How the Working Class Saved
Capitalism: The New Labor History
and The Devil and Miss Jones

Michael Rogin

I

"When Franklin Roosevelt first appeared on the national stage of American public life, as a youthful assistant secretary of the navy, many of his contemporaries considered the 'labor question' the primal problem confronting the Western world," writes Steve Fraser. "The overriding issue" by the time FDR died was	1
the American Standard of Living. . . . Somehow the political chemistry of the New Deal worked a double transformation: the ascendancy of labor and the eclipse of the 'labor question.' . . . The struggle over power and property, which had supplied the friction and frisson of politics since at least the Gilded Age, was superceded by the universal quest for more—goulash capitalism.
"It is all over now," agrees Nelson Lichtenstein, but "all labor history seems either to have looked forward to this moment of mass industrial unionism or backward upon those two decades [the 1930s and 1940s] when American politics stood on the verge of acquiring a European, social democratic character."1	2
Far from looking forward and backward from "the age of the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations]," as Michael Denning has characterized the thirties, film history orients itself instead around the rise and fall of the classic Hollywood studio system. Motion pictures grew out of the immigrant working class, whose children constituted the core constituencies for both classic Hollywood and the CIO. The vitality of the movies and the labor movement in the New Deal decade is impossible to imagine without the immigrant presence. Classic Hollywood and the labor movement reached their apogees at the same time, moreover, on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But "the primal problem confronting the Western world" was virtually invisible on the Hollywood screen during the decade that saw the first permanent organization of the industrial working class in the history of the United States. The labor question is also absent from two of the most influential cultural and intellectual accounts of the New Deal decade, both of which displace class struggle with the search for community: Warren Susman's Culture as History and Richard Pells's Radical Visions and American Dreams. Perhaps that is not simply because the authors were looking backward in the 1970s from a time when "mass politics replaced class politics" but also because they or their subjects were watching too many movies. If we, following Denning's lead, see the New Deal decade as the age of the CIO, then the classic Hollywood screen resembles less a window onto the 1930s than a self-reflecting mirror.2	3
Those on the left who have invested their hopes in mass culture, from the 1930s Popular Front to the present, ignore the screening out of trade unions. Repeating the Popular Front search for a usable American past, cultural historians who celebrate a progressive presence in classic Hollywood either multiply other areas of alleged left influence on screen to hide what is not there, focus on the struggle to unionize Hollywood off-camera, or shift attention from working-class organizations to working-class life. "Warner Brothers vernacular films of the 1930s" may "give a graphic impression of the way ordinary people lived, dressed, talked, worked, courted, traveled, and so on," as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. writes, but the vaguely inclusive "and so on" gestures into mostly empty union space. The gangster film genre's perspective on urban popular life ignores the Ford Motor Company's gangster-ridden, anti-union secret police, the largest private army in the world.3	. . .