Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 | Lizabeth Cohen

Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 | Lizabeth Cohen | In-depth Analysis of Chicago and Chicagoans

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Making a New Deal:...

	Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 Lizabeth Cohen Cambridge University Press, 2008 - 568 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This book examines how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s. We follow Chicago workers as they make choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or to go to the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or patronize the new A & P. Although workers may not have been political in traditional terms during the '20s, as they made daily decisions like these, they declared their loyalty in ways that would ultimately have political significance. As the depression worsened in the 1930s, not only did workers find their pay and working hours cut or eliminated, but the survival strategies they had developed during the 1920s were undermined. Looking elsewhere for help, workers adopted new ideological perspectives and overcame longstanding divisions among themselves to mount new kinds of collective action. Chicago workers' experiences as citizens, ethnics and blacks, wage earners and consumers all converged to make them into New Deal Democrats and CIO unionists. First printed in 1990, Making a New Deal has become an established classic in American History. The second edition includes a new introductory essay by Lizabeth Cohen.

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A superior book on labor, ethnicity, and politics

A well-researched and original book describing the shifting allegiances of Chicago workers from ethnic help societies to their welfare capitalist employers to finally the US government. In addition to the subject of the growing labor movement, the book is also a great survey of the various ethnic/racial groups of 1920s Chicago and their differing experiences with Americanization.

There is a book I would like to recommend as a virtual "sequel" to this one. The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue. While Cohen's book is about the creation of the New Deal coalition in the factory neighborhoods and towns of Chicago, Sugrue's book is about the disappearance of the factories and the departure from the Democratic coalition in the 1960s of the same groups who joined it in the 30s. Sugrue's book also won a Bancroft prize and if you like one you will surely like the other.

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In-depth Analysis of Chicago and Chicagoans

Cohen's work based on her Ph.D. Dissertation at UC-Berkeley proves to be a comprehensive, engaging, and insightful look into popular culture in 1920s and 1930s Chicago. She moves seamlessly from labor history to cultural history to ethnic history without losing the reader by including helpful charts, figures, and photographs. Her section on the nature of mass media and mass consumption undoubtedly provides evidence of her writing style in The American Pageant.

Cohen does not create a delineation between immigrants that came to the area and natives of the Chicago area, which goes a long way in terms of bias. She covers African-Americans, Polish, Italians, and Jews without being critical one way or the other. Each chapter seems to be able to live by itself, which gives the book a flavor of being a compendium of papers instead of a conjoined work. All in all, Cohen does a wonderful job examining Chicago and Chicagoans whatever their ethnicity may be.

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Outstanding view of workers in Chicago between the wars

Making a New Deal is an absolutely incredible look at workers during the Interwar period in Chicago. Cohen has crafted a monumental work that not only covers workers political and union organization but also covers the changes in their lives resulting from societal changes such as the advent of radio and the chain store.
What's particularly appealing and interesting about this book is also what it says about modern times. Cohen discusses that due to the advent of radio and national networks, fewer workers got their local and world news from ethnic newspapers or other papers in Chicago. As can be seen from this, the current lement concerning the consolidation of newspapers, TV and radio stations isn't new, it began even in the 1930s. Also interesting is how many immigrant parents worried about their children becoming influenced by American culture that they did not understand, particularly clubs, dance halls and radio music.
Cohen's work is profoundly important and most of the book is a great read.

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Great insights on the labor movement during the depression

Cohen presents a seemingly broad and well-supported thesis to explain the success of unionism in the 1930s. However, while all persuasive, some of her major arguments seem only tangentially relevant to either each other or her main thesis. While she provides a strong, coherent explanation as to why Chicago workers' political loyalties and attitudes shifted so dramatically during the depression, it is frankly nothing new. Yes, workers felt entitled to aid and came to favor a strong, interventionist federal government, but the connections she draws between this and the unionization of Chicago factories remain tenuous. Correlation, as they say, is not causation; but Cohen argues, both implicitly and explicitly, that workers' preference for government intervention was a major factor in the labor struggles of the 1930s. If Cohen had acknowledged that labor solidarity and preference for big-government welfare programs were but two symptoms of worker's frustration, and accordingly broadened and adjusted her thesis, her chapter about Chicagoans attitudes vis-à-vis big government could have provided excellent support for her final argument. In the context of her overarching thesis, however, the chapter seems almost like a square peg in a round hole. Instead of letting her explanations-albeit insightful-of the working class's political consciousness reflect back on the people who hold them, she advances the somewhat further-fetched notion that worker's political experiences led directly to the later growth of unionization. None of this, however, detracts from her excellent account of the organizations and institutions that were shared between the too. Cohen primarily fails by not supporting her argument that these interrelations were anything more than marriages of political expediency forged in desperate times. That the Communists dabbled in both the labor movement and various forms of political activism does not mean that both were one and the same. Cohen rejects the simple explanation that they were both separate outlets for the collective rage of the underemployed.

Ask many American historians for a short answer why the CIO was so successful in the 30s, and they may answer: because of the NLRA, hesitance of local, state, and federal governments to take the politically inexpedient step of supporting industry, and, most importantly, a mass of desperate workers imbued with a newfound distrust for the system that had betrayed them. This is essentially the answer Lizabeth Cohen arrives at; she simply takes a circuitous-if enjoyable-path to reach it. She provides a complex, nuanced answer in a place where a simple answer might do. Perhaps she's asking a different question than it appears she is. The title of her book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, implies that she's looking at a topic broader than the unionization of Chicago factories, but by bookending her many salient and though-provoking claims with the tales of 1919's failed strike and the CIO's ascendancy in the 1930s, she is limiting the scope of her book far too narrowly. Nonetheless, nothing is intrinsically wrong with any of Cohen's arguments and she provides a fascinating window into the mind of America's urban, industrial workforce during the depression.

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Making Sense of the Great Depression

Cohen's synopsis of Chicago through the 1920's and into the tough times of the 1930's is truly a remarkable account that makes sense of the Great Depression in a way that truly brings it to life for the reader. Though focused on Chicago, the story she tells really holds true for the whole US and delves deeply into the real world reality of the depression experience. Carefully outlining the change in America from an industrial capitalism to a welfare state society, the important changes in America are clearly explained and brought to life through understandable and vivid human stories. The fourth chapter discussing the actual alteration in the worker's mindset that created an atmosphere for not only the New Deal, but for the federal government activity we are used to today, is truly the highlight of the book. Just chapter alone earns this book my highest recommendation, as overall it is one of the better books of this era and topic with which I am familiar.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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