Politics and principle: The United Automobile Workers and American labor-liberalism, 1948-1968. (Volumes I and II)

This dissertation explores post-World War II American labor-liberalism from 1948 to 1968 by examining the national political activity, on both the leadership and rank-and-file levels, of the most socially active major American union, the United Automobile Workers. More specifically, this study details the UAW's participation in a number of important national issues of the period, including the civil rights movement, federal unemployment policy, federal urban policy, the Korean war mobilization, the United States's relationship with Third World nations in Asia, the war on poverty, the Vietnam war, and electoral politics.;Previous work on labor's relationship with the liberal community generally argues that the United Automobile Workers was fully integrated into the liberal consensus of the postwar era. This dissertation contends that, on the contrary, the UAW's postwar political agenda was shaped by a tension between the union leaders' ideological commitment to social democracy and their desire to participate in a political system that did not share that commitment. The rank-and-file, meanwhile, saw politics not in ideological but in practical terms, and favored those policies, either liberal or conservative, that they believed would provide them with economic security.;Harry Truman's 1948 election victory forced the UAW to abandon any hope of forming a labor-based third party. Instead, the UAW leadership forged an alliance with the Democratic party. Rather than becoming an adjunct to the party, however, the UAW worked throughout the 1950s and early 1960s to force a realignment of political forces in an attempt to transform the Democrats into an American version of the British Labor Party. Stymied throughout the 1950s, the UAW found new hope in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which reinvigorated the Democrats' reform wing. When Lyndon Johnson proposed the war on poverty, the UAW committed itself to the campaign and to the Johnson administration. That decision dramatically changed the UAW's political agenda, as UAW leaders became spokesmen for rather than critics of the existing order, both at home and abroad.