The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism

Chapter 3 - Pluralism, Postwar Intellectuals, and the Demise of the Union Idea

Pluralism, Postwar Intellectuals, and the Demise of the Union Idea Nelson Lichtenstein 83 Trade union movements in the industrialized West normally stand on the left side of a nation’s political culture, and they usually reap benefits of great organizational and political value when leftwing ideas circulate freely and when social democratic regimes come to power. This is true in most of Western Europe, Canada, and even Poland, Spain, South Africa, and South Korea, where the rights-conscious values and radical impulses characteristic of “the sixties,” even when delayed for a decade or more, dramatically increased trade union numbers, prestige, and power. But little of this happened in the United States. Trade union membership did grow modestly, largely as a result of a successful organizing breakthrough in public employment, but union density continued a slow decline, and the political influence of organized labor, even under two activist Democratic presidents, seemed muted at best. Indeed, the reputation of American unions and of the entire New Deal bargaining system began a precipitous decline in the 1960s. During the very same years in which the social imagination of American reformers took wing, labor’s historic agenda—for a democratic workplace, an organizational breakthrough into the new white-collar occupations, and a progressive reform of the labor law—sank from sight in all but the most radical circles. At the very moment in which a rights-conscious revolution began to transform American political culture, the model of collective action, of democratic empowerment embodied in the Wagner Act, was reaching something close to an ideological dead end. The Devaluation of “Big Labor” There are many explanations for this extraordinary state of affairs. One is the very real success of the American economy and the union role in capturing a share of that bounty for the working class. Real wages doubled between 1947 and 1973. The old “labor question,” which had animated politics during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, seemed to evaporate under the prosperous postwar sky. Organized labor’s success robbed the unions of their social movement character, a state of affairs made depressingly evident during the sensational McClellan Committee hearings of 1957 and 1958, when Teamster union arrogance and corruption were displayed before a television audience of millions. The standoffishness of the AFL-CIO toward the civil rights movement, combined with its steadfast support for the Vietnam War policy, seemed to confirm labor’s conservative parochialism, at least for the sixties’ Left. Finally, the trade unions never really became corporatist partners within American politics or economic life. There was no stable, consensual “labor-management” accord even during those midcentury decades when unionism was politically and economically most potent. From the late 1950s the unions faced a business community that had begun to mobilize against union bargaining clout and a resurgent right wing whose standard bearers denounced “monopoly unionism” and attacked labor’s capacity to use its collective resources in electoral politics.1 This analysis of labor’s postwar decline has become a cottage industry . But the most consequential sources of unionism’s ideological and cultural devaluation during this era lie in the ideas, ideologies, and values that made the long decade of the 1960s such a watershed. No single great economic, technological, or political change can account for the devaluation of the union idea during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, the midcentury transformation in the labor question was a product of many of the same ideological transmutations that made the sixties such a effervescent moment. Even as unions reached their twentieth-century apogee as economic institutions and mass membership organizations, trade unionism and the old “labor question” practically vanished from popular political and cultural discourse. 84 Nelson Lichtenstein As early as 1960, a generation of intellectuals, jurists, journalists, academics , and politicians had come to see the unions as little more than a self-aggrandizing interest group, no longer a lever for progressive change. This was a project not so much of the political Right, which had long polemicized against big labor, but of radical intellectuals and centrist liberals, whose critique of postwar trade unionism proved far more demoralizing and, in the long run, more ideologically and jurisprudentially debilitating. The radical sociologist C. Wright Mills looked well beyond “the labor metaphysic” to find efficacious sources of social change, while liberal economists such as Clark Kerr argued that writers and intellectuals had been profoundly mistaken to see...