Citadel of Labor

This chapter surveys the role of Civil War memory in the construction of labor patriotism in the American Federation of Labor. Mirroring its anti-revolutionary leadership, notably Samuel Gompers, the AFL moved increasingly away from labor militancy and electoral strategy. The rise of national blue-gray reconciliation paralleled the Federation’s maturation, as well as the establishment of Jim Crow unionism. Labor Day, Decoration Day, and Fourth of July marches were incubators of nationalist pageantry in which white workingmen venerated the veteran alongside the industrial soldier and the union label alongside the American flag. By World War I, the Federation had used Civil War memory to embrace class conciliation and nationalism as leaders, and “respectable” workers complied with government repression of the labor left.

Wolves

Chapter 6 explores the numerous fights between union leaders in the Gilded Age to show that “organized labor” was far from unified. Historians have long noted that these fights, such as those between and within the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor, weakened unions during this period. This chapter, however, argues that the fights between union leadership in the Gilded Age were part of a large but disorganized effort to “purify” labor organizations of corrupt and complacent leadership. The tumult this created tore unions apart, created rival organizations like the Independent Order of the Knights of Labor, and caused workers to doubt which leaders and organizations were trustworthy. This confusion became even more pronounced during the Populist push in the 1896 national election, when rural farmers and laborers, disillusioned with the organizations and individuals who claimed to help them, could not agree on which candidate would best look after their interests.

A Labor-Liberal Constellation

This chapter traces the initial diffusion of the PAC concept from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to other labor organizations, including the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and liberal ideological groups. Though the AFL had previously opposed the CIO’s partisan electoral strategy and the formation of P.A.C., it came to emulate both following passage of the Taft-Hartley Act by a Republican Congress in 1947, forming Labor’s League for Political Education (LLPE) to engage in elections. That same year, two avowedly “liberal” groups were created to bolster the anti-Communist Left and champion liberal Democrats: the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC). The chapter traces the intertwined electoral efforts and tactical innovations of these liberal and labor organizations through the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, the subsequent creation of their joint PAC, the Committee on Political Education (COPE), and the latter’s activities in the 1956 elections.

Workers in Transition

This chapter argues that change in the U.S. labor movement from American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unionism to Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) industrial unionism largely lay behind Jersey City’s opposition to the CIO in 1937, not just Mayor Hague’s supposed antilabor inclinations. Hague aligned with AFL unions, but Depression and New Deal labor laws weakened them, while boosting CIO industrial unionism and its appeal to suffering Jersey manufacturing workers, including women and African Americans. Moreover, the CIO’s class-conscious culture of “working-class Americanism” clashed with Hague’s ethnicity-based rhetoric of “Patriotic Americanism.” Meanwhile, interwar anticommunism intensified Jersey City’s opposition to CIO organizers, who themselves drew on Popular Front rhetoric of antifascism to oppose “dictatorial” regimes like Hague’s. This polarization complicated Jersey City’s reception of the CIO.

4. Railroads and mass distribution, 1850 –1880

“Railroads and mass distribution, 1850–1880” focuses on unprecedented economic and technological innovations in the decades after the Civil War. Coal, telegraph communication, and the railroad network revolutionized distribution and manufacture while creating a new management class. Corporations developed from small beginnings into mail-order companies supported by a new postal network, followed by department stores. Unions such as the American Federation of Labor were developed to regulate the workforce. Railroads and telegraph communication led to increased farming, facilitated the movements of traveling salespeople, and enabled the founding and management of the large industrial concerns that dominated the American economy over the next half-century and beyond.

Epilogue

This epilogue concludes the narrative by examining the effects of World War II on the Tri-State mining district. The National War Labor Board ultimately facilitated the unionization of most district miners in the CIO. As federal support waned at war’s end, however, the district rapidly collapsed. Although now unionized, Tri-State miners opted for the conservative, anti-Communist unionism of the American Federation of Labor. But no union could stop the closure of the mines by the late 1950s. Rather than go into mining, young working-class men. such as the district’s favorite son, Mickey Mantle, now chose other occupations. The epilogue also surveys the books core arguments and reiterates its historiographical significance.

Fighting Unions

This chapter focuses on the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as an explicitly anti-union organization with the stated goal of maintaining the “open shop”—or union-free workplaces. NAM's chief target was the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which, like NAM, sought to bring order and standardization to the field of labor, but on workers' terms. NAM fought the AFL using many of the same tactics the AFL deployed against employers: disciplined organization, injunctions, lobbying, and what it variously called “propaganda” or “education.” The battle between NAM and the AFL was epic, conceived by both as a struggle for control of the American workplace. Unions and industrialists—both wary of the state—fought one another for control. Neither the AFL nor NAM were truly representative of their alleged constituency (“workers” and “industry,” respectively), but they were the organizations most fully engaged in this battle, each vilifying the other as “the enemy,” both claiming to uphold American individualism.