| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents: Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century. By Martin Halpern. (Westport: Prae-ger, 2003. xxii, 261 pp. $79.95, ISBN 0-313-32471-9.)

Historians never tire of inquiring, Why no socialism in the United States? and Martin Halpern demonstrates why: asking opens endless and fascinating historical paths. For others like Halpern who moved from the New Left into the academy, the approach also is consistent with a desire to further activism through scholarship. Together this collection of articles, many previously published, argues that progressive social change in America advances when there exists a Democratic president, a strong labor movement, a strong left movement, and many left-center coalitions built around what are commonly considered rights issues. so readers expecting internal coherence may be disappointed; those appreciating a searching intellect, clear exposition, and mastery of the history of postwar labor and politics will not be. The first essay posits that, becausela -bor is the only social movement that directly challenges the central organizing force of corporate capitalism, the labor movement will always be more than an interest group. The next three chapters are mixed: one suggests ways in which left values can be preserved and communicated over the generations, another recounts a 1938 meeting between Henry Ford and Franklin D. Roosevelt to expose the political and economic tensions inherent during the New Deal's perilous infancy, and the third studies the persecution that followed Detroit's 1952 House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings to show that, even as institutions crumbled, African American leftists drew sustenance from the black community.

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