Walter Reuther
Not With a Bang, But a Whimper: The Long, Slow Death Spiral of America’s Labor Movement
Many commentators have correctly observed that the reelection of Governor Scott Walker is a grave blow to unions, especially public sector unions. They went all in to defeat Walker and, despite the great outpouring of protest last year against his collective bargaining bill, he won by a greater margin this time than he did in 2010. READ MORE >>
Mike Wallace, 1918-2012
"I think it must be terrible to hate as many things as Mr. [Westbrook] Pegler hates, and I would be unhappy I think and therefore I'm afraid that he's unhappy and I'm sorry for him because after all we all grow older and we all have to live with ourselves and I think that must sometimes be difficult for Mr. Pegler." READ MORE >>
Why I Miss ‘Big Labor’
Washington—Watching the great civil rights march on television in August 1963, I couldn't help but notice that hundreds carried signs with a strange legend at the top: "UAW Says." UAW was saying "Segregation Disunites the United States," and many other things insisting on equality. This "UAW" was a very odd word to my 11-year-old self and I asked my dad who or what "U-awe," as I pronounced it, was. The letters, he explained, stood for the United Auto Workers union. READ MORE >>
Auto-Dependent Communities to Gain from Health Reform
Big-time health care reform, now passed, will, like a lot of federal policy, have different effects in the very different American metros that make up our national economy. Those having perhaps the most to gain are the Great Lakes industrial metros--hardest hit by the restructuring of their auto and manufacturing-based economy. READ MORE >>
The Operator
Auto Destruct
A Fighting Faith
On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country ... READ MORE >>
The Closing of the American City
Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD By Lou Cannon (Times Books, 698 pp., $35) Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration By Tamar Jacoby (Free Press, 624 pp., $30) READ MORE >>
The Contract with K Street
When 367 Republican House candidates signed the Contract with America on September 27, 1994, they pledged to create "a Congress that is doing what the American people want and doing it in a way that instills trust." As they stood on the steps of the Capitol, Texas Representative Dick Armey declared, "[W]e enter a new era in American government. Today one political party is listening to the concerns of the American people, and we are responding with specific legislation. READ MORE >>
