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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Samuel W. White, Fragile Alliances: Labor and Politics in Evansville, Indiana, 1919–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers 2005)

GIVEN ORGANIZED labour's political decline, the rise of conservative political economic visions, and the opening of major rifts in the house of labour itself, studies on labour and politics are timely. How do organized labour and capital use the electoral system to secure advances? How do significant political realignments impact the labour movement? In what ways are working people's interests subsumed in larger political issues? These are the questions Samuel White brings to his study of Evansville between the close of World War I and the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Throughout Fragile Alliances, White argues that the Evansville labour movement was "made and remade several times," through "its intimate relationship with the political system and, most importantly, the manner in which labor's demands [were] negotiated within this relationship." (175) White examines how this dynamic functioned in five largely narrative chapters, reserving his analysis for the conclusion.

The first challenge to the Evansville labour movement emerging from World War I was the 1920's Americanism campaigns, something White finds conveniently embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1920s, Evansville Americanized along the reactionary lines of the post-war climate. Anti-immigrant sentiment, patriotic school curricula, and the foreignborn population's decline resulted in an increasingly homogeneous, largely native-born demography with a small black population. The period also witnessed significant shifts in the Evansville economy as traditional mainstays such as lumber, furniture, and stove manufacturing waned, making way for the new consumer durables economy characterized by the refrigerator manufacturing of Servel Incorporated and the Hercules Buggy Company. Anchoring these economic changes was the American Plan for business: employers would chart and lead social progress, watching out for labour, capital, and the consuming public.

In this milieu the Klan arrived in the early 1920s, building on anti-Catholic sentiment in Evansville. Prominent Klansmen D.C. Stephenson and Joe Huffington both helped organize the initial Klan movement. White notes that as Klan activity increased, independent labour activity declined, with Klan demonstrations vastly outnumbering Labor Day parades. However, the Klan's success hinged less on its ethnic and racial ideology and more on its challenge to the established political authority of the Democratic machine. In 1924–1925, Klan-endorsed Republicans swept into office with workers' support. Ultimately, though, the order's rise would prove short-lived, as the independent labour movement revived under the direction of the Central Labor Union [CLU] while Klan-endorsed candidates succumbed to corruption scandals they had pledged to eliminate. The legacy of the 1920s for labour and politics in Evansville was the appeal of Americanism based on optimism, patriotism, prosperity, and a docile labour movement.

The Great Depression and New Deal birthed two competing visions of economic progress. The first was a CIO-inspired vision of recovery upholding worker democracy. The second was Servel president Louis Ruthenberg's paternalistic welfare capitalism. Strong Democratic victories in 1930 and 1932 showed voters' support for the New Deal crystallizing in Washington. With passage of the NIRA and later the Wagner Act, however, labour in Evansville found itself embattled and divided. Ruthenberg led the employers' counterattack by improving conditions while denouncing the New Deal. Nineteen thirty-seven proved a telling year, with the CLU and its AFL-affiliated unions expelling the CIO unions, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America [UE] winning an NLRB election, and Ruthenberg buying off workers engaging in a sit-down strike at Servel.

While 1938's Democratic victories in Evansville signalled commitment to the New Deal, World War II would soon come to dominate national politics. Employers used wartime patriotism and defense contracts' production politics to hold unionism at bay during the war while benefiting from the NLRB's glacial pace. Despite nominal AFL and CIO cooperation, labour continued its internecine conflicts, including the UAW's raiding of UE locals following the UE's expulsion from the CIO, the CLU's red-baiting, and an anti-communist movement (Committee for Democratic Action) within the UE itself. These divisions helped Ruthenberg continually postpone an NLRB election. The 1942 election registered workers' frustration and ambivalence, as Republicans swept into office. Although that victory was reversed in 1944, the post-war climate was taking shape.

After the war, labour retreated from organizing, and workers' interests were subsumed in the broader national political consensus forming around anti-communism. By May 1948, anti-communists in the press, industrial unions, and the city, combined with employers, united to crush UE 813 as it attempted to organize the Bucyrus-Erie plant. Bucyrus president Knox provoked illegal picketing in the wake of Taft-Hartley, prompting the NLRB to decertify the union while anti-communist union members agreed to cross the picket line. White's portrayal of Evansville's labour movement in the early 1950s is disheartening. In 1951 and 1952 elections, the working class turned Republican as anti-communism and economic progress became the framework for labour relations. In March 1955, UE 813 disbanded, sending its members to the International Association of Machinists.

In his concluding chapter, White turns an analytical eye to his topic, noting that the 1920s Americanism and post-war anti-communism both framed politics in a way detrimental to workers' interests by burying them in a larger set of issues. The author also demonstrates consumerism's importance in taming the labour movement, with business advertisements and cars becoming part of Labor Day parades. In the end, White argues that between 1919 and 1955, class was lost as a viable political issue because first Americanism and later anti-communism restrained labour's rhetoric and action, while the fragile New Deal coalition, labour divisions, and recalcitrant employers blocked advances.

Fragile Alliances provides a clear and detailed analysis of voting patterns in Evansville, and White's ward-by-ward scrutiny yields important data. Convenient tables illustrate individual elections, with complete narrative description of how various classes, ethnicities, and races voted and why. The final chapter and conclusion bring the major themes of the work into clear focus. Lastly, an unintended consequence of the book is its detailed description of the AFL-CIO split on a local level. The CLU's actions and the CIO unions' responses provide a unique case study of national labour divisions as lived by a specific urban working class.

Despite the strengths, however, the book suffers from some key weaknesses. First, White often brings a condescending tone to labour activity he deems somehow mistaken. For instance, there is a persistent chiding of factionalism that assumes some "correct" path for the labour movement. White accuses the anti-communist UE faction of holding "dual union" meetings (142) and calls the working-class electorate "fickle." (186)

The second problem is ambivalence about political culture. White argues that while both Klan Americanism and 1950's anti-communism failed to translate neatly into electoral politics, anti-communism threatened labour more because it had distinct implications for structuring labour relations. But this fails to recognize that both ideologies were employer-friendly. The American Plan equaled anti-communism in its threat to labour's interests, illustrating the danger that arises when workers' interests are subsumed in larger political causes.

Finally, Fragile Alliances provides little new material to labour historians. After reading the book, precisely why a case study of Evansville was necessary remains unclear. Given recent work on labour and politics, few of White's conclusions are new or surprising. While Fragile Alliances is an admirable analysis of an industrial city, it offers little in rethinking predominant interpretations of labour and politics.


Andrew J. Hazelton Georgetown University

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