Preface

In part, this book has its origins in my origins. Growing up in the small Pennsylvania town of Clearfield, in the 1950s and early 1960s, I learned from my father and mother, Gaston Le Blanc and Shirley Harris Le Blanc, to have a reverence for the labor movement (the organizations of the working class, especially unions), with which they had identified and which they had been part of for many years. My father worked for the United Stone and Allied Products Workers of America, AFL-CIO/CLC (though he had started off in the Unemployed Councils and Workers Alliance of the 1930s); my mother had worked for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (CIO) in the mid-1940s, and after my birth had also done some part-time work for various unions, including the Stoneworkers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, AFL-CIO. They were mainstays in Clearfield’s central labor council. Among my earliest childhood memories are union meetings, picket lines, and Labor Day parades.

The coherence of the past, the meaning of the present, the hope for the future—for all of these things the labor movement was a central reference point. A union for them, and for me, meant what the word implies: the coming-together, the shared strength, of the workers. I was taught that the workers joined together to struggle against the rich, powerful, selfish employers who exploited them. Through unions they sought dignity, decent wages and working conditions, a better future. (I think they would have appreciated the pugnacious insight voiced by Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber: “Unions don’t organize workers—workers organize unions.”) I was taught labor songs, such as “Solidarity Forever” and “Union Maid,” which sometimes the whole family (there were also my sisters, Patty and Nora) would sing to break the tedium of a long car ride, invariably lifting our spirits with a melodic and poetic vision—expressed with spunk and humor and determination—of labor’s inspiring cause.

The working class in which I grew up was hardly a romantic abstraction. It consisted of actual people with a great variety of individual characteristics, shapes and sizes and colors, names and faces and ages, strengths and weaknesses, limitations and talents. My generation came of age in a prolonged period of unusual relative prosperity for the U.S. working class. Most of us came from families that were neither rich nor poor, and so we were taught to think of ourselves as “middle class.” But the incomes supporting our families came, more often than not, from one or two people who received wages or salaries from an employer who had need of their ability to labor in some blue-collar or white-collar occupation.

Some of the kids I grew up with also came from union families, and we often shared the half-understood notion that unions defended the workers and were “good.” But there were many in Clearfield who saw unions as corrupt, greedy, trouble-making institutions. In junior and senior high school I often found myself arguing with certain teachers and fellow students about these matters. It would have been helpful to have a book like this summarizing the history of U.S. labor and offering the actual words of some of its most eloquent spokespeople.

As I got older, I found that much of the U.S. labor movement did not conform to the idealistic vision that had animated my parents. Much of it seemed to find greater success through practices and policies that were less radical, less inclusive, less democratic. In some quarters there was corruption in the narrow sense—racketeering and gangsterism—but the more pervasive corruption involved a “business unionism” that turned away from the expansive vision of labor’s cause. Unions were less inclined to embrace the great majority of society’s people with the commitment to equal rights and social justice for all. So it seemed to me as a radical activist in the mid-to-late 1960s, and in the 1970s as a union member while employed as a hospital worker, welfare worker, cab driver, shipyard worker, and auto worker.

As it turned out, the “realistic” accommodation to the status quo and the self-satisfied narrowness which characterized so much of the labor movement in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s contributed to the erosion of its accomplishments and strength in the next two decades. Now more than ever, it is essential for those who would revitalize the labor movement to have a sense of its history and of the goals and ideals that animated its pioneering leaders and activists.

As a history teacher, I have become increasingly aware that one cannot truly understand the development of the United States except as a story largely shaped by those who labor. And while union members have always represented less—often many times less—than 40 percent of the U.S. working class, the struggles of labor’s “militant minorities” have sometimes contributed decisively to what has happened in our country. More than once, I have reached for a book such as this—a succinct history with those who spoke for labor in the past having their say—but I have never quite found this specific volume.

In trying to “find” the book I was looking for, I was fortunate to strike up a collaboration with John Hinshaw, a gifted labor historian who wrote an initial draft of this history, which I then revised substantially. As time went on, we found that the book we were collaborating on was going in different directions—at which point we agreed that the two projects (one a little more scholarly, the other a little more popular) each had value, and I moved forward to complete the one, while John moved forward to complete the other. Much of John remains in this volume, just as there is much of me, I’m sure, in the book that he has gone on to produce. At the same time, I see this as very much my own work, and I assume responsibility for any of its deficiencies.

Students and workers whom I’ve had the opportunity to teach in various classes have, in turn, helped teach me much about history and teaching as I have sought to make available and comprehensible the story of the working class. Decisive in helping to shape this book, such workers and students are also the ones whom I hope will make up the bulk of its readers, since the individual and collective realities of where they came from, who they are, and what they could become have been essential ingredients in why this book came to be.

There are others whose contributions must be acknowledged. For valuable suggestions and kind words of encouragement I would like to thank Elaine Bernard of the Harvard Trade Union Program. Two veteran activists who deserve much thanks for reading through this work and offering good critical feedback are Russ Gibbons, formerly of the United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO and for many years editor of Steel Labor, more recently of the Philip Murray Labor Institute at the Community College of Allegheny Country, and David Demarest, a professor of English at Carnegie-Mellon University who has for many years been immersed in literature related to the working class of the Pittsburgh area. From the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America there is Peter Gilmore, editor of the UE News, who provided a very useful critique of an early draft.

Valuable reactions and suggestions on a later version were forthcoming from Michael Yates, who teaches Economics at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown and Labor Studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. A fine labor historian and friend of many years—Mark McColloch, who heads up the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus—reviewed the manuscript in its final stages. Another friend, Dan Kovalik on the legal staff of the United Steelworkers, also shared information and advice, and his enthusiasm and commitment to the cause of labor were a pleasure to behold. Lisa Frank, a fine teacher and colleague in the History Department of Carlow College, also offered encouraging feedback on this project. So did two other friends who have been doing much to deepen our understanding of the North American working class, Paul Buhle at Brown University and Bryan Palmer at Queens University (Canada). The friendship of Carol McAllister—an ethnographer doing exciting work studying family support programs among low-income layers of the working class—has also been invaluable. Frank Lovell, a veteran of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific (AFL) and the United Auto Workers (AFL-CIO), with more than six decades in the labor movement, has been a close friend and a valued teacher, and I dedicate this book to him.

—Paul Le Blanc
April 1998

Postscript (May 21, 1999):

I would like to thank those at Humanity Books who helped with the production of this volume, including Mary A. Read, Tracey Belmont, and Eugene O’Connor. I would like to express my warm thanks to labor muralist Mike Alewitz, whose artistic vision—blending grace and humor—provides an imaginative counterpoint to the text.

Frank Lovell died before this book could be published, but it is a consolation that he was able to read the book in manuscript and knew that I was dedicating it to him. Attending the 1997 AFL-CIO Convention and the 1998 Socialist Scholars Conference with this insightful, admirable working-class militant are among the fond memories that I have of someone who was such a good friend for twenty-five years. He will be missed—but he is part of the still-continuing story reflected in this book.