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Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939x$10.40
  (10 reviews)
Best Price: $23.99 $10.40
This book examines how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s. We follow Chicago workers as they make choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or to go to the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or patronize the new A & P. Although workers may not have been political in traditional terms during the '20s, as they made daily decisions like these, they declared their loyalty in ways that would ultimately have political significance. As the depression worsened in the 1930s, not only did workers find their pay and working hours cut or eliminated, but the survival strategies they had developed during the 1920s were undermined. Looking elsewhere for help, workers adopted new ideological perspectives and overcame longstanding divisions among themselves to mount new kinds of collective action. Chicago workers' experiences as citizens, ethnics and blacks, wage earners and consumers all converged to make them into New Deal Democrats and CIO unionists. First printed in 1990, Making a New Deal has become an established classic in American History. The second edition includes a new introductory essay by Lizabeth Cohen.
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Customer Reviews
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A Change in the Direction of America
By A1MXN73841V28Y on 1998-01-28
Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 by Lizabeth Cohen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (England); New York, 1990. Pp. xviii + 526; illustrations. $47.95, cloth; $17.95, paper. Making a New Deal describes the evolution of Chicago's unskilled and semi-skilled labor force during the inter-war years from individuals bonded in groups only by a common ethnicity or race into a cohesive, broad-based alliance responsible, along with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the federal government, for the success of the union movement during the darkest days of the nation's Great Depression. Cohen's concentration is focused on five of the city's industrial giants and the neighborhoods in which they were located, from which they garnered their workforce: the garment industry in the Old Immigrant Neighborhoods of the near west and southwest sides, International Harvester's McCormick Works and Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in the Southwest Corridor, Armour and Swift located in Packingtown, U.S. Steel and Wisconsin Steel of Southeast Chicago, and, with no industry of its own, the Black Belt. Cohen pursues an answer to the question: how it was possible for these industrial workers to become a cohesive force in national politics in the mid-1930's in light of their disunity entering the decade of the 1920's? During the Twenties, church and a myriad of other neighborhood institutions, mass marketing, government, union organizers, and employers all exerted forces on these laborers. Cohen concludes that the metamorphosis was caused by "the change in the workers' own orientation during the 1920s." It took nothing less than a shift in their very value systems, as old symbols of ethnic security began failing or vanished completely, e.g., national churches, enthic-based savings and loan associations and insurance companies, local stores and, eventually, the welfare capitalism practiced by their employers. These events, according to the author, along with the new experiences infused by the 1920's mass culture, left the workers ripe for cooperation, if not unification, in achieving a "new deal" with the willing forces of the CIO and government as the depression deepened. Cohen's research on attitudes and behavioral patterns of the industrial workers is, in some cases, drawn directly from her sources; in others, however, she interpolates, that is, conclusions about the workers are induced by analysis of changes through time and events in the institutions the workers patronized. What results is a seeming seeming defeat of some of the historical myths about the period. For example, installment buying by the industrial worker was assumed to be a universal truth by their contemporaries. Cohen demonstrates that workers in this class were, instead, savers, a habit instilled through their purchase of Liberty bonds during World War I and reinforced by the 1920-21 depression. Another is the historical axiom that Americans who experienced the depression "were ashamed to be on government relief." Letters written to the Roosevelt administration document a different attitude, one of entitlement, rationalized by the workers as due them because of loyalty to country during war and to party during the 1932 and 1936 elections. The author further suggests that mass culture, instead of engendering a common culture as was thought to be the case, turned workers into a political force by eliminating fragmentation along cultural and ethnic lines and permitted an integration of goals. A classless culture was anticipated; a working-class culture was produced. Thus, in counterpoint to labor historians who claim unionism is a credit of the "artisan worker," Cohen is able to comfortably conclude that it was the factory worker that made the CIO a powerful reality. Making a New Deal is a snapshot of America at a pivotal point in its history. It is a snapshot because Cohen advises the reader not to judge the workers' efforts based on subsequent events of the 40's with its growing, more-intrusive government and top-heavy, national CIO, but to view their accomplishments as events unto themselves, results born out of experiences shared during the 1920's; it is pivotal because of the turn America made, leaving welfare capitalism of the 1920's behind and committing itself to becoming a welfare state.
Great insights on the labor movement during the depression
By A2UK1AJ0RTWRV8 on 2005-01-20
Cohen presents a seemingly broad and well-supported thesis to explain the success of unionism in the 1930s. However, while all persuasive, some of her major arguments seem only tangentially relevant to either each other or her main thesis. While she provides a strong, coherent explanation as to why Chicago workers' political loyalties and attitudes shifted so dramatically during the depression, it is frankly nothing new. Yes, workers felt entitled to aid and came to favor a strong, interventionist federal government, but the connections she draws between this and the unionization of Chicago factories remain tenuous. Correlation, as they say, is not causation; but Cohen argues, both implicitly and explicitly, that workers' preference for government intervention was a major factor in the labor struggles of the 1930s. If Cohen had acknowledged that labor solidarity and preference for big-government welfare programs were but two symptoms of worker's frustration, and accordingly broadened and adjusted her thesis, her chapter about Chicagoans attitudes vis-à-vis big government could have provided excellent support for her final argument. In the context of her overarching thesis, however, the chapter seems almost like a square peg in a round hole. Instead of letting her explanations-albeit insightful-of the working class's political consciousness reflect back on the people who hold them, she advances the somewhat further-fetched notion that worker's political experiences led directly to the later growth of unionization. None of this, however, detracts from her excellent account of the organizations and institutions that were shared between the too. Cohen primarily fails by not supporting her argument that these interrelations were anything more than marriages of political expediency forged in desperate times. That the Communists dabbled in both the labor movement and various forms of political activism does not mean that both were one and the same. Cohen rejects the simple explanation that they were both separate outlets for the collective rage of the underemployed.
Ask many American historians for a short answer why the CIO was so successful in the 30s, and they may answer: because of the NLRA, hesitance of local, state, and federal governments to take the politically inexpedient step of supporting industry, and, most importantly, a mass of desperate workers imbued with a newfound distrust for the system that had betrayed them. This is essentially the answer Lizabeth Cohen arrives at; she simply takes a circuitous-if enjoyable-path to reach it. She provides a complex, nuanced answer in a place where a simple answer might do. Perhaps she's asking a different question than it appears she is. The title of her book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, implies that she's looking at a topic broader than the unionization of Chicago factories, but by bookending her many salient and though-provoking claims with the tales of 1919's failed strike and the CIO's ascendancy in the 1930s, she is limiting the scope of her book far too narrowly. Nonetheless, nothing is intrinsically wrong with any of Cohen's arguments and she provides a fascinating window into the mind of America's urban, industrial workforce during the depression.
A Change in the Direction of America
By A1MXN73841V28Y on 1998-01-29
Making a New Deal describes the evolution of Chicago's unskilled and semi-skilled labor force during the inter-war years from individuals bonded in groups only by a common ethnicity or race into a cohesive, broad-based alliance responsible, along with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the federal government, for the success of the union movement during the darkest days of the nation's Great Depression. Cohen's concentration is focused on five of the city's industrial giants and the neighborhoods in which they were located, from which they garnered their workforce: the garment industry in the Old Immigrant Neighborhoods of the near west and southwest sides, International Harvester's McCormick Works and Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in the Southwest Corridor, Armour and Swift located in Packingtown, U.S. Steel and Wisconsin Steel of Southeast Chicago, and, with no industry of its own, the Black Belt. Cohen pursues an answer to the question: how it was possible for these industrial workers to become a cohesive force in national politics in the mid-1930's in light of their disunity entering the decade of the 1920's? During the Twenties, church and a myriad of other neighborhood institutions, mass marketing, government, union organizers, and employers all exerted forces on these laborers. Cohen concludes that the metamorphosis was caused by "the change in the workers' own orientation during the 1920s." It took nothing less than a shift in their very value systems, as old symbols of ethnic security began failing or vanished completely, e.g., national churches, enthic-based savings and loan associations and insurance companies, local stores and, eventually, the welfare capitalism practiced by their employers. These events, according to the author, along with the new experiences infused by the 1920's mass culture, left the workers ripe for cooperation, if not unification, in achieving a "new deal" with the willing forces of the CIO and government as the depression deepened. Cohen's research on attitudes and behavioral patterns of the industrial workers is, in some cases, drawn directly from her sources; in others, however, she interpolates, that is, conclusions about the workers are induced by analysis of changes through time and events in the institutions the workers patronized. What results is a seeming seeming defeat of some of the historical myths about the period. For example, installment buying by the industrial worker was assumed to be a universal truth by their contemporaries. Cohen demonstrates that workers in this class were, instead, savers, a habit instilled through their purchase of Liberty bonds during World War I and reinforced by the 1920-21 depression. Another is the historical axiom that Americans who experienced the depression "were ashamed to be on government relief." Letters written to the Roosevelt administration document a different attitude, one of entitlement, rationalized by the workers as due them because of loyalty to country during war and to party during the 1932 and 1936 elections. The author further suggests that mass culture, instead of engendering a common culture as was thought to be the case, turned workers into a political force by eliminating fragmentation along cultural and ethnic lines and permitted an integration of goals. A classless culture was anticipated; a working-class culture was produced. Thus, in counterpoint to labor historians who claim unionism is a credit of the "artisan worker," Cohen is able to comfortably conclude that it was the factory worker that made the CIO a powerful reality. Making a New Deal is a snapshot of America at a pivotal point in its history. It is a snapshot because Cohen advises the reader not to judge the workers' efforts based on subsequent events of the 40's with its growing, more-intrusive government and top-heavy, national CIO, but to view their accomplishments as events unto themselves, results born out of experiences shared during the 1920's; it is pivotal because of the turn America made, leaving welfare capitalism of the 1920's behind and committing itself to becoming a welfare state.
A superior book on labor, ethnicity, and politics
By A2DK92HJPXT54V on 2003-02-01
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.
Outstanding view of workers in Chicago between the wars
By A3E0IFPCA7KKP9 on 2003-02-17
Making a New Deal is an absolutely incredible look at workers during the Interwar period in Chicago. Cohen has crafted a monumental work that not only covers workers political and union organization but also covers the changes in their lives resulting from societal changes such as the advent of radio and the chain store.
What's particularly appealing and interesting about this book is also what it says about modern times. Cohen discusses that due to the advent of radio and national networks, fewer workers got their local and world news from ethnic newspapers or other papers in Chicago. As can be seen from this, the current lement concerning the consolidation of newspapers, TV and radio stations isn't new, it began even in the 1930s. Also interesting is how many immigrant parents worried about their children becoming influenced by American culture that they did not understand, particularly clubs, dance halls and radio music.
Cohen's work is profoundly important and most of the book is a great read.
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