Making a New Deal: Industrial
Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 by
Lizabeth Cohen
Chicago New Deal Book Is A Labor Of Love
This book examines how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary
factory workers to become effective unionists and national political
participants by the mid-1930s. We follow Chicago workers as they make
choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or to go to
the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or patronize the
new A & P. Although workers may not have been political in traditional
terms during the 20s, as they made daily decisions like these, they
declared their loyalty in ways that would ultimately have political
significance. As the depression worsened in the 1930s, not only did
workers find their pay and working hours cut or eliminated, but the survival
strategies they had developed during the 1920s were undermined. Looking
elsewhere for help, workers adopted new ideological perspectives and
overcame longstanding divisions among themselves to mount new kinds of

collective action. Chicago workers experiences as citizens, ethnics and
blacks, wage earners and consumers all converged to make them into
New Deal Democrats and CIO unionists. First printed in 1990, Making a
New Deal has become an established classic in American History. The
second edition includes a new introductory essay by Lizabeth Cohen.
Personal Review: Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in
Chicago, 1919-1939 by Lizabeth Cohen
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 similar
goals. 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 chain
stores 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.
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