Making a new deal

World War I, also known as the War to End All Wars, ended the 11 of November of 1918 with the signing of the armistice at Compiègne Forest, France. With a dead toll of 126,200, the United States of America had demonstrated, for the first time, its potential as the next superpower of the world.  Veterans came back to their homes eager to start a new life where an invisible enemy had already struck their homeland. The Spanish Flu killed in 1918 an estimated of 500,000 to 675,000 Americans. That was one of the first signs of the globalized world their descendants would have to affront.

It’s within this scenario that Elizabeth Cohen has written her book. Her thesis is that from the 1920’s to the 1930’s the working class of the United States of America went through a process of evolution and hard earned lessons. According to her, the majority of the working class of the USA never intended to follow the theories of Karl Marx. Instead, they created a mature relation with the politics and economics of their country. Cohen has made use of strong, historical arguments that show this path through two decades. The starting point for her is the strike wave of 1919. At that time workers in the USA had suffered two years of wage control because of World War I. Once the armistice was signed, workers in America wanted to recuperate their rights and pushed for the elimination of wage control and an immediate salary increase. Since their demands where not accepted, four millions workers through all the country went into strike, causing a general panic in the population. This is also known in the history books as the Red Scare. Finally, the strikes ended and with it the initial energy of the unions.

According to Cohen, after this brief interlude between the end of World War I and the first years of the 1920’s, came a period of tranquilization in which the big industrialists changed their approach to workers. They embraced paternalism and applied it: “When industrial workers looked beyond their ethnic community institutions for support during the 1920s, they turned to their welfare capitalist employers. Chapter 4 demonstrated how Chicago manufacturers developed welfare programs explicitly to encourage employees to depend on the boss.”

Additionally, they started to change their usual approach of causing ethnical conflicts between their workers to a more professional and technical oriented administration of the workforce. After all, it made sense to make use of new operations and processes which proved that they could increase efficiency and thus, increase their profit margins. Unfortunately, this increase in margins wasn’t traduced to better wages for the working force of America. She also mentions the appearance of two new concepts in society: mass media and the retail chain stores.

At that time, Chicago was already a multiethnic city. It’s population was composed by American born whites, African-American, Mexicans, Irish and immigrants of Southern Europe. Because of this, each group consumed the goods produced for their national tastes: imported food sold by local ethnic groceries and ethnical orientated media (which could be imported from their countries or locally produced at the USA). As the years went by, people were exposed to the influence of nationwide products and services. Although important, Cohen shows that these American goods didn’t eliminate the ethnic goods consumed by the different nationalities within the country. Cohen sustains, accordingly,  that it was the Great Depression the one which gave the final blown to ethnic economics and forever transformed the population of the USA from multinational to American.

The Great Depression was a global spread economic disaster that occurred in 1929 and continued until the late 30’s. Mentioned as one of the main causes of World War II, it strongly affected industrialized nations, especially cities. Unemployment in the USA raised as high as 25% in the 1930’s. Cohen shows that this debacle killed ethnic groceries; they where more expensive than retail chain stores and couldn’t continue offering the traditional neighborhood credit they usually gave to their local costumers. As she says: “But beginning in the late 1920s and with increasing frequency during the Great Depression, Chicago workers found their customary market relationships disturbed. No longer could they depend on the neighborhood merchant or Maxwell Street.”

On the other hand, Roosevelt came in with the New Deal. He and his advisers concluded that the Great Depression was a consequence of an inadequately redistribution of wealth among the masses of America. His government increased the role of the state in economics and transformed the country from industrial capitalism to welfare capitalism. This policy brought to the USA working rights that are common today but unheard of at that time, like a national minimum wage, social security, workday hours and the abolishment of child labor. Cohen links this crisis and the pact between the government and society, arguing that both of them joined the different ethnic groups of the country.

To further prove her point, she mentions what it was considered impossible in the 1920s: the foundation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935: “Fragmentation of workers ranks by ethnicity, race, and geography impeded efforts to organize unions in the city’s factories just after World War 1.”  These associated unions grouped the industrial workers of the USA and Canada and pushed for the common goals of their members. But it wasn’t until the Second World War started that the Great Depression disappeared. This war was the final event which took out America from the crisis and finally converted it in the superpower of today.

Cohen’s book is an amazing feat. She has studied and analyzed hundreds of sources, trying to understand how is that this process of Americanization of the working class of the USA started. Although some of her arguments could be considered weak (maybe more investigation was required or she lost herself with too much information), it’s interesting to note that she included the influence of technology (which manifested itself in the 1920’s as mass culture and mass consumption) as an important factor for the change in the mental state of the proletarian class of America.

Unfortunately, many historical analysts don’t give the appropriate weight that technology has over human history and social movements. Commonly, they disregard it as a background for change, something that happened and that’s it. Cohen does something different. She places technological advancement as an important and constant influence in the history of mankind and shows that both of them are strongly interrelated. Furthermore, she has shown that to adequately understand the historical process of any event, the only way to do it is to submerge into the details of how the people of that period lived, thought and worked. Her investigation demonstrates that looking at the big picture is not enough and could twist the appreciation of history.

This can be compared with a market analysis. If only the big picture is taking into account, a company won’t be able to recognize the smaller factors that compose it. If they don’t know about them then they don’t really understand their market, they only think they do. As a final word it must be mentioned that through out the book, the reader will appreciate the influence of her working experience at museums. Visual material like photographs, charts and graphs help visualize and understand that complex period in American history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cohen, Elizabeth. Making a New Deal : Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Cambridge University Press. 1991

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear : The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. Oxford University Press. 1999

McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors : The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton University Press. 2002