Preface to the Second Edition

Summary

As I set out to introduce a new generation of readers to Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, I am struck by how different the United States is today from the era I sought to explain in this book. The New Deal and the American-style welfare state it spawned are no longer even the pride of the Democrats who built it, although demands that the government provide for an adequate minimum wage, basic retirement pay, and a safety net of health insurance persist. The unions whose formation I celebrated are ever declining in membership and stature, their calls for what I had labeled “moral capitalism” and a “culture of unity” in the 1930s sounding increasingly like cries in the night, with today's growing income disparities and ambivalence toward immigrants. Employees now worry less about the social welfare commitments of their employers, and more about whether or not they still have a job. The chain movie theaters and stores and the network radio that once triumphed over independent, often ethnic-owned, alternatives are themselves floundering with continued concentration in retail and competition from the Internet and DVDs. And industrial cities like Chicago, the physical setting for my story, are now part of complex metropolitan areas with downtowns that are either gentrified or hollowed out and socioeconomically segmented suburbs that function as urban neighborhoods once did to differentiate residents along class, racial, and ethnic lines, though often with borders even more impenetrable.