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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 103.1 | The History Cooperative
103.1  
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March, 2007
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Reviews

Fragile Alliances
Labor and Politics in Evansville, Indiana, 1919–1955

By Samuel W. White
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2005. Pp. xii, 208. Tables, bibliography, index. $119.95.)

Historians exploring organized labor's decline during recent decades have increasingly turned their attention to politics. Few, however, have observed the axiom that "all politics is local"; most have focused more on national politics and organizations. Samuel W. White's Fragile Alliances reflects the growing interest in labor and politics at a local level. White explores the "fragile alliances" Evansville unions made with politicians in the years between the end of World War I and the 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO, as well as the equally fragile alliances that lay at the heart of both organized labor and the Democratic Party. He provides useful insights into the successes and failures unions experienced in their engagement with electoral politics, and important suggestions about the reasons that labor failed, even at the height of its strength, to fundamentally reshape the nation's politics. 1
      The bulk of Fragile Alliances is devoted to a chronological survey of labor's engagement with local politics. While the full details are too complex to summarize here, the general course of labor's political fortunes is fairly straightforward—and frequently at odds with the trajectory plotted by those studying labor politics at the national level. . . .
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