Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939

This book is an absolute labor of love! You can easily picture Chicago in the 1920's and 1930's while reading the book, and witness the ebb and flow of politics, personalities, ethnicity, and the economy. A great study of Chicago, labor relations, and humanity in Chicago between the wars.

In Making a New Deal Lizabeth Cohen has produced the sort of cultural history many historians only dream of writing. It is both meticulously researched, witness the 140 pages of end notes, and beautifully written. She employs quantitative analysis, material culture interpretations, and oral histories to recover the world of Chicago industrial workers, particularly steelworkers, tractor assemblers, and meatpackers, between 1919 and 1939. As would be expected from the Thompsonish title, Cohen argues that these workers were active participants in the creation of the New Deal. She demonstrates that workers' response to the Depression was shaped by the reconfiguration in the 1920s of both ethnicity and work place relationships, and the growth of mass culture. Workers made the New Deal as part of a process whereby diverse cultural experiences were replaced by homogeneous ones. How did this happen? Cohen begins her book with the defeat of labour's efforts to maintain the wages and conditions they won during the First World War. She argues that after 1919 'localisms' of 'race, ethnicity, job, and neighborhood' undercut the ability of workers to resist 'employers insisting on the open shop, government engaged in Red Scare tactics, and craft unions resistant to organizing industrial workers' (p. 38). Suffice to say that although her argument here is not groundbreaking Cohen takes the time to delineate how these 'localisms' separated workers even as they fought for similar goals. Her focus on the local nature of workers' experiences shows that although the 1920s was a stagnant period for union activism, workers' cultures were politically charged. For instance, ethnic identities were reshaped in those years as mutual benefit societies and community based 'banks' expanded their base from regional to national origin communities and adopted more commercial methods of business. Likewise the struggle of immigrant Italian catholics against the American church hierarchy transformed patron saint festivals from village or Chicago neighbourhood traditions into an Italian-American tradition. As Cohen writes, 'ethnic organizations introduced workers to the world outside their neighborhoods while ensuring that it was still an ethnic one' (p. 95). Workers' encounters with mass culture in the 1920s were also mediated by ethnic and neighbourhood identities. The purchase of a standardised mass produced item, such as a phonograph, did not automatically draw workers into a homogeneous American middle class culture. Rather it helped keep ethnic cultures alive as major American record companies re-pressed European recordings and recruited immigrant entertainers for original releases. Chicago was also an important centre of 'race records' and independent producers who catered to ethnic audiences. Cohen argues that a commodity could help a person retain or lose a cultural identity. 'What mattered were the experiences and expectations that the consumer brought to the object' (p.1

Cohen's work based on her Ph.D. Dissertation at UC-Berkeley proves to be a comprehensive, engaging, and insightful look into popular culture in 1920s and 1930s Chicago. She moves seamlessly from labor history to cultural history to ethnic history without losing the reader by including helpful charts, figures, and photographs. Her section on the nature of mass media and mass consumption undoubtedly provides evidence of her writing style in The American Pageant. Cohen does not create a delineation between immigrants that came to the area and natives of the Chicago area, which goes a long way in terms of bias. She covers African-Americans, Polish, Italians, and Jews without being critical one way or the other. Each chapter seems to be able to live by itself, which gives the book a flavor of being a compendium of papers instead of a conjoined work. All in all, Cohen does a wonderful job examining Chicago and Chicagoans whatever their ethnicity may be.

A well-researched and original book describing the shifting allegiances of Chicago workers from ethnic help societies to their welfare capitalist employers to finally the US government. In addition to the subject of the growing labor movement, the book is also a great survey of the various ethnic/racial groups of 1920s Chicago and their differing experiences with Americanization. There is a book I would like to recommend as a virtual "sequel" to this one. The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue. While Cohen's book is about the creation of the New Deal coalition in the factory neighborhoods and towns of Chicago, Sugrue's book is about the disappearance of the factories and the departure from the Democratic coalition in the 1960s of the same groups who joined it in the 30s. Sugrue's book also won a Bancroft prize and if you like one you will surely like the other.

After the conclusion of the Great War, labor suffered one of its greatest setbacks in its conflict with management. Due to its segmentation along racial, gender, and age lines allowed employers to subordinate worker to their prerogatives. These divisions underwent a gradual shift in attitudes and behaviors of social and cultural experiences and lessen the antagonisms between these groups that allowed the effectiveness of the CIO's intervention in the corporate world. The author analyzes the city of Chicago since it was the 2nd largest industrial center, its multiethnic and interracial workforce and the best-documented city during the interwar period. The Red Scare tactics, employer combativeness, and AFL ambivalence in organizing in non-craft into unions predetermined labor's failure in 1919. Segmentation tactics were similar in context as described in David Gordon's Segmented Work, Divided Workers. Companies hired Blacks and Mexicans as strikebreakers, circulated powerful racist handbills, and limited the contact between ethnic groups at work. Workers reinforced this segmentation by providing uncompromising loyalty to buying from grocers, enlisting in mutual assistance programs, investing in banks, and recreation activities with their own ethnic groups. However the exception to this rule was Blacks shopping at chain stores without fearing of discriminating practices by Polish or Italian merchants. Employers further eliminated the attraction of union by introducing of Welfare capitalism to appease workers demands. This paternalistic policy offered insurance policies, retirement and vacation plans. The author offers a different explanation that the changes developed between employer and employee is due to the innovation of the employee to modify the relationship to suit their own needs. The introduction of mass culture did not conflict or undermine their traditional cultures, but solidified them. The gradual incorporation of these ethnic groups into a mass culture had the undesired effect in unifying these ethnic groups to oppose their employers. These institutions that divided the various ethnic groups collapsed under the financial disasters from the Great Depression. Ethnic grocers and banks were viewed with suspicion and disgust. The supposed benefits given to workers by welfare capitalism demonstrated to every worker the need for a union and a welfare state. Workers united themselves into union in acquiring recognition as organizational bodies and acquiring benefits with the assistance of government intervention on behalf of workers.