It's the Union Leaders, Stupid: Organized Labor's Failures in the South

Abstract

It's the Union Leaders, Stupid:Organized Labor's Failures in the South Chad Pearson (bio) Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Race, Class, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. ix + 416pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index $49.95. Labor historians have debated questions relating to race, place, and class for well over a century. What explains the relative weakness of labor in the South compared to other areas of the United States? And how have such weaknesses impacted the nation as a whole? These essential questions are taken up by Michael Goldfield in his 2020 book The Southern Key. His ambitious, polemical, and provocative work deserves a wide readership, especially given the poor state of our current political and scholarly moment, one plagued on the one hand by efforts in some states to impose bans on parts of the study of Black history, and on the other hand by the presence of the enormously popular New York Times's 1619 Project (2021), which indefensibly says little about unions and class.1 In eight well-crafted chapters, Goldfield advances several salient points, including the idea that organized labor's failure to secure a significant foothold in the South in the 1930s and 1940s has adversely impacted the working classes nationally.2 That failure, in Goldfield's view, stems mainly from the strategic mistakes, wrongheaded assumptions, and the relative conservatism of labor leaders and organizers, especially those in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Beginning in the late 1930s, union organizers demonstrated a sustained unwillingness to build multiracial coalitions while spending an inordinate amount of time fighting, and ultimately eliminating, activists on their left. They appeared primarily interested in establishing cushy relationships with liberal politicians and securing labor peace at worksites. Goldfield comes out swinging: "One is struck at times by the sheer incompetence and stupidity of many of the conservative leaders of the CIO" (p. 32). In making his case, Goldfield has amassed much evidence and provided useful frameworks. Building on the work of sociologists Erik Olin Wright [End Page 152] and Beverly Silver, Goldfield reintroduces us to the concepts of structural and associational power.3 Skilled workers enjoyed structural power; because of their skill, bosses had difficulties replacing them during industrial disputes. Associational power emerges out of labor's ability to mobilize additional support during times of struggle, and often includes other unions, civil rights organizations, and/or community activists. Coalminers, as skilled workers, have traditionally benefited from their structural power. Textile workers, on the other hand, were more easily replaced and thus needed associational power to secure their demands. Regardless of the type of power employed, mobilizing the masses during labor struggles has traditionally helped all workers. Goldfield wrote this book partially to challenge what he believes is the presence of several inaccurate assumptions and myths in scholarly and political circles. One misconception centers on the untrue idea that southern workers were somehow culturally different from laborers elsewhere and thus too difficult to organize. Goldfield shows that this was not the case: their hatred of inequality and exploitation was as natural and widespread as the disgust expressed anywhere else. Goldfield discusses the long history of labor combativeness predating the New Deal period, as well as the activists who organized across racial lines. The Knights of Labor, for example, recruited many African Americans across industries (though they were simultaneously guilty of ugly expressions of Sinophobia). The United Mine Workers, though also far from perfect, did have a record of representing wage earners across racial lines. And the Industrial Workers of the World, unapologetically radical and racially inclusive, enjoyed a presence in parts of the South during the early twentieth century. Additional myths Goldfield challenges concern the roles of the federal government and its supporters from organized labor's officialdom. Here, he repeats earlier arguments about organized labor and politics in the 1930s, demonstrating that the central agents of workplace improvements were rank-and-file militants, not the mainstream union chiefs or liberal government policymakers and bureaucrats. He reenters an often-contentious debate that continues to divide labor and political historians. While many liberal scholars have described the New Deal state in a progressive light...