Labor's Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II

Abstract

In Labor's Home Front, Andrew E. Kersten boldly goes where few historians have gone before—and it's about time. After all, the American Federation of Labor (afl), not the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio), represented the majority of union workers in the years 1941–1945. In fact, with almost 7 million members by the end of the war, the afl was not only the nation's oldest and strongest labor federation, it was the most dynamic, too, out-organizing the cio by almost 400,000 new members during those years. Although the numbers have been available since Christopher L. Tomlins published them in the Journal of American History back in March 1979, they have made almost no difference to labor historians until now (“afl Unions in the 1930s,” p. 1023). To be sure, Kersten does not break historiographical ranks completely. For instance, in the chapter devoted to the afl's prewar history, he presents the usual “narrow conservative” characterization that most historians accept as gospel. As Kersten moves into the war years, however, the story becomes more interesting and complex, probably because he had no choice but to delve into primary sources. Ten the afl comes to life. With war as the catalyst, Kersten argues, the afl finally abandoned “its two cherished principles—volunteerism and pure and simple unionism”—and became “a proponent of federal intervention in the economy and in labor relations” (p. ix). By the war's end it “had become part of the New Deal's liberal coalition” (p. xii).

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