Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance (Suny Series in American Labor History)

Rating:
Summary: Of interest and use to a small segment
Review: As with all collections of essays, the success of Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance rests on the strengths and weaknesses of its varied contributions. The essays, all written by historians sympathetic to the goals of organized labor and liberal Democratic politics consider several important questions: Why did the labor movement align itself with the liberals as opposed to pushing for a more radical social agenda? How is the liberal-labor alliance to be evaluated? What are its successes and where did it fail? Did the labor movement miss an opportunity to form the core of a Social-Democratic Party in the 1930s? What other missed opportunities can be identified?

The essays collected here answer these core questions with chronologically, geographically or thematically narrow essays. For example, Peter Rachleff has written on the failure of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party to sustain its position as a successful third party. His answer, which identifies the hierarchy of the MFLP, the conflict between the AFL and the CIO, and conflict between the CPUSA and the Socialist Workers' Party, can be read as a broader indictment of the leadership of the labor movement. For Rachleff, the MFLP's success was the root of its failure--it became too much like a traditional political party, losing touch with its grass roots organization and selling out the labor movement. Essays by Bruce Nelson, Gilbert Gall, Julie Greene, Kevin Boyle, Richard Ostreicher, Gary M. Fink, Stephen Amberg, and others to varying degrees all evaluate the labor-liberal alliance with their smaller studies. Most of the essays are traditional studies of organized labor and do not address those workers who are not unionized (Gilbert Gall's essay on the defeat of right-to-work legislation in MO and OH is a notable exception), issues of whiteness and the question of gender and labor.

Finally, the collection assumes a considerable degree of familiarity with the language of organized labor and labor history. It should not be read as an introduction to labor history. The book, however, should appeal to students of labor or political history and their intersection in the twentieth century.