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strongest corporation in the world, was unable to defeat
the new industrial unions, then a new day had come. Practical
advances by workers in auto, steel, rubber, electronics,
maritime, meat-packing, trucking and so on, proved
that this was so.
The new union upsurge, which had begun in 1933,
continued into the World War I1 period and the immediate
post-war years. The number of strikes in the U.S. jumped
from 840 in 1932 to 1700 in 1933,2200 in 1936, and 4740 in
1937. By 1944 over 50% of auto workers took part in one
or more strikes during the year. As many settler workers
were taking part in strikes in 1944 as in 1937, at the height
of the Sit-Downs. (12)
The defiant mood in the strongest union centers
was very tangible. On March 14, 1944, some 5,000 Ford
workers at River Rouge staged an "unauthorized" wildcat
strike in which they blockaded the roads around the plant
and broke into offices, "liberating" files on union
militants. (13) It was common in "negotiations" for
crowds of auto workers to surround the company officials
or beat up company guards.
The substantial increases in wages and improvements
in hours and working conditions were, for
many, secondary to this new-found power in industrial
life. In the great 1937 Jones & Laughlin steel strike in Aliquippa,
Pa. - a company town ruled over by a nearfascistic
company dictatorship - one striker commented
on his union dues after the victory: "It's worth $12 a year
to be able to walk down the main street of Aliquippa, talk
to anyone you want about anything you like, and feel that
you are a citizen. " (14)
White Amerika reorganized then into the form we
now know. The great '30s labor revolt was far more than
just a series of factory disputes over wages. It was a
historic social movement for democratic rights for the settler
proletariat. Typically, these workers ended industrial
serfdom. They won the right to maintain class organizations,
to expect steady improvements in life, to express
their work grievances, to accumulate some small property
and to have a small voice in the local politics of their Empire.
In the industrial North the CIO movement reformed
local school boards, sought to monitor draft exemptions
for the privileged classes, ended company spy
systems, replaced anti-union police officials, and in myriad
ways worked to reorganize the U.S. Empire so that the
Euro-Amerikan proletariat would have the life they expected
as settlers. That is, a freer and more prosperous life
than any proletariat in history has ever had.
3. New Deal & Class Struggle
The major class contradictions which had been
developing since industrialization were finally resolved.
The European immigrant proletariat wanted to fully
become settlers, but at the same time was determined to
unleash class struggle against the employers. Settler
workers as a whole, with the Depression as a final push,
were determined to overturn the past. This growing
militancy made a major force of the settler workers. While
they were increasingly united - "native-born" Euro-
Amerikan and immigrant alike - the capitalists were increasingly
disunited. Most were trying to block the way to
needed reform of the U.S. Empire.
The New Deal administration of President
Franklin Roosevelt reunited all settlers old and new. It
gave the European "ethnic" national minorities real integration
as Amerikans by sharply raising their privileges.
New Deal officials and legislation promoted economic
struggle and class organization by the industrial proletariat
- but only in the settler way, in government-regulated
unions loyal to U. S. Imperialism. President Roosevelt
himself became the political leader of the settler proletariat,
and used the directed power of their aroused
millions to force through his reforms of the Empire.
Most fundamentally, it was only with this shakeup,
these modernizing reforms, and the homogenized unity
of the settler masses that U.S. Imperialism could gamble
everything on solving its problems through world domination.
This was the desperate preparation for World War.
The global economic crisis after 1929 was to be resolved in
another imperialist war, and the U.S. Empire intended to
be the victor.
This social reunification could be seen in President
Roosevelt's unprecedented third-term victory in the 1940
elections. Pollster Samuel Lube11 analyzed the landslide
election results for the Saturday Evening Post:
"Roosevelt won by the vote of Labor, unorganized
as well as organized, plus that of the foreign born and
their first and second generation descendants. And the
Negro.
"It was a class-conscious vote for the first time in
American history, and the implications are portentous.
The New Deal appears to have accomplished what the
Socialists, the I.W.W. and the Communists never could
approach ..." (15)
Lubell's investigation showed how, in a typical
situation, the New Deal Democrats won 4 to 1 in Boston's
"Charlestown" neighborhood; that was a working class
and small petit-bourgeois "ethnic" Irish community. Of
the 30,000 in the ward, almost every family had directly
and personally benefited from their New Deal. Perhaps
most importantly, the Democrats had very publicly
"become the champion of the Irish climb up the American
ladder." While Irish had been kept off the Boston U.S.
Federal bench, Roosevelt promptly appointed two Irish
lawyers as Federal judges. Other Irish from that
79 neighborhood got patronage as postmasters, U.S. mar-