Lizabeth Cohen - Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939

Industrial Workers in Chicago, 19191939

Second Edition

LIZABETH COHEN

Harvard University

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

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Cambridge University Press 1990, 2008, 2014

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First published 1990

First paperback edition 1991

19th printing 2006

Second edition 2008

9th printing 2013

Canto Classics edition 2014

Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4yy

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ISBN 9781107431799 Paperback

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In memory of my mother
And for my father and Herrick

Maps

Plates

Since January of 1983 when I made my first research trip to Chicago, many people there and elsewhere have helped bring this project to fruition. Generosity with time, resources, and ideas has distinguished all the people I will acknowledge here and many others whose names I may have inadvertently omitted. Although this project is in the end my own, I feel that some of the collective spirit of the workers whose story this book sets out to tell has carried over to its production. Friends, family members, colleagues, and strangers all have left their mark, although not always in exactly the ways that they might have wanted. For what everyone of them has shared with me, I am sincerely grateful.

This book began as my dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, where it was well nurtured by a committee made up of Paula Fass, David Brody, and Neil Smelser. My thesis director, Paula Fass, has been a constant source of inspiration and support since I began graduate school. Her brilliance has helped me at every turn, making my work infinitely better. Her unfailing commitment to me as teacher, colleague, and friend has been more important to my development than she can ever know. David Brody generously agreed to serve on my dissertation committee despite his affiliation with the Davis campus of the University of California. He gave me the benefit of his enormous critical faculties. I will always carry with me his counsel that complexity of analysis is best accomplished through simplicity and directness in writing and argument. Neil Smelser may have made history himself in being an outside reader who actually read the dissertation with great care and perception. I have appreciated his interest in me and my work since we read social theory together during my course work days.

Several friends and colleagues have at some stage read the entire manuscript and taken the time to share their criticisms with me. Given the length of this book, that was no simple task. Herrick Chapman, Frank Couvares, Gary Gerstle, Jim Grossman, Alice Kessler-Harris, Marjorie Murphy, Roy Rosenzweig, and Joe Trotter have all helped make this a better book. Over the years, many others have read and commented on specific chapters, which I have also appreciated. They include Ross Boylan, Sue Cobble, Kathy Conzen, Drew Faust, Mary Felstiner, Susan Glenn, Jim Gregory, Margo Horn, Becky Hyman, Mike Kazin, Ann Durkin Keating, Roland Marchand, Peggy Pascoe, Steve Ross, Debora Silverman, Judith Stein, Kat Weinert, Gavin Wright, and other members of the Berkeley Americanists Group and the Stanford Dissertation Writing Group. I have benefited as well from discussions of chapters presented to Gavin Wright and Paul Davids Social Science Seminar at Stanford University in 1986, the Working-Class History Seminar of the Pittsburgh Center for Social History in 1987, and the Urban History Seminar at the Chicago Historical Society and the Chicago Area Labor History Seminar of the Newberry Library in 1988. I have not been able to deal adequately with all the criticisms and suggestions I have received over the years, but I hope these colleagues will recognize the ways that they have improved my book.

A large number of people assisted me with my research in Chicago, helping me to locate sources as well as overcome fears that I would be considered a carpetbagger from California. I would like to thank Archie Motley, Linda Evans, Ralph Pugh, Janice McNeill, and my many other friends at the Chicago Historical Society; Mary Ann Bamburger in Special Collections of the University of Illinois at Chicago; Bob Rosenthal and Dan Meyer in Special Collections at Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago; John Jentz and Richard Schneirov, both formerly of the Newberry Library; Leslie Orear of the Illinois Labor History Society; Dominic Pacyga and Jim Martin of the Southeast Chicago Historical Project, now of Columbia College; Greg Linnes at the archives of International Harvester; Diane Davorick at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric, when it was still standing; Leonore Swoiskin at the archives of Sears, Roebuck; Bill Benedict of the Theater Historical Society; John Kok at Foote, Cone and Belding Advertising Company; Bob Marshall at the Special Collections of the Chicago Public Library; John McCutcheon at the