Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance, and: Workers' Paradox: The Republican Origins of New Deal Labor Policy, 1886-1935 (review)

Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance. Edited by Kevin Boyle (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1998) 274 pp. $71.50.

Workers' Paradox: The Republican Origins of New Deal Labor Policy, 1886-1935. By Ruth O'Brien (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 313 pp. $39.95 cloth $17.95 paper.

The demise of New Deal liberalism has prompted historians to reconsider its character, origins, and unraveling. The books under review provide two different approaches to that effort. Of the nine essays on labor and politics edited by Boyle, some are case studies in state or municipal electoral activity, and others analyze union efforts to shape national policy.

No trace of the once-familiar "forward march of labor" theme can be found in this book. Richard Oestreicher sounds the keynote, using polling data to show that electoral behavior was shaped more markedly by economic class between 1932 and 1948 than at any other time in the country's history. He also seconds the emphasis placed on the decisive impact of white racism on workers' voting found in Julie Greene's study of the 1916 effort of Frank P. Walsh to reshape the Wilson Democrats around the needs of white workers, in Bruce Nelson's close examination of Detroit's labor politics between 1937 and 1945, and in Boyle's assessment of the United Auto Workers' role in the Great Society. Gilbert J. Gall's able analysis of voters' repudiation of right-to-work measures in 1958 Ohio and 1978 Missouri gives the interaction of race and class a different spin. In both instances, the solid core of the labor vote was African-American.

State politics receive scanty attention, aside from Gall's essay and Peter Rachleff's explanation of the failure of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party to provide an effective alternative to the Democrats. Stephen Amberg's examination of the decline of labor influence in the federal government since 1945 shifts the categories of analysis from labor strategies to identities. Like Boyle, Amberg depicts the Great Society, not the New Deal proper, as the most promising moment of the labor-liberal alliance, and also as its decisive defeat.

O'Brien exhibits little interest in what she calls the "social unrest" that influenced policymakers and party strategists. Workers' Paradox is concerned with "judicial formalism," especially as it shaped industrial relations during the 1920s. She argues that Republican appointees to the Supreme Court fashioned the doctrine that unions were temporary agents of particular groups of workers, who favored such collective representation at the bargaining table. The justices conceived this view as a way of restraining trade-union conduct, only to see it adopted by Sen. Robert Wagner as the controlling idea of his 1935 National Labor Relations Act.

Arguably, the most original contribution of O'Brien's work, and the point at which her arguments come closest to intersecting with the topics that dominate Boyle's collection, is to be found in her extensive exploration of the role of Progressive Republicans in Congressional debates about railroad-labor legislation during the 1920s. They were the ones who shaped statute law around the court's line of reasoning.

David Montgomery
Yale University

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