Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Canto Classics)

Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal is a deep examination of how Chicago industrial workers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds were able to unite during the Great Depression and New Deal.Cohen has written a massive sprawling narrative that leaves little un-turned about Chicago Industrial Workers from 1919 to 1939 showing how the diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds kept workers divided in a post-WWI economy inflamed by the very companies they worked for and how by the New Deal workers were able to put aside those differences to unite for better working conditions overall.Cohen is able to weave how these workers lived in their community, turned to their communities in times of need, isolated themselves and how they interacted with mass media and how industrialists were able to foster a united worker community at work through welfare-capitalism and eventually how Immigrants and African Americans began to participate in national politics by voting for the Democratic party at every level, local/city, state and federal.Overall, Cohen shows how the New Deal was made possible by the workers at the ground level. Cohen's book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of Chicago, the New Deal and labor rights.

A great view of how early American cities moved from local, ethnic based social networks to more governmental support systems. Also gives a great inside view using Chicago as its case study as to what an urban space looked like and how that space changed and developed based on the role of industry, unions, and the population within those spaces.

This book is an absolute labor of love! You can easily picture Chicago in the 1920's and 1930's while reading the book, and witness the ebb and flow of politics, personalities, ethnicity, and the economy. A great study of Chicago, labor relations, and humanity in Chicago between the wars.

This work removes the agency of the New Deal from FDR and places it in the hands of the working class, primarily Chicago.There is probably some truth in that.This is a good book in the study of what the working class went through during the depression, it will give you insight.It is well written, easy to read, and very well documented.

I am using this book for a class. Interesting.

Perfect!

In Making a New Deal Lizabeth Cohen has produced the sort of cultural history many historians only dream of writing. It is both meticulously researched, witness the 140 pages of end notes, and beautifully written. She employs quantitative analysis, material culture interpretations, and oral histories to recover the world of Chicago industrial workers, particularly steelworkers, tractor assemblers, and meatpackers, between 1919 and 1939. As would be expected from the Thompsonish title, Cohen argues that these workers were active participants in the creation of the New Deal. She demonstrates that workers' response to the Depression was shaped by the reconfiguration in the 1920s of both ethnicity and work place relationships, and the growth of mass culture. Workers made the New Deal as part of a process whereby diverse cultural experiences were replaced by homogeneous ones. How did this happen?Cohen begins her book with the defeat of labour's efforts to maintain the wages and conditions they won during the First World War. She argues that after 1919 'localisms' of 'race, ethnicity, job, and neighborhood' undercut the ability of workers to resist 'employers insisting on the open shop, government engaged in Red Scare tactics, and craft unions resistant to organizing industrial workers' (p. 38). Suffice to say that although her argument here is not groundbreaking Cohen takes the time to delineate how these 'localisms' separated workers even as they fought for similargoals. Her focus on the local nature of workers' experiences shows that although the 1920s was a stagnant period for union activism, workers' cultures were politically charged. For instance, ethnic identities were reshaped in those years as mutual benefit societies and community based 'banks' expanded their base from regional to national origin communities and adopted more commercial methods of business. Likewise the struggle of immigrant Italian catholics against the American church hierarchy transformed patron saint festivals from village or Chicago neighbourhood traditions into an Italian-American tradition. As Cohen writes, 'ethnic organizations introduced workers to the world outside their neighborhoods while ensuring that it was still an ethnic one' (p. 95).Workers' encounters with mass culture in the 1920s were also mediated by ethnic and neighbourhood identities. The purchase of a standardised mass produced item, such as a phonograph, did not automatically draw workers into a homogeneous American middle class culture. Rather it helped keep ethnic cultures alive as major American record companies re-pressed European recordings and recruited immigrant entertainers for original releases. Chicago was also an important centre of 'race records' and independent producers who catered to ethnic audiences. Cohen argues that a commodity could help a person retain or lose a cultural identity. 'What mattered were the experiences and expectations that the consumer brought to the object' (p.106). Workers were less inclined to buy standardised brand name products from cash and carry chainstores that blossomed in the 1920s, such as A & P, because neighbourhood grocers provided credit and were more convenient. Nonetheless the pressure of competition forced independent grocers to organise co-operative wholesale purchases and stock brand name goods. Movies and radio were also first consumed in local and ethnic variants before being subjected to chain ownership. Mass culture was not simply imposed from the top but rather shaped through the interaction of consumers predilections and the methods of distribution. Cohen points to jazz as an example of how one folk culture made it in the mainstream.Workers' identities were also shaped in the workplace where employers sought to create loyalty, increase productivity, and head off militancy, through various welfare schemes. In an effort to ensure individual loyalty employers broke up ethnic and race work groups. They thought this would erase group solidarity and produce a more docile workforce. Instead it promoted worker solidarity. Cohen shows that workers acted together to resist speed ups and other attempts to increase their productivity. The experiments conducted at the Chicago area's largest employer, the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric, by Australian born Elton Mayo receive a mention, as does the fact that these workers dubbed rate breakers 'Phar Lap', but Cohen does not make the obvious connection. Although workers did not give employers their unmitigated loyalty, they came to expect employers to meet some of their welfare needs. Workers noticed when the boss did not deliver on these expectations and this widened the gap between them and employers.In the 1920s workers forged peer communities that existed side by side with traditional institutions that shaped worker and ethnic identities. When the Depression swept these institutions away workers turned to each other for support and mobilized to demand intervention by the federal government. Cohen's final chapters chronicle the pressure workers applied to the Democratic administration, which it had elected, for laws that protected their right to organise unions and for the equitable distribution of welfare. She also devotes a chapter to the rise of the CIO in Chicago. Cohen shows that Chicago's industrial workers invested their future in a centralised national welfare state and a centralised national union of factory workers. She notes that although these institutions were no safeguard of workers liberty, and in some ways came to imprison them, it is important to understand what rank and file workers accomplished.This book established Cohen as one of the great historians of her generation.

Absolutely the most boring material I have ever read. Almost impossible to truly understand the case study at hand