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Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939

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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.

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.

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.

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.

This book is an absolute labor of love! You can easily picture Chicago in the 1920's and 1930's while reading the book, and witness the ebb and flow of politics, personalities, ethnicity, and the economy. A great study of Chicago, labor relations, and humanity in Chicago between the wars.

In Making a New Deal Lizabeth Cohen has produced the sort of cultural history many historians only dream of writing. It is both meticulously researched, witness the 140 pages of end notes, and beautifully written. She employs quantitative analysis, material culture interpretations, and oral histories to recover the world of Chicago industrial workers, particularly steelworkers, tractor assemblers, and meatpackers, between 1919 and 1939. As would be expected from the Thompsonish title, Cohen argues that these workers were active participants in the creation of the New Deal. She demonstrates that workers' response to the Depression was shaped by the reconfiguration in the 1920s of both ethnicity and work place relationships, and the growth of mass culture. Workers made the New Deal as part of a process whereby diverse cultural experiences were replaced by homogeneous ones. How did this happen?

Cohen begins her book with the defeat of labour's efforts to maintain the wages and conditions they won during the First World War. She argues that after 1919 'localisms' of 'race, ethnicity, job, and neighborhood' undercut the ability of workers to resist 'employers insisting on the open shop, government engaged in Red Scare tactics, and craft unions resistant to organizing industrial workers' (p. 38). Suffice to say that although her argument here is not groundbreaking Cohen takes the time to delineate how these 'localisms' separated workers even as they fought for similar
goals. Her focus on the local nature of workers' experiences shows that although the 1920s was a stagnant period for union activism, workers' cultures were politically charged. For instance, ethnic identities were reshaped in those years as mutual benefit societies and community based 'banks' expanded their base from regional to national origin communities and adopted more commercial methods of business. Likewise the struggle of immigrant Italian catholics against the American church hierarchy transformed patron saint festivals from village or Chicago neighbourhood traditions into an Italian-American tradition. As Cohen writes, 'ethnic organizations introduced workers to the world outside their neighborhoods while ensuring that it was still an ethnic one' (p. 95).

Workers' encounters with mass culture in the 1920s were also mediated by ethnic and neighbourhood identities. The purchase of a standardised mass produced item, such as a phonograph, did not automatically draw workers into a homogeneous American middle class culture. Rather it helped keep ethnic cultures alive as major American record companies re-pressed European recordings and recruited immigrant entertainers for original releases. Chicago was also an important centre of 'race records' and independent producers who catered to ethnic audiences. Cohen argues that a commodity could help a person retain or lose a cultural identity. 'What mattered were the experiences and expectations that the consumer brought to the object' (p.106). Workers were less inclined to buy standardised brand name products from cash and carry chain
stores that blossomed in the 1920s, such as A & P, because neighbourhood grocers provided credit and were more convenient. Nonetheless the pressure of competition forced independent grocers to organise co-operative wholesale purchases and stock brand name goods. Movies and radio were also first consumed in local and ethnic variants before being subjected to chain ownership. Mass culture was not simply imposed from the top but rather shaped through the interaction of consumers predilections and the methods of distribution. Cohen points to jazz as an example of how one folk culture made it in the mainstream.

Workers' identities were also shaped in the workplace where employers sought to create loyalty, increase productivity, and head off militancy, through various welfare schemes. In an effort to ensure individual loyalty employers broke up ethnic and race work groups. They thought this would erase group solidarity and produce a more docile workforce. Instead it promoted worker solidarity. Cohen shows that workers acted together to resist speed ups and other attempts to increase their productivity. The experiments conducted at the Chicago area's largest employer, the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric, by Australian born Elton Mayo receive a mention, as does the fact that these workers dubbed rate breakers 'Phar Lap', but Cohen does not make the obvious connection. Although workers did not give employers their unmitigated loyalty, they came to expect employers to meet some of their welfare needs. Workers noticed when the boss did not deliver on these expectations and this widened the gap between them and employers.

In the 1920s workers forged peer communities that existed side by side with traditional institutions that shaped worker and ethnic identities. When the Depression swept these institutions away workers turned to each other for support and mobilized to demand intervention by the federal government. Cohen's final chapters chronicle the pressure workers applied to the Democratic administration, which it had elected, for laws that protected their right to organise unions and for the equitable distribution of welfare. She also devotes a chapter to the rise of the CIO in Chicago. Cohen shows that Chicago's industrial workers invested their future in a centralised national welfare state and a centralised national union of factory workers. She notes that although these institutions were no safeguard of workers liberty, and in some ways came to imprison them, it is important to understand what rank and file workers accomplished.

This book established Cohen as one of the great historians of her generation.

I wanted to use this book for one of my classes, as I had used parts of it in the past for another class and my professor recommended it me I quickly went to Amazon to find it. It took about a week to arrive with regular shipping but expedited shipping is also an option. I would buy from here again.

Cohen's work based on her Ph.D. Dissertation at UC-Berkeley proves to be a comprehensive, engaging, and insightful look into popular culture in 1920s and 1930s Chicago. She moves seamlessly from labor history to cultural history to ethnic history without losing the reader by including helpful charts, figures, and photographs. Her section on the nature of mass media and mass consumption undoubtedly provides evidence of her writing style in The American Pageant.

Cohen does not create a delineation between immigrants that came to the area and natives of the Chicago area, which goes a long way in terms of bias. She covers African-Americans, Polish, Italians, and Jews without being critical one way or the other. Each chapter seems to be able to live by itself, which gives the book a flavor of being a compendium of papers instead of a conjoined work. All in all, Cohen does a wonderful job examining Chicago and Chicagoans whatever their ethnicity may be.

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.

After the conclusion of the Great War, labor suffered one of its greatest setbacks in its conflict with management. Due to its segmentation along racial, gender, and age lines allowed employers to subordinate worker to their prerogatives. These divisions underwent a gradual shift in attitudes and behaviors of social and cultural experiences and lessen the antagonisms between these groups that allowed the effectiveness of the CIO's intervention in the corporate world. The author analyzes the city of Chicago since it was the 2nd largest industrial center, its multiethnic and interracial workforce and the best-documented city during the interwar period. The Red Scare tactics, employer combativeness, and AFL ambivalence in organizing in non-craft into unions predetermined labor's failure in 1919. Segmentation tactics were similar in context as described in David Gordon's Segmented Work, Divided Workers. Companies hired Blacks and Mexicans as strikebreakers, circulated powerful racist handbills, and limited the contact between ethnic groups at work. Workers reinforced this segmentation by providing uncompromising loyalty to buying from grocers, enlisting in mutual assistance programs, investing in banks, and recreation activities with their own ethnic groups. However the exception to this rule was Blacks shopping at chain stores without fearing of discriminating practices by Polish or Italian merchants. Employers further eliminated the attraction of union by introducing of Welfare capitalism to appease workers demands. This paternalistic policy offered insurance policies, retirement and vacation plans. The author offers a different explanation that the changes developed between employer and employee is due to the innovation of the employee to modify the relationship to suit their own needs. The introduction of mass culture did not conflict or undermine their traditional cultures, but solidified them. The gradual incorporation of these ethnic groups into a mass culture had the undesired effect in unifying these ethnic groups to oppose their employers. These institutions that divided the various ethnic groups collapsed under the financial disasters from the Great Depression. Ethnic grocers and banks were viewed with suspicion and disgust. The supposed benefits given to workers by welfare capitalism demonstrated to every worker the need for a union and a welfare state. Workers united themselves into union in acquiring recognition as organizational bodies and acquiring benefits with the assistance of government intervention on behalf of workers.