Editor’s Introduction

Powered by an uncommon collaboration between middle-class reformers and worker activists, the Chicago branch of the Women’s Trade Union League under Margaret Dreier Robins emerged as one of the brightest stars in the Progressive Era firmament. Drawing strength from an alliance with Chicago Federation of Labor President John Fitzpatrick, Robins, as the Chicago league’s president and chief financial angel—alongside other key players like Agnes Nestor, Rose Schneiderman, and Mary McDowell—laid justifiable claim to a host of industrial, legislative, and wartime administrative victories. Yet, almost exactly coterminous to Robin’s resignation from the presidency in 1922 (and subsequent retirement to Florida in 1924), the league, both in Chicago and nationally, suffered a severe and ultimately irreversible downward course. Historian Suellen Hoy, who previously tracked other aspects of the league’s dynamics, here links its existential denouement to a combination of factors: demographic changes in the workforce, the rise of the National Women’s Party, AFL vs. CIO tensions, and the loss of a universally respected leader.Against the backdrop of much post-2016 election commentary on the “white working class” as if it were a force that suddenly came out of nowhere, historian Robyn Muncy looks back in a wide-ranging essay on uses of the term working class in mainstream American journalism since the 1950s. Amid a combination of Cold War pressures and an apparent boom economy, the New York Times (to take her prime source) had, by the early sixties, largely adopted the conceit, common to contemporary social science, of the United States as a “classless” society. To be sure, the reemergence of a Marxist-identified Left amid the student, African American, and antiwar movements of the 1960s did lead to a modest uptick in journalistic reference to working class–themed analysis and strategies, duly reported. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, Muncy identifies a trend in categorization that continues to haunt popular social thought: white people opposed to civil rights and racial integration, without close scrutiny of their actual and varied social roots, began to be pigeonholed in the press as “working class.” Based on their prior vocabulary, suggests Muncy, they might have described these voters as “middle class,” “lower middle class,” or—avoiding class language altogether—“white workers,” “white wage-earners,” or “white working people.” The term white working-class, however, fastens a tighter group label and social coherence on this conservative and racist voting bloc. It had the effect, she argues, of “[distancing] the political views of this group from the presumably better white people who supported civil rights.”In a notable Bookmark forum on Kim Phillips-Fein’s Pulitzer Prize finalist Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, facilitator Joseph McCartin describes the work as “a 360-degree view” of “one of the most consequential events of the past half-century.” Four commentators wrestle with additional lessons and/or questions that might be applied to the city’s mid-seventies political-economic crisis. Lane Windham, for instance, looks to undeveloped policy options that might have rescued the city from total dependency on its finance-capital sector. Bill Fletcher, Jr. calls attention to the lack of a pan-urban political strategy across the state and nation. Suleiman Osman points to a disillusionment with the “social-democratic” state even among liberals well before fiscal crisis. And Michael Kazin laments the lack of a progressive counternarrative: “This was not a neoliberal coup,” he observes, “[in the end] Koch and his ilk got more votes than progressives like Mario Cuomo and Ted Kennedy.” Phillips-Fein sympathetically weighs all the comments, while cautioning against a historically premature consignment of the fiscal and political panic evidenced by New York decision-makers into a full-fledged vision or strategy of neoliberalism.In Contemporary Affairs, longtime labor activist Kim Fellner offers a distillation of an extended report on the “quandaries of principle and practice” for the labor movement “in the age of Trump and Tech.” Beginning with a survey of recent organizing and strategizing literature, Fellner takes note of two different emphases: one (associated with Jane McAlevey) stresses “bottom-up” organizing, preparing workers for workplace and community-centered battles that highlight both workplace- centered collective bargaining and other levers of aroused rank-and-file power. By way of contrast, Seattle SEIU president David Rolf, who is closely associated with the city’s Fight for $15 and citywide minimum wage campaigns, stresses scalable, coalition campaigns in which labor wrestles with other interest groups and politicians to affect the shape of the playing field. In either case, Fellner suggests, an unfriendly judicial interpretation of the labor law combined with a digital revolution effecting the very definition of employment also necessitates an “upheaval in the means of organizing.”Finally, in an extended Arts and Media feature, editor Richard Wells sets Steven Spielberg’s smash hit, The Post, into political and cultural context. While Meryl Streep’s riveting portrayal of publisher Katherine Graham’s 1975 defiance of corporate pressures in supporting publication of the Pentagon Papers offers compelling fare in a period of Me-Too sexism and Trumpian disdain for critical media voices of any sort, Wells suggests that we take a closer look at the dramatis personae. In particular, he calls our attention both to the longer tradition of Hollywood films centered on conflicts affecting the newspaper business and to the less savory side of the post-1975 era Washington Post, in particular. Perhaps chief among the contradictions haunting the liberal owner-heroes at the Post—be they the Grahams or their present-day successor Jeff Bezos—is their determined destruction of any labor union or a guild presence at the paper.Those Labor readers who make it a point to keep abreast of new work in the field will see from this issue’s Reviews that they have their work cut out for them. If one often hears invocations of the “transnational” and “global” turn, here, in a bounteous harvest, is the proof of the pudding. Thus, of nineteen reviews, no fewer than thirteen treat subjects that either cross the boundary or lie (in either time or space) entirely outside US national narratives. This motley crew (aptly) includes two books on British naval impressment and single works on Zacatecas urban Indians, colonial Bahamian laborers, Durban’s dockworkers, Knights of Labor in Britain, Anglo-Australian labor radicals, Mexican revolutionary artists, and immigrant anarchists. In addition, a strong labor angle is discovered in a revisionist account of Wilsonian internationalism as well as in an explanation of global overfishing. Based on the reviewers’ comments, two quite discrete projects may be worth closer attention: one treats the ambivalent impact of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms—so different from its US jurisprudential counterparts—on organized labor; the other, a quantitative study of gender and work in early modern Sweden, points to the possibilities of “big data” in social history research. To be sure, other than the ever-increasing diffusion of the historical craft and curiosity, there is no clear rhyme nor reason (and certainly no collusion!) in the books assembled here. But we may hope, slowly but surely, that knowledge of Swedish village life, the South African docks, or maritime tariff wars will enhance the range of questions and awareness of context we customarily bring to North American subjects.Alas, just as we go to press, we learn that we have lost one of our most cherished colleagues in Ira Berlin (1941–2018). Long a stalwart of Labor as well as a magnificent teacher and path-breaking scholar of slavery, Ira sets a standard from which we will long learn. On very short notice, Susan O’Donovan, his long-time colleague at the University of Maryland’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project, offers a touching and informative tribute.

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