| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture. Ed. by Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. xiv, 297 pp. Cloth, $62.00, ISBN 0-8135-3402-X. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8135-3403-8.)
The original versions of most of this book's essays were presented as papers at the 1999 annual meeting of the Southwest Labor Studies Association, a meeting devoted to the theme of labor and the Cold War emphasizing grass-roots developments. Amplified, revised, and supplemented, the essays now appear in print.	1
The editors' introduction sketches the national context. At the end of World War II the American labor movement was large and vigorous, at the height, as it turned out, of its expanse and power. In 1946 unions represented 35 percent of nonagricultural workers and collectively bargained contracts that regulated the wages and working conditions of millions. For the first and last time, union density in the United States approximated union presence in the industrialized nations of western and northern Europe. Following ten years of relative stability, the proportion of the work force enrolled in American unions slowly, then precipitously, declined until currently only 13 percent of all workers are union members. The political impact of organized labor followed a parallel downward path. These essays throw light on this extraordinary history by examining episodes in the first fifteen years of the Cold War.	. . .

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