In the summer of 1949, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., then a thirty-two-year-old history professor at Harvard, took a trip from Cambridge to Washington, DC. It was a homecoming of sorts. After spending World War II working for the Office of Strategic Services in London, Schlesinger had returned to the United States in 1945, and had set up shop as a freelance journalist in DC. Although a job offer from Harvard's history department came within the next year and was too tempting to turn down, Schlesinger had loved his time in the District and relished the role of public intellectual too much to retreat into the ivory tower entirely. Consequently, when the opportunity arose to write an article for Life magazine on the relationship between Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal, he happily rode the rails to Washington to interview some of the principals in the Truman administration.

Schlesinger's article, “The Fair Dealers and the New Dealers,” never saw the light of day. Its glowing assessment of Truman's agenda – a national health plan, income guarantees for farmers, civil rights legislation, government spending to promote full employment – was too liberal for the dower and reactionary cultural commissars of the Luce publishing empire. “He's such a rampant ‘liberal’ that it colors and contradicts all his conclusions,” wrote John Shaw Billings, the Luce publications' editorial director, as he ordered Life editor Joseph Thorndike to kill the piece.

Schlesinger's thesis was simple. Truman's Fair Deal was a “normalized, rationalized” version of Roosevelt's New Deal. In terms of public policy, Schlesinger believed that the Fair Deal was the more radical of the two. It expanded the welfare state in ways that Roosevelt and his New Dealers could not have even imagined: “a society where government will guarantee levels of income, employment, education, housing, and medical aid below which no one will be allowed to fall.” Schlesinger also claimed that the Fair Deal was committed to government economic planning to a degree that Roosevelt would have “never ventured.”

If ever there was a pyrrhic victory for the labor movement, it was Emporium Capwell. The case protected unions from the schismatic behavior of their members by reaffirming the basic premises of postwar industrial pluralism: exclusive representation and majoritarian decision making within bargaining units. Unfortunately, despite the myopic fears of the AFL-CIO graying leadership, the need to protect local union bargaining agents like Walter Johnson from dissatisfied minority workers who wished to circumvent the union grievance process was the least of the labor movement's problems in 1975. That year, the percentage of nonagricultural workers in labor unions fell to less than 22 percent, down from a postwar high in 1954 of almost 35 percent. Indeed, since 1954 union density had declined every year but two. The worse, of course, was yet to come. In subsequent years, union density would continue to plummet. By the turn of the century it would hover just above 12 percent. Indeed, even that figure fails to fully illustrate the crisis within the American labor movement, hiding, as it does, the utter collapse of industrial unionism in the United States. By the year 2000, only the existence of public-sector unions kept union density figures above 10 percent. That year, less than 8 percent of private-sector, nonagricultural workers were represented by a union.

Nor were the labor movement's losses limited to the workplace. By the middle of the 1970s, labor's political power was dissipating as well. Although the movement as a whole stayed wed to the Democratic Party, the membership began to ignore its leaders, turning away from the Party of the New Deal to vote in increasing numbers for illiberal candidates such as George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Even labor's power within the party had diminished. In 1972 and 1976, labor was stuck with Democratic candidates for president that it was, at best, lukewarm about. The AFL-CIO refused to endorse George McGovern in 1972.

It was the summer of 1943 and the scene at the Atlas Shipyard in Long Beach, California, was damn near explosive. Bob Jones' question to Madge had been a simple one. He needed an extra hand for a particularly difficult piece of welding that his crew was doing. As a leader- man, Jones' position entitled him to make the request, but Madge's response was harsh and instantaneous: “I ain't gonna work with no nigger.” Jones didn't miss a beat. “Screw you then, you cracker bitch.” Both statements hung in the air for a moment. Then Madge turned to the two mechanics sitting slack-jawed nearby. “You gonna let a nigger talk tuh me like that?” One of them started to stand, grabbing a metal bar, but he was a small, elderly man. One glance from Jones sat him back down again, and Jones stalked off.

Within hours, Jones had lost his position and the draft deferment that went with it. His boss was furious: “I'd figured you'd have sense enough to get along with the people you had to work with instead of running around with a chip on your shoulder like most colored boys. I'm not going to have you or any other colored boy in this department who can't maintain a courteous and respectful manner towards the white men and women you have to work with.” Jones' response was simple – “she called me a nigger” – but it had no impact. “You know how Southern people talk,” his boss had said, “how they feel about working with you colored boys.”

Jones seethed with anger at the injustice of the situation, but what could he do? In World War II-era California his options were limited. The shipyards were fonts of economic opportunity. For thousands of workers, impoverished by a decade of economic depression, they provided high-paying, skilled jobs that, in peacetime, many of them would have been excluded from because of their race or their sex. Yet they were also cauldrons of racial tension – black and white workers, many from the South, thrown together for the first time.

Shoppers arriving at the Emporium department store on November 9, 1968, were greeted by an unusual sight. Rather than passing quietly through the San Francisco retailer's neoclassical façade into the waiting arms of perfume-toting cosmetics sales personnel, consumers encountered a number of African American employees of the Emporium as well as members of several Bay Area Black Power organizations. The prospective shopper was handed a leaflet that read:

** BEWARE **** BEWARE **** BEWARE ** EMPORIUM SHOPPERS “BOYCOTT IS ON” “BOYCOTT IS ON” “BOYCOTT IS ON”

For years at The Emporium black, brown, yellow and red people have worked at the lowest jobs, at the lowest levels. Time and time again we have seen intelligent, hard working brothers and sisters denied promotions and respect.

The Emporium is a 20th Century colonial plantation. The brothers and sisters are being treated the same way as our brothers are being treated in the slave mines of Africa.

Whenever the racist pig at The Emporium injures or harms a black sister or brother, they injure and insult all black people. THE EMPORIUM MUST PAY FOR THESE INSULTS. Therefore, we encourage all of our people to take their money out of this racist store, until black people have full employment and are promoted justly throughout The Emporium.

We welcome the support of our brothers and sisters from the churches, unions, sororities, fraternities, social clubs, Afro-American Institute, Black Panther Party, W.A.C.O. and the Poor Peoples Institute.

Printed for the People – By the People of: THE WESTERN ADDITION COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION (W.A.C.O.)

While the boycott, which had started the previous weekend, resulted in heated exchanges between a few shoppers and the protesters, it was, all in all, an unremarkable event. Mainstream media largely ignored it and even the Sun-Reporter covered it – on page five – only when the participating workers were fired by the Emporium a week later. The boycott itself petered out after only two Saturdays of leafleting. The fact of the matter was that a small, peaceful civil rights protest in San Francisco at the end of 1968 was not particularly newsworthy.

During the early fall of 1958, Lester Bailey, a labor organizer and field representative of the Citizens' Committee against Proposition 18, found himself engaged in an unusual activity as he sat in the committee's offices on Sutter Street in San Francisco. He was writing a song: “The Right to Work Blues.” “I'd hate to see / My weekly pay go down,” Bailey wrote.

By choosing an African American musical idiom – the song was to be sung to the tune of W. C. Handy's immensely popular “St. Louis Blues” – Bailey hinted at the identity of his intended audience. The substance of his lyrics also suggested that it was the black voters of California whom he wished to convince to oppose Proposition 18, the right-to-work proposition that would be on the November ballot. African American workers had left the South to come to California in search of the prosperity that had been denied to their parents. Yet the passage of Proposition 18 would bring the South to them, Bailey argued. It would undermine their prosperity and force them to move on once again to preserve both their material comfort and their freedom.

Les Bailey was not the only trade unionist reaching out to the African American community during the 1958 campaign. Indeed, he was part of a concerted effort to ensure that black voters would reject Proposition 18. This effort came into being because the proponents of the proposition had targeted the African American community. They believed that black workers, many of whom had suffered discrimination at the hands of labor unions, could be convinced to vote for a ballot measure that would weaken organized labor in the state.

The sight of workers striking along the waterfront was nothing new to residents of the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco was a union town, and many people there had witnessed the longshore strike of 1934 and the general strike that accompanied it. Consequently, the 800 workers protesting outside the gates of the Marinship shipyards in Sausalito just after Thanksgiving in 1943 might not have raised any eyebrows, except for one fact: the workers were all African American. The target of their strike was not the management of Marinship, but the union that represented the workers there: Local 6 of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, American Federation of Labor.

The strike was one in a series of events that led to the California Supreme Court's 1944 decision, James v. Marinship. In Marinship, the court dramatically limited the ability of unions to exclude African Americans from membership. The litigation that led to the decision marked the beginning of an alliance between local civil rights advocates and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). To the leaders of these groups, the match was made in heaven. It was an interracial alliance to fight racial discrimination and promote economic justice. It was also an opportunity to break the hold that the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had on skilled, industrial jobs on the West Coast. Thus, the Marinship decision lived up to their wildest expectations.

Nevertheless, even as the legal victory cemented the relationship, it revealed some of the tensions that underlay it. First of all, the decision undermined the principles of industrial pluralism by demanding that courts police internal union affairs. It had been barely a decade since unions had succeeded in eliminating the widespread use of the labor injunction, the judiciary's primary tool in its heavy-handed control over union activities since the turn of the century. Yet in Marinship, the CIO requested judicially enforced limitations on the autonomy of trade unions. The decision thus chipped away at one of the labor movement's most precious rights: the right to be left alone by courts.

Second, while Marinship required formal equality between black and white workers, it did nothing to get African Americans jobs.

Staring out the window of his office at 500 Golden Gate Avenue in the fall of 1960, John Riordan could see the top of City Hall's enormous, gilt dome, two blocks away. The packing crates in his office, however, nearly blocked the view. As the third and final executive secretary of the San Francisco Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO), Riordan's job was to close up shop. The Commission, which had been in existence for a little more than three years, was about to cease operations. Its primary job had been to adjudicate claims of employment discrimination that occurred within the city. With the passage of a statewide fair employment practices (FEP) law the previous year, there was now no reason for the Commission to exist. Indeed, Riordon's two predecessors as executive secretary, Ed Howden and John Delury, were already in Sacramento, working for the new state Fair Employment Practices Commission.

Riordan, on the other hand, was trying to dispose of the last of the CEEO's backlog of cases. Like his predecessors, his goal was to resolve these cases informally – to mediate the dispute and settle it to the satisfaction of both parties. Not a single one of the eighty complaints that the Commission had received over the previous three years had required the public, formal adjudication that the city ordinance establishing the CEEO created. Yet one last case, Pacific Motor Trucking, was dragging on and on. Before he left for Sacramento, Delury had worked out a settlement. While the employer would not admit that it had discriminated (employers rarely did), it agreed to hire the employee who had alleged the discrimination. It even agreed to give him seniority to reflect the fact that, but for his race, it would have hired him several months earlier. But just a couple of days after Riordan started work, the settlement fell apart. The company's attorney claimed he couldn't reinstate the worker because the union that represented Pacific Motor Trucking's workers objected.

San Francisco Labor was a weekly newspaper published by the San Francisco Labor Council. Every week it was distributed, free of charge, to more than 100,000 union members in the city of San Francisco. Each issue contained a mixture of news (usually concerning contract negotiations, strikes, local and statewide politics, and economic issues that might be of concern to working families), announcements (“do not patronize” lists, union meeting times) and editorials, reflecting, of course, the political opinions of the Council: prounion, anti-“big business,” gently chiding California Democrats to do better by their union constituents, vociferously attacking the Republican Party for betraying the principles of its glorious founder, Abraham Lincoln. The paper's editor, David Selvin, also frequently commissioned and published cartoons that illustrated the Council's editorial opinions. One cartoon that Selvin commissioned in early 1967, however, struck a different chord. A man is dressed like a drum major in a marching band. In his hand he holds a short staff from which is flying a flag that reads “San Francisco Labor Council.” The figure is running, terrified. His feathered cap has blown off his head. Sweat pours from his face. Aghast, he looks over his shoulder, eyes wide, eyebrows arched, his mouth open in a scream. Directly on his heels are three vicious wolves, fangs bared, tongues lolling out of their mouths. They are moving so fast that their hindquarters are invisible, surrounded by a cloud of dust. On closer examination, the viewer sees that a wolf has already taken a bite out of the seat of the man's pants.

This cartoon never ran in San Francisco Labor, and the reason Selvin commissioned it is lost to history. It does, however, nicely encapsulate how the city's labor leaders felt by the end of 1966, a year that was truly a terrible one for organized labor in San Francisco. It was the year that African American patience with labor's half measures on fair employment practices finally ran out, forcing the Labor Council to defend two of its most precious legal entitlements: the sanctity of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) and the right to be the exclusive representative of employees in unionized workplaces.