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This chapter explores Randolph's involvement in the National Negro Congress (NNC), and how the organization's history provides a compelling example of the internal frictions that would eventually lead Randolph to pursue other strategies for civil rights reform. Randolph, with his radical political credentials and his growing stature in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was the man of the hour to lead the NNC and unite forward-thinking unionists and political activists. Yet Randolph's own failings as a leader, coupled with the centrifugal forces driving the split between the AFL and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and his longstanding feuds with Communists, spelled doom for Randolph's participation in the NNC, which would be weakened greatly by his departure.

This chapter focuses on three developments in the mid- to late 1930s that together helped bring civil rights into mainstream liberals' program. The first is African Americans' emergence as a potential source of votes for northern Democrats. The second key change is the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which pushed for a new interpretation of New Deal liberalism that included civil rights as a component. The third change arose as a response to the first two developments: southern Democrats emerged as key opponents of further extension of the New Deal. These changes brought about a new set of political battle lines, in which a coalition of southern conservatives and Republicans opposed the “ardent New Dealers” of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, African Americans, and other urban liberals.

This chapter discusses the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935, which fanned the flames of anti-Communism while simultaneously creating opportunities for Communists in the labor movement. In Birmingham, the CIO was more than just a federation of labor organizations. The CIO offered activists strength in numbers, security, interracial unity, and legitimacy—goals that Alabama Communists had hoped to achieve through the Popular Front. Thus, it should not be surprising that black Communists devoted more time and energy to the CIO, contributing to the decline of the Party. Most Blacks who left the Party during the Popular Front were not disillusioned with the goals or ideals of the movement; they simply found a better vehicle through which to realize these goals. For some black working people, the CIO was the first real alternative to the Communist Party; for others, the CIO became the Party.

This chapter looks at the progressive forces in the U.S. In the U.S., Franklin Roosevelt's presidency became the prime force for progressive gains. In the New Deal's ascendant phase from 1932 to 1936, the agricultural and industrial recovery strategies of the “Hundred Days” came first and foundered. Later, Roosevelt's administration enacted social security, inventive new programs for work relief, and the Wagner labor relations act that changed the rules of the game for trade unions. Once the European war began in 1939, the U.S. gradually became “the arsenal of democracy.” However, only on a fraught and twisting path did Roosevelt finally lead America into the crucible of World War II. Meanwhile, a new social movement reinforced the progressive thrust of Roosevelt's presidency—the rise of new trade unions in the mass production industries impelled by the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), a new labor federation.

This chapter examines the effects of union organization on women workers and sexual division of labor, focusing on the 1930s and 1940s along with earlier developments in U.S. women's labor history. It draws on feminist scholarship that argued that labor unions' efforts to exclude women from membership had helped to consolidate patterns of job segregation by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After reviewing theories of occupational segregation by sex, especially with regards to the role of unions in the formation of labor-market boundaries between “women's work” and “men's work,” the chapter discusses the ways that the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (initially called Committe for Industrial Organization) contributed to the sexual division of labor. It argues that industrial unions had the opportunity to challenge job segregation by sex during the 1930s and 1940s, but instead helped consolidate it. In both periods, the labor movement showed litte interest in recruiting women into its ranks.

This chapter investigates the shift of social and political conflict to the central axis of class. It outlines the structural impacts of the Depression on the Oakland population. Facing economic crisis, the new political elite adopted a developmental strategy and type of governance that is called business managerialism. It concentrates on the paths of formation of three groups: the white middle classes; African Americans; and the ethnic white working classes. Under Joseph Knowland's leadership, the downtown elite consolidated a form of urban governance in the new regime. The Knowland regime met the challenge of labor insurgency with a combination of repression, exclusion, and selective incorporation. The split between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions strengthened the employers' leverage and fractured the possibilities for a wider expression of labor solidarity in the public sphere.

The aftermath of World War I sees the granting of suffrage to women (by the narrowest of margins). The Great Depression makes these deficiencies dramatically clear. The New Deal is an attempt by non- or semi-socialist forces in America to deal with the weaknesses of the American state, now that America had grown into the major industrial power. The forces behind Roosevelt soon split into two main factions. Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union Message lays out a new bill of rights that is strongly of the Wallace vision. Wallace is Vice-President until 1944 when he is replaced by Harry Truman. Truman is much less open to co-existence with the Soviets. The USSR is increasingly aggressive in Western Europe – the Cold War is on the doorstep and enters with the publication of George Kennan’s famous ‘Long Telegram’ advocating a policy of containment. Containment is in turn made cheaper by the development of atomic weapons and delivery systems that would have to be in flying range of the USSR. Domestically the fear of Communism leads to a vast shrinking of the political spectrum deemed legitimate.

The introductory chapter introduces the reader to the key arguments, themes, events, and protagonists in this book about power laundry workers, which spans and discusses the early twentieth-century women’s labor movement, the Great Migration, Black women’s industrial labor and organizing, the Great Depression and New Deal Order, Communist Party organizing during the Third Period and Popular Front, the rise of the industrial union movement and formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America’s (ACWA) industrial and social unionism, World War II and the Double V Campaign, labor feminism, civil rights unionism and the long civil rights movement, the 1960s feminist movement, and intersectionality. The chapter introduces the reader to the four key protagonists: Black workers Dollie Robinson and Charlotte Adelmond and white radical Jewish organizers Jessie Taft Smith and Beatrice Shapiro Lumpkin. This chapter tells the reader that the book will provide an analysis of the working conditions and occupational structure in the power laundry industry nationwide (chapters 1 and 2) but then focus on laundry workers in New York City, one of the leading centers of the industry. Chapters 3 through 7 follow the workers’ thirty-year union campaign and argue that a multitude of factors led to unionization in 1937, including Depression-era working conditions, the support of allies in the Women’s Trade Union League, the Communist Party and the Negro Labor Committee, the emergence of the industrial union movement, New Deal labor legislation, and, most importantly, the militant industrial and interracial organizing of the workers themselves. Chapters 7 to 10 demonstrate that unionization under the ACWA-affiliated Laundry Workers Joint Board (LWJB) resulted in marginally better working conditions but that tensions quickly erupted between a predominantly Black workforce determined to pursue a civil rights agenda and a white male leadership, including ACWA president Sidney Hillman, who was intent on exercising tight control over the union and implementing a bureaucratic, business-oriented unionism reminiscent of the CIO’s former nemesis, the American Federation of Labor. Chapter 11 discusses the impact of the leadership’s ousting of Adelmond and Robinson and the suppression of their civil rights unionism for both the laundry workers and organized labor more broadly. This chapter concludes with a brief discussion of sources, including union records, oral histories, census data, legal documents, Women’s Bureau reports, newspapers, and the records of the WTUL and Communist Party.

This chapter focuses on the debate over Asian immigration exclusion between the enactment of Japanese exclusion and World War II. During this time, prominent opponents of Japanese exclusion shifted tactics to clear up racial and international misunderstanding through scholarly research, educational initiatives, and campaigns to repeal Japanese exclusion. They did this mainly through the establishment of two institutions: Survey of Race Relations at Stanford University and the Institute of Pacific Relations, initially based in Hawaii. At the same time, proponents of Japanese exclusion moved on to push for the exclusion of Filipino immigrants and the repatriation of those already in the U.S. This was achieved, but only by Congress granting independence to the U.S. colony of the Philippines. Egalitarian views of Filipinos, Japanese, and other Asian immigrant groups gained support within a new and powerful national labor union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Despite the continuation of Asian exclusion, the 1930s was a transitional period in which new opportunities and institutions emerged to combat it.

This chapter offers a explanation of the proliferation of occupational pension plans after World War II. Principally, it shows that private pension development was neither the result of policy interventions before the end of the war nor the simple result of union strength in postwar collective bargaining disputes. Instead, the turn to occupational pensions was caused by policymakers intervening in labor-management disputes—not principally to compel businesses to adopt occupational pension plans, but rather to establish labor peace in order to capture capitalist growth opportunities abroad. The chapter begins by considering why the Congress of Industrial Organizations was unable to expand the pension benefits offered by the Social Security program after the New Deal, roughly between 1939 and 1968, before turning to the expansion of private pensions.

As the Great Depression crushed the mining industry, Tri-State miners looked for ways to restore their standing as hard-working-white men and their faith in capitalism. The New Deal offered hope but brought labor unions back into the district. Some miners, but not a majority, looked to organized labor as the best way to roll back the power of the companies. This chapter explores their 1935 strike to regain what they had lost and the ways the New Deal labor regime was too weak to protect them. While strikers waited for allies in the nascent Congress of Industrial Organizations, the mining companies organized the majority of the district’s nonunion miners into a back-to-work movement that became a company union. This group rallied around old promises of racial superiority and high pay for loyal, hard-working white men who were willing to destroy the CIO union. The CIO, with the help of New Deal officials, eventually won this dispute in court, but it could not overrule the reactionary commitments in the hearts of the majority of Tri-State miners as a new world war brought the mining economy to life again.

This book begins by presenting the common understanding that the Communist Party hindered black cultural expression during the 1940s. The chapter shows that the Communist-led Left promoted several cultural organizations to draw black cultural workers into its orbit. Most important was the National Negro Congress (NNC) to which numerous black artists and writers contributed their talents. The NNC was a coalition of civil rights groups and labor organizations. It was officially launched in 1936 at a national conference in Chicago. It reached out to the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which heavily recruited African Americans into the labor movement. NNC organizers also worked on the cultural front by convening panels with artists and writers at its conferences, organizing campaigns against discrimination in Hollywood, and holding mass rallies to fight discrimination.

This chapter examines the labor movement's recruitment of young people, particularly African Americans, in support of economic justice initiatives. Movement bridge-builders in the labor movement attempted to strategically link framing strategies with organizing and the cultural work of local unions and community-labor coalitions. They relied upon indigenous activists and groups to create an interest convergence between local labor activists, workers, and students who were recruited into the labor movement. Labor and workers' rights activists also focused on intergenerational movement activism in order to shift the labor movement away from institutional leveraging, or efforts by old-guard laborites to channel labor's resources inside of established bureaucratic and political institutions. The chapter highlights the reform measures instituted by President John Sweeney of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) and analyzes on whether these measures created opportunities for young blacks to participate in the labor movement.

This epilogue shows that Hague v. CIO had a legacy more complex than its reputation as a speech rights victory for workers and others over dictatorial city boss Frank Hague under the Bill of Rights. The American Civil Liberties Union and renamed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) immediately split over the decision’s ramifications. Moreover, while the ruling enlarged constitutional protection for the right of public assembly to the benefit of Jehovah’s Witnesses, civil rights demonstrators, and others, it did little to enhance picketing and other “labor speech,” or to shield union organizers from police harassment. And while the decision freed the CIO to organize in Jersey City, it did not destroy Mayor Hague, who accommodated CIO unions and was ousted later due to city politics.

This chapter examines the hard times of the 1930s that highlights the powerful impact finances had on labor relations in the transit industry. Like transportation companies across the country, the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company (PRT) faced an annual drumbeat of falling ridership, declining income, and darkening prospects. The employees' dissatisfaction with the PRT, coupled with the gathering strength of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), led them to abandon their company union and organize in the Transport Workers Union (TWU). Management, pressed to the wall by its financial situation, knew how much the TWU would cost them at the bargaining table, and turned to racist techniques that were sharpened by racial animosity within the workforce.

This chapter explores the roots of the social justice movement in the South. It starts with the Congress of Industrial Organization’s (CIO) efforts in organizing the textile, tobacco, and other industrial workers in the Southern states, which would be known as “Operation Dixie.” The CIO aimed to create “one big union” that would be comprised of the unskilled and mass production workers of the country.

This chapter explores the deepening and consolidation of ideological changes as support for civil rights became a defining commitment of a more robust liberal coalition in the 1940s. African American movement activists capitalized on the World War II crisis to force new civil rights issues onto the political agenda—such as fair employment practices and discrimination in the military—and to forge a much broader civil rights coalition. After the war, continued movement activism laid the groundwork for the dramatic fight over the Democratic platform at the convention in 1948. Ultimately, the political work by African American groups, in cooperation with the Congress of Industrial Organizations and other urban liberals, fostered a new understanding of “liberalism” in which support for civil rights was a key marker of one's identity as a liberal.

Chapter 2 traces Louis Adamic’s emergence as a leader in the antifascist vanguard. By the mid-1930s, Adamic proclaimed that the United States was ripe for fascist exploitation and pointed to the efforts of white nationalists who claimed that the struggles for worker, immigrant, and black rights were communist-inspired. Adamic promoted cultural pluralism and the dynamic labor activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations as countermeasures to fight the demagoguery of the anticommunists. Adamic also attacked the procommunist left in the United States because of their adherence to Moscow’s dictates, which highlighted his independent leftist politics. His proworker novel Grandsons, which became an example of the genera of proletarian literature, and his work with the propluralist Foreign Language Information Service are highlighted.

This chapter introduces the arguments of the book in the context of a summary of the critique of traditional American union leadership as pro-business and dangerously invested in partnerships with management. First, it chronicles the two waves of the American union movement, telling the story of the rise of democratic unionism with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its subsequent decline in the postwar years. It then provides some examples from the 1990s and 2000s of instances in which conservative unions led workers to defeats, primarily because of the failure to prioritize rank-and-file action in favor of more administrative, legalistic, and consumer-oriented strategies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the changing situation of labor today. It argues that that the story of the rise of the CIO provides an inspiring model of the birth of a fighting labor movement out of a period of fragmentation, exclusivity, and weakness in existing labor institutions. It further suggests that present conditions of economic crisis and the stirrings of a new militancy are ripe for a similar transformation.