Fragile Juggernaut: What Was the CIO?
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Although this book is two years old, and this review is over a year old, the relevance of A. J. Muste still resonates in this political season, where the always essential questions of war and peace should take center stage. Muste helped shape the modern peace movement in a host of ways. This book, and this review, offers a window into the life and times of this important movement figure.
The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class
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