A Union and its Politics

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), contends Steven Fraser, “was a quintessentially political creature whose origins and fate were entirely bound up with the rising and receding of the `second New Deal.'” The career of Sidney Hillman provides Fraser, who is the executive editor of Basic Books and co-editor of the important anthology The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980(Princeton, 1989), with a vehicle for exploring the ties that bound the new union...