THE CIO AFTER 50 YEARS: A HISTORICAL RECKONING
Brody, David
Lewis did most of the talking. His voice was low, and he spoke with passion. He outlined the conditions in all of the major industries of the country. He emphasized that thousands upon thousands...
...Social history began to preoccupy the profession...
...The New Left/social-history orientation thus has had the effect of disengaging CP labor history from the formal party history (just as, on the flip side, it has had the effect of treating the Communist party as an agent of rank-andfile containment...
...13 David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 165...
...For an anti-Stalinist like Glaberman, this tendency was fundamental in nature, stemming from a conception of "the motive power of historical development as being the Party rather than the class...
...CIO leaders "assumed a unity of purpose and outlook that did not exist and overlooked forces that restricted the workers' willingness to act in concert...
...Never mind whether Alinsky's words are strictly accurate...
...The legal scholar Karl Klare, for example, saw the Wagner Act at its birth as "indeterminate," and "susceptible to an overtly anticapitalist interpretation...
...It happened (not entirely by chance) at roughly the same time that larger changes within the historical discipline strongly reinforced the hand of the radical historians...
...The past can then be understood on its own terms, a lost world to be recaptured in the historian's imagination...
...He painted the breathtaking potentialities of a great labor movement embracing almost every workingman in the country . . . . As Lewis spoke, most of the food on the table went untouched and grew cold...
...And Bernstein's Turbulent Years (1970) contains the best narrative history we have of the labor battles of the 1930s...
...The French-Canadian carpet weavers of Woonsocket were led by highly skilled Franco-Belgian anarcho-syndicalists...
...to the Musteites in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike...
...The need for relative independence was of a piece with the need for the party connection in the first place...
...It does not appear that industrial workers challenged these basic, determining elements...
...If not corporate business, then the best candidate as the guiding hand of containment would seem to have been the New Deal itself...
...Martin Glaberman, "Vanguard to Rearguard," Political Power and Social Theory: A Research Annual 4 (1984), pp...
...4, 1982), p. 365...
...What impressed Friedlander was "the narrowness of the base of active involvement and . . . the breadth of the more passive mass...
...They too had caught the vision, and it became their gospel...
...Thus a seasoned practitioner such as David Montgomery speaks of a "New Deal formula" that was "simultaneously liberating and co-optive for the workers...
...Bernstein's and Fine's central assumption had been the durability of the industrial-union achievement...
...155-201...
...In their recent Second Industrial Divide (1984), Michael Piore and Charles Sabel make a strong case for technologically determined labor relations...
...From that thought flowed a host of new questions about the known history of the CIO and about the unknown history of America's industrial workers...
...History does not readily shift in its moorings...
...his ally in the torch-welding department had been a union miner...
...Its bargaining structure, constructed painstakingly over many years, has begun to unravel...
...That assumption has fallen increasingly into question in recent years...
...Liberal historiography, however, is no longer what it was when it came under New Left assault 15 or so years ago...
...21 Nelson Lichtenstein, "Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937-1955," Journal of American History 67 (September 1980), p. 353...
...If the CIO has not proved to be the transforming event that Edward Levinson anticipated, neither can later historians cast that history in the heroic terms of Edward Levinson's Labor on the March...
...What seems clear is that the Roosevelt administration never had a blueprint for such legislation and indeed 460 mostly resisted it until its imminent passage...
...August Meier and Elliott 467 Rudwick's Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (1979), in fact, puts an odd gloss on the New Left conception of industrial-union history...
...The very logic of their work environment would seem (if one follows Piore and Sabel) to have compelled industrial workers to opt for a rule-bound system that militated against shopfloor self-activity...
...From the time union activity began in December 1936, triggered by the wave of sit-down strikes in the area, three years passed before the auto-parts plant became fully organized...
...For labor historians, this meant a shift in attention from union institutions to the workers themselves...
...2 Rawick thought he was witnessing in 1969 the next phase in that struggle from below...
...The heart of the matter for Tomlins is not the emasculation of the Wagner Act but the fact that it was in inherent opposition to the voluntaristic basis of the labor movement...
...As a result the working class was taught to rely on the protection of the law rather than on their own strength...
...A perceptible change has overtaken the liberal interpretation of industrial unionism...
...Their indigenous character emerges increasingly in recent scholarship as the key to understanding the CP unionists...
...to the IWW at the South Philadelphia Westinghouse works...
...The answer most confounding to liberal assumptions would have granted industry that role...
...That shop-floor actions might take a reactionary turn became evident in the wartime wildcats in Detroit auto plants, culminating in the week-long "hate" strike at Packard in 1943, called against the hiring or upgrading of black workers...
...One would expect that shadow to be cast back on the formative history of the Wagner Act...
...How strong a case can be made for the proposition that the shop-floor struggles of the 1930s aimed at "a radical restructuring of the workplace" or, more precisely, at a bargaining system that might result in such a restructuring...
...It helps, for one thing, to account for the durable support they enjoyed among a non-Communist rank and file...
...The historian's own world becomes too remote from past events to dictate, in any direct sense, his or her conception of those events...
...He emphasized that thousands upon thousands of workers were waiting with outstretched arms for unionization to come to them...
...Lewis then said, "And it can only come from you and you and you," as he dramatically punctuated his statement by stabbing his finger at each man seated around the table...
...Commissioner of Labor Statistics reports that 2 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 1980, and 471 that nearly all the 7 million jobs created since the 1981 recession have been in services and construction...
...The social-history analysis Friedlander had undertaken suggested that their sociocultural characteristics inhibited the class development of his auto workers...
...But consider the scene with which Bernstein concludes his book...
...It was precisely at the point when Section 7a* pushed them on this issue, as Kim McQuaid has shown, that labor-business collaboration within the National Recovery Administration broke down.' From that time in 1934 until the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Wagner Act in 1937, organized business presented virtually a * A clause of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) granting workers organizing and bargaining rights, but so loosely drawn and weakly enforced as to enable open-shop employers effectively to resist the unionization of their workers...
...Unfortunately, the facts have run too stubbornly against applying the corporate-liberal thesis to industrial-union history...
...Friedlander's methodology also was drawn from the social-history scholarship that aimed at capturing concretely and in depth the experience of 19th-century workers...
...682-704...
...To this mix, Ronald Schatz's systematic study of the electrical workers has added an occupational factor...
...This is a subject by no means ignored by such leading CIO scholars of the 457 older generation as Walter Galenson, Sidney Fine, and Irving Bernstein...
...New directions in the discipline, especially the rise of social history, have prompted labor historians to explore well beyond the political/ institutional boundaries that first defined the events of the 1930s...
...The events leading to the Wagner Act were circuitous and contradictory, heavily affected by the unexpected struggles over Section 7a during the NRA period...
...Christopher Tomlins's new history goes Gross one better...
...Militancy and union power were inversely correlated," Daniel Nelson concluded...
...25 best summary of this reassessment is in Christopher L. Tomlins, "AFL Unions in the 1930's: Their Performance in Historical Perspective," Journal of American History 65 (March 1979), pp...
...In his on-the-spot history, Edward Levinson concluded triumphantly: "Labor .was on the march as it had never been before in the history of the Republic...
...V W hat of the shop-floor actions that swept the industrial plants in the first stages of unionization...
...This was equally true of the New Left: the dividing line at bottom was whether one valued or deplored the stable collective-bargaining 470 system...
...Friedlander identified the four key men who launched the union struggle at his plant: the most important (and Friedlander's main informant) was Edmund Kord, an anticlerical Polish-American Socialist and night student at Wayne University...
...George Green's introduction to this useful collection of Radical America essays sketches in the ideological background and further evolution of Rawick's worker self-activity thesis...
...Nor should one underestimate the extent to which that perspective has taken hold among historians...
...Karl E. Klare, "Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937-1941," Minnesota Law Review 62 (March 1978), pp...
...The theory presumed, however, a sureness of state purpose that poorly described how the New Deal labor policy came about...
...In the months that followed, America's industrial workers rose up against their corporate employers...
...Now 50 years of legal evolution have made the National Labor Relations Act seem a straitjacket for the labor movement and increasingly also a tool of modern antiunion employers...
...Even writers basically sympathetic to the CP role, once they fell within the containment mode, defined party history in terms of "mistakes" in the relation to the rank-and-file struggle...
...Today industrial unionism is in crisis...
...141-82...
...Readers will doubtless have been struck by how strongly the unfolding history of industrial unionism has shaped our thinking about the opening struggles for that movement...
...27 Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions . . . 1880-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), final page...
...The American mass-production system, based on special-purpose machinery and line assembly, called for narrowly defined job structures (in which the job, not the worker, carried the wage rate), orderly job allocation, and hierarchical control...
...Most radical workers traveled in the opposite direction: they were union activists who joined the party for support in organizing...
...Staughton Lynd's words are a kind of touchstone to the new scholarship on industrial unionism...
...Although they spoke a reformist idiom and encouraged other New Deal welfare measures, corporate liberals drew the line (as indeed had their precursors in Weinstein's account of corporate liberalism in the Progressive era) against entering any genuine bargaining relationship with trade unions...
...The difficulties in the New Left assault on liberal institutional history should not blind us to the very real benefits likely to result from breaking out of a unilinear approach to the labor movement, the New Deal, and industry...
...17 Joshua B. Freeman, "Catholics, Communists, and Republicans: Irish Workers and the Organization of the Transport Workers Union," in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America: Essays . . . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 263...
...And narrow job structures very quickly became the framework for wage determination under collective bargaining...
...The utopian aspirations for a radical restructuring of the workplace . . . were symbolically thwarted by Fansteel, which erected labor law reform as a roadblock in their path...
...No one, indeed, has written—or is likely to write—a more complete account of industrial struggle than Fine's SitDown (1969) on the great General Motors strike of 1936-37...
...George Zahavi's point is not, however, that employer paternalism purchased labor quiescence but, on the contrary, that it inadvertently gave to workers considerable leverage in bargaining informally with management...
...Some students, strongly influenced by Edward P Thompson and Herbert Gutman, explored working-class culture...
...This also is Sidney Fine's view...
...More important yet has been the impact of a new generation of historians whose ideological roots go back to the New Left...
...There was nothing random about this slow process...
...At some point, past and present begin to disengage...
...The latest—May 4, 1985—Lane Kirkland denounces the Democratic party for seeking, in the aftermath of the 1984 elections, to distance itself from the labor movement...
...14 Gary Gerstle, "The Mobilization of the Working Class Community: The Independent Textile Union in Woonsocket, 1931-1946," Radical History Review 17 (Spring 1978), pp...
...Rick Hurd, "New Deal Labor Policy and the Containment of Radical Union Activity," Review of Radical Political Economics 8 (Fall 1976), p. 40...
...So the field must ultimately be yielded to the liberal conception of industrial-union history...
...291-92...
...Governmental intervention freed them from employer control, yes, but "also opened a new avenue through which the rank and file could in time be tamed and the newly powerful unions be subjected to tight legal and political control...
...In his study of auto plants during this period, Nelson Lichtenstein found "an inherently parochial and localistic focus" to shop-floor actions...
...Nor have the industrial unions held their own within the labor movement...
...See especially Robert Zieger, "The Limits of Militancy: Organizing Paper Workers, 1933-1935," Journal of American History 63 (December 1976), pp...
...198-225...
...They did not go from communism to unionism...
...to Trotskyists among the Minneapolis teamsters...
...For in a racially divided labor force, fair play for the oppressed minority may translate itself into containment of the white rank-andfile majority...
...Organized labor served as a kind of junior partner in the corporate-liberal enterprise, accepting—to use Ronald Radosh's phrase—a "corporate ideology" and working actively during the New Deal for "the integration of organized labor into the corporate order...
...That would apply, for example, to the 19thcentury Knights of Labor, which was the expression of a long-gone small-producer economy...
...So the capitalist state need not be entirely purposive: its very processes assured a properly conservative outcome...
...161-67...
...z George Rawick, "Working-Class Self Activity," in the same book, p. 147...
...22 George Zahavi, "Negotiated Loyalty: Welfare Capitalism and the Shoeworkers of Endicott-Johnson, 1920-1940," Journal of American History 70 (December 1983), pp...
...labor militancy in Akron does not translate into class-conscious politics...
...Edmund Kord was a Socialist, and he recruited his entire secondary leadership into the Socialist party...
...Firestone, lacking the shop-floor turbulence of the Goodyear plant, exhibited a higher degree of solidarity, as measured, for example, by the vote given to labor candidates in the 1937 municipal elections...
...The ethnic identity of 466 French-Canadian workers, for example, was forged into a notably militant industrial unionism in the carpet industry of Woonsocket, Rhode Island...
...45-59...
...The New Deal itself, however, has been designated the key agency of containment...
...Radical the rank-and-file leadership may have been—but radical in service to the cause of industrial unionism...
...ii 1 VI 1 t could have been otherwise...
...have declined to join in the liberal celebration of [the] results [of] industrial union organizing in the 1930s...
...But if the rank-andfile upsurge was the core event in this history— 462 the event that gave it a logic of containment— then historical inquiry had to proceed on an entirely different plane as well...
...Bodnar, "Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of WorkingClass Realism in Industrial America," Journal of Social History 14 (Fall 1980), pp...
...Nelson, "The CIO at Bay: Labor Militancy and Politics in Akron, 1936-1938," Journal of American History 71 (December 1984), p. 583...
...The heroes of industrial unionism also have lost much of their earlier luster...
...In a particularly keen analysis, Bruce Nelson has linked the militancy of West Coast maritime unionism—for which the San Francisco general strike of 1934 was the exemplary event—to the subcultures of the seamen and longshoremen...
...15 But, on balance, the ethnocultural influences seem to have run counter to rank-and-file militancy...
...Other research has turned up variations on Friedlander's theme...
...The program, concluded one sympathetic writer after a careful assessment of the known facts, "had very little to do indeed with the manipulative ingenuity of a politically sophisticated corporatist element of the American business elite...
...AN INSTITUTIONAL CONFIGURATION emerged altogether different from that of the liberal historiography: instead of agencies ranged for or against the unionization of industrial workers, all institutions found themselves grouped on one side as more or less hostile to the radical self-activity of the rank and file...
...As a measure of emergent working-class consciousness, shop-floor militancy becomes increasingly cloudy and problematic...
...James R. Prickett, "New Perspectives on American Communism and the Labor Movement," in the same journal and issue, pp...
...23 "The CIO at Bay," pp...
...The agent of this process, Meier and Rudwick argue, was the UAW leadership...
...Thus Peter Friedlander subtitled his book The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936-1939 (1975), A Study in Class and Culture...
...Others, following the lead of Harry Braverman and David Montgomery, concerned themselves with the shop-floor experience of American workers...
...The sit-downs at Akron's rubber plants, Daniel Nelson found, included after the first wave many that were called for frivolous or nonexistent reasons...
...Its potency here derived not so much from FDR's broad political appeal to the working class—a familiar complaint of the Old Left—as from the specific impact of the organizing and bargaining protections granted by the Wagner Act (1935) on the self-activity of industrial workers...
...20 Daniel Nelson, "Origins of the Sit-Down Era: Worker Militancy and Innovation in the Rubber Industry, 1934-1938," Labor History 23 (Spring 1982), pp...
...He quotes approvingly Jay Lovestone's remark after the GM sit-down strike that "rarely does a single event of and by itself mean so much"—but with this qualification: "insofar as it applies to the growth of unionism in the automobile and other mass-production industries...
...Thus Karl Klare's analysis of the "deradicalization" of the Wagner Act turned on just those cases that gave primacy to the contract and "responsible" collective bargaining, culminating in the Fansteel decision (1939), which denied NLRB protection to sit-down strikers: Fansteel . . . bolstered the forces of union bureaucracy in their efforts to quell the spontaneity of the rank and file...
...The leading historian of Slavic-American workers during the Great Depression, John Bodnar, has stressed their "realism," the high value they placed on job security, the insulating effect of their familial and community ties...
...They posited a capitalist state relatively autonomous of private capital, and capable even of overriding its wishes in defense of the social order...
...Vittoz's emphasis...
...1° For a brilliant attempt at this, see Theda Skocpol, "Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal," Politics and Society 10 (1980), pp...
...The women leaders were more closely representative of female electrical workers in job terms—short-service, young, semiskilled—but they differed crucially in their personal lives: they lived independent lives while their sister workers mostly were dutiful daughters living at home and turning over their pay to their parents...
...Might it not, however, have signified a more limited kind of struggle—one directed against the collectivebargaining system that was then taking shape under industrial unionism...
...638-57...
...19 Ronald Filippelli, "UE: An Uncertain Legacy," Political Power and Social Theory: A Research Annual 4 (1984), pp...
...s Kim McQuaid, "The Frustration of Corporate Revival during the Early New Deal," Historian 41 (Au-' gust 1979), pp...
...But once radical historians placed the rank and file at the center of New Deal labor history, it followed that social history would be enlisted in 463 the effort to understand the mobilization of industrial workers during the 1930s...
...Around these four, a handful of activists coalesced to undertake the uphill mobilization of the other workers...
...What has proved notable, even remarkable, about his pioneering little book on a minor auto-parts 465 plant is that its findings very largely prefigured an entire decade of further research on the rank-and-file history of the 1930s...
...For a labor movement under siege, the industrial unions constitute a weakening battalion in the order of battle...
...and they occurred with little regard for the interests of other workers...
...On the contrary, Friedlander was able to map quite precisely how the social groupings he had identified—the second-generation Poles, the low-skilled first-generation immigrants, the Appalachians and, last of all, the Yankee toolmakers and inspectors—joined the union and the kinds of union men they became...
...The workplace was, in Richard Edwards's nice phrase, "contested terrain...
...Not all subsequent research of this kind fits Friedlander's findings...
...q 472...
...The second study deals with a climactic moment in CIO power at Akron in 1937...
...405-30...
...And it throws into a rather 468 different light their relationship to the CP apparatus...
...44,59...
...This was an expectation already well certified in New Left thinking before the advent of the syndicalist phase...
...5-20...
...To what purpose...
...Factionalism also contributed...
...As a group, they have shrunk by at least a quarter since 1955, and today they constitute scarcely 15 percent of the AFL–CIO...
...Among the mostly Irish transit workers of New York City, the key leaders were veterans of the IRA who, as Joshua Freeman remarked, differed from their fellow Irishmen in "matters of personality, politics, and ideology...
...A labor ticket was fielded for the 1937 city elections, and was roundly defeated...
...602-20...
...Early on, in fact, as the AFL showed itself to be the more dynamic unionizing force over the longer term, historians began to downgrade the craft versus the industrial issue over which the CIO had been launched...
...The point need not be pushed too far and, in any case, is likely to resist precise resolution...
...And, finally, historical judgments have been tempered by the unfolding history of the industrial-union movement, as it consolidated itself within the trade-union mainstream and then, in our own day, fell increasingly on hard times...
...Worker resistance to paternalistic control at Endicott-Johnson does not lead to (in fact, evades the need for) unionism...
...That heady moment passed...
...That mass-production workers seized every chance for shop-floor control seems clear from Nelson Lichtenstein's study of the auto industry during the sit-down era and during World War II and from postwar industrial-relations research into shop-level resistance to the formal contractual system...
...Rich though the scholarly findings have been, they have not brought forth the one essential for historical reformulation: they have not revealed the alternative that rivaled the union course that was actually taken...
...A sad undercurrent runs through the later chapters of John Barnard's fine brief biography of Walter Reuther...
...The crux of the problem of labor history in the thirties," so it seemed to Friedlander, was "the historic emergence of specific structures of personality and culture out of the collapse and/or transformation of a complex and variegated collection of prebourgeois cultures...
...THE FARTHER WE PROBE, the more intractable becomes the social history of the CIO...
...Steel agreements...
...His point of departure was primarily the conception put forward in Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and adopted by his American disciples, that workingclass consciousness was the product of preindustrial worker cultures transformed in the crucible of industrial capitalism...
...26 James A. Gross, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board . . . 1937-1947 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), p. 267...
...Akron unionists, who more than most industrial workers might have been expected to conform to [a monolithic CIO] image, nevertheless defied it," concluded Daniel Nelson in a detailed study of the Akron election...
...Two weeks later, on November 9, 1935, John L. Lewis and his confederates formed the Committee for Industrial Organization...
...Little of this activity dealt with the modern period...
...In Dubofsky and Van Tine's biography, John L. Lewis emerges as a deeply flawed figure, briefly remarkable as the founder of the CIO but incapable of providing it with sustained leadership, and incapable even of keeping political faith with his followers (he plotted for Herbert Hoover's nomination in 1940 before settling for Wendell Willkie...
...The speaker was vice-president of the UE Erie local, where most of the members were lowskilled immigrant workers...
...For all his social vision and boundless energy, the UAW leader was inexorably defeated by the environment in which he operated...
...We were just part of the common mass, you might say...
...This is Saul Alinsky's account of the first meeting of industrial-union advocates the morning after the adjournment of the AFL convention at Atlantic City...
...That is, rank-and-file activism could occur in settings outside, and resistant to, union development...
...The corporate-liberal thesis was tested out mainly on progressivism, but it was presumed to apply equally well to the New Deal...
...His story was about how UAW Local 229 became organized...
...Lynd's call to arms demanded nothing less than a rank-andfile history of industrial unionism...
...Newly triumphant in the rubber plants, the CIO seemed invincible...
...They shared a 'resentment of injustice...
...Recent historians associated with the Left," Staughton Lynd wrote in 1972...
...Members of this group made up what there was of a radical American working class...
...That the outcome was otherwise Klare put down to deep-rooted judicial reasoning processes that rested on "assumptions of liberal capitalism and foreclosed those potential paths of development most threatening to the established order...
...some unions are boycotting the NLRB...
...For Prickett, the decisive moment came when the CP shifted from the United Front from Below—from the rank-and-file work of the early 1930s—to the Popular Front—to integration into the industrial-union structure, a period lasting until the expulsions of the Cold War era.' As for the CIO, listen to how Staughton Lynd concludes his case study of the steelworkers' movements of the early 1930s: The rank and file dream passed into the hands of [John L.] Lewis in the bastardized form of an organizing committee [SWOC] none of whose national or regional officers were steelworkers, an organizing committee so centralized that it paid even local phone calls from a national office...
...The Kord people gained confidence, a sense of direction and purpose, and practical training in the arts of organizing and running a local union...
...The latest— June 8, 1985—the U.S...
...The mainspring of revolution, as George Rawick had seen it in 1969, was "workingclass self-activity," by which, as Rawick said of the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, "the genuine advances of the working class were made by the struggle from below, by the natural organization of the working class, rather than by the bureaucratic elaboration of the administration of the working class from above...
...Friedlander wrote social history, but in service to Lynd's conception of the labor history of the 1930s as the self-mobilization of workers for collective action...
...and Melvyn Dubofsky, "Not so 'Turbulent Years': Another Look at the American 1930s," Amerikastudien 24 (1979), pp...
...The latest—May 6, 1985—the major steel firms announce they are ending industry-wide bargaining...
...Lane Kirkland speaks of repealing the law...
...There is a similar, if more variegated, drift to much of the subsequent research into shop-floor militancy...
...More telling yet has been the recent treatment of New Deal labor policy...
...They cannot be seen any longer simply as foot soldiers, so to speak, in the march and countermarch from the Third Period to Popular Front to Cold War...
...And, to draw things to a conclusion, neither can the complex reality that is emerging be reduced to the New Left conception of a rank and file potentially revolutionary but somehow contained by external forces...
...He reassures them that the new unions are going through "growing pains...
...IV The search for the rank-and-file activists that Staughton Lynd had in mind narrows down to a small band of industrial workers...
...WITH ALL THIS by way of preface, let us proceed to some reckoning of where we stand today on what Fortune in 1937 called "one of the greatest mass movements in our history...
...Still less active were the black workers, for whom the CIO cause seemed less a hopeful event than a threat to their precarious place in American industry...
...15 Bruce Nelson, "'Pentecost' on the Pacific: Maritime Workers and Working-Class Consciousness in the 1930s," Political Power and Social Theory: A Research Annual 4 (1984), pp...
...One of their earliest demands was for seniority, that is, for a more formalized system of job allocation...
...Ronald Radosh, "The Corporate Ideology of American Labor from Gompers to Hillman," reprinted in the same book, p. 138...
...We have dwelt on happenings which for liberal historians are merely preliminary or transitory, such as the mass strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco in 1934, the improvisation from below of local industrial unions and rank-and-file action committees...
...but the men around the table were on fire...
...At General Electric and Westinghouse, the union pioneers were Anglo-Saxon long-service employees activated in many instances by demotions from high-status jobs during the Depression...
...Collective bargaining, a difficult process in the best of times, can be learned "only by experience...
...Lynd's conception of industrial-union history drew its inspiration from the syndicalist streak in New Left thinking...
...Fifty years of history have passed since John L. Lewis launched the CIO, and so have nearly 50 years of historical writing about those events that Levinson first chronicled in Labor on the March (1937...
...They were mostly limited to strategically placed work groups (not on assembly-line work...
...So that, in the case at hand, the New Deal might impose the Wagner Act on an industrial business class too short-sighted to recognize its own long-term interests...
...1021-42...
...Tomlins's hero is not Robert Wagner or John L. Lewis but Samuel Gompers, for Gompers at least understood—in Tomlins's words—that "a counterfeit liberty is the most that American workers and their organizations [could] gain through the state...
...It furthered the expansion of unions which worked within the economic system...
...And much other social-history scholarship led by a variety of avenues—ethnicity, race, family, urbanism, and so on—into the study of working-class life...
...The political strategy pioneered by the industrial unions is also in shambles...
...9 Stanley Vittoz, "The Economic Foundations of Industrial Politics in the United States and the Emerging Structural Theory of the State in Capitalist Society: The Case of New Deal Labor Policy," Amerikastudien 27 (no...
...III As institutional analysis, the New Left approach redefined the terms, but not the terrain of industrial-union history...
...There was, first of all, a historical context for such a struggle...
...They were the work of young "new hires" who had little interest in the union and whose activities Friedlander considered "nihilistic...
...Whose hand was behind a strategy so ingeniously constructed to forestall radical change...
...But the manufacturing economy on which industrial unionism was built seems today also on its way to extinction...
...A logical question, of course, and one that instantly established a fresh reference point for thinking about the institutional history of industrial unionism...
...As such, . . . it marked the outer limits of disruption of the established industrial order that the law would tolerate...
...He and others of the New Left glimpsed revolution in the factory unrest of the Vietnam era and, on a grander scale, in the Paris spring of 1968...
...To an unexpected degree, the industrial-union movement seems to have been sparked by craft workers...
...459 united front against New Deal labor policy...
...Only step by step, as the union demonstrated its growing power in a series of confrontations with management, did the body of workers sign on...
...That ways could be found for evading or reconciling conflicting claims can certainly be demonstrated, as has been done, for example, by Ronald Filippelli's ingenious explanation of the success of the UE's CP leadership: it struck an implicit bargain with the membership, whereby the party line could be followed on the editorial page and in convention, but at the bargaining table primacy went strictly to bread-and-butter issues...
...James Weinstein, "Gompers and the New Liberalism," reprinted in James Weinstein and David W. Eakins, eds., For a New America: Essays . . . from "Studies on the Left" (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 111...
...those great bastions of the open shop—General Motors and United States Steel—caved in during early 1937, and industrial unionism swept the mass-production sector...
...It depends, of course, on how one defines the state...
...This was one of those moments...
...What has not been demonstrated is the existence of any rank-andfile conception of an alternative—say, of the shop-steward system that existed in England, or the even less structured shop-floor relations in Australia...
...they cast the founding of the CIO in the proper heroic mold...
...The group centering around Studies on the Left (1959-67), with William Appleman Williams as mentor, had advanced the thesis of corporate liberalism, which, first, identified America's corporate leaders as the key actors in the modern capitalist order, and, second, identified moderate reform as their principal method for stabilizing the system...
...The connections do not, however, run to the old corporate liberals but rather to early advocates in business and professional circles of the Keynesian state...
...Notes ' Staughton Lynd, "The Possibility of Radicalism in the Early 1930s: The Case of Steel," reprinted in James Green, ed., Workers' Struggles Past and Present: A "Radical America" Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), p. 190...
...But it implanted a syndicalist enthusiasm that, transmuted and refined, has to a considerable degree redefined the terms on which the historical study of industrial unionism has proceeded ever since...
...This view has been strongly underwritten by a theory of the state in capitalist societies advanced in the 1970s by such neo-Marxist writers as Nicos Poulantzis and Fred Block...
...3-36...
...We didn't care' is a common recollection of the sit-down veterans...
...they were called over grievances specific to those groups...
...Schatz's study of UE pioneers suggests that it did...
...Grievance procedures were installed in the first GM and U.S...
...So, consistently, these rank-and-file leaders were unrepresentative workers, and unrepresentative, as Friedlander said, in ways that gave them "more profound ideals of a broadly democratic nature...
...s Ronald Schatz, "Union Pioneers: The Founders of Local Unions at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1933-1937," Journal of American History 66 (December 1979), pp...
...Fraser has assimilated the New Left perspective, but the outcome is both more sophisticated and less pejorative than, say, Radosh's earlier work on Hillman...
...On this basis, James R. Prickett constructed a reperiodization of party history no 458 longer pegged to the swings in Comintern policy...
...Friedlander stresses the instrumental benefits...
...19th-century materials lent themselves much more readily to what social historians were trying to do...
...And, by its success, this union bureaucracy laid the groundwork for the transformation of a quiescent black labor force in 1935 into a militant union group a decade later...
...Ultimately, "we are going to get a workable system...
...It is precisely this flexibility and sophistication on the part of American businessmen," wrote James Weinstein in 1965, "that has given the system its strength and durability...
...In liberal historiography, the Wagner Act occupied a place of honor: it liberated workers from employer control and paved the way for collective bargaining...
...of the two leaders in front-welding, one was self-educated and probably of radical background, the other a devout Catholic active in church affairs...
...AND WHAT OF THE FUTURE...
...Communist trade-union work, wrote Martin Glaberman, was best described as "`bureaucratic'— the tendency to substitute the power of officials and institutions for the direct power of the rank and file...
...Consider two very recent studies at the far ends of the working-class spectrum...
...565-86...
...But that research must in the end be able to show that indeed "it could have been otherwise...
...Although the New Deal contributed only marginally to the unionization of the working class, it did help shape the movement which evolved...
...So we find James A. Gross's detailed account of the early NLRB devoted to describing the political counterattack that transformed a vigorous, independent NLRB "into a conservative, insecure, politically sensitive agency preoccupied with its own survival and reduced to deciding essentially marginal legal issues using legal tools of analysis exclusively...
...6 John Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1870-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977...
...Other routes, too, can be found to that end...
...One deals with the success of Endicott-Johnson's welfare policy in forestalling unionization at its extensive upstate New York shoe plants...
...But who did the containing...
...217-52...
...12 Steve Fraser, "From the 'New Unionism' to the New Deal," Labor History 25 (Summer 1984), pp...
...In Bernstein's schema, perfectly captured in the book's ending, the central history of Turbulent Years is about the institutionalization of the CIO...
...Nowhere else, recent scholarship suggests, was the conflict between labor traditions of autonomous work and the Taylor469 ist demand by management for control so sharply joined and so endemic as under American industrialism...
...Did that instrumental logic apply as well to the Communists...
...Ongoing research has vastly increased our fund of information: in their definitive 1977 biography of John L. Lewis, Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine call Alinsky's version of that first breakfast meeting "overly dramatic" and, indeed, they dismiss Alinsky's widely read 1949 biography (John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography) as largely fiction...
...The unit of study remained local but was defined by a single factory rather than by a 19th-century industrial town, and the local evidence came not from census records, town directories, and newspapers but almost entirely from the intensive interviewing of surviving participants...
...Thus, in a characteristic statement, Rick Hurd writes: The tendency was to eschew direct action and to opt instead for NLRB elections, or where capital was obstinate to file unfair labor practice complaints with the NLRB...
...With New Deal labor policy installed as the centerpiece in this alignment, a focus existed for thinking about intriguing questions of intention and design...
...No agency could claim exemption from this question and, given its syndicalist presuppositions, none passed muster—not the CIO, not the New Deal, not even the left...
...The guiding hand clearly was Senator Robert Wagner's...
...And that's what got us really thinking a lot about unionism...
...Much the same logic, one presumes, applied to the Socialist leadership of the aluminum workers in Kensington, Pa., and to the Lynn, Mass., electrical workers...
...This notion certainly runs as an undercurrent through the syndicalist visions of New Left scholars...
...Current scholarship, in fact, hinges very largely on the treatment of the CIO as a "mass movement...
...24 There also were scholars who were quick to voice their doubts about the rank-and-file formulation...
...One sees this, for example, in Steve Fraser's 461 current work on Sidney Hillman, who best fits the model of the labor leader well-connected to government and industry and actively pursuing a reconstructed labor-relations system...
...They became loyal union men (as did the immigrant workers in Friedlander's study), but they were not on the barricades in the great industrial battles of the 1930s...
...1 In Lynd's formulation, the rank and file becomes the true subject of New Deal labor history, and the logic of that history resides not—as Fine or Bernstein would have it—in how militancy progressed to stable collective bargaining but rather in how that process killed the rank-and-file character of industrial-union organization...
...We were skilled men on unskilled work...
...A rival generation of younger historians would have struck out Fine's qualification...
...By 1940, Gross's analysis suggests, we were already on course to the Reagan NLRB...
...Are we coming to the time when the CIO—at least in its original incarnation— will become the kind of historical subject that the Knights of Labor is today...
...That history turns on the theme of containment— of rank-and-file radical potential held in check and ultimately defeated...
...Perhaps it is time to coin a new historiographical designation, say, along the lines of postliberal revisionism...
...Here, too, Friedlander's findings have proved prescient...
...586-602...
...The wildcats and slow-downs in his parts plant sprang not from any class perspective or even from a strongly felt sense of grievance...
...President Roosevelt is meeting with a group of worried publishers in April 1937 at the height of the sit-down wave...
...With a sufficiently broad conception—one accommodating substantial internal conflict and uncertainty and stressing the enabling aspects of reform regimes (that is, that the New Deal created the conditions making the Wagner Act possible)—the New Deal doubtless can be made to fit the neo-Marxian mold...
...Friedlander undertook, in effect, a labor ethnography—arranging the workers partly by 464 occupational categories but mainly by ethnic and generational groupings—of an auto-parts plant located in the Polish Hamtranck district of Detroit...
...Its reality they must create for themselves...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
