Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport's Socialist New Deal, 1915–36. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 300 pp. $35.00 cloth; Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 271 pp. $45.00 cloth; $16.95 paper.

Abstract

What impact did the New Deal have at the local level? In these two volumes from the University of Illinois Press series, “The Working Class in American History,” historians Janet Irons and Cecelia Bucki use the vehicle of the case study to present detailed answers to this question. In so doing, each scholar makes a valuable contribution to our understandings of social and political change in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). Looking at parts of the South (textile mill towns in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee), Irons explores how white textile workers responded to changes in labor relations under the New Deal, a response that culminated in the failed 1934 general textile strike. In her study of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Bucki provides a sophisticated urban history, situating workers, ethnicity, class, and the economy firmly within a larger narrative of organized labor's quest for political power.