Turbulent Years
Barbash, Jack
Turbulent Years The CIO Challenge to the AFL. A history of the American labor movement, 1935-1941, by Walter Ga-lenson. Harvard University Press. 732 pp. |9.75. Reviewed by Jack Barbash Segment...
...The seminal period in the development of the modern labor movement is the 1935-1941 period which Walter Galenson has now exposed to detailed investigation...
...There is a concluding chapter called "Some General Aspects of the Labor Movement," but it is hardly more than a clean-up job of some of the neglected tendencies, such as legislation, politics, and international affairs, and all of these are done quite cursorily...
...But this period has meant much more than AFL vs...
...And it is this delineation of the full thrust of the conflict that makes for the superior quality of Galenson's performance...
...What is lacking is a breadth of treatment and analysis which would pull together the quality of this seminal period in the development of the American labor movement...
...Each chapter is a self-contained monograph in its own right and contains brief accounts of the economic organization of the industry and the prior industrial relations history...
...Among the former there are chapters on steel, auto, rubber, textile, petroleum, electrical, and lumber...
...Galenson's great contribution to an understanding of the unions' new role is that he digs into the historical raw material of the times, industry by industry, to come out with the salient characteristics of each situation...
...This is the period, too, in which the unions established themselves as major power centers in the society...
...For example, Galenson says, "looking backward, there can be very little doubt that trade unionism has had profound effects on the performance of the American economy," but nowhere does he spell out by way of generalization what the "profound effects" were...
...Reviewed by Jack Barbash Segment by segment the full story of labor's turbulent years under the New Deal is being pieced together by the scholars...
...Too much of labor history has been written as if an entity called the AFL encounters an entity called the CIO, and much of the written labor history of this period is of this kind—AFL vs...
...There is ample discussion of these elements as they fit into the specifics of each case...
...Galenson fails, however, to mine from this rich detail a sense of the style and the quality of this period...
...It is the period in which the American labor movement threw over the traces of the big sleep of the 1920's and moved in to organize mass production industry...
...For the most part what we have here is a series of individual pieces, each of them first-rate and valuable and suggestive...
...But all of these are minor criticisms in terms of the rich storehouse of material that Galenson has provided...
...He has made it easier for the generalizer to move in...
...The accent is on organizing history, internal union developments, and evolution of the collective bargaining relationship...
...There is enough intrinsic drama and pace in each of the situations so that a sense of excitement is maintained throughout...
...There is no synthesis of Communist penetration, the structure and government of the labor movement, the impact of personality and the effect of NLRB doctrine...
...Galenson covers both the new organizing situations and the renaissance of the older, more established unions...
...I think, too, that the role of personality in the 1935-1941 resurgence could have been dealt with in a more imaginative way...
...He explores almost all of the major industrial situations in detail and with insight...
...among the latter, women's and men's garment industries, teamsters, machinists, building trades, printing, and railroads...
...The chief criticism I have is that Galenson fails to distil the vital essences in a broad, generalized analysis of this period...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
