the likelihood that a substantial Wallace vote would have thrown the election to the Republicans.

Indeed, it is in the final chapter of Labor Rights Are Civil Rights that an otherwise informative and illuminating book becomes an evasive and tendentious one. Problems of reliance on Communist elements in the labor movement, duly, if briefly, noted in earlier sections are now forgotten. The CIO’s purge of the pro-Soviet left is equated with abandonment of a commitment to racial equality. The Truman administration’s–and the mainstream labor movement’s–hostility toward the Stalin-led Soviet Union occurs off stage, so to speak, and appears by default to have been motivated a gratuitous determination to abandon the relatively progressive racial policies of the 1930s and World War II. Vargas is certainly right that the assault on the pro-Soviet left deprived progressive forces of experienced and committed partisans but his failure to place these developments in a historically nuanced context transforms what had hitherto been a more complicated narrative into a simple morality play.

Disappointing too is Vargas’s failure to follow through on his central theme, the connection between labor rights and civil rights. While his decision to end the story in 1950 is defensible, readers are left with little understanding of the fate of the rights-oriented movement begun under left-labor auspices in the 1930s and 1940s in subsequent decades. Did the purge of the pro-Soviet left from the CIO have the result of removing organized labor from playing a major role in post-war civil rights struggles, as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein have argued with reference to African Americans? Were there any connections, positive or negative, between the labor-oriented arousal of civic consciousness in the 1940s and the emergence of the GI Forum in 1948 as a focal point of Mexican American activism? Vargas is silent on these matters. Thus while the theme that labor-rights-are-civil-rights was (and remains in contemporary discourse) a potent one, Vargas leaves it to the reader to make the necessary connections. Perhaps a sequel will bring the story forward and suggest the connections (or lack thereof) between the story that Vargas tells so effectively in the first three-quarters of the book and more recent assertions of civil rights and civic identity on the part of Americans of Mexican descent.

Robert H. Zieger
University of Florida
*****
For Labor History symposium, c. 2006.

Paul D. Moreno. Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2006.

There are two strands to Moreno's argument. He is sharply and incessantly critical of the racial attitudes and practices of both organized labor and the white working class. At the same time, he indicates-and at times rather baldly states-that quite apart from pernicious union racial policies, organization of workers for other than social or philanthropic purposes is inherently illegitimate and harmful to all citizens.

Moreno has little difficulty in documenting the organized labor movement's long record of racial insensitivity and injustice. He cites the critiques of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, although he says little about Martin Luther King Jr.'s pro-unionism. Black Americans and Organized Labor rests on the scholarship of neoclassical economists and free market advocates, along with-and perhaps most tellingly-the work of historians who would consider themselves pro-labor. Indeed, much of the indictment of the early AFL, the railroad brotherhoods, and of the white working class generally is now the conventional wisdom of labor history and labor historiography. Thus, Moreno can draw extensively on the work of Eric Arnesen, Alexander Saxton, Bernard Mandel, Philip Foner, Joseph McCartin, and a host of others to build a compelling case that condemns the racial policies and practices of the mainstream labor movement, especially down to the 1930s.

Moreno does acknowledge the "other side," so to speak, noting exceptions to labor's racial exclusion. Thus, he records William Sylvis's and Samuel Gompers's statements on the need to organize black workers. He registers the inter-racial unionism of the New Orleans dock workers and Alabama coal miners during the Gilded Age, as well as the biracialism of the United Mine Workers more generally. The relatively positive attitudes and policies of the Knights of Labor and the inter-racialism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are duly recorded. In all cases, however, he minimizes the importance of these exceptions. He has no trouble in contrasting Gompers's relatively few positive statements and gestures with the AFL leader's many insensitive or insulting utterances and actions. He writes off the Knights and the IWW as marginal and ephemeral and provides a string of damning quotes of socialist leaders, who either ignored (Eugene V. Debs) or denigrated (Victor Berger) black workers.

With respect to the evidences of inter-racial activism, as portrayed by Arnesen, Daniel Letwin, Brian Kelly,⁽¹⁾ and others, however, Moreno is unfairly dismissive. To be sure, episodes of inter-racial cooperation were always partial and constrained, as Arnesen, Letwin, and the others freely acknowledge and copiously document. But these scholars do something that Moreno does not, and that is explore their subjects within the general context of racial thought and practice of the era. After all, the UMW's dealings with blacks in turn-of-the-century Alabama were more enlightened, for all their limitations and compromises, than those of any other contemporary white-led governmental, military, academic, philanthropic, ecclesiastical, or corporate entity. Nor is this merely a matter of playing fair, presenting the other side. It is important in assessing the racial record of any institutional entity to square its declared ideology with its practices. For historians more sympathetic than Moreno to the goals and purposes of the labor movement, the racism of organized labor, which proclaimed the equality of all toilers, is especially disappointing precisely because of the egalitarianism its ideology proclaimed. Thus, at least in his coverage of the pre-New Deal era, Moreno's narrative tells a rather simple story of pernicious unions victimizing black workers so as to command higher wages for themselves. The narrative that flows from the work of Letwin, Arnesen, Kelly, and others is a more nuanced and complicated one that captures the combination of laborite idealism, gritty workplace dynamics, and social milieu that shaped the extraordinary stories they tell.

Moreno believes that there was one contemporary "group" that did, in fact, practice enlightened racial attitudes and policies-private employers. In his view, organized labor's combination of general exclusion of and occasional cooperation with black workers was really just a subcase of its basic strategy, indeed its raison d'etre, namely limitation of the labor supply and extraction of higher-than-market wages for union members. Labor unions are cartels that exist primarily to exact from employers-and hence from the general public-wage rates that its members could not achieve without the union's monopoly on the jobs. In the final analysis, "Everyone. . . suffers from labor unionization."(6) Employers, seeking efficient labor at the lowest rates, had every reason to employ blacks, and did do so when white workers and/or labor-friendly public officials did not prevent them. To be sure, employers were not more enlightened than workers or union leaders-they were just doing what employers do, i.e., reduce costs and increase profits. And this natural behavior gave black workers their best chance of gaining employment opportunity. Racial justice required not heroic confrontation or selfless enlightenment but simply unfettered labor markets. Moreno spends little time actually exploring the role of employers as putative benfactors of black workers. He does challenge, on the whole persuasively, the widespread view among labor historians that employers characteristically fomented racial division in the workplace as a means of combating unions.⁽²⁾

[This sentence belongs directly after the end note numeral but I can't get Netscape to put it there]: On the other hand, he shows no interest in probing the role played by agricultural and other employers in establishing and sustaining the South's Jim Crow regime, from which they benefitted at the expense of black workers

The Lochner-era courts also win Moreno's praise. Black workers benefitted from pro-employer interventions in labor disputes because restrictions on (mostly white) union activities, such as picketing and harassment of replacement workers, provided opportunities for black workers that the exclusivist unions would not. Thus, he defends the labor injunction, the yellow dog contract, and the general Lochner regime as fighting a rear-guard action to sustain free labor concepts (i.e., individual opportunity, employment at will, labor mobility) in the face of growing demands, especially after the turn of the 20^th century, for state intervention in behalf of organized labor.⁽³⁾

Moreno does not exempt blacks from selfish and manipulative practices. In the few places where they were able to do so, blacks also sought to dominate labor markets, exclude rivals, and gain governmental support for their artificially gained wage premiums. He cites as an example the success of black timber workers in Florida who used the Reconstruction government's powers to exclude French Canadians imported to break a strike. Indeed, Moreno might have, but does not, cite black workers' attitudes toward immigrants overall and the exclusionist efforts of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) vis-a-vis Filipinos.⁽⁴⁾

Moreno stresses that governmental intervention in the economy, and hence in labor markets, was a key factor in the continuing subordination of black workers. From the Erdman Act of 1898 through the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, every piece of federal legislation and almost every major example of federal interventions (for example, federal operation of the railroads during World War I) benefitted white workers and disadvantaged blacks, with the partial exception of the Immigration Act of 1924. The half-century after 1890 was indeed a period remarkable for the amount of pro-union federal legislation and other governmental actions, encompassing both Democratic and Republican administrations: Federal railroad labor legislation culminating in the Railway Labor Acts of 1926 and 1934; the establishment and activities of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations; the Adamson, Clayton, La Follette Seamen's Acts during the Wilson administration; the actions of the World War I-era National War Labor Board; the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931; the Norris-LaGuardia act of 1932; Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act; and, of course, the Wagner Act. Typically, racially exclusive white unions benefitted and blacks lost out. For example, Moreno sees as one of the key purposes of the La Follette Seamen's Act-which historians usually depict as a progressive reform in behalf of oppressed maritime workers-the ouster of Asian sailors from US ships. Moreno follows Eric Arnesen in charting the ways in which the racist railroad brotherhoods used legislative and governmental authority to drive blacks from desirable jobs. Davis-Bacon was passed in part in response to the building trades unions' objections to the practice of some federal contractors who hired low-wage African Americans rather than AFL members. In outlawing the "yellow dog" contract, the 1932 Norris-La Guardia Act removed from employers a weapon that had indirectly benefitted black workers willing to take the jobs of injunction-defying whites. (147; emphasis added)

By the time Moreno gets to Wagner (and amply documenting the defeat of efforts to require non-discriminatory treatment on the part of unions seeking to use National Labor Relations Board services), he makes the desire of some black activists, notably Randolph but including scholar-activist Abram Harris, Du Bois (at least at times), and an emerging group in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to collaborate with organized labor seem bizarre. Indeed, he dismisses A. Philip Randolph's whole life's work. He quotes Randolph, after the AFL granted BSCP federal charters in 1929, as comparing AFL President William Green with Lincoln and then adds this sentence: "Randolph would spend the rest of his long life exhorting blacks to see their interests as aligned with those of white unionists, but his philosophy had limited appeal on account of its atheistic premises and its dissonance with the experiences of many black workers."⁽⁵⁾

Moreno shifts ground in his critique of organized labor with the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. The CIO, he acknowledges, was "compelled. . . to take black workers into account." (176) In a remarkable concession, he quotes with approval Raymond Wolters-otherwise a sharp critic of mainstream labor-who declares that "It would be a serious error to underestimate the extent to which the CIO improved the economic position of Negro workers and educated white workers on the color problem." Indeed, Moreno adds that "there was substantial merit in the claim that the CIO had done more to improve American race relations than any other organization,"(193) an assessment that even the CIO's most favorable historians might find generous.⁽⁶⁾

These judgments stand in surprising relationship to other aspects of Moreno's account of the industrial union movement wherein he stresses "the violence of the CIO campaign."(177) Thus, the Flint sit-down strike is not the heroic episode of working-class self-actualization of labor history lore but rather an illegal provocation. The activities of the La Follette Committee are seen as unfairly curtailing employers' legitimate efforts to resist unionization and as furthering the agenda of the Communist Party. Moreno's account of the Battle of the Overpass seems to conflate black auto workers' opposition to the UAW with the brutalization of Walter Reuther, Richard Frankensteen, and Robert Kanter at the Rouge. At least that's the impression left by this perplexing sentence: "Black workers did help Ford defeat a May 1937 UAW campaign, clashing with organizers in the 'Battle of the Overpass,' in which members of the company's notorious 'service department' were photographed thrashing [emphasis added] several UAW organizers. . . ." (180-81) this section of the book is particularly rewarding.Curious judgments and confusing citations aside, Moreno's account of the first century of organized labor's involvement with African American workers contains few surprises. At its best it is a smart and provocative synthesis of free market legal and econometric scholarship, on the one hand, and the best of new historical work on the subject. For most readers, however, the most useful part of the book will be chapters 6 and 7, which cover the Civil Rights Era and "The Affirmative Action Dilemma" of recent decades. Here Moreno builds on his excellent book From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933-1972 (1997). This is a different world than that depicted in the first two-thirds of Black Americans and Organized Labor. Here judges, legislators, union advocates, business interests, and African American leaders wrestle with complex questions of competing rights. Moreno is dubious about the justice and efficacy of affirmative action, preferential hiring, and other devices that federal administrators and judges employed in efforts to implement Title VI and VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He is critical of organized labor's efforts to protect existing structures of racial injustice embedded in long-established union practice. He believes that programs of affirmative action and preferential hiring have often backfired, benefitting men and women who in fact needed no special treatment while reducing entry level employment opportunities for inner-city black men. But this section of the book, perhaps reflecting Moreno's more detailed understanding of post-World War II legal and political race-labor circumstances, lacks the sense of clear-cut, if matter-of-factly stated, outrage that animates the first two-thirds of Black Americans and Organized Labor. Read in conjunction with Moreno's earlier work and with a vigorous and nuanced emerging literature on the subject,⁽⁷⁾

1. Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press; Illini Books ed., 1994); Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

2. But see Cliff Brown, "Racial Conflicts and Split Labor Markets: The AFL Campaign to Organize Steelworkers, 1918-1919," Social Science History 22: 3 (Fall 1998): 319-47, and Cliff Brown, "The Role of Employers in Split Labor Markets: An Event-Structure Analysis of Racial Conflict and AFL Organizing, 1917-1919," Social Forces 70: 2 (2000): 653-81.

4. Barbara Posadas, "Ethnic Life and Labor in Chicago's Pre-World War-II Filipino Community," Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835-1960, ed. Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson (Albany: SUNY 1990), 63-80; David J. Hellwig, "Black Leaders and United States Immigration Policy, 1917-1929," Journal of Negro History 66: 2 (Summer 1981): 110-127.

5. In fact, this is a worrisome sentence, and not only because of its bizarre and one-off invocation of religion. For support, Moreno cites Paula Pfeffer's book, Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 296. But here, far from dismissing Randolph's life project, Pfeffer has this to say: In the 1930s, Randolph's "ascendency marks the appearance of a new type of black leadership attuned to a whole range of interest groups. In his various campaigns, Randolph managed to anticipate segments of the black community that were just beginning to find their voice. He went beyond the legal action of the NAACP by claiming a whole range of new rights for blacks, the most significant of which was the right to bargain collectively on behalf of Afro-American group interests. [Emphasis added] Randolph was able to make novel demands because he realized that historical circumstances had crated a new black world."

6. Moreno's citation for this positive assessment seems to be Lizabeth Cohen, New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 337, but actually this page is mostly about racial progress in Chicago among packinghouse workers. Cohen does imply that growing racial understanding and cooperation was central to the early CIO project, but this page doesn't make any broad generalizations on the subject. Much of the recent literature emanating from generally union-friendly historians is a good deal more critical of the CIO's racial record than Moreno here posits. See, e.g., Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 83-85, 154-61, and passim; Bruce Nelson, "Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II," Journal of American History 80: 3 (Dec. 1993): 952-88; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement," Journal of American History, 75:3 (Dec. 1988): 786-811; and Michael Goldfield, "Was There a Golden Age of the CIO?: Race, Solidarity, and Union Growth during the 1930s and 1940s," Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s-1990s (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 78-110.

7. See Robert Zieger, "Recent Historical Scholarship on Public Policy in Relation to Race and Labor in the Post-Title-VII Period," Labor History 46: 1 (February 2005): 3-14. Since publication of this survey, three important new books have come to my attention. They are Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (NY: Norton, 2005); and Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)

----
Labor History, written March 2008

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (NY: Norton, 2007); Philip M. Dine, State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008)

    Paul Krugman believes that the revival of the labor movement in the United States is critical to the renewal of liberal hopes for a fairer, more equitable society. He looks back on the post-World War II decades as a period of labor-led middle class prosperity and progress. Labor could play such a leading role because of the gains workers and unions had made in the 1930s and 1940s. Although acknowledging the role of infectious worker militancy in labor’s rebirth, Krugman stresses the role of FDR and the New Deal, highlighting “the government’s shift from agent of the bosses to protector of the workers.” (51) After the war, strong unions boosted lower-income purchasing power and set standards for non-union employers and workers. Moreover, the bargaining strategies of the new industrial unions privileged the needs of the non-skilled workers at the bottom of the wage profile, thus playing a key role in the emergence in the postwar period of a uniquely American blue collar, middle class socio-economic order when the gap between workers’ wages and executive compensation was relatively narrow. Politically as well, “The strength of the union movement lowered the economic center of gravity of U.S. politics, which greatly benefitted the Democrats,” since “a powerful union movement had the effect of mobilizing lower-income voters.” (70-71)
    In accounting for labor’s subsequent decline and for the nation’s increasingly skewed distribution of income and its deteriorating public weal, Krugman stresses two factors: the successful conservative assault on organized labor, which gathered steam in the 1970s; and the effects of race on political realignment. Indeed, he asserts that much of the trajectory of recent political history “can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican.” Racialization of political life in the aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became linked with the long-festering anti-unionism that especially characterized retail, hotel, and small manufacturing employers to undo the prosperous, relatively egalitarian labor-management accord that prevailed into the 1960s. The bad news, of course, is that corporate interests, racial conservatives, and union-busters have been able to seize and hold the political initiative and “crush the labor movement.” (114-15) The good news, according to Krugman, however, is that it is not irresistible forces of “globalization” and deindustrialization that lay at the heart of labor’s enfeeblement. Since the roots of the problem are political and institutional, the remedies are also political and institutional. Hence his hope for “A new political climate [that] could revitalize the union movement,” which “should be a key progressive goal.” (263)
    Conscience of a Liberal does not always stand up well as history. Although Krguman rhetorically credits FDR and the New Deal having adopted the fiscal policies that created a more egalitarian income distribution regime, he actually credits wartime tax measures with being the decisive steps. Relying heavily on a paper by Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo, Krugman shows that it was revenue measures promulgated for wartime revenue raising and inflation-fighting reasons that played the key role in reducing income inequality. Indeed, New Deal tax policies, especially after Social Security levies kicked in in 1937, may have actually had a mildly regressive impact. He misnames the National Labor Relations Act (51) and misdates the Voting Rights Act. (64)
    However, Krugman’s celebration of the role that organized labor played in the 1940s and 1950s is a useful reminder to historians. It helps to restore the imbalance in treatment often found in a historical literature that contrasts the heroic accomplishments of the depression-era CIO with alleged postwar lassitude and bureaucratization. In fact, it was the unions in the now-secure CIO, the revived AFL, and even the much maligned AFL-CIO that achieved breakthrough contract gains in pensions, health care, and wages. Krugman’s depiction of the postwar era as a “golden age of manual labor” may be a bit roseate but it does highlight the contrast between an industrial regime of job security, reliable pensions, decent health care coverage, and narrowing compensation differentials and one of insecurity, lack of social provision, and wildly disparities of income.
    Despite Krugman’s emphasis on the need for a strong labor movement in the to re-energization of progressive politics, Conscience of a Liberal says little about real existing unions and the institutional environment in which they operate. Almost all of his references to unions are to the achievements of the past.   “Revitalizing unions” may “be a key progressive goal,” but there is no mention here of SEIU, the California Nurses Association, AFSCME, or other contemporary organizing initiatives that attempt to expand labor power. Apart from a brief nod to the need for union-friendly appointees to the NLRB and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), Krugman seems uninterested in the process by which such an unlikely development might occur. Little interested in the internal dynamics of labor unions or in the attitudes of twenty-first century workers toward the labor movement, Krugman is content with an abstract call for labor revival.
    Meanwhile, though Krugman is silent about the mechanisms by which such a revival might be achieved, journalist Philip M. Diner has advice a plenty for the labor movement. State of the Unions starts off with edifying accounts of grass roots union activism. In the 2004 primary in Iowa, he recounts, the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) exploited the integral role that its members played in local communities throughout Iowa to mobilize support for its favored candidate, John Kerry, in the state’s Democratic caucus and thus, as it turned out, to rejuvenate his sagging hopes for the nomination. For a parallel case of innovative rank-and-file organizing, Diner reaches back to the successful struggle of catfish-processing workers in the early 1990s in Mississippi. There low wage workers, most of them African Americans, battled their employers and local elites to bring Delta Pride to the bargaining table and to build a strong and effective union. Relying on the resourcefulness and energy of rank-and-file activists, the United Food and Commercial Workers also mounted an effective regional boycott campaign, combining local activism and effective work on the part of international union functionaries. These two examples of successful labor activism identify a key theme in State of the Unions, the need of labor leaders to find ways to mobilize grass roots activism and to use imagination and openness in presenting labor’s case to the broader public.
    Dine’s book contains other edifying stories of union revitalization and organizing success as well as cautionary tales of what happens when workers are voiceless. He shows how AFSCME, SEIU, the California Nurses Association, and other unions are employing innovative organizing and public relations strategies to recruit workers hitherto little represented in the House of Labor. He applauds a reformed Teamsters’ union as an example of how democratic change–in this case, wrought by federal oversight–can revitalize a troubled and compromised union. Conversely, Dine excoriates the defensive and arrogant UAW of the 1990s for its hostility toward the press and its lack of acknowledgment of its tribulations and missteps. Particularly powerful is his recounting of the grim story of the twelve coal miners killed in the Sago explosion in January, 2006, pointing to the absence of a strong union and the erosion of mine safety regulation that has attended the decimation of the once-powerful United Mine Workers. “By the end of 2006,” he points out, “47 coal miners had died in mining accidents,” only five of whom were UMW members. (96-97)
    In chronicling the reasons for union decline, Diner ticks off the usual suspects: globalization; deindustrialization; capital flight; the conservative political climate; anti-union public policies; organized labor’s complacency and disarray. “Labor,” he says, “can’t expect to gain members just by organizing more intelligently.” For even the most resourceful and imaginative recruitment tactics to have a chance of success, the labor movement has to find a way “to change the various policies, laws, and appointments that hinder its efforts and put it in a hole before it starts.” (161) But gaining more favorable public policies requires gaining political power and influence, which in turn requires expanded membership. Thus, he concludes, the union movement faces a seemingly intractable dilemma: “it can’t organize because it can’t change the policies and laws; it can’t change the policies and laws because it can’t organize.” (162)
    Labor leaders bear much of the responsibility for labor’s inability to arrest its decline. As a journalist, he is particularly critical of unions’ reliance on formulaic press releases, canned position statements, and archaic rhetoric in its efforts to bring employer malfeasance and worker victimization to public attention. He singles out those responsible for the split in the AFL-CIO that led to the creation of the Change to Win coalition in 2005. Just as the labor movement was beginning to come to terms with its internal problems and to embark on a course of useful internal criticism and rededication, he believes, it fell victim to “a series of power struggles, transitory alliances, personal conflicts, and contrasting proposals.”(159) Although rival unionists spoke of profound differences in grand strategy, Dine sees the quarrels that divided Sweeney, Stern, McEntee, and Hoffa as “a series of sophomoric spats” that have “torn apart an already reeling labor movement.” (163)
    If Krugman is silent about what it will take for the labor movement to reinvent itself, Dine is generous with advice. Labor’s story, he believes, is a powerful and poignant one. “The country,” he believes, “hungers for what the labor movement, uniquely, could offer” because “average Americans need an advocate” in the struggle to “restore some equilibrium” to a badly skewed socio-political order. (164) Dine’s recommendations, however, are elusive, in part because he believes that each organizing effort and each political campaign is distinctive, allowing for no one formula that will increase the chances of success. In general, however, greater reliance on grass-roots mobilization and finding ways to bring the voices of ordinary workers, both in unions’ internal deliberations and in their efforts to reach the public, is critical. The greater visibility in recent years of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the ranks of labor is a positive sign, especially since workers of these backgrounds often bring with them prior affiliations in the feminist, civil rights, and faith-based social justice movements with which organized labor must forge effective coalitions if it is to be successful.
    Like Paul Krugman, Philip Dine believes that a strong and responsive labor movement is a sine qua non of a decent society. Without a revitalized labor movement, Dine asks, “who will speak up for hourly workers or salaried employees?” Indeed, “labor’s most important role may be to serve as a vehicle for the voices of people who are being drowned out.” (253, 258) Think of what it would mean, Krugman speculates, “If Wal-Mart employees were part of a union that could demand higher wages and better benefits. . . the American middle class would have several hundred thousand additional members.” (150-51) Dine cites surveys that show that large numbers of workers would welcome union representation were it achievable without undue conflict and risk. Would a more union-friendly NLRB and the kind of card-check legislation envisaged in the EFCA, if coupled with the kinds of innovative public relations and grass-roots mobilization that he urges, stimulate the kinds of union growth that characterized the 1930s and 1940s? Or was the rise of the CIO and the revival of the AFL in those years a one-off phenomenon, the result of a unique combination of worker militancy, governmental favor, and gifted leadership goaded by energetic radical activists a one-off phenomenon? Both authors believe a reborn labor movement is imperative for the democratic future of the United States but sometimes the odds seem long indeed.

Robert H. Zieger
University of Florida

Andrew Battista, The Revival of Labor Liberalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
    Political scientist Andrew Battista divides the story of labor liberalism in the United States over the past thirty years into three parts. Part 1 traces “The Rise and Decline of the Labor-Liberal Coalition,” covering the period from the New Deal into the 1970s. Part 2, “The Revival of the Labor-Liberal Coalition: Case Studies,” examines three major efforts in the late 1970s and early 1980s to reconfigure and revitalize labor liberalism. Considered here are the Progressive Alliance (PA; 1978-81); the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition (CLEC; 1978-1984); and the National Labor Committee (NLC; 1981- ). Part 3 addresses “The Past and Future of Labor-Liberal Politics” and treats the more recent past. It chronicles the forging of labor-led liberal initiatives, notably Jobs with Justice (JWJ; 1986- ) and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI; 1986- ), the victory of dissident unionists over the AFL-CIO establishment in 1995, and the split in the US labor movement that occurred with the secession in 2005 of the unions that now form the Change to Win (CTW) coalition.
    Battista believes that despite its long-term decline and its marginalization in public discourse, organized labor remains critical to the fortunes of American liberalism. He also believes that cooperation between the labor movement and various strands of liberalism is essential to labor’s revival. In the 1960s and 1970s, the New Deal era labor-liberal nexus broke down as a new generation of liberals, focusing on civil rights, the environment, and foreign policy, increasingly perceived the labor movement as an impediment to social justice. Underlying this disaffection was a demographic reality that found widening disparities between the age, race, gender, and educational characteristics of liberal voters, on the one hand, and those attributes among union members. The victory of Richard Nixon in 1972 and the triumph of Ronald Reagan eight years later, along with declining Democratic presence in Congress, signaled the death knell of the New Deal labor-liberal coalition.
    Battista’s recounting of the efforts of labor movement activists to rebuild the coalition in the 1970s and 1980s is an important contribution. While the PA and the CLEC were short-lived, both stimulated grassroots labor-liberal cooperation. The NLC, which still functions as a labor-liberal foreign policy advocacy body, sent the message to anti-war liberals that they had allies in the labor movement, despite the anti-Communist fixations of the AFL-CIO establishment. Battista points to specific, if limited, legislative victories such as plant closing legislation, resistance to natural gas deregulation, limitations on aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, and the initial defeat of “fast track” trade agreement authorization as in part a result of the efforts of these labor-liberal initiatives. The Jobs with Justice campaign and the Economic Policy Institute, both launched in 1986, evidence the success of the labor-led effort of the 1970s and 1980s to reconnect with liberal activists. Battista singles out Douglas Fraser, William Winpisinger, and Jerry Wurf, presidents respectively of the UAW, Machinists, and State, County, and Municipal Employees, for their leadership in these efforts. At the same time, Battista is measured in his claims for the accomplishments of the emerging labor liberal nexus. Organized labor’s continuing membership decline, conservative electoral success, and rightward drift of the Democratic party insured that such successes were defensive in nature and often only temporary in effect.
    Battista sees the successful challenge of union dissidents to the AFL-CIO establishment, capped in 1995 by the election of John Sweeney to the federation’s presidency, as solidifying the labor-liberal coalition. The victory of Sweeney and his allies, Battista holds, represented the triumph of the vision of organized labor associated initially with late UAW president Walter Reuther, an unrelenting critic before his death in 1970 of the George Meany-led AFL-CIO. The Sweeney-led federation launched new organizing efforts that often linked membership drives to gender, race, and environmental concerns. The new leadership also substantially increased labor’s political operations, pouring millions of dollars into voter registration, voter education, and candidate support in the late 1990s. Initially these initiatives seemed successful. Union membership edged upward and the elections of 1996, 1998, and 2000 (despite the disputed outcome of the presidential tally) suggested that the Republican tide had crested.
    The new century, however, has not been kind to labor-liberal hopes. Membership and political gains have proved ephemeral. Political defeat in 2002 and 2004 spurred opposition to the Sweeney agenda among service sector and building trades unions, a development that culminated in 2005 in the defection of unions that represented about forty percent of the AFL-CIO membership to form a new body, the Change to Win (CTW) coalition. The split in the labor movement has raised questions about the long-term survival of initiatives such as the creation in 1996 of the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), a promising effort to give institutional identity to the loose labor-liberal alliance that Sweeney and his associates were fostering.
    In this final chapters, Battista, whose tone thus far has been cautious and measured, becomes more prescriptive. He laments the actions of the CTW coalition, believing that they could have registered their legitimate criticisms of the Sweeney-led AFL-CIO without disaffiliating. He steps forth as an advocate of pro-union legislation, declaring that “labor law reform [along the lines of the current Employee Free Choice measure that has passed the U.S. House of Representatives] is necessary for substantial union survival.” The existing labor law regime, he believes, fails to protect workers’ right “to freely form or join a union.” (190) Since success in attaining reform depends on political and legislative muscle, CTW’s criticism of AFL-CIO’s recent emphasis on political action seems misplaced.
    In his discussion of these recent developments, Battista provides a useful framework for understanding a division in the House of Labor that often seems unclear and arcane. He notes, for example, that it is the old CIO-type industrial unions and the public employee unions, both more dependent on governmental support and public policies, that have remained loyal to the AFL-CIO, while CTW is comprised largely of service sector organizations, along with some key building trades unions. Since these organizations are less troubled by the threat of plant relocation, they are perhaps less inherently “political” than are unions such as the Steelworkers and Auto Workers; and since in the service and construction sectors, privatization is not the threat that it poses for public employees, they see less need for direct access to government. Battista might have elaborated on this point, noting perhaps the willingness of CTW unions such as the Carpenters, Hotel and Restaurant Employees, and Service Employees to make deals with conservative politicians in the interest of gaining or protecting membership. Thus, while the AFL-CIO remains wedded to a version of the mildly social democratic politics reminiscent of the heyday of the New Deal coalition–which in turn strengthens ties with non-labor liberals–, CTW appears to be reverting to the political strategies historically associated with the AFL building trades and the railroad brotherhoods.
    The Revival of Labor Liberalism is a thoughtful guide to recent developments in the US trade union movement. By establishing the broad context for labor-liberal interaction, this book will be illuminating even–perhaps especially–to those who followed closely and perhaps even participated in the organizations and initiatives he so carefully describes and analyzes. Andrew Battista is a careful, judicious scholar who has examined a wide range of materials and whose judgments are always balanced and well-argued. In so ably demonstrating both the necessity for and the problems impeding labor-liberal alliance, he has provided an important source both for historians and labor-liberal activists.

Robert H. Zieger
University of Florida (Emeritus)

Eric Arnesen, ed., The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (2007), 319. (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, $60.00, $25 paperback); Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (2008), xii + 202 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, $50.00, $24.95 paperback). During the past decade, historians have been producing important new work on the theme of race and labor. Books by Paul Moreno, Michael Honey, Laurie B. Greene, and Thomas Jackson have received wide attention. The works under review offer both a sampling of recent scholarship and an intriguing glimpse into the intersection of the US legal regime and the post-New Deal race-labor nexus.

The essays in The Black Worker are broadly representative of recent scholarly work on the subject. The collection reprints milestones in black labor history, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein’s 1988 Journal of American History article dealing with labor and civil rights in Winston-Salem and Detroit and Tera W. Hunter’s discussion of black domestic servants in Progressive Era Atlanta. Some essays, notably editor Arnesen’s on black strikebreaking, Brian Kelly’s on African American elites and black workers during the same period, and Steven A. Reich’s on black labor in the aftermath of World War I are adapted from earlier published papers. Still others–Beth Tompkins Bates on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the 1930s; Cynthia M. Blair on sex workers in late nineteenth century Chicago; Leslie A. Schwalm on women in Reconstruction-era South Carolina; Nan Elizabeth Woodruff’s survey of agricultural workers’ struggles in Arkansas; and William P. Jones’s paper on wood products workers in post-World War II North Carolina–are based on books on these subjects by the respective authors. Joseph A. McCartin’s study of rank-and-file AFSCME leader Leamon Hood stands alone as an original, previously unpublished contribution.

As indicated in Eric Arnesen’s introduction, these essays reflect three principle themes. All highlight the agency and autonomy of black workers. All detail the sorry record of exploitation and racial injustice that black workers have suffered. And several, notably the papers by Korstad and Lichtenstein, Jones, Tompkins, and McCartin, explore the limitations and failures of mainstream labor and governmental bodies in their dealings with African American workers. All in all, they justify Arnesen’s claim that the scholars represented in The Black Worker are part of ‘a broad, collective project of recasting labor and African American history’. (7)

Several contributions address familiar themes. Arnesen’s examination of strikebreaking stresses that when black workers did in fact cross picket lines, they did not do so at the behest of black elites who urged them to cast their lot with beneficent employers. Rather, strike-breaking–which was by no means confined to or particularly characteristic of African Americans–was one point in a spectrum of black workers’ survival strategies, a spectrum that also included a vigorous strain of black collective action. Brian Kelly’s treatment of black elites’ perceptions of and prescriptions for black workers highlights the disjuncture between the agenda of even Du Bois’s “talented tenth,” on the one hand, and the circumstances of the turn-of-the-century black working class.

Several essays convey a ‘might have been’ theme. Notable in this regard are the several-generation struggles of rural workers in Arkansas found in Nan Elizabeth Woodruff’s essay, the hope and optimism suffusing black working-class communities in the wake of World War I chronicled by Reich, and Jones’s account of struggles of Carolina wood products workers seeking to link workplace and civil rights activism through the promising–but ultimately disappointing–vehicle of the post-World War II CIO. All three offer glimpses of plausible alternatives to the repression and neglect that in fact characterized these episodes.

McCartin’s biographical study of Leamon Hood is an appropriate choice for closing the volume. It is the only contribution that extends substantially beyond 1950. Its discussion of the rise of post-1960 public employee unionism fills an otherwise notable gap in the collection. In tracing the triumphs and defeats of this mid-level activist, McCartin reveals the ways in which the personal and the political intersected for ambitious and talented black workers in the recent past. The author conveys themes of race prejudice, black activism, and the awkward racial politics of even a progressive white-led union such as AFSCME through the compelling and often poignant story of this capable, but often frustrated, unionist.

Inevitably, even in a rich sampling such as that found in The Black Worker there are omissions. Absent are coal miners, steel workers, and, apart from A. Philip Randolph’s sleeping car porters, the railroad workers whose struggles Arnesen chronicled in his important book Brotherhoods of Color. Black labor radicals, apart from the Communists who figure in Bates’s essay, are largely absent, as are building tradesmen, clerical workers, teachers, and hospital and service employees. To note these gaps is less a criticism of editor Arnesen than a plea for a second volume, one that will devote greater attention to black labor over the past half-century.

While focus of The Black Worker is on workers per se, Paul Frymer in Black and Blue is concerned with the legal, political, and institutional dynamics of race and labor since the New Deal. Frymer stresses the conceptual and legal bifurcation among federal policy makers and jurists between the general rights of workers and unions, on the one hand, and the rights of minority workers to equitable treatment in the workplace and in the labor movement on the other. The National Labor Relations, or Wagner, Act of 1935 did not prohibit racial discrimination; hence when faced with inequities in hiring, workplace treatment, and representation, African American and other minority workers had to look to the federal courts. Even before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, whose Title VII outlawed racial discrimination in hiring, the courts were invoking Constitutional principal and common law precedents to overrode Congress’s legislative intent, intruding the courts–and through them, the entire legal profession–into the promulgation and application of labor law. The key case was the Supreme Court’s decision in Steele v. Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company (1944), wherein the Court compensated for the 1926 Railroad Labor Act’s silence on union discrimination by asserting a ‘Duty of Fair Representation’ (DFR). In effect, DFR became a vehicle by which the courts could regulate union behavior across a broad range of issues, many of them having no relation to racial discrimination.

The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act widened judicial ability to regulate union activity. With Title VII, public interest and private attorneys launched far-reaching litigation that greatly expanded access of African Americans to new employment opportunities. Frymer notes an irony at the heart of this Title VII litigation: Precisely because the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, federal agency charged with enforcing the new law, was understaffed and underfunded, it encouraged aggressive (and highly effective) private litigation in behalf of black workers. Changes dating back to the late 1930s in the rules governing litigation in the federal courts facilitated class action suits and that permitted aggrieved parties to claim punitive damages and litigation costs. Encouraged by EEOC staffers, attorneys eagerly seized on Title VII to secure sweeping benefits for black workers. Private attorneys and crusading racial liberals aggressively pursued cases that often resulted in the collection of monetary damages from black workers’ own unions, found guilty of discrimination in the collective bargaining agreements they negotiated and in the quality and kind of representation they provided minority members. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was becoming increasingly ineffectual as a means of defending the rights of workers and unions.

Frymer’s stress on the institutional structures and historical processes that undergird racism and his criticism of those who see racism primarily as a matter of psychological pathology is salutary. In addition, his account of the role of federal litigation rules and of the legal profession in making effective the promise of Title VII is a revelation. The story he tells explicates the legal and institutional underpinning of the development of equal opportunity and affirmative action that historians such as Timothy Minchin, Nancy MacLean, Hugh Davis Graham, Paul Moreno, and others have explored so productively.

Less convincing is his claim that the divorce of labor rights from work place civil rights is a prime agent in the decades-long decline of organized labor. Frymer alludes repeatedly to the damage that the lawyers and jurists, who have contributed so much to establishing workplace opportunity for minorities and women, have done to the ability of unions to function effectively. In promoting the laudable goal of equal employment opportunity, he asserts, the courts and the lawyers who pled the relevant cases ‘scaled back many important labor protections’. Thus ‘Federal civil rights enforcement unintentionally weakened national labor law. . . .’ (25) Yet nowhere is there a clear account of exactly how progress in one area was connected to regression in the other. Specific examples, apart from brief comments on the litigation costs that Title VII suits have imposed on unions, of Wagner Act rights being lost in rulings in discrimination cases are absent. The closest Frymer comes to pinning this important charge down is his observation that after 1964, the great majority of suits charging union malfeasance have come from union members, not, as was previously the case, from employers (95-97) but even this discussion lacks specificity. Moreover, the saddling of unions with burdensome litigation that discouraged organizing and hamstrung contract negotiation dates back at least to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which greatly broadened the role of litigation and judicial appeal in labor relations.

At times, Frymer’s main concern seems to be using labor-civil rights issues as a means of showing that the post-New Deal courts have not retreated from economic regulation. His charge that otherwise-salutary intervention in the racial practices of unions has brought with it decisive weakening of unions’ ability to recruit new members and perform necessary functions needs more specific and extensive documentation than he provides. The line of inquiry that he opens up is indeed potentially fruitful. In Running Steel, Running America , Judith Stein demonstrated how foreign policy considerations, the vagaries of civil rights law, and industrial policies intersected to weaken both the labor movement and the Democratic party. Black and Blue points in the same direction, although, despite its subtitle, the book rarely addresses party politics. Frymer has provided the basis for more detailed exploration of the relationship between the successful assault on job discrimination, on the one hand, and the decline of organized labor on the other.

Notes--Sorry. The Notes, which are just cites to the books of other authors mentioned in the review, didn't format.

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

Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent. By William H. Thomas Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. xxi, 251 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-299-22890-3.).

William H. Thomas explores the role of the Department of Justice (DOJ) in suppressing and punishing those who opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. He has examined closely the copious Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation, 1908-1922, which have been available in microfilm at the National Archives since 1977. These records, little used by other students of federal repression, provide vivid documentation of the government’s wide-ranging efforts to regulate discussion of the Wilson administration’s wartime goals, policies, and practices. Thomas chronicles the Bureau of Investigation’s (BOI) attacks on the usual suspects, notably anti-war progressives, anti-capitalist radicals, and pacifist-inclined members of the clergy. A separate chapter deals with the DOJ’s relationships with citizen vigilantes, while another uses Wisconsin–a center of progressivism and pro-German sympathy–as a sort of case study of how BOI agents collaborated with local patriots to quell dissent.

Much of the book consists of detailed accounts of individual cases of suppressive activity, stressing the degree to which federal agents relied on informal methods of harassment and intimidation. Thomas focuses on the collaboration between DOJ agents as representatives of the national state and local citizens anxious to enforce uniformity. Indeed, he finds that while the DOJ did initially encourage citizen surveillance and the formation of patriotic citizen groups such as the American Protective League, BOI agents often found local citizens and law enforcement bodies too zealous in their efforts to root out disloyalty. Thomas documents cases in which agents defended dissenters from their local critics, who, they felt, were primarily concerned with settling scores and punishing malcontents.

Unsafe for Democracy raises important questions about the role of the state in modern society. Thomas looks backward to the Progressive Era and forward to controversies over the USA Patriot Act and the effects on civil liberties of the so-called “War on Terror.” One important strain of Progressivism was the drive for efficiency and expert management of public affairs through an empowered federal government. But during and just after the war the same state that Progressives had strengthened so as to enable it to regulate corporate behavior, improve working conditions, and protect consumers now used its powers to curtail the rights of both citizens and aliens.

Thomas draws a direct line between the embryonic surveillance-and-suppression state of the 1910s and the more sinister elements of the national security state of our own time. The weapons of suppression forged during World War I have remained available–and have been put to devastating use–ever since, most recently in the resort to the warrantless searches, promiscuous electronic surveillance, and indeterminate detention. Thus, Unsafe for Democracy poses in a modern idiom the question Lincoln asked: “Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?,”or, in this case, to provide for the security and well-being of its citizens? Is the only alternative to activist government a sterile libertarianism? Thomas has produced a book that both adds to our knowledge of this troubling episode in American history and invites thoughtful consideration of such questions.

Throughout the book, Sugrue awards conservative perspectives of black disadvantage little attention. Perhaps the free market approach to problems of discrimination and black poverty associated with writers Thomas Sowell and John McWhorter and with public figures such as Michael Steele, J.C. Watts, Clarence Thomas, and Ward Connerly has no place in a book dealing primarily with the Movement. But McWhorter=s claim that by the 1980s the Movement had degenerated into a sterile embrace victimization that Ahas hindered black America from adapting to changing economic conditions. . . [and] has discouraged black American leaders from innovative responses to community problems@^{^[iii]} would seem to require some response, offering as it does a provocative critique of the Movement=s trajectory. But since Sugrue, it would appear, regards such analyses as unworthy of consideration, he misses an opportunity to bring his forceful historical perspective to bear on an important strain of ongoing public discourse regarding race, politics, and society.

Sweet Land of Liberty is a powerful, timely, and engaging book, a much-needed complement to the extensive literature on the southern civil rights struggle. Sugrue=s focus on the activism of ordinary people and on the dilemmas with which they wrestled as they sought the northern version of Asimple justice@ is both edifying and poignant. His accounts of the peregrinations of black nationalist and other radical initiatives are sure-footed, as are those of court cases and policy initiatives. It is a testament to Thomas Sugrue=s erudition and enterprise that SLL both raises new questions and provides scholars and other citizens with the means to address them.

Anthony S. Chen. The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941-1972 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009; paperback edition). xii + 395 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendices, index. Price not indicated.

Anthony S. Chen argues that federal executive and judicial authorities adopted affirmative action as a central means of addressing job discrimination largely because of the recurrent failure of Congress to create an authoritative administrative agency in which to lodge responsibility in this important matter. The opposition of Republicans and the energetic lobbying of organized business was primarily responsible for this failure. These same forces also insured that most of the anti-discrimination laws passed in northern states lacked robust enforcement provisions. When Congress finally adopted a national antidiscrimination measure, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the need to appease congressional Republicans, led by Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, established an enforcement agency, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), with only limited powers.

Presidents from Truman through Nixon, however, embraced the concept of equal employment opportunity. They established it as a principle in government employment and with respect to federal contractors in a series of overlapping Executive Orders. Creation of the EEOC in 1964-65 increased the resulting complexity and confusion. On the one hand, Congress had finally made employment discrimination illegal; but on the other hand, the EEOC had little power to implement its mandate. Because it had to rely on individual complaints and, ultimately, on Department of Justice litigation, “equal employment opportunity . . . policy came to consist of a Byzantine concatenation of statutory provisions, executive orders, and administrative rules and regulations–in addition to federal court decisions. . . ” (171).

It was out of this morass that “affirmative action” in its contested recent form came to characterize federal anti-discrimination efforts. This development was ironic because affirmative action involved extensive federal efforts in behalf of “racially attentive” public policies. Thus, antidiscrimination policy under Title VII employed more intrusive methods than would likely have been the case had Congress created a centralized administrative agency modeled after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The case that Chen builds for Republican and business responsibility for weakening anti-discrimination legislation is persuasive. Thirty-two pages of appendices, as well as copious end notes, reflecting Chen’s assiduous work with archival and public records, attest to his diligent research and to his methodological sophistication. Two sub-themes flow from his focus on GOP-business responsibility: the limited role that the absolutist opposition to any civil rights legislation on the part of southern states and congressional representatives played; and the tenacity of mainstream liberal and civil rights organizations. Chen does not let the South off the hook. He is fully aware of the role that southern committee chairmen and senatorial filbusterers played in thwarting civil rights legislation. But he demonstrates that the key votes in Congress and in the northern state houses came from Republicans who used legislative “pressure points” to scuttle or dilute robust reform. Similarly, he demonstrates the potency business opposition to regulation, as expressed both by peak associations such as the United States Chamber of Commerce and myriads of small businesses, in undermining federal and state legislation.

As to the role of liberals, Chen does not directly challenge the argument of Risa Lauren Goluboff (The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, 2007) that the NAACP backed off on economic discrimination in the postwar period. He does, however, credit mainstream liberal and civil rights organizations with making serious and resourceful efforts to gain passage of legislation that would have given the wartime FEPC permanent status and authoritative powers. And after their narrow defeat in the 81^st Congress, he shows, they doggedly pursued strong antidiscrimination legislation on the state level, albeit with limited success.

Chen is less clear in articulating his apparent belief that an NLRB-like anti-discrimination agency would have furthered the cause of employment opportunity more effectively than did the hybrid system that emerged. Here he relies largely on admittedly speculative alternative scenarios. (Pp. 228-29) In fact, it is not clear that Chen believes that a potent FEPC would have produced better results than the complaint-and-litigation process that eventually emerged. Since the book ends in 1972, Chen does not explore the whittling away of affirmative action since 1980. In effect, he suggests–although he does not directly argue–that even in the heyday of affirmative action, an NLRB-like federal agency would have produced more equitable results than those achieved under Title VII.

Chen does briefly nod to the important work of Timothy Minchin (Hiring the Black Worker, 1999; The Color of Work, 2001), Nancy MacLean (Freedom is Not Enough, 2006), and Paul Frymer (Black and Blue, 2008). These scholars demonstrate that a combination of grass-roots activism, imaginative private litigation, vigorous government lawyers, and sympathetic courts helped dramatically to expand employment opportunity for African Americans and for women in the decade and a half after Title VII became law. Chen puts forth the National Labor Relations Board, established by the Wagner Act in 1935, as a desirable model for combating employment discrimination. But even before passage of the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act in 1947, conservative forces had begun to erode the NLRB’s ability to promote collective bargaining. Since then, organized labor, the ostensible beneficiary of the Wagner Act, has grown increasingly critical of an NLRB that its spokespersons perceive as an impediment to democratic work place choice and to the promotion of collective bargaining. While an NLRB-like FEPC would probably have reduced the role of litigation and likely would have created a tidier administrative-legal framework, Chen would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that such an arrangement would have more fruitfully served the cause of expanding employment opportunities.

The Fifth Freedom is a thoughtful and challenging book. The chapters on state antidiscrimination measures provide an illuminating account of grass roots debates over the public policy of race in the North during the heyday of civil rights activism in the South. Indeed, Chen makes a compelling case that the classic narrative of the post-war struggle for racial justice in the South has obscured the equally fierce, if not so lethal, battle for employment rights that raged throughout the northern states. While his case for an NLRB-like FEPC remains questionable, his detailed accounts of congressional hearings and debates, along with his analysis of the opposition of business, large and small, to enforceable antidiscrimination measures make The Fifth Freedom a valuable addition to the literature on the civil rights era.

For Reviews in American History. Written c. mid-2009.
Julie Greene. The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009. 475 pp. Illustrations, notes and index. $40.00

Julie Greene’s excellent book The Canal Builders addresses several significant themes. They are: the role of working people the building of the Panama Canal and the efforts of canal officials to manage a diverse labor force; the relationship between domestic progressivism and twentieth-century US imperialism; and the ways in which Americans have understood the acquisition of the Canal Zone and the building of the canal, both contemporarily and subsequently. With respect to labor, Greene stresses the theme of workers’ agency. When considering the canal project’s broader impact and meaning, The Canal Builders relies largely on traditional historical narrative in conveying her analysis of the statements and actions of US policymakers and canal authorities, although in her introduction Greene invokes recent post-colonial scholarship. She is little concerned with the diplomatic and financial machinations with which Americans supplanted the French and acquired the Canal Zone and leaves most of the geological and engineering details to David McCullough.[1]

The canal project was an enormous undertaking. The seaway took over ten years to build and during peak operations around 1910 employed almost 60,000 people. At most, only about ten percent of these workers were American citizens, most of them white men. Americans filled skilled positions on the rail lines that fed the Zone and nearby Panamanian port cities and served as skilled construction workers. The most visible Americans were the operators of the massive steam shovels, specially designed and built for the project, that became the visual emblem of the enterprise. Americans also performed much of the clerical work and provided most of the medical personnel, who included about a hundred female nurses.

From whence would the vast majority of the men needed to perform the heavy lifting in this stupendous undertaking be recruited? The Chinese option was quickly ruled out, despite the critical role Chinese laborers had played in the building of the transcontinental railroads. Labor agents in Europe recruited Spanish, Italian, and Greek workers, all of whom maintained a small, but distinct, presence in the Zone. But project directors soon turned to blacks from the British and French West Indies, who constituted the only viable long-term source of labor.

Canal officials were initially reluctant to rely on these men. The doomed French construction effort had employed thousands of West Indians, who had been labeled as lazy and feckless. But under chief engineers John Stevens (1904-07) and, especially, George Goethals (1907-14), authorities came to perceive the employment of West Indians in a more positive light. It turned out that many of them were relatively skilled and could be used to supplant white workers at lower wages. European workers, especially the Spaniards, brought troubling traditions of militant radicalism with them. Moreover, they resented the role assigned to them in the Zone’s complex and ever-shifting scheme of job-site and social racial segregation. Thus, in the end, with European workers proving obstreperous and American citizen workers proving replaceable, it was left to West Indians to supply the bulk of the heavy labor and, eventually, to man an increasing proportion of skilled construction positions.

In managing this diverse and at times disputatious labor force, Goethals and other canal officials devised a system of labor control that mixed segregation, inequality, harsh discipline, and paternalism. At its heart was the Gold and Silver scheme of payment. Employees were classified according to the partially overlapping categories of “race” and job assignment. “Gold” status, which carried with it wage rates about thirty percent higher than in the US, relatively good housing, and generous home leave provisions, was reserved for American citizens. “Silver” status was conferred on all others, including, eventually, the relatively few (200 or so) African American citizens who found their way to the Zone.

The officials who designed and implemented this system regarded it as an ingenious and progressive method of classifying and compensating a heterogeneous labor force. In fact, the Gold-Silver system proved awkward, inconsistent, and conflict-ridden. It was based on Progressive Era America’s mixture of putatively “scientific” human taxonomy, divide-and-rule labor policies, and plain old Jim Crow. West Indian workers who replaced skilled white Americans could never attain “Gold” status, thus turning the system into an elaborate method of wage chiseling. Project officials were never quite sure as to where to place swarthy southern Europeans, eventually and uneasily awarding them, as well as African American citizens, a kind of “super Silver” status.

In dealing with all manual workers, Goethals combined harsh discipline and paternalistic indulgence. Project police had virtually unchallenged power to arrest and imprison those designated as recalcitrant or idle; gangs of prisoners performed heavy labor in the swamps and other work sites. This use of convict labor helped to boost productivity, by both exploiting unpaid labor and demonstrating the consequences of idleness and disputatiousness. Determined to discourage collective action, Goethals insisted on addressing workers’ grievances and complaints in weekly Sunday sessions at his home, where workers were permitted to present their problems individually to him in person. In later years, Goethals declared that it was this system of labor management, with its combination of stern discipline and personal attention to grievances, that was his proudest achievement as project director.

The Canal Zone attracted dozens of journalists, social commentators, and reformers. A few, notably writer Poultney Bigelow, who toured the site briefly in 1905, saw in the management of the project a continuation of the pathologies associated with US acquisition of the Philippines. Efforts to govern primitive people in the exotic tropics, Bigelow charged, inevitably forced Americans to resort to the very savagery and despotism that characterized these benighted peoples. In support of his criticisms, Bigelow cited the officially sponsored importation of hundreds of West Indian women into the Zone, clear evidence, he believed, that the United States was promoting prostitution.

Canal officials struck back, defending the bringing in of black women to Panama. This action, they insisted, had nothing to do with prostitution but rather constituted a humane effort to ameliorate the living conditions of hard-working canal builders. Indeed, Bigelow soon found himself facing the wrath of Theodore Roosevelt, who launched a successful campaign to counteract the criticisms of the emerging American empire that Bigelow and others leveled. Indeed, it was in implicit response to such negative publicity that TR undertook the first ever presidential trip outside the continental United States, touring the Zone in 1906 and celebrating the civilizing process that he saw as central to the emerging American imperial mission.

For the most part, however, visiting reformers and journalists approved of the American undertaking. Some, notably National Civic Federation representative Gertrude Beeks, while endorsing the project, urged improvements in living conditions, recreational facilities, and personnel policies, at least for white workers. Others saw the project as offering answers to America’s domestic social conflicts. Thus, in a book published in 1911, socialist Arthur Bullard hailed the building of the canal as illustrating how labor-management relations in the US itself might be transformed. To Bullard, this massive enterprise showed what an enlightened and purposive government could accomplish, with respect both to technological and engineering advances and improvements in human relations. Unencumbered by the profit motive, government could plan and execute a vast construction project while providing high-quality living arrangements, medical care, and recreational facilities for well-paid employees. To be sure, he acknowledged, constitutional guarantees and democratic processes were absent in the Zone, but taken in all, canal building combined efficiency, progress, and social betterment through the agency of a wise and enlightened government. Indeed, some approving observers saw in the canal’s labor system shades of the industrial armies that Edward Bellamy had envisaged in his socialist novel Looking Backward (1890).

The Canal Builders contains vivid descriptions, many based on interview material collected over the years by other scholars, of working and living conditions, which differed sharply according to workers’ “Gold” or “Silver” status. She records the improvement in health and sanitary conditions under the direction of chief medical officer William Gorgas while pointing out that at times the American medical staff viewed West Indian workers as a sort of control group. American doctors observed the ravages of disease among colored workers without providing treatment, their primary goal being always “to analyze and tame the tropics in order to make them safe and comfortable–for whites.” (136)

While carefully outlining the views and policies of project managers and journalistic observes, Greene is primarily interested in the experiences of the workers themselves. Workers did seek to defend themselves from the authorities’ relentless quest for greater productivity and effort. White men had the support of their US-based labor unions, which, although in effect barred from participating in collective bargaining, lobbied Congress in behalf of their members. As British subjects, West Indians could appeal to British consular officials, although these diplomats showed more understanding of the problems their white American cousins faced in coping with exotic people of color than they did of their own subjects’ concerns. White workers who were not members of stateside unions made sporadic efforts to organize, but Goethals and his aides quickly squelched them, primarily through summary deportation. In their enclaves, Spanish and Catalan workers created a lively anarchist subculture, replete with mass meetings and worker-produced newspapers. But their protests were directed as much against black workers as against canal officials, who in any event regarded such radical activism as harmless exuberance.

Thus, with only limited options, workers resorted to “weapons of the weak”[2] for self defense. West Indian workers could “vote with their feet,” either returning to the islands or attempting to change jobs in the Zone or in Panama proper. Moreover, canal workers successfully resisted officials’ efforts to extend workplace discipline to their off-site lives. Most West Indian workers, for example, shunned project-provided housing and avoided the second-rate shops and cafeterias and the limited social and recreational facilities made available to them in favor of autonomous life in their own informal communities, which were often located outside the Zone. Rather than eat the unfamiliar food available in project shops and mess halls, workers grew their own fruits and vegetables and raised, slaughtered, and cooked their own domestic animals. It was the insistence of West Indian workers on living within a familiar family environment that virtually compelled canal officials to permit wives, mothers, and sweethearts to come to live in the Zone.

White American workers also found ways to shape their working and living environment, despite the authorities’ desire to match workplace discipline with off-hours social control. At the insistence of Beeks and other visiting reformers, authorities did eventually sponsor the erection of churches and YMCA facilities. And American workers did engage in a wide variety of sports and hobby activities. Even so, they had their own notion of how to conduct America’s “civilizing mission.” Thus, among the most popular recreational activities was going into Panama City’s entertainment district and raising all sorts of (sometimes literally) red-blooded Yankee hell. American workers, along with troops serving in the Zone, had their own version of the white man’s burden, one that featured white supremacy, strident patriotism, and belligerent treatment of native Panamanians and other people of color. Periodic outbursts of violence usually accompanied their forays into Panama City in quest of drink, sex, and, often, opportunities for brawling. The bloody Cocoa Grove Riot in Panama City’s red-light district in 1912 was but the most spectacular of these affrays.

The theme of workers’ agency, which Greene employs in her treatment of the project’s employees and their families, works well enough. She uses oral histories, court records, and smatterings of diary entries and correspondence to demonstrate that these men and women were conscious historical actors, not mere factors of production and of social reproduction. Neither Catalans, West Indians, nor white American nurses or steam shovel operators passively accepted the role assigned to them by the project’s human engineers. In a chapter titled “The Women’s Empire,” Greene examines the experiences of workers’ wives and companions, white and black, regarded by officials as essential elements in conducting the project’s “civilizing mission.” White nurses and housewives struggled to cope with both an alien environment and the unrealistic expectations of husbands, fathers, and canal officials as to women’s proper role. Meanwhile, white women were themselves, as employers of black servants, reinforced discriminatory gender and racial patterns. For their part, women of color struggled to create familiar forms of family life while resisting the subordination that life in the Zone entailed. For both men and women, political protest and collective labor action were all but impossible, but each ethnic group, in its own idiom, found ways to assert its agency.

Whether workers’ agency in this context was particularly edifying is another question. After all, in the Zone, the Spaniards’ and Italians’ traditions of heady anarchism, presumably a liberating phenomenon, were used primarily to mobilize against those deemed racially inferior. On the one hand, the historian may celebrate the lusty refusal of white workers, soldiers, and Marines to act like Boy Scouts; on the other hand, of course, violence, racism, and cultural arrogance characterized their dealings with Panamanians and other people of color. Greene’s refusal to depict the West Indians as mere victims is salutary, though they were indeed victims of oppressive working conditions, a lethal disease environment, and arbitrary infliction of the colonial power’s system of justice. But while documenting their resistance, she also finds that for some West Indian men at least, the system, after a fashion, worked. Life sagas of project veterans, told in later years to anthropologists and other inquirers, celebrate the canal-building experience. Workers expressed pride in being part of the monumental undertaking; not a few were able to save enough money from their relatively high Zone wages to buy land, educate children, or establish a small business back on the island. “For many,” Greene concludes, “canal work brought an important measure of economic success and independence. . . .many viewed life on the isthmus as a great adventure.” (154, 156) Thus, it would appear, harsh working conditions and lethal disease environment notwithstanding, something like a free labor ideology was at work for many West Indians.

Her final chapter features the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, held in San Francisco in 1915 to celebrate the completion of the great project. The Exposition spectacularly showcased the achievement of the United States, “a young nation made into a world power by technology, science, and individuals of genius.” (335) The isthmian waterway was truly “

America

’s Gift to the World,” according to its celebrants. Curiously, however, despite Goethals’ pride in the project’s management of its labor force, the massive exhibit, which featured endless displays of geological phenomena, medical advance, technological innovation, and engineering wizardry, had no place for “the workingmen and workingwomen who actually built the canal.” (363)

The Canal Builders examines a wide variety of issues in the history of US colonialism. Greene chronicles the chronic intervention of US officials in the internal politics of the new Republic of Panama and the poisonous legacy of resentment that it bred. In a poignant Epilogue, she recounts her stint as a lecturer on a cruise ship taking tourists through the canal early in this century. Well-to-do white people enjoyed elaborate meals and entertainments as people of color sailed the ship, served the food, and made up the beds. She did find her listeners receptive to her efforts to bring the “workingmen and workingwomen who actually built the canal” into a story otherwise dominated by accounts of swashbuckling diplomacy, technological know-how, and pride in national accomplishment. On the other hand, a quarter century after the ratification of the treaty to restore Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal Zone, tour members continued to regard the canal was an emblem of American achievement and the 1978 treaty as a betrayal. After one lecture, Greene introduced her mother, Helen Greene, who a quarter century before had been recruited as a local Democratic party activist to visit to the White House as President Jimmy Carter sought to rally grass roots support for the treaty. Asked if she had in fact favored the canal treaty, elderly Helen Greene replied “No, I didn’t approve. I didn’t think it was right back then, and I still don’t now. It was our canal and we should have kept it.” The audience erupted into applause–but Julie green felt that “I was an alien in someone else’s conversation.” (384)

1. David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (1977)

2. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (1985)

Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009); James J. Lorence, The Unemployed People’s Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929-1941 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009)

Interest in radical activism in the depression-era South shows no signs of abating. In particular, the role of the Pro-Soviet Left (PSL) in the region’s political, economic, and racial affairs continues to engage scholars.[i] Thus, the Communist Party and its various auxiliary and front organizations are at the center of Gregory S. Taylor’s narrative. James J. Lorence too, while discussing the efforts of other radicals and liberals in efforts to mobilize the unemployed in Georgia, finds that “by far the most aggressive organization in meeting the needs of the underclass was the small but militant Communist Party. . . .” (5) Lorence hopes also to document the efforts of the unemployed themselves to call attention to their plight and to wring concessions from public authorities but in neither book do the voices of ordinary people predominate. Both books stress the positive role of the PSL in promoting progressive change during the depression era but neither author addresses the difficulties that attended Communist participation in left-liberal movements.

The History of the North Carolina Communist Party is a blow-by-blow, year-by-year account of the activities of Communists in North Carolina from the Gastonia textile strike of 1929 to the demise of the party in the state, around 1960. Each chapter chronicles a year or a short span of years in narrating Communist plans and activities. The overall impression is one of abortive, overlapping initiatives, coupled with internecine conflicts over strategy and personalities. There are many accounts of rallies and meetings that attracted impressive numbers of participants. Some of these gatherings, even in the 1920s and 1930s, were bi-racial but Taylor doesn’t tell us much about their actual social composition, political orientation, and group dynamics.

Party leaders in New York and representatives on the ground in North Carolina quarreled incessantly. Organizers and functionaries in the state, including those dispatched from New York, constantly called for more funds, more organizers, more attention. National party officials for their part routinely criticized their in-state agents for lethargy, failure to implement party directives, and lack of progress. For the most part, the book is a litany of minor successes (a wage cut restored here, a potential lynch victim rescued there) amid chronic defeat and disappointment. Repression, at the hands of employers, state and local authorities, and vigilante mobs–three overlapping categories–was omnipresent and often brutal.

Race figures importantly in the book, as it posed both opportunities and problems for Communists. On the one hand, Party leaders believed that as the most victimized citizens of North Carolina, African Americans might provide the basis on which to build the Party in the South. On the other hand, close identification with African Americans often antagonized white workers. This dilemma was particularly evident as Party functionaries sought to exploit the militancy that exploded among textile workers in the southern Piedmont from the late 1920s through the 1930s. Since the great majority of textile workers were whites, who typically evinced little concern about the concerns of African Americans, using workers’ grievances as a basis for building a bi-racial presence along class lines was a non-starter. Moreover, North Carolina activists were saddled with the Communist International’s official position on the Negro question, adopted in 1928, that characterized African Americans as a subject colonial people and called for the creation of an autonomous black region in the South. Well aware that such an agenda was as unpopular among African Americans as it was impossible of achievement, organizers and activists on the ground soft-pedaled this embarrassing position, focusing instead on exposure of the injustices of the southern racial order.

At times a wearying chronicle of meetings, intra-Party debate, legal proceedings, and hopeless political campaigns, the book picks up verve during the World War II-postwar era. Central to the Party’s work in this period was Junius Scales, an idealistic young scion of a prominent North Carolina family. Scales joined the Party in the late 1930s while a student at the University of North Carolina, which was already a nodal point of CP influence dating back to the 1920s. Scales committed himself to Party work among African Americans, blue collar workers, and the rural poor. After World War II especially, he gave the Party in North Carolina an articulate voice in its opposition to Jim Crow, its criticism of U.S. foreign policy, and its defense of civil liberties in the McCarthy era. Indeed, in North Carolina, Taylor shows, it was the immediate postwar period and not the turbulent Thirties or the Popular Front-World War II years that constituted the “heyday”[ii] of Communism. His account of the prosecution–and persecution–of Scales in the 1950s is a chilling reminder of the witch-hunting era. Scales was convicted of violating a provision of the 1940 Smith Act that criminalized mere membership in a group deemed to be disloyal, a sort of political profiling that has reappeared with the USA Patriot Act. After appeals were exhausted, he was sentenced to a term of six years, though President Kennedy pardoned him after he had served 18 months.

Throughout the book, Taylor displays little interest in the linkage between North Carolina’s Communists and the international movement of which they were proud to be a part. To be sure, he is far from uncritical of Party operatives, charting as he does the internal squabbles, the fecklessness of some activists, and the misbegotten futility of many Communist-promoted initiatives. Overall, however, the reader looks in vain for commentary on North Carolina’s Communists’ connections to the broader world of international Communism. The index lists only three references to “Stalin, Joseph,” all of them casual. Even U.S. Party General Secretary Earl Browder makes only brief appearances. There is no mention of the purge trials in the Soviet Union, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the Duclos Letter. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes receives one passing mention. This seeming lack of curiosity about the placement of the Party’s North Carolina activities in the context of the international Communist movement is particularly noteworthy in view of Taylor’s extensive treatment of–and admiration for–Scales. As Taylor briefly notes, Scales left the Party after the Khrushchev revelations. In his autobiography, Scales refused to apologize for membership in an organization that so forthrightly championed the cause of racial justice. At the same time, however, he revealed the doubts and misgivings he had felt during his years in the Party about the Soviet Union and the CP’s authoritarian culture, even as he loyally implemented its dubious directives.[iii] Vivid in his account of Scales’ victimization at the hands of American functionaries, Taylor is silent about Scales’ doubts and what they reveal about the Party’s character and behavior.

In The Unemployed People’s Movement, James Lorence likewise is little concerned with the problematics of depression-era American Communism. He stresses the leadership of Communists in promoting activism among Georgia’s unemployed, the importance of New Deal social welfare programs in reorienting the locus of governmental social provision from the state and local to the federal level, and the agency of the unemployed. He is persuasive in demonstrating the first two of these themes but provides insufficient evidence to permit complete acceptance of the third.

Clearly, it was the Communist Party, often working through front groups and at times in coalition with laborites and liberals, that evinced the most consistent and tenacious concern for the state’s unemployed citizens. Georgia’s Communists were particularly responsive to the plight of African Americans, who were disproportionately victimized by the economic crisis of the 1930s. Natural conditions, economic and technological change, and New Deal agricultural policies combined to drive sharecroppers and tenant farmers off the land and into Atlanta and other cities. Inadequate and discriminatory state and local relief programs were implemented by and for the benefit of whites. Inevitably, Party-led rallies and protests aimed at improving benefits, resisting cuts in relief funding, and equalizing distribution appealed most dramatically to the black underclass even as CP functionaries struggled to sustain a bi-racial presence.

Communists did attempt at times to build coalitions that included liberals, socialists, race improvement organizations, and trade unionists. Even before the party’s international line shifted in 1934-35 to promotion of collaboration with these elements, Georgia’s Communists forged temporary ties with other radicals and with liberals in protests against police repression and in defense of the CP’s star organizer in Georgia, Angelo Herndon, indicted in 1933 for putative violations of the state’s archaic anti-insurrection act. These alliances, however, were episodic. During the Party’s “Third Period” (1928-1934), Communists denounced liberals, social democrats, and mainstream trade unionists as at best impediments to the forward movement of the class struggle; indeed, they were routinely depicted as accomplices in fascist ascendancy. Thus, non-Communists remained justifiably suspicious of the motives and tactics of pro-Soviet elements, even after Communists reached out to them in more systematic fashion in the later 1930s.

After 1935 Party activists in

Georgia

, as elsewhere, channeled their main work in behalf of the unemployed through the Workers Alliance (WA). Initially, they shared leadership with Socialists and liberals as part of the broader effort to build organic unity on the left in the face of the rising fascist international threat. Lorence laments the ultimate failure of this Popular Front strategy. Non-Communist progressives, he suggests, were primarily responsible for undermining a unity movement that might have provided the basis for long-range radical-liberal collaboration with the potential to challenge Georgia’s powerful, racially retrograde Democratic Party.

In chronicling activism among and in behalf of the unemployed, Lorence does consider the role played by non-Communist elements. Neither the labor movement, the mainstream civil rights organizations, nor the state’s anemic Socialist Party, however, earns high marks. The Georgia Federation of Labor was far more concerned with protecting union wage scales than with solidarity with the unemployed. NAACP leaders, while earnest in their efforts to expose discrimination and improve benefit levels for the unemployed, feared that red-led mass mobilization of the urban black underclass would challenge its race leadership in the state. As employment picked up in the late 1930s and during the early stages of World War II, only the WA, which was increasingly controlled by Communists, continued to focus on the plight of the hard-core unemployed. Thus, whether in the dark early days of the Great Depression or during the brightening prospects of the World War II build-up, it was the CP whose program “enabled its leaders to work directly . . . to advance a progressive agenda. . . . Communists became well known as the activists who were most willing to advance the interests of the needy. . . .” (8-9)

Lorence is also persuasive in emphasizing the importance of New Deal relief programs. The Unemployed People’s Movement carefully chronicles the impact of the various federal initiatives, most notably the Works Progress Administration (WPA), in Georgia. With state, local, and private resources overwhelmed by the economic catastrophe, it was only Washington that could provide the wherewithal to address the needs of the unemployed. Lorence details the struggles over the administration and allocation of this federal largess. Traditionalist southern white politicians and economic elites sought with considerable success to use federal relief funds to regulate the rural labor supply. Trade unionists fought to keep relief project wages up so as not to jeopardize union rates while at the same time favoring expansion of federal programs so as to reduce the state’s labor supply. The NAACP, sometimes in tandem with the increasingly CP-oriented Workers Alliance, protested racially inflected wage scales and discriminatory allocation of work relief projects. Thus, to a degree unimaginable before the Great Depression, discourse about the state’s political economy increasingly came to focus on developments emanating from Washington, especially with the infusion of massive defense spending just before and during World War II.

Lorence’s research base is impressive. He has examined dozens of archival collections and scores of oral history interviews, many of which he has conducted. It is thus no criticism of him that in The Unemployed People’s Movement the voices of the unemployed themselves are difficult to detect. His general point, namely that many among the unemployed in Georgia during the 1930s were receptive to activist appeals, even those emanating from such “subversive” sources as the CP, is persuasive. But the actual voices of the unemployed are largely, and quite understandably, filtered through the reports of Party functionaries and the recollections of such activists as the redoubtable Hosea Hudson. It is unclear, however, from Lorence’s treatment just where on the self-blame-to-militancy spectrum the characteristic response of Georgia’s unemployed citizens to their plight might lie.

What were the long-range results of New Deal-era Communist activity in southern states? Both authors provide brief and rather formulaic hints. Both credit the CP and the PSL with helping to set the post-World War II civil rights agenda by focusing attention on racial injustice. Both suggest that despite their eventual marginalization, Communists and their allies laid the groundwork for subsequent civil rights advance. Indeed, Lorence goes further than Taylor, asserting that “The Popular Front struggle. . . advanced a model of organizational pressure that before long was to bear fruit in the battle for civil rights. . . .” (230) Yet Lorence also seems to agree with Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, who addressed this issue in a widely cited journal article twenty years ago.[iv] They argued that the harsh repression of the pro-Soviet Left after World War II severed the labor upheaval of the 1930s and 1940s from the emerging civil rights movement, which avoided political radicalism and had only the most formalistic connection to the labor movement. Thus, on the one hand Lorence argues that “African Americans trained in the school of organizational activism [promoted in the 1930s by the CP] maintained the pressure that eventually led to the revolution of the 1960s.” (231) At the same time, however, he declares that “the uneasy cross-racial coalition building of the 1930s slipped into memory. . . .” (231)

Gregory Taylor’s treatment of this theme is even more schematic and anodyne. Citing the passage of civil rights and social welfare legislation in the 1960s, he finds that “much of the Communist agenda has seeped into the mainstream of American life” (214) but goes on to emphasize that “the Communists were not alone in their struggle.” Evading the problematics of liberal and laborite relationships with the Popular Front, he employs an ambiguous verb in observing that “Countless civil-rights organizations, liberal groups, judicial activists, and peace advocates joined the Communists to push the nation forward. . . .” (215)

Recently, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Glenda Gilmore, and others have stressed the enduring continuity between champions of racial justice located in the pro-Soviet left of the 1920s and 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It would seem that both Taylor and Lorence would find this view congenial, although neither addresses the New Deal-era problematics of liberal-Communist collaboration or specifies the institutional or organizational vehicles that in the 1960s carried forth the Communist legacy. Both books capably document the existence and activities of the PSL in the depression-era South and stress its positive role. But in avoiding hard questions about the character of the CP and its relationships with non-Communist liberal and labor groups during this period of intense ideological politics, Taylor and Lorence miss an opportunity to contribute to our understanding of the relationship of the PSL to this “Long Civil Rights Movement.”[v]

David Witwer, Shadow of the Racketeer, review, August, 2009. For Labor History symposium.

Economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway have crunched the numbers and conclude that over the past century “labor unions have reduced

U.S.

output by. . . trillions of dollars.” Indeed, according to legal scholar Paul Moreno, “Everyone. . . suffers from labor unionization.”[i] Such judgments would seem to diminish the importance of David Witwer’s thoughtful book Shadow of the Racketeer. To be sure, Witwer ably documents columnist Westbrook Pegler’s expose of the crimes of union officials William Bioff, George Browne, George Scalese, and others in the World War II-era labor movement. But if by its very nature unionism is illegitimate–if its activities impose an unfair tax on the consuming public and a barrier to those seeking honest employment–crimes such as extortion, personal violence, and collusive bargaining are just a subcase of the everyday pathologies inherent in the very nature of labor unionism.

And indeed, in Witwer’s telling, the view that a strong labor movement is in itself illegitimate was at the heart of Pegler’s high-impact crusade. Yes, the pugnacious columnist played a key role in bringing down the mob-tainted hoodlums who led International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and Building Service International Union (BSIU) locals. BSIU official Scalese was certainly right when he cried out on learning of his indictment for extortion and racketeering “I’ve been Peglerized.” And, yes, Witwer shares Pegler’s jaundiced view of William Green and other AFL leaders who ignored, excused, and/or justified actions by these men that bilked thousands of union members. AFL leaders thus made a mockery of democratic principles of union governance and betrayed the high ideals that they were so quick to invoke and so reluctant to apply. But he also believes that Pegler and his increasingly vocal supporters among business elites and in Congress were after bigger game than a handful of mobsters. Their real target was union power per se.

Pegler and his allies sought to cripple a labor movement that had prospered during the New Deal and by so doing to undermine the New Deal itself. By relabeling activities such as dues collection, union shop contracts, and secondary boycotts forms of racketeering, they blurred the line between legitimate and criminal practice. Thus, they used “the shadow of the racketeer” to achieve labor law “reform,”as enacted in the Smith-Connally Act of 1943 and, especially, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.

Witwer shows that these “reforms” did little to benefit the men and women who were ostensibly the objects of Pegler’s concern, the rank-and-file victims of abusive practices.. These measures, along with dozens of other legislative proposals that circulated throughout the 1940s and beyond, were premised on the belief that by their very nature, labor leaders were power-hungry cynics who did not represent the views of their members. As it turned out, the Taft-Hartley Act provided a mechanism by which to test that premise: the law required that the National Labor Relations Board hold referenda in plants covered by union shop contracts and, under certain circumstances, conduct a vote on an employer’s “last offer” in contract disputes. During the first three years after passage of Taft-Hartley, the NLRB dutifully staged dozens of such elections, the results of which showed overwhelming rank-and-file support for the union and, implicitly, for the leadership. Meanwhile, Taft-Hartley provided no meaningful protection for rank-and-file members who might seek to expose malfeasance or exercise democratic rights. In effect, the Bioff-Browne-Scalise exposes and the legislation they helped to generate “protected” workers against a non-existent danger and left them powerless when faced with tangible problems of misgovernment, corruption, and intimidation.

Pegler himself at times expressed dismay at this turn of events. In private correspondence and occasionally in his columns he lamented the failure of Congress and federal authorities to bolster individual workers’ ability to exercise democratic rights. But he never used his crusading zeal to further the real empowerment of rank-and-file workers. True, throughout the 1950s, congressional committees exposed corruption, intimidation, and extortion in the East Coast Longshoremen’s union, the Teamsters, and other labor organizations. But the legislative results of even these probes, the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act, offered little help to unions’ internal critics and dissident activists.

In part, the disconnect between verbal sympathy for John Q. Worker, on the one hand, and an absence of support for trade union mavericks on the other was rooted in Pegler’s original investigations of Bioff, Browne, and company. Dogged in his attacks on these union officials, the angry columnist ignored the efforts of internal critics who, long before Pegler arrived on the scene, had bravely confronted the criminals who had gained control of their unions. Left wingers and other union activists dug up some of the most incriminating evidence that Pegler eventually used to publicize union corruption and eventually to impel federal prosecution. Yet nowhere did the columnist credit their work. Tenacious in his attacks on complacent and complicit AFL officials, Pegler had no time for the brave mavericks who sought to reform their own unions and to resist the criminal interlopers. The reason, Witwer believes, was that Pegler and the conservative publishers and politicians who reveled in his exposes believed that unions per se were illegitimate. The last thing these critics wanted was to encourage democratic and effective union activism.

A closely related lacuna in Pegler’s brief against corrupt union officials was his depiction of studio executives, theater owners, and building service entrepreneurs as helpless victims of union malfeasance. In reality, as Witwer shows, it took close cooperation between gangsters and employers to make the corrupt system work. Bioff, Browne, Scalese, and other abusers of workers’ interests easily recruited studio heads and other employers in their schemes. By delivering labor “peace” and negotiating substandard contracts, corrupt officials assured employers of a quiescent and intimidated labor force, no small thing during a period of widespread labor militancy. Although Pegler had at his disposal much evidence of employer collusion and even collaboration with corrupt officials, however, his columns regularly portrayed studio heads as passive victims of union arrogance and corruption.

Such omissions did not signal reportorial negligence. Rather they were part of a successful campaign to reframe the public narrative of labor-management relations. The La Follette Committee, the National Labor Relations Board, and the CIO told a story of hard-pressed workers fighting corporate thugs and hard-hearted captains of industry. In contrast, Pegler’s narrative–soon taken up by the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and conservative politicians–insisted that the real story was one of helpless workers and victimized employers struggling to escape the clutches of greedy and power-hungry “laborteers.”

Shadow of the Racketeer joins Witwer’s earlier Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union (2003) in establishing the connection between salutary exposure of union malfeasance on the one hand and root-and-branch opposition to the exercise of union power on the other. Although Witwer is restrained in his assessment of “the shadow of the racketeer” on the long-range health and effectiveness of the labor movement, he is very clear that for the most part, political and journalistic exposers of union malfeasance were more concerned with curbing union power than with empowering aggrieved workers. In the end, it was the labor movement itself, and not merely criminal entrepreneurs such as George Scalise, that was “Peglerized.”

The Way We Are: Wal-Mart and “Consumer Capitalism”

Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)

Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2009)

Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)

Everybody shops in supermarkets. Most of us rely on big box stores for the necessities and amenities of daily life. Many of us, and many of our children, have worked as clerks, checkers, sales people, or back room employees at these stores. Without being fully aware of it, we are the foot soldiers, both as customers and workers, of what Lichtenstein calls “the retail revolution.”

Wal-Mart, of course, is the largest and most visible manifestation of this revolution. Employing over 1,200,000 workers in its domestic operations, the ubiquitous chain has pioneered in the logistics, labor policies, and public relations of modern retailing. This dynamo of innovation and cultural transformation has its origins in, and derived its distinctive identity from, one of the country’s less prosperous, more traditionalist enclaves, Northwestern Arkansas. Until very recently, the Ozark region was a marginal area, characterized by subsistence farming, sparse population, ethnic homogeneity, and rural poverty. But what Detroit was to automobiles, what Pittsburgh was to steel, what Wall Street is to finance, Bentonville is to “consumer capitalism.”

A hundred years ago, the area was a hotbed of Populism, an impulse that in a lower-case idiom has not entirely disappeared. Bethany Moreton points to the resentment and hostility toward the mores and values associated with East Coast finance capitalism, and with the secular and avant garde values attached to it. The genius of Sam Walton and his cohorts in the 1960s and 1970s was to link Ozarkian otherness to the establishment and expansion of a new kind of capitalism–not industrial capitalism, not finance capitalism, but rather “consumer capitalism.” (Moreton, 89) Early on, Wal-Mart crafted “a populist corporate image from Ozarks culture. . .,” associated with “the rise of the Sun Belt, a blended South and West fundamentally reshaped by government subsidy.” (37) The Wal-Mart phenomenon was thus both a reflection of and catalyst for the “southernization” of U.S. culture and politics.

Each of the three books under review contributes significantly to a broad range of issues relating to political economy, cultural patterns, and technological and managerial practice. Thus, Trucking Country is particularly good in tracing the connections between the daily transactions that constitute the stuff of everyday life and the broader political economy. Moreton’s analysis of the role Wal-Mart plays in Latin America and of its multi-faceted involvement with evangelical Protestantism, both domestically and internationally, illuminates key aspects of contemporary culture, religious and secular. Lichtenstein highlights Wal-Mart’s international operations, offering especially keen insights into the company’s involvement in China, both with respect to the labor practices it not-so-implicitly encourages and its growing, but somewhat troubled, retail operations there.

Both Hamilton and Moreton highlight the federal role in the emergence of the consumer-centered economic transformation of the post-war period. Hamilton details the ways in which federal initiatives have shaped the way we live. Congressional legislation, notably the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 and the deregulation of the trucking industry as evidenced in the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, created the conditions that have impelled our relatively cheap producer-to-retail outlet system. Meanwhile, rulings by the Interstate Commerce Commission and the U.S. Department of Agriculture expanded the definition of goods eligible for the “agricultural exemption,” as specified in the 1935 legislation, from ICC purview. The original agricultural exemption, as subsequently expanded, underwrote a flourishing non-union trucking sector, which generated pressure for industry-wide deregulation. Meanwhile, in the 1950s and 1960s, a new breed of meatpackers used the agricultural exemption to launch innovations in livestock transport, feeding, and slaughtering, as decentralized feedlots replaced central stockyards.

Moreton charts the inflow of federal dollars into the Southwest. She points to the role of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under the directorship of Houston banker Jesse Jones during the New Deal years in channeling government money into the Southwest, including the Ozark region. Expansion of the Port of Houston, Corps of Engineers construction, and, eventually, the building of interstate highways pulled the region into the national economy. Along with Wal-Mart, such modern day corporate giants as Tyson Foods and J. B. Hunt Trucking exploited this infrastructural development as the basis for regional-cum-national (and international) expansion and, indirectly, for the building of a robust post-New Deal of low wages, weak regulation, and non-union employment. Meanwhile, COE-created lakes turned the backwater Ozarks into a tourist and retirement destination, whose epicenter is the counter-counter cultural mecca of Branson, Missouri, a sanitized safe haven for the God-fearing folks whose labor and whose consumption patterns make the system work.

At the heart of all three books is an analysis of the post-New Deal workplace and labor relations regime. Hamilton concentrates on the critical role of truck drivers in underwriting the consumer economy’s low-wage, low-price character. Indeed, the Motor Carrier Act’s “agricultural exemption,” intended by New Dealers such as Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace as a means of freeing farmers from ICC-protected quasi-monopolistic carriers and wholesalers, provided a way to resolve policymakers’ dilemma of achieving both agricultural prosperity and low prices for consumers. As it evolved through the 1940s and 1950s, the system relied on “‘Independent’ nonunionized truck drivers, operating outside the regulatory umbrella of the Interstate Commerce Commission. . . .” (92). Thus, it was these militantly non-union truck drivers, along with Department of Agriculture officials and, eventually, “congressional deregulators, [who] paved the way for the low-wage, low-price capitalism that would define the final decades of the twentieth-century U.S. political economy.” (231)

Many drivers who conveyed agricultural products were farmers or farmers’ sons. These men found in cattle- and produce-hauling a means of supplementing farm income and sustaining their valued rural and agricultural identities. Even as the family farm gave way to the agricultural conglomerate, cattle hauling and produce trucking offered opportunities for individual initiative and putative economic autonomy and thus the ability to avoid the inner cities and assembly lines.

Truckers also carried a lot of cultural baggage. Combining a fierce sense of independence, hostility toward both the government and the Teamsters union, and resentment of mounting economic pressures, these “knights of the road” were simultaneously proud kingpins in the emerging transport-retail nexus and vulnerable entrepreneurs in a ruthlessly competitive system. As early as 1940, they entered into popular culture as admirable figures. Films such as They Drive by Night (1940), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), and Convoy (1978), along with the latter’s television spin-off, The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-85), celebrated the aspirations of the driver-owner for financial independence and the adventures and autonomy of life on the open road. The same themes, though often in a more poignant vein, run through what became a distinct sub-genre of postwar trucker/country songs by artists such as Johnny Horton, Red Sovine, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash.

Rural-based truckers also revived regional traditions of populist protest. In the 1970s, surging gas prices and intensified competition triggered collective action. In 1973 and again in 1979, owner-operators brought traffic to a halt on key interstates and shut down gas stations. Slashed tires and assaults on non-cooperating truckers punctuated these efforts to force federal authorities to loosen regulations and subsidize fuel prices. The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which sharply reduced federal regulation of freight trucking, was in part a response this neo-populist revolt.

Truck drivers figure prominently in Nelson Lichtenstein’s account of Wal-Mart’s labor relations as well. Tracing the development of Walton’s sophisticated system of inventory control, just-in-time delivery of merchandise, and computerized tracking, Lichtenstein shows that the company’s truck drivers quickly proved a vulnerable link. Relentless pressure on costs led to deteriorating conditions among men who prided themselves on their relative freedom and privileged status. Walton’s managers, faced with truckers’ discontent and worried about possible union inroads, responded quickly, enhancing truckers’ status both materially and psychologically. In effect, they created a two-tier labor force, with truckers treated as a kind of retail labor aristocracy while in the stores Wal-Mart elaborated its low-wage, high-turnover, benefit-stingy regime.

With respect to these in-store workers, Lichtenstein roots the company’s distinctive patterns of deploying labor and its approach to labor relations in Wal-Mart’s Arkansas origins. Founder Sam Walton viewed the men and women of the rural backwater South as an ideal source of labor. They had low-wage expectations and little understanding of the kinds of workers’ rights that had emerged during the New Deal-CIO era. The female workers who populated the selling floor did not expect, nor did they particularly want, the kinds of full-time, life-tenure jobs that in the 1950s and early 1960s had become commonplace in industrial centers. Walton recruited middle managers from regional colleges and business schools and inculcated them with the company’s gospel of cost-cutting and self-exploitation. Spurred by carefully calibrated performance incentives, managers internalized the company’s relentless focus on paring costs–particularly labor costs–so as to meet rigid targets. Wal-Mart’s cultivation of a workplace regime based on personal relationships and identification with the benign values of “Mr. Sam” encouraged hourly employees to work off the clock as a means of helping friendly managers, themselves often putting in 70-hour weeks, to meet their time-cost quotas.

Walton and his management teams rejected the industrial and labor relations regime that had emerged and matured in the postwar period. Wal-Mart frequently violated wages-and-hours laws, for example, getting away with whatever it could, paying the nominal fines and posting the required messages while selling their stance as principled resistance to the pointy-headed federal or state bureaucrats who would impose their standards on hard-working Americans and disrupt the beneficent personal relationships between workers and employers that company officials, from top management down to shop floor supervisors, celebrated. Thus, Walton himself and the managers that he recruited and groomed had only contempt for governmental regulation of any sort, always enlisting hourly employees in the ongoing crusade against the nanny state.

As the flagship company in the emerging regime of consumer capitalism, Wal-Mart might be seen as a prime candidate for union organizing. After all, in the 1930s and 1940s, a million steelworkers and a million auto workers, most of them toiling for such then-dominant employers as U.S. Steel and General Motors, formed the basis for the high-wage, secure-job post-war dispensation that raised wages, brought medical and pension benefits, and narrowed income disparities. But the circumstances that had sustained the great CIO breakthroughs in heavy industry were absent as the “retail revolution” gathered force. While Wal-Mart’s logistical innovations and its labor policies were centrally generated, its decentralized daily operations necessitated a store-by-store, and even department-by-department, approach to organizing. By the 1960s and 1970s, the union-friendly governmental policies associated with the New Deal were a distant memory. No new John L. Lewis or Walter Reuther emerged to dramatize the exploitation of the company’s cashiers, stock handlers, counter clerks, and the other, largely female, “associates” on whose low-wage labor Wal-Mart’s success rested. While the company did face, and sometimes lose, costly law suits triggered by its violations of wage-and-hour laws, it faced little push-back from perplexed and out-gunned unions whose few tentative initiatives were quickly and almost effortlessly routed. Meanwhile, the company has insisted that workers could find redress of grievances and remedies for rare instances of mistreatment via their unmediated access to worker-friendly managers, without any need for Department of Labor inspectors, union stewards, or other trouble-makers.

Lichtenstein does not explore the ways in which hourly workers have processed Wal-Mart’s “one big family” labor relations regime. Clearly, he regards the company’s anti-unionism as repulsive and dishonest, and its inculcation of employee loyalty as self-serving and manipulative. He does point out that as effective as these employee relations policies have been

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in Wal-Mart’s original small-town heartland, they have been more skeptically received as it has attempted to move into urban centers. And he shows that efforts to expand into Western Europe have often met with pushback in countries with stronger labor movements and social democratic patterns of labor law and industrial practice. But as for the bulk of Wal-Mart’s U.S. workers, in The Retail Revolution they do indeed appear as credulous and easily manipulated, more or less willing participants in “Mr. Sam’s” great project.

In Bethany Moreton’s rendering, however, the women who have constituted most of Wal-Mart’s in-store labor force are anything but passive receptors of corporate practice and ideology. Indeed, it is the floor workers and cashiers, along with their demographically identical shopper-customers, who have shaped the retail workplace. In the big urban department stores of legend, working-class clerks confronted upper-income shoppers, often generating resentments and frictions. At Wal-Mart, however, shoppers, on the one hand, and clerks, on the other, were pretty much from the same class and small farm background. Wal-Mart workers and their customers created a kind of womanly comraderie that, in effect, replaced the skill-oriented, confrontational solidarity of the declining male-dominated industrial, mining, and construction sectors. (71) It was female floor workers and their customers who both embodied and acted out patterns of female cooperativeness and put into practice the “people skills” traditionally ascribed to women who decisively defined Wal-Mart’s in-store culture. Moreton argues that the company was initially slow to understand the value the “ethos of service” that its women workers and women customers generated. Indeed, declares Moreton, Wal-Mart women, on both sides of the cash register, were exercising “a nonmilitant form of worker control.”(77)

To be sure, low wages, paucity of medical and pension benefits, and limited opportunity for personal advancement were the norm. But low wages were offset by “a relatively safe, agreeable workplace and [the sense that] service . . . did not automatically carry the stamp of servitude.” (77) Christian, family-friendly workplaces, while creating a distinctive female shop-floor workplace culture, in no way fundamentally challenged managerial patriarchy, which remained in force throughout the company hierarchy. But for many women workers, the transmutation of male authority from the abusiveness of the stereotypical industrial foreman to the Wal-Mart manager’s reliance of Christian persuasion, demonstrations of personal concern, and abjuring of macho posturing was an acceptable trade-off.

Moreton believes that the distinctive character of Wal-Mart’s distinctive Christian worker-shopper culture has had far-reaching political and cultural implications. Where once the industrial economy had provided “stable work, high wages, and benefits,” there was now “women’s work” for all. And it was “the Arkansas discount store” that pioneered in establishing the new dispensation, with its powerful national and global repercussions.(50)

There is a political dimension as well. Wal-Mart’s increasingly Christianized culture, its embrace of the evangelical orientation of so many of its workers and customers, and its powerful, if usually indirect, corporate ties to such political figures as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Karl Rove, and Newt Gingrich have made it an important component of the New Christian Right. Moreover, Moreton cites polling data indicating that in the 2004 presidential election, “George W. Bush won the votes of 85 percent of frequent Wal-Mart shoppers,” (1) an indication that there is a populist base for Wal-Mart’s corporate politics. Thus, in politics, as in industrial relations and popular culture, “The South, relatively ‘backward’ in terms of its industrialization, . . . had the freedom to redefine the labor model . . . [that has] shaped the subsequent landscape for all of us.” (51)

Along with Jefferson Cowie’s recent Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010) and Joseph McCartin’s forthcoming study of the 1981 PATCO strike[1], these three books implicitly ask historians to address the question of change and continuity in recent U.S. labor history. Are the storied battles of labor’s turbulent past at all relevant to the circumstances in which workers now find themselves? Is there perhaps now a “broken narrative” in labor’s story, forever separating Sam Walton’s blue-smocked clerks from John L. Lewis’s militant miners and Walter Reuther’s rebellious autoworkers? Afer all, declares AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, “At a time when America desperately needs stronger unions . . . nostalgia for organized labor’s past is no strategy for our future.”[2]

Neither Hamilton nor Moreton ventures to extrapolate beyond their respective historical analyses of the forces that have created post-industrial workers’ identity and circumstances. Nelson Lichtenstein is a bit more venturesome, identifying areas of worker resistance to Wal-Mart’s hegemony as the company seeks to enter urban areas and to penetrate foreign markets.

Even he, however, provides little grounds for anticipating a laborite resurgence based on the contradictions of low-wage, low-price “consumer capitalism.” Perhaps historians in the future will see the “Retail Revolution” as having finally put paid to the notion of a dynamic working class as an agent of progressive social change. Then again, we may be wise to recall the words of George Barnett, one of the doyens of depression-era industrial relations, who in 1932 declared that there was “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 last decade.”[3]

For Labor; written September 2011

The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old? Steve Early

Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011

xxv + 409 pp.

In The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor, veteran unionist and labor commentator Steve Early looks “at the troubled interior life of SEIU, not just its polished exterior. . . .” (338) The acronym SEIU, of course, stands for the Service Employees International Union, one of the nation’s largest labor organizations, celebrated by labor advocates as the big exception to the sorry tale of organized labor’s long-term decline. All the “civil wars” referred to in the book’s title involve the SEIU. In 2005, its then-president Andy Stern led his union out of the AFL-CIO and created a new labor center, the Change to Win (CTW) grouping. Within CTW, however, conflict soon erupted within a key affiliate, UNITE HERE, itself an amalgamation of garment and textile workers and hotel, restaurant, and hospitality industry workers. Meanwhile, turmoil has roiled inside SEIU, as the national leadership attempts to impose a more centralized and bureaucratic regime on sometimes-obstreperous state and local organizations, most notably a rebellious California unit representing 150,000 healthcare workers.

For over a quarter century, Early was an organizer and staff member for he Communications Workers of America (CWA). He is affiliated with the Detroit-based Labor Notes group, which has a long record of encouraging and supporting rank-and-file activism, often in the face of opposition from established union leadership. Civil Wars attacks what Early sees as SEIU’s slide toward authoritarianism, misuse of members’ dues money, and resort to bully-boy tactics deployed against dissidents. With an impressive command of the work of labor scholars, journalistic accounts, court and intra-union testimony, and personal conversations (his interviews are apparently not transcribed or generally available), he documents the SEIU’s attacks on local activists, corruption and empire-building among its secondary leadership, and use of local police and private security forces to stifle dissent and to impose what Early views as a corporate model of union governance and grievance handling.

At the core of Civil Wars is Early’s critique of the Stern-led SEIU’s organizing strategy, its denigration of shop floor activism, and its lack of transparency and accountability. The subtitle, however, is misleading in that Early’s celebration of grass-roots activism is not accompanied by a clearly stated strategy for achieving the “birth of a new workers’ movement” on the basis of local activism. Nor does he fully explain the rationale behind the efforts of Stern and his national leadership team to find new ways to expand organizing and address members’ concerns.

Stern believes that in the hostile climate of the early 21^st century, unions such as SEIU must adopt new strategies. With the putative protections of the National Labor Relations Act largely a dead letter, unions must cultivate employer neutrality, even if doing so requires dampening local militancy. Unionization, in this view, even if initial collective bargaining gains are modest, has a transformative effect. Without a union contract, workers in the service economy usually lack the career ladders and job security that collective bargaining, however initially restrained, inaugurates. Once inside the union tent, low-wage workers can be mobilized to achieve contract improvements and to exert political power. Hence, SEIU’s adoption of a “bargaining to organize” strategy. Through this device, SEIU makes agreements with multi-unit employers who pledge to refrain from overtly anti-union practices when SEIU attempts to organize certain facilities in exchange for the union’s agreement to forego organizing efforts at other locales. Both sides agree to conduct expeditious and civil election campaigns.

Early’s critique of SEIU and of Andy Stern is on two levels. To be sure, Civil Wars catalogues abuses of power, financial chicanery, and institutional arrogance. More basic, however, is Early’s critique of Stern and the SEIU leadership’s very conception of the character and trajectory of the contemporary labor movement. Early is persuasive in his vivid and often first-hand accounts of SEIU’s high-handedness, its emulation of corporate methods of governance and control, and its misallocation of resources (read: members’ dues). However, he never does state fully and directly Stern’s conception of modern unionism much less present fairly and directly the case for cultivation of employer neutrality as a tactic in the hostile environment of the early 21^st century.

Early is particularly critical of a corollary to the “bargaining to organize” approach, the union’s reliance on staff members, many of them relatively recent college graduates, rather than on in-facility rank-and file activists. In Early’s view, the marginalization of grass-roots organizing results in unions that view workers as clients or customers rather than as a dynamic participants. Local stewards and grievance-handlers–the daily presence of traditional unionism on the shop floor–are bypassed. An extreme, but growing, manifestation of this pattern is the emergence of “1-800" unionism in which staff members at the end of a toll-free phone line, rather than flesh-and-blood co-workers, advise on contract issues and grievances.

Reflecting the author’s experience in the labor movement, Civil Wars is richly informative and sharply provocative on a wide range of contemporary labor issues. Thus in a chapter titled “How EFCA Died for Obamacare” Early (employing the disdainful nomenclature of the Right in referring to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) points to Stern’s role in the generation and passage of the legislation. Stern, Early believes, provided the Obama administration cover from the left as it, along with the Democratic congressional leadership, rejected out of hand worker-supported “single payer” and “public option” approaches. Meanwhile, again playing the administration’s game, Stern acquiesced in the administration’s sidetracking of the Employee Free Choice Act, thus ensuring (in journalist Harold Meyerson’s words) “the end of labor law reform for another generation.” (280) Early quotes approvingly the judgment of California SEIU dissident Sal Rosselli, who decried the frittering away of the political clout that labor’s massive financial and manpower commitment to Obama’s election might have brought. In the end, lamented Rosselli, “we got no labor law reform and a shitty health care plan.” (280)

Early illuminates other key developments in the twenty-first century labor environment as well. He cautions against over-valuing the success of SEIU in organizing thousands of home care workers, most of them women of color. True, SEIU’s 1999 victory in an election to represent 74,000 home health care workers in California is the largest single NLRB poll since the UAW’s victory over Ford Motor Company in 1941. Indeed, institutional and in-home health care workers, Early notes, constitute “the labor movement’s largest source of new members lately,” with over 600,000 new members. (82) But gaining the opportunity to organize and represent these workers has often entailed questionable political deals necessary to effect change in their “contract worker” status. Moreover, rivalry among AFSCME, the UAW, and Early’s own CWA, as well as SEIU has resulted in “a union free-for-all.” (82) In the end, Early believes, basing union resurgence on such workers, many of whom toil in the isolating environment of patients’ and clients’ homes, is a losing proposition. Gaining better conditions for these low-wage workers is a worthy undertaking, to be sure, but “they are not the modern-day equivalent of the . . . factory workers who formed industrial unions” in the 1930s and 1940s. In the words of one SEIU officer, “‘nursing home workers are not the commanding heights of the economy . . . to think that [organizing home care and nursing home workers is]. . . going to be the basis for rebuilding the labor movement, you have to be out of your mind.’” (107-08)

Of all SEIU’s “civil wars,” it is the struggle between SEIU’s national officers and the erstwhile leaders of a big California health care local, United Healthcare Workers (UHW), that Early regards as most indicative of the Stern-led union’s pathologies. In 2007, as part of a national effort to streamline union administration and balance collective bargaining for existing memberships with efforts to expand organizing, SEIU announced plans to split this 150,000-member organization into units that would represent nursing home workers and in-home health care workers separately. For their part, UHW leaders, while sympathetic to the concept of consolidation, believed that their organization worked well for both home health care and institutional workers. Increasingly, they concluded that SEIU’s mounting attack on UHW evidenced the international union’s growing intolerance of dissent and its reliance on strong-arm tactics. Stern placed UHW in receivership, displacing its elected officers, who eventually led a move to disaffiliate, creating a new, independent entity, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). SEIU waged a relentless, well-funded campaign against its erstwhile affiliate, pulling field representatives off other campaigns and using local police and private security forces to bar NUHW activists from worksites and union property. Eventually, SEIU fought off decertification but at the high cost of alienating rank-and-file workers and of many of its own staff members, who resented being used in what amounted to a union-sponsored union-busting campaign.

In conceptualizing his attack on the Stern-led SEIU, Early invokes Rosa Luxemburg’s and Alendra Kollontai’s critiques of Lenin. The Bolsheviks substituted “the party for the proletariat” (335) and repressive management for genuine grass-roots activism. SEIU’s management team, he argues, has likewise sought to achieve gains in organizing and bargaining for the health care and service industry masses while bypassing actual workers. The story is one that echoes throughout labor history: champions of the rank and file versus union bureaucrats–John Brophy and Powers Hapgood against John L. Lewis; UAW dissidents against Walter Reuther. Early provides sobering perspectives on SEIU success and on Stern’s status as one of the labor movement’s most influential figures. More direct confrontation with the dilemmas facing today’s unionists and a fuller exploration of the theme of rank-and-file-based union building are subjects that Early will perhaps address in subsequent publications.

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida (Emeritus)

Tracy Roof, American Labor, Congress, and the Welfare State, 1935-2010 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)

This is a multiple choice quiz. Which of the following four factors best explains the inability of organized labor and its liberal allies to gain passage of progressive labor, income support, and social welfare legislation in the post-New Deal era? Is it: a) organized labor’s lethargy, bureaucratic inertia, and general retreat from the militancy and radicalism of the 1930s and 1940s; b) the vast disparity in financial and organizational resources enjoyed by the corporate and other conservative opponents of progressive projects; c) an intrinsically conservative, anti-government electoral majority that simply does not want a strong labor movement and an expansive social welfare state; d) the institutional constraints that the traditions and practices of the legislative process, as reinforced by features of the U.S. Constitution, have imposed on liberal activism?

Tracy Roof suggests an answer, although she also hedges her bets. She believes that responsibility for the thwarting of the post-New Deal development of the American welfare state lies in Congress and the way it goes about doing its work. In particular, this thoughtful, clearly written, and well researched book “examines the effect of the legislative process on the ability of reformers,” led by organized labor, “to expand the social safety net” (3) and to remove obstacles to union expansion. Alternative explanations get short shrift.

Roof calls particular attention to the ways in which the “conservative coalition” of Republicans and southern Democrats shaped the legislative process in the four decades after the demise of the New Deal. An interlocking web of procedural and structural factors repeatedly blunted progressive initiatives such as labor law reform, expansion of income support programs, national health care legislation, and, for much of the period, civil rights enactments. Reliance on seniority in determining committee assignments meant that members from the one-party South claimed the most important slots, most notably as chairs of such powerful House committees as Rules and Ways and Means. Entrenched southern committee chairs employed a wide range of arcane rules and traditions to stymie liberal initiatives. In the Senate, the filibuster–or more usually, simply the threat of filibuster–served the same purpose.

In Roof’s account, the labor movement has been the most tenacious and well-organized of the constituencies pressing for progressive legislation and seeking ways through the congressional labyrinth. While its lobbyists and legislative operatives have made mistakes, on the whole organized labor has been vigorous and resourceful in keeping the progressive agenda alive. As World War II ended, labor spokesmen such as Philip Murray, William Green, George Meany, and Walter Reuther were optimistic about the prospects of expanding the New Deal. Even before the congressional elections of 1946 and the passage in June, 1947, of the Taft-Hartley Act, however, Congress rejected or emasculated liberal legislative initiatives, notably full employment legislation and efforts to make permanent the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). Truman’s upset victory in the 1948 presidential election and the return of a Democratic congressional majority briefly buoyed hopes that the onward march of New Deal reform could resume but a resumption of southern domination of House committees ensured that there would be no legislative breakthroughs in health care, income support, civil rights, or labor law revision.

In the 1950s and 1960s, labor’s electoral efforts helped to send many northern liberals, most of them Democrats, to Congress. Along with a few Republicans from industrial states, labor and its liberal allies launched a decades-long effort to change Congress’s institutional arrangements while at the same time fighting frustrating battles for incremental improvements in social welfare and income support programs. Social Security coverage was expanded and benefits periodically upgraded. Even if liberals did not achieve their goal of nationalizing standards for and administration of unemployment compensation, they did, during times of recession, gain extension of benefits. The minimum wage inched upward and now covered a larger proportion of the labor force. An expanded federal role in school and hospital construction and in furthering medical education, while no substitute for comprehensive national health insurance, kept labor’s agenda alive. Incremental reform reached its apogee during the 89^th Congress, elected in 1964, with the passage of legislation providing federally funded and administered medical insurance for the elderly and other measures underpinning the Johnson administration’s War of Poverty. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 seemed to promise transformation of the southern political patterns that had anchored the conservative coalition.

Meanwhile, labor-liberal efforts to reform Congressional procedures and practices slowly gained traction. The rapid expansion of the African American electorate, along with an increase in the numbers and seniority profiles of northern Democrats, weakened the institutional bases of the conservative coalition. In the House, reforms adopted in the 1960s and 1970s took committee assignments out of the hands of traditional power brokers and weakened the ability of the Rules Committee–the graveyard of many progressive initiatives–to dictate the legislative process. Party caucuses became more open and assertive in establishing legislative priorities. Party discipline tightened. In the Senate, new rules adopted in 1975 ostensibly weakened liberal-labor foes’ ability to use filibusters to bury progressive measures.

While these changes did weaken the classic conservative coalition, however, they did not lead to liberal breakthrough. Labor’s effort to achieve its most cherished goal–changes in labor law designed to facilitate organization and promote collective bargaining–narrowly failed in 1965 and again in 1978. Economic issues, notably the challenges of globalization, fiscal policy, and taxation, split liberal-labor forces within the Democratic Party even as they energized a more regionally diverse New Right that embraced much of the agenda of the old conservative coalition.

Long-sought changes in legislative apportionment and congressional procedure turned out to have unforseen and ambiguous effects. Thus, as early as the mid-1960s, labor was finding that the emerging electoral environment was working against its traditional agenda. The enfranchisement of southern blacks did help break the hold of imperious southern committee chairs but it also helped to entrench Dixie’s renascent Republican Party. The ending of systems of legislative and congressional apportionment that favored underpopulated rural districts, long a goal of organized labor, brought dozens of suburban legislators and congressmen into government, many of them indifferent, if not hostile, to labor’s agenda, regardless of their party affiliation. Changes in House rules and procedures, while eroding the traditional impediments to progressive legislation, have tended to weaken the influence of established elements in the Democratic Party, notably organized labor. Ironically, in the wake of massive Republican victory in the 1994 elections and in the GOP-dominated 2000's labor and its allies now resorted to the filibuster–long a staple of the Right in its opposition to civil rights and labor law legislation–to thwart passage of anti-union measures.

Roof sees the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama in March, 2010, as the culmination of sixty years of political mobilization and legislative maneuvering by liberal forces led by organized labor. Her judgment on this ungainly legislation is that “Given everything it took to get the health care bill passed, it is hard to imagine that Obama or labor could have gotten much more, and they could have gotten a lot less.” (226) Indeed, the protracted fight over this first major expansion of the social welfare state in almost fifty years demonstrates both the efficacy of organized labor’s efforts and, in view of the compromises required to gain passage, the continued need to settle for incremental advance. While American Labor, Congress, and the Welfare State ends with the sweeping Republican electoral victories in the 2010 elections, Roof believes that the future is not entirely bleak for labor-led social welfare liberalism. She points to organized labor’s past record of resourcefulness, the ability of liberals to use otherwise-deplored procedural roadblocks to turn back attacks on existing social welfare programs, and perhaps an emerging Latino electorate in key states as sources of hope for liberals attempting to preserve the core of the New Deal and perhaps to resume the halting progress of incremental reform.

What of the three “wrong” answers to our multiple-choice quiz? Roof largely avoids direct engagement with them, noting that, after all, her subject is the institutional role of Congress and the procedures that govern its activities. Only sporadically does she suggest a hierarchy of causation in explaining the long liberal-labor struggle. Other scholars, she reminds us, have subjected organized labor’s efforts at electoral mobilization and its lobbying activities to detailed scrutiny. In asides and endnotes, she does take issue with scholars such as Nelson Lichtenstein, Michael Goldfield, and Kim Moody[1] who hold a hidebound labor movement, self-isolated from sources of radical inspiration, chiefly responsible for the current doldrums in which organized labor seems permanently trapped. She is persuasive in arguing that the mid-to-late 1940s, a period often pointed to as a turning point in labor’s alleged retreat, “was not a missed opportunity as much as a missing opportunity” for policy breakthrough and/or third party creation. (216)

Thus, does she dispose of answer “a,” above. On choices “b” and “c” she is largely silent. Absent from the pages of American Labor, Congress, and the Welfare State is discussion of the rise of business’s aggressive political operations, the massive transformation of lobbying, and the character and weight of corporate and financial sector involvement in the electoral and legislative arenas. Readers interested in these seemingly critical matters would do well to turn to Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (2010), which charts the enormous increase in business’s financial involvement in both electoral politics and legislative maneuvering over the past thirty years. Since the 1970s, organized labor, once a pioneer in political mobilization and lobbying, has struggled in vain to attempt to match this corporate juggernaut. Under these circumstances, the primacy of the institutional and procedural factors that Roof stresses in explaining the fate of progressive legislation seems questionable.

Finally, answer “c.” What if the electorate just does not support the “progressive agenda,” despite–indeed, perhaps because of–its ostensibly democratic and egalitarian character? Liberals and laborites, of course, claim that it has been Congress’s arcane and undemocratic rules and procedures that have stifled the people’s desire for universal health care, more generous social provision, labor law reform, and full employment policies. But perhaps hostility to “big government,” fear and loathing of taxation, and the primacy of individualistic and entrepreneurial values trump the desire for equity and social justice. Roof does suggest this possibility, only to observe that “it is hard to prove either way” and that it is “very difficult to read the policy mandate behind electoral returns.” (219) She does suggest that in recent years the spectacle of congressional deadlock has fed voters’ (and non-voters’) sense of alienation and has helped to create an electorate bereft of faith that government can be a source of beneficial action in the face of mounting social, economic, and environmental problems. Thus, answer “c,” while not true in some existential sense, is perhaps becoming increasingly more plausible.

In chronicling organized labor’s relationship to Congress over the past seventy-five years, Roof helps us to understand the reasons for the partialness and modesty of the American social welfare state. In the Conclusion to American Labor, Congress, and the Welfare State, she steps briefly outside the institutional-procedural framework that otherwise governs the book, pointing to the dilemma organized labor has faced over the past thirty years and that continues to afflict it. Declining political and legislative influence make the changes in labor law necessary for organizational resurgence increasingly problematic. At the same time, inability to expand its membership base further weakens labor’s political clout. And if organized labor continues its downward spiral, she laments, “an important voice for American workers will be lost.” (229)

Robert H. Zieger is Distinguished professor of History Emeritus, University of Florida. He is the author of The CIO, 1935-1955 (1995) and the editor of Life and Labor in the New New South: Essays in Southern Labor History since 1950 (University Press of Florida, 2012).