Class politics and the state during World War Two (United States)

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.