Seventy years ago, American elites knew how to enforce the two-party system. “In 1924,” Robert and Helen Lynd reported in their classic study, Middletown, “It was considered such ‘bad business’ to vote for the third party [the Progressives, who ran …
John Diggins has written an irritating but provocative book. First, the annoyances: He calls the work a history of the left in the United States but slights everyone but intellectuals. He says almost nothing about the labor movement, but devotes …
In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966 by Joshua B. Freeman Oxford University Press, 1989, 434 pp., $34.95 Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 by Gary Gerstle Cambridge University Press, 345 …
