If Unions Had Organized the South, Could Trump Have Been Avoided?
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- Published on Monday, 30 November 2020 06:04
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If Unions Had Organized the South, Could Trump Have Been Avoided?
Chris Wright interviews Michael Goldfield
At a time when activists and commentators are puzzling over the United States’ enduring conservatism, Michael Goldfield’s new book The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides some perspective. Goldfield argues that the old question “Why no socialism in the US?” reduces to “Why no liberalism in the South?,” which itself is answered, in large part, by unions’ failure to organize the region in the early and middle twentieth century. The book consists of case-studies defending this thesis and exploring what went wrong and how... things might have turned out differently. Chris Wright interviewed Goldfield in early November about his arguments and his thoughts on the labor movement today.
Chris Wright (CW): One of the major theses of your book is that the failure of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and 1940s to organize certain key industries in the South, such as woodworkers and textile workers, has shaped US politics and society up to the present. For example, the “liberal” – as opposed to laborite – character of the civil rights movement, Republicans’ racist “Southern Strategy” (influenced by George Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1964 and 1968), businesses’ relocation to the South in the postwar and neoliberal periods, and in general the conservative ascendancy of the last fifty years were all made possible by the CIO’s earlier missteps. How did these failures to organize a few industries have such far-reaching effects?
Michael Goldfield (MG): Underlying my argument is the unique ability of workers organized at the workplace to engage in what I call civil rights unionism, including demands inside the workplace for more hiring and upgrading of non-whites, especially women, desegregation of facilities, etc. Secondly, this involves broader struggles for desegregation, access, and other issues, in the community at large. Of special importance here is the ability of workers at the workplace to resist and successfully fight against right-wing, racist repression, something that was so successful in silencing and destroying individual white liberals in the South. I discuss a number of such examples in the book, including the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) at International Harvester in Louisville and Local 10 of the ILWU in San Francisco. These instances, though vitally important in their limited impact and providing clear templates for future struggles, were too isolated to affect the general course of events.
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