In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein
examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's
political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and
intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from
Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston,
Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories,
strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and
labor in the twentieth century.
The "labor question" became a burning issue during the
Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the
survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there,
Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of
contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the
center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into
alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's
upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male
version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political
culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord"
by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce.
Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained
solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical
transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the
1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor
movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of
Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of
global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of
ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that
labor's most important function, in theory if not always in
practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work
and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their
purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to
the fate of the republic. "State of the Union" is an incisive
history that tells the story of one of America's defining
aspirations.
This edition includes a new preface in which Lichtenstein
engages with many of those who have offered commentary on "State of
the Union" and evaluates the historical literature that has emerged
in the decade since the book's initial publication. He also brings
his narrative into the current moment with a final chapter,
"Obama's America: Liberalism without Unions."
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