Labor historians' abiding interest in manifestations of working-class solidarity needs to be related at all times to analysis of formation and reconstructions of bourgeois hegemony. All industrialized countries experienced declining strike activity and trade union membership between 1921 and 1933, although patterns of subsidence and occasional revival of industrial confrontations were quite different in Germany or England from those evident in France or United States. So stark was contrast within United States between decade Irving Bernstein called the lean years and the turbulent years that followed, that historians have been prone to separate twenties and thirties into two distinct periods for study. In this essay I wish to explore some of more continuous lines of social and political developments between world wars that deserve attention of historians of working class, to sug gest some international aspects of U.S. experience, and to identify topics that appear to be in special need of further research. Sidney Fine's perceptive account of policies and beliefs to which leading executives of General Motors Corporation adhered when con fronted by rising union membership and eventual sit-down strikes in thir ties clearly reveals a continuity of managerial powers, principles, and practices dating back at least to post-World War I years. Management was to culti vate and defend loyal employees; a closed shop agreement with a union would decisively undermine that objective and consequently had to be avoided at all costs. Efficient production methods required not only systematic analysis and assignment of work tasks and foremen selected, trained and guided as front line of management, but also planned use of wage incentives. Although executives of company needed to maintain incessant com munication with both their employees and local elites of communities in which they were located, they were also determined to avoid any outside interference in their direction of enterprise. The autonomy of enter prise was sanctum sanctorum of interwar management. As Ronald Schatz, Nelson Lichtenstein, Katherine Stone, Karl Klare, Christopher Tomlins, and Fine himself have argued?and as Sumner Slichter revealed in 1940?