Abstract
More important to American workers than the faltering steps taken by the New Deal towards economic recovery was the startling growth of organised labour. The New Deal may have failed to disturb the basic structure of American business, but it did appear to have facilitated the formation of a countervailing force in the trades union movement. The 1930s saw the largest ever growth in union membership in a single decade in both absolute and relative terms: trades union membership trebled; by 1940 23 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force was organised. The gains were to be decisive and permanent: by 1945 the war had consolidated the growth in membership at 25 per cent of the workforce. Thereafter there would be no significant increases.
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Bibliographical Essay
Much of the best historical writing on the 1930s is to be found in labour history. Here the studies of national policy can be supplemented by history written ‘from the bottom up’. Not only are there excellent narrative and analytical accounts of legislative battles, union leadership struggles, and great strikes, but there are also fine case studies of the grievances and responses of ordinary workers.
The rich, dramatic account of labour’s struggles by Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1969), can be complemented by a number of particularly astute interpretative overviews of the decade:
David Brody, ‘The Emergence of Mass Production Unionism’ and ‘Reinterpreting the Labor History of the 1930s’, in Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (Oxford University Press: New York, 1980), pp. 82–172;
David Montgomery, ‘American Workers and the New Deal Formula’, in Workers Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1979), pp. 153–80;
Melvyn Dubofsky, ‘Not So “Turbulent Years”: Another Look at the American 1930’s’, Amerikastudien 24 (1979), pp. 5–20;
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 (1982), pp. 365–412;
Howell Harris, ‘The Snares of Liberalism? Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Shaping of Federal Labour Relations Policy in the United States, ca. 1915–1947’, in Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1985), pp. 148–91; and
Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1920–1985 (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1985), pp. 26–61. All these essays subtly weigh the varying degrees of importance of legal change, economic circumstances, union leadership, and rank-and-file pressure in the labour breakthrough.
For successful labour exploitation of Section 7a under the NRA, see Bernard Bellush, The Failure of the NRA (Norton: New York, 1975), pp. 88–94, and
James P. Johnson, The Politics of Soft Coal: The Bituminous Industry from World War I Through the New Deal (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1979), pp. 166–93. For the more important failure of the NRA to protect union organisation in the face of determined employer resistance, see Bellush, The Failure of the NRA, pp. 94–135,
Sidney Fine, The Automobile under the Blue Eagle (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1963), pp. 142–409, and
Louis Galambos, Competition and Cooperation: The Emergence of a National Trade Association (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1966), pp. 230–3, 243–6, 257–68.
The ideas behind the Wagner Act, its passage, and the efforts to ensure that it withstood challenges to its constitutionality are covered in Joseph J. Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (Atheneum: New York, 1971), pp. 190–8, and
Peter H. Irons, The New Deal Lawyers (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1982), pp. 203–89.
See also the exhaustive James A. Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board, 1933–1937 (State University of New York Press: Albany, 1974).
John L. Lewis’s seizure of the opportunity to organise mass-production workers is best followed in the first-rate biography of the Mine Workers’ leader, Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (Quadrangle New York Times Books: New York, 1977), pp. 181–386. For the great CIO breakthrough see: automobiles,
Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–37 (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1969), and
John Barnard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers (Little, Brown: Boston, 1983), pp. 18–69; steel, Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, pp. 432–98; rubber,
Daniel Nelson, ‘The Great Goodyear Strike of 1936’, Ohio History 92 (1983), pp. 6–36, ‘Origins of the Sit-Down Era: Worker Militancy and Innovation, 1934–1938’, Labor History 23 (1982), pp. 198–225, and ‘The Rubber Workers’ Southern Strategy: Labor Organizing in the New Deal South, 1933–1943’, The Historian 46 (1984), pp. 319–38; electrical goods,
Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–60 (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1983).
Interpretations which stress the radicalism of rank-and-file workers and the conservative efforts of government and union leaders to defuse that threat are Alice and Staughton Lynd (eds.), Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Beacon Press: Boston, 1973), pp. 1–8,
James R. Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (Hill and Wang: New York, 1980), pp. 133–73, and
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (Pantheon: New York, 1977), pp. 96–180. Rank and File contains a vivid set of oral history interviews which highlight both the extent of shop-floor grievances and the political radicalism of local activists.
Rank-and-file militancy has been carefully studied in relation to seniority, work roles, ethnic background, and Depression grievances in Peter Friedlander, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939: A Study in Class and Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1975),
John Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1870–1940 (University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1977), pp. 142–9,
Gary Gerstle, ‘The Mobilization of the Working-Class Community: The Independent Textile Union in Woonsocket, 1931–1947’, Radical History Review 17 (1978), pp. 161–72, Nelson, ‘The Great Goodyear Strike’ and ‘Origins of the Sit-Down Era’, and Schatz, The Electrical Workers, pp. 80–164.
Bernard Sternsher provides a probing and comprehensive review of the literature in ‘Great Depression Labor Historiography in the 1970s: Middle Range Questions, Ethno-cultures and Levels of Generalization’, Reviews in American History 11 (1983), pp. 300–19.
These studies focusing on the rank and file begin to fill a major gap in New Deal historiography. Much has been written on the aims of policy-makers and intellectuals to preserve the local community and its values. Little has been written on the actual impact of the Depression and the New Deal on individual communities smaller than a big city like Boston. There are no studies to match the classic contemporary sociological studies of Robert and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (Harcourt Brace: New York, 1937), and
John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1937). The innovative studies by labour historians are the first steps towards the social history of industrial communities in the 1930s. Rural and small-town communities of the 1930s still await their historians.
Communist activity in the labour movement of the 1930s is no longer treated as a conspiracy to deceive American workers. The most positive assessment of the party’s role is Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Union (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1980). Keeran argues that in the car industry ‘the communists were legitimate and often outstanding trades unionists and good Communists, and they made an important, even crucial, contribution to building the auto union in the 1930s’.
Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977) is wider in scope, but nevertheless concentrates on the auto workers. His more sceptical assessment of the Communist role is partly shaped by his personal memories of bitter left-wing internecine feuds.
Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (Basic Books: New York, 1983), pp. 223–50, relentlessy exposes Communist weakness.
Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1966), pp. 97–218, graphically illustrates the violent lengths to which antiunion employers were prepared to go and demonstrates the effect of the public exposure of their tactics. Eventual union victories over the most hostile employers — Harlan County coal operators and the Ford Motor Company — are traced in
John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On?: The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39 (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1979), and
August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (Oxford University Press: New York, 1979), pp. 34–107.
The continued difficulty of organising unions in defiance of local community sentiment is most obviously demonstrated in the South, see J. Wayne Flynt, ‘The New Deal and Southern Labor’, in James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namaroto (eds.), The New Deal and the South (University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 1984), pp. 63–95, and
Charles H. Martin, ‘Southern Labor Relations in Transition: Gadsden, Alabama, 1930–1943’, Journal of Southern History 47 (1981), pp. 545–68.
Daniel Nelson describes the debilitating, but not fatal, effect of lack of community support in the North in ‘The CIO at Bay: Labor Militancy and Politics in Akron, 1936–1938’, Journal of American History 71 (1984), pp. 565–86.
There is a natural tendency to concentrate on the great dramatic strikes of the 1930s and to focus on the CIO. Robert H. Zieger has patiently built up a broader picture of worker experience during the New Deal looking at two types of union which historians usually dismiss as ineffective. His Madison’s Battery Workers, 1934–1952: A History of Federal Labor Union 19587 (Industrial and Labor Relations Press: Ithaca, 1977) describes an AFL Federal Labor Union which survived. Rebuilding the Paper Workers’ Union, 1933–1941 (University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville, 1982) examines an AFL industrial union whose membership rose from 4,000 in 1933 to 60,000 in 1941 and which eventually saw off its CIO rival.
Christopher L. Tomlins also shows how traditional AFL unions revived alongside CIO unions in the late 1930s, ‘AFL Unions in the 1930s: Their Performance in Historical Perspective’, Journal of American History 65 (1979), pp. 1021–42.
Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1982), pp. 15–40, emphatically refutes any notion that employers followed a sophisticated corporate liberal strategy in the 30s. His description of management strategies in the war and after in The Right to Manage, pp. 41–204, and
Nelson N. Lichtenstein’s analysis of union strategies, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1982), together show how the 1940s decisively shaped the ‘responsible’ unionism of modern America. See also Harris, ‘The Snares of Liberalism’, Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, pp. 62–136, and
James A. Gross, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937–1947 (State University of New York Press: Albany, 1981).
In two wide-ranging, authoritative essays, David Brody analyses why labour’s bright post-war hopes were dashed, ‘The Uses of Power I: The Industrial Background’ and ‘The Use of Power II: Political Action’, Workers in Industrial America, pp. 173–257. Christopher L. Tomlins seems to blame state involvement in industrial relations for most of labour’s troubles in The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1985). The Wagner Act, he argues, gave workers a ‘counterfeit liberty’. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, pp. 137–99, shrewdly analyses labour’s strength and weaknesses since 1950 and concludes on a gloomy note on the unions’ future in Reagan’s America. Graham K. Wilson offers a vigorous, if unfashionable, defence of labour’s post-war record in Unions in American National Politics (Macmillan: London, 1979).
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© 1989 Anthony J. Badger
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Badger, A.J. (1989). Strife and Satisfaction: Labour. In: The New Deal. American History in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18848-2_4
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