Joshua B. Freeman's In Transit and Gary Gerstle's Working-class Americanism

...Freeman seems to know, for example, precisely how many workers at which New York transit facilities donned TWU buttons and when...

...Communists and socialists dominated the leadership of these locals, but their radicalism was always tethered by the exigencies of union-building and the need to neutralize enemies inside and outside the ranks of labor who were ever alert to "unAmerican" influences...

...Since unskilled Irish workers were among the most faithful listeners to Coughlin's broadcasts, the right-wing Jesuits made some converts...

...345 pp...

...Union socials always featured Irish bands, and Mike Quill—who later became the TWU's authoritarian leader—first rose to prominence as the bon vivant MC of dances sponsored by Hibernian associations...

...By the end of World War II, however, a growing antileft opposition was telling workers that to "be American," they should eschew all forms of prejudice, including class hostility...

...Both he and Gerstle deliver microhistory at its best without neglecting the larger questions...

...But they place such traditional topics in a richer context, where they become familiar if dramatic background scenery in which a more fundamental play of ethnic, workplace, gender, and ideological allegiances occurred...

...q WINTER • 1990 • 123...

...Meanwhile, a band of CP cadre (to which Quill belonged, although he may never have formally joined the party) directed union affairs, bobbing this way and weaving that to take advantage of any openings provided by the companies and the administration of Fiorello LaGuardia (which was gradually moving to exert municipal control over the entire system...

...Gerstle describes the insular environment of a community dedicated to the survival of Quebecois values and religion...

...Dissent, Fall 1985] Joshua Freeman's In Transit and Gary Gerstle's Working-class Americanism are among the best examples of what the marriage of political commitment and scholarly detachment can create.* Each * Other recent works include those of Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War 11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and his forthcoming biography of Walter Reuther...

...The very name of the new body—the Transport Workers Union (TWU)—had an Irish provenance, resembling that of a republican institution once led by Jim Larkin and the martyred James Connolly...

...But they appealed to the rank and file by portraying the union as the bearer of consensual American traditions of "independence" and "democracy...

...It took an unusual alliance in 1934 between Communists and left-wing veterans of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to solve the problem...

...Ronald Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at GE and Westinghouse, 1923-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983...

...The book is a feast of telling details...

...By melding church doctrine with the new civil religion of cultural pluralism, priests and other French-Canadian conservatives ousted the radicals and took over the union...

...Running the subways, buses, and trolleys was, for decades, a job done mostly by Irish-Americans...

...Before the 1930s, several craft unions had tried to organize these workers, who routinely labored through a seventyhour week...

...WINTER • 1990 • 121 urged members to emulate the Pilgrims and the "wise, hardy and staunch" pioneers in covered wagons who took risks to attain prosperity for their families...

...Peter Friedlander, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936-39: A Study in Class and Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975...

...39.50...

...But, by the 1960s, they no longer could motivate a new generation of working Americans...

...L the 1920s, despite these assertions of ethnic autonomy, Woonsocket textile workers were also beginning to enjoy the fruits of an "American standard of living" and realizing how their political and cultural isolation prevented them from rising further...

...These were significant advances that require no apologies or second thoughts...

...When the Great Depression devastated the textile industry, they were prepared, Gerstle argues, to welcome a union drive if it did not challenge traditions they held dear and if it articulated ideals they held in common with most other Americans...

...This ironic concurrence is not hard to explain...

...The IRA men, most of whom had emigrated to the United States after the end of the Irish civil war in the mid-twenties, brought a well-deserved reputation for toughness and extensive contacts with a Hibernian workforce that was wary of outsiders...

...The town, in Gerstle's phrase, "had become little more than an industrial junkyard...

...This .pecies of Americanism was, of course, ubiquitous during the years of the Popular Front...

...Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press...

...At a time when the industrial unions launched during the Great Depression are struggling with the symptoms of what may be an irreversible decline, labor scholars are producing works of originality and 120 • DISSENT Books insight about the 1930s and 1940s —a more sanguine, though not completely triumphant, era...

...As David Brody remarked several years ago, the steady erosion of the manufacturing economy and of the unions that grew up in the age of mass production enables scholars on the left to separate the CIO as it actually was from the ideal instrument of working-class uplift they would have preferred...

...And he traces the union's expansion into other regions of the country where, in the late 1940s, it established organized labor's first foothold on passenger airlines...

...It avoided references to the church or the faith...

...He gives a clear explanation of the tangled and always contentious process by which the New York transit system was unified under municipal author122 • DISSENT Books ity...

...The original ITU leaders sought to equate patriotism with "industrial democracy," an ongoing struggle to widen the scope of workers' control within the limits of capitalism...

...Meanwhile, CIO unions held their own, in part, by learning to operate within a postwar structure that rewarded playing by the new rules, albeit ones that organized labor had helped create...

...Neighborhood picket lines and enforced silence were used to shame individuals who broke a strike or refused to pay their dues...

...Although these forces did not attain their goal, they probably did convince the men who ran the TWU to show more deference to the church and to voice increasing irritation at policy directives from CP headquarters that clashed with the views and interests of transit workers...

...Woonsocket, Rhode Island, was a city of 50,000 residents, two-thirds of whom were French-Canadians who had begun to emigrate to the United States at the turn of the century to find work in woolen and cotton mills owned, in many cases, by their countrymen and a handful of French investors...

...Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988...

...In its campaign to win and hold the support of thousands of transit workers, the TWU continued to mix elements from Irish tradition and Leninist strategy...

...Transit workers in the CP, then at the end of its ultrarevolutionary Third Period, brought a tenacious commitment to organizing this key industry in America's largest city...

...and a new consensus favored democratic rights for wage earners and a limited welfare state...

...At the same time, the liberal Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) was actively defending TWU members who had been disciplined for opposing union policy...

...WORKING-CLASS AMERICANISM: THE POLITICS OF LABOR IN A TEXTILE CITY, 1914-1960, by Gary Gerstle...

...Contrary to his prolabor reputation, Mayor LaGuardia constantly tried to limit the rights and benefits of TWU members...

...Freeman's book provides far more than a nuanced account of ethno-political conflict within the union...

...Then, perhaps, life on the job will again enter the realm of urgent politics rather than remaining simply a subject for individual grumbling about conditions that seem impossible to change...

...The past can [now] be understood on its own terms," wrote Brody, "a lost world to be recaptured in the historian's imagination...

...But the combination of a bewildering variety of jobs—from ticket agent to roofer to shop mechanic—and sophisticated union-busting by the IRT and BMT, then privately owned subway lines, defeated all organizing attempts...

...For today's left, the most important of these is why contemporary industrial unions have not fulfilled the promise of their heroic origins...

...Daniel Nelson, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900-1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988...

...During the late 1930s, priests at a Jesuit labor school who were admirers of Father Charles Coughlin tried to topple the TWU leadership with anticommunist invective and charges that Quill and his allies were allowing a speedup on the subways...

...The shifting demands of the imperious economy obviously narrowed the possibilities: by the mid-1950s, most Woonsocket textile firms had either gone out of business or left the high wages and ethnic enclaves of New Engiand...

...Freeman also narrates the TWU's active involvement in the sizable left wing of city politics (Quill himself was, for a time, an American Labor party councilman from the Bronx...

...They are, moreover, skillful riders on that long wave of innovative scholarship in social and cultural history that, over the past quarter century, has completely transformed our understanding of how American working people thought and acted...

...and Ronald Edsforth, Class Conflict and carefully details—with the aid of oral history—the growth of a union in an important industry in a single city...

...But Gerstle is the first historian to devote an intricate narrative to showing what a flexible and fickle language it was, available for the purposes of corporatist Catholics and secular radicals alike...

...The organization that accomplished this dual mission was the Independent Textile Union (ITU...

...Beyond such factors, both Gerstle and Freeman suggest that to lament what the CIO might have been is to suffer from historical myopia...

...For unions to revive in the 1990s, they will have to discover, again, the subversive potential of working-class cultures—among both native-born Americans and the new immigrants from Asia and Latin America...

...These new histories don't ignore sit-down strikes, the deeds of national union officials, and factional divisions...

...This charismatic leader did not break with the CP until 1948, but the ideological tensions had been building for years before...

...Not surprisingly, a number of New York Irishmen were not happy with such a formidable left-wing presence...

...In the final analysis (as Marxists used to say), the ancestral faith of Ireland proved more durable than the gospel of William Z. Foster and Joseph Stalin...

...In fact, Gerstle argues that the forging of a patriotic identity was central to what industrial workers achieved in the 1930s and 1940s...

...The ITU was established by a small group of French-speaking Belgian craft workers whose own views had been formed in the anticlerical, socialist milieu of the Belgian Labor party...

...And both portray the organized left in a respectful yet sober fashion...

...Of this approach, Gerstle writes, "Adherence to the American creed of the equality of all men would lead capital and labor, as it would Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, whites and blacks, to respect each other, mend their differences and live harmoniously...

...Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987...

...the popularity of the New Deal cleared space for the emergence of a labor-based Democratic party in scores of industrial towns and cities...

...Both reveal how Catholic immigrant cultures helped to shape and then alter the political complexion of the new unions...

...New York City transit workers, according to Joshua Freeman's fascinating study, faced a similar conflict between radical union leaders and their devoutly Catholic critics...

...According to Freeman, during World War II Mike Quill began to display his piety in a sincere effort "to bathe in the glory of both Rome and Moscow...

...The result is a cluster of local and regional studies that explains, really for the first time, how little-known leaders and anonymous rank-and-file members carried out the changes usually identified with celebrated worthies like John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman...

...In New York, Mike Quill routinely insisted that the Transit Authority grant a long list of exorbitant demands while, in private, he was negotiating agreements that required higher productivity from his members...

...Most contemporary historians of the CIO are former New Leftists, old enough to appreciate the pain of political eclipse but too young to have been partisans in the events they now interpret...

...French was commonly spoken, and, until the Great Depression, the biggest political campaign was waged against a 1922 state law requiring parochial schools to teach most subjects in English...

...At first glance, his chosen locale would not seem the most likely place for a battle over Americanism...

...Steve Fraser, "From the New Unionism' to the New Deal," Labor History 25 (Summer 1984): 405-30 and his forthcoming biography of Sidney Hillman...

...The 1930s upsurge of the people Mary Heaton Vorse called "labor's new millions" occurred amid a uniquely favorable set of cultural and political changes: Immigrant workers began to regard themselves and demand to be treated as authentic Americans...

...The ITU organ :.ompared hostile employers to King George III and Cultural Consensus: The Making of a Mass Consumer Society in Flint, Michigan (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987...