In Making a New Deal Lizabeth Cohen has produced the sort of cultural history many historians only dream of writing. It is both meticulously researched, witness the 140 pages of end notes, and beautifully written. She employs quantitative analysis, material culture interpretations, and oral histories to recover the world of Chicago industrial workers, particularly steelworkers, tractor assemblers, and meatpackers, between 1919 and 1939. As would be expected from the Thompsonish title, Cohen argues that these workers were active participants in the creation of the New Deal. She demonstrates that workers' response to the Depression was shaped by the reconfiguration in the 1920s of both ethnicity and work place relationships, and the growth of mass culture. Workers made the New Deal as part of a process whereby diverse cultural experiences were replaced by homogeneous ones. How did this happen?

Cohen begins her book with the defeat of labour's efforts to maintain the wages and conditions they won during the First World War. She argues that after 1919 'localisms' of 'race, ethnicity, job, and neighborhood' undercut the ability of workers to resist 'employers insisting on the open shop, government engaged in Red Scare tactics, and craft unions resistant to organizing industrial workers' (p. 38). Suffice to say that although her argument here is not groundbreaking Cohen takes the time to delineate how these 'localisms' separated workers even as they fought for similar
goals. Her focus on the local nature of workers' experiences shows that although the 1920s was a stagnant period for union activism, workers' cultures were politically charged. For instance, ethnic identities were reshaped in those years as mutual benefit societies and community based 'banks' expanded their base from regional to national origin communities and adopted more commercial methods of business. Likewise the struggle of immigrant Italian catholics against the American church hierarchy transformed patron saint festivals from village or Chicago neighbourhood traditions into an Italian-American tradition. As Cohen writes, 'ethnic organizations introduced workers to the world outside their neighborhoods while ensuring that it was still an ethnic one' (p. 95).

Workers' encounters with mass culture in the 1920s were also mediated by ethnic and neighbourhood identities. The purchase of a standardised mass produced item, such as a phonograph, did not automatically draw workers into a homogeneous American middle class culture. Rather it helped keep ethnic cultures alive as major American record companies re-pressed European recordings and recruited immigrant entertainers for original releases. Chicago was also an important centre of 'race records' and independent producers who catered to ethnic audiences. Cohen argues that a commodity could help a person retain or lose a cultural identity. 'What mattered were the experiences and expectations that the consumer brought to the object' (p.106). Workers were less inclined to buy standardised brand name products from cash and carry chain
stores that blossomed in the 1920s, such as A & P, because neighbourhood grocers provided credit and were more convenient. Nonetheless the pressure of competition forced independent grocers to organise co-operative wholesale purchases and stock brand name goods. Movies and radio were also first consumed in local and ethnic variants before being subjected to chain ownership. Mass culture was not simply imposed from the top but rather shaped through the interaction of consumers predilections and the methods of distribution. Cohen points to jazz as an example of how one folk culture made it in the mainstream.

Workers' identities were also shaped in the workplace where employers sought to create loyalty, increase productivity, and head off militancy, through various welfare schemes. In an effort to ensure individual loyalty employers broke up ethnic and race work groups. They thought this would erase group solidarity and produce a more docile workforce. Instead it promoted worker solidarity. Cohen shows that workers acted together to resist speed ups and other attempts to increase their productivity. The experiments conducted at the Chicago area's largest employer, the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric, by Australian born Elton Mayo receive a mention, as does the fact that these workers dubbed rate breakers 'Phar Lap', but Cohen does not make the obvious connection. Although workers did not give employers their unmitigated loyalty, they came to expect employers to meet some of their welfare needs. Workers noticed when the boss did not deliver on these expectations and this widened the gap between them and employers.

In the 1920s workers forged peer communities that existed side by side with traditional institutions that shaped worker and ethnic identities. When the Depression swept these institutions away workers turned to each other for support and mobilized to demand intervention by the federal government. Cohen's final chapters chronicle the pressure workers applied to the Democratic administration, which it had elected, for laws that protected their right to organise unions and for the equitable distribution of welfare. She also devotes a chapter to the rise of the CIO in Chicago. Cohen shows that Chicago's industrial workers invested their future in a centralised national welfare state and a centralised national union of factory workers. She notes that although these institutions were no safeguard of workers liberty, and in some ways came to imprison them, it is important to understand what rank and file workers accomplished.

This book established Cohen as one of the great historians of her generation.

Cohen presents a seemingly broad and well-supported thesis to explain the success of unionism in the 1930s. However, while all persuasive, some of her major arguments seem only tangentially relevant to either each other or her main thesis. While she provides a strong, coherent explanation as to why Chicago workers' political loyalties and attitudes shifted so dramatically during the depression, it is frankly nothing new. Yes, workers felt entitled to aid and came to favor a strong, interventionist federal government, but the connections she draws between this and the unionization of Chicago factories remain tenuous. Correlation, as they say, is not causation; but Cohen argues, both implicitly and explicitly, that workers' preference for government intervention was a major factor in the labor struggles of the 1930s. If Cohen had acknowledged that labor solidarity and preference for big-government welfare programs were but two symptoms of worker's frustration, and accordingly broadened and adjusted her thesis, her chapter about Chicagoans attitudes vis-à-vis big government could have provided excellent support for her final argument. In the context of her overarching thesis, however, the chapter seems almost like a square peg in a round hole. Instead of letting her explanations-albeit insightful-of the working class's political consciousness reflect back on the people who hold them, she advances the somewhat further-fetched notion that worker's political experiences led directly to the later growth of unionization. None of this, however, detracts from her excellent account of the organizations and institutions that were shared between the too. Cohen primarily fails by not supporting her argument that these interrelations were anything more than marriages of political expediency forged in desperate times. That the Communists dabbled in both the labor movement and various forms of political activism does not mean that both were one and the same. Cohen rejects the simple explanation that they were both separate outlets for the collective rage of the underemployed.

Ask many American historians for a short answer why the CIO was so successful in the 30s, and they may answer: because of the NLRA, hesitance of local, state, and federal governments to take the politically inexpedient step of supporting industry, and, most importantly, a mass of desperate workers imbued with a newfound distrust for the system that had betrayed them. This is essentially the answer Lizabeth Cohen arrives at; she simply takes a circuitous-if enjoyable-path to reach it. She provides a complex, nuanced answer in a place where a simple answer might do. Perhaps she's asking a different question than it appears she is. The title of her book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, implies that she's looking at a topic broader than the unionization of Chicago factories, but by bookending her many salient and though-provoking claims with the tales of 1919's failed strike and the CIO's ascendancy in the 1930s, she is limiting the scope of her book far too narrowly. Nonetheless, nothing is intrinsically wrong with any of Cohen's arguments and she provides a fascinating window into the mind of America's urban, industrial workforce during the depression.

Cohen's work based on her Ph.D. Dissertation at UC-Berkeley proves to be a comprehensive, engaging, and insightful look into popular culture in 1920s and 1930s Chicago. She moves seamlessly from labor history to cultural history to ethnic history without losing the reader by including helpful charts, figures, and photographs. Her section on the nature of mass media and mass consumption undoubtedly provides evidence of her writing style in The American Pageant.

Cohen does not create a delineation between immigrants that came to the area and natives of the Chicago area, which goes a long way in terms of bias. She covers African-Americans, Polish, Italians, and Jews without being critical one way or the other. Each chapter seems to be able to live by itself, which gives the book a flavor of being a compendium of papers instead of a conjoined work. All in all, Cohen does a wonderful job examining Chicago and Chicagoans whatever their ethnicity may be.

Making a New Deal is an absolutely incredible look at workers during the Interwar period in Chicago. Cohen has crafted a monumental work that not only covers workers political and union organization but also covers the changes in their lives resulting from societal changes such as the advent of radio and the chain store.
What's particularly appealing and interesting about this book is also what it says about modern times. Cohen discusses that due to the advent of radio and national networks, fewer workers got their local and world news from ethnic newspapers or other papers in Chicago. As can be seen from this, the current lement concerning the consolidation of newspapers, TV and radio stations isn't new, it began even in the 1930s. Also interesting is how many immigrant parents worried about their children becoming influenced by American culture that they did not understand, particularly clubs, dance halls and radio music.
Cohen's work is profoundly important and most of the book is a great read.

A well-researched and original book describing the shifting allegiances of Chicago workers from ethnic help societies to their welfare capitalist employers to finally the US government. In addition to the subject of the growing labor movement, the book is also a great survey of the various ethnic/racial groups of 1920s Chicago and their differing experiences with Americanization.

There is a book I would like to recommend as a virtual "sequel" to this one. The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue. While Cohen's book is about the creation of the New Deal coalition in the factory neighborhoods and towns of Chicago, Sugrue's book is about the disappearance of the factories and the departure from the Democratic coalition in the 1960s of the same groups who joined it in the 30s. Sugrue's book also won a Bancroft prize and if you like one you will surely like the other.

Cohen's synopsis of Chicago through the 1920's and into the tough times of the 1930's is truly a remarkable account that makes sense of the Great Depression in a way that truly brings it to life for the reader. Though focused on Chicago, the story she tells really holds true for the whole US and delves deeply into the real world reality of the depression experience. Carefully outlining the change in America from an industrial capitalism to a welfare state society, the important changes in America are clearly explained and brought to life through understandable and vivid human stories. The fourth chapter discussing the actual alteration in the worker's mindset that created an atmosphere for not only the New Deal, but for the federal government activity we are used to today, is truly the highlight of the book. Just chapter alone earns this book my highest recommendation, as overall it is one of the better books of this era and topic with which I am familiar.