Judith Stein (1940–2017)

This past May, the field of labor history lost one of its most original and penetrating thinkers with the passing of Judith Stein, who had battled lung cancer for the past decade and a half. Judith was born in 1940 and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She received her bachelor’s degree from Vassar College in 1960 and her PhD from Yale in 1967. For the past fifty years, she taught countless students at the City College of New York and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Before her retirement last year, she had become a CUNY distinguished professor in 2013.

Her three monographs were field changers in their specific areas. Her first book, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Louisiana State University Press, 1986) dispensed with hagiography and placed Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the context of the rise and fall of World War I–era social movements. Attentive to class relations in the black community, it offered a sober look at the social basis of the Garveyite movement, on the one hand, and the ideological and pragmatic reasons that mid-level Garveyites were attracted to the movement, on the other. Her second book proved to be even more ambitious: Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) did more than examine the fate of black and white steel workers in the civil rights and post–civil rights era; it anchored their experiences and aspirations in the political economy of the American steel industry, whose decline could, in part, be traced to the deleterious effects of international trade policies pursued by a series of presidential administrations that prioritized US foreign policy objectives over the health of domestic industry. In the absence of an industrial policy aimed at preserving American jobs, she shows, the painful battles over affirmative action were bound to leave American workers, black and white, less than satisfied.

Judith’s third and final book, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (Yale University Press, 2011) argued that the triumph of the New Right was not inevitable and that policies pursued by the Democratic Party prior to Reagan’s election in 1980 left it ill-prepared to turn back the conservative tide. Amplifying arguments she developed in Running Steel, she demonstrated how trade policies pursued by Democrats and Republicans alike undermined American domestic industry and its unions; the failure to embrace labor law reform and, especially, an industrial policy left the Carter administration vulnerable. In subsequent years, the Reagan administration’s policies “radically altered the composition of the economy, promoting nontradable sectors like real estate, financial services, and defense” (268), accelerating the shift from factories. Democrats, for their part, offered few alternatives.

Judith Stein was an often sharp but honest critic of contemporary scholarship and politics, whose interventions were always provocative and deserving of engagement. What made “Judith so special, and so beloved among her students and colleagues,” notes her friend James Oakes, was that she “she managed to uphold a model of academic integrity and intellectual rigor while at the same caring deeply for the well-being of her students and her department. Her criticism could be ruthlessly honest, yet it was never personal, and she was always, always, the truest and most loyal of friends. Within her diminutive frame roared a human dynamo.”

Judith never shied away from a debate that needed to be had. She shaped a generation or so of scholars who benefited from her critical observations and timely arguments and were guided by her insights. We have lost a valuable, critical, yet compassionate voice with Judith’s passing.