Of Labor and Its Friends

The State of the Unions
by Paul Jacobs
Atheneum, 1963, 303 pp., $5

Labor Today: The Triumphs and Failures of Unionism in the United States
by B.J. Widick
Houghton Mifflin, 1964, 238 pp., $3.75

America Comes of Middle Age
by Murray Kempton
Little, Brown, 1963, 885 pp., $6.40

The Rank-and-File-Leader
by Sidney M. Peck, foreword by Eugene V. Schneider
College and University Press, 1963, 398 pp., $6

The four books here discussed share the quality of being animated by a genuine concern for the factory hand, the victim of corporate, union, or political bureaucracy. That is to say, three of them are animated. Mr. Peck’s book may more properly be said to exist.

Not that it is lacking in information, or sympathy for its subject: the...