Melvyn Dubofsky: Labor's Role in the Obama Era: A Comment

[Melvyn Dubofsky is Distinguished Professor of History & Sociology Emeritus, Binghamton University SUNY, and author of numerous books and essays in U.S. history, including a major history of the IWW, a biography of John L. Lewis, a study of the role of the federal government in regulating labor-capital relations, and a collection of essays on labor history under the title Hard Work.]

The following is a response to Nelson Lichtenstein’s June 7 web article, “Labor’s Role in the Obama Era: A Troublesome and Unreliable Ally?” Click here to read Nelson Lichtenstein’s reply.

FOR NEARLY forty years now the labor movement in the United States has been on the defensive and in decline. But for a brief moment, it appeared that the election of Barack Obama might offer labor an opportunity to revive. That moment seems to have come and gone. To recapture it, my good friend and colleague, Nelson Lichtenstein, offers labor leaders lessons from history about how to build a stronger movement.

Lichtenstein draws his primary lessons from the 1930s and 1960s. To prove that he is a realist and not a dreamer who romanticizes an unrepeatable past, Lichtenstein cites Mark Twain’s aphorism, that “History never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” To which I would add, it offers no hard and fast truths.

The primary lesson that Lichtenstein derives from the past is that labor and its friends must act as “difficult and demanding allies of our president.” According to Lichtenstein, that is precisely what labor and its allies did during the 1930s and 1960s. Labor and civil rights movements, he claims, “achieved their greatest influence when the Democratic administrations in power perceived the leadership of these social movements as troublesome, unreliable, and unpredictable…” Moreover, he adds that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House advisers worried constantly about John L. Lewis, Phillip Murray, and Walter Reuther “going off the reservation.”...