Making A New Deal
Lizabeth Cohen wants to prove that Chicago workers created a working class during the depths of the Great Depression. Unfortunately, the means she chooses to prove her case do not completely convince me. In Cohen's hefty Making a New Deal she posits a transition of Chicagoans from ethnic, employer-loyal workers in 1920s to members of a common culture who articulated a class consciousness in the 1930s. She asserts that workers needed to overcome ethnicity before they could realize class, but then backs away from this claim. In the end, Cohen's ambivalence, the rosy picture she paints of the New Deal era, and her overemphasis of class consciousness all weaken the book.The book's central theme holds that ethnicity had to be overcome if working-class unity was to be attained. Cohen plants seeds of theoretical discontent within this framework that undermine her basic argument. For instance, in Chapter 3, "Encountering Mass Culture," Cohen argues that mass culture and consumption standardized American life in the 1920s. But then she retreats from this sweeping generalization, equivocating that "the impact of mass culture depended on the social and economic contexts in which it developed and the manner in which it was experienced" (1
What is missing from this book is struggle- whether violent or passive workers' attempts to retain their workplace rights and ethnic culture. Working-class life appears just a bit too happy and the creation of the New Deal a little to easy for this reader. The ideological unity and institutional conformity achieved by the workers as presented in this book happened too effortlessly in what was one of the most turbulent, disorienting periods of American history. Maybe Cohen named the book because it was easier to prove the "Making a New Deal" than the "Making of the American Working Class." Cohen seems to be engaging some historiographical giants in her book. In my opinion, she is writing in the shadow of E.P. Thompson and his vision of the realization of class consciousness. My guess is that Cohen's title is a play on Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Like Thompson, Cohen concentrates on worker thoughts, experiences, and culture. Yet unlike Thompson, Cohen downplays the role of violence in the forging of working-class consciousness. She briefly mentions the 1919 race riots (36-37) and the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 (303, 323, 359), but omits any other mention of the importance of violence in creating working-class anger against employers and a consequent sense of shared oppression and unity. In short, Cohen suggests a benevolent transition of working-class values between 1919 and 1939. Missing is the hard-fought struggle in the streets, on the shop floor, at the store counter, and in the home to create a working class; intraclass disagreement
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1060
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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