The Historical Relationship of Liberals and Intellectuals to Organized Labor in the United States

Abstract

During the 1950's, liberals and intellectuals, once keenly partisan to organized labor, began to voice acute criti cism of American unions. This change, superficially consid ered, seemed to savor of tergiversation. However, a review of the historical relationship of liberals and intellectuals to union ism revealed that the close and relatively long alliance of the 1930's and 1940's itself constituted a distinctive departure from prior American experience. Moreover, the historical approach indicated that the alliance limited itself almost entirely to CIO unions as agencies of reform and excluded nearly all unions of the AFL. As the two organizations came, in time, to resemble each other in their institutional lives, disenchantment set in. This development was inevitable since liberals and intellectuals have traditionally tended to view the functions of unions as more extensive and exalted than the destiny envisaged by unions for themselves. Today, then, liberals and intellectuals have resumed their historical relationship to American union ism by becoming once again the independent guardians of the public good for the community at large.