ROBERT W. CHERNY, WILLIAM ISSEL, editors. American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 297. $23.95.

Abstract

Most labor historians see the Cold War as one root of labor's current weakness. The volume under review, edited by Robert W. Cherny and William Issel, stems from a 1999 Southwest Labor Studies Association conference and provides a “look in detail at the grassroots” (p. 4) through local studies from varied angles of vision. Issel and Kenneth Burt offer positive evaluations of Catholic anticommunism. Issel maintains that the church and Catholic labor activists in San Francisco were motivated by a moderate social vision, worked to settle the 1934 longshore strike, and ignored campaigns to deport left-wing leader Harry Bridges. Burt notes that Catholic officials in Los Angeles worked with left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leaders until 1949 and contends that key activists supporting the anticommunist International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) over the Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) in a 1952 representation election were part of the “liberal-left” (p. 134). Issel acknowledges, however, that the church's labor activists sought to promote “alternatives to radical unionism” (p. 166). Burt, for his part, reports that “toleration of Communists” (p. 125) ended with the appointment of an anticommunist archbishop, church activists' leaflets blared “DON'T LET THE COMMIES FOOL YOU” (p. 132) to counter the UE's emphasis on women's equal contract rights, and the victorious IUE represented workers poorly.