Union Power & American Democracy: The UAW and the Democratic Party 1935-1972

There is one respect in which American democracy differs from both the British and French versions : it has no mass social democratic party. The story is long and complicated, but sufficiently well known so that facile generalizations may be avoided. There was a strong socialist movement in America in the early 20th century ; and at one point it might have succeeded in creating a mass party. But the Democratic party under Woodrow-Wilson captured its social base ; the trade union leaders decided their interests could be better served through the existing system. Has American democracy suffered as a result ? Is there a pressing need for a Labor party — such as the one now led by James Callaghan (to say nothing of Anthony Benn) ; or a Socialist party — like the PS led by Guy Mollet in the past, or the one being torn apart by personality rivalries today ? That would be a difficult case to prove. And what is social democracy anyway ? European socialist parties have abandoned nationalization, and for compelling reasons (let us not bother to explain French exceptionalism). Nor is the recent discovery or invention of autogestion likely to win mass support in America. Autogestion is a vague, undefinable scheme that admittedly does not now exist, and has never existed, anywhere in the world. Samuel Gompers had some choice remarks to make about similar utopian proposals in his day.

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The Racketeer Menace and Antiunionism in the Mid-Twentieth Century US

International Labor and Working-Class History ◽

10.1017/s0147547908000215 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 74 (1) ◽

pp. 124-147 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

David Witwer

Keyword(s):

Organized Crime ◽

Democratic Party ◽

Eisenhower Administration ◽

Organized Labor ◽

Red Scare ◽

Union Power ◽

Congressional Hearings ◽

Congressional Debates ◽

Union Leaders ◽

Legal Restrictions

AbstractIn the postwar era, conservatives manipulated concerns about union corruption and organized crime in order to score political points against New Deal Democrats and to win new legal restrictions on union power. The resulting racketeer menace had much in common with the contemporary red scare. Antiunion conservatives framed the issue of labor racketeering in terms that resembled the language then being mobilized against internal communist espionage and subversion. This rhetoric proliferated in the congressional debates of the postwar era. Proponents of the Taft-Hartley Act invoked the racketeer menace in 1946 and 1947. They depicted the law as an effort to curb racketeering and thus protect workers and the general public by restricting abusive union power. In the years that followed, a series of congressional hearings into union corruption kept attention focused on the issue of racketeering. For the Eisenhower Administration this campaign against labor racketeering offered a chance to peel the working-class vote away from the Democratic Party by politically dividing union members from their leadership. The culmination of this trend came at the end of the 1950s during the McClellan Committee hearings, which was the largest congressional investigation up to that time. Those hearings transformed Teamsters President James R. Hoffa into a potent symbol of the danger posed by labor racketeering. The committee's revelations and the publicity they received undercut the labor movement. Polls showed growing public skepticism toward unions, and especially union leaders. Such attitudes helped conservatives win a new round of legislative restrictions on organized labor in the form of the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959).

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Introduction

Arguing until Doomsday ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469656397.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-10

Author(s):

Michael E. Woods

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

Property Rights ◽

Mississippi River ◽

Democratic Party ◽

River Valley ◽

American Empire ◽

American Democracy ◽

American Slavery ◽

White Voters

The introduction demonstrates how Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis’s intertwined careers can illuminate the sectionalism that split the antebellum Democratic Party. Both men moved west into the Mississippi River Valley, envisioned that valley as the nucleus of a burgeoning American empire, and regarded Democratic unity as vital to preserving a growing Union. But, pressured by their respective constituencies in Illinois and Mississippi, Douglas and Davis promoted incompatible programs for reconciling African American slavery with white freedom. Douglas championed whites-only majoritarianism and left African Americans’ status up to white voters in each state and territory. Alarmed, Davis sought to use federal power to protect slaveholders’ property rights against potentially hostile majorities. Rooted in a larger tension between property and democracy, this conflict shattered their party in 1860. Though ostensibly united by racism and anti-abolitionism, antebellum Democrats aligned into sectional wings and battled over the nature of American democracy itself.

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The Galaxy, National Literature, and Reconstruction

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2020.75.1.50 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 75 (1) ◽

pp. 50-81

Author(s):

Brook Thomas

Keyword(s):

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

National Literature ◽

Lost Cause ◽

American Democracy ◽

Fair Treatment ◽

The Galaxy ◽

Great Poet ◽

John William De Forest ◽

United Nation

Brook Thomas, “The Galaxy, National Literature, and Reconstruction” (pp. 50–81) The North’s victory in the Civil War preserved the Union and led to the abolition of slavery. Reconstruction was a contentious debate about what sort of nation that union of states should become. Published during Reconstruction before being taken over by the Atlantic Monthly, the Galaxy tried, in Rebecca Harding Davis’s words, to be “a national magazine in which the current of thought of every section could find expression.” The Galaxy published literature and criticism as well as political, sociological, and economic essays. Its editors were moderates who aesthetically promoted a national literature and politically promoted reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites along with fair treatment for freedmen. What fair treatment entailed was debated in its pages. Essayists included Horace Greeley, the abolitionist journalist; Edward A. Pollard, author of The Lost Cause (1866); and David Croly, who pejoratively coined the phrase “miscegenation.” Literary contributors included Davis, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, John William De Forest, Julian Hawthorne, Emma Lazarus, Paul Hayne, Sidney Lanier, and Joaquin Miller. Juxtaposing some of the Galaxy’s literary works with its debates over how the Union should be reimagined points to the neglected role that Reconstruction politics played in the institutionalization of American literary studies. Whitman is especially important. Reading the great poet of American democracy in the context of the Galaxy reveals how his postbellum celebration of a united nation—North, South, East, and West—aligns him with moderate views on Reconstruction that today seem racially reactionary.

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Jim and Jap Crow

10.23943/princeton/9780691129488.001.0001 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Matthew M. Briones

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Atomic Bomb ◽

Civil Liberty ◽

Chicago School ◽

Japanese Americans ◽

Japanese American ◽

American Democracy ◽

Social Scientists ◽

Internment Camps ◽

The Military

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. This book follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. The book looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.

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