Generation of Resistance: The Electrical Workers Unions and the Cold War
by John Bennett Sears
Conshohocken, PA, Infinity Publishing Company, 2008.

In the first half of the 20th century, there were two major schools of labor history. The established, anti-socialist one represented by John R. Commons, Selig Perlman and Philip Taft dealt with the institutional political history of the trade union movement, relating in a fairly narrow fashion that history to the larger pattern of U.S. history.

The class conscious, socialist-oriented school, nurtured by the Communist Party and represented most by Philip Foner, also dealt with the political and institutional history of the trade union movement, but in a much broader context. This school of thought related that history to class struggle and a larger social development. The Cold War in the universities saw the purge this socialist-oriented labor history just as labor history itself was struggling to get off the ground and left a vacuum in labor scholarship as it left a vacuum in the larger labor movement.

When a new progressive labor history took shape in the 1960s, it too, in the work of David Montgomery, Herbert Gutman and many others, was clearly Marxist and socialist influenced, but it looked to labor’s social history – to the experiences of workers and communities, away from trade union political history and to a lesser extent the larger political history.  While much of this was very positive, in both exploring workers experiences and making questions of ethnicity and gender central to understanding American labor history, the significance of traditional institutional labor history was put on a back burner. (Perhaps because to confront the Commons school on those questions was too dangerous at a time when the defenders of ideological and institutional red-baiting remained very powerful both in labor scholarship and the labor movement.)

In Generation of Resistance, John Bennett (Ben) Sears has written a remarkable book which uses the institutional political history methodologies of the Commons-Perlman Taft school and their many imitators over the generations to stand their interpretations on their collective heads. Using both primary sources, interviews with participants, and a wide variety of secondary sources, he has traced the history the electrical workers unions in a remarkably even-handed manner.

Sears has written a history of which the late Philip Foner would have been proud and those in the leadership of trade unions today at all levels, would respect. It is the sort of careful narrative of events which will aid both students of the specific history of the UE and the larger narrative of postwar labor.

First, Sears shows that even under the worst conditions, short of open dictatorship, left trade unionists can mount a serious resistance to employers, factional rivals, and government if they continue to work with and for the workers they represent. The UE had been a large industrial union whose leadership cadre was drawn from CPUSA activists and non Communist class conscious industrial unionists in the 1930s and 1940s.  This leadership had prevailed over internal opposition, which routinely used red-baiting against it, by developing and implementing policies which membership could understand, accept and benefit from.

The development of the cold war, which saw employers, the CIO leadership, opposition within the union, and the U.S. government portray the UE leadership as an “enemy within,” posed special problems the both the UE and the industrial labor movement.

Sears follows this larger political history as it was developed through struggles in the UE locals and national leadership. What he finds is the opposite of generations of Cold War stereotypes and conventional wisdom, which in more subdued forms, continues to influence work on labor history today.

The left leadership of the UE for example was in most instances flexible, seeking alliances to defend traditional industrial union positions, appealing to the immediate economic interests and the reason, class and social consciousness of its members.

The anti-left opposition, represented most consistently through the period by James B. Carey, used anti-Communist ideology as a justification for its own shifting policies, allied itself directly with government and indirectly with employers to gain power, and had little trust in its own members.

In short I would say the old Freudian theory of projection has some relevance for Sears study. The anti-left forces in the UE often acted in the ways that they and the larger cold war ideology portrayed their opponents, shifting policies, pursuing anti-democratic internal union politics, and later establishing a dual union, the IUE, when they failed to gain control of the UE.

In the process, they failed to confront important questions like automation which the UE leadership was exploring and undermined the labor unity that was necessary if the postwar worsening of federal labor law was to be reversed and major questions like the effects of automation and later the export of capital on employment was to be addressed.

Sears is very even handed in developing his carefully reasoned complex political narrative, avoiding polemical attacks on the right within the union in order to connect the history of this remarkable left union with the larger history of the U.S.

In the process, Sears makes clear both the achievements and the setbacks that the union faced until the cold war consensus in labor finally collapsed in the late 1960s. His conclusion that the left and center-left labor politics remained an important factor in the UE (and he suggests the larger CIO) through this period, is perhaps his most important analytical contribution. It helps break down simplistic distinctions between the “old” and the “new” left in our understanding of labor history. Historians dealing with the postwar civil rights movement are also finding similar developments, that is, pre-Cold War left and Communist activists continuing under very different circumstances to play an important role in developing civil rights struggles.

What the left UE leadership was about is best captured in Sears quotation from Pat Barile, president of local 428, a Communist activist then and now, in these words: “practically every day of my life, we would have to be—the local leadership—giving out leaflets, explaining what was going on in the world; the Cold War, red-baiting, what it was; lies about the UE, what the split was….negotiate a contract, there would be another raid…and not only in my shop…we were consuming money and we were consuming workers rights in the struggle and it had to end….”

I have known Pat Barile for many years and have had the pleasure work with him in many peoples struggles. In 1969, while working on my doctoral dissertation, I interviewed James B. Carey, then head of the American Association for the United Nations, a position his cold war liberal friends had gotten for him. Carey had been the leader of the right faction of the UE, in his name the raids Pat Barile fought against were organized. Carey took me to a bar afterwards. He was a sad, lonely man, reminiscing about some of his old union comrades, including those he had fought against and tried to purge.

James B. Carey is long gone and in terms of playing any positive role in the workers movement, was gone decades before he passed away. Pat Barile on the other hand is still in the struggle and has never been since I have known him sad, lonely, or isolated.

For both students of U.S. labor history and activists of all kinds, John Bennett (Ben) Sears, Generation of Resistance is an enormously valuable work in relating larger issues to the day to day detailed struggles of the labor movement in the U.S.