Pursuing Justice: Lee Pressman, the New Deal, and the CIO / The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance
The Journal of American History; Bloomington; Jun 2000; Nelson Lichtenstein
Copyright Organization of American Historians, Jun 2000
Pursuing Justice: Lee Pressman, the New Deal, and the CIO. By Gilbert J. Gall. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. xiv, 363 pp. Cloth, $65.50, ISBN 0-7914-4103-2. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-7914-4104-0.) The Unions and the Democrats.- An Enduring Alliance. By Taylor E. Dark (Ithaca: ILR, 1999. x, 233 pp. $37-50, ISBN 0-8014-3576-5.)
These books offer two very different perspectives on labor and the state in the New Deal years and after. Gilbert J. Gall's biography of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) lawyer Lee Pressman argues that the New Deal alliance between the unions and the federal government proved a fleeting affair, soon corroded by presidential diffidence, business militancy, and union factionalism. In startling contrast, the political scientist Taylor E. Dark finds that the trade union capacity to influence the Democrats, and through them the state itself, has been substantial, even during the last few decades when union membership, as a proportion of the entire electorate, shrank by half.
Lee Pressman found his way into the ranks of the industrial union movement in a fashion that demonstrated the degree to which the birth of the CIO was intertwined with that of the New Deal and its left-wing penumbra. The firstborn son of immigrant Jewish parents, he moved rapidly from Cornell University and Harvard Law School to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and then on to the new CIO. At the AAA Pressman joined the Communist party, initially as a member of the now infamous group founded by Harold Ware. Gall handles Pressman's Communist party allegiance with a calm intelligence, avoiding the sensationalistic, ahistorical dichotomizing so rife among some contemporary scholars of Soviet-American communism. Until he quit the CIO to join the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, Pressman easily accommodated his dual allegiances. There were moments when he tilted CIO policy toward Soviet interests, but the net political impact was rather marginal.
Pressman was a superb counsel, first for the CIO president John L. Lewis and then for his successor, Philip Murray. He was loyal, tough, and self assured, what Gardner Jackson described as "certainty in the human form." Pressman understood the symbiotic relationship between the power of the New Deal administrative state and the future of the new industrial unions. He could work the halls of Congress and the hearing rooms of the National Labor Relations Board, but, unlike Taylor Dark, Pressman never doubted that labor's real political influence flowed from the growth of solid organization in the field. That is why he railed against the Taft-Hartley Act and its many legislative imitators on the state level, not because they would destroy the unions, but because these anti-union laws so effectively curbed labor's capacity for membership growth and economic leverage.
Gall's careful, highly informative analysis of the legal-administrative campaign waged by Pressman against the Little Steel corporations illuminates just how crucial was CIO mobilization of the New Deal state on labor's behalf. In May and June 1937 these bitterly anti-union companies dealt the fledgling United Steelworkers of America union a massive, crushing defeat. During almost any other decade in the twentieth century, strikebreaking of this magnitude would have spelled institutional disaster for the union. But over the next four years Pressman organized, mobilized, and prodded his many allies within the New Deal's labor relations apparatus, as well as Congress and the White House, to reverse in Washington the working-class setback suffered in Ohio and Illinois. When five thousand strikers won millions in back pay, the prestige of the CIO surged forward, enabling the Steelworkers finally to sign contracts with the Little Steel companies and organize most of the industry.
Thereafter, Pressman found the state increasingly hostile and his own political-legal resources of diminishing weight. Although CIO membership surged during World War II, so too did the anti-union militancy of the corporations and the influence of the GOP-Dixiecrat alliance. Meanwhile, labor's own potential was undercut by the Pressmanite decision to place so much of its fate in the hands of an increasingly skittish New Deal. Gall offers a fine account of Pressman's growing sense of political desperation, which may account for what the CIO lawyer later called his 1948 third-party "miscalculation," an uncharacteristically ideological gambit that effectively drove him from labor's center stage.
Such political passion is entirely missing in Taylor Dark's analysis. This book actually contains a rather informative account of the ebb and flow of relations between the Democratic party and the AFL (American Federation of Labor)-CIO during the last thirty-five years. They were good during the Lyndon B. Johnson era, terrible during the 1970s, and somewhat better in the 1980s and in the years of the Clinton administration. Dark's thesis is that when labor leadership is unified, AFL-CIO influence with a Democratic Congress and president is sure to rise. Nothing surprising here, but Dark overlays this bit of political science truism with an argument that the unions have maintained their relative political leverage during an era when their numerical size and economic clout have been drastically sliced.
To make this case, Dark constructs an expansive, if tepid, definition of what constituted the New Deal political order and what today counts for effective labor politics. Thus Dark writes that if the "New Deal order were dead, labor would have been excluded from the congressional and presidential wings of the Democratic Party, its legal protections would have been abolished, and it would have become irrelevant in the political calculations of officeholders." By this measure, we would have to return to the era of William McKinley to note a decline in union political influence.
Taylor Dark is a political scientist, not a political economist. Therefore, he never grapples with the manifest decline in organized labor's class power when confronted with an increasingly hostile political-corporate environment. Though his flaws were numerous, Lee Pressman would not have fallen into that trap.
--Nelson Lichtenstein
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia