Labor's Cold War

by Stromquist, Shelton

• ISBN13: 9780252032226
• ISBN10: 0252032225
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-19
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Examining the impact of American Cold War politics on diverse local arenas, Labor's Cold War shows that anticommunist challenges reshaped local political cultures and set the stage for new rounds of political contestation. The contributors demonstrate that the anticommunist movement was more diverse, more pervasive, and more sharply and creatively contested than previous studies have shown. Even as the national anticommunist movement strengthened, workers and their allies defended ongoing progressive politics at the local level. Examples include struggles over public housing, expansion of New Deal-style regional development, fair employment, antidiscrimination politics of race and ethnicity, and union rights to representation and a voice in wage and price controls. Local political stories from New Mexico, California, Tokyo, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, and Schenectedy provide important alternative perspectives on the transformative power of anticommunism in the postwar period and contribute to an ongoing revision of the history of Cold War America and its political legacies. Contributors include Kenneth Burt, Robert W. Cherny, Rosemary Feurer, Eric Fure-Slocum, Christopher Gerteis, Lisa Kannenberg, David Lewis-Colman, James J. Lorence, Shelton Stromquist, and Seth Wigderson.

Author Biography

Shelton Stromquist is a professor of history at the University of Iowa and the author of Reinventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism, and other books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: Was All (Cold War) Politics Local?	p. 1
Anticommunist Networks and Labor: The Pacific Coast in the 1930s	p. 17
Labor's Community-Based Campaigns for Economic and Environmental Planning, and Cold War Politics: The UE's St. Louis District, 1941-48	p. 49
The Fight for Fair Employment and the Shifting Alliances among Latinos and Labor in Cold War Los Angeles	p. 79
From Fellow Traveler to Friendly Witness: Shelton Tappes, Liberal Anticommunism, and Working-Class Civil Rights in the United Auto Workers	p. 110
Putting the "I" before "UE": Labor's Cold War in Schenectady-GE	p. 137
Housing, Race, and the Cold War in a Labor City	p. 163
Mexican American Workers, Clinton Jencks, and Mine-Mill Social Activism in the Southwest, 1945-52	p. 204
The Wages of Anticommunism: U.S. Labor and the Korean War
Subjectivity Lost: Labor and the Cold War in Occupied Japan	p. 258
Contributors	p. 291
Index	p. 293
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