Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom by Daniel J. Clark (review)

How orderly was the New Deal order? Over the last decade or so, historians have set about dismantling the idea of a "postwar social settlement." The project has focused on showing how capital never truly accommodated itself to labor, launching offensives on the shop floor as early as the 1950s, supporting the production and dissemination of right-wing economic knowledge, and transplanting itself to friendlier climes when possible. Oddly, however, this emerging consensus has not transformed how we periodize the twentieth century or present its main contours: the postwar period is still seen as a unique golden age for the working class—even if one party to the treaty was trying to abrogate it at every opportunity.

This tension persists in the scholarship because of a disjuncture between methodologies. What political and intellectual historians have found about the instability of the postwar order has not, thus far, been matched by social historians. (In writing the history of relatively recent times, social history tends to arrive after political and intellectual history, since its archive takes longer to assemble.) It is this disjuncture that Daniel J. Clark sets out to resolve in his new book Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom, from the extraordinary decades-old series from the University of Illinois, "The Working Class in American History."

Clark makes a straightforward case: from the perspective of autoworkers, the quintessential working-class subjects of the postwar social compact, the golden age of the 1950s looked little like how we have remembered it. While wages and profits indeed rose together in aggregate in the 1950s, Clark writes, "People who worked in auto plants did not live their lives as aggregate statistics or in hindsight" (11). Instead, they "moved in and out of auto work throughout the decade, usually with little control over the timing. Factors such as parts and materials shortages, deep recessions, low seniority, overproduction of automobiles, the weather, and military service made auto work an uncertain prospect. So did authorized and unauthorized strikes in auto factories, strikes in other industries, and even plant explosions, all in addition to automation and decentralization." What is often described as the key engine of the postwar political economy, a working class able to buy the products that it made, in fact hardly existed at all.

While the heart of the Disruption in Detroit is an extensive set of original and revealing oral histories, Clark also makes use of newspaper sources to link his subjects' memories to specific economic events from the period. He makes his case over nine short, chronological chapters, stretching from the end of World War II to the election of John F. Kennedy. What emerges is a series of small-scale cycles of boom and bust, observable at the scale of an individual life, a plant, a neighborhood, or a city—but missed in a top-down view of political history.

The process of wartime reconversion, Clark shows, was intensely conflictual and chaotic. A wave of supply shortages plagued the industry, such that, as Chrysler admitted, the autoworkers' strike of 1945–1946 stopped production that would have halted anyway, for lack of window glass. Such events occurred repeatedly throughout the 1940s and 1950s, as strikes or industry-specific problems in the coal, glass, and steel industries reverberated down the supply chain. Observing details such as the higher-than-normal rate of war bond redemption, Clark effectively makes the case for localized economic sluggishness in Detroit.

Alongside specific shortages and the challenges for individuals and families of the periodic upheavals of postwar industrial relations, there also came larger-scale cyclical disruption. A boom in the aftermath of the Korean War turned quickly to bust in 1954. Recovery from that recession in 1955 (the one year that Clark acknowledges resembles our classic view of the decade) led to overproduction and glutted auto markets, followed by slack markets again—a prolonged "hangover" in 1956 and 1957. Then...