NUMBER 74 FALL 2008
Abstracts for Full-Length Articles in ILWCH 74
The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History
Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore
Cornell University
Abstract: “The Long Exception” examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration–– a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression––than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American
history. Indeed, by the early seventies the arc of American history had fallen back
upon itself. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the “interregnum between Gilded Ages.” The article examines four central themes in building this argument: race, religion, class, and individualism.
Christ and the CIO: Blue-Collar Evangelicalism’s Crisis of Conscience and Political Turn in
Early Cold-War California
Darren Dochuk
Purdue University
Abstract: This article explores tensions within the Democratic Party’s uneasy
alliance of grassroots labor and blue-collar evangelicalism that collapsed in heated confrontation during California’s postwar political realignment. The context in which this played out is Ham and Eggs, one of California’s largest old-age welfare movements during the 1930s which, in the midst of economic reconstruction, found new (but short-lived) relevance in the late 1940s. From spring 1945 until summer 1946 Ham and Eggs rallied workers behind its message of economic redistribution and Christian Americanism in hopes of forcing new legislation on behalf of pensions for the elderly. In the process, it stirred a political storm that thrust it into a significance exceeding its original intent. At issue was the “labor question,” the vexing uncertainty animating American politics at this juncture about the extent to which New Deal liberalism’s labor-friendly initiatives and progressive impulses for economic freedom, racial equality, and social justice would be extended. Caught between a labor-Left movement within the Democratic Party that looked to extend New Deal liberalism and a galvanized Christian Right, which looked to roll it back, blue-collar evangelicals affiliated with Ham and Eggs confronted a new
political reality that compelled them to choose between their class and faith
commitments. With reluctance they chose the latter over the former. The decision
marked the beginning of blue-collar evangelicalism’s shift to the Right and ultimately
the formation of a broader evangelical political alliance that would prove instrumental in the rise of California’s conservative Republican movement.
"Things Are Different Down Here”: The 1955 Perfect Circle Strike, Conservative Civic Identity, and the Roots of the New Right in the 1950s Industrial Heartland
David M. Anderson
Louisiana Tech University
Abstract: The article examines the history of the violent 1955 Perfect Circle strike to join the growing body of labor history scholarship that rejects the existence of a postwar“labor-management accord.” Contrary to previous depictions of a postwar “class peace,” the small-town industrial Midwest stood as a key battleground between unionized workers and competitive-sector employers such as the Indiana-based Perfect Circle Corporation, a small, family-owned manufacturer, a model welfare capitalist firm, and one of the nation’s leading automotive parts producers. Driven by their desire to hold down labor costs and their own antistatist ideology, Perfect Circle’s owners had opposed the New Deal and, by the late 1930s, had shed their previous provincialism to join the national political coalition of business conservatives in the National Association of Manufacturers to secure the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. During the Cold War era, even while they were extending their political reach and expanding their operations overseas, Perfect Circle’s owners sought to forge labor-management unity by promoting a quaint vision of “heartland consensus,” a conservative civic identity that management was convinced would render unions unnecessary. As with many business conservatives, Perfect Circle owners tried to rid their plants of unions by tapping into an interlocking network of well-financed right-wing policy groups to mount an extensive employee educational program and public relations campaign in defense of “free enterprise.” Despite Perfect Circle’s vigorous efforts to undercut unionization, by 1953 the majority of workers at all four of its east-central Indiana plants voted to affiliate with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Conflict between labor and management culminated in the violent 1955 strike, in which Perfect Circle handed the UAW a decisive defeat while enjoying widespread support from the regional and national press. The strike became a conservative cause ce´le`bre during the 1957 national “right-to-work” campaign and a centerpiece of the Senate’s 1958 McClellan “Labor Rackets” hearings, which launched Barry Goldwater’s bid for the 1964 presidency. The article concludes that Perfect Circle and many other employers not only continued to contest unions in the 1950s but also played a neglected but important role in the formation of the New Right.
The Racketeer Menace and Antiunionism in the Mid-Twentieth Century US
David Witwer
Penn State Harrisburg
Abstract: In the postwar era, conservatives manipulated concerns about union corruption and organized crime in order to score political points against New Deal Democrats and to win new legal restrictions on union power. The resulting racketeer menace had much in common with the contemporary red scare. Antiunion conservatives framed the issue of labor racketeering in terms that resembled the language then being mobilized against internal communist espionage and subversion. This rhetoric proliferated in the congressional debates of the postwar era. Proponents of the Taft-Hartley Act invoked the racketeer menace in 1946 and 1947. They depicted the law as an effort to curb racketeering and thus protect workers and the general public by restricting abusive union power. In the years that followed, a series of congressional hearings into union corruption kept attention focused on the issue of racketeering. For the Eisenhower Administration this campaign against labor racketeering offered a chance to peel the working-class vote away from the Democratic Party by politically dividing union members from their leadership. The culmination of this trend came at the end of the
1950s during the McClellan Committee hearings, which was the largest congressional investigation up to that time. Those hearings transformed Teamsters President James R. Hoffa into a potent symbol of the danger posed by labor racketeering. The committee’s revelations and the publicity they received undercut the labor movement. Polls showed growing public skepticism toward unions, and especially union leaders. Such attitudes helped conservatives win a new round of legislative restrictions on organized labor in the form of the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959).
“We Must Bring Together a New Coalition”: The Challenge of Working-Class White Ethnics to Color-Blind Conservatism in the 1970s
Dennis Deslippe
Franklin & Marshall College
Abstract: This essay examines working-class white ethnics’ rejection of middle-class suburbanite notions of racial innocence, meritocratic individualism, and idealized equality in post-Civil Rights America. Most scholarly attention on white ethnics has tended to dwell on well-documented racism or on their crass embrace of programs earned by others’ hard-fought activism (a kind of “me-tooism”). I argue that these interpretations do not adequately capture the complex and often contradictory expressions of“ethniclass” identity in a decade characterized by working-class revolt, backlash, and retreat. I focus on white ethnic leaders allied with the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (headed by civil rights veteran Msgr. Geno Baroni); seizing on the capacious definition of “disadvantage” common in the early 1960s, they worked with African Americans and others for increased job training, formed coalitions with organized labor, and lobbied for expanded affirmative action. As they stumbled to construct an economic vision beyond the fading deindustrializing cities from which mainstream liberals seemed disconnected with their version of “rights consciousness,” ethnic leaders articulated positions based on an unwieldy mix of principle and parochialism that defies easy generalization. Given the waning of the white ethnic movement by the late 1970s, their significance lies less in legislative or policy gains and more in their imprint on civic and popular discourse in a period where, despite its powerful effects in the corridors of power, color-blind conservatism fails to capture the views of a majority of white Americans today.
Permanent Replacements and the End of Labor’s “Only True Weapon”
John Logan
University of California-Berkeley
Abstract: This article analyzes the origins and impact of one of the most powerful antiunion weapons used by American employers during the past four decades: the right to use and threaten to use permanent replacement workers during economic strikes. It examines the policy debate over replacements in the 1930s and 1940s, the increasing use of permanent replacements in the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of a powerful and sophisticated “strike management industry,” and the unsuccessful efforts of organized labor and its political allies to amend the National Labor Relations Act to outlaw permanent replacements. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the relationship between the “striker replacement doctrine” and declining strike levels in the postwar decades.
Consuming Lattes and Labor, or Working at Starbucks
Bryant Simon
Temple University
Abstract: This is an ethnographic portrait of working at one of the most conspicuous components of the neoliberal order: the upscale looking, fast-food acting coffee chain, Starbucks. Simon discusses the emotional labors of being a happy and chatty “partner” (employee), the difficulties of the uneven scheduling, the unexpected physical aspects of the job, and the culture of conformity at the nation’s largest seller of coffee and affordable luxury. The essay assesses the corporations’ reputation for being a good employer and contains extensive interviews with Wobblies trying to organize the chain. It suggests how workers are consumed by and with the brand in what the author calls “New Age welfare capitalism.”
“Nothing Special to Offer the Negro”: Revisiting the “‘Debsian View’ of the Negro Question”
William P. Jones
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Abstract: Since the early twentieth century Eugene V. Debs and his essay “The Negro in the Class Struggle” have been cited repeatedly as examples of an alleged indifference among white radicals to African Americans and the historical significance of racism in the United States. A close reading of the essay reveals just the opposite. Not only did Debs support African Americans’ struggle for equality, he believed that it was critical to the realization of America’s democratic promise. That position alienated him from other white Socialists, but it won the admiration of African American radicals including W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. This essay examines how Debs’s essay came to be interpreted as a capitulation to racism and, over time, alleged indifference to African Americans and the significance of racism in the history of the United States.