This book is a product of the political and ideological debate that engaged my New Left generation when, in the early 1970s, so many campus-based radicals inaugurated a remarkable probe into the character, meaning, and history of the working class and its institutions. Two events in particular seemed to crystallize my decision to write a history of unionism and the state during the 1940s. The first came on the evening of September 14, 1970, when a few dozen Berkeley students drove down to Fremont’s sprawling General Motors assembly complex to support rank and file workers when the United Automobile Workers...

In the summer of 1973, a wave of sit-down strikes swept through the Chrysler Corporation plants in Detroit. The grievances of the men and women employed there – over the pace of work, dangerous conditions, and callous attitude of the supervisors – virtually duplicated those that had troubled and motivated the generation of workers who founded the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in the mid-1930s. Using tactics not dissimilar to those of early union organizers, these largely youthful, sometimes radical strikers of 1973 halted or slowed production, battled security guards, and set up illegal picket lines at plant gates. Although management...

The history of the American working class contains a major paradox. Over the last century, working men and women in this country have repeatedly demonstrated a degree of solidarity that has rivaled or surpassed even that exhibited by the proletariat of Western Europe. The self-conscious collective activity of American workers has normally been hidden, submerged in the day-to-day life of factory, mine, and office, obscured either by an overlay of ethnic culture or by identification with the local community and its social and political values. Still, a latent combativeness has never been far beneath the surface. From the railway upheaval...

With the outbreak of the war in Europe, the new industrial unions soon found themselves in the midst of a political landscape that reflected issues quite different from those that had defined New Deal politics in the formative years of the CIO. Especially after the fall of France in June 1940, American politics increasingly turned on the degree of intervention in and economic mobilization for World War II. The drift of government policy and public opinion toward support of Great Britain eventually stripped the New Deal of its isolationist wing, increased the weight of southern conservatism, and generated conditions under...

During the first half of 1941, a series of CIO-organized strikes threatened to disrupt the Roosevelt administration’s defense mobilization effort. To counter this threat, the government applied increasing pressure upon the CIO’s leadership to curb its strike activity, moderate its economic demands, and refer all industrial disputes to a newly appointed National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB). This government policy culminated in the pivotal North American Aviation strike of June 1941. In this industrial crisis, the Roosevelt administration used military force to break the organizational walkout of a Communist-led UAW aircraft local and uphold the influence of those leaders of the...

In the year following the suppression of the North American Aviation strike, union security became the most crucial issue facing the industrial unions and one of the key questions of domestic political debate. Of course, the automatic enrollment of employees in a union holding jurisdiction in a workplace had long been a goal of virtually everyone involved in the twentieth-century labor movement. Such enrollment represented a limited form of security against the vicissitudes of the business cycle and the hostility of the employer. CIO leaders keenly recalled the industrial union experience during World War I, when high wages, union growth,...

As World War II became one of total mobilization on the home front, the state apparatus became a crucial arena of political conflict. With one-half of the Gross National Product committed directly to military production and the entire economy subject to a thicket of controls, the struggle for influence in Washington became almost synonymous with class and interest group conflict over the shape of society itself. Key government agencies such as the National War Labor Board, the Office of Production Management and the War Production Board were the scene of endemic conflict among labor, corporate, military, agricultural, and small business...

The failure of the Equality of Sacrifice idea by early 1943 coincided with the growth of an elemental frustration that touched large sectors of the unionized working class. The social disruption associated with the transformation of the economy to a war footing, the increasingly rigid and cumbersome government wage policy, and the growing volume of shop-floor grievances all provided the social and economic context for the structural crisis that gripped the mass industrial unions in the second half of the war. In this chapter and the next, we examine the social psychology of the wartime workforce, the character of the...

The union movement’s relative political impotence, the government’s increasingly restrictive wage guidelines, and the growing unrest symbolized by the wildcat strikes all provided the context for a bitter factional conflict that divided many CIO unions, above all the United Automobile Workers, the key trade union in the nation during the 1940s. Although such factional warfare sometimes degenerated into a mere quest for office by rival groups of union leaders, many of the actual issues that divided these men rose directly out of the dilemma the organized working class faced during the era of political retreat and wartime economic regimentation. As...

As dissidence grew within the United Automobile Workers, the Roosevelt administration faced a challenge from an old nemesis, John L. Lewis. The subsequent interplay between the UMW leader’s bold attack on the government wage ceiling and the threatening insurgencies within their own unions is an important key in explaining the politics of the CIO leadership during the crisis-filled spring and summer of 1943. Faced with Lewis’s audacious effort to break the Little Steel formula and legitimize the wartime strike weapon, officers of the CIO clung ever more tenaciously to their alliance with Roosevelt and relied with redoubled steadfastness upon the...

While they campaigned vigorously for FDR’s reelection, leaders of the industrial union federation also redoubled their efforts to maintain discipline and order within their own institutions. With military victory now certain and the inequalities of the home front more apparent, American workers, especially those organized in the CIO, demonstrated an increasing propensity to ignore the no-strike pledge and lay down their tools. In 1944 and 1945, more strikes took place and more workers stopped work than in any similar period since 1919, and well over half of the wildcat strikers were CIO union members.¹ Yet the industrial union federation’s formal...

With the end of the war in sight, all sections of the body politic began to prepare for the new wave of conflict that would accompany the reconversion to peacetime production and the diminution of the state’s capacity directly to shape economic life. Although the CIO had helped reelect the president and blunt the wildcat strike movement’s direct assault, its leaders felt far from secure as they entered the postwar round of conflict with adversaries in the government apparatus or in corporate executive suites. The CIO had doubled in size during the previous four years, but the war had increasingly...

The experience of the CIO industrial unions during World War II formed a crucial stage in the transition from their institutionally fluid, socially aggressive character in the 1930s to the relative accommodation and bureaucratic stability of the postwar years. During the war, the unions completed the organization of basic industry, more than doubled their dues-paying membership, and fortified themselves with such an array of contractual and administrative defenses that few contemplated their postwar disintegration. The CIO remained numerically smaller than the AFL, but the strategic location of its major affiliates in the heart of basic industry assured the federation of...