Making a new deal

Making a new deal

The politics of laborers have made them a vital and vibrant part of American history. One has only to study the underlying political causes of the first labor movements to understand why. Few will doubt that one of the most important parts of labor history occurred with the working-class experience in Chicago from the 1920s to the late 30s.

During this era, many workers petitioned the government and employers for changes. Some groups of those workers were successful and others were not. Lizabeth Cohen, in Making a New Deal, takes a different approach from traditional labor historians. She examines the effects that ethnic workers had on the successes and failures of the earliest labor movements.

Though striking workers were not endemic to Chicago, labor historians who begin their research in that city will be getting one national story (Cohen, 7). There are several reasons why Chicago is a logical beginning. In many ways, the nascent laborers of Chicago set the groundwork for the numerous benefits contemporary workers have. Earlier labor movements, like so much other history, were centered in Chicago (Cohen, 7). It just so happens that extraordinary political changes in labor took place during the interwar period, and Chicago was the largest industrial city in America then (Cohen, 7).

Because Chicago was replete with ethnicity, it is also possible to conduct comparative labor studies. Finally, other than New York, no city had as many strikes as Chicago (Cohen, 12).

By 1919, America had its first major strike in which four million people—or one in every five—Americans participated (Cohen, 12). These workers sought to protect their jobs and to solidify their wartime wages. One tool for doing so, of course, was the strike.

Another was organizing a political party. Although local, futile, and ephemeral, a new political party was formed with the sole purpose of incorporating change into the common laborer’s working environment. Its candidates had no success in local elections; the party foundered. In fact, the 1919 strike was deemed a failure on the whole (Cohen, 13). Reasons for the failure abound, such as the “Red Scare tactics of government, employer combativeness, and the AFL’s ambivalence about organizing non-craft workers into unions” (Cohen, 13). In Chicago, there was one other significant reason why the labor movements th...

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...ion leadership knew how to and did thwart the divide-and-conquer tactics of businesses. Legislation was more pro-worker, and striking became easier. Workers, no longer getting major benefits from their community, made greater demands from their employers in order to complement those benefits provided by the government. They were getting much of what they sought with relative ease after 1942. A legal pattern for addressing grievances had been set for the workers of today.

Cohen adequately shows why ethnic workers should not be avoided in the study of labor history. She assiduously takes the workers of the 1920s and 30s out of their working environment and also examines them in a social setting. Using that method, Cohen proves that the ethnicity of certain workers is just as important as other traditional factors in studying labor history. Her work, consequently, will also be of significant use to political and social historians. While not an intention of Cohen, she shows that democracy was alive and well in a polyglot city. Lizabeth Cohen demonstrates in Making a New Deal that magnificant feats can be accomplished when ethnic prejudices are set aside and Americans come together.