Union Pioneers: The Founders of Local Unions at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1933-1937

Abstract

Much remains to be learned, writes Herbert Gutman, the past history of the American working class, much of which will enlarge our understanding of the larger social and economic processes that have shaped the development of late twentieth-century American society. And, he adds significantly, there is much to be learned about the individual men and women who made up that changing class.' This observation applies with great force to the era of the Great Depression. Led by Gutman and David Montgomery, scholars and students have been battering down traditional conceptions about the lives of American workers in every period between the American Revolution and World War I. Work on the 1930s, however, continues to take the form of institutional history, accounts of famous strikes, and biography. The writings of Irving Bernstein, Sidney Fine, Walter Galenson, and Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine tell us a great deal about such topics as the passage of the Wagner Act, the split in the American Federation of Labor, John L. Lewis's decision to establish the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Flint sit-down strike. But they tell us much less about the unionization process and, insofar as their accounts of dramatic events imply that the work force was boiling over with militancy, they may actually be misleading.2 Investigation of the emergence of local unions at large General Electric and Westinghouse factories shows that the rank and file in these plants was not