Labor's Fragile Juggernaut

My best friend’s father was a sit-down striker, a member of the working-class vanguard that built the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He hardly seemed to fit the role. When I knew him, he and his family lived in a bungalow in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit. He was a union electrician for the city, a devout Roman Catholic, a World War II veteran who kept a portrait of himself in uniform hanging on the living room wall, a Democrat who spent one summer vacation taking his son to see Hyde Park. He was a shy man who liked to golf and to tinker with cars. But in 1937 he had helped to transform the history of industrial relations. He had done so reluctantly. The son of Polish immigrants, he was a neighborhood kid, eighteen years old in the spring of 1937, anxious to find work. Like many others of his class and generation, he followed his family’s path, taking a job at the factory where his father had labored for the previous twenty years, the Chrysler Corporation’s Dodge Main plant in an industrial suburb of Detroit. On March 8, 1937, a few weeks after he started work, Dodge Main’s workers laid down their tools and demanded union recognition. My friend’s father, hoping to avoid trouble, headed for the plant gates. But the sit-downers blocked his way, insisting that he stay inside the factory. Thus did he join the CIO’s pantheon of heroes.

I often thought about my friend’s father as I read the historiography of the CIO. He never quite fit the various profiles historians offered of those workers who led the CIO’s great surge forward in the late 1930s. He certainly was not a member of the militant masses that Art Preis described in an early history of the CIO. He was not looking to alter the balance of power on the shop floor, as some scholars argued in the early 1980s. He was not the “new species of worker . . . rootless [and] dispossessed” that Steven Fraser says was most receptive to the CIO message. He was not even particularly interested in participating in the CIO “culture of unity” that Lizabeth Cohen has so effectively described. Similarly, it was difficult to reconcile the man I knew with the bleak picture of the post-World War II CIO common in the literature. His world did not seem circumscribed by the CIO’s bureaucratization or by its incorporation into the state apparatus. On the contrary, he seemed to have benefited from those trends, which gave him the resources he needed to raise his family in greater comfort than he had experienced as a child. But his success had not turned him against that segment of the working class who did not enjoy the protection of unionization, as scholars suggest happened in the postwar era. ¹ He remained a liberal who believed in the efficacy of social reform and in equal rights. Why couldn’t I make my friend’s father fit with my reading? Was his story simply an oddity, a messy detail that had no wider meaning? Or could the historiography be altered in a fashion that would account for my friend’s father? Could he become part of the framework of the CIO’s history, just as he had been part of its construction?

The CIO, 1935–1955, Robert H. Zieger’s masterful study of the industrial labor federation, provides just such a framework. Zieger claims that his aim is simply “to get the historical record of the CIO as right as I can” (p. 5). But in fact he pursues a much broader goal. Building on extensive reading of the secondary literature and on exhaustive research in the primary sources, Zieger offers a new interpretation of the CIO from both the leadership and rank and file perspectives. At once judicious and bold, his interpretation sets a new standard for the study of...