It is easy to forget that there are still places like Hamlet, North Carolina . . . until something tragic happens to put them on our mind.” So the Washington Post informed its readers several days after a September 1991 …
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 …
What else does a man do besides keep house .. .and hang around the saloon, after he has been out of work for fourteen months?” Harvey Swados asked in these pages in 1961, in his essay “The Miners: Men Without …
The economic reform urged upon the Soviet Union by the great international financial institutions reduce to three elements— macroeconomic stabilization, freeing of all but a few prices, and ownership reform. These are discussed in The Economy of the USSR, a …
After fifteen years in the trenches, one union organizer summed up management’s present attitude toward unions with tongue in cheek: “They’re mean to us.” As a description of the past decade, that’s a grand understatement. A great many employers in …
In the new television series “Sisters,” one of the main characters spends most of his time around the house in his bathrobe. He is not sick. He is not crazy. He is unemployed. Years ago, we would have imagined Archie …
A year ago almost everyone I knew in Boston was agonizing over how to be liberal when it seemed no longer really an option. Two men were running for governor of the only state that voted for George McGovern. One …
Over the last fifteen years American corporations have remained as competitive as ever. Their share of global exports has not significantly changed from what it was during the Carter years. The same cannot, however, be said of the competitiveness of …
It has been a rough few months for George Bush. Last summer the administration believed that the recession was caused by jittery consumers who quit spending because of the Gulf War. But the economic slowdown was not related to the …
Constitutionally entrenched individual rights have long been the subject of conservative ire. This is hardly surprising. Conservative notions of “law and order” and “family values” clearly favor the state at the expense of the individual. Buy why do we recently …
American unions have traditionally responded to changing circumstances. If sometimes belatedly, they have transformed themselves over the past one hundred years from craft-centered organizations with guildlike characteristics to powerful enterprises for organizing mass-production and semiskilled workers into huge industrial unions. …
Not long ago I was told about a debate raging among the top political organizers of one of the larger AFL-CIO affiliates, a union that traditionally sent sizable delegations to the Democratic National Convention and is easily capable of doing …
Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois argued that the color line would remain the distinguishing feature of American civilization. At the center of this observation was a proposition about the character of modern American society— namely, …
Recent films about the 1960s belong to one of the basic romantic genres: nostalgic retrospect. The great pioneer of this genre in English was the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth gave us several luminous visions of his rural childhood and of …
Fashioning models for a successful socialist economy is an idiosyncratic inclination these days, but one that we share with John Roemer. He’s not willing to concede that the socialist project has been buried irretrievably beneath the wreckage of communism, and …
