Nick Salvatore

The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History

“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.

Biography and Social History : an Intimate Relationship

Biography has been considered as outside the discipline of history by many historians. Since the chronological framework of the study is pre-determined, given the subjects life, it has been argued, it does not meet the fundamental historical test of analysing historical change across time. Others, particularly literary critics, have suggested that the biographical emphasis on the personal is itself, at root, invalid. This comment instead suggests that the recent turn to biography in labour and social history is most welcome, for it creates the possibility of a broader understanding of the interplay between an individual and social forces beyond ones ability to control. But to write a social biography demands a disciplinary rigor and thorough research effort that treats equally seriously both the subject and the context that shapes that life.

Response to Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920"

As a European labor historian interested in American labor history, I find Sean Wilentzs essay both informative and stimulating. Wilentz focuses on the issue of class consciousness and looks at the language of protest in Europe and America. He maintains that American labor historians have exaggerated the class conscious ness of European workers while underestimating that of American workers. On this point, I find his arguments plausible and compelling. I am more skeptical about his conclusion that the failure of a socialist party to develop in the United States is not an interesting historical question. Wilentzs description of American radicalism in the period between the Amer ican Revolution and the Civil War suggests a parallel with developments in Western Europe between the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848. In the first half of the nineteenth century, in both Europe and and the United States, far-reaching criticisms of large-scale industrial capitalism spread widely among small shopkeep ers, artisans, and industrial workers. This period witnessed a florescence of socialist, trade unionist, feminist, and radical republican ideas among large strata of the population. In Britain Chartism found a wider constituency for radical ideas than did any other mass working-class movement for a century.1 It is possible, as some historians have suggested, that France never again came so near to a revolutionary socialist transformation as it did during the Second Republic between 1848 and 1851.2 The rediscovery of early nineteenth-century popular militancy has led to a reexamination of the ideals that inspired these movements. It is now widely accepted that the harsh working conditions of the industrial revolution and the spread of factory labor cannot alone explain the spread of class consciousness. Work expe rience may well produce frustration and a sense of injustice but the manner of expression of such feelings, whether they are turned internally against other workers or channeled in some political direction, is a consequence of the variety of political alternatives available to workers. In nineteenth-century America the republican tradition, as transformed by its artisans, was one readily available political tradi tion.3 Wilentzs paper is most interesting and intriguing in dealing with the trans

A Brief Ascendency: American Labor After 1945

In 1945, American labor unions optimistically expected considerable growth in the coming decades. The New Deal policies continued their influence, and organized labor achieved its highest density rating (35 percent) ever recorded in the United States. By the mid-1950s, however, that figure began to decline, slowly at first and then, after 1970, swiftly. At the close of 2011, it had fallen to 11.8 percent. The cause of this reduction was not simply employer opposition, although that did occur. Rather, the American working class itself underwent a political and sociological sea change, propelled by southern migration of whites and blacks into the industrial North, sharp changes in political attitudes during and after the 1960s, and the economic transformation of the American and global economy that began in the 1970s. Some of these changes were beyond the scope of organized labor’s ability to alter; regarding others, labor proved to be slow, even hesitant, in its response. One consequence was the resurgence of a sharply conservative political vision among American working people that had a powerful impact on national elections and the policy choices followed.

History, Complexity, and Politics: Further Thoughts

We would like to thank our commentators for their vigorous responses to our essay. Those comments were varied and, at times, at odds with each other but contained a remarkable agreement around our core premise: that the New Deal order was based on an exceptional and unstable set of political circum stances. Beyond that basic consensus, however, a number of important points of contention deserve discussion.

Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music (review)

that the strategy failed because Britain “never made a clear choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives: promoting a slave revolt or promoting the Loyalist Party, which included important slave owners” (56). Similarly, and with wickedly effective force, he later writes of the 1930s that “Stalin gave Communism an uglier face at a time when Roosevelt was giving capitalism a kindlier one” (203). Not surprisingly, the sections on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Evans’ areas of specialization, are especially strong. The sense in which the Democratic Party, and not only the Whigs, collapsed is beautifully captured as is the role of John Brown. The material on the post-Civil War years captures the coexistence of terror and political economy in shaping results and rightly emphasizes that in much of the South struggles persisted far past the 1877 date generally taken as ending Reconstruction. At certain junctures, my own preference would be for more emphasis on the centrality of Black self-activity, and less on exogenous factors shaping what was politically possible. In particular, telling so much of its twentieth century story via the activities of the Communist Party and of anti-Communists seems to lose as much as it yields. But Open Wound on the whole is an excellent study, well-suited to the classroom and beyond. University of Illinois David Roediger

Book Review: History: Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic EqualityMeatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality. By HalpernRick and HorowitzRoger. New York: Twayne (an imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan), 1996. 176 pp. ISBN 0-8057-9120 5,

the TWUA was an unfortunate harbinger of what was to come for many other industrial unions two decades later. Caught in a vicious cycle of plant closings and membership losses, the organization had fewer and fewer resources for organizing or negotiating efforts. Hence, the union was often forced into an early form of concession bargaining that, as was often to be the case, still failed to stem the tide of lostjobs. Out of this debacle, however, the TWUAs Research Director Solomon Barkin became a pioneer of sorts in drafting legislation to bring local, state, and federal government agencies into productive partnerships with unions and businesses to create redevelopment programs for hard-hit mill towns. If there is any significant flaw in Hartfords clear and direct account of the rise and fall of textile unions in New England, it may lie in the very straightforward chronological structure of the book. While a clear timeline is often essential to good historical writing, and Hartfords work is no exception to that general rule, there are moments when his desire to adhere to a strict time frame leads to awkward transitions and juxtapositions as he tries to cram often disparate events and issues into one chapter. If each chapter had sections that were more clearly integrated into a whole argument, and if each central theme were laid out in a more coherent introduction, we would see more directly the connections Hartford wants to make between local rank-and-file and national leaders of the struggling union. Despite these occasional breaks in the narrative flow and analytical arguments, Hartford has written a very instructive history of a union that has often been obscured by its larger and more prosperous cousins in industries such as autos and steel. The valiant, painful, at times innovative, yet often ultimately futile struggles of the TWUA in New England foreshadowed many similar wrenching changes and challenges that eventually engulfed the most powerful industrial unions in the United States. Clearly, there is still much we can learn from the familiar story of the New England textile business and its workers.

28.95 (cloth).

Why has labor played a more limited role in national politics in the United States than it has in other advanced industrial societies? Victoria Hattam demonstrates that voluntarism, as American labors policy was known, was the American Federation of Labors strategic response to the structure of the American state, particularly to the influence of American courts. The AFLs strategic calculation was not universal, however. This book reveals the competing ideologies and acts of interpretation that produced these variations in state-labor relations.Originally published in 1993.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States.

Excerpt] This is a superb book. Lizabeth Cohen has attempted nothing less than a major reinterpretation of how industrial workers became deeply involved with the union organizing drives of the 1930s. Rather than focusing on external stimuli such as governmental actions, Cohen explores in great detail the ways in which changes in working peoples own attitudes allowed them to be participants in, indeed makers of, their New Deal. Her themes are critically important, broadly conceived, and explored with imagination and verve. Her extensive research matches her intellectual vision, and she sensitively uses such diverse sources as advertising agency memoranda, early radio scripts, and the banking and commercial records of a host of ethnic businesses, among other primary materials, to explore the social and cultural changes among workers during the 1920s and 1930s that allowed their involvement in the CIO. This is a book of serious importance for all who are interested in working peoples relation to organized labor, the state, and mass culture in the twentieth century. It was with good reason that the book was recently awarded the Bancroft Prize in American History.