When workers ruled . - more or less - Review - book review

Working-Class
New York
Life and Labor Since
World War II
Joshua B. Freeman
The New Press, $35, 409 pp.

Joshua Freeman's Working-Class New York brilliantly recaptures the sustained historical moment, from the end of World War II through the late 1960s, when "working-class New Yorkers...played a pervasive role in shaping the city's social, economic, and political structure." The result, Freeman argues, was the rise of "a social-democratic polity unique in the country in its ambition and achievements." Pushed by a politically active working class and a powerful trade union movement, successive mayoral administrations constructed a regime characterized by public and co-op housing (not just for the poor but for broad sectors of the city's population), rent control, low transit fares, tuition-free higher education, a reputable municipal hospital system, vibrant cultural institutions that were easily affordable and widely used, and a commitment to racial equality. Much if not all of this went sharply against the grain of where the rest of the nation was headed; it was, says the author, a clear case of "New York exceptionalism." Indeed, in this regard, the city had "more in common with postwar European norms" than with politics in the rest of the United States.

How did such a regime emerge and develop? Freeman, a professor of history at Queens College, identifies several explanatory factors that decenter the city's image as a bastion of high finance and high culture. First, New York was, according to a 1947 estimate, "the greatest manufacturing town on earth." Indeed, it had nearly a million manufacturing jobs--more than Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Los Angeles combined. And there were millions more workers in the city--in wholesale and retail trade, in administrative and service occupations, in transportation. Freeman estimates that in 1947 workers and their families constituted a "clear majority" of New York's population of nearly 8 million. Moreover, by the early 1950s, at least a million of these workers belonged to trade unions, including some of the most aggressive and innovative labor organizations in the nation. Communists and socialists had played a vital role in building some of these unions and shaping their political agendas. But beyond their influence, Freeman argues for the preeminence of a plebeian cosmopolitanism and cultural pluralism, symbolized by Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers' famed "Boys of Summer"; and he attaches great weight to the fact that most of New York's workers were renters, not homeowners. Unlike their more classically proletarian counterparts on Detroit's auto assembly lines, they were not concerned about property taxes and were thus far more willing to levy charges for social provision on the city and its real-property owners.

Although Freeman laments the demise of this polity and the fragmentation of the relatively cohesive and politically decisive working-class presence upon which it was based, Working-Class New York is no sentimental gloss on "the world we have lost." The author recognizes that even during the heyday of New York exceptionalism the story was not all about working-class solidarity and social-democratic achievement. Thus racial discrimination persisted, and shaped job and housing markets, in spite of antidiscrimination laws. Unions were divided on issues of major importance. Those in the manufacturing sector fought the erosion of factory jobs, while those in building trade unions welcomed the destruction of "obsolete" factory districts and the construction of high-rise corporate headquarters in their place. Meanwhile, working-class (and other) New Yorkers were leaving the city in droves--half a million whites in the 1940s, 1.2 million more in the 1950s. Many left for the suburbs of the metropolitan area; others took refuge in the far reaches of Queens. Consciously or not, they were opting for a version of the American Dream that was sharply at odds with the city's dense residential patterns and communal ethos. In short, working-class New York was always in flux, and it was no utopia. But, says Freeman, "looking back from a later era of postliberalism, social meanness, and labor retreat, what New York workers accomplished during the quarter-century after World War II seems utterly breathtaking."

The rest of the story will be more familiar to most readers, because many more of us have lived it. It includes changing racial and ethnic demographics and persistent racial polarization; the emergence of a new political economy, along with a growing ambivalence about the role of government in generating jobs and providing for the health and welfare of New Yorkers; and the rise of aggressive public-sector unions that have often pitted service providers against the consumers of municipal services. Freeman's chapter on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control of education, and the citywide teacher strikes it helped to generate, is masterly, as is his treatment of the backlash among building tradesmen and other, mainly white, workers in the late sixties and early seventies. He traces the increasing centrality of public-sector unionism in the ranks of organized labor, while accenting the preponderant economic and political influence of private-sector power brokers like Felix Rohatyn and Donald Trump. He acknowledges, moreover, that while there are as many organized workers in the city today as there were during the heyday of urban social democracy, class sensibilities have eroded over the years and, in their place, ethnic and racial identities have come to the forefront.

Many readers of this magazine may recall that in the early 1950s nearly half of all New Yorkers were Catholic and more than a quarter were Jewish. (Among whites, Protestants made up only 16 percent of the city's population.) It would be reasonable to assume, then, that the city's white working class was disproportionately Catholic, and that many of Freeman's generalizations about the cosmopolitanism and progressive orientation of the city's workers would apply to them as well as to the Jews who were concentrated in the ranks of avowedly social-democratic unions like the International Ladies Garment Workers. But on the few occasions when Freeman focuses directly on Catholics, he tends to emphasize their conservatism. This was especially true, he argues, during the late forties and early fifties, when cultural and political issues often pitted Catholics against Jews and, more broadly, arrayed an "openly religious, conservative Americanism" against a "left-liberal, secular, pluralist Americanism." There is a problem here, of course; it suggests dissonance and even deeply rooted fragmentation within the ranks of a working class that Freeman has identified as sufficiently unified in its core sensibilities to provide the foundation stone of a social-democratic polity.

The culture wars of the McCarthy era would ebb and flow over the next half century. As they receded in the late fifties and early sixties the political space in which to develop a progressive agenda expanded accordingly. However, at precisely this time--during the halcyon days of "Big Labor" in New York--the steady erosion of manufacturing jobs, the rapid growth of the city's nonwhite population, and the acceleration of the struggle for black equality combined to sharpen the fault lines that divided New Yorkers (and the nation). What is remarkable, then, is not the existence of a unified working-class consciousness and impulse toward solidarity at the grassroots. Such impulses were real, but even in the best of times they competed with narrower and more parochial sensibilities that also had deep roots in working-class communities. What is remarkable is the convergence of underlying historical forces with a labor leadership and substantial segments of labor's rank and file committed to the proposition that government existed mainly to serve the needs--above all, to enhance the security--of ordinary citizens.

Freeman is hopeful that, even in the new "global economy," New York's workers can make that sensibility powerful again. But doing it--building a viable political coalition out of the ethnically diverse and racially polarized components of today's workforce, and developing a compelling program of generous social provision in these leaner, meaner times--will be "no easy walk."

Bruce Nelson is professor of history at Dartmouth College.

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