to the editor

To the Editor

WorkingUSA—Fall 2001 165

WorkingUSA, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2001, pp. 165–166.© 2001 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1089–7011 / 2001 $9.50 + 0.00.

TO THE EDITOR

JOSHUA B. Freeman’s account ofhow labor’s influence and insti-tutions pervaded New York after

World War II (Working Class NewYork: Life and Labor Since World WarII) makes an enormous contributionto our understanding of Americansociety. Yet Freeman’s history, espe-cially at the beginning and end, isoddly out of focus, inviting tenden-tiously slanted interpretations of thesort found in Gerald Horne’s review(WorkingUSA 4, no. 4 [spring 2001]).

By stressing the pro-Communistwing of labor and ignoring prewarorigins of postwar political align-ments, Freeman subtly yet pro-foundly distorts his story. When theanticommunist left acts in mass in-stitutions, its presence is accuratelyreported. But the reader is given nosense of the bitter divide over com-munism that was already well estab-lished in New York’s unions by 1946,let alone the politics and history be-hind it. Freeman elaborates on theanticommunism of New York’sCatholic archbishop, but he does notbother to explain that garment unionleaders like David Dubinsky hadbeen fighting with communists sincethe 1920s. It is a strange choice of top-ics for a book about the workingclass.

Applying the term “social demo-cratic” to the Communist Party’snetwork of institutions may not bethe worst thing Freeman does, but it

is probably the most annoying.Whatever warrant this usage mayfind in current academic fashion, itbrings nothing but confusion to ahistory of the 1940s and 1950s. Surely,if Dubinsky and Communist leaderWilliam Z. Foster could have agreedon anything in those years, it wasthat Dubinsky was a social democratand Foster was not.

This incomplete history leaves thereader poorly equipped to under-stand how thoroughly mistaken isGerald Horne’s effort to blame thedefeat of New York labor in the 1970son anticommunism. Does Horne re-ally think that a procommunist labormovement would have had morepolitical influence? The fundamen-tal reason that anticommunism wasdeeply rooted in the New York labormovement was revulsion againstStalin’s murders of millions andagainst the Communist Party’s slav-ish obedience to orders from Mos-cow. There can be no doubt that thestruggle over communism weak-ened labor, but the anticommuniststance of the majority of New Yorkunion leaders was both a moral im-perative and a political necessity.

Freeman’s own description of theevents of the late 1960s and 1970s issimilarly, if less glaringly, unsatisfac-tory. A detailed picture is painted ofthe relations between the student leftand labor, omitting only the elephantin the room—New Left ideology. To

Ross

166 WorkingUSA—Fall 2001

believers in spontaneity and directdemocracy, the housing coopera-tives, health clinics, and public uni-versities that Freeman celebrateswere the “corporate liberal” enemy.To be sure, the New Left worship ofauthenticity had as yet a long wayto go before morphing into the snob-bishness of Whole Food Stores andRestoration Hardware. Nonetheless,years before the right-wing attack inthe 1970s, the New Left had alreadydeclared war against the bureau-cratic institutions of labor, a declara-

tion in which the element of classantagonism was poorly disguised.

This omission is the more frustrat-ing because Freeman accomplishesso much in restoring to memory thescope and significance of these insti-tutions. Working Class New York is animportant book, one that deserved aless politically tendentious review.

Sincerely,

Benjamin RossBethesda, MD

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