| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jeffrey W. Coker. Confronting American Labor: The New Left Dilemma. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 211. $32.50.

The difference between the 1960s New Left and the 1930s Old Left, we customarily think, lay most obviously in the new radicals' alienation from the labor movement and their rejection of what C. Wright Mills called "the labor metaphysic": the assumption that labor naturally served as spearhead of the drive toward a new society. Surely, criticism of workers' conservatism (particularly white workers' racism), denunciation of labor leaders' complicity with corporate and political elites, and interest in new non-union sources of protest (in black liberation, women's liberation, and peace movements) were common themes of 1960s radicalism. And as Peter Levy pointed in The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (1994), dislike appeared to be mutual, as construction workers in 1970 assaulted antiwar protesters. Yet Levy demonstrated that such antagonism was far from universal among student or union activists and that the 1960s ended with signs of New Left support for strikes and commitment to join struggles for union and workplace democracy.

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