The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination

Abstract

The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination. Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. vii, 422. Notes, list of contributors, index, acknowledgments. $49.95.)The history of organized labor during the twentieth century is often presented as a tidy narrative of growth and decline. After struggling for existence during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, unions claimed a seat among the power brokers of modern America during the 1930s. Nearly one of three nonfarm workers belonged to a union by the 1950s, and a union job became a path to the middle class. By the 1980s, though, labor's fortunes had reversed. Ronald Reagan signaled the changing times when he crushed the air traffic controllers strike in 1981. By the end of the twentieth century, only about one in ten workers claimed union membership. A once-powerful social movement had been brought to its knees. What explains the dramatic decline of organized labor in the United States?This question has attracted much attention in the last two decades. Scholars have studied the fracturing of the New Deal coalition, the political suppression of the Cold War era, the racial politics of the 1960s and 1970s, deindustrialization, and the resurgence of conservatism. The Right and Labor in America makes a valuable contribution to the last interpretive category. Its fourteen essays focus on how conservative philosophies and activism after World War II challenged the existence of unions and workers' rights to organize. Four broad themes structure the volume: conservatives' ideological antipathy to class-based organizations; the role of region and race in shaping attitudes toward organized labor; conservatives' use of civil rights language through institutions such as the National Right to Work Committee; and conservatives' allegations that unions fostered corruption and posed threats to democracy.Two essays, in particular, should attract attention from readers interested in Arkansas history. Michael Pierce, associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, shows how attitudes toward organized labor in Northwest Arkansas paralleled broader shifts in the country. During the early twentieth century, the region harbored large pockets of pro-union and anti-corporate ideas. By the end of the century, the same region championed corporate tycoons Sam Walton and Don Tyson. Pierce suggests that Orval Faubus provided the bridge that linked these two eras. Faubus had been raised in a socialist, pro-union family and won the 1954 gubernatorial race with support of the Arkansas labor movement and African Americans. …