Book Review

In this remarkably sophisticated work, Judith Stein uses the steel industry to chart the decline of liberalism from the 1950s to the present. In tackling the decline of liberalism, Stein enters a debate framed well by others, particularly Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall and, more recently, Thomas J. Sugrue. For Stein, the weakness of liberalism in the 1960s was neither a result of the "excesses" of the civil rights movement, as the Edsalls argue, nor the overt racism of white industrial workers after World War II, as Sugrue suggests. Rather, Stein maintains that "liberalism lacked an economic blueprint to match its social agenda" (195). By linking the often separated narratives of changing race relations and a changing economy, Stein's study does for race what countless studies of race have failed to do: it explains the complex relationship between the macroeconomic policies of the federal government, the national and local decisions of labor unions and industrial management, and the individual decisions of black and white workers. These decisions, Stein demonstrates, powered the decline of liberalism in ways ignored by both contemporaries and subsequent historians.	1
Stein's story begins in the early 1950s when the United States, buoyed by consumer demand and military spending for the Korean War, stood as the leading global producer of steel. Rising productivity and wages in America's fundamental industry created boundless optimism throughout society and few doubted that the United States truly was, to use John Kenneth Galbraith's phrase, an "affluent society." Yet abiding faith in American industrial prowess masked the economy's relatively slow growth compared to European and Soviet economies. It also left policymakers at a loss to explain the recessions of the 1950s and 1960s. While most postwar steel-producing countries socialized the costs of steel production by financing steel industries or owning them outright, American economists and members of the Eisenhower administration believed that minimal interference in the economy was best. The steel industry tried to make up profits through labor intensification, a strategy that brought them into sharp conflict with the increasingly powerful United Steelworkers of America (USWA) and eventually led to the 1959 strike at U.S. Steel. But no sooner had the USWA "won" the strike than the union had to face the problem of technological unemployment. The Kennedy and Johnson years witnessed tax cuts for big business that again fueled industrial growth and soothed labor relations between steel manufactures and the USWA. Thus, for many, the "class issue" had been resolved and their faith in the economy restored. But the more troubling questions about increased investment abroad and increased automation at home were again buried. Therefore, when America realized it had a "race problem" in the 1960s, approaches to the problem would be "moral ones, debated in an economic vacuum." The consensus was, Stein argues, that "markets allocated capital correctly and extraneous workers would be absorbed by growth" (36).	2
In Birmingham, Alabama, this was clearly not the case. When Martin Luther King launched his famous campaign to desegregate the city in 1963, images from the demonstrations were etched into the national consciousness as visual proof that America's "race problem" was, first and foremost, bigotry. But for black steel workers, the problem was more complicated. Though Stein is sensitive to the inherently racist promotional policies in steel plants, she argues that it was the southern economy, more than racism per se, that hindered African American progress. For example, between 1950 and 1970 unskilled factory work in the South decreased by a staggering 58 percent and farm employment was cut in half. Furthermore most new southern jobs required greater education than many African Americans—still haunted by past discrimination—had been able to acquire. Finally, the recessions of the 1950s and 1960s dramatically reduced the number of steel jobs available for both blacks and whites. Thus, even when USWA managed to eliminate the racial designation of jobs, it could not manage the elimination of jobs. But this important story remained largely hidden from most Americans who devoted more attention to the ugly skirmishes on the streets of Birmingham. "The nation had opened its eyes to prejudice," Stein states, "but the ideology of the affluent society held" (68). Race-sensitive critics may find Stein's argument for the political and economic causes of black underemployment exculpatory for white, racist steelworkers. Yet one might well argue that the topic of working-class, white racism has been so thoroughly treated elsewhere that its omission is scarcely a sin.	3
The ideology of the affluent society deeply influenced policymakers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the War on Poverty, and the Kerner Commission report all prescribed remedies that could not cure what ailed the United States. Stein charts the "strange career of Title VII" of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination and created the Economic Employment Opportunity Commission. Not only did Title VII misjudge, in theory, the origins of black underemployment, but its actual implementation was often as undesirable for blacks as it was for whites. Stein reveals the painful limitations of the race-based compensatory programs of the Great Society at two of Bethlehem Steel's eastern plants. In both instances, Title VII was crudely wielded to redress past grievances even when blacks there were not uniquely aggrieved, thus exacerbating racial tension and ultimately polarizing both the plant and the union along racial lines. Ultimately, Stein concludes "the government's single-minded pursuit of a principle whose symbolism exceeded its practical value" alienated white workers and provide few concrete gains for African Americans (144).	4
In the last four chapters, Stein turns toward an analysis of the conditions that created the decline in American steel jobs. During the Cold War, Stein asserts, American foreign economic policy sought socio-political, rather than economic, objectives. Heavy investment in European and Japanese economies nourished a new global steel market in which American producers lost their market share. While other countries reduced the costs of modernizing their steel industries through subsidies, the United States remained doggedly antitrust, thus increasing the cost of modernization and causing overexpansion. The Carter administration exacerbated America's steel problem by "doctor[ing] the world economy, not the domestic one" (230). Reaganomics similarly hobbled the once-fundamental steel industry by channeling resources into nontrading sectors like real estate, finance, defense, and high technology, producing the highest trade deficits in U.S. history.	5
Stein's book is a model of meticulously researched, dispassionate scholarship. Few serious historians of the postwar United States can afford not to read Running Steel, Running America.	6
Josh A. Sides University of California, Los Angeles

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