| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Cecelia Bucki. Bridgeport's Socialist New Deal, 1915–36. (The Working Class in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 289. $35.00.

In this study of Bridgeport's fractious politics between 1915 and 1936, Cecelia Bucki offers an explanation of the rise to power of a Socialist mayor in 1933 and outlines the impact of the Socialist Party (SP) on public policy and the two-party system in Connecticut. She acknowledges the distinctiveness of Bridgeport but insists that its story holds broader insights into working-class political power and third-party movements. Bridgeport, she affirms, "was different but not exceptional" (p. 4). Moreover, the political choices made by Bridgeport workers in the 1930s, according to Bucki, enabled them to shape the local version of the New Deal and to transform permanently the city's machinery of power. 1

By examining the interaction between labor and business from the war years through the 1920s, Bucki traces the significance of business leaders who organized to shape Bridgeport's public affairs and of workers who unionized in record numbers, striking for shorter work days and calling for industrial democracy. Labor activism produced massive strikes in 1915 and 1919 and, although mostly unsuccessful, offered workers an invaluable lesson: the "turbulent war era bolstered their capacity to mobilize economically and politically" (p. 41). . . .

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