Race-Making and the Garrison State

Abstract

This essay explores the implications of Paul Massing’s findings that CIO union members were slightly more resistant to authoritarianism than AFL affiliated unionists. I begin by sketching the contours of the different forms of union consciousness produced by the AFL’s craft unionism and the CIO’s industrial unionism. Then, paying special attention to the ‘ethnic’ constituency of CIO unions, I argue that the CIO offered a particularly egalitarian vision of union democracy, at least until the onset of World War II. In the second half of the essay, I examine cinematic representations of race and the manner in which those representations corresponded to a changing racial consciousness among American workers. I end with a discussion of the contours of Cold War unionism, the decline of union democracy as a result of the wartime ‘no-strike’ pledge and Taft-Hartley, and the manner in which the American union movement displaced exploitation onto a racialized ‘Third World’ work force.