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FRAGILE JUGGERNAUT: WHAT WAS THE CIO?  
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Andrew Elrod
January 24, 2024
N+1
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_ What is there to learn from the history of industrial workers’
struggles in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s? _

Detail of mural painted by Ben Shahn, Hightstown, NJ, Ben Shahn

 

This essay introduces a collective project of inquiry into the history
of the US workers’ movement, taking the form of a Haymarket
Originals
[[link removed]] podcast
[[link removed]], _Fragile
Juggernaut_ [[link removed]], and an
accompanying newsletter series. What is there to learn from the
history of industrial workers’ struggles in the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s? This is the question taken on across twenty or so episodes by
the six hosts of the podcast: Tim Barker, Andrew Elrod, Ben Mabie,
Alex Press, Emma Teitelman, and Gabriel Winant—we like to call
ourselves the Fragile Juggernaut Organizing Committee. _Fragile
Juggernaut _will present the odyssey of American labor as a
historical narrative, but also as a source of inspiration and example,
a litany of strategic innovations and acts of courage and compromise,
and a site of interpretive and political disagreement. How can we
appropriate their triumphs and defeats as lessons for our moment?

AFTER DECADES OF DEFEAT, workers are on the move again. Many of those
interested today in a revived labor movement know that unions once
exercised real sway over the national economy and politics in the US.
And the distant memory of how the labor movement was built holds great
symbolic power: as thousands of union organizers have asked in
meetings, how did they do it in the 1930s? The United Auto Workers
named and conceptualized their recent, triumphant “Stand-Up
Strike” in explicit homage to their union’s breakthrough sitdown
strikes of 1936–1937. Beyond the ranks of organized labor,
politicians from every tendency speak reverently of a vague midcentury
idyll in which (to quote Joe Biden) “unions built the middle
class”—specifically in manufacturing, “the sector that built the
middle class.”

But in the age of hedge funds and Amazon drones, few interested in
labor’s cause are familiar with the facts of how workers actually
organized themselves in the era of manufacturing and landline
telephones (that’s if you were lucky; in 1936, two American
households out of three had no phone at home). Even fewer recognize
just how much disruption, and internal struggle within the existing
labor hierarchy, it took to organize this power—or the
transgressions involved.

That history is the subject of a new project—a podcast series and
newsletter under the title of _Fragile Juggernaut_, produced in
conjunction with Haymarket Books—that explores the history of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations, or the CIO. At a moment when
interest in the possibilities of unions is once again on the minds of
the young and in the pages of the news media, it is time to debate the
legacy of the national union federation that challenged the labor
movement to transform itself into a behemoth capable of shaking the
halls of Washington and Wall Street. How and why have US workers
related their workplace organization to their political strategy? How
have the factors of race, ethnicity, skill, gender, nationality, and
religion contributed to workers’ division and their unity? When
economic inequality and racism have grown into violence, what role
have unions played in relation to the causes of disorder? How have
workers reconciled their broadly shared need for collective action on
a mass scale—the discipline and bureaucracy required for collective
bargaining—with their varying levels of militancy and solidarity
across the workforce? How have activist groups contributed to, or
undermined, the broader project of working-class organization? What
has shaped the relation of union leadership to rank and file in
American labor history?

These questions of labor and democracy are pertinent in 2024. They are
questions about which there has been too little serious investigation
in over a generation, over which interval the stories of labor in the
New Deal have tended to congeal into celebratory hagiographies. But in
light of the challenges we confront in the present, we think it an
appropriate opportunity to invite public participation in the ongoing
process of rethinking and rediscovery that gives permanent life to the
study of the past. “The depository of historical knowledge,” as
the philosopher Walter Benjamin once observed, is “the struggling,
oppressed class itself.”

The Era of the CIO

THE ERA WHEN INDUSTRIAL WORKERS became powerful in the US lasted
about two decades, from 1935 to 1955—or from the Great Depression to
the Korean War. In 1935, a group of national unions formed the
Committee for Industrial Organization within the existing hierarchy of
the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to embrace the controversial
idea of “industrial unionism”—representing all workers
regardless of occupation, race, gender, contractor or employee, at all
the companies within certain industrial boundaries. In 1937, the AFL
expelled these unions, which renamed themselves the Congress of
Industrial Organizations. For the next eighteen years, through World
War II and the onset of the cold war, the CIO fought for industrial
unionism as an alternative labor movement.

In the process, the number of workers who were members of labor unions
exploded nearly sixfold, from 2.8 million in 1933 to 16.4 million in
1953. What organized and propelled this historic phenomenon of
membership growth was competition within organized labor instigated by
the CIO’s success. While its initial victories in auto, rubber, and
steel signaled the starting gun, with the CIO organizing some two
million new workers and doubling its size by the peak of World War II,
the federation never represented more than half of union members.
Rather, it was in response to the CIO’s challenge that the AFL
finally undertook the kind of organizing its leaders had resisted
throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, absorbing nearly four million
members in the same period.

That challenge is the subject of the new _Fragile
Juggernaut_ series. Through its open espousal of class conflict, its
research and communications about the most powerful owners and
managers of the American economic oligarchy, and its power to force
these executives and stockholders to the bargaining table, the CIO
established the foundations for the modern labor movement. The
organizing successes industrial unions won where established unions
had failed before created the very features of organized labor we now
take for granted, for better and for worse: the Labor Board
representation election, the card-check agreement, the dues-checkoff,
the grievance procedure, the Political Action Committee (PAC), health
and retirement benefits, cost-of-living adjustments, and more. This
creation, traversing periods often distinguished in American
history—the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the onset
of the cold war, and the Korean War—can and should be recognized by
the common element of an independent alternative within the labor
movement. This fact touched all facets of American life. The structure
of the economy changed, along with the pattern of American politics;
but so did the presence of working-class people and their power in
culture and society more generally, on the radio and in the movies,
and in the routines of everyday life. It was the age of the CIO.

How the CIO Came to Be

THE IMPETUS to this incredible union growth was the realization, slow
and then sudden, that no amount of election horse-racing or
legislative speculation would yield real, meaningful material changes
in the lives of working people.

This recognition became widespread early on during Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal. While FDR’s influence is remembered as a key
component of the birth of the modern labor movement, this masks a
profound transformation—since he did not campaign as a champion of
collective bargaining. In fact, not one of his 1932 campaign speeches
mentioned organizing rights. Instead, the centerpiece of the early New
Deal, the National Recovery Administration, was a sop to business:
suspending the antitrust laws to allow corporations to restore
profitability on their terms. For this gargantuan concession, the
President and his allies in Congress offered formal, token
participation to workers’ representatives in the formulation of the
Recovery Administration’s new “codes of fair competition.” It
did not take long for the public to see that White House promises of
making the business system fairer had resulted instead in further
entrenching powerful business groups. Only when White House promises
began to ring empty did many workers—then as today—begin to turn
toward the kinds of collective self-help, joining unions and taking
action in picket lines and strikes, that would demonstrate the
possibility of a rebirth of the labor movement.

But popular enthusiasm for labor unions was only one element in the
formula that produced the CIO. The catalyst was a decision among
radicals—communists primarily, but also socialists, Trotskyists,
syndicalists—to direct their disappointment in the two-party system
into the concrete task of defending existing unions and participating
in their fumbling attempts to grow. In the era of Al Capone’s
mob-dominated laundry unions, and in light of the Republican
Party-aligned Building and Construction Trades, the problems with
organized labor as a transformative agent were commonly understood.
But despite these challenges, the radicalism of the era coalesced
around a ubiquitous decision: while they might disagree on who or how,
activists agreed that organized labor would be the instrument of
transformation. Making this revolution required, at a minimum,
building up the unions in order to take leadership within them.

These twin forces of popular enthusiasm and radical commitment crested
in 1934, well after the famed One Hundred Days of the early New Deal.
Throughout 1934, the revolt from below became impossible to ignore, as
major cities erupted into armed conflict: San Francisco, Minneapolis,
Toledo, Kenosha, and across the textile mill towns of the Southern
Piedmont. The most dramatic strikes occurred where the local business
elite was recalcitrantly anti-union. Toledo, Ohio, was more or less a
maquiladora town, churning out low-wage auto parts to be assembled in
Cleveland or Detroit. Minneapolis was still run by the open shop
Citizens’ Alliance. On the San Francisco waterfront, unlike in other
West Coast ports, longshoremen could only access employment through
the shape-up, which they called “the slave market.” In each of
these cities, small radical cells committed to engage in and expand
local union contract fights into the kinds of community-wide struggles
that brought the first signs that another labor movement was coming
into existence.

Though often poor, and always overworked, the workers who organized
these strikes and membership drives were not only concerned with wages
or hours. They revolved around authoritarianism at work, whether that
was concretized by the abuse of a flesh-and-blood manager or
impersonal pressures of the speed-up. The forms that democracy on the
job would take varied by jobsite and were hardly uniform; often, this
kind of collective control over the work process would not even be
recorded by the formal collective bargaining agreement. What the
strikes accomplished exceeded the contract, and maybe their biggest
conquest was not a concession from employers but a qualitative
transformation among the participating workers themselves: a new
“social warrant” that connected quotidian grievances to a larger
struggle for self-emancipation. The newspapers, the workers, and even
their families recorded how “different” the participants were, how
they had been transformed by these strikes: “The old order of things
shall never come back to us,” one longshoreman said. “We are all
brothers now.”

The movement would quickly leap across frontiers guarded by union
jurisdiction, racial segregation and ethnic chauvinism, and steel
bayonets: one participant and eventual chronicler, Art Preis, named it
“labor’s giant step.” It seemed, indeed, to burst forth
everywhere from the working-class worlds of young second-generation
Americans—street gangs, social clubs, movie theaters. They were
citizens now—whether their parents had escaped from Alabama or
Russia; anglophone; modern. There would be no ignoring them.

The Structural Opportunity

WHILE AMERICAN CAPITALISM had provided the tools for rising
productivity, mass production, and economic growth, the business world
created after the Civil War had come to treat labor as any other
commodity. Unguided by social considerations, left to the
uncoordinated profit-seeking of entrepreneurs and financiers, new
industries such as railroads, steel, electrical devices, automobiles,
meatpacking, garments, and coal were prone to boom-and-bust cycles:
prices would rise above wages until markets evaporated, investment
values collapsed with profitability squeezes, and unemployment rapidly
increased. These cycles punctuated the Gilded Age, leading to the
creation of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission in
1913 and 1914. But neither reform was capable of stabilizing the
internal volatility of the capitalist system, which became intolerably
evident with the financial crisis of 1929 and the Great Depression.

As today, one solution to economic volatility discussed throughout the
decade before the crash was the expansion of the domestic
market—mass consumption. But as this would require increasing
workers’ share of the sales dollar, raising wages, it was not a
solution with an organized political constituency behind it. Likewise,
provision of housing, healthcare, and education for a working-class
public required pooling resources and building new institutions, from
state unemployment insurance agencies to cooperatively owned and
managed multifamily housing. Public or private agencies might be made
to do this, and could be aided by subsidies to do so, but these too
would require new organized political constituencies to make the
demands for raising taxes or compelling adaptation of the business
system to things like Blue Cross, the Social Security Administration,
or multi-firm master contracts. Stabilizing and humanizing the US
business system—a goal even some farsighted capitalists understood
to be crucial—therefore was impossible for existing political
leaders to undertake on their own. What they required was increasing
workers’ political and economic power. Naturally, most employers
could only stand to acknowledge this inconvenient, irresistible
reality briefly if at all. Even an accommodation that would benefit
the capitalist system as a whole would have to be forced upon them.

The CIO and Its Dilemmas

BY ORGANIZING TWO MILLION new workers in the auto, steel, rubber, and
electrical industries from 1935 to 1937, the CIO built this power to
defend the reforms we associate with the New Deal. The epochal
fulfillment of this task came in Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936, a
presidential campaign marked by unprecedented class language.
Accepting the party’s nomination in Atlantic City in June 1936, six
months into the new CIO organizing drive, the White House incumbent
denounced the “royalists of the economic order” who “have
maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business.” The
language could have just as easily been heard in the mass meetings the
new CIO leaders had been staging across the industrial heartland of
the Midwest, and was part of the general movement for social
transformation that saw Roosevelt’s landslide victory, with 523
electoral college votes, winning every state but Maine and Vermont.

Yet establishing a new mass union insurgency was only a precondition
for transforming American capitalism or, as many partisans urged, the
establishment of an American socialist republic. In 1937, a recession
began in what the President and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes called
a “strike of capital.” Industrial production fell by one third.
The political structures and business leaders whose intransigence had
pushed the Roosevelt Democrats to the left during the election
remained in positions of power; within the first weeks of the second
term, the New Dealers quickly turned their sights on the bastion of
property and privilege, the Supreme Court—whipping a Senate majority
to pass legislation expanding the number of seats on the judicial
body. But in the 1938 midterms, the President’s project of
realigning the Southern Democratic Party away from its segregationist
ruling class stalled, and the New Deal majorities eroded in the
1939–1940 Congress.

The course of Roosevelt’s second term—four of the CIO’s first
six years—revealed the profound challenges and prolonged struggle
that would be necessary to make good on industrial unionism’s
promise to refashion American society around the economic betterment
and social dignity of labor. It also revealed the contradictory
pressures in the Popular Front coalition between labor and liberals;
as they pressed closer to FDR and CIO chief John L. Lewis, the
radicals who had anchored the movement’s deep reach in democratic
shop floor committees, caucuses, and newspapers dissolved some of
their own social base—hoping to cast themselves as sans-culottes of
this Jacobin Second New Deal, tribunes of a now popular fight for
anti-fascist Social Democracy. This Popular Front with liberals and
political elites came at  a cost to their own ability to organize a
rank-and-file current of the movement on the job.  “A year before
Pearl Harbor,” Nelson Lichtenstein has written, “the CIO remained
but a tentative and incomplete structure.” Dues-paying membership
bottomed out at 1.35 million. The CIO unions laid off organizers and
canceled organizing drives.

What happened? Unemployment from the recession caused workers’ dues
to evaporate. There was also middle-class backlash against the
increasing militancy, especially the sit-down strike—a tactic that
GM executive Alfred Sloan called “a dress rehearsal for Sovietizing
the entire country.” Even the liberals in the Roosevelt
Administration shared this revulsion. With these setbacks came new
doubts about the movement’s strategic course, which turned to
factional conflicts that festered for years. Meanwhile, the CIO
challenge to the AFL had reinvigorated the older federation. The AFL
had recovered its pre-split membership by 1938, and grew by almost a
million members by the time the US formally entered WWII.

Labor’s War at Home

FOR THOSE IN GOVERNMENT, the political and economic solution to the
impasse of the late 1930s was military spending. Rather than the
planned economy for domestic social purposes, the New Dealers and
their erstwhile opponents in big business came to understand that they
might plan a full-employment economy for foreign objectives:
protecting access to export markets, ensuring US ownership of foreign
investments, currency convertibility, and a world safe for US
corporations. That it was European and Japanese fascism standing in
the way of these objectives allowed many leaders of the CIO to embrace
World War II.

Federally controlled wages held below controlled prices soon revealed
the domestic problems engendered by this alliance with capital to
prosecute the war. After Pearl Harbor, to ensure maximum war
production the leaders of both the CIO and the AFL had pledged not to
strike for the duration of hostilities. In exchange, the wartime
government granted “maintenance of membership” and “union
security” clauses in the contracts negotiated under expanded wartime
powers. Union leaders were learning a new function of serving what the
government defined as the public interest: stabilizing labor relations
regardless of local grievances. The CIO, trapped between coalitional
bargaining and conservative backlash, and increasingly bereft of its
earlier infrastructure of the radical shop floor nuclei, was pressured
to adopt new strategies.

The left wing within each of the CIO unions (except, notably,
Communist Party leadership, who urged adherence to the no-strike
pledge) deftly exploited this situation. The number of strikes during
each year of the war actually grew above the heights of the
1930s—now as much against the government as against the employer. In
a situation when workers were essential, and officially deprived of
civil liberties to ensure performance, the working class in World War
II flipped this dependence into a heightened leverage, maneuvering the
structures for national collective bargaining into instruments to
redress their local grievances. To resolve this upsurge in illegal
strike activity, employers were forced to negotiate with workers below
the formal union leaders, while the federal government itself
regularly seized struck properties to guarantee continued production
under wage rates employers were unwilling to pay.

The war had bottled up the tremendous political energies generated by
workers’ organizing over the previous decade. As soon as the wartime
labor regime was relaxed, between 1945 and 1946, enormous strikes
erupted in every major industry. Hitchhiking from Long Beach where he
was discharged from the military back home to Philadelphia, George
Strauss—who would later become a leading academic expert in the
exciting new field of “industrial relations”—spent a night in a
Peoria, Illinois rooming house. In Peoria, auto parts workers,
steelworkers, and railroad workers had all walked out. “It seemed
the whole world was on strike,” he later told the historian Ronald
Schatz.

But while winning dramatic economic gains in these struggles of the
late 1940s, CIO unions were unable to break out of the larger
strategic tangle in which their alliance with Democratic Party
liberalism had ensnared them. Unlike in the 1930s, they no longer
found themselves at the forefront of a popular mass movement that
could exercise political leadership over the country as a whole.
Indeed in the postwar era, the more they won economically, the less
independent they became politically—as each victory now had to be
tallied against its costs to other interest groups to whom Democratic
politicians were equally accountable.

Labor could, in other words, exercise great power, but within narrow
and tightening constraints. From this pressurized situation, inflation
rose like a jet of steam from a boiling kettle.  Suppressed during
the war by price controls that labor fought (and failed) to preserve
in peacetime, inflation would prove an enduring dilemma for the kind
of mixed economy with an empowered labor movement that World War II
created. In both the Korean War of the 1950s and the Vietnam War of
the 1970s, the federal government would be forced again by the
political pressure of inflation to impose centralized federal controls
on prices. Without such controls, the aggressive labor movement
created by the CIO’s industrial unions would respond to rising
prices with strikes to push up wages—leading to a spiral. But with
controls, the question of how the economy would be managed depended on
the balance of political power between capital and labor—a balance
not in labor’s favor by the era of the Vietnam War and Watergate.

Postwar Failure (1947–1955)

AS WITH INFLATION, so too the question of national loyalty would come
to shape labor’s role and constrain working-class choices in the
emerging postwar world. As victory in Europe and Japan curdled into
the cold war, employers and anti-labor politicians orchestrated a
generalized persecution of labor rights as part of a broader
anti-communist political pivot. Accusing the Democrats of conspiring
with Soviet Russia, pursuing such “un-American” goals as economic
planning or racial desegregation, and causing an apparently
irreversible inflation, in 1947 the Republican-controlled Congress
moved to weaken unions with the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed
sympathy strikes and authorized states to pass “right-to-work”
laws limiting membership requirements in union contracts. The bill
also required the exclusion of Communist Party members from union
office, touching off a bitter ideological civil war within the CIO
between communists on one side and liberals and social democrats on
the other. This was the age of paranoia, the CIO’s dusk, when
workers might be watched for what newspaper they were reading or whom
they talked to at the bar. Even the Catholic priesthood sniffed and
stamped out communism in the Italian and Polish sections of the
industrial cities, an activity of Brooklyn’s Father John Corridan,
for example, that Hollywood downplayed in favor of his anti-corruption
campaigning in his fictionalized portrayal in the classic labor film
of these years, _On the Waterfront—_itself made by the most
infamous Hollywood ex-communist snitch, Elia Kazan.

The old forces that had fought most bitterly against the CIO were not,
it turned out, banished for good. Most of all, they rejuvenated in the
Sun Belt, where they soaked up military stimulus and transformed the
backward economies of the South and West in the process. Under the
skies of Orange County, Phoenix, Dallas, and Orlando, a residual
reactionary formation—landlords, regional bankers, smaller and
domestically focused industrialists—blended with emergent
entrepreneurial forces in the military-industrial complex, with the
resulting alloy strong enough to eventually support a claim to
national hegemony. Republic Steel’s Tom Girdler, who once said he
“would go back to the farm and dig potatoes before he would sign
with the CIO,” became an aviation executive—at the invitation of
the Roosevelt Administration, which had itself recently broken a
Southern California aircraft strike with federal bayonets. If you had
to name the one industry most important to the postwar New Right—the
movement that eventually killed New Deal liberalism—you’d probably
want to say aerospace.

In this context, structured by the emerging cold war, the leaders of
the CIO split over how to operate in a newly hostile national
environment where labor was geographically concentrated in the
Midwest, the Northeast, and the Pacific Coast—a major problem in the
US electoral system. Would the project for social transformation
continue into the South, where near misses for industrial unionism had
occurred already in 1934 and again in 1948, grinding against that
region’s racial and political authoritarianism? Or would the new
political limitations of cold war politics be converted into
opportunities, with unions embracing the war against communism in
defense of their Democratic Party patrons? In 1949 this conflict came
to a head with the expulsion from the CIO of national unions with
communist leadership, comprising a third of its total membership.
Bitter struggles took place plant by plant across the country, as
radical organizers who had built their unions in the 1930s were cast
in the cold war’s new demonology—not just by bosses, politicians,
or leaders of the old AFL, but by their own former comrades.

Employers on the attack, hostile politicians in power, ideological
division in its own ranks—the cold war was too much for the CIO.
While it would continue as a powerful economic force through the
Korean War, the political independence that had animated its birth and
propelled its explosive growth was waning fast. By 1955, it elected to
return to the inside game of the old AFL rather than continue its task
of new organizing to bring industrial unionism to the millions of
workers—in the South, but also in the emerging service industries
nationally—who remained unorganized. That year it completed a merger
with the Federation, rejoining the divided house of labor, and
creating today’s AFL-CIO.

How the CIO Has Been Remembered (By those Few Who Remember It)

IF THE AGE OF THE CIO was also a high tide for the “Old Left,”
our vision of the 1930s and 1940s is now impossible to extricate from
the shadow of the “New Left” of the 1960s. The most common
assumption—both then and now—treats the stolid, patriotic,
probably Catholic industrial worker as the exact opposite of the
expressive individualism of the student movement. But this
interpretation obscures the similarities: in both moments, masses of
young people from outside the white Protestant establishment attempted
to transform everyday life and national power structures. “You think
you had a counterculture?” asked Dorothy Healey, the venerable
Communist Party leader and organizer in the California agricultural
strikes of the early 1930s. “I am always amused. We had a
counterculture that I would suggest was far more powerful, far more
inclusive, than what the generation of the [New Left] had thought they
had created.”

As CIO publicist Len De Caux later put it, responsible liberals in
1938 regarded the (illegal) sit-down strike the same way liberals
three decades later regarded the urban riots punctuating the politics
of the Vietnam Era. In the late 1960s, as wildcat militancy within
organized labor kicked off on levels unseen since before the cold war,
young people started to remember (and older people to remind them)
that the age of the CIO was a product of similar “working-class
self-activity”—not simply the maturation of modern industrial
relations science.

Naturally, the social movements of the New Left also inspired new
looks at race and gender across American history, including within the
CIO. The failure of its 1948 southern organizing drive or the
brittleness of its patriarchal, heteronormative culture against the
pressures of the postwar era’s broader claims of solidarity are only
two examples. But the debates instigated by this important scholarship
have by now brought the study of working-class history to a strange
and unfortunate interpretive impasse. The problem of explaining the
decline of working-class militancy after the 1970s—along with
employment in the manufacturing industries core to the CIO
project—has led many historians into the morass of the false
binaries of “culture” versus “structure,” of “material”
versus “ideological” politics. Traumatized by the image of Reagan
Democrats, labor historians began to emphasize the modesty and
conformism of the CIO’s practice, and even theory.

A good example comes from Robert Zieger’s _The CIO_, published in
1995. It ends with an analysis in the terms of a 1970s CBS sitcom:

Bottom line, and to paraphrase that man of the loading dock, Archie
Bunker, “Mister, we could use a man like Walter Reuther again.”

We feel this trite sentimentality is evidence of the need for more,
rather than less, open inquiry into the history of the country’s
economic and social life. _Fragile Juggernaut_, the name of our
project, is Zieger’s own perceptive phrase, but we are aiming to
move beyond his nostalgic conclusion. Workers’ heroic past
accomplishments are honored best by continually attempting to bring
them into contact and relationship with our own changing historical
circumstances—an operation that is not possible if we embalm them
for display. The debates in which the CIO is most often invoked are
motivated by the labor movement’s long-term decline, and bespeak the
experience of defeat and the resulting accrual of defensiveness. Much
of labor history has become, in the parlance of organizers, burnt
turf.

It is therefore time for a fresh look. For a new generation, the
experience of political rule by capitalist oligarchy that dominated
the politics of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years—and has continued
into the age of Trump and Biden—has offered an opportunity to blow
away the historical fog of the cold war and examine anew the
historical creation that is our society. In this spirit, we offer an
open-ended investigation into the legacy of the age of the CIO, which
in the coming weeks and months will include both a limited-run series
of recorded episodes and a variety of written essays and exchanges
such as this one. To understand workers’ own decisions to
participate in new forms of collective life—to live through
institutions that contested the country’s legal, economic, and
cultural foundations, producing its epochal transformation in the
1930s and 1940s—we invite you to join along.

_THE FRAGILE JUGGERNAUT ORGANIZING COMMITTEE is comprised of Tim
Barker, Andrew Elrod, Ben Mabie, Alex Press, Emma Teitelman, and
Gabriel Winant; we thank Andrew for taking the lead and writing the
bulk of this introduction._

_ANDREW ELROD is a writer and historian in Los Angeles who works in
the Research Department at United Teachers Los Angeles._

_N+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and
politics published three times a year. We also post new online-only
work several times each week and publish books expanding on the
interests of the magazine._

_n+1 was founded in New York City in 2004 by six young writers and
editors who wanted to revive the American tradition of politically
engaged literary magazines. At the time, the intellectual scene felt
disturbingly fragmented and drained of vitality: political magazines
didn’t care about literature, literary magazines didn’t discuss
politics, and big ideas had to be buried in tiny book reviews. The
founding editors wanted to make a magazine that could encompass all
the subjects they cared about—one that didn’t shy away from
difficult and ambitious writing, and that saw literature, politics,
and culture as aspects of the same project._

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