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The National War Labor Board and American State Building: A Response

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Bartholomew H. Sparrow
Bartholomew H. Sparrow
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
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Extract

In his article “Creating the National War Labor Board: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politics of State Building in the Early 1940s,” Andrew Workman argues for a revised “institutionalist” understanding of the creation of the National War Labor Board (NWLB). Specifically, Workman includes interest groups, networks of policy intellectuals, and intragovernmental relations in an institutionalist account of the origin of the NWLB. Existing accounts that focus on the government's dependence on labor unions (Sparrow) or partisan politics (Katznelson and Pietrokowski; Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder) do not explain the complex origins of this key wartime board.

Type
Forum
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 2002 , pp. 191 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2002

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References

Notes

1. Workman, Andrew A., “Creating the National War Labor Board: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politics of State Building in the Early 1940s,” Journal of Policy History 12, no. 2 (2000): 233–264CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Sparrow, Bartholomew H., From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira and Pietrykowski, Bruce, “Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Fall 1991): 301–339CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, Geiger, Kim, and Kryder, Daniel, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (Summer 1993): 283–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4. Workman, “Creating the National War Labor Board,” 234, 235, 253, 256.

5. Ibid., 236.

6. See ibid., 236, 256.

7. Ibid. 237–38, 239, 244, 248, 253, 255.

8. Ibid., 256.

9. Ibid., 252.

10. See Stein, Bruno, “Labor's Role in Government Agencies During World War II,” Journal of Economic History 17, no. 3 (09 1957): 389–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 80, 88–89, 263–64Google Scholar. On the consequences of the split in the labor movement, see Quadagno, Jill, The Transformation of Old-Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State (Chicago, 1988)Google Scholar; Galenson, Walter, The CIO Challenge to the AFL (Cambridge, Mass., 1960)Google Scholar; Young, Edwin, “The Split in the Labor Movement,” in Derber, Milton and Young, Edwin, eds., Labor and the New Deal (Madison, 1957)Google Scholar; and Harris, Herbert, Labor's Civil War (New York, 1940)Google Scholar. See also the internal government documents cited in Sparrow, From the Outside In, 264n.

12. Workman, “Creating the National War Labor Board,” 234.

13. Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 22–30, 267–68, 270–86, 314–15Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., 26, 27.

15. Table 3.4, “Labor Dispute Cases Disposed,” in Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 86Google Scholar.

16. Table 3.1, “Work Stoppages,” in Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 83Google Scholar; Table 3.5, “Strike Intervention,” in Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 87Google Scholar.

17. Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 96Google Scholar; emphasis added.

18. Ibid., 96.

19. Ibid., 81–82.

20. See also Glaberman, Martin, Wartime Strikes: The Struggle Against the No-Strike Pledge in the UAW During World War II (Detroit, 1980)Google Scholar; and Preis, Art, Labor's Giant Step (New York, 1964)Google Scholar.

21. Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 73Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., 74–75, 262–63; Murray, Robert K., “Government and Labor During World War II,” Current History 37, no. 217 (09 1959): 146–152Google Scholar.

23. Sachs, Alexander, “The Altered Social Income Structure of This Postwar Compared with Changes Following the First World War,” p. 14Google Scholar, in Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 263Google Scholar.

24. Murray, , “Government and Labor During World War II,” 152Google Scholar.

25. See Table 3.6, “Causes of Work Stoppages,” in Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 93Google Scholar.

26. Murray, , “Government and Labor During World War II,” 152Google Scholar; Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 93Google Scholar.

27. Workman, “Creating the National War Labor Board,” 256.

28. See my discussions of the parallels between the state-building prompted by the two world wars and the legacy of the New Deal in the regulation of labor-management relations (Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 291–295, 306–8Google Scholar).

29. Ibid., 161–267.

30. Ibid., 84–85, 89–90.

31. Schlesinger, Arthur, The Rise of Modern America, 1865–1951 (New York, 1951)Google Scholar; Goldfield, Michael, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar; Seidman, Joel, American Labor from Defense to Reconversion (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar; Blum, John Morton, V Was for Victory (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Brody, David, Workers in Industrial America (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Perrett, Geoffrey, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar; idem, “Labor in the Truman Era: Origins of the ‘Private Welfare State,’” in The Truman Presidency, ed. Lacey, Michael J. (New York, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McConnell, Grant, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Gross, James A., The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: Labor Policy in Transition, 1937–47 (Albany, 1981)Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher, The State and the Unions (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar. See Sparrow, From the Outside In, 67n.

32. Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 93Google Scholar.

33. Ibid., xiv, 263–64.

34. Workman, , “Creating the National War Labor Board,” 237–238, 255Google Scholar.