Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950 (review)

For more than a decade, workers in the Midwest electrical manufacturing industry, as well as many other blue-collar workers in the American heartland, rallied around an openly Communist union organizer who promised to deliver an alternative vision of democracy and economic development. William Sentner's ability to thrive in what one would expect to be a hostile environment for Leftists rested on a community-based organizing strategy attuned more to local conditions than national or international events. This story, Rosemary Feurer suggests, holds important lessons for the American labor movement today, as it shrinks before the seemingly omnipotent corporate power in the modern global economy.

In her account of the building of union power in the region, Feurer tackles many scholars of the New Deal-era labor movement. For example, she asserts that organizing in the Midwestern electrical industry owed more to unskilled workers than skilled craftsmen, although the latter group did land most of the leadership positions. Neither does she see concern for improving wages and working conditions, nor the effective use of collective bargaining and the grievance procedure as proof of workers' limited horizons. In Sentner's hands, Feurer contends, struggles over wage improvements and managerial prerogatives on the shop floor were tools to build a future industrial democracy, "a dynamic, expansive concept whose ultimate direction was toward workers' control of industry" (p. 73). Perhaps, but it would be helpful to see more rank-and-file sentiments here. Nevertheless, the Left continued to win union elections even when the combined forces of business and the state were arrayed in opposition.

Although her work is mainly a labor history, Feurer is often most insightful when she discusses the political economy of St. Louis and the surrounding region. Her early chapter on the "militant minority" of metal trades manufacturers who dominated the labor markets and set wage patterns in St. Louis is an outstanding example of blending business and labor history. Local employers, according to Feurer, developed strategies that at first isolated local labor markets from national ones and then later served as a safe zone of low wages to attract capital and discipline labor. Drawing upon the theory of geographer David Harvey, the analysis of this local struggle to construct a landscape of capital accumulation is a model that many historians might put to good use. Likewise, the chronicling of the stillborn Missouri Valley Authority (MVA) demonstrates the keen understanding that Sentner was able to bring to an alliance of unions, farmers, and consumer groups around a unique and innovative program of postwar community planning. Indeed, the MVA story is perhaps the most fascinating and original part of the book, capturing a Left-led comprehensive plan for Missouri River development that merged the interests of full employment, soil conservation, rural electrification, and protections against flooding. Labor's input, in this campaign, was not narrow, but rather intertwined with the concept of "control, in the public interest, of the flow of waters and the erosion of the land" (p. 165).

At what point did this encompassing Left vision of industrial democracy begin to lose traction? Feurer argues for the importance of the state in tipping sentiments decidedly in favor of the anti-Communist opponents within UE District 8. Despite reactionary politics surfacing as early as 1938, Sentner still won election in 1947. The combined weight of Taft-Hartley, politicians like Stuart Symington and the anti-Communist hearings of the House Education and Labor Committee whipped up a fierce anti-Left hysteria. By 1949, the old leadership of District 8 was increasingly marginalized by employer reprisals, divisions in the \AQ{Q1}Please spell out this abbreviation at the first instance.YCIO and local leaders who hoped to maintain collective bargaining victories in a hostile atmosphere.

Feurer's sympathies clearly lay with the Left program of community-based unionism, and she argues for Sentner's independence from the Party. However, she also...