Ezra's Bookshelf

Making a New Deal

by Lizabeth Cohen · 569 pages · ~10.5 hrs

HistoryPolitics & GovernmentRace & Identity

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Lizabeth Cohen, a Harvard historian, traces how the working-class residents of Chicago—Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, Czech, Mexican, African American, and many other groups—were transformed, between the end of the First World War and the start of the Second, from a fragmented patchwork of ethnic enclaves into a unified political force that powered the New Deal coalition. In 1919, Chicago's industrial workers were divided by language, neighborhood, religion, and rival ethnic mutual aid societies; the great steel strike of that year collapsed largely because of those divisions. By the late 1930s, the same workers were voting Democratic, organizing across ethnic lines in the new CIO industrial unions, and treating the federal government as a guarantor of economic security. Cohen explains the change through the texture of everyday life: chain stores displacing ethnic groceries, radio and movies replacing parish entertainment, mass-produced consumer goods becoming the medium of shared aspiration, and welfare capitalism collapsing during the Depression and being replaced by federal programs. Making a New Deal won the Bancroft Prize, was a Pulitzer finalist, and remains a foundational work in American social and labor history. It is widely taught for its model of how to integrate ethnic, gender, and class analysis with political history.

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