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But money, booze, jazz, and flappers notwithstanding, the decade also brought hard times to many workers. The first worker protests of the era erupted out of the desperation of hard-pressed Southern textile workers who had only recently left impoverished tenant farms and mountain villages for the textile mills and found themselves ground down by exhausting work for long hours in filthy mills and for pitiful earnings. (It was of course this vulnerable labor force that drew textile manufacturers to the South, sometimes from as far away as Germany, so globalization is not really new.) The mill workers finally rose up early in 1929. IN THIS first volume, Bernstein carefully traces the experience of working people from 1920 to 1933, from the years of the roaring twenties through the trough of the economic collapse that began in 1929, up to the swearing in of the Roosevelt administration. Mining, agriculture, and textiles were in a slump, and the workers in these sectors bore the hardships that resulted. But their strikes were ultimately crushed by the conditions that have always thwarted unionism in the American South: the religiosity and xenophobia of Southern communities, state and local politicians ready to ally with employers, the easy resort to violence, and the feebleness of the efforts of national unions to organize under these conditions. As in our own time, the market collapse was preceded by a period of boom and speculation that produced huge fortunes for a few, and a culture that celebrated fabulous riches and excess.

Bernstein quotes Louis Adamic in December 1931, when unemployment was soaring, “I have a definite feeling.that millions of them, now that they are unemployed, are licked.” “Workers on the way down,” writes Bernstein, “were in no mood to improve, far less to reorganize, society.”. But most observers saw little evidence of a spirit of rebellion. Over the next four years, the poverty and unemployment that afflicted the South spread across the country as the Great Depression took its toll in rapidly rising unemployment, wage cuts, worsening working conditions, evictions and foreclosures, and even cases of actual starvation.

Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have to be evoked, and when they are, make it possible for him on another day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his condition. But the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it. In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight.

The movement created real power, enough power to change the American industrial capitalist system, and to change it for the better. THE TURBULENT YEARS is the second volume of Irving Bernstein’s history of the era of the Great Depression. The changes unfolded in the workplace, where workers learned that by shutting it down they could force the hand of the boss and even win the right to unionize. From the textile villages of the South to the auto plants of Detroit to the docks of San Francisco to the truck depots of Minneapolis to the tire plants of Akron to the steel mills of Pennsylvania, and even to the dime stores and movie houses of Main Street America, across the country and in industry after industry, workers marched and rallied, mobilized in walkouts, sit-downs, and street battles. It describes a brief period when American workers were on the move on a scale that had never been matched before and that has not been matched since.

After the Supreme Court ruled in a much-awaited decision that the National Labor Relations Act was constitutional, FDR called Congress into a special session to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing minimum wages and maximum hours. The key leverage of workers during the Great Depression was their ability to shut it down, to stop production, and by doing so jeopardize the manufacturing systems that in the end depended on worker subordination and cooperation. As the workers’ movement escalated, wages increased and working hours fell, and this despite a new dive in the economy that began in 1937. Bernstein’s meticulous research into the complex developments that contributed to the mobilization of workers in the 1930s provides an unparalleled account of the swiftly moving worker politics that gave us the New Deal. The biggest and most virulently anti-union corporations in America were suddenly ready to recognize unions, in return for the regularization of production that they hoped unions would ensure.

In October 2002, he directed the Department of Justice to seek a Taft-Hartley injunction to end an eleven-day shutdown of the West Coast docks. In December 2001, only a few short months after 9/11, the president appointed a Presidential Emergency Board and imposed a 60-day ban on job actions by the 15,000 machinists at United Airlines. Similarly and almost immediately, the administration slashed the budget of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, repeatedly sought increased funding to audit and prosecute unions, and announced plans to put as many as 850,000 federal jobs up for bid to private contractors. After the planes hit the towers on September 11, 2001, national security became the favored argument for rolling back labor rights. This was the first time in American history that a president, in effect, allowed an employer to lock out workers, and then rewarded the employer with court-ordered government intervention. It was also the first time the Taft-Hartley Act had been invoked since 1978.

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