The historiography of US labor during the Second World War has shifted away
from New Left concerns with the fate of working-class militancy, becoming
more attuned instead to the structure and development of the New Deal order
. A quarter century ago, historians debated the extent to which the warfare
state had emasculated working-class radicalism and constructed in its plac
e a bureaucratized, corporate-liberal labor movement. Few scholars doubted
that trade unions were a fixed and permanent feature of the postwar politic
al economy. But in the decades following the presidency of Ronald Reagan, w
hen the legal, ideological, and economic structures sustaining the institut
ional union movement are so weak, the agenda of most historians and social
scientists has shifted to one that problematizes the rise, consolidation, a
nd postwar devolution of the mid-century New Deal settlement. For US labor
and other popular social movements, World War Two had a dichotomous charact
er. In both politics and policy, war-era corporatist structures failed to w
in lasting institutional expressions, either during the war or in the decad
es following 1945. There was no 'labor-management accord', although labor's
strength did generate a kind of armed truce in key oligopolitistic sectors
of the economy. Anti-New-Deal conservatives in Congress and the corporate
hierarchy sought, above all, to divorce industrial relations issues from th
e larger political universe. This was the meaning of 'free' collective barg
aining in the years after 1947. But during the war and reconversion years r
ight afterward, elite power at the top of the mobilization apparatus was re
peatedly challenged by insurgencies from below that sought to take advantag
e of the unprecedented demand for labor while at the same time actualizing
the pluralist, social-patriotic ethos that was the quasi-official ideology
of the World War Two home front. These social movements were a dialectical
product of the mobilizing bureaucracies--the War Labor Board, the Fair Empl
oyment Practice Commission, and the Office of Price Administration--that we
re among the most remarkable features of the wartime New Deal. Indeed, this
increasingly contentious juxtaposition between a state apparatus drifting
rightward and a well-organized working class represents the great paradox o
f the war, a dichotomy that would be resolved in the postwar years by a rap
id, politically brutal divorce between popular aspirations and the stat pol
icies needed to fulfill them.