The following is a chapter out of Ideas, Ideologies, and Social Movements Edited by Peter Coclanis and Stuart Bruchey  1999 University of South Carolina Press

Ideas of the AmericanLabor Movement, 1880-1950

Gary Gerstle

For many years, scholars of the American labor movement were preoccupied with an ideology‑socialism‑that seemed curiously absent from the ranks of American workers. At a time when socialism and later communism were winning the hearts of the European masses, American workers seemed indifferent or antagonistic to it. To the extent to which they participated in the labor movement, they did so in organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), that were avowedly antisocialist. The explanations of this exceptionalism varied, with Werner Sombart stressing the affluence of American workers, Louis Hartz emphasizing the absence of a feudal inheritance, and Marc Karson underscoring the conservative influence of Catholicism on a predominately Catholic working class. But no one seemed to doubt socialism's marginality to American labor and American politics. A close corollary of this view was that class did not have the same salience here as it did in Europe.

In such exceptional circumstances, these same observers agreed, there arose a distinctively American brand of trade unionism. Variously labeled "bread and butter," "pure and simple," and "job-conscious" unionism, this American phenomenon, associated with the American Federation of Labor and its iron willed, ex-Marxist leader, Samuel Gompers, was invariably described as hostile not only to socialism but to ideas and intellectuals of all persuasions. This labor movement was depicted-and often depicted itself-as hard-nosed rather than idealistic, practical rather than visionary, oriented toward the interests of ordinary workers rather than to those of dreamy radicals. Its goal was to get American workers what they most wanted and what the American cultural and political environment most encouraged its people to seek: "More!" in Gompers's famous declaration.  Some observers praised this development as a wise adaptation to the circumstances of American life and wished the AFL and Gompers well; others deplored it as an abdication of labor's mission to transform social and political life. But virtually all conceded that "bread and butter unionism" was indeed the defining characteristic of American labor.

The Challenge of Republicanism

This view came under attack in the 1970s and 1980s, largely by practitioners of the "new labor history," by social historians, and by historians of socialism. These scholars, at first, did not so much challenge the earlier portrait of the AFL as question the centrality of the AFL to the history of American labor. Turning their backs on Gompers, they began recovering the history of other groups of workers and labor organizations that earlier scholars had either ignored or dismissed as insignificant. Melvyn Dubofsky's meticulous history of the Industrial Workers of the World revealed the importance of syndicalism between 1900 and 1920. Nick Salvatore's gripping biography of Eugene Debs, in which he was able to show Debs's rootedness in American political and religious traditions, persuaded historians to accord more significance to American socialism than they once had. Herbert Gutman's stunning studies of long‑forgotten Gilded Age labor struggles made that era seem far more turbulent, class conscious, and radical than previous accounts had suggested. Alan Dawley's and Sean Wilentzs studies of workingmen brought a similar perspective to the antebellum era. Leon Fink rehabilitated the Knights of Labor, a late‑nineteenth‑century labor organization that earlier scholars had written off as thoroughly impractical, unworkable, and thus inconsequential. In Fink's telling, the Knights were effective organizers, politically shrewd, and radical in their resistance to capitalist development and wage-dependency. In the 1880s, in Fink's judgment, the Knights "built the largest and most representative labor body until its time" and "probably the single largest unionizing movement in the Western world in the 1880s."⁸ And until the 1890s, it was far more successful than Gompers's fledgling AFL.

David Montgomery carried this revisionist perspective into the history of the AFL itself. In his magisterial The Fall of the House of Labor, Montgomery convincingly demonstrated that the AFL was a house with many mansions. Bread and butter unionists, many concentrated in the building trades, controlled some of the more imposing mansions, to be sure. But the AFL was full of socialists who comprised as much as a third of its membership. And, at certain points, the socialists challenged Gompers's control, actually ousting him from leadership in 1893 and almost securing in that year adoption of a plank calling for the nationalization of American industry; in 1921, they challenged once again, and almost succeeded.⁴

Twenty-five years of research by the new labor historians produced a historical stage crowded with labor organizations of varied compositions and ambitions. These organizations brought many ideas to the American labor movement: several kinds of socialism and syndicalism, some built on a desire for what Montgomery had labeled "workers' control. "⁵ Equally important were the efforts by native‑born and foreign‑born workers alike to transform religious and ethnocultural traditions into tools of working-class protest. Herbert Gutman stressed the importance of the "Christian spirit" in enabling workers to counterpose values of justice, dignity, and compassion to the exploitative and demeaning character of capitalist development. Immigrant Catholics brought notions of moral economy, a just wage, and fair price to bear on the market forces that bore down hard upon them. Immigrants of all sorts transformed Old World traditions of resistance into tools of anticapitalist protest.⁶

In these studies, one idea seemed more important than the rest: republicanism. Taking their cue from colonial scholars such as J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood, labor historians began to argue that republicanism was the true legacy of the American Revolution.⁷ In the republican vision, the nation would be comprised of independent citizens united by their commitment toward preserving liberty for all. Unlike liberalism, which defined liberty in terms of the right of each individual to pursue his private interest, republicanism emphasized the importance of a rich, vital public realm in which citizens would exercise their democratic rights, cultivate habits of cooperation and virtue, and enrich each other's experience of liberty. In order for this republican realm to flourish, citizens had to be intellectually and economically independent. Hence, republicanism's most ardent supporters, such as Thomas Jefferson, argued that a proprietary democracy, a political society comprised of farmers, artisans, and other producers who controlled their own labor and property, stood the best chance of sustaining the republican dream. Jefferson and others became increasingly vocal critics of capitalism, a system they viewed as stripping farmers and artisans of their economic independence and reducing them to the servile status of wage laborers. Capitalism concentrated power in the hands of a few and mired the masses in relations of economic dependency; in such circumstances, democracy could not survive. Power would drive out virtue and corrupt liberty, and the republic would fall. It was this belief that explains the presence of this remarkable statement in the preamble to the Knights of Labor constitution: "We declare an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage‑system of labor and the republican system of government."⁸

The new labor historians found the republican critique of capitalism everywhere in the nineteenth century: in the workingmen's movements of the antebellum years, in the labor and populist agitation of the 1880s and 1890s, and even in the American Federation of Labor and the Socialist Party of the early twentieth century. American workers, far from being preoccupied with material gain, seem to have been inspired by a glorious idea: that those who labored were to control their economic destiny, and through such control preserve the American republic, the world's most remarkable experiment in popular liberty.⁹

The architects of this view, such as Wilentz, hoped to show that republicanism constituted a mature class consciousness, and thus that class conflict was as fully developed and fully articulated here as it was in any of the industrializing nations of western Europe. But this effort cannot be regarded as more than partially successful. Republicanism never was the coherent class-conscious ideology that some claimed it to have been. The labor republicanism of the nineteenth century was, in fact, a complex and shifting amalgam of ideologies. In addition to a healthy portion of classical republicanism, its ingredients included a good measure of natural rights liberalism and, as Leon Fink has shrewdly pointed out, a strong lacing of Anglo‑American fraternalism. For this reason, it was compatible with a variety of social visions, some markedly less class‑conscious than others. Labor republicanism could and did sustain collective visions of escape from wage labor, visions in which workers were imagined to be pooling their resources to free themselves from their employers and establish cooperatively owned and operated industries. But labor republicanism supported with equal vigor individualist formulas for escape. Countless nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century Americans have expressed their distaste for wage labor and their yearning for independence not through trade unionism but through independent proprietorship. They became farmers, small businessmen and manufacturers, shopkeepers, barowners, professionals‑occupations in which they could be their own bosses, in charge of their own labor. They swelled the ranks of small businessmen (and of the Republican Party) as much as they did the ranks of class‑conscious workers. The ease with which "class‑conscious" labor leaders such as Terence Powderly, John Lewis, and others moved from militant labor organization to independent proprietorship and back again reveals particularly well how the republican thirst for economic independence could lead the same individuals in profoundly different directions."

This same obsession with independence also justified a range of conservative, even reactionary, positions vis-a-vis blacks, women, immigrants, and the unskilled. A detestation of dependence accompanied the high regard for independence. Such disgust could and did prompt some labor republicans to launch movements to raise the dependent classes to a proud and independent status. A good deal of the energy flowing into the suffrage movement, the Knights of Labor, and Populism can be understood in these terms." But what if dependence was thought to be rooted in biological weakness rather than in exploitative social relations? What if women were deemed unsuited by "nature" for republican citizenship or if African Americans, Slavs, the Chinese, or some other group was thought to be constitutionally incapable of achieving independence? Republican‑ism offered those who thought in these racialist terms a rationale for depriving the "dependent" classes of their civil rights and excluding them from citizenship ranks. The very strength of republicanism helps to explain how this "land of liberty" could "thrive" while keeping large portions of its population in various kinds of servitude. Its discursive power makes sense as well of the hysterical fear of dependence‑far more extreme than in Europe‑that seems to fasten itself periodically on the nation's political imagination."¹²

The Question of Socialism Reconsidered

By arguing that republicanism was as class‑conscious an ideology as socialism, Wilentz and others intended to render the whole question of socialism in America obsolete. For, if American workers already had republicanism, they evidently did not need socialism. But if republicanism, in fact, was a poorer vehicle for class consciousness and one that broke down with distressing frequency‑and Wilentz's own work on New York City artisans offers one of the most detailed records of this breakdown‑then the question of socialism in America necessarily resurfaces, especially in regard to the years from 1890 to 1920, when rapid industrialization unleashed the nation's biggest crisis since the Civil War. The huge size of corporations and their extraordinary political power seemed to make a mockery of American republican institutions. The "labor question" bore down upon the country's politics with increasing urgency, especially as labor and capital engaged in a series of battles‑‑the 1877 railroad strikes, the 1886 Haymarket bombing, the 1892 Homestead ironworkers and Coeur d'Alene miners strikes, the 1893 Pullman strike, and the 1913 Ludlow Massacre of 1913‑that were amongthe most violent in the industrializing world.¹³ Once the Knights of Labor, the Populists, and other popular movements that had based their protest on a republican critique had failed, increasing numbers of workers, farmers, and middle‑class critics began gravitating to socialism.

Socialism, in the early years of the twentieth century, came in several forms: the democratic socialism of Eugene Debs; the revolutionary syndicalism of William Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Carlo Tresca; the agrarian socialism of Oscar Ameringer and Julius Wayland; and the technocratic socialism of Richard Ely, Edward Bellamy, Walter Lippmann, and Florence Kelley. Socialists were well represented in labor unions, including several of the AFL's largest (the United Mine Workers and the United Association of Machinists, for example). By 1912, Debs had made the Socialist Party of America a serious contender in American politics. Not only did Debs receive 6 percent of the national presidential vote that year; his agitation about the excessive concentration of power in the hands of monopolists profoundly influenced Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom made the fate of the "Trusts" the most important issue of political debate. Recent works by Alan Dawley and Tom Knock argue persuasively that a powerful left‑liberal alliance took shape in the years from 1912 to America's‑ entry into war, compelling Wilson to push through Congress a series of domestic reforms that gave individual wage earners protection against market forces and corporate power. If socialism was not as strong in America as it was in Europe, it was nevertheless gaining in power and pushing American politics in a "European" direction. ¹⁴

Still, important differences between Europe and America remained. American socialism seemed far more dependent, than did its European counterparts, on an older language of republicanism. In fact, one can argue that insofar as socialists, and later communists, made headway in the United States, they did so by couching their politics in the language of the American republic. This was Salvatore's most startling revelation about Debs. Soon after Debs was released from a Chicago jail in 1895‑an incarceration that had completed his transformation from craft unionist to socialist‑he began an address to an assembled throng of 100,000 with these words: "Manifestly the spirit of '76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished.... The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence is.the high purpose of this convocation."" This kind of language remained a constant throughout the next twenty years when Debs built the American socialist movement into something of political consequence. And, subsequently, in the Communist Party's brief moment of significance in the 1930s and early 1940s, the distinctive language of American politics was equally in evidence, nowhere more so than in Earl Browder's incantation, "Communism is Twentieth‑Century Americanism.”¹⁶

This tendency to couch ideas in the language of Americanism was equally manifest among liberal reformers and labor leaders who were inclined toward socialism. Sometimes individuals such as John Dewey, Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, Sidney Hillman, and Frederick Howe called themselves socialists, but more often they did not. In Europe, they undoubtedly would have joined socialist or labor parties. In America, though they flirted with socialism and sometimes belonged to the Socialist Party, they generally preferred to keep the socialist label at some distance from their politics. They remained Democrats and Republicans or members of a third party that avoided the word "socialism" in its title, usually by putting the more ambiguous moniker, "progressive," in its place. They sought to describe their political agenda in terms that communicated the substance but not the rhetoric of socialism." This was true of the labor movement, too. By 1921, the self‑styled "progressive" bloc within the AFL, which seemed poised to oust Gompers from the federation's leadership, had endorsed a "'sweeping program' of 'government ownership and democratic control' of American industry." Among their aims were the nationalization of railroads and coal mines, national health insurance, the establishment of a labor party, and ironclad government guarantees for the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. But they preferred not to call this socialist agenda by its real name."¹⁸

The phrase most commonly substituted for socialism‑other than progressivism‑was industrial democracy. It seemed to be spoken everywhere in the 1910s, by a wide variety of speakers with diverse political agendas. For shop‑floor radicals, it provided a justification for their radical ambitions to wrest control of their workplaces from their foremen and employers‑the first step, they imagined, toward working‑class revolution. For more moderate trade ' unionists and middle‑class reformers, it symbolized an alternative to revolution, a sharing of power between workers and employers that would introduce at least some measure of democracy into punishing and autocratic mass production regimes. It inspired all sorts of visions‑collective bargaining, work councils, employee representation plans, stock distributions, profit‑sharing, corporate parliaments‑of how industry might be reconstructed in ways that increased the workers' sense of involvement, improved efficiency, and enlarged employer profits. Even socialists found the phrase irresistible. In 1919, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy, and, by the mid‑1920s, Norman Thomas, Debs's successor as Socialist Party leader, found it a useful term for describing the thorough transformation of society that he hoped his Socialist Party would one day accomplish. ¹⁹

What made the phrase so attractive was the opportunity it gave its advocates to link their controversial struggles to the revered American revolution.‑ In a favorite formulation, radicals and reformers alike argued that the achievements of 1776, most notably the establishment of political democracy, were in danger of being subverted by industrial autocracy. Only the extension of democracy to industry could preserve the American experiment in freedom. "Political Democracy is an illusion," declared Frank Walsh, a left Progressive and chairman of the National War Labor Board, in 1918, "unless builded upon and guaranteed by a free and virile industrial Democracy." In 1926, W. Jett Lauck, an economist and long­time advisor to John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, kept Walsh's idea alive with a book‑length treatise on the inseparability of political and industrial democracy. And sure enough, when American trade unionism revived in the 1930s, Lewis, Lauck, and others hailed it as a "great movement for industrial democracy.""

The very prominence of the phrase industrial democracy, I am arguing, reveals a discomfort with the language of socialism. Even in the tumultuous period from 1890 to 1920, when American politics most resembled European politics, class conflict, it seems, could not be easily expressed through socialist language. This is not the same observation made by the early students of American labor such as Sombart. By and large they did not treat language as a medium independent of class relations. To their way of thinking, a working‑class interest in socialism reflected the existence of class conflict; conversely, the lack of interest revealed the absence of class conflict. A situation such as existed in the United States‑the presence of class conflict but an aversion to socialism‑was a phenomenon that, intellectually, they were not prepared to recognize.

The Language of American Nationalism

Why, given the presence of class conflict, was socialist language suspect? The answer lies, I believe, in the very strength and character of theAmerican language of nationalism. America was an invented nation. It lacked an ancient attachment to the land; it lacked, too, a homogeneous population with a common history, religion, or ethnicity. Its identitydepended, therefore, on the story of its invention (the revolution of 1776),and the justification of that invention in terms of a universal creed of equal rights, liberty, and democracy that would benefit all humankind. This story of the Revolution had to be constantly retold and the creed reiterated so that all Americans‑especially the 35 million who came from abroad in the years from 1820 to 1920‑would come to know them well. A willingness to measure progress by reference to the Founding Fathers and their ideals became a precondition for entering American politics, and political discussions often took the form of whether the ideals were being honored or breached. Upholding "republican" or "American" principles, then, entailed more than allegiance to discrete political ideas. It marked a willingness to involve oneself in the American nation. Constituent parts of the language of nationalism, these principles‑liberty, equality, democracy‑were the very sinews of nationhood. To abandon the principles was, thus, not simply to reject an ideology but to sever oneself from the nation. This peculiarly American predicament helps to explain why someone such as Debs always insisted that his socialism was to be understood as a continuation of the principles of 1776.

The situation in the industrializing nations of western Europe was markedly different. A French socialist, for example, might find republican­ism useful to his critique of capitalism but it was not vital to his sense of being French. Some Frenchmen revered the Revolution of 1789, others reviled it; but fidelity to its principles did not become a test of "Frenchness." An opponent of the Revolution did not risk the charge of being "unFrench," any more than did a supporter of the French Socialist or Communist Party. The notion that a Frenchman could injure his nation through the espousal of "un‑French" doctrines was a strange idea. Freed of the obligation to provide the nation with its cohesion, ideology in France enjoyed a kind of autonomy that in America it never had.

The language of American nationalism was a remarkably flexible instrument, able to serve as a vehicle for a wide range of ideologies and political programs. Had it not been so flexible, it would not have survived the major changes in economics, politics, and demography that transpired in the two hundred years following the American revolution. But this language was not infinitely elastic. Two beliefs proved particularly difficult to reconfigure: a suspicion of government power and proprietary notions of independence.

The American revolutionaries viewed unchecked government power­it appeared to them in the form of George Ill‑as the greatest threat to personal liberty, and they were determined to establish a republic immune to such tyranny. This hostility to state power was a crucial part of the story they told about themselves and, over time, it acquired the status of a found­ing myth. This myth proved to be a huge obstacle to the progress of social­ism, an ideology built on a belief that only a strong, centralized state could vanquish private economic power (the most dire threat to personal liberty, in socialist eyes). Even the greatest moments of state‑building in America­the Progressive era, the New Deal and World War 11, the 1960s‑were hampered by a continuing resistance to a strong state. Ambitious policies were often scaled back in Congress, or made dependent on private cooperation, or eviscerated through inadequate funding. This resistance was more than ideological; it took structural form in America's decentralized governing system, a system meant, from its eighteenth‑century inception, to fragment state power (both within the federal government and between the federal government and the states) and to allow a proper scope for private liberty. This ideological and structural resistance to centralized state power made socialism a particularly hard sell."

It was also difficult to overcome proprietary, some would say bourgeois, notions of independence. The original Jeffersonian vision of republicanism‑the one revered by subsequent generations of labor and farmer militants‑had been one grounded in notions of proprietary democracy. The archetypal citizen was the man who owned his land, tools, or shop. When the slaves claimed their freedom in the 1860s they thought not about establishing cooperative farms but about each getting his own "forty acres and a mule." This proprietary vision, too, was sustained by a material reality. A large yeoman farm sector persisted well into the twentieth century, as did a vibrant small business sector comprised of retailers, small manufacturers, and service providers. Thus, those who strove to redefine independence in collective terms, as arising from the common action of individuals seeking the establishment of communal institutions of freedom, had to struggle against the proprietary individualism rooted deep in American nationalism and sustained by particular patterns of American economic development."

Other than the Civil War, the early‑twentieth‑century's industrialization crisis was the one moment when the power of this language of American nationalism might have been broken. The collapse of the Knights and of the Populists placed notions of proprietary democracy under unprecedented pressure. The immensity of corporate power made the notion that government posed the gravest threat to personal liberty look rather preposterous. The presence of so many immigrants infused American politics with a critical mass of freshly imported ideas for reorga­nizing society. But the hold of American nationalism, or "Americanism," a word that was uttered with increasing frequency, was not broken. With slogans such as "New Nationalism" and "New Freedom," influential reformers managed to adapt the language of American nationalism to a new age. The stronger the European ideological presence became, the more reformers intensified their Americanization campaigns. The uncharacteristically centralized state institutions established under Wilson during the First World War did violate the injunction against concentrated state power, but they were all torn down within months after the war had ended. Only an American military defeat in the First World War and accompanying economic devastation‑the circumstances that produced revolutions in Russia and Germany and brought labor to power in Great Britain‑would have shattered the mold. But the United States emerged the big winner in 1918, its capitalism vibrant, its nationalism proud, its antistatism intact, its socialists defeated, censored, scattered. This was the world in which American labor would have to live."

Industrial Democracy, Social Democracy, and the CIO

In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, trade unionists offered two very different visions of labor's place in American society. One was a backward‑looking proprietary vision that found its natural home in the post‑1920 American Federation of Labor. This vision saw American workers as collections of craft workers who possessed highly developed skills and often owned their own tools and whose labor market power gave them a sense of personal inde­pendence. In the minds of those who subscribed to this vision, work, auton­omy, and independence were bundled tightly together; nineteenth‑century notions of republicanism still resonated. They were suspicious of a strong state, too, not so much because of foundational myths but because their real experience with government power had taught them that the state could not be relied upon to enhance their liberty. They were, in sum, a defensive group, conscious that they were a remnant of an earlier age and that most American workers labored in circumstances dramatically different from their own. Their defensiveness showed in their reluctance to bring the unskilled into the ranks, in their xenophobic fear of immigrant workers, especially those from southern and eastern Europe, and in their deep‑seated racism towards African‑American workers. They expended more energy on shoring up their collapsing world than on building a new and inclusive trade union movement.

The other vision was progressive and social democratic. It first emerged as the "new unionism" within AFL unions in the 1910s, and remained a fitful part of that federation until the early 1930s, when its leaders established an independent institutional base, the Committee (later Congress) of Industrial Organizations. The architects of this vision regarded the presence of powerful corporations and their armies of semi­skilled and unskilled wage laborers as accomplished facts. It was these workers that they sought to organize. While conceding that factory workers could not enjoy the kind of workplace independence or control that nineteenth‑century craftsmen had achieved, progressive unionists insisted that the wage‑earning masses would benefit from the introduction of "industrial democracy" to the workplace. Industrial democracy, in their rendering, embodied an ambition to extend the rule of law and the con­sent of the governed to the workplace. Workers would be represented by a union that would bargain with employers not just on wages and bene­fits but on job descriptions, work rules, piece rates, hiring and firing, and perhaps even the marketing of corporate products and the investment of corporate profits. The resulting trade agreement (later called the collective bargaining agreement) would function as a constitution, stipulating the rights of both employers and workers and establishing mechanisms for resolving disputes through law and negotiation rather than by force and flat. William Leiserson, an influential economist and labor relations expert, was so impressed with some early experiments in this "industrial jurisprudence" that he deemed them worthy of comparison to England's parliamentary system."

Unions, in this vision, would not only represent worker interests, but would actively train them in their rights and responsibilities. Thus, unions were expected to restrain shop‑floor militants who displayed little regard for the time‑tested techniques of parliamentary democracy (elections, petitions, negotiations) and to undertake the vital task of Americanizing the masses of ignorant immigrants who were thought to be woefully unfamiliar with constitutional forms of government. When Sidney Hillman, the leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) and later a key architect of the CIO, first observed the success of the ACW's Americanization programs in 1914, he could barely contain his delight: "To see these people, only a few years ago from lands where factories were unknown, meeting to discuss problems of the rights and wrongs of shop discipline, of changing prices, of the rightfulness of discharge is a thing to fill one with the hope for the future of democracy.""

At times, this view of industrial relations seemed not too dissimilar from what far‑seeing corporate leaders envisioned. Frightened by the labor disturbances of World War I, these industrialists recognized the need to give workers more of a stake in their enterprises. They were not motivated simply‑or even primarily‑by a desire to spread democracy or justice. First, and foremost, they were interested in procuring industrial peace and raising corporate profits. They had become convinced that those workers who had a stake in their firm, who believed that they had some say in the conditions of their own labor, would work harder, more efficiently, and thus increase corporate productivity.

In practice, however, the trade union proponents of industrial democracy clashed with corporate managers over what kind of constitutional order factories should have and over how rights and responsibilities were to be distributed between managers and workers. The pioneering systems set up in the garment industry succeeded in large part because clothing manufacturers viewed unions as a crucial source of stability in an industry racked by uncontrollable competition. A national union, they hoped, would bring a uniformity to wage and piece rates, benefits, and work rules that thousands of garment manufacturers had been unable to achieve on their own. Employers were willing to tolerate the loss of unilateral managerial control that union power entailed as long as labor‑management cooperation boosted, rather than hurt, revenues and profits."

But the major sectors of American industry were not like the garment industry. Auto, steel, and rubber manufactures, to take three examples, were characterized by oligopolistic control rather than competition. The dominant firms in each industry believed that they could achieve corporate stability on their own, without the aid of unions; and their sheer industrial might made them contemptuous of the thought of conceding any power to shop‑floor militants. The Great Depression gravely injured the confidence, resources, and power of these firms, of course, and trade unionists were quick to take advantage of their weakness. Labor‑management relations became increasingly contentious and threatening to corporate control. The federal government hoped to direct this labor turbulence into more orderly and constitutional channels by passing the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, legislation that established clear and enforceable procedures for workers to choose unions as their bar­gaining agents and for unions and employers to negotiate a mutually agreed‑upon contract. But the NLRA left several crucial. issues frustratingly vague. For example, the precise nature of employee or employer rights was nowhere specified, nor did the NLRA establish a mechanism that would allow management and labor to adjudicate contract disputes. Thus, in the five years following the NLRA's passage, a variety of workplace regimes developed, their character usually reflecting the strength or weak­ness of particular unions. Where industrial unions were strong, workers were able to translate NLRA law into elaborate systems for the democrati­zation of industrial authority. In Rhode Island by 1941, for example, well­organized textile unionists had demociatized virtually every element of shop‑floor life. The hiring, firing and transfer of workers, the distribution of available work and the determination of work loads, the introduction of new technology and alterations in piece rates: all these tasks, once the sole province of employers, were now to be jointly undertaken by management and labor. But where unions were weak, little constitutionalism developed, and employers remained lords of the shop floor."

The imperatives of war mobilization made this uneven pattern of development intolerable. In 1941, the Roosevelt administration estab­lished the War Labor Board (WLB) to standardize rules of labor‑management relations throughout American manufacturing. The WLB reinforced workers' basic collective bargaining rights‑to join a union, to bargain collectively with employers over wages, hours, and benefits‑and thus abet­ted the spread of unionism to ever wider circles of American industry. By the war's end, fifteen million workers, representing a full 35 percent of the nation's nonagricultural work force, enjoyed union representation, and the access to decent wages, job security, and benefits such as vacations and health insurance that union membership provided. But the WLB simulta­neously carved out a sphere of what it called "managerial prerogatives"­aspects of corporate production, distribution, and investment in which all power would continue to reside with the employers. Workers could no longer hope that their consent would be needed in matters of technolog­ical change, the character and amount of investment, the prices that corporations would charge for their goods. General Motors workers under the leadership of United Auto Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther staged a bold strike in 1946 to undo what the WLB had wrought. Specifically, they insisted that GM commit itself both to an 18-percent wage increase for its workers and to holding the price of its automobiles to their existing levels. GM was willing to grant the wage increase but not union meddling in the pricing of its products‑a practice that it consid­ered the prerogative of the corporation alone. Rather than capitulate, GM weathered a 113-day strike in the midst of a new model season, outlasting the workers who finally agreed to return to work under conditions set by GM. The UAW had received no support from the government, which considered product pricing outside the scope of collective bargaining. This strike thus made clear that the precedents established during war would continue during the peace. The result, at GM and elsewhere, was a truncated kind of constitutionalism that fell far short of the aspirations of the early visionaries of industrial democracy."

The progressive unionism put forward by Sidney Hillman and others in the 1920s and 1930s had another component, however: a grand plan for reorganizing the American economy around the principles of high wages and high consumption. These progressive trade unionists wanted each American worker to be paid wages high enough to escape poverty, to achieve security for himself and his family, and to participate in the satisfactions of an ever expanding and alluring consumer marketplace. They argued that these goals, if achieved, would not only benefit workers but the whole of the American economy. High wages would spur consumer expenditures, invigorate markets, stimulate production, and thus increase corporate revenues and profits. As the depression worsened and corporate profits shrank, these progressives made their case with ever more fervor. They argued that the American economy was suffering from a case of chronic underconsumption, by which they meant that consumers did not possess the resources necessary to purchase enough of what American industry could produce. The surest road to recovery was, simply, to increase consumer purchasing power.

Seen in these terms alone, this economic recovery plan posed little threat to the nation's existing corporate structure. But once the progressive trade unionists began discussing how consumer purchasing power was to be increased, their challenge to a capitalist economy came into focus. Not only would extensive unionization be required to wrest wage increases from unwilling employers, a development that demanded government endorsement and protection of labor organizations, but the government would have to embark on a plan to redistribute wealth from the richest Americans to the poorest, in order to insure that a higher proportion of the nation's income would flow into consumption channels. Progressive taxation, social welfare spending, and public works investments, in the eyes of Hillman and his associates, were all techniques that would accomplish this downward redistribution and thus augment the working class's purchasing power. The deployment of these techniques, of course, could only be done by a strong national government with broad powers to control fiscal policy and to regulate capitalist financial and labor markets. The federal government would have to be enlarged, its economic powers enhanced, its role in economic planning legitimated. Ultimately, progressive unionists hoped to establish a tripartite corporatist system of industrial governance in which the leaders of American labor would meet with those of American industry and government and jointly plan the future of the American economy. In Europe this system came to be known as social democracy. American unionists, still worried about too close an association with the socialist label, substituted their favorite and hopelessly overworked phrase, "industrial democracy."²⁵

This version of industrial democracy required unionists to reformulate two key aspects of the country's nationalist language. First, they had to justify a strong state as quintessentially American, as fulfilling the original aims of the Founding Fathers. This they did by using the argument that Lewis and others had set forth in the 1910s and 1920s, that political democracy would fail unless accompanied by the democratization of industry. Industrial democracy, they insisted, embodied the spirit of liberty unleashed in 1776. The labor leaders were given a boost by Roosevelt's and the Democratic Party's parallel efforts to claim that their innovative social policies and commitment to a large state constituted "a true Americanism," one that the Minute Men of Lexington and Concord would have recognized as necessary to the completion of the struggle that they had begun." Second, the progressive unionists had to argue that the satisfactions of American workers would no longer come through work itself but through the earnings that work made possible. Progressive unionists were genuinely excited about the possibilities opened by a consumer society. They believed that the psychological rewards of leisure could compensate for the inadequate rewards of work, especially for the armies of mass production workers whose jobs held few intrinsic attractions. They thus began to detach themselves from the old republican belief that individuals derived their sense of self and citizenship from the nature and quality of their labor. In its place they asked Americans to commit themselves to an "American Standard of Living," by which they meant an income that would enable each American worker to participate fully in the alluring American marketplace. This reorientation was a dan­gerous one for an American labor movement to undertake, not just because it violated older and still cherished republican principles but also because it risked making the very idea of a labor movement obsolete. For once labor came to be seen in instrumental terms, as simply a means to affluence, security, and leisure rather than as integral to an ontological quest for honor, pride, and satisfaction, then it might lose its special claim on America's moral and democratic imagination.

But these were long‑term and rather abstract considerations that, in the context of the Great Depression, seemed beside the point. The imme­diate concern was developing a political strategy that would enable the labor movement to gain state power and implement its vision. That strat­egy took shape as an alliance with Franklin Roosevelt, once Roosevelt in 1935, in response to labor's growing militancy, welcomed labor into his Democratic Party coalition and turned his New Deal in a decidedly prolabor and "underconsumptionist" direction. He lent his support to the NLRA, a massive public works program, a national social welfare program (Social Security), and sharply graduated tax on the wealthy. In return, labor unions worked all‑out for his reelection in 1936 and helped him achieve a smashing victory. In 1936 and 1937, labor's friends flooded into the administration and established control over such key federal agencies as the National Labor Relations Board, the Interior Department, the Works Progress Administration, the National Resources Planning Board, the Rural Electrification Agency, and the Federal Reserve. The CIO's ranks swelled under the friendly gaze of this incipient welfare state, and social democ­racy no longer appeared so farfetched a dream."

But in 1937, this state‑labor alliance lost its momentum. The Supreme Court's continuing resistance to New Deal policies prompted Roosevelt to embark on his ill‑advised and politically damaging court‑packing scheme. Labor's spreading militancy‑apparent both in a wave of sit‑down strikes and the CIO's 1937 decision to carry its fight to the South (still the nation's most antiunion region)‑further invigorated conservative opposition. When the sharp recession of 1937 dashed hopes for economic recovery yet again, many Americans had had enough of New Deal experimentation and sent a large contingent of conservative, antilabor representatives to Congress. New Deal reform was thus stalemated: Existing social programs were stripped of funds, new ones failed to move out of Congressional committees, the "underconsumptionists" lost their influence over fiscal policy, and labor's most ardent supporters lost their control of the National Labor Relations Board. The march toward a corporatist state was halted and then reversed. Hopes revived during World War II, when war exigencies seemed to demand the kind of democratic national planning that progressive unionists had been advocating since the mid‑1930s. Indeed, the War Production Board and related state institutions seemed to embody the kind of tripartite corporatist arrangements that CIO leaders desired. In fact, how­ever, labor was very much a junior partner in these government arrangements, unable to challenge the superior power of capital, a superiority that the Roosevelt administration had pledged to protect."

Labor vigorously challenged capitalism's restored power once the war ended. The year 1946 saw the greatest strike wave in American history. At the same time, labor embarked on Operation Dixie, its second major effort in a decade to organize southern workers and to develop electoral strength in a region that wielded enormous legislative power. But its efforts failed. An American capitalism rejuvenated by the war was in no mood to share its corporate power. The outbreak of the Cold War and the accompanying ideological hysteria made it easy for labor's opponents to stigmatize any labor militancy as "communist" and thus "un‑American." The Taft­Hartley Law of 1947 curtailed labor's rights to organize and stripped any union led by a communist of its government‑guaranteed rights. Nine CIO unions, representing 900,000 CIO members, were led by communists, and, in 1949, the CIO expelled them from its federation. The CIO would not easily recover from this amputation. The AFL, meanwhile, had been rejuvenated by the favorable labor laws that the CIO movement had achieved, and it was further strengthened by its devout opposition to com­munism, to state planning, and other CIO "sins." It held the upper hand in merger negotiations with the hobbled CIO, which is why an AFL rather than a CIO man became head of the merged labor federation in 1955.11

Certain features of the CIO endured. Mass production industries were organized on an enduring basis for the first time in America history. The CIO had lifted a whole section of working‑class America out of poverty, and integrated them, economically and culturally, into the nation. The CIO had helped to legitimate the idea of a welfare state. But the CIO's more ambi­tious schemes had been defeated. National democratic planning, the constitutionalization of shop‑floor life, a strong social welfare state that would provide income security, pensions, and health care to all Americans, not just those who were unionized: each of these ambitions was scuttled. The CIO had succeeded in moderating but not in overcoming an entrenched American suspicion of a strong state; it had muted but not eliminated American hostility to collective institutions of freedom. The Cold War became the occasion for corporate America to unleash a vigorous ideological attack on even the modest advances that the CIO had achieved. American labor's perch, even in the years of‑its greatest security, was pre­carious. The CIO's ideas had been bold, its strategy of presenting them as an updated Americanism shrewd, but its success had still been limited."

It is tempting to suggest that the CIO would have fared better had it not temporized. But little evidence suggests that labor organizations that resisted the pull of a nationalist language and refused to dilute their radical purity enjoyed better success. The world into which the CIO was born, the language of American nationalism it inherited, were not of its own making. That language could be spoken in different ways, its words could be used to construct rival "Americanisms"; but its influence could not be escaped, and its hostility to socialism never entirely overcome.