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Sheldon Stromquist, ed., Labor's Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context.

Article Excerpt
Sheldon Stromquist, ed., Labor's Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2008)

LABOR'S COLD WAR provides a valuable and timely historical reinterpretation that goes to the roots of the Cold War as it affected the American labour movement and its allies. The case studies on which its chapters are based tell about a concerted anti-communist crusade that began to take shape across the U.S. during the closing years of World War II, and in a few short years, was able to transform the political cultures in the work and community lives of the American working class. Although what happened north of the border did not match the dedication and nastiness with which this war was waged, aspects of these case studies would certainly be familiar to trade union and community activists who survived the Cold War years in Canada.

A good number of studies in recent years have examined the McCarthyism and Cold War that played out at the national level and in us foreign policy. Labor's Cold War marks a significant departure from these, in that is one of the first (Robert Cherney et al., American Labor and the Cold War is another) to explore the manner in which this "anti-communist crusade" attacked trade unions and social activists at the local level to turn back reforms they had been building since the New Deal and the early years of World War II. There are the inevitable references to the junior senator from Wisconsin and national crusaders, to be sure, but throughout, the book emphasizes the importance of local battles, which inevitably shaped the character of the national war.

In another significant departure from established historiography, this book takes the focus of the Cold War away from the conservative anti-reform forces that ran rampant in McCarthy's America. There can be no doubt of the enormous influence this...