The Unions and the Church

The Unions and the Church

In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966
by Joshua B. Freeman
Oxford University Press, 1989, 434 pp., $34.95

Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960
by Gary Gerstle
Cambridge University Press, 345 pp., $39.50

At a time when the industrial unions launched during the Great Depression are struggling with the symptoms of what may be an irreversible decline, labor scholars are producing works of originality and insight about the 1930s and 1940s—a more sanguine, though not completely triumphant, era.

This ir...